 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation with Commvault. I'm Lisa Martin, looking forward to having a spirited conversation with my two guests. Please welcome Janet Giesen, the VP of Operations and Programs for Metallic, a Commvault venture. Janet, welcome to theCUBE. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. And joining us from Amia is Mark Zhao, the Amia VP of Technical Sales at Commvault. Hey Mark, good afternoon to you. Good afternoon Lisa, it's great to be here with you. So just about a year or so ago, theCUBE had the pleasure of being at Commvault Go 2019 and where Metallic was launched. So happy birthday to Metallic. Some evolution and some recent news. Janet, walk us through what you guys have accomplished recently. Absolutely, so last year, we launched with three product offerings for Metallic, Office 365 backup, end point backup, and backup of core data like VMs and files. In that year since, we started with US only. We're now in Canada and Australia, as well as now in our first set of countries in Amia, which Mark will talk about in a little bit. And we've greatly expanded our product offerings. One of the things we did is we just launched eDiscovery, which is a big deal for folks, especially looking for compliance implications in their data protection. So we've had a real journey here and just this quarter, as you see, we are doubling our product offerings for Metallic and tripling our country availability. So we're doing a lot and we're a leader in the data protection as a service space. A lot accomplished and just a 12 month time period. Give me a little bit of a preview, Janet, of why was Metallic launched last year for North America, US expanded to Canada. And then I see it was announced, it was launched in Australia, New Zealand in the late summer 2020. I know that the cloud market, the cloud adoption is quite high, but give us a little bit of an overview of the actual go-to-market sequence from a regional perspective. Absolutely. And I want Mark to really take this one as well. We started in US only in our initial launch. That's where our first launch event was. That's where a lot of our pilot customers were. And then we expanded to Canada, Australia, and Alamea. And this is very thoughtful. You have one chance to really launch in a geography, right? And we wanted to take all the steps whether it was compliance, trademarking, cloud storage availability. We leveraged our partnership with Microsoft in Azure for these launches and really making sure we had everything lined up to best serve our customers. Mark, what would you say about this strategy as well? Yeah, I think certainly, I mean, the strategy is the right one. It's the right one for the following reasons. If you look back to 12 months ago, I think in Colorado, a Go user event when we launched Metallic, I was fortunate enough to be hosting a number of Amir partners and customers. And they were clamoring for the product. They were excited by it. They wanted it. We were, in some cases, pressured to think about releasing it earlier. But all those customers wanted a product that was robust, secure, and coping with specific Amir requirements that they have for the product. In particular, GDPR and supporting the levels of compliance and data privacy that Amir has rigorous standards for. And I think if you look at Combo as a company, we take our customers' data extremely seriously. We got one chance to get this right, as Janet said. And our customers absolutely expect and deserve right first time. So when we launch a product like Metallic with the diversity of workloads, the rigorous high performance and secure environments, we want to make sure it's tested properly, it's compliant with all the jurisdictions. And even in Europe, we think about Europe, it's not one given country. Even the EU has different countries with different legal and tax nuances. We want to make sure that when our customers get Metallic as our customers thankfully in our first launching of Amir now can, that purchasing, that using experience is seamless, sales are frictionless. And the product stands the promises that we make to those customers. So fully behind our phased release for Metallic as are some of our initial early adopter customers in the geographies that we've launched in already. So let's talk about some of the massive changes that we've all experienced since last year. Mark, let's stick with you. Talk to us about some of the changes that you've seen from Amir customers with respect to data protection and data security. As we've seen a lot of things going on, globally ransomware on the rise, every 11 seconds there's a ransomware attack. What are some of the recent challenges that you're hearing from customers that you believe Metallic and Mayo is going to resolve? Yeah, I mean, certainly, even before the current COVID crisis, we were seeing a huge increasing uptake of customers wanting to use SAS applications and to protect SAS workloads. The growth in adoption of Office 365 clearly has driven the need for compelling SAS best solutions for that market. You overlay on that the situation that COVID has created for us all, which in reality is denying our customers with its two most valuable important assets, access to premises and access to staff. And increasingly the staff it does have access to are storing, protecting, generating and creating data, not in the data center, not in the cloud but on laptops. So really it's for us, it's a perfect opportunity and we're seeing an increase in demand from our customers wanting rapid solutions to protecting and managing data, to have low footprint in terms of skills and staff and to reduce the need for them to buy physical infrastructure and to expand an already at capacity set premises. And in many cases, they can't even get access to. So it's very much