 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Commvault Future Ready 2020. Brought to you by Commvault. Hi and welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're at theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Future Ready. We've got the power panel to really dig in on the product and announcements that happened at the event today. Joining me, we have three guests. First of all, we have Ranga, Roger Gopalan. He's the vice president of products. Sitting next to him is Don Foster, vice president of storage solutions. And in the farce piece of the panel, Mercer Rowe, vice president of global channels and alliances, of course, all three of them with Commvault. Gentlemen, thanks all three of you for joining us. Thanks for having us, Stu. Thanks for inviting me. All right, so first of all, great job on the launch. These days with a virtual event, doing the announcements, the engagement with the press and analysts, having demos and customer discussions. It's a challenge to put all those together and it was been engaging and interesting to watch today. Ranga, we're going to start with you. You've been quite busy today explaining all the pieces. So just at a very high level, if you could, this really looks like the culmination of the update to the Commvault portfolio. New team, new products compared to kind of a year, year and a half ago. So just if you could start us off with kind of the high points. Thank you, Stu. Yeah, absolutely exciting day for us today here at Commvault. Multiple reasons for that excitement and I'll go through that. We announced an exciting new portfolio today, knows to not the culmination. It's a continuation of our journey. Bunch of new products that we launched today. Hyperscale X as a new integrated data protection appliance. We've also announced new offerings in data protection, backup and recovery, disaster recovery and complete data protection. And lots of exciting updates to Hedwig. And a couple of weeks back, we introduced updates to Metallic. So yes, it's been a really exciting time. Also today happens to be the day when we got to know that we are the leader in Gartner Magic Quad and for the ninth consecutive time. So a lot of goodness today for us. Excellent. Lots of areas that we definitely want to dig deep in to the pieces done. We just heard a little bit about Hedwig. It was an acquisition a year ago that everybody was kind of looking at and saying, okay, will this make them compete against some of their traditional partners? How will it get integrated in? So maybe just give us one level deeper on the Hedwig piece and what that means to the portfolio. Yeah, sure. So I guess, I mean, one of the key things that Ranga mentioned was the fact that Hyperscale X is built off the Hedwig file system. So that's a huge milestone for us. As we teased out maybe 10 months ago, if you remember at Palm Vault Go on theCUBE and talking about kind of what our vision and strategy was of unifying data and storage management. Those Hyperscale X appliance is a definite milestone in proving out that direction. But beyond just the Hyperscale X, we've also been driving on some of the more primary or modern workloads such as containers. And the really interesting stuff we've come out with here recently is the Kubernetes native integration that ties in all the advanced components of the Hedwig distributed storage architecture and the platform itself across multi-cloud and on-premise environments, making it really easy and policy-driven for DevOps users and infrastructure users to tie in stateful applications from a Kubernetes corporation about that. Great. And Mercer, there's some updates to the partner program and help us understand how all of these product updates are going to affect kind of the partnership and alliances pieces that you own. Absolutely. So in the time since our last meeting at Go in the fall, which was actually right after I had just joined Convalt, we spent a good portion of the following six months really talking with partners, understanding the impact of the partner program that we had released last summer, looking at the data and really looking at barriers to evolve the program, which fell around three different specific points of feedback. One was simplicity, the simplicity of the program and simplicity of understanding rewards, levers and so forth. The second was anchor value, was really helping our partners to be profitable around things like yield registration and other benefits. And then third was around co-investment. So making sure that we had the right levers in place to support our partners for investing in practices and other training and other enablement around Convalt. We launched a number of these things last week as a part of an evolution of that program. Today is a great follow on because in addition to all of the program evolutions that we launched last week, now we have an opportunity with our partners to have many more opportunities or kind of a thin end of the wedge to open up new discussions with their customers now around all of these different use cases and capabilities. So back to that simplification angle, really driving more and more opportunities for those partners to have specific conversations around use cases. Okay, for this next question, I think it makes sense for Ranga to start. Maybe Don, you can give some commentary in too, but when you first see the announcements, there are some new products in the piece that you discuss. But trying to understand, when you position it, do you call it a portfolio? Is it a platform? If I'm an existing Convalt customer, how do I approach this? If I've used something like Metallic, how does that interplay with some of the new pieces that were discussed today? Sure, I can take that question. I'm sure Don and Mercer will have more to add to it. The simplest way to think about it is as a portfolio, but contrary to how you would think about portfolio as independent products, what we have is a set of data management services, granular, they're very aligned to the use case, which can all interoperate with each other. So today we launched Backup and Recurry and Disaster Recurry. These can be handled separately, purchased separately and deployed standalone, or for customers who want a combination of those capabilities, we also have complete data protection. Our file storage