 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Well, good afternoon and welcome back here to San Francisco, we're Moscone North along with Dave Vellante, John Walls. You're watching our coverage here live on theCUBE of VMworld 2019. Dave, I've been over on the other set. I know you've been busy on this side as well. Show going all right for you so far? Oh yeah, a lot of action going on over here. We had Pat Kelsinger on this morning, Michael Dell with this VMware hat. We got Sanjay Pooning coming on later. Yeah, yeah. Good lineup, and that lineup continues. Greg Hughes, the CEO of Veritas. Great to be here. Great to be here, John. Thanks for joining us. Dave, absolutely. We're actually just outside the Veritas Meadow here. Sponsored this area. This is the Meadow set that we're on right now. Nice to be here. Yeah, I didn't know that. All right, just first off, just give me your idea of the vibe here. What are you feeling? I think there's a tremendous amount of energy. It's been a lot of fun to be here. Obviously, VMware is talking about this hybrid multi-cloud world, and Veritas is 100% supportive of that vision. We work with all the major cloud service providers, you know, AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure. We share thousands of customers with VMware. Some of the biggest customers, the most complicated customers in the world where we provide availability and protection and insights for those customers. Well, it's always been the ethos of Veritas. When you go back to the early days of Veritas, essentially it was the storage management, you know, the no hardware agenda, the sort of independent storage company, but pure software. That's us. And, you know, years ago, there was no cloud, you know, but there were different platforms. And so that culture has really migrated now into this multi-cloud world. Get thoughts on that. Absolutely. Look, you know, I'll give you an example of a customer that we work with closely with VMware on. And that is Renault Americas. Renault is a big joint venture. They've got a huge SAP installation, 8,000 users, 40 terabytes, a big net backup customer. They also use our products Infascale and VRP for availability and DR. And they work with us because we are hardware agnostic. They looked at us against the other competitors and we're hardware agnostic. And because of that, we came in at 60% lower TCO than those other providers. So that hardware agnostic approach works really well. You know, you were just touching on this Greg a little bit when you said, you know, whether it's hybrid, whether it's multi, whether it's private, whatever it is, you know, we're here to provide solutions. The fact that this stuff is hard to figure out and really kind of can boggle the mind a bit. It's very complex. How much of an inhibitor is that in terms of what you're hearing from clients and in terms of their progress and their decision making? Well, let me explain where we sit. We are the leader in enterprise data protection, availability and insights. We work with the largest, most complex, most highly regulated and most demanding customers on the planet. 99 of the Fortune 100 are customers of Veritas. 10 of the top 10 telcos, 10 of the top 10 healthcare companies and 10 of the top 10 financial institutions. I spend about 50% of my time talking to these customers. So we learn a lot. And here are the four big challenges they're facing. First is the explosion of data. Data is just growing so fast. Gardner estimates there'll be 175 zettabytes of data in 2025. If you crammed that into iPhones, it would take 2.6 trillion iPhones and go to the sun and back, right? It's an enormous amount of data. Second, they're worried about ransomware. It's not a question of if you'll be attacked, it's when you'll be attacked. Look at what's happening in Texas right now with the 22 municipalities dealing with that. What you want in that case is a resilient infrastructure. You want to be able to restore from a really good backup copy of data. Third, they want the hybrid multi-cloud world just like Pat Gelsinger has been talking about. That's what customers want, that they want to be able to protect their data wherever it is, make it highly available and get insights in their data wherever it's located. And then finally, they're dealing with this massive growth in government regulations around the world because of this concern about privacy. I was in Australia a few weeks ago and one of our customers, she was telling me that she deals with 27 different regulatory environments. Another customer was saying the California Privacy Act will be the death of him. And he's based in St. Louis, right? So our strategy is focused on taking away the complexity and helping the largest companies in the world deal with these challenges. And that's why we introduce the Enterprise Data Services Platform and that's why we're here at VMworld talking about Veritas. So Greg, let's unpack some of those. As I said, Veritas kind of created a market way back when. And now you see, come full circle, you've got multi-cloud, you have a lot of new entrants talking about data management. That's always been your play. But you're kind of the king of the hill. So everybody wants a piece of your hide. So that's kind of interesting. But data growth, so let's start there. So it used to be data was a liability. Now it's becoming an asset. So what are your customers saying about sort of data as something that needs to be managed, needs to be done cost-effectively and efficiently versus getting more value on data? And what's Veritas' sort of perspective on that? Well, they're really trying to get insights in their data, okay? And that's why we acquired a company called Aptar. So when I, this is my second time at Veritas. I was here from 2003 to 2010. Rejoined the company in 2018. Talked to a lot of customers. I found that their infrastructure was so complex. The storage infrastructure is so complex that companies were having a hard time figuring out anything about their data. So they're having the hardest time just answering some fundamental questions that boards were asking. Boards are saying because of the ransomware threat, is all our data protected? Is it backed up? Are all our applications backed up and protected? And customers could not answer that question. On the other hand, they also were backing up some data six, seven, eight times. Wasting storage. What Aptar does, and it's really amazing. I recommend seeing a demo of it if you get a chance. It pulls information from SAN arrays, network file systems, virtual machines, SAN networking and all data protection applications to get a complete picture of what's happening with your data. And that is one example of what customers really want. Okay, so then that kind of leads to the second point, which is ransomware. Now part of that is analytics and understanding what's going on in the system as well. So, but it's a relatively new concept, right? And ransomware is the last couple of years we've really started to see it escalate. How does Veritas help address that problem? And does Aptar play a role there? Well, Veritas helps companies address that problem because Veritas helps create a resilient infrastructure. Okay, the bad guys are going to get in. Spear fishing works, you know? You are going to find some employees who are going to click on a link and the malware is going to get in. So all you can do to protect, you ultimately have to have a good backup copy so you can restore at scale and quickly. And so there's been a lot of focus from these large enterprises on restoring at scale very quickly after a ransomware attack. So you're not beholden, you can't be extorted by the ransomware attackers. The third piece was hybrid and of course that leads to sort of hybrid multi-cloud. Let's put that category out there. Now, I've been kind of skeptical on hybrid multi-cloud from an application perspective. In other words, the vision that you can run any app anywhere in the world without having to retest, recompile. I've been skeptical of that, but the one area that I'm not skeptical and I'm encouraged with is data protection. Because I think actually you can have a consistent data protection model across your on-prem, different on-prem, different clouds. Because you're partnering with all the different cloud companies, you obviously have expertise in on-prem. So talk about your approach there, philosophy and maybe any offering. Well, this is really what sets us apart. We have been around for 25 years, 2000 patents. We protect everything. 