a perfect storm for the solution that Metallic provides. Yeah, Janet, following on to that and just in terms of when Mark mentioned, especially when this first happened, not being able to get access to the premises, this massive pivot to work from home and suddenly millions of endpoints scattered globally. Talk to us about some of the things that you saw here in North America in terms of customer demand changing. Oh, that's a great question. We absolutely saw changes. I mean, I go back to what Satya Nadella said, you know, the CEO of Microsoft, he even said in April and May that what we are seeing is two years of digital transformation happening in a two month period. And that's absolutely what we're seeing. So the interest in fast as Mark mentioned, and then interest in protecting endpoints, your laptops and your desktop as you have an increasingly remote and distributed workforce has completely changed. I mean, when we spoke to you last year at Go, we had endpoint backup more for completeness to round out our portfolio. We didn't expect it to be a lead offering and take off the way it has, but now with the changes everyone's seeing and with what IT teams need to do, with what security teams and cloud architects need to do, we're absolutely seeing that need for endpoint protection growth. Yeah, so just to add to that, Lisa, is the endpoint potential is also seeing a change in a shift in the types of markets that are looking to Metallica as a solution. You know, recall that we originally targeted Metallica and SMB mid-market market where people were looking for simple, predictable, low cost, but yet still scalable infrastructure. The massive drive to protect endpoints and to maintain compliance and control of data there is actually driving large enterprise customers to combo and Metallica as a solution for protecting not hundreds of endpoints, not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of endpoints for some of the customers that we're now talking to. And that's probably going to be something that we see becomes permanent. You know, we're seeing so many leaders, Satya Nadella, you mentioned, Jana, we've heard other ones, Antonio Neary from HPE saying, you know, I expect at least 50% of the workforce to stay remote. So this was a big need. It was a big boom, but a good amount of this is probably not going to change. How is Metallic positioned to help your customers not just survive this time, but be able to thrive and become the winners of tomorrow? I think one real advantage of Metallic is the two technologies that it's built on top of. One is Metallic's part of combo. So what we can do is evolve with the needs of our customers, take all that IP, all those patents, decide what workloads are going to help our customers through these times and release those as new offerings delivered as fast. It allows us to be agile and to pivot as needed. And that's what you'll see, as I said, we're doubling our product offering, we're taking that feedback in real time and that's something we'll be announcing very soon next month. In addition to that, we're also built on top of Microsoft Azure. So we're leveraging certainly their enterprise scalability, the trust and security that they have because we're really something that flexes from the one terabyte data set to the 10,000 terabyte as you're looking to scale and protect your infrastructure. So we are poised to take on that agility that times like these demand. Do you think? I think we should just add to that as well, is if you look at our existing customers that have been traditionally using on-prem combo complete software or they're bought on a perpetual subscription basis, a number of those have been looking for metallic to protect some specific workloads like endpoint, for example. But the way we've done this is the metallic solution and the on-prem solution are manageable from a single combo interface like a men's center interface. So it's not a temporary decision to move to SaaS and then that customer then has to move it back in order to control and manage it in an on-prem environment. They get the best of both worlds from two solutions fit for the purpose they're intended from a company that has a 20-year reputation in designing, building and selling scalable, secure data protection infrastructure. Breeze have a question in terms of the management console. So for example, Mark, the situation that you're talking about customers that may have been using convo on-prem for a long time now have had in the last year and now in EMEA the opportunity to leverage SaaS data protection for Office Microsoft 365, for example, endpoints. Talk to me a little bit about the management of that. If a customer, legacy combo customer has been using on-prem and then they add metallic for SaaS data protection for, say, Microsoft 365, is that managed by a single console? Exactly, it's managed by a command center console so they can see, manage, control, report. All the data that exists within then metallic SaaS-based solution and that that sits within their on-prem or their hybrid cloud environment giving them that total flexibility. And with the recent announcement launched earlier in October of our MCSS and Microsoft, sorry, Metallic Cloud Storage solution that also helps our customers that aren't yet looking to move to Metallic to make the step to put some of their on-prem data rapidly and easily into cloud as a target as a Metallic Cloud Storage service. And that's a future stepping stone to a full Metallic software as a service solution should they so choose for a 365 or endpoint. So we're giving customers the ability to move from self-managed to fully managed with a SaaS solution in the middle. And from a target market perspective, Mark, some of the things that we've seen globally that are new targets, I mentioned ransomware on the