 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. I'm Lisa Martin. I've been here all day with Stu Miniman and we've had a jam-packed agenda of guests. We're now coming to the end of our program. We bring back to CUBE alumni. We've got Bharat Bhadranath. Welcome back. I feel like it's deja vu. The VP of product and solutions marketing at NetApp. And Ken Ringdall also an alumni, VP of Global Alliance Architecture from Veeam. Hey guys. Thanks for stopping by towards the end of the day. I'm sure you guys have both had lots of meetings today. Let's talk a little bit about the NetApp Veeam partnership. Just at Veeam on a few months ago, Ken, the reseller relationship that Veeam has with NetApp was announced. Let's talk about the impetus of that. That momentum coming from joint partners, customers, channel partners. Tell me a little bit about that from Veeam's perspective. Yeah, sure. I think, you know, earlier this year we announced that resell relationship which went live in March. And so Veeam on was in May. So we're just at the early stages of that. And, you know, we've seen some good momentum. We've expanded that relationship. And now we're, you know, we're able to jointly sell the whole portfolio. And I'd say it's a combination of two things. And really it's customers and partners, right? So we had a lot of success in the channel. Veeam and NetApp have been partnering together in the channel for, you know, five, seven years, long time now. And just based on the success of our meeting in the channel and then customer demand and partner demand, you know, we decided to expand that relationship and go deeper and really go deeper not only from a go to market perspective but from a product perspective. We're getting even closer together and driving more business and integration and really highlighting the value of the NetApp platform. NetApp's, you know, reaction to when the channel and customers are saying, hey guys, tell us about that, Maron. Yeah, so of course we obviously are here to make sure the customers have a great experience with it. And Veeam brings in something which is unique in the market for the customer. So we've heard it from our customers, our joint customers were saying the better integration is going to help them. Being the stewards of the customer's data, we want to make sure the data is protected. And if Veeam brings that expertise into the market, we integrate better to make it more seamless for the customer, right? Which is what we're doing as we expand this partnership to the next level. Yeah, both Veeam and NetApp, we're pretty early in leaning into this hybrid multi-cloud world. Wondering if you have any good customer examples you might be able to share as to customers that you're kind of moving towards this future that we're talking about in the partnership. Yeah, sure, I mean, you know, at Veeam, our goal is to really provide a hybrid environment. We started in the virtual world, we expanded to physical, we've gone to cloud. We see NetApp with a very strong presence on-prem. They obviously have now strong relationships with the public cloud vendors and have done a really good job of pivoting the strategy and embracing the cloud, which is what we've done at Veeam as well. And so we see our customers, they're really choosing cloud, they're choosing best of breed now, right? So they don't say, hey, I'm a single cloud strategy. I don't do just one cloud here. I'm saying, best of breed, maybe I'm doing my machine learning and AI and Google and I'm doing my cloud native apps and AWS and I'm doing my Microsoft native workloads in Azure. And so really you do need to provide that hybrid solution. That's really what we've looked to focus on is taking the strength of where we came up and providing that best solution in the virtual world, extending that to physical and now going to the cloud. And we see lots and lots of customers that they just want a comprehensive solution. They don't want point solutions, point solution here, point solution there. They want a comprehensive solution. And so it comes down to two companies really, I think that have a very strong strategy for that hybrid world, right? For best of breed solutions that we can work together in all those facets. Yeah, and I think our strategy and Veeam strategy are pretty aligned, right? When you look at the hybrid cloud, when you look at our data fabric message out in the market and what we are doing to stitch together on-prem and cloud, Veeam happens to be a great partner to help protect that data as we work with the customer along this journey. And today we just announced, Veeam just announced the HCI part of it as well, just making sure that we are helping the customer through every aspect of the journey. Yeah, I'm wondering if you might have, since the deal was announced earlier this year, any specific customer examples or had even anonymized whether you could share? Nothing, I'm sure there are lots of customers we've had jointly. I don't have any specific ones at this moment. Yeah, there's a few I can highlight. Certainly we large, probably one of the top 10 international banks over in Amia, that's a really, really large deal that we're working to get closed. It's multi-million dollars to both of us. Very, very large deal. I think we're seeing success. Really, you know, Veeam's strength has always been sort of in the commercial world and we're moving up into the enterprise. That's a big impetus for the partnership, quite honestly, because NetApp has a lot of strength, especially with the on-tap system in enterprise. So I think we're really sort of dovetailing each other. Veeam is bringing NetApp into more of our commercial deals. NetApp is bringing us into more enterprise deals. But really it's across the board, large banks, you know, even healthcare and other deals as well. I don't know if there's any specific names I can call out, but I can tell you it really stretches, you know, the entire sort of, you know, stretches, verticals, stretches, you know, all different types, different sizes, different types of customers. We just had Dave hits on a little bit of what it goes to and I did today and he kind of talked about really in the last five years really a big revolution at NetApp that has been around 26 years. Can you mention that NetApp and Veeam have been partners for about five to seven years? I'm curious what Veeam's perspective is of NetApp's digital and IT and cultural transformation to now go out boldly and say we're the data authority and