Grey Beards on Systems - 91: Keith and Ray show at CommvaultGO 2019

Episode Date: October 23, 2019

There was a lot of news at CommvaultGO this year and it was our first chance to talk with their new CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani. Just prior to the show Commvault introduced new SaaS backup offering for the mid market, Metallic™ and about a month or so prior to the show Commvault had acquired Hedvig, a … Continue reading "91: Keith and Ray show at CommvaultGO 2019"

Hey everybody, Ray Lucchese here with Keith Townsend. Welcome to another sponsored episode of the Gray Bridge on Storage podcast. This podcast was recorded October 16th, 2019. It's another of our conference special podcasts. Keith and I are here at Commvault Go 2019 in Denver this week, and I thought we'd get together to discuss some of Commvault's announcements at the show. But before that, I was just wondering what you thought, Keith, of the new CEO. You know what? Pretty likable, actually. I thought, you know, we talked to him in the analyst section. We threw a couple of

tough questions his way. He reacted well to them, and he took them in well. Oh, yeah. I thought, you know, it's obvious that things are changing at Commvault. I mean, the whole metallic thing, the Hedwig acquisition, there's lots of movement on a number of fronts that I haven't seen in years at Commvault. So in that perspective, I think it's a breath of fresh air. Yeah, you know, I was quite amazed when they said that, you know, when he joined, he said he wanted the metallic product out. And nine months after he kind of gave the go-ahead, it went GA. That's an amazingly fast pace for Commvault.

It's amazingly fast paced for anybody, but Commvault especially. And they kind of almost created a venture organization within the company. And they had to handpick the people and stuff like that. But they put it together. They got it out. It's out and available. It's sitting on the floor today. It's pretty impressive.

Well, why don't we talk about Metallic? What do you think about Metallic as a solution? gotten it out, it's out and available, it's sitting on the floor today. It's pretty impressive. Why don't we talk about Metallic? What do you think about Metallic as a solution? So maybe we should start out what it is. Yeah, what is it? You know, so Commvault is not exactly killing it in the mid-market section. You know, you don't get many mid-market companies that say they're going to deploy Commvault because it's an enterprise class tool. I just talked to a customer this morning who said one of his sites,

for one of his sites, he spends $4 million a year in maintenance. On Commvault? Commvault. Whoa. That's a hell of a big enterprise. That's one site. One site. One site. He has some big numbers, you know, 50 petabytes of data, et cetera,

et cetera. But Metallic is a play to compete against the likes of Druva, Clumio, for that mid-market dollar to back up with the SAS control plane, or with the backup control plane in the cloud. So it's really a backup as a service kind of offering that they've defined. It uses Commvault back end capabilities.

But there's only like three specific solutions I think they offer. One is Core, VM, SQL Server, that sort of thing. I think the others are... Endpoint and Office 365. So those are the three options. There's three separately priced. I think the core products is priced on a per terabyte basis, per hundred terabytes basis. And then the other two options are priced per user.

Per user per month kind of thing. So I think we were looking at one of them. Office 365, something like five bucks per user per month. A little bit less. It was like $60 a year. Yeah, yeah. And unlimited data. Unlimited data, unlimited retention, unlimited, you know, it's a pretty impressive product. It was.

I'm big at, I mean, I use Office 365 not for email, but for OneDrive and all of that. Well, I use all the Office products, Word and Excel and all that stuff. I haven't used OneDrive, I'm kind of locked into this Dropbox world, but it's a different game. Yes. But yeah, it looks like it's, I was impressed by the team.

They're all hot to go, the team is pretty knowledgeable. I was out at the floor the other day trying to do a sign up and stuff like that, and we were walking through that, and it was, the booth is a small booth, but there's a lot of traffic. I mean, it's like... Small booth, a lot of traffic. Well, you know, 2,000, a little bit less than 2,000 registered attendees.

So not a huge conference to begin with. No, it's not. But, you know, if you think about it, for a point, for a non-platform company, 2,000 people is actually a pretty decent number for the type of conference that it is. And I am also impressed with the people. We talked to the UX designer for Metallic. She was talking through how they, one, it's an all-woman team, which is really great. Right, right, right, it's pretty unusual.

Yeah, pretty unusual. And then two, she just talked about just the healthy debate they had about tearing down that complete user interface and making it as simple as possible for this targeted audience without insulting their intelligence. Like, what is a VM?

