 From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2019, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to Miami, everybody. Sonny Miami, Dave Vellante here with Peter Burris. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, and there's a lot of noise here, and there's a lot of signal here. VeeamON 2019, this is theCUBE's third year doing Veeam's big customer show. We started in Nola last year with Chicago, a very hip location here at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Kerry Stanton is here, he is the vice president of business development and corp dev at Veeam, and Jeff Carlett, a CUBE alum, lifetime friend of theCUBE, senior director of strategic alliances at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thanks for having us. You're very welcome, Kerry, let me start with you. I don't really want to talk about sports with you, but anyway, we won't, we'll hold that up. Monday. Momentum. Relatively new to Veeam, but you've been here now a couple of years, where's this momentum coming from? From your perspective, as a recent Veeam entrant. Yeah, I know the momentum's coming from across the board, but I think a big momentum is coming from new product innovation that we're doing with Office 365 and what is driving on subscription business, momentum that we have for the pent up demand we had for U4, but a big part is coming from our relationships like we have with HPE. We invested heavily a few years ago when we announced that joint reseller agreement. What we've done is not just continue to sell, but add a plethora of new solutions to it. Jeff's going to talk about what we're doing with GreenLake, adding SimpliVity, adding the overall solutions that we have, but that's a team that started two years ago with two people that we now have over 20 people just working dedicated with HPE on co-selling, and I'm happy to say that our business in first half, or should say year to date, is up 50% year-over-year on a global reseller business. Well, Jeff, I mean theCUBE, as you know, has been documenting the ebbs and flows of HPE and HPE over the last, you know, better part of a decade, and when HPE split in two to HPE and HPE Inc, one of the things that, and then sold the software business, or the first person, one of the things that went was data protection, and that just opened up a whole new set of opportunities, and Veeam was obviously one of those, and it's starting to pay dividends. You got, to that point, you know, that evolution through HPE.next, we were able to focus on our core, and the benefit, the inherent benefit is that we can partner with the best of class in the marketplace, and Veeam is considered best of class, so when it comes to data availability, data protection, we are all in, and we're actually, as a company, we're actually doubling down now in our partnership with Veeam. We've actually taken them from maybe a traditional storage alliance and taken them to be one of our top global strategic alliances in the line with the Microsoft, the Veeam, where's the SAPs, because we see great momentum, we see great customer adoption and interest, and we see great innovation at the product level, but also in the whole go-to-market chain. Well, talk a little bit more about that, because the move allowed you to form new partnerships and it dramatically expanded your team, but I'm interested in the nature of the partnership. Is it, you know, just go-to-market? Is there, you know, engineering integration? Talk about that later. Well, our first step when we came together and said, okay, let's take this to the next level is we realized we needed to narrow our focus to the core customer values, and we really settled on three core areas of this relationship. One is first data protection for around our intelligent storage. As you know, our storage portfolio, three-par, nimble, we've had a great relationship there. We continue to drive co-innovation at the roadmap level, but also drive go-to-market activities and marketing, and we have feet on the street actively selling. So the first one's really expanding our work with storage, but now we're taking it, we're extending, if you will, through consumption-based data management using what HP has, GreenLake. GreenLake, we see 40% of customers by 2020 are going to be consuming their data center IT more in a consumption model. They're an inherent benefit to that. Well, we now have offered and launched just recently back up as a service through our flex capacity coming out of GreenLake, providing customers the choice, if you will, to move from a, not from a capital expenditure, but by the drink, if you will, a consumption base. So that's the second core area. And third core area is net new for us, and that's around our HCI portfolio. As you know, we purchase SimpliVity. Well, SimpliVity has a lot of inherent backup, a de-dupe compression inline, but there actually are specific use cases that we're deploying out there that show how SimpliVity in a Veeam environment can actually, customers can see actually incremental value. So those are the three key areas we're focusing on as we up-level this whole relationship and partnership. So, Carrie, please. No, I was just going to say, if you think of, we talk a lot about, we go after the technical decision maker and all these hundreds of people here at the conference and then going towards the executive, the enterprise, and it's through relationships with HPE on this, the flex capacity, being able to go to a customer and offer a true enterprise solution that they're looking for everyone wants as a service. And so we've closed multiple deals this year thanks to having the GreenLake, right? So our relationship with HPE continues to elevate in the enterprise as a result of the solutions that we're doing, not just selling storage, but selling a complete solution. Ratmire was kind of tongue-in-cheeked this morning at the analyst and media event. He was talking about how in 2013, he predicted that Veeam would be a billion-dollar company by 2018, and he said he missed it by six months. One of the reasons was because, you know, you got the subscription model, so that GreenLake obviously is part of that, maybe not the predominant part yet, but I think you said Jeff, 40% you're saying would be consumed as a service by 2020? 