rides, you know, healthcare organizations, schools and governments, are there any specific industries that are gonna be leading edge for Metallic in EMEA? What we've seen from the initial market data and the market uptake by segment from the America's NAND launch is interest from every sector but a particular interest from the sectors where technology is a key differentiator, particularly finance, banking, insurance and the telco sector, the tech sector and the retail sector. Interestingly enough, we're also seeing in the government and public services sector from our recent NAND launch and some of the demand and interest in EMEA is validating this. Customers in public sector organizations, central and local government, who traditionally have been fixated on a CAPEX buying model and on-prem solutions, moving and starting to look increasingly at SAS to get solutions up running protective and secure rapidly in the cloud. And so we're seeing an encouraging uptake in public sector organizations, which are using SAS as a way to move from CAPEX to OPEX models, which is particularly reassuring. And Janet, question for you, if we look at data protection as a service, the fastest growing market segment, rather in data protection market, what are some of the things that knowing Metallic's first year in the evolution, the changes that the world has seen, but also this demand for data production as a service? What are some of the things that we can expect in Metallic's second year? Yeah, so first, you're absolutely right. Data protection as a service is becoming increasingly popular. You know, these are cloud-based solutions, also known as backup as a service. And I think what we're finding as we talk to customers is everyone has a cloud-based initiative, whether they're starting it or they're well on their way. So having a data protection as a service solution, like Metallic, can either be your first move into the cloud, starting with your backup targets and leveraging NCSS, as Mark explained, is one way to do that, or it can just be another point in a customer's hybrid story, you know, how they're starting to leverage data protection as a service, SaaS delivery. And there's this whole notion now of SaaS for SaaS. Now you need SaaS backup or your SaaS applications to follow how the data moves. And that's what we're doing for Office 365. In the second year, we're certainly aiming to continue at increasing our workload supported, the product set, and continuing our geo expansion as we are right now with Amia. This is certainly critical as we continue. We'll also be looking to engage local partners. You know, we work with resellers and distributors today. And we're also going to continue expanding our offerings in Azure Marketplace. We went live in Azure Marketplace last quarter and we're seeing transactions come through there. And we want to continue building out our Marketplace model as well. Last question, Jennifer, you mentioned SaaS for SaaS. And there's been a lot of talk about that recently with customers in every segment. And there was this sort of, there's a shared responsibility model that Microsoft has on Salesforce right in box. But it's been interesting on a lot of customers I've spoken with in the last few months and Salesforce ended support for the data recovery service I think in end of July of going, wait, we thought it was in the cloud. We have to back it up. So is that another direction in terms of metallic's future of being able to protect more types of SaaS workloads besides Microsoft 365? Well, that's certainly the idea and starting with Office 365 is how do we compliment what Microsoft already offers? Right? Office 365, Salesforce, all of these tools are workflow tools, they're integral in organizations or they're just holding critical data. So how do we compliment that through data backup and protection that gives them the control they need? Whether it's policy customization, smart configurations to help them through this and now e-discovery on top to be able to search and manage compliance needs. So we really wanna be that kind of extra security blanket for all of these SaaS applications and that's really what we're aiming to do over time but Office 365 is our focus right now. I think just picking up Lisa on Janet's point about the two points of scale for us about scaling out and launching in new markets and bringing new workloads into the metallic portfolio. One of the things that we understand is clearly we're seeing significant demand for 0365 and endpoint use cases for the metallic but that's also not lose sight of the fact that a number of organizations are coming to us to protect their VMs and their file server environments albeit in initially smaller environments and they're starting to ask us specifically about our plans to incorporate additional enterprise type on-prem workloads in a metallic environment and the fact that we've built 20 years of expertise and IP in that space and we've been probably the quickest to launch the most innovative and wide this range of workloads in our on-prem and subscription based software makes it far easier for us to pivot and to extend over time rapidly the workloads that metallic supports for customers wanting to move traditionally on-prem workloads that are not just 0365 and endpoint but VMs and other database workloads into the cloud and that's a unique differentiator for where metallic can take our customers not just geographically but in terms of diversity of workloads that we'll be able to cover. Great point Mark, absolutely. Well, thank you both for explaining the evolution of metallic, a Commvault venture in its first year giving us an insight into some of the recent new announcements and a peek into what's to come. Janet and Mark, we appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching a CUBE conversation.