>> Announcer: "theCUBE" presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2022. You're watching "theCUBE's" coverage. This is Day 2, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. Sheila Rohra is here. She's the Senior Vice President and GM of the Data Infrastructure Business at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and of course, the storage division. And Omer Asad. Welcome back to "theCUBE", Omer. Senior Vice President and General Manager for Cloud Data Services, Hewlett Packard Enterprise storage. Guys, thanks for coming on. Good to see you. >> Thank you. Always a pleasure, man. >> Thank you. >> So Sheila, I'll start with you. Explain the difference. The Data Infrastructure Business and then Omer's Cloud Data Services. You first. >> Okay. So Data Infrastructure Business. So I'm responsible for the primary secondary storage. Basically, what you physically store, the data in a box, I actually own that. So I'm going to have Omer explain his business because he can explain it better than me. (laughing) Go ahead. >> So 100% right. So first, data infrastructure platforms, primary secondary storage. And then what I do from a cloud perspective is wrap up those things into offerings, block storage offerings, data protection offerings, and then put them on top of the GreenLake platform, which is the platform that Antonio and Fidelma talked about on main Keynote stage yesterday. That includes multi-tenancy, customer subscription management, sign on management, and then on top of that we build services. Services are cloud-like services, storage services or block service, data protection service, disaster recovery services. Those services are then launched on top of the platform. Some services like data protection services are software only. Some services are software plus hardware. And the hardware on the platform comes along from the primary storage business and we run the control plane for that block service on the GreenLake platform and that's the cloud service. >> So, I just want to clarify. So what we maybe used to know as 3PAR and Nimble and StoreOnce. Those are the products that you're responsible for? >> That is the primary storage part, right? And just to kind of show that, he and I, we do indeed work together. Right. So if you think about the 3PAR, the primary... Sorry, the Primera, the Alletras, the Nimble, right? All that, right? That's the technology that, you know, my team builds. And what Omer does with his magic is that he turns it into HPE GreenLake for storage, right? And to deliver as a service, right? And basically to create a self-service agility for the customer and also to get a very Cloud operational experience for them. >> So if I'm a customer, just so I get this right, if I'm a customer and I want Hybrid, that's what you're delivering as a Cloud service? >> Yes. >> And I don't care where the data is on-premises, in storage, or on Cloud. >> 100%. >> Is that right? >> So the way that would work is, as a customer, you would come along with the partner, because we're 100% partner-led. You'll come to the GreenLake Console. On the GreenLake Console, you will pick one of our services. Could be a data protection service, could be the block storage service. All services are hybrid in nature. Public Cloud is 100% participant in the ecosystem. You'll choose a service. Once you choose a service, you like the rate card for that service. That rate card is just like a hyperscaler rate card. IOPS, Commitment, MINCOMMIT's, whatever. Once you procure that at the price that you like with a partner, you buy the subscription. Then you go to console.greenLake.com, activate your subscription. Once the subscription is activated, if it's a service like block storage, which we talked about yesterday, service will be activated, and our supply chain will send you our platform gear, and that will get activated in your site. Two things, network cable, power cable, dial into the cloud, service gets activated, and you have a cloud control plane. The key difference to remember is that it is cloud-consumption model and cloud-operation model built in together. It is not your traditional as a service, which is just like hardware leasing. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> That's a thing of the past. >> But this answers a question that I had, is how do you transfer or transform from a company that is, you know, selling boxes, of course, most of you are engineers are software engineers, I get that, to one that is selling services. And it sounds like the answer is you've organized, I know it's inside baseball here, but you organize so that you still have, you can build best of breed products and then you can package them into services. >> Omer: 100%. 100%. >> It's separate but complementary organization. >> So the simplest way to look at it would be, we have a platform side at the house that builds the persistence layers, the innovation, the file systems, the speeds and feeds, and then building on top of that, really, really resilient storage services. Then how the customer consumes those storage services, we've got tremendous feedback from our customers, is that the cloud-operational model has won. It's just a very, very simple way to operate it, right? So from a customer's perspective, we have completely abstracted away out hardware, which is in the back. It could be at their own data center, it could be at an MSP, or they could be using a public cloud region. But from an operational perspective, the customer gets a single pane of glass through our service console, whether they're operating stuff on-prem, or they're operating stuff in the public cloud. >> So they get storage no matter what? They want it in the cloud, they got it that way, and if they want it as a service, it just gets shipped. >> 100%. >> They plug it in and it auto configures. >> Omer: It's ready to go. >> That's right. And the key thing is simplicity. We want to take the headache away from our customers, we want our customers to focus on their business outcomes, and their projects, and we're simplifying it through analytics and through this unified cloud platform, right? On like how their data is managed, how they're stored, how they're secured, that's all taken care of in this operational model. >> Okay, so I have a question. So just now the edge, like take me through this. Say I'm a customer, okay I got the data saved on-premise action, cloud, love that. Great, sir. That's a value proposition. Come to HPE because we provide this easily. Yeah. But now at the edge, I want to deploy it out to some edge node. Could be a tower with Telecom, 5G or whatever, I want to box this out there, I want storage. What happens there? Just ship it out there and connects up? Does it work the same way? >> 100%. So from our infrastructure team, you'll consume one or two platforms. You'll consume either the Hyperconverged form factor, SimpliVity, or you might convert, the Converged form factor, which is proliant servers powered by Alletras. Alletra 6Ks. Either of those... But it's very different the way you would procure it. What you would procure from us is an edge service. That edge service will come configured with certain amount of compute, certain amount of storage, and a certain amount of data protection. Once you buy that on a dollars per gig per month basis, whichever rate card you prefer, storage rate card or a VMware rate card, that's all you buy. From that point on, the platform team automatically configures the back-end hardware from that attribute-based ordering and that is shipped out to your edge. Dial in the network cable, dial in the power cable, GreenLake cloud discovers it, and then you start running the- >> Self-service, configure it, it just shows up, plug it in, done. >> Omer: Self-service but partner-led. >> Yeah. >> Because we have preferred pricing for our partners. Our partners would come in, they will configure the subscriptions, and then we activate those customers, and then send out the hardware. So it's like a hyperscaler on-prem at-scale kind of a model. >> Yeah, I like it a lot. >> So you guys are in the data business. You run the data portion of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I used to call it storage, even if we still call it storage but really, it's evolving into data. So what's your vision for the data business and your customer's data vision, if you will? How are you supporting that? >> Well, I want to kick it off, and then I'm going to have my friend, Omer, chime in. But the key thing is that what the first step is is that we have to create a unified platform, and in this case we're creating a unified cloud platform, right? Where there's a single pane of glass to manage all that data, right? And also leveraging lots of analytics and telemetry data that actually comes from our infosite, right? We use all that, we make it easy for the customer, and all they have to say, and they're basically given the answers to the test. "Hey, you know, you may want to increase your capacity. You may want to tweak your performance here." And all the customers are like, "Yes. No. Yes, no." Basically it, right? Accept and not accept, right? That's actually the easiest way. And again, as I said earlier, this frees up the bandwidth for the IT teams so then they actually focus more on the business side of the house, rather than figuring out how to actually manage every single step of the way of the data. >> Got it. >> So it's exactly what Sheila described, right? The way this strategy manifests itself across an operational roadmap for us is the ability to change from a storage vendor to a data services vendor, right? >> Sheila: Right. >> And then once we start monetizing these data services to our customers through the GreenLake platform, which gives us cloud consumption model and a cloud operational model, and then certain data services come with the platform layer, certain data services are software only. But all the services, all the data services that we provide are hybrid in nature, where we say, when you provision storage, you could provision it on-prem, or you can provision it in a hyperscaler environment. The challenge that most of our customers have come back and told us, is like, data center control planes are getting fragmented. On-premises, I mean there's no secrecy about it, right? VMware is the predominant hypervisor, and as a result of that, vCenter is the predominant configuration layer. Then there is the public cloud side, which is through either Ajour, or GCP, or AWS, being one of the largest ones out there. But when the customer is dealing with data assets, the persistence layer could be anywhere, it could be in AWS region, it could be your own data center, or it could be your MSP. But what this does is it creates an immense amount of fragmentation in the context in which the customers understand the data. Essentially, John, the customers are just trying to answer three questions: What is it that I store? How much of it do I store? Should I even be storing it in the first place? And surprisingly, those three questions just haven't been answered. And we've gotten more and more fragmented. So what we are trying to produce for our customers, is a context to ware data view, which allows the customer to understand structured and unstructured data, and the lineage of how it is stored in the organization. And essentially, the vision is around simplification and context to ware data management. One of the key things that makes that possible, is again, the age old infosite capability that we have continued to hone and develop over time, which is now up to the stage of like 12 trillion data points that are coming into the system that are not corroborated to give that back. >> And of course cost-optimizing it as well. We're up against the clock, but take us through the announcements, what's new from when we sort of last talked? I guess it was in September. >> Omer: Right. >> Right. What's new that's being announced here and, or, you know, GA? >> Right. So three major announcements that came out, because to keep on establishing the context when we were with you last time. So last time we announced GreenLake backup and recovery service. >> John: Right. >> That was VMware backup and recovery as a complete cloud, sort of SaaS control plane. No backup target management, no BDS server management, no catalog management, it's completely a SaaS service. Provide your vCenter address, boom, off you go. We do the backups, agentless, 100% dedup enabled. We have extended that into the public cloud domain. So now, we can back up AWS, EC2, and EBS instances within the same constructs. So a single catalog, single backup policy, single protection framework that protects you both in the cloud and on-prem, no fragmentation, no multiple solutions to deploy. And the second one is we've extended our Hyperconverged service to now be what we call the Hybrid Cloud On-Demand. So basically, you go to GreenLake Console control plane, and from there, you basically just start configuring virtual machines. It supports VMware and AWS at the same time. So you can provision a virtual machine on-prem, or you can provision a virtual machine in the public cloud. >> Got it. >> And, it's the same framework, the same catalog, the same inventory management system across the board. And then, lastly, we extended our block storage service to also become hybrid in nature. >> Got it. >> So you can manage on-prem and AWS, EBS assets as well. >> And Sheila, do you still make product announcements, or does Antonio not allow that? (Omer laughing) >> Well, we make product announcements, and you're going to see our product announcements actually done through the HPE GreenLake for block storage. >> Dave: Oh, okay. >> So our announcements will be coming through that, because we do want to make it as a service. Again, we want to take all of that headache of "What configuration should I buy? How do I actually deploy it? How do I...?" We really want to take that headache away. So you're going to see more feature announcements that's going to come through this. >> So feature acceleration through GreenLake will be exposed? >> Absolutely. >> This is some cool stuff going on behind the scenes. >> Oh, there's a lot good stuff. >> Hardware still matters, you know. >> Hardware still matters. >> Does it still matter? Does hardware matter? >> Hardware still matters, but what matters more is the experience, and that's actually what we want to bring to the customer. (laughing) >> John: That's good. >> Good answer. >> Omer: 100%. (laughing) >> Guys, thanks so much- >> John: Hardware matters. >> For coming on "theCUBE". Good to see you again. >> John: We got it. >> Thanks. >> And hope the experience was good for you Sheila. >> I know, I know. Thank you. >> Omer: Pleasure as always. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante and John Furrier will be back from HPE Discover 2022. You're watching "theCUBE". (soft music)

(inspiring music) >> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022, from the Venetian in Las Vegas, the first Discover since 2019. I really think this is my 14th Discover, when you include HP, when you include Europe. And I got to say this Discover, I think has more energy than any one that I've ever seen, about 8,000 people here. Really excited to have one of HPE's longstanding partners, Veeam CTO, Danny Allen is here, joined by David Harvey, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam. Guys, good to see you again. It was just earlier, let's see, last month, we were together out here. >> Yeah, just a few weeks ago. It's fantastic to be back and what it's telling us, technology industry is coming back. >> And the events business, of course, is coming back, which we love. I think the expectations were cautious. You saw it at VeeamON, a little more than you expected, a lot of great energy. A lot of people, 'cause it was last month, it was their first time out, >> Yes. >> in two years. Here, I think people have started to go out more, but still, an energy that's palpable. >> You can definitely feel it. Last night, I think I went to four consecutive events and everyone's out having those discussions and having conversations, it's good to be back. >> You guys hosted the Storage party last night, which is epic. I left at midnight, I took a picture, it was still packed. I said, okay, time to go, nothing good happens after midnight kids. David, talk about the alliance with HPE, how it's evolved, and where you see it going? >> I appreciate it, and certainly this, as you said, has been a big alliance for us. Over 10 years or so, fantastic integrations across the board. And you touched on 2019 Discover. We launched with GreenLake at that event, we were one of the launch partners, and we've seen fantastic growth. Overall, what we're excited about, is that continuation of the movement of the customer's buying patterns in line with HPE's portfolio and in line with Veeam. We continue to be with all their primary, secondary storage, we continue to be a spearhead position with GreenLake, which we're really excited about. And we're also really excited to hear from HPE, unfortunately under NDA, some of their future stuff they're investing in, which is a really nice invigoration for what they're doing for their portfolio. And we see that being a big deal for us over the next 24 months. >> Your relationship with HPE predates the HP, HPE split. >> Mmm. >> Yes. >> But it was weird, because they had Data Protector, and that was a quasi-competitor, or really not, but it was a competitor, a legacy competitor, of what you guys have, kind of modern data protection I think is the tagline, if I got it right. Post the split, that was an S-curve moment, wasn't it, in terms of the partnership? >> It really was. If you go back 10 years, we did our first integration sending data to StoreOnce and we had some blueprints around that. But now, if you look what we have, we have integrations on the primary side, so, 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, all their top-tier storage, we can manage the snapshots. We have integration on the target side. We integrate with Catalyst in the movement of data and the management of data. And, as David alluded to, we integrate with GreenLake. So, customers who want to take this as a consumption model, we integrate with that. And so it's been, like you said, the strongest relationship that we have on the technology alliance side. >> So, V12, you announced at VeeamON. What does that mean for HPE customers, the relationship? Maybe you guys could both talk about that. >> Technology side, to touch on a few things that we're doing with them, ransomware has been a huge issue. Security's been a big theme, obviously, at the conference, >> Dave: Yeah, you bet. and one of the things we're doing in V12 is adding immutability for both StoreOnce and StoreEver. So, we take the features that our partners have, immutability being big in the security space, and we integrate that fully into the product. So a customer checks a box and says, hey, I want to make sure that the data is secure. >> Yeah, and also, it's another signification about the relationship. Every single release we've done has had HPE at the heart of it, and the same thing is being said with V12. And it shows to our customers, the continual commitment. Relationships come and go. They're hard, and the great news is, 10 years has proven that we get through good times and tricky situations, and we both continue to invest, et cetera. And I think there's a lot of peace of mind and the revenue figures prove that, which is what we're really excited about. >> Yeah I want to come back to that, but just to follow up, Danny, on that immutability, that's a feature that you check? It's service within GreenLake, or within Veeam? How does that all work? >> We have immutability now depending on the target. We introduced the ability to send data, for example, into S3 two years ago, and make it immutable when you send it to an S3 or S3 compatible environment. We added, in Version 11, the ability to take a Linux repository and make it, and harden it, essentially make it immutable. But what we're doing now is taking our partner systems like StoreOnce, like StoreEver, and when we send data there, we take advantage of an API flag or whatever it happens to be, that it makes the data, when it's written to that system, can't be deleted, can't be encrypted. Now, what does that mean for a customer? Well, we do all the hard work in the back end, it's just a check box. They say, I want to make it immutable, and we manage how long it's immutable. Because if you made everything immutable forever, that's hugely expensive, right? So, it's all about, how long is that immutable before you age it out and make sure the new data coming in is immutable. >> Dave: It's like an insurance policy, you have that overlap. >> Yes. >> Right, okay. And then David, you mentioned the revenue, Lou bears that out. I got the IDC guys comin' on later on today. I'll ask 'em about that, if that's their swim lane. But you guys are basically a statistical tie, with Dell for number one? Am I getting that right? And you're growing at a faster rate, I believe, it's hard to tell 'cause I don't think Dell reports on the pace of its growth within data protection. You guys obviously do, but is that right? It's a statistical tie, is it? >> Yeah, hundred percent. >> Yeah, statistical tie for first place, which we're super excited about. When I joined Veeam, I think we were in fifth place, but we've been in the leader's quadrant of the Gartner Magic- >> Cause and effect there or? (panelists laughing) >> No, I don't think so. >> Dave: Ha, I think maybe. >> We've been on a great trajectory. But statistical tie for first place, greatest growth sequentially, and year-over-year, of all of the data protection vendors. And that's a testament not just to the technology that we're doing, but partnerships with HPE, because you never do this, the value of a technology is not that technology alone, it's the value of that technology within the ecosystem. And so that's why we're here at HPE Discover. It's our joint technology solutions that we're delivering. >> What are your thoughts or what are you seeing in the field on As-a-service? Because of course, the messaging is all about As-a-service, you'd think, oh, a hundred percent of everything is going to be As-a-service. A lot of customers, they don't mind CapEx, they got good, balance sheet, and they're like, hey, we'll take care of this, and, we're going to build our own little internal cloud. But, what are you seeing in the market in terms of As-a-service, versus, just traditional licensing models? >> Certainly, there's a mix between the two. What I'd say, is that sources that are already As-a-service, think Microsoft 365, think AWS, Azure, GCP, the cloud providers. There's a natural tendency for the customer to want the data protection As-a-service, as well for those. But if you talk about what's on premises, customers who have big data centers deployed, they're not yet, the pendulum has not shifted for that to be data protection As-a-service. But we were early to this game ourselves. We have 10,000, what we call, Veeam Cloud Service Providers, that are offering data protection As-a-service, whether it be on premises, so they're remotely managing it, or cloud hosted, doing data protection for that. >> So, you don't care. You're providing the technology, and then your customers are actually choosing the delivery model. Is that correct? >> A hundred percent, and if you think about what GreenLake is doing for example, that started off as being a financial model, but now they're getting into that services delivery. And what we want to do is enable them to deliver it, As-a-service, not just the financial model, but the outcome for the customer. And so our technology, it's not just do backup, it's do backup for a multi-tenant, multi-customer environment that does all of the multi-tenancy and billing and charge back as part of that service. >> Okay, so you guys don't report on this, but I'm going to ask the question anyway. You're number one now, let's call you, let's declare number one, 'cause we're well past that last reporting and you're growin' faster. So go another quarter, you're now number one, so you're the largest. Do you spend more on R&D in data protection than any other company? >> Yes, I'm quite certain that we do. Now, we have an unfair advantage because we have 450,000 customers. I don't think there's any other data protection company out there, the size and scope and scale, that we have. But we've been expanding, our largest R&D operation center's in Prague, it's in Czech Republic, but we've been expanding that. Last year it grew 40% year on year in R&D, so big investment in that space. You can see this just through our product space. Five years ago, we did data protection of VMware only, and now we do all the virtual environments, all the physical environments, all the major cloud environments, Kubernetes, Microsoft 365, we're launching Salesforce. We announced that at VeeamON last month and it will be coming out in Q3. All of that is coming from our R&D investments. >> A lot of people expect that when a company like Insight, a PE company, purchases a company like Veeam, that one of the things they'll dial down is R&D. That did not happen in this case. >> No, they very much treat us as a growth company. We had 22% year-over-year growth in 2020, and 25% year-over-year last year. The growth has been tremendous, they continue to give us the freedom. Now, I expect they'll want returns like that continuously, but we have been delivering, they have been investing. >> One of my favorite conversations of the year was our supercloud conversation, which was awesome, thank you for doing that with me. But that's clearly an area of focus, what we call supercloud, and you don't use that term, I know, you do sometimes, but it's not your marketing, I get that. But that is an R&D intensive effort, is it not? To create that common experience. And you see HPE, attempting to do that as well, across all these different estates. >> A hundred percent. We focus on three things, I always say, our differentiators, simplicity, flexibility, and reliability. Making it simple for the customers is not an easy thing to do. Making that checkbox for immutability? We have to do a lot behind the scenes to make it simple. Same thing on flexibility. We don't care if they're using 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, whatever you want to choose as the primary storage, we will take that out of your hands and make it really easy. You mentioned supercloud. We don't care what the cloud infrastructure, it can be on GreenLake, it can be on AWS, can be on Azure, it can be on GCP, it can be on IBM cloud. It is a lot of effort on our part to abstract the cloud infrastructure, but we do that on behalf of our customers to take away that complexity, it's part of our platform. >> Quick follow-up, and then I want to ask a question of David. I like talking to you guys because you don't care where it is, right? You're truly agnostic to it all. I'm trying to figure out this repatriation thing, cause I hear a lot of hey, Dave, you should look into repatriation that's happened all over the place, and I see pockets of it. What are you seeing in terms of repatriation? Have customers over-rotated to the cloud and now they're pullin' back a little bit? Or is it, as I'm claiming, in pockets? What's your visibility on that? >> Three things I see happening. There's the customers who lifted up their data center, moved it into the cloud and they get the first bill. >> (chuckling) Okay. >> And they will repatriate, there's no question. If I talk to those customers who simply lifted up and moved it over because the CIO told them to, they're moving it back on premises. But a second thing that we see is people moving it over, with tweaks. So they'll take their SQL server database and they'll move it into RDS, they'll change some things. And then you have people who are building cloud-native, they're never coming back on premises, they are building it for the cloud environment. So, we see all three of those. We only really see repatriation on that first scenario, when they get that first bill. >> And when you look at the numbers, I think it gets lost, 'cause you see the cloud is growing so fast. So David, what are the conversations like? You had several events last night, The Veeam party, slash Storage party, from HPE. What are you hearing from your alliance partners and the customers at the event. >> I think Danny touched on that point, it's about philosophy of evolution. And I think at the end of the day, whether we're seeing it with our GSI alliances we've got out there, or with the big enterprise conversations we're having with HPE, it's about understanding which workloads they want to move. In our mind, the customers are getting much smarter in making that decision, rather than experimenting. They're really taking a really solid look. And the work we're doing with the GSIs on workplace modernization, data center transformation, they're really having that investment work up front on the workloads, to be able to say, this works for me, for my personality and my company. And so, to the point about movement, it's more about decisive decision at the start, and not feeling like the remit is, I have to do one thing or another, it's about looking at that workflow position. And that's what we've seen with the revenue part as well. We've seen our movement to GreenLake tremendously grow in the last 18 months to two years. And from our GSI work as well, we're seeing the types of conversations really focus on that workload, compared to, hey, I just need a backup solution, and that's really exciting. >> Are you having specific conversations about security, or is it a data protection conversation still, (David chuckles) that's an adjacency to security? >> That's a great question. And I think it's a complex one, because if you come to a company like Veeam, we are there, and you touched on it before, we provide a solution when something has happened with security. We're not doing intrusion detection, we're not doing that barrier position at the end of it, but it's part of an end-to-end assumption. And I don't think that at this particular point, I started in security with RSA and Check Point, it was about layers of protection. Now it's layers of protection, and the inevitability that at some point something will happen, so about the recovery. So the exciting conversations we're having, especially with the big enterprises, is not about the fear factor, it's about, at some point something's going to occur. Speed of recovery is the conversation. And so for us, and your question is, are they talking to us about security, or more, the continuity position? And that's where the synergy's getting a lot simpler, rather than a hard demark between security and backup. >> Yeah, when you look at the stock market, everything's been hit, but security, with the exception of Okta, 'cause it got that weird benign hack, but security, generally, is an area that CIOs have said, hey, we can't really dial that back. We can maybe, some other discretionary stuff, we'll steal and prioritize. But security seems to be, and I think data protection is now part of that discussion. You're not a security company. We've seen some of your competitors actually pivot to become security companies. You're not doing that, but it's very clearly an adjacency, don't you think? >> It's an adjacency, and it's a new conversation that we're having with the Chief Information Security Officer. I had a meeting an hour ago with a customer who was hit by ransomware, and they got the call at 2:00 AM in the morning, after the ransomware they recovered their entire portfolio within 36 hours, from backups. Didn't even contact Veeam, I found out during this meeting. But that is clearly something that the Chief Information Security Officer wants to know about. It's part of his purview, is the recovery of that data. >> And they didn't pay the ransom? >> And they did not pay the ransom, not a penny. >> Ahh, we love those stories. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on all the success. Love when you guys come on, and it was such a fun event at VeeamON. Great event here, and your presence is, was seen. The Veeam green is everywhere, so appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Okay, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and Lisa Martin. We'll be back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022, from Las Vegas. (inspiring music)

