>>Live from Seattle, Washington. It's the cube covering Smartsheet engage 2019 brought to you by Smartsheet. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Smartsheet engage here in Seattle, Washington. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my cohost Jeff Frick. We have Chris Marsh on the program. He is a research director of workforce productivity and compliance at four 51 research. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So you have just completed a massive report that really looks at the future of work and, and the premise is that the future of work is changing dramatically because of the rise of digital technology. It's, it's, it's changing the way companies think about employees, the way employees think about their jobs. Give us, give us sort of the high level findings here. >>Yeah. So yeah, a big report took me most of my summer so I kind of hibernated for a good month and a half to do it. Um, and yeah, it crystallizes a lot of our views around how, you know, protest technology and culture coming together to, to ground new ways of working. Um, and I guess the basic premise is that, uh, we all know this pervasive friction across day to day work. I mean we've sort of dysfunctional accepted that as the status quo, but actually we seen a lot of our survey research that it's being regarded increasingly in the upper echelons of management within companies as a priority that needs to be, that needs to be addressed. In fact, we had some survey work, um, that came out of failed recently. It was to base it in line of business decision makers and it was what should IUTs priority be when it comes to transformation initiatives and number one was improving the productivity and collaboration experience. >>Now if you put that in the context of all the other things on its plate, the fact that that's number one when traditionally it hasn't been, it's insignificant. And actually we did the same question, same survey September last year. It was number one then. And that was the first time it blips on the radar. So this is, you know, written up the agenda, exec management, it leadership, um, and now looking at ways to address that pervasive friction. So, I guess the basic premise of, of our thinking is that a lot of the legacy technologies on, I mean, they've led to that friction in some ways, right? So most companies have organized in one way or another around the silos that applicate traditional applications have created. And that's created organizational silos and, and hence all of the friction. But we see a lot of interesting new technology trends and tooling that are allowing people to basically operationalize work in the seams between those legacy systems. So lifting some of the data information and potentially workflow workload out of those systems and having them in a, you know, some of the new types of work platform that we're seeing, you know, which Smartsheet's a good example to actually operate in a much more agile way. And we call that shift one from systems of record, which we kind of understand to what we call systems of delivery. Um, so that two, we'll have a big gravitational effects on the way the rest of the business application landscape evolve. >>So didn't, uh, it, uh, kind of grow up to support the silos that were defined before. There was it, there was always sales, there was marketing, there was the executive suite, there was accounting. Um, and, and the it and the apps grew to be aligned. So do you think now that the actual collaboration apps like Smartsheet can actually pull, can pull the silos of the organization into this more hybrid structure? >>Yeah, I think, I think that it certainly looks like, I think that's what companies want to happen. Um, I think it's still early days. I mean the w the way most companies are set up in know actually has a lineage going back a couple of hundred years. The industrial revolution and mechanization leading to standardization, leading to compartmentalization. And then you have lines of businesses we kind of currently understand it. And that's why this is such an interesting time at the moment because a lot of that is breaking down relatively quickly. Um, and obviously the competing area has been the prime catalyst for that. Um, so yeah, I mean, you know, other things that come out of our survey research, massive appetite from senior managers for more collaboration across departments. Right? So, not just within teams, which in and of itself is a challenge, but across departments. Um, so you know, marketing, speaking more often and more purposefully with finance, legal speaking more often with operations. So there is an appetite for higher order types of, not just collaboration but actually work, design, planning, work, execution, um, not just sitting in those departmental silos. >>What is driving this at this appetite? Because I mean it would seem like it was always there and maybe there's just a recognition that we have the tools and the technology to actually execute or is there something that's actually fundamentally changing about the global world that we're living in? >>Yeah, I mean, so we talk about it in the report about this era of personalization, right? Which is just everything we've seen explode in the consumer domain around technology and the climatization we've all had to new kinds of digital experience and how they are coming into the workforce. People want new people will have expectations when you come to digital experience as part of their day to day work. Um, and so that's one thing. The, obviously the related element to that is that companies need to be much more agile in responding to disruptions in their own market. And this is obviously vertical agnostic now. So if there's one thing that you really need to make sure you're good at in the digital age, it's being agile, right? Spotting the sort of signals in the market, understanding what they mean in terms of customer demand, and then you know, catering to that demand quickly with some kind of new products or service or experience. >>So I think it's that need to be able to respond really quickly because there's so much disruption that technology has brought to us. That means that companies are saying, okay, we can't any longer wait six months for this just project life cycle is work life cycle to, to, to run its course. We need to respond more quickly. We need to organize much more agile. We all need to be on the same page when it comes to what we're supposed to be doing. Right? So there's a big demand for a clear line of sight across work. Um, so I think that's, that's probably where it's coming from. All companies realizing we need to act quicker, respond quicker. >>I'm curious, you know, it took a long time for dev ops to really be accepted as the optimal way to create products. Right. Versus a PRD and an MRD and then a PRD and then we define it and we take these when we build in and shoot, we miss the market. Right. It changed in terms of actually running the business though. I mean, do you have any kind of point of view on how long it will take for people to figure out that yes, we can make micro adjustments on our strategy based on speed, competitive threats, but at the same time I've got to be executing on some of these longer term objectives as well, which I would imagine would be a push back on that, on that technique. >>Yeah. I mean it will take as long as the technologies need to have to emerge to support companies really operating in that kind of agile way. Um, I mean one of the things we talk about, um, is the, what we call the three A's, right? So the imperative to be agile operationally, I think there's growing realization that that means that there needs to be tooling to support more autonomy, which is the second, a while more autonomy for more of the workforce to do higher order types of thing. So rather than having the centralized teams of process specialists or you know, technical experts, that needs to be more capability in the tooling, the everyday tooling for, for people to design work and execute on it. But that really is dangerous if you don't have the alignment piece, which goes back to kind of what you were saying about we can't just have a distributed set of teams who are going off and doing their own thing. >>There needs to be alignment back to strategy. There needs to be alignment potentially back to governance and compliance and there needs to be alignment potentially also to work that's adjacent but relevant. It's happening in other teams maybe in other departments. So I think that's really the sweet spot. How do you balance those three things? Um, which is driving a lot of the new interesting technologies that we're seeing emerge. But you know, we're still in relatively early days I think. Um, so you know, give it some time to, to play out. There's different layers of abstraction I think in software that that needs to happen for organizations to really be able to operate in that agile way. There's resource management, this planning, this process automation. A lot of these things have been resident really in discrete kinds of tooling, but the broadly being democratized and Smartsheet's actually a good example of the type of company that's beginning to offer those kinds of capabilities. Workforce wide to Smartsheet users where as they were may, may be previously just to preserve certain types of specialists. User >>I want to ask about what you, what this means for the individual employee in terms of it sounds as though he or she will be more empowered to do more and execute a but also expected more of a moral be expected of that employee in terms of what his or her skill levels are. And then I also want to ask what you're seeing here at Smartsheet engage that is most interesting to you, particularly as it relates to the report. >>Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, I guess it's inevitable that more will be expected of employees, but I think, you know, in a, in a sense what we're seeing is the balance of power shift, not in an absolute terms, but, and, and you know, relative to how, how it's looks historically towards the employee. So at definite strand of inquiry amongst our clients and four or five, one has been how do we create an employee engagement narrative, right? There's growing realization that we've talked about customer experience for a long time, but we've, we've, we've neglected the idea of an employee experience. Um, so more companies are realizing that happy employees tend to be the more productive ones. So how do we introduce the right combination of tooling technologies and then compensation and then career opportunities to allow people to feel more engaged and empowered so that they can do those higher order kinds of things. Um, and this, yeah, this is, this is happening in a very kind of organic way. So, um, you know, I, I don't see this as companies saying, you know, you need to now achieve more. It's a little bit more, we need to provide you with the ability to achieve more. That's really the role of anybody who's making a decision around technology and an enterprise at the moment. >>But it's interesting because the, because the company has so much more data than they had before on kind of execution and some of the demos in the, in the keynote in terms of what are utilization, how many hours are you applying to this task? So it almost feels like there's more of a, in a treating people like a resource versus treating people like people. And I'm just curious how that, you know, kind of place, cause you, you want to do that, you want to measure, you want to know how your resources are allocated. At the same time there they're people, they're not machines and they're motivated as people and that's how you keep them or lose them a lot of times is the people part, not necessarily the job or the tasks. So how does, how does that map end? If I'm aggressive and I'm feeling good, yeah I like doing more but there's probably a lot of people that aren't necessarily up for that. I mean there's been a lot of all of >>'em talk in this conference already. Um, but more broadly in, in other forums of, um, the implications of more data in the context of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the degree to which, you know, by automating things that may previously have been done manually, is that going to upset people? I think on the whole, um, you know for a lot of types of work that may be Smartsheet is enabling, that's not so much of a concern cause you'll see here from their users very engaged, very enthusiastic. They want to get as much value in leave, which out of the platform was possible because they realized that's allowing them to do things that previously hadn't. But there is that sort of dichotomy of um, at what point do we automate things and not give you a choice in the fact that that's been automated. But I think these guys and another, the industry broadly is, is very conscious of that. So where you see all the kind of data being leveraged to do intelligent recommendations, intelligent notifications, there's going to be a wary eye on doing that without either an optin aware. An optin maybe isn't required, at least having permission from the end user to accept the implications of whatever's being recommended to do. So. I think on the whole, you know, people are sort of trying to figure out what that balance, >>what do you think this means for the war on war for talent? Because, I mean, this is the, this is the topic that the technology industry in particular, it's really grappling with, particularly when there are so many, uh, high level skills that are needed skills in, uh, AI and ML and other kinds of specialized technology. How do you, how do you put your, your findings in that context? >>Yeah, I mean it's, it really came on the agenda, this theme, um, couple of years ago, if not a little bit sooner than that as, as a really strategic issue. And in fact we see that in our own survey research where we asked the question to, um, employees across the workforce manage non-managerial to C suite and it was, you know, strategically one, what one thing do you need to improve on? And it was, um, uh, it was basically recruiting, developing and managing talent. And that's a head of, you know, everything else, like improving our, um, product differentiation, improving our customer experience, um, coming up with a strategy that's more fit for purpose, right? It was all about talent and people and managing people. So it's definitely risen up the agenda. I mean, I think one of the things that companies definitely, uh, beginning to think about is how to um, increase the acquisition of skills in the existing workforce and their way that's quicker than the way that's being done now. >>So actually one of the other areas we cover in our research is the shift from like traditional learning management systems, which have been kind of compliance oriented. You need to do this course or training because we need to show that you've done it to the kind of new generation of Alec speeds. We're learning experience platforms which provide much more agile ways for people to understand skills gaps and take on those skills. So I think that's gonna be a big driver actually of of the agile ways of working that we're talking about. But also how people address talent. The talent was, if you can't find that externally or you can't find enough externally, um, you can look internally of course, to existing employees and make sure that they have the platform to, to acquire new skills. >>And it's almost by a rule, you can't find it externally. Cause right now, just the, the, just not that much labor out there to go get, it's just so competitive. So you've got to develop a lot of that inside. >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, um, and it's not just sort of technical skills, it's other kinds of skills. Right. Um, but I think there's a, I think there's a nascent appetite amongst a lot of the workforce just to do that from a career progression point of view. Right. If you know, and I think that's one of the implications of companies trying to find ways to be more operationally agile, manage resources and more kind of agile ways. You know, it might be the case that people who maybe wouldn't be considered for a particular role, um, might now be considered because they re they, you know, saw that there was a capacity problem, a resource problem. They learnt the skill they can be assigned to that kind of project. Whereas previously maybe lines of department lines of business prevented that visibility into who has skills across the workforce. >>That's interesting. Do you have a point of view about kind of workforce transformation and you're giving a talk tomorrow how to avoid the Frankenstein workforce experience just for effective workplace transformation. But it's an interesting play that digitally transform your people to digitally transform your business. People talk about doing it to the business, but they don't talk about doing it to the people. I talk about the workflows and the customer engagement. You're taking it down, you know, start at the base, start at the bed. >>Well this is, I mean this is a, a lot of the reasons as to why companies like Smartsheet came about. I mean digital transformation I think is a kind of narrative has done a good job of, of making companies realize they need to change and they need to change quickly. Technology is a big enabler of that, but it's tended to be kind of top down way of thinking about it. It's tended to be sort of, do you have like a center of excellence? Do you have a technology council? How do we sort of transform from core outwards? It's not really been grassroots from the bottom up, but increasingly tooling like Smartsheets enabling that to happen. Right. How do you get people really engaged using new kinds of tooling to do higher order things? How do you connect that with work that's being done elsewhere? So it's a much more bottom up movement. How I think about workforce transformation and digital transformation has been, and I think more more people are cutting onto the fact that that's the way you need to think about it. >>What's your number one advice for an executive who doesn't have time to read the 47 pages? >>Yeah, I mean I guess it goes back to the, to to maybe the um, those three A's I was talking about earlier. I think my, you know, certainly progressive companies, but I think it's mainstreaming that companies are realizing they need to be more agile. Um, you know, in a broad brush and obviously depends on the context that company, who their customers are and what they're trying to achieve. Um, but really I think it should be a consideration, especially when thinking about workforce tooling and like knowledge worker tooling. To what degree is that giving more autonomy to those people to do higher order things and but also, you know, again, can you tie that back to your goals as a company, right? Because we've had certain technologies in the past of decade that have created a bit of a wild West, right? People go off and do different things and then there's, there's a lack of visibility, a lack of line of sight back to strategy. But if you get the sweet spot in your technology choices between do that, do they help us be operationally agile? Are they giving people a highroad, you know, more ways to do higher order work. Can we tie that back in the way that we need to? Then I think you're at least thinking about it in the right way. >>Really analogous to shadow it is. As you're sitting here talking about kind of the ground swell up of people finding tools to enable them to do their job better and get around kind of the hierarchy that existed in got in their way before his son. You know, there's a lot of parallels to what happened there before. Finally the corporates figured out, okay, we actually need to do dev in public cloud. There's a lot of advantages, et cetera, etc. >>Yeah, there is, but it's kind of like a legitimate version of shadow it. Shadow it was like we call it, we don't like the tools we've been given. No, we don't have them. Let's go and find ones. Yeah. >>Right. Right >>now it's like the ones that are enterprise grade happens to be the ones we also are using. Right. So that's, that is the super interesting, um, sort of wave that companies like Smartsheet carrying these tools fundamentally appeal and they have lots of evidence that are appealing virally. >>Well, I mean the fact that you can collaborate with people outside your company on your license for free and I think Mark said 50% of their users are people that are outside of the organization of the licensee. That's a pretty, pretty, I don't want to say Trojan, uh, strategy, but certainly certainly feels like, you know, a great way to permeate, which I think back like at last, Ian with the way they got started with, you know, a $10 10 seat license and, and again, AWS and some of these early kind of backdoor ways in to deliver real value that people were willing to put the credit card down. Yeah. Right. >>But you know, I mean, so I guess the challenge for Smartsheet and others are as he became a more enterprise grade platform, how do you keep that user appeal? Right. Cause that could obviously be one scenario which has more features, more complication actually more difficult to use, more complex. These guys are very conscious of it. Others in that sort of environment are very conscious of it. Um, but yeah, I mean the whole can do thing which um, Anna talked about this morning in the keynote. It's interesting. It's like a really interesting sort of democratized way of talking about power users that we kind of used to talk about the sort of folks that have that technical ability. And they're the ones that drive some kind of work initiative. Um, you know, platforms like Smartsheet and others are giving more people the ability to be that power user. And that's, that's kind of cool. >>Awesome. Great note to end on. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Chris. Thanks for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Stay tuned. You're watching the cube.

