Transcript
in New York City. I'm Dave Vellante with Chris Takei. C.S. Caravaglia is here. Extraordinary analyst, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research. Hello, my friend. Thanks for making some time. Hey, Dave. And CUBE Collective. And member of the CUBE Collective. That's right. Thanks for the reminder. Yeah. And love having you on. It seems like we have a good cadence. We're on at MWC. I think we had you on at RSA. Yep. And other. We've been down at New York Stock Exchange here in the city. Okay, so Veen, making the case that AI trust is that missing layer, creating a new category. Pretty bold. You've been following this company for a long time. What do you think? Yeah. In fact, I've heard other people talk about it. At WEF this year, I met with Guy Diederich at Cisco, who runs the CDA program. And we actually had a long discussion about that, that you don't trust AI, right? You trust people that make decisions that use AI, right? Now, people, of course, need the right data to be able to make those decisions, the confidence that the AI is making the right call, right? So I do think that that trust layer is something that I think a lot of us grapple with. We all use AI in our jobs regularly. I use it all the time. And then you're never quite sure. Like right now, you have to have a lot of domain knowledge to take advantage of AI. Because I was asking Gemini to do some analysis of stocks for me. And I knew one of the market caps of the game was way off, right? But that's only because I have the domain knowledge. So the whole concept of AI is to democratize access to expertise. You shouldn't have to have deep domain knowledge to use it. But today, you do. And you do because we don't fully trust the data that we get back. Well, this is an interesting point you bring up. I know from my own experience that 100% of the time that I ask AI to go do some financial analysis, literally 100% of the time, it gets something wrong. And so what that tells me is that missing layer that Anand talked about. He's right on data and AI trust. But there's a software layer which is not Veeam's responsibility, which is the harmonization of that data. Pulling in different elements from financial reports, 10Ks, earnings transcripts, etc. How do you reconcile all that? That's not Veeam's job. But it is Veeam's job to protect it. Whether it's a SaaS company like Palantir or Salonis or ServiceNow gets that right. It's their job to protect it. So that is kind of a new category. I mean, are we going to see it in a Gartner Magic Quadrant? Is it that much of a category in your view? I don't know how. You think about it, it's part of the overall AI ecosystem. I suppose it could become a category. I mean, it's coming together of the acquisition they made of security AI and their core business. There's lots of people in the core business of backup and recovery. The question is, do you have the visibility into the things the AI layer is doing? Around the data to make the call that there's a breach here, there's a problem. He'll roll it back to this particular point. And I suppose if AI is really going to become the tool that we all use in our lives all day long, then I suppose, yeah. I mean, I could see all the players on the security side having to come to the data side and vice versa, right? And so you think from an evolutionary perspective, you're playing on one side of those two sides of that coin. You need to have the other, either through partnership or product development. Exactly. I was going to say it's very much a convergence of data protection and security with identity security. And we've talked about that a little bit with Veeam so far today. And we heard that at the keynote this morning that in addition to being able to have these security controls and recoverability of data and the insights into the sensitivity of the data, you need to understand how it's being accessed and used. And that's really where your identity and access management side of the house comes in. There's a lot of tools that do part of it, right? There's DLP tools. You look at all the SASE vendors, Zero Trust. They're all trying to figure out how you protect corporations, the data they have from being exposed to things that shouldn't be exposed or people using data they shouldn't be using. I know I was talking to one of the market research firms here, the big one. I won't say which one, but they just put the kibosh on all AI tools that aren't sanctioned because of that problem. There's a lot of value it can bring, but you've got to be careful with how you use it, where you use it, and what data you use. And that's the problem that we have is there's so much data out there, some of it good, some of it bad, that it's a little bit like if you threw a junior analyst at something and said, go do the analysis, the financial analysis, you asked them, 100% of the time they would make an error because they don't know what data is good, what data is bad. And so something's got to regulate that for the AI to be able to work. But there's a layer of context, which is Veeam's responsibility, and that's what I call the operational and technical metadata. And there's another layer which fixes that problem, which is not Veeam's responsibility. Kind of. Well, I guess from the standpoint of it could be, you're right, it could be. Is that a current source? Yeah. Because they got the date metadata. Is it in that calendar year versus fiscal year format? And is it a validated source of data to use, right? They kind of plan it, but kind of don't. But you could see them. I mean, you've got the data platform guys, the Snowflakes, Databricks. You've got the security folks. You've got the data protection people like Veeam. And you certainly have the hyperscalers all trying to get in there. You play golf with a lot of CISOs, changing the subject. Yeah. Do the CISOs see this space? I'm reluctant to say, well, let's call it data protection, because it's broadly speaking kind of data protection. But it's more than that, recovery and resilience. Now it's business resilience. Do the CISOs that you know well think of that space as a fundamental component of their security stack, of their purview? Or is it sort of a thing in the side that they're slowly migrating in? I think it's an adjacency today that they have to migrate in. I mean, Veeam did really come to prominence and grow their share through ransomware recovery, which you would argue falls under the purview of the CISO. But it only kind of does, right? Like they're responsible for recovering data when they had a ransomware breach. But ultimately, the tools that they use fell to somebody else. And I think if they're ultimately going to be responsible for the protection of the data that drives the AI that powers the company, it does need to fall under them. I don't know how they can avoid it anymore. How do you see Veeam differentiating from the competition? I mean, the market's not that crowded, but you've got four or five companies that are sort of in the data protection space. They call it data management. They're all doing ransomware protection. They're doing cyber resiliency. What differentiates Veeam? Well, I do think it's the last acquisition they made. Security AI is a very good tool. And I think the fact that they built that one dashboard. In fact, I was asking Tom Murphy this morning in the keynote. I said, I thought they were showing some capabilities. And I said, I thought security AI already did this. They said, but we couldn't do it in one dashboard before. And so they're trying to make Veeam the single control plane for that data and AI trust layer, right? And I'm sure that the rubrics and cohesive, they're all going to head down that path sometime. But I think they got a bit of an early head start here right now. Well, it's a great TAM expansion move. The last thing you want to do is you want to just get stuck in backup and recovery. And valuation too, right? So they look a little public. But that is the mainspring. The heritage of backup and recovery, right? But you've got to build a product set around that and be able to respond. All right, I'll give you the last thoughts on VeeamON 2026 here in New York City. I think Anand said it's his first time in New York City. Yeah, I was a little surprised. We've seen him in Vegas. We've seen him in New Orleans. Miami. They were in Nashville. Miami, yep. Miami as well, yep. Miami, yep. So what are your final thoughts, Anand? I think it's an inflection point for the company. This company has always been a company who is squarely in that backup and recovery. In fact, you look at all the analysts and press that come, they have a data background, and they were security adjacent. And so they enjoyed a lot of growth by being able to participate in the security ecosystem without being a security vendor. Now they are squarely in the security ecosystem, and the question is can they create a single market that addresses both sides of that coin? That's an easier thing to say than to do. But if there's somebody that can do it, it's them. But to your point, there are definitely a number of, I see, industry analysts from the security space here. So that's impressive. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm kind of straddling both worlds. You're a hybrid, right? Resilience and security. Yep, absolutely. So that's sort of a sign that these worlds are coming together. Yes. All right, Zeus, we've got to go. Thanks so much for making some time for us. Appreciate it. All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante for Krista Case. theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2026 from the Big Apple. We'll be right back right after this short break. ♪♪♪
