 Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version of the show. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. We're here with David Harvey as the Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam. David, good to see you, how you doing? I'm well, thanks Dave and yourself, you've been good. Yep, doing great, thank you. Hey, you've heard the term follow the money? We're going to follow the data. How about it? All right. So, HPE and Veeam, you're celebrating a 10 year milestone in your alliance. There's a lot of good parties at the HPE Discover shows and of course we missed being face to face this year but next year we'll be back rocking. But talk a little bit about what that milestone means to you. Yeah, thanks Dave and you're right. It is a milestone. I mean, when you look at alliances or partnerships overall, it's crazy that you can maintain this depth of partnership, this depth of relationship and this success for 10 years. I mean, HPE was our number one alliance that we started working with when we started being X number of years ago. And the reason for that was that we really came together from the very start with a philosophy about the approach we wanted to provide to the customer and also the synergy of technology. And 10 years is a long time. I mean, how many alliances have you seen in the IT industry that have managed to maintain it for 10 years? And we're stronger than ever as we come into this point and that's amazing. So from that point of view, we're really excited for this 10 year milestone. We're really pleased that the investment from both sides has maintained and grown through that time period. And as you said, it's a shame we're not doing this in person but this is a great event for us. And that's why we're so proud to be top sponsor this year and supporting the other charge for this government. Well, congratulations on that milestone. I mean, so often when I talk to folks that are in your role, they'll complain yeah, we have a lot of numbers but not a lot of ROI and not a lot of fruitful partnerships. And they'll do Barney deals. I love you, you love me, we'll do a press release but it's not driving. And I happen to know that the HPE Veeam relationship is very productive. And I think one of the key moves when HP split itself in two, it took its competitive data protector product that sold that off. And then that just opened up a whole new opportunity for the relationships. It was a game changer. But looking back, what do you think was the meaningful sort of investment that the Alliance has really made together? Yeah, great question. And it's a really cheesy answer but it's one of those very rare scenarios where it's the truth and it's depth. You know, the depth of discussion from the very start was really what built that foundation. We were the launch back up partner for three part and every release theme has done since then has had a key HPE component to it. And more importantly, as you said, as HPEs evolve through that period, the divestiture and the overall movement of their portfolio, we've continued to listen to each other on what is important to both parties. But while that's great from the relationship in the Alliance, the one thing that's never changed is the response of the customer to saying, not only have you integrated together on technology, you've unified your message, you've provided a supply chain that is meaningful to my business by simplifying and providing value and you continue to evolve, you continue to adjust and move as you've gone through the time period and our needs have changed. I mean, we started with servers, we worked with storage, we're with GreenLake, we're with Esparal, like all across that portfolio, we found a way to continue to listen to each other on what's important and that's been key. So what are the waves that you're surfing here? Put on the binoculars and look forward. What are going to be the most important areas that you guys invest in and focus on in the future? Yeah, great question. I mean, we're focused on three things for the medium to short term here and looking at them is rapidly recovering your data. The news at the moment is exploding related to issues companies are having which is so unfortunate and recovering data quickly, it's an economic component, it's not just about the ability to do it fast, it's about the fact that the quicker you bring data back in this circumstance where you have to, the better it is for your bottom line. We also simplified our data protection and the reason for that is that if you look at the diversity of the portfolio HPE has, you want unification regardless of what product you're buying from HPE, you wanna make sure that you're working with solutions that work with all of those different parts of it. As I mentioned, servers, storage, Esparal, GreenLake, et cetera. And so that simplification of data protection is huge and finally it's getting your data protection as a service. We've been working with GreenLake for a good number of years now and it's one of the fastest growing areas of our partnership. But if you bring those three things together, the customers are deciding that modern data protection needs that they have, they're looking at the hybrid world, they're looking at all parts of the portfolio from the thought leaders they work with specifically HPE and they're wanting to make sure that they've got that unification moving forwards and that whatever decisions they make with the infrastructure, the underlying protection of their