>>Hello. Welcome back to our super cloud 22 event. I'm John F host the cue with my co-host Dave ante. Extracting the signal from noise. We're proud to have two amazing cube alumnis here. We got Sanja Putin. Who's now the CEO of cohesive the emo Aaron who's the CTO. Co-founder also former CEO Cub alumni. The father of hyper-converged welcome back to the cube I endorsed the >>Cloud. Absolutely. Is the father. Great >>To see you guys. Thank thanks for coming on and perfect timing. The new job taking over that. The helm Mo it at cohesive big news, but part of super cloud, we wanna dig into it. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having >>Us here. So first of all, we'll get into super before we get into the Supercloud. I want to just get the thoughts on the move Sanjay. We've been following your career since 2010. You've been a cube alumni from that point, we followed that your career. Why cohesive? Why now? >>Yeah, John David, thank you first and all for having us here, and it's great to be at your event. You know, when I left VMware last year, I took some time off just really primarily. I hadn't had a sabbatical in probably 18 years. I joined two boards, Phillips and sneak, and then, you know, started just invest and help entrepreneurs. Most of them were, you know, Indian Americans like me who were had great tech, were looking for the kind of go to market connections. And it was just a wonderful year to just de to unwind a bit. And along the, the way came CEO calls. And I'd asked myself, the question is the tech the best in the industry? Could you see value creation that was signi significant and you know, three, four months ago, Mohit and Carl Eschenbach and a few of the board members of cohesive called me and walk me through Mo's decision, which he'll talk about in a second. And we spent the last few months getting to know him, and he's everything you describe. He's not just the father of hyperconverge. And he wrote the Google file system, wicked smart, built a tech platform better than that second time. But we had to really kind of walk through the chemistry between us, which we did in long walks in, in, you know, discrete places so that people wouldn't find us in a Starbucks and start gossiping. So >>Why Sanjay? There you go. >>Actually, I should say it's a combination of two different decisions. The first one was to, for me to take a different role and I run the company as a CEO for, for nine years. And, you know, as a, as a technologist, I always like, you know, going deep into technology at the same time, the CEO duties require a lot of breadth, right? You're talking to customers, you're talking to partners, you're doing so much. And with the way we've been growing the with, you know, we've been fortunate, it was becoming hard to balance both. It's really also not fair to the company. Yeah. So I opted to do the depth job, you know, be the visionary, be the technologist. And that was the first decision to bring a CEO, a great CEO from outside. >>And I saw your video on the site. You said it was your decision. Yes. Go ahead. I have to ask you, cuz this is a real big transition for founders and you know, I have founder artists cuz everyone, you know, calls me that. But being the founder of a company, it's always hard to let go. I mean nine years as CEO, it's not like you had a, you had a great run. So this was it timing for you? Was it, was it a structural shift, like at super cloud, we're talking about a major shift that's happening right now in the industry. Was it a balance issue? Was it more if you wanted to get back in and in the tech >>Look, I, I also wanna answer, you know, why Sanja, but, but I'll address your question first. I always put the company first what's right for the company. Is it for me to start get stuck the co seat and try to juggle this depth and Brad simultaneously. I mean, I can stroke my ego a little bit there, but it's not good for the company. What's best for the company. You know, I'm a technologist. How about I oversee the technology part in partnership with so many great people I have in the company and I bring someone kick ass to be the CEO. And so then that was the second decision. Why Sanja when Sanjay, you know, is a very well known figure. He's managed billions of dollars of business in VMware. You know, been there, done that has, you know, some of the biggest, you know, people in the industry on his speed dial, you know, we were really fortunate to have someone like that, come in and accept the role of the CEO of cohesive. I think we can take the company to new Heights and I'm looking forward to my partnership with, with Sanja on this. >>It it's we, we called it the splash brothers and >>The, >>In the vernacular. It doesn't matter who gets the ball, whether it's step clay, we shoot. And I think if you look at some of the great partnerships, whether it was gates bomber, there, plenty of history of this, where a founder and a someone who was, it has to be complimentary skills. If I was a technologist myself and wanted to code we'd clash. Yeah. But I think this was really a match me in heaven because he, he can, I want him to keep innovating and building the best platform for today in the future. And our customers tell one customer told me, this is the best tech they've seen since VMware, 20 years ago, AWS, 10 years ago. And most recently this was a global 100 big customers. So I feel like this combination, now we have to show that it works. It's, you know, it's been three, four months. My getting to know him, you know, I'm day eight on the job, but I'm loving it. >>Well, it's a sluman model too. It's more modern example. You saw, he did it with Fred Ludy at service now. Yes. And, and of course at, at snowflake, yeah. And his book, you read his book. I dunno if you've read his book, amp it up, but app it up. And he says, I always you'll love this. Give great deference to the founder. Always show great respect. Right. And for good reason. So >>In fact, I mean you could talk to him, you actually met to >>Frank. I actually, you know, a month or so back, I actually had dinner with him in his ranch in Moana. And I posed the question. There was a number of CEOs that went there and I posed him the question. So Frank, you know, many of us, we grow being deaf guys, you know? And eventually when we take on the home of our CEO, we have to do breadth. How do you do it? And he's like, well, let me tell you, I was never a death guy. I'm a breath guy. >>I'm like, >>That's my answer. Yeah. >>So, so I >>Want the short story. So the day I got the job, I, I got a text from Frank and I said, what's your advice the first time CEO, three words, amp it up, >>Amp it up. Right? Yeah. >>And so you're always on brand, man. >>So you're an amazing operator. You've proven that time and time again at SAP, VMware, et cetera, you feel like now you, you, you wanna do both of those skills. You got the board and you got the operations cuz you look, you know, look at sloop when he's got Scarelli wherever he goes, he brings Scarelli with him as sort of the operator. How, how do you, how are you thinking >>About that? I mean it's early days, but yeah. Yeah. Small. I mean I've, you know, when I was, you know, it was 35,000 people at VMware, 80, 90,000 people at SAP, a really good run. The SAP run was 10 to 20 billion innovative products, especially in analytics and VMware six to 12 end user computing cloud. So I learned a lot. I think the company, you know, being about 2000 employees plus not to mayor tomorrow, but over the course next year I can meet everybody. Right? So first off the executive team, 10 of us, we're, we're building more and more cohesiveness if I could use that word between us, which is great, the next, you know, layers of VPs and every manager, I think that's possible. So I I'm a people person and a customer person. So I think when you take that sort of extroverted mindset, we'll bring energy to the workforce to, to retain the best and then recruit the best. >>And you know, even just the week we, we were announced that this announcement happened. Our website traffic went through the roof, the highest it's ever been, lots of resumes coming in. So, and then lots of customer engagement. So I think we'll take this, but I, I feel very good about the possibilities, because see, for me, I didn't wanna walk into the company to a company where the technology risk was high. Okay. I feel like that I can go to bed at night and the technology risk is low. This guy's gonna run a machine at the current and the future. And I'm hearing that from customers. Now, what I gotta do is get the, the amp it up part on the go to market. I know a little thing or too about >>That. You've got that down. I think the partnership is really key here. And again, nine use the CEO and then Sanja points to our super cloud trend that we've been looking at, which is there's another wave happening. There's a structural change in real time happening now, cloud one was done. We saw that transition, AWS cloud native now cloud native with an kind of operating system kind of vibe going on with on-premise hybrid edge. People say multi-cloud, but we're looking at this as an opportunity for companies like cohesive to go to the next level. So I gotta ask you guys, what do you see as structural change right now in the industry? That's disruptive. People are using cloud and scale and data to refactor their business models, change modern cases with cloud native. How are you guys looking at this next structural change that's happening right now? Yeah, >>I'll take that. So, so I'll start by saying that. Number one, data is the new oil and number two data is exploding, right? Every year data just grows like crazy managing data is becoming harder and harder. You mentioned some of those, right? There's so many cloud options available. Cloud one different vendors have different clouds. There is still on-prem there's edge infrastructure. And the number one problem that happens is our data is getting fragmented all over the place and managing so many fragments of data is getting harder and harder even within a cloud or within on-prem or within edge data is fragmented. Right? Number two, I think the hackers out there have realized that, you know, to make money, it's no longer necessary to Rob banks. They can actually see steal the data. So ransomware attacks on the rise it's become a boardroom level discussion. They say there's a ransomware attack happening every 11 seconds or so. Right? So protecting your data has become very important security data. Security has become very important. Compliance is important, right? So people are looking for data management solutions, the next gen data management platform that can really provide all this stuff. And that's what cohesive is about. >>What's the difference between data management and backup. Explain that >>Backup is just an entry point. That's one use case. I wanna draw an analogy. Let's draw an analogy to my former company, Google right? Google started by doing Google search, but is Google really just a search engine. They've built a platform that can do multiple things. You know, they might have started with search, but then they went down to roll out Google maps and Gmail and YouTube and so many other things on that platform. So similarly backups might be just the first use case, but it's really about that platform on which you can do more with the data that's next gen data management. >>But, but you am, I correct. You don't consider yourself a security company. One of your competitors is actually pivoting and in positioning themselves as a security company, I've always felt like data management, backup and recovery data protection is an adjacency to security, but those two worlds are coming together. How do you see >>It? Yeah. The way I see it is that security is part of data management. You start maybe by backing with data, but then you secure it and then you do more with that data. If you're only doing security, then you're just securing the data. You, you gotta do more with the data. So data management is much bigger. So >>It's a security is a subset of data. I mean, there you go. Big TA Sanjay. >>Well, I mean I've, and I, I, I I'd agree. And I actually, we don't get into that debate. You know, I've told the company, listen, we'll figure that out. Cuz who cares about the positioning at the bottom? My email, I say we are data management and data security company. Okay. Now what's the best word that describes three nouns, which I think we're gonna do management security and analytics. Okay. He showed me a beautiful diagram, went to his home in the course of one of these, you know, discrete conversations. And this was, I mean, he's done this before. Many, if you watch on YouTube, he showed me a picture of an ice big iceberg. And he said, listen, you know, if you look at companies like snowflake and data bricks, they're doing the management security and mostly analytics of data. That's the top of the iceberg, the stuff you see. >>But a lot of the stuff that's get backed archive is the bottom of the iceberg that you don't see. And you try to, if you try to ask a question on age data, the it guy will say, get a ticket. I'll come back with three days. I'll UNIV the data rehydrate and then you'll put it into a database. And you can think now imagine that you could do live searches analytics on, on age data that's analytics. So I think the management, the security, the analytics of, you know, if you wanna call it secondary data or backed up data or data, that's not hot and live warm, colder is a huge opportunity. Now, what do you wanna call one phrase that describes all of it. Do you call that superpower management security? Okay, whatever you wanna call it. I view it as saying, listen, let's build a platform. >>Some people call Google, a search company. People, some people call Google and information company and we just have to go and pursue every CIO and every CSO that has a management and a security and do course analytics problem. And that's what we're doing. And when I talk to the, you know, I didn't talk to all the 3000 customers, but the biggest customers and I was doing diligence. They're like this thing has got enormous potential. Okay. And we just have to now go focus, get every fortune 1000 company to pick us because this problem, even the first use case you talk back up is a little bit like, you know, razor blades and soap you've needed. You needed it 30 years ago and you'll need it for 30 years. It's just that the tools that were built in the last generation that were companies formed in 1990s, one of them I worked for years ago are aids are not built for the cloud. So I think this is a tremendous opportunity where many of those, those, those nos management security analytics will become part of what we do. And we'll come up with the right phrase for what the companies and do course >>Sanjay. So ma and Sanja. So given that given that's this Google transition, I like that example search was a data problem. They got sequenced to a broader market opportunity. What super cloud we trying to tease out is what does that change over from a data standpoint, cuz now the operating environments change has become more complex and the enterprises are savvy. Developers are savvy. Now they want, they want SAS solutions. They want freemium and expanding. They're gonna drive the operations agenda with DevOps. So what is the complexity that needs to be abstracted away? How do you see that moment? Because this is what people are talking about. They're saying security's built in, driven by developers. Developers are driving operations behavior. So what is the shift? Where do you guys see this new? Yeah. Expansive for cohesive. How do you fit into super cloud? >>So let me build up from that entry point. Maybe back up to what you're saying is the super cloud, right? Let me draw that journey. So let's say the legacy players are just doing backups. How, how sad is it that you have one silo sitting there just for peace of mind as an insurance policy and you do nothing with the data. If you have to do something with the data, you have to build another silo, you have to build another copy. You have to manage it separately. Right. So clearly that's a little bit brain damaged. Right. So, okay. So now you take a little bit of, you know, newer vendors who may take that backup platform and do a little bit more with that. Maybe they provide security, but your problem still remains. How do you do more with the data? How do you do some analytics? >>Like he's saying, right. How do you test development on that? How do you migrate the data to the cloud? How do you manage it? The data at scale? How do you do you provide a unified experience across, across multiple cloud, which you're calling the super cloud. That's where cohesive goes. So what we do, we provide a platform, right? We have tentacles in on-prem in each of the clouds. And on top of that, it looks like one platform that you manage. We have a single control plane, a UI. If you may, a single pin of glass, if, if you may, that our customers can use to manage all of it. And now it looks, starts looking like one platform. You mentioned Google, do you, when you go to, you know, kind Google search or a URL, do you really care? What happens behind the scenes mean behind the scenes? Google's built a platform that spans the whole world. No, >>But it's interesting. What's behind the scenes. It's a beautiful now. And I would say, listen, one other thing to pull on Dave, on the security part, I saw a lot of vendors this day in this space, white washing a security message on top of backup. Okay. And CSO, see through that, they'll offer warranties and guarantees or whatever, have you of X million dollars with a lot of caveats, which will never paid because it's like escape clause here. We won't pay it. Yeah. And, and what people really want is a scalable solution that works. And you know, we can match every warranty that's easy. And what I heard was this was the most scalable solution at scale. And that's why you have to approach this with a Google type mindset. I love the fact that every time you listen to sun pitch, I would, what, what I like about him, the most common word to use is scale. >>We do things at scale. So I found that him and AUR and some of the early Google people who come into the company had thought about scale. And, and even me it's like day eight. I found even the non-tech pieces of it. The processes that, you know, these guys are built for simple things in some cases were better than some of the things I saw are bigger companies I'd been used to. So we just have to continue, you know, building a scale platform with the enterprise. And then our cloud product is gonna be the simple solution for the masses. And my view of the world is there's 5,000 big companies and 5 million small companies we'll push the 5 million small companies as the cloud. Okay. Amazon's an investor in the company. AWS is a big partner. We'll talk about I'm sure knowing John's interest in that area, but that's a cloud play and that's gonna go to the cloud really fast. You not build you're in the marketplace, you're in the marketplace. I mean, maybe talk about the history of the Amazon relationship investing and all that. >>Yeah, absolutely. So in two years back late 2020, we, you know, in collaboration with AWS who also by the way is an investor now. And in cohesive, we rolled out what we call data management as a service. It's our SaaS service where we run our software in the cloud. And literally all customers have to do is just go there and sign on, right? They don't have to manage any infrastructure and stuff. What's nice is they can then combine that with, you know, software that they might have bought from cohesive. And it still looks like one platform. So what I'm trying to say is that they get a choice of the, of the way they wanna consume our software. They can consume it as a SAS service in the cloud. They can buy our software, manage it themselves, offload it to a partner on premises or what have you. But it still looks like that one platform, what you're calling a Supercloud >>Yeah. And developers are saying, they want the bag of Legos to compose their solutions. That's the Nirvana they want to get there. So that's, it has to look the same. >>Well, what is it? What we're calling a Superlo can we, can we test that for a second? So data management and service could span AWS and on-prem with the identical experience. So I guess I would call that a Supercloud I presume it's not gonna through AWS span multiple clouds, but, but >>Why not? >>Well, well interesting cuz we had this, I mean, so, okay. So we could in the future, it doesn't today. Well, >>David enough kind of pause for a second. Everything that we do there, if we do it will be customer driven. So there might be some customers I'll give you one Walmart that may want to store the data in a non AWS cloud risk cuz they're competitors. Right. So, but the control plane could still be in, in, in the way we built it, but the data might be stored somewhere else. >>What about, what about a on-prem customer? Who says, Hey, I, I like cohesive. I've now got multiple clouds. I want the identical experience across clouds. Yeah. Okay. So, so can you do that today? How do you do that today? Can we talk >>About that? Yeah. So basically think roughly about the split between the data plane and the control plane, the data plane is, you know, our cohesive clusters that could be sitting on premises that could be sitting in multiple data centers or you can run an instance of that cluster in the cloud, whichever cloud you choose. Right. That's what he was referring to as the data plane. So collectively all these clusters from the data plane, right? They stored the data, but it can all be managed using the control plane. So you still get that single image, the single experience across all clouds. And by the way, the, the, the, the cloud vendor does actually benefit because here's a customer. He mentioned a customer that may not wanna go to AWS, but when they get the data plane on a different cloud, whether it's Azure, whether it's the Google cloud, they then get data management services. Maybe they're able to replicate the data over to AWS. So AWS also gains. >>And your deployment model is you instantiate the cohesive stack on each of the regions and clouds, is that correct? And you building essentially, >>It all happens behind the scenes. That's right. You know, just like Google probably has their tentacles all over the world. We will instantiate and then make it all look like one platform. >>I mean, you should really think it's like a human body, right? The control planes, the head. Okay. And that controls everything. The data plane is large because it's a lot of the data, right? It's the rest of the body, that data plane could be wherever you want it to be. Traditionally, the part the old days was tape. Then you got disk. Now you got multiple clouds. So that's the way we think about it. And there on that piece of it will be neutral, right? We should be multi-cloud to the data plane being every single place. Cause it's customer demand. Where do you want your store data? Air gapped. On-prem no problem. We'll work with Dell. Okay. You wanna be in a particular cloud, AWS we'll work then optimized with S3 and glacier. So this is where I think the, the path to a multi-cloud or Supercloud is to be customer driven, but the control plane sits in Amazon. So >>We're blessed to have a number of, you know, technical geniuses in here. So earlier we were speaking to Ben wa deja VI, and what they do is different. They don't instantiate an individual, you know, regions. What they do is of a single global. Is there a, is there an advantage of doing it the way the cohesive does it in terms of simplicity or how do you see that? Is that a future direction for you from a technology standpoint? What are the trade offs there? >>So you want to be where the data is when you said single global, I take it that they run somewhere and the data has to go there. And in this day age, correct >>Said that. He said, you gotta move that in this >>Day and >>Age query that's, you know, across regions, look >>In this day and age with the way the data is growing, the way it is, it's hard to move around the data. It's much easier to move around the competition. And in these instances, what have you, so let the data be where it is and you manage it right there. >>So that's the advantage of instantiating in multiple regions. As you don't have to move the >>Data cost, we have the philosophy we call it. Let's bring the, the computation to the data rather than the data to >>The competition and the same security model, same governance model, same. How do you, how do you federate that? >>So it's all based on policies. You know, this overarching platform controlled by, by the control plane, you just, our customers just put in the policies and then the underlying nuts and bolts just take care >>Of, you know, it's when I first heard and start, I started watching some of his old videos, ACE really like hyperconverged brought to secondary storage. In fact, he said, oh yeah, that's great. You got it. Because I first called this idea, hyperconverged secondary storage, because the idea of him inventing hyperconverge was bringing compute to storage. It had never been done. I mean, you had the kind of big VC stuff, but these guys were the first to bring that hyperconverge at, at Nutanix. So I think this is that same idea of bringing computer storage, but now applied not to the warm data, but to the rest of the data, including a >>Lot of, what about developers? What's, what's your relationship with developers? >>Maybe you talk about the marketplace and everything >>He's yeah. And I'm, I'm curious as to do you have a PAs layer, what we call super PAs layer to create an identical developer experience across your Supercloud. I'm gonna my >>Term. So we want our customers not just to benefit from the software that we write. We also want them to benefit from, you know, software that's written by developers by third party people and so on and so forth. So we also support a marketplace on the platform where you can download apps from third party developers and run them on this platform. There's a, a number of successful apps. There's one, you know, look like I said, our entry point might be backups, but even when backups, we don't do everything. Look, for instance, we don't backup mainframes. There is a, a company we partner with, you know, and their software can run in our marketplace. And it's actually used by many, many of our financial customers. So our customers don't get, just get the benefit of what we build, but they also get the benefit of what third parties build. Another analogy I like to draw. You can tell. And front of analogy is I drew an analogy to hyperscale is like Google. Yeah. The second analogy I like to draw is that to a simple smartphone, right? A smartphone starts off by being a great phone. But beyond that, it's also a GPS player. It's a, it's a, it's a music player. It's a camera, it's a flashlight. And it also has a marketplace from where you can download apps and extend the power of that platform. >>Is that a, can we think of that as a PAs layer or no? Is it really not? You can, okay. You can say, is it purpose built for what you're the problem that you're trying to solve? >>So we, we just built APIs. Yeah. Right. We have an SDK that developers can use. And through those APIs, they get to leverage the underlying services that exist on the platform. And now developers can use that to take advantage of all that stuff. >>And it was, that was a key factor for me too. Cause I, what I, you know, I've studied all the six, seven players that sort of so-called leaders. Nobody had a developer ecosystem, nobody. Right? The old folks were built for the hardware era, but anyones were built for the cloud to it didn't have any partners were building on their platform. So I felt for me listen, and that the example of, you know, model nine rights, the name of the company that does back up. So there's, there's companies that are built on and there's a number of others. So our goal is to have a big tent, David, to everybody in the ecosystem to partner with us, to build on this platform. And, and that may take over time, but that's the way we're build >>It. And you have a metadata layer too, that has the intelligence >>To correct. It's all abstract. That that's right. So it's a combination of data and metadata. We have lots of metadata that keeps track of where the data is. You know, it allows you to index the data you can do quick searches. You can actually, you, we talking about the control plan from that >>Tracing, >>You can inject a search that'll through search throughout your multi-cloud environment, right? The super cloud that you call it. We have all that, all that goodness sounds >>Like a Supercloud John. >>Yeah. I mean, data tracing involved can trace the data lineage. >>You, you can trace the data lineage. So we, you know, provide, you know, compliance and stuff. So you can, >>All right. So my final question to wrap up, we guys, first of all, thanks for coming on. I know you're super busy, San Jose. We, we know what you're gonna do. You're gonna amp it up and, you know, knock all your numbers out. Think you always do. But what I'm interested in, what you're gonna jump into, cuz now you're gonna have the creative license to jump in to the product, the platform there has to be the next level in your mind. Can you share your thoughts on where this goes next? Love the control plane, separate out from the data plane. I think that plays well for super. How >>Much time do you have John? This guy's got, he's got a wealth. Ditis keep >>Going. Mark. Give us the most important thing you're gonna focus on. That kind of brings the super cloud and vision together. >>Yeah. Right away. I'm gonna, perhaps I, I can ion into two things. The first one is I like to call it building the, the machine, the system, right. Just to draw an analogy. Look, I draw an analogy to the us traffic system. People from all walks of life, rich, poor Democrats, Republicans, you know, different states. They all work in the, the traffic system and we drive well, right. It's a system that just works. Whereas in some other countries, you know, the system doesn't work. >>We know, >>We know a few of those. >>It's not about works. It's not about the people. It's the same people who would go from here to those countries and, and not dry. Well, so it's all about the system. So the first thing I, I have my sights on is to really strengthen the system that we have in our research development to make it a machine. I mean, it functions quite well even today, but wanna take it to the next level. Right. So that I wanna get to a point where innovation just happens in the grassroots. And it just, just like >>We automations scale optic brings all, >>Just happens without anyone overseeing it. Anyone there's no single point of bottleneck. I don't have to go take any diving catches or have you, there are people just working, you know, in a decentralized fashion and innovation just happens. Yeah. The second thing I work on of course is, you know, my heart and soul is in, you know, driving the vision, you know, the next level. And that of course is part of it. So those are the two things >>We heard from all day in our super cloud event that there's a need for an, an operating system. Yeah. Whether that's defacto standard or open. Correct. Do you see a consortium around the corner potentially to bring people together so that things could work together? Cuz there really isn't no stand there. Isn't a standards bodies. Now we have great hyperscale growth. We have on-prem we got the super cloud thing happening >>And it's a, it's kind of like what is an operating system? Operating system exposes some APIs that the applications can then use. And if you think about what we've been trying to do with the marketplace, right, we've built a huge platform and that platform is exposed through APIs. That third party developers can use. Right? And even we, when we, you know, built more and more services on top, you know, we rolled our D as we rolled out, backup as a service and a ready for thing security as a service governance, as a service, they're using those APIs. So we are building a distributor, putting systems of sorts. >>Well, congratulations on a great journey. Sanja. Congratulations on taking the hem. Thank you've got ball control. Now you're gonna be calling the ball cohesive as they say, it's, >>It's a team. It's, you know, I think I like that African phrase. If you want to go fast, you go alone. If you wanna go far, you go together. So I've always operated with the best deal. I'm so fortunate. This is to me like a dream come true because I always thought I wanted to work with a technologist that frees me up to do what I like. I mean, I started as an engineer, but that's not what I am today. Right? Yeah. So I do understand the product and this category I think is right for disruption. So I feel excited, you know, it's changing growing. Yeah. No. And it's a, it requires innovation with a cloud scale mindset and you guys have been great friends through the years. >>We'll be, we'll be watching you. >>I think it's not only disruption. It's creation. Yeah. There's a lot of white space that just hasn't been created yet. >>You're gonna have to, and you know, the proof, isn't the pudding. Yeah. You already have five of the biggest 10 financial institutions in the us and our customers. 25% of the fortune 500 users, us two of the biggest five pharmaceutical companies in the world use us. Probably, you know, some of the biggest companies, you know, the cars you have, you know, out there probably are customers. So it's already happening. >>I know you got an IPO filed confidentially. I know you can't talk numbers, but I can tell by your confidence, you're feeling good right now we are >>Feeling >>Good. Yeah. One day, one week, one month at a time. I mean, you just, you know, I like the, you know, Jeff Bezos, Andy jazzy expression, which is, it's always day one, you know, just because you've had success, even, you know, if, if a and when an IPO O makes sense, you just have to stay humble and hungry because you realize, okay, we've had a lot of success in the fortune 1000, but there's a lot of white space that hasn't picked USS yet. So let's go, yeah, there's lots of midmarket account >>Product opportunities are still, >>You know, I just stay humble and hungry and if you've got the team and then, you know, I'm really gonna be working also in the ecosystem. I think there's a lot of very good partners. So lots of ideas brew through >>The head. Okay. Well, thank you so much for coming on our super cloud event and, and, and also doubling up on the news of the new appointment and congratulations on the success guys. Coverage super cloud 22, I'm sure. Dave ante, thanks for watching. Stay tuned for more segments after this break.

