 2020 was the most unpredictable year of our lives. A forced shutdown of global economies led everyone to the conclusion that the tech industry spending would decline. And of course it did, but you'd hardly know it if you watched the stock market and the momentum of several well positioned companies. Those firms that had products and services that catered to the pivot to work from home, SaaS based solutions were focused on business resiliency and cloud saw huge growth. The forced march to digital turned a buzzword into reality overnight where if you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. And one of the companies participating in that growth trend was Veeam. Veeam virtual is scheduled to take place on May 25th and 26th and it's one of our favorite physical events and theCUBE will be there again as a virtual participant. One of our traditions prior to Veeam on has always been to bring in an executive into the CUBE and talk not only about what to expect at the show but what's happening in the market. And with me is many time CUBE alum, Danny Allen is the chief technology officer at Veeam. Danny, welcome is always great to see you. I am delighted to be here again. Disappointed as virtual, but excited to talk with you. Yeah, me too, you know, it's coming, it's getting jabbed. But, you know, you look at the surprises here. I mean, look at the chip shortage. You know, everybody thought, oh well, stop ordering chips. I mean furniture, et cetera, cars. And it's just kind of crazy. What was your expectation going into the pandemic and what did you actually see looking back? Well, it's funny. You never know what's going to happen. And for the first few weeks, I would say there's a lot of disruption because all of a sudden you have people who've been going into an office for a long time working from home. And, you know, from an R&D perspective at Veeam, those people weren't used to working from home. So there's a lot of uncertainty, I'll say for the first three or four weeks. But what very quickly picked up was the opportunity, I'll say, to focus more specifically on delivering things for our customers. And one of the things obviously that just exploded was use of digital technologies like Slack and Microsoft Teams. And as you say, Veeam was well-positioned to help customers as they moved towards this new normal, as they say. So what were some of the growth vectors that you guys saw specifically that were where you were helping your customers going to get through this time? Yeah, well, people always associate Veeam with doing data protection for the virtual environment, but two things really stood out last year as our emerging markets. One was Office 365. And I think that's due to the uptake of Microsoft Teams. I mean, if you look at the Microsoft results, you can see that people are doing SaaS and we were very well positioned to take advantage of that, help customers move towards collaborating online. So that was a huge growth vector for us. And the second one was cloud. We had more data moving to the cloud than ever before in Veeam history. And that continues on into 2021. You guys, let's talk more about that SaaS piece of your business. You were very early on in terms of SaaS data protection. You kind of had to educate the market. People are like, well, why do I need to back up my SaaS? Doesn't the cloud provider do that? And then you sort of, so you had to educate. So it was, you were early. But it's really paid off. Maybe talk about how that trend has benefited some of your customers. Yeah, so if you go back four years, we didn't even have data protection for Office 365. And over the last four years, we've emerged into the market leader, the largest in protection for Office 365. And as you say, it was about education. Early on, people knew that they needed to protect exchange when they ran it on premises. And when they first went to the cloud, there was this expectation of, hey, Microsoft or my provider will do that for me. And very quickly, they realized that's not the case. And they're still the same threats. It might not be hardware failure, but certainly misconfiguration or deleted items or ransomware in 2021, sorry, 2020 was massive. And so we do data protection for exchange, for SharePoint online, for OneDrive, and most recently for Microsoft Teams. And so that data protection obviously helps organizations as they adopt Office 365 and SaaS technologies. I said in my last breaking analysis, when you look at the ETR data, Veeam has been really steady. Some competitors spike up, they come down. Others maybe aren't doing so well or the larger established players don't have as much momentum. It just seems like Veeam, even though you crossed the billion dollar revenue mark, you've been able to keep that spending momentum up. And I think it's, and I would observe, it's a function of your ability to identify that the waves and ride those waves and anticipate them. We just talked about SaaS, talked about virtualization, you were there, cloud, we'll talk about that more as well. Plus your execution, it seems like since the acquisition, by insight, you guys have continued to execute. I wonder if you could help the audience understand, how do you think about the phases that Veeam has gone through in its ascendancy and where you're headed? Yeah, so I look at it as three things. It's having the right product, but it's not just enough to have the right products. It's the right product, it's the right timing, and it's the right execution. So if you think about where Veeam started, it was all in data protection for vSphere, for the hypervisor, and that was right at the time when VMware was taking off and the modernized data center was being virtualized. And so that helped us grow, I'll say, into a $600 million company. But then about four years ago, we see the ascendancy of SaaS and specifically Office 365. And so we weren't first to market, but I would argue the timing with the best product, with the right execution has turned that into a massive, a very significant contribution to our bottom line. And then actually the third wave through 2020 is the adoption of cloud. We moved last year, 242 petabytes into cloud storage. And already in the first quarter of 2021, we've moved a hundred petabytes. So there's this massive adoption where migration of data into the cloud and Veeam has been positioned with the right product at the right time with the right execution to take advantage of that. So I wonder if you could help us quantify that. IDC data, IDC does a good job quantifying the market. Maybe you could share with us sort of your position there, maybe some of the growth that we're seeing. Can you