optimization, data governance, eDiscurry and compliance are data management services that build on top of any of these capabilities. Now, a very differentiating factor in our platform is all the services that we're talking about are delivered off the same software we made, same platform managed to the same UI. So it's very easy to start with one service and then just turn on the license and go to other services. So I can understand where your confusion is coming from, but it's all designed with customer simplicity and flexibility in mind, and it's all delivered off the same platform, so it is a portfolio built on a single platform. Don, would you like to add more to it? Yeah, I think the interesting thing too to add on top of that is where we're going with the HeadVig infrastructure, the HeadVig distributed storage platform to Ranga's point and how everything is integrated and can feed and work off of one another. That's the same idea that we have when we talk about unifying data and storage management. So the intricate storage architecture components, the way data might be maneuvered, whether it's for Kubernetes, for virtual machines, database environments, secondary storage, you name it, we are quickly working to continue driving that level of call it unification and integration between the Commvault portfolio and what the HeadVig distributed storage platform can also deliver. So what you're seeing today, going back to I think Ranga's first point, it's definitely not the culmination. It's just another step in the direction as we continue to innovate and integrate this product. And I think for our partners, what this really does is it allows them to sell around customer use cases because it allows, now if I have a DR use case, I can go after just DR. If I have a backup use case, I can just go after backup. And I don't have to try to sell more than beyond what the customer is looking for. In parallel that we can scale these things in line with the customer use case. So if a customer has a lot of remote offices, they want to scale HeadVig across those. They want to use DR to the cloud. They can scale these things independently. And it really gives us a lot of optionality that we didn't have before when we had a few monolithic products. Excellent, it really reminds me more of how I look at products if I was going to go buy it from some of the public cloud providers. Living in a hybrid cloud world, of course, is what your customers are doing. Help us understand a little bit. Mercer talked about Metallic and the Azure partnership, but for the rest of the products, the portfolio that we're talking about, does this kind of work seamlessly across my own data center, hosting providers, public cloud. How does this fit into the cloud environment for your customers? Yes, it does. And I can start with the response there as to, it's our strategy is cloud first, right? And you see it in every aspect of our product portfolio. In fact, I don't know if you got to see our keynote today, but Ron from Johns Hopkins University was remarking that Commvault has the best cloud native architecture. And that's primarily because of the innovation that we drive into the multi-cloud reality. We have very deep partnerships with pretty much all the cloud vendors and we use that for delivering joint innovation. A few things that I would call out, when you think of it from a hybrid customers perspective, the most important need for them is to continue working on from while still leveraging the cloud. And we have a lot of optimizations built into that. And then the next step of the journey is of course, making sure that you can recover to the cloud, be it workload recovery or data recovery. And there's a lot of automation that we provide through our solutions. And finally, of course, if you're already in the cloud, either you're running a SaaS, pass or cloud native, our software protects across all those use cases, either through SaaS with Metallic or through downloadable software with backup and recovery. So we kind of cover the entire spectrum. So back to your question, Stu. We do definitely help customers in every stage of their hybrid cloud acceleration journey. And if you take a look at the head big tech, the ability to work in a cloud native facet is essentially a part of the DNA of the storage plan, right? So whether you're running on-prem, whether you're running in a cloud adjacent setup or inside the cloud, HeadVig can work with any compute environment and any storage environment that you want to essentially then feed those compute nodes to build this distributed storage plan. And the reason that becomes important, and it's pretty much highlighted with our announcements today, it's pretty much highlighted with our announcement around the Kubernetes and containers support with HeadVig is that it makes really easy to start maneuvering data from on-prem to the cloud, from cloud to cloud, region to region, sort of that high availability that, as customers make cloud first a reality in their organizations, starts to become a critical requirement for ensuring the application uptime. And some of the things that we've done now with Kubernetes is in making all of our integration for how we deliver storage for the Kubernetes and container environments and being that they're completely Kubernetes native and that they can support a Google and AWS and Azure and of course any on-premises Kubernetes setup just showcases the value that HeadVig can provide in giving that level of data portability. And it basically provides a common foundation layer for how any sort of DevOps routines will be operating in the way that those stateful containers, state workloads can be maneuvered back and forth. Excellent, Donna. Oh, sorry. Sorry, just go ahead, Mercer, yeah. I couldn't say, you mentioned the Metallic and Azure partnership announcement. And I just wanted to hit on that and one thing that Runga mentioned, which is we are really excited about the announcement of the partnership with Microsoft and all the different use cases that that opens up in our SaaS platform with Azure, with Office 365 and all of the great application stack that's on Azure. At the same time, to Runga's point, we are a multi-cloud company and whether that is other of the hyperscaler clouds, AWS, GCP, Oli, Oracle, IBM, et cetera, or all of our great service provider partners, we