 Live from Denver, Colorado. It's theCUBE, covering Commvault Go 2019. Brought to you by Commvault. Hey, welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin in Colorado at Commvault Go 19. I'm with Stu Miniman and Stu Miniman. Pleased to welcome back to theCUBE and a landmine who hasn't visited us in a while. But he's kind of a big deal. It's the CEO of Commvault, Sanjay Martindani. Sanjay, welcome back. Thank you, Lisa. Good to be here. Good to see you, Stu. So exciting. Go, I love the name, go. And lots of stuff. So you have come on board to Commvault in about nine months ago. And man, are you making some changes? Analyst said, Commvault, you've got to upgrade your sales force. You've got to expand your marketing. You've got to shift gears and really expand your market share. And we've seen what Commvault is doing in all three of those areas along with some pretty big announcements in the last couple of days. Talk to us about this first nine months here and really maybe even I would start with the cultural change that you have brought to a company that's been run by the Bob Hammer for 20 years. Right, no. Firstly, I'm very fortunate to be here because the company is, has incredible foundation. The bones of the company, if you would, are solid. Great balance sheet, over 800 patents, no debt, cash on the books, profitable. It's just, you know, and great, great technology wrapped around some amazing people. So when I look at it, you go, this is an incredible asset. My role, really, when I came in and I transitioned with Bob and Al for a period of time was really about making sure we didn't break anything. Making sure that we kept the momentum, understood the culture, took time to talk to customers, talked to partners, talked to our employees, shareholders, and understand what are the focus areas that we needed to go after? And the last nine months has been about, you know, a lot of learning on my part, but also a very receptive group of employees and partners saying, you know, we'll give you a chance. Let's get this done, let's see where it goes. So that's where the nine months have been around and it's been fabulous. So Sanjay, one of the things I've heard from your team is you've come in loud and clear with the voice of the CIO. Having been a CIO yourself, that's something you want them to focus on. Everybody, we always talk about listening to the customers, but the role of the CIO has changed an awful lot. Since you first became a CIO, clouds changed everything. Nicholas Karth said for a while, does IT even matter? So bring us inside a little bit as to how you want to make sure you're delivering for what the CIOs need, not necessarily what they were saying that they want. Notes fair, and as much as the role of the CIO has evolved, I don't think it's changed fundamentally. They're still the guardians of the data, the compliance and everything else. And of course, more than anything else, the productivity and the competitive edge that businesses need. Technology and business, regardless of which business you're in, are intrinsically tied. Your delivery of anything you do today is tied to technology if you want to be future proof. So if anything, the role of the CIO has only been elevated. I say this playfully, but I do say it. I said if I wasn't running this great company that I am now, I'd love to be the CIO of a dysfunctional IT organization and large company because there's so much you can do. Many of the decisions that we would spend in inordinate amount of time on, the infrastructure, the application, how do you bind it, what are the protocols, which data center, how much, who runs it, which partner, are kind of dissipated. If you're not going to the cloud in some form or fashion, come on, right? If you're not building cloud-native applications, come on. If you're not using DevOps, come on. So you've got all this time back now where you're not hopefully having conversations that don't matter and you really go and building new things, so I think it matters. That's great stuff, and absolutely, we agree. We've talked many times on theCUBE. IT definitely actually matters more than today. If anything, not only did they need to be responsive to the business, but oftentimes, IT can be one of those drivers for innovation and change in the business. I love something you said in your keynote. You said data is at the center of everything you do because most CIOs, hopefully, infrastructure is something they might have under their purview, but it's not what drives the business. It's the data, it's the application, it's their customers that matter. So speak a little bit to, the role of data has changed a lot. You and I worked for that big storage company where we even didn't talk as much about storage, about data, back in the day. Today, it's the lifeblood of the company with everything like that. That is one of the reasons I'm at CommFold because for the past 30 years, I've been in technology. I've done app side, I've done infrastructure side, I've done a mix of all of those. And the more I think about, and DevOps, I've done that, the more I think about it, if I were sitting with a CEO today and having a conversation about what matters in technology, who's maybe a CEO, who's not a technologist, I would say data matters. I would say the asset of your company is the data. It's gone from something that you used to manage down, compress, deduplicate, and hope it went away, and you wanted to minimize its footprint to something where you want to maximize its value. And those aren't just words. I mean, that is what makes great companies, great companies today, the way they use data to their competitive advantage. So this is exactly the mindset where the mindset that got me to CommFold because all we do, all we do is help our