(bright music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. We're here talking about the metaverse and what it all means, what it brings to the table. We've got two pioneers here in the metaverse breaking it down, doing great stuff. Both co-founders of companies, Noah Gainer, co-founder and CEO Parcel. And CJ Hetherington Co-Founder of Atlantis World, digging deep and doing all the great stuff in the Midwest. Chill and thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, first of all, I want to say congratulations for the work you guys are doing. This is one of the biggest waves we've seen coming on. It's a changing user expectations, it's a changing architecture, it's real technology involved, there's a lot of action. 30% of people at University of California, Berkeley are dropping out of the Computer Science program to get into Web3. This is the biggest technological change, business model change, user experience change. And we've been seeing going back multiple inflection points. This is a big deal. So the metaverse is real. Some people say, "Well, you know, it's not com..." It's coming it's just a matter of time. So let's get into it. What are you guys doing? Tell us about your company's Parcel and Atlantis World. Noah, start with you. >> Sure, so Parcel is a marketplace for virtual real estate. So you can think of something like OpenSea, which everyone is familiar with, but we solely focus on virtual land and virtual real estate in a number of virtual world, maybe part of decent land or the sandbox. So we feature those on our platform and, you know, we take it the next level with the user experience. So we have fully interactive maps. We have price estimates. You can think of it like a estimate on Zillow and in general, we're building the fully verticalized solution for virtual real estate users. And that will extend into rentals, like Airbnbing out your virtual condo or getting a mortgage on your virtual home, as well as, you know, cultivating the community around it. And especially helping empower creators and architects and builders and getting them work and getting their work on display. >> I'm looking forward to digging into that, that sounds very cool. CJ what's Atlantis world doing? What do you got going on? >> Yeah, exactly. So at Atlantis world, we're building the Web3, social metaverse by connecting Web3 with social, gaming, and education in one light web virtual world, that's accessible to everybody. So by going with actually a light web first and a pixel approach so that you can play on mobile or a really old device, because the problem with existing metaverses is that they set an incredibly high cost barrier to entry and also tech isn't necessarily readily available globally in terms of things like VR headsets and gaming PCs. Like for example, when I was in Africa, I travel a lot. If my book would break, it's not even that I couldn't necessarily afford to buy anyone, it's actually not available there. So we're ruling out a lot of the global kind of population from a metaverse experience. And we're building something which is like 3D pixel and super light weight, to kind of bridge that gap and build something which is ready to be massive up till now and onboard billions of users into Web3. So they'll all basically be using Web3 applications in a gamified way and going really hard on connecting that with social features, like voice chat and talking, getting, and virtual events and vaulting and all of that stuff. >> You know, I love what you guys are doing, you're pioneering a whole another area, but what's great about the whole crypto area, is that, since you know, 2017 onwards you saw Ethereum set the developer market started coming in strong. So you start to see that development. And now we got the metaverse. So I got to ask you guys what's the current definition of the metaverse. I mean everyone's... I mean, since Facebook changed their name to Meta, it's been a hype cycle and everyone's like, "Woh..." First of all, you know why they did that. But they're actually putting a lot of DAO in this. This is a wave, we talked about that. But what is the metaverse? How do you describe it? Why is it relevant? Virtual real estate, that sounds cool. What does this all come together? Explain it for the people out there that might not be getting it right. >> Yeah, I feel like for me, the critical difference between an ordinary gamer, what one might think of as game and a metaverse is actually Web3. For me, Web3 is metaverse. And for me it's really because Web3 enables real world utility, but inside of a virtual environment. So for example, inside of Atlantis, you might run into a DeFi bank and understand by interacting with other game characters, which are programmed to teach you about DeFi and like, what is Avel, how to deposit. And so you're actually getting a real world utility out of doing something in a virtual environment. And for me, that's what really bridges the gap into metaverse. Yeah, I'm really kind of bullish on that. (chuckles) >> Noah, what's your take? Define the current state of the definition of the metaverse? What is the metaverse? >> Yeah, to me, it's the 3D internet. And I do agree with what CJ's saying, how, you know, what makes it the most compelling and will ultimately the most successful is that addition of a blockchain and essentialized, you know, tributed ledger technology. Because you can have the closed metaverse, which nobody wants that future. And I don't believe that will be the future. you know, versus the open metaverse, which is blockchain-based, the users are the owners of the assets and the land and everything around it. And it's really foreign by the people. But I see the metaverse as just an extension of the internet we're already using today but we're going to have hardware that makes it 3D and more immersive like AR and VR. >> Yeah, I think- >> Yeah, definitely- >> Go on CJ. >> Around kind of like eight or nine months ago when we started to build Atlantis, we decided that the metaverse was a virtual world where you could live, work, play, and earn, and that's what we've been building. It started off as like building the metaverse that has DeFi and over the kind of time it's gone on our community has grown, we've started to understand the future of our product and our mission and values. It started to become the Web3 metaverse, right? And then on top of that, the Web3 social metaverse, so it's a combination of what all these things. >> You know, it's interesting. And I'm a little bit older than you guys, I wish I was your age, but when the web came along, people were saying the same thing. That the web's terrible. It's a stupid thing. It's never going to be real. And yeah, there was problems. It was slow to dial up back in the day. But yeah, now with gaming, I got to say, I had to look at the gaming evolution being a gamer myself, old school, I guess, but the gaming culture is proxy to what I see kind of happening in the metaverse. And let me get your reaction to that. I'm not saying directly, but you saw what gaming did, right? In game currency, some, you know, pockets of the same kind of dynamic where a lot of value is happening, the expectations were different for users. So how does the metaverse... How does gaming cross over? What's the ecosystem of metaverse? Obviously it's a cultural shift, one. Infrastructure, two. But I can just see this new generation of thinking. It's a whole nother level. Can you guys share your thoughts on that riff? >> Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's like for us, we really believe that we can enable a social revolution, where workers from impoverished and remote regions can actually be onboarded into these digital player to earn economies and also learn to earn economies. So it's about leveraging Web3 and blockchain gaming, whatever actually you want to call it, to enable this revolution and actually onboard new people into a completely new working and dynamic. One of the other things we envision for Atlantis, imagine like you run around this game world and you complete quests inside of the game. And these quests basically involve talking to the non-player characters, the NPCs, which are basically pre-programmed. I don't know if anyone's ever played an MMORPG before, but it can be super fun. And they'll actually teach you how to use different crypto applications. Whether that's a DeFi bank, NFT marketplace, kind of digital asset exchange. And once you all do that, the kind of end goal in vision is that you'll be rewarded with tokens. So users will earn crypto for learning about crypto. And if anybody wants to do that right now, they can actually go to rabbithole.gg. It's a different project to Atlantis, but they building learn to earn, and you go on you complete quests and interact with different crypto applications. And it's so crucial for onboarding. And yeah, it's going to be really powerful, the kind of revolution that play to earn and learn to earn will enable. >> I'll check out the rabbihole.gg sounds awesome. What's your take on the reaction to that riff on this convergence of culture tech, gaming, vibe that's kind of divine the metaverse what's your take on that, Noah? >> Yeah, I mean... I think gaming will be the on ramp for maybe the first billion people, you know, into blockchain. It's something people already do and are already paying for, and they now have the opportunity to get paid to play. So the incentives are extremely strong and I think that will be a great way to usher people in, teach 'em about blockchain without realizing that they're using blockchain. And then once they're already in it and have already used it, then it becomes much more natural to user than other applications. >> It's funny, people always talk about, "Oh, user experience!" You know, expectations drive experience, right? If you expect something and if they're used to gaming, I see the great, great call out there, good point. Well, let me ask you guys a question, 'cause I think this is comes out a lot in terms of like the market shifts and metaverse, as an old expression, "Great markets pull the products out of companies or out of the industry." What organic growth have you guys seen in the metaverse that's been either a surprise or a natural evolution of just success and just growth, because the market's hungry for this and it is relevant. It's new, what's pulling out? What's coming out of the organic aspect of the metaverse? >> I think a lot of art and architecture and design. And, you know, it's empowering a lot of independent creators and allowing 'em to stretch their skills in a way that they maybe couldn't do before, but now can do and get compensated for. Like, we see really see the rise of the creator coming in the next couple of years in the open metaverse and finally they will be the ruling class. They won't get the short end of the stick, which artists have for... I mean all the time. >> Yeah, some of the wall street bet skies in the same way, feel the same way. CJ, What's your take on... What's getting pulled out on the organic execution growth of the interactions and metaverse evolution? >> Of course, yeah. I would, first of all love to go back to the previous point on gaming and just kind of like, definitely agree with what Noah said. And the thing is that gaming is 3.4 billion user market, and they're typically an experimental by nature people and group of users, right? So it's definitely a huge onboarding opportunity for teaching users about Web3 and using Web3 in a gamified way and making that kind of inherently fun and engaging. And again, in terms of organic growth, Web3 is incredible for that. We place a huge emphasis on, I think, collaborate versus compete and try to enable network effects for everybody who is involved in Atlantis and becoming part of our fast growing ecosystem. Like we have eight blockchain, more than 10 DeFi apps, like Aave, Yearn, Balanced, 1inch, Perpetual. All of the DAOs like The Exile, MetaCartel, lobsterdao, PizzaDAO, all of the NFT communities. Like we're actually building a yacht for bought yacht club on the beach in Atlantis. So that's fun. But yeah, we grew our community. We're very early stage still. We've been building only for eight or nine months, but we grew our community to like 20 to 30,000 community members across social channels. And we recently raised over a million dollars from our community and we're fully bootstrapped and taken no private money. So the ability to actually do that and to coordinate both kind of community efforts and fundraising and resources is really testament to Web3 and what it's becoming in the community aspect of that. And also its future and the kind of dawn and domination of the Metaverse. >> Well, I got to say, I just got to give you props for that. I think that fundraising dynamic is a real entrepreneurial new thing, that's awesome. You've got active community vote with their contribution and whether it's money and or other value, right? You got social value. This is the whole thing about the metaverse, there's a new community culture going next level here. >> We believe in community and we believe in Web3. And we know we don't understand why most leading metaverses are focusing fully on huge IP and actually ignoring Web3. So we're actually trying to build the infrastructure layer for Web3 applications and for Web3 driven utility inside of the metaverse. And what we mean by that imagine that any developer or any project or any team or any company could occupy a plot for free inside of the metaverse, customize it by branding and then effectively set up shop, whether that's a Web3 integration, so it's a DeFi Bank, or it's an exchange. Or whether that's an NFT marketplace or a music venue or a coworking space. We're really excited about that. And we really believe we've designed the value capture mechanism for virtual land in the metaverse and we're approaching it in a different way to land in the real world. >> That's awesome. Well, let's get that infrastructure conversation, unstoppable domains obviously there having the partner showcase here. You guys are partners. This NFT kind of like access method is a huge... I love it by the way. I think it's phenomenal. I love the value there, but it's also digital identity and it's distributed naming. So you kind of got this enablement vibe, you got solve a problem. How is it working with you guys? Take us through what does unstoppable metaverse... Why does unstoppable matter to the metaverse? >> Yeah, unstoppable is very great mostly for identity and having a kind of crush chain identity inside of the metaverse and just kind of in Web3 in general. And unstoppable, we enable log in with unstoppable. So if you have, for example, an unstoppable domain which is like a human readable kind of crypto wallet address, but you can also do some incredible, stuff with it, and there is a lot of fun and exciting utility, effectively, like if you would have, I don't know, like unstoppable.dao you would be able to use that to log in to the Atlantis metaverse and it would represent some of your identity and social graph in game with your peers. >> Awesome, Noah, what's your take on the unstoppable angle on this? >> Yeah, I mean, it makes it social. So, instead of you can have a feed, you know, something we're thinking about at Parcel is like a feed of all the real estate transactions, and you could follow certain people, you can follow your friends and see a feed of everything that your friends are doing in English or human readable terms that are not just like a wallet address. So, that's obviously a big one and they're also giving people more options in terms of, naming and top level domains if you want to be something.wallet or .nft, or hopefully eventually .metaverse- >> John: Yes. >> Will help expand that ecosystem much more. In addition to like on our... Like backend being able to capture email when they login and to provide better marketing for our users. >> What would you guys say to other metaverse partners looking for work with unstoppable domains for their login and digital identity, what would you recommend? >> It doesn't make sense to- >> I believe- >> Connect with the best DAO and integrate that if you want to keep shipping stuff for your community and keeping it exciting and engaging and enabling user choice in how they choose to display their identity in virtual environments. >> Yeah, there's practically no downside and plenty of upside, again, having those users who are already using unstoppable domains quickly, you know, log into your site and plug in. >> All right. That's awesome. Good stuff with unstoppable. I got to ask you guys give an example of on your products, I love the metaverse progression. I love the pioneering work you guys are doing. And again, the funding things are different. The user expectations are different. The technology experience are different. Billions of people going to be in enabled for it. What are the cool things you guys got going on? CJ, we were talking before we came on camera about the tree thing you got going on. Take us through some of the things that are exciting that people may not know about or may know about. What should they pay attention to share, share some insight? >> Yeah, of course. So one of the fun things, actually that we're building on that on these sites together with our full team and also some outside contributors from the community and two kin protocol, which is a regenerative finance protocol. And I'll get into that a little bit in a minute. Effectively what we're actually doing is planting a carbon capturing virtual forest inside of the metaverse that will in future also be bio diverse. So how we're approaching that is imagine that you can plant NFT trees inside of the metaverse, providing that your will deposit X amount of kind of USD stablecoin or Ether or some digital asset. You can actually use that to deposit inside of the tree. And we will use some, probably something like super fluid, which is like a kind of smart projecting infrastructure platform. And we all essentially enable every single second funds being sent from the contract and actually purchasing real world carbon credits. So legitimate, you know, government bags to carbon credits from the voluntary kind of public market that have actually been bridged on chain, transformed into a crypto asset, and they will be locked away inside of these trees inside of game forever. And in future, we also hope to have like user on animals, roaming the great forest of Atlantis, which will have biodiversity and endangered species credit, locked inside. And we hope to support a variety of different kind of sustainable assets and things like that to really populate this ecosystem. >> So it's you're doing climate change good for real, as well as rendering it as an asset for everyone to see and enjoy. >> Absolutely. And for me, that's what makes the metaverse the metaverse, that's what I talked about. It's how Web3 enables the metaverse to cross over into our real world, ordinary life from URL to IRL and actually provide some incredible positive impact for all of humanity on the planet. >> And Noah, you have some action going on there. I mean, I would be like, "oh, virtual real estate, isn't it unlimited real estate?" But when you have users come together, this value, we've seen this in gaming, what are some of the cool things you got going on over there at Parcel? >> Yeah, I think one thing that stands out, which maybe not enough people are thinking about are AR virtual world. So, right now a lot of people are focused on the VR types, central and sandbox and, and Atlantis, but there very well may be a billion people using augmented reality before there are a billion using virtual reality just because of the nature of the hardware development and apple may come out with their AR headset by the end of the year. So there are a few projects there they've taken the real world to map and Parcel it out into hexagons, and you can actually buy that, and you own that, that piece and you can put your own custom content there. And on that social impact point, we have heard about a few projects that are trying to use it for good. And like one project is bought up some land in the Amazon rain forest and some of the proceeds go to conservation of the rain forest. So, you know, we're all about using blockchain for good and right, coming together as a globe. >> I can't wait to see the commercial real estate division of your group with all the work from, a remote coming on. Guys, great stuff you got going on, again, you guys are pioneering an area that is coming big. It's coming strong, its got a lot of... A momentum, vitality, and energy to it. Put a plug in for your companies. Noah, we'll start with you. What's going on with Parcel, share a plug for the company. What you're looking for, do some key highlights, news, take a minute to, to give a plug. >> Sure. Yeah, great. We are the destination for virtual real estate and that extends well beyond just the buyers and sellers. That's everyone across the whole chain with property managers and property developers, but then also the builders and creators and artists, and we are working right now on aggregating the best creator directory in the metaverse. So you can think of it as a place where artists can come showcase their work and get hired. As well as just generally like bridging this knowledge gap that is much wider than we even expected. So we have our Parcel learn product coming soon, which is a fully fledged, knowledge base with education, informational content and lots of rich data. >> Where can people get involved? What's the channels? Are all channels open? Where can we find you? >> Yeah, our websites Parcel.so on Twitter, you can find us at ParcelNFT and you can link to our discord from either one of those. It's the best way to get involved. >> All right, CJ, put a plug in for the last world, I know you got a lot of action to share. >> Yeah, of course. I would love to see everybody there. Thanks so much for having us. And thanks for listening. Like I said, at the start of the call, we're building the Web3 social metaverse and we're connecting Web3 with social gaming and education, in one light web virtual world that's accessible to everybody. We're also doing some crazy stuff like planting their cabin, capturing virtual forest and all of that, and trying to be the infrastructure layer for Web3 driven real world utility inside of the metaverse. And we believe that we have designed the critical value capture mechanism for virtual learn. I we'll be sharing more all of that very soon and continuing to integrate the best apps from across the Web3 ecosystem and showcasing them at the center of Atlantis. You can go to discord.gg/atlantisworld. If you would love to learn more about us, you can go to wiki.atlantis.world. And there is some documentation now, which includes back story and team and some of our milestones and achievements so far from winning hackathons to raising grants and launching our Alpha belt, soft launching it. And we all have the public free to play coming in March. And where most active, I would say on discord and Twitter. On Twitter you can find us atlantisOx, or just search Atlantis world. And it's the first one that come up. >> All right. CJ, thank you. Noah, thanks for coming out. I really appreciate you spending the time here, and unstoppable showcase and being a partner. Again they got the great digital identity, great plug there for them here. Thanks for sharing that and thanks for sharing the time. Appreciate you guys are pioneer of some good stuff. Appreciate it. >> Thanks so much man. >> I so appreciate that. >> All right, theCUBE's unstoppable domains partner showcase. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good, brought to you by on shape. >>Hello, everyone, and welcome to Innovation for Good Program, hosted by the Cuban. Brought to You by on Shape, which is a PTC company. My name is Dave Valentin. I'm coming to you from our studios outside of Boston. I'll be directing the conversations today. It's a very exciting, all live program. We're gonna look at how product innovation has evolved and where it's going and how engineers, entrepreneurs and educators are applying cutting edge, cutting edge product development techniques and technology to change our world. You know, the pandemic is, of course, profoundly impacted society and altered how individuals and organizations they're gonna be thinking about an approaching the coming decade. Leading technologists, engineers, product developers and educators have responded to the new challenges that we're facing from creating lifesaving products to helping students learn from home toe how to apply the latest product development techniques and solve the world's hardest problems. And in this program, you'll hear from some of the world's leading experts and practitioners on how product development and continuous innovation has evolved, how it's being applied toe positive positively affect society and importantly where it's going in the coming decades. So let's get started with our first session fueling Tech for good. And with me is John Hirschbeck, who is the president of the Suffers, a service division of PTC, which acquired on shape just over a year ago, where John was the CEO and co founder, and Dana Grayson is here. She is the co founder and general partner at Construct Capital, a new venture capital firm. Folks, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Great to be here, Dave. >>All right, John. >>You're very welcome. Dana. Look, John, let's get into it for first Belated congratulations on the acquisition of Von Shape. That was an awesome seven year journey for your company. Tell our audience a little bit about the story of on shape, but take us back to Day zero. Why did you and your co founders start on shape? Well, >>actually, start before on shaping the You know, David, I've been in this business for almost 40 years. The business of building software tools for product developers and I had been part of some previous products in the industry and companies that had been in their era. Big changes in this market and about, you know, a little Before founding on shape, we started to see the problems product development teams were having with the traditional tools of that era years ago, and we saw the opportunity presented by Cloud Web and Mobile Technology. And we said, Hey, we could use Cloud Web and Mobile to solve the problems of product developers make their Their business is run better. But we have to build an entirely new system, an entirely new company, to do it. And that's what on shapes about. >>Well, so notwithstanding the challenges of co vid and difficulties this year, how is the first year been as, Ah, division of PTC for you guys? How's business? Anything you can share with us? >>Yeah, our first year of PTC has been awesome. It's been, you know, when you get acquired, Dave, you never You know, you have great optimism, but you never know what life will really be like. It's sort of like getting married or something, you know, until you're really doing it, you don't know. And so I'm happy to say that one year into our acquisition, um, PTC on shape is thriving. It's worked out better than I could have imagined a year ago. Along always, I mean sales are up. In Q four, our new sales rate grew 80% vs Excuse me, our fiscal Q four Q three. In the calendar year, it grew 80% compared to the year before. Our educational uses skyrocketing with around 400% growth, most recently year to year of students and teachers and co vid. And we've launched a major cloud platform using the core of on shape technology called Atlas. So, um, just tons of exciting things going on a TTC. >>That's awesome. But thank you for sharing some of those metrics. And of course, you're very humble individual. You know, people should know a little bit more about you mentioned, you know, we founded Solid Works, co founded Solid where I actually found it solid works. You had a great exit in the in the late nineties. But what I really appreciate is, you know, you're an entrepreneur. You've got a passion for the babies that you you helped birth. You stayed with the salt systems for a number of years. The company that quiet, solid works well over a decade. And and, of course, you and I have talked about how you participated in the the M I T. Blackjack team. You know, back in the day, a zai say you're very understated, for somebody was so accomplished. Well, >>that's kind of you, but I tend to I tend Thio always keep my eye more on what's ahead. You know what's next, then? And you know, I look back Sure to enjoy it and learn from it about what I can put to work making new memories, making new successes. >>Love it. Okay, let's bring Dana into the conversation. Hello, Dana. You look you're a fairly early investor in in on shape when you were with any A And and I think it was like it was a serious B, but it was very right close after the A raise. And and you were and still are a big believer in industrial transformation. So take us back. What did you see about on shape back then? That excited you. >>Thanks. Thanks for that. Yeah. I was lucky to be a early investment in shape. You know, the things that actually attracted me. Don shape were largely around John and, uh, the team. They're really setting out to do something, as John says humbly, something totally new, but really building off of their background was a large part of it. Um, but, you know, I was really intrigued by the design collaboration side of the product. Um, I would say that's frankly what originally attracted me to it. What kept me in the room, you know, in terms of the industrial world was seeing just if you start with collaboration around design what that does to the overall industrial product lifecycle accelerating manufacturing just, you know, modernizing all the manufacturing, just starting with design. So I'm really thankful to the on shape guys, because it was one of the first investments I've made that turned me on to the whole sector. And while just such a great pleasure to work with with John and the whole team there. Now see what they're doing inside PTC. >>And you just launched construct capital this year, right in the middle of a pandemic and which is awesome. I love it. And you're focused on early stage investing. Maybe tell us a little bit about construct capital. What your investment thesis is and you know, one of the big waves that you're hoping to ride. >>Sure, it construct it is literally lifting out of any what I was doing there. Um uh, for on shape, I went on to invest in companies such as desktop metal and Tulip, to name a couple of them form labs, another one in and around the manufacturing space. But our thesis that construct is broader than just, you know, manufacturing and industrial. It really incorporates all of what we'd call foundational industries that have let yet to be fully tech enabled or digitized. Manufacturing is a big piece of it. Supply chain, logistics, transportation of mobility or not, or other big pieces of it. And together they really drive, you know, half of the GDP in the US and have been very under invested. And frankly, they haven't attracted really great founders like they're on in droves. And I think that's going to change. We're seeing, um, entrepreneurs coming out of the tech world orthe Agnelli into these industries and then bringing them back into the tech world, which is which is something that needs to happen. So John and team were certainly early pioneers, and I think, you know, frankly, obviously, that voting with my feet that the next set, a really strong companies are going to come out of the space over the next decade. >>I think it's a huge opportunity to digitize the sort of traditionally non digital organizations. But Dana, you focused. I think it's it's accurate to say you're focused on even Mawr early stage investing now. And I want to understand why you feel it's important to be early. I mean, it's obviously riskier and reward e er, but what do you look for in companies and and founders like John >>Mhm, Um, you know, I think they're different styles of investing all the way up to public market investing. I've always been early stage investors, so I like to work with founders and teams when they're, you know, just starting out. Um, I happened to also think that we were just really early in the whole digital transformation of this world. You know, John and team have been, you know, back from solid works, etcetera around the space for a long time. But again, the downstream impact of what they're doing really changes the whole industry. And and so we're pretty early and in digitally transforming that market. Um, so that's another reason why I wanna invest early now, because I do really firmly believe that the next set of strong companies and strong returns for my own investors will be in the spaces. Um, you know, what I look for in Founders are people that really see the world in a different way. And, you know, sometimes some people think of founders or entrepreneurs is being very risk seeking. You know, if you asked John probably and another successful entrepreneurs, they would call themselves sort of risk averse, because by the time they start the company, they really have isolated all the risk out of it and think that they have given their expertise or what they're seeing their just so compelled to go change something, eh? So I look for that type of attitude experience a Z. You can also tell from John. He's fairly humble. So humility and just focus is also really important. Um, that there's a That's a lot of it. Frankly, >>Excellent. Thank you, John. You got such a rich history in the space. Uh, and one of you could sort of connect the dots over time. I mean, when you look back, what were the major forces that you saw in the market in in the early days? Particularly days of on shape on? And how is that evolved? And what are you seeing today? Well, >>I think I touched on it earlier. Actually, could I just reflect on what Dana said about risk taking for just a quick one and say, throughout my life, from blackjack to starting solid works on shape, it's about taking calculated risks. Yes, you try to eliminate the risk Sa's much as you can, but I always say, I don't mind taking a risk that I'm aware of, and I've calculated through as best I can. I don't like taking risks that I don't know I'm taking. That's right. You >>like to bet on >>sure things as much as you sure things, or at least where you feel you. You've done the research and you see them and you know they're there and you know, you, you you keep that in mind in the room, and I think that's great. And Dana did so much for us. Dana, I want to thank you again. For all that, you did it every step of the way, from where we started to to, you know, your journey with us ended formally but continues informally. Now back to you, Dave, I think, question about the opportunity and how it's shaped up. Well, I think I touched on it earlier when I said It's about helping product developers. You know, our customers of the people build the future off manufactured goods. Anything you think of that would be manufacturing factory. You know, the chair you're sitting in machine that made your coffee. You know, the computer you're using, the trucks that drive by on the street, all the covert product research, the equipment being used to make vaccines. All that stuff is designed by someone, and our job is given the tools to do it better. And I could see the problems that those product developers had that we're slowing them down with using the computing systems of the time. When we built solid works, that was almost 30 years ago. If people don't realize that it was in the early >>nineties and you know, we did the >>best we could for the early nineties, but what we did. We didn't anticipate the world of today. And so people were having problems with just installing the systems. Dave, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to install these systems. You need toe speck up a special windows computer, you know, and make sure you've got all the memory and graphics you need and getting to get that set up. You need to make sure the device drivers air, right, install a big piece of software. Ah, license key. I'm not making this up. They're still around. You may not even know what those are. You know, Dennis laughing because, you know, zero cool people do things like this anymore. Um, and it only runs some windows. You want a second user to use it? They need a copy. They need a code. Are they on the same version? It's a nightmare. The teams change, you know? You just say, Well, get everyone on the software. Well, who's everyone? You know, you got a new vendor today? A new customer tomorrow, a new employee. People come on and off the team. The other problem is the data stored in files, thousands of files. This isn't like a spreadsheet or word processor, where there's one file to pass around these air thousands of files to make one, even a simple product. People were tearing their hair out. John, what do we do? I've got copies everywhere. I don't know where the latest version is. We tried like, you know, locking people out so that only one person can change it At the time that works against speed, it works against innovation. We saw what was happening with Cloud Web and mobile. So what's happened in the years since is every one of the forces that product developers experience the need for speed, the need for innovation, the need to be more efficient with their people in their capital. Resource is every one of those trends have been amplified since we started on shape by a lot of forces in the world. And covert is amplified all those the need for agility and remote work cove it is amplified all that the same time, The acceptance of cloud. You know, a few years ago, people were like cloud, you know, how is that gonna work now They're saying to me, You know, increasingly, how would you ever even have done this without the cloud. How do you make solid works work without the cloud? How would that even happen? You know, once people understand what on shapes about >>and we're the >>Onley full SAS solution software >>as a service, >>full SAS solution in our industry. So what's happened in those years? Same problems we saw earlier, but turn up the gain, their bigger problems. And with cloud, we've seen skepticism of years ago turn into acceptance. And now even embracement in the cova driven new normal. >>Yeah. So a lot of friction in the previous environments cloud obviously a huge factor on, I guess. I guess Dana John could see it coming, you know, in the early days of solid works with, you know, had Salesforce, which is kind of the first major independent SAS player. Well, I guess that was late nineties. So his post solid works, but pre in shape and their work day was, you know, pre on shape in the mid two thousands. And and but But, you know, the bet was on the SAS model was right for Crick had and and product development, you know, which maybe the time wasn't a no brainer. Or maybe it was, I don't know, but Dana is there. Is there anything that you would invest in today? That's not Cloud based? >>Um, that's a great question. I mean, I think we still see things all the time in the manufacturing world that are not cloud based. I think you know, the closer you get to the shop floor in the production environment. Um e think John and the PTC folks would agree with this, too, but that it's, you know, there's reliability requirements, performance requirements. There's still this attitude of, you know, don't touch the printing press. So the cloud is still a little bit scary sometimes. And I think hybrid cloud is a real thing for those or on premise. Solutions, in some cases is still a real thing. What what we're more focused on. And, um, despite whether it's on premise or hybrid or or SAS and Cloud is a frictionless go to market model, um, in the companies we invest in so sass and cloud, or really make that easy to adopt for new users, you know, you sign up, started using a product, um, but whether it's hosted in the cloud, whether it's as you can still distribute buying power. And, um, I would I'm just encouraging customers in the customer world and the more industrial environment to entrust some of their lower level engineers with more budget discretionary spending so they can try more products and unlock innovation. >>Right? The unit economics are so compelling. So let's bring it, you know, toe today's you know, situation. John, you decided to exit about a year ago. You know? What did you see in PTC? Other than the obvious money? What was the strategic fit? >>Yeah, Well, David, I wanna be clear. I didn't exit anything. Really? You >>know, I love you and I don't like that term exit. I >>mean, Dana had exit is a shareholder on and so it's not It's not exit for me. It's just a step in the journey. What we saw in PTC was a partner. First of all, that shared our vision from the top down at PTC. Jim Hempleman, the CEO. He had a great vision for for the impact that SAS can make based on cloud technology and really is Dana of highlighted so much. It's not just the technology is how you go to market and the whole business being run and how you support and make the customers successful. So Jim shared a vision for the potential. And really, really, um said Hey, come join us and we can do this bigger, Better, faster. We expanded the vision really to include this Atlas platform for hosting other SAS applications. That P D. C. I mean, David Day arrived at PTC. I met the head of the academic program. He came over to me and I said, You know, and and how many people on your team? I thought he'd say 5 40 people on the PTC academic team. It was amazing to me because, you know, we were we were just near about 100 people were required are total company. We didn't even have a dedicated academic team and we had ah, lot of students signing up, you know, thousands and thousands. Well, now we have hundreds of thousands of students were approaching a million users and that shows you the power of this team that PTC had combined with our product and technology whom you get a big success for us and for the teachers and students to the world. We're giving them great tools. So so many good things were also putting some PTC technology from other parts of PTC back into on shape. One area, a little spoiler, little sneak peek. Working on taking generative design. Dana knows all about generative design. We couldn't acquire that technology were start up, you know, just to too much to do. But PTC owns one of the best in the business. This frustrated technology we're working on putting that into on shaping our customers. Um, will be happy to see it, hopefully in the coming year sometime. >>It's great to see that two way exchange. Now, you both know very well when you start a company, of course, a very exciting time. You know, a lot of baggage, you know, our customers pulling you in a lot of different directions and asking you for specials. You have this kind of clean slate, so to speak in it. I would think in many ways, John, despite you know, your install base, you have a bit of that dynamic occurring today especially, you know, driven by the forced march to digital transformation that cove it caused. So when you sit down with the team PTC and talk strategy. You now have more global resource is you got cohorts selling opportunities. What's the conversation like in terms of where you want to take the division? >>Well, Dave, you actually you sounds like we should have you coming in and talking about strategy because you've got the strategy down. I mean, we're doing everything said global expansion were able to reach across selling. We got some excellent PTC customers that we can reach reach now and they're finding uses for on shape. I think the plan is to, you know, just go, go, go and grow, grow, grow where we're looking for this year, priorities are expand the product. I mentioned the breath of the product with new things PTC did recently. Another technology that they acquired for on shape. We did an acquisition. It was it was small, wasn't widely announced. It, um, in an area related to interfacing with electrical cad systems. So So we're doing We're expanding the breath of on shape. We're going Maura, depth in the areas were already in. We have enormous opportunity to add more features and functions that's in the product. Go to market. You mentioned it global global presence. That's something we were a little light on a year ago. Now we have a team. Dana may not even know what we have. A non shape, dedicated team in Barcelona, based in Barcelona but throughout Europe were doing multiple languages. Um, the academic program just introduced a new product into that space that z even fueling more success and growth there. Um, and of course, continuing to to invest in customer success and this Atlas platform story I keep mentioning, we're going to soon have We're gonna soon have four other major PTC brands shipping products on our Atlas Saas platform. And so we're really excited about that. That's good for the other PTC products. It's also good for on shape because now there's there's. There's other interesting products that are on shape customers can use take advantage of very easily using, say, a common log in conventions about user experience there, used to invest of all they're SAS based, so they that makes it easier to begin with. So that's some of the exciting things going on. I think you'll see PTC, um, expanding our lead in SAS based applications for this sector for our our target, uh, sectors not just in, um, in cat and data management, but another area. PTC's Big and his augmented reality with of euphoria, product line leader and industrial uses of a R. That's a whole other story we should do. A whole nother show augmented reality. But these products are amazing. You can you can help factory workers people on, uh, people who are left out of the digital transformation. Sometimes we're standing from machine >>all day. >>They can't be sitting like we are doing Zoom. They can wear a R headset in our tools, let them create great content. This is an area Dana is invested in other companies. But what I wanted to note is the new releases of our authoring software. For this, our content getting released this month, used through the Atlas platform, the SAS components of on shape for things like revision management and collaboration on duh workflow activity. All that those are tools that we're able to share leverage. We get a lot of synergy. It's just really good. It's really fun to have a good time. That's >>awesome. And then we're gonna be talking to John MacLean later about that. Let's do a little deeper Dive on that. And, Dana, what is your involvement today with with on shape? But you're looking for you know, which of their customers air actually adopting. And they're gonna disrupt their industries. And you get good pipeline from that. How do you collaborate today? >>That sounds like a great idea. Um, Aziz, John will tell you I'm constantly just asking him for advice and impressions of other entrepreneurs and picking his brain on ideas. No formal relationship clearly, but continue to count John and and John and other people in on shaping in the circle of experts that I rely on for their opinions. >>All right, so we have some questions from the crowd here. Uh, one of the questions is for the dream team. You know, John and Dana. What's your next next collective venture? I don't think we're there yet, are we? No. >>I just say, as Dana said, we love talking to her about. You know, Dana, you just returned the compliment. We would try and give you advice and the deals you're looking at, and I'm sort of casually mentoring at least one of your portfolio entrepreneurs, and that's been a lot of fun for May on, hopefully a value to them. But also Dana. We uran important pipeline to us in the world of some new things that are happening that we wouldn't see if you know you've shown us some things that you've said. What do you think of this business? And for us, it's like, Wow, it's cool to see that's going on And that's what's supposed to work in an ecosystem like this. So we we deeply value the ongoing relationship. And no, we're not starting something new. I got a lot of work left to do with what I'm doing and really happy. But we can We can collaborate in this way on other ventures. >>I like this question to somebody asking With the cloud options like on shape, Wilmore students have stem opportunities s Oh, that's a great question. Are you because of sass and cloud? Are you able to reach? You know, more students? Much more cost effectively. >>Yeah, Dave, I'm so glad that that that I was asked about this because Yes, and it's extremely gratified us. Yes, we are because of cloud, because on shape is the only full cloud full SAS system or industry were able to reach. Stem education brings able to be part of bringing step education to students who couldn't get it otherwise. And one of most gratifying gratifying things to me is the emails were getting from teachers, um, that that really, um, on the phone calls that were they really pour their heart out and say We're able to get to students in areas that have very limited compute resource is that don't have an I T staff where they don't know what computer that the students can have at home, and they probably don't even have a computer. We're talking about being able to teach them on a phone to have an android phone a low end android phone. You can do three D modeling on there with on shape. Now you can't do it any other system, but with on shape, you could do it. And so the teacher can say to the students, They have to have Internet access, and I know there's a huge community that doesn't even have Internet access, and we're not able, unfortunately to help that. But if you have Internet and you have even an android phone, we can enable the educator to teach them. And so we have case after case of saving a stem program or expanding it into the students that need it most is the ones we're helping here. So really excited about that. And we're also able to let in addition to the run on run on whatever computing devices they have, we also offer them the tools they need for remote teaching with a much richer experience. Could you teach solid works remotely? Well, maybe if the student ran it had a windows workstation. You know, big, big, high end workstation. Maybe it could, but it would be like the difference between collaborating with on shape and collaborate with solid works. Like the difference between a zoom video call and talking on the landline phone. You know, it's a much richer experience, and that's what you need. And stem teaching stem is hard, So yeah, we're super super. Um, I'm excited about bringing stem to more students because of cloud yond >>we're talking about innovation for good, and then the discussion, John, you just had it. Really? There could be a whole another vector here. We could discuss on diversity, and I wanna end with just pointing out. So, Dana, your new firm, it's a woman led firm, too. Two women leaders, you know, going forward. So that's awesome to see, so really? Yeah, thumbs up on that. Congratulations on getting that off the ground. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Okay, so thank you guys. Really appreciate It was a great discussion. I learned a lot and I'm sure the audience did a swell in a moment. We're gonna talk with on shaped customers to see how they're applying tech for good and some of the products that they're building. So keep it right there. I'm Dave Volonte. You're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader in digital tech event coverage. Stay right there. >>Oh, yeah, it's >>yeah, yeah, around >>the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, we're back. This is Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good. A program on Cuba 3 65 made possible by on shape of PTC company. We're live today really live tv, which is the heritage of the Cube. And now we're gonna go to the sources and talkto on shape customers to find out how they're applying technology to create real world innovations that are changing the world. So let me introduce our panel members. Rafael Gomez Furberg is with the Chan Zuckerberg bio hub. A very big idea. And collaborative nonprofit was initiative that was funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and really around diagnosing and curing and better managing infectious diseases. So really timely topic. Philip Tabor is also joining us. He's with silver side detectors, which develops neutron detective detection systems. Yet you want to know if early, if neutrons and radiation or in places where you don't want them, So this should be really interesting. And last but not least, Matthew Shields is with the Charlottesville schools and is gonna educate us on how he and his team are educating students in the use of modern engineering tools and techniques. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cuban to the program. This should be really interesting. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi. Or pleasure >>for having us. >>You're very welcome. Okay, let me ask each of you because you're all doing such interesting and compelling work. Let's start with Rafael. Tell us more about the bio hub and your role there, please. >>Okay. Yeah. So you said that I hope is a nonprofit research institution, um, funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Um, and our main mission is to develop new technologies to help advance medicine and help, hopefully cure and manage diseases. Um, we also have very close collaborations with Universe California, San Francisco, Stanford University and the University California Berkeley on. We tried to bring those universities together, so they collaborate more of biomedical topics. And I manage a team of engineers. They by joining platform. Um, and we're tasked with creating instruments for the laboratory to help the scientist boats inside the organization and also in the partner universities Do their experiments in better ways in ways that they couldn't do before >>in this edition was launched Well, five years ago, >>it was announced at the end of 2016, and we actually started operation with at the beginning of 2017, which is when I joined, um, So this is our third year. >>And how's how's it going? How does it work? I mean, these things take time. >>It's been a fantastic experience. Uh, the organization works beautifully. Um, it was amazing to see it grow From the beginning, I was employee number 12, I think eso When I came in, it was just a nem P office building and empty labs. And very quickly we had something running about. It's amazing eso I'm very proud of the work that we have done to make that possible. Um And then, of course, that's you mentioned now with co vid, um, we've been able to do a lot of very cool work attire being of the pandemic in March, when there was a deficit of testing, uh, capacity in California, we spun up a testing laboratory in record time in about a week. It was crazy. It was a crazy project, Um, but but incredibly satisfying. And we ended up running all the way until the beginning of November, when the lab was finally shut down. We could process about 3000 samples a day. I think at the end of it all, we were able to test about 100 on the order of 100 and 50,000 samples from all over the state. We were providing free testing toe all of the Department of Public Health Department of Public Health in California, which at the media pandemic, had no way to do testing affordably and fast. So I think that was a great service to the state. Now the state has created that testing system that would serve those departments. So then we decided that it was unnecessary to keep going with testing in the other biopsy that would shut down. >>All right. Thank you for that. Now, Now, Philip, you What you do is mind melting. You basically helped keep the world safe. Maybe describe a little bit more about silver sod detectors and what your role is there and how it all works. >>Tour. So we make a nuclear bomb detectors and we also make water detectors. So we try and do our part thio keep the world from blowing up and make it a better place at the same time. Both of these applications use neutron radiation detectors. That's what we make. Put them out by import border crossing places like that. They can help make sure that people aren't smuggling. Shall we say very bad things. Um, there's also a burgeoning field of research and application where you can use neutrons with some pretty cool physics to find water so you could do things. Like what? A detector up in the mountains and measure snowpack. Put it out in the middle of the field and measure soil moisture content. And as you might imagine, there's some really cool applications in, uh, research and agronomy and public policy for this. >>All right, so it's OK, so it's a It's much more than, you know, whatever fighting terrorism, it's there's a riel edge or I kind of i o t application for what you guys >>do. We do both its's to plowshares. You might >>say a mat. I I look at your role is kind of scaling the brain power for for the future. Maybe tell us more about Charlottesville schools and in the mission that you're pursuing and what you do. >>Thank you. Um, I've been in Charlottesville City schools for about 11 or 12 years. I started their teaching, um, a handful of classes, math and science and things like that. But Thescore board and my administration had the crazy idea of starting an engineering program about seven years ago. My background is an engineering is an engineering. My masters is in mechanical and aerospace engineering and um, I basically spent a summer kind of coming up with what might be a fun engineering curriculum for our students. And it started with just me and 30 students about seven years ago, Um, kind of a home spun from scratch curriculum. One of my goals from the outset was to be a completely project based curriculum, and it's now grown. We probably have about six or 700 students, five or six full time teachers. We now have pre engineering going on at the 5th and 6th grade level. I now have students graduating. Uh, you know, graduating after senior year with, like, seven years of engineering under their belt and heading off to doing some pretty cool stuff. So it's It's been a lot of fun building a program and, um, and learning a lot in the process. >>That's awesome. I mean, you know, Cuba's. We've been passionate about things like women in tech, uh, diversity stem. You know, not only do we need more, more students and stem, we need mawr underrepresented women, minorities, etcetera. We were just talking to John Herstek and integrate gration about this is Do you do you feel is though you're I mean, first of all, the work that you do is awesome, but but I'll go one step further. Do you feel as though it's reaching, um, or diverse base? And how is that going? >>That's a great question. I think research shows that a lot of people get funneled into one kind of track or career path or set of interests really early on in their educational career, and sometimes that that funnel is kind of artificial. And so that's one of the reasons we keep pushing back. Um, so our school systems introducing kindergartners to programming on DSO We're trying to push back how we expose students to engineering and to stem fields as early as possible. And we've definitely seen the first of that in my program. In fact, my engineering program, uh, sprung out of an after school in Extracurricular Science Club that actually three girls started at our school. So I think that actually has helped that three girls started the club that eventually is what led to our engineering programs that sort of baked into the DNA and also our eyes a big public school. And we have about 50% of the students are under the poverty line and we e in Charlottesville, which is a big refugee town. And so I've been adamant from Day one that there are no barriers to entry into the program. There's no test you have to take. You don't have to have be taking a certain level of math or anything like that. That's been a lot of fun. To have a really diverse set of kids enter the program and be successful, >>that's final. That's great to hear. So, Philip, I wanna come back to you. You know, I think about maybe some day we'll be able to go back to a sporting events, and I know when I when I'm in there, there's somebody up on the roof looking out for me, you know, watching the crowd, and they have my back. And I think in many ways, the products that you build, you know, our similar. I may not know they're there, but they're keeping us safe or they're measuring things that that that I don't necessarily see. But I wonder if you could talk about a little bit more detail about the products you build and how they're impacting society. >>Sure, so There are certainly a lot of people who are who are watching, trying to make sure things were going well in keeping you safe that you may or may not be aware of. And we try and support ah lot of them. So we have detectors that are that are deployed in a variety of variety of uses, with a number of agencies and governments that dio like I was saying, ports and border crossing some other interesting applications that are looking for looking for signals that should not be there and working closely to fit into the operations these folks do. Onda. We also have a lot of outreach to researchers and scientists trying to help them support the work they're doing. Um, using neutron detection for soil moisture monitoring is a some really cool opportunities for doing it at large scale and with much less, um, expense or complication than would have been done. Previous technologies. Um, you know, they were talking about collaboration in the previous segment. We've been able to join a number of conferences for that, virtually including one that was supposed to be held in Boston, but another one that was held out of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. And, uh, this is sort of things that in some ways, the pandemic is pushing people towards greater collaboration than they would have been able to do. Had it all but in person. >>Yeah, we did. Uh, the cube did live works a couple years ago in Boston. It was awesome show. And I think, you know, with this whole trend toward digit, I call it the Force march to digital. Thanks to cove it I think that's just gonna continue. Thio grow. Rafael. What if you could describe the process that you use to better understand diseases? And what's your organization's involvement? Been in more detail, addressing the cove in pandemic. >>Um, so so we have the bio be structured in, Um um in a way that foster so the combination of technology and science. So we have to scientific tracks, one about infectious diseases and the other one about understanding just basic human biology, how the human body functions, and especially how the cells in the human body function on how they're organized to create tissues in the body. On Ben, it has this set of platforms. Um, mind is one of them by engineering that are all technology rated. So we have data science platform, all about data analysis, machine learning, things like that. Um, we have a mass spectrometry platform is all about mass spectrometry technologies to, um, exploit those ones in service for the scientist on. We have a genomics platform that it's all about sequencing DNA and are gonna, um and then an advanced microscopy. It's all about developing technologies, uh, to look at things with advanced microscopes and developed technologies to marry computation on microscopy. So, um, the scientists set the agenda and the platforms, we just serve their needs, support their needs, and hopefully develop technologies that help them do their experiments better, faster, or allow them to the experiment that they couldn't do in any other way before. Um And so with cove, it because we have that very strong group of scientists that work on have been working on infectious disease before, and especially in viruses, we've been able to very quickly pivot to working on that s O. For example, my team was able to build pretty quickly a machine to automatically purified proteins on is being used to purify all these different important proteins in the cove. It virus the SARS cov to virus Onda. We're sending some of those purified proteins all over the world. Two scientists that are researching the virus and trying to figure out how to develop vaccines, understand how the virus affects the body and all that. Um, so some of the machines we built are having a very direct impact on this. Um, Also for the copy testing lab, we were able to very quickly develop some very simple machines that allowed the lab to function sort of faster and more efficiently. Sort of had a little bit of automation in places where we couldn't find commercial machines that would do it. >>Um, eso Matt. I mean, you gotta be listening to this and thinking about Okay, So someday your students are gonna be working at organizations like like, like Bio Hub and Silver Side. And you know, a lot of young people they're just don't know about you guys, but like my kids, they're really passionate about changing the world. You know, there's way more important than you know, the financial angles and it z e. I gotta believe you're seeing that you're right in the front lines there. >>Really? Um, in fact, when I started the curriculum six or seven years ago, one of the first bits of feedback I got from my students is they said Okay, this is a lot of fun. So I had my students designing projects and programming microcontrollers raspberry, PiS and order we nose and things like that. The first bit of feedback I got from students was they said Okay, when do we get to impact the world? I've heard engineering >>is about >>making the world a better place, and robots are fun and all, but, you know, where is the real impact? And so um, dude, yeah, thanks to the guidance of my students, I'm baking that Maurin. Now I'm like day one of engineering one. We talk about how the things that the tools they're learning and the skills they're gaining, uh, eventually, you know, very soon could be could be used to make the world a better place. >>You know, we all probably heard that famous line by Jeff Hammer Barker. The greatest minds of my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads. I think we're really generally generationally, finally, at the point where young students and engineering a really, you know, a passionate about affecting society. I wanna get into the product, you know, side and understand how each of you are using on shape and and the value that that it brings. Maybe Raphael, you could start how long you've been using it. You know, what's your experience with it? Let's let's start there. >>I begin for about two years, and I switched to it with some trepidation. You know, I was used to always using the traditional product that you have to install on your computer, that everybody uses that. So I was kind of locked into that. But I started being very frustrated with the way it worked, um, and decided to give on ship chance. Which reputation? Because any change always, you know, causes anxiety. Um, but very quickly my engineers started loving it, Uh, just because it's it's first of all, the learning curve wasn't very difficult at all. You can transfer from one from the traditional product to entree very quickly and easily. You can learn all the concepts very, very fast. It has all the functionality that we needed and and what's best is that it allows to do things that we couldn't do before or we couldn't do easily. Now we can access the our cat documents from anywhere in the world. Um, so when we're in the lab fabricating something or testing a machine, any computer we have next to us or a tablet or on iPhone, we can pull it up and look at the cad and check things or make changes. That's something that couldn't do before because before you had to pay for every installation off the software for the computer, and I couldn't afford to have 20 installations to have some computers with the cat ready to use them like once every six months would have been very inefficient. So we love that part. And the collaboration features are fantastic, especially now with Kobe, that we have to have all the remote meetings eyes fantastic, that you can have another person drive the cad while the whole team is watching that person change the model and do things and point to things that is absolutely revolutionary. We love it. The fact that you have very, very sophisticated version control before it was always a challenge asking people, please, if you create anniversary and apart, how do we name it so that people find it? And then you end up with all these collection of files with names that nobody ever remembers, what they are, the person left. And now nobody knows which version is the right one. A mess with on shape on the version ING system it has, and the fact that you can go back in history off the document and go back to previous version so easily and then go back to the press and version and explore the history of the part that is truly, um, just world changing for us, that we can do that so easily on for me as a manager to manage this collection of information that is critical for our operations. It makes it so much easier because everything is in one place. I don't have to worry about file servers that go down that I have to administer that have to have I t taken care off that have to figure how to keep access to people to those servers when they're at home, and they need a virtual private network and all of that mess disappears. I just simply give give a person in accounting on shape and then magically, they have access to everything in the way I want. And we can manage the lower documents and everything in a way that is absolutely fantastic. >>Feel what was your what? What were some of the concerns you had mentioned? You had some trepidation. Was it a performance? Was it security? You know some of the traditional cloud stuff, and I'm curious as to how, How, whether any of those act manifested really that you had to manage. What were your concerns? >>Look, the main concern is how long is it going to take for everybody in the team to learn to use the system like it and buy into it? Because I don't want to have my engineers using tools against their will write. I want everybody to be happy because that's how they're productive. They're happy, and they enjoyed the tools they have. That was my main concern. I was a little bit worried about the whole concept of not having the files in a place where I couldn't quote unquote seat in some server and on site, but that That's kind of an outdated concept, right? So that took a little bit of a mind shift, but very quickly. Then I started thinking, Look, I have a lot of documents on Google Drive. Like, I don't worry about that. Why would I worry about my cat on on shape, right? Is the same thing. So I just needed to sort of put things in perspective that way. Um, the other, um, you know, the concern was the learning curve, right? Is like, how is he Will be for everybody to and for me to learn it on whether it had all of the features that we needed. And there were a few features that I actually discussed with, um uh, Cody at on shape on, they were actually awesome about using their scripting language in on shape to sort of mimic some of the features of the old cat, uh, in on, shaped in a way that actually works even better than the old system. So it was It was amazing. Yeah, >>Great. Thank you for that, Philip. What's your experience been? Maybe you could take us through your journey within shape. >>Sure. So we've been we've been using on shaped silver side for coming up on about four years now, and we love it. We're very happy with it. We have a very modular product line, so we make anything from detectors that would go into backpacks. Two vehicles, two very large things that a shipping container would go through and saw. Excuse me. Shape helps us to track and collaborate faster on the design. Have multiple people working a same time on a project. And it also helps us to figure out if somebody else comes to us and say, Hey, I want something new how we congrats modules from things that we already have put them together and then keep track of the design development and the different branches and ideas that we have, how they all fit together. A za design comes together, and it's just been fantastic from a mechanical engineering background. I will also say that having used a number of different systems and solid works was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Before I got using on shape, I went, Wow, this is amazing and I really don't want to design in any other platform. After after getting on Lee, a little bit familiar with it. >>You know, it's funny, right? I'll have the speed of technology progression. I was explaining to some young guns the other day how I used to have a daytime er and that was my life. And if I lost that daytime, er I was dead. And I don't know how we weigh existed without, you know, Google maps eso we get anywhere, I don't know, but, uh but so So, Matt, you know, it's interesting to think about, you know, some of the concerns that Raphael brought up, you hear? For instance, you know, all the time. Wow. You know, I get my Amazon bill at the end of the month that zip through the roof in, But the reality is that Yeah, well, maybe you are doing more, but you're doing things that you couldn't have done before. And I think about your experience in teaching and educating. I mean, you so much more limited in terms of the resource is that you would have had to be able to educate people. So what's your experience been with With on shape and what is it enabled? >>Um, yeah, it was actually talking before we went with on shape. We had a previous CAD program, and I was talking to my vendor about it, and he let me know that we were actually one of the biggest CAD shops in the state. Because if you think about it a really big program, you know, really big company might employ. 5, 10, 15, 20 cad guys, right? I mean, when I worked for a large defense contractor, I think there were probably 20 of us as the cad guys. I now have about 300 students doing cat. So there's probably more students with more hours of cat under their belt in my building than there were when I worked for the big defense contractor. Um, but like you mentioned, uh, probably our biggest hurdle is just re sources. And so we want We want one of things I've always prided myself and trying to do in this. Programs provide students with access two tools and skills that they're going to see either in college or in the real world. So it's one of the reason we went with a big professional cad program. There are, you know, sort of K 12 oriented software and programs and things. But, you know, I want my kids coding and python and using slack and using professional type of tools on DSO when it comes to cat. That's just that That was a really hurt. I mean, you know, you could spend $30,000 on one seat of, you know, professional level cad program, and then you need a $30,000 computer to run it on if you're doing a heavy assemblies, Um and so one of my dreams And it was always just a crazy dream. And I was the way I would always pitcher in my school system and say, someday I'm gonna have a kid on a school issued chromebook in subsidized housing, on public WiFi doing professional level bad and that that was a crazy statement until a couple of years ago. So we're really excited that I literally and you know, March and you said the forced march, the forced march into, you know, modernity, March 13th kids sitting in my engineering lab that we spent a lot of money on doing cad March 14th. Those kids were at home on their school issued chromebooks on public WiFi, uh, keeping their designs going and collaborating. And then, yeah, I could go on and on about some of the things you know, the features that we've learned since then they're even better. So it's not like this is some inferior, diminished version of Academy. There's so much about it. Well, I >>wanna I wanna ask you that I may be over my skis on this, but we're seeing we're starting to see the early days of the democratization of CAD and product design. It is the the citizen engineer, I mean, maybe insulting to the engineers in the room, But but is that we're beginning to see that >>I have to believe that everything moves into the cloud. Part of that is democratization that I don't need. I can whether you know, I think artists, you know, I could have a music studio in my basement with a nice enough software package. And Aiken, I could be a professional for now. My wife's a photographer. I'm not allowed to say that I could be a professional photographer with, you know, some cloud based software, and so, yeah, I do think that's part of what we're seeing is more and more technology is moving to the cloud. >>Philip. Rafael Anything you Dad, >>I think I mean, yeah, that that that combination of cloud based cat and then three d printing that is becoming more and more affordable on ubiquitous It's truly transformative, and I think for education is fantastic. I wish when I was a kid I had the opportunity to play with those kinds of things because I was always the late things. But, you know, the in a very primitive way. So, um, I think this is a dream for kids. Teoh be able to do this. And, um, yeah, there's so many other technologies coming on, like Arduino on all of these electronic things that live kids play at home very cheaply with things that back in my day would have been unthinkable. >>So we know there's a go ahead. Philip, please. >>We had a pandemic and silver site moved to a new manufacturing facility this year. I was just on the shop floor, talking with contractors, standing 6 ft apart, pointing at things. But through it all, our CAD system was completely unruffled. Nothing stopped in our development work. Nothing stopped in our support for existing systems in the field. We didn't have to think about it. We had other server issues, but none with our, you know, engineering cad, platform and product development in support world right ahead, which was cool, but also a in that's point. I think it's just really cool what you're doing with the kids. The most interesting secondary and college level engineering work that I did was project based, taken important problem to the world. Go solve it and that is what we do here. That is what my entire career has been. And I'm super excited to see. See what your students are going to be doing, uh, in there home classrooms on their chromebooks now and what they do building on that. >>Yeah, I'm super excited to see your kids coming out of college with engineering degrees because, yeah, I think that Project based experience is so much better than just sitting in a classroom, taking notes and doing math problems on day. I think it will give the kids a much better flavor. What engineering is really about Think a lot of kids get turned off by engineering because they think it's kind of dry because it's just about the math for some very abstract abstract concept on they are there. But I think the most important thing is just that hands on a building and the creativity off, making things that you can touch that you can see that you can see functioning. >>Great. So, you know, we all know the relentless pace of technology progression. So when you think about when you're sitting down with the folks that on shape and there the customer advisor for one of the things that that you want on shape to do that it doesn't do today >>I could start by saying, I just love some of the things that does do because it's such a modern platform. And I think some of these, uh, some some platforms that have a lot of legacy and a lot of history behind them. I think we're dragging some of that behind them. So it's cool to see a platform that seemed to be developed in the modern era, and so that Z it is the Google docks. And so the fact that collaboration and version ing and link sharing is and like platform agnostic abilities, the fact that that seems to be just built into the nature of the thing so far, That's super exciting. As far as things that, uh, to go from there, Um, I don't know, >>Other than price. >>You can't say >>I >>can't say lower price. >>Yeah, so far on P. D. C. S that work with us. Really? Well, so I'm not complaining. There you there, >>right? Yeah. Yeah. No gaps, guys. Whitespace, Come on. >>We've been really enjoying the three week update. Cadence. You know, there's a new version every three weeks and we don't have to install it. We just get all the latest and greatest goodies. One of the trends that we've been following and enjoying is the the help with a revision management and release work flows. Um, and I know that there's more than on shape is working on that we're very excited for, because that's a big important part about making real hardware and supporting it in the field. Something that was cool. They just integrated Cem markup capability. In the last release that took, we were doing that anyway, but we were doing it outside of on shapes. And now we get to streamline our workflow and put it in the CAD system where We're making those changes anyway when we're reviewing drawings and doing this kind of collaboration. And so I think from our perspective, we continue to look forward. Toa further progress on that. There's a lot of capability in the cloud that I think they're just kind of scratching the surface on you, >>right? I would. I mean, you're you're asking to knit. Pick. I would say one of the things that I would like to see is is faster regeneration speed. There are a few times with convicts, necessities that regenerating the document takes a little longer than I would like. It's not a serious issue, but anyway, I I'm being spoiled, >>you know? That's good. I've been doing this a long time, and I like toe ask that question of practitioners and to me, it It's a signal like when you're nit picking and that's what you're struggling to knit. Pick that to me is a sign of a successful product, and and I wonder, I don't know, uh, have the deep dive into the architecture. But are things like alternative processors. You're seeing them hit the market in a big way. Uh, you know, maybe helping address the challenge, But I'm gonna ask you the big, chewy question now. Then we maybe go to some audience questions when you think about the world's biggest problems. I mean, we're global pandemics, obviously top of mind. You think about nutrition, you know, feeding the global community. We've actually done a pretty good job of that. But it's not necessarily with the greatest nutrition, climate change, alternative energy, the economic divides. You've got geopolitical threats and social unrest. Health care is a continuing problem. What's your vision for changing the world and how product innovation for good and be applied to some of the the problems that that you all are passionate about? Big question. Who wants toe start? >>Not biased. But for years I've been saying that if you want to solve the economy, the environment, uh, global unrest, pandemics, education is the case. If you wanna. If you want to, um, make progress in those in those realms, I think funding funding education is probably gonna pay off pretty well. >>Absolutely. And I think Stam is key to that. I mean, all of the ah lot of the well being that we have today and then industrialized countries. Thanks to science and technology, right improvements in health care, improvements in communication, transportation, air conditioning. Um, every aspect of life is touched by science and technology. So I think having more kids studying and understanding that is absolutely key. Yeah, I agree, >>Philip, you got anything to add? >>I think there's some big technical problems in the world today, Raphael and ourselves there certainly working on a couple of them. Think they're also collaboration problems and getting everybody to be able to pull together instead of pulling separately and to be able to spur the ideas on words. So that's where I think the education side is really exciting. What Matt is doing and it just kind of collaboration in general when we could do provide tools to help people do good work. Uh, that is, I think, valuable. >>Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And along those lines, we have some projects that are about creating very low cost instruments for low research settings, places in Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, so that they can do, um, um, biomedical research that it's difficult to do in those place because they don't have the money to buy the fancy lab machines that cost $30,000 an hour. Um, so we're trying to sort of democratize some of those instruments. And I think thanks to tools like Kahn shape then is easier, for example, to have a conversation with somebody in Africa and show them the design that we have and discuss the details of it with them on. But it's amazing, right to have somebody, you know, 10 time zones away, Um, looking really life in real time with you about your design and discussing the details or teaching them how to build a machine, right? Because, um, you know, they have a three D printer. You can you can just give them the design and say like, you build it yourself, uh, even cheaper than and, you know, also billing and shipping it there. Um, so all that that that aspect of it is also super important. I think for any of these efforts to improve some of the hardest part was in the world for climate change. Do you say, as you say, poverty, nutrition issues? Um, you know, availability of water. You have that project at about finding water. Um, if we can also help deploy technologies that teach people remotely how to create their own technologies or how to build their own systems that will help them solve those forms locally. I think that's very powerful. >>Yeah, the point about education is right on. I think some people in the audience may be familiar with the work of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the second machine age where they sort of put forth the premise that, uh, is it laid it out. Look, for the first time in history, machines air replacing humans from a cognitive perspective. Machines have always replaced humans, but that's gonna have an impact on jobs. But the answer is not toe protect the past from the future. The answer is education and public policy that really supports that. So I couldn't agree more. I think it's a really great point. Um, we have We do have some questions from the audience. If if we could If I can ask you guys, um, you know, this one kind of stands out. How do you see artificial intelligence? I was just talking about machine intelligence. Um, how do you see that? Impacting the design space guys trying to infuse a I into your product development. Can you tell me? >>Um, absolutely, like, we're using AI for some things, including some of these very low cost instruments that will hopefully help us diagnose certain diseases, especially this is that are very prevalent in the Third World. Um, and some of those diagnostics are these days done by thes armies of technicians that are trained to look under the microscope. But, um, that's a very slow process. Is very error prone and having machine learning systems that can to the same diagnosis faster, cheaper and also little machines that can be taken to very remote places to these villages that have no access to a fancy microscope. To look at a sample from a patient that's very powerful. And I we don't do this, but I have read quite a bit about how certain places air using a Tribune attorneys to actually help them optimize designs for parts. So you get these very interesting looking parts that you would have never thought off a person would have never thought off, but that are incredibly light ink. Earlier, strong and I have all sort of properties that are interesting thanks to artificial intelligence machine learning in particular >>yet another. The advantage you get when when your work is in the cloud I've seen. I mean, there's just so many applications that so if the radiology scan is in the cloud and the radiologist is goes to bed at night, Radiologist could come in in the morning and and say, Oh, the machine while you were sleeping was using artificial intelligence to scan these 40,000 images. And here's the five that we picked out that we think you should take a closer look at. Or like Raphael said, I can design my part. My, my, my, my, my you know, mount or bracket or whatever and go to sleep. And then I wake up in the morning. The machine has improved. It for me has made it strider strider stronger and lighter. Um And so just when your when your work is in the cloud, that's just that's a really cool advantage that you get that you can have machines doing some of your design work for you. >>Yeah, we've been watching, uh, you know, this week is this month, I guess is AWS re invent and it's just amazing to see how much effort is coming around machine learning machine intelligence. You know Amazon has sage maker Google's got, you know, embedded you no ML and big query. Uh, certainly Microsoft with Azure is doing tons of stuff and machine learning. I think the point there is that that these things will be infused in tow R and D and in tow software product by the vendor community. And you all will apply that to your business and and build value through the unique data that your collecting, you know, in your ecosystems. And and that's how you add value. You don't have to be necessarily, you know, developers of artificial intelligence, but you have to be practitioners to apply that. Does that make sense to you, Philip? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think your point about value is really well chosen. We see AI involved from the physics simulations all the way up to interpreting radiation data, and that's where the value question, I think, is really important because it's is the output of the AI giving helpful information that the people that need to be looking at it. So if it's curating a serious of radiation alert, saying, Hey, like these air the anomalies. You need to look at eyes it, doing that in a way that's going to help a good response on. In some cases, the II is only as good as the people. That sort of gave it a direction and turn it loose. And you want to make sure that you don't have biases or things like that underlying your AI that they're going to result in less than helpful outcomes coming from it. So we spend quite a lot of time thinking about how do we provide the right outcomes to people who are who are relying on our systems? >>That's a great point, right? Humans air biased and humans build models, so models are inherently biased. But then the software is hitting the market. That's gonna help us identify those biases and help us, you know? Of course. Correct. So we're entering Cem some very exciting times, guys. Great conversation. I can't thank you enough for spending the time with us and sharing with our audience the innovations that you're bringing to help the world. So thanks again. >>Thank you so much. >>Thank you. >>Okay. Welcome. Okay. When we come back, John McElheny is gonna join me. He's on shape. Co founder. And he's currently the VP of strategy at PTC. He's gonna join the program. We're gonna take a look at what's next and product innovation. I'm Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader. Digital technology event coverage. We'll be right back. >>Okay? Okay. Yeah. Okay. >>From around >>the globe, it's the Cube. Presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, welcome back to innovation. For good. With me is John McElheny, who is one of the co founders of On Shape and is now the VP of strategy at PTC. John, it's good to see you. Thanks for making the time to come on the program. Thanks, Dave. So we heard earlier some of the accomplishments that you've made since the acquisition. How has the acquisition affected your strategy? Maybe you could talk about what resource is PTC brought to the table that allowed you toe sort of rethink or evolve your strategy? What can you share with us? >>Sure. You know, a year ago, when when John and myself met with Jim Pepperman early on is we're we're pondering. Started joining PTC one of things became very clear is that we had a very clear shared vision about how we could take the on shape platform and really extended for, for all of the PTC products, particular sort of their augmented reality as well as their their thing works or the i o. T business and their product. And so from the very beginning there was a clear strategy about taking on shape, extending the platform and really investing, um, pretty significantly in the product development as well as go to market side of things, uh, toe to bring on shape out to not only the PTC based but sort of the broader community at large. So So So PTC has been a terrific, terrific, um, sort of partner as we've we've gonna go on after this market together. Eso We've added a lot of resource and product development side of things. Ah, lot of resource and they go to market and customer success and support. So, really, on many fronts, that's been both. Resource is as well a sort of support at the corporate level from from a strategic standpoint and then in the field, we've had wonderful interactions with many large enterprise customers as well as the PTC channels. So it's been really a great a great year. >>Well, and you think about the challenges of in your business going to SAS, which you guys, you know, took on that journey. You know, 78 years ago. Uh, it's not trivial for a lot of companies to make that transition, especially a company that's been around as long as PTC. So So I'm wondering how much you know, I was just asking you How about what PCP TC brought to the table? E gotta believe you're bringing a lot to the table to in terms of the mindset, uh, even things is, is mundane is not the right word, but things like how you compensate salespeople, how you interact with customers, the notion of a service versus a product. I wonder if you could address >>that. Yeah, it's a it's a really great point. In fact, after we had met Jim last year, John and I one of the things we walked out in the seaport area in Boston, one of things we sort of said is, you know, Jim really gets what we're trying to do here and and part of let me bring you into the thinking early on. Part of what Jim talked about is there's lots of, you know, installed base sort of software that's inside of PTC base. That's helped literally thousands of customers around the world. But the idea of moving to sass and all that it entails both from a technology standpoint but also a cultural standpoint. Like How do you not not just compensate the sales people as an example? But how do you think about customer success? In the past, it might have been that you had professional services that you bring out to a customer, help them deploy your solutions. Well, when you're thinking about a SAS based offering, it's really critical that you get customers successful with it. Otherwise, you may have turned, and you know it will be very expensive in terms of your business long term. So you've got to get customers success with software in the very beginning. So you know, Jim really looked at on shape and he said that John and I, from a cultural standpoint, you know, a lot of times companies get acquired and they've acquired technology in the past that they integrate directly into into PTC and then sort of roll it out through their products, are there just reached channel, he said. In some respects, John John, think about it as we're gonna take PTC and we want to integrate it into on shape because we want you to share with us both on the sales side and customer success on marketing on operations. You know all the things because long term, we believe the world is a SAS world, that the whole industry is gonna move too. So really, it was sort of an inverse in terms of the thought process related to normal transactions >>on That makes a lot of sense to me. You mentioned Sharon turns the silent killer of a SAS company, and you know, there's a lot of discussion, you know, in the entrepreneurial community because you live this, you know what's the best path? I mean today, You see, you know, if you watch Silicon Valley double, double, triple triple, but but there's a lot of people who believe, and I wonder, if you come in there is the best path to, you know, in the X Y axis. If if it's if it's uh, growth on one and retention on the other axis. What's the best way to get to the upper right on? Really? The the best path is probably make sure you've nailed obviously the product market fit, But make sure that you can retain customers and then throw gas on the fire. You see a lot of companies they burn out trying to grow too fast, but they haven't figured out, you know that. But there's too much churn. They haven't figured out those metrics. I mean, obviously on shape. You know, you were sort of a pioneer in here. I gotta believe you've figured out that customer retention before you really, You know, put the pedal to the >>metal. Yeah, and you know, growth growth can mask a lot of things, but getting getting customers, especially the engineering space. Nobody goes and sits there and says, Tomorrow we're gonna go and and, you know, put 100 users on this and and immediately swap out all of our existing tools. These tools are very rich and deep in terms of capability, and they become part of the operational process of how a company designs and builds products. So any time anybody is actually going through the purchasing process. Typically, they will run a try along or they'll run a project where they look at. Kind of What? What is this new solution gonna help them dio. How are we gonna orient ourselves for success? Longer term. So for us, you know, getting new customers and customer acquisition is really critical. But getting those customers to actually deploy the solution to be successful with it. You know, we like to sort of, say, the marketing or the lead generation and even some of the initial sales. That's sort of like the Kindle ing. But the fire really starts when customers deploy it and get successful. The solution because they bring other customers into the fold. And then, of course, if they're successful with it, you know, then in fact, you have negative turn which, ironically, means growth in terms of your inside of your install. Bates. >>Right? And you've seen that with some of the emerging, you know, SAS companies, where you're you're actually you know, when you calculate whatever its net retention or renew ALS, it's actually from a dollar standpoint. It's up in the high nineties or even over 100%. >>So >>and that's a trend we're gonna continue. See, I >>wonder >>if we could sort of go back. Uh, and when you guys were starting on shape, some of the things that you saw that you were trying to strategically leverage and what's changed, you know, today we were talking. I was talking to John earlier about in a way, you kinda you kinda got a blank slate is like doing another startup. >>You're >>not. Obviously you've got installed base and customers to service, but But it's a new beginning for you guys. So one of the things that you saw then you know, cloud and and sas and okay, but that's we've been there, done that. What are you seeing? You know today? >>Well, you know, So So this is a journey, of course, that that on shape on its own has gone through it had I'll sort of say, you know, several iterations, both in terms of of of, you know, how do you How do you get customers? How do you How do you get them successful? How do you grow those customers? And now that we've been part of PTC, the question becomes okay. One, There is certainly a higher level of credibility that helps us in terms of our our megaphone is much bigger than it was when we're standalone company. But on top of that now, figuring out how to work with their channel with their direct sales force, you know, they have, um, for example, you know, very large enterprises. Well, many of those customers are not gonna go in forklift out their existing solution to replace it with with on shape. However, many of them do have challenges in their supply chain and communications with contractors and vendors across the globe. And so, you know, finding our fit inside of those large enterprises as they extend out with their their customers is a very interesting area that we've really been sort of incremental to to PTC. And then, you know, they they have access to lots of other technology, like the i o. T business. And now, of course, the augmented reality business that that we can bring things to bear. For example, in the augmented reality world, they've they've got something called expert capture. And this is essentially imagine, you know, in a are ah, headset that allows you to be ableto to speak to it, but also capture images still images in video. And you could take somebody who's doing their task and capture literally the steps that they're taking its geo location and from their builds steps for new employees to be, we'll learn and understand how todo use that technology to help them do their job better. Well, when they do that, if there is replacement products or variation of of some of the tools that that they built the original design instruction set for they now have another version. Well, they have to manage multiple versions. Well, that's what on shape is really great at doing and so taking our technology and helping their solutions as well. So it's not only expanding our customer footprint, it's expanding the application footprint in terms of how we can help them and help customers. >>So that leads me to the tam discussion and again, as part of your strategist role. How do you think about that? Was just talking to some of your customers earlier about the democratization of cat and engineering? You know, I kind of joked, sort of like citizen