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>> Well good afternoon and welcome back here
to San Francisco, we're in Moscone North,
along with Dave Vellante, John Walls.
You're watching our coverage here
live on theCUBE of VMworld 2019.
Dave I've been over on the other set,
I know you've been busy on this side as well,
show going all right for you so far?
>> Oh yeah, a lot of action going on over here.
We had Pat Kelson go on this morning,
Michael Dell with his VMware hat,
we got Sanjay Putin coming on later.
>> Yeah, yeah.
Good lineup.
And that lineup continues.
Greg Hughes, the CEO of Veritas.
>> Great to be here. >> John: Great to see you.
>> Great to be here John, Dave.
>> Thanks for joining us, we're actually just outside
the Veritas Meadow.
Here, sponsored this area, this is the meadows set.
>> Nice to be here.
Yeah, I didn't know that, all right.
>> First off, just give me your idea of the vibe here.
What are ya feeling, what are ya sensing?
>> I think there's a tremendous amount of energy.
It's been a lot of fun to be here.
You know obviously VMware is talking about this
hybrid multi-cloud world,
and Veritas is 100% supportive of that vision.
We work with all the major cloud service providers,
AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure.
We share thousands of customers with VMware.
Some of the biggest customers,
the most complicated customers in the world,
where we provide availability, and protection,
and insights for those customers.
>> Well it's always been the ethos of Veritas,
when go back to the early days of Veritas,
essentially, it was the storage management,
the no hardware agenda,
this sort of independent storage company but pure software.
>> Greg: That's us.
>> And years ago, there was no cloud,
but there were different platforms.
So that culture has really migrated now
into this multi-cloud world.
Your thoughts on that?
>> Absolutely look, I'll give you an example of a customer
that we worked with closely with VMware on.
And that is Renault Americas.
Renault is a big joint venture.
They've got a huge SAP installation, 8,000 users,
40 terabytes, big NetBackup customer.
They also use our products InfoScale and VRP
for availability, and DR.
And they work with us because we are hardware agnostic.
They looked at us against the other competitors,
and we're hardware agnostic, and because of that,
we came in at 60% lower TCO, than those other providers.
So that hardware agnostic approach works really well.
>> You were just touching on this Greg, a little bit
when you said,
whether it's hybrid, whether it's multi,
whether it's, whatever it is.
We're here to provide solutions.
The fact that this stuff is hard to figure out,
and really kind of can boggle the mind a bit,
its very complex.
How much of an inhibitor is that,
in terms of what you're hearing from clients,
and in terms of their progress and their decision making?
>> Well let me explain where we sit.
We are the leader in enterprise data protection,
availability and insights.
We work with the largest, most complex,
most highly regulated,
and most demanding customers on the planet.
99 of the Fortune 100, are customers of Veritas.
10 of the top 10 telcos,
10 of the top 10 healthcare companies,
and 10 of the top 10 financial institutions.
I spend about 50% of my time talking to these customers,
so we learn a lot.
And here are the 4 big challenges they're facing.
First, is the explosion of data.
Data is just growing so fast.
Gartner estimates there will be 175 zettabytes
of data in 2025.
If you cram that into iPhones,
it would take 2.6 trillion iPhones
and go to the sun and back.
It's an enormous amount of data.
Second, they're worried about Ransomware.
Its not a question of if you'll be attacked,
it's when you'll be attacked.
Look at what's happening in Texas right now,
with the 22 municipalities dealing with that.
What you want in that case is a resilient infrastructure.
You want to be able to restore,
from a really good backup copy of data.
Third, they want the hybrid multi-cloud world,
just like Pat Gelsinger has been talking about.
That's what customers want,
but they want to be able to protect their data
wherever it is, make it highly available,
and get insights on their data, wherever its located.
And then finally, they're dealing with
this massive growth in government regulations,
around the world, because of this concern about privacy.
I was in Australia a few weeks ago,
and one of our customers,
she was telling me, that she deals
with 27 different regulatory environments.
Another customer was saying,
the California Privacy Act will be the death of him,
and he's based in St. Louis.
So our strategy is focused on, taking away the complexity,
and helping the largest companies in the world,
deal with these challenges.
