Many exciting announcements were shared at Conquer Every Cloud 2022, and we are excited for you to get to know the people and the passion behind Veritas, with the Meet the Innovator series. It introduces you to the individuals who develop our solutions – and highlights what motivates them to address cloud challenges, ransomware threats, compliance requirements, and other key customer problems that Veritas solves through innovation. Check back here over the coming weeks as we add more featured profiles.
Ryan Behiel | @ryan-behiel
Senior Principal Technical Marketing Engineer – Veritas Solutions
Reason I chose TME as a career:
I couldn’t think of a better way to combine three interesting things into one role: Representing a corporate message/brand, helping make products better, and coming up with creative/interesting ways to help get products into the hands of customers
Feature you worked on and why you’re excited about it:
In my case, it’s not actually a single feature – it’s a full Veritas solution that I think has huge potential to make a big splash in the IT market: enterprise services for containers. Why is this exciting? The main reason is that we’re ahead of the market!
- Veritas provides enterprise services that customers need (backup, storage) when using containers for most of their apps (Read my white paper: Veritas Enterprise Storage and Data Protection for Containers)
- Our approach is interesting and unique: combine backup (NBU) and storage (InfoScale) to provide a unified solution that enables customers to confidently use containers for important apps with the services they need
- This helps customers modernize their IT operations, and it improves their ability to provide cool/interesting products and services for their end-users (Read my blog: Availability and Resiliency for the Modern Enterprise)
Sandra Moulton | @smoulton
Director, TME and Solution Architects
Reason I chose TME as a career:
I chose TME as a career because I love being one of the first to dig into architectural details on emerging technologies and then explain it to others in easy-to-understand ways. Plus, I get to play around with early code and influence product development; who wouldn’t want that?
Feature you worked on and why you’re excited about it:
I am most excited about having worked on NetBackup Flex Scale. I loved the modern approach to architecting a highly secure scale-out backup solution with ransomware resiliency (Check out my white paper: NetBackup Flex Scale– Secure by Default) at the forefront of the design. It was exciting to dig into the technical details that went into building a solution that makes management super easy with automated tasks starting with initial deployment, scaling performance along with capacity (Check out my video: NetBackup Flex Scale – Scaling Made Simple), AI-based intelligent load balancing, and software updates (even across DR sites) (Check out my blog: Technical Overview of NetBackup Flex Scale – resilient, simple to scale-out, and easy to operate). I also influenced the decisions about how to design the cluster to achieve the high levels of resiliency built into the product. It’s a super cool product to work on.
Drew Tipton | @drewtipton
Technical Evangelist -- InfoScale
Reason I chose TME as a career:
Honestly, I just kind of fell into it. I’ve done a little bit of everything – technical support, technical sales, product management – technical marketing is an underrated area. You get to play with the newest products all the time and figure out just how to make those products compelling, and you also get to work with customers, engineering, and product management to help drive new product improvements!
Feature you worked on and why you’re excited about it:
I’ve been hitting the ground running, looking at all the differences since I was here last (I left originally in 2011, after being here for eight years), and literally marveling at all the things that just haven’t changed! Customers keep coming back to Veritas for just that – and it’s something that I’m telling people still today. Veritas was cloud computing before it was cool. Veritas tried to do on-demand just-in-time provisioning before it was mainstream. Veritas has been doing storage, availability, and data protection for so long now that old things are new again! We, as a company, bring all of that intellectual property and know-how to modern solutions, and nobody else can really say that.
Amber Ved | @AmberVed
Director of Engineering
Reason for being Product Marketer:
To help my teams deliver best in class data protection solution for our customer in area of Kubernetes and cloud.
Feature you worked on and why you’re excited about it:
We are building the next generation of data protection solutions for modern mission-critical applications running in the Kubernetes environment at cloud scale by designing fully self-supported, elastic data protection solutions requiring no active supervision for either Kubernetes or backup administrators while saving cost.
We hope you’ve enjoyed meeting our innovators! Click on their VOX username above to view some of their recent posts or send them a message to learn more about what they’ll be working on next. Or you can also join one of our Veritas Groups on VOX to participate in our future innovations first-hand.
Perseu Acevedo | PerseuAcevedo
Senior Product Manager, Enterprise Data Protection
Reason you chose TME as a career:
As a technology enthusiast, I am always striving for new learnings, aiming to be leading conversations about current and new technology themes continually. My passion about technology has made me a natural trusted advisor for customers, partners and peers, so it is very common to be called out to have conversations about Cloud, Kubernetes, Automation, APIs, IT Analytics, Business Continuity, Cyber Security, and other. Joining the Technical Evangelist team within NetBackup Product Management, provides me unique opportunity to amplify the value of Veritas' solutions to broader audiences and help companies throughout the globe with knowledge sharing thru a continual “learn-teach-learn” framework. Being closer to the solution creation and development per se, and being able to influence the link between products/features and customer’s issues to resolve data management challenges is really exciting to me.
