 Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you by Veritas. Welcome back to Veritas Vision, hashtag VTAS vision. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and this is our second day of Veritas Vision 2017. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman, my co-host Jim Livingston is here. He's the Worldwide Vice President of Global Services at Veritas, good to see you, thanks for coming on. Ah, I appreciate the opportunity. So we love talking services, we're talking off camera. To me, it's where the value is when you talk to customers. It's really, I mean, yeah, product is great, and features are great, but it's services at the end of the day, it keeps them coming back, keeps them happy, solves their problems, where the rubber meets the road. So, tell us about... So Dave, I need you to be one of my top sales reps. Right, I mean, that's outstanding. Well, because services doesn't get the attention, I think it deserves. It's sort of undervalued, certainly, in the trade press. I mean, I'm sure you'd agree with that, but when you talk to a customer and say, okay, we had 100 points to allocate, how much would you place on service? It's oftentimes well over 50%, is that what you've seen? So I'd say it varies by solution. You know, I will tell you that from my perspective, running a services business inside a product company is a little bit different. Mm-hmm. First and foremost, I believe my charter is really to ensure that our customers get the most value from the products. They're able to explore and utilize any of the features and functions that really are applicable to the object. The objective they're trying to solve, the outcomes they're trying to drive towards, and that's a critical piece, and then we just want to make sure they have a great experience. So from my perspective, what I really want to focus on is making sure that we really drive that. What's interesting, though, is I will tell you one of the challenges with that is if you look at, as we've ramped up our innovation engine, which is phenomenal, all the product launches, all the new products, a lot of which we've talked about this week at the conference, it's incumbent on me then to make sure that we've done all the things to continue to refine and redevelop and retrain our people to make sure they're aligned to those, but also aligned to not just the skills of the new products and skills necessary to extract the value from those products, but all the things associated with the new environmental aspects, all the cloud platform attributes, container-based complications, or things like that. So it's been phenomenal to build and align to that journey. Right. So we spoke to Bill Coleman yesterday and he talked about putting in kind of the leadership to help drive not only innovation, but kind of the culture, the vision and where you're driving it. What do you see as the opportunity and how much change needs to happen inside the services organization compared to when it was a piece of Symantec? So I think the very first thing we have to do is we have to continue to recalibrate around thinking outcomes. It's a very simple thing to say, it's a very difficult thing to do. It really, what it requires first and foremost is trying to engage earlier in that life cycle, earlier in the process of engaging and talking to customers and trying to identify ultimately what are their thing, what are the objectives they're trying to solve for, what are the outcomes that they're looking for, what's their imperatives. And so for me, that's a large piece of this is to engage early and then focus all those discussions around outcomes versus fundamentally, I believe that's the basic difference between a product sales motion and a solution sales motion is really aligned to those outcomes. So it's a cultural shift, no doubt. There's a lot of emerging tech that we're talking about this week. How much is consulting, how much is services, what's kind of the makeup of your organization look like in your engagement with customers? So I'd say right now it's about 50-50, where about 50% of those services we're trying to engage and I'm trying to move that to more and more earlier in the process. If I think about, as we develop skills not just around our platform but around the things that are ancillary, cloud, containers, all the different things that are adjacent or add complexity to our world and most importantly to the customer's world. For me, the earlier we can bring those in so that we can align and ensure that we start their journey we align to the things that they want, the things that they need in terms of their environment, serving their customers, aligning to their strategy. So that's a big piece of it is shifting earlier and driving much more of a consulting base versus just the traditional deployment services. So people process technology, we always talk about that on theCUBE. Technology, the execs always tell us the practitioners, generally we got that covered. You've been around long enough to know, see different evolutions of technology and how that technology is applied. The industry is getting so much more complex. Things are happening much, much faster but in thinking about, not the technology but the people in process pieces that have evolved. I wonder if you could comment on what you've seen over your years, describe kind of where we are today and where you see it all going. Great question. So with the rate of change has been phenomenal and it absolutely, it creates challenges every day which are actually typically every challenge is an opportunity from my perspective. For me personally, what