 from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2019, brought to you by Veeam. We're back, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here in Miami, this is a wrap of VeeamON 2019. Two days of coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Peter Burris. This is our third year covering VeeamON. We started in New Orleans. We've seen Veeam go from what they called, at this show, Act One to Act Two. And we talked two years ago about our first VeeamON, about the ascendancy of Veeam being so tightly tied to the rise of virtualization. And now we heard this year Act Two being cloud, multi-cloud. And we heard a number of announcements that are in support of that. We're going to talk about that. But Peter, there were three key announcements this week. One was the billion dollar milestone. They actually, it finally hit a billion dollars. They've been talking about it for a while. It's now official. Billion dollars on a trailing 12 month basis. They're a profitable company Veeam. And a focused billion dollars. I think that's really important. They're very focused. I mean, they do some M&A, but not a lot of M&A. And that's because of NIH. I mean, these guys, they trust themselves to write code. It's also sustained that simple value proposition. Right, and that's a fundamental dogma, I think. I think it's fair to say. We heard the announcement of the with Veeam API infrastructure, which is key. We're going to talk about that. I think there were two companies they announced partnerships with Nutanix, with Mine, and Exigrid, both taking advantage of that. There will be others. Ken Ringdahl just told us, you know, maybe 10 to 12. It's not going to be an enormous number. At least for secondary storage. Yeah, but that'll knock down a large portion of the infrastructure market. And then the Veeam availability orchestrator, version two, which allows you to do fast backups, recover from backups without having to go to a replicated offsite. And some other capabilities they call the dynamic documentation and automating testing and some DevOps capabilities. So, you know, the people seem pretty excited about that. It wasn't a sea of announcements, like you see at some of these things, which I think Peter talks to the degree of focus that you were just mentioning. You know, they're not about bragging rights on the number of announcements that they can make. You know, it's really all about extending that platform. Lot of incremental announcements. Ratmir told us not a big roadmap company, even though he did show a roadmap today, but the roadmap he showed was a lot of near term functional improvements. So very function rich, you know, the tagline of it just works. But let's see, I think this is the first time you and I have done Veeam on together. First time I've been here. Your impressions? Look, I love wandering the halls and talking to the actual attendees and seeing what they have to say. So I spent about an hour, hour and a half just doing some work in one of the hallways here. And one of the reasons I do that is because it's an opportunity here with the attendees and the customers are talking about and what's important to them. You go to a lot of these shows and everybody's buzzing about one or another product announcement. You go here and everybody's talking about the problems that they're solving. And I think that one of the reasons why we didn't have this frenzy of product announcements like we have in so many other places because a lot of companies want the focus to be on them. I think what we heard here, or what I heard here was somewhat different was, again, customers trying to solve the problems and Veeam creating an opportunity for them to talk in terms of some of the new directions and some of the new products are being introduced. But the focus stayed on the customer and the problems that they're trying to solve. And that's what, to my mind, that's what successful companies focus on. Yeah, and I come back to this notion of the with Veeam, the whole API integration, cloud, hybrid cloud, the edge. Veeam wants to be, and they've laid this vision out, certainly last year and even started the year before, of essentially being that backup capability, data protection capability across wherever your data lives, on-prem, in the cloud. Now, they really are focused on backup and data protection. They even say backup is where it starts. A lot of other companies don't even use the term backup. No, it's not about backup, it's about data management and data protection. So it's interesting that Veeam is really focused on backup and when you do what you did and talk to the customers, what do you use the Veeam for? Backup, backup, backup, backup. And so they're not over-rotating to that vision. Now, many of their competitors are going hard after that and doing some great marketing. So the competitive dynamics are very interesting now. You've got Cohesity, you've got Rubrik, doing really well with positioning as a modern architecture and Veeam, definitely not a legacy company, their business is growing. You've got Commvault, you've got Dell EMC, Veritas, IBM, you know, trying to hit single-digit growth, trying not to decline. I mean, IBM in particular declined and then really had to do a deal with CataLogic to