>> from Burlingame, California It's the Cube covering Suma logic Illuminate 2019. Brought to You by Sumer Logic. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the Cube worth, assume a logic illuminate 2019 of it. It's at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco airport. About 809 100 people are second year. It's a 30 year of the event, excited to be here and watch it grow. We've seen a bunch of these things grow from little to bigger over a number of years, and it's always funded kind of beer for the zenith. We're excited to do it by our next guest. She's an analyst. It's Nancy Goering, senior analyst for 4 51 research. Nancy, great to see you. >> Thank you for having me. >> Absolutely so first off, Just kind of impressions of the event here. >> Yeah, good stuff. You know, like he's definitely trying to, you know, get on top of some of the big trends. You know, The big news here was their new Cooper nineties monitoring, also obviously kind of staying on the the leading edge of the cloud. Native Technologies. >> It's it's amazing how fast it's growing, you know, doing some research for this. Then I found some of your stuff out on the Internet and just one quote. I think it's from years ago, but just for people to kind of understand the scale, I think, he said, Google was launching four billion containers a week. Twitter had 12,000. Service is uber 4000. Micro service is Yelp and Justin 25 million data points per minute. I think this is like a two or three year old presentation. I mean, the scale in which the data is moving is astronomical. >> Yeah, well, I mean, if you think of Google launching four billion containers every week, they're collecting a number of different data points about a container spinning up about the operation of that container while it's alive about the container spinning down. So it's not even just four billion pieces of data. It's, you know, multiply that by 10 20 or many more. So, yeah, So the volume of operations dated that people are faced with is just, you know, out of this world, and some of that is beginning to get abstracted away, terms of what you need to look at. So, you know, Kubernetes is an orchestration engine so that's helping move things around. You still need to collect that data to inform automation tools, right? So even if you was, even if humans aren't really looking at it, it's being used to drive automation, right? It still has to be collected, >> right, And they're still configurations and settings and and dials. And it seems like a lot of the breaches that we hear about today are people just miss configuring something on us. It's human error. And so how do we kind of square the circle? Because the date is only growing. The quantity sources, the complexity, Yeah, the lack of structure. And that's before we had a I ot And now we got edge devices and they're all reporting in from from home. Yeah, crazy problem. It's >> really, I think, driving a lot of the investments in the focus and more sophisticated analytics, right? So that's why you're hearing a lot more about machine learning. And a I in this space is because humans can't just look at that huge volume >> of data and >> figure out what it means. So the development of machine learning tools, for instance, is gonna pull out a piece of data that's important. Here is the anomaly. This is the thing you should be paying attention to. Andi, obviously getting increasingly sophisticated, right? In terms of correlating data from different parts of your infrastructure in order to yet make sense of it, >> right? And then, Oh, by the way, they're all made up of micro service is a literal interconnected in AP eyes. The third party providers. Yeah. I mean, the complexity is ridicu >> and then, you know, and I've been actually thinking and talking a lot recently about organizational issues within companies that exacerbate some of these challenges. So you mentioned Micro Service is so ah, lot of times, you know, you've got Dev ops groups and an individual Dev Ops group is responsible for a or multiple. Micro service is right. They're all running, sort of autonomous. They're doing their own thing, right? So they could move quickly. But is there anybody overseeing the application that's made up of maybe 1000 Micro Service's? And in some cases, the answer is no. And so it may look like all the Micro Service's are operating well, but the user experience actually is not good, and no one really notices until the user starts complaining. So it's like things start. You know, you have to think about organizational things. Who's responsible for that, right? You know, if you're on a Dev ops team and your job has been to support the certain service's and not the whole, like who's responsible for the whole application and that's it's a challenge, it's something. Actually, in our surveys, we're hearing from people that they're looking for people that skill set, someone who understands how to look at Micro Service's as they work together to deliver a service, right? It's it's a It's a pain point. Shouldn't >> the project the product manager for that application would hopefully have some instances abilities to kind of what they're trying to optimize for? >> In some cases, they're not technical enough, right? A product manager doesn't necessarily have the depth to know that, or they're not used to using the types of tools that the Dev Ops team or the operations team would use to track the performance of an application. So sometimes it's just a matter of having the right tooling in front of them, >> and then even the performance I was like What do you optimizing four you optimized for security up the mind thing for speed are optimizing for yeah, you can optimize for everything if you got a stack rank order at some point in time. So that would also then drive in a different prioritization or the way that you look at those doctorsservices performance. Yeah, interesting. It's another big topic that comes up often is the vision of a single pane of glass in You know, I can't help but think is in my work day. You know how often I'm tabbing between, you know, sales force and email and slack and asana and, um, a couple of browsers air open. I mean, it's it's it's bananas, you know, it's no longer just that that email is the only thing that's open on my desk all day and only imagine the Dev Ops world. No, we saw just crazy complexity around again, managing all the micro service's of the AP eyes. So what's kind of the story? What are you seeing in kind of the development of that? And there's so many vendors now, and so many service is yeah, it's not just we're just gonna put in HB open view, and that's the standard, and that's what we're all right on. >> So if you're looking at it from the lens of of monitoring or observe ability or performance. Traditionally, you had different tools that looked at, say, different layers of a service, so you had a tool that was looking at infrastructure. Was your infrastructure monitoring tool. You had an application performance monitoring tool. You might have a network performance monitoring tool. You might have point tools that are looking just at the data base layer. But as things get more complicated, Azadliq ations are getting much more complex. Looking at that data in a silo tool tends to obscure the bigger picture. You don't understand when you're looking at the's separate tools how some piece of infrastructure might be impacting the application, for instance. And so the idea is to bring all of that operations data about the performance of an application in tow. One spot where you can run again, these more sophisticated analytics so that you can understand the relationship between the different layers of the application stack also horizontally, right? So how micro service's that are dependent on each other? How one micro service might be impacting the performance of another. So that's conceptually the idea behind having a single pane of glass. Now the execution can happen in a bunch of different ways, so you can have one vendor. There are vendors that are growing horizontally, so they're collecting data across the stack. And there's other vendors that are positioning themselves as that sort of central data repositories, so they may not directly collect all of that data. But they might in just some data that another monitoring vendor has collected. So there's an end. You know, there's there's always going to be good arguments for best of breed tools, right? So, you know, in most cases, businesses are not going to settle on just one monitoring tool that does it all. But that's conceptually the reason, right, and you want to bring all of this data together. However you get it, however, it's being collected so that you can analyze it and understand that big picture performance of a complicated application, >> right? But then, even then, as you said, you don't even want, you're not really monitoring the application performance per se. You're just waiting for the you're waiting for some of those needles to fall out of the haystack because you just you just can't get that much stuff. And you know, it's where do you focus your priority? You know what's most critical? What needs attention now. And if without a machine to help kind of point you in the right direction, you're gonna have a hard time finding that needle. >> And there's a lot of different approaches that are beginning to develop. So one is this idea of SL owes or service level objectives. And so, for instance, a really common service level objective that teams are looking at is Leighton. See, So this Leighton see of the service should never drop under whatever ah 100 milliseconds. And and if it does, I want to be alerted. And also if it drops below that objective for a certain amount of time, that can actually help you as a team. Allocate, resource is so if you're not living up to that service level objective, maybe you should shift some people's time toe working on improving the application instead of developing a new feature, right? So it can really help you prioritize your time because you know what? There was a time when people in operations teams or Dev. Ops teams had a really hard time, and they still d'oh figuring out which problems are important because you've always people always have a lot of performance problems going on. So which do you focus your time on? And it's been pretty opaque. It's hard to see. Is this performance impacting the bottom line of my business? Is this impacting? You know, my customers? Are we losing business over this? Like that's That's a really common question that people I can't answer, right? So there you people are beginning to develop these approaches to try to figure out how to prioritize work on performance problems. It's >> interesting because the other one that and some of you mentioned before is kind of this post incident review instead of a post boredom. And, you know, you talked about culture and words matter, and I think that's a really interesting take because it's it's it implies we're gonna learn, and we're gonna go forward. It's dead. Um, yeah, you know, we're gonna yell at each other and someone's gonna get blamed. That's exactly it. And we're going to move on. So, you know, how is that kind of evolved in. And how does that really help organizations do a better job? >> There's, I mean, there's there's much more of a focus on setting aside time to do that kind of analysis, right? So look at how we're performing as a team. Look at how we responded to an incident so that you can find ways that you can do better next time and some of that Israel tactical right? It's tweaking alerts. Did we not get an alert? You know, did we not even know this problem was happening? So maybe you build new alerts or sport get rid of a bunch of alerts that did nothing. You know, there's there's a lot you can learn on again to To your point, I think part of the reason people have started calling in a post Incident review instead of a postmortem is because yet you don't want that to be a session where people are feeling like Blaine. You know, this is my fault. I screwed up. I spent way too long on this, so I >> had to >> set things out properly. It's it's meant to be productive. Let's find the weak points and fill them right. Fill those gaps. >> It's funny you had another. There's another thing I found where you were talking about not not necessarily the Post Borden, but you know, people, people being much more proactive, much more, you know, thoughtful as to how they are going to take care of these things. And it is really more of a social cultural change unnecessarily. The technical piece that culture pieces. So so >> it is and especially, you know, right now there's a lot of focus on on tooling and that can cause some, you know, interesting issues. So, you know, especially in an organization that has really adopted Dev ops practices like the idea of a Dev Ops team is that it's very autonomous. They do what they do, what they need to do right to move fast and to get the job done. And that often includes choosing your own tools, but that that has created a number of problems, especially in monitoring. So if you have 100 Dev ops teams and they all have chosen their own, monitoring tools like this is not efficient, so it's not. It's not a good idea because those tools aren't talking to each other, even though they're micro service's that are dependent on each other. It's inefficient. From a business perspective. You've got all these relationships with vendors, and in some cases, with a single vendor, you might have 50 instances of the same monitoring tool that you know you have 50 accounts with them, like that's just totally inefficient. And then you've got people on a Dev ops, an individual, all the all the individual Dev ops teams have a person who's supposed to be the resident expert in these tools, like maybe you should share that knowledge across. But my point is, you get into the situation where you have hundreds of monitoring tools, sometimes 40 50 monitoring tools. You realize that's a problem. How do you address that problem? Because you're gonna have to go out and tell people you can't use this tool that you love. That helps you do your job that you chose. And so again, this whole cultural question comes out like, How do you manage that transition in a way that's gonna be productive? >> Thea other one that you brought up that was interesting is where the the sport team basically tells the business team you only have X number of incidents. We're gonna give you a budget. Yeah, exceed the budget. We're not going to help you. It's a really different way to think about prioritization. I >> don't necessarily think that's a great approach, but I mean, there was somebody who did that, but I think it's kind of it's kind of >> an interesting thing. And you talked about it in that. I think it was one of your presentations or speeches where, you know, it makes you kind of rethink. You know, why do we have so many incidents? Yeah, and there shouldn't be that many incidents, and maybe some of the responsibility should be shifted to think about why in the how and is more of a systemic problem than a feature problem or a bug, right? It's a broken code. So again, I think there's so many kind of cultural opportunities to rethink this. In a world of continuous development, continuous publishing and continuous pushing out of new code. Yeah, yeah, sure. All right. Nancy will. Thanks for taking a few minutes, and it's really great to talk to you. Thanks >> for having me. >> Alright. She's Nancy. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube where it's Uma Logic illuminate 2019. Thanks for watching. We'll see next time