And that's why we introduced
the Enterprise Data Services Platform,
and that's why we're here at VMworld, talking about Veritas.
>> So Greg, lets unpack some of those.
As I said, Veritas kind of created a market way back when.
And now you see it come full circle, you got multi-cloud,
you have a lot of new entrants,
talking about data management, that's always been your play,
but you're kind of the king of the hill,
so everybody wants a piece of your hide,
so that's kind of interesting, but data growth,
so lets start there.
So it used to be data was a liability,
now its becoming an asset,
so what are your customers saying about
data as something that needs to be managed,
needs to be done cost effectively and efficiently,
versus getting more value on data,
and what's Veritas's perspective on that?
>> Well they're really trying to get insights in their data.
And that's why we acquired a company called APTARE.
So when I, this is my second time at Veritas,
I was here from 2003-2010, rejoined the company in 2018,
talked to a lot of customers,
I found that their infrastructure was so complex,
the storage infrastructure, so complex.
The companies were having a hard time figuring out
anything about their data.
So they are having the hardest time
just answering some fundamental questions
that boards were asking.
Boards are saying because of the Ransomware threat,
is all our data protected?
Is it backed up,
are all our applications backed up and protected?
And customers could not answer that question.
On the other hand, they also were backing up some data,
six, seven, eight times, wasting storage.
What APTARE does, and its really amazing,
I recommend seeing a demo of it if you get a chance,
it pulls information from SAN arrays, network file systems,
virtual machines, SAN networking,
and all data protection applications
to get a complete picture
of what's happening with your data.
And that is one example of what customers really want.
>> Okay, so then that kind of leads to the second point,
which is Ransomware.
Now part of that is analytics and understanding
what's going on in the system as well.
But it's a relatively new concept,
and Ransomware as we've seen over
the last couple of years we have really
started to see it escalate.
How does Veritas help address that problem?
And does APTARE play a role there?
>> Well, Veritas helps companies address that problem
because Veritas helps create a resilient infrastructure.
The bad guys are going to get in.
Spearfishing works, you are going to find some employees
who are going to click on a link,
and the malware is going to get in.
So, all you can do to protect, you ultimately have to have
a good backup copy, so you can restore at scale and quickly.
And so there's been a lot of focus
from these large enterprises on restoring at scale
very quickly after a Ransomware attack.
So you're not beholden, you can't be
extorted by the ransomware attack.
>> The third piece was hybrid and the question with that
leads to hybrid multi-cloud,
let's put that category out there.
Now I've been kind of skeptical
on hybrid multi-cloud from an application perspective.
In other words, the vision that you can run any app,
anywhere in the world,
without having to retest, recompile,
I've been skeptic of that,
but the one area that I'm not skeptical,
and I'm encouraged with is data protection.
Because I think actually, you can have a consistent,
data protection model across your on-prem,
different on-prems, different clouds.
Because you're partnering with all
the different cloud companies,
you obviously have expertise in on-prems
so talk about your approach there,
philosophy, and maybe any offering.
>> Well, this is really what sets us apart.
We have been around for 25 years, 2,000 patents,
we protect everything.
500 different sources of data,
150 different targets,
60 different cloud service providers.
We compete with two categories of players.
We compete with the new comers and they'll only protect
your most current technology, they don't go back.
We've been around for 25 years, we protect everything.
We also compete with the conglomerates.
In their case, they're not focused.
They're trying to do everything.
All we do is availability, protection, and insights.
And that's why we've been in Gartner MQ 13 times,
and we're the market share leader.
So absolutely.
>> Touch base on what Dave was saying
about the application side of this.
I mean, just your thoughts about, the kinds of concerns
that Dave raises, I mean, he's not alone in that respect,
I mean there are general concerns here, right?
About whether that'll fly.
What do you think in terms of...
>> I think the vision is spot on,
and like all visions, it takes a while to get to.
But, I think what VMware's done recently,
in the acquisition, they've been basically trying to make
the control plane for compute, okay?
And their acquisition of Carbon Black and Pivotal,
add to that control plane.
We're going to be,
we are the control plane for data protection.
That's the way our customers rely on us.
>> See, but that makes sense to me.