engineering, but but so that you know, the demographics are changing the number of users potentially that can access the products because the it's so much more of a facile experience. How are you thinking about the total available market? >>It really is a great question, You know, it used to be when you when you sold boxes of software, it was how many engineers were out there. And that's the size of the market. The fact that matter is now when, When you think about access to that information, that data is simply a pane of glass. Whether it's a computer, whether it's a laptop, UH, a a cell phone or whether it's a tablet, the ability to to use different vehicles, access information and data expands the capabilities and power of a system to allow feedback and iteration. I mean, one of the one of the very interesting things is in technology is when you can take something and really unleash it to a larger audience and builds, you know, purpose built applications. You can start to iterate, get better feedback. You know there's a classic case in the clothing industry where Zara, you know, is a fast sort of turnaround. Agile manufacturer. And there was a great New York Times article written a couple years ago. My wife's a fan of Zara, and I think she justifies any purchases by saying, You know, Zara, you gotta purchase it now. Otherwise it may not be there the next time. Yet you go back to the store. They had some people in a store in New York that had this woman's throw kind of covering Shaw. And they said, Well, it would be great if we could have this little clip here so we can hook it through or something. And they sent a note back toe to the factory in Spain, and literally two weeks later they had, you know, 4000 of these things in store, and they sold out because they had a closed loop and iterative process. And so if we could take information and allow people access in multiple ways through different devices and different screens, that could be very specific information that, you know, we remove a lot of the engineering data book, bring the end user products conceptually to somebody that would have had to wait months to get the actual physical prototype, and we could get feedback well, Weaken have a better chance of making sure whatever product we're building is the right product when it ultimately gets delivered to a customer. So it's really it's a much larger market that has to be thought of rather than just the kind of selling A boxes software to an engineer. >>That's a great story. And again, it's gonna be exciting for you guys to see that with. The added resource is that you have a PTC, Um, so let's talk. I promise people we wanna talk about Atlas. Let's talk about the platform. A little bit of Atlas was announced last year. Atlas. For those who don't know it's a SAS space platform, it purports to go beyond product lifecycle management and you You're talking cloud like agility and scale to CAD and product design. But John, you could do a better job than I. What do >>we need to know about Atlas? Well, I think Atlas is a great description because it really is metaphorically sort of holding up all of the PTC applications themselves. But from the very beginning, when John and I met with Jim, part of what we were intrigued about was that he shared a vision that on shape was more than just going to be a cad authoring tool that, in fact, you know, in the past these engineering tools were very powerful, but they were very narrow in their purpose and focus. And we had specialty applications to manage the versions, etcetera. What we did in on shape is we kind of inverted that thinking. We built this collaboration and sharing engine at the core and then kind of wrap the CAD system around it. But that collaboration sharing and version ING engine is really powerful. And it was that vision that Jim had that he shared that we had from the beginning, which was, how do we take this thing to make a platform that could be used for many other applications inside of inside of any company? And so not only do we have a partner application area that is is much like the APP store or Google play store. Uh, that was sort of our first Stan Shih ation of this. This this platform. But now we're extending out to broader applications and much meatier applications. And internally, that's the thing works in the in the augmented reality. But there'll be other applications that ultimately find its way on top of this platform. And so they'll get all the benefits of of the collaboration, sharing the version ing the multi platform, multi device. And that's an extremely extremely, um, strategic leverage point for the company. >>You know, it's interesting, John, you mentioned the seaport before. So PTC, for those who don't know, built a beautiful facility down at the Seaport in Boston. And, of course, when PTC started, you know, back in the mid 19 eighties, there was nothing at the seaport s. >>So it's >>kind of kind of ironic, you know, we were way seeing the transformation of the seaport. We're seeing the transformation of industry and of course, PTC. And I'm sure someday you'll get back into that beautiful office, you know? Wait. Yeah, I'll bet. And, uh and but I wanna bring this up because I want I want you to talk about the future. How you how you see that our industry and you've observed this has moved from very product centric, uh, plat platform centric with sass and cloud. And now we're seeing ecosystems form around those products and platforms and data flowing through the ecosystem powering, you know, new innovation. I wonder if you could paint a picture for us of what the future looks like to you from your vantage point. >>Yeah, I think one of the key words you said there is data because up until now, data for companies really was sort of trapped in different applications. And it wasn't because people were nefarious and they want to keep it limited. It was just the way in which things were built. And, you know, when people use an application like on shape, what ends up happening is there their day to day interaction and everything that they do is actually captured by the platform. And, you know, we don't have access to that data. Of course it's it's the customer's data. But as as an artifact of them using the system than doing their day to day job, what's happening is they're creating huge amounts of information that can then be accessed and analyzed to help them both improve their design process, improve their efficiencies, improve their actual schedules in terms of making sure they can hit delivery times and be able to understand where there might be roadblocks in the future. So the way I see it is companies now are deploying SAS based tools like on shape and an artifact of them. Using that platform is that they have now analytics and tools to better understand and an instrument and manage their business. And then from there, I think you're going to see, because these systems are all you know extremely well. Architected allow through, you know, very structured AP. I calls to connect other SAS based applications. You're gonna start seeing closed loop sort of system. So, for example, people design using on shape, they end up going and deploying their system or installing it, or people use the end using products. People then may call back into the customers support line and report issues, problems, challenges. They'll be able to do traceability back to the underlying design. They'll be able to do trend analysis and defect analysis from the support lines and tie it back and closed loop the product design, manufacture, deployment in the field sort of cycles. In addition, you can imagine there's many things that air sort of as designed. But then when people go on site and they have to install it. There's some alterations modifications. Think about think about like a large air conditioning units for buildings. You go and you go to train and you get a large air conditioning unit that put up on top of building with a crane. They have to build all kinds of adaptors to make sure that that will fit inside of the particulars of that building. You know, with on shape and tools like this, you'll be able to not only take the design of what the air conditioning system might be, but also the all the adapter plates, but also how they installed it. So it sort of as designed as manufactured as stalled. And all these things can be traced, just like if you think about the transformation of customer service or customer contacts. In the early days, you used to have tools that were PC based tools called contact management solution, you know, kind of act or gold mine. And these were basically glorified Elektronik role in Texas. It had a customer names and they had phone numbers and whatever else. And Salesforce and Siebel, you know, these types of systems really broadened out the perspective of what a customer relationship? Waas. So it wasn't just the contact information it was, you know, How did they come to find out about you as a company? So all of the pre sort of marketing and then kind of what happens after they become a customer and it really was a 3 60 view. I think that 3 60 view gets extended to not just to the customers, but also tools and the products they use. And then, of course, the performance information that could come back to the manufacturer. So, you know, as an engineer, one of the things you learn about with systems is the following. And if you remember, when the CD first came out CDs that used to talk about four times over sampling or eight times over sampling and it was really kind of, you know, the fidelity the system. And we know from systems theory that the best way to improve the performance of a system is to actually have more feedback. The more feedback you have, the better system could be. And so that's why you get 16 60 for example, etcetera. Same thing here. The more feedback we have of different parts of a company that a better performance, The company will be better customer relationships. Better, uh, overall financial performance as well. So that's that's the view I have of how these systems all tied together. >>It's a great vision in your point about the data is I think right on. It used to be so fragmented in silos, and in order to take a system view, you've gotta have a system view of the data. Now, for years, we've optimized maybe on one little component of the system and that sometimes we lose sight of the overall outcome. And so what you just described, I think is, I think sets up. You know very well as we exit. Hopefully soon we exit this this covert era on John. I hope that you and I can sit down face to face at a PTC on shape event in the near term >>in the seaport in the >>seaport would tell you that great facility toe have have an event for sure. It >>z wonderful >>there. So So John McElhinney. Thanks so much for for participating in the program. It was really great to have you on, >>right? Thanks, Dave. >>Okay. And I want to thank everyone for participating. Today we have some great guest speakers. And remember, this is a live program. So give us a little bit of time. We're gonna flip this site over toe on demand mode so you can share it with your colleagues and you, or you can come back and and watch the sessions that you heard today. Uh, this is Dave Volonte for the Cube and on shape PTC. Thank you so much for watching innovation for good. Be well, Have a great holiday. And we'll see you next time. Yeah.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020 of course, happening virtually. And there are certain people that we talk to every year at theCUBE, and this guest, I believe, has been on theCUBE at VMworld more than any others. It's actually not Pat Gelsinger, Eric Herzog. He is the chief marketing officer and vice president of global storage channels at IBM. Eric, Mr. Zoginstor, welcome back to theCUBE, nice to see you. >> Thank you very much, Stu. IBM always enjoys hanging with you, John, and Dave. And again, glad to be here, although not in person this time at VMworld 2020 virtual. Thanks again for having IBM. >> Alright, so, you know, some things are the same, others, very different. Of course, Eric, IBM, a long, long partner of VMware's. Why don't you set up for us a little bit, you know, 2020, the major engagements, what's new with IBM and VMware? >> So, a couple of things, first of all, we have made our Spectrum Virtualize software, software defined block storage work in virtual machines, both in AWS and IBM Cloud. So we started with IBM Cloud and then earlier this year with AWS. So now we have two different cloud platforms where our Spectrum Virtualize software sits in a VM at the cloud provider. The other thing we've done, of course, is V7 support. In fact, I've done several VMUGs. And in fact, my session at VMworld is going to talk about both our support for V7 but also what we're doing with containers, CSI, Kubernetes overall, and how we can support that in a virtual VMware environment, and also we're doing with traditional ESX and VMware configurations as well. And of course, out to the cloud, as I just talked about. >> Yeah, that discussion of hybrid cloud, Eric, is one that we've been hearing from IBM for a long time. And VMware has had that message, but their cloud solutions have really matured. They've got a whole group going deep on cloud native. The Amazon solutions have been something that they've been partnering, making sure that, you know, data protection, it can span between, you know, the traditional data center environment where VMware is so dominant, and the public clouds. You're giving a session on some of those hybrid cloud solutions, so share with us a little bit, you know, where do the visions completely agree? What's some of the differences between what IBM is doing and maybe what people are hearing from VMware? >> Well, first of all, our solutions don't always require VMware to be installed. So for example, if you're doing it in a container environment, for example, with Red Hat OpenShift, that works slightly different. Not that you can't run Red Hat products inside of a virtual machine, which you can, but in this case, I'm talking Red Hat native. We also of course do VMware native and support what VMware has announced with their Kubernetes based solutions that they've been talking about since VMworld last year, obviously when Pat made some big announcements onstage about what they were doing in the container space. So we've been following that along as well. So from that perspective, we have agreement on a virtual machine perspective and of course, what VMware is doing with the container space. But then also a slightly different one when we're doing Red Hat OpenShift as a native configuration, without having a virtual machine involved in that configuration. So those are both the commonalities and the differences that we're doing with VMware in a hybrid cloud configuration. >> Yeah. Eric, you and I both have some of those scars from making sure that storage works in a virtual environment. It took us about a decade to get things to really work at the VM level. Containers, it's been about five years, it feels like we've made faster progress to make sure that we can have stateful environments, we can tie up with storage, but give us a little bit of a look back as to what we've learned and how we've made sure that containerized, Kubernetes environments, you know, work well with storage for customers today. >> Well, I think there's a couple of things. First of all, I think all the storage vendors learn from VMware. And then the expansion of virtual environments beyond VMware to other virtual environments as well. So I think all the storage vendors, including IBM learned through that process, okay, when the next thing comes, which of course in this case happens to be containers, both in a VMware environment, but in an open environment with the Kubernetes management framework, that you need to be able to support it. So for example, we have done several different things. We support persistent volumes in file block and object store. And we started with that almost three years ago on the block side, then we added the file side and now the object storage side. We also can back up data that's in those containers, which is an important feature, right? I am sitting there and I've got data now and persistent volume, but I got to back it up as well. So we've announced support for container based backup either with Red Hat OpenShift or in a generic Kubernetes environment, because we're realistic at IBM. We know that you have to exist in the software infrastructure milieu, and that includes VMware and competitors of VMware. It includes Red Hat OpenShift, but also competitors to Red Hat. And we've made sure that we support whatever the end user needs. So if they're going with Red Hat, great. If they're going with a generic container environment, great. If they're going to use VMware's container solutions, great. And on the virtualization engines, the same thing. We started with VMware, but also have added other virtualization engines. So you think the storage community as a whole and IBM in particular has learned, we need to be ready day one. And like I said, three years ago, we already had persistent volume support for block store. It's still the dominant storage and we had that three years ago. So for us, that would be really, I guess, two years from what you've talked about when containers started to take off. And within two years we had something going that was working at the end user level. Our sales team could sell our business partners. As you know, many of the business partners are really rallying around containers, whether it be Red Hat or in what I'll call a more generic environment as well. They're seeing the forest through the trees. I do think when you look at it from an end user perspective, though, you're going to see all three. So, particularly in the Global Fortune 1000, you're going to see Red Hat environments, generic Kubernetes environments, VMware environments, just like you often see in some instances, heterogeneous virtualization environments, and you're still going to see bare metal. So I think it's going to vary by application workload and use case. And I think all, I'd say midsize enterprise up, let's say, $5 billion company and up, probably will have at least two, if not all three of those environments, container, virtual machine, and bare metal. So we need to make sure that at IBM we support all those environments to keep those customers happy. >> Yeah, well, Eric, I think anybody, everybody in the industry knows, IBM can span those environments, you know, support through generations. And very much knows that everything in IT tends to be additive. You mentioned customers, Eric, you talk to a lot of customers. So bring us inside, give us a couple examples if you would, how are they dealing with this transition? For years we've been talking about, you know, enabling developers, having them be tied more tightly with what the enterprise is doing. So what are you seeing from some of your customers today? >> Well, I think the key thing is they'd like to use data reuse. So, in this case, think of a backup, a snap or replica dataset, which is real world data, and being able to use that and reuse that. And now the storage guys want to make sure they know who's, if you will, checked it out. We do that with our Spectrum Copy Data Management. You also have, of course, integration with the Ansible framework, which IBM supports, in fact, we'll be announcing some additional support for more features in Ansible coming at the end of October. We'll be doing a large launch, very heavily on containers. Containers and primary storage, containers in hybrid cloud environments, containers in big data and AI environments, and containers in the modern data protection and cyber resiliency space as well. So we'll be talking about some additional support in this case about Ansible as well. So you want to make sure, one of the key things, I think, if you're a storage guy, if I'm the VP of infrastructure, or I'm the CIO, even if I'm not a storage person, in fact, if you think about it, I'm almost 70 now. I have never, ever, ever, ever met a CIO who used to be a storage guy, ever. Whether I, I've been with big companies, I was at EMC, I was at Seagate Maxtor, I've been at IBM actually twice. I've also done seven startups, as you guys know at theCUBE. I have never, ever met a CIO who used to be a storage person. Ever, in all those years. So, what appeals to them is, how do I let the dev guys and the test guys use that storage? At the same time, they're smart enough to know that the software guys and the test guys could actually screw up the storage, lose the data, or if they don't lose the data, cost them hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars because they did something wrong and they have to reconfigure all the storage solutions. So you want to make sure that the CIO is comfortable, that the dev and the test teams can use that storage properly. It's a part of what Ansible's about. You want to make sure that you've got tight integration. So for example, we announced a container native version of our Spectrum Discover software, which gives you comprehensive metadata, cataloging and indexing. Not only for IBM's scale-out file, Spectrum Scale, not only for IBM object storage, IBM cloud object storage, but also for Amazon S3 and also for NetApp filers and also for EMC Isilon. And it's a container native. So you want to make sure in that case, we have an API. So the AI software guys, or the big data software guys could interface with that API to Spectrum Discover, let them do all the work. And we're talking about a piece of software that can traverse billions of objects in two seconds, billions of them. And is ideal to use in solutions that are hundreds of petabytes, up into multiple exabytes. So it's a great way that by having that API where the CIO is confident that the software guys can use the API, not mess up the storage because you know, the storage guys and the data scientists can configure Spectrum Discover and then save it as templates and run an AI workload every Monday, and then run a big data workload every Tuesday, and then Wednesday run a different AI workload and Thursday run a different big data. And so once they've set that up, everything is automated. And CIOs love automation, and they really are sensitive. Although they're all software guys, they are sensitive to software guys messing up the storage 'cause it could cost them money, right? So that's their concern. We make it easy. >> Absolutely, Eric, you know, it'd be lovely to say that storage is just invisible, I don't need to think about it, but when something goes wrong, you need those experts to be able to dig in. You spent some time talking about automation, so critically important. How about the management layer? You know, you think back, for years it was, vCenter would be the place that everything can plug in. You could have more generalists using it. The HCI waves were people kind of getting away from being storage specialists. Today VMware has, of course vCenter's their main estate, but they have Tanzu. On the IBM and Red Hat side, you know, this year you announced the Advanced Cluster Management. What's that management landscape look like? How does the storage get away from managing some of the bits and bytes and, you know, just embrace more of that automation that you talked about? >> So in the case of IBM, we make sure we can support both. We need to appeal to the storage nerd, the storage geek if you will. The same time to a more generalist environment, whether it be an infrastructure manager, whether it be some of the software guys. So for example, we support, obviously vCenter. We're going to be supporting all of the elements that are going to happen in a container environment that VMware is doing. We have hot integration and big time integration with Red Hat's management framework, both with Ansible, but also in the container space as well. We're announcing some things that are coming again at the end of October in the container space about how we interface with the Red Hat management schema. And so you don't always have to have the storage expert manage the storage. You can have the Red Hat administrator, or in some cases, the DevOps guys do it. So we're making sure that we can cover both sides of the fence. Some companies, this just my personal belief, that as containers become commonplace while the software guys are going to want to still control it, there eventually will be a Red Hat/container admin, just like all the big companies today have VMware admins. They all do. Or virtualization admins that cover VMware and VMware's competitors such as Hyper-V. They have specialized admins to run that. And you would argue, VMware is very easy to use, why aren't the software guys playing with it? 'Cause guess what? Those VMs are sitting on servers containing both apps and data. And if the software guy comes in to do something, messes it up, so what have of the big entities done? They've created basically a virtualization admin layer. I think that over time, either the virtualization admins become virtualization/container admins, or if it's a big enough for both estates, there'll be container admins at the Global Fortune 500, and they'll also be virtualization admins. And then the software guys, the devOps guys will interface with that. There will always be a level of management framework. Which is why we integrate, for example, with vCenter, what we're doing with Red Hat, what we do with generic Kubernetes, to make sure that we can integrate there. So we'll make sure that we cover all areas because a number of our customers are very large, but some of our customers are very small. In fact, we have a company that's in the software development space for autonomous driving. They have over a hundred petabytes of IBM Spectrum Scale in a container environment. So that's a small company that's gone all containers, at the same time, we have a bunch of course, Global Fortune 1000s where IBM plays exceedingly well that have our products. And they've got some stuff sitting in VMware, some such sitting in generic Kubernetes, some stuff sitting in Red Hat OpenShift and some stuff still in bare metal. And in some cases they don't want their software people to touch it, in other cases, these big accounts, they want their software people empowered. So we're going to make sure we could support both and both management frameworks. Traditional storage management framework with each one of our products and also management frameworks for virtualization, which we've already been doing. And now management frame first with container. We'll make sure we can cover all three of those bases 'cause that's what the big entities will want. And then in the smaller names, you'll have to see who wins out. I mean, they may still use three in a small company, you really don't know, so you want to make sure you've got everything covered. And it's very easy for us to do this integration because of things we've already historically done, particularly with the virtualization environment. So yes, the interstices of the integration are different, but we know here's kind of the process to do the interconnectivity between a storage management framework and a generic management framework, in, originally of course, vCenter, and now doing it for the container world as well. So at least we've learned best practices and now we're just tweaking those best practices in the difference between a container world and a virtualization world. >> Eric, VMworld is one of the biggest times of the year, where we all get together. I know how busy you are going to the show, meeting with customers, meeting with partners, you know, walking the hallways. You're one of the people that traveled more than I did pre-COVID. You know, you're always at the partner shows and meeting with people. Give us a little insight as to how you're making sure that, partners and customers, those conversations are still happening. We understand everything over video can be a little bit challenging, but, what are you seeing here in 2020? How's everybody doing? >> Well, so, a couple of things. First of all, I already did two partner meetings today. (laughs) And I have an end user meeting, two end user meetings tomorrow. So what we've done at IBM is make sure we do a couple things. One, short and to the point, okay? We have automated tools to actually show, drawing, just like the infamous walk up to the whiteboard in a face to face meeting, we've got that. We've also now tried to make sure everybody is being overly inundated with WebEx. And by the way, there's already a lot of WebEx anyway. I can think of meeting I had with a telco, one of the Fortune 300, and this was actually right before Thanksgiving. I was in their office in San Jose, but they had guys in Texas and guys in the East Coast all on. So we're still over WebEx, but it also was a two and a half hour meeting, actually almost a three hour meeting. And both myself and our Flash CTO went up to the whiteboard, which you could then see over WebEx 'cause they had a camera showing up onto the whiteboard. So now you have to take that and use integrated tools. One, but since people are now, I would argue, over WebEx. There is a different feel to doing the WebEx than when you're doing it face to face. We have to fly somewhere, or they have to fly somewhere. We have to even drive somewhere, so in between meetings, if you're going to do four customer calls, Stu, as you know, I travel all over the world. So I was in Sweden actually right before COVID. And in one day, the day after we had a launch, we launched our new Flash System products in February on the 11th, on February 12th, I was still in Stockholm and I had two partner meetings and two end user meetings. But the sales guy was driving me around. So in between the meetings, you'd be in the car for 20 minutes or half an hour. So it connects different when you can do WebEx after WebEx after WebEx with basically no break. So you have to be sensitive to that when you're talking to your partners, sensitive of that when you're talking to the customers sensitive when you're talking to the analysts, such as you guys, sensitive when you're talking to the press and all your various constituents. So we've been doing that at IBM, really, since the COVID thing got started, is coming up with some best practices so we don't overtax the end users and overtax our channel partners. >> Yeah, Eric, the joke I had on that is we're all following the Bill Belichick model now, no days off, just meeting, meeting, meeting every day, you can stack them up, right? You used to enjoy those downtimes in between where you could catch up on a call, do some things. I had to carve out some time to make sure that stack of books that normally I would read in the airports or on flights, everything, you know. I do enjoy reading a book every now and again, so. Final thing, I guess, Eric. Here at VMworld 2020, you know, give us final takeaways that you want your customers to have when it comes to IBM and VMware. >> So a couple of things, A, we were tightly integrated and have been tightly integrated for what they've been doing in their traditional virtualization environment. As they move to containers we'll be tightly integrated with them as well, as well as other container platforms, not just from IBM with Red Hat, but again, generic Kubernetes environments with open source container configurations that don't use IBM Red Hat and don't use VMware. So we want to make sure that we span that. In traditional VMware environments, like with Version 7 that came out, we make sure we support it. In fact, VMware just announced support for NVMe over Fibre Channel. Well, we've been shipping NVMe over Fibre Channel for just under two years now. It'll be almost two years, well, it will be two years in October. So we're sitting here in September, it's almost been two years since we've been shipping that. But they haven't supported it, so now of course we actually, as part of our launch, I pre say something, as part of our launch, the last week of October at IBM's TechU it'll be on October 27th, you can join for free. You don't need to attend TechU, we'll have a free registration page. So just follow Zoginstor or look at my LinkedIns 'cause I'll be posting shortly when we have the link, but we'll be talking about things that we're doing around V7, with support for VMware's announcement of NVMe over Fibre Channel, even though we've had it for two years coming next month. But they're announcing support, so we're doing that as well. So all of those sort of checkbox items, we'll continue to do as they push forward into the container world. IBM will be there right with them as well because we know it's a very large world and we need to support everybody. We support VMware. We supported their competitors in the virtualization space 'cause some customers have, in fact, some customers have both. They've got VMware and maybe one other of the virtualization elements. Usually VMware is the dominant of course, but if they've got even a little bit of it, we need to make sure our storage works with it. We're going to do the same thing in the container world. So we will continue to push forward with VMware. It's a tight relationship, not just with IBM Storage, but with the server group, clearly with the cloud team. So we need to make sure that IBM as a company stays very close to VMware, as well as, obviously, what we're doing with Red Hat. And IBM Storage makes sure we will do both. I like to say that IBM Storage is a Switzerland of the storage industry. We work with everyone. We work with all these infrastructure players from the software world. And even with our competitors, our Spectrum Virtualized software that comes on our Flash Systems Array supports over 550 different storage arrays that are not IBM's. Delivering enterprise-class data services, such as snapshot, replication data, at rest encryption, migration, all those features, but you can buy the software and use it with our competitors' storage array. So at IBM we've made a practice of making sure that we're very inclusive with our software business across the whole company and in storage in particular with things like Spectrum Virtualize, with what we've done with our backup products, of course we backup everybody's stuff, not just ours. We're making sure we do the same thing in the virtualization environment. Particularly with VMware and where they're going into the container world and what we're doing with our own, obviously sister division, Red Hat, but even in a generic Kubernetes environment. Everyone's not going to buy Red Hat or VMware. There are people going to do Kubernetes industry standard, they're going to use that, if you will, open source container environment with Kubernetes on top and not use VMware and not use Red Hat. We're going to make sure if they do it, what I'll call generically, if they use Red Hat, if they use VMware or some combo, we will support all of it and that's very important for us at VMworld to make sure everyone is aware that while we may own Red Hat, we have a very strong, powerful connection to VMware and going to continue to do that in the future as well. >> Eric Herzog, thanks so much for joining us. Always a pleasure catching up with you. >> Thank you very much. We love being with theCUBE, you guys do great work at every show and one of these days I'll see you again and we'll have a beer. In person. >> Absolutely. So, definitely, Dave Vellante and John Furrier send their best, I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you as always for watching theCUBE. (relaxed electronic music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation! >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, your host for Cloud Native Insight. When we launched this series, one of the things we wanted to talk about was that we're not just using cloud as a destination, but really enabling new ways of thinking, being able to use the innovations underneath the cloud, and that if you use services in the cloud, that you're not necessarily locked into a solution or can't move forward. And that's why I'm really excited to help welcome to the program, I have the co-founders of Vendia. First we have Dr. Tim Wagner, he is the co-founder and CEO of the company, as well as generally known in the industry as the father of Serverless from the AWS Lambda, and his co-founder, Shruthi Rao, she is the chief business officer at Vendia, also came from AWS where she worked on blockchain solutions. Tim, Shruthi, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us in here, Stu. Great to join the show. >> All right, so Shruthi, actually if we could start with you because before we get into Vendia, coming out of stealth, you know, really interesting technology space, you and Tim both learned a lot from working with customers in your previous jobs, why don't we start from you. Block chain of course had a lot of learnings, a lot of things that people don't understand about what it is and what it isn't, so give us a little bit about what you've learned and how that lead towards what you and Tim and the team are doing with Vendia. >> Yeah, absolutely, Stu! One, the most important thing that we've all heard of was this great gravitational pull towards blockchain in 2018 and 2019. Well, I was one of the founders and early adopters of blockchain from Bitcoin and Ethereum space, all the way back from 2011 and onwards. And at AWS I started the Amazon Managed Blockchain and launched Quantum Ledger Database, two services in the block chain category. What I learned there was, no surprise, there was a gold rush to blockchain from many customers. We, I personally talked to over 1,092 customers when I ran Amazon Managed Blockchain for the last two years. And I found that customers were looking at solving this dispersed data problem. Most of my customers had invested in IoT and edge devices, and these devices were gathering massive amounts of data, and on the flip side they also had invested quite a bit of effort in AI and ML and analytics to crunch this data, give them intelligence. But guess what, this data existed in multiple parties, in multiple clouds, in multiple technology stacks, and they needed a mechanism to get this data from wherever they were into one place so they could the AI, ML, analytics investment, and they wanted all of this to be done in real time, and to gravitated towards blockchain. But blockchain had quite a bit of limitations, it was not scalable, it didn't work with the existing stack that you had. It forced enterprises to adopt this new technology and entirely new type of infrastructure. It didn't work cross-cloud unless you hired expensive consultants or did it yourself, and required these specialized developers. For all of these reasons, we've seen many POCs, majority of POCs just dying on the vine and not ever reaching the production potential. So, that is when I realized that what the problem to be solved was not a trust problem, the problem was dispersed data in multiple clouds and multiple stacks problem. Sometimes multiple parties, even, problem. And that's when Tim and I started talking about, about how can we bring all of the nascent qualities of Lambda and Serverless and use all of the features of blockchain and build something together? And he has an interesting story on his own, right. >> Yeah. Yeah, Shruthi, if I could, I'd like to get a little bit of that. So, first of all for our audience, if you're watching this on the minute, probably want to hit pause, you know, go search Tim, go watch a video, read his Medium post, about the past, present, and future of Serverless. But Tim, I'm excited. You and I have talked in the past, but finally getting you on theCUBE program. >> Yeah! >> You know, I've looked through my career, and my background is infrastructure, and the role of infrastructure we know is always just to support the applications and the data that run business, that's what is important! Even when you talk about cloud, it is the applications, you know, the code, and the data that are important. So, it's not that, you know, okay I've got near infinite compute capacity, it's the new things that I can do with it. That's a comment I heard in one of your sessions. You talked about one of the most fascinating things about Serverless was just the new creativity that it inspired people to do, and I loved it wasn't just unlocking developers to say, okay I have new ways to write things, but even people that weren't traditional coders, like lots of people in marketing that were like, "I can start with this and build something new." So, I guess the question I have for you is, you know we had this idea of Platform as a Service, or even when things like containers launched, it was, we were trying to get close to that atomic unit of the application, and often it was talked about, well, do I want it for portability? Is it for ease of use? So, you've been wrangling and looking at this (Tim laughing) from a lot of different ways. So, is that as a starting point, you know, what did you see the last few years with Lambda, and you know, help connect this up to where Shruthi just left off her bit of the story. >> Absolutely. You know, the great story, the great success of the cloud is this elimination of undifferentiated heavy lifting, you know, from getting rid of having to build out a data center, to all the complexity of managing hardware. And that first wave of cloud adoption was just phenomenally successful at that. But as you say, the real thing businesses wrestle with are applications, right? It's ultimately about the business solution, not the hardware and software on which it runs. So, the very first time I sat down with Andy Jassy to talk about what eventually become Lambda, you know, one of the things I said was, look, if we want to get 10x the number of people to come and, you know, and be in the cloud and be successful it has to be 10 times simpler than it is today. You know, if step one is hire an amazing team of distributed engineers to turn a server into a full tolerance, scalable, reliable business solution, now that's going to be fundamentally limiting. We have to find a way to put that in a box, give that capability, you know, to people, without having them go hire that and build that out in the first place. And so that kind of started this journey for, for compute, we're trying to solve the problem of making compute as easy to use as possible. You know, take some code, as you said, even if you're not a diehard programmer or backend engineer, maybe you're just a full-stack engineer who loves working on the front-end, but the backend isn't your focus, turn that into something that is as scalable, as robust, as secure as somebody who has spent their entire career working on that. And that was the promise of Serverless, you know, outside of the specifics of any one cloud. Now, the challenge of course when you talk to customers, you know, is that you always heard the same two considerations. One is, I love the idea of Lamdba, but it's AWS, maybe I have multiple departments or business partners, or need to kind of work on multiple clouds. The other challenge is fantastic for compute, what about data? You know, you've kind of left me with, you're giving me sort of half the solution, you've made my compute super easy to use, can you make my data equally easy to use? And so you know, obviously the part of the genesis of Vendia is going and tackling those pieces of this, giving all that promise and ease of use of Serverless, now with a model for replicated state and data, and one that can cross accounts, machines, departments, clouds, companies, as easily as it scales on a single cloud today. >> Okay, so you covered quite a bit of ground there Tim, if you could just unpack that a little bit, because you're talking about state, cutting across environments. What is it that Vendia is bringing, how does that tie into solutions like, you know, Lamdba as you mentioned, but other clouds or even potentially on premises solutions? So, what is, you know, the IP, the code, the solution that Vendia's offering? >> Happy to! So, let's start with the customer problem here. The thing that every enterprise, every company, frankly, wrestles with is in the modern world they're producing more data than ever, IMT, digital journeys, you know, mobile, edge devices. More data coming in than ever before, at the same time, more data getting consumed than ever before with deep analytics, supply chain optimization, AI, ML. So, even more consumers of ever more data. The challenge, of course, is that data isn't always inside a company's four walls. In fact, we've heard 80% or more of that data actually lives outside of a company's control. So, step one to doing something like AI, ML, isn't even just picking a product or selecting a technology, it's getting all of your data back together again, so that's the problem that we set out to solve with Vendia, and we realized that, you know, and kind of part of the genesis for the name here, you know, Vendia comes from Venn Diagram. So, part of that need to bring code and data together across companies, across tech stacks, means the ability to solve some of these long-standing challenges. And we looked at the two sort of big movements out there. Two of them, you know, we've obviously both been involved in, one of them was Serverless, which amazing ability to scale, but single account, single cloud, single company. The other one is blockchain and distributed ledgers, manages to run more across parties, across clouds, across tech stacks, but doesn't have a great mechanism for scalability, it's really a single box deployment model, and obviously there are a lot of limitations with that. So, our technology, and kind of our insight and breakthrough here was bringing those two things together by solving the problems in each of them with the best parts of the other. So, reimagine the blockchain as a cloud data implementation built entirely out of Serverless components that have all of the scale, the cost efficiencies, the high utilization, like all of the ease of deployment that something like Lambda has today, and at the same time, you know, bring state to Serverless. Give things like Lambda and the equivalent of other clouds a simple, easy, built-in model so that applications can have multicloud, multi-account state at all times, rather than turning that into a complicated DIY project. So, that was our insight here, you know and frankly where a lot of the interesting technology for us is in turning those centralized services, a centralized version of Serverless Compute or Serverless Database into a multi-account, multicloud experience. And so that's where we spent a lot of time and energy trying to build something that gives customers a great experience. >> Yeah, so I've got plenty of background in customers that, you know, have the "information silos", if you will, so we know, when the unstructured data, you know so much of it is not searchable, I can't leverage it. Shruthi, but maybe it might make sense, you know, what is, would you say some of the top things some of your early customers are saying? You know, I have this pain point, that's pointing me in your direction, what was leading them to you? And how does the solution help them solve that problem? >> Yeah, absolutely! One of our design partners, our lead design partners is this automotive company, they're a premier automotive company, they want, their end goal is to track car parts for warranty recall issues. So, they want to track every single part that goes into a particular car, so they're about 30 to 35,000 parts in each of these cars, and then all the way from manufacturing floor to when the car is sold, and when that particular part is replaced eventually, towards the end of the lifecycle of that part. So for this, they have put together a small test group of their partners, a couple of the parts manufacturers, they're second care partners, National Highway Safety Administration is part of this group, also a couple of dealers and service centers. Now, if you just look at this group of partners, you will see some of these parties have high technology, technology backgrounds, just like the auto manufacturers themselves or the part manufacturers. Low modality or low IT-competency partners such as the service centers, for them desktop PCs are literally the IT competency, and so does the service centers. Now, most of, majority of these are on multiple clouds. This particular auto customer is on AWS and manufactures on Azure, another one is on GCP. Now, they all have to share these large files between each other, making sure that there are some transparency and business rules applicable. For example, two partners who make the same parts or similar parts cannot see each other's data. Most of the participants cannot see the PII data that are not applicable, only the service center can see that. National Highway Safety Administration has read access, not write access. A lot of that needed to be done, and their alternatives before they started using Vendia was either use point-to-point APIs, which was very expensive, very cumbersome, it works for a finite small set of parties, it does not scale, as in when you add more participants into this particular network. And the second option for them was blockchain, which they did use, and used Hyperledger Fabric, they used Ethereum Private to see how this works, but the scalability, with Ethereum Private, it's about 14 to 15 transactions per second, with Hyperledger Fabric it taps out at 100, or 150 on a good day, transaction through, but it's not just useful. All of these are always-on systems, they're not Serverless, so just provisioning capacity, our customers said it took them two to three weeks per participant. So, it's just not a scalable solution. With Vendia, what we delivered to them was this virtual data lake, where the sources of this data are on multiple clouds, are on multiple accounts owned by multiple parties, but all of that data is shared on a virtual data lake with all of the permissions, with all of the logging, with all of the security, PII, and compliance. Now, this particular auto manufacturer and the National Highway Safety Administration can run their ML algorithms to gain intelligence off of it, and start to understand patterns, so when certain parts go bad, or what's the propensity of a certain manufacturing unit producing faulty parts, and so on, and so forth. This really shows you this concept of unstructured data being shared between parties that are not, you know, connected with each other, when there are data silos. But I'd love to follow this up with another example of, you know, the democratization, democratization is very important to Vendia. When Tim launched Lambda and founded the AWS Serverless movement as a whole, and at AWS, one thing, very important thing happened, it lowered the barrier to entry for a new wave of businesses that could just