>> Narrator: From Burlingame, California, it's theCUBE, covering Sumo Logic Illuminate 2019! Brought to you by Sumo Logic. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Sumo Logic Illuminate 2019 event. It's at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport, about eight hundred, nine hundred people, our second year. It's the third year of the event. Excited to be here and watch it grow. We've seen a bunch of these things grow from little to big over a number of years and it's always fun to kind of be here for the zenith. We're excited to be joined by our next guest, she's an analyst. It's Nancy Gohring, Senior Analyst for 451 Research. Nancy, great to see you. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So first off, just kind of impressions of the event here. >> Yeah, good stuff, you know? Definitely trying to, you know, get on top of some of the big trends, you know, the big news here was their new Kubernetes monitoring tool. So obviously kind of staying on the leading edge of the cloud-native technologies. >> It's amazing how fast it's growing, you know. Doing some research for this event, I found some of your stuff out on the internet, and just one quote, I think it's from years ago, but just for people to kind of understand the scale, I think you said Google was launching four billion containers a week, Twitter had twelve thousand services, Uber four thousand microservices, Yelp ingesting twenty-five million data points per minute, and I think this is a two or three year old presentation, I mean, the scale in which the data is moving is astronomical. >> Yeah, well if you think of Google launching four billion containers every week, they're collecting a number of different data points about a container spinning up, about the operation of that container while it's alive, about the container spinning down. So it's not even just four billion pieces of data, it's, you know, multiply that by ten or twenty or many more. So yeah, so the volume of operations data that people are faced with, is just, you know out of this world. And some of that is beginning to get abstracted away in terms of what you need to look at so you know Kubernetes is an orchestration engine so that's helping move thing around. You still need to collect that data to inform automation tools, right, so even humans aren't really looking at it, it's being used to drive automation. >> Right. >> It still has to be collected. >> Right. And there's still configurations and settings and dials and it seems like a lot of the breaches that we hear about today are just people misconfiguring something on AWS >> Yeah, it's human error. >> It's human error. And so how do we kind of square the circle cause the data's only growing the quantity, the sources, the complexity, the lack of structure and that's before we add IOT and now we have edge devices and they're all reporting in from home. >> Yeah >> Crazy problems. >> It's really, I think, driving a lot of the investments and the focus in more sophisticated analytics, right, so that's why you're hearing a lot more about machine learning and AI in this space. It's because humans can't just look at that huge volume of data and figure out what it means. So, the development of machine learning tools, for instance, is going to pull out a piece of data that's important. Like, here's the anomaly, this is the thing you should be paying attention to. And then obviously getting increasingly sophisticated, right, in terms of correlating data from different parts of your infrastructure in order to make sense of it. >> Right. And then, oh, by the way, they're all made up of microservices that are all interconnected and API is the third party providers >> Yeah. >> I mean the complexity is ridiculous. >> Yeah, and then, you know, and I've been actually thinking and talking a lot recently about organizational issues within companies that exacerbates some of these challenges. So you mentioned microservices. So, a lot of times, you know, you've got DevOps groups and an individual DevOps group is responsible for a, or multiple, microservices, right. They're all running sort of autonomous. They're doing their own thing, right, so that they can move quickly. But is there anybody overseeing the application that's made up of maybe a thousand microservices? And in some cases the answer is "no". And so it may look like all the microservices are operating well, but the user experience actually is not good. And no one really notices until the user starts complaining. So, it's like things start, you know you have to think about organizational things. Who's responsible for that, right? If you're on a DevOps team and your job as been to support these certain services and not the whole, like, who's responsible for the whole application? >> Right. >> And that's, it's a challenge. It's something, actually, in our surveys, we're hearing from people that they're looking for people, that skill set, someone who understands how to look at microservices as they work together to deliver a service, right, it's a pain point. >> Shouldn't the project, or the product manager for that application would hopefully have some visibilities to kind of what they're trying to optimize for. >> In some cases they're not technical enough, right, a product manager doesn't necessarily have the depth to know that. Or they're not used to using tools that the DevOps team or the operations team would use to track the performance of an application. >> Right. >> So sometimes it's just a matter of having the right tooling in front of them >> And then even the performance. It's like, what are you optimizing for? Are you optimizing for security? Are you optimizing for speed? Are you optimizing for... >> Experience... >> You can't optimize for everything. You've got to stack rank order at some point in time, so that would also then drive in a different prioritization or the way that you look at those microservices' performance. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Interesting. So another big topic that comes up often is the vision of a single pane of glass. And, you know, I can't help but think as in my work day how often I'm tabbing between you know, sales force, and email, and slack, and Asana, and a couple of browsers are open. I mean, it's bananas, you know. It's no longer just that email is the only thing that's open on my desk all day. >> Yeah. >> And then you can only imagine the DevOps world that we saw just crazy complexity around, again, managing all the microservices, the APIs, so what kinds of, sort of, what are you seeing in kind of the development of that? And there's so many vendors now, and so many services. >> Yeah. >> It's not just, we're just going to put in HP open view and that's the standard and that's what we're all on. >> So if you're looking at it from the lens of monitoring or observability or performance, traditionally you had different tools that looked at, say, different layers of a service. So you had a tool that was looking at infrastructure - it was your infrastructure monitoring tool. You had an application performance monitoring tool. You might have a network performance monitoring tool. You might have point tools that are looking just at the data base layer. But as things get more complicated, as applications are getting much more complex, looking at that data in a silo tool tends to obscure the bigger picture. You don't understand when you're looking at the separate tools how some piece of infrastructure might be impacting the application, for instance. And so, the idea is to bring all of that operations data about the performance of an application into one spot where you can run, again, these more sophisticated analytics so that you can understand the relationship between the different layers of the application stack, also horizontally, right, so, how microservices that are dependent on eachother how one microservice might be impacting the performance of another, so that's conceptually the idea behind having a single pane of glass. Now the execution can happen in a bunch of different ways. So you can have one vendor, there are vendors that are growing horizontally, so they're collecting data across the stack. There's other vendors that are positioning themselves as that sort of central data repository. So they may not directly collect all of that data, but they might ingest some data that another monitoring vendor has collected. So, there's, and, you know, there's always going to be good arguments for best of breed tools right, so, you know, in most cases, businesses are not going to settle on just one monitoring tool that does it all. But that's conceptually the reason, right, is you want to bring all of this data together however you get it, however it's being collected, so that you can analyze it and understand that "big picture" performance of a complicated application. >> Right. But then, even then, as you said, you don't even want to, you're not really monitoring the application performance per se, you're just waiting for the, you're waiting for some of those needles to fall out of the haystack, cause you just, you just can. There's so much stuff. And you know, it's where do you focus your priority. You know, what's most critical, what needs attention now. >> (Nancy) Yeah. >> And if, without a machine to help kind of, point you in the right direction, you're going to have a hard time finding that needle. >> Yeah, and there's a lot of different approaches that are beginning to develop. And one is this idea of SLO's, or Service Level Objectives. And so, for instance a really common Service Level Objective that teams are looking at is latency. So, the latency of the service should never drop under whatever- a hundred milliseconds, and if it does, I want to be alerted. And also, if it drops below that objective for a certain amount of time that can actually help you as a team allocate resources. So, if you're not living up to that Service Level Objective, maybe you should shift some people's time to working on improving the application instead of developing a new feature. Right? >> (Jeff) Right. >> So it can really help you prioritize your time because you know what? There was a time, people in operations teams, or DevOps teams, had a really hard time, and they still do, figuring out which problems are important. 'Cause you've always, people always have a lot of performance problems going on. So which do you focus your time on? And it's been pretty opaque. It's hard to see, is this performance impacting the bottom line in my business? Is this impacting, you know, my customers? Are we losing business over this? Like, that's, that's a really common question that people can't answer. >> Right. >> So, yeah, people are beginning to develop these approaches to try to figure out how to prioritize work on performance problems. >> It's interesting 'cause the other one that you've mentioned before, kind of this post incident review instead of a post mortem and you know, you talked about culture, and "words matter" >> (Nancy) Yeah. >> And I think that's a really interesting take because it's, it implies, we're going to learn, and we're going to go forward as opposed to "it's dead". >> (Linda) Yeah. >> And, you know, we're going to yell at eachother, and someone's going to get blamed... >> (Linda) That's exactly it... >> And we're going to move on. So, you know, how has that kind of evolved and how does that really help organizations do a better job? >> There's, I mean, there's much more of a focus on setting aside time to do that kind of analysis, right? So look at how we're performing as a team. Look at how we responded to an incident so that you can find ways that you can do better next time. And some of that is real tactical, right, it's tweaking alerts. Did we not get an alert? You know, did we not even know this problem was happening? So maybe you build new alerts or get rid of a bunch of alerts that did nothing. You know, there's a lot you can learn and again, to your point, I think part of the reason people have started calling it a post incident review instead of a post mortem is because, yeah, you don't want that to be as session where people are feeling like blame, you know, this is my fault, I screwed up, I spent way too long on this, or I hadn't set things up properly. It's meant to be productive. >> Right. >> Let's find the weak points and fill them. Right? Fill those gaps. >> It's funny you had another, there was another thing I found, you were talking about not, not necessarily the post mortem but, you know, people being much more pro-active, much more, you know, thoughtful as to how they are going to take care of these things. And it is really more of a social, cultural change than necessarily the technical piece. That culture piece is so, so important. >> It is, and especially, you know, right now there's a lot of focus on tooling and that can cause some, you know, interesting issues. So you know, especially in an organization that has really adopted DevOps practices like, the idea of a DevOps team is that it's very autonomous. They do what they need to do, right, to move fast and to get the job done and that often includes choosing your own tools. But that has created a number of problems especially in monitoring. So if you have a hundred DevOps teams and they all have chosen their own monitoring tools, like, this is not efficient. So it's not a good idea because those tools aren't talking to each other, even though they're microservices that are dependent on each other. It's inefficient from a business perspective. You've got all these relationships with vendors and in some cases with a single vendor. You might have fifty instances of the same monitoring tool that, you know, you have fifty accounts with them. Like that's just totally inefficient. And then you've got people on a DevOps and individual, all the individual DevOps teams have a person who's supposed to be the resident expert in these tools, like, maybe you should share that knowledge across... But my point is you get into this situation where you have hundreds of monitoring tools. Sometimes forty, fifty monitoring tools. You realize that's a problem. How do you address that problem? 'Cause you're going to have to go out and tell people you can't use this tool that you love, that helps you do your job, that you chose. So again this whole cultural question comes up. Like, how do you manage that transition in a way that's going to be productive? >> The other one that you brought up that was interesting was where the support team basically tells the business team you only have X-number of incidents, we're going to give you a budget. (laughs) >> Yeah. >> If you exceed the budget we're not going to help you. It's a really different way to think about prioritization... >> Yeah, I don't necessarily think that's a great approach. I mean there was somebody who did that but like... >> But I think its kind of, it's kind of an interesting thing. And you talked about it in that I think it was one of your presentations or speeches where, you know, it makes you kind of re-think, you know, why do we have so many incidents? >> Yeah. >> And there shouldn't be that many incidents. And maybe some of the responsibility should be shifted to think about why, and the how, and is it more of a systemic problem than a feature problem, or a bug, or... >> Right >> A piece of broken code, so again I think there's so many, kind of, cultural opportunities to re-think this, in this world of continuous development, continuous publishing, continuous pushing out of new code. >> Yeah, yeah. For sure. (laughs) >> Alright Nancy, well thanks for taking a few minutes and it was really great to talk to you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, she's Nancy, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE, where it's Sumo Logic Illuminate 2019. Thanks for watching We'll see you next time (electonic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering veeAMON 2019. Brought to you by veeAM. >> Welcome back to veeAMON 2019, in Miami. