 Commvault was an idea that incubated as a project inside of Bell Labs, one of the most prestigious research and development organizations in the world back in the day. It became an official company in 1996 and Commvault just celebrated its 25th anniversary. As such, Commvault has had to reinvent itself many times over the past two and a half decades from riding the waves of the very early PC networking era to supporting a rich set of solutions for the evolving enterprise. This includes things like cloud computing, ransomware, disaster recovery, security, compliance, and pretty much all things data protection and data management. And with me to talk about the company, its vision for the future, with also a voice of the customer, three great guests. Isabel Geese is the chief marketing officer of Commvault. Manoj Nair is the GM of Metallic and Tim Carbon is the principal systems engineer with Mitchell International. Folks, welcome to the Commvault power panel. Come inside the cube. It's awesome to have you. Where to be here, Dave? All right. First of all, I got to congratulate you celebrating 25 years. That's a long time. Not a lot of tech companies make it that far and are still successful and relevant. So Isabel, maybe you could start off. What do you think has been the driving factor for your ability to kind of lead through these subsequent technological waves that I alluded to up front? So well, 25 years is commendable, but we are not counting success in number of years. We're really counting success in how many customers we've helped over those years. And I will say what has been the driving model for us through that has been innovating with our customers. You know, we were there every step of the way when they migrate to hybrid cloud. And now as they go to multi-cloud in a post COVID world, where they have to handle distributed workforce, different type of workloads and devices, we are there too with their SaaS workload as well. So the innovation keep coming in thanks to us listening to our customers. And then I didn't need that change over the last 25 years and probably for the next 25 as well. You know, we want to be here for a customer who think that data is an asset, not a liability. And also making sure that we offer them a broad range of use cases to put why things simple because the world is getting too complex for them. So let's take the complexity on us. Thank you for that. So Manoj, you've rift on the cube before about, you know, putting on the binoculars and looking at the future. So we're, let's talk about that. Where do you see the future for this industry? What are some of the key driving factors that matter? David, it's great to be back on the cube. You know, we see our industry no different than lots of other industry. The SaaS model is rapidly being adopted. And the reason is, you know, customers are looking for simplicity, simplicity, not just in leveraging, you know, the great technology that Commvault has built, but in the business model and the experience. So, you know, that's one of the fastest growing trends that started in consumer apps and other applications, other B2B apps. And now we're seeing it in core infrastructure, like data management, data protection. They're also trying to leverage their data better, make sure it's not fragmented. So how do you deliver more intelligent services, you know, securing the data, insights from the data, transforming the data. And that combination, you know, our ability to do that in a multi-cloud world, like Isabel said, now with increasing edge workloads, sometimes, you know, our customers say their data centers are the new edge too. So you kind of have this, you know, data everywhere, workloads everywhere, yet the desire to deliver that with a holistic experience, we call it the power of end. The ability to manage your data and leverage that data with the simple, without compromise. And that's really what we're seeing as part of the future. Okay, I don't know if you want to come back to you and double click on that, but I want to introduce Tim to the conversation here. He's bringing the voice to the customer, as I say. Tim, my understanding is Mitchell's been a Commvault customer since the mid 2000s. So tell us, why Commvault? What has kept you with the company for more than 15 years? Yeah, we are, it was what, 2006 when we started. And really, when it all boils down to it, it's just as Isabel said, innovation. At Mitchell, we're always looking to stay ahead of the trend. And just like was mentioned earlier, data is the most important part here. Commvault provides us peace of mind to protect and manage our data. And they do data protection for all of our environments right now. We've been a partner to help enable our digital transformation, including SaaS and cloud adoption. When we start talking about the solutions we have, I mean, we of course started in 2006. I mean, this was version six, if I remember right. This predates me at the company, upgraded to seven, eight, nine, we brought in 10, brought in 11, brought in hyperscale. And then moved on to bring in the metallic. And Commvault provides, well, the reason for this, I guess I should say, is Commvault provides a reliable backup, but most importantly, recovery. Rapid recovery, that's what gives me confidence. That's what helps me sleep better at night. So when I started looking at SaaS as a differentiator to protect our O36 environments, our O365 environments, metallic was a natural choice. And the one thing I wanted to add to that is, it came out cheaper than us building it ourselves. When you take into account resources, as well as compute and storage. So again, just a natural choice. Yeah, as the saying goes, backup is one thing, recovery is everything. Isabel, yeah, we've seen the classification of the enterprise, particularly from the app side. You came from Salesforce. So you were the company that is the poster child for SaaS. But my question is, what's catalyzing this shift? And why do you think data protection is ready to make the move? Well, there's so many good things about SaaS. You remember when people started moving to the cloud and transforming their cat-packs into OPEX. Well, SaaS bring yet another level of benefit. IT we know always has to do more with less. And so SaaS allows you to, once it's set up, you've got all the software upgrades automatically without adding extra work. You can better manage your cash flow because you pay as you grow. And also you have a faster