 Live from the Mendeley Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here's your host, John Furrier. Welcome back, everyone. We're here live at VMworld 2016. It's theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signals from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm here with our next guest from HP Enterprise. Gagan Bautia, Product Marketing Lead and Stephen Aldos, Product Manager HP. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thanks for having us. So you guys have some software on operational managing the VMware, obviously in the ecosystem. What's the news? What are you guys talking about here at the show? Yeah, so today we're actually showcasing our information management and governance solutions. And down at the solutions exchange, we have five parts. We have two booths in HP, booth number 1523 and 1723. And in both, there's a 45, 40 by 40 booth. We're kind of showing the main technology storage, software, adaptive backup and recovery, the data protected technology. And on the other side, in a smaller booth, we have a product called VM Explorer that's focused on virtualized environment, backup and recovery. And then we also kind of showcasing our information management and governance platform, Verity. It's kind of a new announcement that we have done two months ago and we're kind of showcasing those products together. I just interviewed Pat Gelsinger and he was kind of talking about the division of VMware and certainly it's evolved over the years from a one product company to a multitude of NF, NSX, all this other stuff going on. So in the VR ecosystem, how are you guys targeting the operators? Because now the roles are changing. So what is your software specifically doing? What's the value proposition? So software defined everything is the way forward and we at HPE have a whole combination of not just the hardware components but building on top of that the software stack. So things like our hyper-converged platform that pull together service, storage, networking all into one piece. And then adding on top of that the data protection, analytics and governance piece on top. So one of the things that we talked about at HPE Discover was the whole composable infrastructure, which I love the message. I'm like a broken record on this and like a promotional marketing plug for HPE because I just love the positioning of that. It kind of speaks to automation. The composing seems more artistic. What are some of the things you guys doing? Because this is a big issue right now. We started on stage here today in the keynotes. Easy buttons, we hear that, policy. So now you're starting to see that narrative becoming more and more mainstream and certainly backup and recovery is a huge issue. Especially once performers the speeds and fees but now relative to the composable, how does that fit in composable with the VMware ecosystem? Yeah, so customers are expecting easy to use solutions now. They expect something that's just plug and play that they can just get up and running quickly. Customers want to run their business. They don't want to run the infrastructure. So enabling them to focus on their core business and by delivering the platform in a consumable way really enables customers to drive value out of their IT departments. Pathi, talk about the value proposition. When you go talk to customers, when you guys go to market with the products, what's the value proposition? What's the main story that you guys tell the customers? Yes, in terms of the backup and recovery, one of the big things that we're talking about, by the way, the products that we're covering is actually covering the entire segments, it's enterprise segments, mid-market segment as well as the SMB segment. And we're going to talk about specific technologies that we have around SMB and mid-market versus at the enterprise level. What we're kind of trying to see, what we're seeing in the market right now is that backup and recovery is still very complex, hard to manage. You know, there's like multiple things going on. You have physical servers, virtual servers. A lot of times when you do mergers and acquisitions, you have multiple technologies in your environment and you don't have skilled resource to manage all of the backup and recovery environment. And that's one of the messages that we have with data protector software, which can cover both physical and virtual environment. You can do backup and recovery, plus as well as combined with some of our analytics that we have around with storage optimizer. And the message over there is like, you know, look, why are you making multiple copies of the data that's not useful? So for example, if you have legacy data or data that has expired its value and you're still making multiple copies and you're consuming storage, precious storage, right? And that's one of the things that we're doing is like apply analytics at every stage of your backup and recovery process, understand the value of the data and then decide whether you want to dispose it off, whether you want to archive it or whether you want to backup. So it pretty much optimizes the entire backup and recovery. So efficiency is a big one right there. That's the- Efficiency, cost, yes. And then, you know, in terms of like resources, reliability is one of the big things that's got our backup and recovery insurance policy. You want to make sure that the, you know, insurance policy that you have bought, it works, right? Yeah, yeah. Now what about now, technology-wise, what are some of the hot features that you guys are offering? Because, you know, this is again, back to VMware operators, they're managing them in their environments. What are the top features that you guys offer? What if you could point them out for the audience? Yeah, so one of the things that we're showcasing at the event today and this week is a new product in our portfolio called VM Explorer, which was an acquisition that HP made earlier on this year in the February timeframe, completed the legal merge in March. And VM Explorer's focused 100% on virtualized environments to enable customers