We know what a VM is. How do I get that Commvault capability without that Commvault complexity? We were talking with David Ngo last night at a Tech Field Day event the other day or so ago, and he was saying they agonize over a lot of these decisions on how many parameters to put on panels and how to set it up which which offerings to make and stuff like that but in the end you know they had a limited time frame that six month or nine month time frame they wanted to get it out so they had to make decisions based upon the best understanding that they had at the time they did a lot of surveys of customers and stuff like that it's an interesting product yeah probably my biggest pushback for the

solution you know we they said it's cloud native so on the back end they're using cloud native services to build and deploy the convolt technologies but the use from a user API and experience perspective there's no user facing API so you can't programmatically select the service so in my world companies that would be interested in this will want to automate and leverage deployment convolt pushed back and said their research shows that mid market companies aren't really interested in that type of capability yeah I don't know about that. I mean, I've talked to a couple of mid-market customers,

and they are interested in automation and that sort of stuff. But I understand where they're coming from. There's only certain things they can do in a certain time frame. And to try to get it out, they had to make some decisions. One of those decisions was not to offer an API. But, you know, I'm looking at a lot of other companies when they're trying to do, it's really a consumption model change to some extent, going from a capital expense to an op expense.

And a lot of them will just sell you the stuff, but they'll deploy it and they will take a different type of revenue stream. These guys decided, well, let's go make this a real cloud service and stuff like that. I was pretty impressed with that. I was impressed with it, too. Overall, and then the 20 years of IP.

So as customers make requests for new capability, they can offer it like, you know, I'm assuming at this speed within a month or a couple of months. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they've got the agility, it seems, to keep up with that world and stuff like that. It's a good market expansion or adjacent market kind of thing for Commvault to get into. It's certainly not going to be a $4 million maintenance play, but it could represent quite a lot of business for them and stuff like that. Agreed.

So that was probably the most interesting product announcement at the show from my perspective. A lot of talk about Hedwig today and the acquisition and what they're planning to do with that. You know, they spent a lot of money on them. It's not cheap. It wasn't cheap. $225 million, I think, the deal was. And Commvault is not that big of a company. I think it's something like 10% of their market cap or some size before the acquisition.

Really? So it wasn't a small acquisition. And Avanash, I think, made a pretty good argument for why their technology is unique in general. However, they weren't tearing it up, right? No know they weren't tearing it up right I mean yeah no they weren't doing it wasn't like they were you know lighting up the world from that perspective but you know the advantage of that is maybe they were cheaper maybe they just didn't have the reach or marketing to deploy it I you know we both dealt with Alvin Ash over the years and he was not exactly the

easiest CEO to talk to about these sorts of things, but it was funny. Don't get me wrong. I think the technology is good. I think it's focused on containerism. Container applications is the right trend to be and stuff like that. My question is really, does Commvault really, can they really deploy a software-defined storage and their back end and not piss off all their ecosystem? Well, can they find the right balance, too?

So, you know, integrating the technology is one challenge. And then selling the technology. Like, this is, they're going through partners, so they have to enable partners. And partners have to know this well enough. Partners have to have the relationships with the teams that will buy this technology. So there's a lot of big ifs. I think the move in CEO and leadership sets them up well to start to have those conversations. Sanjay is a former CIO, so it's obvious that he understands the enterprise

and how the enterprise thinks. I think that's to their advantage, at least with the Hedbig acquisition. He explained the whole data brain, bringing together the data and storage disciplines under one umbrella. I think that scares some of us. It does scare a lot of us. I mean, there's a whole discussion about, do you want your primary and secondary storage on the same system? Management plan.

Yeah, management plan is a part of that. And obviously a traditionalist, we would say no, but there is room to discuss that and see how maybe you can still have an air gap and still be in the same system environment, even if there are the same control plane. Hedwig and Commvault storage are different. So I think it can work. It reminds me a lot of vSAN, quite frankly, because vSAN come out and VMware, and effectively

threatened their biggest ecosystem partners, which were all the storage vendors, including Dell and stuff like that. But they came out with vSAN, ReadyNodes and Dell and all these other ecosystem partners said, okay, we can play this game and get some benefit from that. And in the same breath, everything they're doing with vSAN, those APIs, vBalls, all that stuff,

those are coming out for regular storage. So if you can retain that independence of the two products in this case, I think you might be able to finesse the ecosystem. Yeah, so that is interesting because, you know, Datrium has a model where, you know, they have some, they've gone into data protection. At least they tried to. I don't know, I haven't heard that story as consistent

as maybe about a year ago. And I argued with them that, hey, you know what? I know that you may have two separate storage environments from a physical, I'm using one class of of storage for backup another class of storage for production But it's the same system Yeah And what happens if there's a problem with the system and not a problem with the underlying storage itself Yeah, we run down on premise podcast yesterday talking a little bit about that but

