 We're here with theCUBE covering Commvault connections 21 and we're going to look at the data protection space and how cloud computing has advanced the way we think about backup, recovery and protecting our most critical data. Ranga Rajagopalan, who is the vice president of products at Commvault and Stephen Orban, who's the general manager of AWS Marketplace and Control Services. Gents, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thank you, always a pleasure to see you. Stephen, thanks for having us, great to be here. Very welcome, Stephen. Let's start with you. Look, the cloud has become a staple of digital infrastructure. I don't know where we'd be right now without being able to access enterprise services, IT services remotely. But specifically, how are customers looking at backup and recovery in the cloud? Is it a kind of a replacement for existing strategies? Is it another layer of protection? How are they thinking about that? Yeah, great question, Dave. And again, thanks for having me. And I think, look, if you look back to 15 years ago when the founders of AWS had the hypothesis that many enterprises, governments, and developers were gonna want access to on-demand pay as you go, IT resources in the cloud, none of us would have been able to predict that it would have matured and become the staple that it has today over the last 15 years. But the reality is that a lot of these enterprise customers, many of whom have been doing their own IT infrastructure for the last 10, 20, or multiple decades, do have to kind of figure out how they deal with the change management of moving to the cloud. And while a lot of our customers will initially come to us because they're looking to save money or costs, almost all of them decide to stay and go big because of the speed at which they're able to innovate on behalf of their customers. And when it comes to storage and backup, that just plays right into where they're headed. And there's a variety of different techniques that customers use, whether it be a lift and shift for a particular set of applications or a data center or where they do very much look at, how can they replace the backup and recovery that they have on-premises in the cloud using solutions like what we're partnering with Convool to do or completely reimagining their architecture for net new developments that they can really move quickly for their customers and completely developing something brand new where it is really a brand new replacement and innovation for what they've done in the past. Great, thank you, Stephen. Raga, I want to ask you about the D word digital. Okay, if you're not a digital business today, you're basically out of business. So my question to you, Raga, is how have you seen customers change the way they think about data protection during what I call the force march to digital over the last 18, 19 months? Are customers thinking about data protection differently today? Definitely, Dave. And thank you for having me and Stephen. Pleasure to join you on this Cuban interview. First going back to Stephen's comments, can't agree more. Almost every business that we talk with today has a cloud first strategy, a cloud transformation mandate. And the reality is back to your digital comment, Dave. There are many different paths to the hybrid multi-term and different customers. There are different parts of the journey. So as Stephen was saying, most often customers, at least from a data protection perspective, start the conversation by thinking, hey, I have all these tips. Can I start using cloud as my air gap, long-term retention target? And before they realize, they start moving their workloads into the cloud and none of the backup and recovery SLAs are going to change. So you need to continue protecting the clouds, which is where the cloud needed data protection comes in. And then they start innovating around DR. Can I use cloud as my DR site so that I don't need to maintain the other site? So digital is all around us, cloud transformation is all around us. And the real essence of this partnership between AWS and Commvault is essentially to drive and simplify all the paths to the cloud, regardless of whether you're going to use it as a storage target or your production data center or your DR disaster recovery site. Yeah, so really is about providing that optionality for customers. I talked to a lot of customers and said, hey, our business resilience strategy was really too focused on DR. I've talked to all the customers at the other end of the spectrum and said, we didn't even have a DR strategy. Now we're using the cloud for that. So it's really all over the map and you want that optionality. So Stephen, go ahead, please. And so ransomware plays a big role in many of these considerations as well, right? Like it's unfortunately not a question of whether you're going to be hit by ransomware, it's almost become like, what do you do when you're hit by ransomware and the ability to use the cloud scale to immediately bring up the resources, to use the cloud backups has become a very popular choice simply because of the speed with which you can bring the business back to normal operations, the agility and the power that cloud brings to the table. Yeah, ransomware is scary. You don't even need a high school diploma to be a ransomwareist. You could just go on the dark web and buy ransomware as a service and do bad things. And hopefully you'll end up in jail. Stephen, we know about the success of the AWS marketplace, you guys are partnering here. I'm interested in how that partnership, kind of where it started and how it's evolving. Yeah, happy to highlight on that. So look, when we started AWS or when the founders of AWS started AWS, as I said, 15 years ago, we realized very early on that while we were going to be able to provide a number of tools for customers to have on-demand access to compute, storage, networking, databases that many, particularly enterprise and government customers, still use a wide range of tools and solutions from hundreds, if not in some cases, thousands of different partners. I mean, I talked to enterprises who literally use thousands of different vendors to help them deliver their solutions for their customers. So almost 10 years ago, we're almost at our 10 year anniversary for AWS marketplace. We launched the first instantiation of AWS marketplace, which allowed builders and customers to find, try, buy, and then deploy third-party software solutions running on Amazon machine instances, also known as AMIs, natively right in their AWS and cloud accounts to compliment what they were doing in the cloud. And over the last nearly 10 years, we've evolved quite a bit to the point where we support software in multiple different packaging types, whether it be Amazon machine instances, containers, machine learning models, and of course, SaaS and the rise of software as a service. So customers don't have to manage the software themselves, but we also support data products through the AWS data exchange and professional services for customers who wanna get services to help them integrate the software into their environments. And we now do that across a wide range of procurement options. So what used to be pay as you go, Amazon machine instances now