 Live from Chicago, Illinois. It's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to the windy city, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day two coverage of VeeamON 2018. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, my co-host. Peter McKay is here, he's the co-CEO of Veeam. Peter, great to see you again. Great to be here, David. We're making some time. Stu? Loving the show, we're watching the evolution of Veeam. Go from scrappy fighter, now moving up the stack. We know from our research that data protection and orchestration are moving up the list on CXO priorities. You were brought in to really up level, top level, the company's messaging, the branding, the talent. How you feeling? It's feeling good. I think this is a major step, right? A lot of work kind of going into just really understanding the market. For me, at least coming out of a VMware and coming into kind of an availability market. So I became a student of the space, talking to a lot of customers, talking to a lot of partners, really pulling together what that business message is versus a feature function message. What we were doing to actually help drive the business, especially now when more and more data is being accumulated, more and more companies are digitizing their organization. And for us, we're kind of the ones that keep that up and running. And I think it was important for us to make sure that message gets out to, when we deliver it in the market, that people think of us as that kind of strategic solution for their mission critical to always on, which we call hyper availability for the enterprise. Any app, any data, any time. Very partner focused event here. You can't walk anywhere without bumping into a partner. When you were at VMware for a number of years, VMware was famous for every dollar spent on a VMware license. Some number of $15, $17 was spent on the ecosystem. So that was sort of probably ingrained in the ethos of your career. And when coming here, you recognize it was a lot of great discussions, a lot of good technology integration with companies like Cisco and HP and NetApp and others. But there wasn't this follow on kind of go to market. Like how can we make it easier for our customers? How can we make it easier for our customers to buy a kind of combined solution versus a technology? And so to do that well, we recognized early that we had to up level the relationships we're having with Pure and Nutanix and all these other companies that were really getting in front of these enterprise and mid-market companies, but with multiple tracks. And we felt that if we can do more together with them that we would have, the customers would have a better experience. And so we started going down that path. We started to do things more together, merging that value proposition together with these companies and then merging our sales efforts together. It brought about a tremendous impact on just the customer success, the experience in leveraging our technology. And this is just kind of the start of it because I think there's a lot more to come that on the partner side that I think was going to be, that gets us to that $2 billion, $3 billion mark. Yes, I want to touch on that. So that combined with the expansion of your product portfolio, the move into cloud and multi-cloud and orchestration expands your TAM significantly. Talk about some of the numbers. Over $800 million in bookings. 827, yes. 30 plus percent growth. 36. 36 percent growth. But who's got it? No, that's good. So now, and of course, Currency is a Swiss-based company. Let me get this right. Currency now is a somewhat of a headwind for you guys, right? So you're blowing through that? Or no, do you guys hedge? Or how do you handle it? No, we're U.S. dollars. Everything's U.S. dollars. So that's a tailwind then for you? That is, it is. I mean, look it, we've always operated as a long-term software company, long-term sustainable. We don't have the quarterly, we're not public, right? So we don't have to hit targets and earnings along. And you know, currency's going to go up and down at various times. Some days, sometimes you're going to have the benefits, the tailwinds and headwinds. So for us, we just continue to make the right decisions based off of where we see what's the best interest of our customers, what's the best interest of our partners, and then let the dust settle. But did you pay attention to the months and the quarters in terms of? Well, we do, yes. Well, in large part, because our ecosystem does, right? When you're selling with Cisco, you need to know when their quarter ends and when their year ends, right? Or in Nutanix, because they're all motivated by those quarters. And I've always been, for the most part, public companies that had that quarter. So we still operate that way, but the way we make decisions is based on what's the long-term best interest of our customers. And there's not that external 90-day shot clocks, too, as we talked about. No, no. Yeah, so Peter, one of the things that's really interesting to look at at your company, you're at 133 customers a day, that's 10,000 a quarter. Very different when you talk about the enterprise. It's