Software if the software is the same a same bug can take out the world you know you're not you're not going to be pleased when both your primary and secondary storage goes down but if they can keep Hedvig and you know Commvault storage separate then maybe there's a play here maybe it makes sense well but they're talking about automations between the two so the ability to self provision storage when you run out of backup we target your backup target starts to run low in space you know combat goes out and provision storage directly via to support the head bitch so you know it's so it's a it's a funny line and we'll so the devil's in the detail it's a fine line and and be able to finesse that and not

piss off all their storage partners and stuff like that is going to be a bit of a challenge. Yeah, I saw NetApp and HPE on the floor, you know, earlier. And at least the people in the booth were still pretty happy with the relationship. Right, right, right. I'm sure it's profitable for everyone. But I think, and the key that VMware showed was if you can maintain independence and API parity between the two, I think you can support your ecosystem and your own internal solutions in a fashion that works for everyone. It's a challenge, and VMware doesn't have it all right all the time either,

but they've been playing that game for quite a while, and it seems like it works for them, stuff like that. So we'll see what happens with Hedwig and see how it plays out in the long run and and look look to see what's going on there so the other big discussion was the activate solution what do you think about that so I did some content with the activate gas Patrick McGrath McGrath and Aaron Murphy talking through just the three different use cases you know sensitive data data optimization and eDiscovery are the three platforms they announced it last year I didn't notice it last year I didn't notice it

last year either but then I it was a different game I think you know that's a whole different discussion the the CEO last year and the but then it was a different game. I think, you know, it's a whole different discussion. The CEO last year and the CEO this year had a different sort of flavor to their conferences. This is the promise, you know, Activate is kind of the promise of realizing your archive data and your live data and mining data is one of those things when you look at Commvault's competitors, it's all about the metadata and being able to manage the metadata

Commvault has quietly like overnight just delivered a product that does that delivers on that promise in theory right and it can't be ignored it's really interesting I'm I'm intrigued. To see what they can do with it. See what they can do with it. See how far they can get with it. And you know, I think it was Patrick mentioned multiple times, one of the biggest data lakes

most enterprises have is their backups. And what can you do with that? And how can you take advantage of that is a question we should all be talking about, really. Yeah, and you can, if you think about it, they're giving, Activate can give end users the power to search that data lake. Right, right.

And the product actually does. One of the features is the ability for a user to go to a webpage and put in keyword search for data. I didn't get a chance to ask them detailed information about like, can a data scientist take a, activate and have an API and create analytics across it and do like some serious data mining. Yeah.

How robust is the platform? Generic types of keywords. I think they said something about they had a list of, you know, standard terms like social security number or I don't know, identity number or something like that. That's for the sensitive data part. Right, right.

And then there's just the whole The search e-discovery thing. The search e-discovery and there's a lot that can be done with it. The Aaron talked about how he's using it inside to get customer insights. So they're using Activate to mine their historical data. On sales and stuff like that.

And customer support and et cetera. That'd be interesting. So yeah, so there is that aspect. It does appear to be a full text index of the data, assuming it's all text, which is a different discussion. But if it is, then you can do this sort of stuff. And it's interesting. I mean, the sensitive data stuff was was okay it's one thing to purge primary storage files with social security numbers under this user

or something like that it's another thing to go back to the backups which can be you know your retention and purge that information as well it's pretty impressive there was another tech field day presenter I think it was active at active field okay I think they was Actifio. Okay. I think they promised to do something similar. Actifio. Actifio. And theirs was much more around landscape management.

If I want to pull data out of production and put it into test dev and strip out sensitive data. Oh, okay. And then I think they had a feature where they integrated with backup solutions you can go out and scrub sensitive data. It's amazing, I mean, if you think about that from a, like what needs to actually happen to scrub that data in those files and still keep like the integrity of the file itself. Yeah, and some of the metadata.

Yeah. And inherent and stuff like that. So you're deleting files with personal identifiable information out there so that when you restore, those files won't get restored anymore. Yeah, and then what happens from a data retention? There's just all these little gimmicks that you have to deal with. Like what happens with data retention if I delete a file that had PII in it, but my data retention policy overall said I keep data for this amount of time. Do I make an exception and say except for PII and we don't store PII at all?

