Veritas Interview VMWorld 2019

What Veritas Had To Say At VMWorld

Jyothi Swaroop, VP of Global Marketing at Veritas, sat down with Mike Matchett at VMworld 2019 to talk about the evolution of the cloud, working with competitors, Veritas’ focus on data protection, and more.

 

Mike Matchett: Hi. Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data. We're at VMworld 2019, talking to lots of the hottest companies and vendors at the show. I've got Veritas here, and we're going to talk about what's new with them because they've got some exciting things in the works.

 

Welcome!

 

Jyothi Swaroop: Hi. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

 

Mike Matchett: So everybody knows who Veritas is, but just catch us up a little bit in case they don't.

 

Jyothi Swaroop: So Veritas is a software company that's been around for 30-plus years in the valley. And we've generally thrived on IT infrastructure-related customer challenges, and we've provided solutions for those challenges — namely data protection, storage availability and insights.

 

Mike Matchett: And so you guys have a lot of long-term customers, right? You've seen trends come and go and everything. And VMware today was talking a lot about cloud and hybrid cloud and spanning clouds. What [role] will they see Veritas playing in that kind of environment?

 

Jyothi Swaroop: Great question. So Veritas, obviously, you know, again, the history is there — 30-plus years of having dealt with everything from mainframes to core applications to cloud today. But I think what's more interesting for Veritas is how we continue to be the Switzerland for IT. We continue to work with people we consider competition, as well as cloud providers like Google, Amazon, Microsoft — as well as virtualization providers like VMware. So we will continue to play that open architecture card as far as our architecture is concerned. And then from a go-to-market standpoint, we will always be that forward thinking, hybrid model company.

 

Mike Matchett: Sort of providing the thought leadership in adulthood in this market of emerging stuff.

 

Jyothi Swaroop: Yeah, absolutely. If you think about it, AI and others [are] a huge topic [sic] these days. What's machine learning? It's learning. If you don't know what's happened in the past, you kind of learn fast enough, right? You can write the coolest algorithm possible, but it will take some time for that algorithm to evolve and mature and be effective. At Veritas, we predict the highest number of exabytes of data. We have a history. So the algorithm on day one is educated to make more educated decisions going forward. And that's the advantage we have, and that's the advantage we're gonna drive home.

 

Mike Matchett: All right. So it occurs to me that this space — [the] data protection space and the surrounding spaces — have been a plethora of different products that have just expanded over time. And what might have been simple at one point becomes complex. And every product you add to the stack becomes more and more complex. What are you guys doing now to help someone get a more simple handle even as the world gets more complex for them?

 

Jyothi Swaroop: Phenomenal question. Look, every 10 years in IT, people say, “We'll simplify the environment for you.” There'll be lesser, fewer products, fewer things to manage, but it just increasingly gets more and more complex. So we're not gonna commit to saying, oh, [that] you as a customer will ultimately have, you know, from 50 to five products. But what we will commit to doing is the three areas that we focus on: availability, protection, and insight for the data [that] will be provided under a single platform. So that gives you cost efficiencies. That gives you OpEx and CapEx efficiencies as well as, you know, you're able to build forward-looking apps on the same platform, which is open, as I talked about earlier on.

 

Mike Matchett: That's great. And VMware's also talked a lot about containers. This is a big thing at the show. Do you have anything to say about containers?

 

Jyothi Swaroop: Absolutely. So Veritas was the first Docker-certified data protection vendor in the world, right? So, in fact, one of our key appliances containerizes data protection, containerizes different applications as a Kubernetes pod, and sits on that appliance. We were the first ones to do it. Everybody thinks of an appliance as, you know, storage and compute — Throw something at it and see if it sticks, right? Whereas what we did is we took data protection. Let's say you have NetBackup, which is our franchise product. You could have NetBackup 7.something, an old version, or NetBackup 8.2, which was just launched recently. You could have each of them as a container. We're running on the same appliance, using the same compute and storage resources. And guess what? If you have an inside application, run it on the same appliance with your data protection on the same box. Nobody else is doing it today.

 

Mike Matchett: I mean, that just makes my mind spin a little bit, thinking about how I can now converge my environments, containerize them at the same time, really get to that modernization but not lose anything, and still bring along my coverage of, like you said, mainframes and everything else that's come before.

 

Jyothi Swaroop: Absolutely. So hyperconvergence has been around. We're not the pioneers in that. There are companies that have done hyperconvergence with a storage computer network. But [where] we're taking it, to your point, is to the container level where the applications are converged with the infrastructure. So they're not separate. You're not standing up new hardware for every application that you're launching in their environment. It can sit on the same appliance — application — as a container as a Kubernetes pod.

 

Mike Matchett: That's awesome. So anything else that you want to talk about here at the show?

 

Jyothi Swaroop: Well, you know, we're excited to be here. VMworld is a phenomenal partner. We've been partners for, I think over 17 years, if I'm not wrong, right? We've had synergy.

 

Mike Matchett: That's a long time, by the way.

 

Jyothi Swaroop: Yeah, yeah. We have over 100,000 customers in common. So we have common challenges that we face every day. Our engineering teams are tied at the hip. So everything we produce at Veritas, whether it's [info] protection with NetBackup or availability with InfoScale, or insights with InfoStudio or APTARE, which is our new acquisition — It'll all be tied at the hip with everything VMware is doing in the hybrid cloud, multi-cloud world.

 

Mike Matchett: Okay. In case someone is not that familiar with Veritas products, and has been under a rock for less than 30 years, where would you recommend they go and start to look at this, or if they just want to learn about what you're now doing with containers and the containerized versions of NetBackup?

 

Jyothi Swaroop: Well, I would definitely start at veritas.com (www.veritas.com), and everything we do is up there, right in front. You know, the platform messaging, everything we do with containers, the links are right there. So go — go look at it. There's a wealth of information.

 

Mike Matchett: Thank you, Jyothi. I appreciate you being here and talking to me today.

 

Jyothi Swaroop: Thank you for having me.

 

Mike Matchett: All right. All right. Mike Matchett, Small World Big Data, VMworld 2019. And we'll be back. Take care.