(upbeat techno) >> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by, NetApp. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to our Cube coverage, exclusive coverage here at the NetApp Insight 2017. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, the co-host, co-founder of the SiliconANGLE Keith Townsend CTO advisor here in Las Vegas, Nevada at the Mandalay Bay, our next guest is Jennifer Meyer, senior director cloud product marketing, and Ingo Fuchs who's the senior manager cloud product marketing. You guys are doing a lot of the heavy lifting on the front lines for NetApp on the cloud, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Okay, so, we've been covering it, but now it's pretty clear there's a cloud play, there is a cloud play for Netapp, you guys are showing product, lot of products in the keynotes, both in the data center in the next generation but the cloud's the big part of the story, it's certainly we hear resonating with customers, and all the guests that have come up on the A teams, and your partner channels, all are like this is really, really great thing. >> Yeah, I think -- >> Part of the plan? >> Absolutely part of the plan, I mean if you caught any of the latest messaging which, you know, Jean and the team have worked really hard on, it's all about us being the data authority and the hybrid cloud, right, and so, if you think about, let's unpack hybrid cloud, there's only about 1% of the population of the planet that's not adopting cloud in some way, and we believe that after the last 25 years of our history in data management and our leadership with things like ONTAP that we are well-equipped to help people get there, how they want to get there and with what, right. >> And you have an install base too, so you've been selling boxes, everyone knows you for selling, that's an old term but I'm showing my age, (Jennifer laughs) hardware, but hardware's not going away either, Amazon makes their own stuff too, so you got to still store stuff, so storage will be there, servers will be there, hyperconverging, all that's happening under the hood, but the software's where the value is, certainly, you know, we have expression at SiliconANGLE, software's eating the world as Mark Andreesen said, but data's eating software, Anthony, your general manager came on and said, you know, data is trumping applications, used to be applications had data, now data has applications. >> Right. >> So that flips things, upside-down, and you guys got to go build that market out for your customers. How do your customers at NetApp, and prospective customers, new customers, NetNew, engage with NetApp and what's the positioning, what's the value? >> Yeah, there are a lot of different ways to do it. So if you're an existing NetApp customer today, a really really easy way to get into the cloud, so we have one of our product called ONTAP Cloud, it's our storage operating system, the number one operating system in the world, running inside Azure and AWS hyperscalers so you use all the same tools, all the same mechanisms that you would use on premises, but you're now running in the cloud, so that makes it really easy to lift and shift applications that are using NFS or CIFS or iSCSI protocols, straight into the cloud, because you have the same storage operating system that you have on premises, you have datafication, you have snapshot, you have cloning, you have all of the advantages of data management infrastructure that has been developed over the last 25 years. >> So some of the push-back that I've seen is that, yeah, you have the tooling, but isn't the cloud all about the new? Can you actually build new apps with on, using ONTAP and Microsoft Azure NFS, can you talk to us a little bit about the story, about not just bringing your legacy tools, quote unquote, but also, the new capabilities that developers will find as a result of the cloud offerings. >> Yeah, absolutely, I think in my opinion the most exciting announcement this week, and others may argue differently -- >> You're a little biased. >> You're a little bit, yeah. >> I'm a little bit biased, because you know, >> We'll take it with a grain of salt. >> It's my baby so I do care about it, is that we, that Microsoft announced, and that we announced that we are the technology provider for Microsoft launching an Enterprise-class NFS service natively in Azure. Now, if you think about that, if it runs natively in Azure, it sits right next to the infrastructure that is processing HDInsight, that's running SQL server, Microsoft announced that they are having SQL running on Linux, so suddenly having an Enterprise cloud very very fast, high performance, managed by NetApp NFS service running natively in Azure opens up the opportunities to do IoT, run your Enterprise databases against this infrastructure and really opening up the door for customers to do more. And because you're using tools like HDInsight, you can run analytics, you can now expand into AI, into machine learning, all of that is now open to people that are cloud-native, and cloud natives don't want to go back and learn how to manage a storage infrastructure, that's not a good use of their time, so something like the NFS service in Azure, you don't have to learn how to do storage, all you do is go to the portal, you provision it, you click