 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VeeamON 2020. Brought to you by Veeam. Hi everybody, welcome back to VeeamON 2020. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON. This is the first time we've done virtual VeeamON and we've got the Veeam power panel, Bill Largent CEO, Jim Krueger, the CMO, Danny Allen who's the CTO and Senior Vice President of Product Strategy all have been on earlier. Guys, great to see you. Thanks for coming back and digging out of the power panel. Appreciate it. Great. Thank you Dave. Glad to be here. Thank you. Okay, I want to start off, Bill. You get a business update. You know, we've sort of talked a lot about COVID. We can go back to that. But you guys, you know, as a private company, you divulge more information than most private companies and we appreciate that as an independent. Guys, if you would bring up that one slide, you know, you shared this publicly a little earlier. I mean, you guys are at a billion in revenue now, 21% annual recurring revenue growth, 375,000 customers, 97% year on year increase in your universal license bookings. Everything seems to be happening, Bill. What can you tell us? Well, we had a great first quarter also that we kicked off where we had our transaction with Insight Venture Partners, which, you know, right in the middle of that quarter at the end of it, we had that activity that went on. That one might think would have disrupted the business that didn't. We had our plan for Q1, really excited about that. We announced our growth. Saw that here recently. We really pumped into our second quarter. We managed to transition everybody out of offices. We probably add 70% of our workforce, 75% of our workforce need to move. They did that. We had a fantastic April. We're having a very good May. So it's just a great start with a great customer base. So really excited about it. Yeah, you mentioned Insight. We obviously covered that and reported on that. Insight, they like growth. You know, it's not like the old school private equity, just, you know, suck money out. They want growth. They want options down the road, optionality. Maybe it's a rule of 40, rule of, you know, the type of company. So that's got to be exciting for you guys and your employees. Yeah, I think it's pretty exciting. We've been around, a few of us have been around the Insight team since 2002. So a very well-known group of individuals to us. They are focused in the software space. They know the infrastructure space really well. My triple at our lead on the Insight team and his staff has helped us move into Act 2 or as we move into Act 2 and stepping up and moving into our annual recurring revenue focus versus more of a total contract value focus. But nice resource to have for things that we might want to do in the future related acquisitions. So we're really excited about it. I mean, if I'm in VC right now, I'm looking at SaaS. I'm looking at software. I'm looking for companies that have an annual recurring revenue model. I'm looking for adoption of products and those kind of KPIs. You guys fit that bill, maybe a larger size than obviously the early stage startup. But that's kind of the profile of the company that you want to invest in in the 2020s, isn't it? Absolutely. And I'd also say it's the kind of company we want to invest in in the futures. We go forward to bring in new technologies to expand market, progressable marketplace. Back to comments, we had discussions on it. What's it look like in 2030? And it's like, those are the places we're heading from. So, Danny, Pat Gelsinger's famous on theCUBE for saying that, look, if you don't ride the waves, it's going to become driftwood. So what are the mega trends that you guys are riding today and that you're seeing in the future that will keep you ahead of the pack? Well, we clearly talk a lot about cloud data management. So Act 2 for us is not just moving from perpetual licensing to subscription and evolving with the market at a business level. It's also at a technical level. And so we invested heavily, as you know, we demoed earlier today, Veeam Backup Propfist 365 version five. An important point, Act 2 for us is not just product. It's also product delivery. That's version five of a release of a product that came out three years ago. So Veeam Backup Propfist 365, we showed you Veeam Backup for AWS and you saw from Anton as well, supporting Google cloud storage and supporting all of the major cloud providers. So for us to not just ride the wave, but actually be ahead of everyone else, it's to embrace cloud data management and give the customers what they really need. Well, I think you guys are in a unique position too. I mean, you know, if you guys obviously sell on-prem, but if you're an on-prem infrastructure company that's really living on box margins, you know, you could talk the cloud talk, but it's not necessarily a tailwind for you guys. So Danny, how is cloud, explain how cloud is a tailwind for Veeam, you know, versus some of the other legacy players? Well, Veeam has always been, we always highlight simple, flexible, reliable, but one of the parts of flexible of course is being software defined. And we've been software defined from the very beginning. And if you're in a world where you have to go, take a box, plug it into the data center and rack and stack it and do, you know, be there physically, you're not going to survive in this type