 From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeMon 2019, brought to you by VeeM. Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris. We're here at day one of VeeMon 2019 at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. Rat Pack used to hang out here. It was just kind of the big theme of the reception last night. Dale Hoffman is here. He's the director of offering management for VMware solutions at IBM. Dale, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks, David. No, it's pleasure to be here and, Teter. Nice to meet you. Okay, yeah, pleasure to meet you as well. So let's unpack the notion of offering management that people generally refer to as product management. IBM calls it offering management. So you are focused on the public cloud, but specific to the VMware swim lane, is that right? Yeah, that is correct. So if you think about it, I own the VMware offering solutions on our cloud. So that is everything associated with the whole VMware software-defined data center stack, but also a lot of our partner solutions, many solutions in the security space, many solutions in the business resiliency space, and that's kind of where Veeam had came in on that aspect. So the first public cloud deal that VMware did, correct me if I'm wrong, was with IBM, was it not? Yeah, so if you just go back a little bit in time, IBM itself is probably the largest, if not the largest provider of VMware workloads, and mainly that's due to a lot of our GTS services business. But back in 2016, this looked like a great opportunity to actually go on the public cloud and actually stand up a software-defined data center stack from VMware. So we started on that in that partnership with VMware, and started to just basically grow that business. That business has been growing at about a 75% cager over the last few years, and then that was kind of like step one, get the stack. And then step two was, how do you get those security services in, and some of those business resiliency services in? And that's where we started to go in and do a real deep partnership with Veeam, and happy to say that we started that in 2017, and we have about 12,000 plus VMs, both bare metal and also in virtualized VMware, on our cloud. It's been about 170% year-to-year growth rate, so Veeam's killing it on our cloud. It really are. And your scope is anything in the IBM cloud that's VMware related. So it could be database services, could be object stores, obviously data protection with Veeam. What do you think is driving the Veeam IBM momentum? Well, I think what's driving it is, if you think about a lot of these critical customers, first thing they're going to want to do is take advantage of a lot of things that you get with the cloud, whether it's moving from a CapEx to an OpEx model, or being able to get that capacity expansion, and there's a whole bunch of different use cases that you got. But one of the key things to them is this whole business continuity. The ability to make sure that I can back it up, I can recover as quickly as I possibly can. And maybe more importantly, we have about 60 data centers worldwide. And being able to essentially have that geographic span is a huge advantage. And also the fact that, just take backup as a simple example. When I back up, I may be moving data back and forth in a particular region, I'm looking for some latency. And not to be able to be charged for that, it's a powerful value proposition for the customer. So we don't charge for any type of data movement inside our cloud. And also when you go outside, maybe for high availability, outside into the geographic reach, the same thing happens. So I think those are some very key things that it's the security, the very fast backup and recovery, and knowing that you're not getting charged for that private secure network. Brings a real good value proposition to our customers that are leveraging Veeam and other services. So we think that we're now entering into a third era of cloud. We're the first one who's basically makers, companies that created SaaS companies, gaming companies, and then people moved analytics into there for a variety of reasons. Now the enterprise seems to be getting in in a big way. Certainly to large size, but that's starting to move down into the mid-range as well. Your advantage, IBM's advantage has always been your ability to engage and bind with your customer base. How are you, how is IBM helping to move these customers forward? And what is the backup restore conversation in that process? Is it an afterthought? Is it something that's becoming more central to their thinking? How is it working? Yeah, so that's a great question, Peter. So the way I think we and IBM Cloud have thought about this is we've kind of divided the journey to cloud into two pieces, the 20% that are there. They weren't the real, I'll call them, business critical type of workloads that are going on, but that next 80%, that's where we really see a huge advantage to us. It's our enterprise relationships. It's what we do from a security aspect on the cloud and how easily we could help them, what we call lift and shift and migrate things over. And then once you're there, how can I help give you that assurance that we're going to give you the best backup, the best recovery in the event of a disaster, something that can, if you do see a failure, being able to have a very fast recovery point, you know, objective and get you knowing that everything is secure and backed up and has this wide geographic spread. And even think about in the areas of compliance these days, GDPR, I mean, you have to have these data centers worldwide and sometimes they have to be fixed. So we provide that whole value proposition, I think, to those clients in that essence. And I think the business