>> Narrator: Live from Miami Beach, Florida it's theCUBE.
Covering VeeamON 2019.
Brought to you by Veeam.
>> Welcome back to Miami everybody.
You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.
This is day two of VeeamON 2019.
This is theCUBE third year at VeeamON.
We did New Orleans, we did Chicago last year.
Of course here at the Fontainebleau it Miami
great venue for an event like this.
I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Peter Burris.
Abba Abbaszadi is here.
He's the head of IT at Charles Russell Speechlys,
a London-based law firm.
Abba, great to see you thank you for coming on.
>> Thank you.
>> So tell us about this interesting name,
Charles Russell Speechlys.
It was a merger of two firms, right?
Tell us about how it came about.
>> Back in 2014 Charles Russell Speechlys were formed
for the merger of between two different companies.
Charles Russell and Speechly Bircham.
From an IT perspective that was very interesting
for the two IT departments coming in together.
So we had a limited time period
where we had to merged these two companies.
Two different systems, different data centers,
different data sets.
So it was formed by a merger back in 2014
and for five years on and we're here today.
>> Yeah we see this a lot M&A goes down,
the acquiring company, although this sounds
like it was a merger, so they battle whose going to,
really which frame works is going to win.
You guys I'm sure had that conversation,
but take us through that merger, what it entailed,
what the scenario looked like, and how you plan for it.
>> Sure, so I was part of the Charles Russell
legacy Charles Russell team.
And obviously Speechly Bircham had their own team as well.
So initially when we first found out about the merger,
it was essential for the two teams to get together
to work out okay what systems do you have for e-mail,
what systems do you have for documents management system.
It's playing trump cards.
Who's got the best systems?
And which way do we want to move forward?
>> A little of this a little of that.
>> So but being a law firm, most law firms around the world
and in the UK especially used the same type of softwares.
So essentially from that perspective it was quite simple.
But then we had to work out how do we go forward with this
because two different headquarters in the London area.
Which office do we move into?
So the logistic is around there.
Can we fit in pre-merger?
It was Charles Russell had roughly 600 people.
Speechly Bircham had roughly 500 people.
>> Dave: Pretty comparable.
>> Yeah yeah so working out the space logistics was an issue.
>> Dave: They making it even more complicated right?
>> One of the thing is interesting about the law firm,
verus a you know a traditionally manufacturer
or a financial services firm that has a lot of very
fast write writing system that have a scale on
those lines, there's a law firm feature very complex docs
very complex information--
>> Dave: Lot of files.
>> Lot of files that are written but at the same time
you have repurposed a lot of different workflows,
very sensitive to external contingent regulatory change,
and so you have all of that happening especially,
I mean two years if I'm not mistaken
it was you're getting into the Brexit stuff too,
so that also had to be a source of uncertainly.
So how has it been combining external regulatory issues
the way the technology is being use in the law firms
and some of the new workflows you guys
are trying to support, and then adding on the top that
the complexity of being these two firms together.
>> Dave: Lets speak a little about GDPR.
>> Well GDPR itself was a one year old project for us
it terms of.
Obviously we got offices in Middle East,
we got offices in the far East,
and in Central Europe as well.
Data logistics or where it sits is an issue for us as well.
So GDPR been a big project for us.
In terms of the merger itself, it was very, very difficult
for two IT departments to come together
and actually work out
how do we goes to one unified systems.
Essentially one document management system,
one e-mail system.
All of that took a lot of planning,
a lot of project management,
and essentially within the legal part itself
we got doubted in the time frames that we had
that we could've of achieved it, and within I think it was
an 18 months period, we had merged
all of the different systems.
The various offices Speechly Bircham at the time as well
had offices lets say Zurich and Geneva.
We had to merged different offices together as well.
So it was a big, big tasks for the IT department
and the firm itself.
>> They're very right migration deadlines
and as you started to approach those deadlines
you had to worried about:
when we're going to cut over how do we avoid downtime?
How we do we make sure that we don't have
bad data data corruptions and the like?
So how do you planned for that and how did it go?
>> So we here at VeeamON and Veeam was a big part
of our migration process.
