 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you by Veritas. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is the wrap for Veritas 2017. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman and Stu, two days. We're witnessing the evolution, transformation of Veritas. Veritas used to be sort of the gold standard for what wasn't known at the time as a software defined, but just software function to deliver storage capabilities, no hardware agenda. And now you're seeing investment under the leadership of new management, some innovation, a cycle that's quite rapid. It's hard to tell how much of that is really taking shape in the customer base. Seems like the channel partners are picking up on it. Customers are still sort of trying to figure out how to move beyond sort of their existing legacy situation. It's like Keith Townsend says, the vendor community tends to move at the speed of CIO. It's a great quote. But overall, I think very good show. Some surprises here in terms of specifically the breadth of the Veritas portfolio, not just a backup company, really focused on data management, focused on information management, which obviously is relevant in the digital economy. What were your takeaways? Yeah, so Dave, the big strategy is that the 360 data management. And I think one of the things we teased out in here is, first of all, nobody thinks that cloud is simple, right? Multi-cloud, where customers are, and when you dig into it, and what Veritas has learned in the last year, is that there's a lot of work to be done. Where are their deeper integrations that they need to have? There's different requirements from the different partners here. See, Microsoft, the top-level sponsor, Razinovich up on stage, giving kind of his usual hybrid cloud with a lot of open source pitch there. But seems a good fit from the customers and partners that we talked to here to say, Microsoft aligns well with what Veritas is doing. Amazon, big player here. A lot of integration's happening behind the scenes to make sure that Veritas can work there. And then you follow Google, of course. Big focus around data. Good to see where Veritas is going. We had a nice conversation with Google. Google seems very open on a lot of these. Not as much focus on some of the functionality that Veritas has, so it's a good natural fit. And then IBM and Oracle kind of rounding out kind of the big players here. So the thing I've come in, I think every show I've gone to this year, Dave, is where do companies that've been around for more than a couple of years fit in this multi-cloud world? And absolutely, that's where the puck's going, as Bill Coleman said, that's where they're betting the company and putting it forward. And we wondered coming in, would it be like, ah, yeah, this is a net backup and Veritas Foundation suite with a new coat of paint on it? And no, I mean, they've brought in a lot of new management team. Sure, there's engineers here with a lot of expertise and experience to build on, to know how to do this. But I was pretty impressed with what I saw this week, Dave. So no hardware agenda is evolving to no cloud agenda. That's one of the things we learned here is that, and we had a good discussion, got a little bit awkward at times, but good discussion about why Veritas relative to the other players here. And the answer we got back, and what we had to tease it out a little bit, was essentially the upstart guys, the rubrics, the cohesities, to a certain extent, Zerto. I think they try to put Veeam in that category, come back to Veeam, because it's kind of interesting. Maybe not big enough to deliver on that multi-cloud vision. And they're really not even trying, cohesiating rubric, I don't know. They've added a lot of clouds, recently actually, rubric's been doing it for a while, cohesity, definitely seen there. They understand that cloud, but I think what, maybe I'd say they tend to start from an on-premises piece, as opposed to you say, this Veritas strategy is, it doesn't matter. And what many of the players write, where is there natural gravity, is it on-premises, or is it in the public cloud? And Nutanix, they partner with Google, they're doing the cloud, but absolutely, most of their revenue is, you know, it's just all in there. So the upstarts, I think, you know, I kind of buy the Veritas argument that there maybe doesn't have the gravitas and the heft to attack that multi-cloud, other than pick at it and grow, and they'll do hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and maybe get to a billion and have a great exit. I think that'll happen. So that was that, and then the other guys, the big guys, HPE, Dell, EMC, IBM, they certainly have the capabilities to do that. But is it going to be the main focus of those companies? HPE maybe, we'll see. HPE and Veeam are an interesting partnership. You know, my information suggests