to do simple, easy to use, low cost backup and disaster recovery services for their virtual machines. So it's not just getting a backup done easily, but it enables them with a multitude of recovery options in the event of a disaster or what I like to refer to as an oops situation where someone accidentally deletes something. And how's that going? How's that feature product going? It's going great. So, you know, we only went live under HPE on April the 1st this year, so it's about five months into it right now. And we're growing exceptionally well and very happy with the results. And what's some of the reaction from some of the customers? What are they saying? What's some of the feedback? They love it. In the five months that we've had it, we've already got two video case studies and eight published case studies live up on our website already. So the response, the feedback from, not just from the existing customers that have transitioned across into HPE, but also from our channel partners, the ease of use for selling and supporting of their customers, that the product just works and it's intuitive and easy to use. So the main reason is just basically functionality, cost, efficiency, is that the main? Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, and then some of the features that we have like security and reliability, whether you're an SMB or whether an enterprise, you need to make sure that your data is secure, your data is protected, your data is recoverable. So it doesn't matter where you fit in, like in which segment are you in. So VM Explorer does offer those. Security feature has encryption, also provides the automated backup verification capabilities, also provides the capabilities like instant VM recovery. So you can pretty much getting the enterprise value at SMB price and that's kind of a message. So the product's got some range then in terms of capability. It's not like a niche or not niche, but high-end enterprise only. It's very flexible for customers to configure, to do pretty much whatever they want. So if they want to backup to disk, to sand, to a NAS, to tape or to VTL, but also to the cloud. So we support Amazon S3, Rackspace, OpenStack and HP Helion and next month we'll have Microsoft Azure in the list as well. So enabling customers that even though it's an affordable price product, giving them enterprise features that they expect. Certainly that plays into the whole cross-cloud message that Pat Gelsinger is promoting, having that kind of diversity on the cloud side. Absolutely, yes. So we'll take us through an example. We'll spend a minute to discuss the use case. Take us through a day in the life of a customer. They just call up a reseller and say, ship me the box, is it software? Do I load it? What's going on? Take us through the specific, you know, walk us through a typical deployment. So it's a Windows-based application and you can either install it on a physical or a virtual machine itself. Obviously you're backing up your version environments. You need to make sure you probably run that on a separate host. And it connects to VMware through the Restorage APIs for data protection. So it enables us to do snapshotting capabilities, take advantage of connecting to vCenter, controlling different hosts. We can do not just backup and recovery but we can also do replication. So for customers that have maybe a DR site or a standby system, we can replicate machines to that. And as Garga mentioned, features such as instant VM recovery. So you can actually directly mount a backup copy to a hypervisor host and power it on within seconds. But the product installs within like a minute. It's very, very... There's no hardware. It's just software, right? It's a software product. It's an operational guy who says, hey, you know what? I got to do my job. I got to manage my resources. So he gets a view into the VMs and that he's got, right? That it worked. It's a 35 meg downloads. It's very, very easy for a customer to get up and running and provides full reporting. And next year we'll have plug-in to our backup navigator application which enables customers that have our data protector product and VM Explorer to view a consolidated report across. So the sales motion is pretty easy. It's low surface area to get into and low bar to get in, download it. And is it a land and expand kind of situation? Reseller? Yeah, we offer a free 30 day trial right off our website. And then customers can buy through our channel, through our distribution and channel partners and all right on our website with a credit card if they want to. Why are the channel guys like it? Because it's this download. Is there more of a touch point to get it into the account or how does the channel play in this? So for the channel, obviously there's good margins for a channel partner. Of course, software. It's a lot of software margins as they would say. Always great. But it's also, it's a low touch sale, right? It's a short sale cycle. It's low touch because the product just works. They don't need to have any real special training or professional services around it. Customers can get up and running through a wizard driven interface very, very quickly. So it's an easy sale for a channel partner. It's multiple environment supports. Take us through that use case. So how does that work? Amazon, Azure, no problem with the clouds? Yeah, so Azure supports coming next month but we have Amazon S3, Rackspace, HPE, Helion, and OpenStack today. And so enables customers to either back up directly to those cloud targets using the standard APIs that they offer. So if a customer is already using one of those clouds, we can leverage the object storage. Not right now. Yeah, maybe not. But we can also back up, tear your storage. So if someone wants to back up hourly to disk, for example, then nightly to tape and then weekly off to the cloud. So enabling them to get different retention periods. The product's clean. It's a clean product, easy to get into. And then the value really comes from the operators, right? So that's really seems to be the, yeah. Very straightforward. And