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Justin Warren as my co-host. Simon Robinson here is the Senior Vice President, 451 Research, Simon it's great to see you, thanks for coming to the cube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So is this your, is this right, your first veeAMON. >> It is, it is, first veeAMON, the first time in Miami, first time on theCUBE. So kind of bucket list check. >> Hey, got to give you a sticker here then, so here you go, thank you for coming on. And of course you've got the veeAM party tonight, which you may have been to some other veeAM parties at other shows, but-- >> Simon: I know them by reputation. >> Yeah, they're good. So looking forward to that. Two days, what have you learned here in the last couple of days, what are your impressions? >> Yeah, my impressions are that this is a conference that reflects the type of company that I think veeAM is, and veeAM's a little atypical for a technology company in this space, they didn't go down the traditional route, they had a very kind of different model right from the get-go, but what I see is real grass roots innovation, and veeAM has always been short on rhetoric, short on hype, and long on actually delivering the products and the capabilities that customers want, and it's been great to see examples of how that's playing out at the show, and we heard Ratmir talking about innovation, and 451 Research, we're an analyst firm focused on understanding the impacts of innovation, we provide data and insight around the technology innovation lifecycle, and it's always been, we've covered veeAM from pretty much day one, and it's always been clear to us that veeAM is a pretty special company, not just you have to be in the right place at the right time with the right product, but you also have to do it in a way that, they're kind of table stakes, you've got to do it in a way that actually engages and empathizes with what a customer is looking to achieve, and I think they've got that at the grassroots level, the veeAM admin level, a decade or more ago, and really have doubled down on that, so it's been awesome to see some of the examples of that at the conference this last couple of days, to have a general session with the eight demos. (laughing) >> And they all worked. >> They all worked. >> All of the eight!. >> I was terrified when they wheeled out the tub of water and it was like, they were dropping a laptop in there. Hey, you know, it was awesome and I think Ratmir is talking around, this being Act Two of veeAM's journey and veeAM's story. But firstly, lets kind of pay tribute to what they did in Act One. I think for any company to build a billion dollar revenue business software is a phenomenal achievement. But to do it in the data protection space? It's even more so. >> It's on backup, possibly the most boring thing ever, and they've kind of made it exciting. >> They used to say that backup was, well they used to say two things about backup. Firstly it's an insurance policy. And secondly, it was the one part of the IT environment that even storage people found boring. (laughing) But I mean, just see the kind of energy, enthusiasm, passion, of the folks here. That really isn't the case. >> That's true. It's been one of those boring but important factors. And then, veeAM's ascendancy, I've said this many times, has coincided with the birth of virtualization. We were consolidating physical servers because they were under-utilized, but then the backup had to be completely rethought because you didn't have enough band-width in the servers, and the capacity to run a backup job, and here comes veeAM, and it's just perfect fit, boom. Takes off. Now you've got Act Two, which is cloud. And I feel like it's jump balled, to use a U.S. basketball analogy, for you-- >> Simon: No idea what that means. >> --folks who don't follow basketball. (laughing) But it's "start over," right? And so, everybody's going after cloud, multi-cloud hybrid. And so, do you feel as though veeAM can replicate a success in what Ratmir's calling "Act Two" and draft from "Act One"? And one of the key factors, what's the tail wind for them, and what are some of the head winds. Certainly competition, we're going to' talk about that, but what are some of the other things that you guys see in your research? >> Yeah, so I think, I mean, first off, I think the hybrid cloud is a reality. Our research tells us that 60% of organizations are looking to, or characterize their strategy as being hybrid cloud strategy. But they're really struggling with actually enacting that and doing that in a processed, organized, deliberate way. We got a lot going on in the multi-cloud world, but multi-cloud is often an accident rather than something deliberate. It just turns out that they've got all these assets across all these different-- >> Dave: Multi-vendor, "Oh, I've got all these clouds!" >> That's right, that's right. Again, go back a decade, and how relatively straight forward the data and application environment seemed, right? I mean you had your application, it was probably on-prem, it really on a server that was connected to this bit of tin, and-- >> Little did we know at the time, right? >> Yeah, and fast forward to today, and data is just everywhere. So I think the tailwind for a company like veeAM is that, obviously, there's always going to be a need for backup, but I think that the conversation is evolving from one around data backup into one of data management, because you can only manage the data in your environment if you understand where it is, what its value is, what the potential exposures are, and I think that's why we see a big opportunity in managing data across this much more diverse and broader environment. >> So given that, do you think customers are better able to manage their data environment now than they used to be, or is it actually getting worse because now it's a much more dynamic and disparate environment. People weren't that great at it beforehand, have they gotten better, or not? >> It's hard to generalize. I think, in the main, customers acknowledge that they do a pretty bad job of managing it on a holistic basis. And I think we are seeing many organizations do it on a piece by piece basis. I think things like GDPR have been a wake-up call that, "Hey, your data is your responsibility!" And whether that data is on your facilities or it's in somebody else's, that doesn't matter. It's still your responsibility. So that was kind of a little bit of a wake-up call for organizations, certainly in Europe, and I think we're going to' see that replicated across the region also. >> We had the rise of Ransomware as well, which was actually the best advertisement for backup that you could ever have had. >> No doubt. >> Absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> These, we talk about the shared responsibility model, I mean, to your point, Simon, I mean, it's like security, right? I mean, somebody misconfigures an Amazon EC2-- >> Simon: That's right. >> -okay, it's not Amazon, it's the shared responsibility, and the same thing with the GDPR, malware. >> It really is, but I think, when we think about what the major challenges that just about every business faces, it's how do they scale their operations in a way that's going to' allow them to really take advantage of this thing we're calling "Digital Transformation," I know it's an over-used term, but-- >> Dave: But it's real. >> It is real, it is real. And I'll research, we asked a question in a survey recently, which is, "What is your organization's single biggest barrier?" And it's, "We don't respond quickly enough to the business." It's the biggest objective, but it's also the most difficult barrier to overcome. And I think we're only going to start to address this if we can fundamentally have a different look at how we scale operations, and that's across the application estate, across the infrastructure, it's also across data, right? And it's modernized, and it's transforming the way we think about managing data, and it's, we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past and end up with a zillion silos that all have a person that needs managing that silo, that environment. We've done that. We don't want to, as we move to multi-cloud, and we acknowledge that data and applications are going to' be in a greater diversity of locations, we have to have a model that scales to managing across those environments. And it's that kind of consistency of approach that I think the industry is lacking, but there's definitely an awareness that we need to address though. >> Yeah, so given that there's that awareness and there's a need there for the market, there has been a refresh in data protection in that part of the industry. Nothing much was happening for probably a good 10 years. David LaMein was kind of the last big disrupter that we had in that marketplace. And then it feels like overnight, everything changed. And suddenly there were a whole bunch of competitors all trying to go after this data-protection market, and veeAM being one of them. So with that challenge for customers happening, and this dynamic market, how do you see the market dynamics evolving as we go through what veeAM calls its "Act Two," and people start moving to this hybrid cloud. What does that look like from your research? >> I think from a customer's perspective, it is often actually just perplexing. I mean, where do you start? How do you think about this on a strategic basis? And again, some of our research has pointed out, highlighted that, again, it's kind of obvious, but, how do we get better alignment between IT and the business? And when we asked about that in the context of digital transformation, it was the businesses, it was the respondents that said, "Yes, our IT strategy is being developed in lock-step with the business," right? Those are the companies that feel like they can, that they have a good handle on this digital transformation. Data transformation. And we do see a bit of a, almost kind of a schism opening up. There is a kind of digital leaders, and there are definitely digital laggards that are really, really struggling with this. And I think that, to me, means opportunity. I mean, there's opportunity for vendors to come here, to come in here and address it. I think with data protection specifically, if you'd have said 10 years ago that there was almost kind of a Cambrian explosion of start-ups and new companies in backup recovery, and data protection, DR. That sounded like madness a decade ago. You know, we've seen absolute explosion, huge number of companies coming together, coming to market with real innovation, which ultimately, I think, is going to' be good for customers. I think there's probably too many for the market to sustain at this point, 'cause all these new entrants, none of the incumbents are going away. But I think it's going to' be very much a partner-centric kind of success. There's a realization I think from, certainly from the hyperscale cloud providers that they're not going to be able to do this on their own, right? They're going to' have to work with "legacy" incumbents. These guys definitely have a role to play. I mean, I was just in a session earlier today talking about VTL in the cloud. >> Dave: Yeah. >> I mean (laughing) VTL?! In the cloud?! (laughing) >> Legacy processes, they're hard to kill. >> But the more this evolves, the more it seems like the public cloud is starting to resemble kind of the on-prem world in some ways. >> Well that's interesting. You know I was in London a couple of weeks ago for the AWS summit and Matt Garman, who's the AWS exec, I think he's the guy who first launched EC2, he was the product manager at the time. Now he's the senior executive. He said, "We believe the vast majority of customers will eventually migrate all workloads into the cloud." And then it was, "But," and this is the "but" that they wouldn't have acknowledged two years ago, we realize that its a hybrid world-- >> We can't do this ourselves. >> And then they talked about snowball, and outpost, and all these other things that they're doing. And Microsoft has always had a different posture. Of course it has a huge on-premise state. But let's talk a little bit about the horses on the track. So you were mentioning some of the legacy backup guys, all the start-ups coming in. There's been over a billion and a half raised for data protection. So you've got Veritas, Dell EMC, IBM with its Tivoli business, it's done some stuff with Catalogic. And then you've got Cohesity and Rubrik trying to get escape velocity, so they got tons of cash, having big parties, trying to replicate that marketing momentum. And you've got veeAM, has, to your point, Simon, built a billion dollar software business, okay. And is now saying, "Okay, we're going into the next wave." >> And profitable! I was speaking with Ratmir this morning, and they were actually cash-flow positive and on gap-basis as well, they're making money! >> There's nothing more atypical than-- >> I know! >> --a start-up type company that's making money. >> And you've got specialists. You've got Drover in there and Zerto-- >> Simon: Yeah, you've got Zerto, you got, >> --you know, a lot of guys, Amantis just got taken out by Cohesity, so. How do you guys see that competitive market shaking out, Dave Russel did the bubble chart, Ratmir showed it yesterday, 15 billion. Is the tam big enough to support all these guys? What do they have to do to get return for their investors? We're talking IPO's in the future before the window closes. It's getting hairy. >> It is, and you know, certainly some of those incumbents are not without having their challenges. I think it's incumbent on them to listen to what customers are asking for. Customers are moving to the cloud, right? They're going to' do that with or without the legacy guys. So they have to get on-board with that and help manage that process for customers. I think what I like about some of the newer guys, the Rubrik's, the Cohesity's, is they are talking about this bigger picture, this issue that, we said at the start, that many organizations acknowledges is a real challenge, and that's having an overall view into their data estate, their data assets. But for many different reasons, it's always been very, very difficult to crack that on a holistic basis. These guys are putting together some compelling stories, some compelling products to do that, and customers are definitely buying it. Now it's not on the scale that they're buying Veeam on a very tactical basis, so I think the challenge for Veeam is to evolve their own proposition from being pretty tactical, important, absolutely, but to kind of move up the value chain from there. And I think we are starting to see many examples of how that is coming into play with some of the announcements we've had at the show today. >> Yeah, I mean, to your point. A billion dollars profitable, 350,000 customers, and a modern sort of approach. >> Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. We've heard simplicity so many times over the last couple of days, but to me when we talk about if the challenge is operational scale, you can't do that without simplicity. And I think the fact that they acknowledge that from a very early date, we speak to a lot of, you know, customers overall, but lots of veeAM customers. Every single one says, "I love the simplicity." It works, it just works. You know, it's these kinds of things that they really do matter, because, not just because it just sounds great, but actually it lets, it either lets the administrator do other things, it's freeing up their time, or it allows a different part, maybe a less experienced or different type of professional to come in and manage the environment and not have to have a PhD in storage and backup and all those things that made this such a human capital-intensive process in the past. >> Easy and simple, they're easy, things to claim, and many companies actually try to claim that they're either easy or simple. It's really difficult to actually deliver on. >> That's right. >> But when you have customers coming back to you and telling you, "You are simple and easy to use," That's when you know that you've got it right. >> What I like about veeAM's messaging is, I've heard it a lot this week, is it's, start with backup. It actually is all about the backup, and you don't hear that from a lot of the upstarts, they're like, "No, no, no, backup. It's all about the data management." It's this sort of vision, these guys used the term "aspirational," almost as a pejorative. >> Right. >> So it's kind of interesting to see that competitive battle and then you've got the legacy guys trying to hang onto their install base, maybe making some announcements, I mean, Dell EMC just made a bunch of announcements, and kind of came out and admitted, "Hey, we took our eye off the ball." Obviously Veritas has a huge install base that everybody's trying to attack. IBM with Tivoli. >> There's a new CEO at Commvault. >> Yeah, and Commvault. We, I don't want to leave them out of the equation, right? They're doing their enterprise piece. And they've always had a little different angle on this space, so, there's a lot of action going on here. 15 billion, half of that is probably backup. >> The challenge is that this isn't a homogenous market, right? >> Dave: Right, very fragmented. >> There are just so many different things that we need to protect. There are so many different ways we can protect them, that soon just started getting into the details, that's when it starts, the market starts to stratify. >> And with cloud and new programming-- >> And people keep creating new ones, you know, object storage comes up, and then we've got no sequel databases that are now happening. >> Microservices, kubernetes, protection-- >> The whole container thing which we haven't really heard an awful lot about this week, I think. I mean, I'm looking forward to seein' how veeAM's story evolves there, but if we do accept that containers, kubernetes is going to be the new middleware that connects a new breed of infrastructure to a new application paradigm, if you like, then that's going to' need protecting. So I think we talk about it, backup, as being tactical, but actually it is a start of a journey, and also, I think one thing that's come out from this last couple of days is the importance of DR, and that's absolutely reflected in our research when we ask about, "What are big challenges in the storage and data arena, DR is a top two challenge every single time. It's too expensive. It's too difficult to run, to build, to test. I've been hearing that for 15, 20 years, right? And we're still not there. >> You can't automate the testing, it's too dangerous to fail over and fail back, so we don't do it, and we don't test it, so we clearly haven't cracked this one as an industry, and there is massive latent demand, I think, and I think, as we think, I mean who can tolerate any sort of down time for any sort of application, right? It just becomes a prerequisite to have applications always on-line. You know, that prerequisite for effective DR is going to' continue. >> Okay, guys, we got to' go. Thanks very much, Simon, for coming on theCUBE. >> Simon: Hey, great! Great to be here! >> Great to have you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest, you're watching theCUBE, live, from veeAMON, 2019, Miami. We'll be right back. (theme music)