on it, it's running, it's done. >> I think that's a really important point, because everybody just hears it's a new native or first-party service in Azure, which frankly is industry-first. I mean, nobody, especially from the storage provider standpoint is doing that today, but I think the ability to get all those Enterprise-class services without it feeling like a prostate exam is probably a first for everybody. (men laughing) >> Probably you get, you get put under for that these days, but I mean, my point is, the multi-cloud thing's interesting to me, and I think you guys have hit on something with the Cloud Orchestrator product we saw on stage, the demo, is that multi-cloud, customers don't want to be locked in. >> That's right. >> That's the number one thing we hear in theCUBE, and the suppliers, whoa, we don't lock in, now open-source has been growing, that's great, but you know, the new lock-in as we still call it, is functionality, are you helping customers scale up and scale out at the same time, so the question for you is, how far along is that cloud orchestrator, and is that the guiding principle of the cloud group to seamlessly, first of all the cloud orchestrator allows you to move data around just by clicking buttons, so it takes away all the under-the-covers work that's needed. >> That's right. >> 'Cause each cloud has its own architecture. >> That's right. >> How they do things. So, that's a value quotient I think will be a home run. >> It is, and a big priority for NetApp and specifically in our cloud business unit and our cloud marketing is to make sure that people feel like they have the freedom to choose where they want to go and how, right, and so think about it like a compass, a compass still needs you to pick the destination, and it tells you the best way to get there. That's really sort of what we're trying to do and the orchestrator is just a very flexible way to help people do it, even at the API level. >> Alright, so for all the naysayers out there that are, oh NetApp, they're just cloud washing, they're not really in the cloud game, what does this mean, how do you put that to rest, 'cause I know you've been involved in Amazon for some time, now with the Microsoft deal pretty significant, what do you say to the naysayers or customers that might learn for the first time wow, good story there, or there's a path to the cloud. >> You know, we joked one time we should have an entire marketing campaign that said, oh, I didn't know NetApp did that, because there are so many things, even me, being fairly new to NetApp that I didn't even know we were doing, let alone how long we were doing them for, so it might shock some people to know that we've been doing the ONTAP cloud product for four years, I mean four years, and that product frankly was born out of our own need to abstract the software and test it on our own for TestApp, right, >> Well Jean's in town so she's a good marketer so she should do a good job of changing the marketing angle, but the tell sign to me at events is on keynotes, right, this is to me the relevance barometer, I think Amazon has really nailed this, they have so many announcements they can't even keep track of them, they actually, there's just a tsunami, and that is an indicator of success, and that's to me the competitive advantage, keep on introducing new products. You guys had how many products introduced on stage today, I mean, it was just not enough time. >> A lot, the payload was huge. >> There's a huge -- >> It's a really good sign of momentum and what's to come, yeah. >> Great sign, great sign. And I think what's going to, I'm sorry, we're so excited we can't even help ourselves. (men laughing) I think what's going to be interesting and a challenge for marketing moving forward is how do you put a net around it when you want to announce it, because when you look at continuous innovation and delivery, we're going to be doing something every few days, right, once a month, once every two weeks, so -- >> Well you guys have a good install base, and I always said you can't go out of business if you have money in the bank and if you have customers, thousands of customers do you guys have, not losing that core, building on the core, so how are you guys, from a product marketing standpoint, you got to package to the core, you got to have your core base, but now you have new constituencies, new personas in your base, now, developing, you have analytics, you have chief data officers, you have the guy who's going to be thinking about governance now and GP, GS, >> GDPR. >> G, D, >> G, D, P, R, >> G, E, P, R. Gettin' late in the day. (Jennifer laughing) But it's a global skill, you guys now have a new territory to take down, what's the plan? >> You take that one. >> Yeah, I think it's a really interesting one. Let me give you a specific example, and then we can broaden the story a little bit, but we recognize that one of the problems that our customers have is packing up their SAS environments. So that they have come from on-premises environments, where they were maybe using our storage, maybe not, moved into the cloud, and now, like one of our customers was talking recently about, he has hundreds of SAS providers, and he doesn't really know what data they have, so he's concerned about data protection, he's concerned