 We're back at Veeamon 2022 at the Aria in Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, David Nicholson. Danny Allen is here. He's the Chief Technical Officer at Veeam and he's joined by Opie Bacare, who's the Chief Technical Officer at HPC. Dave, one of the few companies that's older than my home. Unbelievable. Opie. That's right. Danny, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. It's true, by the way. 1670, we're going to learn more about HPC. Sure. I wonder, Danny, if you could set it up. The kind of topic of this discussion here is hybrid cloud. We've got a pretty interesting use case. Give us the high level. What should we be focused on here? So, lots of customers today focused on digital transformation and moving into the cloud. Everyone talks about that. I can take my workload and move into the cloud. One of the interesting things that we saw originally was, you know, I'll just lift it and move it over there. That's not necessarily the best model for the cloud. So you see people doing that. What I actually think is really interesting, and I know Opie's been very focused on, is actually transforming the application so that it works most effectively in the cloud model. So, Opie, maybe give us the background on HPC for folks who aren't familiar with the company and your role there. Sure. So HPC is 350-somewhat years old. It's the oldest corporation that's continually existed in North America. I have the privilege to serve as the chief technology officer there. And, you know, HPC is a company that has innovation kind of baked into its core DNA. We have to keep reinventing ourselves. Otherwise, we get stagnant and we get left behind. Clearly, we're still around to where we're supposed to be. So far, so good. We must be doing so good. Right. So far, so good. But kind of pivoting to what you were saying earlier, you know, our journey to the cloud was multifaceted. Some of it was to improve the pace of innovation. Some of it was to improve on quality. So, you know, we have typical data center technologies. And, you know, we had some of the typical issues you would have, right? So some older equipment, you know, failures, et cetera, et cetera. When you're in the cloud, a lot of that is just managed for you. Again, it's about what I talked about this morning. It's about moving your team up the value chain. So it's creating value, right? So you stop with the managing of core basic infrastructure and you start consuming them as services. The interesting thing is, as you mentioned, for the vast majority of people, your first foray into the cloud is pick up all those virtual machines that you had on-prem and put them in the cloud. And that's great. Immediately, you get a better, possibly a better or more available under-cloud platform there. But you're just barely scratching the surface. You don't really get into cloud until you start consuming cloud-native services. Until you go serverless, you go stateless with containers in Kubernetes. You can use platforms like Kafka for streaming your data, as opposed to constructing cumbersome, easy-to-break data pipelines and all that. So it's a very interesting pivot. And I think a lot of people sometimes struggle with going past that first step. They have the VMs. It's familiar. It's what they're used to. But for us, we had a digital transformation in the works. We were replatforming from a legacy platform. Some of you may know Blue Martini. But we were moving to a more modern, more flexible platform that was really suited to accelerate our omni-channel strategy. Thank goodness we did, because the pandemic came around and proved it exactly correct. Good timing. Yeah. So that's really what happened for us. That actually forced us forward in the cloud journey. So Alan Nance, who was at the time, he was like a CIO slash CTO at Phillips. And he said to me, if you just lift and shift in the cloud, this is early days of cloud. You're just not going to change your operational model. Big company. If you want to save billions, you got to change that operational model. But listening to what Opie just said, Danny, what does that mean from your perspective? That mean cloud native? And what does that do for your business? Well, cloud native, the benefit of the cloud, of course, makes it completely portable. And it's elastic. You can scale almost infinitely, and you don't have to build it. However, the hard part is not the technology. I always say the hard part is the process. You actually have to rewrite your applications to take advantage of all the things in the cloud. And that is not an easy thing. So what we're seeing a lot in the industry across our customer base is when they have a greenfield opportunity, a new project, they always start in the cloud. We're not seeing a lot of, hey, I'm going to completely modernize my applications because that's expensive. It's already built. And so customers will sometimes pick that up and move it to the cloud, and sometimes they'll actually move it back on premises because the cost model isn't there. But I do think in the long term, if you're looking at four or five years, all the new applications will be designed for a cloud native experience. What that means is, written in containers with container orchestration, seamlessly orchestrating the entire portfolio and data lifecycle. So I'll be spot on. Translate that into what actually happened at HBC. So as Danny said, we're not just going to move everything into the cloud. We've