continue to believe in customer choice and we'll continue to drive unique innovations across all of those platforms. All right, Donna, I was wondering if we could just dig in a little bit more on some of the Kubernetes pieces you were talking about. We look at just the maturation of storage in general. How do we add state back into containers in Kubernetes environments? Help us see what you're hearing from your customers and how you're ready to meet their needs to not only lever storage, but as you say, really full data protection in that environment. Certainly. So I mean, there's been a number of enhancements that have happened to the Kubernetes environment in general over the last two to three years. One of the big ones was the creation of what the Kubernetes environment calls a persistent volume plan. And what that allows you to do is to really present storage to a Kubernetes application, do it the typically through what's called a CSI or container storage interface. And that allows for stateful data to be written to storage and be handled and reattached applications as you leverage them throughout that Kubernetes ecosystem. As you can probably imagine then, with the addition of stateful applications, some of the overall management now of stateless and stateful apps become very challenging. And that's primarily because many customers have been using some of the more traditional storage solutions to try to map that into these new stateful scenarios. And as you start to think about DevOps organizations, most DevOps organizations want to work in the environment of their choice, whether that's Google, whether that's AWS, Microsoft, something that might be on-prem or a mix of different on-prem environments, what you typically find, at least in the Kubernetes world, is there's seldom ever one single, very large Kubernetes infrastructure or cluster that's set to run dev, test, QA, and production all as one. You usually have this spread out across a fairly global configuration. And so that's where some of these traditional mechanisms from traditional storage vendors really start to fall down because you can't apply the same level of automation and controls in every single one of these environments when you don't control the storage per se. And that's really where interfacing HeadVig and allowing that sort of extension of distributed storage platform brings about all of this automation, policy control, and really storage execution definition for these stateful workloads so that now managing the stateless and the stateful becomes pretty easy and pretty easy to maintain when it comes to developing another dev branch or simply trying to do disaster recovery or HA for production app. And if I may add to that, Stu, that's a very interesting response, right? And the reality is, customers are beginning to experiment with containers. Very often they already have a virtual environment and now they are also trying to expand into containers. So HeadVig's ability to serve as primary storage for virtualization as well as containers actually gives the degree of flexibility and freedom for customers to try out containers and to start their containers generally, frankly. Familiar constructs, everything is well aware, you just need to try it with containers. Ranga, flexibility is something that I heard when you talked about your portfolio and the pricing as to how you put these pieces together. You actually talked about in the presentation this morning, aggressive pricing, if you talk about the Convult backup and recovery. Help us understand Convult 2020, how you're looking at your customers and how you put together your product set to meet what they need at that, as you said, aggressive pricing. Absolutely, and you used this phrase a little bit earlier as to cloud-like flexibility. That's exactly what we are trying to get to. The reason why we are reconstructing our portfolio so that we have these very granular use case-aligned data management services is to provide that cloud-like flexibility. Customers don't have the same data management needs all the time, right? So they can pick and choose the exact solution they need because they're all delivered off the same platform, they can enable other solutions as fast and when they need it. And that's the reality. We know that many of our customers are gonna start with one and keep adding more and more services because that's what we see as ongoing conversations. That gives us the ability to really price the entry products very aggressively when compared to competition. Especially when we go against single product vendors, this gives us a lot of strength where we can start with a really aggressively priced product and enable more capabilities as we move forward. To give you an idea, we launched Disaster Recovery today. I would say that compared to the, so the established vendors in DR, we would probably come in at about 25 to 40% of the price range, because it depends on the environment and whatnot, but you're gonna see that that's the power we are bringing to the table. You start small and then depending on what your needs are, you have the flexibility to add on either more data management capabilities or more workloads depending on what your needs might be. And I think it's very attractive from a partner perspective as well, Mr. if you wanted to add a little bit more on that. Yes, I mean, that goes back to the idea of being able to simply scale across different use cases and functionality. And for example, things like the fact that our Disaster Recovery offering, the new one doesn't require a backup, really allows us to have those tailored conversations around use cases, applications, as well as platforms, thinking about one of the big demands that we've had coming in from customers and partners, which is help me have a DR scenario or DR setup in my IT environment that doesn't require people to go put their hands on boxes and cables, which is one of those things that a year ago, if we were having this conversation would not necessarily have been as important as it is now, but that ability to target those specific urgent use cases without having to go across and sort of sell things that aren't necessarily associated with the immediate pain points really makes this an effective offer. Yeah, you bring up some changing priorities. I think almost everybody will agree