 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Veeamon 2019, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to the Fontainebleau Miami, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host for this segment, Justin Warren. Justin, it's great to see you. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Day two of our coverage of Veeamon 2019 here in Miami. Jason Buffington at Jbuff is here. He's the vice president of solution strategy. Congratulations on the promotion and great to see you again, my friend. Thank you very much. And Nathan Hughes, who was the IT director at Flexingate. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. We'd love to get the customer's perspective, so welcome. Great to be here. Okay, so Jason, let me start with you. Former analyst, you've been at Veeam now for long enough to, well, A, get promoted, but also get the Kool-Aid injection. You're wearing the green. What are the big trends that you're seeing in the market that are really driving this next era? What do you guys call it, act two of data protection? So, you know, I preached on this even before I joined Veeam, that every 10 years or so, when the industry shifts the platform of choice, the data protection vendors almost always reset, right? The people that led in network don't lead in Windows. The people that led in Windows didn't lead in Vert. The next wave is we're moving from servers to services, right, we're going from on-prem and to cloud. And so, and every time, the problem is the secret sauce doesn't line up, right? So, you got to reinvent yourself each time. And what we saw in the past generations, what we learned from is you can't be so busy taking care of your install base as you forget to keep innovating on what that next platform is. And so, for us, act two is all about cloud. We're going to take everything we know about reliability, but we're moving it into cloud. The difference is that in virtualization, there was one hero scenario, VMs, right? This time around, it's IaaS, it's SaaS, it's PaaS, it's using cloud storage, it's PaaS and DraaS. There's not a single hero scenario, which means we have a lot more innovation to do. That's round two. And you made that point today. You used the Archimedes quote, it could be a lever in a fulcrum, I'll change the world. You used the analogy of backup is now becoming much more than just backup. It's data protection, it's data management. We're going to get into that and test some of that with Nathan. So, Nathan, tell us about Flexingate. What does the company do and what's your role as IT director and tail? So, Flexingate is a tier one automotive supplier, which means that we provide parts, most of the things that go into a car, besides electronics and glass, to the final automotive makers. So, most of the companies that you're familiar with when you go to buy one. Okay, so you guys are global. I think you got, what, 24,000 associates worldwide, 64 locations. So, what are some of the things that are fundamental drivers of your business that are rippling through to your IT strategy? Well, our business has varied in the sense that we do a lot of different things in-house. So, we do obviously manufacturing, that's a big part of what we do. And then, even that is broken down into sort of different kinds. And then beyond manufacturing, we have advanced product development and engineering, and so we do a lot of light in-house. You support it all. So, you got diverse lines of business, you've got different roles and personas, engineers versus business people, versus finance people, and you got to make them all happy. We got to make them all happy. So, one of the things I love about manufacturing examples is, if you think about it, it's the two extremes of high-tech and low-tech. On the low-tech side of things, you've got this manufacturing floor, and it's just producing real stuff, not the zeros and ones that we live with, real things come off this line. And then you have the engineering and R&D side, where they are absolutely focused on stuff that comes out of some engineer's head into a computer, which is truly unique data. So, one of the things I love about the story is, talk about the downtime challenges you have around the manufacturing floor, because I learned some things when we first met that I think is phenomenal when it comes to manufacturing things that I didn't realize. Sure, so we have a lot of different kind of manufacturing environments. Some of them are more passive and some of them are more active. The most active environments are a form of manufacturing known as sequencing, and it's sort of where you bring final assembly of parts together right before they go to the customer. The way that customers order up parts these days, it's not like they used to back in the 70s and 80s where they would warehouse huge volumes of everything sort of on their site and then just draw it down as they needed it and you just kept the queue full. Now they want everything just in time delivery, so they basically want parts to come to the line right when they're needed and actually in the order they're needed. So, a final car maker, they're not necessarily making 300 of the same thing in a row, they're going to make one of this in blue and one of that in red, and they're all going to be sequenced behind each other one right after the other on the assembly line, and they want the parts from the suppliers to come in the exact right order for that environment. So, the challenge with that from our perspective is that we have trucking windows that are between 30, maybe 60 minutes on the high end, and if anything goes badly, you can put the customer down and now you're talking about stopping production at a Ford, Chrysler, GM, whatever, and that's a lot of money and a lot of other suppliers impacted. So, this is a data problem, isn't it? Yeah, it definitely is, and it's an interesting point because you talk about sequencing, Veeam has their own kind of sequence about how customers use the product and they start with backup, everything starts with backup, and then they move further to the right so that you get ideally to fully automated data protection. So, what are you actually using Veeam for today and where do you see yourself going with Veeam? So, right now we're using Veeam primarily as backup and recovery, that's how we started with it. We came from another product that was great conceptually, but in the real world it had terrible reliability and its performance was very poor as time went on and so when Veeam came on the scene, it was a breath of fresh air because we got to the place where we knew that what we had was dependable, it was reliable, we got to understand how the product worked and to improve the way that we'd implemented it. And so one of the key features in Veeam that really actually excited us, especially in those