 Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante. I'm with Wikibon.org and this is theCUBE, Silicon Angles Continuous Production of VMworld 2013. This is our fourth year here. Year one and four have been at Moscone. We're in Las Vegas a couple of years ago. Rick Jackson was on earlier, locked in a 10 year deal with San Francisco and the Moscone. So we're very happy about that. And we've been unpacking VMware, it's transformation into the cloud, going beyond the core hypervisor, beyond vSphere into other management areas. But the key thing about VMware is it's got a large ecosystem. And the ecosystem players are critical to the continuous growth and development of the VMware platform. David West is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Commvault, who is part of that ecosystem, a specialist in data and data protection, archiving and getting value out of data. David, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, thanks for having me, Dave. Our pleasure. So anyway, VMworld, we're here in our 10th year, 15 year old company, you've seen the evolution of VMware as this disruptive force in the industry. Talk about that a little bit and what it's meant to Commvault. Yeah, I have. I mean, I remember not too long ago, seven, eight years ago, meeting with VMware folks and they were saying, look, we see this is a journey. We're going to start by getting customers to consolidate for efficiency. And then we're going to move to the next phase of getting mission critical applications on a virtualized environment. And we see that as a massive transformation on how companies manage their data and information in a virtualized environment. And old approaches to new data and information management just can't keep up in the new modern infrastructure. Well, and I remember those discussions and there were a lot of skeptics. I had some skepticism and I'm sure you did too. You have to say VMware has done a great job of executing on that. Paul Moritz used to call it the software mainframe and those marketing guys made him stop. But I mean, essentially that's what they've built with commodity components. And of course, Commvault is known as a backup specialist. You're a leader in that space. You do a lot more than that. I want to get into that, but the whole data protection piece has changed dramatically because of virtualization. You've seen that evolve. So maybe talk about that a little bit and then we can get into some of the other areas that you guys are involved in. Yeah, sure. So backup and recovery in a virtualized environment, especially when you're putting mission critical applications on it looks very different. And it's not just applying a point level solution at solving a VM backup. It's having an application aware view and abstracting the storage layer with technologies that are leveraged from the storage layer to do snapshot management with application aware protection. And that has to be done in a completely different way than the old approaches. And I think that's what we're seeing today is companies that are putting their mission critical apps in a virtualized environment are looking for a way to get the SLAs that they need now that they've got massive amounts of applications all in on a server. Yeah, so that's a key piece of the business decision. It's okay, if I'm going to put this thing into, I'm going to virtualize it. First of all, I'm going to put a layer in. I got to make sure that I'm going to have the service level. So give me some examples, some proof points. How is Commvault sort of supporting that trend? Well, I mean, first of all, Commvault is probably best known for being a leader in the data protection space for backup and recovery. And that growth of Commvault is coming because the old approaches just don't work anymore. Now you'll layer on top of that virtualized environments and it just adds to the complexity. So what Commvault is doing is saying, look, let's start with making sure we understand the application and then tie into the storage layer underneath to make sure that we can do very fast performance. And so about 80% of our customers today are using Commvault to manage their virtualized environments. It's a huge trend we're seeing. So when you say manage their virtualized environments, can you be more specific? Like what kinds of things are they doing with Commvault in the platform? Well, so you probably saw last week we announced a new solution for addressing for VM sprawl. So many of our customers are starting with solving backup and recovery. They're moving to managing replication, archiving and compliance, but it goes beyond that. As VM has, virtualization has gotten predominant. Now they're worried about how do I handle the sprawl, for example. So Commvault's approach is, let me give a set of tools and solutions that address how do I make my virtualized environment a lot more efficient. Yeah, so the interesting thing to me about Commvault is you sit at the heart of what you do is data. And you've got a lot of data about the data. People call it metadata. Even New York Times writes about metadata now. Metadata has gone mainstream. So the frustration that people always have with backup is that it's, first of all, it's seen as insurance policy. It's always an afterthought, sort of bolted on. And it doesn't add, intrinsically, it doesn't add any direct business value. So how do you take the data that you have and the information about that data and get additional value out of it, whether it's for other use cases like archiving or how do you help people reduce copies or protect things off-site? Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, so I think you raised a good point. It is all about the data. And I think backup and recovery has gone from a back office operation to how do I take all my data under management and turn it into a business value, a business asset. So Commvault starts with the premise of you got to do it in a single platform. A single platform that does backup, archive, replication, search, and e-discovery. All through a single platform. And Sampana's been that for, since early days, right? Sampana stands for Singular Information Management. That's the SIM in Sampana. So yes, I mean that's fundamentally what we believe in. It starts with a single approach. I very efficiently move that data, no matter what the purpose is for, all within a single platform. And as I'm doing that and moving that data, I garner intelligence. I have the metadata, I understand the application, the created it, I understand about the files, I understand about the content inside of it. So it's not just about making sure I'm protected for disaster recovery, or I've got an archive for compliance. But how do I take that massive amount of protected data that's been sitting in retention copies and add that back to the lines of business for, you know, as a business asset that they can go and tap into and mine for information. So we're kind of turning it upside down. We're turning the whole paradigm shift from, I got a protected copy, to how do I take that protected copy that lives on multiple tiers of storage, and now feed that back into, you know, a healthcare environment, you know, the mobile workforce, your compliance teams, and give them that data, rather than go and deploying a separate product for, you know, compliance, or a separate product for archiving. Yeah, so everybody's big data crazy. We're big data crazy too here at theCUBE. But it's interesting, Dave, because, you know, historically, data's been a problem, it's been, you know, data growth, data's been something that has to be managed, it's a liability, you know, when can I get rid of data? I'm sure you've got, you know, ISVs doing e-discovery using, you know, your platform and so does. So you know this story well. And I feel as though the big data meme has flipped that bit, and has got people focused on data as an asset, more than a liability. So what you just said, first of all, are you seeing that, and how will Commvault capitalize on that? Yeah, so I mean, I think the whole big data trend is just, you know, driven a conversation around, wow, I've got this data, I've got this information, what can I do with it to make better decisions? So, you know, our view of it is, when you've got a backup copy in an archive, let's not lose sight of the fact that there's business value there, and it's living on, you know, multiple tiers of storage across lots of different hardware vendors, and off to tape and into the cloud. So with Commvault, since we understand where all that data is, where it lives, and we know what created it in the context, how do we then turn that back over as an asset through a set of APIs and interfaces, to mine it? That's big data. That's mining all that information across these tiers of storage, and I think what's different is people haven't historically thought about backup and archive copies as a source of big data. It's let's go build a, you know, hardware appliance and throw it in there and, you know, give a set of tools to analyze it, and I'm saying, well, why do that? You've got all this information, make it available, make it accessible with a set of interfaces. And you've got metadata that can help guide you. Okay, so. Well, not just metadata, we've got the metadata, but also we've got an engine that goes and creates, you know, an index of the data within the data. Yeah, and so because you know so much about the data, you know, when it was created, you know, who owns it, what applications it feeds, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you can actually do something with it as opposed to have to, what you described before is let's stick it in a box and figure out what we want to do with it as opposed to, okay, we know the characteristics of that data, now let's try to leverage it throughout the organization for different use cases. So you talked about the VMware sprawl, you know, the other problem is Copycreep, I call it. You know, there's copies everywhere around the organization. I'm sure you're seeing that as well. We estimated the other day that for every master copy, there's probably eight or 10 additional copies created. Do you see that as a challenge within the customer base? And as we're talking about here, can you help address that problem anyway? Right, yeah. So I think Copycreep is kind of one of the pillars of how we got into this business, right? When we looked at helping customers reduce their storage footprint, i.e. their costs and improve operations, it starts with a premise that says, stop creating silos or copies of the data. I don't need three backup vendors all creating their own silo of data and then another couple archive vendors creating its own stack of data. So our premise that got into business is to wipe all that out, start with a single platform and make real efficient copies that are deduplicated and that are super efficient on the backend. Which, you know, check that box. That's what got us into the game. Now we go back in to say, look, we've got data sitting out at the edge and a lot of data and it's becoming mission critical. We're seeing a lot of data moving. So we've introduced, you know, tools within the Sampana platform that go grab edge data and also move it into a very efficient copy to slow that Copycreep that you mentioned earlier. Yeah, so you talked earlier about sort of a set of APIs that people can use to get into your platform. So you've got the entries and exits there. Another big theme that's going on in the industry is openness, new platforms, new orchestration platforms like OpenStack. So what are you seeing there? And again, how do you capitalize on that? Yeah, so we talk about software defined data center. Really, it's about an intelligent set of software based solutions that can abstract the complex underneath to create efficiencies. And for us, what we're seeing is using a set of software based data management tools that then allow our customers to go in and create API sets to go grab that data. So openness for us is a set of APIs into our content store. So when we create these copies of data for backup archive replication that are in an efficient state, sit within what we call the content store. That's our backend repository. So we have created a set of tools that allow users and partners to tap into the content store through a set of APIs. So for example, you may have an application inside a homegrown application. You say, hey, look, I need to go and tap into that data to go grab healthcare images. So through a set of APIs, customers can then go in and say, based on this criteria or these set of policies, go and pull out that information from our archives. Do you see, or how do you see analytics as a policy-based information management has been around, at least in concept for a while, you guys have been doing it on a platform. As the amount of data grows and the complexity of the problem grows, do you see the day where you can actually use analytics to automate a lot of, and you may be doing some of this today, automate a lot of that policy management and decision-making so that the machines are actually taking care of it instead of humans to what degree are we there today and how far can we take it? Yeah, so absolutely, we believe that's where the market's going. From Commvault's perspective, our contribution to that is we have a very sophisticated policy engine. And based on rules and policies that the customer creates, we are able to go in and make things happen. So it could be move information across multi-vendor tiers on the back based on a set of criteria, and that could be for lowering storage costs or for migration strategies or test dev or replication between sites. So you create a policy, separate that layer from the storage, and then you can create some backend. We can also do, based on policies, which we consider our workflow set of tools where customers can have, based on AB parameters, they can go in and have a whole bunch of backend operations happen that used to be done in scripting that now happen in our software. So we really believe that the intelligence needs to be in the software, and it needs to be policy-driven, and it needs to understand the infrastructure from the storage layer to the server layer to the virtualized layer and the networking layer. Awesome, all right, my last question as we run out of time here is, what should we be watching for out of Commvault independent observers watching the company, kind of milestones you want to hit, things that you want to move the industry on, just break it down over the next, say, 12 to 18 months? Yeah, so Commvault, knock on wood, we've been on a great revenue track, and I think the customers appreciate the value proposition, and it starts with fixing broken backup, but looking beyond it to holistic data management approach. We're on a track to a billion dollars, we've stated that, that's where the company is going, we got a plan to get there. What are we doing in the marketplace? I think it is that transformation from your backup and archive being a afterthought back-end process, to how do we open up this repository and give business users the value that they need. You're going to see us push a lot harder in terms of marketing that message, I think we've got a great portfolio products today, but we're going to be driving a lot more users and partnerships to go then and tap into that data for business. So whether it's taking your mobile applications and giving users access to all that information, that's something we deliver today. So that shift from backup and archive to tapping into that data for business value and intelligence and insights. Yeah, there aren't a ton of billion dollar software companies, that's a huge milestone for a company like yours. You guys have been around long enough to earn the right to get into the enterprise, so congratulations on the success. You're good luck, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Thanks a lot. I keep it right there everybody, this is Dave Vellante, this is theCUBE right back live from VMworld 2013.