20, actually, soon. Okay, so pretty substantial. What's driving it? Is it just CFOs want to go to OPEX or? I think it's, there are many, the value you get without locking yourself in to every three years needing to do a total forklift upgrade of your infrastructure, that's one thing. The second thing is moving it from a capital expenditure to an OPEX expenditure. It can be planned, it can be budgeted as well. The third thing is the customer doesn't have to mess with all the technology, updating the firmware of the drivers and all that. We will do it on their behalf, right? We give them the economics of cloud on-prem, and that's the beauty of that. So we believe in lockstep and alignment with Veeam, the world is hybrid in the future, so on-prem is here to live forever, but increasingly we need to leverage the assets on the cloud and this is providing that ability of doing it in a consumption model. And it's not just the economics, it's the experience as well. Oh, totally, if you want to, if you live in a house and you're a homeowner and you want a new bathroom, you put it in the bathroom. If you're a renter, you end up in a long, laborious negotiation that you're going to lose. And the same kind of notions here is people realize there's greater strategic opportunities and options from how they use their data differently, they want access to those options. And that's the basis of agility. The OPEX, the OPEX to CAPEX is good, but it's, you got to put it in business context. It's how you create additional options in your data-oriented investments. So as you guys are moving forward, are you starting to have that conversation with customers and relating data, data value, asset management, backup, restore, to this broader picture, this broader strategic union you're putting together? Yeah, and that is a key imperative of how we get even stronger up-to-entraction is telling the bigger picture. Look at the world of yesterday where it's just back up in recovery. Look at what the advent of edge devices and the amount of data that's being consumed put at the edge. Now look at AI and machine learning where the data is inherently needed to project the changes and the needs that are in the future. So I think these all tie into the play and I believe a GreenLaker consumption model can provide great benefits above and beyond just the traditional kind of backup and recovery. And I was just going to add to it is that it also brings in our ecosystem. So the relationship, the tier one relationship we both have with the Microsoft. So when you start looking at a solution that the business owner wants, they want to be able to say I need cloud, I need on-prem, I need backup and recovery. And so by going through GreenLake, they can encompass, you know, we have a broader ecosystem that we're able to bring in versus just single-threading these discussions where you're going in and selling a data protection story and leaving, but you didn't solve that broader customer problem. And by with GreenLake, they are solving that overall problem. I was like to say, nothing really happens until you make a sale. You talked about some of the growth earlier. So why, but why Veeam? I mean, obviously you're getting subtraction in the market, but there's a lot of players out there that you could partner with and you do partner with others, but why Veeam? What makes Veeam so special? I think one, inherently, we are lockstep in agreement of the overarching strategy. We talked about hybrid, we talked about portfolio. Two is we've got the engagement at all levels of our organization, which all stems truly from having a unified roadmap. Innovation has to happen at the roadmap level and you need to be lockstep aligned through the value chain in the way you take it to market, the way you align your sellers, the way you deliver a value proposition that truly is valuable to our customers. It's proven from our IDC research that customers that are deploying and purchasing HP and Veeam solutions are seeing a 250 plus percent ROI on that investment. So there's this huge customer benefit and why not go bigger and go bigger and go bigger with them? Same question to you, Kerry. So why is HPE so special as a partner? So I think HPE, first and foremost, being that first partner that came to us to want to go all in as Jeff was talking about from day one and top down, right? So we're not just working with the department of HPE, we have it from Antonio, from Jim Jackson down the stack in the organization. We're aligned from day one. They lead with data protection. It's no longer maybe just a nice to have. It's a requirement in every one of their sales processes we're their lead partner that they have on data protection. And what we've been able to do and have that enterprise visibility by them assisting us on our journey. So from across the board, whether it's through management, through technology, or just in true go to market, they're by far the our number one partner that we have on our sell with motion. So Jeff, I want to talk a little bit about GreenLake and Kerry, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it as well. One of the challenges that going to this consumption based model for a company that's traditionally sold products, you know, as part of this overall move in all industries, all sectors, from a product to a services orientation, is how do you introduce metrics that are associated with the service because it used