So another thing that was kind of characteristic of the solution was, and I'm not sure what the, but it was approval level. So you could have multiple approval levels for an operation. Let's say you wanted to delete the PII information and you could delete it on a primary, you could delete it on a backup, but you could also have, it was almost like an email train or something like that where people would have to actually approve. Right, yeah, to just a ledger to. Yeah. I want to throw the term blockchain. Which is immutable, I might add. So maybe it's not a great place for this sort of stuff.

But it's interesting to see how they're rolling out the functionality and stuff like that. And they didn't talk too much about the search and e-discovery and the tech field day stuff. But there's a lot of applicability in that sort of stuff and there's a lot and these guys I mean any of the big corporations nowadays litigation is a constant constant lifetime and I think one of the challenges that they have is similar to the challenge that they have with other the Havoc solution is who who sells the product and who do they sell it into? That's a big product like that's three different applications

Oh, yeah, and there's no single owner of all of that in a typical enterprise, right? You discover is multiple organizations. Yeah, so, you know you you can sell as a You can try and sell it to the backup guy, the backup and storage guy, but he doesn't have the budget for the solution. Right, right, right, right. Well, there's the other thing about Metallic, which was kind of interesting, and we had a lengthy discussion with the development team,

well, some of the developers last night, is it's a partner-led sale. You can only really purchase it through a partner. And there's a number of partners that they've provided, and it's only USA at the moment from a sales perspective. So we're talking about a SaaS application. Most of the guys with a SaaS application,

I can take my credit card, I can go and buy it like within 10 seconds, I might have to provide some personal information, that sort of stuff. But it's not a partner-led sale necessarily. But he said that the surveys they did, again, with the mid-market, say that most of the guys do this through a PO, which means that a partner is active in this sort of environment. It's not just a credit card sale.

And that's their expectation is that, you know, something like 65% of the people they surveyed said we buy through partners. Wow. In that space. Some things just don't change, I guess. Yeah, I was thinking about going in and signing up for end product, you know, end point services. I said, well, I want to work with a partner or something. I said, well, you don't actually have to work with a partner to get the free trial.

So you get 45 days of free trial, but if you want to actually purchase it. You have to go. That is unfortunate. I would like to just, because I'm only one person. I don't want to deal with a partner to get a point solution. I think, and I'm not sure what the numbers were, but something on the order of 500 employees to 5,000 employees was the way they defined the market. And, you know, 500 employees, I could see a PO being the process there rather than then but you know a lot of these line of businesses and stuff like that they just want to get this thing started get it rolling and start moving they don't want to have to go through that process. If you're a CMO and you're building a cloud native app and you need backup and your company already uses Commvault in general and

you're like I trust the technology and this does what you need it to do to back up your cloud native app. Why should I go through IT or through IT's partners, etc. to get the service that I know already works. Yeah, yeah. And the other thing that was surprising, quite frankly, because the way that Commvault has always been, it's been an enterprise solution and stuff like that, there was a lot of activity at the booth, and what they're seeing is that a lot of these enterprises have these line of businesses that are smaller. They got robo organizations that are out there and stuff like that.

That kind of fit the, doesn't necessarily fit all the T's and C's of a mid-market organization, but have mid-market requirements. Yeah, that same customer I talked to this morning was talking about how they were looking at products like Cohesity, Rubrik, Veeam for their robo locations. You know, they don't need something as heavy as Commvault at a robo location. So, you know, these other smaller mid-market solutions were perfect for that.

So I'm sure Commvault through their research saw that there's the same opportunity. They're losing some backups to competitors because they can't shrink down. Because they don't have the support for that. But this is the answer to that. Well this has been great Keith. Anything else you'd like to say about the conference

or anything like that? So this is my third go. How many have you gone through? I think it's my third as well. it's improved oh god yeah it's so much better than the first one yes last year was pretty good yeah uh and this has been i think they're getting into a groove yeah i think so i mean you could see that they had a a tour of the floor and stuff like that i think that went better this year i think i that, you know, what they were doing and explaining how they were going about it went better.

This whole dog park thing is pretty impressive. I mean, it's like guerrilla marketing kind of thing. Almost, almost, almost came home with a puppy. Almost. That's the danger of the dog park. Well, anyways, this has been great. Thank you very much, Keith, for being on our show today at Commvault.

Go 2019. Next time we'll talk with another system storage technology person. Any questions you want us to ask please let us know and if you enjoy our podcast tell your friends about it and please review us on iTunes and Google Play as this will also help get the word out. That's it for now. Bye Keith. Bye Ray. Until next time. Thank you.