got a hybrid setup, maybe some of the new stuff. What did you do? Your back end systems, your database kind of protected that. How did you go about this omnichannel journey? So for us, by the way, that was completely spot on. It's not a fallacy to really examine some costs because we all have to live in the real world, right? We understand that there are budgets and there are limits to what we can accomplish within a fiscal year. So you look at an application that's already built, that's already fulfilling the business purpose for which was built. What's the value in immediately going and taking that all apart and containerizing it? If there is a small or easy lift, sure, it might be worth it, but if it's a major system that you have to rewrite, the ROI is just not there, right? So a lift and shift model in that scenario kind of makes sense. But what you said earlier is exactly what we did. When we had an opportunity, again, with the omnichannel strategy, we were looking to strengthen our digital arm. And so we were moving from our legacy platform to this new one. And that required us to do a bunch of work. So we had to modernize some of our services. We had to change some of our data process, how we stream data into and out of the e-commerce platform. And all of that actually provided sort of almost a groundswell of support for all of this transformative work, apologies, for all this transformative work we had to do. So it totally made sense in that case. We actually were able to kill two birds with one stone, really transform and go cloud-native at the same time as deprecating a bunch of legacy technologies that, to be perfectly frank, didn't really have much of a place in the cloud. So many questions, go. Yeah, yeah, so it's interesting because when you talk about that sort of journey to cloud that you're on, sometimes people will ask the question, well, how long before everything is in the cloud? And often the answer is, if you look at what's called the vanishing point where the two sides of the highway come together off in the distance, it's like that's when it'll happen. But as you get closer to that point, it gets further away. So if you had to categorize it in terms of a percentage of where you are now and then an aspiration over time, how would you categorize that? So I have the pleasure of telling you that we are probably at about, I'd say 90% in the cloud. Oh, wow, okay. We were very aggressive about it. And then frankly, I think, first of all, I have the privilege to lead an amazing team. And they did everything possible to make this real. We had a goal and it was focusing on our customers, being customer obsessed really. And for us, data centers just didn't make sense in that world. So all we did was work towards how do we deprecate these legacy technologies? How do we consolidate? And then move them to the cloud as quickly as possible. So for us, 90% and we're going even further. Is that last 10% worth it to go for that? I mean, what's the, what's the, you know, you get to that marginal return? I really think the next 5% will be worth it. The last five, we're not gonna pursue and here's why. So think about, you know, we talked about really low latency things that need to be physically in the building. So we have a bunch of, we have a whole lot of fulfillment and distribution centers, right? In some cases, we have automation equipment that really requires low latency connectivity to physical equipment. Moving that to the cloud is not really a high value proposition. If you think about, you know, large corporate presences, there are some pieces of technology that you could move to the cloud, but again, latency in the customer, the user's experience might be compromised as a result. If there's no value really to moving that into the cloud, why would you do it? And wouldn't you have to freeze the application in order to move it into the cloud or not for these 10% or 5% or not necessarily? Not necessarily. Okay. In many cases, we have applications that are built in a distributed fashion so that you can take, you know, some percentage of it, move it to the cloud, validate it over there, and then move the rest of it. You could build some kind of abstraction layer. Exactly. So the million dollar question is, what does Veeam have to do with all this? Well, so Veeam has been, for quite some time now, our data protection engine. You know, when I talk about moving people up to value stack, I don't take that lightly. For me, you know, having engineers do things like, and please forgive me for a second here, but doing things like backups, to me, it's a hard requirement, but it's not really high value for me. So if I can get a platform that can use policies, can use tags, can operate natively in the cloud, and once you have it running, you can set it and forget it, other than your periodic, you know, business continuity DR tests, you know, that's the dream scenario, and we've achieved that largely. We still have some legacy systems that are not on Veeam yet, but that's something that's going to change over the next, let's call it 18 or so months. So, did you evolve as Veeam evolved? How long have you been in this role? Apologize to sure. I've been with HPC for three years now. Okay, so no, right? Veeam goes, I remember I first saw Veeam at a V-Mug. I'm like, Veeam, where? It was just brilliant, right? Of course, we all say that now, but you saw Veeam's ascendancy through virtualization, and then it took a