 from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re-invent here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Hey Rebecca. We, hello, it's good to be working together again. It's the first time we work together this week. Exactly, exactly. And I'm excited for our next guest. He is an esteemed CUBE alum, Harish Venkat, Vice President, Global Sales Enablement and Marketing at Veritas Technologies. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Good to see you, David. So you've been to, this is not your first rodeo. You've been to many AWS re-invents. Talk, what are you hearing? What are you hearing on the ground from your customers? What trends are you seeing? What most excites you? Yeah, first of all, it's great to be part of re-invent. You know, love the buzz here. It's very electrifying. And we're very happy about our partnership with AWS and we're very happy about the sponsorship for re-invent as well. If there are any skeptics out there who's still thinking cloud is still a fashion statement, they really need to reassess their statement. Because cloud is in full effect for both computer and storage. The other trend that I'm seeing is globalization is in full effect. Ideas are flowing swiftly and freely through the borders. And then when you think about technology, technology is very exciting. The global GDP is, what about? 79 trillion, IT spend globally is about four trillion. But it's interesting to see the four trillion sort of fueling the growth for the 79 trillion. I also think AI, machine learning, deep learning, all of this is going to reshape, not only the software industry, but I think it's going to reshape the way we live our lives. And the last thing I'll say is data hands down is the new currency for enterprise. Right, exactly. We keep hearing this data as the new oil data is the, it is the currency. It's even more valuable. I got to take on this. Okay, let's hear it. So I can take a quarter oil or a gallon oil, I can put it in my house or I can put it in my car. I can't do both with that same resource. Data, it doesn't follow the laws of scarcity. I can use that same data for multiple use cases. So by premises, it's more valuable than oil. What do you think? Diversitility of data is not the same as oil. Oil has very limited purpose and I think it's important and we are all dependent on it. But data is so meaningful. The amount of insights you can get, it provides you competitive edge in the industry. It is unbeatable. So yeah, oil, that's a data model. I've had the pleasure of doing a couple of Veritas solution days. Of course, I did Veritas vision last year. You guys have broken that up into multiple cities this year. I did New York and Chicago just with the last 30 to 45 days. Had some great conversations with customers, some Veritas execs. The conversation was obviously heavy, Kool-Aid injection of Veritas technology, your roadmap, your vision, really, really detailed stuff. Obviously a cloud was a piece of that. The conversations here, I'm sure, are much more cloud oriented. Can you talk about the discussions that you're having, the focus that you have on cloud generally and AWS specifically? Yeah, sure. Look, I mean, data is growing year over year and customers are still trying to figure out how to manage the data. How am I going to work out the economics of this by leveraging cloud? And this is not an easy equation to solve by no means. And this is where Veritas and cloud service providers like AWS are really taking the market leadership role. And then figuring out how do we leverage the entire data landscape, if you will. So before you even think of cloud, the first thing you want to know is where does my data reside and what type of data do I have? So Veritas is able to provide that visibility of data, classification of data. We provide immense amount of deduplication ratio which helps with the economics of this equation. So I think we provide an end to end solution from visibility, classification, deduplication, even helping move application and data to the cloud. And the partnership with AWS is really enabling customers to solve that conundrum that you're talking about. So I want to double click on this. So as a person who understands backup and recovery deeply, as a worker for a company that's their business, and of course you're extending beyond backup and I understand that, but you know, snapshots, replication, that's not backup and recovery. So when I see something like Outpost, Outpost is this on-prem infrastructure appliance that AWS is bringing as part of its hybrid strategy, I want to know how is that going to be protected? And of course they'll talk about the way in which they protect it. But a company like yours has a different philosophy. Recovery is everything, the whole data management approach. How do you guys think about data management and data protection beyond snapshots or beyond just replication? Can you explain that? Yeah, so I think the best way to explain that would be to talk about a customer use case. And while several customers come to mind, I want to talk about CIMC. I think it's a perfect embodiment of all the business use case that we've been discussing so far. CIMC is China International Marine Container and they've been in business since 1980. Employee about 51,000 based out of Shenzhen in China. And they started their digital transformation in 2017. And what they're trying to do is really achieve three things. One, move all of their business application to the cloud, starting with their strategic ERP, in this case it was SAP and SAP HANA. And the other thing is because they've been around since 1980, a lot of their processes are outdated. It's very manual and they had a lot of dependency on tape as part of their backup and recovery. So they want to modernize? So they want to modernize that piece of it. And then the last thing is they wanted a state