>> Narrator: Live from Midtown Manhattan it's theCUBE! Covering Big Data, New York City 2017. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem sponsor. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here in New York this is theCUBE's coverage of Big Data NYC, our event. We've been doing it for five years, it's our event in conjunction with Strata Data, which is the O'Reilly Media that we run, it's a separate event. But we've been covering the Big Data for eight years since 2010, Hadoop World. This is theCUBE. Of course theCUBE is never going to change, they might call it Strata AI next year, whatever trend that they might see. But we're going to keep it theCUBE. This is in New York City, our eighth year of coverage. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Our next two guests is Andrew Burt, Chief Privacy Officer and Andrew Gillman, Chief Customer Officer and CMO. It's a start-up so you got all these fancy titles, but you're on the A-team from Immuta. Hot start-up. Welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Thanks for having us, appreciate it. >> Okay, so you guys are the start-up feature here this week on theCUBE, our little segment here. I think you guys are the hottest start-up that is out there and that people aren't really talking a lot about. So you guys are brand new, you guys have got a really good reputation. Getting a lot of props inside the community. Especially in the people who know data, data science, and know some of the intelligence organizations. But respectful people like Dan Hutchin says you guys are rockstars and doing great. So why all the buzz inside the community? Now you guys are just starting to go to the market? What's the update on the company? >> So great story. Founded in 2014, (mumbles) Investment, it was announced earlier this year. And the team, group of serial entrepreneurs sold their last company CSC, ran the public sector business for them for a while. Really special group of engineers and technologists and data scientists. Headquartered out of D.C. Customer success organization out of Columbus, Ohio, and we're servicing Fortune 100 companies. >> John: So Immuta, I-M-M-U-T-A. >> Immuta.com we just launched the new website earlier this week in preparation for the show. And the easiest way-- >> Immuta, immutable, I mean-- >> Immutable, I'm sure there's a backstory. >> Immutable, yeah. We do not ever touch the raw data. So we're all about managing risk and managing the integrity of the data. And so risk and integrity and security are baked into everything we do. We want our customers to know that their data will be immutable, and that in using us they'll never pose an additional risk to that underlying data. >> I think of blockchain when I think of immutability, like I'm so into blockchaining these dayS as you guys know, I've been totally into it. >> There's no blockchain in their technology. >> I know, but let's get down to why the motivation to enter the market. There's a lot of noisy stuff out there. Why do we need another unified platform? >> The big opportunity that we saw was, organizations had spent basically the past decade refining and upgrading their application infrastructure. But in doing so under the guise of digital transformation. We've really built that organization's people processes to support monolithic applications. Now those applications are moving to the cloud, they're being rearchitected in a microsurfaces architecture. So we have all this data now, how do we manage it for the new application, which we see is really algorithm-centric? The Amazons of the world have proven, how do you compete against anyone? How do you disrupt any industry? That's operationalize your data in a new way. >> Oh, they were developer-centric right? They were very focused on the developer. You guys are saying you're algorithm-centric, meaning the software within the software kind of thing. >> It's really about, we see the future enterprise to compete. You have to build thousands of algorithms. And each one of those algorithms is going to do something very specific, very precise, but faster than any human can do. And so how do you enable an application, excuse me, an algorithm-centric infrastructure to support that? And today, as we go and meet with our customers and other groups, the people, the processes, the data is everywhere. The governance folks who have to control how the data is used, the laws are dynamic. The tooling is complex. So this whole world looks very much like pre-DevOps IT, or pre-cloud IT. It takes on average between four to six months to get a data scientist up and running on a project. >> Let's get into the company. I wanted to just get that gist out, put some context. I see the problem you solve: a lot of algorithms out there, more and more open sources coming up to the scene. With the Linux Foundation, having their new event Rebrand the Open Source summit, shows exponential growth in open source. So no doubt about it, software's going to be new guys coming on, new gals. Tons of software. What is the company positioning? What do you guys do? How many employees? Let's go down by the numbers and then talk about the problem that you solve. >> Okay, cool. So, company. We'll be about 40 people by Q1. Heavy engineering, go to market. We're operating and working with, as I mentioned, Fortune 100 clients. Highly regulated industries. Financial services, healthcare, government, insurance, et cetera. So where you have lots of data that you need to operationalize, that's very sensitive to use. What else? Company positioning. So we are positioned as data management for data science. So the opportunity that we saw, again, managing data for applications is very different than managing data for algorithm development, data sciences. >> John: So you're selling to the CDO, Chief Data Officer? Are you selling to the analytics? >> In a lot of our customers, like in financial services, we're going right into the line of business. We're working with managing directors who are building next generation analytics infrastructure that need to unify and connect the data in a new way that's dynamic. It's not just the data that they have within their organization, they're looking to bring data in from outside. They want to also work collaboratively with governance professionals and lawyers who in financial services, they are, you know, we always jest in the company that different organizations have these cool new tools, like data scientists have all their new tools. And the data owners have flash disks and they have all this. But the governance people still have Microsoft Word. And maybe the newer tools are like Wikis. So now we can get it off of Word and make it shareable. But what we allow them to do is, and what Andrew Burt has really driven, is the ability for you to take internal logic, internal policies, external regulations, and put them into code that becomes dynamically enforceable as you're querying the data, as you're using it, to train algorithms, and to drive, mathematical decision-making in the enterprise. >> Let's jump into some of the privacy. You're the Chief Privacy Officer, which is codeword for you're doing all the governance stuff. And there's a lot of stuff business-wise that's going on around GDPR which is actually relevant. There's a lot of dollars on table for that too, so it's probably good for business. But there's a lot of policy stuff going on. What's going on with you guys in this area? >> So I think policy is really catching up to the world of big data. We've known for a very long time that data is incredibly important. It's the lifeblood of an increasingly large number of organizations, and because data is becoming more important, laws are starting to catch up. I think GDPR is really, it's hot