 Live from the BuildGram Auditorium in San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at Pure Storage Accelerate 2018 at the BuildGram Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin, sporting prince today with Dave Vellante, sporting the hoop. And I'm sandwiched, most importantly, between two Celtics fans and the Warriors are across the bay. We'll save that for after the conversation. So, we want to welcome to theCUBE the first time Ken Ringdahl, the VP of Global Alliance Architecture from Veeam. Welcome. Great, thank you, Lisa. It was a truth we told we're afraid of the Warriors, okay? We really don't want to play the Warriors. Oh, really? No, I mean. And we're not afraid of many people in Boston, but I don't know. They look pretty good. Well, I appreciate the honesty. That's pretty cool. Although they lost last night, right? We're going to start the sports talk now. Yeah. Iguodala was out. They showed some fallibility. So, anyway. We digress, too. We'll be back to it later on in a segment. Stay tuned. All right, so you just fresh off Veeam on last week. We're impressed that you have a voice. You've recovered from that. Tell us a little bit about some of the things that are new with Veeam and Pure. So just a month ago in April, new integration between Veeam availability platform and Pure Storage Flash Array to deliver business continuity, agility, intelligence for the cloud era. Expand a little bit upon that. Yeah, sure. I mean, this is really this integration with Pure Storage. We, in the Veeam backup and replication product, end of last year, we introduced this new functionality called Universal Storage API. And what this really is, is a way for us to enable our partners to take control of their destiny a little bit more. It's a program we invite our partners into. You know, Pure is one of the first that we integrated with and invited into the program very early. We announced this last year and we've now finished the integration, as you mentioned, we announced it last month. It's now been out there. And I think the number I heard earlier today is we've already had a couple hundred downloads and deployments. So that's just great adoption of, and just shows the pent up demand for that. But what we've integrated is the ability for our partners, our storage partners in particular, to integrate with our storage snapshot technology to really offload the snapshot from the VMware side and really put more of it on the storage side and take it really off the production environment. And so it's a better together story where we take the feature that we've introduced in Veeam Backup and Replication and Pure built this plugin and they integrate with their own APIs and we jointly test and develop that and release that plugin and they can install it with Veeam Backup and Replication and it really takes, as I mentioned, takes that load off the production environment. So that snapshot, you know, without this integration to VMware snapshot, that snapshot stays open as long as the backup is, which can be minutes and, you know, tens of minutes potentially for a large system. But now we shrink that down literally to just seconds. So we take a VMware snapshot, we take the Pure snapshot, we close the VMware snapshot and that's, you know, typically it's like 10 to 12 seconds long as opposed to the, you know, minutes and even tens of minutes from before. So really it's really offloading a lot of that, you know, backup impact and we're able to do it in a very secure QIES fashion from the production environment. Let's roll back and understand that a little bit better, Ken, if you could explain it to us in our audience. In, you know, 2000, that's eight, seven, eight, nine timeframe, virtualization, VMware in particular, started to take hold and you ended up replacing a bunch of physical servers with virtual servers, which was awesome because all those physical servers were underutilized except for one major workload, which was backup. So when you didn't want to do the backup, you didn't have enough resources. Veeam's ascendancy coincided with that trend. So there was a simplicity component, but it seems like what you're describing now is another instantiation of offloading that bottleneck. So what was the journey to Veeam's efficiency in a virtualization environment? Yeah, if you look at that journey and, you know, Veeam really grew up in the virtualization age, right? So, you know, backup prior to VMware virtualization was really all agent-based, it was physical, right? So everything was over the wire and Veeam went and said, hey, look, you know, we see VMware really sort of growing and we see that trend towards virtualization, right? And at this point, what's the world? 