of the art disaster recovery, which is also required by the local compliance laws in China where it doesn't matter where your business application is running, they needed a copy of that data on-prem. So they evaluated all the different vendors in the market and clearly they chose Veritas as well as AWS to solve that business problem. Why? Why did they choose you guys? Yeah, so obviously Veritas is number one in data protection 15 years in a row. We got more than 50,000 customers, 96% of Fortune 100 trust their data with us. But more importantly, I think it's the partnership with AWS that really helps solve this problem. And let me tell you how they did it. I think that's important. So the first thing they did is they launched an instance of net backup in AWS. Gone are the days where you're completely dependent on purpose-built appliance. People are switching over to virtual appliance and they were able to do that by the partnership with Veritas and AWS. So an instance in AWS leveraging S3 for their media server. Two days after the data, they moved that S3 data over to S3 IA and eventually to Glacier. And obviously Andy Jesse has been talking quite a bit in terms of increased throughput from S3 to Glacier, which is going to help this cause. And then when you think about how customers are dealing with the transition to the cloud, not everyone's ever going to move all of their application to the cloud. It's going to be a journey with time. But what that creates in a customer environment is you got critical data in the cloud, critical data on-prem, and they're looking at one data protection solution for both on-prem and cloud. And this is where Veritas net backup really comes in. Well, I want to ask a little bit about that journey because as you said, they don't have everything in the cloud. So how as Veritas and AWS, this sort of three-way partnership, how are you, how does that work? I mean, are you sort of hand-holding them? Are you, is it a co-creative process? Can you riff on that a little bit? Yeah, sure. So, you know, just like any other aligns, we start off with the technical aligns. We want to make sure that whatever use case that we're going to the market, and all of those use cases are really coming from customers. We understand customer challenges. We work with different companies and cloud service providers, in this case, AWS, to make sure that the solution that we take to the market is completely vetted. There's absolutely no hiccups. We got professional services to help them to mitigate the risk factors and two considerations that most customers are thinking about. One is cost, another one is performance. And thanks to NetBackup, AIR, or AutoImageReplicator, you know, we are able to take a two-third of the network bandwidth out. So you can achieve all of that performance with one-third of the network. We got incredible deduplication ratio. The storage cost as a result is 50 times less than what you would get. And so, back to the two consideration factor of performance and cost, we are able to do that in collaboration with AWS. So I wonder if we could talk about multi-cloud or poly-cloud, as we sometimes call it. So you can infer from listening to AWS that it really, it's better off having a one-cloud strategy, but as we know, oh, you say you talk to customers, there's no one customer cloud strategy. There's customers that are made up of, there's like the government, there's multiple constituencies in the company and shadow IT, and so there's multi-clouds. You don't care whether it's one cloud or multi-cloud. You're there to protect it, but I'm interested in what you're seeing. So what are you seeing and how are you, because we know it's more than just one, not just on-prem and one-cloud. How are you approaching that problem? Talk about customers and what their kind of roadmap looks like and their strategic plans and where you fit. Yeah, so back to your point. I don't think we'll ever see just one cloud. The dependency on just one cloud is not happening. We're seeing multiple clouds. We're seeing hybrid clouds, obviously. Azure Stack is coming up with their own version and so is AWS. And in a customer's environment, you are seeing that. Now, there's also talks about, are we going to see cloud-to-cloud movement, cloud-to-cloud disaster recovery? I am not seeing that at all. I think that economics of cloud-to-cloud moveover or failover is just too expensive. So I think we're still seeing physical to cloud, cloud back to physical, and then one physical to another cloud. I don't see a whole lot of cloud-to-cloud movement. So where Veritas really comes in is our ability to provide that disaster recovery, both from physical to physical, protect your data in the same assured way, on-prem as well as the cloud, allowing you to leverage the cloud as your disaster recovery mechanism. In fact, I was having breakfast with Bell Media this morning and they have two sites in Canada that they're using disaster recovery and they're wanting to leverage cloud and he's super excited about NetBackup 812, cloud catalyst, you know, ability to leverage cloud as a disaster recovery and with our VRP with Veritas resiliency platform to achieve that. So a culmination of all of that hopefully answers your question. Now, absolutely, and I think that's right on. You had referenced earlier in your commentary, Harish, that you see some major changes coming for the software industry. And we were talking to Jerry Chen the other day from Greylock, a really sharp former VMware. Now he's, you know, VC, so he sees a lot of stuff. And he put forth the premise that everything's changing in software development. As a software company, I wonder if you could comment that Amazon is essentially giving all these, this tooling to create new software apps. But as a software player, how do you guys look at that? How are you modernizing, you know, your platform and