 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas. Third day, some of us our voices are a little bit rough, but we've still got lots of stuff to do and some people are still looking quite good. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host Justin Warren, not talking about our current guest who came in, looking great, great, good energy. Jyothi Swaroop, welcome back to the program. You're the vice president of global marketing with Veritas. Thanks Stu, thanks for those kind words. I mean, I'm just joining the party here in terms of good looking guys, so it's not unique to me at all. Yeah, yeah, we didn't have as much time to spend on our hair this morning, but. I wake up this way. That's all. So do I. All right, so Jyothi, first of all, VMworld, do you know this ecosystem? There's some good energy at the show. What's been your impression so far? Look, I mean, having been on the other side, right? I've actually having worked for the EMC in the past and being part of organizing an event like this, it's great to see the VMworld, the diaspora expanding with every year and how they've reinvented themselves. Every three to four years, people were like, oh, VMworld's going away. VMworld is not relevant anymore, but it's been amazing to see the evolution of VMworld and how they've reinvented themselves, what they're doing with AWS, et cetera. And at Veritas, we're trying to map to that strategy. We're going where the fuck's going, right? So we're literally mapping to everything VMworld's doing with their customers, which tends to be a lot of our customers. There's a significant overlap between Veritas's customers and VMworld install base. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we talk about things like software to find these days. And especially like in the storage world, I mean, Veritas was the original in that space. How do I get software out of hardware? It's like, Veritas was the no hardware agenda company. So at this show, the last few years, data, data protection, multi-cloud and how that impacts data have been big themes. Tell us how that ties into what you're hearing from customers and what you do at Veritas. Yeah, absolutely. The two words that come out are data management, right? So increasingly, yes, we are in a multi-cloud world. Everybody will tell you that there are at least four to four and a half clouds on average that most of our enterprise customers use. And when I say that, it doesn't mean public clouds only, obviously, right? There are SaaS portals that people access. There are actual infrastructures of service, public clouds that people access. So it's a combination of those. At Veritas, what we want to do is we want to focus on one of the most important elements of managing data, which is protected, right? Look, recently, there have been news about large transportation companies. I won't say which type, but transportation companies, you know, being grounded because their clouds were not up, you know, or data wasn't protected enough. Not because the planes or the trains weren't working well. They were working fantastically well. It's just because their systems were not up. They weren't protected. They weren't backed up. They just trusted their cloud vendors or whoever else to manage it for them. Doesn't work that way, right? You are responsible. If you actually read through some of the contracts that are out there from multi-cloud vendors it will clearly say you, Mr. Customer, are responsible for your own data protection. So that's where Veritas comes in. So we help customers protect their data where it's at, whether it's in a public cloud environment, whether it's virtualized through VMware, or with some physical servers, right? And we've been doing this for 30 years. Yeah, and I've used NetBack up for many, many years. I have a long heritage and even before that, Veritas was pretty much the standard for the way that we did all kinds of storage and data management to your point there. So give us some examples of what customers are doing with Veritas in this new era of cloud and data could be anywhere. Absolutely. So I think the first step to all of this is visibility. A lot of people don't talk about data visibility enough. Why don't they talk about it enough? It's because most of the management and visibility tools that companies have, these vendors have, are limited to their own infrastructures. So they're basically IT ops tools, right? To help manage their particular software-defined infrastructure or a hardware box, et cetera. They're not really trying to be Switzerland for everybody. At Veritas, we have this unique honor almost of being the Switzerland. Everybody wants to work with us, has worked with us for the last 30 years. We don't really come out there and say, we're competing against every infrastructure company out there. No, we're very good at data protection. We've extended our leadership from data protection to software-defined storage. As Stu talked about earlier on, we launched our portfolio three years ago and Gartner just published the fact that we are number one in software-defined storage market share already in three years. Because it's in our DNA. We built the first software-defined product and we used that back in the Veritas Oracle Sun Microsystem days boss, as it was called. And we've used that DNA to build this out and extend our data protection into storage. And that's why I said it's visibility, protection, and then storage. And that storage could be anywhere. Jothi, one of the challenges we have in the industry is you say NetBackup has a long history. Decades out there. People will be like, oh, well, I was using it for a while, but then something changed. And I haven't looked at it in five years, 10 years. Tell us why the NetBackup of today isn't our father's NetBackup. Great question. I love that question, right? So it's not your father's NetBackup, clearly. Look, NetBackup has been great for what we call traditional workloads. For the last, what, 25 years? Oracle, SQL, we've done phenomenal