 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Coming to you today from our Palo Alto studios, it's COVID is still going on, so still no shows, but the good news is we got the technology we can reach out to the community and bring them in from far, far away. So today joining us from Virginia across the country is David Scott, he is the director of product management for Veritas. David, great to see you. Thanks, Jeff, great to be here. Absolutely, so let's jump into it. You guys have been about backup and recovery for years and years and years, but oh my goodness how the landscape continues to evolve between public cloud and all the things happening with Amazon and Google and Microsoft and then now, of course, big push for hybrid and where are the workloads and kind of application centric infrastructure. You guys still got to back up and secure all these things. What if you can give us a little bit of your perspective on kind of the increasing complexity of the computing environment as all these different kind of pieces of the puzzle all are kind of gaining traction at the same time. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm on the compliance side of the company. So I'm more on looking after requirements around collection of content, preparation for litigation, making sure you're adhering to compliance regulations in different parts of the world. And I mean, that's a constantly evolving space. One of the, so basically the products I look after are enterprise vault, enterprise vault.cloud and e-discovery platform. And as you say, I mean, one of the biggest challenges is that customers are starting to move, you know, customers are looking for flexibility in how they deploy our solutions. We've been, we've had a product in market with enterprise vault for about 20 years. And so we have a lot of customers that have a lot of data on-premise. And now they're starting, you know, they've got cloud mandates. They want to move that content to the cloud. So we have gotten very aggressive at building out our SaaS archiving solution enterprise vault.cloud. But we also provide other options. Like if you want to move enterprise vault from your data center on-premise to your tenant in Azure Amazon, we fully support that. In fact, we're taking advantage of cloud services to make that a much more viable option for our customers. So let's then get into the regulation and the compliance because that's a big piece of the motivation beyond just, you know, making sure that the business can recover. The regulation and compliance thing is huge. You know, the GDPR, which has been around now for a couple of years, California Protection Act. And I think what I find interesting from your perspective is you have this kind of crazy sea of regulations that are different by country, by industry, by data type, and they're evolving all the time. So that's got to be a relatively complex little grid you got to keep track of. Yeah, it makes the job interesting, but it also has a huge competitive advantage for us. We have a team that researches data privacy regulations around the world. And it's been a competitive advantage in that we can be incredibly nimble in creating a new policy. We had some opportunities come up in Turkey. There's a regulation there that mirrors GDPR called KVKK or KaBe KaKa, I think they call it locally. And it's, I joke, it's kind of like GDPR but with jail time for non-compliance. So there's a lot more motivation on the part of an IT department to make sure they're meeting that requirement. But it has to do with dealing with data privacy again and ensuring the safety of that content. And that's proliferating throughout the world. You mentioned California Consumer Privacy Act. Many other states are starting to follow what the California Consumer Privacy Act, and I'm sure it won't be long before we have a data privacy act in the U.S. that's nationwide instead of at the state level. In other industries that we serve like the financial services industry, there's always been a lot of regulation around SEC and FINRA in the U.S. That's spreading to other countries now. MIFID-2 in the European Union has been huge and that dictates you need to capture all voice conversations, all text conversations, instant messages. Everything that goes on between a broker and the end customer has to be captured, has to be supervised, and has to be maintained on worm storage. So that's a great segment for us as well. That's an area we play very well in. So it's interesting because in preparing for this I saw some of the recent announcements around the concept of data supervision. So I think a lot of people are familiar with backup and recovery and continuity, but specifically data supervision. What does that really mean? How is that different than kind of traditional backup and recovery, and what are some of the really key features or attributes to make that a successful platform? Yeah, it is really outside of the realm of backup and recovery. Archiving is very different from backup and recovery in that archiving is about preserving the communication and being able to monitor that communication for the purposes of meeting compliance regulations. So in the case of our solution, Veritas Advanced Supervision, it sounds a bit big brotherish, if I'm being honest, but it is a requirement for the financial service community that you sample a subset of those communications looking for