that the number one priority we're hearing from customers is around security. So whether I'm adopting more cloud, I'm looking at different solutions out there, security has to be front and center. Could we just kind of go down the line and give us the update as to how security fits into all the pieces we've been discussing? I guess I'm the top of the line, right? So I'll start. The security for us is built into everything that we do in the portfolio. The same view you're probably gonna get from each of us because security is built in, it's not a bolt on and you would see it across a lot of different dimensions. If you take our backup and recovery and disaster recovery, for instance, a lot of ransomware protection capabilities built into the solution. For instance, we have anomaly detection that is built into the platform. If we see any kind of spurious activity happening all of a sudden, we know that that might be a potential threat and be reported so that the customer can take a quick look at it. Air gap isolation, encryption by default. So many features built in and when you come to disaster recovery, encryption on the wire, lot of security aspects built into every all to the portfolio. Don? Yeah, consequently with HeadVig, it's probably no surprise that when this platform was developed and as we've continued development, security has always been at the core of what we're doing restored. So whether it's for something as simple as encryption on different volumes, ensuring the communication between applications and the storage platform itself and the way the distributed storage platform communicates, those are all incredibly secured lockdown almost essentially through our own protocols for ensuring that only we're able to talk within our own system. Beyond that though, I mean it comes down to ensuring that data in rest, data in transit, it's always secure and it's also encrypted based upon the level of control that the user and end user want. And then beyond just the fact of keeping the data secure, you have things like immutable snapshots. You have declarative data sovereignty to ensure that you can put essentially virtual fence barriers for where data can be transported in this highly distributed platform. And then from a user perspective, there's always a level of security for providing policy control on what groups or organization can consume storage or leverage different resources in the storage platform. And then of course, from a service provider perspective as well, providing that multi-tenant to access so that the users can have access to what they want when they want it. It's all about self-service. Yeah, and the only thing I'll add there is that obviously we're all familiar with the reports of increased bad actors in the current environment, increased ransomware attacks and so forth. And part of that is addressed by what Ranga and Don said in terms of our core technology. Part of that also though is addressed by being able to work across platforms and environments because as we see the acceleration of say tier one applications or entire data center evacuations into service provider or cloud environments has happened, this could have taken five, 10 years in a normal cycle but we've seen this happen overnight as companies have needed to move those IT environments off site into managed environments. And our ability to protect the applications whether they're on premises, whether they're in the cloud or in the most typical scenario where they live in both cases, both places at once is something that's really important to our customers to be able to ensure that end to end security posture. Great, well, final thing I have for all three of you is you correctly noted that this is not the end but along the journey that you're going along with your customers. So, you know, with all three of you would like to get a little bit, give us directionally, what should we be looking at a convolt to take what was announced today and a little bit of look forward towards the future? Directionally, we should be looking at a place where we are delivering even greater simplicity to our customers and that's going to be achieved through multiple aspects. First one is more technologies coming together and integrating. We announced three important integrations today. We announced the Microsoft partnership a couple of weeks back, we're going to see us move along the direction. The second piece is technology innovation. We believe in it. That's what differentiates us as a very different company and we will continue building it along the dimensions of data awareness, data automation and data agility. And the last one, continued obsession with data. What more can we do with it? How can we drive more insights to our customers? They're going to see us introducing more capabilities along those dimensions. Don? And I think Ranga tying directly into what you're highlighting there. I'm going to go back to what we teased out 10 months ago at Commvault Go there in Colorado on this very program and talk about how in the unification of data and storage management, that vision we're going to make more and more reality. I think the announcements we've made here today plus some of the things that we've done in between to lead up to this point is just proof of our execution. And I can happily and excitedly tell you we're just getting warmed up. So it's going to be going to be some fun future headquarters. And I think, Stu, in rounding that out with the partner angle, obviously we're going to continue to produce great products and solutions that are going to make our partners relevant in those conversations with customers. I think we're also going to continue to invest in alternative business models, services, things like migration services, audit services, other things that build on top of this core technology to provide value for customers and additional opportunities for our partners to build out their offerings around Commvault technologies. All right, well, thank you all three of you for joining us. It was great to be able to dig in, understand those pieces. I know you've got lots of resources online for people to learn more. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu. Thank you. All right, and stay with us. So we've got one more interview left for theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCUBE.