 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live on day one of IBM's inaugural Think 2018 event. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are at Mandalay Bay in Vegas and excited to welcome back to theCUBE a veteran from our very first year eight years ago, work down ever. Welcome back. Thanks guys, happy to be back. It's been a while. It has been a while. You're now the director of product strategy at Veeam. So Veeam, IBM, what's cooking? You know, it's actually a result of a lot of work on the Veeam side, some great momentum that we've had over the years. And it actually works well with IBM because Veeam has transitioned into the enterprise and nobody needs to convince IBM that they're enterprise. So we kind of earned a seat at the table here and we're really excited about that. It's come across as started as a business relationship and we added some technical capabilities, some integrations as well. Those are all really strong things that have gotten us to this point and this is our second year exhibiting. So we're happy to be here. So Rick, what's happening in the space? I mean, you and I, we follow this stuff pretty closely. We've seen backup and recovery explode. The way in which people are talking about it is changing. You go to Veeam World and it's the hottest area. You guys have great tailwind. As you say, you're moving up market now with more partnerships like IBM and other enterprise companies. What's your perspective and point of view on what's happening in your space? Well, Dave and Lisa, I hate to drop a buzzword on it but it's digital transformation. And the simple fact of that is businesses need their data. They need the services in their data center. They need their applications. Even if things don't go as expected, simply put, this is historically an area of the data center that's not very interesting backup and recovery but we've up-leveled it to something that we call availability. And what I mean by that is we're able to meet the expectations of organizations today, keep their workloads available, be ready for tomorrow, migrate, change, know what's going to happen. There was a lot of threats today, all kinds of things underscore the fact that the data services today need to be available. I mean, just think of any organization, if you didn't have the data center or didn't have the cloud services, how effective would that many hundreds or thousands of people be for the company and probably not very effective today? So the result is digital transformation that these services are just basically required to be available. And it was really a good timing as we came in with this message at the time that everybody had some amount of digital transformation and it's working for us. When we did Veeam on last year, New Orleans was a great show and I was explaining to our audience that the ascendancy of Veeam, really it started with VMware admin when we changed from sort of physical servers to virtual servers, you had to change backup. You needed something that was simpler, more efficient, far more cost effective and spoke the language of virtualization. And Veeam, boom, timed it perfectly, your products fit very, very nicely there. We're kind of entering, you know, new era, right? We're well into the cloud era, entering as you point out the digital transformation area. So how has Veeam transformed to meet those customer demands? So it's actually interesting you bring that up, Dave, because a lot of people don't realize that, ooh, I'm drawing a blank on my memory here that if we start from the announcement phase to where we are today, so just under four years, Veeam has released one, two, three backup products that don't require a virtual machine. Two of which are for like cloud native workloads. Actually, if you include an acquisition, there's a fourth product that we've added to our portfolio for native Amazon backups. But on-premises workloads, whether they're Windows or Linux or in the hyperscale public cloud or on different hypervisors, we have options there. And then we also added, last year, our first product into the SaaS space. So our Microsoft Office 365 backup. These are things that people, I still have to educate to different organizations that these are capabilities that Veeam have, in addition to that really strong VMware and Hyper-V story that kind of made us known in that regard. But we realized that enterprises today have more than just virtual machines. And there's a need for that availability experience wherever they are. And so that's one of the driving factors of some of our new product innovations in the form of additional products. And each one of them have their own market persona. They're different buyers and they appeal in different ways. And telling the SaaS story is different than the on-prem story. And that's been a really good thing for us to kind of get buyout across the board when we talk to enterprises. Like everyone's kind of shaking their head and that's a good sign. Yeah, platform optionality is something that you guys have always done pretty well. And you sort of addressed my other question was, how are the buyers changing? And how is the way in which you go to market and converse with those buyers changing? Well, the buyer persona, no matter which one they are, if they're cloud or the storage person or the traditional backup person, they all have a need for some key things. They want their data available. Everybody wants that and they get that. But they also want simplicity and ease of use. And even in the enterprise space, this is something that nobody's going to actively say no to. In fact, kind of the joke at Veeam is, all this time just until late last year, we didn't even have a professional services group. I hate to say it was dare I say that easy, but we've actually got a lot of feedback from partners which is central to our business model. But that's something that they want as an upsell option because you can put something in but then those extra increments of performance gains and efficiency, that's where deep knowledge is going to come into play. So there's a huge opportunity there to our own partners and then we just launched an announcement around some IBM partnerships around services as well. I want to get to that IBM announcement in a minute, but I'm curious from a customer perspective, you talked to a lot of customers. Digital transformation, you're right, it's a buzzword, but it's also an essential survival of the fit. And that's what it is for any organization. When you talk with customers, some of the pain points around data, I imagine that we hear are so much data, lots of silos, lots of control that resides within lines of business. How do you first question, how do you help, maybe I shouldn't say that, what are some of the trends that you're seeing within organizations as you're trying to help them really maximize the protection and they make the data available. Trends that you're seeing, where is security as ransomware is going through the roof? You hit one of my favorite topics and the long-term historical definition of IT security is to maintain confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data and services. And that's where Veeam comes in on the A, part of it, it's called the CIA triad. And we think that there's an incredible opportunity for visibility, user education, resiliency, different types of storage can help. In fact, that's a really good one. We integrate with a lot of different IBM storages right now. Spectrum Virtualize and a store-wise family, including really established products in the data center like the SVC. But also it is 2018, but there's a great use case for tape because tape storage like the TS series from IBM, for example, there's nothing more resilient against ransomware than offline storage and the acquisition cost and the portability just can't be beat. So we talk to a lot of customers around preparedness. And what I mean by that is there's this balance of complexity and ease of use and security and they all kind of have their own factors on where they sit. But I advocate that organizations need to be prepared for this type of thing today. And this is, you talk to anyone who's gone through it, anybody's gone through a ransomware situation, they always end it with thank goodness I had backup or shame on me I had to pay the ransom. And I just want people to be on the right of that conversation. So I advocate a lot, we've done a lot at Veeam about that and our integrations with different storage systems is one of the best ways to be resilient against that type of stuff. But yeah, we put a lot of stuff on Veeam.com about that but it's a real threat today for sure. So talk a little bit more about that. I mean, what's the prescription for ransomware? I mean, you talk about air gaps, okay, that's fine. What about analytics? I mean, you as the source of data for backup, you have a lot of data that you can analyze. Where does that fit in to sort of maybe being more anticipatory about whether it's malware, you mentioned security, ransomware, can you help? How do you help? We've got a question. I'll give you two answers before and after. So on the before, like maybe if a ransomware incident is underway, we actually have this alarm that can detect the possible ransomware activity. It's somewhat prescriptive where you see a high amount of CPU, a high amount of disk rights. Those types of sustained behaviors are possibly ransomwares. We actually can alarm on that on the production side, not so much even on the backup side. But on the backup side, we can address how many different copies of data are aware. And more importantly, who's accessing it? That's actually really something to think about because many organizations put a lot of security controls on their production data. I don't know if they have the same level of scrutiny on the backup data, right? So we have a number of different tools and reporting solutions that can help people with that. I've tweeted a lot of that kind of stuff, but it's one of those things that I love getting into real specific use cases there. I don't know if this group can handle it here today, but this is something I have a lot of passion for for sure. Handle what? Go ahead, let's do this. Who's accessing what data? Like, if Dave is one of my administrators and so is Lisa, maybe Dave's in charge of databases and Lisa's in charge of email. But what if I come in one day and I see that Dave was restoring email and not just any old email, but maybe it was a CEO's email and you put it on your desktop, not back into the CEO's inbox. That's an incredible data breach, right? We can report on that type of stuff. So I can tell you that Dave got into your email just like that. So I want to ask you about reporting. You know, it's sort of a, not often talked about certainly in the trade press, but it's pretty important. What's the state of reporting? What do you guys do in your products? How about visualization? Where does that fit into the reporting equation? Yeah, so that's actually one of the emerging opportunities and we have some existing capabilities, but we get a lot of feedback on that because people want a nice view of where their data is, who's accessing it, how busy is it. I mean, these are very expensive investments in the data center and answering really specific questions like why is this development team taking 80% of the production storage throughput? You know, those types of business problems can be solved through capabilities today and I feel that organizations need to look at that more than just a backup use case because sure, we move the data on behalf of the backup task, but we actually have a broader view and actually the management products that we have, that's what really makes that come to life, right? So, v1 and the v-management pack for enterprises and the system center space, those are products that could really give you nice specific heat maps, things like that, answer those types of questions around the resources, but I think it's important that organizations have that visibility because you can't really make your next step as an IT organization without knowing what your current state is and the details don't go away. I mean, the IOPS don't lie, whatever type of buzzword I want to throw out at it. You know, you got to have this information today to be prepared for your next move. V-man. Oh yeah. Yeah, it's coming up. That is. May, Chicago. Mid-May, I'm drawing a blank. It's the week after Mother's Day, I know that here in the US and the cube will be there. Yeah, we're excited to have you guys back and we're targeting a great diary of content, a number of industry experts and I'm in charge of the breakouts for that event. I'm targeting 81 breakouts, so a lot of really good information for attendees to choose from. So I'm really looking forward to that. Yeah, so we're excited. This will be our second V-man. It's a show with a lot of buzz, great ecosystem. You got a lot of partners that'll be there. As I say, great fun. The V-man party is notorious. I've heard it's legendary. It is. You guys having a party here? No, not this week. Okay, that's the first. The party will be pretty cool. I've seen the details on it, but. Have you never been to a V-man party? You haven't been to a party. It's true, you haven't been to a party in tech. But no, the partners are in our DNA. That's one of those things that we as a company, everything from selling through the channel, alliance partners like IBM and other established brands, distribution partners, service provider partners that my colleague Mac will talk about here in a second. It's in our DNA for sure. Yeah, we're going to talk to Matt about those partnerships coming up next. So, I appreciate it. We are. So we're at IBM, they're inaugural thing event. We're four campuses, you're speaking Wednesday. I think so. Probably a lot of this stuff. What are some of the things that excite you and Veeam about some of the IBM announcements as you talked about them being a core partner? Yeah, I was really excited for this year in particular. We're coming off of a huge release last year, our update three for our current release of the Veeam availability suite. We dropped an integration for a number of different IBM storages. So an incredible, incredible use case if you've not heard of it, Veeam's integration for the spectrum virtualized and store-wise storage systems. I take the backup challenge with this, it can't be beat, it's great stuff. And we also have a huge cloud technology which Matt will talk about here in a second. But it's a great time to be available to Veeam and that's the takeaway for sure. And that's kind of the central theme of my presentation Wednesday. Go into some specifics on how you can use it, where it makes sense, and then how it fits into a broader portfolio of availability for organizations today. Awesome, Rick. Thanks so much for stopping by. Coming back to theCUBE, after all this time away, we look forward to it, we'll see you at Veeam on. Awesome, thanks guys. All right, thank you. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You are watching theCUBE live at the first day of IBM Think 2018. Head over to thecube.net, watch all the videos that we've done so far and check out Wikibon. See what our analysts are uncovering about all things cloud, machine learning, AI, et cetera, et cetera. We will be right back after a short break with our next guest, we'll see you then.