(upbeat music) >> We're back at VeeamON 2022. We're here at the Aria in Las Vegas Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Bill Andrews is here. He's the president and CEO of ExaGrid, mass boy. Bill, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I hear a lot about obviously data protection, cyber resiliency, what's the big picture trends that you're seeing when you talk to customers? >> Well, I think clearly we were talking just a few minutes ago, data's growing like crazy, right This morning, I think they said it was 28% growth a year, right? So data's doubling almost just a little less than every three years. And then you get the attacks on the data which was the keynote speech this morning as well, right. All about the ransomware attacks. So we've got more and more data, and that data is more and more under attack. So I think those are the two big themes. >> So ExaGrid as a company been around for a long time. You've kind of been the steady kind of Eddy, if you will. Tell us about ExaGrid, maybe share with us some of the differentiators that you share with customers. >> Sure, so specifically, let's say in the Veeam world you're backing up your data, and you really only have two choices. You can back that up to disc. So some primary storage disc from a Dell, or a Hewlett Packard, or an NetApp or somebody, or you're going to back it up to what's called an inline deduplication appliance maybe a Dell Data Domain or an HPE StoreOnce, right? So what ExaGrid does is we've taken the best of both those but not the challenges of both those and put 'em together. So with disc, you're going to get fast backups and fast restores, but because in backup you keep weekly's, monthly's, yearly retention, the cost of this becomes exorbitant. If you go to a deduplication appliance, and let's say the Dell or the HPs, the data comes in, has to be deduplicated, compare one backup to the next to reduce that storage, which lowers the cost. So fixes that problem, but the fact that they do it inline slows the backups down dramatically. All the data is deduplicated so the restores are slow, and then the backup window keeps growing as the data grows 'cause they're all scale up technologies. >> And the restores are slow 'cause you got to rehydrate. >> You got to rehydrate every time. So what we did is we said, you got to have both. So our appliances have a front end disc cache landing zone. So you're right directed to the disc., Nothing else happens to it, whatever speed the backup app could write at that's the speed we take it in at. And then we keep the most recent backups in that landing zone ready to go. So you want to boot a VM, it's not an hour like a deduplication appliance it's a minute or two. Secondly, we then deduplicate the data into a second tier which is a repository tier, but we have all the deduplicated data for the long term retention, which gets the cost down. And on top of that, we're scale out. Every appliance has networking processor memory end disc. So if you double, triple, quadruple the data you double, triple, quadruple everything. And if the backup window is six hours at 100 terabyte it's six hours at 200 terabyte, 500 terabyte, a petabyte it doesn't matter. >> 'Cause you scale out. >> Right, and then lastly, our repository tier is non-network facing. We're the only ones in the industry with this. So that under a ransomware attack, if you get hold of a rogue server or you hack the media server, get to the backup storage whether it's disc or deduplication appliance, you can wipe out all the backup data. So you have nothing to recover from. In our case, you wipe it out, our landing zone will be wiped out. We're no different than anything else that's network facing. However, the only thing that talks to our repository tier is our object code. And we've set up security policies as to how long before you want us to delete data, let's say 10 days. So if you have an attack on Monday that data doesn't get deleted till like a week from Thursday, let's say. So you can freeze the system at any time and do restores. And then we have immutable data objects and all the other stuff. But the culmination of a non-network facing tier and the fact that we do the delayed deletes makes us the only one in the industry that can actually truly recover. And that's accelerating our growth, of course. >> Wow, great description. So that disc cache layer is a memory, it's a flash? >> It's disc, it's spinning disc. >> Spinning disc, okay. >> Yeah, no different than any other disc. >> And then the tiered is what, less expensive spinning disc? >> No, it's still the same. It's all SaaS disc 'cause you want the quality, right? So it's all SaaS, and so we use Western Digital or Seagate drives just like everybody else. The difference is that we're not doing any deduplication coming in or out of that landing zone to have fast backups and fast restores. So think of it like this, you've got disc and you say, boy it's too expensive. What I really want to do then is put maybe a deduplication appliance behind it to lower the cost or reverse it. I've got a deduplication appliance, ugh, it's too slow for backups and restores. I really want to throw this in front of it to have fast backups first. Basically, that's what we did. >> So where does the cost savings, Bill come in though, on the tier? >> The cost savings comes in the fact that we got deduplication in that repository. So only the most recent backup >> Ah okay, so I get it. >> are the duplicated data. But let's say you had 40 copies of retention. You know, 10 weekly's, 36 monthly's, a few yearly. All of that's deduplicated >> Okay, so you're deduping the stuff that's not as current. >> Right. >> Okay. >> And only a handful of us deduplicate at the layer we do. In other words, deduplication could be anywhere from two to one, up to 50 to one. I mean it's all over the place depending on the algorithm. Now it's what everybody's algorithms do. Some backup apps do two to one, some do five to one, we do 20 to one as well as much as 50 to one depending on the data types. >> Yeah, so the workload is going to largely determine the combination >> The content type, right. with the algos, right? >> Yeah, the content type. >> So the part of the environment that's behind the illogical air gap, if you will, is deduped data. >> Yes. >> So in this case, is it fair to say that you're trading a positive economic value for a little bit longer restore from that environment? >> No, because if you think about backup 95% of the customers restores are from the most recent data. >> From the disc cache. >> 95% of the time 'cause you think about why do you need fast restores? Somebody deleted a file, somebody overwrote a file. They can't go work, they can't open a file. It's encrypted, it's corrupted. That's what IT people are trying to keep users productive. When do you go for longer-term retention data? It's an SEC audit. It's a HIPAA audit. It's a legal discovery, you don't need that data right away. You have days and weeks to get that ready for that legal discovery or that audit. So we found that boundary where you keep users productive by keeping the most recent data in the disc cache landing zone, but anything that's long term. And by the way, everyone else is long term, at that point. >> Yeah, so the economics are comparable to the dedupe upfront. Are they better, obviously get the performance advance? >> So we would be a lot looped. The thing we replaced the most believe it or not is disc, we're a lot less expensive than the disc. I was meeting with some Veeam folks this morning and we were up against Cisco 3260 disc at a children's hospital. And on our quote was $500,000. The disc was 1.4 million. Just to give you an example of the savings. On a Data Domain we're typically about half the price of a Data Domain. >> Really now? >> The reason why is their front end control are so expensive. They need the fastest trip on the planet 'cause they're trying to do inline deduplication. >> Yeah, so they're chasing >> They need the fastest memory >> on the planet. >> this chips all the time. They need SSD on data to move in and out of the hash table. In order to keep up with inline, they've got to throw so much compute at it that it drives their cost up. >> But now in the case of ransomware attack, are you saying that the landing zone is still available for recovery in some circumstances? Or are you expecting that that disc landing zone would be encrypted by the attacker? >> Those are two different things. One is deletion, one is encryption. So let's do the first scenario. >> I'm talking about malicious encryption. >> Yeah, absolutely. So the first scenario is the threat actor encrypts all your primary data. What's does he go for next? The backup data. 'Cause he knows that's your belt and suspend is to not pay the ransom. If it's disc he's going to go in and put delete commands at the disc, wipe out the disc. If it's a data domain or HPE StoreOnce, it's all going to be gone 'cause it's one tier. He's going to go after our landing zone, it's going to be gone too. It's going to wipe out our landing zone. Except behind that we have the most recent backup deduplicate in the repository as well as all the other backups. So what'll happen is they'll freeze the system 'cause we weren't going to delete anything in the repository for X days 'cause you set up a policy, and then you restore the most recent backup into the landing zone or we can restore it directly to your primary storage area, right? >> Because that tier is not network facing. >> That's right. >> It's fenced off essentially. >> People call us every day of the week saying, you saved me, you saved me again. People are coming up to me here, you saved me, you saved me. >> Tell us a story about that, I mean don't give me the names but how so. >> I'll actually do a funnier story, 'cause these are the ones that our vendors like to tell. 'Cause I'm self-serving as the CEO that's good of course, a little humor. >> It's your 15 minutes of job. >> That is my 15 minutes of fame. So we had one international company who had one ExaGrid at one location, 19 Data Domains at the other locations. Ransomware attack guess what? 19 Data Domains wiped out. The one ExaGrid, the only place they could restore. So now all 20 locations of course are ExaGrids, China, Russia, Mexico, Germany, US, et cetera. They rolled us out worldwide. So it's very common for that to occur. And think about why that is, everyone who's network facing you can get to the storage. You can say all the media servers are buttoned up, but I can find a rogue server and snake my way over the storage, I can. Now, we also of course support the Veeam Data Mover. So let's talk about that since we're at a Veeam conference. We were the first company to ever integrate the Veeam Data Mover. So we were the first actually ever integration with Veeam. And so that Veeam Data Mover is a protocol that goes from Veeam to the ExaGrid, and we run it on both ends. So that's a more secure protocol 'cause it's not an open format protocol like SaaS. So with running the Veeam Data Mover we get about 30% more performance, but you do have a more secure protocol layer. So if you don't get through Veeam but you get through the protocol, boom, we've got a stronger protocol. If you make it through that somehow, or you get to it from a rogue server somewhere else we still have the repository. So we have all these layers so that you can't get at it. >> So you guys have been at this for a while, I mean decade and a half plus. And you've raised a fair amount of money but in today's terms, not really. So you've just had really strong growth, sequential growth. I understand it, and double digit growth year on year. >> Yeah, about 25% a year right now >> 25%, what's your global strategy? >> So we have sales offices in about 30 countries already. So we have three sales teams in Brazil, and three in Germany, and three in the UK, and two in France, and a lot of individual countries, Chile, Argentina, Columbia, Mexico, South Africa, Saudi, Czech Republic, Poland, Dubai, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, et cetera. We've just added two sales territories in Japan. We're adding two in India. And we're installed in over 50 countries. So we've been international all along the way. The goal of the company is we're growing nicely. We have not raised money in almost 10 years. >> So you're self-funding. You're cash positive. >> We are cash positive and self-funded and people say, how have you done that for 10 years? >> You know what's interesting is I remember, Dave Scott, Dave Scott was the CEO of 3PAR, and he told me when he came into that job, he told the VCs, they wanted to give him 30 million. He said, I need 80 million. I think he might have raised closer to a hundred which is right around what you guys have raised. But like you said, you haven't raised it in a long time. And in today's terms, that's nothing, right? >> 100 is 500 in today's terms. >> Yeah, right, exactly. And so the thing that really hurt 3PAR, they were public companies so you could see all this stuff is they couldn't expand internationally. It was just too damn expensive to set up the channels, and somehow you guys have figured that out. >> 40% of our business comes out of international. We're growing faster internationally than we are domestically. >> What was the formula there, Bill, was that just slow and steady or? >> It's a great question. >> No, so what we did, we said let's build ExaGrid like a McDonald's franchise, nobody's ever done that before in high tech. So what does that mean? That means you have to have the same product worldwide. You have to have the same spares model worldwide. You have to have the same support model worldwide. So we early on built the installation. So we do 100% of our installs remotely. 100% of our support remotely, yet we're in large enterprises. Customers racks and stacks the appliances we get on with them. We do the entire install on 30 minutes to about three hours. And we've been developing that into the product since day one. So we can remotely install anywhere in the world. We keep spares depots all over the world. We can bring 'em up really quick. Our support model is we have in theater support people. So they're in Europe, they're in APAC, they're in the US, et cetera. And we assign customers to the support people. So they deal with the same support person all the time. So everything is scalable. So right now we're going to open up India. It's the same way we've opened up every other country. Once you've got the McDonald's formula we just stamp it all over the world. >> That's amazing. >> Same pricing, same product same model, same everything. >> So what was the inspiration for that? I mean, you've done this since day one, which is what like 15, 16 years ago. Or just you do engineering or? >> No, so our whole thought was, first of all you can't survive anymore in this world without being an international company. 'Cause if you're going to go after large companies they have offices all over the world. We have companies now that have 17, 18, 20, 30 locations. And there were in every country in the world, you can't go into this business without being able to ship anywhere in the world and support it for a single customer. You're not going into Singapore because of that. You're going to Singapore because some company in Germany has offices in the U.S, Mexico Singapore and Australia. You have to be international. It's a must now. So that was the initial thing is that, our goal is to become a billion dollar company. And we're on path to do that, right. >> You can see a billion. >> Well, I can absolutely see a billion. And we're bigger than everybody thinks. Everybody guesses our revenue always guesses low. So we're bigger than you think. The reason why we don't talk about it is we don't need to. >> That's the headline for our writers, ExaGrid is a billion dollar company and nobody's know about it. >> Million dollar company. >> On its way to a billion. >> That's right. >> You're not disclosing. (Bill laughing) But that's awesome. I mean, that's a great story. I mean, you kind of are a well kept secret, aren't you? >> Well, I dunno if it's a well kept secret. You know, smaller companies never have their awareness of big companies, right? The Dells of the world are a hundred billion. IBM is 70 billion, Cisco is 60 billion. Easy to have awareness, right? If you're under a billion, I got to give a funny story then I think we got to close out here. >> Oh go ahead please. >> So there's one funny story. So I was talking to the CIO of a super large Fortune 500 company. And I said to him, "Just so who do you use?" "I use IBM Db2, and I use, Cisco routers, and I use EMC primary storage, et cetera. And I use all these big." And I said, "Would you ever switch from Db2?" "Oh no, the switching costs would kill me. I could never go to Oracle." So I said to him, "Look would you ever use like a Pure Storage, right. A couple billion dollar company." He says, "Who?" >> Huh, interesting. >> I said to him, all right so skip that. I said, "VMware, would you ever think about going with Nutanix?" "Who?" Those are billion dollar plus companies. And he was saying who? >> Public companies. >> And he was saying who? That's not uncommon when I talk to CIOs. They see the big 30 and that's it. >> Oh, that's interesting. What about your partnership with Veeam? Tell us more about that. >> Yeah, so I would actually, and I'm going to be bold when I say this 'cause I think you can ask anybody here at the conference. We're probably closer first of all, to the Veeam sales force than any company there is. You talk to any Veeam sales rep, they work closer with ExaGrid than any other. Yeah, we are very tight in the field and have been for a long time. We're integrated with the Veeam Data Boomer. We're integrated with SOBR. We're integrated with all the integrations or with the product as well. We have a lot of joint customers. We actually do a lot of selling together, where we go in as Veeam ExaGrid 'cause it's a great end to end story. Especially when we're replacing, let's say a Dell Avamar to Dell Data Domain or a Dell Network with a Dell Data Domain, very commonly Veeam ExaGrid go in together on those types of sales. So we do a lot of co-selling together. We constantly train their systems engineers around the world, every given week we're training either inside sales teams, and we've trained their customer support teams in Columbus and Prague. So we're very tight with 'em we've been tight for over a decade. >> Is your head count public? Can you share that with us? >> So we're just over 300 employees. >> Really, wow. >> We have 70 open positions, so. >> Yeah, what are you looking for? Yeah, everything, right? >> We are looking for engineers. We are looking for customer support people. We're looking for marketing people. We're looking for inside sales people, field people. And we've been hiring, as of late, major account reps that just focus on the Fortune 500. So we've separated that out now. >> When you hire engineers, I mean I think I saw you were long time ago, DG, right? Is that true? >> Yeah, way back in the '80s. >> But systems guy. >> That's how old I am. >> Right, systems guy. I mean, I remember them well Eddie Castro and company. >> Tom West. >> EMV series. >> Tom West was the hero of course. >> The EMV 4000, the EMV 20,000, right? >> When were kids, "The Soul of a New Machine" was the inspirational book but anyway, >> Yeah Tracy Kidder, it was great. >> Are you looking for systems people, what kind of talent are you looking for in engineering? >> So it's a lot of Linux programming type stuff in the product 'cause we run on a Linux space. So it's a lot of Linux programs so its people in those storage. >> Yeah, cool, Bill, hey, thanks for coming on to theCUBE. Well learned a lot, great story. >> It's a pleasure. >> That was fun. >> Congratulations. >> Thanks. >> And good luck. >> All right, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2022, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back right after this short break, stay with us. (soft beat music)

(digital music) >> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The storage business as we know it has changed forever. On-prem storage was once a virtually unlimited and untapped bastion of innovation, VC funding and lucrative exits. Today it's a shadow of its former self and the glory days of storage will not return. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights Powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we'll lay out our premise for what's happening in the storage industry, and share some fresh insights from our ETR partners, and data that supports our thinking. We've had three decades of tectonic shifts in the storage business. From the simplified history of this industry shows us there've been five major waves of innovation spanning five decades. The dominant industry model has evolved from what was first the mainframe centric vertically integrated business, but of course by IBM and it became a disintegrated business that saw between like 70 or 80 Winchester disk drive companies that rose and then fell. They served a booming PC industry in this way it was led by the likes of Seagate. Now Seagate supplied the emergence of an intelligent controller based external disc array business that drove huge margins for functions that while lucrative was far cheaper than captive storage from system vendors, this era of course was led by EMC and NetApp. And then this business was disrupted by a flash and software defined model that was led by Pure Storage and also VMware. Now the future of storage is being defined by cloud and intelligent data management is being led by AWS and a three letter company that we'll just call TBD, otherwise known as Jump Ball Incorporated. Now, let's get into it here, the impact of AWS cannot be overstated now while legacy storage players, they're sick and tired of talking about the cloud, the reality cannot be ignored. The cloud has been the most disruptive force in storage over the past 10 years, and we've reported on the spending impact extensively. But cloud is not the only factor pressuring the on-prem storage business, flash has killed what we call performance by spindles. In other words, the practice of adding more disk drives to keep performance from tanking. So much flash has been injected into the data center that that no longer is required. But now as you drill down into the cloud, AWS has been by far the most significant factor in our view. Lots of people talked about object storage before AWS, but there sure wasn't much spending going on, S3 changed that. AWS is getting much more aggressive about expanding its storage portfolio and its offerings. S3 came out in 2006 and it was the very first AWS service and then Elastic Block Service EBS came out a couple of years later, nobody really paid much attention. Well last fall at storage day, we saw AWS announce a number of services, many fire-related and this year we saw four new announcements of Amazon at re:Invent. We think AWS' storage revenue will surpass 8 billion this year and could be as high as 10 billion. There's not much data out there, but this would mean that AWS' storage biz is larger than that of a NetApp, which means AWS is larger than every traditional storage player with the exception of Dell. Here's a little glimpse of what's coming at the legacy storage business. It's a clip of the vice-president of AWS storage, her name is Mahlon Thompson Bukovec, watch this. Okay now, you may say Dave, what the heck does that have to do with anything? Yeah, I don't know, but as an older white guy, that's been in this business for awhile, I just think it's badass that this woman boxes and runs a business that we think is approaching $10 billion. Now let's take a quick look at the storage announcements AWS made at re:Invent. The company made four announcements this year, let me try to be brief, the first is EBS io2 Block Express Volumes, got to love the names. AWS was claims this is the first storage area network or sand for the cloud and it offers up to 256,000 IOPS and 4,000 megabytes per second throughput and 64 terabytes of capacity. Hey, sounds pretty impressive right, Well let's dig in a little bit okay, first of all, this is not the first sand in the cloud, at least in my view there may be others but Pure Storage announced cloud block store in 2019 at its annual accelerate customer conference and it's pretty comparable here. Maybe not so much in the speeds and feeds, but the concept of better block storage in the cloud with higher availability. Now, as you may also be saying, what's the big deal? The performance come on, we can smoke that we're on-prem vendor We can bury that. Compared to what we do, AWS' announcement is really not that impressive okay, let me give you a point of comparison there's a startup out there called VAST Data. Just there for you and closure with bundled storage and compute can do 400,000 IOPS and 40,000 megabytes per second and that can be scaled, so yeah, I get it. And AWS also announced that io2 two was priced at 20% less than previous generation volumes, which you might say is also no big deal and I would agree 20% is not as aggressive as the average price decline per gigabyte of any storage technology. AWS loves to make a big deal about its price declines, it's essentially following the industry trends but the point is that this feature will be great for a lot of workloads and it's fully integrated with AWS services meaning for example, it will be very convenient for AWS customers to invoke this capability for example Aurora and other AWS databases through its RDS service, just another easy button for developers to push. This is specially important as we see AWS rapidly expanding its machine learning in AI capabilities with SageMaker, it's embedding ML into things like Redshift and driving analytics, so integration is very key for its customers. Now, is Amazon retail going to run its business on io2 volumes? I doubt it. I believe they're running on Oracle and they need much better performance, but this is a mainstream service for the EBS masses to tap. Now, the other notable announcement was EBS Gp3 volumes. This is essentially a service that lets let you programmatically set SLAs for IOPS and throughput independently without needing to add additional storage. Again, you may be saying things like, well atleast I remember when SolidFire let me do this several years ago and gave me more than 3000 IOPS and 125 megabytes per a second performance, but look, this is great for mainstream customers that want more consistent and predictable performance and that want to set some kind of threshold or floor and it's integrated again into the AWS stack. Two other announcements were made, one that automatically tiers data to colder storage tiers and a replication service. On the former, data migrates to tier two after 90 days of inaccess and tier three, after 180 days. AWS remember, they hired a bunch of folks out of EMC years ago and they put them up in the Boston Seaport area, so they've acquired lots of expertise in a lot of different areas I'm not sure if tiering came out of that group but look, this stuff is not rocket science, but it saves customers money. So these are tried and true techniques that AWS is applying but the important thing is it's in the cloud. Now for sure we'd like to see more policy options than say for example, a fixed 90 day or 180 day policy and more importantly we'd like to see intelligent tiering where the machine is smart enough to elevate and promote certain datasets when they're needed for instance, at the end of a quarter for comparison purposes or at the end of the year, but as NFL Hall of Fame Coach Hank Stram would have said, AWS is matriculating the ball down the field. Okay, let's look at some of the data that supports what we're saying here in our premise today. This chart shows spending across the ETR taxonomy. It depicts the net score or spending velocity for different sectors. We've highlighted storage, now don't put too much weight on the January data because the survey was just launched, but you can see storage continues to be a back burner item relative to some other spending priorities. Now as I've reported, CIOs are really focused on cloud, containers, container orchestration, automation, productivity and other key areas like security. Now let's take a look at some of the financial data from the storage crowd. This chart shows data for eight leading names in storage and we put storage in quotes because as we said earlier, the market is shifting and for sure companies like Cohesity and Rubrik, they're not positioning as storage players in fact, that's the last thing they want to do. Rather they're category creators around data management or intelligent data management but their inadjacency to storage, they're partnering with all the primary storage companies and they're in the ETR taxonomy. Okay, so as you can see, we're showing the year over year, quarterly revenue growth for the leading storage companies. NetApp is a big winner, they're growing at a whopping 2%. They beat expectations, but expectations were way down so you can see in the right most column upper right, we've added the ETR net score from October and net score of 10% says that if you ask customers, are you spending more or less with a company, there are 10% of the customers that are essentially spending more than are spending less, get into that a little further later. For comparison, a company like Snowflake, it has a net score approaching 70% Pure Storage used to be that high several years ago or high sixties anyway. So 10% is in the red zone and yet NetApp, is the big winner this quarter. Now Nutanix isn't really again a storage company, but they're an adjacency and they sell storage and like many of these companies, it's transitioning to a subscription pricing model, so that puts pressure on the income statement, that's why they went out and did a deal with Bain, Bain put in $750 million to help Bridge that transition so that's kind of an interesting move. Every company in this chart is moving to an annual recurring revenue model and that as a service approach is going to be the norm by the end of the decade. HPE's doing it with GreenLake, Dell has announced Apex, virtually every company is headed in this direction. Now speaking of HPE, it's Nimble business that has momentum, but other parts of the storage portfolio are quite a bit softer. Dell continues to see pressure on its storage business although VxRail is a bright spot. Everybody's got a bright spot, everybody's got new stuff that's growing much faster than the old stuff, the problem is the old stuff is much much bigger than the new stuff. IBM's mainframe storage cycle, well that's seems to have run its course, they had been growing for the last several quarters that looks like it's over. And so very very cyclical businesses here now as you can see, The data protection data management companies, they are showing spending momentum but they're not public so we don't have revenue data. But you got to wonder with all the money these guys have raised and the red hot IPO and tech markets, why haven't these guys gone public? The answer has to be that they're either not ready or maybe their a numbers weren't where they want them to be, maybe they're not predictable enough, maybe they don't have their operational act together or maybe they need to you get that in order, some combination of those factors is likely. They'll tell you, they'll give other answers if you ask them, but if they had their stuff together they'd be going out right now. Now here's another look at the spending data in terms of net score, which is again spending velocity. The ETR here is measuring the percent of respondents that are adopting new, spending more, spending flat, spending less or retiring the platform. So net score is adoptions, which is the lime green plus the spending more, which is the forest green. Add those two and then subtract spending less, which is the pink and then leaving the platform, which is the bright