to talk about. I think it is just the beginning of a larger trend. >> People are scared. People are nervous. It's like they don't know, this could be a blank check that they're signing away. The enforcement side is pretty outrageous. >> So I mean-- >> Is that right? I mean people are scared, or do you think? >> I think people are terrified because they know that its important, and they're also terrified because data scientists, and folks in IT have never really had to think very seriously about implementing complex laws. I think GDPR is the first example of laws, forcing technology to basically blend software and law. The only way, I mean one of our theses is, the only way to actually solve for GDPR is to invent laws within the software you're using. And so, we're moving away from this meetings and memos type approach to governing data, which is very slow and can take months, and we need it to happen dynamically. >> This is why I wanted to bring you guys in. Not only, Andrew, we knew each other from another venture, but what got my attention for you guys was really this intersection between law and society and tech. And this is just the beginning. You look at the tell-signs there. Peter Burris who runs research for Wikibon coined the term programming the real world. Life basically. You've got wearables, you've got IOT, this is happening. Self-driving cars. Who decides what side of the street people walk on now? Law and code are coming together. That's algorithm. There'll be more of them. Is there an algorithm for the algorithms? Who teaches the data set, who shares the data set? Wait a minute, I don't want to share my data set because I have a law that says I can't. Who decides all this stuff? >> Exactly. We're starting to enter a world where governments really, really care about that stuff. Just in-- >> In Silicon Valley, that's not in their DNA. You're seeing it all over the front pages of the news, they can't even get it right in inclusion and diversity. How can they work with laws? >> Tension is brewing. In the U.S. our regulatory environment is a little more lax, we want to see innovation happen first and then regulate. But the EU is completely different. Their laws in China and Russia and elsewhere around the world. And it's basically becoming impossible to be a global organization and still take that approach where you can afford to be scared of the law. >> John: I don't know how I feel about this because I get all kinds of rushes of intoxication to fear. Look at what's going on with Bitcoin and Blockchain, underbelly is a whole new counterculture going on around in-immutable data. Anonymous cultures, where they're complete anonymous underbellies going on. >> I think the risk-factors going up, when you mentioned IOTs, so its where you are and your devices and your home. Now think about 23 and Me, Verily, Freenome, where you're digitizing your DNA. We've already started to do that with MRIs and other operations that we've had. You think about now, I'm handing over my DNA to an organization because I want find out my lineage. I want to learn about where I came from. How do I make sure that the derived data off of that digital DNA is used properly? Not just for me, as Andrew, but for my progeny. That introduces some really interesting ethical issues. It's an intersection of this new wave of investment, to your point, like in Silicon Valley, of bringing healthcare into data science, into technology and the intersection. And the underpinning of the whole thing is the data. How do we manage the data, and what do we do-- >> And AI really is the future here. Even though machine-learning is the key part of AI, we just put out an article this morning on SiliconANGLE from Gina Smith, our new writer. Google Brain Chief: AI tops humans in computer vision, and healthcare will never be the same. They talk about little things, like in 2011 you can barely do character recognition of pictures, now you can 100%. Now you take that forward, in Heidelberg, Germany, the event this week we were covering the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, or HLF 2017. All the top scientists were there talking about this specific issue of, this is society blending in with tech. >> Absolutely. >> This societal impact, legal impact, kind of blending. Algorithms are the only thing that are going to scale in this area. This is what you guys are trying to do, right? >> Exactly, that's the interesting thing. When you look at training models and algorithms in AI, right, AI is the new cloud. We're in New York, I'm walking down the street, and there's the algorithm you're writing, and everything is Ernestine Young. Billboards on algorithms, I mean who would have thought, right? An AI. >> John: theCUBE is going to be an AI pretty soon. "Hey, we're AI! "Brought to you by, hey, Siri, do theCUBE interview." >> But the interesting part of the whole AI and the algorithm is you have n number of models. We have lots of data scientists and AI experts. Siri goes off. >> Sorry Siri, didn't mean to do that. >> She's trying to join the conversation. >> Didn't mean to insult you, Siri. But you know, it's applied math by a different name. And you have n number of models, assuming 90% of all algorithms are single linear regression. What ultimately drives the outcome is going to be how you prepare and manage the data. And so when we go back to the governance story. Governance in applications is very different than governance in data science because how we actually dynamically change the data is going to drive the outcome of that algorithm directly. If I'm in Immuta, we connect the data, we connect the data science tools. We allow you to control the data in a unique way. I refer to that as data personalization. It's not just, can I subscribe to the data? It's what does the data look like based on who I am and what those internal and external policies are? Think about this for example, I'm training a model that doesn't mask against race, and doesn't generalize against age. What do you think is going to happen to that model when it goes to start to interact? Either it's delivered as-- >> Well context is critical. And the usability of data, because it's perishable at this point. Data that comes in quick is worth more, but historically the value goes down. But it's worth more when you train the machine. So it's two different issues. >> Exactly. So it's really about longevity of the model. How can we create and train a model that's going to be able to stay in? It's like the new availability, right? That it's going to stay, it's going to be relevant, and it's going to keep us out of jail, and keep us from getting sued as long as possible. >> Well Jeff Dean, I just want to quote one more thing to add context. I want to ask Andrew over here about his view on this. Jeff Dean, the Google Brain Chief behind all of the stuff is saying AI-enabled healthcare. The sector's set to grow at an annual rate of 40% through 2021, when it's expected to hit 6.6 billion spent on AI-enabled healthcare. 