with that. But the world has moved on. The world's moved to no SQL. The world's moved to Hadoop. The world's moved to a lot of unstructured, data-related infrastructure. We're talking about RDS at this show, so. Exactly, and NetBackup has had to evolve as well. Look, I'm an engineer. I know how difficult it is to take a product that's 20, 25 years old and to kind of make it relevant to today's workloads. And we did take that time. So until our last week's launch of NetBackup, the latest version, we didn't go out there and market ourselves as the modern workloads data protector. We did market ourselves as, hey, listen, your mission-critical workloads that still run on Oracle, et cetera, yes, NetBackup is the product for you. But we do have other data management technologies that will support you. But today, I'm very happy to announce that we've not only kind of, we protect the most modern workloads, but we've simplified the UX as well. So I'll make a comment on the market before I get into NetBackup again. So if you notice, there's a lot of money being raised in the data protection space. A lot of new vendors that have come out there, right? And what's the message they use? The message is that of simplicity. Because they can't come out the gate and say we're the most reliable, scalable product that's being used by 86% of the Fortune 500. They can't say that straight out of the gate. So what do they use? They say we're simpler to use. We're not about job security. We're going to cater to you, Mr. Customer. Three clicks to Nirvana, right? That's literally what the message is. So what we try to do with NetBackup is, look, we are the king of scale. We're the king of reliability. We know that. So we've completely modernized. Killian was here at theCUBE yesterday and she's the head of user experience. So we created an entire team for user experience alone. And we've simplified all of the operations on NetBackup. So if you're a VMware admin or a backup admin or a storage admin, it doesn't really matter. Looks, feels the same. And you get three clicks to value, right? Even if you don't reach Nirvana, you get three clicks to value with everything you do. So we've really simplified the operations. We continue to be the king of scale. We continue to be deployed at multi-paddle-byte scale. And that innovation is going to roll on. That's a really encouraging thing to hear because all of the new vendors, as a good point that you make there, is that they can't re-duplicate that idea of we have 10 years of history or 25 years of history. So we've been doing this for a long time. And that means that you can trust us with your data. If anything that you need from a data protection vendor is the ability to trust them, that when I go to try to recover my data, it'll be there and it will work, you've fixed that. You've been doing that for such a long time. So now you're just updating the software to be able to make it easy to use, doing some of the new things. Well, of course anyone needs to be able to adapt and do some of the new things. So the fact that you're adding some of these features, so maybe you could give us a bit of a flavor of some of the changes that people would notice in from if you've experienced that backup before, what does it actually look like now? So for those net backup admins that have been using that backup for decades now, right? They will, can I be used to the Windows interfaces where it's a file structure, things have to be dragged and dropped and things like that. But if they go to the new interface now, it's available for download off our website. It's literally just all tiles and buttons and clicks, the new user experience that you expect from an iPhone, right? It's, that's exactly what we've put into net backup 8.1.2. Now the other thing I want to talk about is we spoke to about, I think I've personally spoken about 15 customers at this show, day one and day two. You know, they said while the simplification is great Jyothi, we're actually looking ahead already. We're looking ahead to machine learning and AI where people, I want your software to tell me when jobs are going to fail. I don't want an alert when the job has failed and then I have to do something about it. Yeah, it's cool that I can pull my phone up or my iPad up and take actions right away and make sure the data's protected. But I really would love for your software to predict when something's going to fail. Help me, warn me to take action in advance. If not, take action yourself for the simple job failures that you can take action on based on policy driven actions, right? So that's essentially what our customers are asking for and that's what we've incorporated into 8.1.2. Yeah, Jyothi, great stuff. I want to step up level for a second here and what you're hearing from customers about kind of the challenges and opportunities with data and maybe start with, we spent the last year or year and a half hearing a lot about the impending GDPR. It doesn't feel like it ended up being like the Y2K, you know, scramble at the last minute, a couple of lawsuits against like Google and Facebook, but other than that, I haven't heard nearly as much since we passed that deadline earlier this year. Start there as the update and tell me what else is facing customers and kind of their challenges. Sure, look, if I have to use a lose analogy here, I consider GDPR as filing your taxes. Most people wait till the last day, right? And they get extensions if things are not right, et cetera. But having said that, filing taxes is one of the most important things you do, right? So as a corporation, this is very similar. Most corporations want to wait to see if there are others that will take missteps and they can learn from that. There's nothing wrong with that, but a lot of the Fortune 500 customers that we deal with take GDPR extremely seriously. Yes, you mentioned a couple of companies that have been fined or are being investigated, et cetera. Nobody wants to be in that boat, right? You know, a large company can take a