red, what's left over is net score. So, let's look at the picture here, Cohesity leads all players in the storage taxonomy, the ETR storage taxonomy, again they don't position that way, but that's the way the customers are answering. They've got 55% net score which is really solid and you can see the data in the upper right-hand corner, it's followed by Nutanix. Now they're really not again in the scope of Pure play storage play but speaking of Pure, its net score has come down from its high of 73% in January, 2016. It's not going to climb back up there, but it's going to be interesting to see if Pure net scorecard rebound in a post COVID world. We're also watching what Pure does in terms of unifying file and object and how it's fairing in cloud and what it does with the Portworx acquisition which is really designed to bring forth a new programming model. Now, Dell is doing fine with VxRail, but VSAN is well off its net score highs which we're in the 60% plus range a couple of years ago, VSAN is definitely been a factor from VMware, but again that's come off its highs, HPE with Nimble still has some room to improve, I think it actually will I think that these figures that we're showing here they're are somewhat depressed by the COVID factor, I expect Nimble is going to bounce back in future surveys. Dell and NetApp are the big leaders in terms of presence or market share in the data other than VMware, 'cause VMware has a lot of instances, it's software defined that's why they're so prominent. And with VMware's large share you'd expect them to have net scores that are tepid and you can see a similar pattern with IBM. So Dell, NetApp, tepid net scores as is IBM because of their large market share VMware, kind of a newer entry into the play and so doing pretty well there from a net score standpoint. Now Commvault like Cohesity and Rubrik is really around intelligent data management, trying to go beyond backup into business recovery, data protection, DevOps, bringing that analytics, bringing that to the cloud, we didn't put Veeam in here and we probably should have. They had pre-COVID net scores well in to the thirties and they have a steadily increasing share of the market, so we expect good things from Veeam going forward. They were acquired earlier this year by Insight, capital private equity firm. So big changes there as well, that was their kind of near-term exit maybe more to come. But look, it's all relative, this is a large and mature market that is moving to the cloud and moving to other adjacencies. And the core is still primary storage, that's the main supreme prerequisite and everything else flows from there, data protection, replication, everything else. This chart gives you another view of the competitive landscape, it's that classic XY chart it plots net score in the vertical axis and market share on the horizontal axis, market share remember is a measure of presence in the dataset. Now think about this from the CIO's perspective, they have their on-prem estate, got all this infrastructure and they're putting a brick wall around their core systems. And what do they want out of storage for that class of workload? They want it to perform consistently, they want it to be efficient and they want it to be cost-effective, so what are they going to do? they're going to consolidate, They're going to consolidate the number of vendors, they're going to consolidate the storage, they're going to minimize complexity, yeah, they're going to worry about the blast radius, but there's ways to architect around that. The last thing they want to worry about is managing a zillion storage vendors this business is consolidating, it has been for some time, we've seen the number of independent storage players that are going public as consolidated over the years, and it's going to continue. so on-prem storage arrays are not giving CIOs the innovation and strategic advantage back when things like storage virtualization, space efficient snapshots, data de-duplication and other storage services were worth maybe taking a flyer on a feature product like for example, a 3PAR or even a Data Domain. Now flash gave the CIOs more headroom and better performance and so as I said earlier, they're not just buying spindles to increase performance, so as more and more work gets pushed to the cloud, you're seeing a bunkering in on these large scale mission-critical workloads. As you saw earlier, the legacy storage market is consolidating and has been for a while as I just said, it's essentially becoming a managed decline business where RnD is going to increasingly get squeezed and go to other areas, both from the vendor community and on the buy-side where they're investing on things like cloud, containers and in building new layers in their business and of course the DX, the Digital Transformation. I mentioned VAST Data before, it is a company that's growing and another company that's growing is Infinidat and these guys are traditional storage on-prem models they don't bristle If I say traditional they're nexgen if you will but they don't own a cloud, so they were selling to the data center. Now Infinidat is focused on petabyte scale and as they say, they're growing revenues, they're having success consolidating storage that thing that I just talked about. Ironically, these are two Israeli founder based companies that are growing and you saw earlier, this is a share shift the market is not growing overall the part of that's COVID, but if you exclude cloud, the market is under pressure. Now these two companies that I'm mentioning, they're kind of the exception to the rule here, they're tiny in the grand scheme of things, they're really not going to shift the market and their end game is to get acquired so they can still share, but they're not going to reverse these trends. And every one on this chart, every on-prem player has to have a cloud strategy where they connect into the cloud, where they take advantage of native cloud services and they help extend their respective install bases into the cloud, including having a capability that is physically proximate to the cloud with a colo like an Equinix or some other approach. Now, for example at re:Invent, we saw that AWS has hybrid strategy, we saw that evolving. AWS is trying to bring AWS to the edge and they treat the data center as just another edge note, so outposts and smaller versions of outposts and things like local zones are all part of bringing AWS to the edge. And we saw a few companies Pure, Infinidant, Veeam come to mind that are connecting to outpost. They saw the Qumulo was in there, Clumio, Commvault, WekaIO is also in there and I'm sure I'm missing some so, DM me, email me, yell at me, I'm sorry I forgot you but you get the point. These companies that are selling on-prem are connecting to the cloud, they're forced to connect to the cloud much in the same way as they were forced to join the VMware ecosystem and try to add value, try to keep moving fast. So, that's what's going on here, what's the prognosis for storage in the coming year? Well, where've of all the good times gone? Look, we would never bet against data but the days of selling storage controllers that masks the deficiencies of spinning disc or add embedded hardware functions or easily picking off a legacy install base with flash, well, those days are gone. Repatriation, it ain't happening it's maybe tiny little pockets. CIOs are rationalizing their on-premises portfolios so they can invest in the cloud, AI, machine learning, machine intelligence, automation and they're re-skilling their teams. Low latency high bandwidth workloads with minimal jitter, that's the sweet spot for on-prem it's becoming the mainframe of storage. CIOs are also developing a cloud first strategy yes, the world is hybrid but what does that mean to CIOs? It means you're going to have some work in the cloud and some work on-prem, there's a hybrid We've got both. Everything that can go to the cloud, will go to the cloud, in our opinion and everything that can't or shouldn't won't. Yes, people will make mistakes and they'll "repatriate" but generally that's the trend. And the CIOs they're building an abstraction layer to connect workloads from an observability and manageability standpoint so they can maintain control and manage lock-in risk, they have options. Everything that doesn't go to the cloud will likely have some type of hybridicity to it, the reverse won't likely be the case. For vendors, cloud strategies involve supporting your install basis migration to the cloud, that's where they're going, that's where they want to go, they want your help there's business to be made there so enabling low latency hybrids in accommodating subscription models, well, that's a whole another topic, but that's the trend that we see and you rethink the business that you're in, for instance, data management and developing an edge strategy that recognizes that edge workloads are going to require new architecture and that's more efficient than what we've seen built around general purpose systems, and wow, that's a topic for another day. You're seeing this whole as a service model really reshape the entire cultures in the way in which the on-prem vendors are operating no longer is it selling a box that has dramatically marked up controllers and disc drives, it's really thinking about services that could be invoked in the cloud. Now remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcasts and please subscribe, I'd appreciate that checkout etr.plus for all the survey action. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. A lot of ways to get in touch. You can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. you could DM me @dvellante on Twitter, comment on our LinkedIn posts, I always appreciate that. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everyone stay safe and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the CUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a CUBE conversation. we've got a couple of a CUBE alumni veterans who've been on a lot of times. They've got some exciting announcements to tell us today, so we're excited to jump into it, So let's go. First we're joined by Eric Herzog. He's the CMO and VP worldwide storage channels for IBM Storage, made his time on theCUBE Eric, great to see you. >> Great, thanks very much for having us today. >> Jeff: Absolutely. And joining him, I think all the way from North Carolina, Sam Werner, the VP of, and offering manager business line executive storage for IBM. Sam, great to see you as well. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> Absolutely. So let's jump into it. So Sam you're in North Carolina, I think that's where the Red Hat people are. You guys have Red Hat, a lot of conversations about containers, containers are going nuts. We know containers are going nuts and it was Docker and then Kubernetes. And really a lot of traction. Wonder if you can reflect on, on what you see from your point of view and how that impacts what you guys are working on. >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We talk, everybody hears about containers constantly. Obviously it's a hot part of digital transformation. What's interesting about it though is most of those initiatives are being driven out of business lines. I spend a lot of time with the people who do infrastructure management, particularly the storage teams, the teams that have to support all of that data in the data center. And they're struggling to be honest with you. These initiatives are coming at them, from application developers and they're being asked to figure out how to deliver the same level of SLAs the same level of performance, governance, security recovery times, availability. And it's a scramble for them to be quite honest they're trying to figure out how to automate their storage. They're trying to figure out how to leverage the investments they've made as they go through a digital transformation and keep in mind, a lot of these initiatives are accelerating right now because of this global pandemic we're living through. I don't know that the strategy's necessarily changed, but there's been an acceleration. So all of a sudden these storage people kind of trying to get up to speed or being thrown right into the mix. So we're working directly with them. You'll see, in some of our announcements, we're helping them, you know, get on that journey and provide the infrastructure their teams need. >> And a lot of this is driven by multicloud and hybrid cloud, which we're seeing, you know, a really aggressive move to before it was kind of this rush to public cloud. And that everybody figured out, "Well maybe public cloud isn't necessarily right for everything." And it's kind of this horses for courses, if you will, with multicloud and hybrid cloud, another kind of complexity thrown into the storage mix that you guys have to deal with. >> Yeah, and that's another big challenge. Now in the early days of cloud, people were lifting and shifting applications trying to get lower capex. And they were also starting to deploy DevOps, in the public cloud in order to improve agility. And what they found is there were a lot of challenges with that, where they thought lifting and shifting an application will lower their capital costs the TCO actually went up significantly. Where they started building new applications in the cloud. They found they were becoming trapped there and they couldn't get the connectivity they needed back into their core applications. So now we're at this point where they're trying to really, transform the rest of it and they're using containers, to modernize the rest of the infrastructure and complete the digital transformation. They want to get into a hybrid cloud environment. What we found is, enterprises get two and a half X more value out of the IT when they use a hybrid multicloud infrastructure model versus an all public cloud model. So what they're trying to figure out is how to piece those different components together. So you need a software-driven storage infrastructure that gives you the flexibility, to deploy in a common way and automate in a common way, both in a public cloud but on premises and give you that flexibility. And that's what we're working on at IBM and with our colleagues at Red Hat. >> So Eric, you've been in the business a long time and you know, it's amazing as it just continues to evolve, continues to evolve this kind of unsexy thing under the covers called storage, which is so foundational. And now as data has become, you know, maybe a liability 'cause I have to buy a bunch of storage. Now it is the core asset of the company. And in fact a lot of valuations on a lot of companies is based on its value, that's data and what they can do. So clearly you've got a couple of aces in the hole you always do. So tell us what you guys are up to at IBM to take advantage of the opportunity. >> Well, what we're doing is we are launching, a number of solutions for various workloads and applications built with a strong container element. For example, a number of solutions about modern data protection cyber resiliency. In fact, we announced last year almost a year ago actually it's only a year ago last week, Sam and I were on stage, and one of our developers did a demo of us protecting data in a container environment. So now we're extending that beyond what we showed a year ago. We have other solutions that involve what we do with AI big data and analytic applications, that are in a container environment. What if I told you, instead of having to replicate and duplicate and have another set of storage right with the OpenShift Container configuration, that you could connect to an existing external exabyte class data lake. So that not only could your container apps get to it, but the existing apps, whether they'll be bare-metal or virtualized, all of them could get to the same data lake. Wow, that's a concept saving time, saving money. One pool of storage that'll work for all those environments. And now that containers are being deployed in production, that's something we're announcing as well. So we've got a lot of announcements today across the board. Most of which are container and some of which are not, for example, LTO-9, the latest high performance and high capacity tape. We're announcing some solutions around there. But the bulk of what we're announcing today, is really on what IBM is doing to continue to be the leader in container storage support. >> And it's great, 'cause you talked about a couple of very specific applications that we hear about all the time. One obviously on the big data and analytics side, you know, as that continues to do, to kind of chase history of honor of ultimately getting the right information to the right people at the right time so they can make the right decision. And the other piece you talked about was business continuity and data replication, and to bring people back. And one of the hot topics we've talked to a lot of people about now is kind of this shift in a security threat around ransomware. And the fact that these guys are a little bit more sophisticated and will actually go after your backup before they let you know that they're into your primary storage. So these are two, really important market areas that we could see continue activity, as all the people that we talk to every day. You must be seeing the same thing. >> Absolutely we are indeed. You know, containers are the wave. I'm a native California and I'm coming to you from Silicon Valley and you don't fight the wave, you ride it. So at IBM we're doing that. We've been the leader in container storage. We, as you know, way back when we invented the hard drive, which is the foundation of almost this entire storage industry and we were responsible for that. So we're making sure that as container is the coming wave that we are riding that in and doing the right things for our customers, for our channel partners that support those customers, whether they be existing customers, and obviously, with this move to containers, is going to be some people searching for probably a new vendor. And that's something that's going to go right into our wheelhouse because of the things we're doing. And some of our capabilities, for example, with our FlashSystems, with our Spectrum Virtualize, we're actually going to be able to support CSI snapshots not only for IBM Storage, but our Spectrum Virtualize products supports over 500 different arrays, most of which aren't ours. So if you got that old EMC VNX2 or that HPE, 3PAR or aNimble or all kinds of other storage, if you need CSI snapshot support, you can get it from IBM, with our Spectrum Virtualize software that runs on our FlashSystems, which of course cuts capex and opex, in a heterogeneous environment, but gives them that advanced container support that they don't get, because they're on older product from, you know, another vendor. We're making sure that we can pull our storage and even our competitor storage into the world of containers and do it in the right way for the end user. >> That's great. Sam, I want to go back to you and talk about the relationship with the Red Hat. I think it was about a year ago, I don't have my notes in front of me, when IBM purchased Red Hat. Clearly you guys have been working very closely together. What does that mean for you? You've been in the business for a long time. You've been at IBM for a long time, to have a partner you know, kind of embed with you, with Red Hat and bringing some of their capabilities into your portfolio. >> It's been an incredible experience, and I always say my friends at Red Hat because we spend so much time together. We're looking at now, leveraging a community that's really on the front edge of this movement to containers. They bring that, along with their experience around storage and containers, along with the years and years of enterprise class storage delivery that we have in the IBM Storage portfolio. And we're bringing those pieces together. And this is a case of truly one plus one equals three. And you know, an example you'll see in this announcement is the integration of our data protection portfolio with their container native storage. We allow you to in any environment, take a snapshot of that data. You know, this move towards modern data protection is all about a movement to doing data protection in a different way which is about leveraging snapshots, taking instant copies of data that are application aware, allowing you to reuse and mount that data for different purposes, be able to protect yourself from ransomware. Our data protection portfolio has industry leading ransomware protection and detection in it. So we'll actually detect it before it becomes a problem. We're taking that, industry leading data protection software and we are integrating it into Red Hat, Container Native Storage, giving you the ability to solve one of the biggest challenges in this digital transformation which is backing up your data. Now that you're moving towards, stateful containers and persistent storage. So that's one area we're collaborating. We're working on ensuring that our storage arrays, that Eric was talking about, that they integrate tightly with OpenShift and that they also work again with, OpenShift Container Storage, the Cloud Native Storage portfolio from, Red Hat. So we're bringing these pieces together. And on top of that, we're doing some really, interesting things with licensing. We allow you to consume the Red Hat Storage portfolio along with the IBM software-defined Storage portfolio under a single license. And you can deploy the different pieces you need, under one single license. So you get this ultimate investment protection and ability to deploy anywhere. So we're, I think we're adding a lot of value for our customers and helping them on this journey. >> Yeah Eric, I wonder if you could share your perspective on multicloud management. I know that's a big piece of what you guys are behind and it's a big piece of kind of the real world as we've kind of gotten through the hype and now we're into production, and it is a multicloud world and it is, you got to manage this stuff it's all over the place. I wonder if you could speak to kind of how that challenge you know, factors into your design decisions and how you guys are about, you know, kind of the future. >> Well we've done this in a couple of ways in things that are coming out in this launch. First of all, IBM has produced with a container-centric model, what they call the Multicloud Manager. It's the IBM Cloud Pak for multicloud management. That product is designed to manage multiple clouds not just the IBM Cloud, but Amazon, Azure, et cetera. What we've done is taken our Spectrum Protect Plus and we've integrated it into the multicloud manager. So what that means, to save time, to save money and make it easier to use, when the customer is in the multicloud manager, they can actually select Spectrum Protect Plus, launch it and then start to protect data. So that's one thing we've done in this launch. The other thing we've done is integrate the capability of IBM Spectrum Virtualize, running in a FlashSystem to also take the capability of supporting OCP, the OpenShift Container Platform in a Clustered environment. So what we can do there, is on-premise, if there really was an earthquake in Silicon Valley right now, that OpenShift is sitting on a server. The servers just got crushed by the roof when it caved in. So you want to make sure you've got disaster recovery. So what we can do is take that OpenShift Container Platform Cluster, we can support it with our Spectrum Virtualize software running on our FlashSystem, just like we can do heterogeneous storage that's not ours, in this case, we're doing it with Red Hat. And then what we can do is to provide disaster recovery and business continuity to different cloud vendors not just to IBM Cloud, but to several cloud vendors. We can give them the capability of replicating and protecting that Cluster to a cloud configuration. So if there really was an earthquake, they could then go to the cloud, they could recover that Red Hat Cluster, to a different data center and run it on-prem. So we're not only doing the integration with a multicloud manager, which is multicloud-centric allowing ease of use with our Spectrum Protect Plus, but incase of a really tough situation of fire in a data center, earthquake, hurricane, whatever, the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster can be replicated out to a cloud, with our Spectrum Virtualize Software. So in most, in both cases, multicloud examples because in the first one of course the multicloud manager is designed and does support multiple clouds. In the second example, we support multiple clouds where our Spectrum Virtualize for public clouds software so you can take that OpenShift Cluster replicate it and not just deal with one cloud vendor but with several. So showing that multicloud management is important and then leverage that in this launch with a very strong element of container centricity. >> Right >> Yeah, I just want to add, you know, and I'm glad you brought that up Eric, this whole multicloud capability with, the Spectrum Virtualize. And I could see the same for our Spectrum Scale Family, which is our storage infrastructure for AI and big data. We actually, in this announcement have containerized the client making it very simple to deploy in Kubernetes Cluster. But one of the really special things about Spectrum Scale is it's active file management. This allows you to build out a file system not only on-premises for your, Kubernetes Cluster but you can actually extend that to a public cloud and it automatically will extend the file system. If you were to go into a public cloud marketplace which it's available in more than one, you can go in there click deploy, for example, in AWS Marketplace, click deploy it will deploy your Spectrum Scale Cluster. You've now extended your file system from on-prem into the cloud. If you need to access any of that data, you can access it and it will automatically cash you on locally and we'll manage all the file access for you. >> Yeah, it's an interesting kind of paradox between, you know, kind of the complexity of what's going on in the back end, but really trying to deliver simplicity on the front end. Again, this ultimate goal of getting the right data to the right person at the right time. You just had a blog post Eric recently, that you talked about every piece of data isn't equal. And I think it's really highlighted in this conversation we just had about recovery and how you prioritize and how you, you know, think about, your data because you know, the relative value of any particular piece might be highly variable, which should drive the way that you treated in your system. So I wonder if you can speak a little bit, you know, to helping people think about data in the right way. As you know, they both have all their operational data which they've always had, but now they've got all this unstructured data that's coming in like crazy and all data isn't created equal, as you said. And if there is an earthquake or there is a ransomware attack, you need to be smart about what you have available to bring back quickly. And maybe what's not quite so important. >> Well, I think the key thing, let me go to, you know a modern data protection term. These are two very technical terms was, one is the recovery time. How long does it take you to get that data back? And the second one is the recovery point, at what point in time, are you recovering the data from? And the reason those are critical, is when you look at your datasets, whether you replicate, you snap, you do a backup. The key thing you've got to figure out is what is my recovery time? How long is it going to take me? What's my recovery point. Obviously in certain industries you want to recover as rapidly as possible. And you also want to have the absolute most recent data. So then once you know what it takes you to do that, okay from an RPO and an RTO perspective, recovery point objective, recovery time objective. Once you know that, then you need to look at your datasets and look at what does it take to run the company if there really was a fire and your data center was destroyed. So you take a look at those datasets, you see what are the ones that I need to recover first, to keep the company up and rolling. So let's take an example, the sales database or the support database. I would say those are pretty critical to almost any company, whether you'd be a high-tech company, whether you'd be a furniture company, whether you'd be a delivery company. However, there also is probably a database of assets. For example, IBM is a big company. We have buildings all over, well, guess what? We don't lease a chair or a table or a whiteboard. We buy them. Those are physical assets that the company has to pay, you know, do write downs on and all this other stuff, they need to track it. If we close a building, we need to move the desk to another building. Like even if we leasing a building now, the furniture is ours, right? So does an asset database need to be recovered instantaneously? Probably not. So we should focus on another thing. So let's say on a bank. Banks are both online and brick and mortar. I happened to be a Wells Fargo person. So guess what? There's Wells Fargo banks, two of them in the city I'm in, okay? So, the assets of the money, in this case now, I don't think the brick and mortar of the building of Wells Fargo or their desks in there but now you're talking financial assets or their high velocity trading apps. Those things need to be recovered almost instantaneously. And that's what you need to do when you're looking at datasets, is figure out what's critical to the business to keep it up and rolling, what's the next most critical. And you do it in basically the way you would tear anything. What's the most important thing, what's the next most important thing. It doesn't matter how you approach your job, how you used to approach school, what are the classes I have to get an A and what classes can I not get an A and depending on what your major was, all that sort of stuff, you're setting priorities, right? And the dataset, since data is the most critical asset of any company, whether it's a Global Fortune 500 or whether it's Herzog Cigar Store, all of those assets, that data is the most valuable. So you've got to make sure, recover what you need as rapidly as you need it. But you can't recover all of it. You just, there's just no way to do that. So that's why you really ranked the importance of the data to use sameware, with malware and ransomware. If you have a malware or ransomware attack, certain data you need to recover as soon as you can. So if there, for example, as a, in fact there was one Jeff, here in Silicon Valley as well. You've probably read about the University of California San Francisco, ended up having to pay over a million dollars of ransom because some of the data related to COVID research University of California, San Francisco, it was the health care center for the University of California in Northern California. They are working on COVID and guess what? The stuff was held for ransom. They had no choice, but to pay them. And they really did pay, this is around end of June, of this year. So, okay, you don't really want to do that. >> Jeff: Right >> So you need to look at everything from malware and ransomware, the importance of the data. And that's how you figure this stuff out, whether be in a container environment, a traditional environment or virtualized environment. And that's why data protection is so important. And with this launch, not only are we doing the data protection we've been doing for years, but now taking it to the heart of the new wave, which is the wave of containers. >> Yeah, let me add just quickly on that Eric. So think about those different cases you talked about. You're probably going to want for your mission critically. You're going to want snapshots of that data that can be recovered near instantaneously. And then, for some of your data, you might decide you want to store it out in cloud. And with Spectrum Protect, we just announced our ability to now store data out in Google cloud. In addition to, we already supported AWS Azure IBM Cloud, in various on-prem object stores. So we already provided that capability. And