6.6 billion. Today it's around 600 million. That's the growth just in AI healthcare impact. Just healthcare. This is going to go from a policy privacy issue, One, healthcare data has been crippled with HIPPA slowing us down. But where is the innovation going to come from? Where's the data going to be in healthcare? And other verticals. This is one vertical. Financial services is crazy too. >> I mean, honestly healthcare is one of the most interesting examples of applied AI, and it's because there's no other realm, at least now, where people are thinking about AI, and the risk is so apparent. If you get a diagnosis and the doctor doesn't understand why it's very apparent. And if they're using a model that has a very low level of transparency, that ends up being really important. I think healthcare is a really fascinating sector to think about. But all of these issues, all of these different types of risks that have been around for a while are starting to become more and more important as AI takes-- >> John: Alright, so I'm going to wrap up here. Give you guys both a chance, and you can't copy each other's answer. So we'll start with you Andrew over here. Explain Immuta in a simple way. Someone who's not in the industry. What do you guys do? And then do a version for someone in the industry. So elevator pitch for someone who's a friend, who's not in the industry, and someone who is. >> So Immuta is a data management platform for data science. And what that actually gives you is, we take the friction out of trying to access data, and trying to control data, and trying to comply with all of the different rules that surround the use of that data. >> John: Great, now do the one for normal people. >> That was the normal pitch. >> Okay! (laughing) I can't wait to hear the one for the insiders. >> And then for the insiders-- >> Just say, "It's magic". >> It's magic. >> We're magic, you know. >> Coming from the infrastructure role, I like to refer to it as a VMWare for data science. We create an abstraction layer than sits between the data and the data science tools, and we'll dynamically enforce policies based on the values of the organization. But also, it drives better outcomes. Because today, the data owners aren't confident that you're going to do with the data what you say you're going to do. So they try to hold it. Like the old server-huggers, the data-huggers. So we allowed them to unlock that and make it universally available. We allow the governance people to get off those memos, that have to be interpreted by IT and enforced, and actually allow them to write code and have it be enforced as the policy mandates. >> And the number one problem you solve is what? >> Accelerate with confidence. We allow the data scientists to go and build models faster by connecting to the data in a way that they're confident that when they deploy their model, that it's going to go into production, and it's going to stay into production for as long as possible. >> And what's the GDPR angle? You've got the legal brain over here, in policy. What's going on with GDPR? How are you guys going to be a solution for that? >> We have the most, I'd say, robust option of policy enforcement on data, I think, available. We make it incredibly easy to comply with GDPR. We actually put together a sample memo that says, "Here's what it looks like to comply with GDPR." It's written from a governance department, sent to the internal data science department. It's about a page and a half long. We actually make that very onerous process-- >> (mumbles) GDPR, you guys know the size of that market? In terms of spend that's going to be coming around the corner? I think it's like the Y2K problem that's actually real. >> Exactly, it feels the same way. And actually Andrew and his team have taken apart the regulation article by article and have actually built-in product features that satisfy that. It's an interesting and unique--- >> John: I think it's really impressive that you guys bring a legal and a policy mind into the product discussion. I think that's something that I think you guys are doing a little bit different than I see anyone out there. You're bringing legal and policy into the software fabric, which is unique, and I think it's going to be the standard in my opinion. Hopefully this is a good trend, hopefully you guys keep in touch. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, thanks for-- >> Thanks for having us. >> For making time to come over. This is theCUBE, breaking out the start-up action sharing the hot start-ups here, that really are a good position in the marketplace, as the generation of the infrastructure changes. It's a whole new ballgame. Global development platform, called the Internet. The new Internet. It's decentralized, we even get into Blockchain, we want to try that a little later, maybe another segment. It's theCUBE in New York City. More after this short break.

(upbeat electronic. music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017 brought to you by VMware and it's Ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with Keith Townsend and you're watching theCUBE's broadcast of VMworld 2017. One of our guests earlier this week called this set the punk rock set and one of my guests here in a preview said that this is going to be the battle of the baldies (laughter) so I'm really happy to bring two leaders of two of the hottest topics being discussed this week, welcoming back to the program Dom Delfino of course representing NSX and Security at NSBU and Lee Caswell from the vSAN Team. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, how are you, buddy? >> I'm doing phenomenal. Dom, are you making network great again, yet? >> It's fantastic again now. We're making network fantastic again. >> Yeah and I expected you to show up a little more bling because we were talking Silicon Valley. Your group is reaching the three commas of a billion dollars. >> Dom: That's right. >> So let's start there, NSE when it was bought a few years back, over a million dollars. SDN was something that we all in the networking world was talking about and things have changed. I don't hear SDN talked at this show, it's real customers, real deployments, pretty good scale. The interconnected fabric if you will for VM's cloud strategy. >> Yep, absolutely. So Stu, these major transformational shifts in the industry take time, right? You know, you're not going to undo what you've done for the last 25, 30 years in a month or a quarter or a year and I think what you saw initially was adoption of NSX or automation of network provisioning. Then what you saw second to that was microsegmentation as a defense in depth strategy for our customers and now you see the multi data center moving into the hybrid cloud. vRNI is a service, NSX is a service, App Defense, layering additional security capabilities on top of that and as our production customers sort of adopted it in the beachhead methodology operationalized it, you see additional follow on adoptions. We've got one customer running 18 data centers on NSX today so this is becoming more and more mainstream and as you look at our approach moving forward in terms of where we are and the software defines us in our journey, how that connects to our strategy for VMC on AWS or VMC on Blue Mix. You saw Agredo Apenzeller yesterday demonstrate crossed into Microsoft Azure. When was the last time you thought you'd see that at VMworld, huh? >> Hey Lee, I got to bring you in here. (laughter) It's funny, I've lived in the storage world. >> I thought this was a storage show. >> And now we're tech people throwing all these acronyms. >> I know, they're so excited. >> And you know because come on, NSX is not simple. Who's the one that's saving customers money so that they can buy all of these? >> NSX is a great value, but vSAN pays for the ride, right? >> Here we go, right? >> They do. We'll happily accept it. >> I mean, we're consolidating storage in a way that basically brings back the magic of consolidation, right? The first time you consolidated, people called it magic because you consolidated servers, bought shared storage and had money left over, right? Now we're doing the same thing again, right, with now storage, right? What's interesting is is this is a huge career path gain for the virtualization administrator. >> Wow, so talking about being disruptive, vSAN. You know, I've got to rib you guys a little bit at the dodge ball tournament benefiting Unoria, the vSAN team lost to the Dell EMC team, so. >> Can you