(upbeat music playing) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Couchbase ConnectONLINE Mary Roth, VP of Engineering Operations with Couchbase is here for Couchbase ConnectONLINE. Mary. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on remotely for this segment. >> Thank you very much. It's great to be here. >> Love the fire in the background, a little fireside chat here, kind of happening, but I want to get into it because, Engineering and Operations with the pandemic has really kind of shown that, engineers and developers have been good, working remotely for a while, but for the most part it's impacted companies in general, across the organizations. How did the Couchbase engineering team adapt to the remote work? >> Great question. And I actually think the Couchbase team responded very well to this new model of working imposed by the pandemic. And I have a unique perspective on the Couchbase journey. I joined in February, 2020 after 20 plus years at IBM, which had embraced a hybrid, in-office remote work model many years earlier. So in my IBM career, I live four minutes away from my research lab in Almaden Valley, but IBM is a global company with headquarters on the East Coast, and so throughout my career, I often found myself on phone calls with people around the globe at 5:00 AM in the morning, I quickly learned and quickly adapted to a hybrid model. I'd go into the office to collaborate and have in-person meetings when needed. But if I was on the phone at 5:00 AM in the morning, I didn't feel the need to get up at 4:30 AM to go in. I just worked from home and I discovered I could be more productive there, doing think time work, and I really only needed the in-person time for collaboration. This hybrid model allowed me to have a great career at IBM and raise my two daughters at the same time. So when I joined Couchbase, I joined a company that was all about being in-person and instead of a four minute commute, it was going to be an hour or more commute for me each way. This was going to be a really big transition for me, but I was excited enough by Couchbase and what it offered, that I decided to give it a try. Well, that was February, 2020. I showed up early in the morning on March 10th, 2020 for an early morning meeting in-person only to learn that I was one of the only few people that didn't get the memo. We were switching to a remote working model. And so over the last year, I have had the ability to watch Couchbase and other companies pivot to make this remote working model possible and not only possible, but effective. And I'm really happy to see the results. A remote work model does have its challenges, that's for sure, but it also has its benefits, better work-life balance and more time to interact with family members during the day and more quiet time just to think. We just did a retrospective on a major product release, Couchbase server 7.0, that we did over the past 18 months. And one of the major insights by the leadership team is that working from home actually made people more effective. I don't think a full remote model is the right approach going forward, but a hybrid model that IBM adopted many years ago and that I was able to participate in for most of my career, I believe is a healthier and more productive approach. >> Well, great story. I love the come back and now you take leverage of all the best practices from the IBM days, but how did they, your team and the Couchbase engineering team react? And were there any best practices or key learnings that you guys pulled out of that? >> The initial reaction was not good. I mean, as I mentioned, it was a culture based on in-person, people had to be in in-person meetings. So it took a while to get used to it, but there was a forcing function, right? We had to work remotely. That was the only option. And so people made it work. I think the advancement of virtual meeting technology really helps a lot. Over earlier days in my career where I had just bad phone connections, that was very difficult. But with the virtual meetings that you have, where you can actually see people and interact, I think is really quite helpful. And probably the key. >> What's the DNA of the company there? I mean, every company's got the DNA, Intel's Moore's Law, and what's the engineering culture at Couchbase like, if you could describe it. >> The engineering culture at Couchbase is very familiar to me. We are at our heart, a database company, and I grew up in the database world, which has a very unique culture based on two values, merit and mentorship. And we also focus on something that I like to call growing the next generation. Now database technology started in the late sixties, early seventies, with a few key players and institutions. These key players were extremely bright and they tackled and solved really hard problems with elegant solutions, long before anybody knew they were going to be necessary. Now, those original key players, people like Jim Gray, Bruce Lindsay, Don Chamberlin, Pat Selinger, David Dewitt, Michael Stonebraker. They just love solving hard problems. And they wanted to share that elegance with a new generation. And so they really focused on growing the next generation of leaders, which became the Mike Carey's and the Mohan's and the Lagerhaus's of the world. And that culture grew over multiple generations with the previous generation cultivating, challenging, and advocating for the next, I was really lucky to grow up in that culture. And I've advanced my career as a result, as being part of it. The reason I joined Couchbase is because I see that culture alive and well here. Our two fundamental values on the engineering side, are merit and mentorship. >> One of the things I want to get your thoughts on, on the database questions. I remember, back in the old glory days, you mentioned some of those luminaries, you know, there wasn't many database geeks out there, there was kind of a small community, now, as databases are everywhere. So you see, there's no one database that has rule in the world, but you starting to see a pattern of database, kinds of things are emerging, more databases than ever before, they are on the internet, they are on the cloud, there are none the edge. It's essentially, we're living in a large distributed computing environment. So now it's cool to be in databases because they're everywhere. (laughing) So, I mean, this is kind of where we are at. What's your reaction to that? >> You're absolutely right. There used to be a few small vendors and a few key technologies and it's grown over the years, but the fundamental problems are the same, data integrity, performance and scalability in the face of distributed systems. Those were all the hard problems that those key leaders solved back in the sixties and seventies. They're not new problems. They're still there. And they did a lot of the fundamental work that you can apply and reapply in different scenarios and situations. >> That's pretty exciting. I love that. I love the different architectures that are emerging and allows for more creativity for application developers. And this becomes like the key thing we're seeing right now, driving the business and a big conversation here at the, at the event is the powering of these modern applications that need low latency. There's no more, not many spinning disks anymore. It's all in RAM, all these kinds of different memory, you got centralization, you got all kinds of new constructs. How do you make sense of it all? How do you talk to customers? What's the main core thing happening right now? If you had to describe it. >> Yeah, it depends on the type of customer you're talking to. We have focused primarily on the enterprise market and in that market, there are really fundamental issues. Information for these enterprises is key. It's their core asset that they have and they understand very well that they need to protect it and make it available more quickly. I started as a DBA at Morgan Stanley, back, right out of college. And at the time I think it was, it probably still is, but at the time it was the best run IT shop that I'd ever seen in my life. The fundamental problems that we had to solve to get information from one stock exchange to another, to get it to the SEC are the same problems that we're solving today. Back then we were working on mainframes and over high-speed Datacom links. Today, it's the same kind of problem. It's just the underlying infrastructure has changed. >> Yeah, the key, there has been a big supporter of women in tech. We've done thousands of interviews and why I got you. I want to ask you if you don't mind, career advice that you give women who are starting out in the field of engineering, computer science. What do you wish you knew when you started your career? And if you could be that person now, what would you say? >> Yeah, well, a lot of things I wish I knew then that I know now, but I think there are two key aspects to a successful career in engineering. I actually got started as a math major and the reason I became a math major is a little convoluted. As a girl, I was told we were bad at math. And so for some reason I decided that I had to major in it. That's actually how I got my start, but I've had a great career. And I think there are really two key aspects. First, is that it is a discipline in which respect is gained through merit. As I had mentioned earlier, engineers are notoriously detail-oriented and most are, perfectionists. They love elegant, well thought-out solutions and give respect when they see one. So understanding this can be a very important advantage if you're always prepared and you always bring your A-game to every debate, every presentation, every conversation, you have build up respect among your team, simply through merit. While that may mean that you need to be prepared to defend every point early on, say, in your graduate career or when you're starting, over time others will learn to trust your judgment and begin to intuitively follow your lead just by reputation. The reverse is also true. If you don't bring your A-game and you don't come prepared to debate, you will quickly lose respect. And that's particularly true if you're a woman. So if you don't know your stuff, don't engage in the debate until you do. >> That's awesome advice. >> That's... >> All right, continue. >> Thank you. So my second piece of advice that I wish I could give my younger self is to understand the roles of leaders and influencers in your career and the importance of choosing and purposely working with each. I like to break it down into three types of influencers, managers, mentors, and advocates. So that first group are the people in your management chain. It's your first line manager, your director, your VP, et cetera. Their role in your career is to help you measure short-term success. And particularly with how that success aligns with their goals and the company's goals. But it's important to understand that they are not your mentors and they may not have a direct interest in your long-term career success. I like to think of them as, say, you're sixth grade math teacher. You know, you getting an A in the class and advancing to seventh grade. They own you for that. But whether you get that basketball scholarship to college or getting to Harvard or become a CEO, they have very little influence over that. So a mentor is someone who does have a shared interest in your long-term success, maybe by your relationship with him or her, or because by helping you shape your career and achieve your own success, you help advance their goals. Whether it be the company success or helping more women achieve leadership positions or getting more kids into college on a basketball scholarship, whatever it is, they have some long-term goal that aligns with helping you with your career. And they give great advice. But that mentor is not enough because they're often outside the sphere of influence in your current position. And while they can offer great advice and coaching, they may not be able to help you directly advance. That's the role of the third type of influencer. Somebody that I call an advocate. An advocate is someone that's in a position to directly influence your advancement and champion you and your capabilities to others. They are in influential positions and others place great value in their opinions. Advocates stay with you throughout your career, and they'll continue to support you and promote you wherever you are and wherever they are, whether that's the same organization or not. They're the ones who, when a leadership position opens up will say, I think Mary's the right person to take on that challenge, or we need to move in a new direction, I think Mary's the right person to lead that effort. Now advocates are the most important people to identify early on and often in your career. And they're often the most overlooked. People early on often pay too much attention and rely on their management chain for advancement. Managers change on a dime, but mentors and advocates are there for you for the long haul. And that's one of the unique things about the database culture. Those set of advocates were just there already because they had focused on building the next generation. So I consider, you know, Mike Carey as my father and Mike Stonebraker as my grandfather, and Jim Gray as my great-grandfather and they're always there to advocate for me. >> That's like a schema and a database. You got to have it all right there, kind of teed up. Beautiful. (laughing) Great advice. >> Exactly. >> Thank you for that. That was really a masterclass. And that's going to be great advice for folks, really trying to figure out how to play the cards they have and the situation, and to double down or move and find other opportunities. So great stuff there. I do have to ask you Mary, thanks for coming on the technical side and the product side. Couchbase Capella was launched in conjunction with the event. What is the bottom line for that as, as an Operations and Engineering, built the products and rolled it out. What's the main top line message for about that product? >> Yeah. Well, we're very excited about the release of Capella and what it brings to the table is that it's a fully managed and automated database cloud offering so that customers can focus on development and building and improving their applications and reducing the time to market without having to worry about the hard problems underneath, and the operational database management efforts that come with it. As I mentioned earlier, I started my career as a DBA and it was one of the most sought after and highly paid positions in IT because operating a database required so much work. So with Capella, what we're seeing is, taking that job away from me. I'm not going to be able to apply for a DBA tomorrow. >> That's great stuff. Well, great. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. Congratulations on the company and the public offering this past summer in July and thanks for that great commentary and insight on theCUBE here. Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay. Mary Roth, VP of Engineering Operations at Couchbase part of Couchbase ConnectONLINE. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music playing)

>>And welcome to the cubes coverage of Couchbase connect online, Mary Roth, VP of engineering operations with couch basis here for Couchbase connect online. Mary. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on remotely for this segment. >>Thank you very much. It's great to be here. >>Love the fire in the background, a little fireside chat here, kind of happening, but I want to get into shooting, you know, engineering and operations with the pandemic has really kind of shown that, you know, engineers and developers have been good working remotely for a while, but for the most part it's impacted companies in general, across the organizations. How did the Couchbase engineering team adapt to the remote work? >>Uh, great question. Um, and I actually think the Couchbase team responded very well to this new model of working imposed by the pandemic. And I have a unique perspective on the couch space journey. I joined in February, 2020 after 20 plus years at IBM, which had embraced a hybrid in-office rewrote remote work model many years earlier. So in my IBM career, I live four minutes away from my research lab in almond and valley, but IBM is a global company with headquarters on the east coast and SU. So throughout my career, I often found myself on phone calls with people around the globe at 5:00 AM in the morning, I quickly learned and quickly adopted to a hybrid model. I'd go into the office to collaborate and have in-person meetings when needed. But if I was on the phone at >> 5: 00 AM in the morning, um, I didn't feel the need to get up at 4:30 AM to go in. >>I just worked from home and I discovered I could be more productive. They're doing think time work. And I really only needed the in-person time for collaboration. These hybrid model allowed me to have a great career at IBM and raise my two daughters at the same time. So when I joined Couchbase I joined a company that was all about being in-person and instead of a four minute commute, it was going to be an hour or more commute for me each way. This was going to be a really big transition for me, but I was excited enough by couch facing what it offered that I decided to give it a try. Well, that was February, 2020. I showed up early in the morning on March 10th, 2020 for an early morning meeting in person only to learn that I was one of the only few people that didn't get the memo. >>We were switching to a remote remote working model. And so over the last year, I have had the ability to watch cow's face and other companies pivot to make this remote working model possible and not only possible, but effective. And I'm really happy to see the results. Our remote work model does have its challenges that's for sure, but it also has its benefits better work-life balance and more time to interact with family members during the day and more quiet time, just to think we just did a retrospective on a major product release Couchbase server 7.0 that we did over the past 18 months. And one of the major insights by the leadership team is that working from home actually made people more effective. I don't think a full remote model is the right approach going forward, but a hybrid model that IBM adopted many years ago and that I was able to participate in for most of my career, I believe is a healthier and more productive approach. >>Well, great story. I love the, um, the, uh, you come back and now you take leverage all the best practices from the IBM days, but how did the, your team and the Couchbase engineering team react and were there any best practices or key learnings that you guys pulled out of that, >>Uh, the, the initial reaction was not good. I mean, as I mentioned, it was a culture based on in-person people had to be in person in person meetings. So it took a while to get used to it, but the, there was a forcing function, right? We had to work remotely. That was the only option. And so people made it work. I think the advancement of virtual meeting technology really, really helps a lot over earlier days in my career where I had just bad phone connections, that was very difficult. But with the virtual meetings that you have, where you can actually see people and interact, I think is really quite helpful. >>What's the DNA of the culture. What's the DNA. Every company's got the DNA entails Moore's law. Um, and at what's the engineering culture at Couchbase like if you could describe it. >>Uh, the engineering culture at Couchbase is very familiar to me. We are at our heart, a database company, and I grew up in the database world, which has a very unique culture based on two values, merit and mentorship. And we also focus on something that I like to call growing. The next generation. Now database technology started in the late sixties, early seventies with a few key players and institutions. These key players were extremely bright and they tackle it and solve really hard problems with elegant solutions long before anybody knew they were going to be necessary. Now, those original key players, people like Jim gray, Bruce Lindsey, Don Chamberlin, pat Salinger, David Dewitt, Michael Stonebraker. They just love solving hard problems. And they wanted to share that elegance with a new generation. And so they really focused on growing the next generation of leaders, which became the Mike caries and the Mohans and the lower houses of the world. And that culture grew over multiple generations with the previous generation cultivating, challenging and advocating for the next, I was really lucky to grow up in that culture. And I've advanced my career as a result, as being part of it. The reason I joined Couchbase is because I see that culture alive and well, here are two fundamental values on the engineering side, our merit and mentorship. >>One of the things I want to get your thoughts on, on the database questions. I remember, you know, back in the old glory days, you mentioned some of those luminaries, you know, there wasn't many database geeks out there, Zuri kind of small community now is databases are everywhere. So you see there's no one database that's ruling the world, but you starting to see a pattern of database kinds of things, and more emerging, more databases than ever before. They're on the internet, they're on the cloud. There are none the edge it's essentially we're living in a large distributed computing environment. So now it's cool to be in databases cause they're everywhere. So, I mean, this is kind of where we're at. What's your reaction to that? >>Uh, you're absolutely right there. There used to be a, a few small vendors and a few key technologies and it's grown over the years, but the fundamental problems are the same data, integrity, performance and scalability. And in the face of district distributed systems, those were all the hard problems that those key leaders solve back in the sixties and seventies. They're not, they're not new problems. They're still there. And they did a lot of the fundamental work that you can apply and reapply in different scenarios and situations. >>It's pretty exciting. I love that. I love the different architectures that are emerging and allows for more creativity for application developers. And this becomes like the key thing we're seeing right now, driving the business and a big conversation here at the, at the event is the powering, these modern applications that need low latency. There's no more, not many spinning disks anymore. It's all in Ram, all these kinds of different memory, you got decentralization and all kinds of new constructs. How do you make sense of it all? How do you talk to customers? What's the, what's the, what's the main core thing happening right now? If you had to describe it? >>Yeah, it depends on the type of customer you're talking to. Um, we have focused primarily on the enterprise market and in that market, there are really fundamental issues. Information for, for these enterprises is key. It's their core asset that they have and they understand very well that they need to protect it and make it available more quickly. I started as a DBA at Morgan Stanley back, um, right out of college. And at the time I think it was, it probably still is, but at the time it was the best run it shop that I'd ever seen in my life. The fundamental problems that we had to solve to get information from one stock exchange to another, to get it to the sec, um, are the same problems that we're solving today. Back then we were working on mainframes and over high-speed data comm links today, it's the same kind of problem. It's just the underlying infrastructure has changed. >>You know, the key has been a big supporter of women in tech. We've done thousands of interviews on why I got you. I want to ask you, uh, if you don't mind, um, career advice that you give women who are starting out in the field of engineering, computer science, what do you wish you knew when you started your career? And you could be that person now, what would you say? >>Yeah, well, there are a lot of things I wish I knew then, uh, that I know now, but I think there are two key aspects to a successful career in engineering. I actually got started as a math major and the reason I, I became a math major is a little convoluted. Is it as a girl, I was told we were bad at math. And so for some reason I decided that I had to major in it. That's actually how I got my start. Um, but I've had a great career and I think there are really two key aspects first. And is that it is a discipline in which respect is gained through merit. As I had mentioned earlier, engineers are notoriously detail oriented and most of our perfectionist, they love elegant, well thought out solutions and give respect when they see one. So understanding this can be a very important advantage if you're always prepared and you always bring your a game to every debate, every presentation, every conversation you have build up respect among your team, simply through merit. While that may mean that you need to be prepared to defend every point early on say, in your graduate career or when you're starting over time, others will learn to trust your judgment and begin to intuitively follow your lead just by reputation. The reverse is also true. If you don't bring your a game and you don't come prepared to debate, you will quickly lose respect. And that's particularly true if you're a woman. So if you don't know your stuff, don't engage in the debate until you do. That's awesome. >>That's >>Fine. Continue. Thank you. So my second piece of advice that I wish I could give my younger self is to understand the roles of leaders and influencers in your career and the importance of choosing and purposely working with each. I like to break it down into three types of influencers, managers, mentors, and advocates. So that first group are the people in your management chain. It's your first line manager, your director, your VP, et cetera. Their role in your career is to help you measure short-term success. And particularly with how that success aligns with their goals and the company's goals. But it's important to understand that they are not your mentors and they may not have a direct interest in your long-term career success. I like to think of them as say, you're sixth grade math teacher. You know, you're getting an a in the class and advancing to seventh grade. >>They own you for that. Um, but whether you get that basketball scholarship to college or getting to Harvard or become a CEO, they have very little influence over that. So a mentor is someone who does have a shared interest in your longterm success, maybe by your relationship with him or her, or because by helping you shape your career and achieve your own success, you help advance their goals. Whether it be the company success or helping more women achieve, we do put sip positions or getting more kids into college, on a basketball scholarship, whatever it is, they have some long-term goal that aligns with helping you with your career. And they gave great advice. But that mentor is not enough because they're often outside of the sphere of influence in your current position. And while they can offer great advice and coaching, they may not be able to help you directly advance. >>That's the role of the third type of influencer. Somebody that I call an advocate, an advocate is someone that's in a position to directly influence your advancement and champion you and your capabilities to others. They are in influential positions and others place, great value in their opinions. Advocates stay with you throughout your career, and they'll continue to support you and promote you wherever you are and wherever they are, whether that's the same organization or not. They're the ones who, when a leadership position opens up will say, I think Mary's the right person to take on that challenge, or we need to move in a new direction. I think Mary's the right person to lead that effort. Now advocates are the most important people to identify early on and often in your career. And they're often the most overlooked people early on, often pay too much attention and rely on their management chain for advanced managers, change on a dime, but mentors and advocates are there for you for the long haul. And that's one of the unique things about the database culture. Those set of advocates were just there already because they had focused on building the next generation. So I consider, you know, Mike Carey is my father and Mike Stonebraker is my grandfather. And Jim gray is my great-grandfather and they're always there to advocate for me. >>That's like a scheme and a database. You got to have it all white. They're kind of teed up. Beautiful, great advice. >>Thank you for that. That was really a masterclass. And that's going to be great advice for folks really trying to figure out how to play the cards they have a and the situation and to double down or move and find other opportunities. So great stuff there. I do have to ask you Maira, thanks for coming on the technical side and the product side Couchbase Capella was launched, uh, in conjunction with the event. What is, what is the bottom line for that as, as an operations and engineering, you know, built the products and roll it out. What's the main top line message for about that product? >>Yeah, well, we're very excited about the release of Capella and what it brings to the table is that it's a fully managed in an automated database cloud offering so that customers can focus on development and building and improving their applications and reducing the time to market without having to worry about the hard problems underneath and the operational database management efforts that come with it. Uh, as I mentioned earlier, I started my career as a UVA and it was one of the most sought after and highly paid positions in it because operating a database required so much work. So with Capella, what we're seeing is, you know, taking that job away from me, I'm not going to be able to apply for a DBA tomorrow. >>That's great stuff. Well, great. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate congratulations on the company and public offering this past summer in July and thanks for that great commentary and insight on the QPR. Thank you. >>Thank you very much. >>Okay. Mary Ross, VP of engineering operations at Couchbase part of Couchbase connect online. I'm John furry host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

