(inspiring music) >> Announcer: theCUBE presents
HPE Discover 2022.
Brought to you by HPE.
>> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage
of HPE Discover 2022, from the Venetian in Las Vegas,
the first Discover since 2019.
I really think this is my 14th Discover,
when you include HP, when you include Europe.
And I got to say this Discover, I think has more energy
than any one that I've ever seen, about 8,000 people here.
Really excited to have one of HPE's longstanding partners,
Veeam CTO, Danny Allen is here, joined by David Harvey,
Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam.
Guys, good to see you again.
It was just earlier, let's see, last month,
we were together out here.
>> Yeah, just a few weeks ago.
It's fantastic to be back and what it's telling us,
technology industry is coming back.
>> And the events business, of course, is coming back,
which we love.
I think the expectations were cautious.
You saw it at VeeamON, a little more than you expected,
a lot of great energy.
A lot of people, 'cause it was last month,
it was their first time out,
>> Yes. >> in two years.
Here, I think people have started to go out more,
but still, an energy that's palpable.
>> You can definitely feel it.
Last night, I think I went to four consecutive events
and everyone's out having those discussions
and having conversations, it's good to be back.
>> You guys hosted the Storage party last night,
which is epic.
I left at midnight, I took a picture, it was still packed.
I said, okay, time to go,
nothing good happens after midnight kids.
David, talk about the alliance with HPE, how it's evolved,
and where you see it going?
>> I appreciate it, and certainly this, as you said,
has been a big alliance for us.
Over 10 years or so,
fantastic integrations across the board.
And you touched on 2019 Discover.
We launched with GreenLake at that event,
we were one of the launch partners,
and we've seen fantastic growth.
Overall, what we're excited about, is that continuation
of the movement of the customer's buying patterns
in line with HPE's portfolio and in line with Veeam.
We continue to be with all their primary, secondary storage,
we continue to be a spearhead position with GreenLake,
which we're really excited about.
And we're also really excited to hear from HPE,
unfortunately under NDA,
some of their future stuff they're investing in,
which is a really nice invigoration
for what they're doing for their portfolio.
And we see that being a big deal for us
over the next 24 months.
>> Your relationship with HPE predates the HP, HPE split.
>> Mmm. >> Yes.
>> But it was weird, because they had Data Protector,
and that was a quasi-competitor, or really not,
but it was a competitor, a legacy competitor,
of what you guys have, kind of modern data protection
I think is the tagline, if I got it right.
Post the split, that was an S-curve moment, wasn't it,
in terms of the partnership?
>> It really was.
If you go back 10 years, we did our first integration
sending data to StoreOnce
and we had some blueprints around that.
But now, if you look what we have,
we have integrations on the primary side,
so, 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, all their top-tier storage,
we can manage the snapshots.
We have integration on the target side.
We integrate with Catalyst in the movement of data
and the management of data.
And, as David alluded to, we integrate with GreenLake.
So, customers who want to take this as a consumption model,
we integrate with that.
And so it's been, like you said, the strongest relationship
that we have on the technology alliance side.
>> So, V12, you announced at VeeamON.
What does that mean for HPE customers, the relationship?
Maybe you guys could both talk about that.
>> Technology side, to touch on a few things
that we're doing with them,
ransomware has been a huge issue.
Security's been a big theme, obviously, at the conference,
>> Dave: Yeah, you bet.
and one of the things we're doing in V12
is adding immutability for both StoreOnce and StoreEver.
So, we take the features that our partners have,
immutability being big in the security space,
and we integrate that fully into the product.
So a customer checks a box and says,
hey, I want to make sure that the data is secure.
>> Yeah, and also, it's another signification
about the relationship.
Every single release we've done has had HPE
at the heart of it,
and the same thing is being said with V12.
And it shows to our customers, the continual commitment.
Relationships come and go.
They're hard, and the great news is, 10 years has proven
that we get through good times and tricky situations,
and we both continue to invest, et cetera.
And I think there's a lot of peace of mind
and the revenue figures prove that,
which is what we're really excited about.
>> Yeah I want to come back to that,
but just to follow up, Danny, on that immutability,
that's a feature that you check?
It's service within GreenLake, or within Veeam?
How does that all work?
>> We have immutability now depending on the target.
We introduced the ability to send data, for example,
into S3 two years ago,
and make it immutable when you send it
to an S3 or S3 compatible environment.
We added, in Version 11,
the ability to take a Linux repository and make it,
and harden it, essentially make it immutable.
But what we're doing now is taking our partner systems
like StoreOnce, like StoreEver,
and when we send data there, we take advantage
of an API flag or whatever it happens to be,
that it makes the data, when it's written to that system,
can't be deleted, can't be encrypted.
Now, what does that mean for a customer?
Well, we do all the hard work in the back end,
it's just a check box.
They say, I want to make it immutable,
and we manage how long it's immutable.
Because if you made everything immutable forever,
that's hugely expensive, right?
So, it's all about,
how long is that immutable before you age it out
and make sure the new data coming in is immutable.