data continues to be a core component that they can evolve with as they move their needs forward. You talk about that speed to recovery there's so much in the news today, we're seeing all this ransomware, I mean, it's bringing down organizations, it's affecting supply chains all over the world, very concerning. And there's two dimensions here, one is the speed to recover, we can all relate it. You know when your laptop freezer's like, oh, I gotta reboot and it takes five minutes and you're frustrated to imagine your whole business, you know, takes half a data recover, that's huge. The other dimension of course is how much data you lose in that recovery and you try to compress that RPO, right, as tight as possible and that's the other sort of value that customers look for from a combination of HPE and Veeam. So, but I want to ask you, so we're here at HPE covering HPE Discover, you can't talk about HPE without getting a Kool-Aid injection of Green Lake and as a service and I'm worried about how are you guys sort of addressing those as a service needs for today's customers? Yeah, it's a great question. And by the way, Kool-Aid, you can be a sales person for us with RPOs and all those key words, I love it Dave, but what I would say overall is that when you look at the change in way customers are spending it depends on where they're structuring their financial desires, whether it's the CapEx world, the OpEx world, et cetera. And Green Lake by its nature allows you to look at having the control of a physical component but having the economic structure of, in some respects pay as you go when you look at it in that component. And so you're avoiding that capital investment concern, but you're getting the power and the strength of the management component as well. And that's what's really important. I mean, when you look at overall movement, ESG did a really interesting report recently and they're saying that spending on data center protection is going to grow 50% this year in 2021, looking at improving that level of key component for their data centers as they go through that modernization. And so from that point of view, what we're seeing, and this is applicable for HPE more than anybody else's that the speed that they came out with with Green Lake a number of years ago allowed customers, especially the big enterprises where we're having a massive amount of success together enabled them to decide the economic buying model that they wanted and to combine that with the best of breed service and management and control. So from our point of view, that's something we've been investing with in a long period of time now, not only on the solutions, but also on how we go to market together. Our field team is working very closely with their field team within Green Lake to be there so that the customer can utilize it as a tool and not feel like they're having a different conversation because we're so baked in with the rest of the organization. So from our point of view, Green Lake is key to how things are moving forward and other things that the storage department's doing as well as they look at some of their new ways with their announcements they've recently made with buying down on demand and new products they're having. So it's allowing the customer to have that choice and from us it forms a core component of how we're working together. However, you decide you want to consume the HPE portfolio, you should have the ability for us to seamlessly work with it and to your point, that's why that growth rate on ROI, but more importantly on the revenue and the amount of growth of our customers year over year, I've really embraced that synchronization together. David, I think of your thoughts on containers generally, I want to talk about the cast and acquisition specifically, but I want to ask about it in the context of two things. One is just kind of the overall where you see that going and how you're working with HPE on that. But the other is, as it relates to two of the most vexing problems for IT folks in the past have been security and data protection and they're adjacencies. You're not a security company, but it's kind of a cousin, if you will. And both of those areas have always been an afterthought after you get snake bitten, you close the barn door kind of thing and it's a bolt on, okay, I got my application, it's all hardened, I got my database ready to go, oh, hey, how do we back this thing up? As an afterthought, when I think containers and I think Kubernetes, I think developers, I think infrastructure is code and now you're designing in security and data protection, focusing on the latter, obviously, how does the cast and acquisition and what HPE's doing on containers fit into that context and how do you see it evolving overall? Yeah, that's a great question and there's two parts to it. I mean, if you look at the way that HPE moves to marketing and you look at the themes and the focus they've had now for the last three plus years with regards to that data center transformation and the movement and modernization of IT, this has been a part of it, but as you exactly said, this is a newer type of context point that's come in. Obviously, we acquired Cast as you alluded to early in 2020 because for us, we absolutely believe that this is a core component to IT and you raised the point perfectly there, Dave. It used to be a component after you were snake bit, it's not today, I mean, you alluded to it with regards to what's going on in the news over the last few weeks or