while, but then all of a sudden bare metal, the first in SaaS, great cloud strategy, now the first in, I don't know if I can say that, scratch that, we'll talk to you about that tomorrow. So more to come here at Veeam on. So, from what you know about HPC, did you kind of follow that Veeam strategy? They were just sort of there as you migrated to the cloud, SaaS, Microsoft 365, et cetera? Yeah, so we actually started using Veeam in a very limited capacity quite some time ago, mostly to protect on-prem virtualized workloads. And that was really the limit. And my team had even used Veeam in my previous role when I worked for a large healthcare provider, a healthcare company in the States. So I was pretty familiar with Veeam as a platform. I was very familiar with the journey. I think that more than many other, most of their competition, they've made the transition into the cloud first world far more successfully. If you think about the policy engine, the automatic tiering by age, as well as some of the cloud tagging and the full integration with the native capabilities in AWS and in Azure, it's been a dream scenario for us. You and I have talked about this, Danny. And a lot of your competitors, especially early on in the cloud, they wrap their stack into container Kubernetes and it's shoved it in the cloud, which is really hosted on-prem app. You guys didn't do that. I mean, I've pushed you on this a number of times. What did you do? Every time there's a modern infrastructure, we say, how can we actually apply data protection, modern data protection to that infrastructure specifically? We don't try and take what already exists. And Veeam started at this. If you think back when we first started, everyone was doing agents. And if you took an agent and put it on a hypervisor and you had 100 of them running at the same time, you would kill your production system. So we said, we'll take a snapshot at the hypervisor level. And then when storage arrays came out with snapshots, let's take advantage of that. When we went to the cloud, we said, let's take advantage of the APIs rather than trying to put an agent in there. And so every time we encounter a new infrastructure, we say, how do we take advantage of what that infrastructure is bringing? We're gonna dig into more of this tomorrow, but I don't wanna steal from the HPC story. Let me ask you about, we talk a lot about digital transformation and modernization. And of course, COVID was like a forced march to digital. We all sort of realized this. What do you see, OPI, that's now permanent? Whether it's security, data protection, of how you're thinking about modernization, what are those practices that are now best practices that will become permanent? Well, the obvious one that kind of hits us all in the face is remote work. For the past, let's call it two-ish years, my team has been almost completely remote. And as a result, we've been able to show that for us, it worked just fine. There were some teething pains, I think we liked to do. It was like, hey, wasn't it? Hey, the world didn't end. It was, yeah, it became a non-factor very quickly. Why? Because for most technology organizations, we're already used to working outside of normal hours. So it wasn't a stretch, really, to extend logic to just working remotely permanently. That said, one of the things that for us, and I'm gonna deviate away from the technology side for a second, one of the things is really critical for us is we're trying to make sure that we respect people's work-life balance. As we have colleagues who work from home today, it's very easy to roll out of bed in the morning, put your Zoom suit on, and why are you wearing your shorts and all that, and just work the whole day. And then around like five to seven p.m. or whatever you sign off, and you just realized, I just spent way more time working than I probably would have if I were going to the office. That's, you know, it's a great project. With no breaks. With no breaks, right? And there's no but no water cooler moment or whatever else, right? But, you know, we're trying to come up with various ways to respect people's work-life balance. Interestingly enough, we actually have a law that is going to affect in, I think, early June in Ontario where there will be a right to disconnect. So outside of normal working hours, you will be required to disconnect from your employees unless it is an operational issue or some other pertinent emergency that requires them to engage. So I think that's gonna become the new norm as we go forward. Coming back to technology, I think just looking at the last two years, I don't know if you've noticed the same thing, but the pace of innovation seems to have picked up a tick. And I think that is going to become the new normal. You're gonna see a lot of people challenging status quo. A lot of sacred cows are gonna get put out to pasture. And I think that's a good thing for our industry. It's gonna quicken the pace of innovation and it's also gonna make people more thoughtful about where they place their bets, I think. The other thing, and this is the last one, dollars and cents. If you think about the pandemic when it first started, we all had to take a breath because instantly a whole lot of industries just paused, right? And when that happened, you had no revenue coming in, you had, it was, whoa, what are we doing here? And I think that also sharpened our focus when it came to making some decisions. We all had to deal