>> Dave: It's like an insurance policy,
you have that overlap.
>> Yes.
>> Right, okay.
And then David, you mentioned the revenue,
Lou bears that out.
I got the IDC guys comin' on later on today.
I'll ask 'em about that, if that's their swim lane.
But you guys are basically a statistical tie,
with Dell for number one?
Am I getting that right?
And you're growing at a faster rate, I believe,
it's hard to tell 'cause I don't think Dell reports
on the pace of its growth within data protection.
You guys obviously do, but is that right?
It's a statistical tie, is it?
>> Yeah, hundred percent.
>> Yeah, statistical tie for first place,
which we're super excited about.
When I joined Veeam, I think we were in fifth place,
but we've been in the leader's quadrant
of the Gartner Magic-
>> Cause and effect there or?
(panelists laughing)
>> No, I don't think so.
>> Dave: Ha, I think maybe.
>> We've been on a great trajectory.
But statistical tie for first place,
greatest growth sequentially, and year-over-year,
of all of the data protection vendors.
And that's a testament
not just to the technology that we're doing,
but partnerships with HPE, because you never do this,
the value of a technology is not that technology alone,
it's the value of that technology within the ecosystem.
And so that's why we're here at HPE Discover.
It's our joint technology solutions that we're delivering.
>> What are your thoughts or what are you seeing
in the field on As-a-service?
Because of course, the messaging is all about As-a-service,
you'd think, oh, a hundred percent of everything
is going to be As-a-service.
A lot of customers, they don't mind CapEx,
they got good, balance sheet,
and they're like, hey, we'll take care of this,
and, we're going to build our own little internal cloud.
But, what are you seeing in the market
in terms of As-a-service, versus,
just traditional licensing models?
>> Certainly, there's a mix between the two.
What I'd say, is that sources that are already As-a-service,
think Microsoft 365, think AWS, Azure, GCP,
the cloud providers.
There's a natural tendency for the customer to want
the data protection As-a-service, as well for those.
But if you talk about what's on premises,
customers who have big data centers deployed,
they're not yet, the pendulum has not shifted
for that to be data protection As-a-service.
But we were early to this game ourselves.
We have 10,000, what we call, Veeam Cloud Service Providers,
that are offering data protection As-a-service,
whether it be on premises, so they're remotely managing it,
or cloud hosted, doing data protection for that.
>> So, you don't care.
You're providing the technology,
and then your customers
are actually choosing the delivery model.
Is that correct?
>> A hundred percent, and if you think about
what GreenLake is doing for example,
that started off as being a financial model,
but now they're getting into that services delivery.
And what we want to do is enable them
to deliver it, As-a-service, not just the financial model,
but the outcome for the customer.
And so our technology, it's not just do backup,
it's do backup for a multi-tenant,
multi-customer environment that does
all of the multi-tenancy
and billing and charge back as part of that service.
>> Okay, so you guys don't report on this,
but I'm going to ask the question anyway.
You're number one now,
let's call you, let's declare number one,
'cause we're well past that last reporting
and you're growin' faster.
So go another quarter, you're now number one,
so you're the largest.
Do you spend more on R&D in data protection
than any other company?
>> Yes, I'm quite certain that we do.
Now, we have an unfair advantage
because we have 450,000 customers.
I don't think there's any other
data protection company out there,
the size and scope and scale, that we have.
But we've been expanding,
our largest R&D operation center's in Prague,
it's in Czech Republic, but we've been expanding that.
Last year it grew 40% year on year in R&D,
so big investment in that space.
You can see this just through our product space.
Five years ago, we did data protection of VMware only,
and now we do all the virtual environments,
all the physical environments,
all the major cloud environments, Kubernetes, Microsoft 365,
we're launching Salesforce.
We announced that at VeeamON last month
and it will be coming out in Q3.
All of that is coming from our R&D investments.
>> A lot of people expect that when a company like Insight,
a PE company, purchases a company like Veeam,
that one of the things they'll dial down is R&D.
That did not happen in this case.
>> No, they very much treat us as a growth company.
We had 22% year-over-year growth in 2020,
and 25% year-over-year last year.
The growth has been tremendous,
they continue to give us the freedom.
Now, I expect they'll want returns like that continuously,
but we have been delivering, they have been investing.
>> One of my favorite conversations of the year
was our supercloud conversation, which was awesome,
thank you for doing that with me.
But that's clearly an area of focus,
what we call supercloud,
and you don't use that term, I know, you do sometimes,
but it's not your marketing, I get that.
But that is an R&D intensive effort, is it not?
To create that common experience.
And you see HPE, attempting to do that as well,
across all these different estates.
>> A hundred percent.
We focus on three things, I always say, our differentiators,
simplicity, flexibility, and reliability.
Making it simple for the customers
is not an easy thing to do.
Making that checkbox for immutability?
We have to do a lot behind the scenes to make it simple.
Same thing on flexibility.
We don't care if they're using 3PAR, Primera, Nimble,
whatever you want to choose as the primary storage,
we will take that out of your hands and make it really easy.