that Veeam is driving many tens of millions of dollars through Hewlett Packard Enterprise, now that the micro-focused deal has been done, and they've got rid of data protector. IBM, they're kind of reinvigorating the storage business. Data protection is part of that. Dell EMC is, I think, challenged to invest. They can't invest in as much as they used to, certainly not in acquisitions. The acquisition pipeline has basically dried up. I mean, Dave, Dave, look at, you know, Datamain was a great acquisition by EMC at the time, now under Dell EMC. I mean, you're probably closer to it than me. You know, I don't hear a strong cloud message coming out of that group when we talk about backup and the like. You know, Dell corporate, of course they've got Microsoft partnerships, VMware has Amazon partnerships, but it very much has tied to, you know, appliances or servers at the main piece. It's not a software message, which is, you know, we're very close. Well, so you look at Dell EMC's acquisitions recently. Icelon, okay, a couple billion, two and a half billion, I think. Datadomain, two and a half billion. DSSD, a billion, which really hasn't turned it to much at this point in time anyway. Extreme IO, not sure what they paid, but you know, you're hearing ebbs and flows on that. So, but that, my point is that is how under Joe Tucci EMC innovated. They would incrementally add on to their existing platforms. You were there, you saw it. And then they would invest in what Joe Tucci used to call tuck-in acquisitions. And all of that was well and good, and they were able to sort of keep, not sort of, they were able to keep pace with the industry. That's basically stopped that strategy. We've seen cuts, some layoffs, but still a financial, you know, windfall, I think is coming for Dell. And VMware is a secret sauce there, so we don't have to dig into that too much. But my point is that services is going to be the linchpin for that company in terms of attacking multi-cloud services and VMware. Okay, so now you can. And Pivotal of course too. And Pivotal as well, that's right, great point. Now you come back to Veritas, focused on that strategy of information management. Investing apparently in R&D. Seemingly patient capital with Carlisle. So I like to, you know me, I like to unpack the numbers from what I can tell my sources and going to do some more digging on this, but when Veritas was acquired by Carlisle, it was about a $2.3 billion company, wouldn't surprise me if on an income statement basis, it's actually shrunk, wouldn't surprise me at all. In fact, Bill Coleman kind of hinted to that. And especially if you start looking at ratable, rateable revenue models, maybe bookings could be up. And I've heard numbers as high as 2.6, 2.7 billion, but who knows. I've also heard now that the valuation at the time of the acquisition was 7 billion in change. I've heard numbers as high as 14, 15 billion now, maybe a little inflated, but I think easily over 10. And I think this company has an opportunity to get the 3 billion, get the valuation up to 15, maybe even 20 billion, big win for the private equity investors. And the key to that, I think, is going to be a continuous investment, go to market that aligns to those new areas that they're talking about. And very importantly, the ecosystem. I want to see this thing start exploding. Nice, the big highlights here were the cloud guys. What else would you highlight? You walk around the shows, a lot of smaller partners here really would like to see that ecosystem grow. That's something that we're going to watch. And the audience grow. I think this show is up from last year, next year, I believe, in Las Vegas again, moving to the Cosmopolitan. A little bit better venue, bigger venue. We'll see if they can get up to where the big boys go over time, but overall I'd say pretty good second year for Veritas Vision. Yeah, Dave, you look at the different areas. Veritas has a full suite of software-defined storage. The analogy I've used all the time, storage industry is a knife fight in a dark alley. So you've got some big players out there that all have their software-defined storage messaging out there. Of course, Veritas would say they all have the hardware agenda. There's some truth to that, but Veritas also has to partner with a bunch of these players to get there. So where did they get the reach? How does the channel help them punch above their weight? I mean, the difference is there, two and a half, 2.6 billion dollar run rate company, revenue company, that is private. So they're trusted because they have history. They're not a small startup. Can this innovation and all the new team members come in? And definitely the cloud piece is pretty interesting, Dave. We'll be back at re-invent with a cube and Veritas will have a presence there. Amazon, huge ecosystem. Where do they play? Where do they show