 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you by Veritas. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here covering Veritas Vision. The hashtag is VITAS, V-T-A-S, Vision. A little bit of a funny hashtag, so make sure you get that one right if you want to follow all the action. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host this week, Stu Miniman. Michelle Van Amber is here. She's the director of Global Alliances for Veritas, and she's joined by Daniel Witteveen, who's the vice president of Global Portfolio Resiliency Services at IBM, folks. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us. Michelle, let's start with you. Alliances, a fundamental component of Veritas' strategy. You got to make friends with a lot of different people. What's your general philosophy around alliances? Let's start there. Yeah, well, specifically with IBM, we've had a long-term alliance starting back in 2004 around backup and managed services. It's evolved into a very strategic alliance with IBM providing both internal IT support to migrate our key applications into their blue mix and IBM cloud infrastructure, and then also evolving the managed service around backup, strategically moving into the cloud. We announced something in March to work on backup in the cloud with IBM as part of their blue mix services. So each and every partner in our alliances has specific strengths and weaknesses, and I think with IBM we're maximizing our partnership around their strengths, and that's the services and their play in the enterprise market, where we both have about 86% overlap among those customers. So I mean, this is interesting, Daniel. I mean, IBM, big technology company, huge product portfolio, some of the products competitive with Veritas, but you're part of the services organization, so you've got to have the customer's interest first. You guys are sort of technology agnostic generally as a services professional. So what's your philosophy with regard, maybe I just laid it out, but with regard specifically to data protection and backup? So you said exactly right, right? We measure ourselves against the business outcomes for our clients, and that truly is vendor agnostic. But when you take a partnership like Veritas, and if you saw the keynotes this morning, they were talking about the leader in the Magic Lodging for the last several years, right? IBM's also been the leader in resiliency and in security. So that's an unparalleled partnership that you can't get from anywhere else. You've got a services firm that can take their software, provide a high-valued outcome to their clients, our clients, our mutual clients, and provide it in the cloud. And that could be our cloud, that could be another provider's cloud. Very significant for our clients. So every time we go to these shows, you hear about digital transformation. And it's an important topic, but sometimes putting meat on the bone is hard. So let's try to do that. And I presume you're hearing the same thing from your joint customers. We got to become a digital business. You hear that from the top. So what does that mean to your customers? What does it mean to become a digital business? So for me, I think a lot of people say that in the context of a one-time event. We have to go through digital transformation. And there's somebody who, we're there. And that's a big, wide definition of what that can mean. I think it's continual transformation. It's innovation. That's a buzzword to me that says, okay, yeah, this creates the conversation. It's a door opener. But we really have to talk about evolving transformation, cognitive learning, right? Using IBM Watson, always making us better. It's not laying out, here's what we're doing and walk away. It has to be continual. Can you add anything to that, Michelle? What are your thoughts on digital? I mean, we think digital means data. You guys are all we heard this morning is how you're the sort of center of the data universe. What are you hearing from customers on digital? Well, I think we're all including us, right? Veritas internally struggling with the same thing, right? How do you get there? How do you save cost over time? And how do you keep your business running with all the governance and compliance regulations that are coming down like GDPR, right? So there are a lot of challenges coming out of a lot of these organizations. And I think it takes not only somebody that's the leader in technology like Veritas, but then it takes somebody who's the system integrator, who is monitoring the outcomes for their customers over time. If you look at all the large accounts that IBM manages, we have a huge play for Veritas technology and use of those products in those accounts. So I think it takes more than just a point product or a point in time, like Daniel mentioned, it really takes an evolution over time and a solid plan, right? That can be, again, flexible, right? As GDPR regulations come down the pike, how do we move at the times? How do we manage those outcomes for our customers to be cost effective so that we can keep their business and grow it too? Daniel, do you want to comment on that one? Yeah, I mean, we mentioned GDPR, which I think is kind of the biggest event. It's going to be the Y2K of 2018, right? It's massively significant. But if you throw that under the compliance bucket, right? We really think about what does that mean for our clients and protecting our clients with those compliance requirements? When you look at IBM and Veritas, right? Our partnerships extensively talked about, Bill Coleman was talking this morning about meeting with the two largest banks, right? IBM covers 75% of the top 35 banks, right? We get regulation. That's our job. Customers look for us to lead that example. We have 80% of the Fortune 100 across multiple industries. So when you combine these technologies together, you combine that regulation overlay, which we have to know not just for one customer, but across all of our customers, it's really unmatched. So in addition to kind of the governance piece, what about security? It's been something in my whole career, used to get a lot of lip service today. It's board level discussion. Everybody's handling it. Resiliency services have to believe covers that as well as kind of traditional kind of BCDR type activity. Yeah, I mean, we define that under cyber resiliency, right? And that is really going from everything from threat protection, right? All the way to outage to recovery. And I think a lot of customers are struggling with that. We did a study with the Panama Institute back in May and 68% of their respondents said they lack actually a reliable, foundational way to recover against a cyber attack. And when you really think about it, everyone's been in the news over the last several months, you have to respond to that very differently than a hurricane outage, or what people think of a disaster recovery, which I struggle with that name, because it's really any kind of outage. So it's a cyber resiliency key. In fact, we have a session tomorrow at 12 30, specifically talking about our combined approach against cyber resiliency, starting from threat protection deterrence, but more importantly, when the outage occurs, how do you make sure you accurately