sequencing environments are these instant recovery options, right? So we were used to the idea of having to write down a Veeam out of snapshot storage and then being put in a position where it might take an hour, two hours, three hours before you could get that thing back online and now, or again to be able to launch that right out of snapshot storage was a blessing in the industry we're in. Yeah, did you see the tech demo yesterday where they were showing off how you could do an instant recovery directly from cloud storage? Yes, yeah. Does that get you excited? Yeah, no, no, that is exciting. Yeah, are you using cloud at the moment or is this something that you're looking to move towards? Cloud is something we're sort of investigating but it's not something that we're actively utilizing right now. Right. So this instance recovery, you guys obviously make a big deal out of that. I was talking to Danny Allen yesterday offline about it. He claims it's unique in the industry that, and I asked him a question I said specifically, if you lose the catalog, can I actually get the data back? And he said, yes. And I was like, that sounds like magic. So I guess my question, maybe both of you, is instant, how instant and how does it actually work? It just works, isn't that? It just works. It's just magic. Can you tagline? I guess we don't have to get into the weeds but when you say, when I hear instant recovery, we're talking instantaneous recovery with very short RTOs. To us what that means is that in practice, we can expect to have a VM from snapshot data back into production in about a five minute window. Five minutes. And that is sufficient for our needs in any environment. Okay, so now we're talking RTO, right? And then what about, so we said 64 sites across the world, 24,000 associates. Is Veeam your enterprise wide data protection strategy or are you kind of rolling it out now? Or where are you at? No, Veeam, I mean we started with a handful of key sites and we were using it specifically to back up SharePoint and a few other platforms. But once we understood what the product was capable of and we were sort of reaching the end of our rope with this former product, yeah we began an active roll out and we've now had Veeam in our facilities for five, six years. So you kind of swept the floor of that previous product. Yes, yep. And how complicated was it for you to move from the legacy product to Veeam? It was a challenge just rethinking the way that we do things. The previous product, one thing that I really had going for it, if this could be considered a positive I guess, is that it was very, very simple to set up. So you could take an entry level IT administrator and they just next, next, next, next, next. And it would kind of do all the things that they needed it to do. But the problem was that in the real world, that was sort of the Achilles heel because it meant that it wasn't very well customized and it meant also that the way that they developed that product, it became performance, it had poor performance. So the reason I ask that question is because so many times customers are stuck and it's like they don't want to move because it's a pain. But the longer they go, the more costly it is down the road. So I'm always looking to IT practitioners like, advice that you would give in terms of others, things that you might do differently if you had a Mulligan, I don't know, maybe you would have started sooner or maybe there was some things that you do differently. What would you would have done? Well, yeah, I mean, if we'd understood the whole context of what was happening with that other product, we would have moved sooner. And the one thing that I will say about Veeam is that it is, it's not click and point. It does involve a little more setup, but the Veeam team is excellent when it comes to support. So there's nothing to fear in that category because they stand behind their product and it's very easy to get qualified technicians to help you out. Is that by design? I don't know if it's by... I mean, well, the being great to work with, yes, that's by design. Yeah, yeah, but I mean... I was talking to Danny yesterday and asked about the interface thing because there is that always tension between making it really, really simple to use but then it doesn't have any knobs to change when you need to. That's why I'm asking. Yeah, it's complex either. Our gap actually comes a little bit later in the process, right? So you asked earlier about in what ways to use Veeam and we think of Veeam as a progression, right? So everybody, if they're using Veeam at all, or using it for Veeam backup and replication and because foundationally, until you can protect your stuff, right? Until you can reliably do that, all the other stuff that you'd like to do around data management is aspirational and unattainable at best, right? So we think the journey comes in that, yeah, it is pretty easy to go next, next, next finish. There's a few tweaks, right? To get backup going. But then when you go beyond that, now there's a whole range of other things you can do, right? I'm sure talked about data labs yesterday, the orchestration engine. Those are not next, next, next finish. But anything that's worthwhile takes a little bit of effort, right? So as we pivot from now that you've solved backup, then you can do those other things and that's where we really start going back into something which is really, really more expertise driven. As well. Well, it's early days too, and as you get more data and more experience, you can begin to automate things. Yeah, absolutely. So Justin was asking, Nathan, sort of where the direction is today, it's really backup. You've seen the sort of stages where you're talking about full automation. Is that something that is on the horizon? Is it sort of near-term, mid-term, long-term? I mean, coming to the conference, our experience with backup or Veeam is primarily backup and recovery operations. But I've seen a lot of things in the last few days that have sort of piqued my interest, particularly when it comes to the cloud integration, that's being actively baked into the product now. And some of the automated API stuff that's being built into the product. Any place where I can get to where we simplify our procedures for recovery, that's a plus. So I'm really excited about the idea of the virtual labs being able to actively test backup on a regular basis without human intervention and have reporting out of that. Those are things that I don't see in any other product that's out there. You know, there's another piece of innovation that we should think through. And so we've talked about the sequencing side, which is where we focus on RTO. How fast can you back in the running again? And when you and I talked earlier, the example that we kind of worked on was, think like a zipper, right? You've