violations. So you're looking for insider trading, you're looking for money laundering. In some companies, HR departments are even just trying to ensure that their employees are being compliant. And so you may sample a subset of content, but it's absolutely required within the financial services community. And we're starting to see a lot of other industries, leveraging this technology just to ensure compliance with different regulations or compliance with their own internal policies, ensuring a safe workplace, ensuring that there's not sexual harassment or that type of thing going on through office communications. So it is a way of just monitoring your employees' communications. So it's wild, I remember when people used to talk about messaging and kind of the generic sense, and I could never understand, it's an email, it's a text. I mean, little did I know that every single application that's now installed on every single device that I have has a messaging app, has a direct messaging feature. So I mean, the complexity and I guess the variability in the communication methods across all these applications and probably more than half of them that most of us work on are SaaS as well, really adds a ton of complexity to the challenge that you were just talking about. Absolutely, I mean, I'm old. When I started, all of my communications were on a Microsoft mail server. All my files were in the file, server room down the hall. Now I've got about 20 different ways to communicate on my phone. And the fragmentation of communication does make that job a lot more challenging. Now you need to take a voice conversation, convert it to text with COVID and with the dawn of telemedicine or at least the rapid growth in telemedicine, sorry, there is a whole new potential market for this kind of supervision tool. Now you can capture every doctor-patient interaction that takes place over Zoom or over a team's video, transcribe that content and there's a wealth of value in that conversation. Not only can you tell if the doctor is responding to the patient if the interaction is positive or negative, is the doctor helping to calm the patient down? Do they have good quality of interaction? That sort of thing. And so there's incredible value in capturing those communications so you can learn best practices, I guess. And then feed that into a broader data lake and correlate the interaction with patient outcomes. Who are your great doctors? Who are your, you know, that type of thing? So that's an area that we're very excited about going forward. Wow, that's pretty interesting. I never kind of thought that through because I would have assumed that, you know, kind of most of the calls for this type of data were based on some type of litigation. You know, it was some type of an ask or a request that I was going to ask you. You know, how does that actually work within the context of the sea of data that you have? Is it usually around a specific individual who's got some issues and you're kind of looking at their ecosystem of communications, or is it more of a pattern or is it potentially more of a keyword type of thing that's triggering, you know, kind of this forensics into this tremendous amount of data that's in all these enterprises? Yeah, it's a little bit of everything. Like, so first of all, we have the ability to capture a lot of different native content sources, but we also leverage partners to bring in other content sources. We can capture over 80 different content sources, all the, you know, instant messaging, social media, of course, email, but even voice communications and video communications. And to answer your question, as far as litigation, I mean, it really depends on the incident, right? In the past, in the old days, any kind of litigation resulted in a fire drill where you're trying to find every scrap of evidence, every piece of information related to the case. By being a little bit proactive in capturing your email and your communication streams into a mutable storage in an archive, you're ready for that litigation event. And you've already indexed that content, you've already classified that content, so you can find the needle in the haystack, you can find the relevant content to prove your innocence, or at least to comply with the request for information. Now, that has also led to solving similar issues for public sector, U.S. Federal with the Freedom of Information Act. They're getting all kinds of requests for right now for COVID-related communications. And that could be related to lawsuits, it could be related to just information around how stimulus funds are being spent. And they've got to respond to these requests very, very quickly. Our team came up with a COVID-19 classification policy where we can actually weed out the communications related to COVID-19 to allow those federal agencies and even state and local agencies to quickly respond to those types of requests. So that's been an exciting area for us. And then there's still the SEC requirements to monitor broker-dealers and conversations with end users to ensure they're not doing anything they shouldn't be doing like insider trading. Right, which is so different than kind of a post event, kind of forensic investigation and then collecting that data. So I'm curious, how often are you having to update policies and update kind of the sniffers and the intelligence that goes behind the monitoring to trigger a flag? And then does that just go into their own internal kind of compliance reg and set off a whole nother chain of events, I would imagine? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things we can do with our classification policies. And in the case of the COVID policy, we just kind of crowdsourced that internally. And created a policy in about a week really that we shaped the basic policy and then kept refining it, refining it, testing it. And we were able to go from start to finish and have it publicly available within about a week and a half. It was really a great effort. And we have that kind of ability to be very nimble to react to different types of regulations as they become, get out there. And there's also a constant refining of even data privacy for every country that we support. We have data privacy regulations for the entire European Union and for most countries around the world, obviously the US, Canada, Australia, and so on. And you can always make those policies better. So we've introduced feedback loops where our customers can give us feedback on what works and what isn't working and we can tweak the policies as needed. But it is a great way to respond to whatever's going on in the world to help our customer base, which is largely the financial verticals, the public sector verticals, but even healthcare is becoming more important for us. So, David, I wonder if there's some other use cases that people aren't thinking about where you guys have seen value in this type of analytics. Yeah, I mean, definitely, the one thing I think it's just starting to emerge is the value that's inherent in communications. So I mentioned earlier the telemedicine idea and can you learn from doctor-patient interactions if you're capturing them over telemedicine vehicles, again, video, chat, Zoom and that sort of thing. But similarly, if you've captured communications for a long time as many of our customers have, what can you do with that data and how can it feed into a broader data lake to give you new insights? So for example, if you want to gauge whether a major deal is about to close, you can rely on your sales reps to populate the CRM and give you an indication it's 10% complete, it's 50% complete, whatever, but you're dependent on all the games that salespeople play. It would be far better to look at the pattern of a traditional deal closing. First, you start out with one person at your company talking to one person at the target customer. That leads to meetings, that leads to calendar invites, that leads to emails being sent back and forth. You can look at the time of response, how quickly does the target customer respond to the sales rep? How often are they interacting? How many people are they interacting with? Is it spanning different geos? Is it spanning different groups within the company? Are there certain documents being sent back and forth like a quote, for example? All of this can give you a higher confidence that that deal is going to close or that deal is failing, you don't really know. You can also look at historical data and compare the current account manager to his predecessor. Does the current account manager interact with his customer as much as the former rep did? And is there a correlation in their effectiveness based on kind of their interactions and their just basic skills? So I think that's an exciting field and it shines a new light on the data that you have to collect to comply with regulations, the data you have to collect for litigation and other reasons, now there's other value there. Right, that's a fascinating story. So the reason that you guys would be involved in this is because you're sitting on, you're sitting on all that comms data because you have to for the regulation. I mean, what you're describing sounds like a perfect, you know, kind of Salesforce plug-in with a richer data set versus, as you said, relying on the salesperson to input the Salesforce information which would require them to remember their password, which gets reset every three weeks. So the chances of that are pretty slim. Yeah, I mean, there's a fact, I think I read a stat recently that about, you know, only 10% of information is actually captured in a CRM, you know, contact information and that sort of thing. But if you're looking at their emails, if you're looking at their phone calls and their texts and that sort of thing, you get a rich set of data on contacts and people that you're interacting with at a target customer. And, you know, sales, more than any other job, I think sales has high turnover. And so you need that record of, you know, if one account rep leaves, you don't want to lose all their contacts and start over again. You want to smooth handover to the next person. If you capture all that content from their communications into CRM, you're in great shape. So, David, I want to get your take on something that's happening now because you're so dialed into policy and policy and regulations, which is such a giant determinant of what people can and should not do with data. When you take something like COVID and the conversations about people going back to work and contact tracing, it's, to me, it's like, whoa, you know, it's kind of this privacy clash against HIPAA and, you know, that's medical information. And yet it's like this particular disease has been deemed such that it kind of falls outside the traditional, you know, kind of HIPAA