then we're in this announcement talking about LTL-9. And you got to also be smart about which data do you need to keep, according to regulation for long periods of time, or is it just important to archive? You're not going to beat the economics nor the safety of storing data out on tape. But like Eric said, if all of your data is out on tape and you have an event, you're not going to be able to restore it quickly enough at least the mission critical things. And so those are the things that need to be in snapshot. And that's one of the main things we're announcing here for Kubernetes environments is the ability to quickly snapshot application aware backups, of your mission critical data in your Kubernetes environments. It can very quickly to be recovered. >> That's good. So I'll give you the last word then we're going to sign off, we are out of time, but I do want to get this in it's 2020, if I didn't ask the COVID question, I would be in big trouble. So, you know, you've all seen the memes and the jokes about really COVID being an accelerant to digital transformation, not necessarily change, but certainly a huge accelerant. I mean, you guys have a, I'm sure a product roadmap that's baked pretty far and advanced, but I wonder if you can speak to, you know, from your perspective, as COVID has accelerated digital transformation you guys are so foundational to executing that, you know, kind of what is it done in terms of what you're seeing with your customers, you know, kind of the demand and how you're seeing this kind of validation as to an accelerant to move to these better types of architectures? Let's start with you Sam. >> Yeah, you know I, and I think i said this, but I mean the strategy really hasn't changed for the enterprises, but of course it is accelerating it. And I see storage teams more quickly getting into trouble, trying to solve some of these challenges. So we're working closely with them. They're looking for more automation. They have less people in the data center on-premises. They're looking to do more automation simplify the management of the environment. We're doing a lot around Ansible to help them with that. We're accelerating our roadmaps around that sort of integration and automation. They're looking for better visibility into their environments. So we've made a lot of investments around our storage insights SaaS platform, that allows them to get complete visibility into their data center and not just in their data center. We also give them visibility to the stores they're deploying in the cloud. So we're making it easier for them to monitor and manage and automate their storage infrastructure. And then of course, if you look at everything we're doing in this announcement, it's about enabling our software and our storage infrastructure to integrate directly into these new Kubernetes, initiatives. That way as this digital transformation accelerates and application developers are demanding more and more Kubernetes capabilities. They're able to deliver the same SLAs and the same level of security and the same level of governance, that their customers expect from them, but in this new world. So that's what we're doing. If you look at our announcement, you'll see that across, across the sets of capabilities that we're delivering here. >> Eric, we'll give you the last word, and then we're going to go to Eric Cigar Shop, as soon as this is over. (laughs) >> So it's clearly all about storage made simple, in a Kubernetes environment, in a container environment, whether it's block storage, file storage, whether it be object storage and IBM's goal is to offer ever increasing sophisticated services for the enterprise at the same time, make it easier and easier to use and to consume. If you go back to the old days, the storage admins manage X amount of gigabytes, maybe terabytes. Now the same admin is managing 10 petabytes of data. So the data explosion is real across all environments, container environments, even old bare-metal. And of course the not quite so new anymore virtualized environments. The admins need to manage that more and more easily and automated point and click. Use AI based automated tiering. For example, we have with our Easy Tier technology, that automatically moves data when it's hot to the fastest tier. And when it's not as hot, it's cool, it pushes down to a slower tier, but it's all automated. You point and you click. Let's take our migration capabilities. We built it into our software. I buy a new array, I need to migrate the data. You point, you click, and we automatic transparent migration in the background on the fly without taking the servers or the storage down. And we always favor the application workload. So if the application workload is heavy at certain times a day, we slow the migration. At night for sake of argument, If it's a company that is not truly 24 by seven, you know, heavily 24 by seven, and at night, it slows down, we accelerate the migration. All about automation. We've done it with Ansible, here in this launch, we've done it with additional integration with other platforms. So our Spectrum Scale for example, can use the OpenShift management framework to configure and to grow our Spectrum Scale or elastic storage system clusters. We've done it, in this case with our Spectrum Protect Plus, as you saw integration into the multicloud manager. So for us, it's storage made simple, incredibly new features all the time, but at the same time we do that, make sure that it's easier and easier to use. And in some cases like with Ansible, not even the real storage people, but God forbid, that DevOps guy messes with a storage and loses that data, wow. So by, if you're using something like Ansible and that Ansible framework, we make sure that essentially the DevOps guy, the test guy, the analytics guy, basically doesn't lose the data and screw up the storage. And that's a big, big issue. So all about storage made simple, in the right way with incredible enterprise features that essentially we make easy and easy to use. We're trying to make everything essentially like your iPhone, that easy to use. That's the goal. And with a lot less storage admins in the world then there has been an incredible storage growth every single year. You'd better make it easy for the same person to manage all that storage. 'Cause it's not shrinking. It is, someone who's sitting at 50 petabytes today, is 150 petabytes the next year and five years from now, they'll be sitting on an exabyte of production data, and they're not going to hire tons of admins. It's going to be the same two or four people that were doing the work. Now they got to manage an exabyte, which is why this storage made simplest is such a strong effort for us with integration, with the Open, with the Kubernetes frameworks or done with OpenShift, heck, even what we used to do in the old days with vCenter Ops from VMware, VASA, VAAI, all those old VMware tools, we made sure tight integration, easy to use, easy to manage, but sophisticated features to go with that. Simplicity is really about how you manage storage. It's not about making your storage dumb. People want smarter and smarter storage. Do you make it smarter, but you make it just easy to use at the same time. >> Right. >> Well, great summary. And I don't think I could do a better job. So I think we'll just leave it right there. So congratulations to both of you and the teams for these announcement after a whole lot of hard work and sweat went in, over the last little while and continued success. And thanks for the, check in, always great to see you. >> Thank you. We love being on theCUBE as always. >> All right, thanks again. All right, he's Eric, he was Sam, I'm I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Hi, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020, the Virtual Experience. Happy to welcome back to the program, just had him on at VeeamON at theCUBE's coverage there. David Harvey, he is the Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam. David, welcome to our coverage of HPE Discover. >> Thank you. I appreciate the invitation and great to see you again. >> All right, so when I talked to you at VeeamON, of course, you talk about lots of partners and you love all of them, but now we get to hear the truth. HPE, which one of your partners do you love the best? Talk to us a little bit about that HPE relationship. >> Sure, yeah, absolutely and really great to be part of Discover this year. And I think it's a fantastic set up in the way that HPE is running this event. As we've talked about with you guys before as well, HPE's always been a really special relationship for us. It was really the first relationship that we sort of established over eight years ago. And so from our point of view, it's got a long, rich heritage, that level of trust and desire for growth has been fantastic. And in the recent years as well as both of us have really continued to lean in, it's just continued to grow at a fantastic rate. I mean you would've seen some of the recent results there. Veeam's grown over 20% in the second half of 2019 with IBC. I'm really happy to say that the HPE alliance is growing well in excess of that. And so we're really pleased on how things have continued to evolve. >> Well congratulations on that growth. Yeah, boy, eight years so much has changed. So of course, I think about HPE and VMware and one of the earliest partners for server virtualization. But HPE's got a broad portfolio. Bring us through where Veeam sits. You know you got solutions like GreenLake out there, of course, traditional virtualization. So give us a little bit of kind of the breadth and depth of engineering work and partnership that you have. >> Yeah, great question Stu. And I think the interesting part of this is when you look at sort of the ecosystem that's out there now and the evolution HPE's gone through in embracing partners, the focus on the portfolio development and engagement between the two companies has reflected that. There are so many different areas that we could work with HPE on, but when we sat down together and we said where can we really provide the best value to our customers, we focused on a few key parts of the portfolio. Storage, obviously, is key. 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, StorONE, Apollo, areas where we've done really strong work over the years and continue to provide great solutions to the customers. Really pleased with how we've increased into SimpliVity. That's a really big push area for us over the last 12 months. And we're starting to see some great success together with that providing really unique solutions to extend the value of SimpliVity into new use cases, complimenting what they already have. And then obviously at Discover a couple of years ago we did a big push with GreenLake. And we're really pleased with how that's moving forwards as well because that's not really as much as a technology type of play, but that's a philosophy play about how we're satisfying the economic and service needs of the customers. So we're really pleased how that's been moving forwards, and that's another really big push for us this year. >> Well excellent. Maybe it would help to illustrate this. Do you have some customer examples? I understand sometimes, if you can share who the the logo is >> Harvey: Sure. >> that's great, otherwise if it needs to be a little more anonymized, that's fine too. >> No I think that's a great question, and the reason why we like talking about these types of things is we do thousands of orders a year with HPE. It's a really rich partnership on a global basis. If I remember correctly, last time we had over 100 countries where we've done deals together, so it's really nice to see it be appeared as on a global basis. A couple of easy ones that come to mind, certainly is White River Health Services. Big medical system solution serving over half a million customers that are out there. And those guys had a massive growth rate of data, 30% growth year over year, and really needed to make sure that that availability of data was there so that they provided solid solutions to their customers. We partnered up with a solution with StorONE and provided them with a fantastic amount of savings per year on their overall solution but also gave them that business continuity that they were looking at. So I think that's a great example. If we move over to Europe though there's another good market for us where we're seeing really success, great success together. The Metropolitan Thames Valley is a very large housing authorities are a very different virtual but shows the wide applicability of the solution, where they were having trouble looking at the ability to put a full disaster recovery plan into place, And obviously contingencies is a key topic right now. So we worked with HPE and then we've really put in great solution that not only reduced the ability to recover from seven days to less than 30 minutes, but we also managed to be more efficient with the amount rack utilization that was in place for them as well. So economic support, very critical business continuity support, and obviously a unified solution to allow them to be in a scenario where they knew that the IT partners they were working with were fully in unison so there was never any service question if they needed any support. So a couple of really good examples from around the world. >> You know, I wonder if we can touch a little bit on the competitive dynamics here. So eight years ago, HP had its own data protectant. When HP split that piece went over to micro focus so it kind of (murmurs) the swim lanes a little bit. But HP has also been increasing their partnership, so Veeam, you're a good partner but there are other partners out. So how do you help differentiate and how do you make you got clean engagements through HPE's channel and with their field? >> Yeah, that's a really good question, and there's a number of different answers to that, but I think that one of the things that will support what I'm about to touch on is that we're really proud that we just got awarded the Global Technology Partner award again this year. This is the second year running for HPE. Last year was the first time a software application partner was provided and now two years in a row, we've demonstrated that the partnership is really valuable for HPE. And I think to your point, Stuart, it comes down to a couple different areas. The first is just the overall attitude, approach, and relationship. Partnerships work when you can turn your back on each other. They work on the assumption that you really have the same vested interest for success and you can roll through some tough times as well as the good times. With good dialogue, with focus on the objectives you are trying to achieve, but also more importantly that you are excited and you enjoy working together. And so, it's a pleasure to spend hours and hours together to come up with something that satisfies the customer pains that you are solving. Now combined with that attitude because to me that attitude is a core foundation, technology's hugely important but if you can't have a business relationship, you can't actually execute that technology position. Now we're fortunate enough as well that you combine that attitude of partnershipping together with the investments and technology that we've done, and that's why we feel like we continue to differentiate. I think it's great that HPE has such a rich ecosystem. I think it's helpful to get focus on what is a huge topic for customers and frankly, the technology world is a complex ecosystem nowadays. But I think you stand out from the rest by focusing on being the most successful, being the best, having the right attitude, making the right investments together to move forward and that's where we've demonstrated, historically, our engineering commitment and our future roadmap commitment, which we're working on right now together heavily combining with a big marketing and sales investment, so all of the facets and the organization come together in a nice, seamless manner. So, you know, trust, I think it's great that they have the depth of ecosystem that's out there, we're just really proud that we continue to be the preferred partner in this space and we keep getting recognized for the investment that we have with HPE as well. >> Excellent. Yeah, you brought up it is such a complex ecosystem out there. One of the themes that we heard, your show as well as HP Discover, you know, we're talking about customers going through that digital information. You gave us a couple of customer examples, but maybe some big themes, what're you hearing? You know, how do the (murmurs) markets align between Veeam and HPE? >> Yeah, great question. And I think that is another great example where when you use the topic of data transformation, it's a really broad discussion. You know, what we've tried to do is focus on the areas that we provide the most value to customers right now. And I think that focuses us down and data protection powered by intelligence storage, which is a really key topic for a lot of our joint customers that are out there. We really want to make sure we can extend your data management from on-premise to the cloud. That's a really key area we're working with the Simplivity team on. And then finally, the consumption-based data management working very closely with GreenLake. And the (murmurs) of all of those solutions satisfied the plethora of needs that the customers have on storage of data availability. And I think that from that point of view, that's where keeping that focus on what is solving pains today, is why were having such great success together. So I think from that basis, we found that that helps the sales teams identify and satisfy the needs of the customer, It helps us get clarity on execution, and more importantly, keeps us in the scenario where we got really clear bars for success to make sure that this partnership is not just a, I call it a website partnership, but a real partnership that's driving key revenues, key (murmurs) leadership, and frankly, key solutions for the customers. >> Yeah, if you talk about where your data lives and how Veeam could support across multiple environments. There's the technical pieces which Veeam's done a good job on and I think people understand pretty well. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the financial piece of things. How do you make sure, you know, especially with a deep partner like HPE, that you make it seamless as companies are trying to move more towards the SaaS and Opex models, and that it's not getting understanding, full control of what my billing is, and how these things go together. >> Yeah, it's a really good point, and I think there's sort of a capital facet to that. You know, the first part is, on a global basis across all of the segments that we've worked together on, especially if when you look at the success we have at the higher end price together, and the high end commercial. You have to be in a situation where you can support the financial structure that they have as a business. And that's looking at it whether or not it's a traditional Capex employment related to more of the traditional HP solutions, or looking at the flexibility of the Veeam licensing combined with that so they can have the choice that they desire. As well as moving down that path, that if they decide they want to move through a more consumption-based type of position by having that seamless integration with GreenLake as well, you get through a scenario where you can find the right solution for their needs and then the economic structure is really a choice for them, taking away a lot of that pain imposition. Now what we're seeing overall to that point too, which I think is also interesting is customers are going through evolution. If you go back a number of years, every conversation and topic was related to public cloud and it's still a huge area of focus. But, I've also seen a lot of organization especially at the higher end, really start to look at how they can take a lot of their consumption-based economics and bring it on-premise because they want to make sure that the reaction position they got, they're getting their data back is within their premise as well. And so that's why we're really enjoying a lot of success together because we can synergize the flexibility of the HPE offerings with the commercial offerings of (murmurs) Veeam, and be in a scenario where it's almost a perfect fit for most customers. And we try not to force them down a specific path because I think those days are gone, but customers want to look at the economic or the budget constraints they've got today and find the best fit, but they want that best fit without compromising on their overall support they get, and they want the scenario, like we have with HPE where it's fully on their price box, single supplier, single throat to choke, making sure were in unison, and they've got continued investment moving forward in the portfolio (murmurs). >> Excellent. Well final question I have for you is in the general market place, people often get stuck in their head to how they think about a company. Veeam is such a close partner to HPE. (murmurs) has thousands of customers with them. Give our viewers a little bit of how should people be thinking about HPE in 2020, and then also give us the final take away for Veeam and HPE. >> Yeah, great question. I mean, I've been working with HPE now a multitude of, overall over six years now. And the evolution that we're seeing is fantastic. I think that my view on how you should see HPE is, a trusted advisor related to talking about the transformation you're going through your data, and also a clear, solidified portfolio, especially in the storage realm related to the control of the data. Following the data from the origination point of the application all the way through. And so I think from that point of view, there's clarity with portfolio, there's a comprehensive interlock of the portfolio. And so from that point of view, I think there's calmness in the discussion. What I would say is that (murmurs) further and how to look at the HP (murmurs) relationship is. That continued investment on future proofing and hopefully some exciting announcements as we move through the year, will demonstrate that we are constantly making sure that we're differentiating at the frontier (mic cuts) for the customer. And you can see that in the growth of our enterprise business together. You could see that in the growth of high end commercial business together, and you can also see the fact that our customers are growing every single year together. So when we put these solutions in place, they're loving them and they're growing them year over year, and very quickly as well. So we're seeing a very high percentage of our customers reorder within the first year because they're really enjoying the unification of the solution. And so hopefully, the HP customers should look at that, through confidence, through calmness, and be really pleased that the market leader approach will indict protection by Veeam and they're primary (murmurs) leader when it comes to technology with HPE, together provide a really powerful solution, and we're really pleased on the customer satisfaction results we're getting from this work. >> All right. Well, David Harvey, thank you so much for the updates. Looking forward to some of those innovations that you talked about coming later this year. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks so much. I really appreciate the time and enjoying Discover, and I hope everybody's having a great event. >> All right, stay tuned for launch of theCUBE's coverage, HPE Discover 2020, the Virtual Experience. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks as always for watching.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everybody and welcome to this week's CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. It is Breaking Analysis, but first I'm coming to you from the floor of Cisco Live in Barcelona, and I want to talk about storage. Storage continues to be soft but there are some bright spots. I've been reporting on this for awhile now and I want to dig in and share with you some of the reasons why, maybe give you some forecasts as to what I think is going to happen in the coming months. And of course, we want to look into some of the ETR spending data, and try to parse through that and understand who's winning, who's losing, who's got the momentum, where are the tailwinds and headwinds. So the first thing I want to show you is let's get right into it. What this slide is showing here is a storage spending snapshot of net score. Now remember, net score in the ETR parlance is an indicator of momentum or spending velocity. Essentially every quarter, what ETR does is they go out to, in this case, 1100 respondents out of the 4500 dataset, and they ask them are you spending more or are you spending less. Essentially they subtract the less from the more and that constitutes net score. It's not that simple but for this purpose, that's what we're showing. Now you can see here on the left hand side, I'm showing all respondents out of 1161. You see the January survey net scores. You've got Rubrik, Cohesity, Nutanix, and Pure, and VMware vSAN are the top five. So Rubrik and Cohesity, very strong, and interesting, Rubrik was very strong last quarter. Cohesity not as strong but really shooting up. It kind of surprised me last quarter, Cohesity being a little low but they were early into the dataset and now they're starting to show what I think is really happening in the marketplace. That's a good indicator. But you can see 75 percent, 72 percent. Nutanix still very strong at 56 percent, driving that hyperconverge piece. You see Pure Storage at 44 percent, down a little bit, talk a little bit more about that in a moment. VMware vSAN, Veeam, et cetera, down the list. The thing about the left hand side and storage in general, you can see the softness. Only about one third of the suppliers are in the green, and that's a problem. If you compare this to security, probably three quarters are in the green. It's a much hotter segment. Now, look on the right hand side. The right hand side is showing what ETR calls GPP, giant, public, and private. You can see there's an N of 403. These are the largest, the very largest public and private companies, private company being a company like Mars Candy. And they say that they are the best indicators of spending momentum in the dataset. So really isolating on some of the large companies. Look what happens here. You can see Rubrik gets even stronger as does Cohesity, they're into the 80 percent range. That's really rarefied air, so very strong. You can see Nutanix drops down. It does better in the smaller companies, it appears. They drop down to 41 percent. Pure gets stronger in the GPP at 68 percent. You can see VMware's vSAN uptick to 45 percent. Nimble gets better, HPE's Nimble, to 54 percent. Dell drops down to 4.8 percent. HPE goes up to 33 percent. HPE was red in the left hand side. You can see Veeam drops, not surprising, Veeam in the biggest companies is not going to be as prevalent. We talked about that in our Breaking Analysis segment after the acquisition of Veeam. You can see NetApp bumps up a little bit but it's still kind of in that red zone. I also want to call your attention to Actifio. They're way down on the bottom in the left hand side, which kind of surprised me. And then I started digging into it because I know Actifio does better in the larger companies. In the right hand side, they pop up to 33 percent. It's only an N of three, but what I'm seeing in the marketplace is Actifio solving some really hard problems in database and copy data management. You're starting to see those results as well. But generally speaking, this picture is not great for storage, with the exception of a few players like Rubrik and Cohesity, Pure, Nutanix. And I'm going to get into that a little bit and try to explain what's going on here. The market's bifurcated. Primary storage has been on the back burner for awhile now, and I've been talking about that. The one exception to that is really been Pure. Little bit for Dell EMC coming back, we'll dig into that a little bit more but Pure has been the stand-out. They're even moderating lately, I'll talk about that some more. Secondary storage is where the market momentum is and you can see that with Rubrik and Cohesity. Again, we'll talk about that some more. Let me dig into the primary side. Cloud, as I've talked about in many Breaking Analysis segments is siphoning off demand from on-prem spend. The second big factor in storage has been there was such an injection of flash into the marketplace, it added headroom. Customers used to buy spindles to get performance, and they don't need to do that so much anymore because so much flash was pushed into the system. The third thing is you're still seeing in primary the consolidation dynamics play out with hyperconverge. So hyperconverge is the software defined bringing together of storage, compute, and networking into a single logical managed unit. That is taking share away from traditional primary storage. You're also seeing tactical NAND pricing be problematic for storage suppliers. You saw that with Pure again this past quarter. NAND pricing comes down, which you'd think would be a good thing from a component standpoint, which it is, but it also lowers prices of the systems. So that hurt Pure's revenue. Their unit volume was pretty good but you're seeing that sort of put pressure on prices, so ASPs are down, average system prices. Let's turn our attention to the secondary market for a moment. Huge injection of venture capital, like a billion dollars, half a billion dollars over the last year, and then another five billion just spent on the acquisition of Veeam. A lot of action going on there. You're seeing big TAM expansions where companies like Rubrik and Cohesity, who have garnered much of that VC spending, are really expanding the notion of data protection from back-up into data management, into analytics, into security, and things of that nature, so a much bigger emphasis on TAM expansion, of course as I talked about the M and A. Let's dig into each of these segments. The chart that I'm showing now really digs into primary storage. You can see here the big players, Pure, Dell EMC, HPE, NetApp, and IBM. And lookit, there's only company in the green, Pure. You can see they're trending down just a little bit from previous quarters but still far and away the company with most spending momentum. Again, here I'm showing net score measure of spending velocity back to the January '18 survey. You can see Dell EMC sort of fell and then is slowly coming back up. NetApp hanging in there, Dell EMC, HP, and NetApp kind of converging, and you can see IBM. IBM announced last quarter about three percent growth. I talked about that actually in September. I predicted that IBM storage would have growth because they synchronized their DS8000 high-end mainframe announcement to the z15, so you saw a little bit of uptick in IBM. Pure, as I said, 15 percent growth. I mean, if you're flat in this market or growing at three percent, you're doing pretty well, you're probably a share gainer. We'll see what happens in February when Dell EMC, HPE, and NetApp announce earnings. We'll update you at that time. So that's what you're seeing now. Same story, Pure outpacing the others, everybody else fighting for share. Let's turn our attention now to secondary storage. What I'm showing here is net score for the secondary storage players. I can't isolate on a drill down for secondary storage, last slide I could do on storage overall, but what I can show is pure plays. What's showing here is Rubrik, Cohesity, Veeam, Commvault, and Veritas. Five pure play, you can argue Veritas isn't a pure play, but I consider it a pure play data protection vendor. Look at Rubrik and Cohesity really shooting up to the right, 75 percent and 72 percent net scores, respectively. You see Veeam hanging in there. This is again, all respondents, the full 1100 dataset. Commvault announced last quarter it beat earnings but it's not growing. You can see some pressure there, and you can see Veritas under some pressure as well. You can see a net score really deep in the red, so that's cause for some