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington it's theCUBE covering SmartSheet ENGAGE '18. Brought to you by SmartSheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are continuing our coverage live from Bellevue, Washington. We're at SmartSheet ENGAGE 2018. I'm with Jeff Frick here. This is the second annual ENGAGE event. Huge, doubled from last year. We've had a great day so far, Jeff, of execs from ShartSheet, customers. We're now excited to welcome an analyst from the 451 Group, Chris Marsh, the Research Director for WorkFresh Productivity and Compliance; welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you very much. >> So we have, as I was saying, this is the second annual event, some of the stats that Mark Mader, our CEO, shared in the keynote this morning, there are over 1100 companies represented here at the event, a couple thousand people, 20 countries. We've had some very enthusiastic SmartSheet customers, SmartSheeters themselves talking about this tool that's designed for the business user, that's not designed for the citizen developer, people that don't even need to know what API stands for. So talk to us about your role at 451, but then we'll kind of get into project management, program management, and some of the trends and the changes that you're seeing there. >> Sure, yeah, so, so I've had the workforce productivity compliance research practice in 451, so as a team of analysts, we cover, essentially, productivity software, right? So the different tools that members of the workforce are using to get work done. So in addition to work management companies like SmartSheet, we also look at collaboration tools, digital workspaces, we cover the content management landscape, and we cover content creation, asset creation tools as well, so, really the focus for my team is to give perspectives on how the future of work is evolving, but really what those technology and dependings of that are. >> Such a busy space. You've picked a good area to specialize in. So how should people think of it? How should they categorize it, because from the outside looking in, a lot of the tools are very similar, you know, there's some overlap, some not overlap, there's some places where they can work together. Ya know, how should leaders be thinking about approaching this opportunity, 'cos you talk a lot about, you know, that's a great place to find untapped competitive advantage, but it seems to be very, kind of, confusing to the outsider. >> Yeah, it's a super interesting space, and it's probably more interesting than it's ever been. I think for many of us, it was, to be frank, kind of not interesting, right? There's lots of kind of legacy tools that people were struggling to figure out how to do new kinds of work with. >> Beyond email! (chuckles) >> Exactly, yeah, yeah. >> Was there anything beyond email 10 years ago? Yikes! >> Exactly, I mean we as a, I think, a research team find ourselves looking as much of intersections of those five areas that we cover as much as we go deep in them, for the very fact that, you know, it's a space that's going through a lot of innovation, a lot of disruption, and vendors and segments are learning from one another. Then, of course, we have, you know, broad, kind of transversal trends brought by technologies like AI and machine learning. Beginning to have more conversations around things like Block Chain, people beginning to talk about what may be some of the use cases are around AR, VR, and the kind of mixed-reality type technologies. So, you know, lots of innovation, lots of disruption. Um, in terms of what business leaders should be looking for, it obviously depends on what they're trying to do in their workforce. I think one of the big shifts that we're seeing is, um, you know, the sort of decentralization of ownership over more complex types of work to business users, right, whereas, I think, in a lot of companies, traditionally there are centralized teams of process specialists or project management folks, and, you know, tools have kind of mediated the relationship between those centralized, you know, teams and business users; where increasingly those tools are appealing to those business users. So in the panel moderation I did this morning, I showed some statistics around, you know, users of tools like SmartSheet, and it's not the type of people we would have seen using this type of tool four or five years ago. It's leaders were then legal teams, finance teams, HR teams, marketing teams, operations teams-- so that's sort of reflective of a broad shift in productivity software of, you know, virality in terms of how these tools enter businesses, right? Lots of organic adoption and it kind of runs contrary to how a lot of enterprise technology gets sold into enterprises, which is gone a little bit more top down or into specific buying centers. Increasingly, it's going in sort of the grass roots. People are finding new use cases for technology, and it sort of spreads from there, so, yeah, it's a super hot space right now. >> So one of the things we talk about is every place we go, right? Digital transformation and innovation, everybody wants more. And it seems pretty simple to say, but hard to do, that if you get more people more data, the tools to process it, and then the power to do something, that that just can unlock a tremendous amount of untapped innovation and execution and efficiency out of a company. That said, that's easier said sitting here than done. So are you seeing, you know, kind of a continual trend towards, you know, pushing down the data, pushing down the tools, and pushing down the authority to execute decisions? >> Yeah, I think so. And actually, the work management space is a very good example of that, right? So, um, you know, for some companies culturally that's not going to come very easy, because they just culturally may have a more sort of top-down kind of culture. But I think digital transformation for everyone, essentially means more agility, more speed, you know, more quickness in how work is executed and how it's designed. And that almost inevitably means that those closest to the delivery of the work are the ones that actually have the power to design the work in the first place and can, rather than sort of relying on IT for everything and/or central teams somewhere. So, it is a broad shift, but again, it comes, to your point, it comes more easily for some companies and some industries than others. >> And we talked about that with a number of the people from SmartSheet as well as users, that this is a massive cultural shift. I think Mark Mader, the CEO, this morning was telling us a quick anecdote of a 125-year-old oil and gas company, >> Yeah. >> That is, talk about, you know, probably really married to a lot of legacy processes and ways of thinking, not just tools, and how SmartSheet probably started in, you know, one function within the organization, probably, you know, quite low, and it started, to your point before, go viral, and we started, we started to hear a number of stories from PayPal, Sodexo, how this virality that you talk about is really kind of transforming from the bottom up. But that cultural change is essential. >> The cultural change is essential, I mean, in some cases it's just being led by the fact that that's happening anyway, right? Because, you know, gone are the days when IT chooses the tools, provisions them, and, you know, there's an awareness of what's going on in the environment. There are, and it's not just the work management space, we also look at sort of, workflow automation tools. A lot of these tools are, you know, going into a company grass roots, there are then potentially hundreds if not thousands of work processes or workflows that are created on these tools before IT even figures that out, right? Which is not necessarily an ideal scenario, but it's increasingly, you know, one of the patterns that we're seeing in enterprises, so. It's a big cultural shift, but um, there's a certain amount of push and pull here. Some companies that realize that are looking proactively to give effect to it. Other people are going to be pulled, to be frank, to the fact that there are tools that enable new kind of work patterns, new styles to happen, and they almost have to get on board with that, so. So obviously you want to strike a balance, I think, somewhere in between of being the catalyst for those kind of new things to happen whilst making sure there is still the kind of centralized oversight that's required for you to maintain control over your overall technology estate, but also so that you can make sure the technologies are aligning to your strategic goals. So it's a delicate balance. >> And there's these pretty big forces at play here. There's a term that 451 Group has recently coined called a liquid enterprise. >> That's right, yeah. >> Liquid; I think of fluidity, you mentioned agility, we've heard nimbleness today, um, talk to us. What, by definition, is the liquid enterprise, and how are you helping customers to embrace it and maybe not fight the force, because the forces of pull are stronger and better; but what does that mean? >> Yeah, so liquid enterprise, I mean, you've encapsulated it very well, right? So it's all about, you know, when we speak of digital transformation, you almost always end up to about business agility. So in some ways, liquid enterprise is just our way of giving a little bit more flavor to what business agility looks like in the kind of digital age. So our kind of view is that, you know, a lot of the companies that we kind of laud now as those really interesting companies like the AirBnB's and the Uber's, those with kind of, massively scalable infrastructure and then a very simple UI. We think that whole pattern of what the, kind of, digital enterprise will look like is one that's much more able to fluidly marshal it's different resources in a way that allows them to respond much more rapidly to changes in their own market conditions, right? Because one of the things, obviously, that digital is doing is changing user behavior to user requirement. So your ability, as a company, to respond very quickly to that is becoming, you know, a primacy in most companies, and a big part of how we think about the liquid enterprise is the fact that companies will actually be able to change their own organizational structure. Not just what they offer to a market, not just the tools that enable them to do that, but actually, they'll begin to sort of re-tesselate their own organizational design, to enable that to happen. So, you know, we see early indicators of technologies that are beginning to allow companies to think in that way. I think for most companies, liquid enterprise is aspirational right now, but I think, certainly, it's a pattern a lot of companies are trying to tact towards. >> So, I'm just curious, you talk about culture as a competitive advantage. And how much of these tools are culture enablers to make that possible? How much of it are just critical, because if you don't have that culture you're going to lose? How much of it is tied to, kind of, the consumerization of IT, where again, your workforce has an expectation of the way apps work based on their interaction with Amazon and their interaction with Google and those types of things? >> Very much driven by the consumerization of IT trend. I mean, often, increasingly what we see happen in the consumer realm ends up happening in some kind of expression in the enterprise realm sooner or later. So, yeah, that's very much it. One of the other things we talk about in our research is the kind of hierarchy of employee motivation, right? So we kind of have this way of thinking about, you know, what companies need to do and what technologies need to enable to really satisfy that end user experience. I think in the productivity software space, you know, it's probably not hyperbolic to say that most tools really only satisfy end users, right? We have lots of tools, including lots of modern SAAS tools, that actually, you know, may have good usability, but aren't particularly flexible. There sort of better, more scalable versions of a lot of legacy tools. So we see this kind of passage towards tools actually doing things like, you know, decentralizing the ability to create workflows, so that, you know, business users, including non-managerial folks, can actually design work, and how that work actually happens, right? So there's a big element there in terms of motivation in your role, you know, actually making an impact, having that recognized and all of those kinds of things, which is driving a more, sort of, engaged relationship between people and technology, so we only see that continuing. And, the work management space in SmartSheet's very good examples of that. There's lots of conversations you can hear and engage where people are discussing, you know, what they're doing with their tool that they created themselves, some kind of local business team that has redesigned a certain process that is allowed better business value to be created; and they're the ones that are going to take credit for that. I think that trend is only going to accelerate. So again, from an enterprise perspective, embracing that, helping catalyze that, but again, having the ability to have central oversight over that kind of local team-based execution, it is obviously very important. >> What about just kind of the competition from my desktop? You know, what apps are open while I'm working all day, and you know, we all wish if you're driving an app company that it's your app that is on top, but the reality is many, many apps open all the time. So do you see that evolving, do you see that aggregating, do you see a couple of kind of uber apps over the top of these integrations that you'll be doing your primary workplace, or is it just kind of horses for courses depending on the types of things that you do in your day-to-day job? >> Really good question, I mean, I think one of the background trends we've seen, especially with SAAS, is just the growth and the overall enterprise application estate. Right, so just more apps. And obviously catalyzed also by end users having positive experiences in consumer apps, and then being used to choosing the way that they do things, like that, that is transitioning into the enterprise environment, as well, so. I don't envisage that the total number of apps is going to decrease, but very good question as to, you know, whether we get consolidation. Time will tell, but I think, you know, to my point earlier, we spend a lot of time looking at intersections that cross existing segments, because, each segment is really transforming. And you see lots of examples of customers here at ENGAGE using SmartSheet as a displacement tool for other ones that they previously were using. They find the automation of SmartSheet a way to sort of disintermediate other tools that they were using. We're certainly seeing some of that, whether that means the total number of applications decreases, I don't know, because we're still yet to see play out lots of cool, new, innovative technologies that will obviously give rise to new kinds of applications. Question is out as to whether it will mean further apps, but we certainly seeing a changing in the, in the sort of preference for tools based on what new ones we're enabling. >> And I would imagine in very short order, the application of AI and machine learning behind the scenes in all these apps, is also going to change the UI experience dramatically, as more and more and more of the processes are automated on the back-end, there's more kind of smart suggestions as to what to do or completely automated processes. So even the face of the most popular apps today, I would imagine you see significant change with the application of AI and machine learning. >> Yeah, I would think so. One of the, sort of, big trends here, listening to customers and listening to some of the key notes, is, you know, the shift that comes with companies trying to make from low value work to high value work, so all of that kind of granular and manual work we're having to do is so most existing applications; people just want to abstract their way. They don't want to be doing that anymore, they want to be focusing on, um, sort of resource management, team coordination, creative ideation, they want to focus on strategy execution, they want to