 Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2018, brought to you by Commvault. Welcome back to Nashville. You're watching theCUBE and this is Commvault Go, third year of the show, 2,000 people here. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Keith Townsend, happy to welcome to the program two first time guests. To my immediate left is Robert Brower, who's the vice president and chief of staff and sitting next to him is Vincila Lau, who's the president of Worldwide Alliances, new to Commvault recently. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us. All right, so when we talk about alliances, partnerships, it's about the ecosystem and first of all, you guys have an impressive show floor here. I was talking to your CMO on the open here. We go to quite a lot of shows. We love when we're in the center of the energy here. People are clapping, getting excited. You've got partners with showing what they're doing. You've got the technology partners. You've got go-to-market partners. So Robert, maybe we'll start with you. Tell us a little bit about, you know, what would you look at the ecosystem and what brings everybody together for a show like this? What brings everybody together is the opportunity for us to be able to create joint success for our customers. We have taken an act in the last 18 months to really pivot towards our alliance partners with the idea that we should approach with humility. When Hewitt Packard Enterprise, or when Atachi, or when NetApp, or when Cisco is transacting with us, we're a part of a much larger transaction and it's our responsibility to create joint value. Understanding that in that eight-figure deal, we may be six or seven figures of that transaction. We want to create value acceleration through attachment for our partners, create value for our customers, but we want to do so with the understanding that we go into this partnership as an enabler for our success and the partners are the customer's success. And that's really been a strong positive for us and a big pivot in our corporate emotional stack, if you will. How do we work together more collaboratively to create success for our prospects, customers, and ultimately the alliance partner? All right, Vences, I've talked to some of your partners here, one of the big partners, and I was talking to him offline and he's like, look, one of the reasons we partnered deeply with Commvault is they've got good tech, and that's why big traditional companies want to partner together. You're new to this company. Absolutely. What brought you in? What was exciting you? Hopefully something was exciting you about bringing you inside. It's a great question. I think that the most important thing is that on my past 25 years in the IT industry, I've been in several companies. This is the first time I joined a company where the product portfolio is so robust, so simple to use, and so appealing to the customers that I think that's not the problem. What we need to really accelerate our business through our alliance partners, our go-to market, and really address more and more customers in our day-to-day business. So the business is changing, digital transformation, digital business. How has that affected the alliances as you guys are starting to have different conversations with a different part of the business, the focus of your existing customers are changing? How has the conversation changed? Great question, if I might start. Yeah, sure. So when we look at our traditional partners, and traditional partnerships with Atachi as an OEM, Cisco, Hewitt-Packard Enterprise, those are big infrastructure organizations, and those big infrastructure organizations look at the cloud with a certain degree of anxiety. You know, two, three years from now, that concept of raised-floor data center and racks and racks of servers in secondary storage may not exist in the same light that it exists today. We can almost certainly say that. So the great benefit that we can bring to these partners is helping them with that hybrid IT strategy, where we can provide better software, better movement, less cost and infrastructure into the cloud and keep people from learning that cloud is that expensive place to learn, but rather that we can be part of their cloud-enabling strategy in a manner that helps them feel like they've got confidence to go into the next three to five years and understand that they can create value on the data layer that says, today my secondary storage exists in racks, next year or two years or three years from now it may exist in the cloud, but I've been part of the data attached and valuation and control-playing creation that makes them feel like great, I've got a long-term play with Commvault, with value, no matter where the storage resides. In data center, OmniCloud are back to the data center. Yeah, and to add to what Robert was saying, I think that this is also, if you are looking at the customer perspective, they are demanding more. They are demanding only, yes, that the solution is going to optimize the IT resources or it's going to accelerate their outcomes, but even more important is that they want to have an ecosystem of partners or alliances that are going to be able to really help them to navigate and to create that journey that they are moving into the vision that they will have in the future. And I think that this is where we are really excited on creating that ecosystem of partners. Yeah, one of the things that's interesting when I look at not only technology partners but the go-to market is you're starting to help customers move towards that as a service consumption model. Certain partners, people