imagine? And did you see how valiant we were? >> Dom: You guys fall hard. >> You fall hard. (laughter) >> You looked like you could have used a little youth on that team, by the way, Lee. >> So a lot of competition, you walked the show floor. >> Lee: Yeah. >> This, we usually call this storage world. I think it's fair to say it's HCI world now. >> Lee: It's amazing, right? >> How is vSAN fitting into the larger ecosystem? >> You know, we announced, Pat said we have over 10,000 customers now, right? And yet VMware has hundreds of thousands of customers right? So we're just getting started here and what you're finding is the two assets to bring to this party are a hypervisor or a server. >> Keith: Right. >> Right, you don't have either one of those, it's going to be very difficult because if you go back and you'll appreciate this, right? You remember a Type 2 hypervisor? >> Yep, vaguely. I almost wrote about it, like wait, they don't even exist anymore, do they? >> Well, Workstation still, right? If you start thinking, right, that was a hypervisor on a guest, right? And so what happened though, as soon as these XI came out, right, integrated the compelling performance advantages, the resource utilization and then the idea that hey, I got a common management through vCenter, right? That's what's playing right now is users are trying to find leverage and scale, how do I do that and that's where we've just seen a massive adoption of ECM. >> Alright, one of the reasons we brought the two of you together though is because while peanut butter and chocolate are great on their own, the cloud foundation. >> Dom: I have the whole sandwich now, Stu. >> Yes, yes, so you know Cloud Foundation, NSX might be the interconnective fabric between all of them. Cloud Foundation is that solution, there's a whole business unit, put that together and drive that, so talk about how you feed that solution, how that changes the way you think about it. >> Probably the most interesting thing and I've only had the vSAN team for six months but I think the most interesting thing for me and vSAN is it scales downmarket very well as well, so we have massive enterprise customers, right, who have large global deployments of vSAN but you can take vSAN, put it on three nodes and see value out of that, right? And I think when you look at, you know, this is the year of cloud reality I'm calling it now, Stu, right? That's what's happened here this weekend at VMworld. When you look at that I think the most fundamental thing the customers are taking out of this week is my private cloud has to be as good as the public cloud offering, okay? Now if you're a Fortune 1,000 customer you certainly have a lot of resources, a lot of talent, a lot of expertise, a lot of history, and potentially a lot of budget to throw at that problem. But if you're a mid-market customer, right? And you look at I need to build a private cloud that's fast and easy, right? Which was the two primary reasons to adopt public cloud, you have a good place to start with Cloud Foundation and I think it's just the beginning so you get vSphere, you get NSX, you get vSAN, and you get SDDC Manager to do life cycle management, certainly you could layer vRealize on top of that for automation, orchestration, provisioning and self service as well and it really allows everybody to start to take advantage of the capabilities that only existed in the major cloud providers before on-prem and their own data center so I think as you look at Cloud Foundation and I'm working very closely with John Gilmartin on this, moving forward, it is going to become the basic foundational element, pun intended, right, for many of the VMware offerings moving forward as we turn into next year, that we'd look at this very closely and we have a lot of plans as that being the base to build off of in terms of how we help our customers get to this private cloud. >> Lee, I need to hear your perspective because some of this Cloud Foundation, there's got to be some differences when you talk about some of the deployment models whether where I'm doing it, how I'm doing it, VMC, the VMware managed cloud I guess on AWS, VMware on AWS something getting a lot of buzz. You know, everybody's digging into to it. What's it do today, what's it going to do in the future? >> Well, you know I thought it was really impressive when Andy Jassy got up and basically said, "We've been faced with a minor choice." Customers want these to be integrated, right? And the second day was Google, right? Talking about how we're taking developer tools, right, and making them common, so that element. Now storage people think that the strategic engagement with the cloud is about data, right? >> Stu: Right. >> Putting a VM in the cloud, I mean that's a credit card transaction, but once you put your first byte of data into the cloud, now you take on sovereignty issues, you think about performance and where you're going to get guaranteed ihovs out of it. You start thinking about how am I going to move that data? It's not fast or free or as anyone who has emailed a video knows, right, so you start thinking that it's the data elements and now what's really powerful and we saw some of this in the demos in general session. Once you have a common data structure, we call it dSAN, right, all the way from the edge into the data center of virtual private cloud then into the public cloud, now I've got the opportunity to have this really flexible fluid system, right? All virtualized, it's so powerful, right? About how I can manage that and we think, it'll be interesting, does the virtualization administrator then become the cloud administrator, right? >> So then, let's expand that one, vSAN everywhere. vSAN in the AWS, vSAN in vCAN, vSAN in my own data center. How do I protect that data? That seems just, is this where NSX comes in? How do I protect that data? >> Can we let Lee talk the security first? >> Where's the security, is the security in vSAN? >> Cause I know Dom >> We'll let Lee go first and then I'll correct him, okay? (laughter) >> Well, I mean you start with a security like encryption on the data, right? I mean one of the things why vSAN's so portable is because there is no hardware dependency. I mean, we're using like all, we support all different servers, there's no proprietary cards or anything, right, to stick in these servers so we can go run that software wherever. Now, we're also then as a result doing software encryption with our latest release on 6.6 software encryption allows us to use common key management partners, right, and so we use those partners including iTrust, Vales, FlowMetric, and others and now you can have key management regardless of where your data resides, so we start there but then what customers say really quickly, right, is if I start moving something, they say, "NSX help me out, right?" >> So I think Lee took to a very critical part of it, the ability to encrypt that data at rest and you know, as it transits, there's really three elements to this, it's the data itself, which we say that 6.6 introduced, right, the ability to encrypt that data, microsegmentation and upcoming DNE to both protect and encrypt that data while it's in flight and now if you look at that App Defense strategy, right, it's to secure that data while it's being processed as well at the host level up at the application layer, so I think Stu this just continues to be a huge challenge for our customers. Particularly with the breeches, we saw what happened with Wannacry, with Pedia, with non-Pedia, the different versions of that, Electric Blue and all. >> Stop, you know, your boss who's on theCUBE on the other set right now said, "As an industry, we have failed you." Pat Gelson gave the keynote, so when we're solving it, you know we're going to