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Christophe: Welcome to Data Protection Conversations. We are at VMworld in San Francisco, and I'm here today with Danny Allan, who is the vice president of product strategy for Veeam. Danny, welcome.

Danny: Thank you.

Christophe: So tell me a little bit more about what's going on at this show. You have a big booth. I see lots of activity. And what are you hearing from your customers?

Danny: Well, exciting to be here. We've been here since the very beginning of Veeam. We started out being number one in VMware data protection as you know. If you look at our customer base, I think over 80% of them are using VMware. So we've had a very tight relationship with them over the years and continue to co-innovate on all kinds of interesting things. We did some sessions yesterday on how to do better, smarter replication.

What we're hearing from customers is, certainly, evolution of workloads. Started out being virtualized workloads obviously, but we've heard a lot at this conference about Kubernetes and containers and how things are evolving.

We're hearing the same from our customers. They haven't wholesale shifted over into modernization. That's a hard lift, as you know. But we're certainly having conversations, and it's great to have the alignment with VMware and with our customers on where the market's going.

Christophe: Perfect. And so I see also a lot of partners, a lot of Veeam partners are even exhibiting, which I think is a very good sign. How's the ecosystem going? And what type of alliances are you focused on?

Danny: Well, we have different groups of alliances. Certainly, at the technology level, as you know, infrastructure runs on hardware. So there's going to be some kind of storage system under there, and we have partnerships both on the primary storage side for snapshot integrations and on the secondary side as a target repository. But you highlighted another type of partners that I'm very passionate about, which is Veeam cloud service providers.

Everyone talks about cloud and typically when they talk about cloud, they're thinking AWS and Azure and the hyperscale public clouds. But when you move to the public cloud, the types of techniques that you apply are very different. And so it requires subject matter expertise, it requires an understanding of the economics of what works better on-premises versus in the cloud, it requires expertise over how to know when to place something in one place versus another place, and so a partnership is very valuable there.

And so we have a rich ecosystem of partners who run our software and become, sometimes, just a trusted advisor in that journey, and sometimes they become part of the infrastructure for their customers. They'll help them run at both on-premises and in the cloud.

Christophe: That makes perfect sense. In some way it's an evolution we're seeing also from our research. We recently talked to your partner, iLand, for example. So some of a very good example of the type of partnership that you can have. Well, I'd like to thank you very much for your time, and I'd like to thank our viewers for watching this Data Protection Conversation.

Danny: Thank you.