>> Welcome back to the cubes coverage of Couchbase connect online, where the theme of the event is, is modernize now. Yes, let's talk about that. And with me is Ravi mayor him, who's the senior vice president of engineering and the CTO at Couchbase Ravi. Welcome. Great to see you. >> Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here with you. >> I want to ask you what the new requirements are around modern applications. I've seen some of your comments, you got to be flexible, distributed, multimodal, mobile, edge. Those are all the very cool sort of buzz words, smart applications. What does that all mean? And how do you put that into a product and make it real? >> Yeah, I think what has basically happened is that so far it's been a transition of sorts. And now we are come to a point where that tipping point and that tipping point has been more because of COVID and there are COVID has pushed us to a world where we are living in a in a sort of occasionally connected manner where our digital interactions precede, our physical interactions in one sense. So it's a world where we do a lot more stuff that's less than in a digital manner, as opposed to sort of making a more specific human contact. That does really been the sort of accelerant to this modernize Now, as a team. In this process, what has happened is that so far all the databases and all the data infrastructure that we have built historically, are all very centralized. They're all sitting behind. They used to be in mainframes from where they came to like your own data centers, where we used to run hundreds of servers to where they're going now, which is the computing marvelous change to consumption-based computing, which is all cloud oriented now. And so, but they are all centralized still, but where our engagement happens with the data is at the edge at your point of convenience, at your point of consumption, not where the data is actually sitting. So this has led to, you know, all those buzzwords, as you said, which is like, oh, well we need a distributed data infrastructure, where is the edge? But it just basically comes down to the fact that the data needs to be there, if you are engaging with it. And that means if you are doing it on your mobile phone, or if you're sitting, but doing something in your while you're traveling, or whether you're in a subway, whether you're in a plane or a ship, wherever the data needs to come to you and be available, as opposed to every time you going to the data, which is centrally sitting in some place. And that is the fundamental shift in terms of how the modern architecture needs to think when they, when it comes to digital transformation and, transitioning their old applications to the, the modern infrastructure, because that's, what's going to define your customer experiences and your personalized experiences. Otherwise, people are basically waiting for that circle of death that we all know, and blaming the networks and other pieces. The problem was actually, the data is not where you are engaging with it. It's got to be fetched, you know, seven sea's away. And that is the problem that we are basically solving in this modern modernization of that data, data infrastructure. >> I love this conversation and I love the fact that there's a technical person that can kind of educate us on, on this because date data by its very nature is distributed. It's always been distributed, but with the distributed database has always been incredibly challenging, whether it was a global SIS Plex or an eventual consistency of getting recovery for a distributed architecture has been extremely difficult. You know, I hate that this is a terrible term, lots of ways to skin a cat, but, but you've been the visionary behind this notion of optionality, how to solve technical problems in different ways. So how do you solve that, that problem of, of, of, of, of a super rock solid database that can handle, you know, distributed data? >> Yes. So there are two issues that you alluded little too over there. The first is the optionality piece of it, which is that same data that you have that requires different types of processing on it. It's almost like fractional distillation. It is like your crude flowing through the system. You start all over from petrol and you can end up with Vaseline and rayon on the other end, but the raw material, that's our data. In one sense. So far, we never treated the data that way. That's part of the problem. It has always been very purpose built and cast first problem. And so you just basically have to recast it every time we want to look at the data. The first thing that we have done is make data that fluid. So when you're actually, when you have the data, you can first look at it to perform. Let's say a simple operation that we call as a key value store operation. Given my ID, give him a password kind of scenarios, which is like, you know, there are customers of ours who have billions of user IDs in their management. So things get slower. How do you make it fast and easily available? Log-in should not take more than five milliseconds, this is, this is a class of problem that we solve that same data. Now, eventually, without you ever having to sort of do a casting it to a different database, you can now do solid queries. Our classic SQL queries, which is our next magic. We are a no SQL database, but we have a full functional SQL. The SQL has been the language that has talked to data for 40 odd years successfully. Every other database has come and tried to implement their own QL query language, but they've all failed only SQL has stood the test of time of 40 odd years. Why? Because there's a solid mathematics behind it. It's called a relational calculus. And what that helps you is, is basically a look at the data and any common editorial, any, any which way you look at the data, all it will come, the data in a format that you can consume. That's the guarantee sort of gives you in one sense. And because of that, you can now do some really complex in the database signs, what we call us, predicate logic on top of that. And that gives you the ability to do the classic relational type queries select star from where, kind of stuff, because it's at an English level becomes easy to so the same day that you didn't have to go move it to another database, do your sort of transformation of the data and all the stuff, same day that you do this. Now that's where the optionality comes in. Now you can do another piece of logic on top of this, which we call search. This is built on this concept of inverted index and TF IDF, the classic Google in a very simple terms, what Google tokenized search, you can do that in the same data without you ever having to move the data to a different format. And then on top of it, they can do what is known as a eventing or your own custom logic, which we all which we do on a, on programming language called Java script. And finally analytics and analytics is the, your ability to query the operational data in a different way. And talk querying, what was my sales of this widget year over year on December 1st week, that's a very complex question to ask, and it takes a lot of different types of processing. So these are different types of that's optionality with different types of processing on the same data without you having to go to five different systems without you having to recast the data in five different ways and apply different application logic. So you put them in one place. Now is your second question. Now this has got to be distributed and made available in multiple cloud in your data center, all the way to the edge, which is the operational side of the, the database management system. And that's where the distributed platform that we have built enables us to get it to where you need the data to be, you know, in the classic way we call it CDN'ing the data as in like content delivery networks. So far do static, sort of moving of static content to the edges. Now we can actually dynamically move the data. Now imagine the richness of applications you can develop. >> And on the first part of, of the, the, the answer to my question, are you saying you could do this without scheme with a no schema on, right? And then you can apply those techniques. >> Fantastic question. Yes. That's the brilliance of this database is that so far classically databases have always demanded that you first define a schema before you can write a single byte of data. Couchbase is one of the rare databases. I, for one don't know any other one, but there could be, let's give the benefit of doubt. It's a database which writes data first and then late binds to schema as we call it. It's a schema on read thing. So, because there is no schema, it is just a Json document that is sitting inside. And Json is the lingua franca of the web, as you very well know by now. So it just Json that we manage, you can do key value look ups of the Json. You can do full credit capability, like a classic relational database. We even have cost-based optimizers and other sophisticated pieces of technology behind it. You can do searching on it, using the, the full textual analysis pipeline. You can do ad hoc webbing on the analytics side, and you can write your own custom logic on it using or inventing capabilities. So that's, that's what it allows because we keep the data in the native form of Json. It's not a data structure or a data schema imposed by a database. It is how the data is produced. And on top of it, bring, we bring different types of logic, five different types of it's like the philosophy is bringing logic to data as opposed to moving data to logic. This is what we have been doing in the last 40 years, because we developed various database systems and data processing systems at various points in time in our history, we had key value stores. We had relational systems, we had search systems, we had analytical systems. We had queuing systems, all these systems, if you want to use any one of them are answered. It always been, just move the data to that system. Versus we are saying that do not move the data as we get bigger and bigger and data just moving this data is going to be a humongous problem. If you're going to be moving petabytes of data for this, it's not going to fly instead, bring the logic to the data, right? So you can now apply different types of logic to the data. I think that's what, in one sense, the optionality piece of this. >> But as you know, there's plenty of schema-less data stores. They're just, they're called data swamps. I mean, that's what they, that's what they became, right? I mean, so this is some, some interesting magic that you're applying here. >> Yes. I mean, the one problem with the data swamps as you call them is that that was a little too open-ended because the data format itself could change. And then you do your, then everything became like a game data recasting because it required you to have it in seven schema in one sense at, at the end of the day, for certain types of processing. So in that where a lot of gaps it's probably related, but it not really, how do you say keep to the promise that it actually meant to be? So that's why it was a swamp I mean, because it was fundamentally not managing the data. The data was sitting in some file system, and then you are doing something, this is a classic database where the data is managed and you create indexes to manage it. And you create different types of indexes to manage it. You distribute the index, you distribute the data you have, like we were discussing, you have ACID semantics on top of, and when you, when you put all these things together, it's, it's, it's a tough proposition, but we have solved some really tough problems, which are good computer science stuff, computer science problems that we have to solve to bring this, to bring this, to bear, to bring this to the market. >> So you predicted the trend around multimodal and converged databases. You kind of led Couchbase through that. I, I want, I always ask this question because it's clearly a trend in the industry and it, and it definitely makes sense from a simplification standpoint. And, and, and so that I don't have to keep switching databases or the flip side of that though, Ravi. And I wonder if you could give me your opinion on this is kind of the right tool for the right job. So I often say isn't that the Swiss army knife approach, where you have have a little teeny scissors and a knife, that's not that sharp. How, how do you respond to that? >> A great one. My answer is always, I use another analogy to tackle that, and is that, have you ever accused a smartphone of being a Swiss army knife? - No. No. >> Nobody does. That because it actually 40 functions in one is what a smartphone becomes. You never call your iPhone or your Android phone, a Swiss army knife, because here's the reason is that you can use that same device in the full capacity. That's what optionality is. It's not, I'm not, it's not like your good old one where there's a keyboard hiding half the screen, and you can do everything only through the keyboard without touching and stuff like that. That's not the whole devices available to you to do one type of processing when you want it. When you're done with that, it can do another completely different types of processing. Right? As in a moment, it could be a TomTom, telling you all the directions, the next one, it's your PDA. Third one. It's a fantastic phone. Four. It's a beautiful camera which can do your f-stop management and give you a nice SLR quality picture. Right? So next moment, it's the video camera. People are shooting movies with this thing in Hollywood, these days for God's sake. So it gives you the full power of what you want to do when you want it. And now, if you just thought that iPhone is a great device or any smartphone is a great device, because you can do five things in one or 50 things in one, and at a certain level, he missed the point because what that device really enabled is not just these five things in one place. It becomes easy to consume and easy to operate. It actually started the app based economy. That's the brilliance of bringing so many things in one place, because in the morning, you know, I get an alert saying that today you got to leave home at >> 8: 15 for your nine o'clock meeting. And the next day it might actually say 8 45 is good enough because it knows where the phone is sitting. The geo position of it. It knows from my calendar where the meeting is actually happening. It can do a traffic calculation because it's got my map and all of the routes. And then it's got this notification system, which eventually pops up on my phone to say, Hey, you got to leave at this time. Now five different systems have to come together and they can because the data is in one place. Without that, you couldn't even do this simple function in a, in a sort of predictable manner in a, in a, in a manner that's useful to you. So I believe a database which gives you this optionality of doing multiple data processing on the same set of data allows you will allow you to build a class of products, which you are so far been able to struggling to build. Because half the time you're running sideline to sideline, just, you know, integrating data from one system to the other. >> So I love the analogy with the smartphone. I want to, I want to continue it and double click on it. So I use this camera. I used to, you know, my kid had a game. I would bring the, the, the big camera, the 35 millimeter. So I don't use that anymore no way, but my wife does, she still uses the DSLR. So is, is there a similar analogy here? That those, and by the way, the camera, the camera shop in my town went out of business, you know? So, so, but, but is there, is that a fair and where, in other words, those specialized databases, they say there still is a place for them, but they're getting. >> Absolutely, absolutely great analogy and a great extension to the question. That's like, that's the contrarian side of it in one sense is that, Hey, if everything can just be done in one, do you have a need for the other things? I mean, you gave a camera example where it is sort of, it's a, it's a slippery slope. Let me give you another one, which is actually less straight to the point better. I've been just because my, I, I listened to half of my music on the iPhone. Doesn't stop me from having my full digital receiver. And, you know, my Harman Kardon speakers at home because they, I mean, they produce a kind of sounded immersive experience. This teeny little speaker has never in its lifetime intended to produce, right? It's the convenience. Yes. It's the convenience of convergence that I can put my earphones on and listen to all the great music. Yes, it's 90% there or 80% there. It depends on your audio file-ness of your, I mean, your experience super specialized ones do not go away. You know, there are, there are places where the specialized use cases will demand a separate system to exist. But even there that has got to be very closed. How do you say close, binding or late binding? I should be able to stream that song from my phone to that receiver so I can get it from those speakers. You can say that all, there's a digital divide between these two things done, and I can only play CDs on that one. That's not how it's going to work going forward. It's going to be, this is the connected world, right? As in, if I'm listening to the song in my car and then step off the car, walk into my living room, that same songs should continue and play in my living room speakers. Then it's a connected world because it knows my preference and what I'm doing that all happened only because of this data flowing between all these systems. >> I love, I love that example too. When I was a kid, we used to go to Tweeter, et cetera. And we used to play around with three, take home, big four foot speakers. Those stores are out of business too. Absolutely. And now we just plug into Sonos. So that is the debate between relational and non-relational databases over Ravi? >> I believe so, because I think what had happened was relational systems. I've mean where the norm, they rule the roost, if you will, for the last 40 odd years and then gain this no SQL movement, which was almost as though a rebellion from the relational world, we all inhabited because we, it was very restrictive. It, it had the schema definition and the schema evolution as we call it, all those things, they were like, they required a committee. They required your DBA and your data architect. And you had to call them just to add one column and stuff like that. And the world had moved on. This was a world of blogs and tweets and, you know, mashups and a different generation of digital behavior, There are digital, native people now who are operating in these and the, the applications, the, the consumer facing applications. We are living in this world. And yet the enterprise ones were still living in the, in the other, the other side of the divide. So out came this solution to say that we don't need SQL. Actually the problem was never SQL. No SQL was, you know, best approximation, good marketing name, but from a technologist perspective, the problem was never the query language, no SQL was not the problem, the schema limitations and the inability for these, the system to scale, the relational systems were built like airplanes, which is that if a San Francisco, Boston, there is a flight route, it's so popular that if you want to add 50 more seats to it, the only way you can do that is to go back to Boeing and ask them to get you a set from 7 3 7 2 7 7 7, or whatever it is. And they'll stick you with a billion dollar bill on the allowance that you'll somehow pay that by, you know, either flying more people or raising the rates or whatever you have to do. These are all vertically scaling systems. So relational systems are vertically scaling. They are expensive. Versus what we have done in this modern world is make the system horizontally scaling, which is more like the same thing. If it's a train that is going from San Francisco to Boston, you need 50 more people be my guest. I'll add one more coach to it, one more car to it. And the better part of the way we have done this here is that, and we are super specialized on that. This route actually requires three, three dining cars and only 10 sort of sleeper cars or whatever. Then just pick those and attach the next route. You can choose to have, I need only one dining car. That's good enough. So the way you scale the plane is also can be customized based on the route along the route, more, more dining capabilities, shorter route, not an abandoned capability. You can attach the kind of coaches we call this multidimensional scaling. Not only do we scale horizontally, we can scale to different types of workloads by adding different types of coaches to it, right? So that's the beauty of this architecture. Now, why is that architecture important? Is that where we land eventually is the ability to do operational and analytical in the same place. This is another thing which doesn't happen in the past, because, you would say that I cannot run this analytical query because then my operational workload will suffer. Then my front end, then we'll slow down millions of customers that impacted that problem. They'll solve the same data once again, do analytical query, an operational query because they're separated by these cars, right? As in like we, we, we fence the, the, the resources so that one doesn't impede the other. So you can, at the same time, have a microsecond 10 million ops per second, happening of a key value or a query. And then yet you can run this analytical query, which will take a couple of minutes to them. One, not impeding the other. So that's in one sense, sort of the part of the problems that we have solved it here is that relational versus the no SQL portion of it. These are the kinds of problems we have to solve. We solve those. And then we yet put back the same query language on top. Why? It's like Tesla in one sense, right underneath the surface is where all the stuff that had to be changed had to change, which is like the gasoline, the internal combustion engine the gas, you says, these were the issues we really wanted to solve. So solve that, change the engine out, you don't need to change the steering wheel or the gas pedal or the, you know, the battle shifters or whatever else you need, over there your gear shifters. Those need to remain in the same place. Otherwise people won't buy it. Otherwise it does not even look like a car to people. So even when you feed people, the most advanced technology, it's got to be accessible to them in the manner that people can consume. Only in software, we forget this first design principle, and we go and say that, well, I got a car here, you got the blow harder to go fast. And they lean back for, for it to, you know, to apply a break that's, that's how we seem to define design software. Instead, we shouldn't be designing them in a manner that it is easiest for our audience, which is developers to consume. And they've been using SQL for 40 years or 30 years. And so we give them the steering wheel on the, and the gas pedal and the, and the gear shifters by putting SQL back on underneath the surface, we have completely solved the relational limitations of schema, as well as scalability. So in, in, in that way, and by bringing back the classic ACID capabilities, which is what relational systems we accounted on, and being able to do that with the SQL programming language, we call it like multi-statement SQL transaction. So to say, which is what a classic way all the enterprise software was built by putting that back. Now, I can say that that debate between relational and non-relational is over because this has truly extended the database to solve the problems that the relational systems had to grow up to solve in the modern times, rather than get sort of pedantic about whether it's we have no SQL or SQL or new SQL, or, you know, any of that sort of jargon oriented debate. This is, these are the debates of computer science that they are actually, and they were the solve, and they have solved them with the latest release of 7.0, which we released a few months ago. >> Right, right. Last July, Ravi, we got got to leave it there. I love the examples and the analogies. I can't wait to be face-to-face with you. I want to hang with you at the cocktail party because I've learned so much and really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming to the cube. >> Fantastic. Thanks for the time. And the opportunity I was, I mean, very insightful questions really appreciate it. - Thank you. >> Okay. This is Dave Volante. We're covering Couchbase connect online, keep it right there for more great content on the cube.

