 Live from Anaheim, California, it's theCUBE covering Nutanix.next 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We have two guests for this segment. We have Ken Ringel. He is the Vice President Global Alliance Architecture at Veeam. Thanks so much for coming on. You're a CUBE alum returning to theCUBE. It's great to be here again. And we have Mark Nymeyer. He is the Director of Product Management for Data Protection Nutanix. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. How are you? So, one of the big announcements today is Nutanix Mine. I'm going to ask you, Ken, what brings Nutanix and Veeam together to create Nutanix Mine? Yeah, sure, we're super excited. We've been partners for many years. We actually brought a product to market together last year called Veeam Availability for Nutanix, which added support for primary workloads. But we hadn't been working together on the secondary side, where we land our backups. And it became very clear from our customers that, hey, we really want to provide that seamless experience, a turnkey experience for our customers. So we started talking together, and really, this is over a year in the making. We came together and we started brainstorming and it became very clear a lot of synergies between the companies and what we could deliver to our customers. So it became obvious, hey, let's bring this together. It was more about the high, not when, or it was how, how do we do it? And what were the problems you were trying to solve here? What were the issues that you were hearing from customers? So when we talk to customers, a lot of the complaints that our customers are voicing is around the complexity in their backup infrastructure. Nutanix is known for providing simplicity for the primary infrastructure, right? Reducing complexity that you typically have in your free-tier architecture. Nutanix, mine will provide the same amount of simplicity for your backup infrastructure. A hyperconverged solution that includes the Veeam software to provide data protection services for any workload running in your data center. Integrations are a big part of the modernized hybrid on cloud with, you know, on-premises, private cloud, as you guys know. Integrating it is not always that easy. This is pretty important. You guys have been very successful with your partnering, your product has been successful, the revenues obviously show that. As the cloud comes into the picture, a lot of people have been tweaking their game a little bit on the product side because of the unique differences with cloud. So with multi-cloud and private cloud and hybrid, what changes? What's changing in the customer mind right now? Because they get their on-premises thing pretty solid, but operationally, it feels like cloud, but how does it affect the DRP? Because this is going to be one of the big conversations. Yeah, no question. I mean, when we talk to our customers on how they're protecting their data, you know, we hear from a lot of customers is, hey, we want to leverage the cloud for a number of things. And I think the cloud has gone through an evolution, right? You know, just like anything, there's, you know, the great, the great, hey, can do all these things and then people come back to reality. And what we see a lot of our customers doing is using the cloud for long-term data retention, using it as a secondary DR site. You know, you go back five years, you know, customers, especially large customers, all have two physical data centers. So now what we're seeing, a lot of our customers, they have that one physical primary data center, but they're leveraging the cloud as their DR site, right? So they're moving their data there with our recovery capabilities. You know, you can actually get a cloud workload recovered in a disaster scenario quite rapidly. And that's been a major change over, especially over the last couple of years. And then if you really look at integration, right, the Nutanix Minds solution, the platform, provides integration in six different areas. Integration in sizing, making it very easy to size. We've identified some form factors, we're building it into Nutanix Sizer. Very easy to buy. Single skew that basically provides the hardware, hardware support, software from Nutanix and software from Beam. Easy to deploy, right? Very automated installer that turns the Nutanix appliance into a mind appliance in a matter of minutes. And then easy to manage integrated dashboards. Easy to scale, right? Horizontally scaling out for capacity, but also for increased performance. And then integrated support where we have a joint support model between the two companies to really help our customers in case there are issues. So why did you choose each other? What was the courtship like and how did the relationship evolve? Yeah, so if you look at Beam and Nutanix, we really focus on quality and providing simplicity for our customers. That is something that really was very apparent from the beginning that we have the same viewpoints and the same mantras basically around simplicity. Providing quality, both of our MPS scores are definitely the highest in the industry, something that is pretty unheard of. So it was a very natural, I think, these companies coming together and providing value together. Yeah, I mean we're maniacal about customer success and customer support and customer satisfaction. That was very clear early on. Beam as a pure software company, we need a partner in order to deliver a full stack solution. Nutanix, there's just a lot of synergies to culture the companies, the size of the companies, the age of the companies. It's just a great partnership and a great fit where we're both moving in the same direction in concert. Both hard charging cultures too. Entrepreneurial, high quality, focus on the customer, but hard charging, you guys move fast. So while I got into two experts here on data protection, I got to ask you about my favorite topic, ransomware. Because people are fun and get rid of that tape, I got to get stuff back faster on recoveries, but ransomware really highlights the data protection scenario because they target IT departments that may be understaffed or might be vulnerable or just don't fix their problem. They go back to the well every time and they want to make some cash and go back. This is where software can solve a lot of the problem. What's your guys' view of the whole ransomware thing? Because this becomes huge. Yeah, no question. I mean, we hear this from a lot of our customers and of course we can't talk about it when we have customers come to us, but we've had many customers come to us and unfortunately it's after the fact. Hey, I had a ransomware attack and I lost all this, but now I can't let it happen again. But it's really from a backup strategy perspective, it's still important to keep air gap. These ransomware, these folks that are building these ransomware attacks, they're very intelligent. They've gotten extremely intelligent in how they move from one system to another and they even hide out. So you eliminate a ransomware attack and that thing can come right back. You restore a backup that was a month old that has that sitting and waiting. So, you know, having a solution that can actually test your backups