 Welcome back to Veeamon 2021, you're watching theCUBE and my name is Dave Vellante. You know, the last 10 years of cloud, they were largely about spinning up virtualized compute infrastructure and accessing cheap and simple object storage and some other things like networking. The cloud was largely though a set of remote resources that simplified deployment and supported a whole spate of native applications that have emerged to power the activity of individuals and businesses. The next decade, however, promises to build on the troves of data that live in the cloud make connections to on-premises applications and support new application innovations that are agile, iterative, portable and span resources in all the clouds, public clouds, private clouds, cross-cloud connections all the way out to the near and far edge. And a linchpin of this new application development model is container platforms and container orchestration which brings immense scale and capability to technology-driven organizations, especially as they've evolved from supporting stateless applications to underpainting mission-critical workloads. As such, containers bring complexities and risks that need to be addressed, not the least of which is protecting the massive amounts of data that are flowing through these systems. And with me to discuss these exciting yet challenging trends are Danny Allen, who's the CTO of Veeam and Niraj Tolia, the president at Casten by Veeam. Gentlemen, welcome to the queue. Thank you, delighted to be here with you, Dave. Likewise, very excited to be here, Dave. Okay, so Danny, you know, big, you know, M&A move, a great little acquisition you're now seeing others try to make similar moves. Why, what did you see in Casten? What was the fit? Why'd you make that move? Well, I think you nailed it, Dave. We've seen an evolution in the infrastructure that's being used over the last two decades. So if you go back 20 years, you know, there was a massive digital transformation to enable users to be self-serviced with digital applications, about 2000 or so. 2010, everything started being virtualized. I know virtualization came along before that, but virtualization really started to take off because it gave return on investment, it gave flexibility, all kinds of benefits. But now we're in a third way, which is built on containers. And the amazing thing about containers is that as you said, it allows you to connect multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, the edge to the core, and they're designed for the consumption world. If you think about the cloud, you can provision things, deprovision things. That's the way that containers are designed, the applications. And so because they're designed for a consumption-based world, because they're designed for portability across all of these different infrastructures, it only made sense for us to invest in the industry's leading provider of data protection for Kubernetes, and that of course is custom. Yeah, so Neeraj, I mean, take us back. I mean, containers have been around forever, but then they started to hit go mainstream. And at first, they were obviously ephemeral, stateless apps, kind of lightweight stuff, but you at the time, you and the team said, okay, these are gonna become more complex microservices, maybe also micro, but you had to have the vision, and you made a bet, maybe take us back to sort of how you saw that and where containers have come from. Sure, so let's rewind the clock, right? As you said, containers, old technology, in the same way virtualization started with IBM mainframes, right? Containers in different forms have been around for a while, but I think when the light bulb went off of me was very early days in 2015, right? When my engineering team at a previous company started complaining, and the reason they were complaining about different other engineering groups, and the reason they were complaining was because of the right things. Things were coming together sooner, we were identifying things sooner, and that's when I said this is going to be that next wave of infrastructure. The same way virtualization revolutionized how people built deployed apps. We saw that with containers, and in particular in those days, we made that bet on Kubernetes, right? So we said from first principles, that's where you had other things like Docker swarm, mesos, et cetera. And we said, Kubernetes is going to be the way to go because it is just so powerful, and it is, at the end of the day, what we all do is infrastructure. But what we saw was that containers were optimizing for the developer. They were optimizing for the people that really build applications, deliver value to all of their end customers. And that is what made us see that even though the initially we only saw stateless applications, stateful was going to happen because there's just so much momentum behind it. And the writing for us at least was on the wall, and that's how we started off on this journey in 2017. What are the unique nuances and differences really in terms of protecting containers? From a technical standpoint, what's different? So there are a couple of subtle things, right? Again, the joke is, you know, I say is that I'm a recovering infrastructure person. I've always worked on infrastructure systems in the past and recovering them. But in this case, we really had to flip things around, right? I've come at it from the cloud, disks, volumes, VMs perspective. In this case, to do the right thing by the customer needed a clean slate approach of coming at it from the application down. So what we look at is, what does the application look like? And that means protecting not just the stuff that's on disk, but your secrets and networking information, all those hundreds of pieces that make up a cloud native application. And that involves scale challenges, work visualization challenges for admins, API. So all of that shifts in a very dramatic way. So Danny, I mean, typically Veeam, you guys haven't done a ton of acquisitions. You've grown