little, a fine of some magnitude, but a smaller to medium business company, that could be, you know, severe. That could end the business. That could end the business for them, and they don't want that. So a lot of these customers are taking GDPR seriously, but what is different to what we expected, not just as Veritas, but as an industry, is they're taking a consultative approach to GDPR. It's not a product-based approach. There's no magic bullet, like I buy three products and stitch them together and I'm GDPR compliant, right? They're taking a very consultative approach, looking at their data, especially companies that have existed for many years. It's really hard for them to go back, and the data is sitting on some archaic systems, and they really don't know, you know, how do I delete? I mean, if Stu was a European citizen, for example, and he said, hey, listen, X, Y, and Z company, I want you to delete everything you have on me. Hey, it's sitting on some mainframe, a bunch of tape, et cetera. There's no way for them to get that out, and Stu is able to sue them if they're not able to take action by X number of months or years. So, you know, it's an interesting, but a very important challenge for companies. Yeah, we're experiencing some of those challenges here in Australia as well, which is not actually subject to GDPR, but there are certainly a lot of legislators and a lot of other organizations looking at it, particularly if they're global organizations, they do need to be compliant. It applies to EU citizens. So if we have EU citizens and you have systems in another country, then you need to actually deal with GDPR issues even though you're not part of the EU. So a lot of organizations are grappling with that. So maybe you could give us a bit more of an indication of how Veritas is helping those customers to grapple with that situation. Yeah, absolutely. You're right. So as long as you have a connection to the EU, whether through a customer or through some sort of a transaction, you're already part of the GDPR compliance initiative, right? That's what customers need to realize if they haven't already. That's number one. Number two is going back to my original point about visibility. Compliance has been a thing for a long time. GDPR is yet another new thing around compliance. So if you don't have end-to-end visibility into your infrastructure, and if your data is not classified, and it's not classified on ingest going forward, look, yes, I made a big deal about the fact that over the last 30 years we've created a ton of data and we've put it away in archaic systems. But if you consider that as a percentage of the amount of data that we have today, it's very small. What they should be most worried about as customers is what they're going to create in the future. So the classification of that data has to happen on ingest. As soon as it comes from a Hadoop system, et cetera, needs to be classified. This is raw data, right? This is redundant, obsolete, et cetera. I need to classify this data as PII information. So I need to put it separately. I can't just ship everything off to the cloud. So that's what we help with Veritas. Our products help you classify the data on ingest, right? So you can actually tier this data to the right storage mechanisms and have visibility, end-to-end visibility of that data, globally. And then you can actually take actions. When you have that visibility, you can actually say, you know what? I don't need six petabytes of browsing history of the 100,000 employees that I have. They've literally gone to Amazon and bought diapers for their babies or whatever. I don't really need to store that stuff. I can just delete it, and it's gone, right? Customers don't have that confidence today because they don't have that visibility. All right, Jothi, last thing I want to have you help us cover is, we know Veritas has a long history. Learned a lot, I think, being inside Symantec. Now coming out, bring us up to speed as to kind of Veritas today, positioning the marketplace, what the customers are coming to you at this show and outside this show for specifically. Absolutely, so Veritas continues to be the leader in data protection. That's not going away. That is still at the heart of everything we do, right? Whether it's net backup or other products that we put out to market, it will still be at the core of everything we do. We protect the customer's most valuable data from the Fortune 500 all the way down to the SMB level. That's number one. Number two, we're extending that leadership into new areas like software defined storage. We're already number one in market share for that. We're going to continue to work on our archiving business. We're number one there as well according to Gardner, right? So the three key areas that we're already in we're number one. The next area we're going into is paper over rocks. We want to get into the data management business because we've realized we are the true Switzerland of infrastructure. There are very few companies that will say, okay, I'm competing head to head with Veritas on a lot of things. I don't want to work with them, right? Unless you're a core data protection vendor. Everybody else wants to work with us. We have partnerships with all the major public cloud vendors to VMware, to on-prem traditional vendors who you might even consider as competition. They all want to work with us because we sit on top of the most number of exabytes of data in the world. We protect the most number of exabytes of data. So there's a lot we can do with that data. Protection is not enough. Our next step in this journey is to make management, visibility, and compliance on top of that data a lot easier for our customers. So if you're to sum it up in one word, is it still Veritas? It's Veritasum. It's very, very Veritasum. All right, well, we've been having an awesome week here at VMworld. Joe Thieswerb, thank you for the update with Veritas for Justin Warren. I'm Stu Miniman. We hope you've had an awesome time watching theCUBE.