focus on things like, you know, risks to the business, actions that they need to take, decisions that they need to make, they don't want to be doing the whole, um, who did this, when did they do it, what do I need to do now, they don't want to be sort of manually moving information from applications, they don't want to be doing sort of manual reconciliations of data, and that kind of thing. >> Right. >> So um, heh, so yeah, the kind of low value to high value work is only going to be accelerated by AI and ML, to the point where we're beginning to see much more contextual work. So the ML is the basis on which work can be surfaced contextually to end users. So that is sort of automating the abstraction of that low value work, and that's hugely exciting, because that offers a whole new paradigm for how we interact with applications, what that end user experience is. Imagine, you know, sort of going into your office loading up your computer, opening up an application, and it surfaces to you what you need to focus on that day. >> Right. >> That's where a lot of productivity application vendors are trying to get to. >> That's the dream, right there. >> Not here is the application, you decide where you need to focus, it's the kind of, these are the things you really need to put your time in. I mean, that's pretty exciting. And that's what a lot of the companies would want. >> Well even, a certain CRN company that's got a large tower in San Francisco, why do I have to put the city and the state and the zip code, I mean, we have so far to go, can't I just put the zip code in and it fills in the city and the state, and those little, you know, simple things that take a lot of time and these are the kind of data entry tasks that just drive people bananas, and discount the value, the fundamental value of the tool, because you just get stuck in a data entry mode, or a double entry mode. It's this crazy opportunity that we still have in front of us to make improvements. >> Yeah, I think, huge opportunity, obviously. But it's not quite so easy as that, I think, really it's kind of how I would talk about it. You know, AI and ML will inevitably have a transformative impact on enterprise software; I don't think anybody would dispute that. But it does rely on large data sects, against which you have to train your algorithms and your models, and that takes time for individual companies to build that data sect. They need enough work in there, they need enough people, enough workflows in there, to generate those data sects so that they will actually be useful, right? So, it's going to take a bit of time to play out. But yeah, it's going to be very impactful in the longer term. >> Well Chris, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing your insights on this new, emerging term of the liquid enterprise, we appreciate that. >> Pleasure, thanks very much. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from SmartSheet ENGAGE 2018. Stick around, Jeff and I will be right back with our next guest. (electronic music)

>> San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Conga Connect West 2018 brought to you by Conga. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at the Thirsty Bear at Salesforce Dreamforce, 170,000 people, we're in a small side of it put on by Conga, it's called Conga Connect West, think they had 3000 people last year. if you can see behind us the Thirsty Bear is packed to the gills, they're here for three days with free food, free drink, theCUBE and some entertainment. But as you know, we like to get the smartest people we can, get the knowledge from them and we're really excited to have a super smart person from 451, she's Sheryl Kingstone, the VP of Research for Customer Experience and Commerce at 451 Sheryl, great to see you. >> Nice to see you, too and thanks for inviting me. >> Oh absolutely, so you've been coming to this thing you said for a number of years. Every time I come to Dreamforce, it's like oh my goodness, how can it get any bigger? >> So, I can think back to the year 2000 when I did roadshows with Salesforce and we couldn't even get 40 people in the room. >> Oh my goodness. >> And now we have what, 170,000? >> That was kind of the dark, the dark and... >> That was when we were convincing people >> The dark days. >> That SaaS was the way to go and everyone was like wait, what? >> Right. >> Saas? >> When ASP was not Average Selling Price >> Oh god. >> But Application Service Provider. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Very good. So let's jump into it. So now it's 2018, time flies. Digital transformation is all the rage and I know you do a lot of work on digital transformation. So where do people get started, what is digital transformation? >> Yeah, yeah >> So how do you help people kind of, you know, I got to do it, the boss wants me to do it, my competitors are doing it. >> Yeah >> Where do they go? >> And here's the thing, you could say digital transformation has been pretty much evolving for two decades, it really is leveraging software. But what's really changed is digital transformation is more than just an IT strategy, right? So digital transformation is a business strategy. It's a culture, it's understanding how to leverage these new, more modern technologies so that we're reducing customer friction points, or empowering employees, or helping our partners sell more. So it's really more of an overarching strategy instead of independent, I'm going to go out and get software A versus software B. >> Right, and there's so many components of it, in not only the technology piece, but as we always see at shows, also the people and the process. The technology by itself is just another tool. >> Yeah, and we've been also talking in decades about people, process and technology, and one of the things I've said for a long time is what's missing in that, is the overlying or underlying data element of it. And that's another thing that's changed, is what are we doing to harness the power of the data that we get through these digital transformation processes that were undertaken? >> Right. >> And data's absolutely critical. >> But data by itself's just data, right? And to turn it in for information you got to have context. >> Yeah. >> You got to have the right data to the right person at the right time make the right decision. >> Yeah, but I've said all along, it's not about he who holds the right data, most data, it's really who has the right data. >> Right. >> So absolutely. >> Right. So as you look at some of the significant kind of glacial shifts in terms of infrastructure, in terms of CPU, in speed of CPUs compared again to 2000, you know, compared to the data that we have, the storage economics, and obviously Cloud. Now, finally, it seems like we're getting to the tipping point, where you've got enough horsepower, you've got enough storage, you Compute, and networking that you can start to implement some of these things that were just a pipe dream when you couldn't get 40 people, >> Yeah, well, >> In a room. >> So Compute has definitely changed and it's one of the things that's changed with respect to machine learning. The storage, because if you really think about intelligence, it's all about making sure you have all of that data. So yes, absolutely, that's changed. But one of the things that we really have to understand, and at 451 we just launched a lot of research around Foresight, right, and it's so about, hindsight is 20/20 and Foresight is 451, right? So it is all about looking more forward. >> Right, right. >> And one of the things that we talk about is just that. What are we doing with invisible infrastructure? Because no one really cares about what the infrastructure it is today, it's what's the intelligence that's coming out of it? So our four themes are around invisible infrastructure, pervasive intelligence, contextual experiences and then the ability to deal with the risk. So those four themes come together to create Foresight, and we actually launched that this week at our own conference, HCTS. >> I used to joke, we used to operate on a sample of historic data, right? Take a little bit of something that already happened. As opposed to now, you actually have the opportunity to get all the data and you have the opportunity to get it in real-time and have that feed your decision making processes. >> Well, what's really changed is we're no longer working from just operational data, we're bringing a lot more of that behavioral data that has to be streamed in real-time, and that's the architectural changes that have shift. >> Right. >> And the other thing you have to do with the infrastructure changes, if you're really making a decision, you have to make that decision on the edge. (announcements in background) >> So I think Marc Benioff is going to start speaking. >> Yeah, that's what we're going to have to adjust, to cut this off. >> So Sheryl, it's great to catch up and we'll see you next time. >> Not a problem, thank you. >> Marc Benioff's coming on. Thanks for watching theCube. (announcements in background) (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back everyone. This is The Cube's day two coverage of HPE Discover 2017. We're here live in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconAngle Media. My other co-founder Dave Vellante, head of research at Wikibon.com. And our next guests are Kevin Wan, Director of Software Defined and Cloud Group Marketing at HPE, and William Fellows, co-founder and VP of Research at 451 Research, well-known research firm with Wikibon, and some of the other research firms out there, covering the cloud. Guys welcome to The Cube. >> Thanks for having us, it's exciting day today. >> So the first thing I want to get into here is, we were just talking before we went on live, about multicloud and kind of having a great debate, it's great, it's a great debate because it really is a hard definition to knock down. And Wikibon has done some research, you've got some new research, I want to get into that. Dave done some, I think, called, True Private Cloud, that shows not a decline in on-prem and server deployment, there's actually an increase. Hybrid cloud is increasing. You guys got some new research. What is the state of enterprises with respect to moving to cloud, vis-a-vis hybrid. 'Coz certainly there's movement there. What's going on? >> So, users want to make decisions about where to place applications, and workloads, and source services based upon policy, based upon latency, based upon geography, and so on. And as the worlds of cloud and hosting, and co-location and managed services, as they converged those options are growing exponentially. And, you know, what HP has been doing is to bring into view tools which allow organizations to select those best environments to meet their hybrid IT needs. And what we've seen in 451 Research is that between now and the next couple of years, there's going to be an increased momentum to put those workloads and applications into different kinds of cloud environments. In other words, when you talk to an organization, they say, "Well, we've got a bit of SaaS here. "We're using a bit of public cloud here. "We're using some other hosting services. "We're doing things on-premise." Already they're using multiple cloud services. So when we asked our global commentator network of about 60,000 folks for whom enterprise IT is their day job, which we call voice of the enterprise, they've told us that between now and in two years' time, existing 40% of workloads in those cloud environments is going to become 60%. In other words, the majority of workloads in two years' time are going to be running in some kind of cloud environment. Now, the mix of those is going to be different depending on different organizations. But we found a variance of less than about 10% across different vertical markets, which suggests there's an interesting benchmark, if you like, a right mix coming into view in terms of the balance of when you would use public cloud services, when you would use hosted private, and when you would use on-premise services. >> Ken I want to get your thoughts on this because that's a great point he's bringing up. The cloud business model is not necessarily, I have to move it to public. You can do cloud-like on-premise. That's where the True Private Cloud comes in. To your point, there is a massive shift to cloud-like, and there's a trend towards the same software on-prem as in the cloud. So, as these things get laid out, you're seeing that path. So just because you're still on-prem doesn't make you not cloud, right? >> That's right, that's exactly right. So what we're seeing is, as William was saying, is that there's an interest in figuring out where is the best place for workload to go? Based on its performance needs, it's security, compliance, cost needs. And often we find that sometimes traditional IT leaving a traditional IT environment is the best thing to do. Sometimes it's best to put it into a private cloud, sometimes it's best to put it into a public cloud. So we're seeing a lot of customers with multiple clouds, on average, somewhere between five and eight clouds today. And the challenge they're starting to have now is, "My God, I've got five to eight clouds. "How do I manage all these?" >> "How'd that happen?" Clouds brawl. >> Yeah, and so, but there's very little interoperability between them. And so you have different stacks of management for each of these clouds. And there's a fair amount of resource required to manage all these different clouds. So I think what the next thing you'll start seeing are tools that allow you to migrate resources, or look at clouds more holistically, and to analyze the entire cloud environment, all the multiple clouds, and to be able to use policy, and then analyze where is the best location automatically, and to be able to pull cost data out, performance data out, across the whole cloud environment. >> And this is what we've, at 451 research has been calling best execution venue for about 10 years now. So the idea is that for every class of IT-related business need, there's an environment which best balances performance, and cost, and other things. And IT should be able to deploy to that environment automatically. And get the benefits associated with having things in the right resources and the right services they need. >> That's right. Our view is that people need to figure out their right mix. Every company will use a different amount of SaaS, private cloud, public cloud, based on their company strategy. An online bank will have different requirements than a brick-and-mortar bank, as an example. Even though they're in the same industry. Because their business models are different, their mix will be different. So we work with each company to figure out what their right mix should be, where do they need that portability. One of the exciting things that we're doing today at Discover is talking about Microsoft Azure Stack. We've worked with Microsoft to bring out this new offering that provides full compatibility between what's running on-premise and what's running in a public cloud. So Azure Stack uses the ability to run Azure-consistent services right out of your data center with its fully API compatible. So that means, as a developer, I can write an application and deploy it into either a public cloud or a private cloud, with no change to the code at all. >> So the extensibility is the key message here. You don't have to adopt Azure Stack from the Azure cloud. You can actually mirror that on-prem in a cloud-like way that's still on-prem. And you can call that private cloud. I mean you can call it private cloud but then that's what it is. >> Right, right. >> But that's obviously going to resonate with developers, this whole notion of infrastructures as codes. So one of the things that CEOs complain about is we spent way too much money on non-differentiated infrastructure management. And so to the extent that you're putting in these clouds, private cloud, whatever, hybrid clouds, that substantially mimic public cloud, William, what does your research show in terms of how organizations are shifting their spending on labor? If that premise is true that CEOs don't want to spend it on, you know, provisioning LANs, but they do wanted initiate digital transformation initiatives. Are you seeing any evidence that this notion of cloud is helping on-prem, is helping them shift their spending on labor? >> So what I would say is that cloud provides the basis and the platform for broader digital transformation agendas. And cloud brings with it some really important changes in the operating model which affect staffing and how you do these things. So, for example, moving from a process development which is waterfall or top down to, agile, from moving from a situation where resources are allocated from one where they are consumption based. So from installing