critical and eventually what we call mission critical workloads that will eventually move over, it's probably the best choice to be able to have that trusted place to put workloads. So the other related to that is you've got customers who are now moving and we're going to see them moving at varieties of speeds, but increasingly, the enterprises are going to move faster to do this than they've done in almost anything previously. And you've got Veeam, a very hard charging vendor that has a reputation for great quality stuff, but a lot of innovation moving very quickly. How are you ensuring that there's no impedance mismatch between you, IBM, IBM customers, and Veeam and the technology vectors that it's on? Yeah, well first of all, it's a very, very deep partnership. I mean, very, very close relationship with them. This is not a vendor supplier relationship. This is a very, very deep partnership. And the other thing is from a technology standpoint, one of our big differentiators on the cloud is we actually provide that access all the way down to the hypervisor level. So you have full freedom of action to do whatever you want to be able to do. So from a Veeam standpoint, since it's really based on a hypervisor type of technology, that gives us a real big advantage because let's say, David, you're using Veeam on-prem. I give it the exact same look and feel as if you're off-prem, and I essentially make that data center look like an extension, like it was just in the next building and start shooting it. It's just another group. It's just another pool of VMs. Absolutely, and that whole control and management of that gives you extreme flexibility that you really can't get in any other type of cloud. I like to say that you can come in and custom build your infrastructure, your VMware software defined data center stack, your services such as Veeam, you custom build it any way that you want. And it's like lease on a car. After you custom-built that car, we hand you the keys. It's client-managed. You go out and do whatever you want with that. And if you don't like it, you can turn those keys back in because we just do things not on a long-term commitment but on monthly commitments and such. I want to maybe drill down on that a little bit, Jill, and try to better understand some of the flexibility that I'm inferring from your statement. So you're a main framer. You remember the days of SMS, and one of the things about it was that I could set policy for data protection for backup based upon the workload. I could say back this up once a week or back this up every day or every hour or what it was. I had a granular level of capability. It was mainframe, so it was big stuff. A lot of the challenges within, certainly the mid-size and smaller businesses, it's like one size fits all. This has been a problem for everybody for years. Janie Allen this morning and the analyst and media session was talking about- There's the products guy here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talking about the ability to sort of set granular levels, the pressures of RPO and RTO, and I want to sort of test how challenging it is to do that by workload or by application and how IBM and Veeam are supporting that. How complicated is it? Are your clients doing it, or is it still kind of a one-size-fits-all world? I wouldn't say it's one-size-fits-all, but what I would say is by, given the clients full control and having the freedom and the flexibility to do things that they want, the tight integration of this Veeam technology into the vCenter console and such, it gives them the ability, I like to say, do it at your own pace. Do it when you want to. Even something as simple as, let's say, managing VMware and patching it. Instead of having somebody else do it for you at their pace, we essentially allow you to do it at your pace when you want to. And it's the same thing with the backup. You do it when you want to at your frequency, what regions you want to go or your whole geographic spread. And we try to provide the maximum flexibility and control to our mutual clients to enable that. And on the automation scale, or the nine inning game of automation, where are we? How automated can I make that? But more importantly, how fast are customers adopting that sort of automation scenario? Yeah, so your experience when you come into our cloud, and essentially you click on, I want to go to the cloud, you click on the VMware offering, it's a very simple menu. You pick your infrastructure, compute network storage, I'll keep it simple for now. You pick your software defined data center stack, and we even enable a BYOL, and a lot of people have their own vSphere licenses. We enable them to go in and insert their key, which is a cost advantage to them. Then you pick your partner services and such. So you pick your Veeam, and then you can go in there and say, well, where do I want to put it? Do I want to put it into vSAN? Do I want to put it into a file-based storage? And I think what we're really excited about is we just recently announced being able to put this into IBM's cloud object storage. And that's huge because if you think about it, we all live in this area of regulatory and compliance, and you can't throw anything away, and the data's just exploding all over the place. So having that ability to put it into a lower-cost storage, and all automated, and essentially veeam, can essentially point to any of those multiple storage tiers, it gives our customers a big advantage so that they can essentially, I'll call it, right-tune what they want to do and where they want to do their backups. So they want something there quick, or they say, ah, you know, that could be a cold vault. I can keep that out there for a while, when I need it, I'll go back and get