 From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. Okay, welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE's coverage two days here in Miami Beach at the Fontainebleau Hotel for Acronis's Global Cyber Summit 2019. It's an all-rule event around a new category emerging called cyber protection. This isn't a wave that's going to be part of the modernization of, we've been calling Cloud 2.0, whatever you want to call it, a complete modernization of the IT technology stack and development environment, includes core data centers of the edge and beyond. Our next guest is Dan Havens, Chief Growth Officer for Acronis. Dan, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Dan, so what does Chief Growth Officer mean? You guys obviously are growing, so obviously we see some growth there. The numbers are there. We have a couple divisions in the company where we see we can really accelerate the business. So we came in, we wanted to make some large investments here. One of those areas was sports. You're seeing race cars out here on the floor. You're seeing all kinds of baseball teams, soccer teams, and we're talking to everybody. We have 40 teams now that are using our technology for competitive advantage on the field. The other area is OEM, so original equipment manufacturers, everybody from making a camera to a server somewhere, having Acronis be embedded. That's a big angle for us and we just didn't have a lot of focus. So I came in to build those divisions. I've actually joined the CEO before in prior life in his last company and did something similar for him on a similar vector. We had violent success. So yeah, it's been a lot of fun. I've been here a year and a half and we're killing it. We got triple digit growth in the sporting category and similar in the OEM. It's interesting, you know, I look at a lot of these growth companies and it's kind of a formula you see. You guys have a very efficient and strong product platform engineering group, a lot of developers, a lot of smart people in the company and a strong customer facing, for the lack of a better word, field group, which you're involved. This is not, and we've got marketing supporting in the middle. So nice, efficient organizational structure on a massive wave with cyber. This isn't your grandfather's data protection. This is a platform. What's the pitch? So the key here for us is we have to always, in IT it's hard to simplify. And we're easy. In fact, we're cost effective. Sometimes I'll even say I'm cheap and I'm easy and that does not go out of style for an enterprise, right? So our ability to take good old fashioned backup in these things that other people need and basically extend that across. Now I can have one window where I can control, keep them out. If somebody gets in or from the inside or a disaster happens, I from this one place can recover my data. I'm secure with my data. I have the ability to notarize my data. So this one, and by the way, key, simple interface. Customers love simple. This one simple interface to be able to do that. Now, it takes a lot of engineering that goes behind that. I have plenty of, I have fancy engineering degrees and all that, but I try to forget that when I'm talking to a customer, because at the end of the day, it's got to make sense. A mind that doesn't know says no. And I think we do a pretty good job of simplifying the message, but as they get under the covers and they roll it out, they recognize that there's, you know, we have more engineers per employee capita than any company that would have 1,600 employees. Simple, easy to use, it reduces the steps that takes to do something as a winning business model. You kind of come from that school you mentioned it. Yeah, cheap and easy, that's what is key. But we're in a world where complexity is increasing and costs are increasing. These are two dynamics that are facing every enterprise. Cyber, IT everywhere. What's your story when you want to educate that person so they can get to that yes? I want to work with you guys. What's that getting to yes process motion look like? So the beautiful part is, is we sell software, right? Now, software can be purchased, complex, you install it, you configure it, you do everything yourself. We also can sell that from a cloud standpoint. So now you consume it like a service, like you consume Netflix at home, right? I can now consume this protection as a service. So you have both spectrums covered. Most enterprises are somewhere in the middle, we call that hybrid. So the idea here is that there's going to be components where this data's not leaving these four walls. It might be government agency, it might be some compliance factor, but the ability to be able to say yes anywhere on that spectrum makes it very easy for an executive to say okay. But we have a very, as you leverage the cloud, the on ramp for this can be as simple as turning on the service and pointing it at a data source. I mean, you're a student of history, obviously you've been in this business for a while, you've been there, done that. Longer than you'd think. Data protection was kind of like that afterthought, backup, data recovery, all based upon, yeah, we might have an outage or a flood or hurricane Sandy, who knows what's going to happen. You know, some force majeures out there might happen, but security is a constant disruptor of business continuity. The data's being hijacked, ransomware to malware attacks. This is a major disruption point of a world that was supposed to be a non-disruptive operational value proposition. So the world has changed. It went from a niche, well we've got, we've got architecture, oh throw in backup. You've got to think about it from day one at the beginning. This seems to be your story for the company. You think about security from the beginning, with data protection as only one club in the bag, so to speak. Talk about that dynamic and how's that translating into your customer storytelling, customer engagement. So you used an interesting word at the beginning, disaster recovery. Years ago, I started my tech industry in 1992, right? Disaster recovery is when we're going to have a flood or a hurricane and the building's going to burn down. What we find is most of our customers, that certainly happens, but that's not the driver. The driver now is somebody's after my data, because the world has changed, not only has the amount of data we're collecting changed, but the ability to illegally monetize somebody else's data has become reality. And you have social media that socializes if you get breached and so forth. So there's a number of drivers. Number one, I don't want to be turned out of business. Number two, I don't want to be ransomed. And number three, I certainly don't want to be in the cover of the Wall Street Journal tomorrow morning as the top executive who looked past data. We literally watch brands. I won't mention the brand now, but a very large Fortune 1000 was called out yesterday. We see it every few days and we watch the carnage of their brand get diluted because they weren't protected. So I think it's the perfect storm up. I've got a ton of data, so it's coming in from all directions. Secondly, I'm concerned about my brand and being able to protect that data. And then what do I do? And the disaster in this case is not necessarily flood or fire. It's that somebody from the inside or outside got in. Okay, so Dan, pretend that I'm a decision maker. I'm like, my head's exploding. I'm got all this carnage going on. I don't want to get fired. I know I'm exposed. Nothing's yet happened. Or maybe I settled a ransomware thing, but I know I'm not in a good place. What's your story to me? What's your pitch to me? What's in it for me? Tell me the posture in the pitch. Well, we're halfway home if you say I know I'm not in a good place, right? Because oftentimes somebody has to get bit first. Or they have to see their neighbor get bit first and then they say, hey, come in. One of my first plays would be, let's find out what place you really are. I can do that very quickly in an assessment. We can gather your systems. We can get a sense for where's your data, where it's flowing from, what are you doing and what are you doing to protect it? We typically will come back and there's going to be spots where there's blind spots. Sometimes they're fully naked, right? But the good news is is now we know the problem. So let's not waste any time, but you can get on board in Baby Steps or we can band-aid it or we can really go into full surgery, however you want to move forward. But the idea is recognizing this has to be addressed because it's a beast that every single device that's out there on the floor and any enterprise, any company is a way in. And POCs are critical for your business model. You want to get them a little taste, show the value quickly. How does a POC get structured? You have an assessment, you come in at a narrow entry, nail something quick, get a win. What's the playbook? Love POCs because we're so fast and easy. Meaning, oftentimes you do POCs because you're complex software and you're trying to prove your point and so forth. I love to push a POC because I can do it inside of days, but I get the customer to take the drive. It's just on the car lot. If I get you to drive it down the block, you're not bringing it back. You're bringing it home to the neighbors, right? That is the case with our software and our hit rate is cute. But again, it's because it's straightforward and it's easy. So though most sales cycles don't push for pilot, I can't wait to get a pilot, but we don't need 30 days to do it. In a couple of days, they're going to recognize I can do this. Do you have a good track record of converting POCs? If I, this is going to be the most conceivable, you might have to edit this out. If I get an audience, I will win. That is the most conceited statement on the planet. But if I get the audience and they will look, and this is why we use the sports teams. Sports teams are the cool kids using this. And if I get an executive to say, what are you guys doing with the Red Sox? If I can get him a hurdle look, it's game over. Hey, being badass and having some swagger is actually a good thing. If you got the goods to back it up, that's the fun piece here is that the product works well and it's not this massive mountain to hurdle. It is, we can get started today and take bites as we go. You mentioned sports. Let's get into that talk track because we've been covering sports data for now, six years on theCUBE in San Francisco. We were briefly talking about it last night at the reception. But I think sports teams encapsulates probably the most acute use case of digital transformation because they have multiple theaters that are exploding. They got to run their business. They got a team to manage and they got fan experience and they're consumers. So you got consumerization of IT, you got security of your customers either in a physical venue from a potential terrorist disaster could happen to just using analytics to competitive advantage. From the money ball model to whatever, sports really encapsulates what I call the poster child of using digital into a business model that works. You've been successful with sports. We interviewed Brian Shield yesterday, Red Sox vice president of technology. He was very candid. He's like, look it, we use analytics. It helps us get a competitive. I'm not going to tell