of environment. So being software defined helped us, not only win the data center, but to help our customers as they go through that evolution from on-prem to maybe just storing backups in the cloud to actually running their workloads in the cloud and protecting them there. So Jim, I want to turn it to you, sort of thinking about the Veeam brand. We talked earlier about how you guys have always punched above your weight, famous parties and so forth, but now you're a billion dollars now entering a new era, not, it's ironic that we're now doing virtual events, so no big giant party this year, but I feel like you guys are what, 14 year old company now and kind of grown up. You three and your colleagues are bringing, you know, lots of adult supervision. How should we think about the Veeam on or Veeam brand going forward? Yeah, I think the Veeam brand is critically important because there's just such a strong affinity and connection with customers. And I think one of the challenges as you get larger and go from one billion to two billion, a lot of companies miss the beat relative to staying connected to their customers. And that's something that we're putting a tremendous amount of focus on. That first slide that you flashed up, you know, 91% customer satisfaction, 75 net promoter score, which is three and a half times industry average. I think our key to success is not only bringing great products to market, but looking at the holistic picture relative to supporting customers and customer satisfaction, which is a key driver of the company, will help us to continue to build on the brands and have, you know, the best brand in the market. Well, I want to come back to you as the marketing whiz and the panel. I mean, you think about digital, we feel like the war is going to be won in digital in the next decade. I take the GNC example and you think about just even the term like customer relationship management, you know, we all use CRM systems, but I'm not sure I want a relationship with GNC, but I do know this, I want a good deal, right? If they're going to make me an offer, I'm going to look at that and these other brands and that's digital. That is having infrastructure and data that's obviously protected to be able to offer that at the right time for the right customer so that they can take advantage of it and have the right panels. I wonder if you could talk about what you see as a marketing pro, just in terms of digital and that customer intimacy. Yeah, yeah, so I think it's multifaceted. I think one of the key things that again, Veeam does that's different than other companies is that we have a direct connection with our customers. So, you know, our head of product management sends out an update every Sunday and goes into, you know, quite a bit of detail around sort of how to deploy this, how to deploy that and really creating a digital journey for the customer from a marketing perspective because yeah, like in any situation, you know, you don't want to talk to a salesperson right off the bat because you know they're going to try to sell you. So, you want to do some investigation. You need the content and information to help you move along that journey until you get to the point where, okay, now it's time. I've kind of narrowed it down and I need to talk to someone to give me some more information. So, I look at, you know, one of the key differentiators of Veeam is that digital prowess, which I think from the founding of the company that Ratner put into place, you know, it's carried us forward and we continue to put a lot of focus on that digital experience, which I think gives us definitely a leg up on the competition. So, Bill, you got to place Betz as the CEO. I'm interested in where you're placing Betz. I mean, you've made some pretty substantial investments in your partner network. You've got some big name partners that are, you're moving a lot of product, you know, through those guys. Obviously, your heritage as a company is steep in technical development. You are a very successful sales organization, but so where are you placing your chips on the table these days and maybe, especially in the context of this pandemic, if anything has changed in your thinking? Yeah, well, the Betz will always be placed on the product side of it. That's a big, so you go products, you go partners and you go our employees and those are the big Betz that we'll make. What are we doing on the partner side? We're continuing a pretty aggressive activity and making sure these partners have a simpler place as I've discussed before to do business with that gets more challenging the larger we get, but yeah, we'll keep that focus on it. The product offering has been, again, always go back to any of our taglines that just work, put us in the lab, we're gonna win, we're gonna win that technical decision process. And then we're putting pretty big bets on our employee base. We're all over the world, 4,300. I think the decisions we have, like a lot of companies have moving forward are gonna be, where are you gonna work from? Are you gonna work from that home office? Are you gonna combine it back into the office? Or are you gonna not? You're just gonna, you know, you're gonna go back to the way things are. I don't think that's going to happen at all. So our bets will always be on bringing good product to marketplace, good technical decisions. So let's talk, Danny, about the product. I