Feature you worked on at Veritas, and why you’re excited about it:
Throughout the last 15 years I’ve been working with several large enterprise companies from various industries on a multitude of data protection related subjects, from helping companies resolve critical issues and get back to business, to partnering with them to architect and modernize solutions to improve data protection objectives and strategies.
While in the field, I’ve helped customers simplify data protection operations and consolidate datacenters with NetBackup Appliance families, embrace the cloud while keeping applications running securely and with ideal recovery points and be ahead of overall market by supporting adoption of NetBackup features as they become available, including Kubernetes protection, NetBackup Instant Access and Instant Rollback, Parallel Streaming Framework, Dynamic NAS (DNAS) and increasing resiliency against Ransomware and other cyberthreats thru knowledge sharing of best practices and implementation of newest technologies such as NetBackup Flex Appliance and Immutable Storage. Now, as I start a new journey within NetBackup Product Management as a Technical Evangelist, I can’t wait to add my field experience with the highly scalable power of Veritas product and development organizations to help build solutions that fit customer’s needs and spread the word about the outstanding new things coming in NetBackup 10 and future, powered by Cloud Scale Technology. Stay tuned! :)
Ernie Bergan | @ZenOfAnalytics
Aptare/NetBackup IT Analytics Enterprise Sales Engineer
Reason I chose (PM, Engineer, TME, etc) as a career:
Being an SE/SME allows me to help customers make complex activities or combinations of information be easy to digest and understand. The art in assembling data into meaningful summaries is a creative endeavor. With a bit of tongue in cheek, I call myself a data nerd, as it is immensely rewarding to make difficult things look simple for our customers.
Having been a customer of the product, I continue to work to be a faithful messenger to the entire team of what our customers and prospects are telling us in terms of what resonates well, what can still be made simpler, and areas we don’t yet do well. Ultimately, it’s an entire team of dedicated people who engineer, test, quality assure, and help customers benefit from the rich information provided by NetBackup IT Analytics.
Feature you worked on in NetBackup IT Analytics 11 and why you’re excited about it:
In earlier releases of NetBackup IT Analytics, we offered hundreds of great reports, but being aware of that incredible pool of reports was a challenge. Credit to a prospective customer who summarized the problem: “The package offers incredible reports across most of the elements of our data center. We don’t feel we could effectively leverage that information without becoming experts in what reports are available, and where to find them. This would be particularly problematic in cases where we are trying to troubleshoot an issue within the data center where the root cause is not yet clear.”
The team internalized the above feedback and came out with the Inventory tab in the product, allowing an “instant invitation to explore” based on a flexible navigation scheme. By default, the inventory tab organizes around infrastructure objects (Storage arrays, Backup Servers, Hosts, etc.). Clicking on an object type immediately exposes an overview report for that object type. Clicking a “+” tab exposes a rich range of other reports that may be of interest based on the object type selected. Users can pin these additional reports to make the inventory experience fit their preferences. Brand new users and experts alike can quickly find doorways to great information provided by the tool. The Inventory framework continues to evolve, exposing more information in a one-tab “shop”.
Neil Glick | GNeil
Technical Marketing Engineer (TME)
Reason I chose (PM, Engineer, TME, etc) as a career:
I truly believe I was a teacher in another life. Being a TME has given me the opportunity to explore, learn, and become an expert on next generation technology, work with some of the brightest minds from around the world and tell people how cool the products are. What could be better?
Feature you worked on and why you’re excited about it.
Cloud-Optimized Backup from Snapshot: This is a super cool feature that can really help companies looking to store long term backups in the cloud.
Cloud snapshots provide a great option for fast recovery, with rollback restore and the ability to restore to alternate virtual machines (VMs) but can be cost prohibitive to use as long-term retention. By deduplicating and compressing your data and then storing it on a cheaper storage tier, Veritas can provide storage savings when compared to the cost of snapshot storage.
Check out the Technical Brief and video for more details on this awesome feature!
Nelson Namba | nelsonnamba
Sr. Principal Technical Marketing Engineer (TME)
Reason I chose (PM, Engineer, TME, etc) as a career:
I was a Sales Engineer at Veritas Technologies for 6 years and I realized that I could help customers beyond my assigned territory. As a TME, I still have the opportunity to interact with customers and partners but from within the Product Management organization which gives me direct access to the latest innovations and a deeper technical understanding to drive awareness of our solutions to customers and help them achieve their business goals.
Feature you worked on and why you’re excited about it.
As part of the Veritas NetBackup Technical Marketing Team, I’m very excited about how Veritas is committed to bringing innovations to the main market trends and helping with Kubernetes and Virtualization protection as well as providing IT analytics and insights through our NetBackup IT Analytics solution.