you the secrets, but we have other issues that people might not think about drone strikes while the game's going on, potential terrorist attacks, gathering of people, adding on eSports stadium to Fenway Park. They have a digital business model integrating in real time with a very successful consumer product and business in sports. This has been a good market for you guys. What's been the secret to success? Explosive market, couple things. First off, you summarized well, sports teams are looking for competitive advantage. So anything that can come in under that guise is going to get some attention. Plus data, fan data, system data, ticket data in baseball. They're studying every single pitch a pitcher's ever thrown. They have video on everything. This is heavy lift data, right? So a place to put it, save money. A place to protect it. A place to access it so that all of my scouts that are out in the field with a mobile device have the ability to upload or evaluate a player while they're out still on the field somewhere, maybe in another country. And then add the added caveat and our sexiest piece and that's artificial intelligence. You mentioned Moneyball, right? The entire concept of statistics came out in the Moneyball concept and we all saw the movie and we all read the book. But at the end of the day, this is the next step to that, which is not just written down statistics. Now we can analyze data with machine learning and we have unique baseball examples where there's absolutely no doubt. They have the data. It's the ability, how do I turn that to where I can be more competitive? On our racing teams, we're actually working with teams improving, changing the car on the track during the race using our software. In fact, we always look forward to opportunities where somebody says, hey, come in and talk about that because it's incredibly sexy to see. But sports are fun because first off, they're the cool kids. Secondly, they're early adopters if it's going to give competitive advantage. And third, they hit all the vectors. Tons of data. Have to protect it. It's a life blood. And the business model is digital too. So the digital transformation is in prime time. They cannot ignore the fact that people want Wi-Fi. They got Instagram, Facebook, all these... They're all conscious of social media. They're all conscious. Sports club, they have to be hip, right? And being out front like that, think about the data they have coming in. And also, not just to be smart on the field, they have to be smart with their customer. They're competing with that customer for four other major sports or whatever major sports in our case in this nation. I mean, to be fashionable to be hip is cool for the product. But now you think about how they run their business. They got suppliers that have data, interesting suppliers with data as a difficult protection formula. They got national security issues. They have to protect. Well, they have to protect is a big part of these guys. They have to protect. Well, first off, these archives of data that are of 20 races ago or of this picture pitched three years ago and I have a thousand of his pitches and I'm looking for tells, that's mission critical. But also, to boot, you have just business functions where I'm a team and I have a huge TOCO sponsor and we are shifting back and forth in designing what their actual collateral is going to be in the stadium. They're actually using a Cronus to be able to do that up in the cloud where they can both collaborate on that. Not only doing it, but being able to protect it that way, it's more efficient for them. You know, it's interesting. I asked Brian Shield this question. I asked, so how does baseball flex and digital with the business model digital with the success of the physical product or their actual product, baseball? And he said an interesting thing. He's like the ROI models just get whacked out because what's the ROI of an investment in technology? It used to be total cost, the ownership, the classic. Under the iceberg, the shark fin, whatever you use. He goes, we don't use that. We think about other consequences, like a terrorist attack. So the business model ROI calculation's shifting. Do you have those kind of conversations with some of these big teams and these sports teams? Because they win a World Series, their brand franchise goes up. If they win a national championship, or whatever their goal is, has real franchise value. There's numbers on that. There's also the risk of, say, an attack or some sort of breach. Well, I won't mention the teams by name, but I have a half a dozen teams right now and two that are actually rolling out that are doing facial recognition just for security of fans entering their stadium. So they are taking the ownership of the safety of their fan to the level of doing visual or facial recognition coming into their stadium. Obviously, the archive to measure against is important. We can archive that, but they're also using artificial intelligence for that. So you're absolutely right. They owe their fan a safe experience, not only a safe experience, but good experience and so forth. And we love to be associated whenever we can with wins and losses. But to your point, how do you get or how do you show a TCO on a disaster? And nobody wants, and by the way, we've seen enough of that to know it's looming. And there's also the supply chain too. I could buy a hot dog and a beer from Aramark, which is the red sauce, say supplier. That's not owned by the red sauce. They have a relationship, but my data's in there. I'm a consumer of the red sauce. I'm procuring some food or service from a vendor. My data's out there, so who protects that? Well, these are unique questions