mean, you've been saying, you've grown up, you've gone from relatively narrow portfolio to now one that's expanding a lot of different use cases, many, many, you know, several different clouds, on-prem, hybrid, et cetera. How do you ensure, Danny, from a product standpoint, that you don't just get a collection of point product, that you actually have, you know, a platform that even, you know, for instance, your licensing model can very easily, you know, support that notion. How do you ensure that you're more of a platform, if you will, than just a bunch of collection of product? The answer to that would be focus, maniacal focus. So it's interesting that you brought up licensing. So one of the things that we're very focused on is making sure that licensing can move across all these different types of infrastructures. So, you know, Veeam Universal License allows you to do that, move a workload from physical to virtual to cloud, to back to application services, all with a single license. But we also do that at a product level too. One of the interesting things that we've been focused on is something internally, we call it the Veeam integration platform, that enables you to have a central, common control plane across the entire organization. But yet you can deploy in the native environments that make the most sense. So if you think about what we showed you earlier today with Veeam Backup for AWS, you're running on an interface that you deploy out of the AWS marketplace, but that product actually integrates back into Veeam Availability Suite. And so that's true of Veeam Backup for AWS, Veeam Backup for Azure, Veeam Backup for Nutanix. Every time we add a new capability across the platform, whether it's SaaS or virtual or cloud, we make sure that it still has that central connection to the main control plane. And that's why we call this cloud data management because it gives you that data management across all of these different infrastructures. It's clearly not easy to do, but the focus that we put on this results in our customers success ultimately. So I want to ask you guys about culture, Jim, I'll start with you. I mean, a lot of people, obviously, I'm sure you've heard it or asked you, is Veeam still going to have parties? You got your two founders who sort of set the notion of the culture, you know, Ratmir would always be right there in the mix, last one to leave, very hard charging. And that's kind of steep in the Veeam culture, but I'm interested in if there's been any sort of discernible change as you get bigger and bigger, how you're able to maintain that culture. You know, what are some of the things that you want to keep? And maybe some of the things that you want to evolve. Yeah, great question. And I think culture is, I'm a big believer that culture can really differentiate a company in the marketplace. And I think Veeam's culture in the past has really done that effectively. And I think that's, you know, it shows in the success of the company. So I definitely see it as, you know, as my job along with the rest of the executive team to continue to carry that torch forward. One of the things that, you know, I learned coming to Veeam was really winning the hearts and minds of the, you know, the customers that you're serving. And so that can be anything from a party, being totally open to your customers, listening to your customers, giving them different channels to give you feedback. And just being a company that's easy to do business with, I think is critically important. And those are some of the key things from a cultural perspective that we want to carry forward. You mentioned hard charging, absolutely being aggressive in the marketplace, bringing solutions to market that really hit the sweet spot relative to customer need, I think is again, one of the cultural pieces and that maniacal focus on customer satisfaction, which is absolutely key. So, well, I wonder, Bill, if you could comment, and maybe in this contact, you know, part of your job, of course, is TAM expansion. You've traditionally been a European based company, you're moving HQ to the US. Curious as to what effect that will have, both culturally and on TAM as well, you're extremely successful in overseas. Of course, so there's maybe even more penetration within the US. And obviously, you know, throughout the globe, we've certainly talked a lot about cloud, but maybe your thoughts on those points. Yeah, thanks very much. Well, really hopefully you see no impact on culture in a sense of our move from European headquarters to a US headquarters. We definitely felt it important to bring a US headquarters in place. We, you know, now have moved all US shareholders. So it's really critical. Our culture is really built on core values that we developed back in 2012 that really everything else branches off of. It's about product innovate and iterate. It's about everybody's sales. We clearly have that goal for everyone in the company and in the fact that we also want to win. So we'll fight hard to win. Bringing it to the US, you know, a lot of our competitors are based in the US. We think we can put up a, even though we've got great numbers against all of our competitors, we'll even bring the fight much harder now that we're in the United States as a headquarter place, but change nothing else internationally. Global focus. So Danny, every aisle of five or seven years or so, you