obviously would know, okay, AWS, that's how they do things. Companies like HPE have been helping customers move that way. The channel, I'd be interested to hear your feedback because they are right in the middle of going from box or shrink-wrapped software to subscription models, so maybe you can give us a little color on how that's going from both sides. You want me to start? Yes, sir. Outstanding, good question, thank you Stu. So in that context, you're absolutely right. That traditional reseller that worked in the raised floor, that's really started to pivot over the last few years into a service provider given construct. And that was almost that traditional SP role of I can be your app layer, I can be your host storage layer, I can move your data around. And now it's becoming much more consumption-based. As they look at the models that have been really pioneered by Amazon, really pioneered by the folks with Microsoft and Azure, that I want the outcome. I don't necessarily want to design a whole plan that says, I've basically taken data center operations and given them to you, I just want the outcome. And so being able to help our partners with the playbooks that we're creating around Azure service and being able to work inclusively with those partners that want to make that pivot, we can go there. And for those partners that don't want to make that pivot, they can resell us. And for those customers that are coming to us for the first time, but saying, you know what? My unique use case might be, I only can connect to a data center that's close to Frankfurt because I'm a German financial concern. Great, we've got a partner in that market that runs our playbook that can help you. So as a service for Commvault is really about helping to facilitate a channel to be able to move to that next level without having to be the pioneer taking all the arrows. And I think, I'm sorry, just to add what Roya was saying, it's not only just also as a service, but also in the traditional business. If you are considering the cycles that our traditional partners has been using to put all these solutions together, they've been using very of the most expensive resources that they have on doing testing, doing configuration, doing installation and things like that. What we are doing is helping them from a technology standpoint bringing those solutions faster to market so they will be able to be much quicker on bringing that to the customers. Also they will be able to redeploy those very expensive resources and something more productive like professional services that will help more the customer in terms of the adoption of the solution, mainly if you are thinking about as a service and also being able to expand all these different solutions through all these different branches of the customer. Good point. Big announcements around partnerships with HPE doing a show, the Calis and Commvault integration, great work from a technology perspective, great example of the power of alliance. But let's talk about, you mentioned professional services. How important is professional services or what role does professional services play at the partner level now that you guys have more tightly integrated with HPE and your other partners on delivering the technology, talk to us about professional services. Outstanding, happy to do so. So you can look at the different partners and their needs around professional services and construct a go to market model with them. Again it's about value creation that is better together with that partner. So as a for instance with HPE and GreenLake and what they do with Pointnext, they're very doubled down in terms of hey, we'd like to create value around our services on the Commvault product integrated with our different solution stacks. Perfect, not a problem. If you look at NetApp, NetApp said, you know what, we're not in that services business. We've pivoted away from that. We want to make sure that your solutions can actually stand the trial test of can a customer buy this and use this without having to leverage in a lot of advanced services. We had a great meeting yesterday with Cisco who said the same thing. We're in different theaters where we don't necessarily have a services stack. Can we have our customers buy and successfully consume our joint solutions without having to rely on services to be able to do that? And so to that end, as the partners that we work with, say I need this stack or I need this capability or this go to market, our product is versatile, our depth is sufficiently solid that we can provide that for them and align with what their GTM is. That's one of the reasons why with the NetApp announcement that you've seen, they've come back and said we'd love to have you take on the entire portfolio because they did that hard test. Can your product sustain without a large cord way of services along with it? We could, they said, great, we're in. Yeah, and also if you think about, so the status of the customer, the customer already have an install base, they already are using some other software and what those professional services can help is in two sense. One is how they are going to do the migrations or when you're thinking about hybrid IT, how much of the workloads are going to be in cloud, how much are going to be in secondary, and so on and so forth. So helping the customer in that, you don't need to move in from one place to the other and execute and operate that. All right, you bring up customers having to make change. Wonder if we can unpack a little bit the appliances because that's one thing that, from what I hear and you can validate for me, Commvault, you