new things in different Silos to where things are updated on a continuous basis. So those things have a dramatic effect on the way you organized internally in order to support that, which indeed then set you up for doing these things that would create a digital platform. So linking technology, information assets, customer experience, marketing, and so on. And I think Devoxx is at the heart of that because it provides the automation, the process change, 'coz remember what we're talking about here is moving from, you know, a world in which, you've talked about, the Silo, to one in which is collaborative, to one in which is multidirectional, and to one which is based on sharing. And I think all of those things have an impact on how you staff for those. I think there's been enough research to understand that not everyone is going to make it necessarily in this transformation. But I think our research indicates that at least 2/3 of the folks in silent organization bind to the things that they will need to be doing in order to support this digital transformation. >> We've certainly seen, the many customers that I've talked to, look at this and see this huge opportunity for essentially automating a lot of functions, you know, the LANS, the networks, installing the application, the databases, and all that. And through this automation, all these people who used to do this now are available to be re-skilled, to do higher level, more value-differentiating sorts of work. All these IT departments are struggling because they want to bring, focus more of their effort on new services but they're so much work to just maintaining the existing services. They don't have the time. So one of the things the cloud does is reduce the mundane day-to-day time and take those resources and move them on a more differentiated value-creating types of services so that they can advance their businesses. >> Ken, interesting point, I mean, yes they were talking about IT, information technology, those two words, I mean, they're not going away, they're only getting stronger. And it's interesting that some of the narrative in the media is the decline of servers, decline of storage shipments. Now I get that, those boxes may or may not be sold in the same volumes as it was before. But the growth shifting somewhere else. And that's the issue. I want to get your thoughts on that. Because it's not the decline in the IT. It is growing if you look at the private cloud and your report suggests that there's a massive growth. So your point about shifting to the value stack is interesting. So what are you seeing with the customers? What specifically are they doing in that shift with IT resources? Is it app development? Is it more operational automation? What are some of the things that you're observing? >> We're seeing through this digital transformation, a desire to automate a lot of the common functions that they use to automate, so that they can speed up services, speed up VMs in minutes rather than days, being able to provide PaaS services to their developers. So the developers, instead of getting a VM from the IT department, then having to load in the database, the middleware, all these development tools, that he should go into his environment and request an environment, the environment automatically comes up. So now the developer doesn't have to spend time figuring out what version of database, what version of middleware, all that. The environment's up and running and he can just focus on writing code, which is ultimately what we want to do, is to help our customers get the developers doing more of what they do best, which is writing code and less of this infrastructure management kind. >> Yes they automate a way and they move to higher value-- >> Well I guess at the top of the pile there, you know, the old adage used to be that, you know, for CIOs cloud meant, you know, career is over. >> John: Not anymore (laughs). >> But what that really should apply, it means, you know, becoming the chief innovation officer, and returning to innovating for the business rather than just keeping the lights on right? >> That's right. It gives the IT folks an opportunity to think about how can you apply this new technology to the business challenges that the line of business are having. So that they can bring together those thoughts. It's very often the line of business guys don't know enough about the technology. And the technology guys don't know enough about the line of business. You've got to have somebody who knows both sides who could see how you can apply new technology to accelerate the business. >> So that underscores that the organizational roles are changing. Lest, like you say, doing this provisioning, server provisioning, more strategic initiatives. There's an area in the market place that everybody sort of talking about as jump-all, which is this multicloud, intercloud management. Nobody really dominates that. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, obviously, has a good position there. So first question is, what are you seeing in terms of the changing role of the IT department, the gestalt of that? And what does that mean in terms of opportunities for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise? Maybe William you could take the first? >> So what I would say is the IT department is increasingly becoming a broker of services, both those that are created internally and those that are procured from outside. And so what they need is a way to be able to to provision those, to be able to manage, to build a meter and charts, for those who implement security, and governance, and so on. So what we're seeing is the rise of sets of cloud management technologies and real large, you know, we talked about, a cloud management platform that enables users to find, access, and use, you know, a range of different kind of services. And this is what HP is going to be providing with, you know, the New Stack. And the New Stack is effectively a cloud management platform. >> Absolutely >> Right Ken? >> So talked about the opportunity that you see from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise's perspective. >> So what we see is exactly that the challenge that you laid out, is that there's a lot of different clouds out there but there's still a lot of manual work to have to configure and manage them individually. And so one of the things that we announced at the show is something what we call Project New Stack. So this is a vision for how we're going to enable our customers to manage a multicloud environment. So imagine if someone is using AWS, Azure, Google, VMware, OpenStack, >> Containers, Kubernetes. >> and you have a way to look across all of these different clouds and say I can see where my spend is. I can see where my capacity is. And I can do that not only as a whole but from my finance department, they can see their part as well. The HR department can see their resource usage. So now we have a way to look across the entire computing environment, the cloud environment. And understand cost utilization performance at a more holistic level, rather than at an individual level. So we look at this from three different personas. You have to think about this. And we've talked about people and organizations. So one of these personas is the IT guy, right? He has to worry about operation. So we give him a portal where he can set this environment up, where we can make connectivity into all these services on the public cloud and private cloud. We have a different persona where if it was a developer. So that developer doesn't care about the infrastructure, they don't care, all they want is access to their development tools. So we give him access to a whole market place, to different tools, whether that's Chef, Puppet, all these answerable, all these tools that they can use to do their dev ops work. And then there's the line of business. This line of business, again, he doesn't care about the network, or the storage. What he cares about is how much money am I spending? Are my services meeting the performance requirements? So we see the shift to these three very clear personas that need to interact with this environment what we call Project New Stack, and to look at how we enable this multicloud environment. >> So Project New Stack supports this notion of an IT operations management center that allows to have full visibility and control over all my clouds, my SaaS, my on-prem, my public clouds, protecting that data, securing that data. How far away are we from that nirvana? >> And not to be locked in right? Because I think one of the things that characterizes Project New Stack versus other approaches, is that it allows organizations to access and use different kinds of servers. 'Coz the danger with these things is that, you know, everyone talks about, you know, a single pane of glass, that they can easily become a single glass of pane if they don't allow you to do these things. >> That's a good point, I mean-- >> That's correct. And one of the challenges we see from the developer world is developers like to use the tools they like to use, you know, they don't like to be told what to do. So it's very important that there's ability for the developers to bring in the latest and greatest tool that their buddy, you know, that they work with just heard about, to bring in 'coz it's going to make their job a lot easier. So this Project New Stack has strong integrations to third party products and the ability to bring in new developers. >> This is a challenge and opportunity. We should follow up on this. But I want to get your final thoughts on this, both of you. Because this is an interesting challenge, but an opportunity. Too many tools, same hammer, five different versions of a hammer you have. Now multicloud which has kind of been by accident, on purpose, people just got to Amazon over here, they wake up and they go, "Oh my God, I'm in multiple clouds." That doesn't mean multiclouds in the sense of seamless workloads moving around and best resource. So in a way there's an existing kind of legacy set up here. So your thoughts on how customers can manage this. Is that accurate? Do you agree or-- >> So, you raise a good point. So there's a small percentage of folks who are using multiple clouds to fulfill a single business process. However, the majority, when they say hybrid cloud, it just means they're using different clouds to meet different needs at different times. >> Workloads, on Azure, I've got some Office 365, I've got some analytics on Redshift-- >> Exactly, but we haven't seen is organization's moving workloads and applications between clouds based upon minute by minute or penny by penny changes in price. However, the world of HP and other folks envisage is one where you will be able to, because of the needs of a particular application or a geography or latency, you will be able to move data between these things. >> Or cost as you said. >> Exactly. >> So build a stack for your company basically. So you're essentially giving a composability fabric, and go to a company and saying, "Hey, there's no general purpose products anymore, "here's a New Stack approach where you can kind of," I won't say cobble together, but you know, stitched together what they need. >> Put together your right environment, and in fact it's not just going to be about moving application across different clouds based on container technology, it's certainly one of the things that we'll be doing, but even beyond that, it's the ability to run different micro services on different clouds so your actual service is actually running on multiple clouds, all managed together by a single environment. And the operator can look and say, "Oh looks like this service needs a little more resource, "so let me automatically provide that more resource." So we're scaling up, your application continues to meet its needs. That's where this is really getting interesting. >> Because micro services aren't always so micro. (laughs) >> You know latency and data are really important factors in this multicloud. I want to continue this conversation. >> But also if you leave the hyper-scalers to one side, every other organization is becoming a broker of cloud services to some extent. In other words, what I mean is, they're offering access to, not only their own services but to third party services as well, because if they don't, the customers are going to go elsewhere. So they need the mechanism to be able to manage that. >> That's right, that's exactly right. >> It's a great opportunity for HP to take that whole market and increase that TAM of that cloud service provider if you will, I mean-- >> Huge opportunity. >> anyone in the SaaS business is essentially a cloud provider. So you call them a cloud service provider I guess. Guys thanks so much. William great to meet you and have your commentary here on The Cube, appreciate it. Ken thanks so much for the New Stack conversation and hybrid IT. This is The Cube. Day two coverage of three days. I'm John Furrier for Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (soft upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering DockerCon '18, brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at DockerCon 2018 on a stunning day in San Francisco at Moscone West. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer and we're excited to welcome two new folks to theCUBE from Skytap. We've got Lucas Welch, the senior director of communications and Hamish Hill, technical product marketing manager. Hey, guys. >> Great to be here, thanks for having us. >> And thanks for adding a lot of color, Lucas, to our set. >> Well, I just wanted to bring enough flair that you could realize I might have something interesting to say. >> Awesome, so speaking of interesting things, tell us about Skytap, what do you guys do, who are you, where are you based? >> Great, so Skytap. Founded in 2006, so relatively old by start-up standards but it's allowed us to learn a lot about where clouded option has been going. And what we've seen is there really is an overlooked challenge that enterprises are facing today, right? So, cloud native development, growing rapidly, gonna continue to develop, but what do you do with all your old stuff, your existing applications? And so Skytap is a cloud purpose-built for modernizing those traditional applications and we do that through a process we call IPA, although we don't advocate that you drink on the job. It's Infrastructure, Process, and Architecture. And the idea is to really get yourself to true modernization and making the most of cloud, and containers, and all of the modern technologies we can see on the show floor behind us, you first need to modernize the infrastructure, get yourself out of the data center. From there, in eliminating that barrier, you're gonna be able to modernize the processes. How do you develop, how do you change your applications? And by getting better in that regard, adopting things like DevOps and agile methodologies, finally you can start to make changes to the application themselves. So, in short order, we are the cloud for modernizing traditional applications and we like to see ourselves as complementary to the folks at AWS behind us and others who are best for that cloud native web scale development of new applications. >> Great conversation this morning at the Key Note about modernizing applications. I think it's on everybody's mind because the world does not start fresh and new every day, right? We all are working with things that we've been carrying, for some cases, for years and decades. So Docker is talking about, in fact we modernized a .NET application, I think, this morning so they showed a little bit of a demo with that and kubernetes. Can you talk a little bit about how you work with Docker and, you know, some of the challenges that you work with in terms of modernizing applications? >> Yeah, Docker has a great framework with what they have with their MTA. Actually, our VP of Product, Dan Jones, presented yesterday on making modernization magical and really looking at how Skytap complements what Docker has with their MTA framework. And I think Skytap provides, with our IPA approach, a great platform for enterprises to execute the Docker MTA approach and beyond that, sort of what Skytap provides is the abilities, sort of, to move out of the data center and get away from the hardware side of things, and start to leverage some of the scale that you can get out of the cloud. >> What are some of the things that an enterprise, that a legacy application expects that it's not gonna have if you just lift and shift it. You know, why do we need Skytap? >> Yeah, I think what's important to remember is often, even just lifting and shifting it is very difficult because if you want a monolithic or traditional application that's very much wed to the infrastructure it was built on five, 10, 15 years ago, taking that