know, Gartner, IDC, whoever put the other service, is that we just did a survey that X% of the customers are going to rethink their backup strategies in the next 24 months. You see that literally every half a decade. So, you know, what's the driving that now? I mean, certainly cloud is a huge factor. Edge, we're going to be talking to edge for the next many, many years. And then it's really going to start to drive revenue at some point, kind of like the cloud was 10 years ago. But so talk about how you guys sort of stay relevant in that conversation and what customers should be thinking about in terms of those transitions. Well, you know, every customer says, I'm going to reevaluate my backup solution every, you know, five or seven years. But the reality is what's happened is the industry itself goes through transition. So we go from physical to virtual and as they go to virtual, for example, they say, hey, I can't use my legacy provider. So I'm going to choose a new one and they choose Veeam. And then of course we go to cloud and we're going to go to containers and we're going to go to edge. And every time we go through those iterations, there is an opportunity for the next generation of platform to emerge. And so Veeam's focus here is to make sure that we're ahead of those trends to make sure we're thinking ahead of our customers. So right now, for example, you know, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about cloud and containers so that when the customer gets there, when they get to edge, when they get to all of these things, that they have a data management platforms that protects them. And step one is always going to be the same. I always say the step one for every iteration of infrastructure is just ingest the data because you need to protect it. It's only after you protect it and begin to manage it, be integrated into the business, can you begin to unleash it? But we go through this cycle over and over again. And ultimately it's the vendor, it's the partner that is most trusted that wins. And as Jim alluded to, our NPS scores speak for themselves. Our customer base speaks for itself. Our intimacy with the customer speaks for itself. And so as long as we keep that close connection, then we think we're well positioned to lead as we go through the next iteration of infrastructure. Okay, let's talk about the competition. Danny, let's stay with you. You know, you've got some well funded, not even startups anymore, but companies that are kind of going after the base, you've got a huge install base of legacy companies. I mean, I think it's easier for some of those guys to attack sort of a box-based solution. You guys are more software, but I'm sort of interested in your take, Danny, on why Veeam, how you compete with the shiny new toys and that obviously have momentum in the marketplace. Yeah, you know, the shiny new toys, they come out with a solution that is very packaged up and black box. You can't actually customize it very much for the user need. We don't believe that that's going to work in the longterm. And the reason I say that, look the pandemic we're in, if you can't go into the data center to rack and stack a box, if you can't actually work with the infrastructure that's already in place, then you're not positioned to work well in the longterm. And so we have this unfair advantage. We've been around for over a decade. We integrate with over 45 different storage vendors. That's not including the cloud vendors and all of our partners. And so we do have an unfair advantage with the history of all of these integrations. But that flexibility is really what our customers need. They don't want to be locked into the data center. They don't know two, three years from now, the strategy might change. They might say, take the workload, move it to the cloud. And so if your whole focus is on selling your customers something that ties them to their data center, that in itself is a challenge. And being software defined, we're well positioned to make them future proof for any evolutions that happen in the marketplace. So we're in a good place and we'll knock on wood that I think we're going to keep going. Yeah, that's an interesting answer, Danny. And not one that I expected, but it kind of makes sense in the context of a Q and A we had with Andy Jassy in the CUBE a while ago. And I was kind of pushing him on the zillion APIs. And he basically had a similar answer. Obviously cloud services is different, but essentially saying, we don't know where the market's going. So we want to have very granular control at kind of a primitive level. So we have that flexibility. And maybe there's a trade-off sometimes just in terms of what you called out of the box. But it's a very Andy Jassy like answer that strikes me. Well, it's certainly true that the, customers don't know a year from now, they've been using that hardware, but a year from now, two years from now, we run into another market impediment. They might want that money back. They might want flexibility to expand into a different geography or take advantage of the elasticity of the cloud and buying a piece of hardware. Just the very fact that you buy hardware, that essentially ties you into that hardware the next at least three years probably. Being software defined, you can continue to reuse and leverage all the assets that you already have without committing to a lock-in for the next period of