got the bumpers coming into a line of cars, and if either side slows down, everything breaks. And at the end, by the way, is the truck, right? Everything has to come at the same time, at the same rate. If there's downtime on either side of the source, you're done. But that's an RTO problem. The engineering side for high tech is an RPO problem, right? You have unique stuff coming out of somebody's brain into a PC, and it will never come out that way again. And so when we look at backup and replication, that should be the next pieces to go on. And then as you mentioned, data labs becomes really interesting in orchestration, so. Yeah. Well, speaking of human brains, and you kind of touched on it, Nathan, that you came here to learn some things and you've learned things from different sessions. So what is it about coming to beam on that is worth the time for IT practitioners like yourself? Yeah, I think it's all those things. I mean, we were talking about beam doing, you know, backup and recovery operations fairly straightforwardly, you know, in terms of getting in, but once you see some of this stuff here at a conference like this, you get a better sense of all the more elaborate aspects of the product. And you wouldn't get that, I think, if you were just sitting in front of it, using it conventionally. This is a good place to really learn the depth and the level that you can go with it. And you're like most of your peers here, is that right, highly virtualized? Yes. Is that right? A lot of Microsoft apps. Yep. And it's a mid-sized, global organization actually kind of bumping up into a big. Sure. Yeah, cool. I asked about the data problem before. It sounds like, you know, the zipper's coming together. That's some funky math that you got to figure out to make sure everything's there. So, talk about the data angle. How important data is to your organization? We know how much data, and data's growing, and data's the new oil, all those bromides. But what about your organization specifically as it relates to a digital strategy? It's a buzzword that we hear a lot, but does it have meaning for you, and what does it mean? Yeah, data is vital in any organization now. I mean, we were referencing earlier how you've got sort of low-tech in manufacturing, or at least people think of it as lower-tech, and then high-tech in R&D, and how those things merge together in a single company. But the reality is that all of that is data-driven, right? Even when you go to the shop floor, all your scheduling, all your automation equipment, all this stuff is talking, and it's all laying down data. You're putting rivets into parts. You're probably taking pictures of that now with imagers when you're in manufacturing, and you do that so that if you get 300 bad ones, you can see exactly when that started and what happened at the machine level, right? So we're just constantly collecting massive volumes of new data, and being able to store that reliably is everything. Well, the reason I'm asking is, you guys have been around for a while, and you're a highly distributed organization, so in the old days, and even still today, you'd build a, you'd get a server, you'd, for an application, you'd harden that application, you'd secure that box in the application, running on it, and you'd lock the data inside, and what my question is is, can the backup approach, the data protection approach, the data management, or whatever we want to call it, can it help solve that data silo problem? Is that part of the strategy, or is it just too early for that? Yeah, I'm, sorry, I'm going to get you to repeat that question in a slightly different way. Am I correct that you've got data in silos from all the years and years and years of building up applications, and can you use something like Veeam to help unify that data model? All of them together, yeah. I think a lot of that has, it's more on the hosting side, right? So it depends on how those systems were rolled out originally and all that kind of thing, but yeah, as we've moved towards Veeam, we've necessarily rebuilt some of those systems in such a way that they are more aggregated, and that Veeam can pick them up in an integrated kind of way. You see that as a common theme, is this a Veeam as sort of one of the levers or the fulcrum to a new data architecture? We're getting there, so here's the trick. So first you got to solve for basic protection, right? But the next thing along the way to really get towards data management is you got to know what you got, right? You got to know what's actually in those zeros and ones. And so some of the things that you've already seen from us are around what we do around GDPR compliance, some of the things we do around sanitization of data for DevOps scenarios and reuse scenarios. All of that opens up a box of, okay, now that the data is curated, now that it's ingested into our system, what else can you do with it? When I talk to C-level execs, what I tell them is data protection, no matter who it comes from, including Veeam, is really expensive if the only thing you do is put that data in a box and wait for bad things to happen, right? Now the good news is bad things are going to happen, so you're going to get ROI, right? But better is don't just leave your data in a box, right? Do other stuff with that data, unlock the value of it, and some of that value comes in, now that I'm more aware of it, let's reduce some of the copies, let's reduce some of the compliance mandates, let's only put data that has sovereignty requirements where it goes, but to do all of that, you got to know what you got. Yeah. All right, go ahead, please. There was some impressive demo yesterday about exactly that, so we have the data, you can use the API to script it and you can do all kinds of it. Basically you're limited by your imagination, so it's going to be fascinating to see what customers do with it once they've put it in place, they've got their data protected, and then they start playing with things, come to a conference like this and learn, ooh, I might just give that a try on my data when I get back home. That's right. All right, we'll give the customer the last word, Nathan. Impressions of VeeamON 2019. Oh, it's been great, and like I say, you know, if you're a company that's been using Veeam even for a while, and you sort of have your entry level setup for backup and recovery, and I think there's a lot of probably companies out there that use Veeam in that kind of way, this is a great place to have a better understanding of all that's available to you in that product, and there's a lot more than just meets the eye. And it's fun, good food, fun people, that, thanks you guys for coming on, I really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE, Dave Vellante, Justin Warren, and Peter Burris is also here. VeeamON 2019, we'll be right back.