rules. They're not going to test me for any other ailments before I come in the door at work, but they, you know, eventually we're going to be scanning people. So, you know, the levels of complexity and dynamicism that's even a word around something like that, that's even a one-off within a specific, you know, kind of medical data has got to be, you know, I guess interesting and challenging, but from a policy perspective and an actual handling of that information, that's got to be a crazy challenge. Yeah, I mean, we do expect that COVID is going to lead to all kinds of litigation and freedom of information act requests. And that's a big reason why we saw the importance very quickly that we need a classification policy to highlight that content. So what we can do in this case is we can, first of all, identify where that content is stored. We have a product called Data Insight that can monitor your file system and quickly locate if you've got a document that includes, you know, patient data or anything related to COVID-19, we can find that. And now as we bring in the communications, we can flag communications as we archive them and say this is related to COVID-19. Then when a litigation happens, you can look, you can do a quick search and you can filter on the COVID-19 tag and the people you're concerned with and the date range you're concerned with, you can easily pull in all of the communications, all of the file content, anything related to COVID-19. And this is huge for, again, for public sector where they're subject to, you know, I'm sorry, Freedom of Information Act requests, but it's also gonna affect every company because like it's gonna be litigation around when a company decided that they would work from home and did they wait too long, you know, and did someone get sick because they weren't aggressive enough. There's gonna be frivolous lawsuits, there's gonna be, you know, more tangible lawsuits and there's gonna be all kinds of activity around how stimulus funds were spent and that sort of thing. So yeah, that's a great example of a case where you've gotta find the content quickly and respond to requests very quickly. Classification can go a long way there. Yeah, the lawyers have hardly gotten involved in this COVID thing yet. And to your point, it's gonna be both frivolous as well as justified and did people come back too early? Did they take the right steps? It's gonna be messy and sloppy, but it sounds like you're in a good position to help people get through it. So, you know, just kind of your final thoughts, you've been in this business for a long time. The rate and pace of change is only increasing, the complexity, veracity, stealing some good old big data words and velocity of the data is only increasing, the sources are growing exponentially. You know, as you kind of sit back and reflect, obviously a lot of exciting stuff ahead, but what do you think about what gets you up in the morning beyond just continuing to race to keep up with the never ending sea of changing regulatory environment? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think we have a great portfolio that can really help us react to change and to take advantage of some of these new trends. And that is exciting. Like, telemedicine, the changes that come with COVID-19, what we could do for telemedicine rating doctors gauging their performance, we could do the same sort of thing for teleeducation. You know, like I have two kids that have had, you know, homeschooling for the last three months and probably are going to face that in the fall. And there might be some need to just rate how the teachers are doing, how well are the classes interacting and what can we learn from best practices there? So I think that's an interesting space as well. But what keeps me going is the fact that we've got market leading products in archiving, e-discovery and supervision. We're putting a lot of new energy into those solutions. They've been around a long time. We've been archiving since 1998, I think, doing supervision and discovery for 20 years. And it's strange, the market's still there, it's still expanding, it's still growing. And it's kind of just keeping up to change and trying to find better ways of surfacing the relevant communications content. That's kind of the key to the job, I think. Right, well yeah, finding that signal amongst the noise is going to get increasingly more difficult than has been kind of a recurring theme here over the last 12 weeks or 15 weeks or how long it's been. Is this kind of light switch moment on digital transformation is no longer when we're going to get to it or we're going to do a POC or let's experiment a little bit here and there. It's ready, set, go, whether you're ready or not, whether that's a kindergarten teacher that's never taught online, a high school teacher running a big business. So nothing but great opportunity. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, it's a very changing world and lots of opportunity comes with that. All right, well, David, thank you for sharing your insight. Obviously regulation, compliance, and I like that data supervision is not just backup and recovery is much, much bigger opportunity and a lot higher value activity. So congrats to you and the team and thanks for the update. All right, thank you, Jeff. Thanks for the time. All right, he's David, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.