concern. We'll keep watching that, maybe dig into some of the larger accounts to see how they're doing there. But you can see clear standouts with Rubrik and Cohesity. I want to look at hyperconverge now. Again, I can't drill into hyperconverge but what I can do is show some of the pure plays. So what this slide shows is the net score for some of the pure play hyperconverge vendors led by Nutanix. The relative newcomer here is vSAN with VMware. You can see Dell EMC, VxRail, and Simplivity. I would say this. A lot of the marketing push that you hear out of Dell and out of VMware says Nutanix is in big trouble, they're dying and so forth. Our data definitely shows something different. The one caution is, you can see Nutanix and larger accounts, not as strong. And you can see both vSAN and Dell EMC stronger in those larger accounts. Maybe that's kind of their bias and their observation space, but it's something that we've got to watch. But you can see the net scores here. Everybody's in the green because overall, this is a strong market. Everybody is winning. It's taking share as I said from primary. We're watching that very closely. Nutanix continues to be strong. Watching very carefully that competitive dynamic and the dynamics within those larger companies which are a bellwether. Now the big question that I want to ask here is can storage reverse the ten-year trend of the big cloud sucking sound that we have heard for the past decade. I've been reporting with data on how cloud generally has hurt that storage spend on-prem. So what I'm showing here in this slide is the net score for the cloud spenders. Many hundreds of cloud spenders in the dataset. What we're showing here is the net score, the spending velocity over the last 10 years for the leaders. You can see Dell EMC, the number one. NetApp, right there in terms of market share, IBM as well. I didn't show HPE because the slide got too busy but they'd be up there as well. So these are the big spenders, big on-prem players and you can see, well, it's up and down. The highs are lower and the lows tend to be lower. You can see on the latest surveys, maybe there's some upticks here in some of the companies. But generally speaking, the trend has been down. That siphoning away of demand from the cloud guys. Can that be reversed, and that's something that we're going to watch, so keeping an eye on that. Let me kind of summarize and I'll make some other comments here. One of the things we're going to watch here is Dell EMC, NetApp, and HPE earnings announcements in February. That's going to be a clear indicator. We'll look for what's happening with overall demand, what the growth trajectory looks like, and very importantly, what NAND pricing looks like. As a corollary to that, we're going to be watching elasticity. I firmly believe as prices go down, that more storage is going to bought. That's always been the case. Flash is still only about 20, 25, 30 percent of the market, about 30 percent of the spending, about 20 percent of the terabytes. But as prices come down, expect people to buy more. That's always been the case. If there's an elasticity of demand, it hasn't shown up in the earning statements, and that's a bit of a concern. But we'll keep an eye on that. We're also going to watch the cloud siphoning demand from on-prem spend. Can the big players and guys like Pure and others, new start-ups maybe, reverse that trend. Multi-cloud, there's an opportunity for these guys. Multi-cloud management, TAM expansion into new areas. Actually delivering services in the cloud. You saw Pure announce block storage in the cloud. So that's kind of interesting that we'll watch. Other players may be getting into the data protection space, but as it relates to the cloud, one of the things I'm watching very closely is the TAM expansion of the cloud players. What do I mean by that. Late last year, Amazon announced a broader set of products or services really in its portfolio. Let's watch for Amazon's moves and other big cloud players into the storage space. I fully expect they're going to want to get a bigger piece of that pie. Remember, much if not most of Amazon's revenue comes from compute. They really haven't awakened to the great storage opportunity that's out there. Why is that important. You saw this play out on-prem. Servers became a really tough market. Intel made all the money. Amazon is a huge customer of Intel, and Intel's getting a big piece of Amazon's EC2 business. That's why you see, in part, Amazon getting into its own chip design. I mean, in the server business, you're talking about low gross margin business. If you're in the 20s or low 30s, you're thrilled. Pure last quarter had 70 plus percent gross margins. It's been a 60 plus percent gross margin business consistently. You're going to see the cloud guys wake up to that and try to grab even more share. It's going to be interesting to see how the traditional on-prem vendors respond to that. Coming into last decade, you saw tons of start-ups but only two companies really reached escape velocity: Nutanix and Pure. At the beginning of the century, you saw Data Domain, Isilon, Compellent, 3PAR all went public. EqualLogic and LeftHand got taken out. There are a bunch of other companies that got acquired. Storage was really a great market. Coming into this decade, mid part of the decade, you had lots of VC opportunity here. You had Fusion and Violin, Intentury went public. They all flamed out. You had a big acquisition with SolidFire, almost a billion dollars, but really Pure and Nutanix were the only ones to make it, so the question is, are you going to see anyone reach escape velocity in the next decade, and where's that going to come from. The likely players today would be Cohesity and Rubrik. Those unicorns would be the opportunity. You could argue Veeam, I guess reached it, but hard to tell because Veeam's a private company. By escape velocity, we're talking large companies who go public, have a big exit in the public market and become transparent so we really know what's going on there. Will it come from a cloud or a cloud native play. We'll see. Are there others that might emerge, like a Nebulon or a Clumio. A company like Infinidat's doing well, will they hit escape velocity and do an IPO and again, become more transparent. That's again something that we're watching, but you're clearly seeing moves up the stack where there's a lot more emphasis in spending on cloud, cloud native. We clearly saw it with hyperconverge consolidation but up the stack towards the apps, really driving digital transformations. People want to spend less on heavy lifting like storage. They're always going to need storage. But is it going to be the same type of market it has been for the last 30 or 40 years, of great investment opportunities. We're starting to see that wane but we'll keep track of it. Thank you for watching this Breaking Analysis, this is CUBE Insights powered by ETR. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hello everyone and welcome to this special cube conversation you know Hewlett Packard Enterprise has gone through one of the most significant transformations in the history of the tech business once a much larger in far-flung conglomerate HP as you know split in two and now HPE is much more focused and has a completely different posture with respect to technology partners so today we're gonna focus in on the big drivers of innovation in the technology business data AI and cloud and get HPE spointer222 digging to two areas of growth hyper-converged infrastructure and intelligence storage I also want to share some ETR data using simply and nimble as proxies for these markets finally we want to peek into some of the spending data in HPE zico system to see how a more partner friendly HPE is faring and with me today is Patrick Osbourne Patrick is the vice president and GM of big data analytics and scale-out data platforms at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and a friend of the cube Patrick always a pleasure thanks for coming in thanks so much for having him so let me set it up here and I want to share some spending data with our audience Alex if you bring up the the first slide I want to show is this shows the the latest spending data just released from ETR on the various segments and you and it's a double y-axis and you can see in the left hand side is the average spend represented by the size of the charts on the right hand side is the growth rate represented by the dots and I've highlighted in green some of the key areas that we're going to talk about analytics bi big data you can see 12% still pretty big market even ten years into the big data theme cloud computing you know growing 15 16 % ml AI 17% you can see the container space is growing it between 15 and and 20 percent so Patrick let's start with what's in your title the big data you know the analytics piece you know what are you seeing there what's HP story yes so that's been a area growth for us within HPE not only from an infrastructure but also a services play we've got a number of you know big partners in the traditional you know big data space we made a number of you know strategic acquisitions over the last two years in this area specifically around blue data nap are so these areas that customers are in you know continue to invest in in the macro area are very important and well I think one of the things you're seeing here from a growth perspective is that they're also bringing in some very adjacent markets with AI and ml so it's part of an entire workflow so you start off with bi analytics big data and we have a number of solutions around that area and then starting to add in things like AI AM LDL into that analytics work workflow so it's been really good for us you're really kind of adding into your portfolio they're like say the map bar acquisition they they kind of were one of the the big three that started that whole big data movement and then now you have this organizations with these troves of data and they're trying to figure out okay what do we do with it and that's really where machine intelligence or AI comes in isn't it absolutely and not only you know we're we providing a number of solutions for customers in this area but we're using it ourselves to write to you know enhance our customer experience enhance our automation support automation I definitely give a you know much better customer experience with our storage and data platforms so wait you send your practitioners of AI to make your customers lives better by M you're saying by embedding that into storage platform you know if you take a look at a number of our marquee services that we have whether it's things like info site Green Lake even a rubra central you know think about some of the things that we do at the edge all that is being powered by AI right at the end of the day so we're using those techniques to improve the product and solution experiences for you know a number of our products everything from it started with nimble we added 3par now we've got simplicity in the info site and as we start to bring together some of the workloads at the edge right with Aruba and things we're doing there it's you know the customers are obviously voting with their dollars all right let's talk about cloud generally but specifically I want to get into hybrid containers McLeod has permanently changed you know our industry everybody wants to bring that cloud model on Prem it's clearly a hybrid world you could see containers really growing Stu Minutemen has a premise that look containers and kubernetes that we treat them as a separate thing but it's really being embedded into all parts of the portfolio so what's your point of view on on containers hybrid bring us up to speed on what HPE is doing there yeah so that's definitely fueling a lot of our growth not only in what you think about the traditional storage segments but as well as HCI right so you know when we talk later about some of the growth we're seeing nimble and simplicity we've got a number of solutions that sit you know directly within this container container orchestration container management we've got you know things that we develop on our own we made a huge announcement at kuba con right around the HPE container platform so for customers that want to run these analytics AI ml very data oriented applications that run in containers we have a great platform for that an HP container platform we could run that on bare metal we can run that in simplicity for example so we're seeing a lot of fuel for that not only just servicing some of the storage and data needs for containers right but also being able to provide an info site like experience for this new generation of application development and were close how do you see the edge fitting into this you know we interviewed Antonio recently with John Chambers at the pensando announcement and and that was kind of interesting you see do you see that as a as a pendulum swing or sort of an expansion of the cloud if you will yeah I definitely see it as an expansion when we talk at HPE we want to be an edge to quarter cloud you know company and helping customers navigate the digital transformation in hybrid IT right and then we're gonna offer that to customers as a service through Green Lake we've been pretty public about that and so one of the big opportunities we see is around these distributed data centers some people define a distributed edge whether that's customers who are doing autonomous vehicles autonomous drilling we see a number of you know big-box retailers you know for example that don't necessarily have a traditional data center but it's not so far out into the edge that it's like an autonomous vehicle but they have you know the similar concerns in terms of a distributed nature how do you automate that how do you manage that at scale and so these assets that we bring together with things like Aruba and our edge line servers and managing that data experience is something that we're gonna capitalize on in FY 24-hour constant retail is interesting right every Nevitt has a Amazon war room but many sectors as a retailer really on fire right now people trying to take advantage of their their store presence yep when IOT is a big factor there so you're seeing a lot of that action is HP yeah absolutely and those customer those customers of ours are fueling their growth through digital transformation so they're using containers and kubernetes and this new style of application development and they want to be able to distribute those data centers and that data but they also have to make it simple right so you see the march towards what we you know are platforms like simplicity for HCI some of the offerings we have around you know independently scalable three-tiered architectures but you get the best of HCI with that we call it nimble d HCI all right so we have a number offerings for customers who you know really want that scale and in serviceability alright let's let's let's pivot a little bit and talk about some of that infrastructure Alice you bring up the next slide what I want to talk to here is this is the ETR data every time they do one of these surveys they ask essentially you're spending more are you spending less and they subtract the less from the more and that's what they call net score net score remember is a measure of spending momentum now what we've done here is you can see the filtered end of 313 HPE customers out of the thousand plus survey respondents of this quarter and you can see a good mix of enterprise size and industry and it's a lot of North America but but good regional - and we're showing the net scores breakdown for for two of your platforms simplicity which is the HCI and nimble storage and you can see the bright green is people adding to the platform the sort of darker green is spending more so let's start with Pleasant levity HCI still a really hot in growing space you've got a nets or of 38 percent almost which is very very strong in ETR parlance you know it's not off the charts like some new tech but it's really really solid so what's the update on simplicity and HCI yeah so I mean this is obviously from from a market perspective HCI is a rapidly growing space still right there's a lot of room for growth both Brown field as well as green field opportunities in the core data center at the edge even in hybrid cloud format so for us it's all about new logo acquisition for simplicity we've shown a phenomenal growth rate for that technology stack developed here in Massachusetts are a great local company great story and so for us this HCI the the markets that we're playing in we take a look at storage and data management in general sub segments of the market are growing rapidly right take a look at HCI you take a look at SDS you take a look at all flash and so we have some great offerings in that space that are completely differentiated from a customer experience and a technology experience and they work together so for example simplicity we just announced earlier in the and later in the calendar year in 2019 that we would be offering simple ibbity with an info site right so you have the same experience that you get from nimble right you get with our HCI products so we're driving those experiences together obviously you know all flash is a huge growing category within storage nimble it's got some great growth they're not only just for new logo adoptions but expansion capability so we're you know - two great products that were seeing some success in yeah so let's talk about nimble the Alex could show that data again so neighborhoods got a net score of 46 percent which again a lot of momentum I mean smaller you know sample size but still really you know strong and you can see it's a more mature market so you see maybe fewer adoptions but almost 50 percent of your customers are saying they're gonna spend more this this quarter relative to last period so that's showing momentum you mentioned info site which is really the technology that sort of nimble brought to your company which are pushing out through the portfolio so your thoughts on that yes so I mean at the end of the day customers are you know the products themselves are great and they provide the customers a really good experience we're driving all that together at a meta layer right so we talked about the products and solutions for us the strategies around the intelligent data platform right so we have a number of platforms that can help dress a number of different workloads whether it's HCI disaggregated HCI whether it's all flash whether it's you know container workloads and container orchestration but we want to provide a very good experience that you can consume as a service and we're driving that together across product lines with data services that work both on Prem and in the cloud right so we have HPE cloud volumes and a number of our Cloud Data Services that tie these platforms together so for us it's all about a strategy around this intelligent data platform not just individual products the individual products are great but from a strategy perspective that is definitely resounding with customers well you talked about digital transformation earlier Patrick I think that's important it's it customers want solutions they don't want to certainly don't want to provision loans they don't want to think about managing boxes so they really want that infrastructure to be invisible they want to push their folks up the stack yep to just do more strategic things and it's it's really your Rd that they're looking toward to automate a lot of those mundane tasks isn't it yeah they look towards RI Rd as well as they look to HPE as a portfolio company to bring together a solution stack that's gonna work for them and sometimes that solution stack is comprised of some of our partners as well so we pick some of the best partners in the industry to go work with in some of these hottest you know portions of the market that are growing significantly so in the areas of HCI or in the areas of software-defined storage you know we've got a number of folks that we that we partner with hybrid cloud and we are able to bring you know a full complete solution to a customer and we D risk that for our customers at the end of the day right we've got some great partnerships with some great companies and that's really you know suited HP very well well great segue let's talk about some of those partnerships so you when when hewlett-packard split into two companies it opened up a ton of opportunities for partnerships for you guys you got a great distribution channel and what I'm showing here Alex on this next slide if you bring this up is three partners that are gaining a lot of momentum based on the spending ETR spending data in the surveys Kohi City theme and Nutanix now remember ETR uses this concept of of net score which we talked about and I'm gonna talk about that a little bit but also market share market share is a measure of pervasiveness in other words how how much there be mentioned inside of the service so I'm showing here market shares but also net scores and you can see Kohi city is just starting in the survey so starting to you know get more noticed and then you can see Veeam and Nutanix you know with the consistent long steady market share growth this is again within the hewlett-packard enterprise account based at 313 respondents so you can see there all three are doing very well and and look at the net scores for cohesive off-the-charts 74% growing very very rapidly again smaller sample size Nutanix much larger sample size you know 60% net score so very very strong in Veen you know surprisingly for a pretty mature company with a 45% net score again very very strong so talk about the the partnerships the new HPE partner posture and then we can maybe get into what you're seeing in the market with some of these partners yes so from for HPE you know we listen to our customers in terms of you know what their their challenges are part of my business is managing around scale out data platforms and so the data is always growing and so we're seeing you know this big trend of scale out architectures powered by you know ubiquitous very high bandwidth low latency networking in the data center and outside the data center and so we're able to you know put some of these software stacks on our infrastructure that works very well with our our you know our own IP solutions and you know solve a number of critical problems for customers around secondary storage right it's growing you want to make use of it to backup and disaster recovery it's always a problem it's definitely an opportunity around hybrid cloud HCI in SDS right it has many forms and flavors right and we want to be able to provide those solutions to our customers especially if you're doing hybrid or private cloud so a lot of these partners you know we want to you know provide a full stack solution to our customers and you know these have partners help us do that how are you I mean the the you've got HCI wouldna Tanic you've got HCI with simplicity you've got sort of certainly beam and cohesively compete up how do you guys position and the a let's start with the HCI piece huh you just let customers sort of direct you and guide you or you guide them how does that all work yeah I mean we always listen to the customer first but at the end of the day we you know we lead with our own IP and we have some you know we have two great solutions around the HCI framework where you going for a very simple very scalable solution in simplicity that has some very powerful data services great economics for the HCI market and you know you see the growth and sympathy for that then we have a number of other solutions specifically around nimble called DHC I write what we're finding is that customers as a classic customers that want to they want the simplicity of management that you'd get from from HCI but they also want to be able to independently scale your compute your networking and your storage and we're able to provide that with something like nimble ProLiant our networking stack and then plug that all into info sites and it works together right so at the end of the day if I having a workload that's more appropriate to work it's on simply as a platform or it's more appropriate for DHC i we can recognize that for our customers through predictive analytics we can automate the placement of that workload and then we provide customers a set of data services so those platforms work together so it really works out well okay and then in terms of well take the situation with Nutanix so that's a customer saying hey we want you guys to work together and you say great yeah problem absolutely we'll do that so that you know we have a set of recipes and and reference architectures and offerings around those that are available direct was well through the channel and is it fair to say that the Dean viii mispronounced be even though they tried a big push in the enterprise you're a part of that that push in and and of course you know cookie city's the hot new kid in the block again is it just sort of market pull that drives that or do you have yeah I mean we definitely theme has been recognized as a great solution for customers doing you know start off you know certainly focused directly on on virtualization and then you know their their strategy is moved and you know to a very adjacent market which is how do i you know tackle that virtualization and VMS and protecting my data but in a hybrid cloud in formats so they're definitely all in on cloud I think cohesive has a very scalable file system back in and it started off with backup and recovery and now is moving into some very adjacent use cases around file secondary storage what can I do around see ICD pipelines so it's kind of approaching it from different different angles you guys really kind of changing your marketing and your product marketing really focusing more on solutions yes outcomes customer outcomes bringing that cloud model to wherever your data lives whether it's on prem at the edge talking about bringing containers throughout the portfolio bring it home what are you sort of hoping for 2020 looks like what are some of those outcomes and what should we expect from from your perspective from HP yeah so I mean we at HPE are very focused on this edge to court a cloud concept hybrid IT so all of our products have you know some sort of endemic whether it's data services or a management paradigm around hybrid cloud and so we you know we we really are you'll see that within our products product releases solution releases the people that we partner with and I think the big thing that we you know pivoted it into at the end of 2019 you'll see this accelerate significantly in 2020 is around this consumption model right the cloud consumption model with Greenlake so we talked a little bit of you know certainly Green Lake from a financial perspective but awful Green Lake as a management paradigm so Green Lake central was announced at the end of the year and just the ability to be able to you know like you do in the top of cloud right but top of private cloud or top of hybrid cloud from HPE and get a really good visibility financially into you into what you're doing it's a mindset too from the top I mean Antonio is saying everything is a service right absolutely yeah so all right Patrick hey thanks for coming in and give us the update on on HPE good luck this year and great to see it yeah thank you very much you're welcome and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave a lot day for the cube we'll see you next time thanks for watching