time to value. So all of this had helped the SaaS adoption. And I will tell you today, I don't think there is a single customer who doesn't have at least one SaaS application because they are seeing the value of this. Now, when it comes to backup and recovery, everybody's at different stage. They still have on-premise, they have cloud, they have SaaS, they have workloads, devices. And so what we think was the most important was to offer a broad choice of delivery model. Being able to support them if they want software description, if they want an integrated appliance, or if they want a SaaS as a service model, and also some of our partners are actually delivering this in a more custom and managed way as well. So offering choice because everybody is at a different stage on this journey when it comes to data management and protection. Actually, I think team is the example of taking full advantage of this broad choice. Well, you mentioned, Tim, that you leaned into Metallic. I mean, we have seen the SaaS everywhere. We used to have an email server, right? I mean, on-prem, that just doesn't happen anymore. But how was Mitchell International thinking about SaaS? Maybe you could share from your customer perch what you're seeing. Well, what's interesting about this is Mitchell has been providing SaaS for a long time. We are a technology company and we do provide SaaS solutions to our customers. And this makes it so important to be able to embrace it because we know the value behind it. We're providing that to our customers. When I look at what Commvault is doing, I know that Commvault is doing the same thing. They're providing this SaaS model as a value to their customers. And it's so important to go with this because we keep our environments cutting edge. As GDPR says, you need to have a cutting edge environment. And if you don't, if you cannot check that box, you do not move forward. Commvault has that. And this is one less thing that I have to worry about when choosing Metallic to do my backup of 0365. Well, thank you for that, Tim. So Manoj, thinking about what you just heard from Isabelle and Tim, kind of fitting into a company's cloud or hybrid cloud, more importantly, strategy, you were talking before about this and, in other words, it's not an either or, it's not a zero sum game. It's simpatico, if you will. I wonder if you could elaborate. Yeah, no, the power of end, I'm very proud of that. When I think of the power of end, I think of actually folks like Tim, our customers and Commvault first, right? And really that need for choice. So for example, customers on various different paths to the cloud, we kind of homogenize it and say they're on a cloud journey or they're on a digital transformation journey, but each journey looks different. And so part of that end, as Isabelle was saying, is really the ability to meet them where they are in that journey. So for example, do you go in there and say, hey, you know what, I'm going to be some customers 100% multi-cloud or single-cloud even, and that includes SaaS applications and my infrastructure running as a service. So there's a natural fit there saying, great, all your data protection, you're not gonna be running software appliances for that. So you've got a data protection, data management as a service that Metallic is able to offer across the whole estate. And that's probably a small set of customers but rapidly growing. Then you see a lot more customers who are saying, I'm going to do away as you talked about with the email server. I'm going to move to Office 365, leverage the power of teams and there's a shared responsibility model there which is different than an on-prem data protection use case. And so they're able to just add on Metallic to their existing Commvault environment, whether it's a Commvault software or Hyperscale and connect the two. So it's a single integrated experience. And then you kind of go to the other end of the spectrum and say, great customers all in on a SaaS delivered data protection. As you know, and you hear a lot from a lot of your guests and we hear from our customers, there's still a lot of data sitting out there, 90% of workloads and data centers, increasing edge data workloads. And if you were to back up one of those data workloads and say that the only copy can be in the cloud, then that would take like a 10 day recovery SLA and we have some competitors who say that then that's what they have. Our flexibility, our ability to kind of bring in a Hyperscale deployment and just docket into Metallic and have a local copy instant recovery SLA, remote backup copy in the cloud for ransomware or your worst case scenario. That's the kind of flexibility. So all those are scenarios we're really seeing with our customers. And that's kind of really the power of hand. It's a very unique part of our portfolio. Companies can have portfolio products but have a single integrated offering with that flexibility that kind of, depending on the use case, you can start here and grow into a different point. That's really the unique part of that power of hand. Yeah, yeah, 10 day RTO just doesn't cut it. But Tim, maybe you could weigh in here. Why, what was the catalyst for you adopting Metallic and maybe you could share, what was the business impact there? Well, the catalyst and impact, obviously two different things. The catalyst when we look at it, there was a lot of what are we gonna do with this? We have an environment, we need to back it up and how are we going to approach this? So we looked at it from a few different standpoints. And of course, when it boils down to it, one of the major reasons was the financial. But when we started looking at everything else that we have available to us and the flexibility that Commvault has in rolling out new solutions, this really was a no-brainer at this point. We are able to essentially back up new features and new products as soon as they're available. Within our Metallic environment, we are running deactivate. We are running the self-service for the end users to where they can actually recover their own files. We are adding the teams into it to be able to recover and perform these backups for teams. And I wanna step aside really quick and mention something about this. Because I'd been with Metallic for a long time and I'd been waiting for this. We've been waiting for an ability to do these backups and anyone I know, Minaj knows that I've been waiting for it. And Commvault came back to me a while back and