 Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's the Cube. Covering VeeamON 2018, brought to you by Veeam. We're back in the windy city. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. This is our second day of covering VeeamON 2018. Second year of the Cube at VeeamON. Danny Allen is here as the vice president of product strategy at Veeam. Welcome, back to the Cube. Good to see you again. Thank you, very excited to be here. Love the keynote yesterday, gave a lot of detail. The bumper sticker, the summary on your product strategy. How would you summarize your product strategy? It is to be the most comprehensive intelligent data management platform that meets the demands of the enterprise. So when you say intelligent data management, people hear that, they certainly don't go immediately to backup and data protection. So you've expanded that notion of what you guys do. There's a TAM expansion there as well, which is great. What do you guys mean by intelligent data management? So, believe it's a journey, first of all, right? And it starts with backup in our application. I know that there are vendors that are saying, hey, this is a new world, completely different. You know what, the cornerstone of this is still backup in our application. So that is the first stage on this journey. We believe that right now, especially the customers I'm talking to, they're deploying things on the public cloud. They're deploying things in SaaS clouds. It's all over the place. It's growing, it's sprawling, trying to get their hands around it. And so they have to do that first as the next step. And then it's an evolution beyond that. Okay, now I understand it. Now, let me do something with it. Let me actually drive the business to better outcomes. So, some things we know, or we believe anyway, that data protection and orchestration are moving up on the list of priorities for CXOs. That's, I think, very clear, you would agree. But there's a dichotomy that exists between the perception from the business side as to what can be done in terms of data protection, particularly with regard to the degrees of automation and what IT today can deliver. So there's tension there. And there's, frankly, lots of opportunity for churn. When you talk to people about, okay, are you going to switch data protection vendors as you go to this digitization, multi-cloud, or are you wed to them? And they're like, no, we're totally open. We have an open mind. So that's good news for you guys. So, thinking about those trends, how do you take advantage from a product standpoint? Well, Veeam has been known, I always talk about three words. It just works. People love us because the software works and it's reliable. And so that's the starting point in all of this. The opportunity, I believe, is in that it just works. And so if we take them through this journey towards intelligent data management, every step has to be about it just works. In some ways, the step from stage one to stage two, which is aggregating data, is at an infrastructure level. As you get to the later stages of three, four, or five, it just works at a business level. And so our focus is still going to be on that simplicity, reliability, making sure the platform works. So I want to follow up on that because it just works. Obviously it's going to resonate with the IT Pro, who's got a deal with failed backups, with poor reporting, with lousy recovery, slow, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, getting pounded because they're losing data. We all know that thankless world. But in terms of the business side, there's billions of dollars being left on the table by businesses in the Fortune 1000 because they have inadequate data protection, processes, procedures, architectures. Not, I mean, there's becoming aware of it. But what's the above the line message? So it just works. How do you crack through that billions of dollars of opportunity and get CFOs to open up the wallet? That is the great opportunity for you guys, we think. It is, so they have challenges in a number of areas, right? Compliance, security, regulatory. We don't talk to executives at the C level and hear them say, oh, I need backup, I need replication. They're saying reduce my costs. Well, if you can leverage, it just works and deploy this in a way that requires less FTEs that makes it simpler to do it, that can give them attestation, proof that, hey, I can fail over to the public cloud, I can burst up to the public cloud or to a managed cloud. If I can give that fluidity, that's an it just works at an ROI perspective. Or we talk about intelligent data management and sometimes I'll be honest, I roll my eyes when I hear artificial intelligence. And that's not because it's not real. It's because what we haven't done is taken it just works and applied it to the business. So an example of this, forget artificial intelligence for a moment. One of the examples I give is, if you see malware crossing the network, that is a really good time to do something. Let's leverage that intelligence to provide an outcome. And that's an it just works at the business level rather than at the infrastructure level. All right, so Danny, I love the message. It's any data, any app across any cloud. We have these pesky little things called like physics and data gravity and the like. So, protecting and getting access to my data in the public cloud versus the edge with, we're going to see 90 plus percent of the data in the future versus my traditional data center and the SAS, it's a complicated world. How do you make it that simple? Well, so let me expand our benefits into a third area. So Veeam took off in that it was easy to use. It was reliable. But the second one is the portability and the agnostic system of the platform. You didn't need media servers. It was all self-describing backup things, VBKs or Vibs without trying to get too technically clear. That self-describing capability allows us to move between infrastructures. In some ways, what VMware did at the hardware level, they decoupled the workload from the physical server. We're decoupling the workload from the infrastructure on which it sits because it's this self-describing very portable format that enables fluidity of movement. All right, so I haven't heard much about edge yet. Is that a place that you expect Veeam to have a play? Yes, and I expect we have to do that. And the reason is because a lot of the computing now is happening out at the edge and you want to make your actions