what do you see as the outcome? Yeah, so, you know, it's interesting you talked about VC in New York, obviously you and I spoke about it and when I talked about two things over there which was really ease of use and simplicity and that's really where the customers are gravitating. We have to make sure that any platform in the software industry has the three-click to value mantra built in. You can't be having the green screens anymore. So Veritas has taken the same approach. We're really looking at ease of use and simplicity and three-clicks to value. So that's a big trend. You know, I talked about AI and machine learning and deep learning. You know, gone are the days where everyone is reacting to something. Now it's all predictive analytics. How do I garner more information? So we're building AI and machine learning into our platform where if there is an outage, we're going to tell you beforehand some of the reasons beforehand and some of the reasons behind it and that way you can address it and not be a subject to a reactive catastrophe. So I think those are two big things that I'm seeing in the software defined storage and the second thing is just the overall ecosystem, right? So it's not just about standalone value but how do you collaborate with the rest of the software providers to build a bigger and better solution? As an example, our relationship with AWS is speaking very highly of that. We're solving bigger and better problems as a result of this. We just announced our alliance with Pure Storage, with their data hub architecture. We're able to do data protection with IOTs which is again another trend in the marketplace where we can share, protect and collaborate with Pure Data as well. Well, let's talk about the edge in terms of data protection for the edge. How does the edge IoT? How does that affect customers' data protection strategies and what's Veritas' angle there? Yeah, so, you know, I mentioned this in Microsoft Ignite because Satya had mentioned this in his keynote saying that the edge computing, there's a lot of proliferation around that and it's not just a compute fact because a lot of data has been generated in that too. So how do you make sense of all of that data? How do you, which ones do you protect? Which ones do you discard? So Veritas has that solution which allows you to sift through all of that data, figure out which one's important, classify that and then help you provide data protection for the edge computing. I'm thinking about yesterday's keynote with Andy Jassy, a dizzying number of announcements of new products and services, new innovations. And this is really de rigueur at AWS re-invent. Is this pace sustainable? I mean, this constant innovation. I mean, is that sustainable? What do you take? You know, it's interesting you asked me that question because it's the same concept of is Moore's law going to be sustainable, right? So far we're seeing that it is. And as a result, you're seeing all these madness around innovation, you know, driverless cars and journey to another planet, you know, AI and ML and full effect and all of this is going to reshape our future. So far, I'm not seeing any signs of slowing down as long as Moore's law is going to keep up with its multiplier effect. I think we'll see better lifestyle and more and more innovation. Just the amount of patterns that we're seeing with new startups, it's just off the charts. So I'm a big proponent of innovation and I think this will continue going on. Well, and I think, if I could comment, I think Moore's law in many ways was one dimensional. I mean, you had the doubling of, you know, performance every 18 months, whatever it is. Now you have this multi-dimensional innovation combination. Moore's law is fine, but you've got data. You've got machine intelligence applied to that data and you've got cloud at scale. So you have this combinatorial effect that has multiplicative effects on innovation so that our argument is the curve is actually bending, you know, to a non-linear and it's mind boggling this pace of innovation. You certainly see that here from Amazon. It seems to be accelerating and it's underscored by the number of announcements that this company's making, others trying to keep pace, them forcing their customers to keep pace. It actually feels like it's speeding up, not decelerating. Without a doubt, and I think it depends on the type of company you're talking about. If you're a startup company, you don't have any of the legacy things that you're talking about. You're spending all of your IT spend purely on innovation. You look at a classy IT spend equation, 85% of it just to keep the lights on and less than 10% on innovation. I think that is mind boggling to me and that's why some of these new startups are constantly challenging Fortune 500 companies whose lifespan used to be 65 years, but now it's 16 years and it's constantly getting down because of this effect that you just talked about. Well, and I think that's a great point. If you're stuck in that 85% technical debt world and you don't allocate enough for innovation, it's going to be problematic and so what we see is customers looking at it as a portfolio. We got run the business, we have grow the business, we have transformed the business, we're going to deliberately allocate capital to each of those and hopefully bet on the right things. Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, look, at the end of it, as a result of all these different phenomenons that we're talking about, it is good for consumers because they're looking at more and more options, better technology and those sort of fierce competition is always good for everyone as consumers as well as enterprise. Right, right. Well, Harish, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was my pleasure. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re-invent coming up in just a little bit.