really kind of wrap their strategy around cloud. Yeah, sure. You know, I would say, you know, we are in a data driven world, right? Data is the currency in the cloud world, right? So, you know, we look at ourselves as sort of being the stewards of data availability. You know, NetApp has the strength in that primary data management, right? So there's really a natural dovetail between the two of us and a natural handoff where we can provide the entire end-to-end, you know, from primary to DR to secondary and really about sort of, you know, managing the place of that data, the value of that data and the availability of that data. It's incredibly important. I think together we really, as I said, we cover that end-to-end. Barat, one of the messages we've been hearing today is talking about, there's a lot of complexity out there in NetApp's goal, like many companies in this space try to help simplify it. What is the partnership, the integration, the reselling of the solution? How does that help simplify solutions for different companies? Absolutely. So, you know, as you heard earlier, it was all about providing a comprehensive stack end-to-end but what makes it simple is when it is comprehensive and integrated, right? So when the two companies' engineering teams work together to drive that integration, that results in simplicity, which are customers and our partners. For our partners, it's assurance that we're both working together so it makes the solution more reliable, works well as advertised, if you will, in the customer premises for customers. It's the simplicity in the form of integration which comes in where the two companies' engineering teams are driving towards that. Last question, Ken, for you, in terms of kind of following onto what Barat was saying, the customers now not only need that simplicity they expected. I'm curious, where is that in the selling motion? Where is that conversation? Is it with some of the folks that are down in the technical weeds who are looking to drastically improve recovery time and recovery point objectives? Or are you also having conversations at the business level, of the business going? Whether maybe it's a legacy, not cloud native, that needs to go, well, we have so much data, which is an advantage, how do we use that? Are you seeing those business leaders, business unit leaders and C-levels involved in this conversation with Veeam and NetApp? Yeah, yeah, no question. I think, traditionally, Veeam has really been compelled by the backup administrator, by the IT director, because the product is so easy to try. You can download it, you can try it for free. Our whole, it just works, has been our tagline because it is just so simple to get started with Veeam. We make it simple to get up and running and to manage your backups and also give some of that power back to your customers. In fact, it's just a quick sidebar. Had dinner last night with a long time Veeam customer, a long time NetApp customer, and they said, hey look, NetApp is my storage vendor of choice, Veeam is my backup data protection vendor of choice, and really they come together well, and NetApp does such a great job from primary to leveraging the snapshot replication, but he told me about this great story, he said, hey look, we had somebody at midnight needed to recover a file, we have self-restore capabilities that they were able to give that power to their end users to go recover a file to their server instead of calling up and opening a ticket and having that, instead of what took maybe eight hours to go through a whole process to get a storage admin and then a backup admin, took eight minutes, right? And I think it talks to the value of the NetApp platform and providing that availability and the simplicity of the Veeam system to be able to give that power and really do it and take what might be complex and make it very simple, but it is, so back to your original question, Lisa, about we have traditionally really sort of been very, very valuable to that backup administrator, IT admin, as we move further into the enterprise, of course, that goes up into VP of IT all the way up to the CIO. I think our relationship is really bringing us both ways. We can come bottom up, NetApp can come top down and we're hitting both sides of, and really that whole stack of influencer to buyer, to decision maker in that whole stack. For our last question for you, we have got a few seconds left. I'm curious, when a customer says Veeam is our backup and recovery, NetApp is our storage, how does NetApp in this day as, hey, cloud is the heart of our strategy, how do you react to NetApp as our storage provider? So, I don't see those as exclusive things, right? We manage their data on-prem and we, given their abilities in the hybrid cloud, if a customer considers us as an on-prem storage company, that is great, we're working with them to change that impression, to get them on, with them on their journey to the cloud. So, we don't want to force them to get into the cloud, but as they move to the cloud, we want to be there to make sure we can manage their data in the cloud. And Veeam, given their hybrid capabilities and where they have been and what they do with the customer and ability to manage multi-cloud, maps really well to what we offer the customers. Of course, we'd like our customers to change their perception, to not just view NetApp as an on-prem storage, as a cloud vendor as well, but it takes time for them to change the perception and we're working very hard on that. As you saw today in the keynote as well, you're starting to see customers, it has to be driven by the customer need, right? Like, sometimes they realize certain things are done better in the cloud which drives them to the cloud. We want to be there to provide that service for them as they move, so. Well, Bharat and Ken, thanks so much for stopping by at the end of the day here. We appreciate your time and we look forward to in 2019, maybe hearing more from that big EMEA bank and some of the great successes they're achieving with this partnership. Thank you for having us. Absolutely, thank you. Our pleasure. We want to thank you for watching. This wraps up theCUBE's full day. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We have a great day, Stu, talking with NetApp executives, customers, partners and we want to thank you for watching. Hope you've learned a lot and of course, watch the replays at thecube.net. For Stu, I'm Lisa. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.