stop Veeam from eating its market share. That's really what that deal was all about. You saw Dell EMC kind of take its eye off the ball when it merged with Dell EMC. You know, it was the leader and purpose-built backup appliances. It's made some announcements recently to try to get back in the game, right? So, you know, you don't ever count those guys out. Commvault's approached it differently. They've got a large install base. You know, Veritas went through private equity and so they had some other challenges. But again, they're investing. And so, it's a big market. You know, people are going to go fight hard for it and then with the outside funding that's come in, it's really up the game. Now, a lot of that funding is going to go to promotion, which again, comes back to your point about focused R&D. Really, really important to focus R&D on things that customers want that you're going to solve a business problem. So, if you go back, and just to take your segmentation and we can kind of look at it in a couple of perhaps simple ways. You've got Veeam and companies like Veeam who saw the whole virtualization and the need to do a better job of supporting and protecting and replicating and backing up virtualized resources. All hitting the market pretty hard. And then you had the Dell EMCs and a lot of the other companies that you mentioned. Trying to sustain or keep pace with those guys. And then you have the new guys, the drovers and whatnot. We're talking about just cross-cloud, multi-cloud backup. On top of that, you have, and something we talked about with a couple of guests, the security guys are looking at this and saying, wait a minute, you know, data is data and protection and security are going to be increasingly difficult to separate because data is going to move and I have to be able to move security with the data. It's going to be an inevitability. We're talking about a cloud that allows us to do more distribution of data because we're going to do more distribution of work and the security is going to have to move from the data. So the security guys are going to get in this. The networking guys are going to be asking questions about the opportunity. You got the old guard who is more focused on devices and managing and backing up the devices, trying to get back in. You got the new guys who are saying, let's lead the Act 2 before the Veeam's get there. It's going to be an extremely complex market, but all of it's going to boil down to this simple fact. I'm going to distribute data in response to the work that needs to be performed and how am I going to manage the digital assets that I have to make that easy so that it doesn't explode. And all of these companies at some point, kind of the next phase of this is going to be I'm protecting data, but can I turn it into a digital asset? So here's what I saw. I saw Veeam talking about the idea of, you know what, we're going to protect locally. I'll suggest it over the course of the next couple of years. It's going to be we're going to do data asset management with protection where the actual act of protecting it is similar to the act of defining it as an asset. So being able to use a snapshot for a lot of different uses already happening now, but adding services, consistent set of services on top of that through with Veeam and other resources that allow them to do that. And then move more of that, what's today regarded as replication function into that protection side of things. A lot more support for locally because that's where the services are going to become. Having the services or not having the services is really going to be an essential question because we're going to move more of this data out to where the work's going to be performed. We often talk about customers having to place bets, but the vendors are having to place bets as well. They're obviously betting on multi-cloud, but juxtapose for example, what Veeam's doing, and it was interesting to hear Ken Ringdahl, he answered your question about whether it was through M&A, and he answered it in an M&A context, but or maybe organic development around more security functions. And he kind of said, I'll never say never, but really focused, the team, the engineering team is really focused on backup and data protection and what they call data management. Juxtapose that now, would they say for instance, what are Daytreams doing? X-Data Domain guys built their own file system trying to bring both primary and secondary stores together. Yeah, and which I like, and I think it's really powerful, Veeam's taking a different approach. They're saying with Veeam APIs, we're going to partner with Pure, we're going to partner with Cisco, we're going to partner with Nutanix. So, different approach, and they're going to obviously claim the same capability. Hey, we can do that too. Daytreams saying, well, we can do that too with just one mouse trap, the integration points, et cetera. So it's going to really be interesting to see how that all shakes out, that word seamless. Like I said, it sometimes triggers me. If it really is seamless, Veeam has a go to market advantage relative to the Swiss Army knife approach. If it's not seamless, then a daytream approach will have an advantage. It's from a product standpoint. You and I both know there's so much more to success than just having a great product. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. You can write in there and know the best of it. And mentioned it. But here's, it's interesting. When we talked about what will the road map, the practical road map, because Veeam has altered its road map in response to Custer of Demand. Quite frankly, very successfully, and you've got to applaud them for doing so. But one of the things we heard was that, look, we don't want to over promise on the engineering front, because you've got a certain number of engineers in a certain engineering capacity, focus them on things that are creating value to the problems you're trying to solve. The same thing's true within a lot of user shops. You don't want to throw a whole bunch of new function and new requirements at a bunch of guys who are still themselves trying to evolve from backing up devices to now actually protecting data. And so there's a natural evolution that's going to take place. And I think Veeam has done a pretty good job of keeping their finger on what that pulse is. It's what can be invented, but also what can be innovated if we think of innovation as the customer adopting and applying it and embedding it and changing their activities around it. And I think Veeam's done a pretty good job of navigating that what can customers really do right now not getting too far ahead. So a lot of these guys, the natural tendency that you come from a product perspective and you say put more into the product and get the better check marks and have the better statue, the better fact sheet. And I think Veeam is taking a simpler approach, almost an Apple-like approach in an enterprise sense and saying, look, give them what they can handle, give them what they can use, give them what's going to generate value, and as they master that, give them a little bit more. You know what it reminds me of is you said Apple, it reminds me of early EMC days. When EMC brought out, you know, it's symmetric, it was, it would connect to, you know, AIX, Solaris, Unisys, obviously IBM, Maverick. It had all the optionality, all the connectivity, and that's kind of what Veeam is doing. And then the features that are announced were really practical, they clearly solved the problem now. Since then, you know, EMC's evolved into the checkbox, right? We have more features than anybody. That's what happens when you have a user-solve base. But they have the customer base that everybody wants, right? You have the customer base that everybody wants and they say, check, we have that thin provisioning, we have that too, and you know, we're going to freeze the market. That's, you know, much more mature company. But in their defense, it's also in response to an increasingly specialized and complex customer base, they're trying to cover all the bases. And, you know, competitive guys eating at their heels. Absolutely, absolutely. And the sales guys saying, hey, we need something to stop this. Absolutely, absolutely. And they've done a great job of doing that. But Veeam is very, very focused on the optionality, and for years, they wouldn't talk about bare metal. A couple of years ago at Veeam on, the big thing was, hey, we said for years, we're only virtualization, well, guess what? Now we do bare metal. That was sort of the big announcement one year. So they're very judicious about how they allocate their R&D, you know, capital. And you're seeing that, you know, translate into function that actually gets used. Actually, yeah, I think that's a key point. I think your analogy with EMC is actually really good, Dave, because if you go back 30 years when EMC first started getting going, what was the problem? Controllers on mainframes and mini computers were getting incredibly complex. It's, you know, dusty controllers. And the amount of processing that was being put into that and the microcode was just overwhelming most people's ability to deal with it. And so EMC came along and said, well, if that's the problem, can we fix it? Can we put cash in? That'll just make this whole system simpler. And then they stay true to that for a number of years and they turn into a BMOV. And it's interesting, I think it is a good analogy, because what is the problem? The problem is, data is going to be more distributed. It's going to be more central to a company's mission. It's going to be used by more functions and repurposed into more applications that have a greater diversity of RTO and RPO. And as a consequence, they seem to be saying, we're going to do our best to pull as much function to that protect side of things, local, as we possibly can, so that people who aren't PhDs in computer science can perform a real business service by making all that stuff work. And then at the same time, work very closely with third parties who can bring specialization of that secondary storage to bear as the specialization increases, because it's going to increase. And the other MBA case study example that I would point to is the early days of Veritas. When Jeremy Burton was running Merrick Marketing at Veritas, he coined the, I think it was Jeremy, coined the no hardware agenda, pure software, a lot of function, and they rose to a couple of billion dollars in