add some color to that? Yeah, we have some very exciting results from the recent IDC report. So in the second half of 2020, we saw 17.9% year-over-year growth in our revenue. That was actually triple the closest competitor. And our sequential growth was over 21%. So massive growth. And all of that is on in the second half of the year, 563 million in revenue. So over a billion dollar company. So these aren't just 20% growth on small numbers. This is on a very significant number. And we see that continuing forward. We'll be announcing some things, I'm sure, at Vee Maan coming up in a few weeks here. But that trend continues. And again, it's the right product, right time with the right execution. Cloud continues to roll on. You're seeing solid, whether if you add them all up to big four, 30 plus percent growth, you're seeing Azure even higher growth. AWS is huge, Google growing, Google Cloud probably in the 60 to 70% range. So cloud still hot. It's kind of gone mainstream, but there still feels like there's a long way to go there. What's happening in cloud? You guys again, leaning in, riding that wave. What can you tell us? We are leaning in. You're going to see some things coming up at Vee Maan related to that. But two things I would say. One is we're in the marketplace of all three of the major hyper scalers. So there's a Vee backup for AWS, a Vee backup for Azure, and a Vee backup for GCT. And not only is there products that are purpose-built for those clouds in the marketplace. All three of them have integrations to the Corvine platform. And so this isn't just standalone products while it is in the marketplace. It's integrated into the full strategy around modern data protection for the organizations. And so I am thrilled about some of the things that we're going to be showing in there, but we're leaning in very closely with those. We think we're in early days, like I say, maybe first, second year, and it will be the next decade as they truly emerge into their dominant position. But even more than cloud, if you ask me what I get excited about looking forward, certainly cloud adoption is massive, but Kubernetes. That's what's enabling some of the hybrid models of both on-prem and cloud hosted, and we're clearly doing some things there as well. So I'm glad you brought that up because I think the first time I ever sort of stumbled into a company that was actually doing data protection for containers was at a Veeamon event. It was one of your exhibitors, and I was like, that's an interesting name. And yeah, of course you ended up buying the company, but so, you know, it's funny, right? Because containers have been around forever. And then when you started to see Kubernetes come to fore, containers were really ephemeral. They weren't persistent, but they didn't have state, but that's changing. I wonder if you could give us your perspective as to how you're thinking about that whole space. I truly believe that the third big wave of technology transformation, the first was around physical systems and mainframes and things, and then we went into the virtualized era. I think that the third world is not the cloud. I actually think it is containers. Now why containers? Because as you mentioned, Dave, they're ephemeral. They're designed for the world of consumption. Everything else is designed for you install it and then you build to the high watermark. The whole thing about containers is that they're ephemeral and they're built for the consumption model. The other thing about containers is that they're highly portable. So you can run it on premises with OpenShift, but then you can move it to GKE or AKS or EKS or any of the big cloud platforms. So it definitely aligns with organizations' desire to modernize and to choose the infrastructure of best choice. Now, at the same time, the reason why they haven't taken off, I would argue as quickly as they could have is because they've been really complex. In early days, the complexity of containers was very difficult, but the platform or ecosystem is evolving. They are becoming more simple. And what is happening is IT operations teams are now considering the developer, their customer, and they're building self-service models for the developers to be more productive. So I think of this as platform ops and certainly backup and security is a part of this, but it is moving and we're seeing traction actually faster than I would have predicted in early 2020. Yeah, we've been putting forth this vision of a layer that abstracts the complexity of the underlying clouds, whether it's on-prem, across clouds, eventually the edge and containers are a linchpin to enabling that. Let's talk about Veeamon 2021. Show us a little leg, give us a preview. So we always come with the excitement and we always come with showing a sneak peek of what's to come. So certainly we're going to celebrate some of the big successes. We brought version 11 to market earlier this year that had security capabilities around ransomware, it had continuous data protection, it had a whole lot of things. So we're going to celebrate some of the products that have already recently launched, but we're also going to give a sneak peek of what's coming over 2021. Now, if you ask me what that is, we talk an awful lot about cloud. So you should expect to see things around Veeam backup for AWS and Azure and GCP. You should expect to see things around our Kubernetes data protection with our Casting Cape 10 product. You should expect to see evolution of capabilities with our SAS data protection with Office 365. So we're going to give a sneak peek of lots of things to come. And as always, we bring lots of innovation to the market. It's not just another checkbox theme. As always said, how can we do it differently? How can we do it better? And then we're going to show that to our customers at Veeam on. Well, we're always super excited to participate in the Veeam community. We've always had a lot of fun. They're great, great events. Yes, it's virtual, but you guys always have an interesting spin on things and make it fun. It's May 25th and 26th. It starts at 9 a.m. Eastern time. You go to Veeam.com and sign up. Make sure you do that and check out all the content. theCUBE, of course, will be there. I will be interviewing executives, customers, partners, there's tons of content for practitioners. And as always, you guys got the great demos and always a few surprises. So Danny, really looking forward to that and really appreciate your time on theCUBE today. Thank you, Dave. All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. Again, May 25th and 26th, 9 a.m. Eastern time. Go to Veeam.com and sign up. We'll see you there.