(ethereal music) >> Welcome to the special Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of "The Cube" here in Palo Alto, California. We've got two great remote guests here having a conversation around security, security convergence with platforms around networking and security with cybersecurity at an all time high, the need for understanding how to manage the breaches how to understand them, prevent them, everything in between cybersecurity and data are the number one conversation happening in the world today. We got two great guests, we've got Nirav Shah, VP of products at Fortinet and Peter Newton's senior director of products at Fortinet. The product leaders in the hottest cybersecurity company. And guys, thanks for coming on this Cube Conversation. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you, John. >> So last month or so I talked to John Madison about the Fortinet new release, FortiOS 7.0, as well as highlighting the convergence that's going on between the platforms around companies trying to consolidate and or manage or grow and build, converting networking and security together. Seeing that happening in real time, still doesn't change the underpinnings of how the internet works, and how these companies are structured. But the need for security is at an all time high. Talk about the impact to the customer. Do you guys have the keys to the kingdom here, product group? What is the killer product? What are customers doing? Give us the overview of why there's such a big need for the security platforms right now. >> Yeah, absolutely John. So if you see today's environment, we have seen working from anywhere it's become normal. And as part of that, we have seen so many different network edges. At the same time, they have different devices that they're using from anywhere. So what's important is as users have different devices, different users and applications that they're consuming from Cloud, we have to make sure that we provide security across the endpoint, across all network edges, and going to the Cloud compute. And for that kind of approach, you cannot have point products provide the visibility control and management. You need to have a comprehensive cybersecurity platform, which gives you security from that endpoint, to the edge, to the user, so that you have a simple but effective management and have a solid security in place to get that working from anywhere in a much more better user experience way. And that's exactly Fortinet describes as the security fabric platform. >> It's interesting not to kind of go on a tangent here, but to illustrate the point is, if you look at all the cyber security challenges that we're facing globally, especially here in the United States, the public private partnerships are increasing. We're seeing more public sector, commercial integration, the role of data. We've covered this on SiliconANGLE and many other cube interviews, especially with you guys. And there's all this kind of new approaches. Everyone's trying everything. They're buying every product that's out there, but now there's like overload. There's too much product. And that the obvious thing that's becoming clear, as cloud-scale, the evolution of this new edge environment. And so with that becomes the importance two trends that you guys are participating in. I want to get your thoughts on this because that's called SASE and SD-WAN. We know SD-WAN, but SASE stands for Secure Access Service Edge. That's I think Gartner made that term up or someone made that term up, but that's a new technology. And you've got SD-WAN, these are traditionally had been like edge for like branch offices. Now evolve now as pure network edges than a distributed computing environment. What's so important about these two topics. Nirav take us through the changes that are happening and why it's important for enterprises to get a handle on this >> Yeah John. So, as you said, SASE, Secured Access Services Edge. Really the foundation of that topic is the convergence of networking and security. And as you mentioned, Fortinet has been doing a lot of innovation in this area, right? Six years back, we pioneered the convergence of security and networking with security SD-WAN but what's happening now with the SASE is, as that working from anywhere continues to remain the dominant trend, users are looking for a Cloud-Delivered Security. And that's what Fortinet recently announced, where we can provide the most comprehensive Cloud-Delivered Security for remote users. For thin edge. You can still, anytime access from any device. To give you an example, now, our remote users, they are still at home or they can be branch of one user, but still have that always on threat protection with the consistent security given in the Cloud. So they don't have to go anymore from the branch or data center, but have a direct connectivity to the Cloud Security before they access SaaS application. That's what one of the SASE trend is. Second thing, John we are observing is users are now, as they are going back to the hybrid workforce, they are looking for a thin edge right? To your point of an edge, edge is still intelligent and a very important but there is an interesting architectural shift of, can I just use an intelligent networking there move my CapEx to OPEX and have security in Cloud? That unified security, unified policy is again becoming important. That's what SASE-- >> Okay, so I like this Cloud-Delivered Security. This is a hybrid workforce you're addressing with this marketplace, that's clear. Hybrid is a everywhere, hybrid cloud, hybrid workforce, hybrid events are coming. I mean, we love covering events physically but also now virtual. Everything's impacted by the word hybrid and Cloud. But talk about this thin edge. What do you mean by that? I mean I think thin edge, I think thin clients, the old trend. What is thin edge mean? >> Yeah, so there're different organizations are looking at the architecture in a different way. Some organizations are thinking about having a very simple branch where it is used for modern networking technologies, while security has been shifted to the Cloud deliver. What happens with this model is, now they are relying more into technologies like SD-WAN on edge to provide that intelligence steering, while everything in the security is being done in a Cloud compute way for both remote users and thin edge environment. Now the good news here is, they don't have to worry about the security patching, or any of those security capabilities. It is all done by Fortinet as they go and use the SaaS applications performance >> I want to come back and drill down on that but I want to get Peter in here in the Zero Trust equation because one of the things that comes up all the time with this edge discussion is network access. I mean, you go back to the old days of computing, you had edge log in, you'd come in, radius servers, all these things were happening, pretty simple cut paradigm. It's gotten so complicated now, Peter. So Zero Trust is a hot area. It's not only one of the things but it's a super important, what is Zero Trust these days? >> Zero Trust is indeed a very hot term because I think part of it is just it sounds great from a security standpoint, Zero Trust, you don't trust anyone, but it really comes down to a philosophical approach of how do you address the user's data applications that you want to protect? And the idea of Zero Trust and really what's driving it is the fact that as we've been talking, people are working remotely. The perimeter of the organization has dissolved. And so you no longer can afford to have a trusted internal zone and an untrusted external zone. Everything has to be "Zero Trust." So this means that you need to be authenticating and verifying users and devices on a repeat and regular basis, and you want to when you're bringing them on and giving them access to assets and applications, you want to do that with as granular of control as possible. So the users and devices have access to what they need, but no more. And that's kind of the basic tenets of Zero Trust. And that's what, it's really about prioritizing the applications and data, as opposed to just looking at, am I bringing someone into my network. >> God, the concept of Zero Trust, obviously hot. What's the difference between Zero Trust Access and Zero Trust Network Access, or as people say ZTA versus ZTNA? I mean, is there a nuance there? I mean, what's the difference between the two? >> That's actually a really good question because they both have the Zero Trust in the name. ZTNA is actually a specific term that a Gardner created or other analyst I should say, created 10 years ago. And this refers specifically to controlling application to controlling access to applications. whereas Zero Trust, overall Zero Trust access deals with both users and devices coming on to networks, how are you connecting them on? What kind of access are you giving them on the network? ZTNA is specifically how are you bringing users and connecting them to applications? Whether those applications are on premise or in the Cloud. >> So what the NA is more like the traditional old VPN model connecting users from home or whatever. Just connecting across the network with user to app. Is that right? >> That's actually a really good insight, but ironically the VPN clinical benefits of this are actually an outgrowth of the ZTNA model because ZTA doesn't differentiate between when you're on network or off network. It creates a secure tunnel automatically no matter where the user is, but VPN is all just about creating a secure tunnel when you're remote. ZTNA just does that automatically. So it's a lot easier, a lot simpler. You get a hundred percent compliance and then you also have that same secure tunnel even when you're "on a safe network" because with Zero Trust, you don't trust anything. So yes it really is leading to the evolution of VPN connectivity. >> So Nirav I want to get back to you on tie that circle back to what we were talking about around hybrid. So everyone says everything's moving to the Cloud. That's what people think. And Cloud ops is essentially what hybrid is. So connect the dots here between the zero trust, zero trust A and NA with the move to the hybrid cloud model. How does that, how does it, what's the difference between the two? Where's the connection? What's the relevance for your customers and the marketplace? >> Yeah, I think that again goes back to that SASE framework where ZTNA plays a huge role because John, we talked about when users are working from anywhere in this hybrid workforce, one of the important thing is to not give them this implicit trust right? To the applications, enabling the explicit trust is very important. And that is what ZTNA does. And the interesting thing about Fortinet is we provide all of this part of FortiOS and users can deploy anywhere. So as they are going to the Cloud-Delivered Security, they can enable ZTNA there so that we make sure this user at what time, which application they're accessing and should we give them that access or not. So great way to have ZTNA, SASE, everything in one unified policy and provide that anytime access for any device with a trusting place. >> Okay, real quick question to you is, what's the difference between SASE, Secure Access Service Edge, and SD-WAN? Real quick. >> Yeah, so SD-WAN is one of the core foundation element of SASE, right? So far we talked about the Cloud-Delivered Security, which is all important part of the security of the service. SASE is another element, which is a networking and a service where SD-WAN plays a foundation role. And John that's where I was saying earlier that the intelligent edge modern technology that SD-WAN provides is absolutely necessary for a successful SASE deployment, right? If users who are sitting anywhere, if they can't get the right application steering, before they provide the Cloud-Delivered Security, then they are not going to get the user experience. So having the right SD-WAN foundation in that edge, working in tandem with the Cloud-Delivered Security makes a win-win situation for both networking and security teams. >> So Peter, I want to talk to you. Last night I was on a chat on the Clubhouse app with some cybersecurity folks and they don't talk in terms of "I got ZTNA and I got some SASE and SD-WEN, they're talking mostly about just holistically their environment. So could you just clarify the difference 'cause this can be confusing between Zero Trust Network Access ZTNA versus SASE because it's kind of the same thing, but I know it's nuance, but, is there a difference there? People get confused by this when I hear people talking 'cause like they just throw jargon around and they say, "Oh, with Zero Trust we're good. What does that even mean? >> Yeah, we get a lot of that when talking with customers because the two technologies are so complimentary and similar, they're both dealing with security for remote workers. However sassy is really dealing with that kind of firewall in the Cloud type service, where the remote user gets the experience and protection of being behind a firewall, ZTNA is about controlling the application and giving them that secure tunnel to the application. So they're different things one's kind of that firewall and service, security and service, even networking in a service. But ZTNA is really about, how do I have the policies no matter where our user is, to give them access to specific applications and then give them a secure tunnel to that application? So very complimentary, but again, they are separate things. >> What's the landscape out there with competitive because has there products, I mean you guys are product folks. You'll get the product question. Is it all kind of in one thing, is this bundled in? Do you guys have a unique solution? Some people have it, they don't. What's the marketplace look like from a product standpoint? >> Yeah. So John, that starts back to the platform that we talked about, right? Fortinet always believes in not to develop a point product, but doing organic development which is part of a broader platform. So when we look at the thing like SASE, which required a really enterprise grade networking and security stack, Fortinet has organically developed them SD-WAN, we are a leading vendor, for the Gartner magic quadrant leader there, network firewall, including whether they deployed on Cloud, on-prem or a segmentation. We are a leader there. So when you combine both of them and ZTNA is part of it, there is only handful of vendor you will see in the industry who can provide the consistent security, networking, and security together and have that better user experience for the single management. So clearly there's a lot of buzz John, about a lot of vendors talk about it. But when you go to the details and see this kind of unified policy of networking and security, Fortinet is emerging as a leader. >> Well I always like talking the experts like you guys on this topic. And we get into the conversations around the importance under the hood. SASE, SD-WEN, we've been covering that for a long time. And now with Zero Trust becoming such a prominent architectural feature in Cloud and hybrid, super important under the hood. At the end of the day though, I got to ask the customers question, which is, "what's in it for me? "I care about breaches. "I don't want to be breached. "The government's not helping me over the top. "I got to defend myself. "I have to put resources in place, it's expensive, "and nevermind if I get breached." The criticality of that alone, is a risk management discussion. These are huge table. These are huge stakes and the stakes are high. So what I care about is are you going to stop the breaches? I need the best security in town. What do you say to that? >> Yeah this goes back to the beginning. We talked about consistent certified security, right John. So yes a SASE model is interesting. Customers are going to move to Cloud, but it's going to be a journey. Customers are not going Cloud first day one. They are going to take a hybrid approach where security is required in a segment, in an edge and on the Cloud. And that's where having a solid security in place is a number one requirement. And when you look at the history of Fortinet, over the last 20 years, how we have done, with our FortiGuard Labs, our threat intelligence and ability for us to protect over 450,000 customers, that's a big achievement. And for us to continue to provide that security but more importantly, continue to go out, and do a third-party certification with many organization to make sure no matter where customers are deploying security, it is that same enterprise grade security deployment. And that's very important that we talk to our users to make sure they validate that. >> Peter would weigh in on this. Customers don't want any breaches. How do you help them with the best security? What's your take on that? >> Well, to kind of reiterate what Nirav said earlier, we really believe that security is a team sport. And you do need best in class products at each individual element, but more importantly you need those products we talking together. So the fact that we have industry leading firewalls, the fact that we have industry-leading SD-WAN, we've got industry leading products to cover the entire gamut of the end point all the way email application, Cloud, all these products while it's important that they're, third-party validated as Nirav was mentioning, it's more important that they actually talk together. They're integrated and provide automated actions. Today's cyber security moves so fast. You need that team approach to be able to protect and stop those breaches. >> Well, you guys have a great enterprise grade solution. I got to say, I've been covering you guys for many years now and you guys have been upfront, out front on the data aspect of it with FortiGuards. And I think people are starting to realize now that data is the key, value proposition is not a secret anymore. Used to be kind of known for the people inside the ropes. So congratulations. I do know that there's a lot action happening. I want to give you guys a chance to at the end of this conversation now to just put a plug in Fortinet because there's more people coming into the workforce now. Post pandemic, young people with computer science degrees and other degrees that want to go into career with cybersecurity, could you guys share both your perspective on for the young people watching or people re-skilling, what opportunities there are from a coding standpoint, and or from say an analyst perspective. What are some of the hot openings? 'cause there are thousands and thousands of jobs give a quick plug for Fortinet and what openings you guys might have. >> Well, certainly in the cyber industry, one of the major trends we have is a work place shortage. There are not enough trained professionals who know about cybersecurity. So for those who are interested in retooling or starting their career, cybersecurity is an ongoing field. It's going to be around for a long time. I highly encourage those interested, come take a look at Fortinet. We offer free training. So you can start from knowing nothing to becoming certified up to a security architect level, and all those, all that training is now available for free. So it's a great time to star, great time to come into the industry. The industry needs you >> Any particularly areas, Peter you see that's like really jumping off the page. >> Well, it's hybrid, knowing Cloud, knowing on-prem, knowing the traffic, knowing the data on the applications, there's just so much to do. >> You're the head of product, you've got all, probably a ton of openings but seriously young people trying to figure out where to jump in, what are the hot areas? Where can people dig in and get retrained and or find their career? >> Yeah, no, I think to reiterate what Peter said, right? The program that Fortinet has built, LSE one, two, three which is free available, is a great foundation. Because that actually goes into the detail of many topics we touched upon. Even though we are talking about SD-WAN, SASE, ZTNA, fundamentally these are the networking and security technologies to make sure users are able to do the right work in the user experience. And that will be really helpful to the young people who are looking to learn more and go into this area. So highly encouraged to take those training, reach out to us. We are there to provide any mentorship, anything that is required to help them in that journey. >> Anything jump off the page in terms of areas that you think are super hot, that are in need. >> Certainly there's convergence of networking and security. There is a growing need of how and what is Zero Trust is? and how the security is applied everywhere. Definitely that's a topic of mine for a lot of our customers, and that's an area, it's a good thing to gain more knowledge and utilize it. >> Nirav and Peter, thank you for coming on. You guys are both experts and the leaders at Fortinet, the product team. The need for security platform is an all time high consolidating tools into a platform. More tools are needed and there's new tools coming. So I'm expecting to have more great conversations as the world evolves. Certainly the edge is super important. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay, Cube Conversation on security here in the Palo Alto studios. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. (ethereal music)

(upbeat introductory music) >> Presenter: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE CONVERSATION. >> Hi everyone, welcome to this special CUBE CONVERSATION I'm John Furrier, Host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios, we have a remote guest here talking about cybersecurity and all the industry trends and the recent news and announcements around Fortinet with John Madison CMO and Executive Vice President of products at Fortinet John, great to see you, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to have you back for some commentary around what's going on in the trends and your recent news. So thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John, nice to see you again. >> So you guys had earnings, congratulations again another successful results, you guys are doing well. Cyber is super important and that's the top conversation, cloud computing, cloud native, we're living in a pandemic. New things are exposed. Clearly the environment has changed in the past four months in a major, major way. So a lot of demand, a lot of needs out there from customers. So you guys had some earnings and you also have an update on your Fortinet OS67.0 platform with major updates. Let's quickly hit the news real quick. What's the hot topic? >> Yeah, well you're right. Things have accelerated in some ways in this cybersecurity world and we had the recent solar winds incident that's also made people look really, really closely at their cyber security strategy and architecture. We announced our results yesterday for Q4. For Q4 we had over 20% product growth which is the key, of course, the future growth. We also, for the full year in 2020 past 3 billion in billings for the first time for the company. And we're really proud of that. We're proud for a lot of reasons with our people and our team, but also another company that goes and makes large acquisitions to boost revenue and billings growth. We've done it predominantly organically over the last 20 years. And so we're very proud of our achievement and obviously a big thank you to our partners, our employees, and our customers. >> We also have been covering you guys for many, many years. Congratulations, well deserved good products win the long game, as we say on theCUBE, and that's a great Testament, but now more than ever I really want to get your thoughts because everyone that I talked to is really kind of sitting back saying, "Wow, look what's happened in the past three, six months in particular, a lot of sea change in both on the technical landscape, the intersection with society obviously with cyber, you mentioned solar winds that's been kind of hanging around. More data's coming out about how pervasive that was and how native it was for many months. So what's out there, we don't even know what's next. So this is causing a lot of people to take pause and reevaluate their environment. Can you share your perspective and how Fortinet sees this playing out and how that you are advising your customers? >> Yeah, well, leaving compliance and regulatory to one side for now because that's also a driver cybersecurity and focus on the two main drivers. One is the threat landscape, and I hinted a bit around that supply chain attack which affects a lot of people in solar winds incident. They got hold or got onto a device that has privileged access across a lot of servers and applications. And that's exactly what they wanted to get to. So state-sponsored ABTs, there's still volume out there. We still see now ransomware doubling every six months but that's very scary. The threat landscape around state sponsored. Now, the other driver of cybersecurity is the infrastructure. And whether that be end point. So as you know people are working from home as I am for the last eight months. So there's a on and off network, end point kind of a zero trust architecture there that people are looking towards. On the network side, we've seen these edges develop. And so whether it be the WAN edge, LANedge, Cloud Edge, data center edge even OT edge, those need protecting. So that's a big challenge for customers. And then also on the cloud side where the applications have moved to cloud, but different types of cloud, multi-cloud I've even seen building cloud recently. So that's a very adaptive area. So challenging for the customer in the terms of the threats and weaponized threats as well as the ability to cover all the different parts of the attack surface going forward. >> It's interesting, we've been living in a generation in the technology business around, you just get a tool for that. Every hammer looks for a nail, that's the expression. Now more than ever when you have this no perimeter environment, which we've been talking about for many years, that's not new. What is new is that everyone's now thinking about architectural systems approach to this and thinking systematically around the platform of what their business is. So in your announcement that you guys just released for OS67.0, there's really some meat on the bone there. You have the secure access, edge SASE and then the endpoint protection which are defined categories by the analyst. But those are the areas that are super hot. Can you translate that into the architectural equation because you and I were talking before we came on camera around how it's not just one thing there's multiple layers to this. Could you break that out for us please? >> Yeah. If you look at historically and I'm now coming up to my 20th year in cybersecurity. Before Fortinet I worked for an end point company. If you go back a while and I can, between 2000, 2010, the Endpoint Vendors were the the big cybersecurity players because Endpoint was where the data was and everything else. And then over the last 10 years the network security vendors, the next gen firewalls have been the most important vendors out there. And it's also reflected in revenues and market cap and everything else. What we're going to see over the next 10 years is the platform. And that platform can't be just an endpoint platform. It can't be just a network security platform or just the cloud platform, because you only, you're only seeing and defending and protecting a part of the overall we call digital experience. Whether it be a device in the factory, whether it be a person dialing in from somewhere or connecting from somewhere through the network and through to the applications you've got to measure that digital experience. And so that's going to be very important to be able to provide a platform that sits across all your devices users, across your whole network including new networks like 5G and across the applications and in the cloud. So the platform to us extends across all those areas. We've been building that platform on what we call our FortiOS operating system. The latest release is 7.0, which released yesterday. It obviously upgrades and extends all parts of the platform but we did major parts of the release yesterday were around SASE, which of course is the CloudEdge. So we're adding that CloudEdge to our component. We did acquire a company Opaque Networks a few months ago that's now we've integrated that technology. And then just as importantly on the access side, a zero trust network access capability for giving access per application. In fact, again, with this, I've talked a bit about in the past about all these Gartner acronyms I don't think zero trust network access is the right wording for it. It should be application access, because that's all we are going to move to. Application specific access versus just getting on the network and getting access to everything. But something that gives you context. So those are the two big things, but there's 300 plus new features across networking end point in cloud across management, inside the resource. It's a major release for us. And it gives us our customers the capability to really protect that attack surface from the end point to the cloud. >> Yeah, there's a lot of meat in there, from that release, I've got to say. but it's basically you're saying devices and users have access. That's been around. There's been tools for that. You hire people, you get some tools. Network access, it's been around. It's getting evolving. Now apps in the cloud, cloud native is a hot area. And people that I talk to, I want to get your reaction to this comment that I hear from people and customers and CXOs and developers. "Hey, we bought a tool for that. We hired a bunch of people. They mainly left, or the environment changed. We bought another tool. And then we bought a tool for that. We bought a tool for that." And then you have this kind of tool shed mentality, where they have tools that don't even have people to run them. So you have this problem there kind of tools need to be upgraded. And then you have this hot trend of observability on the app side, where now you have new data coming in on the application side, those are new tools. You got all kinds of stuff and competing for that. How do you talk to that customer? Because this is what the customer hears all this noise, all this action. They need to have it. They got to have the staff, they got to be trained up. What's going on there? What's your reaction to that? And how do you talk to customers who have this problem? Well, it's a big problem for them. Because, and by the way when I speak to a lot of customers about cloud they don't go to cloud because it's cheaper. It's not, it's actually more expensive. But they go to cloud to give them more agility because they want flexibility in the way they deploy applications as they go forward. And again, this pandemic has made a lot of companies realize they need to be more flexible in the way they deploy IT resources and faster in the way they bring up new services and applications. And so, but there's quite a few elements I say of cybersecurity and networking, which to me and to us are just features. You shouldn't be buying 40 different networking and cybersecurity vendors. You just can't staff and maintain that. And so we do see some things consolidated and converging into a single platform. We're a leader in the magic quadrant for SD WAN or a leader for network security or a visionary in WIFI. And many of the times in each of those magic quadrants, it's a different vendor or if it's the same vendor it's a different platform. For us it's the same platform in each one. And we pride ourselves in building not only best of breed capabilities, but also it's the same platform same management system, same API. And that gives the customer some capabilities in trying to manage that. What we say to customers is not a question of going from 40 vendors down to one That's no good, but go from 40 vendors down to maybe seven or eight platforms but make sure those platforms can inter-operate. They can share policy, and they can share threat intelligence. And that's why customers are looking to more of an architectural approach to cybersecurity but also they feel cybersecurity and networking are starting to converge at the same time. >> One of the biggest stories we're covering these days in 2021 besides the pandemic and how people are going to come out with a growth strategy that's secure, trusted and scalable, is the rise of the new executive in business in the enterprise where they're more tech savvy, right? You see executives like Satya and Intel. Intel, rise with the CEO of Microsoft. Andy Jassy rise up to the CEO of Amazon and you're seeing lawmakers in DC become more techie, less lawyer-oriented. So you seeing the rise of a business techie person. And I think this speaks to this holistic fabric philosophy you guys have as you talk to customers, when they look at the business impact of cybersecurity, for instance you mentioned solar winds earlier. I mean, these are deadly company killing events. This is real. So it's not just an IT problem. It's a business problem. How do you guys talk to customers, obviously that you have the security fabric and you're stitching things together? What's the conversation when you talk to customers like that? >> One interesting thing I've noticed, and I do quite a lot of customer calls each week, executive briefings and pretty early on, I noticed that both the infrastructure networking with the CIO team and the cyber security the CSO teams run on the same video call and that's got more and more as we've gone on. And I think what companies have realized is that if they want to move fast, they can't have these silos or this layering of capabilities. Then when they build something they needed to build it securely from day one and have that as a joint team. And so I don't think the teams are not merged but they're definitely working more closely. And I think the responsibility of reporting back into the board level gain is not just, it's just an IT project. Oh, by the way, we've got a security project. It's the same project. And I think that's again, points to this convergence of networking and security. >> Yeah. The silos got to be broken down. That's been a theme that's been more highlighted more than ever the benefits and the consequences of doing it or not doing it are clear to people especially at all levels of the corporation and tech. That brings up my favorite conversation. I always ask you whenever you're back on theCUBE giving me an update on what's going on with Fortinet I got to ask you how it's going with data, because data again is the consistent theme we always talk about, how we're exposing that data, how we're protecting that data, the role of data as people continue to get more data and figure out how to use machine learning how to use AI, how to democratize it all kinds of things are happening around data. What's the latest in your opinion? >> Yeah, I think there's progress, but I always say there's progress on both sides. The cyber criminals, big AI networks and machine learning just to counter what the cyber security companies are doing. I think right now we're processing hundreds of billions of events on a weekly basis. We've got the largest install base of network security out there over 500,000 customers. And so processing that event, it's going well in that we're able to determine really quickly for specific threat vectors in specific geographies that this battle good. It's about a good file. It's about a good URL. It's a vulnerability that's associated with Stevia. So we're able to kind of do use machine learning and volume against a specific application to get a good result. The key going forward for us, and I think for the whole industry is using the AI to start to discover campaigns in the wild like the solar winds ones, which is going on without anybody knowing. And that takes a lot of compute, takes a lot of threat intelligence and the AI piece needs to understand the relationship between the different elements of threat vectors, the command and controls and everything else to get you that result. I do think a couple of things. One is the cybersecurity industry, and I've said this before on this broadcast is are not walking together as they should. And sharing this threat intelligence across the industry. As soon as they find something, I actually applaud Microsoft on the solar wind side, they got information out really quickly and did well. And so we did the same. I think the industry needs to do more of that more proactively. And then I do think that, again, that I see a lot of companies cybersecurity companies claim a lot of things without any evidence that it works whatsoever. >> The world's got to call them out the consequences of not having, things work as they're advertised and or sharing them, your point about sharing. There should be some recognition for folks that are actually being fast on the sharing side. It's not like... We need our own militia against the bad guys. That's what's kind of going on here. So great stuff. I got to get your thoughts on the edge real quick. I know we talked about it briefly. You broke it down to three categories device users, network, and then apps in the cloud. The hottest topic on our recent CUBE on cloud editorial virtual event we had was the edge. And edge being industrial edge. And also, just the edge of the network with humans and users and devices. How are you seeing the current situation out there? A lot of hype, obviously the reality of that, that we're in a distributed network, the internet and the web and the cloud cloud natives coming. What's Fortinet's thoughts? What's your thoughts on how the edge is evolving and what people should pay attention to when they look at as they're architecturally planning for building out and managing and securing the edge? >> Given this a zero trust conversation on users and devices and given that people are familiar with the cloud and how they're going to use cloud. I think the network is becoming a really important very important area. And some people say, "Oh, don't worry about the network, just go to the cloud." The network is very important in providing that digital experience, but what's happening with the network is it's being stretched. It's being extended into factories. It's opening up on the winning side. You've got people now working from home. You've got that edge that used to be just the data center edge is now CloudEdge and SAS edge. And so you have to pay close attention to those edges. Now what you can't do is say, "Oh, I know we've got all those edges there. Let me overlay some security on each edge," because it's going to be different the way you deploy that in on a wifi device versus a CloudEdge. And so what you need to look towards is convergence of a capability either of the CloudEdge or the WAN edge or the LTE edge, it's got to be converged networking, and security. Otherwise it's too operationally inefficient, too complex to do. And so I think this is a really important subject and area for customers because as I said at the beginning, it provides that digital, we acquired a company called (indistinct) a few months ago, which actually focuses on the digital experience monitoring marketplace. What are users actually going through in terms of availability and quality and performance all the way from their device, all the way back into the application? I think that's very important. And the network edges have to be secured, where you can only do it through a converged solution. >> Yeah, that's a great point Architecturally, you might have a good technology or product look on paper but the complexity is the vulnerability. That's a really, really great point. John always great to have you on. Thanks for coming on, sharing the update. Before we end, I'll give you a quick minute to plug the news you had. Quickly put a plug in for the release you guys just put out around the new FortiOS 7.0 the features. What's the most important point about that release? Share, take a minute to explain. >> Yeah. FortiOS 7.0 is our big release our operating system is big news because it allows us FortiOS to sit at any edge across the network, whether it would be the one edge CloudEdge, data center edge. We've extended it into the CloudEdge with SASE in this release. We're also bringing in zero trust network access capabilities but overall it includes 300 features across the network, Endpoint in cloud. So a very important release for us and our customers and partners. >> John, great to have you on theCUBE again and get the news. You guys doing a great job, congratulations on your earnings but more importantly, congratulations on the product success and how you guys are thinking about it as a platform. That's what customers want. And you guys are continuing to do a great job there and congratulations from the news. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Jim. >> Again, John Furrier here inside theCUBE for CUBE Conversation getting the update on Fortinet and cybersecurity. Look for our cybersecurity coverage on SiliconANGLE.com. And of course, theCUBE's coverage continuing to talk to the thought leaders and the people making things happen, securing our networks and our cloud and deploying cloud native applications. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies updates from the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video Shannon Champion, of Dell Technologies. And the way we do things a lot of times, is, analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things. You might have questions on it. So, rather than me just wanting it, or you wanting yourself I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expertS two of our Cube alumni, happy to welcome you back to the program. Jon Siegal, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing, and Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Great to be here. >> All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done. We're actually holding a crowd chat, where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the experts and everything. And so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it. And with that, it's VxRail. Taking HCI to the extremes is the theme. We'll see what that means and everything. But without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. >> Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion, and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the Core, Edge and Cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options, as well as the latest in software innovations. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry, who've chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads, deploying nearly 100,000 nodes today. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability, and support new use cases, so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the Core, at the Edge or for the Cloud. In the Core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as In-Memory databases, like SAP HANA, and more AI and ML applications, with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs, by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the Cloud, it's all about Kubernetes, and how Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is VCF on VxRail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and Cloud native applications. And we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments, designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. >> Alright, so Shannon talked a bit about, the important role of IT Of course right now, with the global pandemic going on. It's really, calling in, essential things, putting, platforms to the test. So, I really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI, of course, in the early days, it was, HCI-only-does-VDI. Now, we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So, Jon, why don't we start with you as the what is (muffled speaking) >> Absolutely. So first of all, Stu, thank you, I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see The impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands, doing the antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So we are here to help that's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments, so to your points too, HCI, VxRail, VDI, that was an initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile, to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost effective cater to everything from knowlEdge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know from 250, desktops up to 1000. But again, back to your point VxRail, HCI, is well beyond VDI, it crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually. And VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, all the way to mission critical applications now with SAP HAN. So, this has changed the game for sure. But the range of work loads and the flexibility of the actual rules which really helping our existing customers during this pandemic. >> Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments, from the ones that we sure all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI. Now, the mission critical things now to Cloud native workloads as well, and the sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI. And specifically, VxRail gives them that ability to pivot. When these, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise? And I think that that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IP strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility, and ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. >> Excellent. Now I want to get into the announcements. What I want my team actually, your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo, so maybe they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they pivoted, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. >> Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms, to further enable IT modernization across Core, Edge and Cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only VxRail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and Lifecycle Management, across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent, simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid Cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies Cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware Cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options. And finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for Lifecycle Management. Let's get started with our new Cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies, Cloud Platform, bringing automation and financial models, similar to public Cloud to On-premises environments. VMware recently introduced Cloud foundation for Delta, which is based on vSphere 7.0. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7.0 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced VxRail 7.0 based on vSphere 7.0 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on we're embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere Lifecycle Manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how VxRail fits in in a moment for VCF 4 with Tom Xu, based on vSphere 7.0 customers now have access to a hybrid Cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. So containers are now first class citizens of your private Cloud alongside traditional VMs and this is now available with VCF 4.0, on VxRail 7.0. VxRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid Cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at Cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second Cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid Cloud, because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that Dell Technologies Cloud platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry level hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their Cloud deployment over time. VCF and VxRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry level Cloud to run general purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point. Both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a Consistent Cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred. You can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon, VDI, and vSphere with Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jon, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware is doing with vSphere 7.0. understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's VCF as that so we've seen the announcements, Dell, partnering in there it helps us connect that story between, really the VMware strategy and how they talk about Cloud and where does VxRail fit in that overall, Delta Cloud story? >> Absolutely. So first of all Stu, the VxRail course is integral to the Delta Cloud strategy. it's been VCF on VxRail equals the Delta Cloud platform. And this is our flagship on prem Cloud offering, that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any Cloud, whether it's On-prem, in the Edge or in the public Cloud. And we've seen the Dell tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid Cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days, it can be still up and running. And really, the Dell tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models, overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. This is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will, into especially critical in the Cloud. So the full automation of Lifecycle Management across the hardware and software stack across the VMware software stack, and in the Dell software and hardware supporting that, together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax. They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated, and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that those three value propositions together really fit well, with any on-prem Cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned, and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. >> Yeah, I love it. I remember in the early days talking with Dunn about CI, how does that fit in with Cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple years is, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, then this plays into what you're talking about. All right, we can let Shannon continue, we can get some more before we dig into some more analysis. >> That's good. >> Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates. that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options. covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D series. This is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the Edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management. But in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's adorable form factor that's extremely temperature-resilient, shock resistant, and easily portable. It even meets milspec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support, enabling you to rapidly react to business needs, no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real-time GPS mapping on the go, or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D series. >> All right, Chad we would love for you to bring us in a little bit that what customer requirement for bringing this to market. I remember seeing, Dell servers ruggedized, of course, Edge, really important growth to build on what Jon was talking about, Cloud. So, Chad, bring us inside, what was driving this piece of the offering? >> Sure Stu. Yeah, yeah, having been at the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these Edges or some of the more exotic locations. whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, submarine ships, military applications, places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails you're managing your Edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations, you can take a product that's designed for a data center where definitely controlling power cooling space and take it some of these places where you get sand blowing or seven to zero temperatures, could be Baghdad or it could be Ketchikan, Alaska. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude, but still offer that operational simplicity. Now military is one of those applications for the rugged platform. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat, it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range, but it can do an excursion up to 55 C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat sand, dust, vibration, it's very lightweight, short depth, in fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is a smallest form factor, obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks certified to withstand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. Pretty high. And this is sort of like wherever skydivers go to when they want the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to, to be for that that altitude. They're milspec-certified. So, MIL-STD-810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements. EMI and radiation immunity often. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember when we first launched it was like, "Oh, well everything's going to white boxes. "And it's going to be massive, "no differentiation between everything out there." If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public Clouds build their things, but I called it a few years or is there's a pure optimization. So you need to scale, you need similarities but you know you need to fit some, very specific requirements, lots of places, so, interesting stuff. Yeah, certifications, always keep your teams busy. Alright, let's get back to Shannon to view on the report. >> We are also introducing three other hardware-based additions. First, a new VxRail E Series model based on where the first time AMD EPYC processors. These single socket 1U nodes, offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 Cores, up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer aided design. Next, the addition of the latest Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional work flows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC persistent memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity, even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. Alright, let's finally dig into our HCI system software, which is the Core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joining engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best in class hardware, married with VMware HCI software, either vSAN or VCF. But what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper converged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI system software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver seamless, automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI system software shown around the arc here that include the extra manager, full stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts. And I will tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on the LCM being a key feature to the vSphere 7.0 earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail Lifecycle Management. The LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that Lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of Lifecycle Management and VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective, and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages, and reduced overall cost of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent Lifecycle Management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters and continuously validated states while minimizing risks and operational costs. How do we ensure Continuously validated states for VxRail. VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single click non disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing. taking you to the next VxRail version of your choice, while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades. No matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging simply choose any VxRail version you desire. And be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. >> All right, so Chad, the lifecycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is, not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing, reminds me back the early vSAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why, 2020 Lifecycle Management still, a very important piece, especially in the VM family line. >> Yes, Stu, I think it's sexy, but, I'm pretty big nerd. (all laughing) Yeah, this is really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important, the larger the deployments come, when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all the software all together in tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across Each major release for patches, express patches, that's about 7000 hours for each of those. So, obviously, there's a lot of parallelism. And we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality. And one of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously, a huge amount of automation. And we've talked about that investment to execute those tests. That's one worth of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2000 VxRail units in our testbed across the US, Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. >> Yeah, well, absolutely, it's super important not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this actually a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas, he was an existing VxRail customer. And he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work-from-home initiative, as well as we get to hear in his words the value of what Lifecycle Management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please? >> It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we mature, I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance, really justified why I was driving progress. So fervently why it was so urgent today. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt With VxRail in place, in a week we spun up hundreds of instant balls. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half, for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that work, a little lagging or a little conservative, or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> Alright, so great, Richard, you talked a bunch about the the efficiencies that that the IT put in place, how about that, that overall just managed, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. need to be able to do things much simpler? So how does the overall Lifecycle Management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, It took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive, when we did make change, it overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. That wasn't cost efficient. And then simple things like, I've worked for multi billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production, simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on Lifecycle Management because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> All right, well, nothing better than hearing it straight from the end user, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And, if you heard him he said, if this is his, before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands, if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the CrowdChat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow up but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement he can and got for us though. Let's roll the final video clip. >> In our latest software release VxRail 4.7.510, We continue to add new automation and self service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades, to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows, as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version, or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rate than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data sets modernization extending HCI to harsh Edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure. VxRail is there delivering a turn-key experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation and Lifecycle Management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid Cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across Core, Edge and Cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail new features and functionality and sCore some sweet digital swag while you're at it. Delivered via an augmented reality app. All you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is/passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet The Experts sessions available for a limited time. First come first served, just go to vxrail.is/expertsession to learn more. >> All right, well, obviously, with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the CrowdChat right after this. But Jon, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having done Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet The Experts sessions over the next couple weeks, and we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you. We're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive, and really looking forward to, having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. >> All right, well, Jon and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it if you're watching this on demand. You can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net/vxrailrocks. For myself, Shannon on the video, Jon, Chad, Andrew, man in the booth there, thank you so much for watching, and go ahead and join the CrowdChat.

>> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies updates from the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video Shannon Champion, of Dell Technologies. And the way we do things a lot of times, is, analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things. You might have questions on it. So, rather than me just wanting it, or you wanting yourself I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expertS two of our Cube alumni, happy to welcome you back to the program. Jon Siegal, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing, and Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Great to be here. >> All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done. We're actually holding a crowd chat, where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the experts and everything. And so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it. And with that, it's VxRail. Taking HCI to the extremes is the theme. We'll see what that means and everything. But without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. >> Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion, and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the Core, Edge and Cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options, as well as the latest in software innovations. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry, who've chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads, deploying nearly 100,000 nodes today. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability, and support new use cases, so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the Core, at the Edge or for the Cloud. In the Core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as In-Memory databases, like SAP HANA, and more AI and ML applications, with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs, by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the Cloud, it's all about Kubernetes, and how Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is VCF on VxRail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and Cloud native applications. And we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments, designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. >> Alright, so Shannon talked a bit about, the important role of IT Of course right now, with the global pandemic going on. It's really, calling in, essential things, putting, platforms to the test. So, I really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI, of course, in the early days, it was, HCI-only-does-VDI. Now, we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So, Jon, why don't we start with you as the what is (muffled speaking) >> Absolutely. So first of all, Stu, thank you, I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see The impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands, doing the antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So we are here to help that's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments, so to your points too, HCI, VxRail, VDI, that was an initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile, to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost effective cater to everything from knowlEdge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know from 250, desktops up to 1000. But again, back to your point VxRail, HCI, is well beyond VDI, it crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually. And VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, all the way to mission critical applications now with SAP HAN. So, this has changed the game for sure. But the range of work loads and the flexibility of the actual rules which really helping our existing customers during this pandemic. >> Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments, from the ones that we sure all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI. Now, the mission critical things now to Cloud native workloads as well, and the sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI. And specifically, VxRail gives them that ability to pivot. When these, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise? And I think that that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IP strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility, and ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. >> Excellent. Now I want to get into the announcements. What I want my team actually, your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo, so maybe they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they pivoted, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. >> Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms, to further enable IT modernization across Core, Edge and Cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only VxRail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and Lifecycle Management, across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent, simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid Cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies Cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware Cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options. And finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for Lifecycle Management. Let's get started with our new Cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies, Cloud Platform, bringing automation and financial models, similar to public Cloud to On-premises environments. VMware recently introduced Cloud foundation for Delta, which is based on vSphere 7.0. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7.0 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced VxRail 7.0 based on vSphere 7.0 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on we're embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere Lifecycle Manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how VxRail fits in in a moment for VCF 4 with Tom Xu, based on vSphere 7.0 customers now have access to a hybrid Cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. So containers are now first class citizens of your private Cloud alongside traditional VMs and this is now available with VCF 4.0, on VxRail 7.0. VxRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid Cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at Cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second Cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid Cloud, because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that Dell Technologies Cloud platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry level hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their Cloud deployment over time. VCF and VxRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry level Cloud to run general purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point. Both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a Consistent Cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred. You can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon, VDI, and vSphere with Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jon, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware is doing with vSphere 7.0. understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's VCF as that so we've seen the announcements, Dell, partnering in there it helps us connect that story between, really the VMware strategy and how they talk about Cloud and where does VxRail fit in that overall, Delta Cloud story? >> Absolutely. So first of all Stu, the VxRail course is integral to the Delta Cloud strategy. it's been VCF on VxRail equals the Delta Cloud platform. And this is our flagship on prem Cloud offering, that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any Cloud, whether it's On-prem, in the Edge or in the public Cloud. And we've seen the Dell tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid Cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days, it can be still up and running. And really, the Dell tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models, overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. This is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will, into especially critical in the Cloud. So the full automation of Lifecycle Management across the hardware and software stack across the VMware software stack, and in the Dell software and hardware supporting that, together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax. They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated, and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that those three value propositions together really fit well, with any on-prem Cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned, and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. >> Yeah, I love it. I remember in the early days talking with Dunn about CI, how does that fit in with Cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple years is, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, then this plays into what you're talking about. All right, we can let Shannon continue, we can get some more before we dig into some more analysis. >> That's good. >> Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates. that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options. covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D series. This is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the Edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management. But in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's adorable form factor that's extremely temperature-resilient, shock resistant, and easily portable. It even meets milspec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support, enabling you to rapidly react to business needs, no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real-time GPS mapping on the go, or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D series. >> All right, Chad we would love for you to bring us in a little bit that what customer requirement for bringing this to market. I remember seeing, Dell servers ruggedized, of course, Edge, really important growth to build on what Jon was talking about, Cloud. So, Chad, bring us inside, what was driving this piece of the offering? >> Sure Stu. Yeah, yeah, having been at the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these Edges or some of the more exotic locations. whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, submarine ships, military applications, places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails you're managing your Edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations, you can take a product that's designed for a data center where definitely controlling power cooling space and take it some of these places where you get sand blowing or seven to zero temperatures, could be Baghdad or it could be Ketchikan, Alaska. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude, but still offer that operational simplicity. Now military is one of those applications for the rugged platform. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat, it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range, but it can do an excursion up to 55 C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat sand, dust, vibration, it's very lightweight, short depth, in fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is a smallest form factor, obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks certified to withstand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. Pretty high. And this is sort of like wherever skydivers go to when they want the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to, to be for that that altitude. They're milspec-certified. So, MIL-STD-810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements. EMI and radiation immunity often. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember when we first launched it was like, "Oh, well everything's going to white boxes. "And it's going to be massive, "no differentiation between everything out there." If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public Clouds build their things, but I called it a few years or is there's a pure optimization. So you need to scale, you need similarities but you know you need to fit some, very specific requirements, lots of places, so, interesting stuff. Yeah, certifications, always keep your teams busy. Alright, let's get back to Shannon to view on the report. >> We are also introducing three other hardware-based additions. First, a new VxRail E Series model based on where the first time AMD EPYC processors. These single socket 1U nodes, offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 Cores, up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer aided design. Next, the addition of the latest Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional work flows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC persistent memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity, even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. Alright, let's finally dig into our HCI system software, which is the Core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joining engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best in class hardware, married with VMware HCI software, either vSAN or VCF. But what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper converged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI system software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver seamless, automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI system software shown around the arc here that include the extra manager, full stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts. And I will tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on the LCM being a key feature to the vSphere 7.0 earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail Lifecycle Management. The LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that Lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of Lifecycle Management and VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective, and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages, and reduced overall cost of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent Lifecycle Management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters and continuously validated states while minimizing risks and operational costs. How do we ensure Continuously validated states for VxRail. VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single click non disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing. taking you to the next VxRail version of your choice, while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades. No matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging simply choose any VxRail version you desire. And be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. >> All right, so Chad, the lifecycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is, not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing, reminds me back the early vSAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why, 2020 Lifecycle Management still, a very important piece, especially in the VM family line. >> Yes, Stu, I think it's sexy, but, I'm pretty big nerd. (all laughing) Yeah, this is really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important, the larger the deployments come, when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all the software all together in tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across Each major release for patches, express patches, that's about 7000 hours for each of those. So, obviously, there's a lot of parallelism. And we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality. And one of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously, a huge amount of automation. And we've talked about that investment to execute those tests. That's one worth of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2000 VxRail units in our testbed across the US, Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. >> Yeah, well, absolutely, it's super important not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this actually a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas, he was an existing VxRail customer. And he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work-from-home initiative, as well as we get to hear in his words the value of what Lifecycle Management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please? >> It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we mature, I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance, really justified why I was driving progress. So fervently why it was so urgent today. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt With VxRail in place, in a week we spun up hundreds of instant balls. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half, for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that work, a little lagging or a little conservative, or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> Alright, so great, Richard, you talked a bunch about the the efficiencies that that the IT put in place, how about that, that overall just managed, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. need to be able to do things much simpler? So how does the overall Lifecycle Management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, It took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive, when we did make change, it overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. That wasn't cost efficient. And then simple things like, I've worked for multi billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production, simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on Lifecycle Management because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> All right, well, nothing better than hearing it straight from the end user, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And, if you heard him he said, if this is his, before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands, if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the CrowdChat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow up but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement he can and got for us though. Let's roll the final video clip. >> In our latest software release VxRail 4.7.510, We continue to add new automation and self service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades, to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows, as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version, or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rate than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data sets modernization extending HCI to harsh Edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure. VxRail is there delivering a turn-key experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation and Lifecycle Management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid Cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across Core, Edge and Cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail new features and functionality and sCore some sweet digital swag while you're at it. Delivered via an augmented reality app. All you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is/passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet The Experts sessions available for a limited time. First come first served, just go to vxrail.is/expertsession to learn more. >> All right, well, obviously, with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the CrowdChat right after this. But Jon, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having done Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet The Experts sessions over the next couple weeks, and we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you. We're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive, and really looking forward to, having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. >> All right, well, Jon and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it if you're watching this on demand. You can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net/vxrailrocks. For myself, Shannon on the video, Jon, Chad, Andrew, man in the booth there, thank you so much for watching, and go ahead and join the CrowdChat.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to the Palo Alto Studios, theCube. I'm John Furrier, we here for a special Cube Conversation and special report, big news from VMware to discuss the launch of the availability of vSphere 7. I'm here with Krish Prasad SVP and General Manager of the vSphere Business and Cloud Platform Business Unit. And Paul Turner, VP of vSphere Product Management. Guys, thanks for coming in and talking about the big news. >> Thank you for having us. >> You guys announced some interesting things back in March around containers, Kubernetes and vSphere. Krish, tell us about the hard news what's being announced? >> Today we are announcing the general availability of vSphere 7. John, it's by far the biggest release that we have done in the last 10 years. We premiered it as project Pacific few months ago. With this release, we are putting Kubernetes native support into the vSphere platform. What that allows us to do is give customers the ability to run both modern applications based on Kubernetes and containers, as well as traditional VM based applications on the same platform. And it also allows the IT departments to provide their developers, cloud operating model using the VMware cloud foundation that is powered by this release. This is a key part of our (murmurs) portfolio solutions and products that we announced this year. And it is targeted fully at the developers of modern applications. >> And the specific news is vSphere.. >> Seven is generally available. >> Generally a vSphere 7? >> Yes. >> So let's on the trend line here, the relevance is what? What's the big trend line, that this is riding obviously we saw the announcements at VMware last year, and throughout the year, there's a lot of buzz. Pat Gelsinger says, "There's a big wave here with Kubernetes." What does this announcement mean for you guys with the marketplace trend? >> Yes what Kubernetes is really about is people trying to have an agile operation, they're trying to modernize the IT applications. And the best way to do that, is build off your current platform, expand it and make it a an innovative, an Agile Platform for you to run Kubernetes applications and VM applications together. And not just that customers are also looking at being able to manage a hybrid cloud environment, both on-prem and public cloud together. So they want to be able to evolve and modernize their application stack, but modernize their infrastructure stack, which means hybrid cloud operations with innovative applications Kubernetes or container based applications and VMs. >> What's exciting about this trend, Krish, we were talking about this at VMworld last year, we had many conversations around cloud native, but you're seeing cloud native becoming the operating model for modern business. I mean, this is really the move to the cloud. If you look at the successful enterprises, leaving the suppliers, the on premises piece, if not moved to the cloud native marketplace technologies, the on-premise isn't effective. So it's not so much on-premises going away, we know it's not, but it's turning into cloud native. This is the move to the cloud generally, this is a big wave. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, John, if you think about it on-premise, we have, significant market share, we are by far the leader in the market. And so what we are trying to do with this, is to allow customers to use the current platform they are using, but bring their modern application development on top of the same platform. Today, customers tend to set up stacks, which are different, so you have a Kubernetes stack, you have stack for the traditional applications, you have operators and administrators who are specialized in Kubernetes on one side, and you have the traditional VM operators on the other side. With this move, what we are saying is that you can be on the same common platform, you can have the same administrators who are used to administering the environment that you already had, and at the same time, offer the developers what they like, which is Kubernetes dial-tone, that they can come and deploy their applications on the same platform that you use for traditional applications. >> Yeah, Paul, Pat said Kubernetes can be the dial-tone of the internet. Most millennials might even know what dial-tone is. But what he meant is that's the key fabric, that's going to orchestrate. And we've heard over the years skill gap, skill gap, not a lot of skills out there. But when you look at the reality of skills gap, it's really about skills gaps and shortages, not enough people, most CIOs and chief information security officers, that we talk to, say, I don't want to fork my development teams, I don't want to have three separate teams, I don't have to, I want to have automation, I want an operating model that's not going to be fragmented. This kind of speaks to this whole idea of, interoperability and multi cloud. This seems to be the next big way behind hybrid. >> I think it is the next big wave, the thing that customers are looking for is a cloud operating model. They like the ability for developers to be able to invoke new services on demand in a very agile way. And we want to bring that cloud operating model to on-prem, to Google Cloud, to Amazon cloud to Microsoft Cloud to any of our VCPP partners. You get the same cloud operating experience. And it's all driven by a Kubernetes based dial-tone that's effective and available within this platform. So by bringing a single infrastructure platform that can run in this hybrid manner, and give you the cloud operating agility the developers are looking for, that's what's key in version seven. >> Does Pat Gelsinger mean when he says dial-tone of the internet Kubernetes. Does he mean always on? or what does he mean specifically? Just that it's always available? what's the meaning behind that phrase? >> The first thing he means is that developers can come to the infrastructure, which is, The VMware Cloud Foundation, and be able to work with a set of API's that are Kubernetes API's. So developers understand that, they are looking for that. They understand that dial-tone, right? And you come to our VMware cloud foundation that runs across all these clouds, you get the same API set that you can use to deploy that application. >> Okay, so let's get into the value here of vSphere 7, how does VMware and vSphere 7 specifically help customers? Isn't just bolting on Kubernetes to vSphere, some will say is that's simple or (murmurs) you're running product management no, it's not that easy. Some people say, "He is bolting Kubernetes on vSphere." >> it's not that easy. So one of the things, if anybody has actually tried deploying Kubernetes, first, it's highly complicated. And so definitely one of the things that we're bringing is you call it a bolt on, but it's certainly not like that we are making it incredibly simple. You talked about IT operational shortages, customers want to be able to deploy Kubernetes environments in a very simple way. The easiest way that you can do that is take your existing environment that route 90% of IT, and just turn on the Kubernetes dial-tone, and it is as simple as that. Now, it's much more than that, in version seven, as well, we're bringing in a couple things that are very important. You also have to be able to manage at scale, just like you would in the cloud, you want to be able to have infrastructure, almost self manage and upgrade and lifecycle manage itself. And so we're bringing in a new way of managing infrastructure so that you can manage just large scale environments, both on-premise and public cloud environments at scale. And then associated with that as well is you must make it secure. So there's a lot of enhancements we're building into the platform around what we call intrinsic security, which is how can we actually build in a truly a trusted platform for your developers and IT. >> I was just going to touch on your point about this, the shortage of IT staff, and how we are addressing that here. The way we are addressing that, is that the IT administrators that are used to administering vSphere can continue to administer this enhanced platform with Kubernetes, the same way they administered the older releases, so they don't have to learn anything new. They are just working the same way. We are not changing any tools, process, technologies. >> So same as it was before? >> Same as before. >> More capability. >> More capability. And developers can come in and they see new capabilities around Kubernetes. So it's a best of both worlds. >> And what was the pain point that you guys are solving? Obviously, the ease of use is critical, obviously, operationally, I get that. As you look at the cloud native developer cycles, infrastructure as code means, as app developers, on the other side, taking advantage of it. What's the real pain point that you guys are solving with vSphere 7. >> So I think it's multiple factors. So first is we've talked about agility a few times, there is DevOps is a real trend inside an IT organizations. They need to be able to build and deliver applications much quicker, they need to be able to respond to the business. And to do that, what they are doing is they need infrastructure that is on demand. So what we're really doing in the core Kubernetes kind of enablement, is allowing that on demand fulfillment of infrastructure, so you get that agility that you need. But it's not just tied to modern applications. It's also all of your existing business applications and your monitoring applications on one platform, which means that you've got a very simple and low cost way of managing large scale IT infrastructure. So that's a huge piece as well. And then I do want to emphasize a couple of other things. We're also bringing in new capabilities for AI and ML applications for SAP HANA databases, where we can actually scale to some of the largest business applications out there. And you have all of the capabilities like the GPU awareness and FPGA awareness that we built into the platform, so that you can truly run this as the fastest accelerated platform for your most extreme applications. So you've got the ability to run those applications, as well as your Kubernetes and Container based application. >> That's the accelerated application innovation piece of the announcement right? >> That's right, yeah. It's quite powerful that we've actually brought in, basically new hardware awareness into the product and expose that to your developers, whether that's through containers or through VMs. >> Krish, I want to get your thoughts on the ecosystem and then the community but I want to just dig into one feature you mentioned. I get the lifestyle improvement, life lifecycle improvement, I get the application acceleration innovation, but the intrinsic security is interesting. Could you take a minute, explain what that is? >> Yeah, so there's a few different aspects. One is looking at how can we actually provide a trusted environment. And that means that you need to have a way that the key management that even your administrator is not able to get keys to the kingdom, as we would call it. You want to have a controlled environment that, some of the worst security challenges inside in some of the companies has been your internal IT staff. So you've got to have a way that you can run a trusted environment independent. We've got vSphere Trust Authority that we released in version seven, that actually gives you a secure environment for actually managing your keys to the kingdom effectively your certificates. So you've got this, continuous runtime. Now, not only that, we've actually gone and taken our carbon black features, and we're actually building in full support for carbon black into the platform. So that you've got native security of even your application ecosystem. >> Yeah, that's been coming up a lot conversations, the carbon black and the security piece. Krish obviously vSphere everywhere having that operating model makes a lot of sense, but you have a lot of touch points, you got cloud, hyper scalars got the edge, you got partners. >> We have that dominant market share on private cloud. We are on Amazon, as you will know, Azure, Google, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud. So all the major clouds, there is a vSphere stack running. So it allows customers if you think about it, it allows customers to have the same operating model, irrespective of where their workload is residing. They can set policies, components, security, they set it once, it applies to all their environments across this hybrid cloud, and it's all supported by our VMware Cloud Foundation, which is powered by vSphere 7. >> Yeah, I think having that, the cloud as API based having connection points and having that reliable easy to use is critical operating model. Alright guys, so let's summarize the announcement. What do you guys their takeaway from this vSphere 7, what is the bottom line? What's it really mean? (Paul laughs) >> I think what we're, if we look at it for developers, we are democratizing Kubernetes. We already are in 90% of IT environments out there are running vSphere. We are bringing to every one of those vSphere environments and all of the virtual infrastructure administrators, they can now manage Kubernetes environments, you can you can manage it by simply upgrading your environment. That's a really nice position rather than having independent kind of environments you need to manage. So I think that is one of the key things that's in here. The other thing though, I don't think any other platform out there, other than vSphere that can run in your data center in Google's, in Amazon's, in Microsoft's, in thousands of VCPP partners. You have one hybrid platform that you can run with. And that's got operational benefits, that's got efficiency benefits, that's got agility benefits. >> Great. >> Yeah, I would just add to that and say that, look, we want to meet customers, where they are in their journey. And we want to enable them to make business decisions without technology getting in the way. And I think the announcement that we made today, with vSphere 7, is going to help them accelerate their digital transformation journey, without making trade offs on people, process and technology. And there is more to come. Look, we are laser focused on making our platform the best in the industry, for running all kinds of applications and the best platform for a hybrid and multi cloud. And so you will see more capabilities coming in the future. Stay tuned. >> Well, one final question on this news announcement, which is awesome, vSphere, core product for you guys, if I'm the customer, tell me why it's going to be important five years from now? >> Because of what I just said, it is the only platform that is going to be running across all the public clouds, which will allow you to have an operational model that is consistent across the cloud. So think about it. If you go to Amazon native, and then you have a workload in Azure, you're going to have different tools, different processes, different people trained to work with those clouds. But when you come to VMware and you use our Cloud Foundation, you have one operating model across all these environments, and that's going to be game changing. >> Great stuff, great stuff. Thanks for unpacking that for us. Congratulations on the announcement. >> Thank you. >> vSphere 7, news special report here, inside theCube cCnversation, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We are having a very special Cube Conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil, if you will of the new VMware vSphere 7.0 we're going to get a little bit more of a technical deep dive here today we're excited to have longtime Cube alumni, Kit Colbert here, is the VP and CTO of Cloud Platform at VMware. Kit, great to see you. And, and new to theCube, Jared Rosoff. He's a Senior Director of Product Management VMware, and I'm guessing had a whole lot to do with this build. So Jared, first off, congratulations for birthing this new release. And great to have you on board. >> Feels pretty good, great to be here. >> All right, so let's just jump into it. From kind of a technical aspect, what is so different about vSphere 7? >> Yeah, great. So vSphere 7, bakes Kubernetes right into the virtualization platform. And so this means that as a developer, I can now use Kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment. And it means as an IT admin, I'm actually able to deliver Kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run. >> So I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that might be coming with the acquisition of the FTO team. So really exciting news. And I think Kit you tease it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments, regardless of whether that's on-prem, public cloud, this public cloud, that public cloud. So this really is the realization of that vision. >> It is, yeah. So, we talked at VMworld about project Pacific, this technology preview, and as Jared mentioned, what that was, is how do we take Kubernetes and really build it into vSphere. As you know, we had Hybrid Cloud Vision for quite a while now. How do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible. Now part of the broader VMware Cloud Foundation portfolio. And as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud on-premises, at the edge, with service providers, there's a secondary question, how do we actually evolve that platform? So it can support not just the existing workloads, but also modern workloads as well. >> All right. So I think you brought some pictures for us a little demo. So why (murmurs) and let's see what it looks like. You guys can keep the demo? >> Narrator: So we're going to start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware Cloud Foundation for and vSphere 7. So what you're seeing here is a developer is actually using Kubernetes to deploy Kubernetes. The selfie in watermelon, (all laughing) So the developer uses this Kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole Kubernetes cluster. And the whole developer experience now is driven by Kubernetes. They can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of Kubernetes API's and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere. And so, that's not just provisioning workloads, though. This is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed, so go look at, hey, what's the IP address that got allocated to that? Or what's the CPU load on this workload I just deployed. On top of Kubernetes, we've integrated a Container Registry into vSphere. So here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images. And one of the amazing things about this is, from an infrastructure is code standpoint. Now, the developers infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control. I can check in, not just my code, but also the description of the Kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app. So now we're looking at sort of a side by side view, where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application and on the left hand side, we see vCenter. And what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through Kubernetes, those are showing up right inside of the vCenter console. And so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things, the same names, and so this means what a developer calls their IT department and says, "Hey, I got a problem with my database," we don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about. They got the same name, they see the same information. So what we're going to do is that, we're going to push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience. And what you'll see here is that vCenter is the vCenter you've already known and love, but what's different is that now it's much more application focused. So here we see a new screen inside of vCenter vSphere namespaces. And so these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications, like the whole distributed system now as a single object inside of vCenter. And when I click into one of these apps, this is a managed object inside of vSphere. I can click on permissions, and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces. I can hook this into my active directory infrastructure, so I can use the same, corporate credentials to access the system, I tap into all my existing storage. So, this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers. I can use storage policy based management to provide storage for Kubernetes. And it's hooked in with things like DRS, right? So I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory, and all that's going to be enforced by DRS inside the cluster. And again, as an admin, I'm just using vSphere, but to the developer, they're getting a whole Kubernetes experience out of this platform. Now, vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the Kubernetes environment. So besides, seeing the VMs and things that developers have deployed, I can see all of the desired state specifications, all the different Kubernetes objects that the developers have created, the compute network and storage objects, they're all integrated right inside the vCenter console. And so once again, from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective, this data is invaluable, often saves hours, just to try to figure out what we're even talking about more trying to resolve an issue. So, as you can see, this is all baked right into vCenter. The vCenter experience isn't transformed a lot, we get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say, "Where's the Kubernetes?" And they're surprised. They're like, they've been managing Kubernetes all this time, it just looks, it looks like the vSphere experience they've already got. But all those Kubernetes objects, the pods and containers, Kubernetes clusters, load balancer stores, they're all represented right there natively in the vCenter UI. And so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins. >> Well, it's pretty wild. It really builds off the vision that again, I think you kind of outlined Kit teased out at VMworld, which was, the IT still sees vSphere, which is what they want to see, what they're used to seeing, but (murmurs) see Kubernetes and really bringing those together in a unified environment. So that, depending on what your job is and what you're working on, that's what you're going to see in this kind of unified environment. >> Yeah, as the demo showed, (clears throat) it is still vSphere at the center, but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere, Kubernetes base one, which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks, as well as the traditional vSphere interface API's, which is great for VI admins and IT operations. >> And then it really is interesting too, you tease that a lot. That was a good little preview, people knew they're watching. But you talked about really cloud journey and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are that are running in their classic VMs, and then kind of the modern, kind of cloud native applications built on Kubernetes. And you outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum, and getting from one to the other, but not really about kind of the messy middle, if you will, and this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum, they can move their workloads or move their apps. >> Yeah, I think we think a lot about it like that, we talk to customers, and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go, their future state architecture. And that involves embracing cloud and involves modernizing applications. And you know, as you mentioned, it's challenging for them. Because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of these two extremes either you're here where you are, kind of the old current world, and you got the bright Nirvana future on the far end there. And they believe that the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other, they have to kind of change everything out from underneath you. And that's obviously very expensive, very time consuming, and very error prone as well. There's a lot of things that can go wrong there. And so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really to your point as you call it, the messy middle, I would say it's more like, how do we offer stepping stones along that journey? Rather than making this one giant leap we had to invest all this time and resources? How can we enable people to make smaller incremental steps, each of which have a lot of business value, but don't have a huge amount of cost? >> And it's really enabling kind of this next gen application, where there's a lot of things that are different about it. But one of the fundamental things is where now the application defines the resources that it needs to operate, versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities what the application can do. And that's where everybody is moving as quickly as makes sense. As you said, not all applications need to make that move, but most of them should, and most of them are, and most of them are at least making that journey. Do you see that? >> Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that, certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from, looking historically at how we managed infrastructure, one of the things we enable in vSphere 7, is how we manage applications. So a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings, or, your resource allocation, you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure, you talk about it in terms of, this VM is going to be encrypted, or this VM is going to have this firewall rule. And what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management. So you actually look at an application and say, I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU. Or I want this application to have these security rules on it. And so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level. >> And like, I can even zoom back a little bit there and say, if you look back, one thing we did was something like vSAN before that people had to put policies on a LAN an actual storage LAN, and a storage array. And then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array, inherited certain policies. And so, vSAN will turn that around allows you to put the policy on the VM. But what Jared is talking about now is that for a modern workload, a modern workloads is not a single VM, it's a collection of different things. You got some containers in there, some VMs, probably distributed, maybe even some on-prem, some on the cloud. And so how do you start managing that more holistically? And this notion of really having an application as a first class entity that you can now manage inside of vSphere is really powerful and very simplified one. >> And why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view, which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time. That's a nice big word, but when the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications. And more importantly, how do you continue to evolve them and change them, based on on either customer demands or competitive demands, or just changes in the marketplace. >> Yeah when you look at something like a modern app that maybe has 100 VMs that are part of it, and you take something like compliance. So today, if I want to check if this app is