have like next year I expect both of you to have this all fixed. >> One of these, you asked like with all the HCI enthusiasts that are out there in many companies, you know, how do we differentiate? Well, part of it is this is not just a drop in a little box, right, someplace, right? This is how do you go and modernize your data center, basically tie into the complete software stack and regardless of the timing in which you're going to go and deploy that, right, if you're going to deploy the full stack today, that's a VMware cloud foundation, awesome, if you want to go start with vSAN, great, and then add in other pieces, or you can start with NSX. In any event, the common management is the piece that we really think is going to go and set us apart, right, as a part of it's an infrastructure play, not just a point component. >> So? >> Hold on I want to let Don finish. >> Stu, I think three years ago if we sat down here and told you you're going to encrypt your software defined storage, in software, no hardware requirements, I probably would have said I was nuts for saying that and you definitely would have said I was nuts for saying that so this is critical and we are hyper-focused on solving this problem and what customers have to recognize is that you have to make some foundational architectural changes in order to fix this problem and if you don't it's not going away, it's only going to get worse. >> So, I took a peep in at FUTURE:NET. First off, VMware does an awesome job of this conference within a conference. >> Isn't it fun? >> It is fun, a little bit over my head at times, which we have to be getting that same reaction from the CIOs that this stuff even when we're taking stuff that we know very well, Vmware or vSphere, starting with that, adding on vSAN, again the conversation, Dom, we can encrypt at both network and compute and storage? That's a little deep, but now we're talking about this crosscloud conversation that FUTURE:NET is most definitely addressing. How is that conversation going with customers? Are they finally starting to get their arms around the complexity of the situation? >> Absolutely Keith, because when you look at our multi-data center functions of NSX that we introduced back in NSX 6.2 at VMworld two years ago, three years ago, I'm getting long in the tooth here, so I can't remember times anymore. Those were the foundational elements for the components of crosscloud today so many customers who started the NSX journey with one use case and one data center and expanded it horizontally and then down through a number of use cases and then across to another data center are already taking advantage of those crosscloud functionalities from private data center to private data center. Now we've just taken them and extended them into Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS as well. So the customers who've been on this journey with us from the beginning have seen this step by step and it doesn't really seem like a big leap to them already. Now obviously if you haven't been on that journey it seems like you know, hey can you guys really do this and yeah, we've been doing it from private data center to private data center, now we're just bringing that capability to public data center and certainly the partnership with Amazon is a tremendous help to that as well. >> Yeah, when customers are buying into these solutions, and I know you like to look at it as a platform, so let's look out a little bit. I want you to talk a little bit about what we should expect from the future, if it makes edge computing kind of IoT is a big one, I have to expect that both of you have a play there, so? >> I guess I'll touch on that in two pieces so you sort of see us extending this up a little bit initially with PKS with pivotal container services, with Kubernetes on BOSH and the ability to do rolling upgrades and NSX is embedded in that solution, right, it's not a built-on offering, it's natively part of that for all the reasons that we talked about earlier and we see a lot of opportunities as it relates to edge computing, right, and I think this is something that, wasn't it file computing like seven years ago, Stu? >> Your former employer was one that was pushing that. >> Dom: Oh okay, yeah what happened to that? >> Yeah I have heard it come back from data center to cloud. >> I'm just needling you Stu, we didn't need to get into that. >> But you know, terminology does matter, but I hear your point. >> So I think A. IoT is the biggest security challenge that we face, right? >> Stu: Yep. >> That's number one. If you think it's bad now it's about to get a lot worse with the wholesale adoption of IoT. I think that when you look at the remote office, the branch office, what's going on with the transition with wide area networking right now, I think there's a tremendous opportunity there. Clearly we have a play where you can provide sort of a branch in a box with our technology but I think there's a lot of things you'll see coming from us in the near term as far as innovation that we can do there to really enhance edge computing as it relates to IoT and certainly our user computing platform with Horizon Air of the Legacy AirWatch venture, is an important part of securing those edge devices as well. >> Lee? >> On the vSAN side, this week we announced the HDI Acceleration Kit and that's basically a way to take advantage of single socket servers, right? And one of the things we're seeing for bandwidth reasons and economics you don't want to have everything centralized so the ability, particularly in an IoT environment, but also in retail or robo, if you've got hundreds of stores there's no way to put a sandbox and a fiber channel switch in separate storage and scale that, right? So what we're doing is we've got a very cost-effective license, right, incredible where you can get with hardware now, you can go and drop in a three node fully configured vSAN plus vSphere for under 25K. Drop it in, now you've got a virtualized environment, unlimited VMs, this sort of thing where we're helping basically bring the accelerating the adoption using HDI of enterprise modern infrastructure outside the data center. >> So last question around customer adoption and again, assessments of this model. The push, I think 816Z said that the edge is going to eat loud computing. Where do you guys see in the real world, the ground, is it a push towards the cloud or is it this combination of doing? >> In my experience, right and this is like an accordion, right, it goes in, it goes out it goes in, it goes out, why? Well it goes in and out based on economics and bandwidth. Right, so you start looking and saying, now until HDI came out, it just wasn't really feasible to put enterprise infrastructure at the edge, right? >> Keith: Right. >> So things were centralized, right? Well now, right, now we start distributing again, right? The cloud is an example of more centralized, right? But I think we're going to see both, right? And you're going to see this what's particularly interesting right now is right, the new advances in media, CPUS, low-latency networks makes it possible to use these I call it the serverization of storage, but really it's a serverization of the modern data center, right, and which by the way is common to how clouds are built. >> But does that mean the overall IT management or complex, as I build it out that control plane. >> I'll give you an example from this morning. I was meeting with one of the largest banks, right? And they were looking at HDI, they've used a lot of stance ORKS in the past and do you know what he asked at the end? "Could you give me the ORK charts of customers "in my scale who are using HDI?" >> Stu: Yeah. >> Because I want to go figure out how I hyper-converge my