You mentioned supercloud.
We don't care what the cloud infrastructure,
it can be on GreenLake, it can be on AWS, can be on Azure,
it can be on GCP, it can be on IBM cloud.
It is a lot of effort on our part
to abstract the cloud infrastructure,
but we do that on behalf of our customers
to take away that complexity, it's part of our platform.
>> Quick follow-up,
and then I want to ask a question of David.
I like talking to you guys
because you don't care where it is, right?
You're truly agnostic to it all.
I'm trying to figure out this repatriation thing,
cause I hear a lot of
hey, Dave, you should look into repatriation
that's happened all over the place, and I see pockets of it.
What are you seeing in terms of repatriation?
Have customers over-rotated to the cloud
and now they're pullin' back a little bit?
Or is it, as I'm claiming, in pockets?
What's your visibility on that?
>> Three things I see happening.
There's the customers who lifted up their data center,
moved it into the cloud and they get the first bill.
>> (chuckling) Okay.
>> And they will repatriate, there's no question.
If I talk to those customers who simply lifted up
and moved it over because the CIO told them to,
they're moving it back on premises.
But a second thing that we see is
people moving it over, with tweaks.
So they'll take their SQL server database
and they'll move it into RDS,
they'll change some things.
And then you have people who are building cloud-native,
they're never coming back on premises,
they are building it for the cloud environment.
So, we see all three of those.
We only really see repatriation on that first scenario,
when they get that first bill.
>> And when you look at the numbers, I think it gets lost,
'cause you see the cloud is growing so fast.
So David, what are the conversations like?
You had several events last night,
The Veeam party, slash Storage party, from HPE.
What are you hearing from your alliance partners
and the customers at the event.
>> I think Danny touched on that point,
it's about philosophy of evolution.
And I think at the end of the day,
whether we're seeing it with our GSI alliances
we've got out there,
or with the big enterprise conversations
we're having with HPE,
it's about understanding which workloads they want to move.
In our mind, the customers are getting much smarter
in making that decision, rather than experimenting.
They're really taking a really solid look.
And the work we're doing with the GSIs
on workplace modernization, data center transformation,
they're really having that investment work up front
on the workloads, to be able to say,
this works for me, for my personality and my company.
And so, to the point about movement,
it's more about decisive decision at the start,
and not feeling like the remit is,
I have to do one thing or another,
it's about looking at that workflow position.
And that's what we've seen with the revenue part as well.
We've seen our movement to GreenLake tremendously grow
in the last 18 months to two years.
And from our GSI work as well,
we're seeing the types of conversations
really focus on that workload, compared to,
hey, I just need a backup solution,
and that's really exciting.
>> Are you having specific conversations about security,
or is it a data protection conversation still,
(David chuckles) that's an adjacency
to security?
>> That's a great question.
And I think it's a complex one,
because if you come to a company like Veeam,
we are there, and you touched on it before,
we provide a solution
when something has happened with security.
We're not doing intrusion detection,
we're not doing that barrier position at the end of it,
but it's part of an end-to-end assumption.
And I don't think that at this particular point,
I started in security with RSA and Check Point,
it was about layers of protection.
Now it's layers of protection,
and the inevitability that at some point
something will happen, so about the recovery.
So the exciting conversations we're having,
especially with the big enterprises,
is not about the fear factor,
it's about, at some point something's going to occur.
Speed of recovery is the conversation.
And so for us, and your question is,
are they talking to us about security,
or more, the continuity position?
And that's where the synergy's getting a lot simpler,
rather than a hard demark between security and backup.
>> Yeah, when you look at the stock market,
everything's been hit, but security,
with the exception of Okta,
'cause it got that weird benign hack,
but security, generally, is an area that CIOs have said,
hey, we can't really dial that back.
We can maybe, some other discretionary stuff,
we'll steal and prioritize.
But security seems to be,
and I think data protection is now part of that discussion.
You're not a security company.
We've seen some of your competitors
actually pivot to become security companies.
You're not doing that,
but it's very clearly an adjacency, don't you think?
>> It's an adjacency,
and it's a new conversation that we're having
with the Chief Information Security Officer.
I had a meeting an hour ago with a customer
who was hit by ransomware,
and they got the call at 2:00 AM in the morning,
after the ransomware
they recovered their entire portfolio
within 36 hours, from backups.
Didn't even contact Veeam, I found out during this meeting.
But that is clearly something
that the Chief Information Security Officer
wants to know about.
It's part of his purview, is the recovery of that data.
>> And they didn't pay the ransom?
>> And they did not pay the ransom, not a penny.
>> Ahh, we love those stories.
Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.
Congratulations on all the success.
Love when you guys come on,
and it was such a fun event at VeeamON.
Great event here, and your presence is, was seen.
The Veeam green is everywhere, so appreciate your time.
>> Thank you.
>> Thanks, Dave.
>> Okay, and thank you for watching.
This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and Lisa Martin.
We'll be back right after this short break.
You're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022,
from Las Vegas.
(inspiring music)