and putting it in a hyper scale provider often means you gotta rewrite from scratch and that's a really arduous process, often one that creates a skills challenge in and of itself because not only do you need people to manage the existing application, you need a whole set of new skills to take a cloud-like approach to that development. So that can create a lot of challenges and so what we see here at DockerCon, really the reason we're here, is both Docker and Skytap see the next wave of cloud, the next wave of modern development, is gonna be, "How do we bring all these benefits we've seen "in Cloud Native development "to those existing applications?" and what we see ourselves doing is eliminating that infrastructure barrier so then you can really start using containers to their full benefit, whether it's in Skytap cloud, in another cloud, or both. >> So, just to follow up a little bit. So it's not just some services like, I don't know, you've gotta have authentication, and you've gotta have storage, and you've gotta have all the things that an old legacy application, sitting in a data center, expects. But it sounds like, also, there's operational services as well and being able to operate with that kind of cloud-level agility? >> Yeah, what we provide with Skytap is, you know, we have a concept of a Skytap environment and so within that environment, you can have your traditional X86, sort of, VMware-based workloads. We also support IBM power systems. So we're the only cloud that can run AIX workloads and Linux on power and so alongside that, what we get is sort of the combination of being able to bring in containers as well and so as organizations go through that modernization journey, being able to receive or see value in the hybrid applications, sort of, along the way. >> We saw a lot of stats, thanks Lucas, this morning I think one of the first ones that I saw was in the press release that Docker released which was, this morning, 85% of enterprise organizations are running a multi-cloud strategy, so that's pretty pervasive. We're also seeing stats like, up to 90%, we had Scott Johnston on earlier, their Chief Product Officer, up to 90% of enterprises are spending, sorry. Enterprises are spending up to 90% of their IT budgets just keeping the lights on for traditional applications. As you said, lift and shift isn't practical for a number of reasons. You also talked about, you know, skill-set changes there. So I'm curious, what are some of the, kind of, common challenges you're seeing in the customer environment where they might be trepidatious to go to the container journey and how specifically does Skytap and Docker knock those out of the park? >> Yeah, well those stats, I think, are really indicative of the challenge and then the new approaches that companies are trying to take to solve that challenge which is, you have so much invested in what's made your company successful, and if you're a long-standing enterprise doing well on your market, you've been doing this for 10, 15, 20, maybe more, years and you've done very well to get yourself to where you are. You've invested millions, if not billions in your infrastructure, your talent, and the people that build the systems that run your business so to burn that all to the ground and start from scratch doesn't make a lot of sense and so, I think, one challenge you run into is inertia, right. It's like "Hey, we did well to get here, "why do we need to suddenly change everything we're doing?" And Skytap's recommendation is you don't need to change everything, but you do need to prepare to be able to change much more rapidly as our economy continues to be more driven by digital technique. So you have inertia as a challenge. I think you also have that idea that if you're spending 90%, as you said, right, of what you just got with the lights on, where's the money and where's the time gonna come for net new and how can you bring those two together? And so that's really where I think Skytap would play a big role is bridging that gap from where you are today, allowing you to leverage the people that you have, the skills that they have, the technology that you have invested in. So you don't have to throw that all out overnight. And instead you can get more and more value out of it as you bring it into the cloud, gain incremental agility, and then, over time, make the modernization and evolutionary changes you want to make based on business needs, not having technology drive what your business does. >> How much of that is a cultural change that you guys can help companies understand is essential? Because culture, change in culture is obviously, especially with large enterprises, they can't pivot that quickly, but culture is essential for a company to successfully undergo digital transformation. I'm just wondering, what kind of conversations are you seeing with that inertia? How much of it is culture needs to change and mindsets to embrace, you know, moving forward? >> Yeah, I mean, we see a lot of this in the conversations we have with customers. We see a lot of it comes out of the market from what analysts sort of have to say as well and I think reasons out of an analyst article that was shared sort of publicly so it talks about, actually, enterprises who have adopted DivOps first are actually more successful in the move to containerization and that's what we see, sort of, with the customers that come to us. And what we're able to provide and what the customers see in Skytap is, actually, the simplicity of the UI that we provide is, actually, a good step from what they currently have without sort of needing to get into what can often be multiple UI's and screens in some of the hyper scale cloud providers. And then on top of that, sort of, the on-demand access to environment so you're taking away, sort of, what is typically a reactive approach from corporate IT when they need to reach out and go, "Hey, I need "another environment or I need another BM like this." And these organizations, it's often taking maybe six to eight weeks to get those environments turned around. We can provision a complex environment in less than, sort of, 30 seconds in Skytap. So it enables those teams to be a lot more productive in what they're doing. And there's sort of the first phase of deciding to sort of adopt the changing culture before sort of even getting into that move from, sort of, after linking in with legacy applications, you've gotta waterfall SDLC, and so actually moving from there into, sort of, more agile approaches and looking at how you can increase release cadence and what, sort of, comes into that from a people aspect, and a process change, and a methodology, and how Skytap, sort of, supports that along with integration with other third party's automation tools as well. >> Yeah, I think you nailed it on the culture point and I just wanted to not forget about people as being a big part of culture, right? And you have, fear is a very real thing, right? Fear of change, fear of net new. And so in our own adoption of Docker, and containers, and kubernetes internally. SO our cloud runs on a very large kubernetes cluster of containerized services so internally, over the last few years, we went through our own modernization journey. And I think that, paired with some research we've seen, we recently did a study with 451 Research looking at what enterprise tech leaders are experiencing. The fear of change, the reticence to change, and then just the lack of knowledge of, "Okay, what is required of me?" Like, "You're asking me to change overnight. "All of a sudden I have to take classes at night "while I do my day job." I think these are really, very realistic and human questions to ask and I think you need to take that into account when you're looking at digital transformation, modernization, so thinking about, "Hey, how do we communicate, "with transparency, what we expect and the time frame?" Let's be upfront about the challenges we expect to run into and where we're gonna have problems and how we'll deal with those together. And make sure the communication is crisp, and clear, and consistent, so that people at least know what's going on, even if they may not like it upfront. >> Well, Lucas, you brought up kubernetes and containers, right? We're here at DockerCon, so, obviously, containers on the tip of everybody's tongue. But you also work with legacy apps, which traditionally, I suppose at this point, traditional means a VM. So how does that go together? What are you looking at your customers? Are they able to transition to more containerized infrastructure? Are they sticking with VMs? I mean, how do modern containers fit into the Skytap platform here? >> Yeah, I think we're seeing a lot of adoption with our customers who are moving into Skytap with their traditional applications and we continue to, sort of, learn and observe what they're doing. For us, there's two types of customers that move to Skytap. The first of those are really looking to migrate their whole data center or evacuate the data centers going, "Where can I put these legacy applications?" You know, there's not many places they can sort of go and so they move them into Skytap, get them up and running in there, and sort of see some benefits in that. And then, almost organically, start to look at going, well how else can I make, or get my team to be sort of more cloud-native or cloud reading. It's sort of an evolution of the people component we were talking about before and sort of going, all right, well as I get my teams more ready for cloud native, they start to sort of move towards containers and cloud native services. For our, sort of, other organizations that come in are those who already know and probably have already experienced, you know, other cloud, sort of, modernizations and are looking at what have they been able to achieve and what do they learn from that. And seen the value in actually Skytap and actually come to us with the approach of going, "Right, we want to come in here. "We want to move to more agile sort of methods. "We want to, sort of, start to take our traditional "monolithic applications, break it down "into into microservices, and move it into containers." >> I'm curious. One of the things that Steve Singh, the CEO of Docker, said this morning during his keynote was, about half the room, there's about five to six thousand people here at DockerCon, their fifth conference, that only about half of them are already on this containerization journey. I'm curious, and I know there's no one-size-fits-all, but when you're talking to customers who are at the preface of going, "All right, we've gotta do this. "This is really an essential component "of our transformation." What's the time frame that they could look to see measurable business impact once they start working with Skytap and Docker on this container journey? >> Yeah, well, I think we've gotta move away collectively as an industry from the idea that there's a Big Bang or silver bullet approach to change, right? I spent the five previous years before joining Skytap last year at a company called Chef Software, competes with Puppet, who's here on the show floor. Automation software. And what I saw there in terms of both DevOps adoption, adoption of automation, and the transition to the cloud, is that if you think you can get everybody full sale on the same amount of change at the same time, to do that effectively in a relatively reasonable amount of time, you're going to not only fail, but by failing, you actually set yourself further back than had you taken a more iterative approach. So I think from a time perspective, I think the first answer is you'll never be done so presume that the journey will continue into perpetuity because continuing to gain agility, continuing to get better at delivering software, to deliver value to customers, I don't see an end to that in any sort of near-term in our economy so I think that's gonna go on for a long time. So digital transformation, modernization, whatever buzz word people may want to use, the idea of evolving and changing is an ongoing process. I think, then, business leaders will say, "Well, that's baloney, I need change now. "I want results." I think, start with a project that has a deadline associated with it, alright? We need to be able to deliver our customer banking app online, via mobile, by January. Okay, well, bite that off singularly and so that you focus on that first, you learn from how you do that process, and then you can take those learnings, communicate them, and pick another project and another project. So we recommend kind of an iterative, progressive approach that will put time and measurable goals around a specific project, meet those deadlines, hopefully, if you're successful, and then give you a lot to learn and operate off of the next time. >> That's great. I'm really kind of curious about looking forward and economic models. You know, everything is as a service at this point. You have a lot of traditional providers, the Dells and HPEs of the world who sell a lot of hardware still and sell a lot of things upfront and they, the analysts and everyone else scratching their heads about how they get to sell more services along with that. Skytap's already there. You're selling your cloud provider, you're selling a service, in some ways you're replacing some of the infrastructure or, you know, an adjunct to it. I'm just kind of curious, going forward, I mean, is this the future of cloud? As a service provider, how do you see the economic model of the DNA of Skytap partnering with people? We've ended up talking about process and people more than we've ended up talking about technology today. Which is kind of fascinating. But is that, project us into the future, what do you all see? >> Yeah, I think what we see today with cloud, and the microservices and container model is really the evolution of what was sort of the virtual data center and developing in sort of VMs. And so sort of going a step beyond that, we're seeing the container model grow and as you rightly pointed out, we talked a lot about people and process and I think that sort of was what's holding back a little of the enterprise adoption today and I think as organizations get into this sort of process and mindset, almost and sort of going, "Hey, things are gonna continue to evolve over time "and our organizations need to be "ready to adopt a lot of these." And this isn't just sort of your development level as well as looking at right, well how does your corporate IT teams, how do your security teams and other parts of the business realize this is gonna continue to evolve really quickly? And I think that's what we're gonna continue to see, sort of up front and it's gonna drive a lot of the adoption of the cloud native services and containers but it's gonna take a bit of time for some organizations to get there. >> Yeah, I have a soapbox, I want to stand on it real quickly. I think cloud is the way forward, right? So no one wants to be in the infrastructure business long-term. So I think regardless of what your deployment model will be, most businesses, five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, I don't see them owning a lot of data center real estate, right? So make the infrastructure someone else's problem. Whether that's Skytap, whether that's AWS, whether that's Azure, or, frankly, whether that's all of us, to your multi-cloud statistic, right? We see the same thing. It's much like the data center was today and has been for a long time. Use the right tool for the right job. You've got a mix of technologies so you're not locked in to any single vendor and you're able to fit technology to your business needs so I think, one, we're going cloud and that's gonna be the way it is. I think, two, is open source, right? I mean, that's where containers gained all their momentum where Docker did a fantastic job of really giving a vibrant community of developers an opportunity to do their work much more easy, much easier and much faster. And so I think you'll continue to see open source play a much larger component in how, even very large, long-standing businesses, develop what they're doing. And then you bring those two together, right? You look at, how can the cloud ecosystem best support open source tools to deliver and develop software that's gonna add value at the end of the day. >> Guys, I wish we had more time. Thank you so much for stopping by and sharing with us what Skytap is doing and how you're enabling customers to not just evolve from a technology standpoint but, I think, as we've all talked about here, really, what might even be more important is evolve the people and the processes. So thanks Lucas, thanks Hamish. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE. Again, I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer from DockerCon 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)