organically. So now you pop in, Kasten, what did that mean for you from a platform perspective? You know, IBM has this term blue washing when they buy a company. Did you greenwash Kasten? How did that all work? And again, what does it mean from the platform perspective? Well, so our platform is designed for this type of integration. The first type of integration we do with any of our technologies, because we do have native technologies. If you think about what we do, Veeam backup for AWS, for Azure, for GCP, we have backup for Acropolis hypervisor. These are all native purpose-built solutions for those environments. And we integrate with what we call Veeam platform services. And one of the first steps that we do, of course, is we take the data from those native solutions and send it into the Veeam repository. And the benefit that you get from that is that you have this portable self-describing format that you can move around the Veeam platform. And so the platform was already designed for this. Now, we already showed this at Veeam on. You saw this on the main stage where we have this integration at a data level, but it goes beyond that. Veeam platform services allows us to do not just day one operations, but day two operations. Think about updating the components of those infrastructures or those software components. They also allows reporting. So for example, you can report on what is protected, what's not protected. So the platform was already designed for this integration model, but the one thing I want to stress is we will always have that standalone product for Kubernetes, for the container world. And the reason for that is the administrator for Kubernetes wants their own purpose-built solution. They want it running on Kubernetes. They want to protect the uniqueness of their infrastructure. If you think about a lot of the container-based systems, they're using structured data and unstructured data, sure, but they're also using object-based storage. They're using message cues. And so they have their nuances and we want to maintain that in a standalone product, but integrate it back into the core Veeam platform. So we do these, we have a data partner called ETR Enterprise Technology Research. They do these quarterly surveys and they have this metric called NetScore. It's a measure of spending momentum. And for the last, I don't know, 8, 10, 12 quarters, the big four have been robotic process automation. That's hot space, cloud obviously is hot. And then AI, of course, but containers and container orchestration, right up there. Those are the big four that outshine everything else, even things like security and other infrastructure, et cetera. So that's good. I mean, you guys skating to the puck back in 2015, Hirosh, but you've made some announcements and I'm wondering sort of how they fit into the trends in the industry, what's significant about those announcements and what's new that we need to know about? Sure, so let me take that one there. So we've made a couple of very interesting announcements. The most recent one of those was the 4.0 release of the Gaston by Veeam platform, right? We call it K10. And we've known since a couple of weeks, colonial pipeline ransomware has been in the news and the US gas prices are being driven up because of that. And that's really what we're seeing from customers where we are seeing this increase in Kubernetes adoption. Today we have customers from the world's largest banks all the way to weekly connected cruise ships that run Kubernetes on them. People's data is precious. People are running a large fleet of nodes for Kubernetes, large number of clusters. So what we said is, how do we protect against these malicious attacks that want to lock people out? How do you bring immutability so that even someone with keys to the kingdom can't go compromise your backups and you have quick restores, right? So this echoes a lot of what we hear from customers and what we hear about in the news. So we protected that, but we still held true to some of the original vision behind Caston that is, it's not just saying, hey, I give you ransomware protection, but do it in such an easy way, the admin barely notices this new features being turned on if they wanted. Do it in a way that gives them choice, right? If you're running in a public cloud, if you're running at the edge, you have choice of infrastructure available to you. And do it in a way that you have 100% automation. When you have 100 clusters, when you deploy on ships, right? You're not going to be able to have bespoke things. So how do you hook into CSED pipeline to make the job of the admin easier is what we focused on in the last few weeks. And that's because you're basically doing this at the point of writing code and it's essentially infrastructure as code. We always talk about, you don't want to bolt on data protection as an afterthought, that's what we've done forever. This, you can't, right? So in fact, I would say a step before that day, right? Are the most leading customers we work with, right? So Lighthouse, one of the US government's largest contractors, right? They do this before the first line of code is written, right? They run an AWS Cloud Cloud as an example. But with the whole shift left that we all hear, the cube talks a lot about, we see this point where as you bring up infrastructure, you bring up a complete development environment, a complete test environment. And within that, you want to deploy security, you want to deploy backup, you want to deploy protection at day zero before the developer inserts the first line of code in. So you're protected at every step of the journey while trying to bolt it on. And this sounds seemingly, yes, I stitched together a few pieces of technology, but it fundamentally impacts how we're going to build the next generation of secure applications. Great. Now, Danny, I think I heard you say or announced that this is going to be integrated into Veeam backup and replication. Can you explain sort of what that took, why that's