So I think, I feel like the
multi cloud vision is very aspirational today,
and I think its going to be really hard to get there without
homogeneous infrastructure, and that's why you
see things like Outpost, you see that Oracle
has cloud of customer, you got Azure stack.
So and I think its going to be a multi-vendor world.
However I do think, that as it relates to data protection,
you can set a standard and say
we're going to standardize on Veritas or one of...
So I think that it's achievable,
so that's kind of, was my point there.
The last one was regulations.
Do you think GDPR will be sort of a framework globally?
What are your customers seeing there?
>> Well they're dealing with more than GDPR.
Like I talked about that one customer,
27 different regulatory environments,
and the challenge there is, how do you deal with that
when you don't know what you have in terms of data?
The 50% of data is what we call dark data.
You don't know anything about it.
So you need help classifying it,
understanding and getting insight into that data,
and that's what we can help our customers with.
>> But how do you deal with that in that environment?
I mean Dave raises the point, and this is obvious as well,
it's like California, which is somewhat infamous for having
it's own regulatory mindset.
I mean how do you exist when the United States
has privacy concerns, and Congress can address it,
and various federal agencies can do the same.
Europe obviously we've talked about,
now Australia, now here.
You got this vulcanized system, that has no consistency,
no framework, so how do you operate on a global scale?
>> Fundamentally, it relies on classifying that data.
Understanding what's where.
And what do you have?
Is it PII?
Personally Identifiable Information.
Is it information that's intellectual property?
What kind of data you have.
Once you have that insight, which is what we provide,
you can layer on top of the regulatory.
>> And is that APTARE IP?
Is it Veritas IP?
A blend of the two?
>> It's a blend of APTARE and Veritas IP,
we have a product called Info Studio,
that helps to provide that.
Now remember, one of the things that
our NetBackup product has is a catalog of data.
So we know where the data is, primary to secondary storage.
And we have all the versions of that data.
And then we can run analytics against the secondary storage,
and not hit the primary systems.
So we're out of band to the primary systems,
and that turns out to be very valuable in these days.
>> A question, the catalog,
you can't do this without a catalog,
and not to geek out here a little,
but I'll geek out a little bit,
when you bring in multi-clouds, other clouds,
how do you incorporate that knowledge into your catalog.
>> Our catalog works across multiple clouds.
So we work with 60 different cloud service providers,
there's three big ones represented here today.
Microsoft, AWS, and Google.
We work very closely with all three of them.
>> And that's because you do the engineering
at the API level?
>> Our engineering teams work very very closely together.
>> So lets talk about competition a little bit.
The markets heated up, it's great,
it's good to see all this VC money floating in,
everybody, as I said, wants a piece of your hide.
Why Veritas?
>> Well, I explained that,
we are the leader in enterprise data protection,
availability and insights.
There are some new comers, they just will support you
on your current technology.
They don't support the infrastructure you've had for
many years if you're a large complicated enterprise,
you have layers of technology, we support all that.
We've been around for 25 years.
Against the big conglomerates?
We are completely focused, and that's why we're the leader,
according to Gartner, in the leaders quadrant, 13 years.
>> And just as we close up, I mean you talked about,
you brought up the case in Texas
about the 22 municipalities,
you do a lot of public sector work,
states, federal government, whatever.
Just what is the difference, is it a different animal
between public and private, and what you need to do
in terms of providing them with data protection?
>> They're struggling with the same challenge.
I mean, in fact we work with some of the largest
government agencies in the world.
And they're struggling with exactly these same challenges.
They also want to leverage the public cloud.
They're worried about Ransomware.
They're dealing with data growth.
All of these are challenges to them.
These are common challenges we're addressing,
our strategy is to help our customers with these challenges,
so they can focus on the value of data.
>> Well 18 months in, you seem pumped up.
>> Yeah he does! >> I love it.
I'm having a great time.
>> Got the team fired up.
>> Yeah we get that, right?
>> Great to be here.
>> And I'm glad you're okay with Dave geeking out too, right?
>> Yeah I'm impressed! Very good.
>> Hey, thanks for the time.
>> Thank you Dave, thank you John.
>> We've run out of time, 49'ers next time.
>> All right, we'll do it.
Thank you.
>> Greg Hughes joining us from Veritas, back with more.
VMworld 2019, right here on theCUBE.
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