customers be data ready, as I was saying this morning. I love that term because it kind of encapsulates it for me, so that's where my head's at. Yeah, I mean, we've always said the thing that defines a company that's gone through that digital transformation is that data drives the business. It absolutely should, but when you talk with customers that have, whether it's a big university, a research university, a healthcare organization, or whatever type of organization that has multiple departments, so much data that potentially has a tremendous amount of value that they actually aren't managing well or can't get visibility out of when you say we want to help you be data ready, what does that mean to them? It means a few things. You summed it up perfectly. That's the world, the chaos that customers could live in because fundamentally, Lisa, if I had to oversimplified, applications were intrinsically tied, data that you use were tied intrinsically to the application to build. So if you had an SAP system, your data was very tightly tied to that. If you had an Oracle ERP system, it was very tightly tied, you had a supply chain system, you were tied to that. And once data started getting released from the abstracted from the system it was built on, you got a little bit of chaos. Then you had to figure out who had access, where, how are you replicating, and how are you backing it up over the policies you apply in compliance, and then it became chaos. And what I say to customers being data ready is saying, do you have a strategy and a capability, more importantly, to protect, manage, control, and use that information in the way you wish to for competitive advantage. Just protecting it is like a life insurance policy. Controlling, managing, and using it is where you get the value out of it. Absolutely. Right? And so, and as companies become more data driven, this is where we help them. So, the whole concept of the show, what we're sort of bringing to market is the fact that we can help our customers be data ready. And some of the technologies we talked about today lend themselves to exactly that. So, Sanjay, one of the questions many of us had coming into the show is how exactly HeadVig, your first acquisition, was going to play out. You made a comment in your opening keynote this morning that we need to rethink primary and secondary storage. So, some of us read the tea leaves and be like, well, you're selling an SDS storage. You're in the primary storage market as we would have called it before. Yes, the lines are blurring. I don't think those there. So, I want to give you the chance to let us know where we're going. For years, primary and secondary storage has been classified them. We're looking grayer and grayer. I mean, there'll always be primary storage because there's always a certain use set of use cases for high performance scale up capabilities. But a lot of the stuff was getting murky. You know, is it really primary? Is it lower end primary? Is it secondary? And it shouldn't really matter. And with that segmentation, came a set of other capabilities like file, block, object, cloud, more segmentation, more siloing, more fragmentation. And I'm a big believer that it's all about software. The magic is in the software. And if you forget for a minute that it's software to find storage as we call it today, but a set of capabilities, a universal plane that allows you to truly define how customers get that ubiquity between any infrastructure that they run. Which in turn gives them the abstraction from the data that they build. We've just taken a lot of workload and pressure off the customer to figure all that stuff out, keep whole, manage. So I wouldn't get wrapped up on the whole storage thing as much as I would on the universal data plane or the data brain as I called it. Nick named it in the show earlier as the left and right side. One side is the data management. The other side is traditional storage management. Yeah, maybe I was reading too much in this. There's two brains. I think if you turn them sideways they look like clouds too. But, yeah, partners, wonder if you could speak. You know, we're talking about, obviously the channel hugely important. We're going to talk to a lot of your team. But from a technology standpoint, you've got a lot of those hardware providers as well as different software companies that are here in the Expo hall. Does Metallic and HeadVig and those, you know, how will that change the relationships? I mean, there's one, I've never built a business in my life that wasn't partner centric. And partnerships to me is where both sides feel like they won. They went together. And so I've been very clear with our team, our channel, our board, our ecosystem that we're not doing this alone. That's not my intent. And our goal is to work together. Now, we have partners across the spectrum. Cloud partners, technology partners like NetApp, HPE, Cisco. We've got ecosystem partners, the startups that are building new capabilities that want to be part of our ecosystem and vice versa. Traditional channel, okay, SIs. So we've got the whole run of those, of those partnerships. And we've been very focused, but we've also been very clear that we're in this for the long haul with them. HeadVig is today sold through the channel and will continue to. And Metallic is built to be only sold through the channel. And you guys also, I was looking at some of the strategic changes that you've implemented since you've been here. Leadership changes to the sales organization, but even on the marketing side, go-to-market, you mentioned the channel opportunities for HeadVig as well as Metallic. But also, you guys have a new partner program really aimed at going after and cultivating those large global enterprises with your SIs. So in