 Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019, brought to you by Commvault. Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are in Denver, Colorado, specifically Aurora actually. For the fourth annual Commvault Go, Stu, I'm super excited to be back hosting with you again. Yeah, Lisa, it's great to be with you, our second year doing Commvault Go. Last year, Keith Townsend was here with me and so glad you're here with me, because you've got a little bit of background with this company. I do, I was with Commvault 10 years ago. It's scary to think that it's been 10 years, but we're at the Gaylord Rockies, which is one of their customers, massive convention center, and as you said, the first conference of the Gaylord Rockies. That's what I heard, this convention center just opened up a couple of months ago. I think it holds like 1,500 people, the 1,500 rooms at the hotel, and supposedly this is the first large event that they've done, and this was planned last year. We were in Nashville at the Gaylord. The year before, I think they were in D.C. at the Gaylord, and next year I know they'll be at another Gaylord, so definitely putting their customers forth, just like in the keynote this morning, they had the State of Colorado opening up the event. We always love to hear a local customer welcoming us and talking about their partnership with the supplier. Absolutely, agree with that. The State of Colorado, the stat to share, the highest number of micro breweries per capita. I don't know about you, I'm not a beer person. I would be super blown away if I was, but. There is the too much choice in beer. It used to be you'd go in and say, okay, here's the five or 10 beers I like, now you go in and it's like, all right, there's 100 new ones I haven't tried because they weren't here last time. So many beers here, Greater Denver, I've been to Boulder a couple of times. They say if you want to start a micro brewery, there's one that's ready to hand you over a place because they're going out of business. They just churn and go over and everything's like that. My first time actually hosting an event of the Cube here in Colorado, so I'm super excited for that. It's a great locale and yeah, we're talking about, so Commvault, a 20 year old company, a lot of customers, but a lot of new faces. You look at who we're going to be talking to the next two days. They brought in a whole new executive team. We knew this was coming last year. Our final guest in our two days is going to be Al Bunty who was the COO, was one of the original 20 years with the company. We'll talk about the baton and some of the changes and some of the things that are the same. So yeah, interesting, you mentioned they started things off this morning with the customer, the state of Colorado. I too like, you always love to hear the voice of the customer. And I also really like it when customers talk about the challenges that they had. They talked about the SAM-SAM attack and all of the exposures and vulnerabilities. I love that because that's what happens. We're seeing data protection as a service to market, positive trends in the market. There are, it's a rise in cyber attack. So I love it when customers articulate, yep, nothing is perfect, but here's how working with Commvault, we were able to recover quickly from something like that. A lot of big news. You mentioned a lot of new executive leadership. This is Sanjay Merchandani's first go as CEO, came in about nine months ago. He's a CUBE alumni, so we're going to talk to him later this morning. But he came in after successfully leading Puppet through many rounds of millions and venture funding. He took Puppet worldwide, but he came into a company with declining revenues. And one where folks said, Commvault, you've got pressures to find alternative sources of growth. They said three things specifically. One, you need to upgrade your sales force. Two, you need to enhance your marketing. And three, you need to shift gears and expand your market share. And there's been a whole bunch of news, not just yesterday today, but in the last month or so, last few weeks actually, where Commvault is making a headway in all three of those states. Yeah, Lisa, right, because you look on paper and you look in the keynote and say, we have 20 years of experience. Here's all of the analyst reports that show us as the clear leader in this space. But then you look at it and say, oh, 2018 to 2019 declining revenues. There are a lot of competitors, both as some of the big stalwarts in technology, as well as many startups. Heck, I'm even seeing the startups now they're trying to call the last generation of startups that are going after Commvault as the legacy. So if you're not fully cloud native microservice SaaS-based architecture, you're the old way. And that's one of the news from Commvault already is they've done a couple of what they call Commvault Ventures. So the first one you were alluding to is they bought HeadVig, which was a software-defined storage company. They just bought them back in September, what was there, $240, $250 million, which was almost half of the cash that Commvault had sitting there. HeadVig, a company that's been around for a number of years. We're going to have Avinash, who's the founder and CEO on the program here. He was on the keynote stage going through the demo. They kind of sat at this interesting line between software-defined storage and actually hyper-converged infrastructure because you could in the early days do either storage-only or fully-converged environments. But massive scale, the customer that he talked about was a very large-scale deployment. Those large-scale deployments are really tough and can be challenging and they're not something that you just deploy everywhere. Unlike the other announcement that Commvault announced is Metallic. If you go to metallic.io, they have this new SaaS-based architecture. They built it in months, from the ground up, from the internal team. Part of me sitting there saying, okay, wait, if they could do this in six months or nine months or whatever it was, why hadn't they done it before? What has changed? What Commvault technology is under there? It's great, it's working Azure and AWS, as well as you can have a local copy in your environment. So they call it SaaS Plus and we need to understand a little bit more of the technology. So a lot of exciting things, definitely getting awareness, but both Metallic and HeadVig, they call Commvault Ventures. So new areas, areas that they're looking to add some incremental growth. And one of the things Sanjay said in his