(upbeat music) >> Hi, and welcome to another CUBEConversation where we go in-depth into the topics that are most important to the technology industry with the thought leaders who are actually getting the work done. I'm Peter Burris, and we've got a great conversation today, and it all starts with the idea of how do you get smart people outside of your organization, in-service organizations to help you achieve your outcomes? It's a challenge because as we become more dependent upon services, we discover that service companies are often trying to sell us bills of goods or visions that aren't solving our exact problem. There's a new breed of service company that's really fascinated by your problem, and wants to sell it. Starts with engineering, starts with value add, and then leads to other types of potential relationships and activities. So what do those service companies look like? Well, to have that conversation, we've got Greg Tinker, who is the CTO and founder of Serene IT. Greg, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much Peter, glad to be here. >> So tell us a little bit about Serene IT. >> So Serene IT is a, well we call it a next generation bar. So what do I mean by that? We mean that we are an engineering-first firm, so our staff is big, we're across the U.S., we have multiple branches and we just went international into Canada, with Serene IT Canada. We have other international branches that we coming online next year. So with that being said though, the key to our growth, the key to our success is the fact that we're an engineering firm first. We have very few sales staff. Our sales staff are more of an account management style, more of a nurturer or a farmer, we would call it, versus a hunter that means someone going out, because the customers are coming to us with their problems because they need a smart engineering bench to help them. They're not looking for somebody else's to bring them askew, or resell them a product. That can be easily done by some of the large conglomerates that are already out there, not to mention, spend 30 seconds on Google, you can pretty much buy anything you want. >> Yeah, and you know Fred Brookes said a million years ago, when I was, even before I got into computer science, wrote "The Mythical Man Month", and made the observation that the solution to a hard problem typically, is not more people, >> Right. >> It's working smarter, and working more with the right people. So tell a little about how you're able to find the right people from the industry, and bring them together to turn them into the right team. >> It's a great question, Peter, so I've been very fortunate. I loved my career at Hewlett Packard. I left on good terms because I saw a problem in the industry that I wanted to go and tackle head-on. It's easy for people to sit back and talk about it, it's more difficult to actually go and try to solve the problem, and I'm trying to solve the problem. The problem is, there's a lot of orders out there that bring very low value today, they bring a lot of resale. And that's great for those clients that just know what they want. The vast majority of customers don't know what they want today because the technologies are so advanced, they need help to get from where they were, a legacy model, to a more modern software-defined ecosystem. >> And the business problems are so complex. >> Yes. >> It's that combination of complex business problems, 'cause your competitions and your customers are pushing you, and now advanced technologies that have to be marshaled to solve those problems. >> That's exactly right, so with that being said, I set out build an engineering firm and resale would be something later, but we sell through the engineering consulting firms to solve those business problems for our clients. And so our engineering bench is comprised of engineers from Cisco, from Dell, from HPE, from a lot of big conglomerates that everybody all knows. But when you work in this industry, in the labs of these big conglomerates, me coming from HPE, when you do that, you get a lot of friends across the pillars. >> Sure. >> You build networks. >> You build networks. And quite frankly, it's the Marvel lab guys that own today Q-Logic. We all know each other, and with that being said, some of these guys want to go out and try to solve these big problems with companies like myself, and so with that being said, that's how we're building Serene IT, is engineering-first, and we have a very large technical bench today. Just think about it, the company came online in 2017 with just two, so today, we are significantly bigger than that. We're approaching a 50-plus headcount, and we continue to expand with multiple branches, and our growth rate is almost double every six months. And it's something I'm having a great deal of fun doing. The key thing here though is solving business problems and helping customers. >> Well let's talk about that, because every IT organization faces the challenge that they've been so focused on the hardware assets for so long, or the application assets. Now they're trying to focus on the data assets, but they find themselves often in conflict with the business They're not doing a particularly good job of translating a business opportunity into a technology solution still. >> True. >> You've got these great engineers. How are you getting them to also speak business, so that you facilitate that domain expertise about the business so it can be turned into a technology-reliable solution? >> Like any good engineering firm, you have to have levels right? So we have a knock all the way to level four, and our level four engineers are our master technologists that are usually patent published or some varied nature thereof, with usually a multitude of master ASC certification structures to be able to state the fact that they are level four. We also have some college kids that are coming up that are wanting to learn with us, which is good. But I want to tell you on that same point though, is we only allow those elite, the level three, the level four guys, to be in front of our clients, because they've been in this industry a long time. Like myself, we can understand the business problems, as well as the technology problems, and help a client go from zero to hero. That's what we do well. >> So you're bringing in people who have been business people, but have strong engineering backgrounds >> Correct. >> In product domains, in service domains, in the industry, and you're bringing them together and saying, let's go back to being engineers, that can still talk business. >> That's exactly it, that's the key differentiator with us, is the fact that we're not talking just essays, a lot of ours, in our mindsets have essays they call engineers. We don't hire anyone that can't put fingers on a keyboard. If they can't make magic happen on a keyboard, they're of no value to us, they're of no value to our clients, which is what they need help with. So if we're not able to sit down and have a conversation and pull out a laptop and make some some magic happen with, name it, Ansible, Puppet, Shell, Saltstack, that's just in automation CodeLogics, C-code we've got all the cool stuff in that space. But if we can't sit down and write Python, Ruby on Rails and whatnot, and make something tangible to a client in very short order, we didn't do our job. >> So a lot of companies that I've experienced, a lot of customers I've talked to, have what I would call the "goldilocks" problem with their service providers. By that I mean, some of their service providers don't have the technical chops to just throw numbers at it, so they're too cold. Some of their service providers are too smart, or pushing too hard and they get suspicious of them. How do you be that just right, stay focused on the problem bringing the other team, the engineers or the IT folks that you're working with along with you, so you get that natural technology transfer so the business gets the capability that it can run and you can go do something else? >> So that's a good point, Peter. I mean, we're still working out some of those details, I'll tell you, to be honest with you on that stuff. >> Everybody is. >> Yeah. We're getting better at it, you know customers. If we get to aggressive, and tell the customers this is what's wrong with your problem, this is where you need to go, we call their baby ugly, it puts a lot of contention right on the onset, so it causes problems. So we have to be very cognitive of what they have, and where they want to go, and show them where we're going and why we're doing it, and not just focus on "You did it the wrong way". We don't want to focus on that. That's already done, that ship's already sailed, why bash it? I tell my engineers don't talk negative, there's no good going to come of it. Focus on what you have, and where you need to go with it, and how we're going to get there. Keep it a positive message, and you'll find it'd be more receptive, and it's working for our team. >> Well I'll tell you, one of the things I've heard about Serene IT is that you guys especially developed competencies in technologies that have worked in the past. >> You can say that. >> It seems as though one of the things you're able to do is you're able not to make something so new and so distinct that the client can't see how they can possibly operate it without you. You're taking a lot of open-source, a lot of established tried-and-true technologies and using your smarts to put them together in new and interesting ways so the customer says, "Oh that was smart, that was smart. "I can do that, oh yes, now I get it". Is that, am I mis-characterizing your guys? >> No, you're not, you're actually spot-on. We actually have one of the largest ZFS file systems on the planet right now with 142 million users hitting it and-- >> ZFS? >> Yeah, it's old school. >> With 142 million, okay. >> Yeah, it's old-school But if what's old is new again, we're just putting a new wrapper around it. It worked great in its day, but you put that old technology, the file system itself that's been around for a long time, one of the biggest file systems at 128 bit. You take that file system and you put that on today's Red Hat, Caldera, SUSE, name your favorite. You put that on a big machine, a Linux machine today, a large scale like an HPDL380 with NVME drives with a back-end data store, like a 3PAR or Primäre, or name whatever you want on the back end with a big fiber channel, you'd be surprised what we can do with that thing. So we're able to keep customers' costs down by showing them we can take a old-school technology and make it far bigger than you ever imagined, and give you more horsepower and at less cost, and customers are really receptive to that. Now is that perfect for every footprint? No, that was a unique situation. Not everybody's got 142 million users.(chuckles) >> Well, that's true. And so let me build on that, because the other thing that the CIOs I talk to and senior IT people and also business people, increasingly, is they want to make sure that the solution works now, but that it's not going to end-of-life options for them. >> Yeah. >> How do you do this using tried-and-true technologies combined into new and interesting ways, in a way that still nonetheless gives customers future growth options or future application options? >> I'm not a fan of vendor-locking, I'm not a fan of Franken-monsters. Our team of engineers, we have a mandate that they do not build anything like that, I won't approve it. Because I don't want to have a customer locked in to Serene IT. That was never the intent. We want them to choose us, we want them to come to our team and get our value, so we can show them how to grow their business, and do it in a nice, sustainable way, so we can show their staff how to support it. That takes us into our managed services component. Most of the big things we design and do, we're what we call an adaptive managed services, an AMS model. What do I mean by that statement? We're not a WITO. What's a WITO, you ask? It's a "Walk In, Take Over". That's the big boys, that's the DXEs of the world, that's the Assentras, that's what they do. And they do that well. We're not here to compete with that. But what we're here to do is say, to a company or business, whoever they might be, you probably don't need us to take over everything in your IT shop, and really, we're not going to be the best at that, nor are they in some cases, the other vendors. I'll tell you, you know your business the best. We know infrastructure the best, and we can show you where you can build your skillsets up and get better at it. We can automate a lot of it and show you how to manage the automation, and there'll be certain key points that maybe you guys don't want to own for various reasons, and we will manage just that key component, and we do that today with a lot of our big clients. >> Greg Tinker, CTO and founder of Serene IT, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. >> And once again, I want to thank you for participating in this CUBEConversation. Until next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Denver, Colorado, it's The Cube. Covering Commault Go 2019. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Commvault Go 19! I'm Lisa Martin, with Stu Miniman. And Stew and I are pleased to welcome to The Cube for the first time, we have Chris Powers, VP and General Manager at HPE. Chris, welcome! >> Thank you very much, thank you. I was telling Stu earlier, you know, long time watcher. First time participant. >> All right, well, awesome, we love that. So here we are in your native area of Colorado. We were just talking about the weather which is probably a topic if you live or visit Colorado that is always an interesting conversation because it changes >> Chris: Rapidly. >> So rapidly, exactly. You guys had snow last week, we have beautiful weather. Well, at least so far this week. But I only got in last night. >> Well stick around till this weekend cause we'll have some more snow. >> All right, I brought some boots. So Chris, talk to us, you've been a long time HPE guy, let's have just kind of a status of the HPE, Commvault relationship, the partnership. What's going on there? >> Absolutely, so Commvault is key important partner to HP. We actually have an arrangement via a capability we call HPE Complete by which we actually skew up Commvault products, we go through the background working with Commvault making sure we have application integration so that customers have a lot of confidence in them. And then a customer or a partner can buy a complete solution on a single P.O. from both companies. So it really provides that ease of transaction, ease of evaluation. And then confidence in the delivered solution that they purchased from HPE. >> So confidence and simplification are great from doing a transaction. Talk to us about how Commvault and HP are working together to really have customers in this multi-cloud world that a lot of them are living in have confidence that they're able to access secure data in a way that is as simple as it can be. >> Well there's a couple things we have. We have integration with Commvault products with a number of our, across a number of our platforms. Commvault is the backbone for our HPE GreenLake backup as a service product, right? And what that gives is the confidence and the capabilities of having a cloud-like experience for your backup environment. But it's managed and controlled on premises. So it brings the benefits of both with the Commvault and Telesnap technology we've got that integrated in with our HPE Primera 3Par and Nimble platforms and that makes snapshot management much more seamless and much more of core portion of their data protection strategies. So there's a number of connection points that we have and we will continue over time to just continue to broaden and exploit that, you know, where the opportunities exist. >> Yeah, I just had a conversation with Craig Rutledge, last week about GreenLake. Bring us inside your customers and you know, how is it some of their buying patterns are changed? GreenLake's actually been around for about nine years, I hadn't been aware that it had been around that long. But you know, cloud and as a service, Commvault's talking about there's a new SaaS offering that they have. You know storage used to be just something you thought about with a box. Now, you know, software is one of the key delivery mechanisms for how I manage and deal with my data. >> That's correct. Well, you know, a lot of the consumption models changed. You know quite a bit over time. And there are more and more, we're seeing more and more of our customers really being more interested in not purchasing the box. Really, I mean the box delivers something. Really, this is shifting more towards purchasing what is being delivered, right. And so that's why these SaaS service models are really that significant. They're a market changer in a couple of aspects. First of all it changes the economics. You know from a consumption standpoint about what are you purchasing? Second thing it does, is it pushes back under the vendor more of the responsibility of the day-to-day maintenance and the activities. Right, it offloads. And so you could be using these IT, you know, compute storage services. Really focusing on them to bring your business outcome as opposed to spending a lot of your time and energy managing the infrastructure itself. >> Chris, of course we've heard a lot about data this week. One area I'm surprised I haven't heard about it much, maybe I just haven't been in the right conversations, is AI. And I know, I've talked to your peer Patrick Osborne, quite a few times about how AI is impacting your portfolio. Maybe help us understand how it fits into this whole discussion. >> Certainly, you know, it's really in two forms. One is AI to support your infrastructure management itself. Right? So a key component of our strategy is something we call the global intelligence engine. And that brings with it a combination of really monitoring what's happening within the environment. Creating from that a set of, think of fingerprints. Associated with workloads such that we can begin to trace and understand, based upon those fingerprints, if there's something changing in the environment, applying rules based AI to understand what an immediate type of response is. So that's how we're using it to simplify infrastructure management, because it is amazingly complex to what it used to be years ago. The second way though is actually bringing to market capabilities that support AI type workloads. And that's a step that Patrick's really focused on with our Mapar, blue data, integration. And it's really, so it's bringing both of those sets to marketplace. Wanting to help customers better manage their environment and then more on effectively being able to utilize those tools to then manage their businesses. >> And this is part of your, the intelligent data platform strategy that HPE is talking about. Can you kind of walk us through that IDP pitch? >> Absolutely. So, first and foremost it starts with workloads. Right? And it's workload optimized systems. That being either from your primary, from you file based from your object in secondary all the way to managing your cloud capabilities. And it's providing that workload mobility, data mobility across those platforms. We layer on top of that this notion of the global intelligence engine. Right? That I've already spoken to. And then what we have is effectively then able to make sure that we have SaaS type plugins for infrastructure management, right? Plugins and (mumbles), chef puppet and so forth. And then also optimizing from an application standpoint what is necessary from a workload standpoint from a data protection standpoint. In all of this then focused at consumers. Be it the data administrators. Be it the line of business owners being the IT infrastructure ops people. It's really this layered sort of capabilities but it starts and ends with workloads. Right? We don't talk about platforms, it's really how do you optimize the capabilities for a specific set of workloads, recognizing that the data associated with those workloads needs to transition over time. >> Chris, wondering if you have any customer examples that might be able to illustrate the power of HPE plus Commvault. >> Certainly, just reflecting back to the backups as a service, via HPE GreenLake. We have number of large customers that utilize GreenLake for the core of their operational activities. Just recently we took down a number of large deals in Europe utilizing HPE with Commvault to provide that in a backup environment managed by HPE GreenLake. >> And from the value of doing that is that you know obviously there's simplicity. You know, does that have an organizational change to how they think about their data protection once their, they leverage GreenLake. >> Well definitely, upon you know leveraging GreenLake, because no longer do you have this arm of backup administrators, you know sitting with you, within your company, right? You are procuring a service, right? You're no longer having to take care of it and manage that infrastructure, be responsible for it. And we take it upon ourselves then to also make sure that that infrastructure is being continuously updated, refreshed. Basically taking that headache of IT management away and focusing on the business outcome. >> Yeah, I'm wondering too, you could probably give a good kind of longterm view of this. How do you see that as different from the previous trend of outsourcing that we've gone through? >> So, I think that trend of outsourcing a lot of times that turned into, once you played it out over a couple of years, turned into more of a game of asset sweating. Right? And so you know, this notion of continually keeping up from a serviceability standpoint, optimizing the capabilities, I think it was more of a focus from an asset utilization play as opposed to delivering a service. I think the real change now, is delivering a service and what does that involve as opposed to like I said, arbitrating and taking advantage of an asset play. >> So when you were talking, you mention the term business outcomes a second ago and my ears perked up, so whether you're talking about whether it's a large retailer or it's a bank for example, talk to us about some of the business outcomes that you guys together with Commvault are helping customers achieve. You talked about kind of a consumer focus, but in terms of kind of like distilling that down to how an organization is maybe delivering new products and services because not only is the data protected and it's available, it's recoverable they've got the AI to be able to gain insights from it. Favorite story maybe that shows like business transformation by leveraging HPE and Commvault together. >> So I think, you know, that the best stories there are really in regards to given that we've freed up resources from that day to day operational type of activities and coupled together with last year, as you mention, that AI type understanding the insights. What it's really doing is it's allowing companies to really accelerate from a flexibility standpoint it's that notion of flexibility and speed to be able to react quickly. And we're seeing that across a large number of customers and that's really what's differentiating customers in this new, what we call the intelligence era, it's that speed and agility to adopt those new quick, adopt new business models, adopt new opportunities quickly change on a dime to recognize when things are changing and then chase after it and take the opportunity. >> So as we're here at day one of Commvault Go 19 this is their fourth event but a lot has changed for them since Sanjay Mirchandani came onboard just about what nine months or so ago, I'm just curious, you've been a partner a long time. Your perspectives on maybe this new Commvault or this Commvault 2.0 that you're seeing that HPE is partnering with? >> So I think it's refreshing, right? It builds into it a new energy, right? A new sense of focus and it's really I think as all of this within the IT industry are recognizing it's this whole notion about service and customer, really it's customer experience and the service enablement that we provide from infrastructure capabilities. I mean we are providing the tools to allow these companies to accelerate and so I think it's really great. It's really great, you know? Companies need to go through transformation, new leaders come in, breathe some different viewpoints and so forth and I think it's very healthy. >> Cultural change is always challenging to do but in some cases it's like you said, it's refreshing, they've also done a lot even with the launch of metallic yesterday just in terms of how quickly we are seeing them go from ideas to you know, to conceiving technologies and delivering them quite quickly to not just their kind of sweet spot of the enterprise, the large global enterprises, but you know down into the mid-market. So in terms of that speed and agility I think there articulating that and showing that pretty well. As to your point, customers have to have the ability whatever size they are, whatever type of industry they're in to be able to react quickly to take advantage of the next wave or be on the front of that next wave and having an infrastructure that is smart, that is optimized, cost-efficient, is as table-stakes to that. >> Absolutely, absolutely. Right, and I think what they've been able to demonstrate this week, you know, as part of their announcement said, is that flexibility, that awareness that there's continuous opportunities to be chased. >> Excellent. Well Chris, we thank you for joining Stu and Me on the The Cube today, telling us what's new with HPE and Commvault. We appreciate your time. >> Appreciate it, thank you very much! >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube, from Commvault Go 19! (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From Austin, Texas it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante is my co-host. I'm at Pure accelerate 2019 in Austin, Texas and Dave and I are really pleased to welcome to theCUBE, for the first time, John Colgrove, Coz, CTO and founder of Pure Storage, Coz, welcome to theCUBE. >> Ah, I'm glad to be here thanks for having me. >> And happy 10th anniversary. So, 10 years ago I'm sure you couldn't have envisioned 3, 000 people, Austin being taken over by a sea of orange. But let's go back 10 years, Why did you found Pure Storage? >> Why did I found it? Well, I wasn't really ready to be retired yet. Flash, I started have seen from when I worked at Amdahl many years ago all the way through Veritas, I saw disks continuing to get bigger and bigger and effectively slower and slower. Cause when they don't get any faster and they get bigger, they get slower from by their data. And flash was a catalyst that was going to to change that. But it was the catalyst. What we really wanted to do was to completely change the storage industry. Everything that had annoyed me about the storage industries through all the years in Veritas, All the complexity, all the bad customer practices that the industry forced on people, I wanted to change all that. think of what you demand from your personal tech from your iphone or your laptop or your tablet. Customers should demand that kind of quality, service ability, ease of use from their enterprise IT gear. >> When I started my career in the early '80s I was at IDC and they didn't have a storage analyst. And I started following mainframes and I learned a lot about channel command words and IO subsystems and I came to the conclusion that this is a really hard thing, hard problem to solve. And, so, I got interested in it. You obviously did as well. I'm interested in when you went from Amdahl to Veritas, you had to do some unnatural acts with software to make IO better, 'cause of the spinning disk and understanding the latencies and the scatty chatty protocols and everything else. When you went and thought about Pure and when you think about great architects and I've obviously put you in that category, you chose flash, others like another great architect, Moshe have said you know what I can even squeeze more out of spinning disks. What led you to flash versus trying to squeeze more blood from the spinning disk stone? If I can phrase it that way. >> I think I tend to be more of an extremist on things like that. And I think that's been the key to Pure's success. We were not the first all flash startup. We were the first to focus on affordable flash. Right, if you're going to change the world you have to make something for everyone not for an elite few. But the other thing was we were all flash. There were a lot of other startups that were hybrids that were squeezing more out of the disk and we just went all flash from the beginning. Everything about us is all flash. So, as the future goes more and more towards all flash, we're in a stronger and stronger position. >> And you think that was the game changer that led Pure to be that unicorn that IPO'd four years ago versus those other startups who are trying to do similar things with flash? >> So, that focus helped us a lot with that. The biggest thing that, as I said before flash was a catalyst. The biggest thing we brought to the industry is the simplicity and the evergreen business model. And it's really cool to see all the big companies that we've competed against all these years mimicking a lot of that, but that's the differentiator. Flash was the catalyst that lets you do that. >> Well, so, I'm interested as a little bit of an industry historian and some of the factors that led to your ability to achieve escape velocity which used to be defined as an IPO. I mean, I would argue the 3PAR achieved its escape velocity, I was a $250 million company before it got acquired for 2.5 billion or whatever it was, never reached a billion never even came close. You were the first storage company since NetApp to achieve billion dollar revenue. And you're well on your way to 2 billion, you'll do probably 1.7 this year. In addition to what you've said are there other factors that we should consider in our B school case study on Pure? >> I think one of the things we've tried to do is we've tried to build a company that's going to be in it for that long term. So, we never wanted to settle for an acquisition. We want to build a long term enduring great brand and part of that you have to build more of a partnership with your customers. You have to be a good partner to your partners. Right, if you are short-term focused if you try to squeeze every dollar you can out of people, they don't like you, they don't want to come back. If you build something great and you partner well with the environment around you you can build something long lasting. And we wanted to do that from the beginning, we focused a lot on culture and things like that to help us do that. >> Well it's impressive, congratulations are in order, 'cause 3PAR couldn't do it, Compelling couldn't do it, Isilon, on and on and on. And and EMC at the time was really about EMC that's how you went after. They were able to do virtualization and freeze the market on 3PAR . They were able to do a low cost call it the compellant killer. They were never able to figure out, now maybe they got distracted with elliot management and everything else, but they were never able to figure out how to squash you guys. And that's impressive that you're able to live through that. >> Well, thanks. I mean one of the things we've always tried to do is be supremely disruptive, and that does make it harder for them. >> So, I got to ask I got to challenge you on a couple of things that have come out largely from your competitors but I want to get your take on it. The first one is scale out how come Pure doesn't scale out? I'll leave it there. I have my own thoughts that I've shared with Lisa but. Two controller design. >> Yeah one thing I'd point out is well, FLashBlade, one of our products, is scale out. Flash array, our first product, is not scale out. Scale out isn't a capability for a customer, it's an architecture in how you build the product. When I scale out I have more complicated software. I have more components. More components lead to more failures. Right, if I have a piece of memory and it's going to fail at a certain annual failure rate and I have 10 pieces of memory, I'm going to fail it 10 times that same rate. So, scale out introduces complexity, it introduces more components. And then you have to say what do you get from it. So, if our customers needed a lot more performance than we're delivering, if they needed a lot more scale than we're delivering in the flash array product, we'd then react to that and go build scale out. Where the flash array sells, we don't see that as a major market need, it's more of a niche. Where FlashBlade sells, then there is much more of a need for that and that's why FlashBlade was scale out from day one. >> Well my correct to that the other thing you get from scale out is non disruptive controller swaps but you've solved that in other ways right? >> You say you get non disruptive controller swaps, I will point out that if you look at these scale out architectures out there there's a set of them that do provide that, but actually the larger set of them don't provide it. Because what they're doing is they're making what they view and what the customer views as one monolithic array built from a set of scale out components. So, in those architectures you can't swap out one part of the scale out, you have to swap out the whole thing. >> The other thing I heard, I love this analogy is you don't really see planes anymore. You see them but you really don't want to fly 'em cause they're old with four engines versus two engines 'cause the two engine planes are so, much more reliable. All right the other question is on proprietary flash modules. You guys have chosen your philosophies, do things that you can't do with just off the shelf components. So, you've gone proprietary and this history there, I mean 3PAR with Custom ASICs but I'd like you to share with us your philosophy on what you're doing there. >> So, kind of, there's a couple dimensions to that. Number one, we have gone with proprietary flash modules but in our flash array, we could plug in off-the-shelf drives any time we want. And in fact today our XR2 line, the lower end models use off the shelf flash and the higher end models use the proprietary. What we get with the proprietary is our own firmware on there. Right, it's the same nanochips, the same nanocontrollers, it's all the same components but it's our firmware. And our firmware only has to support one application, our purity operating system. However the customer reads and writes data into the array, we write it the same way down to the flash. We read it back the same way from the flash. So, by making simpler firmware that only has to solve that one problem, we get better performance out of the flash. We get longer life out of the flash and we get order less that one third of the failures of flash drives. Now the flash drives we were using were already failing, a lot less than disk drives. But we've gotten better than three times the reliability by going to our own flash modules. >> Tiering, your philosophy on tiering. Five, 10 years ago there was a big thing on automated tiering, we're going to put the hot data on the high performance either disk or flash and the slow data on the cheap stuff. Your philosophy on tiering, I think I infer you don't believe in tiering. Why not? Or maybe I don't want to put words in our mouth. >> Well so, tiering is another thing that it adds complexity. So, why do you tier? You tier because you say oh I can't afford all of the better things so, I'm going to layer it in with something that's a little cheaper. If you can get by without tiering that's a better solution it's a simpler solution. >> Simplicity is a theme here. The copy of your acquisition your a file system guru to my knowledge what I've read about them, strong file system. What do you intend to do with that? it's concerned about it forking your existing products. How do you respond? >> So, the compuverde file system, we're going to put that on top of our flash array line and make that a unified architecture where you can support block in file. Compuverde is a very complete file protocol stack. And file protocols are a lot more complex than block protocols. Implementing all of the SMB protocol is not an easy thing it takes a bunch of time. So, it's a way to accelerate that and get a very complete protocol stack for that product. Flash blade will continue on with its own scale out file protocols, file and object protocols independent of that. >> Last question I had is on, there's some criticism that's been laid on you guys on the evergreen. The controller, performance of controller upgrades which I we have not heard, we didn't hear that from customers, we've asked some customers that, but I'd love to get your take on, why is there no guarantee of performance improvements as you go to subsequent controller swap outs. Your