we really try to focus on is first and foremost, develop the skills that are closest and in closest relation to us so that we can apply those skills and the knowledge and the expertise of our engineering team, our consulting team to ultimately align to the customer's objectives. So if you think about things that are happening, for example, without a doubt, the one that's happening to, virtually all of our customers is the proliferation of cloud. What it really means to them is, their information fabric, where their information lies, their charter as an IT organization, our traditional customer, their charters become much more complex just to challenge, identify where all the information assets are is a big opportunity for us to come in and assist them in that process. And then ultimately to be able to take their strategies around data protection, business continuity or disaster recovery, whatever it is around how they protect and secure that data to be able to take that into something that has proliferated into so many different areas, both in the infrastructure base and then driven by applications and other cloud deployment methods. So you guys are both at EMC, which Tucci was always famous to saying we're a products company, not a services company. Veritas obviously, great engineering team, product company. Talk about services inside of a products company. So I'll go back to what I said first and foremost, I believe services, the first charter, although it doesn't have to be the only charter, the first charter that you have to do well is you have to ensure that you have the skills and capability to guarantee a great customer experience. That for me is the very first piece. So typically that doesn't rise to the occasion of saying it's a services company, it really rises to the occasion of we have a great customer experience, we have a loyal customer base and we have a customer base that ultimately is so rewarded with the capabilities of the product because they're enjoying them, it's well integrated into their environment, et cetera. It becomes a sticky customer as well and I believe that's our first charter. Take us inside some of those customers, what are the real, some of the main pain points you're seeing, where are the areas that you find that your team's able to help them the most? It's great. Multiple areas, you could start with the very basics what I would consider kind of very infrastructure oriented and very basic around storage. Customers are constantly looking, as clouds are proliferating, so is their storage base. And all of them are ultimately looking for ways that they can lower their costs and still maintain access to the information that they need and protect it in the same manner. So going and design and architect a solution that allows them to leverage commodity storage, cloud based storage, et cetera, and still have a lot of the functionality that they're used to, that aligns right into their existing data protection strategy as one good piece. Monster ROIs on that. Then you get into more complex things around compliance. Most notably GDPR being on six, seven, eight months out and it's driving a lot of interest in demand, but in reality, if you go around the globe, the vast majority of the countries are driving some level of increased focus on regulations that drive a level of protection of privacy, personal data privacy, et cetera. And again, having the technology is one thing and Mike does a phenomenal job of building the products that the customers need to be able to locate, classify, protect, et cetera. My job and my charter is to make sure the customers can actually take that technology and use it in that manner. So we're doing, to your question, I'm seeing a huge uptick in that short time I've been here, tremendous amount of interest in customers wanting to engage and leverage in that fashion. Talk about where Veritas picks up and leaves off relative to some of the SI partners that you have. What's that relationship like? So I'd say we tend to stay fairly focused on our technology and how we work and partner and align to those types of partners. As a matter of fact, compliance and regulatory activities are a great example of that. If you really think about a typical customer's concerns around how they protect their customer's data, their employee data, their supplier data, et cetera, we provide a lot of the technology and the infrastructure behind that. The overarching process and the business processes go much wider and that's where alignment with systems integrators and things like that that have a much more robust in terms of breadth into lots of business units, et cetera, becomes an important partnership on our part. We can focus on our piece, really create a solution that's beneficial first and foremost to the customer and helps complete their solution. One of the things Stu and I have been talking about this week is you got this massive Veritas install base. You're moving toward this vision of modern data protection and information management. Services is going to be key there. How do you get the customer from point A to point B? Bill Coleman said it's ours to lose. That means pressures on your organization to make it happen. So what's that conversation like? What's the journey you're taking customers through there? A lot of those, we try and start those journeys first and foremost with assessments or things that are really driven around identifying what the transformational event is. That's all about engaging, bringing the breadth of knowledge around not just the products, but how the products are used and how they're going to be