95% virtualized, I mean, at this point, the only workloads that aren't virtualized are really legacy workloads. And so, you know, we made a significant leap forward in a data protection stance by integrating with the hypervisor. So instead of, you know, offloading that into the individual guests, right? The Windows guests, the Linux guests, we said, okay, we're going to go to the hypervisor, right? And we're going to do this in an agent-less fashion so you don't have to go and visit every little, every system that you're looking to back up. That was sort of the first step, right? Now what we're saying is we can do that, do even better, and we can offload the hypervisor and offload that to the storage system so we can have a very small impact on the hypervisor, really minimize that, and now really put that workload on the storage system which has a lot of extra, you know, cycles and availability and we can go straight to the backup environment and not through the VM or through the hypervisor to get there. So VMWare admins, they don't like snapshots because it's overhead intensive, it clogs up their system, if you will. This capability makes that transparent or irrelevant to them? It does, it minimizes it to such a small degree that it's a blip, you know, it's a little blip on the radar as opposed to, you know, that when you snapshot a VM, you know, you're essentially quiescing that VM, so everything sort of slows down for a very short period of time and what happens is that it spawns another virtual disk. So while that snapshot is open, this other virtual disk is being written to and then when you close that snapshot and you remove that snapshot, that disk gets merged back in, right? This is, you know, generally how VMWare snapshots work and what we're saying is we're going to minimize as much as we possibly can the data that goes in there. So if you think of a running virtual machine that's merging, if you're merging back in a gigabyte disk versus a disk that has 10 megabytes, you know, that's going to be really, really quick as opposed to, you know, the other, you know, if you keep that snapshot open for a long period of time, that merge operation and it just slows things down and we're trying to minimize that impact on the system. So business benefits, I get the performance improvements that this integration with Pure facilitates. If we think of this in the context of digital business transformation where companies that are doing it well have the ability to really glean actionable insights from their data to be able to drive, you know, new products and get products to market faster, is this actually going to facilitate a company being able to get new products to market faster? Absolutely. So there's a feature inside of a beamback of a replication we call Data Labs. And what Data Labs is the ability to take a production snapshot. In this case, we're talking about a pure snapshot and be able to stand that up in a sandbox environment and you can run DevTest, you can apply your Windows patches in an environment that literally matches production. And it's a key differentiator. It's a key differentiator for Veeam and it's enabled by the Pure Snapshot integration that you have this environment and it's even like, even if you have an infected system, you go put it over in Data Labs, it's sandboxed so you can put it in a private network so it doesn't have any connectivity. So if you have a worm or some other ransomware, you can run analytics, you can run diagnosis on any of that and not worry about it sort of infecting any other environment nor does it put workload on your production environment. So you get Patch Tuesday, right? And we all know that Windows patches don't always go as they seem, right? So Data Labs, let's take that Pure Snapshot, let's stand up a virtual environment which exactly matches production, let's test that patch, right? And then we have confidence there so when we go to production, we have confidence because we've already done it. We've already run that in production and so there's a lot of value in that capability. So we were at Veeamon last week, fresh off the Kool-Aid injection, it's all orange here, it was all green at Veeamon in Chicago. The messaging there was all about multi-cloud and hyper-availability in this multi-cloud world. We're hearing a lot about cloud-like function here but a lot of on-prem activity. Of course, multi-cloud includes on-prem so I wonder if you could dovetail your messaging last week, what you're seeing in the field and what you're seeing with the partnerships with companies like Pure? Yeah, no question. I mean, the Veeam platform and really I mean you started last week at Veeamon, we talked about sort of private cloud, public cloud and our ability to orchestrate and really stretch across all those environments and we know that customers all the way from SNB, all the way up to enterprise, they have remote offices, branch offices, some of them use the cloud, some of them use multiple data centers and really they need their data protection to be able to stretch across those environments. They don't want point solutions in each of those locations. They want a platform that they can trust and have visibility, right? That's one of the five stages that we talked about about hyper-availability last week is visibility. They want visibility across those clouds. They want, you know, step phase two is aggregation. They want to be able to