keynote is we want to rethink primary and secondary storage. So where is Commvault? Will they start dipping their toe into the primary storage? Does that line blur? We've got HP on the program, NetApp is up on stage with them. They have partnerships. So changing landscape, Commvault has long had a strong position in the market, but as things change, they want to make sure that they make themselves relevant for the next era. Absolutely, and the HeadVig acquisition gives them a pretty significant, a much larger presence in the software defined space, but it also is going to give them a big Tam expansion. We look at Metallic as you mentioned, yeah, the venture, I want to break that down. We've got Rob Kalucian on a little bit later. What is this Commvault venture? But also giving them, it sounds to me like giving customers in mid-market more choice, but one of the things I mentioned that analysts were saying is, hey you guys, you got to expand your market share, you really got to expand marketing. So we're seeing not just the technology announcements with HeadVig for the large scale enterprises, of which I think most of their revenue, at least three quarters of Commvault revenue, does come from that large space, Metallic for mid-market, but also some of the sales leadership changes that they've made, so we're really positioning them, new initiatives, new partner initiatives, really focused on the largest global enterprises. We're going to break some of that down today. So in terms of routes to market, you're seeing a lot of focus on mid-market and enterprise. Yeah, well at least 80% of Commvault's revenue comes from the partners, so that is hugely important. How does Metallic fit in? Will that be as a SaaS offering? Will that be direct? Will that go through the channel? Believe it's going to, the channel's going to be able to be enabled. How do all of these pieces go together? One note on HeadVig, you talk about TAM expansion, HeadVig was not a leader in the market when it comes to where they are. There's a lot of competition there. They were not a unicorn that had a road to a billion dollars worth of actual revenue there, so they got bought at a very high multiple of what their actual revenue was, and the question was, did they just not have the go-to-market to be able to bring that, and maybe Commvault can bring them there? Were they misposition in the market? Should they not be really primary storage? Should they go more to secondary storage? Were partner closely with secondary storage? Because I know some of Commvault's competitors did work with HeadVig. I've talked to a number of partners out there that liked HeadVig and was like, oh, it's a nice complimentary offering to what we have, whether they be a hardware or software play. So, will being in Commvault hypercharge that growth? Obviously, they've got some smart team members. Avanesh came from Amazon and Facebook, and his team, but what will this do to accelerate what they're doing? How will there be, hit the word, but synergies between the two sides of the company? So, Sanjay and team really laying out their vision for where they want to take the company, and it's challenging to be where the trusted, reliable enterprise, and we're going to go down to the lower end of the market, and we're going to go in all these cool new spaces and everything, so Commvault only has limited resources, just like any other company, and how will they maintain and grow their position going forward? We are going to hear from a number of their customers, Stu, today, who've been Commvault customers for 10 plus years. Some of them who have a number of Commvault competitors within disparate organizations, I'd love to hear from them. Why are you running Commvault, the backup exec within these different departments, for example, AstraZeneca is one of them, and what makes Commvault in certain departments really ideal? So, going to get a good picture of that, but also love to understand from these customers who've been using Commvault for years, do you see a new Commvault in their fiscal year 2020? Talked about the leadership changes. As you mentioned, this is a company that's not only 20 years old, but it'll run some stats by you that Sanjay Merchandani shared this morning. They've got 2.8 million virtual machines protected. They've got over 700 millions of petabytes they're protecting in the cloud, 1.6 million servers on and on and on. How is Commvault of fiscal year 2020 different and really poised at this intersection of unified storage and management? And one of the answers for that that we'll dig into is it's about data. So while Commvault does 45 million weekly backup jobs, we used to know backup is something that you just kind of had, but you didn't necessarily use it. Now it's not just having my data and making sure that it's relied on, but how can I leverage that data? It's data at the core, and Sanjay said data's the heart of everything they're doing. Coming from Puppet, Sanjay knows about DevOps and Agile, and he's going to bring some of that in. He's brought in a team that's going to infuse some change in the culture, and we'll see. I expect Commvault to be moving a little faster. They definitely have made a number of changes in the short time that he has already been there, and we'll get a little bit of road map as to where we see them going in the future. Yeah, there certainly seems to be moving quickly. You mentioned Sanjay being nine months. Metallic, you mentioned also being developed in a matter of months. Announcing the Hedvig acquisition in September, it closed October 1st. Their Q2 earnings come out in just a couple of weeks right before Halloween. So it seems like a lot of momentum carrying Commvault into the Denver, Aurora area. Are you saying is it going to be a trick or a treat? Ooh, I like that. As a marketer, I'm jealous that you thought of that and I didn't, but I like that. We'll go with that. Well, it's all these years on theCUBE. You've got to have the snappy comebacks. Right? So Stu, it's going to be a great day today. We are jam-packed session, interview after interview with Commvault executives, really dissecting what they're doing, what's new. What's positioning them to really kick the door wide open and really reverse those revenues, taking them positive and really, not only meeting the analyst expectations, but exceeding them. So I'm looking forward to an action-packed two days in Aurora with you Stu. Can't wait. All right, first two men and man. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Commvault Go 19. We'll be right back with our first guest.