experiment, try out new things, if it failed, they scrap it, if it worked, they could scale it out. And that was possible because of the entry point, because of the paper used, and the architecture itself, and we are, our vision and mission for Vendia is that Vendia fuels the next generation of multi-party connected distributed applications. My second design partner is actually a non-profit that, in the animal welfare industry. Their mission is to maintain a no-kill for dogs and cats in the United States. And the number one reason for over populations of dogs and cats in the shelters is dogs lost, dogs and cats lost during natural disasters, like the hurricane season. And when that happens, and when, let's say your dogs get lost, and you want to find a dog, the ID or the chip-reading is not reliable, they want to search this through pictures. But we also know that if you look at a picture of a dog, four people can come up with four different breed names, and this particular non-profit has 2,500 plus partners across the U.S., and they're all low to no IT modalities, some of them have higher IT competency, and a huge turnover because of volunteer employees. So, what we did for them was came up with a mechanism where they could connect with all 2,500 of these participants very easily in a very cost-effective way and get all of the pictures of all of the dogs in all these repositories into one data lake so they can run some kind of a dog facial recognition algorithm on it and identify where my lost dog is in minutes as opposed to days it used to take before. So, you see a very large customer with very sophisticated IT competency use this, also a non-profit being able to use this. And they were both able to get to this outcome in days, not months or years, as, blockchain, but just under a few days, so we're very excited about that. >> Thank you so much for the examples. All right, Tim, before we get to the end, I wonder if you could take us under the hood a little bit here. My understanding, the solution that you talk about, it's universal apps, or what you call "unis" -- >> Tim: Unis? (laughs) >> I believe, so if I saw that right, give me a little bit of compare and contrast, if you will. Obviously there's been a lot of interest in what Kubernetes has been doing. We've been watching closely, you know there's connections between what Kubernetes is doing and Serverless with the Knative project. When I saw the first video talking about Vendia, you said, "We're serverless, and we're containerless underneath." So, help us understand, because at, you know, a super high level, some of the multicloud and making things very flexible sound very similar. So you know, how is Vendia different, and why do you feel your architecture helps solve this really challenging problem? >> Sure, sure, awesome! You know, look, one of the tenets that we had here was that things have to be as easy as possible for customers, and if you think about the way somebody walks up today to an existing database system, right? They say, "Look, I've got a schema, I know the shape of my data." And a few minutes later I can get a production database, now it's single user, single cloud, single consumer there, but it's a very fast, simple process that doesn't require having code, hiring a team, et cetera, and we wanted Vendia to work the same way. Somebody can walk up with a JSON schema, hand it to us, five minutes later they have a database, only now it's a multiparty database that's decentralized, so runs across multiple platforms, multiple clouds, you know, multiple technology stacks instead of being single user. So, that's kind of goal one, is like make that as easy to use as possible. The other key tenet though is we don't want to be the least common denominator of the cloud. One of the challenges with saying everyone's going to deploy their own servers, they're going to run all their own software, they're going to build, you know, they're all going to co-deploy a Kubernetes cluster, one of the challenges with that is that, as Shruthi was saying, first, anyone for whom that's a challenge, if you don't have a whole IT department wrapped around you that's a difficult proposition to get started on no matter how amazing that technology might be. The other challenge with it though is that it locks you out, sort of the universe of a lock-in process, right, is the lock-out process. It locks you out of some of the best and brightest things the public cloud providers have come up with, and we wanted to empower customers, you know, to pick the best degree. Maybe they want to go use IBM Watson, maybe they want to use a database on Google, and at the same time they want to ingest IoT on AWS, and they wanted all to work together, and want all of that to be seamless, not something where they have to recreate an experience over, and over, and over again on three different clouds. So, that was our goal here in producing this. What we designed as an architecture was decentralized data storage at the core of it. So, think about all the precepts you hear with blockchain, they're all there, they all just look different. So, we use a no SQL database to store data so that we can scale that easily. We still have a consensus algorithm, only now it's a high speed serverless and cloud function based mechanism. You know, instead of smart contracts, you write things in a cloud function like Lambda instead, so no more learning Solidity, now you can use any language you want. So, we changed how we think about that architecture, but many of those ideas about people, really excited about blockchain and its capabilities and the vision for the future are still alive and well, they've just been implemented in a way that's far more practical and effective for the enterprise. >> All right, so what environments can I use today for your solution, Shruthi talked about customers spanning across some of the cloud, so what's available kind of today, what's on the roadmap in the future? Will this include beyond, you know, maybe the top five or six hyper scalers? Can I do, does it just require Serverless underneath? So, will things that are in a customer's own data center eventually support that. >> Absolutely. So, what we're doing right now is having people sign up for our preview release, so in the next few weeks, we're going to start turning that on for early access to developers. That'll be, the early access program, will be multi-account, focused on AWS, and then end of summer, well be doing our GA release, which will be multicloud, so we'll actually be able to operate across multiple clouds, multiple cloud services, on different platforms. But even from day one, we'll have API support in there. So, if you got a service, could even be running on a mainframe, could be on-prem, if it's API based you can still interact with the data, and still get the benefits of the system. So, developers, please start signing up, you can go find more information on vendia.net, and we're really looking forward to getting some of that early feedback and hear more from the people that we're the most excited to have start building these projects. >> Excellent, what a great call to action to get the developers and users in there. Shruthi, if you could just give us the last bit, you know, the thing that's been fascinating, Tim, when I look at the Serverless movement, you know, I've talked to some amazing companies that were two or three people (Tim laughing) and out of their basement, and they created a business, and they're like, "Oh my gosh, I got VC funding, and it's usually sub $10,000,000. So, I look at your team, I'd heard, Tim, you're the primary coder on the team. (Tim laughing) And when it comes to the seed funding it's, you know, compared to many startups, it's a small number. So, Shruthi, give us a little bit if you could the speeds and feeds of the company, your funding, and any places that you're hiring. Yeah, we are definitely hiring, lets me start from there! (Tim laughing) We're hiring for developers, and we are also hiring for solution architects, so please go to vendia.net, we have all the roles listed there, we would love to hear from you! And the second one, funding, yes. Tim is our main developer and solutions architect here, and look, the Serverless movement really helped quite a few companies, including us, to build this, bring this to market in record speeds, and we're very thankful that Tim and AWS started taking the stands, you know back in 2014, 2013, to bring this to market and democratize this. I think when we brought this new concept to our investors, they saw what this could be. It's not an easy concept to understand in the first wave, but when you understand the problem space, you see that the opportunity is pretty endless. And I'll say this for our investors, on behalf of our investors, that they saw a real founder market-fit between us. We're literally the two people who have launched and ran businesses for both Serverless and blockchain at scale, so that's what they thought was very attractive to them, and then look, it's Tim and I, and we're looking to hire 8 to 10 folks, and I think we have gotten to a space where we're making a meaningful difference to the world, and we would love for more people to join us, join this movement and democratize this big dispersed data problem and solve for this. And help us create more meanings to the data that our customers and companies worldwide are creating. We're very excited, and we're very thankful for all of our investors to be deeply committed to us and having conviction on us. >> Well, Shruthi and Tim, first of all, congratulations -- >> Thank you, thank you. >> Absolutely looking forward to, you know, watching the progress going forward. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu, thank you. >> Thanks, Stu! >> All right, and definitely tune in to our regular conversations on Cloud Native Insights. I'm your host Stu Miniman, and looking forward to hearing more about your Cloud Native Insights! (upbeat electronic music)

>> Paige: Hello everybody and thank you for joining us today for the virtual Vertica BDC 2020. Today's breakout session is entitled End-to-End Security in Vertica. I'm Paige Roberts, Open Source Relations Manager at Vertica. I'll be your host for this session. Joining me is Vertica Software Engineers, Fenic Fawkes and Chris Morris. Before we begin, I encourage you to submit your questions or comments during the virtual session. You don't have to wait until the end. Just type your question or comment in the question box below the slide as it occurs to you and click submit. There will be a Q&A session at the end of the presentation and we'll answer as many questions as we're able to during that time. Any questions that we don't address, we'll do our best to answer offline. Also, you can visit Vertica forums to post your questions there after the session. Our team is planning to join the forums to keep the conversation going, so it'll be just like being at a conference and talking to the engineers after the presentation. Also, a reminder that you can maximize your screen by clicking the double arrow button in the lower right corner of the slide. And before you ask, yes, this whole session is being recorded and it will be available to view on-demand this week. We'll send you a notification as soon as it's ready. I think we're ready to get started. Over to you, Fen. >> Fenic: Hi, welcome everyone. My name is Fen. My pronouns are fae/faer and Chris will be presenting the second half, and his pronouns are he/him. So to get started, let's kind of go over what the goals of this presentation are. First off, no deployment is the same. So we can't give you an exact, like, here's the right way to secure Vertica because how it is to set up a deployment is a factor. But the biggest one is, what is your threat model? So, if you don't know what a threat model is, let's take an example. We're all working from home because of the coronavirus and that introduces certain new risks. Our source code is on our laptops at home, that kind of thing. But really our threat model isn't that people will read our code and copy it, like, over our shoulders. So we've encrypted our hard disks and that kind of thing to make sure that no one can get them. So basically, what we're going to give you are building blocks and you can pick and choose the pieces that you need to secure your Vertica deployment. We hope that this gives you a good foundation for how to secure Vertica. And now, what we're going to talk about. So we're going to start off by going over encryption, just how to secure your data from attackers. And then authentication, which is kind of how to log in. Identity, which is who are you? Authorization, which is now that we know who you are, what can you do? Delegation is about how Vertica talks to other systems. And then auditing and monitoring. So, how do you protect your data in transit? Vertica makes a lot of network connections. Here are the important ones basically. There are clients talk to Vertica cluster. Vertica cluster talks to itself. And it can also talk to other Vertica clusters and it can make connections to a bunch of external services. So first off, let's talk about client-server TLS. Securing data between, this is how you secure data between Vertica and clients. It prevents an attacker from sniffing network traffic and say, picking out sensitive data. Clients have a way to configure how strict the authentication is of the server cert. It's called the Client SSLMode and we'll talk about this more in a bit but authentication methods can disable non-TLS connections, which is a pretty cool feature. Okay, so Vertica also makes a lot of network connections within itself. So if Vertica is running behind a strict firewall, you have really good network, both physical and software security, then it's probably not super important that you encrypt all traffic between nodes. But if you're on a public cloud, you can set up AWS' firewall to prevent connections, but if there's a vulnerability in that, then your data's all totally vulnerable. So it's a good idea to set up inter-node encryption in less secure situations. Next, import/export is a good way to move data between clusters. So for instance, say you have an on-premises cluster and you're looking to move to AWS. Import/Export is a great way to move your data from your on-prem cluster to AWS, but that means that the data is going over the open internet. And that is another case where an attacker could try to sniff network traffic and pull out credit card numbers or whatever you have stored in Vertica that's sensitive. So it's a good idea to secure data in that case. And then we also connect to a lot of external services. Kafka, Hadoop, S3 are three of them. Voltage SecureData, which we'll talk about more in a sec, is another. And because of how each service deals with authentication, how to configure your authentication to them differs. So, see our docs. And then I'd like to talk a little bit about where we're going next. Our main goal at this point is making Vertica easier to use. Our first objective was security, was to make sure everything could be secure, so we built relatively low-level building blocks. Now that we've done that, we can identify common use cases and automate them. And that's where our attention is going. Okay, so we've talked about how to secure your data over the network, but what about when it's on disk? There are several different encryption approaches, each depends on kind of what your use case is. RAID controllers and disk encryption are mostly for on-prem clusters and they protect against media theft. They're invisible to Vertica. S3 and GCP are kind of the equivalent in the cloud. They also invisible to Vertica. And then there's field-level encryption, which we accomplish using Voltage SecureData, which is format-preserving encryption. So how does Voltage work? Well, it, the, yeah. It encrypts values to things that look like the same format. So for instance, you can see date of birth encrypted to something that looks like a date of birth but it is not in fact the same thing. You could do cool stuff like with a credit card number, you can encrypt only the first 12 digits, allowing the user to, you know, validate the last four. The benefits of format-preserving encryption are that it doesn't increase database size, you don't need to alter your schema or anything. And because of referential integrity, it means that you can do analytics without unencrypting the data. So again, a little diagram of how you could work Voltage into your use case. And you could even work with Vertica's row and column access policies, which Chris will talk about a bit later, for even more customized access control. Depending on your use case and your Voltage integration. We are enhancing our Voltage integration in several ways in 10.0 and if you're interested in Voltage, you can go see their virtual BDC talk. And then again, talking about roadmap a little, we're working on in-database encryption at rest. What this means is kind of a Vertica solution to encryption at rest that doesn't depend on the platform that you're running on. Encryption at rest is hard. (laughs) Encrypting, say, 10 petabytes of data is a lot of work. And once again, the theme of this talk is everyone has a different key management strategy, a different threat model, so we're working on designing a solution that fits everyone. If you're interested, we'd love to hear from you. Contact us on the Vertica forums. All right, next up we're going to talk a little bit about access control. So first off is how do I prove who I am? How do I log in? So, Vertica has several authentication methods. Which one is best depends on your deployment size/use case. Again, theme of this talk is what you should use depends on your use case. You could order authentication methods by priority and origin. So for instance, you can only allow connections from within your internal network or you can enforce TLS on connections from external networks but relax that for connections from your internal network. That kind of thing. So we have a bunch of built-in authentication methods. They're all password-based. User profiles allow you to set complexity requirements of passwords and you can even reject non-TLS connections, say, or reject certain kinds of connections. Should only be used by small deployments because you probably have an LDAP server, where you manage users if you're a larger deployment and rather than duplicating passwords and users all in LDAP, you should use LDAP Auth, where Vertica still has to keep track of users, but each user can then use LDAP authentication. So Vertica doesn't store the password at all. The client gives Vertica a username and password and Vertica then asks the LDAP server is this a correct username or password. And the benefits of this are, well, manyfold, but if, say, you delete a user from LDAP, you don't need to remember to also delete their Vertica credentials. You can just, they won't be able to log in anymore because they're not in LDAP anymore. If you like LDAP but you want something a little bit more secure, Kerberos is a good idea. So similar to LDAP, Vertica doesn't keep track of who's allowed to log in, it just keeps track of the Kerberos credentials and it even, Vertica never touches the user's password. Users log in to Kerberos and then they pass Vertica a ticket that says "I can log in." It is more complex to set up, so if you're just getting started with security, LDAP is probably a better option. But Kerberos is, again, a little bit more secure. If you're looking for something that, you know, works well for applications, certificate auth is probably what you want. Rather than hardcoding a password, or storing a password in a script that you use to run an application, you can instead use a certificate. So, if you ever need to change it, you can just replace the certificate on disk and the next time the application starts, it just picks that up and logs in. Yeah. And then, multi-factor auth is a feature request we've gotten in the past and it's not built-in to Vertica but you can do it using Kerberos. So, security is a whole application concern and fitting MFA into your workflow is all about fitting it in at the right layer. And we believe that that layer is above Vertica. If you're interested in more about how MFA works and how to set it up, we wrote a blog on how to do it. And now, over to Chris, for more on identity and authorization. >> Chris: Thanks, Fen. Hi everyone, I'm Chris. So, we're a Vertica user and we've connected to Vertica but once we're in the database, who are we? What are we? So in Vertica, the answer to that questions is principals. Users and roles, which are like groups in other systems. Since roles can be enabled and disabled at will and multiple roles can be active, they're a flexible way to use only the privileges you need in the moment. For example here, you've got Alice who has Dbadmin as a role and those are some elevated privileges. She probably doesn't want them active all the time, so she can set the role and add them to her identity set. All of this information is stored in the catalog, which is basically Vertica's metadata storage. How do we manage these principals? Well, depends on your use case, right? So, if you're a small organization or maybe only some people or services need Vertica access, the solution is just to manage it with Vertica. You can see some commands here that will let you do that. But what if we're a big organization and we want Vertica to reflect what's in our centralized user management system? Sort of a similar motivating use case for LDAP authentication, right? We want to avoid duplication hassles, we just want to centralize our management. In that case, we can use Vertica's LDAPLink feature. So with LDAPLink, principals are mirrored from LDAP. They're synced in a considerable fashion from the LDAP into Vertica's catalog. What this does is it manages creating and dropping users and roles for you and then mapping the users to the roles. Once that's done, you can do any Vertica-specific configuration on the Vertica side. It's important to note that principals created in Vertica this way, support multiple forms of authentication, not just LDAP. This is a separate feature from LDAP authentication and if you created a user via LDAPLink, you could have them use a different form of authentication, Kerberos, for example. Up to you. Now of course this kind of system is pretty mission-critical, right? You want to make sure you get the right roles and the right users and the right mappings in Vertica. So you probably want to test it. And for that, we've got new and improved dry run functionality, from 9.3.1. And what this feature offers you is new metafunctions that let you test various parameters without breaking your real LDAPLink configuration. So you can mess around with parameters and the configuration as much as you want and you can be sure that all of that is strictly isolated from the live system. Everything's separated. And when you use this, you get some really nice output through a Data Collector table. You can see some example output here. It runs the same logic as the real LDAPLink and provides detailed information about what would happen. You can check the documentation for specifics. All right, so we've connected to the database, we know who we are, but now, what can we do? So for any given action, you want to control who can do that, right? So what's the question you have to ask? Sometimes the question is just who are you? It's a simple yes or no question. For example, if I want to upgrade a user, the question I have to ask is, am I the superuser? If I'm the superuser, I can do it, if I'm not, I can't. But sometimes the actions are more complex and the question you have to ask is more complex. Does the principal have the required privileges? If you're familiar with SQL privileges, there are things like SELECT, INSERT, and Vertica has a few of their own, but the key thing here is that an action can require specific and maybe even multiple privileges on multiple objects. So for example, when selecting from a table, you need USAGE on the schema and SELECT on the table. And there's some other examples here. So where do these privileges come from? Well, if the action requires a privilege, these are the only places privileges can come from. The first source is implicit privileges, which could come from owning the object or from special roles, which we'll talk about in a sec. Explicit privileges, it's basically a SQL standard GRANT system. So you can grant privileges to users or roles and optionally, those users and roles could grant them downstream. Discretionary access control. So those are explicit and they come from the user and the active roles. So the whole identity set. And then we've got Vertica-specific inherited privileges and those come from the schema, and we'll talk about that in a sec as well. So these are the special roles in Vertica. First role, DBADMIN. This isn't the Dbadmin user, it's a role. And it has specific elevated privileges. You can check the documentation for those exact privileges but it's less than the superuser. The PSEUDOSUPERUSER can do anything the real superuser can do and you can grant this role to whomever. The DBDUSER is actually a role, can run Database Designer functions. SYSMONITOR gives you some elevated auditing permissions and we'll talk about that later as well. And finally, PUBLIC is a role that everyone has all the time so anything you want to be allowed for everyone, attach to PUBLIC. Imagine this scenario. I've got a really big schema with lots of relations. Those relations might be changing all the time. But for each principal that uses this schema, I want the privileges for all the tables and views there to be roughly the same. Even though the tables and views come and go, for example, an analyst might need full access to all of them no matter how many there are or what there are at any given time. So to manage this, my first approach I could use is remember to run grants every time a new table or view is created. And not just you but everyone using this schema. Not only is it a pain, it's hard to enforce. The second approach is to use schema-inherited privileges. So in Vertica, schema grants can include relational privileges. For example, SELECT or INSERT, which normally don't mean anything for a schema, but they do for a table. If a relation's marked as inheriting, then the schema grants to a principal, for example, salespeople, also apply to the relation. And you can see on the diagram here how the usage applies to the schema and the SELECT technically but in Sales.foo table, SELECT also applies. So now, instead of lots of GRANT statements for multiple object owners, we only have to run one ALTER SCHEMA statement and three GRANT statements and from then on, any time that you grant some privileges or revoke privileges to or on the schema, to or from a principal, all your new tables and views will get them automatically. So it's dynamically calculated. Now of course, setting it up securely, is that you want to know what's happened here and what's going on. So to monitor the privileges, there are three system tables which you want to look at. The first is grants, which will show you privileges that are active for you. That is your user and active roles and theirs and so on down the chain. Grants will show you the explicit privileges and inherited_privileges will show you the inherited ones. And then there's one more inheriting_objects which will show all tables and views which inherit privileges so that's useful more for not seeing privileges themselves but managing inherited privileges in general. And finally, how do you see all privileges from all these sources, right? In one go, you want to see them together? Well, there's a metafunction added in 9.3.1. Get_privileges_description which will, given an object, it will sum up all the privileges for a current user on that object. I'll refer you to the documentation for usage and supported types. Now, the problem with SELECT. SELECT let's you see everything or nothing. You can either read the table or you can't. But what if you want some principals to see subset or a transformed version of the data. So for example, I have a table with personnel data and different principals, as you can see here, need different access levels to sensitive information. Social security numbers. Well, one thing I could do is I could make a view for each principal. But I could also use access policies and access policies can do this without introducing any new objects or dependencies. It centralizes your restriction logic and makes it easier to manage. So what do access policies do? Well, we've got row and column access policies. Rows will hide and column access policies will transform data in the row or column, depending on who's doing the SELECTing. So it transforms the data, as we saw on the previous slide, to look as requested. Now, if access policies let you see the raw data, you can still modify the data. And the implication of this is that when you're crafting access policies, you should only use them to refine access for principals that need read-only access. That is, if you want a principal to be able to modify it, the access policies you craft should let through the raw data for that principal. So in our previous example, the loader service should be able to see every row and it should be able to see untransformed data in every column. And as long as that's true, then they can continue to load into this table. All of this is of course monitorable by a system table, in this case access_policy. Check the docs for more information on how to implement these. All right, that's it for access control. Now on to delegation and impersonation. So what's the question here? Well, the question is who is Vertica? And that might seem like a silly question, but here's what I mean by that. When Vertica's connecting to a downstream service, for example, cloud storage, how should Vertica identify itself? Well, most of the time, we do the permissions check ourselves and then we connect as Vertica, like in this diagram here. But sometimes we can do better. And instead of connecting as Vertica, we connect with some kind of upstream user identity. And when we do that, we let the service decide who can do what, so Vertica isn't the only line of defense. And in addition to the defense in depth benefit, there are also benefits for auditing because the external system can see who is really doing something. It's no longer just Vertica showing up in that external service's logs, it's somebody like Alice or Bob, trying to do something. One system where this comes into play is with Voltage SecureData. So, let's look at a couple use cases. The first one, I'm just encrypting for compliance or anti-theft reasons. In this case, I'll just use one global identity to encrypt or decrypt with Voltage. But imagine another use case, I want to control which users can decrypt which data. Now I'm using Voltage for access control. So in this case, we want to delegate. The solution here is on the Voltage side, give Voltage users access to appropriate identities and these identities control encryption for sets of data. A Voltage user can access multiple identities like groups. Then on the Vertica side, a Vertica user can set their Voltage username and password in a session and Vertica will talk to Voltage as that Voltage user. So in the diagram here, you can see an example of how this is leverage so that Alice could decrypt something but Bob cannot. Another place the delegation paradigm shows up is with storage. So Vertica can store and interact with data on non-local file systems. For example, HGFS or S3. Sometimes Vertica's storing Vertica-managed data there. For example, in Eon mode, you might store your projections in communal storage in S3. But sometimes, Vertica is interacting with external data. For example, this usually maps to a user storage location in the Vertica side and it might, on the external storage side, be something like Parquet files on Hadoop. And in that case, it's not really Vertica's data and we don't want to give Vertica more power than it needs, so let's request the data on behalf of who needs it. Lets say I'm an analyst and I want to copy from or export to Parquet, using my own bucket. It's not Vertica's bucket, it's my data. But I want Vertica to manipulate data in it. So the first option I have is to give Vertica as a whole access to the bucket and that's problematic because in that case, Vertica becomes kind of an AWS god. It can see any bucket, any Vertica user might want to push or pull data to or from any time Vertica wants. So it's not good for the principals of least access and zero trust. And we can do better than that. So in the second option, use an ID and secret key pair for an AWS, IAM, if you're familiar, principal that does have access to the bucket. So I might use my, the analyst, credentials, or I might use credentials for an AWS role that has even fewer privileges than I do. Sort of a restricted subset of my privileges. And then I use that. I set it in Vertica at the session level and Vertica will use those credentials for the copy export commands. And it gives more isolation. Something that's in the works is support for keyless delegation, using assumable IAM roles. So similar benefits to option two here, but also not having to manage keys at the user level. We can do basically the same thing with Hadoop and HGFS with three different methods. So first option is Kerberos delegation. I think it's the most secure. It definitely, if access control is your primary concern here, this will give you the tightest access control. The downside is it requires the most configuration outside of Vertica with Kerberos and HGFS but with this, you can really determine which Vertica users can talk to which HGFS locations. Then, you've got secure impersonation. If you've got a highly trusted Vertica userbase, or at least some subset of it is, and you're not worried about them doing things wrong but you want to know about auditing on the HGFS side, that's your primary concern, you can use this option. This diagram here gives you a visual overview of how that works. But I'll refer you to the docs for details. And then finally, option three, this is bringing your own delegation token. It's similar to what we do with AWS. We set something in the session level, so it's very flexible. The user can do it at an ad hoc basis, but it is manual, so that's the third option. Now on to auditing and monitoring. So of course, we want to know, what's happening in our database? It's important in general and important for incident response, of course. So your first stop, to answer this question, should be system tables. And they're a collection of information about events, system state, performance, et cetera. They're SELECT-only tables, but they work in queries as usual. The data is just loaded differently. So there are two types generally. There's the metadata table, which stores persistent information or rather reflects persistent information stored in the catalog, for example, users or schemata. Then there are monitoring tables, which reflect more transient information, like events, system resources. Here you can see an example of output from the resource pool's storage table which, these are actually, despite that it looks like system statistics, they're actually configurable parameters for using that. If you're interested in resource pools, a way to handle users' resource allocation and various principal's resource allocation, again, check that out on the docs. Then of course, there's the followup question, who can see all of this? Well, some system information is sensitive and we should only show it to those who need it. Principal of least privilege, right? So of course the superuser can see everything, but what about non-superusers? How do we give access to people that might need additional information about the system without giving them too much power? One option's SYSMONITOR, as I mentioned before, it's a special role. And this role can always read system tables but not change things like a superuser would be able to. Just reading. And another option is the RESTRICT and RELEASE metafunctions. Those grant and revoke access to from a certain system table set, to and from the PUBLIC role. But the downside of those approaches is that they're inflexible. So they only give you, they're all or nothing. For a specific preset of tables. And you can't really configure it per table. So if you're willing to do a little more setup, then I'd recommend using your own grants and roles. System tables support GRANT and REVOKE statements just like any regular relations. And in that case, I wouldn't even bother with SYSMONITOR or the metafunctions. So to do this, just grant whatever privileges you see fit to roles that you create. Then go ahead and grant those roles to the users that you want. And revoke access to the system tables of your choice from PUBLIC. If you need even finer-grained access than this, you can create views on top of system tables. For example, you can create a view on top of the user system table which only shows the current user's information, uses a built-in function that you can use as part of the view definition. And then, you can actually grant this to PUBLIC, so that each user in Vertica could see their own user's information and never give access to the user system table as a whole, just that view. Now if you're a superuser or if you have direct access to nodes in the cluster, filesystem/OS, et cetera, then you have more ways to see events. Vertica supports various methods of logging. You can see a few methods here which are generally outside of running Vertica, you'd interact with them in a different way, with the exception of active events which is a system table. We've also got the data collector. And that sorts events by subjects. So what the data collector does, it extends the logging and system table functionality, by the component, is what it's called in the documentation. And it logs these events and information to rotating files. For example, AnalyzeStatistics is a function that could be of use by users and as a database administrator, you might want to monitor that so you can use the data collector for AnalyzeStatistics. And the files that these create can be exported into a monitoring database. One example of that is with the Management Console Extended Monitoring. So check out their virtual BDC talk. The one on the management console. And that's it for the key points of security in Vertica. Well, many of these slides could spawn a talk on their own, so we encourage you to check out our blog, check out the documentation and the forum for further investigation and collaboration. Hopefully the information we provided today will inform your choices in securing your deployment of Vertica. Thanks for your time today. That concludes our presentation. Now, we're ready for Q&A.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019. And a special segment, we're actually going to doing our 2020 predictions. I am Stu Miniman, joining me, my two co-hosts of the week. To my left is Justin Warren, who I believe's been to, you went to the first one? >> I've been to all four, yeah. >> All four of the North America shows. >> Yep. >> I personally have been now to three of the North American, as well as one in the Barcelona. And we have a first time KubeConner, but long time host of theCUBE and things, John Troyer to my right. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. So first thing, the rapid fire. 12,000 in attendance. Last year 8,000, the year before 4,000. So, my math says that it will be 16,000 when we come next year to beautiful November in Boston, Massachusetts, which I can drive to. We've had snow in Austin, rain in San Diego. So, I'm predicting 60 to 70 degree weather in Boston, 'cause that never happens in Boston. Number of attendees next year, Justin? >> Well, it was doubling and now they have dropped it to 50%, so I reckon another 50%, I'll reckon 18 to 20,000. >> Stu: Oh, John? >> Yeah, I'll go higher. That many plus one. >> Okay, I feel like we'll do, I bet $1, $1. But, okay-- >> We have not hit peak Kubernetes yet. >> No. >> We definitely have not hit peak Kubernetes. One of the things, I keep looking for the theme of the show, and one of the things, we've been talking in some of the segments, is there needs to be simplification. When we talk about where we're at with cloud adoption, when we talk about some of these environments, there is a broad ecosystem. So, there needs to be some winnowing down of the technologies. We've seen some areas where things like MicroK8s and K3s to be able to be able to put Kubernetes at the edge. It's not that, that will replace Kubernetes, but things need to get simpler in some environments. Justin, I'll throw it to you first. Is simplification the theme of the show, is there something else that's grabbing you? >> The theme for me is that the money has arrived. We saw a little bit of that last year but this year it is definitely just the number of sponsors that we have here, the number of startups that we have here, the ecosystem, the number of parties, the VCs are here. This feels like a lot of other technology shows that we've been to before in their hay day. We are right here in the hay day of Kubernetes. So, I can see it getting bigger. Will there be consolidation? Yes, I think there will. But I think that this is going to broaden out further first. I don't think that we're quite at the point where things need to start collapsing in. I think we're still going to be exploring all the different options that we have. I think the theme is simplification, yes, I agree. But it's now going to be people trying to solve that problem by creating these higher-level services, managed-Kubernetes offerings. A lot of the different component projects that are there, we're going to see a lot of options where they try to manage that for you and make it easier to consume. But there will be several different attempts at that and not all of them are going to survive. >> Yeah, I'll go with you. Simplification's going to be an issue. Has to happen, we saw a lot of different stacks here at the show, if you go out on the show floor. A lot of people are trying to give you a generic platform. A general-purpose platform, maybe it has its own opinionated view of networking, or storage, or management, or security. But at the end of the day we need things on top of the platform. So, I'm hoping next year we see more things on top of the platform, more applications. We saw some big data applications this year. But people are still building engines and I want them to build cars, because not everybody can build the engine. >> Justin: Yes! >> Well, and actually, Justin, a question for you is when we talk about Kubernetes, there's so many people I interview here and they're like, "Well, no, "we know how to build it better than others "and when you want to go across all environments "we should do it." Is that, are we still going to see that for awhile? Or, can we all hold hands, and talk about open source and be able to just manage across all of these environments? >> Well, one of the key founding principles of Kubernetes is that you can operate it the same everywhere. If it's certified Kubernetes, it should function the same, no matter who's build of it it is. So, that just provides us a common platform that we then build on top of. So, I think the main differentiation's going to be on things like the tooling and the services that allow you to operate that base layer of Kubernetes. But that base layer of Kubernetes is about interesting as Ethernet. It's extremely pluggable and it's just ubiquitous, but no one really cares which brand of Ethernet you happen to be giving me. I care about all the stuff that I run on it. And that's what I think that we're going to see a lot more, I'm with you, John. We're going to see a lot more of those services. I'm seeing a bunch of startups at this show that are starting on that journey, they're providing a lot of things like database services, very highly-tuned monitoring and measurement telemetry systems. There's a big push to make sure that there is a certain amount of interoperability between these different services. Things like having open telemetry be the standard for sending telemetry information around. Because everyone knows that if we all build to Ethernet we're all going to have a much better time of it, than if we all start trying to come up with our own version of it and call it Banyan VINES, and FidoNet, and God knows what. >> Okay, I'm glad you brought up the example of Ethernet. First of all, I have no problem watching a 45-minute discussion of what 400 Gig's going to look like, and the challenge and the opportunities. And if you are talking Ethernet in someone's data center, for the most part they're going to run that on a single vendor because while there is interoperability, it's not until I go to the Internet, because layer two, I want to keep it single vendor, when I go layer three I want to do that. Is that, maybe it's not the best analogy but Kubernetes-- >> No, I think that's reasonable. And if you're trying to operate something across different environments then it's much easier if the two environments can talk to each other. Simple example that people tend to forget about is M&A. If one company goes and buys another one and I run Banyan VINES and you run, I don't know, FinLand or something, then we can't talk to each other, and integrating those two companies becomes impossible. But at least if we both have, you might have Juniper, I might have Cicso, those two network sets can still talk to each other. You might be running, I don't know ,Mesosphere, and someone else might be running Mirantis or Rantia, and that's their system for operating Kubernetes. Turns out, actually if you can operate it much the same, one of you can decide, you know what, we're going to operate everything with Rantia, 'cause we think that that's going to be the best thing for the holistic company. You may keep them separate. As long as you get the same outcome then it doesn't really matter. >> Yeah, that's why I think we aren't yet at peak Kubernetes. Those Kubernetes skills that are in high demand from a job market that people are being upskilled on, they're actually still going to be useful. Now, these stacks that these opinions that people are doing. I mean, they want us to talk about people over projects, right? That's a great philosophy, this is a very friendly community, it's very open source. But, cynically, I think, and sometimes people swap your company T-shirt for your project T-shirt that your company is the one that's behind. And that's kind of a, that's a little bit of a bait and switch. Yes, it's an open source stack. Yes, all the major vendors have open source, 100% open source stacks around Kubernetes. But they're all with different projects and they all pick their own projects. So, I think that is yet to be resolved. >> Well, it's interesting 'cause the thing that I heard is it used to be open source was something that people contribute to it. Now, the majority of people that contribute to open source do it as part of their job. So, there is some of that. Yes, I'm paid by company X, but my job is to participate in the community. There is a large company that got bought by $34 billion. They have a lot of contributors out there. Their job is open source, they are on those projects, they might switch from one project to another. We had Kelsey Hightower on today, he's like, "Hey, right, "but we need to think of people above project. "It's okay for them to move from one to the other "between projects or between companies." But, right, it is very much often companies that are behind the scenes and pushing people and dollars into these projects. One thing I like about the CNCF here is we do have, there's 129 end-user companies participating here, so we've reached a certain maturity level that they are driving it, not just companies driving it for the dollars. So, I guess the thing I want to ask though is, there's so many companies here, we started off the conversation this week, John, talking about Docker. And the cautionary tale of how many companies, when I asked, "What is your business model, what do you do?" Is, I created some cool new project. What does that mean? You look at the business model. You live right with Silicon Valley there. What are you seeing as you look forward? What do you expecting to see consistently? >> Oh sure, I mean, half the logos will be gone but they'll be swapped out for other logos, so that's all fine, right? If you have a point solution, as I was kind of pointing out, things are kind of stackifying. So, things need to consolidate from a buyer's perspective. A lot of the sessions here were about custom projects that people did, either in-house or for a customer. So, I think that's okay, that's the natural, it's the natural Cambrian explosion and then die off. >> Yep, creative destruction. (John laughing) That's the general point of how we do things. There's a lot of things that are basically a feature and you can't really build a company behind a feature. They're hoping that they will find some sort of pathway to money, we've seen some big acquisitions where they didn't really find a good route to money. That's fine, people will figure that out. And how you fund this development, Stu, I mean that's the perennial problem. At the moment it's possibly not the perfect solution but it's a pretty good one, in that we have developers are employed by a company that pays them to develop open source software. So, anyone can go and grab that software and then use it. So, we don't actually really depend on that company sticking around. >> And enterprise sales, it's still very expensive to have even a small booth here, and three or four people and nice T-shirts, and all of your swag, and you flew them here. And fly them all around the country to company after company, conference room after conference room. That is an expensive model to sell things. I mean, you need to have a fair amount of revenue. >> All right, so, Justin, a lot of progress, a lot of projects. >> Yeah. >> What's missing? Look out for 2020, is there an area or a space that needs to mature or needs work? What's your advice for this ecosystem? >> Well, for me it's all about the data. So, we've seen a lot of evolution in stateful sets and being able to manage state-based data within the Kubernetes ecosystem, a lot of progress on that, but there's still a long, long, long way to go. Also, just on the general operational tooling. So, the things that we are used to and have taken for granted in other traditional, like vSphere, or we've come from the VMware ecosystem. Simple things like higher availability. So, I need my data to always be available and I need to be able to have this managed. There's a lot of stuff in there but there's still a lot