aggregate all these different places, right? And that's what we provide our customers with the platform is backup, visibility, aggregation, orchestration, automation and we provide them, you know, on different stages of that journey for our customers, we have different product services and integrations actually with our partners that really help our customers along that journey. We know from our research, the crew at Wikibon does some great work on this. We know that data protection and orchestration are moving up on the list of CXO priorities. At the same time, you know, for a lot of IT practitioners who are under real budget constraints, it's like trying to sell more insurance to a 24 year old. So those are sort of two countervailing trends. What are you seeing in the marketplace? I mean, what we're seeing is customers, you know, downtime is really, it's gone, right? I mean, I think, you know, last week we heard in one of our key notes, you know, you roll back a couple of years, you were talking about availability in terms of five nines, right? Now it's zero. I mean, people don't talk about downtime because, you know, downtime can't exist and customers need that sense of security and availability, you know, it will happen. I mean, let's face it, I mean, even, you know, Amazon, the best data centers in the world go down, right, there's been some notable S3 outages, but it's about how fast can you recover, right? And you're talking about low RPOs. I mean, one of the things that, you know, this week here at Pure Accelerate, we're hearing a lot about rapid recovery, right? Flash blade and the ability and, and you take rapid recovery and flash blade, you combine that with the Veeam platform and our instant VM recovery and you can get to near zero downtime, near zero time recovery in your environments, right? To really provide that security and let's face it, time is money for a lot of our customers, right? So the longer they're down, the more time they're losing money, they need availability and RPOs are near zero these days, so. The other thing, if I may just follow up, one follow up, is the other thing our research shows is that the average Fortune 1000 company over three or four year period is leaving literally, you know, billion plus dollars on the table because of poorly architected backup or inadequate backup. So that's a huge opportunity for you and others, obviously. There's a lot of opportunity right now for vendor churn, that's the other thing our research shows is that people aren't wed to their backup and recovery vendor. So does that resonate with customers? Are they, because of digital, for example, are you seeing that tipping point, that critical mass occur? And then if you could tie that in to sort of your partnership with Pure, I'd be interested in that. Sure, yeah, no doubt about it. We're seeing customers, you know, they want that flexibility and that portability. One of the things we do with our platform, it's one of our unique selling features, is it is agnostic, right? I'll tie it back to Pure in a moment, but, you know, when we back up, we back up in a storage agnostic fashion. So any Veeam backup that lands on a disk, on a tape anywhere, can be reconstituted, can be re-imported. So even if you have a full disaster scenario, we can go stand that backup somewhere else and fully consume that backup and restore it. We have direct restore capabilities, so we can port those backups and direct restore them, for example, a direct restore to Azure, for example. So that flexibility and portability is extremely valuable. Now, bring that back to Pure, some of the things we're doing around rapid recovery, around the snapshot integration we talked about, is we're really enabling customers to have high-performing primary storage environments, high-performing secondary storage environments, and really bring that together in a way that works, we talked about multi-cloud, right? You know, remote data centers and work across and aggregate and give visibility, that's really where the Veeam and Pure story together becomes really strong because you get an incredibly high-performing primary and secondary with a highly flexible, portable secondary data protection environment, and you get the capability to get to the cloud. You know, if that's, you know, for DR, a lot of customers looking to the cloud for DR because it's, you know, they don't have to stand up infrastructure there. It's when they need it, they spin it up, and then they can bring it back, and there's a lot of value there. So I hear a lot of harmony, but I actually read recently online that a different analyst firm called the Pure Veeam relationship a match of opposites. Now they say opposites attract, and you've done a great job of talking about the integration. Do you agree it's a good blending of opposites, and if so, what's that kind of symbiotic benefit that we both bring to each other? Yeah, I don't know that I saw that report, but I mean, what I would say from, you know, there's a lot of synergy. I mean, we're growing at a very rapid rate. I think when I look