terms of, you know, partner first, it really seems like the strategic directions that you're moving in are really underscoring that. Absolutely, everything we do. Every single thing we do is, you know, the question, the reviews we do, the internal inspection we do with the business, the way I look at the go-to-market conversations is to, you know, the pipeline. It's always about which partner is involved, who's the partner involved, you know. And on an exception where we don't have a partner involved, my, it's a flag to me going, why? No, I don't know if you're speaking with Ricardo today or at some point, he'll let you know exactly what we're doing there and how we think about it. And then we just hired Mercer Rowe, I don't know, you know Mercer, and so Mercer's just come on board as our sort of partner lead worldwide. Yep, we're going to be talking with him as well. It's a cultural shift, folks, and we're completely committed to it, 100% committed to it. So one of the things that Stu and I were chatting about earlier today that you guys talked about in the keynote is in terms of how quickly Metallic was conceived, designed, built really fast. Does that come from kind of a nod to your days at Puppet where you were used to much shorter cycles and how did internally the calm ball folks kind of react and we're able to get that done so quickly? They embraced it. And I'll tell you, people will tell you that I'm used to saying this thing, I say that competition and time are not our friends. So we have to get out there before somebody else does and if you're coming out with something, it's got to be better than anybody else has. And so we all agreed there was a need for a world-class South solution, but we also understood that we had to do it differently. Doing it the way we've always built something probably wasn't the best answer. We needed to go shake things up because it's a different audience, a different delivery capability, but the beauty of the whole thing was that we had core technology at Conval that was truly multi-tenanted, truly secure, truly scalable, which we had. This was years of great IP, which we took and we built on top of. And so we ended up focusing on the user experience and the capabilities of a SaaS solution, the modern SaaS solution, as opposed to putting a wrapper of SaaS around substandard technology. So in full credit to the team, we do 90-day releases on our core technology today. So yeah, I think that refresh cycle is what customers expect of us, and that's what we do today. I don't think it's, I'm not giving myself any credit for it. Yeah, and Sanjay, actually, we had a customer on earlier talking about that cadence release cycle and he said to Conval's credit that they're hitting it and it makes my life more predictable when I do that. And the channels? Yeah, and so they know when to expect something. So we have a 90-day, and Tom will talk to you about this when he comes on, how we get our channel ready for it, how we enable them, our own support, so we're completely buttoned up and taking advantage of that release cycle. All right, oh, go ahead Stu. So Sanjay, nine months, you've already made quite a few moves in the test board making a lot of pieces there. From what we hear, this is just the beginning. Give us a little bit going forward. Those people watching, what does Sanjay's next nine to 12 months foretold? And as much as you may think it's a lot of moving parts that we've changed, they're all part of a roadmap that we've done. And I've been very open and public about it. When I came in there was a lot we had to do and I wanted to be really focused about getting this company back to Grove and really helping it realize the potential that it had with its heritage of great technology, the great customer base, great ecosystem. So I laid out a very simple three-point plan. Simplify, innovate, execute. And till people are tired of me talking about it and giving me proof points that I'm done I'm going to keep talking about it. And so simplify is everything about how we use the product, the user experience with us and how you engage with us, okay? Innovate is innovate in everything we do. Products, experiences, everything. We have to. We have to challenge the status quo and say there's a smarter way of doing it. Metallic is a complete encapsulation of that energy. Okay, and the last is execute. It's all about getting out there and getting it done. You know, doing what we're saying, saying what we do. Just get it out there, get it done. And I think the team has been amazing. They've just rallied around it and have embraced it. This is what, I think this is what they want. So the changes, sorry, just to, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. But I'll sum it up by saying that, you know, the nine months have been very focused in the direction of making. Now it's about really making sure we help the company and how customers realize it's true potential. Because the technology is great. The people are great. We're a good company. People love our technology. They stay with us forever because it does what it's supposed to. We just think we have a lot more to offer now. So I know we're only day one of the show. Things did kick up a little bit yesterday with partners. What's some of the feedback that you've heard from those customers? Either those that have been using Commva for 10 years or those that are maybe newer to the bandwagon? Somebody asked me if I had 10 cups of coffee before I went on stage this morning. But I think it's a good proxy for what I feel on the show. I feel incredible energy. I think that the customers, the partners, our own people, it's just, it's a buzz. And you've been to shows before and some of them are just, you know, some of them have that energy and some of them