>> Narrator: From around the globe,
it's the Cube,
with digital coverage of convo
future ready 2020.
Brought to you by Commvault.
>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman
and this is the cubes coverage of
Commvault's Futureready event.
Welcoming back to the program fresh off the keynote stage,
Sanjay Merchandani,
he's the CEO of Commvault.
Sanjay,
nice job on the keynote and thanks so much for joining us.
>> Thanks Stu, good to see you again.
>> Nice to see you, too.
So Sanjay, about a year and a half
into your journey with Commvault.
You took over and you know, wow,
looks like you've almost completely
refreshed the portfolio there.
Maybe start a little bit, Futureready,
tell us how you're getting Commvault
and its customers ready to
be prepared for what happened today as well as the future.
>> Right.
So
we've been busy.
The past 18 months have flown by
in the past four or five, even faster.
The change that we've had to all deal with
as organizations has been tremendous.
We've been hard at work.
When I came on board,
I sort of talked about how we were
setting out to simplify, innovate and execute
all three of those pillars.
And Futureready,
which I love as a as a term,
completely embodies what I think
the work we've been up to and what the work leads today,
which is really getting ready for whatever's next.
And it's coming together of innovation, simplification
and hopefully you'll agree,
some good execution to bring it all together.
Yeah, so we've been busy.
>> Yeah.
Sanjay,
you talked a bit about just
the moment in time that we are in.
Wonder if you can bring us inside your customers.
So there are certain things
that we saw for a couple of months, people put a pause on,
other things absolutely been accelerated.
We talk to customers about their adoption of cloud,
digital transformation,
it's one of those things that boy, I hope
I'm through some of those or can be as agile as possible,
but what are you specifically from your customer base
and how they're dealing with things?
>> You know Stu,
I touched a little bit on that during my keynote
and this time that we're in has really caused,
I think a couple of shifts.
The first structural shift was,
oh, heck this thing is here to stay
and let's get our employees working and productive
and keep the businesses running and keeping them safe
and everything else.
That first shift happened,
right on, on us and about what,
was it that March April,
and businesses small and big had to figure out how to take
a go from their their operating model
into a remote model.
With the remote model you reprioritize.
And you thought through what was important at the time
and what it was,
was really getting laptops into the hands of your employees,
getting them safe into their working environment,
making sure your business processes
leaned in that direction,
you could take care of your customers
and so on.
That was sort of the first structural phase.
The second structural phase was okay,
how do we really drive productivity?
What are the new priorities?
What do we need to do?
What do we want to to invest in,
what do we want to pull back from?
And from our vantage point
and from a technology and data point of view,
what we're hearing is the themes
that if I had to paraphrase the conversations
I have with CIOs,
it's NCOs, it's really around,
hey, simplification.
This is a this is a great time to really simplify
and make sure that you're working with a tried and tested.
This is not the time to experiment,
this is not the time for esoteric,
this is really about simplifying
and working with a tried and tested.
The second is really about focusing on skills.
This is,
you need to be able to leverage
and you need to be able to bring productivity
from the people that you have in IT.
And really focus around that,
that's sometimes forgotten.
The, I like to call them the unsung heroes of technology
have just been pushed into their homes.
They're now doing their jobs longer hours,
tougher scenarios,
they have no access to their data centers,
so on and so forth.
So let's think about skills.
And the third thing really
that has been propelled into this conversation is cloud.
So if you were on a journey, you're off the journey,
you need to get there quickly, okay?
And you need to really leverage a light touch,
low touch, remote sort of capability as fast as you can.
Call it digital transformation,
call it whatever you'd like to say,
but it is about truly leveraging the cloud
in a way that that was no longer
a one year two year three year plan,
you just have to bring it right in.
'Cause those are the kinds of things we're hearing
and dealing with.
>> Yeah.
So important Sanjay,
especially that simplicity piece.
I remember a few years ago
there were certain customers that were adopting cloud
and it was the reminder,
oh hey, your data protection and your security,
you need to make sure you take care of that
when you go to the cloud.
And unfortunately,
some of the people that are now accelerating things
have to quickly say,
oh wait, I can't work this in a few months,
I need to take care of this upfront.
So help us understand a little bit
the announcements that you've made,
how are you making sure that you're ready for customers,
the simplicity that they need to take advantage of
the innovation and opportunity that cloud
and solutions provide?
>> Absolutely.
And make no mistake, for me Stu
simplification is not just the technologies easy to use,
even though that is a big part of what we're working on
and delivering through these announcements.
But we've also got to make sure that
the partnerships that we have
lend themselves to what customers need.
Engineered better it's what's not in the field.
And then and then the ecosystem
to make the technology available
and consumed commercially in the way
that customers would like to keep that simple too.
But today probably if I just focus on the portfolio,
we've,
you could say we've completely rebuilt
this incredible stack of technology
that we've built this company on.
And we've,
and in a nutshell, what we've done is
announced a,
we've taken our backup and recovery suite
and be saying we've got a new
Commvault backup and recovery product,
we've got a brand new Commvault disaster recovery product,
you can get them together as a unit,
as the complete backup and recovery suite if you would.
So that's one big set of offerings.
The second and you know, the second is
we bought Hedvig,
a sort of a next generation Software defined storage
technology company last year,
and we've been feverishly at work, quietly at work,
integrating Hedvig into Commvault,
not just as a company but in the technology.
And our new hyperscale technology, Hyperscale X
is the embodiment of those two things coming together.
The best of data protection from Commvault
and the best storage subsystem to drive that from Hedvig,
also from Commvault.
So the two come together.
And all of this technology,
whether it's the suite that I mentioned or the hyperscaler,
all of it, you can mix and match any way you want
with with a world class user interface,
or user interfaces if you want
command lines, if you want API's,
we give it all of it to you.