not just how many customers, but there's at least traditionally been more, it's more belly to belly. You have to be deeper engaged. You've got those partners. Bring us inside a little bit. Some of the challenges there are about going from kind of the scale and simplicity of the built beam to deeper into these enterprises. That's a really good question. And there's kind of two elements of that. The first one is first do no harm. Your SMB business is cranking double digits. Your mid-market is cranking double digits and invest heavily in this massive opportunity we have in front of us in the enterprise. But make no mistake, that's a major effort that we've embarked on two and a half, three years ago. Our technology, as you mentioned, is broadening. Our messaging is up-level. Our focused marketing efforts are very much targeted to very specific customers. Our support is different. I mean, everything we do, the ecosystem, is different to go into that enterprise space. So it's a massive investment that we're doing around the globe to get much closer to those companies. But we're not losing kind of what made us great, which get in the door. Just get in the door to any of these companies. You're going in and you're going to Coca-Cola. Just get in the door and then do a really good job and expand from there, which is really what we've been doing since the beginning. Just on that, I heard AIX support is coming. All the enterprises, well, but I have this other application that you're not certified. Go down the SAP HANA route and Oracle and everything else. You can just get bogged down in so much red tape. And that's changing. I mean, it used to be that we're not used to be. We are the number one VMware backup. We're the number one virtual backup and we're the best in the world at virtual. But in Ratmir, we'd always say, we're just going to do virtual virtual. Well, in the enterprise, that can't be, right? You need to be obviously virtual cloud because every conversation you're having is multi-cloud, right? And you need physical because there's 10, 15, 20% of all these enterprise that are going to stay physical. And so for us, we needed to do that. Now we can do virtual, physical and cloud for our enterprise customer, for everybody, but we see it more in the enterprise. When Veeam first started, it saw an opportunity to help with the virtualization problem. Backup had to change with virtualization. Veeam, right place, right time, right product and right attitude, boom. It was more straightforward than what's going on now. What's happening now, and I wonder if you can comment from our perspective is there's a dichotomy between what the businesses expect in terms of the levels of data protection, the levels of orchestration and automation that exists and what IT can deliver. And it seems like Veeam is trying to fill that gap which says a couple of things. It's jump ball to use the basketball analogy which we'll be talking about later. And the second thing is there's a lot of potential for customer churn, which is good news for you guys. Your thoughts? First off, there's a lot of churn going on. I mean, anybody that bought a solution, you know, two, three, four, five, 10 years down the road, you know, the game has changed, right? The world, we kind of track three things. One, it's all about the data, right? And the data today is becoming much more critical for businesses, right? Our business, every business, it's all making better decisions with more critical data and at the right time. The second is it's massive data growth. It's exponential, it's, what did they say? Two x every, 10 x every five years. And so we're seeing this massive increase in growth of data that if you use the same methods you used in the past, it's really expensive and really difficult to be able to manage that and keep it running and available. And the last is sprawl, it's everywhere. I mean, data is on devices and, you know, from thermostats to automobiles to everywhere. And so you used to have it sitting in an easy data center and now the data is everywhere. And so you have the criticality of data, you have a massive growth in data and you have a massive sprawl of data. And what we believe is we want to be that hyper-availability solution to make that we're protecting that data, we're helping you manage that data, we're helping you orchestrate that data and be able to protect it for companies who need it in real time because it's becoming so critical today. The other change that we would observe is you're really kind of going from what was a product company to a platform company. You showed that platform slide. Talk about the importance of platform in the enterprise to sustain growth. Yeah, and I think there's, in the enterprise obviously it's more complicated. And you know, because of the sprawl, because of all the things I mentioned, you know, it needs a bigger, broader solution that can be able to handle backup, backup and recovery, replication, failover. You need to be able to have a single pane of glass, whether it's in the cloud or on-premise. You need to be able to manage and orchestrate workloads from on-premise. I, you know, I want to put it in Azure or