deployed early in that process. And that's a four-pay service? That's a four-pay service, but it's something that we really focus on the deliverables. So it's a four-pay service that says, hey, we're going to come out with a roadmap, a specific solution, et cetera. But that's important because the customer has skin in the game. They do. If it's a freebie, that's nice, but then a lot of times they don't show up for the meeting. And that's so true, Dave. And that's a big piece honestly and in some cases, candidly, the challenge or the opportunity in terms of a four-pay is to ensure their skin in the game. I think further down the, further into the journey around what I consider things around driving operational efficiency or optimizing the customer's environment, that actually becomes another great point of entry. Sometimes you go in and you just want to ensure that the customers are getting maximum value for the product. They're continuing to have a great experience, et cetera. But in all cases, those ultimately, there's always changes in the environment around, not just environmental changes, changes within the customer around new priorities, new objectives, new imperatives for next year, the following year. And to the extent that we can take that opportunity through assessments and health checks and things like that to identify those, map them up to their business imperatives and ultimately go in and ensure that they continue down that journey with our solutions is a big piece. Yeah, Jim, one of the things we're also looking at, we used to sell point products. Then it was kind of a suite and now we even talk a little bit about a platform. You know, what's the impact on the services for moving to kind of that integrated platform? So it's actually, I'd say two-fold. The first piece is really, first and foremost, we want to make sure the customers are getting maximum value for the solution. And I'd say that's probably charter number one. The other piece is, in many cases, kind of a little bit going to the transformational or the assessment type services or more traditional consulting services. In many cases, you buy a platform and you engage and you have three or four pieces of functionality and you're really looking for three. And we just gave you four. One of the opportunities from my perspective is, how do we actually ensure that the customer understands the value that they have on that fourth and then we can deploy it in a manner that they get the most value for it and it becomes a benefit for us and most importantly, a benefit for our customers. Feedback from the customers at the event. What have you been hearing? I mean, you guys are a year into this 360. What are they telling you? It's been phenomenal. Both from customers and partners. I've spent time really, probably equally with both. It's been a lot of excitement around the product launches, a lot of excitement around the innovation, not just of the launches for this week, but really the innovation, the changes that have taken place over last year, even before I joined. I'd say one of the ones that actually has resonated and I've heard most often is when people talk about modernizing data protection. Mike Palmer in yesterday's general session used this slide. It was actually the first time I'd seen it as well. I'm like, I got to get a copy of that because it actually just, it shows with any customer bars, the breadth of change that's taking place in their environment from cloud and hybrid and all the different things, which is a challenge and the opportunity for me to go in and ensure that we continually align to those and we ensure that they're aligned. Veritas has long history working on lots of different solutions. From a services standpoint though, I've got to think cloud's a little bit different. We've talked to customers, if you're a big customer, you probably get good support. Some smaller ones, well, you're a little bit more on your own. What's your experiences? How is it to work with those hyperscale partners? So from one of the things I'd like to do is I like to ensure that, handily, we can establish an environment that we can improve and level out the consistency in some cases of some of the cloud experiences that our customers have. And by the way, I'm also a big fan and we're really putting a lot of our focus around automation, which actually takes the burden off of the customers in many cases. And we'll have a lot of focus in the second half of our fiscal year in the next six months, really around driving automation so that as cloud touches any type of deployment or interaction with our products, there's all the work, obviously, that Mike and the product teams are driving themselves. There's areas that really fall below that, that are really much more aligned to the business process that the customers perform, where I can actually, I believe I can do a lot to improve their service across all the platforms, whether it's Amazon, Azure, IBM, Google, et cetera. We'll give you last thoughts. You talked a little bit about sort of the feedback, but Veritas Vision 2017, what's your takeaway? Exciting event, great opportunity for me personally to meet a lot of customers in one location. I think a great demonstration of the excitement around the company where we're at in terms of our evolution as a company, most importantly, where we're at with regards to our product roadmap. All right, Jim, we'll leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it, good luck. Appreciate it. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is Kuber live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back.