with, in some cases, furloughs, in some cases, reductions. Thankfully, we're all back to normal now, but where you place your bets financially is gonna drive a lot of technology decision investing, right? So I think that's gonna be a larger part of our landscape going forward. So that last point about innovation, Danny, is gotta be music to your ears because the premise you're saying behind Veeam is that you look at the next trend and then modernize, you put meaning behind modern data protection. It's not just a tag line. You gave a couple of good examples, but talk a little bit more about what OPI just said and what that means to you guys. Well, at a technology level, I always talk about three things being part of modern data protection. One is around the security. Everyone working from home, there's intellectual property going into the home on the endpoint in Microsoft Teams in all the collaboration tools. That needs to be protected. And actually, we're seeing because of the rise in ransomware, cyber insurance is actually requiring data protection for that. So a big part of modern data protection is all about the security of the environment. The second is cloud acceleration. We want customers to move to the cloud. I love sitting here quietly listening to him tell the story of what they're doing because it's perfect. That is the story that we want from our customers moving to the cloud. And we don't want to stop that in any way. In fact, all of our licensing models that go to market supports that cloud acceleration. And the last thing is, of course, data protection. If they're going to do that, you own that data. You need to protect it on any cloud and on every cloud. And so our focus around modern data protection is those three things. Ransomware protection, cloud acceleration, and modern data protection. In an environment that is not bespoke, I presume. We're going to talk about super cloud tomorrow. But this idea that instead of going to, I don't know if you're running on Google, AWS, Azure, whatever, but instead of going there and doing your thing and going over here and doing your own prem, you want a consistent experience across all your estates, whether it's on prem and the cloud eventually out to the edge. We're going to talk about that tomorrow too. Is that a fair premise? It is. I mean, operational consistency is absolutely crucial for my team to succeed. I mean, think about running multiple different tools for data protection. It just creates a whole lot of interaction, let's call it, that has friction. And ultimately with anything in technology, wherever there's friction, you're going to have problems eventually. And you're going to have varying levels of skill in the team. Suppose you have part of your data protection team. You lose one or two people to COVID for a week, and you have a DR test. And it so happens that these are the experts at Fubar software that is your data protection platform. The people that you may have available may not have the right skills. I mean, unifying that stuff and actually running them out of the same ethos, really, I think that creates operational consistency that is so valuable for us to be successful. There is one thing I wanted to bring up just here and what you said earlier. Zero trust, I think, is going to become part of our industry baseline as well. Zero trust approaches to network connectivity, to tooling, so that you stop dealing with traditional VPNs. Authentication. Authentication, that's where we're going as well. So apologies. No, not at all. It was a buzzword before the pandemic. It was, but it's actually. Now it's a mandate. It's come back and become actually useful. And people are trying to think, OK, what does this really mean? What does this mean to our organization? Exciting times. The thing is, there's a lot of unknowns. We certainly saw that with COVID. So how do you, as a technologist, deal with? It used to be we would automate the known. This industry was built on that. How are you approaching what you don't know from a technology infrastructure and process standpoint? So I'm going to, everyone turn their videos off. I'm going to give them a secret. It's the people. The people are the secret sauce. If you surround yourself with amazing people, curious people, you can solve any problem. Again, like I said, I have the privilege of leading this team. And we have some amazing thinkers and problem solvers. If you set them to task and give them the right support as a leader, they will accomplish anything. And so for me, having a robust and just really diversely skilled team allows us to attack any problem. I have zero worries about the future of the state of technology. I have absolute confidence we'll be able to engage, master, and exploit whatever technology has come our way, or any other challenges that actually happen to be in our path as well. We hear there's a lot in the queue. People process technology. Technology figure itself out. You get the good people. You can get the right process and win. Absolutely. Opie, Danny, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Danny, we'll see you tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon, Danny's coming back on. We're going to dig into a lot of this stuff and double click on it. Appreciate your time. Thank you. This is Dave Vellante for David Nicholson. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Veeamon 2022 from the Aria in Las Vegas. This is day one. Keep it right there.