so, it's nowhere near an afterthought now. It's a component that's built in from the start and that's why when you look at some of those studies about the spend in this area overall, it isn't an afterthought anymore, but I agree with you it was when you look back a number of years and so for us, Cast didn't build a very key area of our portfolio, but it also allowed us with HPE to double down on another area of investment for themselves. Esmeral is a key play for HPE moving forwards. You can get Cast in on the Esmeral marketplace and that's another example, as I was saying, it doesn't matter how you keep evolving your relationship with HPE, how you keep drawing down from the portfolio, you want to make sure that the data protection you've got the simplified data protection across all of these areas is there from the start and what we're finding is with Greenfield size, with new applications, with new deployments, where containers, Kubernetes really comes into play, they are looking to buy it together at the start so that they can focus on learning, acquiring, deploying and really maximizing the benefit of Kubernetes and not worry about that snake bite component you talked about. So for us, it supports our portfolio and it allows us to stay with HPE as they continue to evolve their strategy. You know that ESG stat of 50% growth and data protection is pretty amazing and it's funny. I think back to the insight acquisition of Veeam and a conventional wisdom would have said, oh wow, what a bummer, they bought this thing right before a global pandemic and an economic downturn. But in your business, it's like real estate with pre-pandemic, post-pandemic, the valuation should be skyrocketing as a function of the heightened focus on digital and security and data protection. So it's really an exciting time. If I were to ask you this question 10 years ago, where are HPE and Veeam seeing joint success in the marketplace? It would have been, well, of course virtualization, it's all the rage. Where are you seeing success today? And that's a great question and it's interesting you talk about it with the pandemic, I'll be honest. The last recession the US had, I was in the digital messaging market and at that point when economies get tight, everybody invests in cheaper types of marketing which is digital messaging. Now we've got a pandemic and guess what? Everybody's looking at this area of the market again with protection. And I think to your point, it's a great question. What we're finding is the word hybrid, it's a well overplayed term, but it's reality of the scenario. We came through and started our journey of Veeam here in the virtual world, but we moved into the physical and that's where we've been having so much success with HPE as well. And now as we move towards that cloud world and to a degree the application world with Office 365, et cetera, what you're seeing is that hybrid need. We're seeing that the large enterprises that have relied on HPE for so many years are also looking for that ubiquitous data protection layer. And because we have it so well baked into all the different parts of the portfolio, it's a seamless ability to just continue to expand the utilization of the portfolio. So from our point of view, we're seeing fantastic enterprise success. We're seeing it in some of these verticals like medical, like financial, the big core propellers of societies related to the economic and industrial models. We're seeing those areas come on board, but we're also seeing people look at what I would classify as some of the Greenfield projects. And that's a different viewpoint because if you look back at the history of HPE as well, they were a fantastic IT provider but a foundational, the core business. Now what we're finding is they're coming into HPE and Beaman saying, hey, new areas, Greenfield, want to start fresh with a new approach less of the legacy concern I've had before. How can we look at these new projects I'm working on? So we're seeing it in the enterprise, we're seeing it in what I would classify as traditional type of verticals. And now we're starting to see that acceleration in some of these Greenfield projects, which is key. And that's something we've really, really enjoyed. And the last part I'd say on that one as well is from a geographic basis, we are seeing all of our regions come up. And the reason why that's important is sometimes you see alliances that have success in one market or one area. We're seeing the year over year growth and maybe faster than we've ever seen. We're seeing our America's growth grow year over year and Asia's continuing to explode for us together. And so from that point of view, I think what that's telling us is that the customers resonate on what we're producing together. And so from that point of view, we're very ubiquitous in our level of value to customers and we're hoping to carry that on moving forwards. Well, it's two trusted brands. Obviously, you know, the Hewlett Packard enterprise name and that stands out and Veeam's no longer a startup with a funny name. It's, you're proven in the marketplace. You just had a major release. I think it was V11, I'm not great the greatest of products, but earlier this year, wondering how that impacted the alliance. Where's that fit? Yeah, great question and to your point, some people still have trouble with the name, but overall, you're right. We do tend to find that we're in a good spot nowadays with regards to recognition. And IDC just released some fantastic statistics