includes multiple different ways to contract directly. Customers can do that directly with the vendor, with their channel partner, or using kind of our public e-commerce capabilities. And we're super excited over the last couple of months, we've been partnering with Commvault to get their industry leading backup and recovery solutions listed on AWS marketplace, which is available for our collective customers now. So not only do they have access to Commvault's awesome solutions to help them protect against ransomware as we talked about and to manage their backup and recovery environments, but they can find and deploy that directly in one click right into their AWS accounts and consolidate their billing relationship right on the AWS invoice. And it's been awesome to work with Ranga and the product teams at Commvault to really expose those capabilities where Commvault's using a lot of different AWS services to provide a really great native experience for our collective customers as they migrate to the cloud. Yeah, the marketplace has been amazing. We've watched it evolve over the past decade. And it's a key characteristic of cloud. Everybody has a cloud today, right? We're a cloud too, but marketplace is unique in that it's the power of the ecosystem versus the resources of one of Ranga. I wonder from your perspective, if you could talk about the partnership with AWS from your view, and then specifically you've got some hard news. I wonder if you could talk about that as well. Absolutely, so the partnership has been extending for more than 12 years, right? So AWS and Commvault have been bringing together solutions that help customers solve their data management challenges. And everything that we've been doing has been driven by the customer demand that we see, right? Customers are moving their workloads into the cloud. They're finding new ways of deploying the workloads and protecting them. Earlier, we introduced cloud native integration with the EBS APIs, which has driven almost 70% performance improvements in backup and resource. And when you look at huge customers like Coca-Cola who have standardized on AWS and Commvault, that is the scale that they want to operate in. They manage around 150,000 snapshots, 1,200 EC2 instances across six regions, but with just one resource dedicated for the data management strategy, right? So that's where the real built-in integration comes into play. And we've been extending it to make use of the cloud efficiencies like power management and autoscale and so on. Another aspect is our commitment to a radically simple customer experience. And that's, you know, I'm sure Stephen would agree, it's a big month at AWS as well. That's really together with the customer demand which brought us together to introduce Commvault into the AWS marketplace. Exactly the way Stephen described it. Now the heart announcement is Commvault backup and recovery is available in AWS marketplace. So the exact four steps that Stephen mentioned, find, try, buy and deploy, everything simplified through the marketplace so that AWS customers can start using Commvault backup software in less than 20 minutes. A 68 trial version is included in the product through marketplace. And you know, it's a single click buy. We use the cloud formation templates to deploy. So it becomes a super simple approach to protect the AWS workloads. And we protect a lot of them. Starting from EC2, RDS, Dynamo TV, Document TV, you know, the containers that the list just keeps going on. So it becomes a very natural extension for our customers to make it super simple to start using Commvault data protection for the AWS workloads. Well, the Commvault stack is very robust. You have a extremely mature stack. I'm curious as to how this sort of came about. I mean, it had to be customer driven, I'm sure, where your customers say, hey, we're moving to the cloud. We had a lot of workloads in the cloud. We're a Commvault customer. That intersection between Commvault and AWS customers. So again, I presume this was customer driven but maybe you can give us a little insight and add some color to that, Ranga. Everything in this collaboration has been customer driven. We were earlier talking about the multiple paths to cloud and a very good example. And Steven might probably add more color from his own experience at the Jones but I'll bring you to reference Parsons who's a civil engineering leader. They started with the cloud first mandate saying, we need to start moving all our backups to the cloud but we are worried that bad actors might find it easy to go and access the backups. AWS and Commvault came together with AWS security features and Commvault brought in its own authorization controls. And now we have moved more than 14 petabytes of backup data into the cloud. And it's so robust that not even the backup administrator can go and touch the backups without multiple levels of authorization, right? So the customer needs, whether it is from a security perspective, performance perspective or in this case from a simplicity perspective is really what is driving us. And the need came exactly like that Dave. There are many customers who have now standardized on AWS. They want to find everything through the AWS marketplace. They want to use their existing AWS contracts and also bring data strategy as part of that. So that's the real driver behind this. Steven and I were hoping that actually announced some of the customers that have actively started using it. Many notable customers have been behind this innovation. Steven, I don't know if you wanted to add more to that. Yeah, I would just add Dave, like if I look back before I joined AWS seven years ago, I was the CIO at Dow Jones and I was leading a fairly big cloud migration there over a number of years. And one of the impetuses for us moving to the cloud in the first place was when Hurricane Sandy hit, we had a real disaster recovery scenario in one of our New Jersey data centers. And we had to act pretty quickly. Commvault was part of that solution. And I remember very clearly, even back then, back in 2013, there were being options available to help us accelerate our move to the cloud. And just to reiterate some of the stuff that Rongo was talking about, Commvault has done a great job over the last more than a decade taking features from things like EBS and S3 and EC2 and some of our networking capabilities and embedding them directly into their services so that customers are able to more quickly move their backup and recovery workloads to the cloud. So each and every one of those features was as a result of, I'm sure, Commvault working backwards from their customer needs just as we do at AWS. And we're super excited to take that to the next level to give customers the option to then also buy that right on their AWS invoice on AWS Marketplace. Yeah, I mean, we're going to have to leave it there. Steven, you've mentioned this several times the sort of the early days of AWS. Back then we were talking about gigabytes and terabytes. And now we're talking about petabytes beyond, guys, thanks so much. I really appreciate your time and sharing the news with us. Dave, thanks for having us. All right, keep it right there. More from Commvault Connections 21. You're watching theCUBE.