team. We'll never be fast until we go and get teams that are working more closely together where they start from the VM level and then they look at the network attributes and the storage attributes and the compute attributes. That's going to speed up everything. >> And I think Lee is 100% spot on there and every customer I've talked to this week, you have to make the transition to an infrastructure team, not a network team, a storage team, a security team, you're an infrastructure team, and this is why the app developers have been going around you, right? And this is why you have Shadow IT, it's because they want fast and simple and they don't want to have to deal with four different people, right? They don't want to have to deal with a serialization of a deployment that they're left waiting for the lag for and I think in terms of the edge computing, I think you related it to one of the conversations by Andreessen Horowitz. I think that might differ a little bit in the consumer space and in the enterprise space as well so it may be the case in the consumer space that it erodes some functionality from the cloud, particularly on the IoT side of things as well, driverless cars and things of that nature where it makes sense that if you get disconnected that you still need to have some computing capacity so you don't crash, right Lee? Crashing is not good. But I think the behavioral change, the people change, the mindset change is much more challenging than the technological change. Everything you haven't done before seems complicated until you actually do it, right? >> Alright well, we talked a lot to customers. Actually some of that organizational change is helping them to tackle things like those new architectures. Security is one that is I've been leaving it for too long and now absolutely front of the table. Don Delfino, Lee Caswell, always a pleasure to catch up with both you. >> Always a pleasure. >> Hope it lived up to your expectations that we brought the heat. Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017. Thank you for watching the CUBE. (light electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (bright music) >> Welcome to VMworld 2017. This is the Cube. We are live in Las Vegas on day one of the event, a really exciting, high energy general session kicked things off. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We're excited to be joined by two folks from VMware. We've got Cube alumni Yanbing Li, senior VP and GM of the storage and availability BU. Welcome back to the Cube. >> Good to be here. >> Lisa: And we've also got Matt Amdur, your first time on the Cube, principle VMware chief architect. >> Thanks for having me. >> We're excited to have you guys here so been waiting with baited breath, a lot of folks have, for what are VMware and AWS going to actually announce product-wise. Really exciting to see Pat Gelsinger on stage with Andy Jassy today. Talk to us about, as the world of hyper-converged infrastructure is changing, what does VMware cloud on AWS mean for, not just VMware customers, but new opportunities for VMware? >> Yeah, that's a great question Lisa. Let me get it started. You know, I think my biggest takeaway from the exciting keynote, a couple of things. One is private cloud is sexy again. You know, so we've been talking about cloud a lot, but there is so much opportunity and tremendous growth associated with private cloud, and certainly hyper-converged infrastructure being the next generation architecture shift is going to drive a lot of the modernization of our customers' private environment, so that's certainly very exciting. The other aspect of the excitement is how that same architecture and consistent operating model is extending into the cloud with our AWS relationship, and this is also why I have my colleague, Matt, here, because he's been the brain behind a lot of the things we're doing on AWS. >> Yeah, thanks so much, Yanbing, and I tell you, for years, it was like, ah, storage is sexy, storage is hot. Cloud's kind of sexy and hot, so we found a way to kind of connect storage into that. Matt, you know, a lot of people don't really understand what happened here. This isn't just, oh, you know, we're not layering, you know, VMware on top of the infrastructure as a service that they have. Last year, we kind of dug in a little bit with Cloud Foundation. Talk to us, what did it take to get this VMware cloud onto AWS, bring us inside a little bit, the sausage making if you would. >> I think Andy talked about this a little bit at the keynote this morning, where it's really been an incredible, collaborative effort between both engineering organizations, and it's taken a lot of effort from a huge number of people on both sides to really pull this off, and so you know, as we started looking at it, I think one of the challenges that we faced, and Andy mentioned this this morning was there was this really binary decision for customers. If you had vSphere workload, do you want them to bring them to the public cloud? There was nothing that was compatible. And so, we really sat down with Amazon and said, okay, how can we take advantage of the physical infrastructure and scale that Amazon built and provides today, and make it compatible with vSphere, and if you look at what we've done with VSAN on premise as an HCI solution, it's become a sort of ubiquitous storage platform, and it offers customers an operational and a management experience for how they think about managing their storage, and we can take that and uplift it into the cloud by doing the heavy lifting of how do we make VSAN run, scale, and operate on top of AWS's physical infrastructure. >> One of the things that I found was really interesting this morning was seeing the, I couldn't see it from where I was sitting, the sort of NASCAR slide of customers that were in beta. Talk to us a little about some of the pain points that you're helping with VMware cloud and AWS. What are some of those key pain points that those customers were facing that from an engineering perspective you took into the design of the solution? >> Sure, so I think if you look at it, some of the benefits that we see with public cloud infrastructure that our customers really want to take advantage of are flexibility and elasticity. One of the challenges that you have on premise today is if you need new hardware, you have to order it, it's got to ship on a truck, someone's got to rack it and hook it up, and if you're trying to operate and keep pace with your competition, and you have a need to allocate a lot of capacity to drive a project forward, that can be a huge impediment, and so what we wanted to do is make it really easy for our customers to configure, deploy, and provision our software. And so, one of the really interesting things about VMware managed cloud on AWS is that it's a managed service, so some of the things that, you know, we've talked about VCF and the things that we've done on premise to streamline physical infrastructure management is taken to the next level. Customers don't have to worry about managing the vSphere software lifecycle. VMware is now going to do that for them, and Amazon is going to manage the physical infrastructure, and that removes a lot of burdens and gives customers the opportunity to focus on their core business. >> If you think about, you know, Stu, you touched on Cloud Foundation, we were using Cloud Foundation to automate how our customer consumed the entire software-defined data center stack. And you think about moving that same goodness into, you know, the VMware cloud on database, and you know, really removing a lot of the complexity around managing your own infrastructure. And so that customer can truly focus on their value adds, through, you know, developing the next