500 different sources of data, 150 different targets, 60 different cloud service providers. You know, we compete with two categories of players. We compete with the newcomers and they'll only protect your most current technology. They don't go back. We've been around for 25 years. We protect everything, right? We also compete with the conglomerates, okay? In their case, they're not focused. They're trying to do everything. All we do is availability, protection and insights. And that's why we've been in Gartner MQ 13 times and we're the market share leader. Well, so absolutely. Touch race on what Dave was saying though about the application side of this. I mean, just your thoughts about, you know, the kinds of concerns that Dave raises. I mean, he's not alone in that respect. I mean, there are general concerns here right about whether that'll fly. What do you think in terms of- I think the vision is spot on and like all visions, it takes a while to get to. But I think what VMware's done recently in the acquisition, they're basically trying to make the control plane for compute, okay? And their acquisition of carbon black and pivotal add to that control plane. We are going to be, we are the control plane for data protection. I mean, that's the way our customers rely on. See, but that makes sense to me. So I think, I feel like the multi-cloud vision is very aspirational today. And I think it's going to be really hard to get there without homogeneous infrastructure. And that's why you see things like Outpost. You see Oracle has cloud a customer. You got Azure Stack. So, and I think it's going to be a multi-vendor world. However, I do think that as it relates to data protection you can set a standard and say, we're going to standardize on Veritas. So I think that it's achievable. So that's kind of was my point there. The last one was regulations. Do you think GDPR will be a sort of a framework globally? What are your customers seeing there? Well, they're dealing with more than GDPR. Like I talked about that one customer, 27 different regulatory environments. And the challenge there is how do you deal with that when you don't know what you have in terms of data? The 50% of data is what we call dark data. You don't know anything about it, right? So you need help classifying it, understanding and getting insight into that data. And that's what we can help our customers with. But how do you deal with that in that environment? I mean, Dave raises the point. And this is obvious as well. I mean, it's like California, right? Which is somewhat infamous for having, you know, its own regulatory mindset. I mean, how do you exist with the United States has privacy concerns and Congress can address it and various federal agencies can do the same. Europe, obviously, we've talked about. Now Australia now here and now there. You've got this Balkan eye system that has no consistency, no framework. And so how do you operate on a global scale? Fundamentally, it relies on classifying that data, right? Understanding what's where and what do you have? Is it PII, personally identifiable information? Is it information that's intellectual property? What kind of data you have? Once you have that insight, which is what we provide, you can layer on top of the regulatory compliance. And is that Aptar IP? Is it Veritas IP, a blend of? It's a blend of Aptar and Veritas IP. We have a product called Info Studio that helps to provide that. Now remember, one of the things that our net backup product has is a catalog of data. So we know where the data is, from primary to secondary storage, and we have all the versions of that data. And then we can run analytics against the secondary storage and not hit the primary systems, right? So we're out of band to the primary systems and that turns out to be very valuable in these days. A question, the catalog can't do this without a catalog and not to geek out here a little but it'll give out a little bit. When you bring in multi-clouds, other clouds, how do you incorporate that knowledge into your catalog? Yeah, our technology, our catalog works across multiple clouds. So we work with 60 different cloud service providers. There's three big ones represented here today, Microsoft, AWS and Google. We work very closely with all three of them. And that's because you do the engineering at the API level. Our engineering teams work very, very closely together. Okay, so let's talk about competition a little bit. The market's heated up. It's great. It's good to see all this VC money floating in. Everybody, I said, wants a piece of your hide. Why Veritas? Well, I explained that. We are the leader in enterprise data protection availability and insights. There are some newcomers. They just will support you on your current technology. They don't support the infrastructure you've had for many years. If you're a large, complicated enterprise, you have layers of technology. We support all that. We've been around for 25 years. Against the big conglomerates, we are completely focused. And that's why we're the leader, according to Gartner, in the leaders quadrant, 13 years. And just as we close up, you talked about, you brought up the case in Texas about the 22 municipalities. You do a lot of public sector work, states, federal government, whatever. Just what is the difference, the different animal between public and private and what you need to do in terms of providing them with data protection? They're struggling with the same challenge. I mean, in fact, we work with some of the largest government agencies in the world. And they are struggling with exactly these same challenges. They also want to leverage the public cloud. They're worried about ransomware. They're dealing with data growth. All of these are challenges to them. And that's the, so these are common challenges we're addressing. Our strategy is to help our customers with these challenges so they can focus on the value of data. Well, 18 months in, you seem pumped up. Yeah, he does. I'm having a great time. The team fired up. Yeah, we get that, right? It's great to be here. You're okay with geeking out too, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you just talk a little bit about that. Very good. Hey, thanks for the time. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, John. We'll run out of time. We'll get to 49ers next time. All right, we'll do it. Great news, joining us from Veritas, back with more, VMworld 2019 right here on theCUBE. Thank you.