they said, we just have to wait for the API. We have to wait for Microsoft releasing. Well, I follow the news, I saw Microsoft release the API and I think it may have been two days later that Commvault reached out to me and said, hey, we got it available. Are you ready to do this? And that sort of turnaround, that sort of flexibility being on top of new applications with that, with Salesforce, that is just not necessarily the reason why I adopted Metallic, but one of those things that puts a smile on my face because I adopted Metallic. That's an interesting story. I mean, you get the SDKs and if you're a leader, you can put the resources on it and you're ready when the product comes to GA. Minaj, I wonder if we could talk about just the notion of backing up SaaS. Part of the announcements today included within Metallic included backup and offerings for Dynamics 365. But my question is why support Dynamics specifically and SaaS apps generally? I mean, customers might say, doesn't my SaaS provider protect my data? Why do I need a third party? And the second part of that question is, why Commvault? Well, Dave, great question. As always, I'll start with the second part of the question. It's really three words, the shared responsibility model. And a lot of times our customers, as they go into the cloud model, they really start understanding that there is something that you're getting a lot of advantages with certain things you don't have to do, but the shared responsibility model is what every cloud and SaaS provider will indoctrinate in the SLAs, and it's really the application data is owned by the customer. And the meaning of that is not something that some SaaS provider can understand. And so that requires specialized skills and that's a partnership. We've done this now very successfully with Microsoft and LG 65. We've added support for Salesforce and we see a rapid customer adoption because with that shared responsibility model, if you have some kind of an admin issue, as we have seen in the news, somebody changed their team setting and then lost all their chat and that data is discoverable. And you, the customer responsible for making sure that data is discoverable or ransomware attacks. Again, recovering that SaaS data is your responsibility because the attack could be coming in from your instance, not from the SaaS provider. So those are the reasons. Dynamics is one of the fastest growing SaaS applications from a business applications perspective out there. And as we looked at our roadmap and you looked at the right complement, what is the right adjacency? We're seeing this part of Microsoft's business application suite growing, there's millions of users out there and it's rapidly growing. And it's also integrated with the rest of the Microsoft family. So we're now proud to say that we support all three Microsoft Clouds from Microsoft Azure or 365 Dynamics. Those applications are increasingly integrated. So we're seeing commonality in customer base and that's a business critical data. And so customers are looking to manage that data, have solutions that they can be sure they can leverage is not just protecting data from worst case scenarios in the case of some of the apps like Dynamics, we offer support like setting up the staging environment. So it's improving productivity of the application admins and that's really kind of the value we're able to bring to the table. Yeah, that shared responsibility model, I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's oftentimes misunderstood but when you talk to CISOs, they understand it well. They'll tell you the shared responsibility is my responsibility. Maybe the cloud provider will secure the object storage bucket for the physical space but it's on me. So that's really important. So thank you for that. Isabel, last question. The roadmap, how do you see Commvault's metallic SaaS portfolio evolving? What can you tell us? Well, it has a big strategic impact. I'm convolved for sure as the portfolio first because all of our existing customers, as you mentioned earlier, 25 years, it's a lot of customers who have somehow some workload as SaaS. And so the ability without adding more complexity, without adding another vendor, just to be able to protect them in one click and as teams they bring a smile to his face is really important for us. The second is also a lot of customers who come to Commvault for metallic. This is the first time they enter the Commvault community and Commvault family. And as they start protecting their SaaS application, they realized that they could leverage the same application to protect their on-premise data as well. So back to the power of hand and without writing off their past investments, going to the cloud at the pace they want. So from that perspective, there is a big impact on no customer community, the second that metallic brings, I don't know, manage this way to humble, but you know, he double his customer every quarter and you know, we have had it 24 countries to the portfolio, to the product. So we see a rapid adoption. And so obviously, back to your question, we see the impact of metallic growing and growing fast because of the market demand, because of the rapid innovation. We can take the Commvault technology and put it in the SaaS model and our customer really like it. So I'm very excited. I think it's going to be, you know, a great innovation, a great positive impact for customers and our new customer we're welcoming, which by the way, I think half manage correct me, but I think half of the metallic customer have Commvault and the other half are new to our family. So they're very bullish about this and it's just the beginning as a, you know, we are 25 year old or sorry, 25 year young and looking forward to the next 25. Well, I can confirm, you know, we have a data partner, a survey partner, ETR, Enterprise Technology Research and I was looking at the Commvault data and it shows within the cloud segment, when you cut the data by cloud, you're actually accelerating. The spending momentum is accelerating and I think it's a function of, you know, some of the acquisitions you've made, some of the moves you made in integration. So congratulations on 25 years and you know, you're riding the correct wave. Isabel, Manoj, Tim, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE, it was great to have you. Thank you for having me. Thank you, Dave. I really appreciate it. And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time.