at Pure and I look at Veeam, you know, we grew 36% last year. I think Pure is growing at like 50% year over year. We have NPS scores. Where our NPS score is 73, we're really proud of that. The Pure NPS score, I think I started to keep it up, is 83. I don't think it could be higher than 73. It is incredible. I think there's a lot of synergy, the size of our organizations, I think the age of our organizations, the aggressiveness we have, some of it we have joint competitors in the market. So I think there's a lot of synergies between, you know, where we are as an organization, and as Veeam, and where Pure is there. I wish I read the article in terms of the opposites, because I'd love to understand. Personally, as a long time analyst, I would say the similarities are greater than the differences. Sure sounds like it. You're both about a billion dollars. You're both growing at, you know, let's say call it 35, 40% a year. You're both pursuing platforms. You're both like really aggressive. You're insanely passionate about your customers and winning. So, and you like colors. You like green. They like orange. Absolutely. All right. We got to talk a little. Chicken and green. We got to talk about ourselves. I'm going to start somewhere else, though, because I asked this question of a number of folks at Veeam on. If you were, Ken, if you were Robert Kraft, would you have traded Tom Brady? No. No, elaborate. No. I think when you look at, A, the guy was the MVP of the league last year. So that by itself stands on its own. But you have to look and it's, you know, the Patriots have always been about sort of, you know, trading or moving on a year too early versus a year too late. So you could make that case with Tom Brady. But I think there's always exceptions. And when you look at, I mean, he is basically like a adopted son of Robert Kraft and the organization. He's brought five Super Bowls. He's basically, he built Patriot Place, you know, and you know, Robert Kraft built Patriot Place on the backs of Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, to that extent. But, you know, how do you move on from someone that's given, that's brought you so much success that has been under market, you know, paid under market, so that they can go and do other things and have flexibility with the cap. And I just don't know how you can move on from that. So that's consistent now. I think it's four for four of people we've asked Boston fans. So they'll appreciate that feedback. Let's talk a little hoops, you know, Celtics, feeling pretty good up to zip. Now it's tied 2-2, Houston, Golden State tied 2-2. Those two teams are proven they can win on the road. Celtics haven't proven that yet. What are your thoughts on that series? Yeah, so certainly Cleveland came storming back. I think the stories of the downfall of the Cavs were clearly over-exaggerated. They came back in a big way. I think the Celtics started to figure out the Cavs in quarters two, three, and four. They got themselves in a big hole in the first quarter and the last game. So, you know, I feel good. The Celtics are not at home this year in the postseason. You know, they've got, it's basically a best of three and they have two of them at home. So, the Cavs will have to break serve if they want to win the series. If they're lucky enough to get through, you know, to the finals, which would be unbelievable. Do they have any shot against the Warriors? So, I think to say they have no shot is probably going a little too far, but you know, you got to play the games and the Celtics traditionally have matched up well against the Warriors. I mean, last year, the Celtics actually came in to Oracle and broke, I don't know, what was it, like a 50-game home winning streak or something. So, you know, and that was a team that didn't have Kyrie or Gordon Hayward and I know they're still out. So, you know, the future looks bright for the Celtics, but in the context of this year's finals, certainly if I were a betting man, I'd be putting my money behind the Warriors, but you know, I don't doubt that Brad Stevens could come up with a scheme that could, you know, steal a couple of games and make people, you know, in the Bay Area feel a little uneasy. We'd love to see a non-Lebron final. Yes. Yeah, I think it's the worst. Sorry, Brendan. Sorry, buddy. It's a little diversity, not, you know, three years in a row, we've had the same thing, so I'll extend my support to the Celtics in honor of both of you guys. All right, and we can talk if they get to the finals, then we can, you know, we can take it from there. I can't imagine what the day after the Super Bowl was like this last year for both of you. We won't go there. I still haven't recovered, so. Awesome. Well, Ken, thanks so much for stopping by. Congrats on being a CUBE alumni now. We look forward to seeing you at VMworld in just a few months' time. Yes, great. Thanks, Ken. We'll be there for sure. All right, for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Pure Accelerate 2018. Stick around, Dave and I will be back with a wrap in just a moment.