about losing that data, obviously hacking attacks and similar things. >> Yeah. >> So we actually started a program around a product that we call Cloud Control, and Cloud Control for Office 365 is a first iteration of that that we launched just a few months ago, and it takes the Office 365 data and protects it and retains that data so that if something happens, somebody hacks, somebody corrupts your files, your CEO deletes emails and three months later you want it back, that data is there and it's protected and it's secure, so that's a native cloud service, you don't buy any equipment from us, your earlier comment about moving boxes, so the cloud for us is a great vehicle to get to these new buyers, and the interest that we're getting back is tremendous, but you're absolutely right that we need to find different ways and we are finding different ways to get to these buyers, to get to these personas that are out there. >> Well, not having a hardware-specific thing is certainly a great way, cloud, I mean. >> Exactly. >> Absolutely. >> you got a lot of data back in the recovery, there's no walls in the cloud, so the on-premises paradigm changes it a lot. >> Yeah, and this time we're talking SAS to SAS, right? >> That's great, so ecosystem partners, one of the big successes is partnerships. What's the strategy on partners, I mean cloud-native foundation, cloud CNCF cloud native compute foundations has grown, who's in there are you guys getting involved in that, what's your position, what's the strategy for partnering. >> Yeah, so as you would expect, you know, cloud is different enough that one framework doesn't match the things that we've been doing for those 25 years that we've been so successful in this business, so what we've tried to do in this new cloud first partner program that we've launched several months ago is really target our cloud native partners, these guys that couldn't care less about on-prem, they don't even know how to spell the word storage, and see how do we help service them with some of these great data services that we're bringing to bear, really, and these guys have no previous NetApp history with us. And we've got, you know, a couple dozen partners that have already signed up on our behalf, and we'll continue that momentum, but we're certainly excited to give them a new level of treatment that NetApp hasn't done before. >> So I would love to hear feedback from the lower-level from the ecosystem. NetApp I think, which is I think is a good thing, is very opinionated when it comes to its approach to cloud. This isn't oh, bring any old object store to the, it's you know what if you adopt ONTAP, if you adapt NetApp, data-driven vision, the data fabric, if you adopt that, then you enable a new level of cloud mobility. So if you, as you've brought that nest to the ecosystem, what's been the response, I mean a lot of these guys are pretty opinionated themselves. >> I was going to say you've already talked to Anthony and he's pretty opinionated. >> Yes (laughing). >> Yeah, no I think it's well-received, right, I mean, who doesn't want the ability to have some freedom to move around and choose their partners as we go, and I think one thing that Ingo was alluding to earlier is the fact that we're pretty heterogeneous in our data services, you don't have to have NetApp to be able to benefit from Cloud Control, or Cloud Sync, or OnCommand Insight, which is one of our sort of business insight tools for infrastructure and cloud-cost monitoring. So, it's nice to be able to give them a more sort of open message, but still have a pretty strong opinion on where people need to go and why. >> So let's talk about Cloud Control a little bit more, is Cloud Control an API, or is that just a, is that only control plane? >> It's a service, so it's a native cloud service, you can buy it on the marketplace, you can do free trials, you don't buy any hardware anywhere, it will grab the data through official APIs out of Office 365 and store it in a choice of locations, so we can host the storage for you, or you can store it in AWS, you can store it in Azure, or you can store it on-premises and storage with AppScale, which is our object store, so you know, for some customers it's important for compliance reasons to have an off-site on-premises copy, other customers would prefer to use Azure, use AWS, depends on what kind of licensing agreement, or massive purchase agreements they might have, so we give our customers that flexibility, but that is an example for native cloud service. We have another one that's called Cloud Sync, which is a data migration tool, you can go from CIFS, NFS, or S3, to CIFS, NFS, or S3. To, and it transforms the data, so you can go from an NFS source and move it natively into an S3 object in the cloud. It's another example for a native cloud service, it's not a license, it's not something that you buy and install on-premises. >> So that brings a question about data mobility today, I know cloud orchestrator is something that's coming in the future, but as far as data mobility, can I do something as simple as, say, or as complex, depending on your perspective, say I have two AWS regions, I'm front-ending this with ONTAP and I'm using ONTAP as a filer, and I want to replicate storage from one AWS region to another one, can I do that with object