thoughts? >> So, what we guarantee is you'll get the like or better. So, you might get a new set of controllers that are perform about the same, you might get one a little better. Generally speaking every time we've done it so far it's moved to better. It doesn't move to radically better, but it moves to the better. So, we are guaranteeing that, it's just a question of how much do you chose to deliver with that. What you're doing is you're keeping the array new. It's not so much about making huge strides in the performance it's about keeping the array new. >> But there's another nuance there that I want to test I mean, just conceptionally it seems to me, because the way you ship software constantly that you're making incremental improvements throughout that three year period. First of all is that an accurate assertion? >> it's actually very accurate. The first time we started really looking at how much better we realized that we had moved the needle on the old gear about, I think it was about 60% up during the time period so, yeah there was sort of a little less gains. >> Okay, so, the proper measurement is okay from what's the performance from day one delta to the controller upgrade? That is more significant versus the controller swap day, whatever and plus one if that makes sense. >> Well, I think both are valid ways to look at it. The biggest thing is the customer doesn't have to migrate and the migrations are the most horrible event in storage. Right it's like moving your house for everyone who has moved, you got to pack everything up. Things could get broken things could get lost, it's just a mess. You don't have to do that and the array just gets bigger, denser, more power efficient it gets better and better over time. And you're on that forever, we are happy to do controller swaps after three years, six years, nine years, 12 years. We will continue to do that as long as customers are paying for that it's our job to keep improving it and to keep making it better. >> We've done a lot of research on array migrations. At a minimum, your anti to do a array migration is $50,000. That's what our data shows. We talk to a very large practitioner last night he said, "When I'm doing an array migration I start six "to eight months ahead of time because it takes that long "to do an array migration, array migrations are horrendous "and anything you can do to avoid those is worth it." So, that's all I had that awesome. Thank you for addressing those questions. >> So, the acceleration, pun intended, that Pure has achieved in its first 10 years we talk about customers all the time we've had a number on yesterday from law firms to utilities to F1, we'll have more on today. But in order to achieve what Pure has, you have had to build a culture that's pretty unique. One, this vibrant orange color that just screams energy, boldness too, we're in Austin, Texas, Dell Technology's backyard. Give us a little bit as we wrap here about how you and your co-founders have developed and really fostered this culture of passion that is delivering more than your competitors would like to see. >> Well, so, one of the things that was a key part of the culture is we didn't just hire a bunch of storage people. We had a few early on cause you need some experience in the history but an awful lot of the people we hired came from other backgrounds. Other engineers, marketing people, et cetera, they did not come from storage. And what we challenge people to do when they come in the door is we're hiring them because of their brain power, right. We don't own minimal rights somewhere, we don't have buildings we don't have a lot of assets. Our asset is our people and what they can produce. And obviously if you think back, well, when I was the only employee, right, I was doing every job. Ideally everyone we've hired since can do whatever we've hired them to do a lot better than I could do it. And that's a philosophy you want to keep going. Every person in Pure should be focused on using their brains, using their creativity to deliver the most value possible to disrupt things where they can, to always look for how we do things better, and to always be looking to hire better than them. >> So, it kind of gets into the next 10 years. Don't hate me for saying this but in retrospect the first 10 years you had it kind of easy. You caught EMC off guard, you drove a truck through their install base, NetApp miss flash. You guys executed obviously, we talked about that billion dollar company. Next 10 years, a little different. Where's the TAM expansion come from in the next 10 years? It's Multicloud, it's new AI workloads, it's lower cost solutions that get you more of the market, it's partnering with backup. But you got cloud, you got competitors that are starting to figure it out. How do you see the next 10 years to go from beyond where you are and that next pike. >> Well, so, I'll start by saying when you start a company, you dream of success and the first 10 years have been as good as you could possibly have dreamt. So, A, hopefully the next 10 years will continue that way. I think you touched upon one thing is the cloud. People have been through the hype cycle of saying the entire world is going to be cloud, there's only going to be three data centers in the world and it's going to be Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They now understand the cloud is a tool and you need to use it properly. So, one of the focuses we're going to be working on over the next several years is making sure that someone can have their data, their application on prem. They can decide I want to put it in the cloud. Move there seamlessly. Move there as easily as you move from one of your cell phones to the next model. Move from one cloud to another cloud. Move from that cloud back on prem. Whether you want to move the data, the applications, both and get the same kind of service, the same kind of experience. That's going to be a big thing. >> You got a lot of work to do there, but yeah. But there's an opportunity isn't there? >> It's the way everybody wants to run, it's the way everybody should run. Running an IT service to deliver value to your company, value to your organization should not be rocket science. And our job at Pure is to make that accessible to everybody so, everybody can deliver that kind of quality experience to their organization. >> And it's an obvious question but you see that as technically feasible over the next five to 10 years? >> Yeah it is technically feasible. This goes back to one of the things that I was mentioning before with flash as a catalyst. One of the thing flash helps do to make this simpler is it frees you from the geometry constraints of disk. You don't have to care as much. Another thing that's making it possible, is faster networking, right. And better networking. And then again you have all the compute and GPUs and co-processors and things pushing things. As you get to where resources are more plentiful, then you have the ability to trade off some of the I've got to get like every microsecond out of this thing for the simplicity, for that ease of use. And that lets you deliver something better in the long run. Right, if I perfectly tune something I might be able to do a little bit better but I'm not going to be able to keep it in tune and I'm going to spend my whole life retuning it and retuning it and finding it out of sync. Simplicity, that drives so much efficiency. Agility, that drives so, much value. >> Well, Coz, thank you so, much for joining Dave and me on theCUBE this morning from Accelerate day two. You talked about flash being a catalyst that sounds to me like Coz has been one of the major catalysts of Pure's success. Happy 10th anniversary, we look forward to the next 10. >> Thanks a lot and thanks for having me. >> For Coz and Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from Pure Accelerate, 2019. (techno music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's the theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Velllante (electronic music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome to the special CUBE conversation sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This is part of our partner series. You know the partner business has changed quite dramatically over the years. It used to be you could make a lot of money pushing hardware and get some pretty good margins there. But increasingly, partners are becoming system integrators. They're becoming much more specialized in helping organizations transform, supporting their digital transformations, their infrastructure modernization, moving to the cloud, hybrid cloud, security. It really runs the gamut. And here to talk to me about that is Tim Ferris, who's a solutions architect at GreenPages. Tim, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here. Thank you. >> So tell me a little bit about GreenPages. It's kind of a cool name. Where did that come from? And what are you guys all about? >> Oh God, I'm going to be killed for not knowing the history here. But, I think back in the old days, we used to hand out a neon green catalog. So we couldn't, back when we were doing cold calls, you'd probably get a lot of okay, we shipped you a catalog. Did you get that? Oh, I'm not quite sure. It may be buried under there. Neon green catalog, you could not lose. (laughs) I think we do our invoices on neon green paper now. >> That's good, green, the color of money. So tell us about your role as a solutions architect. What does that entail? And what's your background? >> Sure. So I'm a solutions architect. We have a number of different solutions architects at GreenPages who have a number of different specialties. My specialty is storage, disaster recovery and data management and protection and DR automation. And that's where it computes hyperconvergence, infrastructure and hybrid cloud. So specialization, a little bit wide, but we have other architects who are very deep in networking and hybrid cloud networking and that sort of thing as well. >> So let's get into some of that. Looking at your website, you guys are into everything. You've got software defined. You got cloud. You got security. You got DevOps and really runs the gamut. Well sometimes in this industry, we suffer from acronym soup. The reality is that things are changing quite dramatically. I mean it used to be you'd build an infrastructure to support a single application. You'd harden that infrastructure and that was it. It became a silo and people don't want that anymore. They want their data to be shared. They want it out of the silos, but at the same time it has to be protected. So what are some of the big trends that you're seeing in the marketplace and let's get into it. >> Sure. So yeah, many years ago that one app, one server, one application thing went the way of the dodo. You just got back from VM world. I paid my dues during the Wave One virtualization boom. When people were transforming racks and racks of servers into virtual machines. And so it used to be so easy to impress a customer. You show them a vMotion and it was like magic. You move the server from this server to that server without missing a beat. Now people are looking at hybrid cloud. So not just cloud, but hybrid cloud. Everybody we're talking to, we hear some people say that this is the last major hardware purchase that I want to make. Now I don't know the reality is that. That's debatable, right? But I think people want to have a roadmap to move their infrastructure to cloud or cloud services. Not just infrastructure as a service. You know, lift and shift. Software is a service and take advantage of that. So helping our customers manage that hybrid cloud journey is a big part of what GreenPages does. >> And of course, what the customer is really telling you is we don't want to spend a lot of time provisioning LUNs anymore because it doesn't add value to our business. We want to focus on building new apps or our digital transformation, etc. So and I think you're right. It's sort of aspirational that okay, we're not going to buy anymore hardware anymore. To me the key is, can the industry, through R & D, simplify what's on-prem and you know, lets face it, those mission critical apps you don't just want to throw them into the cloud. I mean, they're working. You don't want to have to refactor them and migrate. That's sort of an evil word. So to the extent that the industry can deliver that cloud-like experience on-prem, you can start to see this hybrid cloud vision evolve. What are your thoughts on that? >> Sure. So I think, in H it's fortuitous that we're here with HPE. I think they're doing a couple of things with some of their products and services that help push that. So it used to be that storage was relatively complicated. There were a lot of knobs and dials on storage that you could push and rotate in order to increase performance. You could have a number of different RAID levels. You know the 3PAR chunklets, and this sort of thing. There was a lot of customization you could do, you could use as a customer in order to properly set up your array for your workloads. People appreciate that level of detail that you can put into that but they want it easier. So I'm seeing a trend toward less customization and more ready just set it and forget it arrays. Nimble, the 3PAR array was highly available. Very good, very good array, very fast, but a little bit higher end to operate. Nimble with HPE's acquisition of Nimble, they've taken that operational complexity down significantly. Not only with operating the array, provisioning LUNs but managing it, maintaining it and performing predictive analytics through Infosite and that sort of thing. So at the storage level I think Nimble, in that paradigm is transforming storage. And HPE's GreenLake technologies, that is very much an answer to the private cloud. Having that hyperscale feel, that ability to expand elastically and get out of the hardware maintenance business by using the GreenLake service. >> So actually, a little bit of history here. So 3PAR was actually, the company was formed in the early 2000s before the term cloud computing really came out. They used, I think utility computing in their S-1 registration. But what 3PAR did is, it really simplified that high end. And then 3PAR reached escape velocity by going after the high end EMC base and did very well and of course famously got acquired by Hewlett Packard. At the time HP then became HPE. Nimble now is bringing sort of a new level where you're talking about intelligent automation and AI managing infrastructure, predictive analytics and that drives more automation which I think, Tim has really got to be a theme of hybrid cloud. I mean cloud is all about automation so hybrid cloud, on-prem, and public some kind of interconnection has to be highly automated, doesn't it? >> It absolutely does and people don't have time to turn the dials and to optimize their storage. They need systems that will do that for them. And there's the level one, the level two support that you get through those predictive analytics of Infosite are critical to customers. They don't, you know a lot of customers don't have time for full time storage admins anymore. And these technologies are what's freeing up those resources, those people resources to do other strategic things for the business. >> Especially in small and mid-sized businesses. >> Absolutely. >> Where they're generalist really, not really specialists at one thing. I want to come back to the hybrid cloud. You know thinking about data governance and management and security. Are we at the point where you can start to see sort of a consistent framework across clouds? You're smiling. (laughs) So what's the journey there? How are we going to get there? I mean (mumbling) (laughs) >> Yeah, I would say we're certainly early days there. I think you know customers need to be much more cognizant of the tools that they use and buy. They can't be necessarily proprietary on-prem tools. The best use of your money is to buy tools, that can be used to manage hybrid and secure hybrid infrastructures. So that should be a main qualifier for what people are looking for for security technologies and that sort of thing. It's not quite the wild west, though we still see, you know there's that shared governance model. That shared responsibility in the cloud. I think there are still some who haven't woken up to that basic concept. That just because I moved the workload to the cloud doesn't mean it's no longer my responsibility to secure that data. Though we're still talking with people today who may be under that misimpression. >> You're right, Tim. I mean that is not well understood and people think if I move in the cloud, I'm good. But there is shared responsibility model whether it's for security or governance, etc. And when you talk to chief information security officers they'll tell you, yeah, you know the cloud vendor might secure the storage device, but its' really our responsibility to do everything else. And the list of everything else is still quite long. >> Absolutely, you know rights, roles and responsibilities. Those sorts of things, firewall rules. They provide the firewall. They make sure the firewall is up to date on it's firmware. But you're setting the rules. You're setting the ingress, egress. So, yes it's very much still a shared responsibility. And yeah, it's eye opening still to some. >> Let's talk about your partnership with HPE. We talked about some of the products, but what do you look for in a partner? Obviously as I said before, you know used to be you sell in boxes. You want margin and I'm sure you still want margin. But there's got to be more, right? >> Well yeah, I mean we've known for quite a while. I mean we've seen the writing on the wall that, I remember the glory, I don't know glory days, the old days back when people could make a fortune selling memory, back before the turn of the century, turn of the century. (laughs) I'm dating myself. But it's true you could make quite a bit of money selling memory back then. But today and certainly over the past 20 years, people, our clients are choosing partners that they can't, not just the cheapest price, but people who can talk to them about a solution. Not just a product. Hear their business problems and turn that into technology solutions that help them address those problems. So that's what I would look for as a partner, if I were, we look to HPE for the same thing. Not just pushing product, where to sell product, but to solve business problems. And I think that HPE is listening, they're hearing their clients. They were listening to them with the acquisition of HPE Nimble. They're listening to them, how they're expanding Infosite from just a Nimble platform, the 3PAR and Prolient and other things and expanding some of those things. >> Yeah, the pendulum has swung after the dot.com boom it became cut, cut, cut. Everyone was concerned about budgets. You know IT doesn't matter anymore. We heard all that >> crosstalk >> and that's totally changed. IT's driving revenue. It's driving top line. Of course budgets are still critical and we've talked a lot about simplification which is a lot about attacking the IT labor problem. But right now the sentiment with the booming economy we're in. This tenth, ninth year of a run on a bull market, obviously in the late cycles, but the sentiment is much more toward how do I enable the business with technology? >> Yes. Yeah, yeah. So how does IT add value back to the business? They can do that through AI, through analytics and through digital transformation in general. I think we've seen a, you know there's always been this upward curve to storage growth. But it's dramatically increased I think. It's upward, predicted to be upward of 40 zettabytes, or something like that by the year 2022. And that's because more and more businesses are using this data more creatively. They're saving it more and not only is that growing, the usable data, but they need to retain it for longer. You've got to retain it, you've got to protect it and we've still got data protection problems. Not just storing it and providing the right performance level for it. But it's really difficult. And then you've got to secure all that extra data, as well. >> Well, I think you're right too. The curve is getting non-linear. I mean it used to be, I've said this often on the theCUBE that we for decades, we've marched to the cadence of Moore's law. But now the innovation sandwich, if you will, it's about applying machine intelligence to data and then automating, whether it's public cloud or on-prem cloud-like, it's being able to scale. >> Right. >> And it's those three pieces of the sandwich that are now driving innovation. No longer the doubling of transistors every 18 months. >> Yeah, so do people want to scale on-prem? Do they want to scale to the cloud and the cloud market itself as it's very elastic, very easy to grow and shrink and contrast? Or can you do some of those types of things on-prem? You know with GreenLake and with some other programs that let you have your on-prem security blanket and your on-prem performance with the hands-off operational paradigm and the elastic growth that you have in cloud. I think that's the best of both worlds for some. >> Let's end with a call to action. So what advice would you give to practitioners, clients that are looking to modernize their infrastructure? They're trying to support their digital transformation. They want to get from point A to point B. They don't want to spend a billion dollars doing it. They got to go on a journey. How do they get there? What's your advice? >> My advice is to certainly, I'm jaded here, but I would say engage professionals who have done this many many times. Don't learn on the job here. You can make some expensive mistakes moving workloads to the cloud. And we've seen anecdotal evidence, and in-person evidence of people moving to the cloud, doing it the wrong way and then having to migrate that back. That's a costly mistake. So make sure you do your planning. Migrate in phases. Move your data there in phases. Bite off some smaller chunks first to make sure if you have growing pain, teething pains that that happens with a non-critical application. Build your knowledge base and then make some better decisions. Engage people like GreenPages to help you roadmap your journey, your hybrid cloud journey. And don't go in with a preconceived notion of where you need to end, right? The applications, their performance requirements and that assessment work up front should dictate where the best place is for those workloads. >> Great advice. Tim Ferris from GreenPages. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to have you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for watching everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. We're out. (electronic music)

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hi I'm Peter Burris analyst at wiki bond welcome to another wiki bond the cube digital community event this one sponsored by HP and focusing on hybrid storage like all of our digital community events this one will feature about 25 minutes of video followed by a crowd chat which will be your opportunity to ask your questions share your experiences and push forward the community's thinking on the important issues facing business today so what are we talking about today again hybrid storage let's get going so what is hybrid storage in a lot of shops most people have associated the cloud with public cloud but as we gain experience with the challenges associated with transforming to digital business in which we use data as a singular value producing asset increasingly IT professionals are starting to realize this important relationship between data storage and cloud services and in many respects that's really what we're trying to master today is a better understanding of how the business is going to use data to affect significant changes in how it behaves in the marketplace and it's that question of behavior that question of action that question of location that is pushing business to think differently about how its cloud architectures are going to work we're going to keep data proximate to where it's created to where it's going to be used to where it's going to be able to generate value which demands that we have storage resources in place close to that data proximate to that activity near that value producing activity and that the cloud services will have to follow in many respects that's what we're talking about when we talk about hybrid cloud today we're talking about the increasing recognition that we're going to move cloud services to the data default and not move the data into the cloud public cloud specifically so it's this ongoing understanding as we gain experience with this powerful set of technologies that data architecture is going to be increasingly distributed that storage therefore will be increasingly distributed and that cloud services will flow to where the data is required utilizing storage technologies that can best serve that set of workload so it's a more complex world that demands new levels of simplicity ease of use and optimization so that's where we're going to start our conversation so these crucial questions of how data storage and cloud are going to come together to create hybrid architectures was the basis for a great cubed conversation between silicon angle wiki bonds david Volante and HPE sun dip aurora let's hear what they had to say talk about let's talk about the break down those three things cost efficiency ease of use and resource optimization let's start with cost efficiency so obviously there's TCO there's also the way in which I consume the people I presume are looking for a different pricing model is that are you hearing that yeah absolutely so as part of the cost of of running their business and being able to operate like a cloud everybody is looking at a variety of different procurement and utilization models one of the ways HPE provides utilization model that can map to their cloud journey a public cloud journey is through Greenlake the ability to use and consume data on-demand consume compute on demand across the entire portfolio of products HPE has essentially is what a Greenlake journey looks like and let's go into ease-of-use so what do you mean by that I mean people look they think cloud they think swipe the credit card and start you know deploying machines what do you mean by easy for us ease of use translates back to how do you map to a simpler operating and support model for us the support model is the is the key for customers to be able to to realize the benefits of going to that cloud to get to a simpler support model we use AI ops and for us a offs means using a product called info site info site is a product that is uses deep learning and machine learning algorithms to look at a wide net of call home data from physical resources out there and then be able to take that data and make it actionable and the action behind that is predictiveness the prescriptive nosov creating automated support tickets enclosing automated support tickets without anybody ever having to pick up a phone and call IT support that info site model now is being expanded across the board to all HP products it started with nimble now info site is available on three part it's available on synergy and a recent announcement said it's also available on pro alliance and we expect that info set becomes the glue the automation a I do that goes across the entire portfolio of HP products so this is a great example of applying AI to data so it's like call home taking to a whole new level isn't it yeah it absolutely is and in fact what it does is it uses the call home data that we've had for a long time with products like 3par which essentially was amazing data but not being auctioned on in an automated fashion it takes that data and creates an automation tasks around it and many times that automation task leads to much simpler support experience all right third item you mentioned was resource optimization let's let's drill down into that I infer from that there's there are performance implications is maybe governance compliance you know physical placement can you elaborate that's in color yes I think it's all of the above that he just talked about it's definitely about applying the right performance level to the right set of applications we call this application of air storage the ability to be able to understand which application is creating the data allows us to understand how that data needs to be accessed which in turn means we know where it needs to reside one of the things that HP is doing in the storage domain is creating a common storage fabric with the cloud we call that the fabric for the cloud the idea there is that we have a single layer between the on-premises and off premises resources that allows us to move data as needed depending on the application needs and depending on the user needs so this crucial new factors that have to be incorporated through everyone's thinking of cost efficiency ease of use and resource optimization it's going to place new types of stress on the storage hierarchy it's gonna require new technologies to better support digital transformation David Flor an analyst here in wiki bon has been a leading thinker of the relationship between the storage hierarchy and workloads and digital thinking for quite some time I had a great conversation with David not too long ago let's hear what he had to say about this new storage hierarchy and the new technologies they're gonna make possible these changes have you've been looking at this notion of modern storage architectures for 10 years now and you've been relatively prescient in understanding what's going to happen you were one of the first guys to predict well in advance of everybody else that the crossover between flash and HDD was gonna happen sooner rather than later so I'm not gonna spend a lot of time quizzing you what do you see as a modern storage architecture let's just let it rip ok well let's start with one simple observation the days of stand-alone systems for data have gone we're in a software-defined world and you want to be able to run those data architectures anywhere where you the data is and that means in your data center where you've is created or in the cloud or in a public cloud or at the edge you want to be able to be flexible enough to be able to do all of the data services where the best place is and that means everything has to be software German Software Defined is the first proposition of a modern day in a storage so so the second thing is that there are different types of technology you have the very fastest storage which is in the in in the DRAM itself you have env dim which is the next one down from that expensive but a lot cheaper than the dim and then you have different sorts of flash you have the high-performance flash and you have the 3d flash you know as many layers as you can which is much cheaper flash and then at the bottom you have HD DS and an even tape as storage devices so how the key question is how do you manage that sort of environment well let me start because it still sounds like we still have a storage hierarchy absolutely and it still sounds like that hierarchy is defined largely in terms of access speeds yep and price point size points yes those are the two mason and and bandwidth and latency as well with it which are tied into the richer tied into those yes so what you if you're gonna have this everywhere and you need services everywhere what you have to have is an architecture which takes away all of that complexity so that you all you see from an application point of view is data and how it gets there and how it's put away and how it's stored and how it's protected that's under the covers so the first thing is you need a virtualization of that data layer the physical layer the virtualization of that physical yes and secondly you need that physical layer to extend to all the places that may be using this data you you don't want to be constrained to this data set lives here you want to be able to say ok I want to move this piece of programming to the data as quickly as I can that's much much faster than moving the data to the to the processing so I want to be able to know where all the data is for this particular dataset or file or