So where we had two different supports of business,
different storage systems, different virtualization systems,
we used Veeam as the middleman basically
to migrate data from one data center to another
using Swing Kit, so where there was large of amount
terabytes and terabytes amounts of data,
we had Swing Kit available to us.
Using Veeam we were able to V2V essentially
a lot of the environments into the Swing Kit
and then bring them over to the other side of the business.
And Veeam was essentially part of that.
And on top of that making sure that the data
that we were being across is true and not corrupt.
And that using some of their technologies assure backups
and stuff like that.
Really, really was essential to the migration going well.
>> And was Veeam installed in both organizations at the time
or was that something had to sort of redeploy?
>> Yeah, so Legacy Charles Russell had Veeam.
It was actually myself going back
to probably eight years ago, version four,
at the time I think Veeam had 20,000 customers,
so to hear they've got--
>> Wow we at what version 10 now thirty three hundred
and fifty thousand?
>> 350,000, 4,000 a month.
>> And that makes me proud that we invested
in Veeam when we did.
>> Dave: Hey good call.
>> So yeah it was a good call from us
and essentially the other side business did not have Veeam,
but then we just expanded our Veeam estate to look
at both sides and then bring them across.
And then ever since then we've grown out Veaam estate
across the world across, all of our offices.
>> So how did you that?
So that was at another migration that had to occur.
Did you kind of do those simultaneously?
Did you do the Veeam migration first
and then bring the bring the two systems together?
>> Did you used Veeam to do special sort in the migration?
>> Yeah so Veeam was essentially the tool that we used
to migrate data centers from one data center to another,
using their backups technology, using their
replication technology we were able to replicate
all of one side's virtual machines to the another.
And then that gave us that gave us the flexibility as well
when we had the limited downtime period that we had,
that us the flexibility to actually say
okay the business is during these particular hours,
we not going to be able to, you're not going to have access
to these systems because we're going to bring up
the systems from point A to point B.
So Veeam was essential to that.
>> If you had to do it over again if you had a mulligan,
what would you have done differently?
What advice might would you give to somebody
whose going trying to go through a similar migration?
>> I would say give your partners and lawyers
a more realistic timeframe.
(laughter)
Than the timeframe that we were given.
>> Or don't let them give you an unrealistic timeframe.
>> Exactly yeah so it's essentia, the amount of work
it's not just data itself.
We're talking network, and we're talking security,
we're talking two similar size companies coming together
with a very, very limited timeframe,
consolidating all of their systems into one,
which is essential for the two parts of the business
to collaborate together
because you know we could've of taken our time,
it could've of take us three or four years,
as far as we're concerned.
But the fact that we did do it in such a quick timeframe
meant that the two parts of the business from day one
can collaborate much better with each other.
>> We talked a lot about digital business transformation
and our approach or our observations on it is that
digital business transformation is a process
by which you alter and change your firm
to re-institutionalize or change your game model,
your overall governor's model
as you use data as an asset.
So that's affecting every firm everywhere.
How is it affecting a law firm and your law firm specially?
And how is that going to change your stance
and your approach to data protection?
>> Data is an incredibly important to a law firm,
as it is to most organizations.
But in term of, you know one of the things
that's quite important in terms of law firm,
we work with the finical institutions.
So we held information like that, we held personal data,
we held all tons of information.
Charles Russell Speechlys works with all areas of law
apart from criminal.
So the areas of law that they work with
is vast in terms of the amount of data that we hold.
And essentially, I mean for us data is the most important
thing that runs the firm and having visibility to our data,
how do we work that data?
How do we then market based on the data that we have?
How do we market ourselves from that data?
There might be one area of business that's dealing
with a family issue, family law.
But then that could correspond with a litigation issue
or you know how do we work that data to be
an advantage to our businesses is extremely important to us?
>> What'd you thinking of the announcements this week?
I'm kind of curious, I always like to ask the practitioners
you know what they think about what was announced.
You had Veeam at a billon dollars so that's kind of fun
and cool, but you had the with Veeam program which was
kind of interesting the whole API thing.
>> I really like that.
>> And the Veeam Availability Orchestrator
where they really talking about recovering from
backups as opposed to need them to recover from
a replicated instance.
Some of the automated testing stuff was kind of interesting.
They talked about dynamic documentation.