important? Yeah, so the timeline on this, and when we do integrations from these native solutions into the core platform, typically it begins with a data integration, in other words, the data being collected by the backup tool is sent to a Veeam repository. And that gives us all the benefits, of course, of things like instant recovery and leveraging dedupe storage appliances and all of that. Step two, typically is around day two operations, things like pushing out updates to that native solution. So if you look at what we're doing with Veeam backup for AWS and Azure, we can deploy the components, we can deploy the data proxies and data movers. And then lastly, there's also a reporting aspect to this because we want to centralize the visibility for the organization across everywhere. So if your policy says, hey, I need two weeks of backups and after two weeks that I need weekly backups for X amount of time, this gives you the ability to see and manage across the organization. So what we've demonstrated already is this data level integration between the two platforms. And we expect this to continue to go deeper and deeper as we move forward. The interesting thing right now is that the containers team often is different than the standard data center IT team, but we are quickly seeing the merge and I think the speed of that merging will also impact how quickly we integrate them within our platform. Well, I mean, obviously you see this for cloud developers and now you're bringing this to any developers. And if I'm a developer and I'm living in an insurance company and I've been writing COBOL code for a while, I want to be, sign me up. I want to get trained on this, right? Because it's going to, I'm going to become more valuable. So this is where the industry is headed. You guys talk about modern data protection. I wondered, Niraj, if you could paint a picture for us of sort of what this new world of application development and deployment and data protection looks like and how it's different from the old world. So I think, Dave, you mentioned the most important word which is developer. They come first. They are the decision makers in this environment. They are the people that have the most pull and rightly so. So I think that's the biggest thing at the cultural level that is developers are saying, this is what we want and this is what we need to get our job done. We want to move quickly. So some of the things that let's not slow them down. Let's enable them. Let's give them an API to work with, right? No, when bulk of production use will be API based versus UI based. Let's transparently integrate into the environment. So Dave for protection for security, they need zero lines of changed code. So those are some of the ways we approach things. Now, when you go look at the requirements from the developers, they say, I have a CI CD pipeline to integrate into that. I have a development pipeline to integrate into that. I deploy across multiple clouds sometimes. Can you integrate into that and work seamlessly across all those environments? And we see those category of us coming up over and over again from people. So the developer writes once and then doesn't have to worry about where it's running. It's got the right security, the right protection and those policies go with it. So that's definitely a different world. Okay, last question. Maybe you guys could each give your opinion on sort of where we're headed, what we can expect from the acquisition, the integration, what should we look forward to and what should we pay attention to? Well, the one obvious thing that you're going to see is tremendous growth on the company side. And that's because Kubernetes is taking off, cloud is taking off, SaaS is taking off. And so there's obvious growth there. And one of the things that we're clearly doing is we're leveraging the power of a few thousand sales people to bring this out to market. And so there's a merging of sales and marketing activities and leveraging that scale. But what you shouldn't expect to see anything different on is this obsessive focus on the product, on quality, on making sure that we're highly differentiated, that we have a product that the company that our customers and companies actually need. Naraj? Yeah, so I'll agree with everything Danny said, but a couple of things excite me a lot. So Dave, we've been roughly eight months or so since acquisition and I particularly love how last quarter and this quarter have gone in terms of how we focus on solving customer problems. Right? So we'll always have that independent support for our cloud data customers. But I'm excited about not just working with a broader set of customers and as we scale the team that's going to happen, but providing a bridge to all the folks that grew up in the virtualization world, right? Grew up in the physical world, physical servers, et cetera. And saying, how do we make it easy for you to come over to this new containerization world? What is the on ramp? So bridging that gap, solving as the on ramp and we're doing a lot of work there from the product integration and independent product features that just make it easy. Right? And we're already seeing very good feedback for that from the field right now. I really like your position. I just dropped my quarterly cloud update. I focus, you know, I look at the big four. The big four last year spent $100 billion on CapEx. And I always say that is a gift to companies like yours because you can be that connection point between the virtualization crowd, the on-prem cloud, any cloud, eventually we'll be more than just talking about the edge, we'll actually be out there doing real work. And I just see great times ahead for you guys. So thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, explaining this really exciting new area. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dave. And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and our continuous coverage of Veeamon 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there.