to be just sold a product. And the metrics for storage are different from the metrics from backup, different from the metrics from compute. So as you've gone to GreenLake, what kind of, because I love GreenLake, what kind of specialized or specific types of things, how are you selling it to try to tie that service into the business outcomes that your customers are trying to see? Well, clearly, my belief, some of our first wins, early wins, we are able to monitor and metric the value that customers were getting, the service levels they've received. And so we have a number of different methods of capturing the data and the empirical data on the service levels and being able to use that to then use that in the selling motion to be able to articulate the experience and the expectations that come with that. What are some of the harder problems that your customers are asking you guys to solve? And how are you approaching it together? Well, I think that what we're talking about here at GreenLake is a real hard problem to solve, right? A consumption base across geographic regions, across different technologies, on-prem, off-prem, hybrid. And we don't have another partner that we can go to market with when we hear this from the customer. So when we hear it, we know that we can lean in and we truly are, you know, to follow on from your question is that the fact is that HPE is solving all this and then bringing us in as their number one partner, right? Is the differentiator that we love? So solving those problems at an enterprise level and at a commercial level and doing it with one partner is easy, right? We're shortening the sales cycle, increasing the value to the customer. Yeah, one thing I'd say is, and it's always the, complexity is always a problem and an issue, right? So that it will always be a problem and an issue and we will always be striving to improve and improve the complexity. Well, you know, the beam works super simple, right? And we, especially when you look in our HCI portfolio and that's all about driving simplicity, if you will, and the way you can deploy IT and scale it. So I think complexity is and will always be a problem, but it's a given too. It'll always be there and we will always be striving to make it even easier and easier and easier for our joint customers. But one of the challenges that you face, especially as you go to a services oriented model, is how do you put a price on the outcomes that you're delivering as opposed to the price on the assets that the person's taking? So I think one of the biggest challenges, and it sounds like you guys are pretty close to, you know, getting this together, but it's part of a bar portfolio, is where does this, let's put it slightly differently. We've talked about this before in some of the other interviews. Backup is moved from a half to have it, for maybe compliance or it just makes good sense to have it, to a strategic business capability for a company that's increasingly differentiating itself on its data assets. That moves this conversation about as a service into a different group and a different level. And that's what I'm wondering, those metrics have got to be a big part of the conversation because the entire organization is now recognizing backup as more than just a bull time. Yeah, yeah, you know, one example, one of our close partners, and actually we're here with them, Island. So disaster recovery is a service, right? They standardize on Nimble and Veeam. And together, you know, that combination to them was good enough to build their business on, right? So there's inherent value, and we expect to continue to grow and be able to expose that value because we believe more and more customers, now you're just your pure enterprises, but from your mid-market all the way up can be able to utilize and see that value and experience it. Just a point of clarification if I could on the HCI piece, specifically around SimpliVity. So SimpliVity was known for backup use cases. It was. So where does Veeam and SimpliVity fit versus sort of SimpliVity? Yeah, so low. Well, first and foremost, yes. You know, SimpliVity has inherent, great data availability features inherent in it. That's core to it. But in reality, for customers, let's say a mixed environment, you know, whether it be virtualized, non-virtualized, there are inherent benefits of having Veeam in addition to SimpliVity. Another example would be customers that want to really have the access to be able to do specific file restores. So we see capabilities in running Veeam in parallel with SimpliVity. Actually, I see a lot of customers that are deploying SimpliVity are also deploying Veeam and it's an additive value that they're seeing and they're able to parse out features and functionality and be able to increase their level of value that couldn't be done just purely from the SimpliVity standpoint alone. All right, Kerry, we'll give you the final word. The final word is... Bumper sticker on Veeam on. I would say that what we're doing here with HPE is kind of, we would say we're in the first inning. What we're seeing on the innovations that we have coming out later this year with HPE, coming into next year and that we're just thrilled to be having them as a platinum sponsor of Veeam on and look forward to another successful year. Awesome, guys, thanks so much for coming on. All right, I got to ask you, Boston-based person. Bruins fan? Bruins, yes. You worried about Tuka at all, a 12-day layoff? No. No problem. No. I mean, nice and rested and... Chara, more Chara or less Chara? I'm going to, yeah, well, I got to take more, thanks. Okay, all right, good. We'll see. We'll see. Go Bruins. All right, guys, thanks so much for coming on. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest shortly right after this break. You're watching theCUBE from Veeam on 2019 from Miami. We're right back.