compliant, I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down hardened and secured the right way. But now instead, what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of vCenter, set the right security settings on that and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are going to inherit that stuff. So it really simplifies that. It also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications. If you think about vCenter today, you might log in and see 1000 VMs in your inventory. When you log in with vSphere 7, what you see is few dozen applications. So a single admin can manage much larger pool of infrastructure, many more applications than they could before. Because we automate so much of that operation. >> And it's not just the scale part, which is obviously really important, but it's also the rate of change. And this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done, done, i.e. building applications, while at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security performance concerns, these sorts of elements. And so being by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level, and then have the developer be able to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction. It actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better. They're not stepping over each other. But in fact, now they can both get what they need to get done, done, and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe, and in compliance, and so forth. >> So there's a lot more to this, this is a very significant release, right? Again, a lot of foreshadowing, if you go out and read the tea leaves, it's a pretty significant kind of re-architecture of many, many parts of vSphere. So beyond the Kubernetes, kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out in this very significant release? >> Yeah, that's a great question, because we tend to talk a lot about Kubernetes, what was Project Pacific, but it's now just part of vSphere. And certainly, that is a very large aspect of it. But to your point, vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features. And so there is a demo here, let's pull up some slides. And we're ready to take a look at what's there. So, outside of Kubernetes, there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere 7. So the first first one is simplified Lifecycle Management. And then really focused on security as a second one, and then applications as well, but both including, the cloud native apps that could fit in the Kubernetes bucket as well as others. And so we go on the first one, the first column there, there's a ton of stuff that we're doing, around simplifying life cycles. So let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics. So we have this new technology vSphere Lifecycle Management, vLCM. And the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades, lifecycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts? How do we make them more declarative, with a single image, you can now specify for an entire cluster. We find that a lot of our vSphere admins, especially at larger scales, have a really tough time doing this. There's a lot of ins and outs today, it's somewhat tricky to do. And so we want to make it really, really simple and really easy to automate as well. >> So if you're doing Kubernetes on Kubernetes, I suppose you're going to have automation on automation, because upgrading to the sevens is probably not an inconsequential task. >> And yeah, and going forward and allowing you as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great VCR functionality at a more rapid clip. How do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well. >> Next big thing you talk about is security. >> Yep >> We just got back from RSA. Thank goodness, we got that show in before all the badness started. But everyone always talks about security is got to be baked in from the bottom to the top. Talk about kind of the the changes in the security. >> So I've done a lot of things around security, things around identity federation, things around simplifying certificate management, dramatic simplifications they're across the board. What I want to focus on here, on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere Trust Authority. And so with that one, what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces, and really ensure there's a trusted computing base? When we talk to customers, what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats, including even internal ones, right? How do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted. And obviously, if you're hiring someone, you somewhat trust them. How do you implement the concept of least privilege. >> Jeff: Or zero trust (murmurs) >> Exactly. So they idea with trust authority that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down ensure a fully secure, those can be managed by a special vCenter Server, which is in turn very locked down, only a few people have access to it. And then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that, okay, this untrusted host haven't been modified, we know they're okay, so they're okay to actually run workloads or they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing. So it's this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment. >> And then the third kind of leg of the stool is, just better leveraging, kind of a more complex asset ecosystem, if you will, with things like FPGAs and GPUs, and kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application can draw the appropriate resources as needed. So you've done a lot of work there as well. >> Yeah, there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space, as you mentioned, all sorts of accelerators coming out. We all know about GPUs, and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases, not to mention 3D rendering. But FPGAs, and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there. And so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out, they have a lot of the same problems that we saw in the very early days of virtualization, i.e. silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using. And what you find is, all the things we found before you find very low utilization rates, inability to automate that, inability to manage that well, putting security and compliance and so forth. And so this is really the reality that we see in most customers and it's funny because, and sometimes you think, "Wow, shouldn't we be past this?" As an industry should we have solved this already, we did this with virtualization. But as it turns out, the virtualization we did was for compute and then storage network. But now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators. And so that's where this bit fusion technology that we're including now with vSphere, really comes to the forefront. So if you see in the current slide, we're showing here, the challenges that just these separate pools of infrastructure, how do you manage all that? And so if the we go to the next slide, what we see is that, with that fusion, you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization, you can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together. So they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use. We can, have multiple people sharing a GPU, we can do it very dynamically. And the great part of it is that it's really easy for these folks to use. They don't even need to think about it, in fact, integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows. >> So it's free, it's pretty cheap, because the classifications of the assets now are much, much larger, much varied and much more workload specific right. That's really the opportunity slash challenge there. >> They are a lot more diverse And so like, a couple other things just, I don't have a slide on it, but just things we're doing to our base capabilities, things around DRS and vMotion. Really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads, right. So you look at some of the massive SAP HANA or Oracle databases, and how do we ensure that vMotion can scale to handle those, without impacting their performance or anything else there? Making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing, and so forth. So a lot of the stuff not just kind of brand new, cool new accelerator stuff, but it's also how do we ensure the core as people have already been running for many years, we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well. >> All right. So Jared I give you the last word. You've been working on this for a while. There's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys. What do you tell them? What should they be excited about? What are you excited for them in this new release? >> I think what I'm excited about is how IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps. I think today, you look at all of these organizations, and what ends up happening is, the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT infrastructure. And so, now, I think we can shift that story around. I think that there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and app dev teams are going to be having over the next couple of years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team? Make you more productive, give you better performance, availability, disaster recovery and these kinds of capabilities. >> Awesome. Well, Jared, congratulation and Kit both of you for getting the release out. I'm sure it was a heavy lift. And it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it. And thanks for for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep dive into this ton more resources for people that didn't want to go down into the weeds. So thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, he's Jared, he's Kit, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube. We're in the Palo Alto Studios. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music) >> Hi, and welcome to a special Cube Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're digging into VMware vSphere 7 announcement. We've had conversations with some of the executives some of the technical people, but we know that there's no better way to really understand the technology than to talk to some of the practitioners that are using it. So really happy to have joined me on the program. I have Philip Buckley-Mellor, who is an infrastructure designer with British Telecom joining me digitally from across the pond. Phil, thanks so much for joining us. >> Nice too. >> Alright, so Phil, let's start of course, British Telecom, I think most people know, you know what BT is and it's, really sprawling company. Tell us a little bit about, your group, your role and what's your mandate. >> Okay, so, my group is called service platforms. It's the bit of BT that services all of our multi millions of our customers. So we have broadband, we have TV, we have mobile, we have DNS and email systems. And it's all about our customers. It's not a B2B part of BT, you're with me? We specifically focus on those kind of multi million customers that we've got in those various services. And in particular, my group we do infrastructure. we really do from data center all the way up to really about boot time or so we'll just pass boot time, and the application developers look after that stage and above. >> Okay, great, we definitely going to want to dig in and talk about that, that boundary between the infrastructure teams and the application teams. But let's talk a little bit first, we're talking about VMware. So, how long has your organization been doing VMware and tell us, what you see with the announcement that VMware is making for vSphere 7? >> Sure, well, I mean, we've had really great relationship with VMware for about 12, 13 years, something like that. And it's a absolutely key part of our infrastructure. It's written throughout BT, really, in every part of our operations, design, development, and the whole ethos of the company is based around a lot of VMware products. And so one of the challenges that we've got right now is application architectures are changing quite significantly at the moment, And as you know, in particular with serverless, and with containers and a whole bunch of other things like that. We're very comfortable with our ability to manage VMs and have been for a while. We currently use extensively we use vSphere NSXT, VROPs, login site, network insight and a whole bunch of other VMware constellation applications. And our operations teams know how to use that they know how to optimize, they know how to pass the plan, and (murmurs). So that's great. And that's been like that for half a decade at least, we've been really, really confident with our ability to deal with VMware environments. And along came containers and like, say, multi cloud as well. And what we were struggling with was the inability to have a single pane of glass, really on all of that, and to use the same people and the same processes to manage a different kind of technology. So we, we've been working pretty closely with VMware on a number of different containerization products. For several years now, I've worked really closely with the vSphere integrated containers, guys in particular, and now with the Pacific guys, with really the ideal that when we bring in version seven and the containerization aspects of version seven, we'll be in a position to have that single pane of glass to allow our operations team to really barely differentiate between what's a VM and what's a container. That's really the Holy Grail. So we'll be able to allow our developers to develop, our operations team to deploy and to operate, and our designers to see the same infrastructure, whether that's on-premises, cloud or off-premises, and be able to manage the whole piece in that respect. >> Okay, so Phil, really interesting things you walk through here, you've been using containers in a virtualized environment for a number of years, want to understand and the organizational piece just a little bit, because it sounds great, I manage all the environment, but, containers are a little bit different than VMs. if I think back, from an application standpoint, it was, let's stick it in a VM, I don't need to change it. And once I spin up a VM, often that's going to sit there for, months, if not years, as opposed to, I think about a containerization environment. It's, I really want to pool of resources, I'm going to create and destroy things all the time. So, bring us inside that organizational piece. How much will there needs to be interaction and more interaction or change in policies between your infrastructure team and your app dev team? >> Well, yes, me absolutely right, that's the nature and the timescales that we're talking about between VMs and containers is wildly different. As you say, we probably almost certainly have Vms in place now that were in place in 2018 certainly I imagine, and haven't really been touched. Whereas as you say, VMs and a lot of people talk about spinning them all up all the time. There are parts of architecture that require that, in particular, the very client facing bursty stuff, does require spinning up and spinning down pretty quickly. But some of our some of our other containers do sit around for weeks, if not months, really does depend on the development cycle aspects of that, but the heartbeat that we've really had was just visualizing it. And there are a number of different products out there that allow you to see the behavior of your containers and understand the resource requirements that they are having at any given moment. Allies troubleshoot and seven. But they need any problems, the new things that we we will have to get used to. And also it seems that there's an awful lot of competing products, quite a Venn diagram of in terms of functionality and user abilities to do that. So again coming back to being able to manage through vSphere. And to be able to have a list of VMs on alongside is a list of containers and to be able to use policies to define how they behave in terms of their networking, to be able to essentially put our deployments on rails by using in particular tag based policies, means that we can take the onus of security, we can take the onus of performance management and capacity management away from the developers who don't really have a lot of time, and they can just get on with their job, which is to develop new functionality, and help our customers. So that means then we have to be really responsible about defining those policies, and making sure that they're adhered to. But again, we know how to do that with the VMs through vSphere. So the fact that we can actually apply that straight away, just with slightly different compute unit, is really what we're talking about here is ideal, and then to be able to extend that into multiple clouds as well, because we do use multiple clouds where (murmurs) and as your customers, and we're between them is an opportunity that we can't do anything other than be excited about (murmurs) >> Yeah, Phil, I really like how you described really the changing roles that are happening there in your organization need to understand, right? There's things that developers care about the they want to move fast, they want to be able to build new things and there's things that they shouldn't have to worry about. And, you know, we talked about some of the new world and it's like, oh, can the platform underneath this take care of it? Well, there's some things platforms take care of, there's some things that the software or your team is going to need to understand. So maybe if you could dig in a little bit, some of those, what are the drivers from your application portfolio? What is the business asking of your organization that's driving this change? And being one of those tail winds pushing you towards, Kubernetes and the vSphere 7 technologies? >> Well, it all comes down to the customers, right? Our customers want new functionality. They want new integrations, they want new content, they want better stability and better performance and our ability to extend or contracting capacity as needed as well. So there will be ultimate challenges that we want to give our customers the best possible experience of our products and services. So we have to have address that really from a development perspective, it's our developers have the responsibility to, design and deploy those. So, in infrastructure, we have to act as a firm, foundation, really underneath all of that. That allows them to know that what they spend their time and develop and want to push out to our customers is something that can be trusted is performant. We understand where the capacity requirements are coming from in the short term, and in the long term for that, and he's secure as well, obviously, is a big aspect to it. And so really, we're just providing our developers with the best possible chance of giving our customers what will hopefully make them delighted. >> Great, Phil, you've mentioned a couple of times that you're using public clouds as well as, your VMware firm. Want to make sure I if you can explain a little bit a couple of things. Number one is, when it comes to your team, especially your infrastructure team, how much are they in involved with setting up some of the basic pieces or managing things like performance in the public cloud. And secondly, when you look at your applications, or some of your clouds, some of your applications hybrid going between the data center and the public cloud. And I haven't talked to too many customers that are doing applications that just live in any cloud and move things around. But you know, maybe if you could clarify those pieces as to, what cloud really means to your organization and your applications? >> Sure, well, I mean, tools. Cloud allows us to accelerate development, which is nice because it means we don't have to do on-premises capacity lifts for new pieces of functionality are so we can initially build in the cloud and test in the cloud. But very often, applications really make better sense, especially in the TV environment where people watch TV all the time. I mean, yes, there are peak hours and lighter hours of TV watching. Same goes for broadband really. But we generally were well more than an eight hour application profile. So what that allows us to do then is to have applications that are, well, it makes sense. We run them inside our organization where we have to run them in our organization for, data protection reasons or whatever, then we can do that as well. But where we say, for instance, we have a boxing match on. And we're going to be seeing an enormous spike in the amount of customers that want to sign up into our auto journey to allow them to view that and to gain access to that, well, why would you spend a lot of money on servers just for that level of additional capacity? So we do absolutely have hybrid applications, not sorry, hybrid blocks, we have blocks of sub applications, dozens of them really to support our platform. And what you would see is that if you were to look at our full application structure for one of the platforms, I mentioned, that some of the some of those application blocks have to run inside some can run outside and what we want to be able to do is to allow our operations team to define that, again, by policies to where they run, and to, have a system that allows us to transparently see where they're running, how they're running, and the implications of those decisions so that we can tune those maybe in the future as well. And that way, we best serve our customers. We got to get our customers yeah, what they need. >> All right, great, Phil, final question I have for you, you've been through a few iterations of looking at VMs containers, public cloud, what what advice would you give your peers with the announcement of vSphere 7 and how they can look at things today in 2020 versus what they might have looked at, say a year or two ago? >> Well, I'll be honest, I was a little bit surprised by vSphere 7. We knew that VMware will working on trying to make containers on the same level, both from a management deployment perspective as VMs. I mean, they're called VMware after all right? And we knew that they were looking at that. But I was surprised by just quite how quickly they've managed to almost completely reinvent the application, really. It's, you know, if you look at the whole Tansy stuff and the Mission Control stuff, I think a lot of people were blown away by just quite how happy VMware were to reinvent themselves from an application perspective, and to really leap forward. And this is, between version six and seven. I've been following these since version three, at least. And it's an absolutely revolutionary change in terms of the overall architecture. The aims to, to what they want to achieve with the application. And luckily, the nice thing is, is that if you're used to version six is not that big a deal, it's really not that big a deal to move forward at all, it's not such a big change to process and training and things like that. But my word, there's an awful lot of work underneath that, underneath the covers. And I'm really excited. And I think all the people in my position should really use take it as an opportunity to revisit what they can achieve with, in particular with vSphere, and with in combination with NSXT, it's quite hard to put into place unless you've seen the slides about it and unless you've seen the product, just how revolutionary the version seven is compared to previous versions, which have kind of evolved through a couple of years. So yeah, I think I'm really excited about it. And I know a lot of my peers or the companies that I speak with quite often are very excited about seven as well. So yeah, I'm really excited about though the whole base >> Well, Phil, thank you so much. Absolutely no doubt this is a huge move for VMware, the entire company and their ecosystem rallying around, help move to the next phase of where application developers and infrastructure need to go. Phil Buckley joining us from British Telecom. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCube. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are having a very special CUBE conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil, if you will, of the new VMware vSphere 7.0. We're going to get a little bit more of a technical deep-dive here today and we're excited to have a longtime CUBE alumni. Kit Colbert here is the VP and CTO of Cloud platform at VMware. Kit, great to see you. >> Yeah, happy to be here. And new to theCUBE, Jared Rosoff. He's a Senior Director of Product Management of VMware and I'm guessing had a whole lot to do with this build. So Jared, first off, congratulations for birthing this new release and great to have you on board. >> Thanks, feels pretty great, great to be here. >> All right, so let's just jump into it. From kind of a technical aspect, what is so different about vSphere 7? >> Yeah, great. So vSphere 7 bakes Kubernetes right into the virtualization platform. And so this means that as a developer, I can now use Kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment. And it means as an IT admin, I'm actually able to deliver Kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run. >> So I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that that might be coming with the acquisition of the Heptio team. So really exciting news, and I think Kit, you teased it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments, regardless of whether that's on-prem, public cloud, this public cloud, that public cloud, so this really is the realization of that vision. >> It is, yeah. So we talked at VMworld about Project Pacific, right, this technology preview. And as Jared mentioned of what that was, was how do we take Kubernetes and really build it into vSphere? As you know, we had a hybrid cloud vision for quite a while now. How do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible? Now part of the broader VMware cloud foundation portfolio. And you know, as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud, on premises, at the edge, with service providers, there's a secondary question of how do we actually evolve that platform so it can support not just the existing workloads, but also modern workloads as well. >> Right. All right, so I think he brought some pictures for us, a little demo. So why don't we, >> Yeah. Why don't we jump over >> Yeah, let's dive into it. to there and let's see what it looks like? You guys can cue up the demo. >> Jared: Yeah, so we're going to start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation four and vSphere 7. So what you're seeing here is the developer's actually using Kubernetes to deploy Kubernetes. The self-eating watermelon, right? So the developer uses this Kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole Kubernetes cluster. And the whole developer experience now is driven by Kubernetes. They can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of Kubernetes API's and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere. And so, that's not just provisioning workloads though, this is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed. So go look at, hey, what's the IP address that got allocated to that? Or what's the CPU load on this workload I just deployed? On top of Kubernetes, we've integrated a Container Registry into vSphere. So here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images. And you know, one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as code standpoint, now, the developer's infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control. I can check in not just my code, but also the description of the Kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app. So now we're looking at a sort of a side-by-side view, where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application. And on the left hand side, we see vCenter. And what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through Kubernetes, those are showing up right inside of the vCenter console. And so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names. And so this means when a developer calls, their IT department says, hey, I got a problem with my database. We don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about. They got the same name, they see the same information. So what we're going to do is that, you know, we're going to push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience. And you know, what you'll see here is that vCenter is the vCenter you've already known and love, but what's different is that now it's much more application focused. So here we see a new screen inside of vCenter, vSphere namespaces. And so, these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications, like the whole distributed system now is a single object inside of vCenter. And when I click into one of these apps, this is a managed object inside of vSphere. I can click on permissions, and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces. I can hook this into my Active Directory infrastructure. So I can use the same corporate credentials to access the system. I tap into all my existing storage. So this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers. I can use storage policy based management to provide storage for Kubernetes. And it's hooked in with things like DRS, right? So I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory, and all of that's going to be enforced by DRS inside the cluster. And again, as an admin, I'm just using vSphere. But to the developer, they're getting a whole Kubernetes experience out of this platform. Now, vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the Kubernetes environment. So besides seeing the VMs and things the developers have deployed, I can see all of the desired state specifications, all the different Kubernetes objects that the developers have created. The compute, network and storage objects, they're all integrated right inside the vCenter console. And so once again from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective, this data's invaluable. It often saves hours just in trying to figure out what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue. So as you can see, this is all baked right into vCenter. The vCenter experience isn't transformed a lot. We get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say, where's the Kubernetes? And they're surprised, they like, they've been managing Kubernetes all this time, it just looks like the vSphere experience they've already got. But all those Kubernetes objects, the pods and containers, Kubernetes clusters, load balancer, storage, they're all represented right there natively in the vCenter UI. And so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins. >> Well that's a, that's pretty wild, you know. It really builds off the vision that again, I think you kind of outlined, Kit, teased out it at VMworld which was the IT still sees vSphere, which is what they want to see, what they're used to seeing, but devs see Kubernetes. And really bringing those together in a unified environment so that, depending on what your job is, and what you're working on, that's what you're going to see and that's kind of unified environment. >> Yep. Yeah, as the demo showed, it is still vSphere at the center, but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere. The Kubernetes based one, which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks, as well as a traditional vSphere interface, APIs, which is great for VI admins and IT operations. >> Right. And then, and really, it was interesting too. You teased out a lot. That was a good little preview if people knew what they were watching, but you talked about really cloud journey, and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are running in their classic VMs and then kind of the modern, you know, cloud native applications built on Kubernetes. And you outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum and getting from one to the other but not really about kind of the messy middle, if you will. And this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum they can move their workloads or move their apps. >> Yeah, no. I think we think a lot about it like that. That we look at, we talk to customers and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go. Their future state architecture. And that involves embracing cloud, it involves modernizing applications. And you know, as you mentioned, it's challenging for them because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of, these two extremes. Either you're here where you are, with kind of the old current world, and you got the bright nirvana future on the far end there. And they believe that the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other. That you have to kind of change everything out from underneath you. And that's obviously very expensive, very time consuming and very error-prone as well. There's a lot of things that can go wrong there. And so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really, to your point, is you call it the messy middle, I would say it's more like how do we offer stepping stones along that journey? Rather than making this one giant leap, we had to invest all this time and resources. How can we enable people to make smaller incremental steps each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost? >> Right. And it's really enabling kind of this next gen application where there's a lot of things that are different about it but one of the fundamental things is where now the application defines the resources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities of what the application can do and that's where everybody is moving as quickly as makes sense, as you said, not all applications need to make that move but most of them should and most of them are and most of them are at least making that journey. So you see that? >> Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from looking historically at how we managed infrastructure, one of the things we enable in vSphere 7 is how we manage applications, right? So a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know, your resource allocation, you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure. You talk about it in terms of this VM is going to be encrypted or this VM is going to have this Firewall rule. And what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management. So you actually look at an application and say I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU. Or I want this application to have these security rules on it. And so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level. >> Jeff: Right. >> Yeah, and like, I would kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say, you know, if you look back, one thing we did with something like VSAN, before that, people had to put policies on a LUN, you know, an actual storage LUN and a storage array. And then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array, it inherited certain policies, right? And so VSAN really turned that around and allows you to put the policy on the VM. But what Jared's talking about now is that for a modern workload, a modern workload's not a single VM, it's a collection of different things. We got some containers in there, some VMs, probably distributed, maybe even some on-prem, some in the cloud, and so how do you start managing that more holistically? And this notion of really having an application as a first-class entity that you can now manage inside of vSphere, it's a really powerful and very simplifying one. >> Right. And why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time. That's a nice big word, but the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications, and more importantly, how do you continue to evolve them and change them based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace? >> Yeah, well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance, right? So today, if I want to check if this app is compliant, I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down, and hardened, and secured the right way. But now instead, what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of vCenter, set the right security settings on that, and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are going to inherit that stuff. So it really simplifies that. It also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications. You know, if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory. When