generation of applications that enable their business. It's been a great extension of what we're solving on premise to the public cloud. >> Yeah, I wonder if we can drill in a little bit deeper on this. So you know, most customers I think understand, okay, if I needed to set up a VSAN environment right, I got to get my servers, how long it takes, what skill set I had, virtualization admins have been doing this for a few years now, and congratulations, you've got the number up near 10,000 customers, which is, you know, great milestone there. Walk us through, you know, when we're saying okay, I want to spin it up. If I know, swipe a credit card and turn on a VM, is it as fast? And what is that base configuration, what kind of scale can it go to? >> Sure, so to start with, what was announced today for initial availability, you can come to the VMware portal, so if you come to our portal, you give us your credit card, obviously, and then you can provision between four and 16 nodes. So you pick how many nodes you want. And you give us a little bit of networking-related information so we can understand how to lay out IP address ranges so we're not going to conflict with what you have on premise. And then you click provision, and in a few hours you'll have a fully stood up SDDC. And so that's going to include a vCenter instance that we've installed, all of the ESXOs we've provisioned from Amazon, we install ESX, we configure VSAN for you. And it's basically like getting a brand new vSphere deployment, and you can start provisioning your VM workload as soon as it's ready. And then once it's there, if you want to grow your cluster, you can dynamically add hosts, on the order of about 10 minutes. And if you want to remove capacity, you can remove hosts as well. So it gives you that elasticity and flexibility from the public cloud. >> Awesome, so we're early with some of the early customers. I'm curious, do you have any compare contrast as to what they like about, you know, doing it the Amazon, you know, VMware cloud on Amazon versus my own data center? Of course there's things I could say, okay, I could spin it up faster, but I could turn it off and then not have to pay for it. What, are we at the point we understand some of those use cases to tell why they might do one versus the other? >> Yeah, I think lots of the customers interested in this new model are really liking that common operating experience. It has some of the flex of customers you've heard about this morning, you know, Medtronic for example. They are a VMware Cloud Foundation customer. They are running entire, you know, SDDC through VMware Cloud Foundation, but because they really enjoy that experience and that simplicity that brings, now they're extending that into the cloud. So they're also one of the earlier customers for VMware cloud on AWS. So having that common operational experience is a big value prop to our customers. >> And I think we really see customers wanting both, right? The customers, you mentioned before, the private cloud is sexy again. The customers who have a lot of workloads, that makes sense to run in a private cloud. But they also want the flexibility of how they can take advantage of public cloud resources. And so depending on the problem that they're trying to solve, they view this as a complement to their existing infrastructure. >> And I have to think, some of the services I have available are a little different. Things like disaster recovery, if I'm doing it in kind of that cloud operating model, a little different. I now have Amazon services I can use, and VMware announced a whole, what was it, seven new SaaS services which kind of spanned some of those environments. >> Yeah, so the SaaS services we announced, they are truly across cloud. Cause they not only limit to a vSphere power cloud, they truly are extending into this cross-cloud, multi-cloud world of, you know, heterogeneous type of cloud environments. And now, you know, you spoke about DR, and certainly for someone coming from the storage and availability background, you know, in terms of our, BU's role that we're playing in our cloud relationship, you know, certainly we are trying to provide the best storage infrastructure as part of our cloud service. But we are also looking at what are the next levels of data-related services, whether it's data mobility, application mobility, disaster recovery, or the futures of other aspects of data management. And that's what we've been focusing on. You know, we have lots of customers, you know, even thinking about what's happening with, you know, Hurricane Harvey, I still remember the Hurricane Sandy days. A lot of our site recovery manager customers told us, you know, how SRM has saved their day. We're seeing the power of a disaster recovery solution. And now with the cloud, you can totally leverage the economics and the flexibility and scalability that cloud has to offer. So those are all the directions we're working on. >> So we're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the closure of the Dell acquisition of EMC and its companies. Would love to understand, looking at this great announcement today, VMware cloud on AWS, from a differentiation perspective, what does this provide to VMware as part of Dell EMC, this big partnership with AWS? >> Yeah, so let me, you know, maybe take it back a step, not just the AWS relationship but really look more broadly, what we're doing together with Dell. And certainly, you know, starting with the storage business, we're doing amazing work around our entire portfolio of software defined storage, hyper-converged infrastructure. And the good thing is, as Stu pointed out, we're seeing tremendous growth in our core business around VSAN. You know, 10,000 customers, expanding rapidly. But we're truly firing from multiple cylinders of both consuming it as a software model as well as working with partner like Dell EMC, TurnKey appliance, such VxRail. They're seeing tremendous success. So we are extending into our partnership around data protection. This is why I'll be coming to the Cube with Matt Felon to talk about all the great things we're doing around data protection collaboration, both for on prem as well as in the VMware cloud for AWS. So lots of things happening in different parts of the business unit. So but coming back to VMware on AWS, I think we're thinking about leveraging the strength of our portfolios, say this is not just a full VMware stack, but there is some of the Dell technology IPs we're pulling in. So for example data protection, they're part of our ecosystem, being one of the very first partners, enabling data protection on top of AWS. Yeah, so Matt, anything to add? >> Yeah, I think, you know, when we look to what's made us so successful on premise, it's been that extended storage ecosystem of which Dell EMC is a huge part of. And we continue to see that value as we go to the cloud. Yanbing mentioned backup and disaster recovery as sort of the obvious starting points, but I think beyond that there's a bunch of technology that they have that's equally applicable whether or not you're running on premise or the public cloud. And the tighter we can integrate and the more we can take advantage of it, the more value we can derive for our customers. >> So VSAN 6.6 is now out. You know, any other things that we haven't talked about that you want to highlight there, and any roadmap items that you can share that are being kind of publicly discussed, you know, here at VMworld? >> So yeah, 6.6 was definitely a big hit, you know, with encryption and also lots of the cloud analytics and things we were doing has been really hitting, you know, the hard core of what our customers are looking for. So going forward with VSAN, we talked about AWS, our relationship