out at the edge. There's this concept in the U.S. Air Force called the Udalloo, observe, orient, decide, and act. You would try and act out on the edge. But my belief is that data protection systems will do some of that protection out on the edge, but sometimes they won't know what to do. And so the information will be sent back to the cloud or sent back to the core to make a better business decision on what should we do with this data. When you think about your platform, we were talking to Peter McKay about you've gone and gone from a product company to a platform company. We talked about that a little bit, but I wonder if we could dig into it more from a standpoint of your role as head of product strategy. What does the platform mean? Where do you see that platform going? Can you share a little roadmap with us? Platform to me has kind of three connotations to it. One is that you have the capabilities within the platform that are very broad, and we believe we have that. We can cover physical, virtual cloud, we have orchestration, we have reporting, we have all of those capabilities. The second though is comprehensive APIs. You need to have the extensibility in a platform that you can actually talk to the ecosystem of partners. And that's actually the third area. It's being able to work with your Cisco's and your NetApps and your HPEs and all of our partners to deliver these better outcomes. Yeah, I mean, it's funny. Last year, Stu, when we saw a beam and sort of the introduction of those capabilities, I noted that, I remember the ascendancy of EMC back in the day, they did a really good job of connecting to everything that was out there. I mean, it sounds so simple, but it's integration work. They just went in and rolled up their sleeves and did the dirty work. It's a lot of work, Dave. I've got the scars living in the center of the lab. You guys do that dirty work so that, and every time you do that, it expands your total available market. And I don't want to say it's unique in the business, but you seem to have an aptitude to do it without it appearing to be such a heavy lift to the marketplace. Why is that? Well, frankly, it's a scalability thing. We're an almost $1 billion company. This year, we should cross $1 billion in bookings. And if you want to scale to add more and more partners, you take our storage integrations, for example, we were doing maybe one a year for a few years. And we recognize all these vendors knocking on our door saying, hey, give us that capability. And so we've added just in the last six months, IBM, Lenovo, Infinidap, Pure. The only way you can do that is to have a consistent API framework that people can plug into. It's the way we scale. Right, well, I mean, but again, I look at a company like VMware when we saw all the sort of integration challenges that they went through and the limited resources that they had, you remember it was, and the cartel got the SDKs first and it took forever to get the integrations done. A year later, you might see some function. It just seems like you guys have some kind of good process internally to actually make this stuff work. We're the largest small company you've ever met. We're really agile internally. It helps us to respond to the customer requests. They come to us and say, hey, I want this, I want this, I want this. If we can't respond to that quickly, we'll never be successful. Danny, just wondering if you can stand a little bit on the cloud opportunity. Should we be looking to see more cloud services out of Veeam as you kind of layer on what's happening you had the acquisition a year ago? Unquestionably, so I say 2017 was the year of agents. We added support for physical and for cloud, but through agents. I tell everyone that 2018 is really the year of the cloud for us. We started the year by acquiring N2W software, but last week, for example, it's not even making huge PR announcements. We just released version two of backup for Office 365, which adds OneDrive and SharePoint support. And you'll see in the next release of our product, Anton has a breakout session on this today, another huge capability around not just integrating with the cloud, but actually integrating in a way that provides business value. I'm a big believer in you don't just put a checkbox in. I support cloud. I can send things to the cloud. It's how do I actually use the cloud in a way that delivers business outcomes? So this year actually, 2018 is about cloud for Veeam. I want to follow up on that because as an observer of this industry for a long time, there seems to be sort of two philosophies, and you just laid out yours. You're not a big believer in checkboxes, but I've seen it. You're an old company. We got every feature, and it would take the sales person, and we have this, they don't, headlock buy it. So you're not trying to do the checkbox game. You're trying to map business value to, or your features and capabilities to business value for the customer. And that's how you sell and emphasize in your sales motions. Yes, so this is somewhat of a controversial statement, but we sometimes say, we won't be first to market with a feature. We'll be first to market with a solution. So you can come out with, for example, sending things to object storage in the cloud. And if you're sending up a one gigabyte object, that is a totally, you're not going to leverage that in the real world. But if you deliver that in a way that actually is effective, then you can leverage the cloud as a tool because the cloud is not a destination for most of these enterprises. It's a tool in their toolbox that they use to solve a problem. So we're all about solving those problems. Excellent. All right, Danny, thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. We'll give you a last word on Veeam on 2018 and maybe give us a little preview of what we can expect. Well, we're really excited to be here. The most exciting thing to me is, is the recognition in the conversations with customers about this journey towards intelligent data management. As you said, most customers are in stage one, stage two, but for us, this is a partnership. This isn't us just giving software. This is talking to customers, talking to partners, making them successful. All right, well, hey, congratulations on a great show and all the success. And thanks for coming to theCUBE. Thank you very much. Happy to be here. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest from Chicago, theCUBE Veeamon 2018. We'll be right back.