Things you saw this week that you'll actually
go back and say hey I can apply that to solve a problem.
>> Sure so essentially I think I mean that's
a really good, good question, it's very relevant to us.
Many of just not us as a law firm,
but many of the other law firms around the world
are now looking at cloud-based services.
Now for us I mean this was a big thing five years ago
where you know everyone was talking
about public clouds, AWUS, Azure.
We're now looking at clouds and we're basically
we're being pushed by the vendors themselves
to go towards clouds like Citrix for example,
their licensing model is based around cloud services.
So is Microsoft, you know Microsoft you don't really have
exchange anymore within premises, you have Office 365.
So a lot of the SAS applications are moving towards
the cloud and what Ratmir had to say during his keynote
in regards to act two and how Veeam are trying to be
the visionaries in terms of looking at cloud
as their next big things for the next ten years,
offering that is crucial.
And businesses like ours who have limited exposure
to cloud technologies, limited understanding essentially,
having a tool that could migrate from one cloud
to another is fantastic.
We've offered, and I've spoken to
obviously as an IT directors around the other law firms
where one or two have gone to the public cloud,
but they don't know how to get come back in.
And having a tool that essentially
gives you the flexibility to bring it back in-house,
to go from AWS to Azure, or if there's a particular
SAS application for example, that pairs better with AWS,
but you've got your other applications that pairs
with that particular application is Azure,
why would you want it to have it in Azure?
You'll probably want to move it into AWS.
So for us I think what the message coming out of
VeeamON this year has been really, really helpful for us.
>> So when you start Veeam it said that had 20,000 customers.
You were like the 20,000 and first customer,
and it was coincided with the virtualization craze.
Do you feel like Veeam, knowing what you know about them,
you got a lot of experience with them,
can sort of replicate that success in this--
>> Peter: Pun intended--
>> Dave: In yeah in act two?
>> I think when I first looked at Veeam,
I thought wow this is really, really simple.
It's a bit like an iPhone.
You give an iPhone to grandmother or to your children
and they know how to play with it,
and I seen Veeam as an intuitive piece of software
that's easy for IT professionals to get on with.
As their slogan said a few years ago it just works.
It does just work.
We're great advocates of Veeam.
It's worked wonders for us.
We've acquired smaller business using Veeam.
We merged companies using Veeam.
And when I see, and when you go to these sessions
and you see the intelligence behind their thinking,
I think going back to your question,
I think we see Veeam as the strategic partner for us.
And we see their vision and we believe in their vision.
And I think what they doing in terms of
what they're working on the next few years,
I think we're all in favor of that
and I think you know essentially that's where
most of their businesses is going to come from.
>> When you sit down with you know Ratmir over a vodka
(laughter)
and he says tell me the one thing I could do
to make your life easier, better, you can't say cut prices.
That's not allowed, but what would you advise him?
>> To make my life better.
>> Peter: Other than gin instead of vodka.
>> Yeah (laughter).
>> Dave: 'Cause that would make you crazy.
>> Yeah, so in term of Veeam as a technology platform--
>> How about your business relationship
or something you like to see them do
that would improve a lot?
>> I think in terms of mergers and acquiring companies,
seeing license rentals would be a good thing.
I know they give you evaluation license keys
and that's something that you can use.
So for example if we were to acquire a company
that has hundreds of servers and Vms,
having license rentals for a period of time--
>> Ah you'll be able to spin it up and spin it down
like a true cloud that's great.
>> That would be an advantage.
I think in terms of what they doing in the marketplace,
and a lot of law firms use Veeam,
I think like they can't do anymore then they are doing now.
And all the years that we used Veeam
I think it's has been eight years now,
but we only had one serious problem
and the way they dealt with that problem,
the way they communicated with us,
all the different team across the Europe
and the U.S got involved,
I think you know in terms of service, in terms of software,
in terms of what they do for us,
I don't think there is anything more
to add to Ratmir's visions.
>> That's great. >> For their customers.
>> Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE,
it was great to have you.
>> No problem, thank you very much.
>> You're welcome alright keep it right there everybody
Peter and I will be we our next guest right after this short
break we're live from Miami at the Fontainebleau Hotel.
You're watching theCUBE from VeeamON 2019.
We'll be right back.
(upbeat music)