you log in with vSphere 7, what you see is a few dozen applications. So a single admin can manage a much larger pool of infrastructure, many more applications than they could before because we automate so much of that operation. >> And it's not just the scale part, which is obviously really important, but it's also the rate of change. And this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done, done, i.e., building applications, while at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security, performance concerns, these sorts of elements. And so by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level and then have the developer be able to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction, it actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better. They're not stepping over each other but in fact now, they can both get what they need to get done, done, and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe and in compliance and so forth. >> Right. So there's a lot more to this. This is a very significant release, right? Again, lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves, it's a pretty significant, you know, kind of re-architecture of many parts of vSphere. So beyond the Kubernetes, you know, kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out in this very significant release? >> Yeah, that's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about Kubernetes, what was Project Pacific but is now just part of vSphere, and certainly that is a very large aspect of it but to your point, vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features. And so instead of a demo here, let's pull up some slides and we'll take a look at >> Already? what's there. So outside of Kubernetes, there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere 7. So the first one is simplified lifecycle management. And then really focused on security is the second one, and then applications as well, but both including the cloud native apps that couldn't fit in the Kubernetes bucket as well as others. And so we go on the first one, the first column there, there's a ton of stuff that we're doing around simplifying lifecycle. So let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics. So we have this new technology, vSphere life cycle management, vLCM, and the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades, life cycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts? How do we make them more declarative with a single image that you can now specify for an entire cluster. We find that a lot of our vSphere admins, especially at larger scales, have a really tough time doing this. There's a lot of in and outs today, it's somewhat tricky to do. And so we want to make it really really simple and really easy to automate as well. >> Right. So if you're doing Kubernetes on Kubernetes, I suppose you're going to have automation on automation, right? Because upgrading to the seven is probably not an inconsequential task. >> And yeah, and going forward and allowing, you know, as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great vSphere functionality at a more rapid clip, how do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well? >> Right. Next big thing you talk about is security. >> Yep. >> And we just got back from RSA, thank goodness we got that show in before all the madness started. >> Yep. >> But everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top. So talk about kind of the changes in the security. >> So, done a lot of things around security. Things around identity federation, things around simplifying certificate management, you know, dramatic simplifications there across the board. One I want to focus on here on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere trust authority. And so with that one what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces and really ensure there's a trusted computing base? When we talk to customers, what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats including even internal ones, right? How do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted? And obviously if you're hiring someone, you somewhat trust them but you know, how do you implement the concept of lease privilege? Right? >> Right. >> Jeff: Or zero trust, right, is a very hot topic >> Yeah, exactly. in security. >> So the idea with trust authority is that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and ensure are fully secure. Those can be managed by a special vCenter server which is in turn very locked down, only a few people have access to it. And then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that okay, this untrusted host haven't been modified, we know they're okay so they're okay to actually run workloads on they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing. So it's this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment. >> Right. And then the third kind of leg of the stool is, you know, just better leveraging, you know, kind of a more complex asset ecosystem, if you will, with things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know, >> Yeah. kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application can draw the appropriate resources as needed, so you've done a lot of work there as well. >> Yeah, there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space. As you mentioned, all sorts of accelerateds coming out. We all know about GPUs, and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases, not to mention 3-D rendering. But you know, FPGAs and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there. And so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out, they have a lot of the same problems that we saw on the very early days of virtualization. I.e., silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using. And you know, what you find is all things we found before. You find very low utilization rates, inability to automate that, inability to manage that well, put in security and compliance and so forth. And so this is really the reality that we see at most customers. And it's funny because, and so much you think, well wow, shouldn't we be past this? As an industry, shouldn't we have solved this already? You know, we did this with virtualization. But as it turns out, the virtualization we did was for compute, and then storage and network, but now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators. And so that's where this Bitfusion technology that we're including now with vSphere really comes to the forefront. So if you see in the current slide we're showing here, the challenges that just these separate pools of infrastructure, how do you manage all that? And so if you go to the, if we go to the next slide what we see is that with Bitfusion, you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization. You can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together so they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use. We can, you know, have multiple people sharing a GPU. We can do it very dynamically. And the great part of it is is that it's really easy for these folks to use. They don't even need to think about it. In fact, integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows. >> So it's pretty interesting 'cause of the classifications of the assets now are much larger, much varied, and much more workload specific, right? That's really the opportunity / challenge that you guys are addressing. >> They are. >> A lot more diverse, yep. And so like, you know, a couple other things just, now, I don't have a slide on it, but just things we're doing to our base capabilities. Things around DRS and vMotion. Really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads, right? So you look at some of the massive SAP HANA, or Oracle Databases. And how do we ensure that vMotion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else there. Making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth. >> Jeff: Right. >> So a lot of the stuff is not just kind of brand new, cool new accelerator stuff, but it's also how do we ensure the core apps people have already been running for many years, we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well. >> Right. All right, so Jared, I give you the last word. You've been working on this for a while, there's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys. What do you tell them, what should they be excited about, what are you excited for them in this new release? >> I think what I'm excited about is how, you know, IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps, right? I think today you look at a lot of these organizations and what ends up happening is the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT's infrastructure, right? And so now I think we can shift that story around. I think that there's, you know, there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and app dev teams are going to be having over the next couple years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team, make you more productive, give you better performance, availability, disaster recovery, and these kinds of capabilities. >> Awesome. Well, Jared, congratulation, again both of you, for you getting the release out. I'm sure it was a heavy lift and it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it and thanks for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep-dive. I'm sure there's a ton more resources for people that even want to go down into the weeds. So thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, he's Jared, he's Kit, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in the Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley. Palo ALTO, California It is a cute conversation. >>Hi, and welcome to the Cube studios for another cube conversation where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the technology industry. I'm your host, Peter Boris. Digital businesses affecting every enterprise of every size, small and large, and the types of solutions that required the types of outcomes that are being pursued are extremely complex and require an enormous amount of work from some of the best and brightest people on the business side as well as the technology side. And that means not just from a large company. It means from an entire ecosystem of potential sources of genius and insight and good hard work. So the consequence for every enterprises, how do they cobble together that collection of experts and capabilities that are gonna help them transform their business more successfully, Maur completely and more certainly than they would otherwise? And that's we're gonna talk about today. Today we're here with Kelly Ireland, who's the founder and C E o. C. B Technologies. Kelly. Welcome to the >>Cube. Thank you, Peter. Happy to be here, >>so let's start by finding a little bit about CV Technologies to also about what you do. >>Um, I have a IittIe background, so I have been in it for 40 years. In 2001 I decided I had a better idea of how to both support clients as well as my employees. So I opened CB Technologies were value added reseller, um, and then say about five years ago, I decided to do some transforming of the company itself. I saw what was going on in the industry, and I thought this was the time for us to get going. Turned out we were a little early, but we wanted to transform from what you would call it the value added reseller two systems integrator. Because that was the only words what they had for. You know what that end result would be? Now I've heard it's the, um, domain expert integrator, which we like a lot better. And what we've done is gone from this value add, which we've all seen over the last couple of decades, into actually engineering solutions, and mostly with consortiums, which will talk about of the O. T. I t. Convergence and what's going to be needed for that to make our customers successful. >>Well, you just described. In many respects, the vision that businesses have had and how it's changed over years were first. The asset was the hardware. Hence the var. Today, the asset really is the date of the application and how you're going to apply that to change the way your business operates the customer experiences, you provide the profitability that you're able to return back to shareholders. So let's dig into this because that notion of data that notion of digital transformation is especially important in a number of different names, perhaps no more important than in the whole industrial and end of things domain. That intersection of I t know Tia's, you said, Tell us a little bit about what you're experiencing with your customers as they try to think about new ways of applying technology technology rich data to their business challenges. >>We'll use the perfect word you said dig, because this is all about layers. It's all about it was technology and software. Now it's about technology, software and integration. In fact, the conversations were having with our clients. Right now we don't even talk about a no Yim's name. Where before you would. But we haven't our head. What? We know what would be best. What we look at now is the first thing you do is go in and sit down with the client. And not only with the client, the you know, the executives or the C I or the C T. O's et cetera, but the employees themselves. Because what we've seen with I I I o t o t i t Convergence, it's You have to take into account what the worker needs and the people that are addressing it that way. Um, this project that we started with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, they started up what we call the refinery of the future. It could be acts of the future. It doesn't really matter. But it was getting at least up to five use cases with a consortium of partner companies that could go address five different things within the refinery. And the reason that I think it's been so successful is that the owner, the CEO Doug Smith and the VP of ops Linda Salinas, immediately wrap their arms around bringing employees. They're a small company there, maybe 50. They brought half of them to HPD Lab to show them what a smart pump laws for their chemical plant text. More chemical in Galina Park in Texas. Starting from that, it was like they put him on a party bus, took them down, put them in the lab, told them, showed them what a smart pump was and all of a sudden the lights turned on for the workers. These are people that have been, you know, manual valves and turning knobs and, you know, looking at computer screens they'd never seen what a smart, censored pump waas all of it sudden on the drive back to the company, ideas started turning. And then HP took it from there, brought in partners, sat everybody in the room, and we started feathering out. Okay, what's needed. But let's start with what the client needs. What do those different business users within the chemical plant need, and then build use cases from that? So we ended up building five use cases. >>Well, so what? Get another five years cases in a second? But you just described something very interesting, and I think it's something that partners have historically been able to do somewhat uniquely on that is that the customer journey is not taken by just an individual within the business. What really happens is someone has an idea. They find someone, often a partner, that can help them develop that idea. And then they go off and they recruit others within their business and a local partner that has good domain expertise at the time. And energy and customer commitment could be an absolutely essential feature of building the consensus within the organization to really accelerate that customer journey. If I got that right? >>Absolutely, absolutely. And what we saw with Refinery of the Future was getting those partnerships HP East started. It created the project kind of through information out to many of their ecosystem partners trying to gain interest because the thing was is this was kind of our bet was a very educated bet, but it's our bet to say, Yeah, we think this makes sense. So, you know, like I said, I think there's about 14 partners that all joined in both on the I t om side the ot oh am side and then both Deloitte and CB Technologies for the S. I and like expert domain expert integration where you really get into How do you tie OT and I t together? >>All right, so we've got this situation where this is not As you said, It's not just in the refining process, manufacturing businesses. It's in a lot of business. But in this particular one, you guys have actually fashioned what you call the refinery of of the future has got five clear use cases. Just give us an example of what those look like and how you've been RCB technology has been participated in the process of putting those together. >>Um, the 1st 1 was pretty wrapped around Predictive Analytics, and that was led by Deloitte and has a whole host of OT and I t integration on it >>again, not limited to process manufacturing at all >>at all, but and a good group, you know, you have national instruments, Intel flow. Serve. Oh, it's ice off Snyder Electric, PTC riel, where they're such a host >>of the >>consortium and I I think what was most important to start this whole thing was H P E. Came in and said, Here's an MOU. Here's a contract. You all will be contract ID to the overall resorts results. Not just your use case. Not just one or two use cases you're in, but all five because they all can integrate in some sense so >>that all can help. Each of you can help the others think. Problems. Truce. That's the 1st 1 about the 2nd 1 >>The 2nd 1 is video is a sensor that was Intel CB Technologies. I think we have as you're in there as well, doing some of the analytics, some P T. C. And what that was all about was taking video. And, you know, taking a use case from Linda and saying, Where where do you need some sort of video analytics Taking that processing it and what we ended up doing with that one was being able to identify, you know, animals or aggressive animals within the train yard. A downed worker transients that shouldn't be there because we can't decipher between you know, someone that's in text marks p p ease versus somebody that's in street clothes. So taking all that analyzing the information, the pictures, training it to understand when it needs to throw and alert >>lot of data required for that. And that's one of the major major drivers of some of the new storage technologies out there. New fabrics that are out there. How did that play? A role? >>As you can imagine, H p E is the under underlying infrastructure across the entire refinery. The future from compute with the, uh, EJ data center into the Reuben network into nimble storage for storing on site. Um, what we're finding, no matter who we talked to in the industry, it is. Most of them still want to keep it on Prem. In some sense, security. They're still all extremely cautious. So they want to keep it on Prem. So having the nimble storage right in the date, having the edge data center having everything in the middle of this chemical plant was absolutely a necessity. And having all of that set up having my team, which was the C B Tech team that actually did all the integration of setting up the wireless network, because guess what? When you're in a different kind of environment, not inside a building, you're out where there's metal pumps. There's restrictions because ah, flash could cause an explosion so intrinsically safe we had to set up all that and determined how? How could we get the best coverage? Especially? We want that video signal to move quite fast over the WiFi. How do we get all that set up? So it takes the most advantage of, you know, the facility and the capabilities of the Aruban network. >>So that's 12345 quickly were >>three worker safety, which hasn't started yet. We're still waiting for one of the manufacturers to get the certification they need. Um, four we have is connected worker, which is on fire, having a work >>of connected worker on fire and worker >>safety. >>Yeah, they don't sound, but just think of all the data and having the worker have it right at his fingertips. And, oh, by the way, hands free. So they're being ableto to take in all this data and transmit data, whether it's by voice or on screen back >>from a worker central perspective, from one that sustains the context of where the worker is, what stress there under what else? They've got to do it said. >>And and what are they trying to complete and how quickly? And that's where right now we have r A y that's in the 90% which is off the chart. But it's and and what's great about being at Text Mark is we actually can prove this. I can have somebody walk with me, a client that wants to look at it. They can go walk the process with me, and they will immediately see that we reduce the time by 90%. >>So I've given your four. What's the 5th 1? >>Acid intelligence, which is all about three D Point Cloud three D visualization. Actually being able to pull up a smart pump. You know it really? Any pump, you scan the facility you converted into three D and then in the program that we're using, you can actually pull up a pump. You can rotate it 360 degrees. It's got a database behind it that has every single bit of asset information connected videos, cad cams, P and I. D s. For the oil and gas industry. Everything's in their e mails could be attached to it, and then you can also put compliance reports. So there you might need to look a corrosion. One of those tests that they do on a you know, annual or every five year basis. That's point and click. You pull it up and it tells you where it sits, and then it also shows you green, yellow, red. Anything in red is immediate, attest that tension yellow is you need to address it greens. Everything's 100% running. >>So the complexity that we're talking about, the kind of specificity of these solutions, even though they can be generalized. And you know, you talked about analytics all the way out to asset optimization Intel intelligence. There are We can generalize and structure, but there's always going to be, it seems to us there's going to be a degree of specificity that's required, and that means we're not gonna talk about package software that does this kind of stuff. We're talking about sitting down with a customer with a team of experts from a lot of different places and working together and applying that to achieve customer outcome. So I got that right >>absolutely, and what we did with the consortium looking at everything. How they first addressed it was right along that line, and if you look at software development, agile following agile process, it's exactly what we're doing in four I I o T o R O T I t Convergence, because if you don't include all of those people, it's never going to be successful. I heard it a conference the other day that said, POC is goto I ot to die, and it's because a lot of people aren't addressing it the right way. We do something called Innovation Delivery as a service, which is basically a four day, 3 to 4 day boot camp. You get all the right people in, in in the room. You pull in everything from them. You boot out the executive team partway through, and you really get in depth with workers and you have them say what they wouldn't say in front of their bosses that this happened with Doug and Linda and Linda said it was mind blowing. She goes. I didn't realize we had so many problems because she came back in the room and there was a 1,000,000 stickies. And then she said, the more she read it and the more you know, we refined it down, she said it was absolutely delivered, you know, the use case that she would have eventually ended up with, but loved having all the insights from, >>well, work. Too often, tech companies failed to recognize that there's a difference between inventing something and innovation. Inventing is that engineering act of taking what you know about physics or social circumstance Secreting hardware software innovation is a set of social acts that get the customer to adopt it, get a marketplace to adopt it, change their behaviors. And partners historically have been absolutely essential to driving that innovation, to getting customers to actually change the way to do things and embed solutions in their operations. And increasingly, because of that deep knowledge with customers are trying to doing, they're participating. Maurine, the actual invention process, especially on the softer side of you said, >>Yeah, yeah, I think what's really interesting in this, especially with Coyote. When I look back a few years, I look at cloud and you know everything was cloud and everybody ran to it and everybody jumped in with both feet, and then they got burned. And what we're seeing with this whole thing with I o t you would think we're showing these are lies, return on. Investments were showing all this greatness that can come out of it and and they're very slow at sticking their toe in. But what we've found is no one arrives should say the majority of corporations anymore don't want to jump in and say, Let's do it two or five or $10 million project. We see your power point. No, let's let's depart Owen with with what we're doing, it's, you know, a really small amount of money to go in and really direct our attention at exactly what their problem is. It's not off the shelf. It's but it's off the shelf with customization. It's like we've already delivered on connected worker for oil and gas. But now we're are so starting to deliver multiple other industries because they actually walk through text mark. We could do tours, that text mark. That was kind of the trade off. All these partners brought technology and, you know, brought their intelligence and spent. We were now on two years of proving all this out. Well, they said, Fine, open the kimono will let your customers walk through and see it >>makes text mark look like a better suppliers. >>Well, it's enhanced their business greatly. I can tell you they're just starting a new process in another week. And it was all based on people going through, you know, a client that went through and went. Wait >>a minute. I >>really like this. There are also being able to recruit technologists within the use in industry, which you would think text marks 50 employees. It's a small little plant. It's very specialized. It's very small. They pulled one of the top. Uh, sorry. Lost not. I'm trying to think of what the name >>they're. They're a small number of employees, but the process manufacturing typically has huge assets. And any way you look at it, we're talking about major investments, major monies that require deep expertise. And my guess is the text Mark is able to use that to bring an even smarter and better >>people smarter and better. People that are looking at it going they're ahead of the curve, for they're so far ahead of the curve that they want to be on board were that they're bringing in millennials on they're connected. Worker Carlos is there trainload lead. And he dropped an intrinsically safe camera and it broke and he tried to glue it together, tried to super glue it together. And then he ran back to Linda and he said I broke the case and this case is like £10. They call it the Brick. They gotta lug it up. They got to climb up the train car, leg it up, take a picture that they have sealed the valves on all the cars before they leave. Well, he had used the real where had, you know, device. And he went into Linda and he said, I know there's a camera in there. There's camera capabilities. Can I use that until we get another case? And she's like, Yeah, go ahead. Well, he went through, started using that toe like lean over, say, Take photo. We engineered that it could go directly back to the audit file so that everybody knew the minute that picture was taken, it went back into the audio file. This is where we found the process was reduced by 90% of time. But he turned around and trained his entire team. He wasn't asked to, but he thought, this is the greatest thing. He went in trainable. And now, about every two weeks, Carlos walks in to my team that sits a text mark and comes up with another use case for connected worker. It's amazing. It's amazing what you know were developed right out of the customer by using their workers and then, you know, proactively coming to us going. Hey, I got another idea. Let's add this where I think at version 7.0, for connected worker. Because of that feedback because of that live feed back in production. >>Great story, Kelly. So, once again, Callie Ireland is a co founder and CEO of CB Technologies. Thanks for being on the tube. >>Thank you for having me >>on once again. I wanna thank all of you for joining us for another cute conversation. I'm Peter burgers. See you next time.

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to see CUBE's exclusive coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018 live in San Francisco, California at Moscone West. I'm John Furrier, your cohost of theCUBE with John Troyer co-founder of Tech Reckoning advisory and community development firm. Our next two guests Mike Piech Vice President and General Manager of middleware at Red Hat and Mark Little, Vice President of Software Engineering for middleware at Red Hat. This is the stack wars right here. Guys thanks for coming back, good to see you guys again. >> Great to see you too. >> So we love Middleware because Dave Vellante and I and Stu always talk about like the real value is going to be created in abstraction layers. You're seeing examples of that all over the place but Kubernetes containers, multi-cloud conversations. Workload management and all these things are happening at these really cool abstraction layers. That's obviously you say global I say middleware but you know it's where the action is. So I got to ask you, super cool that you guys have been leading in there but the new stuff's happening. So let's just go review last year or was it this year? What's different this year, new things happening within the company? We see core OS' in there, you guys got OpenShift is humming along beautifully. What's new in the middleware group? >> There's a few things. I'll take one and then maybe Mike can think of another while I'm speaking but when we were here this time last year we were talking about functions as a service or server-less and we had a project of our own called Funktion with a K, between then and now the developer affinity around functions as a service has just grown. Lots of people are now using it and starting to use it in production. We did a review of what we were doing back then and looked around at other efforts that were in the market space and we decided actually we wanted to get involved with a large community of developers and try and move that in a direction that was pretty beneficial for everybody but clearly for ourselves. And we've decided, and we announced this publicly last year but we're now involved with a project called Apache OpenWhisk instead of Funktion. And OpenWhisk is a project that IBM originally kicked off. We got involved, it was tied very closely to cloud foundering so one of the first things that we've been doing is making it more Kubernetes native and allowing it to run on OpenShift. In fact we're making some announcements this week around our functions are service based on Apache OpenWhisk. But that's probably one of the bigger things that's changed in the last 12 months. >> I would just add to that that across the rest of the middleware portfolio which is as you know, a wide range of different technologies, different products, in our integration area we continue to push ahead with containerizing, putting the integration technologies in the containers, making it easier to basically connect the different components of applications and different applications to each other together through different integration paradigms whether it's messaging or more of a bus style. So with our Jboss Fuse and our AMQ we've made great progress in continuing to refine how those are invoked and consumed in the Openshift environment. Forthcoming very shortly, literally in the next week or two is our integration platform as a service based on the Fuse and AMQ technologies. In addition we've continued to charge ahead with our API management solution based on the technology we acquired from Threescale a couple of years ago. So that is coming along nicely, being very well adopted by our customers. Then further up the stack on the process automation front, so some of the business process management types of technologies we've continued to push ahead with containerizing and that was being higher up the stack and a little bit bigger a scale of technology was a little bit more complex in really setting it up for the containerized world but we've got our Process Automation 7.0 release coming out in the next few weeks. That includes some exciting new technology around case management, so really bringing all of those traditional middleware capabilities forward into the Cloud Native, containerized environment has been I would say the most significant focus of our efforts over the last year. >> Go ahead. >> Can you contextualize some of that a little bit for us? The OpenShift obviously a big topic of conversation here. You know the new thing that everyone's looking at and Kubernetes, but these service layers, these layers it takes to build an app still necessary, Jboss a piece of this stack is 17, 18 years old, right? So can you contextualize it a little bit for people thinking about okay we've got OpenStack on the bottom, we've got OpenShift, where does the middleware and the business process, how has that had to be modernized? And how are people, the Java developers, still fitting into the equation? >> Mark: So a lot of that contextualization can actually, if we go back about four or five years, we announced an initiative called Xpass which was to essentially take the rich middleware suite of products and capabilities we had, and decompose them into independently consumable services kind of like what you see when you look at AWS. They've got the simple queuing service, simple messaging service. We have those capabilities but in the past they were bundled together in an app server, so we worked to pull them apart and allow people to use them independently so if you wanted transactions, or you wanted security, you didn't have to consume the whole app server you actually had these as independent services, so that was Xpass. We've continued on that road for the past few years and a lot of those services are now available as part and parcel of OpenShift. To get to the developer side of things, then we put language veneers on top of those because we're a Java company, well at least middleware is, but there's a lot more than Java out there. There's a lot of people who like to use Pearl or PHP or JavaScript or Go, so we can provide language specific clients for them to interact. At the end of the day, your JavaScript developer who's using bulletproof, high performing messaging doesn't need to know that most of it is implemented in Java. It's just a complete opaque box to them in a way. >> John F: So this is a trend of microservices, this granularity concept of this decomposition, things that you guys are doing is to line up with what people want, work with services directly. >> Absolutely right, to give developers the entire spectrum of granularity. So they can basically architect at a granularity that's appropriate for the given part of their job they're working on it's not a one size fits all proposition. It's not like throw all the monoliths out and decompose every last workload into it's finest grain possible pieces. There's a time and a place for ultra-fine granularity and there's also a time and a place to group things together and with the way that we're providing our runtimes and the reference architectures and the general design paradigm that we're sort of curating and recommending for our customers, it really is all about, not just the right tool for the job but the right granularity for the job. >> It's really choice too, I mean people can choose and then based on their architecture they can manage it the way they want from a design standpoint. Alright I got to get your guys' opinion on something. Certainly we had a great week in Copenhagen last week, in Denmark, around CUBECon, Kubernetes conference, Cloud NativeCon, whatever it's called, they're called two things. There was a rallying cry around Kubernetes and really the community felt like that Linix moment or that TCPIP moment where