revenue, very, very successful. Now has the big install base that everybody wants to eat. It's just, again, reminiscent, being pure software company, they're not shipping boxes, they're not shipping appliances, they're not selling direct, they're pure channel play. There's a big tam to just continue to do virtualization. I like the big question is, are they going to, will their focus on what they're currently doing translate into focus on multi-cloud? Here at this conference, they're claiming, yes, we've heard nothing that suggests that they won't be able to, but there's a lot of new players out there who are looking at that space and saying, you know what, I can do that too, and there's going to be a lot of invention, a lot of investment, and there's good reasons to suspect that Veeam's going to be able to evolve successfully, but there are few areas where I think they're going to have to focus more time. Yeah, a big part of a CEO's job is TAM expansion, and right now they're a billion out of 15, let's call it, so there's a long way to go, but as you point out, that multi-cloud appears like it's going to be lucrative, and there's a lot of different companies coming at it from different angles. You got it. And today we look at it as this big blob. Yeah. And the reality is it's going to be incredibly specialized. Very fragmented. I mean, you got Cisco coming at it from a networking perspective, Red Hat coming from a PaaS perspective, Google, you know, partnering everybody. Amazon right now ignoring it, but you guarantee they're going to be. Absolutely. And Microsoft has to be in it because of the huge estate of on-prem software. And there's a dozen security guys are going to be looking at this and saying, oh, look, date and motion. That's us. My service now is going to get its piece of it. So very interesting how that's all going to shake out. It's okay. So wrap it up, Peter. You know, kind of summarize your thoughts on the space, Veeamon. So first Veeamon for me, a lot of customers that we're talking about solving complex problems during their digital business transformation, that's always good to hear. Got to a billion dollars. That's a great milestone for any software company. Good reasons to suspect that Veeam is going to evolve into a company like Veritas, like one of the big guys. This is a company that's got legs. And I think that the final one that I'd say not got legs, but they've got what it takes to be able to affect this transition. They probably got the execution chops. Look, we had a user on here who effectively said, if you're a CIO and you're not using Veeam, you're not competent. Basically he said that. That's not a bad testimony when you come down to it. Yeah, and then the one thing that we have not talked about which is it shines through is culture. This company has a culture that is a winning culture. It's a fun culture. There's an accountability associated with it. And very customer oriented. Absolutely, yep. So that's winning formulas. It's been fun sort of watching these guys grow and interacting with a number of their customers. And you saw a couple of years ago Veeam saying, okay, we're going enterprise. Well, ain't so easy to just say we're going enterprise. But interestingly, even though they've somewhat retrenched from that messaging, they're having success in the enterprise. Clearly with their partnerships with guys like HPE, and Cisco, and NetApp, and others. And so they're just going to let it bake a little bit and go from their position of strength, which is that kind of S and MB. Do more simply with your protection environment is not a bad story for a company of any size. Right, right. Okay, Peter, hey, it's been great working with you. Thank you. And thank you for watching. Guys, great job. Awesome. Go to siliconangle.com, you'll see all the news. Thecube.net is where we host all these videos and you'll see wikibon.com has all the research. Peter recently wrote a great piece on data protection and how that market's involving. Check out our Twitter at theCUBE and at theCUBE 365 Twitter handles. You'll see all kinds of clips coming out of this show and other shows. Let's see, we got a lot coming up. Last word for you, what'd you think? So, I think you're seeing, as I said before, a very practical approach to gaining foothold and maintaining and growing in a market. I like the business model. This company has been somewhat opaque. European-based, you know, Russian founders. But, and most of this business is outside of the US and I think they're really coming into the mainstream now. And theCUBE helps make it more transparent. Yeah, absolutely. And right, because you can ask the questions of people and you know, you get all kinds of different answers. So, and we're able to have, you know, independence on, you know, guys like Justin, firms like the 451, guys that, you know, Gartner coming on and it's fun to have those guys. So, so it's been great. Thank you for watching theCUBE. Go to theCUBE.net, check out the events that are coming up. Huge, huge season. May and June are our busiest months. Take a slight break in July, although, you know, we'll be cranking this summer as well. So thank you for watching everybody. We're out, Dave Vellante for Peter Burris. We'll see you next time.