on growth and another record breaking year for being both for the sequential growth and the year over year growth for the second half of 2020, moving us up into the number two position for the first time, which again is a testament to the success we're also having with HPE. And when you look at what happened on V11, because as I mentioned at the start of this discussion, every one of our major releases has had HPE baked into it. And V11 was a big release for us. There was a lot of pent-up development work we were trying to get done. And what we focused on with this, again, especially for the enterprise was looking at the HPE portfolio and looking at faster speeds. Faster speeds have an economic value. We increased our speed and performance with HPE Primera. We increased it with HPE Nimble. We also made a really significant win where working with HPE Store once, we did a lot of evolution on that for huge space savings, which together really values the customer. And then finally, where we've also found the customers asked for a lot of development from us together is consolidated with an all-in-one backup type of approach with the HPE Apollo series. So from that point of view, we focused on the experience of the customer because the integrations are so solid. We're now fine-tuning to increase that ROI for the customer. And V11 was a big component of that. You know what I love about Veeam, David? So I used to be at IDC for years. You just mentioned the study that came out and you're number two. And I've been talking a lot of your executives recently. You've thrown out that stat a lot, number two, number two. But when I was at IDC, everybody wanted to be number one at something. So you could say, oh, hey, we're number one backup company with the green logo. Hey, we're number one, but you're not doing that. And I'm joking about the green logo, but you actually are the number one. I think I'm correct in saying this, the number one pure play in backup and data protection. And you don't stand up on that mantle. And I was asking some executives why, and you're like, well, no, because we want to be number one. That's our objective. You know, we're not going to claim number one now until we get to number one and we'll claim real number one. So I like that about you guys. You set the mark high, but so I love that. I appreciate that, yeah. How should people be thinking about the future of your relationship with HPE the rest of this year and beyond? Yeah, great question. And I do really do appreciate that comment because it's an easy one to sort of pick up on. And it comes down to the attitude. It comes down to our attitude with regards to there's nothing wrong with fight. There's nothing wrong with making sure you continue to have a North Star that you never want to stop getting to. I think that's the testament to the development of the products and the overall attitude to working in the field and working with our alliances. And when you look about, when you ask the question, excuse me, Dave, about, you know, where do we see the HPE and being moving forward? Consistency. Consistency is key for us. For 10 years, we've been consistent in providing value and we want to continue doing that for another 10 years moving forward. And as we evolve our portfolio and you look at our act two and as you talked about some of the things you've talked to our other executives about, when you look at, we're moving forwards, we're doing that in conjunction. And we believe as you move forward with regards to some of the things HPE are doing, we want that consistency of integration. We want that consistency of experience to the customer. We want that consistency of listening and developing our engineering resources together to address that need. And again, it sounds like a really obvious answer and it is, but the difference on the back of this one, to be honest with you, Dave is, we've proved this again and again and again. And as you look at the true Monde data protection solution and you do it in conjunction with HPE, it's one of those things where we're so proud to make sure we keep working hard together and pushing each other to be better for our customers that we're really excited about how it moves forwards. We're also, and again, we're not going into any juicy secrets here but I wouldn't be surprised if V12 that comes here in the future also has another little nice treat related to HPE as well. So from that point of view, you should have consistency, you should have trust and you should be excited about the fact that the investment and the joint alliance is stronger than it's ever been. Well, you guys are setting the marks in certainly the competitive landscape. You know, it gets tougher and tougher but you guys are leading, you're moving fast, you've got great product. So move at the speed you are and growing at the pace you are for a billion dollar, you know, company is impressive. So congratulations on that and you're not done yet. So thanks for coming back to the queue. We're excited about Discover here. This is again, another, I think this is almost the ninth plus year we've been a strong sponsor of it. We're excited about HPE's future as well here together and hey, we do this together so we're great to see it moving forwards. David, great to see you again. Thanks so much. Thanks so much, Dave. As always, I appreciate the time. And thank you for being with us for HPE Discover 2021, the virtual edition. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in digital tech coverage.