I want to put it in a service provider. And so the ability to be able to automate and orchestrate that movement requires a platform to be able to do that partially with us, but also the ecosystem, right? I mean, do it with the hardware providers, with people who have a component for security to make sure that if we detect ransomware to kick off a backup, you know, a clean backup. And so this orchestration and automation is going to be a critical part of that platform. Yeah, Peter, I wonder if we can step away from the technology for a second. Talk a little bit about culture. You know, we've been noting, you come on board, you know, Veeam's always had a good team, but been bringing on some key pieces, especially help focus on the enterprise. It's a challenge for a lot of companies to get into that space. Why is Veeam positioned well? Talk to us about your methodology on how you bring these type of people in. Yeah, you know, we've, we have. We've grown, you know, a thousand people over the last 12 months, and that's on top of what we did the year before. And we're probably going to add another, you know, seven, eight, a thousand people this year. And the key is to kind of do two things. One, we're investing heavily in our team today, right? Because we're growing at 36% year over year. You're doubling almost every three years, less than three years. So you need to have that investment in the existing team, married with skill sets from outside, and doing in the best talent I can get to blend with that culture. So marry the culture of old with a culture of new. And that's, you know, we look for a hungry, humble, and smart. You know, people who fit that description, that's what we look for, that's what we check for. When we're recruiting top talent, whether executive, or, you know, a frontline sales rep, or customer support. So, we've only got a couple of minutes. Yep. Another question. If you were Robert Kraft, would you have traded Tom Brady? Oh, you saved that question. Ha! What do you think? Ha! We're going to chime in. If I was Robert Kraft, no. I would not have traded Tom Brady. Tom Brady has earned the right to plan his future. With the Patriots. I think this needs to be a happy ending for Tom Brady, and I think it would be a happy ending for Robert Kraft. I would have proactively figured out how to handle Garoppolo far better than they did. I thought they handled that poorly, but no, I would not have traded Tom Brady. So you mean you would have wanted to get more for Garoppolo? Oh, definitely. Yeah, obviously. If you were going to get rid of them, you should have done it sooner, or you should have done it, you should have figured out how you'd be able to do it later. And got more value. Okay, so you're on the side that basically, Brady should be allowed to cash his shit for all these years of taking, you know, haircuts. Okay, that's great. You're taking haircuts. Most importantly, performance. Yeah, and winning, right? There's nobody who's great. Yeah, and Dave, Brady's performance, it's not like he's fallen off a cliff or he's some old man. He was MVP. Come on, Dave, didn't you hear the note today? The reason Tom Brady's staying in there is he hasn't gotten a thousand yards of brushing yet. I think he's 36 yards off, so, you know. I could take another three more years. He's way more mobile now than he was 10 years ago. Yeah, so you guys are both optimists for the coming year? Oh yeah. Well, you know. As long as we don't play the NFC East in the Super Bowl, we're okay. Yeah, Tom Coffin, yeah. Okay, how about the Celts? Up to Zip, you know, LeBron really, he showed up in the first quarter last night. I know you couldn't watch the game because you were hosting a bunch of different events, but do you think LeBron's going to come back at home, little home cooking? You know, can the Celts make it to the finals? I think Brad Stevens has exposed the Cleveland Cavaliers for the team that they are, which is LeBron and a bunch of other guys. And so I think, you know, yes, LeBron's going to have, I mean, he had 45 points. So it's like, you know, we're waiting for him to break out. He had 45 points and they still lost. So I'm not so sure that you're going to see that massive resurgence. I think they'll get one game in Cleveland. I think the Celts will have one game, they'll win one game in Cleveland. I mean, I think you're right. I think Brad Stevens has exposed the supporting cast. Now, unfortunately, if the Celtics make it that far, the Warriors aren't going to be exposed because their supporting cast is pretty strong, but it'd be great to get there to compete. With your two top players are out. And what do you think? Gordon Hayward comes off the bench next year? Is he a sixth man? I mean, wow. Yeah, who do you trade to get even, and what would you trade for to make the team better? I mean, it's already in great shape. It's good to be a Boston sportsman. It's great to be a Boston sportsman. Peter, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Always a pleasure seeing you. It's a pleasure. Good to see you. All right, keep it right there, but we'll be back with our next guest, Veeamon 2018 from Chicago. You're watching theCUBE.