with AWS for a long time, but the fundamental product-level innovation is happening inside VSAN as well. One of the big focus is really looking at our next generation architecture that truly enables the leverage of all the new device technology. You know, I keep saying, a software defined product is really driven by sometimes hardware innovation, and that's very true for VSAN. So at the foundational layer, we're looking at new hardware innovations and how to best leverage that. But moving up the stack, we're also looking at cloud analytics and, you know, proactive maintenance. I was just talking to one of our customers about what it takes to support, provide support in 2017. It's all these automatic intelligence, proactive, you know, you heard Pat talk about Skyline. This is a new proactive support approach we've provided, and there will be a lot of cloud analytics that's driving technology like that. >> I was going to say, on the analytics side, what are you hearing from customers with respect to what they're needing on analytics as they have this big decision to make about cloud, private, public, hybrid, what are some of the analytics needs that you're starting to hear from customers that would then be incorporated into that roadmap? >> So from our view, we're looking at lots of the infrastructure-level analytics. Certainly there is also lots of the application-level analytics. But from an infrastructure point of view, you know, to Matt's earlier point, customers do not want to really worry about their, you know, the plumbing around their infrastructure. So we're gathering analytics, we're pumping them into the cloud, we're performing, you know, intelligent analysis so that we can proactively provide intelligence and support back to our customers. >> I think it really, it helps customers to understand things about how their using their storage, how they're using their data, what applications are consuming storage, who needs IOPs, who has latency constraints, all that type of data. And being able to package that up and show it to customers in real time and help them both understand what they're currently doing and future planning, we see a lot of value in. >> Matt, I'm curious, one of the challenges you have as a software product is you need to be able to live in lots of different environments. Amazon is kind of a different beast, you know, they hyper-optimize is what I said. There's kind of misconception now. They're oh, they take, you know, white box and do this. I said, no, they will build a very specific architecture and build 10,000 nodes or more. Without sharing any trade secrets, any lessons learned or anything, you know, that kind of is like, wow, this was, you know, an interesting challenge and here's what we learned when you talk cause the challenge of our time is building distributed architectures. And I'd have to think that porting over to Amazon was not a, you know, oh, yeah, I looked at the code and everything worked day one. So what can you share? >> I think goes back to sort of the really interesting and tight collaboration from the engineering aspects. And it's really been phenomenal to see the level of detail that Amazon has in terms of how they operationalize hardware and what they can tell us about the hardware that they're building for us. And so I think it really highlights some of the value that you see in the public cloud, which is, it's not just about having physical infrastructure hosted somewhere else. It's about having a company like AWS that's understood how to deploy, monitor, and operate it at scale. And that goes to everything from how they think about, you know, the clips that are holding power cables into servers to how they think about SSDs and how they roll our firmware changes. And so from an engineering standpoint, it's been a great collaboration to help us see the level of detail that they go to there, and then we're able to take that into account for how we design and build solutions. >> Yeah, we are definitely taking all that learning into, you know, how to build cloud scale solutions that truly empower, you know, cloud scale operations. And lots of the operation learning, you know, that we get from this exercise has been just tremendous. >> Yeah, well one of the bits of news I saw is that VMware's IT is now running predominantly or all on VSAN, right? What can you tell us about that? Are there still storage arrays somewhere inside the IT? >> So we're extremely excited about this, and we have a visionary CIO, Bask Iyer, I know he was a Cube guest as well. So he's been really pushing this notion of VMware running on top of VMware. So we have 119 clusters, you know, 30,000 VMs, probably close to 1,000 hosts, and seven petabytes of data running on VSAN. And so if VSAN as a product doesn't hold up, you know, I get to experience it firsthand. So it's been pretty phenomenal to see that happen. We are also deliberately running a range of different versions of VSAN. There's, you know, some that are GA versions. There are some that are cloud edition that's yet to be made GA to our customers. So this really helps us develop much more robust software. If you see what's happening here in the hands on lab, that's being powered by VSAN as well behind the scenes. >> VMware's done a great job of leveraging kind of core competencies, like VSAN for the software defined data center. As you mentioned, 10,000 customers, I think Pat said adding 100 a week, >> Yanbing: Yeah. not sure if I heard that correctly. Wow, that's phenomenal. So as, and another thing that he said that was interesting, right before we wrap up here, is we're moving from data centers to centers of data. As customers are transitioning and really kind of figuring out what flavors of cloud are ideal for them, are you seeing any industries really leading the charge with respect to, for example, VMware cloud on AWS? Are you seeing it in, you know, we saw Medtronic, but health care, financial services, any industry specificities that you're seeing that are really leading edge that need this type of infrastructure? >> I think it's happening across many different industries. So tomorrow, I'm going to be in a session called Modernizing Data Center, but there is also lots of emphasis what's happening on the edge. So I have been exposed to customers from health care, customers from, airline customers, so we're going to be probably talking about examples of airbus 380, you know, the biggest airplane that's been ever built, and they have 300,000 sensors on the plane that's generating tons of data, and those data are being processed by technology like VSAN. And just, you know, stories across different industry. And I think that data center to edge story is very powerful. And this is also why the next generation architecture such as HCI make it happen. Clearly we've seen tremendous adoption in the data center. Now we're seeing adoption in the cloud. And I have to say, it's not just the VMware cloud on AWS. We have about 300 cloud provider partners to VMware that's adopted and deployed VSAN to different degrees. And now we're seeing it go to the edge. We have some amazing announcement this morning around HCI accelerator kit that is really providing a much more affordable solution to enable really edge use case. >> Fantastic, well tremendous momentum, great growth, we wish you guys the best of luck. Congratulations on everything announced today. And we hope you have a great rest of the show. Yanbing Li, Matt Amdur, thanks so much for joining us on the Cube. >> Thank you very much for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Woman: Absolutely. And we want to thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, live from day one at VMworld 2017. Stick around, we'll be right back. (bright music)