the big thing is about reliability. As I was mentioning, you talked about channel. Why do channel love it? They love it because they don't have to go back to the customer. The customer's kind of complaining and provide support. So it's one of the big value prop of the product. It's easy, not only that, cost-effective and also very reliable. And with security and all the flexibility built in. It was seen that the channel guys or anyone would like it because now the customer can deploy it easily. Then they can get a view into their resources and then try to make tweaks and or, you know, be agile in their infrastructure. So then they're probably going to identify optimization areas, other areas. And they go, hey, I need some more X that's dialed up. You know, one of the key benefits of VM Explorer is it's low cost, as Garga mentioned earlier. And that means, you know, for a channel partner they can use that saved budget to either buy more hardware for the customer or other services. All right, so I got to ask, I always ask this question because I love these product conversations because it's always one of those things where when you have this kind of product, you probably have multiple scenarios where surprising use cases pop out of the woodwork. So what's an area that surprised you from a customer standpoint? We're like, well, I would never thought of that use case. Have you probably seen some of those in this kind of product? You can you share any kind of color? Well, so much, I mean, we're kind of more focused on the mid to smaller customer segment. So, you know, up to about 250 virtual machines is a good kind of sweet spot. It all depends on the performance of the customer's equipment, of course. You can go up and down on those numbers, but that's a good kind of sweet spot for us. So in those environments, you generally don't see too many, you know, obscure environments that, you know, situations to be honest. It's pretty straightforward. They had storage. One of the things that customers ask us about, like, you know, do you support physical environment? And that's when, you know, the clear segmentation that we have that for this small mid market, the VM Explorer for virtual environments, but then we have data protector, which is enterprise class, backup and recovery, that supports physical, virtual, and then provides wide variety of features that as well as very robust, actually, and scalable environment for remote offices, back offices. So they don't need to have either one. They could go to VM Explorer, which is a virtual side of it. Yeah. And then if they identify the physical side, they can just move into that other product. Absolutely. You typically find that the VM admins have, you know, separate autonomy within their organizations. Exactly. They want to have their own tools for their environment separate from the rest of the organization. Talk about your target audience. What are some of their hot buttons that these guys work, what do they care about? What's the burning desire that they're trying to solve? And is there complexity? Is it just the operations? What's the main perspective? Yeah, I think in the lower end of the market, you generally have IT generalists in those organizations. You don't have specialists. So they need products that just work. They don't want something that's low-touch. They guys don't read the manual, basically. Yes. RTFM, you know. They don't have a manual. In this case, there's no manuals. They want a dashboard. They want anything. Yeah, I mean, we have a manual. We have YouTube video tutorials, but it's point and click. We get email reports that you know what's going on with the environment. And it's so easy to get set up that it's something they can just set and forget. Well, the IT generalists and then any IT guys, they want to save time, right? They don't want to be going in and having to learn nuances and tuning. They've got other priorities and more high-value tasks they can do in their organization. But backup is pretty important, too. You've got compliance, all kinds of issues around it. It's got to work. It's one of those things where it's like plumbing. That's one of the things that the backup got to work, but that they wanted to focus on their core business. That's one of the things. They don't want to sit down, learn backup and recovery, learn what this button does and what this function do. And they just want to make sure backups work in case there is an accident or something happens. They want to make sure that data is safe and they can safely get it back. That's the nice thing that plays into Composable. Yeah, exactly. It plays really well into Composable. Yep. All right, so final question. What are you guys taking away from VMworld this year? What's the big, ah-ha, what are you going to take back to the ranch to share with your colleagues about this year's VMworld? So far to find everything. NSX is obviously a key, big message here, Composable infrastructure obviously, and hyper-convergence. NSX did some nice tweaks to NSX. It's got some legs. Yeah, absolutely. I was quite impressed this morning with the whole discussion around NSX. In fact, yesterday was also very cool when we talked about the Cloud Foundation and Cloud Foundry and it was pretty cool stuff. I love when they see machine code up on the keynotes. I was walking in the hallway and you see all the geeks around the monitors and I'm seeing like, is that a command line? So you're seeing like ports, you know, addressing ports of like, you don't usually see that at the big other shows. So like, you know, entertaining keynotes. Here they get down and dirty, I don't think. Yeah, definitely. Well guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. VM, X4. VMWare, you guys are doing great work together and congratulations on the success. Thank you so much, really appreciate that. Thanks so much. You're watching theCUBE here live at VMworld with HP Enterprise, making things easy for VMWare operators. Check it out, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We'll be right back with more after this short break.