before you put them in production, have an air gap, you know, have a mutability on some of your backup data. These are all things we talk to our customers about. Yeah, your point about the, I bring this up because it was just talking to a customer about this. They fixed the ransomware paid, but didn't fix the problem. So, it's like end of the month, they need some cash to round up, end of the month. But you know what I'm saying, they shake them down again. The well's there, they keep on coming back. So there's a lot of community of data protection, community professionals getting together to kind of get ahead of this problem. And then the other aspect of basically being able to recover quickly is performance, right? The Nutanix platform provides to perform the throughput so you can very quickly restore your workloads as well. Yeah, that'd be a great problem to simplify. Exactly, exactly. So what are the next steps for this alliance? Where do we go from here? Yeah, so from basically we've just finished a round of beta testing, right? We are going to be maniacally focused on the first hundred customers, really understanding how they are going to put mine in their data centers, how they are going to use it in their data centers to protect their workloads and their applications. From there on, we have a lot of plans, very interesting plans around roadmap where we can build even tighter integration from a management perspective but also from a data fabric perspective. Whether that's on-prem or whether that's goes into the ZY cloud, the Nutanix ZY cloud, there's a lot of interesting areas that Brain and I have been brainstorming on, quite boarding and so on that you'll see coming out in the next few versions of the products. What's the big customer request? What's the big feature request? What's the big ask from customers for you guys together? At the end of the day, our customers are really asking for simplicity. They want to simplify their environment. I mean, IT is moving from specialist to generalist and they want a system that works well together that's going to lower their cost and they want peace of mind. So they want to know their backups are protected, they want to know they can restore and that's really what we're focused on is providing that to our customers. Inreliable, I'm making sure there are works, 100%. Any new things emerging out of the multi-cloud thing that you guys see coming down around the corner that you're getting ready for to help customers simplify? Any signals from this multi-cloud equation? So one of the things I look at is really the lines between on-prem and primary and secondary and tertiary, they're really blurring. Also the lines between on-prem and the cloud are blurring as well. Nutanix can replicate data and replicate backups really, really efficiently to wherever it needs to be. So I really see that as a core strength to enable value that plays into the multi-cloud environment. True operational model across whatever environment and still do the tiering and things you need to do. All right, yep. Yeah, no doubt flexibility and being able to support multiple environments, you know, that's absolutely what we're after. It's what we leverage as part of the Nutanix ecosystem is that breadth of coverage, but also given customer choice. I was just talking to Rebecca, which we love data protection. I do. I'll leave you and we'll see you all, you guys be on next week. This is a huge conversation that used to be a bolt-on conversation in the old days of IT. Now, data protection, backup and recovery, disaster planning, all part of a operating model holistic picture. Yeah, we are 100% there yet and all customers, are they still, are the systems still kind of like not forgetting to design in? Yeah, I mean protection. You know, lots of our customers are coming to us because they're struggling with legacy solutions and they're looking to modernize their whole infrastructure, right? They're modernizing where they land the backups, they're modernizing the platform that lands those backups on the infrastructure. And so, you know, it's a major problem for our customers and really, you know, you mentioned, you know, availability and, you know, you go back five years, maybe five, seven, eight years. You know, availability was measured in three nines, four nines, five nines. Availability, you know, everyone in the world of everything cloud and everything SaaS, you know, availability is 100% or nothing. You know, it's, there is no, there really is no sort of anything but 100% availability. And security highlights all the problems. I mean, I saw another customer about this ransomware, another ransomware customer, they were doing all their backups on tape. I mean, can you imagine? Of course there are a lot of ransomware. It's just good on the directory. Who's still using tape? Because they can't turn around fast enough. That was a big problem. Yeah, you know, it's funny, you know, we're focused on innovation and next things, but when you, you know, you then have some of those customer conversations and some of them are still, you know, because of their compliance and processes and procedures, they're still, you know, five years behind, maybe where we are and you know, you got to sort of bring them along for the journey to knowing that they're going to trail behind, but for the early adopters and the innovators, we also have to serve them as well. And they got to level up themselves too, it's not them too, they have to level up. So speaking of innovation, you are two different companies. You already talked about the synergies and the similarities in culture, but you are two companies coming together to build a product. How does that work? I mean, do you, do you get in the same room? Do you watch the same movies? Do you, how do you get one brain working on this? Veeam is a distributed company. We are a distributed company, so it's a lot of calls and so on, but it's really fun to really see it come together and becoming real, right? Yes, there's a lot of hard engineering problems that we have to solve and some very deep discussions around layout and things like that, but then bubbling it up and working on the joint value prop and working on the joint marketing, it really is a very nice wide set of capabilities and skills that we've been working on. And what I would add, I mean, it is hard. It is hard to bring two things together and work on them jointly, and we've so far been fairly successful, but what I would tell you is that it brings some advantages to us as well, because we have a best of breed platform, we have a best of breed data protection platform. Bringing those together brings some advantages that maybe someone that does all that together on their own don't have because it's not a focus area for them, right? So it's our job to make sure we take advantage of that and provide some additional things for our customers that maybe they won't get out of some of those other platforms. Well, Mark and Ken, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE, it was a pleasure having you. Great, thank you very much. Thanks for having us. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have more from Nutanix.next coming up just a little bit. Stay with us.