it. So a lot of flexibility on storage options, a lot of flexibility on the pricing, but veeam, essentially, is that powerhouse behind it that's actually interfacing that vmware world, as well as on the bare metal side, over to those various levels of storage. So, Dave, an answer to your question, we're only on nine innings, I would have said bottom of the first, one out, two men on, one of them is Manny Ramirez. Yeah. Because you just don't know what's going to happen next. And that's what I want to bring up. Veeam talked about- Is he a Boston fan? No, I'm not. I'm not. Veeam talked about the width Veeam, and I'm wondering how IBM sees it bringing its, this massive innovation. You still are one of the leading generators of patents in certainly in the tech industry, but globally. How do you see IBM bringing IBM intellectual property, IBM invention to this width Veeam platform to increase the degree to which it can serve a broader range of customers of different sizes, different geographies, and different workload forms? How do you see IBM participating in that process? Yeah, let me give you a couple examples. So let me just take a non-Veam example just to talk about some IBM innovation. So, about a month ago, we actually introduced something called HyperProtect Crypto Services. That's a big word there. Basically, it is, it's the same technology that we have in System Z that's used by our large enterprise customers that gives you that FIPS 140-2 Level 4. So we are the only cloud in the world that has that technology that's on there. Basically, once you put your keys in there, nobody's going to get to them at all. And it's an innovation of taking something that was done in a different division within IBM and now making that as an endpoint service within our cloud. Now, let me give you an example of doing a little bit of innovation even with Veeam. So one of the things that we are trying to do is, you know, we started out, hey, let's lay down the software data center stack, let's lay down partner services. Now, let's focus on what's that solution layer on top of it? How do we add more value into our clients? So just take SAP, for example. We've just recently announced both on a bare metal and also on our VMware side to be able to have a, we're the only cloud that has a certified SAP server in the cloud. And what we've just recently done is we've integrated and put Veeam as that backup choice for that. So now what that really enables everyone to do is leverage a lot of innovative work that Veeam was doing to make sure that you can back up SAP correctly. We married that with our infrastructure and our bare metal slash VMware stack with Veeam as that backup. And just a little bit of foreshadowing in the future, we're going to look at ways to further automate a lot of that SAP landscape. So our clients see, you know, a much better automated solution so that they essentially, using your baseball analogy, they're going to see that full range of automation and say, wow, I think we're at the end of the game here. This thing truly is automated, easy to consume, and I'll have the confidence of the security and the business resiliency knowing that it's got the trusted IBM name behind it. You know, give us the summary of 2019, maybe some of the first half highlights and maybe show a little leg for the second half. Sure, sure, why not? Leading up to IBM thing. So I mentioned a few things about what we did in the security space already. So we've enabled, besides what we've done with high trust with data and key protection, we've also enabled IBM's key protect services. We brought this system Z hyper protect services into the mix. We've enabled things like Cavionics to bring their risk foresight. So now we can monitor a lot of compliance and keep things in compliance and monitor that for you. We brought some app modernization to essentially help people on their journey modernize their apps, leveraging both an tight integration of VMware and what we call ICP hosted or IBM Cloud Private hosted to get that tight integration and such. But moving forward, I see a couple big things and I'll try to maybe put them in the Veeam perspective and such. You heard me mention before about this, 80% of that real key workload coming over to the cloud that business critical or mission critical. We announced last year something called Mission Critical VMware. And basically what it is, it's two active type of sites with a witness site and you essentially are moving things back and forth. So if you have a failure within a region, you instantly can go in and switch over. And the idea is to give you the highest availability into the cloud. And Veeam is a very much integral part of that solution in the sense that it'll be our backup. And then since you said to do a little bit of foreshadowing and say what's coming in the future, we have a very, very strong single tenant VMware offering on the cloud. Like I was saying, it's client managed, a hypervisor access, you got that extreme flexibility and control. But what we'd like to do is kind of look into a little bit more that multi-tenant type of space. And we think it opens up a whole new market segment for us in that emerging market and commercial market space. I guess who's going to be our partner in that to make the backup happen? That's going to be Veeam. Great. Cool, Dale Hoffman, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Oh thank you for having me. Some of the ways in which IBM is differentiating, not doing infrastructure service and just racing to zero, but really trying to pick your spots and really appreciate your insights and thanks again. Okay, thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris. Day one at Veeam on 2019 and for Miami. You're watching theCUBE, we'll be right back.