that come up all the time. So again, that's a business decision for the customer. The idea is with cloud and collaboration, it's technically quite easy. But again, they have to decide where they're going to commingle their data, how they're going to share. But the idea here is again, back to the spectrum, fully cloud and accessible and lockdown airtight government scenario where we have a lock. Bottom line is you get to pick where you want to be on there. And there's going to be times where my example talking to the telco vendor, we're actually going to share our data together and we're going to make us faster, make a quicker return and design this collateral for our stadium faster. Those are business decisions, but they're allowed because a Cronus can be as hybrid as you need to be along the site. And again, that resonates with an executive. They never want to be wearing handcuffs. And they don't want to pay overpay for stuff they're not using. Well, of course not. And if you decide to consume cloud, you just pay as you go. It's like your electricity bill. All right, so the red sauce or customer of you guys, they use your service. What other sports teams have you guys engaged with who you're talking to? Give a taste of some of the samples. So European, we have a couple of Formula One teams. We have a racing point. We have the Williams team and Formula E. We have to Cheetah, the dragon team. We have a Venturi. We also have Neo. So we have a good presence in the racing clubs. We have a ton of world rally cars and motorcycle, motocross and so forth. Then you step over into European football. So we started in cars and recognize this is hot. So then we got our first European team and we had Arsenal. As a matter of fact, we have one of the legends here signing with us today and, you know, I mean, they're rock stars, right? People follow them anyway. So we have Arsenal and we did Man City and we just landed Liverpool. Just did that this quarter, two weeks ago. I literally just, the ink is still drying. And then you move into the United States which I brought the circus to town on January 1, 2019. First win was the Boston Red Sox. We quickly followed that up. You'll see us on the home run fence at San Diego Padres. Both bought for different reasons, but both very sexy reasons. So it's- What are the reasons? What were the main drivers? So in the case of the Boston Red Sox, it was heavy lift on video. A lot of on the protection side. The San Diego was file-sinking share. So the example I was giving of being able to share with your largest Toco vendor or with your largest investor slash sponsor for your stadium, that was the driver. Now what's funny about both is as they get started, he's always expanded, right? So we have the baseball teams. We did land this quarter, the Dallas Stars. So that's our first hockey club. I really want, my goal is to try to get a couple in each of the main four categories and then some of the subs. Just cause you get the cool kids, you get a tipping point. Everybody then wants to know what's going on. I have a hundred in play. And so we typically try to qualify regional where it makes sense. We're very close with a team here in the region. So, you know. What's been the feedback on some of the successes you had, implementations? What's been the feedback from the customers in terms of? Here's the fun part, and this sounds like I'm just tripping with sales guy. And I apologize, warning sign in. That's okay. If they use it, we're home free. So when you get Brian or any one of these guys that are using it, all I have to do is make sure that a new customer hears this person who has no reason to say anything else and just expose them to it. Because it's this unknown, scary thing that we're trying to protect against. And being able to do that and have the freedom of how aggressive and what metaphor am I going to cover that? And then also, obviously the economics work as you pay as you go, it's a good story. Well Dan, congratulations on the success. Great to see you guys really digging in, getting those POCs and being successful. We're watching your growth. Final question for you. Yes. Of all the data and the patterns that you see and all the customer conscious, what's the number one reason why Acronis is selected and why you win? I think that's an interesting question and I think that it's a couple of reasons. Number one, we work, we're easy, we have an enormous footprint. So there's a lot to reference from. Many people have already used this on the consumer side, so we're safe. So that's one reason. I would also tell you, however, that we have a great ecosystem because Acronis is different than most software companies. Most software companies have a huge outside sales force that sells direct to customer. Acronis, everybody here is a partner. We sell through a service provider, through a channel member, through an ISV, and then we have some direct enterprise. But the idea is there's a variety of solutions that can be baked on this foundation and I think people like that variety, like the freedom of I'm not just trapped with this one thing. I can buy it and all options are available and I will tell you, in IT, nobody wants to be locked down, everybody wants options, safety and numbers. They want their data protected with the whole cyber lens. And they know everything's changing, every six months something's different and I don't want to be handcuffed to my desk, I want all options available. I think that's our best value problem. All right, Dan, thanks for coming on. Dan Havens, Chief Growth Officer of Acronis. We're here at the Acronis Global Cyber Summit. I'm John Furrier, stay tuned for more cute coverage after this short break.