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Partner Link 2016, Las Vegas - Day Two in Review

ZoeSands
Community Manager
Community Manager
Employee

Today the attendees at Partner Link were invited to participate in the morning session of Veritas Vision 2016, which was opened by Lynn Lucas, CMO of Veritas. This is the first headline conference Veritas has hosted since becoming independent, the last conference was held in 2006 and since then so much has changed. Back then businesses were just beginning their digital innovation and transformation journeys. Veritas is a company in transformation we have a new leadership team, although there have been many changes Veritas has always been about the data, that’s our sweet spot.

Lynn then welcomed Bill Coleman, our CEO to the stage who shared a personal story about his niece and how technology, data and the Internet of Things (IoT) has helped her live an independent high quality life. Bill and his wife were inspired by their niece to found the Coleman Institute Cognitive Disabilities, which is based in Colorado and aims to help enrich the lives of those with disabilities through technology.

Bill continued and highlighted information is the most critical asset in today’s world. If you don’t learn to access that data, your competitors will win. He said "this week is about helping you map out your own digital transformation, gather data and gain insight. Your data is not just in the data centre it has moved to the cloud." He advised everyone to start with a great foundation and that with Veritas products you can access your data in real time using a data driven management platform allowing you better control and insight.

Bill presented the three aspects to Veritas’ Data Driven Management Platform;

  1. Software Defined Storge (SDS) – leverage commodity hardware and extend data visibility and access.
  2. Polices – ensure management, control and automation. Manage across the entire lifecycle.
  3. Metadata – enable predictive analytics and machine learning. Drive competitive advantage.

Next up was Ana Pinczuk, EVP and Chief Product Officer, she set the scene by saying we are in an exciting digital era. Evolution is faster than ever before through digital transformation business models are changing. We now have businesses that have developed from the sharing economy. Veritas has evolved too from a data protection company to being an enterprise data management organisation.

She presented the New Veritas Data Journey as;

  1. Protect data over the hybrid cloud.
  2. New Consumption Models – launching usage based licences for NetBackup.
  3. Private Cloud – introducing Veritas Hyperscale and Access to complement openstack.
  4. 360 Data Management – starting with visibility and preserving critical information using Information Map which will be integrated with NetBackup. Veritas Resiliency Platform (VRP) will also be integrated within NetBackup. And VRP will integrate with Amazon Web Services plus Velocity.
  5. Intelligent Data Management – where data becomes your key asset. You can do contextual searches on your metadata. Data will become self-aware, contextual and self-protecting.
  6. Platform – interlock the power of data by capturing metadata and catalogue this. Discover, classify and secure. Open architecture for third party development too.

Veritas’ approach is software driven.

Ana welcomed Ted Brockway, Partner Director at Azure Storage to the stage to talk about the Microsoft Azure partnership with Veritas and how we are helping customers transfer to the cloud. He was very clear in his speech that the journey to cloud starts with data and leveraging this early on in the journey is critical.

Next up was Nate Silver, Statistician he posed the question ‘Is information everything?’ and proceeded to say that we are currently experiencing a data deluge. He said “we have Big Data and big problems where people have used data that has lead them to wrong conclusions and created biases.” He highlighted that it is important to look at the signal to noise ratio when looking at data relationships to gain better insight and identify information that is relevant from the big data sets.

Here are his suggestions for effectively management of big data;

  1. Think probabilistically.
  2. Know where you’re coming from and check for biases.
  3. Try and err. Get the basics right and you’ll get better over time.

After the break Mike Palmer, SVP and GM took centre stage. He presented how to get more value from your data with interactive demos with the audience (the PIXMOB wristband were very funky and brought his presentation to life). During his session he said “how do you scale out in a cloud environment? The answer is not hardware. It is software!” The software defined storage (SDS) and information map demos were very interesting. Information Map provides you with the world view of your data and is simple to use, just ask questions and get the data visualization, it is as easy as that.

Guest speaker Nan Boden, Head of Global Partnerships at Google joined Mike on stage. She spoke about open source and the rush towards open cloud. She highlighted that machine learning has helped make improvements across Google's business.

Mike concluded his session by saying that all this can only be achieved with a software approach.

Mark Nutt, Senior Vice President Global Channel headlined the afternoon session and spoke about building value, increasing profits and streamlining processes for Veritas Partners. He stressed we need to ensure that customers are agile with their data to help them add value to their own customers. He continued to highlight that optimising customers’ budgets and providing value on information governance we can help transition customers to the cloud.

Next was a panel discussion with Juli Clark, Susan DiSalvo, Dave Gregory and John McGoun they spoke about some of the challenges Veritas has been having and how we are moving forward and adding value to our partner experience through enablement and training.

Mark’s closing thought reiterated the theme of the Partner Link Conference ‘Growth is Everything.’ By driving customer value this will increase profitability.

Today’s Partner Link Conference closed with Partner Awards, the winners can be found in the next blog post, check it out!