up? Data, we've said so many times on here, it becomes repetitive. Data is the new oil and customers need to take advantage of them. Can Veritas's message get them at the table and in a conversation where so much it's about infrastructure? And I love the message here at the show. It's not infrastructure technology, it's information technology and we want to put a highlight on that. So like the message, like where it's going, here are the customers, but can they get at the table when there's so many different, there's the startups, there's the big players, everybody pulling at where the customers are. And GDPR was an interesting angle because it was the most crisp conversation I've heard on GDPR. I know you've been talking about it at least the last six months on some cube interviews. I've done a number of interviews but it really crystallized for me this week at the show. I'm glad you mentioned that because I've done a couple of shows where GDPR has come up and I was like, okay, yeah, we get it, it's coming, it's nasty. How are you going to help me again? And I think Veritas did a really good job this week of saying, look, we are here to help. We're going to start with discovery and they sort of laid out the journey and I think they made a good case for their portfolio aligning well with solving that problem. So this could be a nice little kicker there. One of the things I wanted to sort of riff on a little bit was the TAM and the data protection space. You know, it reminds me when ServiceNow went public, I know there was a story about a Gartner analyst who was very negative on it saying the help desk is a dead business and then Frank Slutman did a masterful job of expanding the TAM, explaining that TAM, guiding the company to a massive opportunity. And I see a similar dynamic here. In the one hand, I say, wow, a lot of companies in this data protection space, even though it's exploding, a lot of VC money coming in, you're seeing new entrants like Datrium now get in the space, even though they're not just back up, they're not, that's not their primary, but I mean, you certainly saw SimpliVity was kind of their specialty, but guys like Datos, IO and some of these new guys coming in that we talked about, Rubrik, et cetera, there's a lot of players here is the market big enough to support those. Part of me says, I don't know, but then I think back to that ServiceNow example, I think the TAM is going to explode because it's not about backup and it's not even just about data protection. It is about information management. I think Veritas got that right and so what I like about their chances is they're big, they got a big install base and I think their vision is right and they don't have that cloud agenda. They're pure software company, even though they do sell some appliances sometimes and they got what seemingly is good management. I think I'd like to see them attract even more management as they grow and as they start executing this and as I say, the ecosystem has got to grow. Yeah, so Dave, IT has to deal with information governance. That's the defense they need to play. There's going to be money thrown at that. Some of the conversations we had this week, IT operations becomes one of those tailwinds that should lift companies like Veritas to be able to have further discussion and grow those budgets to be able to be much more important piece. All right, good, Stu, thank you. Good working with you again. It's been a long few weeks here but we're at it again next week. The Cube is at Big Data NYC which is done in conjunction with Strata in New York City. We've got a big party on Wednesday night. Actually, we got a presentation. Peter Burris, Neil Raden, Jim Cabilis and we got a panel talking about software eating the edge. That's on Wednesday at 37 pillars. Tweet me at at D-Velante if you don't have an invitation. I'll get you one although I heard there was a wait list last week but we'll get you in, don't worry. And then we're also at Splunk next week. I'm going to be at .conf in DC. Very interesting company. We've done .conf since I think 2011 was the first year we did .conf. And I'll be keeping a big eye on Microsoft Ignite next week while we don't have the Cube there. Obviously, pretty important things like Azure Stack, expected to roll out and got so many shows, Dave. So theCUBE, we love digital content, creating content, sharing with you, our community. Follow at theCUBE, that handle for theCUBE Gems. You'll see a bunch of videos. Go to theCUBE.net. That's where we host all the videos from all of our shows. And then SiliconANGLE.com is where we write up our news and analysis of these events and news of the day. And of course wikibon.com is our research site. A lot of really good, deep work going on there. So thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. We're out from Veritas Vision 2017. We'll see you next time.