more stuff that needs to happen. Service mesh and that service discovery and making that easy enough for normal mortal humans to deal with, that still really isn't there. You kind of have to be a bit of a super genius to configure that and get it working and operating. So, there's still a lot of very hard work on these quite hard problems, to then make it look simple. >> Yeah, so, John, the one I want to throw to you is Dan Kohn came out on the keynote stage yesterday and he said, "Kubernetes has crossed the chasm, "yet most enterprises are still worried "about software failure." We know many people that are coming in new and shell-shocked when they come to look. What does the industry as a whole and this ecosystem, specifically, need to do to make sure that we don't come a year from now and say, "Wow, things slowed down "because we kind of couldn't get "the vast majority of people on board?" >> Well, I mean, we're going back to, I guess then the same thing, things have to be simpler. In times of uncertainty people either stop or they go to a trusted provider. There is, probably, although there's a high value on Kubernetes skills right now, that also means there's not enough folks. So, if you can't get the engineers. That was a problem in previous generations of some of these stacks, in that if you couldn't get enough engineers, or if the stack, if everybody had their own snowflake version of it and the skills were not transferable you could not move forward. So, I'm hoping we'll see more managed service providers. I'm hoping that we'll see more startups and services built on top of these existing infrastructures, I think we're seeing more of those. I see a lot of stuff in the operations space and kind of the SRE space, the incident management space. Kind of all the tooling you'll need to actually run these things in day two and beyond. And then, hopefully, the industry keeps pounding on digital transformation and process transformation. One project at a time, you start with one, you start small, you start tooling, you start tooling up, you get some small things under your belt and start to learn. But that's enterprise timeline. So, at a certain speed. >> All right, last thing, any aha moments, surprises, cool things as you've been going around the show? Justin? >> Oh, just walking into the show surprised me. Just how big it has gotten and how much energy there is here. It's amazing to me and I can just only see it getting bigger and, I hope, better. I am surprised by the reaction from people who haven't come into the Kubernetes ecosystem, I think. There's still a lot of people out there for whom this is a big surprise. That it's as big a show as this is, there are lots and lots of people out there who can't actually spell Kubernetes. So, there's a lot of work for us to go and do to figure out how we get those people to come into this ecosystem in a way that doesn't shock them and scare them away. >> Yeah, absolutely. Welcome to the party, those of you that had been joined. John? >> Hey, the thing that surprised me was this is both a multicloud show and a non-cloud show. This is the only show where people working in multiple public clouds can come together. So, that's one of the systemic forces causing it to grow. On the other hand, this is not a public cloud-only show. Over and over again, we talk to people here on theCUBE, I talk to people on the show floor, and most of their workloads, or many of their workloads, are on-premises, right? Kubernetes is fully functional and fully up to speed in private cloud, in people's data centers because it is useful. And they're starting to do that process tooling and process re-engineering, even on-site. And then they may be using a portfolio of different clouds. So, I think that was one of the surprising things to me is this was not 100% public cloud show. >> Yeah, and a little bit of caution I'll give there is we want to make sure we don't become complacent and say, oh, well, we could just kind of slide in what we were doing before and not make some change because the driver here, we've been talking about for decades now, was really kind of that application modernization. And Kubernetes and this whole, it is about cloud-native. It's not the Kubernetes, it's the cloud-native piece. >> You know what I didn't hear? I did not hear putting legacy apps on Kubernetes as much this year. Much quieter this year. >> So, and I'll just say, I'll highlight, we did an interview yesterday with the American Red Cross. Tech For Good, it's something that we've been highlighting, John, for especially helping lead the charge and make sure we highlight that. The Microsoft show, they very much talked about that this year. American Red Cross is saying, hey, we always want your dollars but we'd also love your skillset. So, if this community, and specifically Kubernetes, cloud-native ecosystem makes it easier. There's common tooling, something that I've been hearing a lot this year is when I go through that modernization I can hire the next-generation workforce. There's too many of those, oh, I'm doing it the old way. If I don't have somebody with 30 or 40 years experience in the industry, you won't understand our systems and we need that next generation of workforce to be able to get involved. So, love future jobs, Tech For Good, all good things. This community's always been strong on diversity and inclusion. And so, I guess final word I'll say, big shout-out to, of course, the CNCF, this event, they have a large menagerie that they need to take in here and manage, and they're doing a good job. There's always things to work on. They are listening and open. We have really appreciated the partnership. A huge shout-out, of course, to our sponsors that make it possible for us to do this. So, for Justin Warren, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much. We definitely are excited for one more day. Tomorrow, as well as next year in 2020, Amsterdam and Boston. Please reach out always if you have any questions. And thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From the Silicon Angle Media Office, in Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this breaking analysis where we try to provide you some insights on theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Jim Kobielus who was up today, and Jim we were just off of the VMworld 2019. Big show, lot of energy, lot of announcements. I specifically want to focus on containers and the impact that containers are having on VMware, specifically the broader ecosystem and the industry at large. So, first of all, what was you take on VMworld 2019? >> Well, my take was that VMware is growing fast, and they're investing in the future, which is fairly clearly cloud and native computing on containers with Kubernetes and all that. But really that's the future and so, what VMware is doing is they're making significant bets that containers will rule the roost in cloud computing and application infrastructures going forward. But in fact virtual machines, VMs hypervisors are hotter than ever and that was well established last week by the fact that the core predominate announcement last week was a VMware Tanzu, which is not yet a production solution, but is in a limited preview, which is the new platform for coexistence of containers and vSphere. A container run time embedded in vSphere, so that customers can run containers in a highly-iso workloads, in a highly isolated VM environment. In other words, VMware is saying, we're saying to their customers, "You don't have to migrate away from VMs "until you're good and ready. "You can continue to run whatever containers "you build on vShpere, "but we more than encourage you to continue to run VMs "until you're good and ready "to migrate, if ever." >> All right. So, I want to come back and unpack that a little bit, but does your data, does your analysis, when you're talking to customers and the industry at large, is there any evidence from what you see that containers are hurting VMware's business? >> I don't get any sense that containers are hurting VMware's business. I get the strong sense that containers, they've just of course acquired Pivotal, a very additive to the revenue mix at VMware. And VMware, most of their announcements last week were in fact all around Kubernetes, and containers, and products that are very much for those customers who are going deep down the container road. >> So that was a setup question. >> You've got lots of products for them. >> So that was a setup question. So I have some data on this. >> Go ahead >> Right answer. So, I want to show you this. So, Alex, if you wouldn't mind bringing up that slide. And we shared this with you last week when we were prepping for VMworld. This is data from Enterprise Technology Research ETR, and they have a panel of 4500 end user customers that they go out and do spending surveys with them. So, what this shows is, this is container customers spending on VMware. So, you can see it goes back to early January. Now it's a little deceiving here. You see that big spike, but what it shows it that, A, that big spike is the number of shared customers. So, you really didn't have many customers back then that were doing both containers and VMware that ETR found. But as the N gets bigger, 186, 248, 257, 361, across those 461 customers, those are the shared customers in the green. And you can see that it's kind of a flat line. It's holding very well in the high 30's percent range, which is their sort of proprietary metric. So, there's absolutely no evidence, Jim, that containers, thus far anyway, are hurting VMware's business. Which of course was the narrative, containers are going to kill VMware, no evidence of that. But then why would they acquire Pivotal? Are they concerned about the future, what's your-- >> Well, they're concerned about cross selling their existing customer base who are primarily on V's, fearing the hypervisors, cross selling them on the new world of Kubernetes base products for cloud computing, and so forth and so on. In other words it's all about how do they grow their revenue base? VMware's been around for more than 20 years now. They rule the roost on the hypervisors. Where do they go from here, in terms of their product mix? Well, Kubernetes and beyond that, things like serverless will clearly be in the range of the things that they could add on. Their customers could add on to their existing deploys. I mean, look at Pivotal. Pivotal has a really strong Kubernetes distribution, which of course VMware co-developed with them. Pivotal also has a strong functions as a service backplane, the Pivotal function service for, serverless environments. So, this acquisition of Pivotal very much positions VMware to capitalize on those opportunities to sell those products when that market actually develops. But I see some evidence that virtual machines are going like gang busters in terms of customer deployments. Last week on theCUBE at VMworld, Mark Lohmeyer who's an SVP at a VMware for one of their cloud business unit, said that in the last year, for example, customers who are using a VMware cloud on AWS, VMware grew the customer base by 400% last year, and grew the number of VMs running in VMware, cloud, and AWS by 900%, which would imply that on average each customer more than doubled the number of VMs they're running on that particular cloud service. That means VMs are very much relevant now, and probably will be going forward. And why is that? That's a good question, we can debate that. >> Well, so the naysayers at VMworld in the audience were tweeting that, "Oh, I though we started Pivotal. "We launched Pivotal so that we didn't have to run VMs on, "or run containers on VMs, "so we could run them on bare metal." Are people running containers on virtual machines? >> Well, they are, yes. In fact, there's a broad range of industry initiatives, not just Tanzu at VMware, to do just that. To run containers on VMs. I mean, there is the KubeVirt, open source project over at CNCF, that's been going for a couple years now. But also, Google has Gvisor, Intel has the Kata containers initiative, I believe that there are a few others. Oh yeah, AWS with Firecracker, last year's reinvent. All this would imply, strongly indicate that these large cloud and tech vendors wouldn't be investing heavily into convergence of containers and VMs and hypervisors, if there weren't a strong demand from customers for hybrid environments where they're going to run both stacks as it were in parallel, why? Well, one of the strong advantages of VMs is workload isolation at the hardware level, which is something that typically container run times don't offer. For example, the workload isolation seems to be one of the strong features that VMware's touting for Tanzu going forward. >> So, VMware is--the centerpiece of VMware's strategy is obviously multicloud, Kubernetes as a lynch pin to enable running applications on different platforms. Will, in your opinion, and of course VMware is hard core enterprise, right? Will VMware, two things, will they be able to attract the developers, number one. And number two, will those developers build on top of VMware's platform or are they going to look to their cloud? >> That's a very important question. Last week at VMworld, I didn't get a sense that VMware has a strong developer story. I think that's a really open issue going forward for them. Why would a developer turn to VMware as their core solution provider when they don't offer a strong workbench for building these hybridized VM, /container/serverless applications that seem to be springing up all over? AWS and Microsoft and Google are much stronger in that area with their respective portfolios. >> So, I guess the obvious answer there is Pivotal is their answer to the developer quandary. >> Yes. >> And so, let's talk about that. So, Pivotal was struggling. I talked last week in my analysis, you saw the IPO price and then it dipped down, it never made it back up. Essentially the price that VMware paid the public shareholders for Pivotal was about half of it's initial IPO price, so, okay. So, the stock was struggling, the company didn't have the kind of momentum that, I think, that it wanted, so VMware picks it up. Can VMware fold in Pivotal, and use its go-to-market, and its largess to really prop up Pivotal and make it a leader? >> Well, possibly because Cloud Foundry, Pivotal Cloud Foundry could be the lynch pin of VMware's emerging developer story, if they position in that and really invest in the product in that regard. So yeah, in other words this could very much make VMware a go-to-vendor for the developers who are building the new generation of applications that present serverless functional interfaces, but will have containers under the cover, but also have VMs under the cover providing strong workload isolation in a multi-tenant environment. That would be the promise. >> Now, a couple things. You mentioned Microsoft, of course as you're in the clouding, and Google. The ETR data that I dug into when I wanted to understand, better understand multicloud. Who's got the multicloud momentum? Well, guess who has the most multicloud momentum? It's the cloud guys. Now, AWS doesn't specifically say they participate in multicloud. Certainly their marketing suggest that multicloud is for somebody else, that really they want to have uni-cloud. Whereas Google, and as you're kind of embracing multicloud and Kubernetes specifically, now of course AWS has a Kubernetes offering, but I suspect it's not something that they want to promote hard in the market place because it makes it easier for people to get off of AWS. Your thoughts on multicloud generally, but specifically Kubernetes, and containers as it relates to the big cloud providers. >> Yeah, well my thoughts on multicloud generally is that multicloud is the strategy of the second tier cloud vendors, obviously. If they can't dominate the entire space, at least they can maintain a strong, provide a strong connective tissue for the clouds that actually are deployed in their customer's environments. So, in other words, the Ciscos of the world, the VMwares of the world, IBM. In other words, these are not among the top tier of the public cloud players, hence where do they go to remain relevant? Well, they provide the connective tissue, and they provide the virtualized networking backbones, and they provide the AI ops that enables end-to-end automated monitoring management of the entire mesh. The whole notion of a mesh architecture is something that grew up with IBM and Google for lots of reasons, especially due to the fact that they themselves, as vendors, didn't dominate the public cloud. >> Well, so I agree with you. The only issue I would take is I think Microsoft is a leader in public cloud, but because it has a big On-Prem presence, it's in its best interest to push containers and Kubernetes, and so forth. But you're right about the others. Cisco doesn't have a public cloud, VMware doesn't have a public cloud, IBM has a public cloud but it's really small market share, and so it's in those companies, and Google is behind, but it's in those companies best interest really to promote multicloud, try to use it as a bull work against AWS, who's got an obviously awesome market momentum. The other thing that's interesting in the ETR data when I poke in there, it seems like there are more people looking at Google. Now maybe that's 'cause they have such strong strength in data and analytics, maybe it's 'cause they're looking for a hedge on AWS, but the spending data suggests that more and more people are kicking the tires, and more than kicking the tires on Google. Who of course is obviously behind Kubernetes and that container movement, and open source, your thoughts? >> Yeah, well, many ways, you have to think, that Google has developed the key pieces of the new stack for application development in the multicloud. Clearly they developed Kubernetes, its open source, and also they developed TensorFlow open sources, it's the predominant AI workbench essentially for the new generation of AI driven applications, which is everything. But also, if you look at Google developed Node JS for web applications and so forth. So really, Google now is the go-to-vendor for the new generation of open source application development, and increasingly DevOps in a multicloud environment, running over Istio meshes and so forth. So, I think that's, so, look at one of the announcements last weekend at VMworld. VMware and NVIDIA, their announcement of their collaboration, their joint offering to enable AI workloads, training workloads to run in GPUs in an optimal high performance fashion within a distributive of VMware cloud end-to-end. So really, I think VMware recognizes that the new workloads in the multicloud are predominately, increasingly AI workloads. And in order to, as the market goes towards those kinds of workloads, VMware very much recognizes they need to have a strong developer play, and they do with NVIDIA in a sense. Very much so because NVIDIA with the rapid framework and so forth, and NVIDIA being the predominant GPU vendor, very much is a very strategic partner for VMware as they're going forward, as they hope to line up the AI developers. But Google still is the vendor to beat as regards to AI developers of the world, in that regard, so-- >> So we're entering a world we sometimes call the post-virtual machine world. John Furrier is kind of tongue and cheek on a play on web tudauto. He calls it cloud tudauto, which is a world of multiple clouds. As I've said many times, I'm not sure multicloud is necessarily a coherent strategy yet as opposed to sort of a multi-vendor situation, Shadow IT, >> Yes. >> Lines on business, et cetera. But Jim, thanks very much-- >> Sure. >> For coming on and breaking down the container market, and VMworld 2019. It was great to see you. >> Likewise. >> All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Jim Kobielus. We'll see you next time on theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From the Silicon Angle Media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. (upbeat music) >> Hello everybody, this is Dave Vallante with Stu Miniman and we're going to take a look back at ten years of theCUBE at VMworld and look forward to see what's coming next. So, as I say, this is theCUBE's 10th year at VMworld, that's VMworld, of course 2019. And Stu, if you think about the VMware of 2010, when we first started, it's a dramatically different VMware today. Let's look back at 2010. Paul Maritz was running VMware, he set forth the vision of the software mainframe last decade, well, what does that mean, software mainframe? Highly integrated hardware and software that can run any workload, any application. That is the gauntlet that Tucci and Maritz laid down. A lot of people were skeptical. Fast forward 10 years, they've actually achieved that, I mean, essentially, it is the standard operating system, if you will, in the data center, but there's a lot more to the story. But you remember, at the time, Stu, it was a very complex environment. When something went wrong, you needed guys with lab coats to come in a figure out, you know, what was going on, the I/O blender problem, storage was a real bottleneck. So let's talk about that. >> Yeah, Dave, so much. First of all, hard to believe, 10 years, you know, think back to 2010, it was my first time being at VMworld, even though I started working with VMware back in 2002 when it was like, you know, 100, 150 person company. Remember when vMotion first launched. But that first show that we went to, Dave, was in San Francisco, and most people didn't know theCUBE, heck, we were still figuring out exactly what theCUBE will be, and we brought in a bunch of our friends that were doing the CloudCamps in Silicon Valley, and we were talking about cloud. And there was this gap that we saw between, as you said, the challenges we were solving with VMware, which was fixing infrastructure, storage and networking had been broken, and how were we going to make sure that that worked in a virtual environment even better? But there were the early thought leaders that were talking about that future of cloud computing, which, today in 2019, looks like we had a good prediction. And, of course, where VMware is today, we're talking all about cloud. So, so many different eras and pieces and research that we did, you know, hundreds and hundreds of interviews that we've done at that show, it's definitely been one of our flagship shows and one of our favorite for guests and ecosystems and so much that we got to dig into at that event. >> So Tod Nielsen, who was the President and probably COO at the time, talked about the ecosystem. For every dollar spent on a VMware license, $15 was spent on the ecosystem. VMware was a very, even though they were owned by EMC, they were very, sort of, neutral to the ecosystem. You had what we called the storage cartel. It was certainly EMC, you know, but NetApp was right there, IBM, HP, you know, Dell had purchased EqualLogic, HDS was kind of there as well. These companies were the first to get the APIs, you remember, the VASA VAAI. So, we pushed VMware at the time, saying, "Look, you guys got a storage problem." And they said, "Well, we don't have a lot of resources, "we're going to let the ecosystem solve the problem, "here's an API, you guys figure it out." Which they largely did, but it took a long time. The other big thing you had in that 2010 timeframe was storage consolidation. You had the bidding war between Dell and HP, which, ultimately, HP, under Donatelli's leadership, won that bidding war and acquired 3PAR >> Bought 3PAR >> for 2.4, 2.5 billion, it forced Dell to buy Compellent. Subsequently, Isilon was acquired, Data Domain was acquired by EMC. So you had this consolidation of the early 2000s storage startups and then, still, storage was a major problem back then. But the big sea change was, two things happened in 2012. Pat Gelsinger took over as CEO, and VMware acquired Nicira, beat Cisco to the punch. Why did that change everything? >> Yeah, Dave, we talked a lot about storage, and how, you know, the ecosystem was changing this. Nicira, we knew it was a big deal. When I, you know, I talked to my friends that were deep in networking and I talked with Nicira and was majorly impressed with what they were doing. But this heterogeneous, and what now is the multi-cloud environment, networking needs to play a critical role. You see, you know, Cisco has clearly targeted that environment and Nicira had some really smart people and some really fundamental technology underneath that would allow networking to go just beyond the virtual machine where it was before, the vSwitch. So, you know, that expansion, and actually, it took a little while for, you know, the Nicira acquisition to run into NSX and that product to gain maturity, and to gain adoption, but as Pat Gelsinger has said more recently, it is one of the key drivers for VMware, getting them beyond just the hypervisor itself. So, so much is happening, I mean, Dave, I look at the swings as, you know, you said, VMware didn't have enough resources, they were going to let the ecosystem do it. In the early days, it was, I chose a server provider, and, oh yeah, VMware kind of plays in it. So VMware really grew how much control and how much power they had in buying decisions, and we're going through more of that change now, as to, as they're partnering we're going to talk about AWS and Microsoft and Google as those pieces. And Pat driving that ship. The analogy we gave is, could Pat do for VMware what Intel had done for a long time, which is, you have a big ecosystem, and you slowly start eating away at some of that other functionality without alienating that ecosystem. And to Pat's credit, it's actually something that he's done quite well. There's been some ebbs and flows, there's pushback in the community. Those that remember things like the "vTax," when they rolled that out. You know, there's certain features that the rolled into the hypervisor that have had parts of the ecosystem gripe a little bit, but for the most part, VMware is still playing well with the ecosystem, even though, after the Dell acquisition of EMC, you know, we'll talk about this some more, that relationship between Dell and VMware is tighter than it ever was in the EMC days. >> So that led to the Software-Defined Data Center, which was the big, sort of, vision. VMware wanted to do to storage and networking what it had done to compute. And this started to set up the tension between with VMware and Cisco, which, you know, lives on today. The other big mega trend, of course, was flash storage, which was coming into play. In many ways, that whole API gymnastics was a Band-Aid. But the other big piece if it is Pat Gelsinger was much more willing to integrate, you know, some of the EMC technologies, and now Dell technologies, into the VMware sort of stack. >> Right, so Dave, you talked about all of those APIs, Vvols was a huge multi-year initiative that VMware worked on and all of the big storage players were talking about how that would allow them to deeply integrate and make it virtualization-aware storage your so tense we come out on their own and try to do that. But if you look at it, VVols was also what enabled VMware to do vSAN, and that is a little bit of how they can try to erode in some of the storage piece, because vSAN today has the most customers in the hyperconverged infrastructure space, and is keeping to grow, but they still have those storage partnerships. It didn't eliminate it, but it definitely adds some tension. >> Well it is important, because under EMC's ownership it was sort of a let 1,000 flowers bloom sort of strategy, and today you see Jeff Clarke coming in and consolidating the portfolios, saying, "Look, let's let VMware go hard with vSAN." So you're seeing a different type of governance structure, we'll talk about that. 2013 was a big year. That's the year they brought in Sanjay Poonen, they did the AirWatch acquisition, they took on what the industry called VDI, what VMware called EUC, End-User Computing. Citrix was the dominant player in that space, VMware was fumbling, frankly. Sanjay Poonen came in, the AirWatch acquisition, now, VMware is a leader in that space, so that was big. The other big thing in 2013 was, you know, the famous comment by Carl Eschenbach about, you know, if we lose to the book seller, we'll all lose. VMware came out with it's cloud strategy, vCloud Air. I was there with the Wall Street analyst that day listening to Pat explain that and we were talking afterwards to a number of the Wall Street analysts saying, "This really doesn't make a lot of sense." And then they sort of retreated on that, saying that it was going to be an accelerant, and it just was basically a failed cloud strategy. >> And Dave, that 2013 is also when they spun out Cloud Foundry and founded Pivital. So, you know, this is where they took some of the pieces from EMC, the Greenplum, and they took some of the pieces from VMware, Spring and the Cloud Foundation, and put those together. As we speak right now, there was just an SEC Filing that VMware might suck them back in. Where I look at that, back in 2013, there was a huge gap between what VMware was doing on the infrastructure side and what Cloud Foundry was doing on the application modernization standpoint, they had bought the Pivotal Labs piece to help people understand new programming models and everything along those lines. Today, in 2019, if you look at where VMware is going, the changes happening in containerization, the changes happening from the application down, they need to come together. The Achilles heel that I have seen from VMware for a long time is that VMware doesn't have enough a tie to or help build the applications. Microsoft owns the applications, Oracle owns the applications. You know, there are all the ISVs that own the applications, and Pivotal, if they bring that back into VMware it can help, but it made sense at the time to kind of spin that out because it wasn't synergies between them. >> It was what I called at the time a bunch of misfit toys. And so it was largely David Goulden's engineering of what they called The Federation. And now you're seeing some more engineering, financial engineering, of having VMware essentially buy another, you know, Dell Silver Lake asset, which, you know, drove the stock price up 77% in a day that the Dow dropped 800 points. So I guess that works, kind of funny money. The other big trend sort of in that mid-part of this decade, hyperconverged, you know, really hit. Nutanix, who was at one point a strong partner of both VMware and Dell, was sort of hitting its groove swing. Fast forward to 2019, different situation, Nutanix really doesn't have a presence there. You know, people are looking at going beyond hyperconverged. So there's sort of the VMware ecosystem, sort of friendly posture has changed, they point fingers at each other. VMware says, "Well, it's Nutanix's fault." Nutanix will say it's VMware's fault. >> Right, so Dave, I pointed out, the Achilles heel for VMware might be that they don't have the closest tie to the application, but their greatest strength is, really, they are really the data center operating system, if you will. When we wrote out our research on Server SAN was before vSAN had gotten launched. It was where Nutanix, Scale Computing, SimpliVity, you know, Pivot3, and a few others were early in that space, but we stated in our research, if Microsoft and VMware get serious about that space, they can dominate. And we've seen, VMware came in strong, they do work with their partnerships. Of course, Dell, with the VxRail is their largest solution, but all of the other server providers, you know, have offerings and can put those together. And Microsoft, just last year, they kind of rebranded some of the Azure Stack as HCI and they're going strong in that space. So, absolutely, you know, strong presence in the data center platform, and that's what they're extending into their hybrid and multi-cloud offering, the VMware Cloud Solutions. >> So I want to get to some of the trends today, but just real quick, let's go through some of this. So 2015 was the big announcement in the fall where Dell was acquiring EMC, so we entered, really, the Dell era of VMware ownership in 2016. And the other piece that happened, really 2016 in the fall, but it went GA 2017, was the announcement AWS and VMware as the preferred partnership. Yes, AWS had a partnership with IBM, they've subsequently >> VMware had a partnership >> Yeah, sorry, VMware has a partnership with IBM for their cloud, subsequently VMware has done deals with Google and Microsoft, so there's, we now have entered the multi-cloud hybrid world. VMware capitulated on cloud, smart move, cleaned up its cloud strategy, cleaned that AirWatch mess. AWS also capitulated on hybrid. It's a term that they would never use, they don't use it necessarily a lot today, but they recognize that On Prem is a viable portion of the marketplace. And so now we've entered this new era of cloud, hybrid cloud, containers is the other big trend. People said, "Containers are going to really hurt VMware." You know, the jury's still out on that, VMware sort of pushes back on that. >> And Dave, just to put a point on that, you know, everybody, including us, spent a lot of time looking at this VMware Cloud on AWS partnership, and what does it mean, especially, to the parent, you know, Dell? How do they make that environment? And you've pointed out, Dave, that while VMware gets in those environments and gives themselves a very strong cloud strategy, AWS is the key partner, but of course, as you said, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and all the server providers, we have a number of them including CenturyLink and Rackspace that they're partnering with, but we have to wait a little while before Amazon, when they announced their outpost solutions, VMware is a critical software piece, and you've got two flavors of the hardware. You can run the full AWS Stack, just like what they're running in their data center, but the alternative, of course, is VMware software running on Dell hardware. And we think that if VMware hadn't come in with a strong position with Amazon and their 600,000 customers, we're not sure that Amazon would have said, "Oh yeah, hey, you can run that same software stack "that you're running, but run some different hardware." So that's a good place for Dell to get in the environment, it helps kind of close out that story of VMware, Dell, and AWS and how the pieces fit together. >> Yeah, well so, by the way, earlier this week I privately mentioned to a Dell executive that one of the things I thought they should do was fold Pivotal into VMware. By the way, I think they should go further. I think they should look at RSA and Dell Boomi and SecureWorks, make VMware the mothership of software, and then really tie in Dell's hardware to VMware. That seems to me, Stu, the direction that they're going to try to gain an advantage on the balance of the ecosystem. I think VMware now is in a position of strength with, what, 5 or 600,000 customers. It feels like it's less ecosystem friendly than it used to be. >> Yeah, Dave, there's no doubt about it. HPE and IBM, who were two of the main companies that helped with VMware's ascendancy, do a lot of other things beyond VMware. Of course, IBM bought Red Hat, it is a key counterbalance to what VMware is doing in the multi-cloud. And Dave, to your point, absolutely, if you look at Dell's cloud strategy, they're number one offering is VMware, VMware cloud on Dell. Dell as the project dimension piece. All of these pieces do line up. I'll say, some of those pieces, absolutely, I would say, make sense to kind of pull in and shell together. I know one of the reasons they keep the security pieces at arm's length is just, you know, when something goes wrong in the security space, and it's not of the question of if, it's a question of when, they do have that arm's length to be able to keep that out and be able to remediate a little bit when something happens. >> So let's look at some of the things that we're following today. I think one of the big ones is, how will containers effect customer spending on VMware? We know people are concerned about the vTax. We also know that they're concerned about lock-in. And so, containers are this major force. Can VMware make containers a tailwind, or is it a headwind for them? >> So you look at all the acquisitions that they've made lately, Dave, CloudHealth is, from a management standpoint, in the public cloud. Heptio and Bitnami, targeting that cloud native space. Pair that with Cloud Foundry and you see, VMware and Pivotal together trying to go all-in on Kubernetes. So those 600,000 customers, VMware wants to be the group that educates you on containerization, Kubernetes, you know, how to build these new environments. For, you know, a lot of customers, it's attractive for them to just stay. "I have a relationship, "I have an enterprise licensing agreement, "I'm going to stay along with that." The question I would have is, if I want to do something in a modern way, is VMware really the best partner to choose from? Do they have the cost structure? A lot of these environments set up, you know, it's open source base, or I can work with my public cloud providers there, so why would I partner with VMware? Sure, they have a lot of smart people and they have expertise and we have a relationship, but what differentiates VMware, and is it worth paying for that licensing that they have, or will I look at alternatives? But as VMware grows their hybrid and multi-cloud deployments they absolutely are on the short list of, you know, strategic partners for most customers. >> The other big thing that we're watching is multi-cloud. I have said over and over that multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of multi-vendor. It's not necessarily, to date anyway, been a strategy of customers. Having said that, issues around security, governance, compliance have forced organizations and boards to say, "You know what, we need IT more involved, "let's make multi-cloud part of our strategy, "not only for governance and compliance "and making sure it adheres to the corporate edicts, "but also to put the right workload on the right cloud." So having some kind of strategy there is important. Who are the players there? Obviously VMware, I would say, right now, is the favorite because it's coming from a position of strength in the data center. Microsoft with it's software state, Cisco coming at it from a standpoint of network strength. Google, with Anthos, that announcement earlier this year, and, of course, Red Hat with IBM. Who's the company that I didn't mention in that list? >> Well, of course, you can't talk about cloud, Dave, without talking about AWS. So, as you stated before, they don't really want to talk about hybrid, hey, come on, multi-cloud, why would you do this? But any customer that has a multi-cloud environment, they've got AWS. And the VMware-AWS partnership is really interesting to watch. It will be, you know, where will Amazon grow in this environment as they find their customers are using multiple solutions? Amazon has lots of offerings to allow you leverage Kubernetes, but, for the most part, the messaging is still, "We are the best place for you, "if you do everything on us, "you're going to get better pricing "and all of these environments." But as you've said, Dave, we never get down to that homogeneous, you know, one vendor solution. It tends to be, you know, IT has always been this heterogeneous mess and you have different groups that purchase different things for different reasons, and we have not seen, yet, public cloud solving that for a lot of customers. If anything we often have many more silos in the clouds than we had in the data center before. >> Okay. Another big story that we're following, big trend, is the battle for networking. NSX, the software networking component, and then Cisco, who's got a combination of, obviously, hardware and software with ACI. You know, Stu, I got to say, Cisco a very impressive company. You know, 60+% market share, being able to hold that share for a long time. I've seen a lot of companies try to go up against Cisco. You know, the industry's littered with failures. It feels, however, like NSX is a disruptive force that's very hard for Cisco to deal with in a number of dimensions. We talked about multi-cloud, but networking in general. Cisco's still a major player, still, you know, owns the hardware infrastructure, obviously layering in its own software-defined strategy. But that seems to be a source of tension between the two companies. What's the customer perspective? >> Yeah, so first of all, Dave, Cisco, from a hardware perspective, is still going strong. There are some big competitors. Arista has been doing quite well into getting in, especially, a high performance, high speed environments, you know, Jayshree Ullal and that team, you know, very impressive public company that's doing quite well. >> Service providers that do really well there. >> Absolutely, but, absolutely, software is eating the world and it is impacting networking. Even when you look at Cisco's overall strategy, it is in the future. Cisco is not a networking company, they are a software company. The whole DevNet, you know, group that they have there is helping customers modernize, what we were talking about with Pivotal. Cisco is going there and helping customers create those new environments. But from a customer standpoint, they want simplicity. If my VMware is a big piece of my environment, I've probably started using NSX, NSX-T, some of these environments. As I go to my service providers, as I go to multi-cloud, that NSX piece inside my VMware cloud foundation starts to grow. I remember, Dave, a few years back, you know, Pat Gelsinger got up on a stage and was like, "This is the biggest collection of network administrators that we've ever seen!" And everybody's looking around and they're like, "Where? "We're virtualization people. "Oh, wait, just because we've got vNICs and vSwitches "and things like that." It still is a gap between kind of a hardcore networking people and the software state. But just like we see on storage, Dave, it's not like vSAN, despite it's thousands and thousands of customers, it is not the dominant player in storage. It's a big player, it's a great revenue stream, and it is expanding VMware beyond their core vSphere solutions. >> Back to Cisco real quickly. One of the things I'm very impressed with Cisco is the way in which they've developed infrastructures. Code with the DevNet group, how CCIEs are learning Python, and that's a very powerful sort of trend to watch. The other thing we're watching is VMware-AWS. How will it affect spending, you know, near-term, mid-term, long-term? Clearly it's been a momentum, you know, tailwind, for VMware today, but the questions remains, long-term, where will customers place their bets? Where will the spending be? We know that cloud is growing dramatically faster than On Prem, but it appears, at least in the near- to mid-term, for one, two, maybe three more cycles, maybe indefinitely, that the VMware-AWS relationship has been a real positive for VMware. >> Yeah, Dave, I think you stated it really well. When I talked to customers, they were a bit frozen a couple of years ago. "Ah, I know I need to do more in cloud, "but I have this environment, what do I do? "Do I stay with VMware, do I have to make a big change." And what VMware did, is they really opened things up and said, "Look, no, you can embrace cloud, and we're there for you. "We will be there to help be that bridge to the future, "if you will, so take your VMware environment, "do VMware cloud in lots of places, "and we will enable that." What we know today, the stat that we hear all the time, the old 80/20 we used to talk about was 80% keeping the lights on, now the 80% we hear about is, there's only 20% of workloads that are in public cloud today. It doesn't mean that that other 80% is going to flip overnight, but if you look over the next five to ten years, it could be a flip from 80/20 to 20/80. And as that shift happens, how much of that estate will stay under VMware licenses? Because the day after AWS made the announcement of VMware cloud on AWS, they offered some migration services. So if you just want to go on natively on the public cloud, you can do that. And Microsoft, Google, everybody has migration services, so use VMware for what I need to, but I might go more native cloud for some of those other environments. So we know it is going to continue to be a mix. Multi-cloud is what customers are doing today, and multi- and hybrid-cloud is what customers will be doing five years from now. >> The other big question we're watching is Outposts. Will VMware and Outposts get a larger share of wallet as a result of that partnership at the expense of other vendors? And so, remains to be seen, Outposts grabbed a lot of attention, that whole notion of same control plane, same hardware, same software, same data plane On Prem as in the Data Center, kind of like Oracle's same-same approach, but it's seemingly a logical one. Others are responding. Your thoughts on whether or not these two companies will dominate or the industry will respond or an equilibrium. >> Right, so first of all, right, that full same-same full stack has been something we've been talking about now, feels like for 10 years, Dave, with Oracle, IBM had a strategy on that, and you see that, but one of the things with VMware has strong strength. What they have over two decades of experiences on is making sure that I can have a software stack that can actually live in heterogeneous environments. So in the future, if we talk about if Kubernetes allows me to live in a multi-cloud environment, VMware might be able to give me some flexibility so that I can move from one hardware stack to another as I move from data centers to service providers to public clouds. So, absolutely, you know, one to watch. And VMware is smart. Amazon might be their number one partner, but they're lining up everywhere. When you see Sanjay Poonen up on stage with Thomas Kurian at Google Cloud talking about how Anthos in your data center very much requires VMware. You see Sachi Nodella up on stage talking about these kind of VMware partnerships. VMware is going to make sure that they live in all of these environments, just like they lived on all of the servers in the data center in the past. >> The other last two pieces that I want to touch on, and they're related is, as a result of Dell's ownership of VMware, are customers going to spend more with Dell? And it's clear that Dell is architecting a very tight relationship. You can see, first of all, Michael Dell putting Jeff Clarke in charge of everything Dell was brilliant, because, in a way, you know, Pat was kind of elevated as this superstar. And Michael Dell is the founder, and he's the leader of the company. So basically what he's created is this team of rivals. Now, you know, Jeff and Pat, they've worked together for decades, but very interesting. We saw them up on stage together, you know, last year, well I guess at Dell Technologies World, it was kind of awkward, but so, I love it. I love that tension of, It's very clear to me that Dell wants to integrate more tightly with VMware. It's the clear strategy, and they don't really care at this point if it's at the expense of the ecosystem. Let the ecosystem figure it out themselves. So that's one thing we're watching. Related to that is long-term, are customers going to spend more of their VMware dollars in the public cloud? Come back to Dell for a second. To me, AWS is by far the number one competitor of Dell, you know, that shift to the cloud. Clearly they've got other competitors, you know, NetApp, Huawei, you know, on and on and on, but AWS is the big one. How will cloud spending effect both Dell and AWS long-term? The numbers right now suggest that cloud's going to keep growing, $35, $40 billion run-rate company growing at 40% a year, whereas On Prem stuff's growing, you know, at best, single digits. So that trend really does favor the cloud guys. I talked to a Gartner analyst who tracks all this stuff. I said, "Can AWS continue to grow? It's so big." He said, "There's no reason, they can't stop. "The market's enormous." I tend to agree, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, first of all, on the AWS, absolutely, I agree, Dave. They are still, if you look at the overall IT spend, AWS is still a small piece. They have, that lever that they have and the influence they have on the marketplace greatly outweighs the, you know, $30, $31 billion that they're at today, and absolutely they can keep growing. The one point, I think, what we've seen, the best success that Dell is having, it is the Dell and VMware really coming together, product development, go to market, the field is tightly, tightly, tightly alligned. The VxRail was the first real big push, and if they can do the same thing with the vCloud foundation, you know, VMware cloud on Dell hardware, that could be a real tailwind for Dell to try to grow faster as an infrastructure company, to grow more like the software companies or even the cloud companies will. Because we know, when we've run the numbers, Dave, private cloud is going to get a lot of dollars, even as public cloud continues its growth. >> I think the answer comes down to a couple things. Because right now we know that 80% of the spend and stall base is On Prem, 20% in the cloud. We're entering now the cloud 2.0, which introduces hybrid-cloud, On Prem, you know, connecting to clouds, multi-cloud, Kubernetes. So what it comes down to, to me Stu, is to what degree can Dell, VMware, and the ecosystem create that cloud experience in a hybrid world, number one? And number two, how will they be able to compete from a cost-structure standpoint? Dell's cost-structure is better than anybody else's in the On Prem world. I would argue that AWS's cost-structure is better, you know, relative to Dell, but remains to be seen. But really those two things, the cloud experience and the cost-structure, can they hold on, and how long can they hold on to that 80%? >> All right, so Dave here's the question I have for you. What are we talking about when we're talking about Dell plus VMware and even add in Pivotal? It's primarily hardware plus software. Who's the biggest in that multi-cloud space? It's IBM plus Red Hat, which you've stated emphatically, "This is a services play, and IBM has, you know, "just got, you know, services in their DNA, "and that could help supercharge where Red Hat's going "and the modernization." So is that a danger for Dell? If they bring in Pivotal, do they need to really ramp up that services? How do they do that? >> Yeah, I don't think it's a zero sum game, but I also don't think there's, it's five winners. I think that the leader, VMware right now would be my favorite, I think it's going to do very well. I think Red Hat has got, you know, a lot of good market momentum, I think they've got a captive install base, you know, with IBM and its large outsourcing business, and I think they can do pretty well, and I think number three could do okay. I think the other guys struggle. But it's so early, right now, in the hybrid-cloud world and the multi-cloud world, that if I were any one of those five I'd be going hard after it. We know Google's got the dollars, we know Microsoft has the software state, so I can see Microsoft actually doing quite well in that business, and could emerge as the, maybe they're not a long-shot right now, but they could be a, you know, three to one, four to one leader that comes out as the favorite. So, all right, we got to go. Stu, thanks very much for your insights. And thank you for watching and listening. We will be at VMworld 2019. Three days of coverage on theCUBE. Thanks for watching everybody, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue. Here's your host. Still Minutemen. >> Hi, I'm Stew Minutemen. And welcome to a special cute conversation here in our Boston Areas studio where in spring 2019 whole lot of shows where the cubes gonna be on going to lots of events so many different technologies were covering on one of the areas we always love to be able to dig into is what's happening with the users. Many of these shows, we go to our user conferences as well as the community. Really happy to Boca Burger. Believe first time on the program. Steve Methodists famous. Who is the newly elected president of the mug s. So I think most of Ronan should know the V mug organization to the VM where User group. We've done cube events at, you know, the most related events. Absolute talked about the mug we've had, you know, the CEO of the mug on the program. And of course, the VM were Community 2019 will be the 10th year of the Cube at VM World. Still figuring out if we should do a party and stuff like that. We know all the ins and outs of what happened at that show. But you know the V mugs itself? I've attended many. Your Boston V mug is one that I've been, too. But before we get into the mug stuff, Steve could just give us a little bit of your back, because you are. You're practicing your user yourself. >> Yeah, well, first thanks for having me. You know what? I've been watching the cube for years, and it's ah, it's great to be on this side of the of the screen, right? So, yes. So I'm Steve. I think I, you know, show up every day as the associate chief information officer of the University of Massachusetts. Little just for 95 here, and that's my day job. That's my career, right? But what? You know what? I'm excited to be here to talk about what I'm excited in general with the mug is it's a community organization. And so it's a volunteer gig, and that's true of all of our leadership, right? So the from the president of the board of directors to our local leaders around the world, they're all volunteers, and that's I think, what makes it special is We're doing this because we're excited about it. We're passionate about it. >> Yeah, you know the mugs, It's, you know, created by users for user's. You go to them, talk a little bit. It's evolved a lot, you know, It started as just a bunch of independent little events. Is now you know, my Twitter feed. I feel like constantly every day. It's like, Oh, wait, who is at the St Louis? The Wisconsin one? I'll get like ads for like, it's like a weight is the Northeast one. I'm like, Oh, is that here in New England that I don't know about? No, no, no. It's in the UK on things like that. So I get ads and friends around the world and I love seeing the community. So, boy, how do you guys keep it all straight? Man, is that allow both the organic nature as well as some of the coordination and understanding of what's going on. How do you balance that? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And you know, So I was a V mug member for many, many years before I ever got interested in becoming a leader, and you're right it when it started, it was 10 of us would get around with a six pack of beer and a box of pizza, right? And we'd be talking shop and that, you know, that was awesome. And that's what would that was, how it started. But you get to a certain scale when you start talking about having 50,000 now, over 125,000 members around the world. You gotta coordinate that somehow you're right on the money with that. And so that's why you know, we have, you know, a strong, um, coordination effort that is our offices down in Nashville, Tennessee, and their their role is to enable our leaders to give back to their community and take the burden out of running these things. You know, sourcing venues and, you know, working with hotels and stuff. That is effort that not everybody wants to do all the time. And so to do that for them lets them focus on the really cool stuff which is the tech and connecting users. >> Yeah. Can you speak a little bit too? You know what were some of the speeds and feed to the event? How many do you have How much growing, you know, Like I'm signed up. I get the newsletter for activities as well as you know, lots of weapons. I've spoken on some of the webinars too. >> Yeah, well, first thanks for that s o. We have over 30 user cons around the world on three continents. >> In fact, what's the user cough? >> Great questions. So user kind is user conference, you know, consolidated into user Connery. And those are hundreds of end users getting together around the world were on three continents. In fact, I was fortunate enough in March, I went to Australia and I spoke at Sydney and Melbourne on That was awesome, getting to meet users literally, almost a sw far away from Boston. As you can get having the same challenges in the office day today, solving the same business problems with technology. So that was exciting. And so we've got those all over. We also have local meetings which are, you know, smaller in scope and often more focused on content. We've got 235 or Maur local chapters around the world. They're talking about this, and so we're really engaged at multiple levels with this and like you talk about. We have the online events which are global in scope. And we do those, you know, we time so that people in our time zone here in the States could get to them as well as folks in, you know, e m b A and a factory. >> Yeah, and I have to imagine the attendees have to vary. I mean, is it primarily for, you know, Sylvie, um, where admin is the primary title there up to, you know, people that are CEOs or one of the CEOs? >> Yes. So that actually we've seen that change over the past couple years, which is exciting for me being in the role that I'm in is you're right historically was vey Sphere admits, right? And we're all getting together. We're talking about how do we partition our lungs appropriately, right? And now it has switched. We see a lot more architect titles. We Seymour director titles coming in because, you know, I said the other day I was in Charlotte talking and I said, You know, business is being written in code, right? And so there's a lot more emphasis on what it's happening with V m wearing his VM worth portfolio expands. We've got a lot of new type of members coming into the group, which is exciting. >> Yeah, And what about the contents out? How much of it is user generated content versus VM were content and then, you know, I understand sponsorships or part of it vendors. The vendor ecosystem, which vm where has a robust ecosystem? Yes, you know, help make sure that it's financially viable for things to happen and as well as participate in the contest. >> Yes, I feel like I almost planted that question because it's such a good one. So, you know, in 2018 we started putting a strong emphasis on community content because we were, you know, we heard from remembers that awesome VM were content, awesome partner content. But we're starting to miss some of the user to user from the trenches, battle war stories, right? And so we put an emphasis on getting that back in and 2018 we've doubled down in 2019 in a big way, so if you've been to a user kind yet in 2019 but we've limited the number of sponsors sessions that we have, right so that we have more room for community content. We're actually able to get people from around the world to these events. So again, me and a couple folks from the States went toe Australia to share our story and then user story, right? And at the end of the day, we used to have sponsored sessions to sort of close it out. Now we have a community, our right, and Sophie Mug provides food and beverages and a chance to get together a network. And so that is a great community. Our and you know, I was at one recently and I was able to watch Ah, couple folks get to them. We're talking about different problems. They're having this and let me get your card so we can touch base on this later, which at the end of the day, that's what gets me motivated. That's what >> it's about. It's Steve. I won't touch on that for a second. You know what? Get you motivated. You've been doing this for years. You're, you know, putting your time in your president. I know. When I attended your Boston V mark the end of the day, it was a good community member talking about career and got some real good, you know, somebody we both know and it really gets you pumped up in something very, a little bit different from there. So talk a little bit without kind of your goals. For a CZ president of Emma, >> Sure eso I get excited about Vima because it's a community organization, right? And because, you know, I've said this a bunch of times. But for me, what excites me is it's a community of people with similar interests growing together right and reinforcing each other. I know for a fact that I can call ah whole bunch of people around the world and say, Hey, I'm having a problem technically or hey, I'm looking for some career advice or hey, one of my buddies is looking for work. Do you know of any opening somewhere? And that's really powerful, right? Because of the end of the day, I think the mug is about names and people and not logos, right? And so that's what it motivates me is seeing the change and the transformation of people and their career growth that V mug can provide. In fact, I know ah ton of people from Boston. In fact, several of them have. You know, they were administrators at a local organization. Maybe they moved into partners. Maybe they moved into vendors. Maybe they stay where they are, and they kept accelerating their growth. But I've seen tons of career growth and that that gets me excited watching people take the next step to be ableto to build a >> career, I tell you, most conferences, I go to the kind of jobs take boards, especially if you're kind of in the hot, cool new space they're all trying to hire. But especially when you go to a local on the smaller events, it's so much about the networking and the people. When I go to a local user, event it. Hey, what kind of jobs you hiring for who you're looking for and who do I know that's looking for those kind of things and trying to help connect? You know, people in cos cause I mean, you know, we all sometime in our career, you know we'll need help alone those lines that I have, something that's personally that you know, I always love to help >> you. I have a friend who said it. I think best, and I can't take credit for this, right? But it's It can be easy to get dismissed from your day job, right? One errant click could be the career limiting click. It is nigh impossible to be fired from the community, right? And that that, to me, is a powerful differentiator for folks that are plugged into a community versus those that are trying to go it >> alone. Yeah, there are some community guidelines that if you don't follow, you might be checking for sure, but no, if if we're there in good faith and we're doing everything like out, tell me it's speaking. You know, this is such, you know, change. Is this the constant in our world? You know, I've been around in the interview long enough. That's like, you know, I remember what the, um where was this tiny little company that had, you know, once a week, they had a barbecue for everybody in the company because they were, like, 100 of them. And, you know, you know, desktop was what they started working on first. And, you know, we also hear stories about when we first heard about the emotion and the like. But, you know, today you know Veum world is so many different aspects. The community is, you know, in many ways fragmented through so many different pieces. What are some of the hot, interesting things? How does seem a deal with the Oh, hey, I want the Aye Aye or the Dev Ops or the you know where where's the vmc cloud versus all these various flavors? How do you balance all that out? All these different pieces of the community? >> Yeah, it's an interesting question. And to be fair with you, I think that's an area that were still getting better at. And we're still adapting to write. You know, if you look at V mug Five years ago, we were the V's fear, sort of first, last and always right. And now you know, especially is VM. Where's portfolio keeps increasing and they keep moving into new areas. That's new areas for us, too. And so, you know, we've got a big, uh, initiative over the next year to really reach out and and see where we can connect with, you know, the kubernetes environment, right? Cause that the hefty oh acquisition is a really big deal. and I think fundamentally changes or potential community, right? And so you know, we've launched a bunch of special interest groups over the span of the past couple years, and I think that's a big piece of it, which is, if you're really interested in networking and security, here's an area that you can connect in and folks that are like minded. If you're really interested in and user computing, here's what you can connect into. And so I think, you know, as we continue to grow and you know, we're, you know, hundreds of thousands of people now around the world so that you can be a challenge. But I think it's It's also a huge opportunity for us to be ableto keep building that connection with folks and saying, Hey, you know, as you continue to move through your career, it's not always gonna be this. You're right. Change is constant. So hey, what's on the horizon for >> you? When I look at like the field organization for being where boy, I wonder when we're gonna have the sand and NSX user groups just because there's such a strong emphasis on the pieces, the business right now? Yeah, All right, Steve, let's change that for a second. Sure said, You know, you're you got CEO is part of your title, their eyes, what you're doing. Tell me about your life these days and you know the stresses and strains And what what's changing these days and what's exciting? You >> sure? So you know, it's exciting to have moved for my career because I'm an old school admin, right? I mean, that's my background. Uh, so, you know, as I've progressed, you know, I keep getting different things in my portfolio, right? So it started out as I was, you know, I was the admin, and then I was managing the systems engineering team. And then they added desktop support that was out of necessity was like, I'm not really a dustup person, right? So something new you need to learn. But then you start seeing where these synergies are, right? Not to hate, like the words energies. But the reality is that's where we launched our VD. I project at U Mass. Lowell, and that has been transformative for how we deliver education. And it has been a lot of ways. Reduced barriers to students to get access to things they couldn't before. So we had engineering students that would have to go out and finance a 3 $4000 laptop to get the horsepower to do their work. Now, that can use a chromebook, right? They don't have to have that because we do that for them and just they have to have any device t get access via via where horizon. Right, So that happened, and then, you know, then they moved in. Our service is operation, right? So what I'm interested now is how do we deliver applications seamlessly to users to give them the best possible experience without needing to think about it? Because if you and I have been around long enough that it used to be a hassle to figure out okay, I need to get this done. That means they need to get this new applications I have to go to I t there and I have my laptop. Now it's the expectation is just like you and I really want to pull out my phone now and go to the APP store and get it right. So how do we enable that to make it very seamless and remove any friction to people getting their work >> done? Yeah, absolutely. That the enterprise app store is something we've talked about is not just the Amazon marketplace these days. >> In some ways, it is so not all applications rate. Some applications are more specific to platforms. And so that's a challenge, which is, you know, I'm a professor. I really like my iPad. Well, how do I get S P ss on that? Okay, well, let me come up with some solutions. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I'm curious if you have any thoughts just from the education standpoint, how that ties into i t. Personally myself, I think I was in my second job out of school before I realized I was in the i t industry because I studied engineering they didn't teach us about. Oh, well, here's the industry's You're working. I knew tech, and I knew various pieces of it and, you know, was learning networking and all these various pieces there. But, you know, the industry viewpoint as a technology person wasn't something. I spend a lot of time. I was just in a conference this week and they were talking about, you know, some of the machine learning pieces. There was an analyst got up on stage is like here I have a life hack for you, he said. What you need to do is get a summer intern that's been at least a junior in college that studied this stuff, and they can educate you on all these cool new things because those of us have been here a while that there's only tools and they're teaching them at the universities. And therefore that's one of those areas that even if you have years, well, if you need to get that retraining and they can help with that >> no, that's that to me is one of most exciting parts about working in education is that our faculty are constantly pushing us in new directions that we haven't even contemplated yet. So we were buying GPU raise in order to start doing a I. Before I even knew why we were doing and there was like, Hey, I need this and I was like, Are you doing like a quake server? Like they were mining Bitcoins? I don't think so, but it was, you know, that was that was that was an area for us and now we're old. Had it this stuff, right? And so that is a exciting thing to be able to partner with people that are on the bleeding edge of innovation and hear about the work that they're doing and not just in in the tech field, but how technology is enabling Other drew some groundbreaking research in, you know, the life sciences space that the technology is enabling in a way that it wasn't possible before. In fact, I had one faculty member tell me, Geez, maybe six months ago. That said, the laboratory of the past is beakers and Silla scopes, right? The laboratory of the future is how many cores can you get? >> Yeah, all right, So next week is Del Technologies world. So you know the show. The combination of what used to be A M, C World and Del World put together a big show expecting around 15,000 people in Las Vegas to be the 10th year actually of what used to be M. C world. We actually did a bunch of dead worlds together. For me personally, it's like 17 or 18 of the M C world that I've been, too, just because disclaimer former emcee employees. So V mugs there on dhe, Maybe explain. You know, the mugs roll there. What you're looking to accomplish what you get out of a show like that. >> Sure. So V mug is a part of the affiliation of del Technologies user communities. Right? And what I love about user communities is they're not mutually exclusive, right? You absolutely can. Being a converged and Avi mug and a data protection user group. It's all about what fits your needs and what you're doing back in the office. And, you know, we're excited to be there because there's a ton of the move members that are coming to Deltek World, right? And so we're there to support our community and be a resource for them. And that's exciting for us because, you know, Del Del Technologies World is a whole bunch of really cool attack that were that were seeing people run vm were on Ray. We're seeing via more partner with, and so that's exciting for us. >> Yeah, and it's a try. Hadn't realized because, like, I've been to one of the converted user group events before, didn't realize that there was kind of an affiliation between those but makes all the sense in the world. >> Yeah, right. And it's, you know, again, it's an open hand thing, right? Beaten and one being the other. You realize them both. For what? They're what They're great at connecting with people that are doing the same thing. There's a ton of people running VM wear on. Ah, myriad. Like you talked about earlier VM Where's partner? Ecosystem is massive, right? But many, many, many in fact, I would say a huge majority of converged folks are running VM we're >> on it. All right. So, Steve want to give you the final word? What's the call to action? Understand? A lot of people in the community, but always looking from or always, ways for people to get involved. So where do they go? What? What would you recommend? >> Yeah, thanks. So if if you are not plugged into user community now, when you're in the tech field, I would strongly encourage you to do so. Right? V mug, obviously, is the one that's closest to my heart, right? If you're in that space, we'd love to have you as part of our community. And it's really easy. Go to V mug. dot com and sign up and see where the next meet up is and go there, right? If you're not into the VM where space and I know you have lots of folks that air, they're doing different things. Go check out your community, right? But I tell you, the career advantages to being in a user community are immense, and I frankly was able to track my career growth from admin to manager to director to associate CEO, right alongside my community involvement. And so it's something I'm passionate about, and I would encourage everybody to check out. >> Yeah, it's Steve. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, I give a personal plug on this. There are a lot of communities out there, the virtual ization community, especially the VM. One specifically is, you know, a little bit special from the rest. You know, I've seen it's not the only one, but is definitely Maur of. It's definitely welcoming. They're always looking for feedback, and it's a good collaborative environment. I've done surveys in the group that you get way better feedback than I do in certain other sectors in just so many people that are looking to get involved. So it's one that you know, I'm not only interviewing, but, you know, I can personally vouch for its steeple. Thank you. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright. And be sure to check out the cube dot net. Of course, we've got dealt technologies world in the immediate future. Not that long until we get to the end of summer. And vm World 2019 back in San Francisco, the Q will be there. Double set. So for both del world del Technologies world and VM World. So come find us in Las Vegas. If you're Adele or Mosconi West in the lobby is where will be for the emerald 2019 and lots and lots of other shows. So thank you so much for watching. Thank you.

>> Announcer: Live, from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to events, we extract the signal from the noise. The signal here is all about automation, robotic process automation, software robots, we're seeing the ascendancy of that market space. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is UiPath's Forward conference, big user conference, UiPath Forward Americas, about 1500 people here, Stu. They have conferences all over the world, I think I heard 14,000 people in the last year have attended such shows. They're intimate, there are a lot of partners here, they're loud, they're a lot of good energy. Ana Cinca is here, she's the Vice President of Enabling Technologies, and she's joined by old friend Tom Clancy, who's the Senior Vice President of UiPath Learning, both folks from UiPath, welcome. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having us. >> So Ana, let's start with you. VP of Enabling Technologies. What does that mean, what's that role? >> Well, my role in the organization is to generate a set of non-core products and programs that are creating an ecosystem that is actually contributing actively into accelerating the adoption of the core platform. And that would be through learning, through generating new products like the UiPath Go!, the Marketplace, or constantly engaging the community of users and so on. >> Okay, so you started the training program, correct? >> Ana: Yeah. >> How did that get started? What was your kind of mission, how'd you do it? >> Well it started from a very simple need. Back then, about two years ago, we were, a bunch of my team members were a bunch of RPA developers, who were losing their time only delivering training, so, two years ago about 500 trainings, five days per week, per year. That were a lot of training, so we said, we need to automate this, we need to do something about it. And the only thing that could come into our mind was to, we got inspired by the Udemy, by Coursera, by all the right courses out there, like platforms out there, which were very democratic in sharing the knowledge. So we said, how about we actually create a set of online courses that are really, really good, RPA focused, UiPath focused, courses, and put it out there? That's how it all started, we just wanted to get rid of these repetitive trainings, ultimately. >> Alright, so you had to do it for yourselves and then. >> Ana: Absolutely, yeah. >> So Stu, we heard today from Daniel, he kind of did the moon shot. He said we are going to train a million people in three years, right? >> Well, Tom, it seems like you've got a challenge in front of you to really scale this business. We've talked with you for years, back in your EMC days, your not just storage but new architectures, this convergent approach to the silos, and then cloud architects, really training kind of next generation of the work force in IT, give us a little bit, what's the same, what's different between what you did back at EMC and what you're doing now here with RPA? >> So the biggest difference between EMC and UiPath is EMC had a technology that a lot of people thought was kind of commodity, right? So, the excitement wasn't there when you started going outside of your partners and customers, right? This technology, there is passion about this throughout the entire globe. This is the next big wave, and so, if you're going to scale a program like this, you have to have a bunch of different factors on your side. What Ana just talked about is the academy, you have to bring value somehow, and that starts with having the right courses. If you don't have the courses built up, then you're starting from zero, right, from scratch. But, the other thing that's even more important, is the passion from the CEO. You know, when I first met with Daniel, it was actually sort of an interview, he was, he talked about, you know, employee training, partner training, customer training, but his passion and forty-five minutes of the hour was talking about educating the planet, right? And so he started with universities, which that was kind of a no brainer. And then he went to Youth in Action, under-represented groups, and so forth. The other factor that's really important is having the right team, so, at UiPath, the team is the company, everybody wants to do this. If you're the leader in India, Japan, China, the US, they're all coming to us saying "We need this program." Not just universities but all the way down to the youths. And then, you need a good academic alliance team. So the team that we're building is going to leverage academy, but we are bringing in some of those EMC academic alliance people, we're bringing in a person from Salesforce.com that was running a big piece of it, starts today. We're bringing in a VMware person, a Cisco person, so we're getting all the best. Those are the best programs in the industry. >> Tom, there's one underlying thing, that I saw, a similarity, is back when you talked about convergence or cloud, there was an underlying fear of "Oh my gosh, I'm not going to have the skills, I'm going to be out of a job." Automation's always been that thing "Oh wait, if I automate it, what's that mean for me?" How do you address that? >> Well, first of all, there's a report all that says by 2030, 1.5 billion jobs will be impacted. It doesn't say negative, it just says impacted. So, everybody is going to have to understand that this is coming, and how does it impact me? We're going to put together, as part of this, we'll have an upscaling rescaling, so everybody, it doesn't matter who you are, will be able to leverage the academy, and we'll be tweaking the academy courses, so if it's upscaling rescaling, they will take the courses in a different way, in a different format, than the university students, than the Youth in Action, so we'll target those different audiences, and the other, one other thing is marketing is hugely important, because you can't rely on the training group to get the word out. So, Bobby Patrick and his team, are working hand-in-hand with us to drive the awareness across the globe. >> So Ana, when we first heard about RPA and UiPath, we read the Forrester report, and said "Okay, there's a few leaders out there, let's "play with it, let's go download the software "and see how hard it is to do." Turned out, we could only get our hands on UiPath software, it was very easy to get our hands on the software, it was very open. Some of the other guys were like, "Why do you want to use it?" Forget it. But then we built some automations, and it was kind of, you know, it took a little, there was a little bit of a learning curve, but it was not a developer who did it, so it was relatively low code, or even no code. So, when you started this program and as you scale it, who are you targeting? Is it the hardcore developer, is it the, you know, RPA developer, is it the citizen developer, both? And how do you adjust the training correspondingly? >> Yeah, so, first of all, the way we set up the trainings, were, we wanted to make sure that, exactly like we did with the core platform, that was the first RPA software that had a trial version that was available for everyone, right? We had to do the same thing in learning and we're an academy, so what we said were we're launching courses which are free of charge, online, for everyone to use. But, moreover than that, what we wanted to do, is to, have courses that take someone from a very basic foundation level, of basic programming, and actually guide him or her through a learning curve that will get them to an expert level. So, the way we built the courses, are in such a matter that it is very easy to be followed by anyone, actually. And now, that's the reason why, now we're having not only courses for the RPA developers, the techie guys, or solution architects, or infrastructure engineers, but, moreover than that, we're tackling into the space of non-technical people who are equally very important in the RPA journey. Like business analysts, the RPA project managers, and so on. So we're trying to cover all the personas that are critical in an RPA COE set up. >> So it's interesting, Tom, hearing you say you're recruiting people from Cisco, Vmware, some EMC folks, a lot of the traditional, some would say legacy, enterprise companies, who are constantly in the process of reskilling, so I would think that these folks would be very receptive to that. Now you think about Vmware admin, Cisco certified engineers, Microsoft certifications, they sort of led to full employment for at least some period of time. Do you think RPA skills are going to be similar, in that they are going to be in such demand, if young people start to get trained in RPA they're going to essentially have full employment for life, or do you think it's more fleeting that that? You're thoughts? >> So I've been here for three months now, so I guess that makes me a veteran at UiPath, but robotics is going to be in everybody's job. So one of the things that it took me a while to kind of grasp when I was talking to Daniel the first time, the first meeting I mentioned, is he said that there will be at least one robot on every desktop moving forward. This is going to be, you know, when you had the flip phone before, well actually, when people went from the big cell phones and people were saying everybody's going to have a cell phone, you know, everybody looked like "That's kind of crazy," but then, next thing you know, you have a computer on your phone, and everybody has at least one phone. This is going to be the same way with robots. It's going to be ubiquitous across the entire industry. So, people will grow up understanding what robots are. That's why we're going after the youth, so they understand robots right from the get go. And then, it will integrated into everybody's job across the globe, so it's not fleeting at all, it's actually the complete opposite. >> How do you guys measure success? Obviously, you got to get to a million in three years, that's a lot of training. How else do you measure success? What kind of parameters do you set? Tests you take, how do you measure it? >> Want to take that one up for scaling? >> So, one of the things we did, well Ana, one of the things that Ana did before I got here, was they built certification. Certification is going to continue to get more and more important for us. You know, so, think Microsoft, Cisco, certification, and so forth, and so, we believe we will have the industry standard certification program, period. But one of the things we did, was we built our own certification platform, high stakes certification. So what that does is, we do not have to charge, or charge much, any of the people going through our courses and certification. So, today, because we had to go through a third party, we're charging 850 dollars per test. This quarter, through the end of the year, it's going to be zero, just to bring more people in. And then, going forward, it would be significantly lower than 150. What we want to do, and what we will do, is democratize learning and certification for robots. >> I think this is huge, go on you want to add something? >> Yeah, I really want to add one more thing, because what we're doing together, is actually, through the way we're approaching community, and through the spaces that we have already built so far like the academy, the forum, we're bringing now the UiPath Go! in October, the end of October, the project space, all holistically wrapped up in a new version of the community. What we're trying to get out there is an RPA developer getting trained on the academy, being certified, but then practicing within the UiPath universe. Ultimately, where we want to get to, is to measure success also through the number of community users, of end-users, who are not only certified, but we will be able to see what is their activity status, like reputation, and recognition, within the community itself. And, hence, ultimately, reaching up to a stage, where we will be able to pinpoint to a true UiPath expert elite of people throughout the world. >> I love that it's a community driven measurement. >> Everything goes into building up a holistic and global community. >> Very open-- >> If I could just say one thing on community if you just look at the education and the different audiences, you know, let's say, you know, people that do robotics and they get certified, all the way down to youth, we will have a community, where all these different organizations are talking to each other, and to professionals. So, you might have a ten year old in Bangladesh, that is on the community asking questions, and you might have an engineer in Romania at UiPath answering those questions because they're part of the community. Or, it could be a customer or partner, you know, in Philadelphia, but they're all part of the community, we're bringing all these people together. So, things like STEM, Women in Coding, one person came up to me last night, he was so excited, he said "I represent a lot of the black community when "it comes to education and I really want to get my teams "across the country involved in this." >> Phenomenal, now, the no cost training is available roughly when? >> Yeah, right now. >> It's today? >> Well no cost training has been available-- >> Since the beginning. >> That was a decision that Ana made 18 months ago. If somebody, if a customer wants to have a seminar, or something like that, we have third-party training companies that will go in, and they'll charge, but if you go online to the academy, 100 percent free. And the certification for the next quarter is going to be 100 percent free. >> That's unbelievable, because, you know, I got three kids in college and one of them is he's doing Python, he's doing R, he's doing Tableau and he's texting me, "Hey, these Tableau courses "are really expensive, can you pay for it?" And I'm like well, what's the ROI? And I'm sayin' learn about RPA, because it's going to change the world, you know, visualizations important and all that stuff's important, but that's, I think, a huge investment that you guys are making, and then also, helps me understand how you guys plan on staying ahead. So congratulations on getting this started, Tom, you basically came out of retirement, you know, quasi-retirement so it had to be pretty alluring. Extremely successful career at EMC, so great to have you back in the game. >> Thanks, it's great to be here. >> Thanks so much, you guys, for coming on theCUBE. >> Okay, thank you. >> Right there, everybody, you're watching theCUBE, live, from the Fontainebleau in Miami. We'll be right back, right after this short break, you're watching UiPathForward Americas, we'll be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen Denmark, it's theCUBE covering Kubecon and CloudnativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, live here at Copenhagen, Denmark, Cube's coverage of Kubecon 2018 in Europe, this is all about the Kubernetes the future of cloud native, CloudNativeCon part of the CNCF Cloud Native Foundation, I'm John Furrier and my co-host Lauren Cooney, founder of Spark Labs industry expert of open source. So, we have two end user customers of Kubernetes and Cloud Native, Zach Arnold, software engineer Ygenre energy fund, and Austin Adams software development manager, same company. You guys are doing really interesting business model around energy and equity in buildings and homes, but you're writing code, so you have to make all this stuff work, so I'm sure you're cloud native, why have a data center when you can have the cloud >> Austin : We were born in the cloud. >> You were born in the cloud. So take us through, explain the business real quick, and then what's your back end, technical scaling situation look like in terms of infrastructure, software and what's the make up of the systems. >> Zach: You know the business best. >> Yeah, so Ygrene operates under something called PACE, property assess clean energy. We operate in a couple of different states. We work with local governments to create a PACE program that is accepted in different counties or jurisdictions within the state, and then we allow homeowners and contracting companies to provide financing for home improvements that are specifically within the domain of renewable energy or energy efficiency. >> So, you basically finance a solar panel that I put on my house or building if there's benefits there, and then you guys get the financing and you tie in with the government so the property taxes, the leverage the security is the building right, or the asset. >> Yeah, and the way that we're chartered is basically we can put a tax on the property which gives us some guarantees on repayment and things like that, and it's a great model so far. >> It's a new financial engineering around energy efficiancy so you've got to build systems, so you're working with government, so now we all know how government systems work, so you've got to be agile and nimble. Take us through how the back end works, what's it look like, what's the system look like, you're hosted in the cloud, is it Amazon, Google? >> So everything that we have is in a cloud provider that starts with an A, and ends with an S, it's AWS I don't know if I can say that, I think I can say that, AWS all the way-- >> Yes, it's good. >> And we have tons of services, we have Kubernetes running most of our main services. Within our migration we actually started with our main service. A lot of people start with, you know, their smallest microservice, we just went whole-hog and just went in for it, so they system is mainly a lone-management system. Underwriting data aggregation and underwriting processing, so every application that comes in we have to underwrite it and make sure every little thing checks out, and our underwriting system has won awards for how accurate it is and how high quality it is as well. >> So, I'm doing a mental white board in my mind, just kind of graphing this so just help me out here and take us through this. So, you guys are a cutting edge company, new progressive business model, real innovative, great stuff. Cloud native, so you're born in the cloud no data center, cool, check, it's what everyone does, and now you're like okay, now I've got to deal with these legacy systems. So, you're putting containers around things, so you have to interface, you build your own system so that's cool, but you're dealing with other systems and then how are you handling that, you are just containerizing it, so take us through some of those linkages. >> Yeah, so where we're creating, a lot of times when we have to integrate with another system, we'll create a small service that is code that we own, and we'll reach out to those integrations, those vendors and we'll do aggregation within our system and provide an interface back to our systems. You know, like everyone, we're breaking up the monolith or whatever, maybe in 10 years we'll go back to a monolith, who knows but you know we're slicing out things, making microservices, it looks like a mess on the back end, just tons of microservices going everywhere and that's why we're using all these Cloud Native tools to be able to manage that. So, in order to move quickly, we're wanting to containerize everything, everything runs in a container at this point. >> Lauren: Great. >> A lot of our services follow this kind of we're kind of calling the container adaptor pattern, it follows the software adaptor pattern where, just like Austin was saying, let's say for example we're interfacing with a credit vendor, we create a service where we talk to our own service that has a well defined interface that we know will always get a credit report back with the following fields, but then where that information actually comes from, whether it's one of the big three credit vendors or someone else who has a well defined API, that's largely not the concern of the main loan management system, it's the concern of the microservice that's responsible for reaching out to that other entity there. So, that's how we've kind of gotten to beat around the legacy interfacing of all these other different financial services and tools that help to aggregate data.. >> It's super clever you can optimize on a service basis but now you have to orchestrate and kind of conduct everything through-- >> And keep everything secure. >> That's really interesting, I mean I think what I'm looking at here is a huge ecosystem of partners and companies and end users coming together and one of the questions, beyond why you are here, what are you looking at here, what is interesting to you, what do you want to learn about that you might bring into your, you know, architecture essentially? >> Austin and I were talking about this, we kind of tend to look at the CNCF list of projects as a dinner menu. (laughs) >> We're refreshing that page frequently, because we're adding projects at an alarming rate, but one project we're using FluentD, Notary, Kubernetes, of course, Prometheus, things like that, we want to start using those things more extensively. One's that we're really excited about are Spire and Spiffy, the identity, kind of a new take, not necessarily new but new for cloud native take on identity of services and authentication, as well as the open policy agent to provide a single DSL to do all of your policy and authorization-- >> Lauren: That's a lot of work, load and management and identity correct? >> Yeah, yes. >> Authorization and authentication are two of the most important things that happen in our system and we have so many different ways that it happens right now, it can tend to look a little clogy, just from the sense of the fact that we need a little more coordination or standardization around it, I mean we have well written policies that are documented but the way that those actually get enforced are, it's individualized based on the service, you know, if it's a cloud based policy, then it's AWS IAM, if it's Kubernetes based policy it's RBAC using Kubernetes RBAC, so it kind of looks like if we can abstact a lot of that functionality out of the services, the containers, the orchestration tool or the cloud, to making those decisions, that would really, really simplify things for us. >> So, you guys are end users, so are you part of like an end user group that gives feedback directly into the community or how does that work, and do you contribute to that? >> Yes, so we're on the fringes of the contributor community as well, and we're definitely on GitHub on all these projects posting issues and in some cases providing our own PR's or whatever. None of us are within the Kubernetes orb but that's definitely something we all are achieving or aspiring to be is jumping into some of these projects, especially some of the smaller projects that we're using on a daily basis on our build servers like, Portheurs or Notary, some of those things we're actively contributing to those. >> So, you've traded on mastery of product but being active on the project is the key, the balance there. >> Yeah, I mean typically what you find in the fiance industry is when they go for a solution, they lead with their wallet as for what we can purchase, or what we can sponsor, but Ygrene has been, our managers and management have been incredibly empowering this way, they say well what can we give, we lead with our hands. >> Yeah, and this is interesting, if you have a good business model innovation, which you guys have, you can be a completely clean sheet of paper to build it. >> Right >> So, that's the best thing about the cloud. You can really move fast and go from, you know, point A to point B, move the needle. >> Yeah, with it at the same time there's kind of a clean slate, there's even a clean slate in terms of best practices within our industry. Now if we were in mortgage, there's a lot of rules, there's a lot of clear guidelines on how to do security and auditing and things that you need, where in our industry that's all emerging, so we have a chance to also set the pace, set the tone for what security might look like, or what cloud usage might look like within the PACE industry. But at the same time, we're getting increasing government regulations, so we're having to make these decisions around, what are the tools that are going help us achieve maximum customer protection and audit-ability while maintaining our business model without totally-- >> And you're going to need flexibility because you don't know what's going to come next you've got to be ready for anything, and that is what leads to my next question, two points, how do you guys prepare for what's next, what's the main ethos around, technical architecture around being prepared for that, ready state that's coming to you, and then two, what have you learned over the, what's the scar tissue look like, what's the moments of joy and despair going on because you're reiterating, your learning, you're always constantly getting knocked down, standing back up. so this is what innovation is, it can be fun and also grueling at the same time. >> Yeah, so how we deal with what's new beyond our like software process, we have a well-defined process that everything gets churned into. Government is really good about giving us notice about when stuff's going into effect, so we always have target dates that we're going toward. But, in terms of what's next in terms of our software, we have this interesting culture within our organization, everyone wants to improve everything, I think it's called a Kaizen culture, just people are looking at stuff they want to improve it, and so our process allows for anyone to throw something on the backlog. It will get prioritized and put around, but we're allowing all of our engineers to say, hey we want to do this, and you know, putting it into an open forum where, you know, we might not do it but we have the discussion, and we have all the channels to have those discussions and, like most technology companies or technology focused companies, we spend a lot of time talking about technologies, and making those decisions. >> You guys really have the cultural ethos but the people to bate and then commit. >> And that's one of my, you know, recommendations for any company trying to move to cloud native or Kubernetes is, always, you have to have your evangelists, on your team, because you can't expect people who have been doing it one way forever to instantly be onboard. You need some sort of technical evangelist whether that's outside company, it works best, I think, if it's someone you've hired, or someone in your organization who's preaching the gospel of Kubernetes or cloud native. >> Spark Labs, Lauren's company's doing a lot of that work, but that really nails it, I mean, you got to just, it's not a technical issue, per se-- >> Exactly. >> We're hearing that all through the show here. What's on your wish list, what is the holiday's want to bring for you? If you could throw your wish list out there, and you can, a magic wand, crystal ball >> EKS, if Amazon would respond to our request. >> Okay, we just had AG on yesterday, he said it's coming >> It's coming. >> He said, months, >> Did he say months, I thought it was a few months, So maybe >> We'll check the transcripts. >> Alright >> Yeah, it wasn't tomorrow. >> That's alright. >> And that's one of our, that's our scar tissue right? We're doing this ourself, you know, there's this huge control board and we got people, you know, doing the knobs and things and we're relatively small, you know, we're a small engineering organization so we're doing a lot of this ourselves where we can abstract a lot of that work out to a cloud provider that we are already on. >> Well it's going to be good reps for you guys as this thing gets abstracted away, you're going to have a great core competencies in Kubernetes, I think that is a notable thing there. >> Austin: For sure. >> One of the things on my wish list, I was speaking to Jace and Josh Burkus and a lot of the core contributors in Kubernetes at the Contributors Summit, I kind of realized that I would love to see a coordinated cross cutting after, either on part of the CNCF or on part of The Kubernetes Project proper, to have a proactive security, I wouldn't call it a working group, I guess a SIG, a Special Interest Group. It would be, I know that we can deal with zero day issues really, really quickly. For example, the Azure host path mapping issue that was a few months ago, but right now it's kind of on the responsibility of each SIG to implement whatever security looks like to them individually, which is great, it means there are people thinking about security, that makes me sleep better at night. But, seeing some coordination around that and kind of driving towards, okay we have this tool that seems to be changing the game, how are we going to change the game with security? Like is there a way to look at that and even, 'cause authentication and authorization have been around since more than one user used a terminal in the 1960's and 70's. But, even with this new step of admission controllers, where we have more fine grain control around how stuff gets into the cluster. I think it would be great to look at what a coordinated cloud native security effort would look like. >> I think that's great, I mean we've been talking to a lot of vendors here and a lot of folks that have projects, and we bring security every single time and they kind of have an answer, but they really don't. >> They body swerve you, we've got this we've got that. >> Or you're the developer and you have to build it in yourself, so I totally agree with that recommendation I think it's fabulous. >> Yeah, Kubernetes is making so many things simpler at certain levels. Now, if we can focus those efforts at making security simple for people, because they're security experts, they can put their two cents in >> Lauren: Let's build it in and not block it on. >> Build it in and not expect every developer to know. >> Zach: Don't bolt it on, build it in. >> Build it from the beginning, there are all kinds of new ways. The fact there is no perimeter with the cloud brings up, really kind of throws everyone for a loop because you have to go to the chipset down, I mean what Google got, I think is a very interesting approach, they're trying to push forward this multilayer approach from chip to kernel to OS to app, interesting. They've got, managing through all their security, they've got android, I mean spear phishing is a huge problem right now, we're seeing and a lot of enterprises we talk to are like, well, it's like the firewalls and VPN's like that's old school, they need to modernize that so this is going to get them thinking about that. So great, hey guys, thank you for coming on and sharing your feedback-- >> Thank you. >> And your data and your place and how you are architected on AWS and your work with Kubernetes. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Cube coverage here in Copenhagen. It's theCUBE's coverage at Kubecon 2018. We'll be back with more after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017, brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage live here in Austin, Texas for the CNCF's two conferences, CloudNativeCon, which was yesterday, and two days, today and tomorrow, KubeCon for Kubernetes' conference. This is theCUBE, of course, from SiliconANGLE Media. I'm John Furrier with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Our next guest, Dan Kohn, is the executive director of the CNCF, the man who put it all together. Congratulations. Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Oh, absolutely. Thrilled to have you guys back here again. >> So you kind of doing a victory lap here now, high fiving each other? >> Dan: Great hugs. >> John: Great event. >> Laughing: I'm glad it's a good event, and I am hearing fantastic feedback that folks are thrilled to be here. But we sort of describe this moment for the organization and the community as being the end of the beginning. >> John: Yeah. >> Where we now have all the major cloud vendors, all of the biggest enterprise software companies. We have a core group of 14 projects anchored by Kubernetes, but tons and tons of work in front of us. >> And tons of success, so I'm just going to read a couple of highlights from yesterday. There's a lot today. Baidu joins the CNCF, a lot of scaling production application examples, 31 new silver end-user members joined, Alibaba Cloud update to platinum, CoreDNS 1.0, Containerd, Fluentd, Jaeger, tons of news. Obviously, we've been pumping out the coverage. Today, again, more and more great goodness. But really interesting is that you guys have put a frame around this community to allow it to grow, to fertilize the open source vibe, which is all cloud but yet scaled. And you put up a slide I want to get your reaction to that I thought was compelling yesterday during your keynote. It was the flywheel, circle, and it said projects, products, profit. >> Dan: Right. >> And not that you're promoting profit, but you're not hiding the ball, either, saying, hey, you know what? There's a lot of commercial interest in cloud, obviously. We saw AWS' success last week. And that is if you create good products in this community framework, there's profit to be had. >> Right. So first of all, I should admit to plagiarizing that slide from Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. >> And similarly, I think you can look at a lot of aspects... >> It's an open source feature. >> Dan: Yes. >> Free for you to use. >> John: Right. >> Similarly, I think there's a lot of ways in which Kubernetes is trying to build on the success of Linux. And Jim even describes Kubernetes as the Linux of the cloud. >> John: Yeah. >> Stu: Yeah. >> John: That's a good point. >> Dan, one of the things we've been talking around Kubernetes is you talk about scale. >> Dan: Right. >> Talk about scale of the CNCF. You have 4 to 14 projects. People are a little worried when you get all the vendors around here and there's all these projects. It's a foundation thing, it's going to go off the rails. >> Dan: Yeah. >> Customers aren't going to have a voice. How do we make sure we kind of learn from some of the things that other projects have had challenges with in the past? >> And I think that's our advantage, which is the great thing about coming later than some of the other foundations, is we can look at where they had successes and where they had issues. And our aspiration for CNCF is to get to go make entirely new mistakes rather than replicating some of the issues that have come before. And so really from the beginning of CNCF, we had a somewhat unusual and frankly a little bit cumbersome charter where I describe it at times as a three-ring circus. We have a governing board made up of the vendors that are putting a lot of money into the community, but they don't get to run the projects and they don't even get to pick the projects. Instead, they appoint six of the nine members of an independent technical oversight committee, kind of like the Supreme Court. And then we have a third group in the end-user community that I'm thrilled to say is now up to 28 members in it. They appoint one of those folks. We finally got that working. We have Sam Lambert, the director of infrastructure at GitHub, who has just made a huge commitment to Kubernetes and is moving all their infrastructure over into it. Those seven appoint the last two. And so that body, and they just had their public meeting a couple hours ago. They feel very strongly about their independence, about their reputation, that they're trying to make very good judgments based on what they're seeing in the marketplace. >> That's interesting, the three-ring circle. I like how you put it. But let's talk about the end-user piece because I think that's critical. One of the things we were commenting earlier from the Lyft folks was you have a lot of end users who have built some large-scale systems out of their own sheer necessity. >> Dan: Definitely. >> And that is now being donated in. We saw Kubernetes come in with, you shepherded beautifully, went from Google, but you've got Lyft donating an amazing product convoy. >> This first convoy has a huge amount of excitement. And what was fun was, actually, on the same stage that they contributed back in LA in September, Uber contributed a separate project. Now, unlike Uber and Lyft, the two projects are in no way competitive- >> John: Yeah. >> Like Jaeger is really fantastic tracing one. But what they have in common is that they're companies that have had to grow from nothing to extremely high scale and then had problems that they solved. And they wanted to share that expertise with us. >> I want to get your thoughts on this. Because we've been speculating, on theCUBE, we've been kind of thinking, an editorial, but just that this is all good business. Now, that's pretty obvious, right? You're starting to see this kind of contribution, the gifts that keep on giving. These are significant code. >> Dan: Yeah. >> Not like, okay, let's start a little group and huddle and build something organically. You have real goodness coming in from Google, Uber, Lyft, and there's a million others. >> Dan: Right. >> How is that changing the game? Certainly accelerating it. That's really bringing goods to the table. >> Right. I think the whole... >> You have to manage it. >> Well, and for what it's worth, I don't actually manage the projects. And so we do provide a set of services- >> John: The community? >> -to them and we help them, we market them. But one of the unusual aspects of CNCF is that the projects do actually manage themselves. A little bit of guidance from the TOC, but we really are unusual in that sense. And that's one of the reasons the projects have been... >> And what's interesting is, to connect the dots, though, one step further, you're talking about a commercial entity donating massive intellectual property in the open for all the goodness of everyone else. But yet that flywheel is continuing. They're still using it. So it is inherently commercial dynamic. >> Right. And back to that circle, I think really the underlying concept is that companies agree that sharing key parts of their infrastructure has a huge amount of value to the whole ecosystem, to each other. And then they're absolutely eager to compete above that. And so you can look at it with the public clouds where we have now Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, IBM, Oracle all at the table. They are absolutely fierce competitors. But they're saying that this specific software infrastructure layer isn't the area that they want to compete. They want to compete on all the value-added services, customer service, et cetera. >> Dan, I wonder if you can speak to how CNCF connects to some of the broader communities out there. Things like Kata containers got announced coming out of the OpenStack group. You've got a serverless track happening here, kind of extends some of where Kubernetes is going. How does CNCF fit into the broader... >> Sure. And it's definitely the case that all the innovation out there cannot happen in CNCF. Most obviously, everything that we do, almost everything depends on Linux. And so that's our parent organization, the Linux Foundation. But we've had a good collaboration with Jonathan Bryce from OverStack. They have two booths on the floor here at the show. And we've spoken to Clear Containers and RunV, the two predecessors in the past. But the part that I'm particularly pleased with for Kata containers is that it is an OCI-compliant runtime, that's another sister organization, and is really designed to work well for Kubernetes. And then they can pitch that and let the market go decide which container runtimes they find the most valuable. >> Obviously a lot of traction here in terms of the sentiment around service meshes and pluggable lock-in textures. That's been very cool. But security came up. So I want to get your thoughts around security, obviously storage and these older models around how to deal with storage and networking. Obviously, always in the action. >> Yeah. >> But security is top of mind for everyone. How is that being addressed? You know, talk is out there... >> Sure. I mean our philosophy on this is that moving to cloud-native and particularly the continuous integration and continuous development that goes along with that is the most important step that you can do to help secure your infrastructure. And Equifax is the example everyone always brings up. But there was a case where they were using known insecure software and they didn't have the processes up to place where instead of doing quarterly updates or monthly updates, you want to be doing dozens of updates per day. And a cloud-native infrastructure allows you to do that. >> What's next for you? Because you've got great traction with both community response, and the community has been absolutely amazing, the quality of people, level has been great, but also at the funding sponsors. You've got a lot of people that are involved. What's next? What happens next? What do you envision happening? What's the plan, and then how do you view that evolving? >> Well, I hate to fall into the buzzword implosion here, but if you go back to the crossing the chasm metaphor, I think we're still very much just in the early adopter phase. 2018 could very well be the moment that we jump over to the early majority. And I do feel like this whole community now has the velocity to do that and that we're on track for it. But as that happens, there's just far, far more people who need to be educated so they understand the projects and the options and how to work with them. And then hopefully they go from just being consumers of these technologies to contributors and that we can welcome them into our community and hopefully get the advantage of their expertise as well. >> I want to get your thoughts on a comment that Stu and I were talking about. Stu, you and I were talking about the notion of value creation above the stack, and then how Kubernetes, although some could say being commoditized, but it's also creating value because with that consistency of Kubernetes, you can now create value. So we believe, and I want to get your reaction to this, because we think a whole new ecosystem dynamic will emerge of a new kind of ecosystem. And if this new app developer combined with software engineering, which is really going on, you're talking about the cloud, the app developers will just build in value, that value creation will be rewarded. That's where monetization will be happening. >> And if I could build off that... >> John: Yeah. >> Dan, I loved one of your opening comments. You quoted, "exciting times for boring infrastructure, "maybe too exciting." So this week we've been teasing out there's a lot of work to make that infrastructure boring. You've got everybody on this floor, the CNCF board, lots of new projects making that. Where the action is and what this is going to create is that application monetization and the speed and agility of being able to create these cool new cloud-native applications out there. So it's interesting dynamic, spans broad pieces of this, layers of the stack there. >> Yeah. Well, I will point out that there was an odd level of unanimity of just a ton of different leaders in the community, in keynotes from Craig McLuckie and Chen Goldberg and others where they all agree that Kubernetes is not by any means the ultimate answer or the final answer. I think everybody now expects to see Kubernetes as a core aspect of the infrastructure for software for the next decade or more. But there's a belief that there's a whole ton of value that needs to be added above it, particularly to try and show for a regular application developer who just has a PHP app or no-GS microservices or anything else what's the easiest way to go from having a piece of software and deploying it effectively. >> Dan, so it's interesting. You watch the people on the outside. They're like, oh, look at Kubernetes. They're all holding hands and saying Kumbaya. We know there's some spirited debates that happen- >> Dan: Definitely. >> In the code, some projects that are sometimes competing up there. Why has the community come together, and where are some of the areas that we still need to work on and improve to help customers going forward? >> And again, I think they have the big advantage of having watched other communities that didn't value community and consensus and the ability to work through their issues. And so thankfully, we just have a ton of really capable engineers who also have some of those social or personal qualities that they care about working these things out. And to date, at least, I think most of those disagreements have been settled pretty amicably and in a positive direction. I think there's still huge swathes of this space that are still up in the air. Storage is an obvious one where there's a ton of work going on in a storage working group of CNCF. Serverless is another where I think everyone agrees that the application deployment model of AWS Lambda is really exciting and has things that people should replicate and should be brought over to Kubernetes. But how that should happen, what the software is, et cetera, there's still, in fact, we have our first serverless track today here at KubeCon where several different competing approaches are all talking about what they'd like to do. >> Awesome stuff. And you also announced some dates for next year, December 11 and 13 in Seattle. >> Dan: Yes. >> Okay. >> Dan: That's a year from now. >> November 14 and 15 in Shanghai. >> Now, you and I met in Hangzhou in the lobby, which was just amazing. But I certainly am hoping to convince you to go back to China with us. This will be our first event... >> I got a three-year visa. >> Good, yeah, that's the exactly right one. But this will be our first event in China, which I think is just a huge opportunity. We now have Baidu, Tencent, Huawai, ZTE, a number of startups. There's just so much excitement for this space over there that we're really excited to satisfy. >> Stu: And Copenhagen in May. >> And that's the last one. Thank you. May 2 to 4 in Copenhagen, and we're really excited for the event, to bring it to Europe and the rest of the world. >> Okay. So you've been working like a dog, you've been working hard. I've seen you in China. It's serendipitous. But it's not without being mentioned that this has been great effort by your team and the Linux Foundation and Jim and the whole team. But congratulations. Are you having a pinch me moment? I know it's too early to do a victory lap. >> But you've got to be pretty excited. >> Yeah. It really has been a great thing for the foundation that we sort of accomplished many of our 2018 and 2019 goals this year. But I'm sure we're going to find plenty of stuff to do next year. >> And your goal for the next 6 to 12 months, what's on your top three to-do's, continue the momentum? Share your API for... >> Yeah. What's great is that we really have plenty of members. We'd always like to add new ones and serve the ones we have better. But right now, the focus is really about providing better services to our projects. All of them feel overworked. They would love help on documentation, on marketing, on messaging about it, and some of them need help with testing development and other things. So that's really what we're buckling down on. >> Great community are going to test them, being here on the ground, personally present at creation. And I was standing there with J.J. and Lew Tucker, OpenStack three years ago, talking about Kubernetes. We were kind of ripping. We couldn't have imagined, then, obviously, they bolted it on last year with your event. Now second year here, huge community... >> But you have 4,100 folks here, is more than the previous four events combined. >> Yeah, awesome. >> So it really is exciting. >> TheCUBE, always on the ground. And sometimes the squirrel finds a nut. We found a cloud-native foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. CNCF, Cloud-Native Compute Foundation, really a new, growing, and relevant community for cloud and a new way to do software and reimagine the future from software engineering to full application development, a new way. This is theCUBE's coverage, and we are here live in Austin. More live coverage after this short break. We'll be right back. [Techno Music]

>> Welcome everybody, we're at the Flink Forward conference in San Francisco, at the Kabuki Hotel. Flink Forward U.S. is the first U.S. user conference for the Flink community sponsored by data Artisans, the creators of Flink, and we're here with special guest Kenneth Knowles-- >> Hi. >> Who works for Google and who heads up the Apache Beam Team where, just to set context, Beam is the API Or STK on which developers can build stream processing apps that can be supported by Google's Dataflow, Apache Flink, Spark, Apex, among other future products that'll come along. Ken, why don't you tell us, what was the genesis of Beam, and why did Google open up sort of the API to it. >> So, I can speak as an Apache Beam Team PMC member, that the genesis came from a combined code donation to Apache from Google Cloud Dataflow STK and there was also already written by data Artisans a Flink runner for that, which already included some portability hooks, and then there was also a runner for Spark that was written by some folks at PayPal. And so, sort of those three efforts pointed out that it was a good time to have a unified model for these DAG-based computational... I guess it's a DAG-based computational model. >> Okay, so I want to pause you for a moment. >> Yeah. >> And generally, we try to avoid being rude and cutting off our guests but, in this case, help us understand what a DAG is, and why it's so important. >> Okay, so a DAG is a directed acyclic graph, and, in some sense, if you draw a boxes and arrows diagram of your computation where you say "I read some data from here," and it goes through some filters and then I do a join and then I write it somewhere. These all end up looking what they call the DAG just because of the fact that it is the structure, and all computation sort of can be modeled this way, and in particular, these massively parallel computations profit a lot from being modeled this way as opposed to MapReduce because the fact that you have access to the entire DAG means you can perform transformations and optimizations and you have more opportunities for executing it in different ways. >> Oh, in other words, because you can see the big picture you can find, like, the shortest path as opposed to I've got to do this step, I've got to do this step and this step. >> Yeah, it's exactly like that, you're not constrained to sort of, the person writing the program knows what it is that they want to compute, and then, you know, you have very smart people writing the optimizer and the execution engine. So it may execute an entirely different way, so for example, if you're doing a summation, right, rather than shuffling all your data to one place and summing there, maybe you do some partial summations, and then you just shuffle accumulators to one place, and finish the summation, right? >> Okay, now let me bump you up a couple levels >> Yeah. >> And tell us, so, MapReduce was a trees within the forest approach, you know, lots of seeing just what's a couple feet ahead of you. And now we have the big picture that allows you to find the best path, perhaps, one way of saying it. Tell us though, with Google or with others who are using Beam-compatible applications, what new class of solutions can they build that you wouldn't have done with MapReduce before? >> Well, I guess there's... There's two main aspects to Beam that I would emphasize, there's the portability, so you can write this application without having to commit to which backend you're going to run it on. And there's... There's also the unification of streaming and batch which is not present in a number of backends, and Beam as this layer sort of makes it very easy to use sort of batch-style computation and streaming-style computation in the same pipeline. And actually I said there was two things, the third thing that actually really opens things up is that Beam is not just a portability layer across backends, it's also a portability layer across languages, so, something that really only has preliminary support on a lot of systems is Python, so, for example, Beam has a Python STK where you write a DAG description of your computation in Python, and via Beam's portability API's, one of these sort of usually Java-centric engines would be able to run that Python pipeline. >> Okay, so-- >> So, did I answer your question? >> Yes, yes, but let's go one level deeper, which is, if MapReduce, if its sweet spot was web crawl indexing in batch mode, what are some of the things that are now possible with a Beam-style platform that supports Beam, you know, underneath it, that can do this direct acyclic graph processing? >> I guess what I, I'm still learning all the different things that you can do with this style of computation, and the truth is it's just extremely general, right? You can set up a DAG, and there's a lot of talks here at Flink Forward about using a stream processor to do high frequency trading or fraud detection. And those are completely different even though they're in the same model of computation as, you know, you would still use it for things like crawling the web and doing PageRank over. Actually, at the moment we don't have iterative computations so we wouldn't do PageRank today. >> So, is it considered a complete replacement, and then new used cases for older style frameworks like MapReduce, or is it a complement for things where you want to do more with data in motion or lower latency? >> It is absolutely intended as a full replacement for MapReduce, yes, like, if you're thinking about writing a MapReduce pipeline, instead you should write a Beam pipeline, and then you should benchmark it on different Beam backends, right? >> And, so, working with Spark, working with Flink, how are they, in terms of implementing the full richness of the Beam-interface relative to the Google product Dataflow, from which I assumed Beam was derived? >> So, all of the different backends exist in sort of different states as far as implementing the full model. One thing I really want to emphasize is that Beam is not trying to take the intersection on all of these, right? And I think that your question already shows that you know this, we keep sort of a matrix on our website where we say, "Okay there's all these different "features you might want, "and then there's all these backends "you might want to run it on," and it's sort of there's can you do it, can you do it sometimes, and notes about that, we want this whole matrix to be, yes, you can use all of the model on Flink, all of it on Spark, all of it on Google Cloud Dataflow, but so they all have some gaps and I guess, yeah, we're really welcoming contributors in that space. >> So, for someone whose been around for a long time, you might think of it as an ODBC driver, where the capabilities of the databases behind it are different, and so the drivers can only support some subset of a full capability. >> Yeah, I think that there's, so, I'm not familiar enough with ODBC to say absolutely yes, absolutely no, but yes, it's that sort of a thing, it's like the JVM has many languages on it and ODBC provides this generic database abstraction. >> Is Google's goal with Beam API to make it so that customers demand a level of portability that goes not just for the on-prim products but for products that are in other public clouds, and sort of pry open the API lock in? >> So, I can't say what Google's goals are, but I can certainly say that Beam's goals are that nobody's going to be locked into a particular backend. >> Okay. >> I mean, I can't even say what Beam's goals are, sorry, those are my goals, I can speak for myself. >> Is Beam seeing so far adoption by the sort of big consumer internet companies, or has it started to spread to mainstream enterprises, or is still a little immature? >> I think Beam's still a little bit less mature than that, we're heading into our first stable release, so, we began incubating it as an Apache project about a year ago, and then, around the beginning of the new year, actually right at the end of 2016, we graduated to be an Apache top level project, so right now we're sort of on the road from we've become a top level project, we're seeing contributions ramp up dramatically, and we're aiming for a stable release as soon as possible, our next release we expect to be a stable API that we would encourage users and enterprises to adopt I think. >> Okay, and that's when we would see it in production form on the Google Cloud platform? >> Well, so the thing is that the code and the backends behind it are all very mature, but, right now, we're still sort of like, I don't know how to say it, we're polishing the edges, right, it's still got a lot of rough edges and you might encounter them if you're trying it out right now and things might change out from under you before we make our stable release. >> Understood. >> Yep. All right. Kenneth, thank you for joining us, and for the update on the Beam project and we'll be looking for that and seeing its progress over the next few months. >> Great. Thanks for having me. >> With that, I'm George Gilbert, I'm with Kenneth Knowles, we're at the dataArtisan's Flink Forward user conference in San Francisco at the Kabuki Hotel and we'll be back after a few minutes.

why from Las Vegas Nevada it's the queue covers AWS reinvent 2016 brought to you by AWS and its ecosystem partners now here your host John Fourier and Stu Mittleman he welcome back everyone we are here live in Las Vegas for Amazon Web Services AWS reinvent 2016 their annual user developer conference I'm John furry with silicon angle Joe and Mike Coast give me a minute with boogie bond it's the cube our flagship program when we go out to the events and extract the signal noise and right now we have some really hot signal it's Andy jassie CEO of Amazon Web Services welcome back to the cube great to see you cube alumni three years in a row now you've been on the cube great to have you back keep the tradition going thanks for coming on it's great to be here and I wanted to congratulate you on your 29th birthday today I wish I'm eighteen actually you're gonna go that way I'll never get over eighteen okay appreciate that appreciate the merry Cammarata bringing the cake out for the team but what a birthday present for us to be at the cube this year because you guys have celebrate your 10 year birthday a little bit younger than I am but the world has changed in the past five years we sat down at your house and in your sports bar talked about the future and that's all on Silk'n angle comm and Forbes magazine calm but you guys have to set the agenda and 32,000 people up from 19,000 it's a significant uptick in attendance the enterprise cloud market is changing you guys are disrupting yeah your thoughts and on what's happened since Tuesday night with James Hamilton laying up a secret sauce of silicon brows back it's not being touched by anybody else efficiencies scale yeah well you know for us it's it's unbelievable to see how many people are here a reinvent I as I said in the keynote yesterday we weren't sure the first year that we could get 4,000 people to come so to have 32,000 people here and 50,000 more on our live streams for the keynotes it's just it's really inspiring and you know our teams spend most their time thinking about new new customer experiences new features new capabilities that enable our customers to build more for their customers and then operating the services and for our team to have a chance to be here with all of our customers for a week and just see how excited people are about what we're doing the platform I mean you really feel it when you're here it's a movement and it's a movement because it allows builders to build customer experiences much quicker than ever before and change their businesses you guys got a spy nose juice got some specific questions on some specific points but I want to get your thoughts on the Amazon what I call spring in your step for the first time at reinvent have seen some bravado but more you know confidence around thinking a position Vernor Vogel said a Mediate that sometimes doesn't understand things or hey why do I want to get a lower price by doubling upfront enough seeing the sales guy you mentioning a little bit of Oracle and but mainly it's the themes around the old garden and a new way so I want you to take a minute to explain your view on this new way this new environment because you're comparing interesting old ways of doing things how people buy from IP suppliers how technology is coded deployed and this new way where the game is all new ballgame everywhere scale changes in how people buy our changing it can you share your thoughts on this new way yeah well that's a I mean there's so much that we could share in that area but I you know I think that if you think about what's different about a company like Amazon and a business like AWS relative to the companies who've been providing infrastructure for the last few decades there are a lot of differences but I'll list a few you know the first is I think many companies talk about being customer focused very few walk and I think Amazon in every business including AWS is extraordinarily customer focused everything we do starts with the customer moves backwards from there 90% of our roadmap but what we build is driven by what customers tell us matters and the other 10% we try to listen to a customer's of trying to articulate and then read in between the lines and invent on their behalf I'd say most of the big technology companies the old guard our competitor focused and that could be a successful strategy they can wait and see what others are gonna do and then try to one-up them it's just not ours we tend to be customer focused second thing is we are pioneers you know we we hire builders who look at customer experiences and see what's wrong with them and then figure out how to reinvent them most of the old guard technology companies have lost their will and their DNA to invent and so they acquire most their innovation and that can work too but I think in a space as dynamic as the cloud which is the biggest technology shift in our lifetime you are much better off with the partner that has the most functionality that's iterating the fastest the most amount of customers the biggest ecosystem who's had the vision for how these things fit together from the start and then the third thing I'd say is that we are unusually long-term oriented you know I think one of the standard old guard tactics is that when a deal is to be done at the end of the quarter or the end of the year they show up at your doorstep and they harass you till you sign a deal only to be heard from again a few years from now well you actually need to sign a new deal that is not the way that we pursue our business we're trying to build a business and instead of customer relationships that lasts all of us and so we operate we treat customers we think long term and we iterate in a different way than you see the old guard do and you wrote the business case for creating AWS I think if somebody you know wrote the case study today they you talk about the flywheel you talk about the effect that scale has on your business I think many look at it is your scale and that flywheel allowed you to kind of compress margins in the industry overall well you know you know right the next business case that was scale let's kind of say if margin and you know you talked about how the race to zero wasn't it beyond kind of ancho piece of scale what is the advantage that you have with the experience and the scale and you know is there a new flywheel that goes beyond what we've been talking about well you know I think that there will be multiple successful players in this space because the market segments is something like AWS addresses are trillions of dollars worldwide but there are gonna be 30 it's gonna be a small handful and it's in part because scale really matters and in part because the amount of functionality that you need for people to choose you as their primary infrastructure technology platform is massive and we have a lot more functionality by a large amount than anybody else now I think that if you look at a couple of the key criteria and reasons that we've been successful one of them is that we just have iterated so quickly I mean I think that the rate at which we deliver new capabilities for customers is pretty unusual I mean every day on average customers wake up and they have three new capabilities they can take advantage of just by virtue of being on the platform but we're also on top of just delivering quickly we're innovating at a really rapid rate I mean look at what we did in building the no sequel database DynamoDB they would build look at what we did in building our own database engineer Aurora which is the fastest growing service in the history of AWS we just made Postgres compatible yesterday look at what we announced on the IOT side yesterday with green grass and with snowball edge look at what we did even with snowmobile where it's been impossible for companies to move large amounts of data look at how many instances we have and then look at us bringing FPGA instances to the client the pace of raw innovation on the AWS platform is very unusual and I think what that does that creates its own flywheel where because you don't have to spend a hundred million dollars upfront to buy an infrastructure platform you only pay for what you use when you make the choice of who you're gonna partner with is your primary infrastructure platform you want the platform the the most capability because it allows you not just to move your existing apps but to be able to launch new ones and any any imaginable business idea you have so one of the advantages Amazon has had both on that the dot-com side and now in the it beside it your data you've got a lot of information I think about what actually said that's part of a new flywheel that you're gonna be doing how much of that data is just what Amazon's gonna be able to drive and how much will that kind of spread to the ecosystem and your customers is there data exchanges or how do you look at data well we certainly have a lot of data and a lot of models and a lot of deep learning capabilities and we expose several of those to the AI services we housed yesterday but I think one of the significant flywheels you'll see over times that so many customers are storing their data inside of AWS because they love our storage services and our data stores that they're gonna want to use that data and they're gonna want to layer on top of it all kinds of analytics services whether it's batch whether it's you know various hadoop applications whether it's real-time processing of streaming data they're gonna want to run their data warehouse off of it and they're gonna want to run machine learning models as well as their AI models on top of it and even though I think loads and loads of companies will use the AI services that we've released yesterday I think a lot of the biggest machine learning that's gonna happen is company's own data companies have huge amounts of data that they want to get better signal from and a lot of that data lives on AWS and they're gonna use a lot of the analytics and machine learning tools that we have to get more value from it and you want to ask you specifically around the cloud competition we've said on the queue I think for you so at the first main event that we were here it's not a winner-take-all to winner take most the multi cloud conversations been going around and that's been kind of confusing people as well one of my goals this year at the reinvent was to look at the VCS dig deep once all the parties talk to entrepreneurs I wanted to find out from the canary in the coalmine the startups the developers what their their sense was they all love AWS because you you had a great service for them but now as the competition comes in Microsoft in particular spending a lot of dough trying to lure them in through their ecosystem Google mean they just have some tech not a lot of Salesforce these terms want to build their own sales forces and might not want to compete with Oracle or or Microsoft together monsters Salesforce massive commission incentives all kinds of mechanics that they're doing in the day and that product may or may not be as strong as you guys what's your message to that group of people that want to win with you what do you say to those guys on how do you look at that and what are the how do you respond to their feedback and what's the outlook for them because that's a big question of people's mind is I love Amazon I want to win with them but I might be lured by well you know I think if you look at the startup market segment the vast majority of startups continue you choose AWS as their provider and in fact you could argue an even larger share than before and the reasons are a few fold number one at the end of the day what startups want is they're trying to build incredible businesses and they're often trying to build businesses where the idea never existed before and to do that well you need the broadest functionality you can get Native US has much broader functionality with anybody else there's also a much larger ecosystem around our platform so if you actually want to use other software in your business you want to be able to use it on the infrastructure technology platform that you choose and again many more info system providers in the ad avails platform but they also are building applications where even though they're startups these security and the availability those applications are a big deal and there's just a lot more maturity in the AWS platform because we've been at it a lot longer you can't learn some of those lessons until you get two different elbows of the curve and as Gardner has said because AWS has several times the aggregate size so the next 14 providers combined we just have a different scale on a different set of lessons now we also help our startups and we go to market with our startups and we have get in front of our customers we have a lot of enterprise customers on the platform we're super interested in the new technology and the new offerings that our startups have and we continue to put them in front of saying at obviously Google obviously that's on the cube actually this morning Google doesn't really have a sales force now not known for customer engagement they're known for technology and I kind of hinted that Amazon doesn't have many sales guys but you do apparently a lot of simple you talk about the number how many sales people what's the field organization look like and he clarified that potential misconception that Amazon is just a self-service cloud well when we launched AWS in 2006 we had two sales people and in fact one of the first calls our first sales person made was to Tom McCaskill is the CEO SmugMug who has been just an incredible customer of AWS and provided so much valuable feedback and the ten and a half years we've been to the market but since then we have a very large field team I mean this is this is not a small team it's a very large field team with a lot of sellers and a lot of solutions architects and a large process yeah I mean it's it's it's you know we don't disclose the exact number but it's thousands it's it's a significant team sellers solutions architects professional services training certification it's a big team and we're continuing to grow at a very rapid rate yeah Andy you know that rapid rate is amazing to watch because you know you've spoken to us before about you look for builders you look for people that you know want challenges and keep learning I've talked to you know a few friends this week that have joined Amazon and they said the culture is different in a good way and I want you to talk about kind of that Amazon ethos there's you know a lot of companies have like mission statements you guys have leadership principles that are up on your website I hear they are you know quoted quite regularly you know in in daily life and it's you know very different can maybe there's a little bit of insight on that well 14 leadership principles and I think they've been the single most important reason that we have been able to scale as fast as we have and scale across the world the way we have without losing our culture and you know there are so many of the leadership principles that I think are really interesting you know one of them has to do with hiring and developing the best and we are really vigilant about not lowering the bar when you're trying to hire as many people as we are at Amazon and AW is a big temptation is just a lower the bar to allow you to move quickly and that's always a mistake when you're trying to build great products for customers I like you know I'll give you a couple the leadership principles I like one is the leadership principle that's being right a lot and when we first started when we rolled out the leadership principles people thought being right a lot meant that it had to be their idea they had at the start that she went with the people would get dug in and argue for their idea but being a leader and being write a lot means that you get to the right answer regardless of whose idea was at the beginning and regardless of how many times you change your mind along the way great leaders change their minds when they get new information so I really like that leadership principle I also really like have backbone disagreeing commit and so what that leadership principle is about is we don't just make it an option we expect employees if they disagree with the direction we're headed regardless of seniority of anybody in the room that they speak up and say we're going the wrong direction we're doing the wrong thing for customers even if we end up making the same decision we're gonna make before we end up with more rigor and the decision and people can argue too you know as long as they want as respectfully as they as they can in making the point and we're at the end of the day a truth-seeking culture so you know that old adage about two people look at a ceiling and one says it's ten feet and the other says it's 14 feet and they say okay let's compromise it's 12 feet what's very rarely twelve feet and so when you have a truth-seeking culture like we have it encourages people to disagree and debate with one but then once we make a decision yeah the disagreeing commit means that even if it's not the direction you were advocating everybody has to get him seeking argument you could say well if the customers not involve which version of the truth the customer has to calibrate that right I mean from here Stanfill ultimately the cut I mean we try to get customers involved the decisions we're making and we we speak to cus for input from customers yeah and we get input all the time but there are also times when you're making these decisions where you can't perfectly know we're trying to make what we think is the right decision for customers we get it right a lot of the time and sometimes we don't and if we don't then we'll learn from it sign here I gotta get this in but I gotta ask you a personal question do you get worried that you guys might get too cocky I mean right now you're on a great run rate the traction is amazing for me personally see it it's pretty stuff you know proud about you guys do this I'm a big fan as you know we're customer but you do a great work how do you guys not get too cocky what's that ethos what do you guys what do you say the customers would say it a little too big for your britches and Ian team how do you calibrate that I think that a lot of that has to do with the culture of the team and I think if you look at the culture of this team it is not a cocky team it's not an arrogant team it's a customer focused team and we I mean I think we're pretty thrilled with how things have gone the first 10 and a half years I don't think any of us would have had the audacity to predict yeah that would be where we are but I think we all know that the next 10 years are gonna have even more innovation and changed in the first 10 years so that's what we're really focused on and you know one another one of our leadership principles says that you know great leaders don't believe that their body odor doesn't stink you know and that's really intended to say that we recognize that there's all kinds of things that we can be doing better yeah and we have to be a constantly learning organization and that's the way we think about our business we have a lot of management style content on silca Daniel my third part of my three-part series with Andy final question I want you to summarize your you know really well done you had some nice clever confident in there the whole superpowers a bombastic claim with some that validated with some meat good very clever I like how you did that how would you summarize the keynote did the boy look down to what you were trying to accomplish what were you trying to convey what was the core theme of your keynote yesterday morning yeah the core theme really is that with the cloud with AWS builders have capabilities that were never before available to them on premises or elsewhere and with those capabilities or superpowers it allows them really to take on any technical challenge that they're facing and to build and implement any idea they can dream up and you know that was really the theme and then you know sprinkled in there we had a few announcements the 14 to be precise yesterday and then some customers who I think you know I think are really vivid illustrations of really reinventing their businesses and building customer experiences that weren't easily possible before doing it on top of AWS well congratulations on all your success I know it's still early I know I know you don't get to coffee knowing knowing you firstly after after the little sitting down with you and reinventing is about pioneering so you got to be humble and congratulations Andy Jesse the CEO of Amazon Web Services here in the cube I'm Sean for Ace to many are you watching Silicon angles the cube we right back with more live coverage of ABS 2016 reinvent after this short break