respond? And you're not out for hours, days, and months. You're really truly out for minutes. Yes, Michelle, anything around, you know, ransomware, the cyber resiliency piece? You know, how does Veritas look at partnering with companies like IBM for these solutions? Yeah, so, you know, since we've broken off from Symantec, right? And we had a lot of security and data protection that was combined. We really look for our partners like IBM to provide a lot of that security specific services around our product. So one of the things that Daniel had developed is the cyber resilience offer that we are looking to our joint customers to provide specifically a short engagement around that to help them. So really we are starting to look to our partners to offer that security service. So I'm a little bit of an industry historian, mainly because I'm old. And so when I look back in 1983 when Veritas got started, and we heard today that Veritas has been a leader in the Magic Quadrant for 15 years. Okay, so you had the PC era, which changed, you know, backup when the pendulum swung from the mainframe into PC, and then obviously client server evolved that. And then the virtualization, you know, business changed that, so you saw backup evolve, and obviously Veritas stayed with that, you know, as a leader throughout. Now we come to digital business and cloud. And when you think of digital business and cloud, I'm interested in the impacts that it's having on data protection. I think of distributed data, analytics, edge computing, you know, the cloud itself, whole different set of technologies and processes and skill sets to manage data protection. So I wonder if you could bring that Daniel back to the customer. How are they re-architecting their businesses and around specifically the data protection side of the business? So I think the first, and we saw this with virtualization, we saw it with storage area networks, right? And we saw it with cloud. The first instinct and the first kind of sales point is, well then I don't need DR, I don't need backup, right? And it's kind of this false sense of, or I have an SLA, so I'm covered, which an SLA is just a penalty, it doesn't mean you're covered at all, right? So we've seen that at every kind of hurdle in our business. But then what we've seen when you saw like storage and virtualization is probably a perfect example. When it's more consolidated, your risk is a lot more condensed, right? So before you could have one server outage you might never have known, but now you have an entire virtual system stand or even a cloud, right? We've seen that in the press just being out. It's much more significant. So customers are taking a lot more serious look at how they're architecting those solutions, making sure they're not reliant on one of those consolidated entities, right? Do I have my data in the cloud? Do I have a way to have that data out of the cloud? And but can I run in this cloud, maybe that cloud on-prem, hybrid IT, you hear that a lot from IBM? But how can I diversify, which is a very different way of architecting solutions when you just had client server? Right, okay, anything you could add to that, Michelle, just in terms of what customers are asking you and then specifically how it might relate to some of your partnerships. Maybe no offense, but broader than IBM. Yeah, from a broader perspective, we're seeing all the cloud providers in the market and we're partnering with all of them at Veritas. Each one of them has their strength. And if you look across our partners and I've been integral in some of our accounts, right? Some of them are doing things just as simple as snapshots, right? They don't have way to index, they have a hard time recovering, things like that. So our customers are really in that high end, right? So as Daniel mentioned, we have a lot of overlap in the Fortune 1000 and they are looking for ways to recover their data like they did on-prem, but they're moving to the cloud. So our solutions together with IBM are really those heavy duty enterprise solutions that allow them to have the data recovery, same times, RTO, RPO, and also the disaster recovery programs and the security around those high end applications that have all the compliance around them. So from my point of view, IBM's the key partner in that space to allow those highly regulated customers to have the same type of data protection. So historically, you guys are in the insurance business. It's a great business, no question. And I always ask, is data an asset or a liability? And the answer is both, but if you had the value pie, clearly the pendulum is swinging and things are evolving. Is data still more of a liability in your world than it is an asset? So our CEO said it best, right? Data is a new natural resource. So data is the number one important thing within the customer environment. Without it, you don't have intelligence, you don't have machine learning, you don't have predictive added, you don't have Salesforce automation, all that is relying on data. So it's more critical. Where you could argue it becomes a liability is when you have to be compliant and you have to have that data for the next number of years. A lot of people like to promote backup success rate. Well, it's nice if you can back it up, but can you restore it, right? Can you make that data active? So that's where it can be treated as a liability, but there's no way I would say it's a liability over an asset. It's absolutely the number one asset in the business. You would agree, I presume. Yeah, I would agree. And we always use the iceberg analogy, right? You're always, the data that you really need is just at the tip of the iceberg above the water and then you have all this data hidden under the water. Like how do you make that secure and understand what you have? And so I think the analytics and some of the data protection and the tiering, right? The understanding what you readily need available versus what can be archived and stored in a lower cost tier is really important. So where do you guys want to take this relationship? When you sit down, give us a little inside baseball here. Where do you see this going over the next 18 to 24 months? It's only going to be stronger. A lot of conversations in the works about doing a lot more strategic relationships together. I'll leave it as that. We've been very healthy partners for over 11 years. You mentioned 2004 timeframe, I think. We have folks on my development team that are integral part of Veritas' product offering, right? They're very important to the feedback loop. And vice versa to the managed service. So I think that's going to get tighter. I think it's going to expand just beyond backup and I'm really looking forward to those possibilities. Yeah, Michelle? So I'm really excited about our cloud partnership that we announced in March. We, I see IBM as a key to allowing Veritas to leap into that market and to provide the enterprise strength solutions. And just really excited about our future. Great. All right, well thank you very much. Good luck for your partnership. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for being on theCUBE. Appreciate it. All right, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE. Right back. Awesome, guys.