in the back-end and then use ONTAP to present that as files on both coasts, for example? >> Yeah, it depends a little bit on your application, the database that you're using, but say you're using ONTAP cloud, you can replicate between regions using cross-region replication, that's easy. But what's different is we have HA, so what you can do with ONTAP cloud is that you can do a fail-over from one availability zone to another availability zone, and that's all managed within the software. So if you're thinking about moving Enterprise application, mission-critical applications running production inside the cloud, you definitely do want to have HA, we did, we tackled this a little bit different for the NFS Azure service 'cause we were running and operating the infrastructure that is underneath the Azure portal so we have the reliability built into our product because it's running on our equipment. So we have complete control over that. >> Guys, final question, I know we got to go but I want to get your thoughts on management software, because the management game is changing the cloud too, as the trend of having the same code bases running on-prem or on the cloud, or applications working across multiple clouds brings up the role of the folks that are being shifted to high-value activities. One of them is, you know, managing dashboards automating some of the system management, application management, OnCommand has been around for a long, long time, NetApp has a history of good management tooling. How does that translate to the products in the cloud? >> It does, and I want to pull back to talk a little bit about OnCommand Insight 'cause we kind of overlook it because it's been around for a little while and it's more traditionally thought of as an SRM tool, but really, some of the capabilities that we've talked about even as early as today, was the fact that now we're extending sort of those infrastructure analytics and those business insights so you can identify resources that are wasted or places where you're out of capacity and you're bottlenecking, now into the cloud for things like cost-monitoring. So, imagine you're a CIO and you have people going around your back swiping credit cards to find whatever tools they want to use in the SAS universe to get their jobs done, only you have no idea where they're spending your money. Now you'll have the ability to look at almost a unified bill and see which departments are charging what money, and charge back those departments to keep them accountable in your budget. >> John: We call that the toolshed problem. >> Toolshed >> All these tools. >> They're everywhere. >> They're everywhere, don't be a tool, get out, get that toolshed, there's too many things in a tool, you get too many tools >> We have a lot of tools. Yeah, so we're happy to have things like that that help to give people a little bit more empowerment to first identify what's going on and how to fix it. >> The problem is though, in tools, they buy a tool, sometimes it turns into something else, like you buy a hammer and it turns into a lawnmower, but that's not what it's designed for. >> That's right. >> You can't mow your lawn with a hammer. >> You can't. >> So a final question before we break is product marketing focus. What's your to-do items, you guys got your list, I know you're making decisions on there with the product teams on how to take it to market, what's the to-do list for you guys. >> I'll give my answer and then I'll let you close, but it's messaging, messaging, messaging, right? I think in marketing we traditionally get sick of our own message before sometimes our audiences have heard it, and certainly we don't want to let Jean down, because she's done such a phenomenal job of getting the ship steered in a singular direction, so you're going to see a lot of big bold messages from us, a lot of us not being apologetic about some of the great IP that we've got and some of the things that we're doing, so we want to be sort of out there, reiterating that we're helping people harness the power of the hybrid cloud, and that we are the data authority on the hybrid cloud. >> And they say position it and they will come. That's absolutely right, anything you'd like to add? >> You know, so I spend a lot of time both with our internal product team and with our partners like Microsoft for example, it's really exciting the last few weeks, and the great thing for me is that we have more and more partners coming to us, wanting to leverage our products and working with us and understanding how they can participate in the data fabric vision, how can they be part of this network of partners and solutions and services that we're building, and that has been really, really exciting, cloud is real, and we're making it work. >> We're a little excited. >> Cloud is real, we look forward to following up, I'll have to get you guys into the studio in Palo Alto, a lot to talk about, lot more certainly, Kubernetes containers, we're getting a huge renaissance in application development that's going to create a lot of value, you guys are at the center of it. That's the keyword, the center of the action, here in Las Vegas with NetApp Insight 2017, we'll be right back with more live coverage afterwards I'm John Furrier, Keith Townsend, we'll be right back. (upbeat techno)