are flat. Well, this one's just full of energy and it feels like a lot of adrenaline here and these people are excited and, you know, I'm excited to go walk the floor. Well, your competitors are taking notice. There was some interesting digital signage yesterday at the airport, I noticed, so that happened. What was that? Uh-huh. Okay, I didn't, I missed it. Invitation hires from a flattery. So, Sontre, any, not the noticing. There's a lot of investment that goes into this segment of the market. It's been really hot. You know, what's your take on all the startups and as well as the big companies that have been putting a lot of it in this year? Well, it's an important space, you know, right? It's in the top three, top five, depending on which study you look at, data protection's back because it's one thing to have data, it's another thing to know that it is the way you want it. It's also testimony to the, you know, it's not an easy space to get into. When you're telling your customer that you're protecting them, that's a big word, okay? I believe that you earn your way there, day on day, you know, release on release and we've done that. I mean, the annuals are saying good things about us in half a years. We had customers on stage, you know, and customers don't just come up on stage unless they really believe it. We had a pretty decent turnout at the partner event yesterday. You know, I think we're in a great space at a great time and we've got 20 years of great pedigree that I don't take for granted. As much as people sort of go, oh, you're an old company. I go, uh-uh, don't mistake pedigree for anything else. You know, we've got some incredible IP. Over 800 active patents. We were sharing some of those stats this morning. I was looking to see where I put them. How are you guys leveraging the data that you have under management to make Combal's technology even better and to help make some of those strategic investments? It gives us deep learning. It gives us much, you know, we're applying AI implicitly. I don't want it to be like, I'm not AI washing my technology or my customers. It's in there. It just works for them and it's my job to make my product better so they get more value out of it as opposed to them to bolt on something to make my product better. So I really don't care what others say about it. What I care about is, I'm building that right into the intelligence we have. All the data we know, we know how customers use it, how they back it up, what their expectations are, what the SLAs are, what their protocols are. We know this stuff. And you have to, you know, we've been around enough to know this stuff. So now we're taking all of that with technology like deep learning and machine learning and making the product better. Yeah. So Sondre, one of the toughest things to do out there is have people learn about somebody again for the second time. You know, you only get one chance to make a first impression. So maybe, I'd love your insight. You've been on board for nine months. You know, everybody knows Commvault. It has a strong pedigree, as you said. Has a lot of patents. There's the culture there. But anything you've learned in the last nine months that you didn't know from the outside. We're still a pretty good secret. There's a lot of people that don't know us. As long as, even though we've been around in the enterprise and have achieved a ton, there's still a ton of customers that don't know us. And, you know, our job's to get it out there. And if you've looked at our digital presence, if you've looked at how we're engaging online, it's a different Commvault. In fact, one of my favorite hashtags that's trending at the show is hashtag new Commvault. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, I like that one. I mean, I started it. I don't know. But it is, it's an opportunity, right? As Stu said, you know, we all wish sometimes in certain situations we could make a first impression again. I think you have that opportunity, as you're saying. You have, I think, Stu was saying close to 80% of, I think I read the other day, 75, 80% of Commvault's revenue comes from the Fortune 500. You have the big presence with BLIG global enterprises, the sustainability initiative that you were doing with the UN that Chris talked about. So there's a lot of momentum behind that as well to take and really kind of maybe even leverage the voice of those enterprises to share with the world the benefits that Commvault provides. Like you said, data protection is hot again. If you have the data and you don't have the insight and it's not protected and you can't recover it quickly, then what value is it to your innovation? Or use it. If you can't use that data, why does it have to be compartmentalized where you say, oh, that is my archive? Why can't I say that yes, it is my archive, but I can leverage that data for other things in my business, okay? And so our product orchestrate allows its customers to do e-discovery, to do, sorry, activate, not orchestrate, to do e-discovery, to curate information, to use it for R&D, to have policy on sensitive governance needs. There's so much we can do with the data that's just sitting there and from different sources that I believe that at some level, protecting and managing and controlling are almost table stakes. So I'm raising the stakes. Use is where the magic is. All right, raising the stakes. Well, Sanjay, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE today. Can't wait to see where those stakes are going to be at Commvault Go 2020. Hashtag new Commvault. Hashtag new Commvault, thanks Stu. Thanks Lisa. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Hashtag new Commvault for Stu Miniman and Sanjay Marachandani. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Commvault Go.