want to buy the software from Commvault or you want to buy the software and the hardware, Commvault, you guys are pretty agnostic because you have a lot of partners that can help do that. Well, when you get into the field and you say, okay, wait, I started down with one partner and I was buying this server platform of choice and now I want to make a change, how easy is it? I'm sure the software is pretty much the same, but the devil's always in the details there, so help us understand, first of all, big announcement to expand and mature number of partners and the number of different options that you have, so walk through that a little bit and then how do you deal with the field engagement and the various hardware and software models? Got it, so if I can just, I'm going to straight the question different way to make sure I've got it. So, if we're talking about alliances and appliances, it's one of those questions of, if we're both approaching a prospect, how do we establish an appropriate swim lane so that we don't find ourselves in co-optition with that particular partner? The secret in the sauce, if you will, is create better together. And Keith, you said earlier, the store wants integration with Catalyst and the ability for us to be able to create a really strong value proposition with HPE around their value creation with both an existing customer base and then new customers they want to acquire. That better together mantra was something that we worked out with them and we said we will integrate more deeply into your technology stack than other partners to create success for you. With NetApp, we're working on something quite similar with a specialization around where their go-to-market is because they have a fantastic story on primary storage, as you know. SolidFire's been a great acquisition for them and they're saying, boy, we'd sure like to see the kind of attach rates on secondary that we have on primary. One of the reasons being that potential flight to cloud, how can we create a value solution structure with Commvault and we're doing that now. Can't go into all the details but there's something really exciting happening there. With Cisco, we've aligned with both UCS and HyperFlex with some really neat solutions that again create better together swim-laning so that as we talk to that customer and the customer says, I like an X and I need to have a Y pivot, maybe it doesn't have services attached to it, maybe it does, we can create that channel that allows us to not have to find ourselves in that co-opetition sort of a scenario with that partner. And that works not just when we're talking about two sets of direct sellers selling to a named account but it also works really well in the channel too because we've got mutual channel partners that are transacting on our price book and or Cisco HPE NetApp. And while, excuse me, creating that degree of swim-laning, it works. It helps to keep the structure so that 90% of those transactions have velocity and the other 10% we work through. So we've talked a lot about the technology, professional services on top of the technology. Let's talk about support day two. There's these alliances, they can get complex especially as you play across so many different partners. What is the day-to-day relationship between the customer and Commvault when it comes to supporting backup and recovery? Got it, you want me to take it? Again, great question and I appreciate that and I ran the customer support organization for a number of years so it's near and dear to my heart. That's a very passionate team, they're very invested in customer success. We've structured our relationships with these alliance partners so that we are that first point of entry for that customer experience around our software and we have a huge amount of versatility within those different storage stacks. The integration with Catalyst as a for instance was precipitated by a long and involved enablement and training cycle for our support members throughout the world to be able to understand that software hardware integration and the stacks so that when a customer is calling in and saying, I've got this thing, where do I go? We don't, it doesn't turn into vendor-vendor pointing, it rather turns into we will own the problem and we work the solution. I can speak on experience the support organization has any number of different JSAs, joint support agreements with the vast variety of tier one and tier two infrastructure providers so we can interact very seamlessly. We own the solution, we own the customer challenge until it's resolved and we work and solve actually a large number of hardware issues even though the first call came into Convalt because it is the customer experience that we want to own to make sure it's successful. And I think that the importance as well is that we are just, with that support, we are just supporting any of the way of how the customer is going to consume our software so it can be directly from us, it can be through one of our alliance partners, it can be through one of our partners or it can be also as a service. So the most important thing and relevant is that the customer is supported, is understand, we understand how the infrastructure is used and we obviously can, as Robert says, basically fix all the different problems at the first call. All right, that's it. And Robert, thank you so much for joining us. Sure, thank you. Congratulations on the announcement and the expanded partnerships that you have here. All right, Keith and I will be asked with lots more coverage here from Convalt Go. Thank you for watching theCUBE. Thank you gentlemen. Thank you.