In addition,
we've got announcements around to activate suite,
and recently we talked about a partnership with Microsoft
with the Metallic Azure sort of combination for customers.
So it's a left to right set of announcement
with simplification threaded right through it.
>> Yeah, so Sanjay, you mentioned partnerships.
A little bit before the show,
you had of course the extended partnership
with Microsoft >> Yeah.
with Netallic.
Maybe give us just a little bit more color about
how Commvault makes sure they're positioned
and working closely with those hyperscalers.
>> Yeah, is you know, and we work with all hyperscalers.
So
we are probably the most prevalent
data protection technology, if you would,
in the public cloud.
And most of you know,
we talk about over and [Indistinct]
that we've helped customers write to the cloud,
doesn't just one data point.
We've been seen as from the outside in as being
the transport, the capability across hybrid cloud scenarios.
The partnership with Microsoft and Microsoft Azure
in particular,
is a coming together of these things
because customers, when we talk to customers
and when Microsoft talks to the customers,
we hear from them.
They want the ability to be,
as they get more prevalent in the cloud,
as their workloads get more pervasive in the cloud,
they want to make sure they've got the same
industrial strength data protection cloud in
that they had well, while they were on-prem
or primarily on prem.
Our solutions are completely hybrid.
And so the partnership really brings together again,
technology that's engineered better together.
Our data protection and their cloud, best of class,
our channels working together
and making sure that it's easy
for customers to work with us,
and we're available on the Azure Marketplace,
and our field force is also aligned around it.
So it's, again, a 360 kind of conversation
that we can have with customers
as much as much of today's announcements are.
>> Yeah.
Sanjay, you talk about the hyperscalers,
you mentioned the integration of the Hedvig solution,
work with DevOps and really the cloud native type solutions.
Of course, one of the things everybody was looking at
when you were hired to this job is
you've got background in the automation and developer world.
So how was that seen in the update to the portfolio?
Really that embracing of
cloud native and developer environments.
>> But cloud without automation is not a cloud, right?
It's just infrastructure that's put somewhere else.
It's deep, deep degrees of automation
that really bring cloud to life, right?
And I was fortunate to have
been in the DevOps world for a while
with a marketing product
and was very pleasantly surprised when I came to Commvault
and saw [Indistinct] views of automation and workflows
that our core technology had.
With the Hedvig acquisition,
being a platform layer,
being the storage layer that is multi-protocol
and appeals incredibly to DevOps engineers
because everything in the product
is callable through an API
or a set of API's.
It's rich, it's got workflows
and it's multi-protocol.
So whether you're using VMs
or you're building the next generation
container applications
or you're just using it object storage, it doesn't matter.
We can Mix and match it across
private and public cloud environments,
and it's all callable,
and it's all programmable,
and it's all automated
in as much as you want it.
>> All right.
So Sanjay,
I know, we can't talk too much about financial pieces,
where we are in the quarter.
But one of the things that
Dave Volante and I were discussing and looking at Commvault,
there's some good data.
Especially if you look at win rates against
some of the newer players in the space,
the data that we have, from ETR was showing
increased win rates for Commvault.
Just could you give us a little bit
of your competitive landscape view.
You talked about customers don't want to take too much risk.
How do you balance between being
a company with a large install base
but you want to be more modern?
>> Oh, yeah.
And, you know, the use cases we're talking about,
the cloud that we're seeing as leaders
are are today use cases
not yesterday's use cases.
And we're winning on the basis the fact
that we respect by customers are coming from, okay?
There's a lot of stuff that runs that business
that is still good that isn't in the cloud
that they're working their plans
to journey from that to something else,
as well as we're we're leading in areas where they're headed
in the public cloud.
And we always like to stay one to two steps
ahead of the hard problems
our customers are going to encounter.
So our portfolio is absolutely cloud ready.
Our portfolio is rich in that capability.
And we're not slowing down.
We're winning because we have the breadth of technology
that we support both
source data that customers want to want to protect
and target scenarios,
where it would be the hyperscalers or anything else
where customers want to take it.
And the flexibility.
The second thing, and if you heard the interview I did
with Ron from from Johns Hopkins,
it's the optimization
of our technology around each of those cloud scenarios
that gives our customers true value around
the compute and storage decisions they have to make,
and we help them make
through deep degrees of AI and ML built in.
So it's not just about moving bits,
it's about optimizing all of that
and the entire lifecycle of that data
from the point it's created to the point to archive it.
>> Excellent.
Well, Sanjay, want to let you have the final word.
Give us what you want customers to have
as the takeaway from today's Futureready event.
>> Sure.
So first of all
I wanted to thank all our audience here,
our customers for being with us.
It's being with us as a customer,
being with us
and looking at us as a prospect for our technology.
We are investing, like,
we've invested over a billion dollars
over a period of time
as a company in data protection.
And we're taking that to a whole new level
with the innovations that we're bringing to the table.
So we truly believe,
that the journey as it pertains to data,
the journey to the cloud
requires you to be able to think through the lifecycle
from storing, protecting, optimizing
and using that data all the way through.
And our solutions can be used independently
best of class across each of them,
all together, better together.
And,
I urge you to take a few minutes and look at
some of the great innovations we've brought to the table
and and rest assured that everything we're doing
is with the hypercloud in mind
and is completely cloud optimized.
>> All right, well, Sanjay Merchandani,
thank you so much for joining us.
Congratulations the team on the work on the updates.
Definitely look forward to hearing more in the future.
>> Thanks Stu, good to be here.
>> All right, stay tuned.
We've got more from Commvault Futureready.
I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching The Cube.
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