time. So from a marketing standpoint, Jim, strategy, brand, customer intimacy, what, why Veeam, what you're in? Well, and Danny already talked a little bit about it in terms of kind of the three cornerstones of how we think our simplicity, flexibility and reliability. And as Bill talked about, when we get into a customer and if they're testing us out, trialing us out, nine times out of 10, we're going to win because they see those three key things and those three key things we hear on a daily basis from our customers of how important that is. We continue to build out on each of those. The challenge is keeping it simple and that's an area that we have to continue to focus on. But I think those are the key differentiators for us going forward. I think the flexibility piece is the integration with all the storage, our ecosystem of partners. We have, I think close to 40 partners that are sponsoring Veeam on here. So that's a key differentiator because we work across basically everybody who are agnostic. And again, just easy to do business with and a true partner. I got one more question for Danny and then I want to ask Bill to close, but guys, feel free to chime in on this one as well. But some of the things we haven't talked about much, Danny, containers, protecting containers, the edge. These are all sort of emerging opportunities. I know you've got some partners on the container side. The edge is early days, but there's whole new models of computing. Potentially a lot of data going to be created unclear how much is going to have to be persisted, but certainly with that much data, the IDC forecasts, a lot of us going to have to be protected. So your thoughts on some of those other emerging trends that we haven't talked about? Well, the key to this segment of the market, our partners trust us. We're thinking about this ahead of when they will actually need it. And you're right, I think we're early days in containers. I think we're early days in edge. We don't know, you know, we have a partner Ducks Unlimited where they're storing data for 60 years, use it from IoT sensors and they keep it for 60 years because they don't know in the future if that data is going to be relevant. And so our focus is to make sure that we're ahead of our customer base in terms of thinking of it and then making sure that our platform supports what they need as they need it. But you'll want to be careful about going too far in advance. Sometimes in the industry you hear about, you know, people who are talking about magic pixie dust and solving crazy problems that our customers don't actually have. We're very pragmatic. We want to make sure that the problems that we're addressing that our platform fundamentally addresses where they are today and then also be in those discussions with them about where they're going to be tomorrow. Well, maybe some of that magic pixie dust will go into the COVID vaccine. That would be good. They'll bring us home. So, you know, the virtual forklifts are breaking down Veeamon 2020. What are the big takeaways from your first Veeamon as CEO? We've been to many, you know, I know, but what are the big takeaways as the virtual trucks are pulling away? Thanks very much for asking that question. We, you know, we did do our first Veeamon in 2014 and I can still remember when Ratmir came to me and said, let's do this. It's like, oh, you're going to get me. This is going to cost a fortune. Why would we ever? And then he's obviously right, continues to be right. So, hey, the story about Veeam is growth. When you're growing, you've got funds available. People interested you to innovate. You mentioned containers, Danny did also, and Kubernetes and, you know, we've got our friends at Casting that are here with us. Now, those are all important relationships and will continue to develop relationships that are like this. But why Veeam, what we've supported, we've got great customer support. We have a growth engine. We're going to continue that. We don't plan on being comfortable with where we are. We'll continue to enter and go after an additional TAM, but we'll also take care of that core base we came from. So really excited about where we've done. We had a lot of great breakout sessions. I keep, you know, Kubernetes was on, there's a lot of great ones. I did like the one though, and it was like falling in love with tape all over again. So when I first saw that, they brought that to my attention. It's like, ah, I went running for my eight track tapes and my John Fogarty and CCR, I found one. So I had to get readjusted to, ah, that's not what they mean. So in any event, I do think, we like to have a lot of fun. You'll see that. We get back to a, see where we go as far as a virtual versus an onsite V-mon in the future. We plan an onsite one. And if so, you'll, and you're there, you'll, you'll, we'll be at the party. Yeah, indeed. And I, but I do think there's going to be some learnings that we carry forward. And you know, I think for a while and maybe even for quite a long time there'll be some kind of hybrid going on. We just seem to live in a hybrid world. Guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and making this a successful power panel. It was really a pleasure having you. Great. Thanks for having us. Thanks. Thank you. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. Keep it right there. Our tenuous coverage of V-mon 2020. We're right back.