people talk about standards but like when will we just do something? We got to get behind it and then differentiate and provide all kinds of coolness around it. Core defacto stand with Kubernetes is opening up all kinds of new creative license for developers, it's also bringing up an accelerated growth. Istio's right around the corner, Cubeflow have the cool stuff on how software's being built. >> Right. >> So very cool rallying cry. What is the rallying cry in middleware, in your world? Is there a similar impact going on and what is that? >> Yeah >> Because you guys are certainly affected by this, this is how software will be built. It's going to be orchestrated, composed, granularity options, all kinds of microservices, what's the rallying cry in the middleware? >> So I think the rallying cry, two years ago, at Summit we announced something called MicroProfile with IBM, with Tomitribe, another apps vendor, Piara and a few quite large Java user groups to try and do something innovative and microservices specific with Enterprise Java. It was incredibly successful but the big elephant in the room who wasn't involved in that was Oracle, who at the time was still controlling Java E and a lot of what we do is dependent on Java E, a lot of what other vendors who don't necessarily talk about it do is also dependent on Java E to one degree or another. Even Pivotal with Springboot requires a lot of core services like messaging and transactions that are defined in Java E. So two years further forward where we are today, we've been working with IBM and Oracle and others and we've actually moved, or in process of moving all of Java E away from the old process, away from a single vendor's control into the Eclipse Foundation and although that's going to take us a little while longer to do we've been on that path for about four or five months. The amount of buzz and interest in the community and from companies big and small who would never have got involved in Java E in the past is immense. We're seeing new people get involved with Eclipse Foundation, and new companies get involved with Eclipse Foundation on a daily basis so that they can get in there and start to innovate in Enterprise Java in a much more agile and interesting way than they could have done in the past. I think that's kind of our rallying call because like I said we're getting lots of vendors, Pivotal's involved, Fujitsu. >> John F: And the impact of this is going to be what? >> A lot more innovation, a lot quicker innovation and it's not going to be at the slow speed of standards it's going to be at the fast, upstream, open source innovative speed that we see in likes of Kubernetes. >> And Eclipse has got a good reputation as well. >> Yeah, the other significant thing here, in addition to the faster innovation is it's a way forward for all of that existing Java expertise, it's a way for some of the patterns and some of the knowledge that they have already to be applied in this new world of Cloud Native. So you're not throwing out all that and having to essentially retrain double digit millions of developers around the world. >> John F: It's instant developer actually and plus Java's a great language, it's the bulldozer of languages, it can move a lot, it does a lot of heavy lifting >> Yep. >> And there's a lot of developers out there. Okay, final question I know you guys got to go, thanks for spending the time on theCUBE, really appreciate certainly very relevant, middleware is key to the all the action. Lot of glue going on in that layers. What's going on at the show here for you guys? What's hot, what should people pay attention to? What should they look for? >> Mark: I'll give my take, what's hot is any talk to do with middleware >> (laughs) Biased. >> But kind of seriously we do have a lot of good stuff going on with messaging and Kafka. Kafka's really hot at the moment. We've just released our own project which is eventually going to become a product called Strimsy, integrated with OpenShift so it's coognative from the get-go, it's available now. We're integrating that with OpenWhisk, which we talked about earlier, and also with our own reactive async platform called Vertex, so there's a number of sessions on that and if I get a chance I'm hoping to say into one >> John F: So real quick though I mean streaming is important because you talk about granularity, people are going to start streaming services with service measures right around the corner, the notion of streaming asynchronously is going to be a huge deal >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Mark: And tapping into that stream at any point in time and then pulling the plug and then doing the work based on that. >> Also real quick, Kubernetes, obviously the momentum is phenomenal in Cloud Native but becoming a first class citizen in the enterprise, still some work to do. Thoughts on that real quick? Would you say Kubernetes's Native, is it coming faster? Will it ever be, certainly I think it will be but. >> I think this is the year of Kubernetes and of enterprise Kubernetes. >> Mike: I mean you just look at the phenomenal growth of OpenShift and that in a way speaks directly to this point >> Mike, what's hot, what's hot? What are you doing at the show, what should we look at? I'd add to, I certainly would echo the points Mark made and in addition to that I would take a look at any session here on API management. Again within middleware the three-scale technology we acquired is still going gangbusters, the customers are loving that, finding it extremely helpful as they start to navigate the complexity of doing essentially distributive computing using containers and microservices, getting more disciplined about API management is of huge relevance in that world, so that would be the next thing I'd add. >> Congratulations guys, finally the operating system called the Cloud is taking over the world. It's basically distributed computer all connected together, it sounds like >> All that stuff we learned in the eighties right (laughs) >> It's a systems world, the middleware is changing the game, modern software construction of Apple cases all being done in a new way, looking at orchestration, server lists, service meshes all happening in real time, guys congratulations on the all the work and Red Hats. Be keeping it in the open, Java E coming around the corner as well, it's theCUBE bringing it out in the open here in San Francisco, I'm John Furrier with John Troyer we'll be back with more live coverage after this short break

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's the cube. Covering Pentaho World 2017. Brought to you by Hitachi Ventara >> Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of Pentaho World brought to you by Hitachi Ventara. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We have two guests today from the Universal Service Administrative company. First Sachin Batra who is the Senior Manager, Information Architecture and Tom Nesbitt, Senior Manager, Systems and Data Analytics. Welcome, thanks so much for coming on The Cube. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> So, first tell our viewers a little bit what the Universal Service Administrative Company is and what it does. >> Sure USAC, Universal Service Administrative Company, was created as a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 so that act deregulated the telecommunications industry and opened it up for competition. Along with that, the United States Federal Government passed legislation to create the Universal Service Fund. This fund, basically, supports four programs. High costs, we have a low income program, we have rural healthcare program, we also have our E-Rate or schools and libraries program. >> Okay, so, what are you doing here are Pentaho? It's a relatively new company. How do you use Pentaho? >> We're going to share our experience and our journey to become a data driven organization and how Pentaho has helped us to achieve this mission. >> When you talk about data driven organization, that means a lot of different things, to a lot of different people. What does it meant to you guys and how does it fit into your mission? >> For me, I think the first thing is the availability of data. So, historically, a lot of business people have had a hard time getting to the data. So, Pentaho has really freed the data and made it available. For me, step one is freeing the data. From there, it's then becoming more sophisticated in terms of analyzing the data, using the data to manage your day to day operations. >> So, can you describe the before and after? Maybe, the Pentaho journey? What was life like before and how did that change? >> Sasha: Oh, you want to go ahead? >> No, I can go. So, typically, I'll just say ten years ago. You would typically have to put in a request to get data or to get a report. You want a report on the state of Texas and you would have to open up a ticket, get in a line, and wait for someone to fulfill that. Now with Pentaho, we've built self-service models. So, the user can go in themselves and just create the report on the fly. So, we're talking weeks down to minutes. >> Dave: Oh, okay. >> Just to add on to that, we also have now enterprise data warehouse available so now we can do enterprise level reporting and analytics. Rather than just doing a program level reports. >> Can you give our viewers an example of what kind of a report someone would need and what could be implemented after that reports gotten? >> Sure, a lot of our reporting is about funding. We cover products and services for telecommunications. We'll do a lot of report at the national level but we may run state reports, as well. Maybe we have an inquiry, someone wants to know how's our funding in Iowa, how many applications have we completed, what type of products and services are we covered, which schools and libraries have we funded. >> How would you describe the way in which you measure the success of the mission, and how are you doing? >> The focus is a lot about ensuring we provide the right funding to the right schools and libraries and hopefully do it quickly. It's accuracy, and it's also speed. Those are, probably, the two elements. Then, of course, it's the connectivity in the classroom. Ultimately, we're trying to ensure that our products and services lead to connectivity in the classroom as well as libraries. >> How does it work? Is it like winning the lottery? You just say, "hey good news" then somebody knocks at your door or how do you inform folks, how do you collaborate with them, what's the prerequisite on their end, or requisite, things that they have to do? Is there a give and a get? >> There's applications people have to fill out. So, each year, there's a series of applications that have to be completed. We do have a special application window for funding. It's, typically, about 75 days. All the schools and libraries across the country will go ahead and fill out their applications and it's their request of what they would like to receive funding for. So, it's a special time. (chuckles) >> So, we're hearing a lot about the social innovation piece of Pentaho and how that is really one of the real approaches that it takes to business. This double bottom-line and your organization really fulfills that principle that it's trying to make good on. How does working with Hitachi Ventara and the Pentaho product, what's that relationship like there? >> I would say with the Pentaho product, it has really helped us a lot to achieve our mission. We can do a lot more reporting, enterprise level reporting, analytics. Users have the data available at their hands. They can just quickly drag and drop and create their own reports and analytics. >> How does this change employees lives? As you've said, it used to take weeks, months, now it's minutes. >> I think if you've got an operational issue or problem you get a report, maybe there's a problem with data point, or maybe there's a certain set of applications that aren't getting processed quickly enough. We can more quickly identify that problem and respond. So, it's again, identification, and then the magnitude. Is it a small problem or a big problem? Again, by freeing the data and giving it to the managers, they can better manage their operations. And we can hopefully provide better funding, faster funding to schools and libraries across the country. >> Can you take us inside your data journey? What are the sources of data? How have those sources multiplied over time, and how you're dealing with that. >> Sure, when we started we only were thinking about the four programs. So, we wanted to start with Pentaho with the four different programs. We have extracted the data from the four different transactional db's, the four programs. Like, low-income, schools and libraries, RHC, high cost areas, and then we extract this with the help of PDI and load it into our program data marks. And on the top of that, we are making Pentaho sit and then we can report and analyze based on that. >> Maybe, talk a little bit about data quality. You have to trust the data. As the data grows, it's got to be harder and harder to maintain data quality and governance and those sort of boring but important things. >> Yeah, that's been a challenge. We obtain data from other sources. So, a lot of our data is driven by what our applicants put into our forms. So, through Pentaho and other tools, we can mine that data and find out, oh, maybe the person put down the wrong county that they live in, believe it or not. We need to correct that. We do get a lot of outside data brought in and we have to make sure it's, we can use cleaning devices to make sure it's accurate. >> So, you're kind of living the data world. You talk about data driven mission. Today you hear all this buzz about AI, and machine learning, and deep learning, and all these fancy buzzwords. Do they have meaning for you, are you thinking about applying them to your organization, and if so, why? What are the outcomes that you're hoping for? >> Sure, not that much AI but I think we are planning to go more toward the predicted analytics. So, we are going to look at that very soon. We want to be proactive rather than reactive. So we want to respond to the problem proactively. >> So, that means what? Identify areas that are in need before they inform you or anticipating other problems? Describe what problems you'd be solving. >> With our application review process we receive a large number of applications. A lot of them are very similar. So, we can hopefully, put the similar ones that are within our control points and push those through more quickly. Whereas, if we have some outliers we can then, maybe, scrutinize that a little bit more. So, some type of predictive analysis to say, hey this is within a range, it's okay, let's fund it. No, this one needs a lot more scrutiny. >> Okay, so, ensuring better outcomes really? >> Tom: Yes. >> Aligning with those is really the objective, right? Okay. Great. >> So, here at Pentaho World, there's many practitioners who are sharing best practices, learning from each other. Here's how we're using the product. What are you hearing, what are you learning, are there things that as a government agency, part of the FCC, that you are going to be able to take back home and implement? >> I think what I have seen in the last couple of presentations we can do a lot more with the Pentaho version 7.0 and 8.0. You can actually visualize the data right from, when you're extracting the data. Which, I really liked it. I'm pretty sure we're going to apply that and then make the data available in the hands of business much much early rather than later. >> And, I'd also say dashboards. There's nothing better than a slick dashboard with all the metrics right there, clean display, clear indications if your meeting your goals or not. So, I think that's a scenario we have a lot of opportunity for growth. >> Where do you expect to get the viz? Is that something that comes out of Pentaho or are you going to have to bring in other third party tools? >> I think we can do it in Pentaho with custom dashboards. >> Sure, we can do custom dashboards and we are also doing some GIS analytics that we can actually embed into Pentaho portal or even any other open-data portal. >> What did you think of this morning... Did you see the keynote this morning? >> Tom: Yep. >> How did that, I don't know if you're one of the hands that went up when they said who does business with Hitachi, probably no, most people were no. So, you have this big conglomerate, great company, known name, but not really sure exactly what it is they do. As a customer, what was your sense of the keynote, the messaging, does it matter to you, are you indifferent to that or is it meaningful? >> For me, it opened up my eyes about what the possibilities are. And the key is also to be proactive, right? You don't want to be, even though we're a government agency, we act on behalf of the government. We'd like to think we can stay at the forefront and leverage these greats tools and stay current. Because we're all dealing with so much more data and everyone's asked to do everything faster, even though there's more data. >> So what's your key take-away from this conference? >> Better use Pentaho product. (Rebecca laughs) Which we are actually using but the new versions. Apply those, the concepts, and get some more out of it. >> So, I got to ask you, When you think about the governments use of data. There's nobody more sophisticated. Of course, the guys who really use that data in sophisticated ways nobody knows what they do. You can't talk to them, I'm sure they don't expose you to their secrets. But, the government is so enormous, so, as they say, sophisticated. I mean, I'm sure there's a bell curve. But, are there ways to share best practice with non-confidential or classified information? Are you learning from your colleagues? Is there some kind of pipeline to share best practice? Or are you kind of on your own? >> We're actually sharing our practices. We collaborate with FCC and see what they are doing. Where are they in the technology and we share what our experience also. Over here there are some other common institutions, which are here at conference and we are talking to them and how they're leveraging the data, how they're leveraging the product, and how they're better using this product. >> From an enterprise grade level, you think of things like security, and compliance, and things like that. I presume that's important in your world. >> Sachin: Definitely. Absolutely. >> I would imagine that some of those can seep through different agencies and organizations. But, does the system allow for that? I guess is the question or is it just everybody's so busy kind of doing their own thing. >> Sachin: Want to take that? >> We've been getting more mandates from the government to publish our data. That's a big initiative in Washington. To make it available and it's available to the public. It's available to researchers. It's available to state agencies. So, I think there's definitely a lot of sharing of best practices in that space. >> And those are largely unfunded mandates, right? Figured out how you're going to do this and reallocate capital or is it... >> No, I think that if they give us a directive to do that they'll fund that. >> Dave: They usually provide resources to do that. >> Yeah. >> So, you're not having to rob from your mission to, alright great. >> One of the other things that we've been hearing at this conference is the enormous culture shifts that are involved in digital transformation. How would you describe the culture within your organization? Is there an understanding, that data needs to be front and center? Because there is this mission element as well. But, is it hard to bring other people along with you? >> We've been trying to do that with training. Training people how to use Pentaho, how to use data. I will say that it seems like there are some staff that, I don't know if resistance is the right word but, they're a little scared of it. I find some of the younger staff will just dive in there and start analyzing. For me, I try to do a lot of one on one sessions with people and try to individually change their approach and attitude toward data. It can be a little overwhelming. >> Great, great. Well, Tom, Sachin, thank you so much for coming on The Cube. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, you guys. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from Pentaho World just after this. (tech music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D. C., it's the CUBE. Covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to the nation's capitol everybody. This is the CUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here at day two covering Splunk's .conf user conference #splunkconf17, and my name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with with co-host, George Gilbert. As I say, this is day two. We just came off the keynotes. I'm over product orientation today. George, what I'd like to do is summarize the day and the quarter that we've had so far, and then bring you into the conversation and get your opinion on what you heard. You were at the analyst event yesterday. I've been sitting in keynotes. We've been interviewing folks all day long. So let me start, Splunk is all about machine data. They ingest machine data, they analyze machine data for a number of purposes. The two primary use cases that we've heard this week are really IT, what I would call operations management. Understanding the behavior of your systems. What's potentially going wrong, what needs to be remediated. to avoid an outage or remediate an outage. And of course the second major use case that we've heard here is security. Some of the Wall Street guys, I've read some of the work this morning. Particularly Barclays came out with a research note. They had concerns about that, and I really don't know what the concerns are. We're going to talk about it. I presume it's that they're looking for a TAM expansion strategy to support a ten billion dollar valuation, and potentially a much higher valuation. It's worth noting the conference this year is 7,000 attendees, up from 5,000 last year. That's a 40% increase, growing at, or above actually, the pace of revenue growth at Splunk. Pricing remains a concern for some of the users that I've talked to. And I want to talk to you about that. And then of course, there's a lot of product updates that I want to get into. Splunk Enterprise 7.0 which is really Splunk's core analytics platform ITSI which is what I would, their 3.0, which I would call their ITOM platform. UBA which is user behavior analytics 4.0. Updates to Splunk Cloud, which is a service for machine data in the cloud. We've heard about machine learning across the portfolio, really to address alert fatigue. And a new metrics engine called Mstats. And of course we heard today, enterprise content security updates and many several security-oriented solutions throughout the week on fraud detection, ransomware, they've got a deal with Booz Allen Hamilton on Cyber4Sight which is security as a service that involves human intelligence. And a lot of ecosystem partnerships. AWS, DellEMC was on yesterday, Atlassian, Gigamon, et cetera, growing out the ecosystem. That's a quick rundown, George. I want to start with the pricing. I was talking to some users last night before the party. You know, "What do you like about Splunk? "What don't you like about Splunk? "Are you a customer?" I talked to one prospective customer said, "Wow, I've been trying to do "this stuff on my own for years. "I can't wait to get my hands on this." Existing customers, though, only one complaint that I heard was your price is to high, essentially is what they were telling Splunk. Now my feeling on that, and Raymo from Barclays mentioned that in his research note this morning. Raymo Lencho, top securities analyst following software industry. And my feeling George is that historically, "Your price is too high," has never been a headwind for software companies. You look at Oracle, you look at ServiceNow, sometimes customers complain about pricing too high. Splunk, and those companies tend to do very well. What's your take on pricing as a headwind or tailwind indicator? >> Well the way, you always set up these questions in a way that makes answering them easy. Because it's a tailwind in the sense that the deal sizes feed an enterprise sales force. And you need an enterprise sales force ultimately to be pervasive in an organization. 'Cause you can't just throw up like an Amazon-style console and say, "Pick your poison and put it all together." There has to be an advisory, consultative approach to working with a customer to tell them how best to fit their portfolio. >> Right. >> And their architecture. So yes, the price helps you feed that what some people in the last era of enterprise software used to call the most expensive migratory workforce in the world., which is the sales, enterprise sales organization. >> Sure, right. >> But what's happened in the different, in the change from the last major enterprise applications, ERPCRM, and what we're getting into now, is that then the data was all generated and captured by humans. It was keyboard entry. And so there was no, the volumes of data just weren't that great. It was human, essentially business transactions. Now we're capturing data streaming off everything. And you could say Splunk was sort of like the first one out of the gate doing that. And so if you take the new types of data, customer interactions, there are about ten to a hundred customer interactions for every business transaction. Then the information coming out of the IT applications and infrastructure. It's about ten to a hundred times what the customer interactions were. >> Yeah. >> So you can't price the, Your pricing model, if it stays the same will choke you. >> So you're talking about multiple orders of magnitude >> Yes. >> Of more data. >> Yeah. >> And if you're pricing by the terabyte, >> Right. >> Then that's going to cross your customers. >> Right. But here's what I would argue though George. I mean, and you mentioned AWS. AWS is another one where complaints of high pricing. But if, to me, if the company is adding value, the clients will pay for it. And when you get to the point where it becomes a potential headwind, the company, Oracle is a classic at this, will always adjust its pricing to accommodate both its needs as a public organization and a company that has to make money and fund R & D, and the customers needs, and find that balance where the competition can't get in. And so it seems to me, and we heard this from Doug Merritt yesterday, that his challenge is staying ahead of the game. Staying, moving faster than the cloud guys. >> Yeah. >> In what they do well. And to the extent that they do that, I feel like their customers will reward them with their loyalty. And so I feel as though they can adjust their pricing mechanisms. Yeah, everybody's worried about 606, and of course the conversions to subscriptions. I feel as though a high growth, and adjustments to your pricing strategy, I think can address that. What do you think about that? >> It's... It sounds like one of those sayings where, the friends say, "Well it works in practice, "but does it work in theory?" >> No, no. But it has worked in practice in the industry hasn't it? So what's different now? >> Okay. So take Oracle, at list price for Oracle 12C, flagship database. The price per processor core, with all the features thrown in, is something like three hundred thousand, three hundred fifty thousand per core. So you take an average Intel high end server chip, that might have 24 cores, and then you have two sockets, so essentially one node server is 48 times 350. And then of course, Oracle will say, "But for a large customer, we'll knock 90% off that," or something like that. >> Yeah, well exactly. >> Which is exactly what the Splunk guys told me yesterday. But it's-- >> But that's what I'm saying. They'll do what they have to do to maintain the footprint in the customer, do right by the customer, and keep the competition out. >> But if it's multiple orders of magnitude different. If you take the open source guys where essentially the software's free and you're just paying for maintenance. >> (laughs) Yeah and humans. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Okay, that's the other advantage of Splunk, as you pointed out yesterday, they've got a much more integrated set of offerings and services that dramatically lower. I mean, we all know the biggest cost of IT is people. It's not the hardware and software but, all right, I don't want to rat hole on pricing, but that was a good discussion. What did you learn yesterday? You've sat through the analyst meeting. Give us the rundown on George Gilbert's analysis of .conf generally and Splunk as a company specifically. >> Okay, so for me it was a bit of an eye opener because I got to understand sort of, I've always had this feeling about where Splunk fits relative to the open source big data ecosystem. But now I got a sense for what their ambitions are, and what their tactical plan is. I've said for awhile, Splunk's the anti-Hadoop. You know, Hadoop is multiple, sort of dozens of animals with three zookeepers. And I mean literally. >> Yeah. >> And the upside of that is, those individual projects are advancing with a pace of innovation that's just unheard of. The problem is the customer bears the burden of putting it all together. Splunk takes a very different approach which is, they aspire apparently to be just like Hadoop in terms of platform for modern operational analytic applications, but they start much narrower. And it gets to what Ramie's point was in that Wall Street review, where if you take at face value what they're saying, or you've listened just to the keynote, it's like, "Geez, they're in this IT operations ghetto, "in security and that's a La Brea tar pit, "and how are they ever going to climb out of that, "to something really broad?" But what they're doing is, they're not claiming loudly that they're trying to topple the giants and take on the world. They're trying to grow in their corner where they have a defensible moat. And basically the-- >> Let me interrupt you. >> Yeah. >> But to get to five billion >> Yeah. >> Or beyond, they have to have an aggressive TAM expansion strategy, kind of beyond ITOM and security, don't they? >> Right. And so that's where they start generalizing their platform. The data store they had on the platform, the original one, is kind of like a data lake in the sense that it really was sort of the same searchable type index that you would put under a sort of a primitive search engine. They added a new data store this time that handles numbers really well and really fast. That's to support the metrics so they can have richer analytics on the dashboard. Then they'll have other data stores that they add over time. And for each one, you're able to now build with their integrated tool set, more and more advanced apps. >> So you can't use a general purpose data store. You've got to use the Splunk within data. It's kind of like Work Day. >> Yeah, well except that they're adding more over time, and then they're putting their development tools over these to shield them. Now how seamlessly they can shield them remains to be seen. >> Well, but so this is where it gets interesting. >> Yeah. >> Splunk as a platform, as an application development platform on which you can build big data apps, >> Yeah. >> It's certainly, conceptually, you can see how you could use Splunk to do that right? >> And so their approaches out of the box will help you with enterprise security, user, they call it user behavior analytics, because it's a term another research firm put on it, but it's really any abnormal behavior of an entity on the network. So they can go in and not sell this fuzzy concept of a big data platform. They said, they go in and sell, to security operations center, "We make your life much, much easier. "And we make your organization safer." And they call these curated experiences. And the reason this is important is, when Hadoop sells, typically they go in, and they say, "Well, we have this data lake. "which is so much cheaper and a better way "to collect all your data than a data warehouse." These guys go in and then they'll add what more and more of these curated experiences, which is what everyone else would call applications. And then the research Wikibon's done, depth first, or rather breadth first versus depth first. Breadth first gives you the end to end visibility across on prem, across multiple clouds, down to the edge. But then, when they put security apps on it, when they put dev ops or, some future big data analytics apps as their machine learning gets richer and richer, then all of a sudden, they're not selling the platform, because that's a much more time-intensive sale, and lots more of objectives, I'm sorry, objections. >> It's not only the solutions, those depth solutions. >> Yes, and then all of a sudden, the customer wakes up and he's got a dozen of these things, and all of a sudden this is a platform. >> Well, ServiceNow is similar in that it's a platform. And when Fred Luddy first came out with it, it's like, "Here." And everybody said, "Well, what do I do with it?" So he went back and wrote a IT service management app. And they said, "Oh okay, we get it." Splunk in a similar way has these depth apps, and as you say, they're not selling the platform, because they say, "Hey, you want to buy a platform?" people don't want to buy a platform, they want to buy a solution. >> Right. >> Having said that, that platform is intrinsic to their solutions when they deliver it. It's there for them to leverage. So the question is, do they have an application developer kit strategy, if you will. >> Yeah. >> Whether it's low code or even high code. >> Yeah. >> Where, and where they're cultivating a developer community. Is there anything like that going on here at .conf? >> Yeah, they're not making a big deal about the development tools, 'cause that makes it sound more like a platform. >> (laughs) But they could! >> But they could. And the tools, you know, so that you can build a user interface, you can build dashboards, you can build machine learning models. The reason those tools are simpler and more accessible to developers, is because they were designed to fit the pieces underneath, the foundation. Whereas if you look at some of the open source big data ecosystem, they've got these notebooks and other tools where you address one back end this way, another back end that way. It's sort of, you know, you can see how Frankenstein was stitched together, you know? >> Yeah so, I mean to your point, we saw fraud detection, we saw ransomware, we see this partnership with Booz Allen Hamilton on Cyber4Sight. We heard today about project Waytono, which is unified monitoring and troubleshooting. And so they have very specific solutions that they're delivering, that presumably many of them are for pay. And so, and bringing ML across the platform, which now open up a whole ton of opportunities. So the question is, are these incremental, defend the base and then grow the core solutions, or are they radical innovations in your view? >> I think they're trying to stay away from the notion of radical innovation, 'cause then that will create more pushback from organizations. So they started out with a google-search-like product for log analytics. And you can see that as their aspirations grow for a broader set of applications, they add in a richer foundation. There's more machine learning algorithms now. They added that new data store. And when we talked about this with the CEO, Doug Merritt yesterday at the analyst day, he's like, "Yes, you look out three to five years, "and the platform gets more and more broad. "and at some point customers wake up "and they realize they have a new strategic platform." >> Yeah, and platforms do beat products, and even though it's hard sell, if you have a platform like Splunk does, you're in a much better strategic position. All right, we got to wrap. George thanks for joining me for the intro. I know you're headed to New York City for Big Data NYC down there, which is the other coverage that we have this week. So thank you again for coming on. >> Okay. >> All right, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest, we're live. This is the CUBE from Splunk .conf2017 in the nation's capitol, be right back. (electronic music)