whatever it is where they all are how they connect together what the latency is between everything I want to understand that architecture and I want a virtualized view of that across that whole the nodes that make up my hybrid cloud so let me be clear here so so we are going to use a software-defined infrastructure that allows us to place the physical devices that have the right cost performance characteristics where they need to be based on the physical realities of latency of you know power availability hardening etc on the network and the network but we want to mask that complexity from the application the application developer an application administrator yes and Software Defined helps do that but doesn't completely do it No well you you want services which say exactly so their service is on top of all that apps that are that are recognizable by the developer by the you know the business person by the administrator as they think about how they use data towards those outcomes not use a storage or use a device but use the data to reach application outcomes that's absolutely right then that's what I call the data plane which is a series of services which enable that to happen and and driven by the application required so we've looked at this and some of the services include you know and and compression deduplication the backup restore security data protection so that's kind of that's kind of the services that now the enterprise by or needs to think about so that those services can be applied with you know by policy yes wherever they're required based on the utilization of the data correct where it's kind of where the event takes place and then you still have at the bottom of that you have the different types of devices you still have you still want of hamsters Mickey you still want hard disk they're not disappearing but if you're gonna use hard disks then you want to use it in the right way if you're using a hard disk you know you want to give it large box you to have it going sequentially in and out all the time so the storage administration and the day the physical schema and everything else is still important in all this but it's less important less the centerpiece of the buying decision correct increasingly it's how well does this stuff prove support the services that the business is using to achieve their outcomes and you want to use course the lowest cost that you can and there will be many different options over more more options open but but the automation of that is absolutely key and that automation from a vendor point of view one of the key things they have to do is to be able to learn from the usage by their customers across as broad a number of customers as they can learn what works what doesn't work learn so that they can put automation into their own software their own software services well sounds like we're talking four things we got we got software-defined still have a storage hierarchy defined by cost and performance but with mainly semiconductor stuff we've got great data services that are relevant to the business and automation that masks the complexity from the artificial AI there is also also made many things fantastic so David's thinking on the new storage hierarchy and how it's going to relate to new classes of workload is a baseline for a lot of the changes happening in the industry today but we still have to turn technology into services that deliver higher levels of value once again let's go back to Dave volantes conversation with Sun dip Arora and here what Sun dip has to say about some of the new digital services some of the new data services they're gonna be essential to supporting these new hybrid storage capabilities we have and what it does it it gives us the opportunity now not just you look at column data from storage but then also look at call home data from the compute side and then what we can do is correlate the data coming back to have better predictability and outcomes on your data center operations as opposed to doing it at the layer of infrastructure you also set out a vision of this this orchestration yeah lair can you talk more about that are we talking about across all clouds whether it's on pram or at the edge or in the public cloud yeah we are we're talking about making it as simple as possible where the customers are not necessarily picking and choosing it allows them to have a strategy that allows them to go across the data center whether it's a public cloud building their own private infrastructure or running on a traditional on-premises sand structure so this vision for us cloud fabric vision for us allows for customers to do that and what about software-defined storage yeah where does that fit into this whole equation yeah I'm glad you mentioned that because that was a third tenant of what HP truly brings to our customers software-defined is is something that allows us to maximize the utilization of the existing resources that our customers have so what we've done is we've partnered with a great deal of really strong software-defined vendors such as comm world cohesive accumulo de terre I know we work very closely with the likes of veeam Zotoh and and the goal there is to do to provide our customers with a whole range of options to drive building a software-defined infrastructure build off the Apollo series of products Apollo servers or storage products for us are extremely dense storage products that allow for both cost and resource optimization so Sunday I made some fantastic points about how new storage technologies are going to be turned into usable services that digital businesses will require as they conceived of their overall hybrid storage approach here's an opportunity hear a little bit more about what HPE thinks about some of these crucial areas let's hear what they have to say in this Chuck talk short take I'm gonna introduce you to HPE primary storage if you want the agility of the public cloud but need the resiliency and speed of high-end storage for mission-critical applications this force is a trade-off of agility for resiliency high-end storage is fast and reliable but falls short on agility and simplicity what if you could have it all what if you could have both agility and resiliency for your mission-critical apps introducing the world's most intelligent storage for mission-critical apps HP primary it delivers an on-demand experience so storage is instantly available Apple wear resiliency backed with a hundred percent availability guarantee predictive acceleration so apps aren't fast some of the time but fast all the time with embedded AI let me tell you more about HPE primarily was engineered to drive unique value in high-end storage there are four areas we focus on global intelligence powered with the most advanced AI for infrastructure info site an all active architecture with multiple nodes for higher resiliency and limitless parallelization a service centric OS that eliminates the risk and simplifies management and timeless storage with a new ownership experience that keeps getting better to learn more go to hp.com slash storage slash prime era so that's been a great series of conversations about hybrid storage and I want to thank Sun dip Arora of HPE David floor of wiki bonds to look at angle jim kanby lists of wiki bonds to look and angle and my colleague David Volante for helping out on the interview side I'm Peter Burris and this has been another wiki bond the cube digital community event sponsored by HPE now stay tuned for our Crouch at which will be your opportunity to ask your questions share your experiences and push for the community's thinking on hybrid storage once again thank you very much for watching let's crouch at

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

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi buddy this is Dave Volante and welcome to this cube conversation I'm here with Dave faithful who is the chief architect at WEEI and we're going to chat about intelligent storage and specifically HPE intelligence story storage Dave good to see you again thanks for coming on alright so HP uses this you know everybody has these cool marketing terms intelligent storage intelligent storage platform it sounds pretty cool what's it all about well HP has it has done a really good job at developing their storage platform to leverage AI and machine learning and deliver some useful analytics and information to their customers and here's know what they're doing they are from a machine learning perspective taking their entire install base of storage devices gathering that information not personal information such as you know what the data is that sits in the storage but more of the performance we understand it's this type of application it's this type of data and here's how it performs across all these different varmints and they're sharing that with their customers to say if you have this type of data on your storage here's the optimal performance settings to be able to to get the most out of your storage in the best performance additionally they're using a I machine learning that that same idea to give customers heads-up on when they might run into trouble either from a break fixed perspective you know for instance you've got some drives that maybe family you've got a controller that's acting up you've got a connectivity issue someplace all the way to you don't have a performance issue yet but trends we see with your data types may deliver some poor performance under these conditions be aware of that so they're giving insight to to their customers by leveraging everything that they're learning across your entire install base which is pretty neat and they're taking that same capability that they have on storage and applying that so there compute environments as well so think about I think about this one from from an HP perspective they're able to give their customers through their info site application the ability to see and discover performance issues and constraints well before it ever happens to avoid customers from having to find that out the hard way so there's a really good example of the application of AI we talked about AI like it's some mysterious thing it's really machine intelligence and machine learning and and I think it's a practical application because it's relatively narrow you're talking about predictive analytics around infrastructure and being able to you know identify potential hotspots taking the humans out of the equation to do some of that stuff that is really not value-add for the business freeing up time to do some other things is that the right way to think about it that's exactly the right way to think about it you're absolutely right with this type of intelligence you don't need to have IT administrators digging through logs to try to figure out where performance problems are after they've already occurred instead you're getting this information before it ever occurs and you're able to head it off at the pass so I liked the nimble acquisition HPE that one things you like about Nimbo you think nimble you think info site one of the other things I like about the acquisition is if I understand it correctly they've they think you pointed this out they drove that technology across its entire portfolio and you think about three power eight PE made the three power acquisition gosh 10 years ago now to 2010 and that was kind of the gold standard for simplicity for high-end storage they had great metadata reports and and now you know nimble you fast forward has a sort of modern version of that with with AI and predictive analytics the fact that HPE has taken that and pushed it across the portfolio and I think even into into compute into servers as well is it's an impressive you know use of a technology sometimes companies buy tech and they just it sits there for years and they don't do anything with it so your thoughts on that yeah no I think it's I think you're absolutely right HPE did it right now they leverage this technology to add additional value to their compute platforms such as their ProLiant brands and their synergy platform so it's the it's it's it's a very smart thing to do and it's a very good use of that technology from the nibble acquisition and you know Minh see where HP E is heading alright with you know predictive analytics across their entire portfolio so it's all about that that insight to information right and be able to head off problems before they occur yet at the same time how do we optimize or you know automatically optimize our environments based on all of this this information which organization has never had you know access to before so WEEI you guys are a trusted partner of your customers you work with large customers they they look to you you're not trying to jam a specific solution down their throat you think about financial advisors you know here's an insurance policy well if if they're getting a Vig on that insurance policy you go oh wait a minute you guys have to be agnostic so my question to you as a sort of the trusted advisors what's the sweet spot for HPE storage where is it's you know best fit okay that's a trick question right no the it really depends on the platform so you know when we talk about nimble and we talked about info site you know there is a marker segment that that fits well in as well as you know the same could be said for 3par for example and and now we're there new releases the primary storage platform you know I think you'll see a lot more adoption but one of the things that all of those platforms have in common is the ability to connect into data center automation and provisioning strategies and so that's where from our perspective from W nice perspective the value that we're adding around customers is how do we architect that that IT service delivery model that's cloud like in nature and what are the platforms that allow us to easily enable those those provisioning models so irrespective of the the the vendor name on the bezel what are you looking for in a storage platform well what we're again what we're looking for is the ability to to do a couple things one so easily integrate into a provisioning model and to automation are they you know are there investments made by the OEM into the API calls that we can now leverage to connect to either public services or to on-prem compute resources and to software-defined networking in other areas that we that we need to connect you when we're kind of creating those mile two mile three automation automations that you know that enable us for vision loss you know the other thing we're looking for of course is availability reliability you know and performance so you know selecting the right storage platform based on the customer need based on cost or the things that you know that go into that but you're absolutely right we're designing architectures at wi based on customer's business needs right based on how well it fits into their environment and how well that they can maintain those you know those cloud like IT service delivery models and once we understood what those business requirements are what the IT requirements are what their relationships with different services might be and their preferences for four different types automations then we work with them to introduce the right storage platform and HP has a nice portfolio of storage platforms that fit into many many different hybrid cloud and hybrid IT environments all right good stuff Dave thanks for taking us through some of your perspectives on HPE of specifically in storage in general appreciate it Thanks all right thank you for watching we'll see you next time this is david ontei with the cue

>> From Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Covering Actifio 2019 Data Driven. (upbeat techno music) Brought to you by Actifio. >> Hello everyone and welcome to Boston and theCUBE's special coverage of Actifio Data Driven 19. I'm Dave Vellante. Stu Miniman is here. We've got a special guest, John Furrier is in the house from from Palo Alto. Guys, theCUBE we love to go out on the ground, you know, we go deep. We're here at this data theme, right? We were there in the early days, John, you called me up and say, "Get your butt here, we're going to cover the first of Doop World". And since then things have moved quite fast. Everybody thought, you know, Hadoop Big Data was going to take over the world. Nobody even uses that term anymore, right? It's kind of, now it's AI, and machine intelligence, and block chain, and everything else. So what do you think is happening? Did the early Big Data days fail? You know, Frank Genus this morning called it The experimentation phase. >> I mean, I don't really think Frank has a good handle on what's going on in my opinion, cause I think it's not an experimentation, it's real. That was a wave that was essentially the beginning of, not an experimentation, of realization and reality that data, unstructured data in particular was real and relevant. Hadoop looked good off the tee, mill the fairway as we say, but the thing about the Hadoop ecosystem is that validated big data. Every financial institution jumped on it. Everyone who knew anything about data or had data issues or had a lot of data, knew the value. It's just that the apparatus to build via Hadoop was too expensive. In comes Cloud computing at scale, so, as Cloud was accelerating, you look at the Amazon Web Services Revenue Chart you can almost see the D mark where the inflection point is on the hockey stick of Amazon's revenue numbers. And that is the point in time where Hadoop was on the declining of failure. Hortonworks sold the Cloudera. Cloudera's earnings are at an all-time low. A lot of speculation of their entire strategy, and their venture back company went public, but bet the ranch to be the next data warehouse. That wasn't the business model. The data business was a completely new industry, completely being re-transformed, and, far from experimentation, it is real and definitely growing like a weed, but changing because of the underpinning infrastructure dynamics of Cloud Native, Microservices, and that's only going to get highly accelerated and the people who talk about context of industry like Frank, are going to be off. Their predictions will be off because they don't really see the new picture clear enough, in my opinion, >> So, >> I think he's off. >> So it's not so much of a structural change like it was when we went from, you know, mainframes to PCs, it's more of a sort of flow, evolution into this new area which is being driven, powered by new technologies, we talk about block chain machine intelligence and other things. >> Well, I mean, the make up of companies that were building quote, "Big Data Solutions", were trying to build an apparatus or mechanisms to solve big data problems, but none of them actually had the big data problem. None of them were full of data. None of them had a lot of data. The ones that had problems were the financial institutions, the credit card companies, the people who were doing a lot of large scale, um, with Google, Facebook, and some of the hyperscalers. They were actually dealing with the data tsunami themselves, so the practitioners ended up driving it. You guys at Wikibomb, we pointed this out on theCUBE many times, that the value was going to come from the practitioners not the suppliers of so called technology. So, you know, the Clouderas of the world who thought Hadoop would be relevant and growing as a technology were right on one side, on the other side of the coin was the Cloud decimation of that sector. The Cloud computer just completely blew away that Hadoop market because you didn't have to hire a PhD, you didn't have to hire specialty skills to stand up Hadoop clusters. You could actually throw it in the Cloud and get agile quickly, and get value out of data very very quickly. That has been real, it has not been an experiment. There's been new case studies, new companies born, new brands, so it's not an experiment, it is reality, and it's only going to get more real every day. >> And I add of course now you've got, you mentioned Cloudera and Hortenworks, you also got Matt Bar reeling Stu. Let's talk about Actifio. So they coined the term Copy Data Management, they created the category, of course they do a lot of backup, I mean, everybody in this space does a lot of backup. And then you saw the Silicon Valley companies come in. Particularly Cohesity and Rubric, you know, to a lesser extent he got some other guys like Zerto and Durva, but it was really those two companies, Cohesity and Rubric, they raised more money in their D round than Actifio has since inception. But yet Actifio keeps, you know, plodding along, growing, you know, word is they're profitable, you know, they're not like this really sectioned very East Coast versus kind of West Coast mentality. What's your take on what's going on? >> Yeah, so, Dave right, you look at the early days of Actifio and you say great, Copy Data Management, I have all these copies of data, how do I reduce my cost, get greater utilization than I have and leverage the data? I love the title of the show here, Data Driven. You know, we know at the center of digital transformation if you can't become data driven, like the CMO Brian Regan got up on stage talk about that industrialization of data. How am I going along that journey being this, I collected data versus now, you know, data, you know, is the reason that I make decisions, how I make decisions, I get smarter. The Cloud of course is a huge enabler of this, there's all these services that I can instantly access to be able to get greater insight, and move along with that environment, and if you look underneath all of these backup companies, it's really how I can change that data into business value and drive my business, the metadata underneath and all those pieces, not just the wonky storage and technical solutions that make things better, and I get a faster ROI. It's that data at the core of what we do and how do I get that as a business to accelerate. Because we know IT needs to be able to respond back to the business and data needs to be that rocket fuel. >> Is it the case of data haves and data have-nots? I mean, Amazon has data >> I mean, you're right-- >> and Facebook has data. >> We're talking about Actifio, you brought that up, okay, on this segment, on the inside segment, which is cool, they're here at the event, but they have a good opportunity but they also, they got some challenges. I mean, the thing about Actifio is, to my earlier point, which side of the wave are they on? Are they out too much out front with virtualization and Amazon, the Cloud will take them away, or are they riding the Cloud wave, making that an enabler? And I think what really I like about Actifio is because they have a lot of virtualization capabilities, the question is can they scale that Stu, to containers and microservices, because, the real opportunity in this market, in my opinion, is going to build on the virtualization trend, and make container aware, microservices capabilities because if they don't, then that would be a tell sign. Now either way it's a hot M&A market right now, so I think being in the market, horse on the track as you say. You look at the tableau sales force deal monster numbers we are in clearly a hot IPO market and a major roll up market on the M&A side. I think clearly there's two types of companies, old and new, and that is really what people are looking at, are they part of the old guard, are they the new guard. So, you know, this to me is going to be a tell sign of what they do next, can they make the data driven value proposition, you articulated Stu, actually a reality It's going to come from the technology underneath. >> Well I think it's a really interesting point you're making because, Stu as you probably know, that Amazon announced the Amazon backup service right, and you talked about the backup guys and they're like, "Ah yeah it's backup, but it really doesn't do recovery, it's really not that robust". It's part of me says, "Uh oh"... >> Watch out. >> You better move fast", because Amazon has stated, "Hey if you don't move fast we're going to just keep gobbling", and you've seen Amazon do this. What are your thoughts on that? Can these specialists, can they survive, John's talking about M&A. Can the market support all these guys along with the big, you know, traditional guys like Veritas, and Dell EMC, and IBM and Combol? >> Right, well so Actifio started very much in the data center. They were before this Could wave really took off. It's really only in the last year that they've been sassifying their product. So the question is, does that underlying IP, which wasn't tied to hardware, but, you know, sat at really more of, you know, reminded us of that storage virtualization battles that we talked about for years, Dave, but now they are going in the Cloud. They've got all the partnerships in the Cloud, but they are competing against those new vendors that you talked about like Cohesity and Rubric out there, and there's big money chasing this environment. So, you know, I want to talk to the customers here and find out, you know, where they are using them, and especially some of those first customers using this--. >> Well they clearly need a Cloud play cause that's clearly where the action is. But if you look at what's going on with Amazon, Azure, and Google you see a lot of on premises, Stu, because that's where the customers are. So just because the customers are currently not migrating their existing workloads to the Cloud doesn't mean it's not going to happen. So I think there's an opportunity for any company like Actifio, who may or may not be on the curve on the tech side, one little misfire on a tech bet could cripple the company and also make the company. There's a lot of high risk, reward ratio. How they handle containers. How they build on virtualizations. Virtualization going to to be part of the future with Cloud. These are the kind of the dynamics that are going to be in play, and they got some time on their hands because the on premises growth is because the clients are trying to figure out what to do and they're not going to be migrating, lifting, and shifting workloads all off to the Cloud. New will be Cloud based, but enterprises have proven why we are in multi-Cloud and hybrid-Cloud conversation, that... The enterprise on premises is not going away anytime soon. >> I want to ask you guys, John you specifically, about this sort of new Silicon Valley growth model and how companies are achieving escape velocity. When you and I made our first trip to Barcelona, I was having dinner with David Scott who was the CEO of 3PAR and he said to me, When I came to 3PAR the board said, "Hey we're willing to invest 30 million dollars in this company". And David Scott said to them, "I need way more, I need 80 million dollars". Today 80 million dollars is nothing. You saw, you know, Pure Storage hit escape velocity, was just throwing money, and growing at the problem. You're seeing Cohesity-- >> Well you can debate that. I mean, If you have to build a rocket ship, hit critical mass and you want to fund that, you're going to to need an enterprise. However, there's arguments on the south side that you can actually get fly wheel effect going early with less capital. So again, that's 3PAR-- >> But so that's my point. >> Well so that's 3PAR, that was 2009. >> So, yeah that was early days so that's ancient history. But software is generally supposed to be a capital efficient market, yet these companies are raising many hundreds and hundreds of millions, you know, half a billion dollar raises and they are putting it largely in promotion. Is that the new model, is that sustainable, in your view? >> Well I think you're conflating capital market dynamics with viable companies to invest in. I think there's a robust seed in series A market but the series A market and Silicon Valley is you know, 15 to 25 million, it used to be 3 to 5. So the dynamics are changing on funding. There's just not enough companies, horses on the track, to deploy capital at tranches of 30, 50, 80 million. So the capital markets are clearly going to have the money available so it's a market for the startups and the broke companies. That's separate from actually winning. So you've got slacks going public this weeks, you have other companies who have built business on a sass fly wheel, and then everything else is gravy in terms of the go to market, they got a couple hundred million. I think slack got close to a billion dollars in cash that they've raised. So they're flooded with cash, they'll never spend it all. So there are some companies that can achieve success like that. Others have to buy market share, they got to push and build out a sales force, and it's going to be a function of the role of customer, customization, specialism, and whatnot. But with AI machine leaning there's more efficiencies coming in so I think the modern company can do more with less. >> What do you think of the ride sharing on IPOs, Uber and Lift, do you abol? Do you like 'em or do you think it's just, they're losing too money and can't sustain it? >> I was thinking about that this morning after looking at the article in the Wall Street Journal in our coverage on Silicon angle. You look at Zoom communications, I like models that actually can take a simple concept and an existing mature market and disrupt it by being Cloud efficient and completely sass and data driven. That is an example of success. That to me, Zoom Communications and Zscaler, another company that we talk to, these are companies that were built with a specific value proposition that made the product and they were targeting mature markets with leaders in it. Video conferencing, Webex, Citrix, Zoom came out of nowhere, optimized on simple value proposition, used Cloud scale and data, and crushed it. Uber, Lift, little bit different issue. They're losing money but I would bet on the long term that that is going to be the used case for how people will have transportation. I think that's the long game and I think that without regulatory kind of pressure, without, there's regulatory issues that's really the big risk. But I believe that Uber and Lift absolutely will be long brands and just like Facebook was early on, although they threw off a lot of cash, those guys are building for penetration, and that's where the funding matters. Penetration is critical. Now they're the standard, and people really don't take taxis anymore, but they're really using the ride sharing. And you get the scooters, you get the bikes, they're all sequencing into these adjacent markets which drains more cash but builds the brand, builds the footprint. >> Well that's what I want to ask you. So people compare the early Uber, Lift, Taxi, Ride sharing to Amazon selling books, but there's all these other adjacencies. You have a thought on this? >> Well, just, you know, right, Uber Eats is a huge opportunity for that environment and autonomous vehicles everybody talks about, but it's still quite a ways out. So there are a lot of different- >> Scooters are the same, we're in San Diego, there are 8 gazillion scooters. >> San Diego had fun, you know, going around on their electronic scooters, boy, talk about the gig economy, they pay people at the night, to like go pay by the recharge you do on that, what is the future of work, >> Yeah, that's a great point. >> and how can we have that-- >> Uber going to look a lot like Amazon. You subsidize the front end retail side of the business, but look at the data that they throw up. Uber's data that they're gathering on, not only customer behavior, but just mapping services, 3-D mapping is going to be huge, so you've got these cars that are essentially bots on the road, providing massive mapping and traffic analysis. So you're going to start to see data driven, like Actifio slogan here, be a big part of all design decisions and value proposition from any company out there. And if they're not data driven I think they're going to be toast. >> Probably could because there's that data and that machine learning underneath, that can optimize, you know, where the people are, how I use the system, such a huge wave that we're watching. >> How about one last topic which is heavily data driven, it's Facebook. Facebook is obviously a data driven company, the Facebook crypto play, I love it, I love Facebook. I'm a bull on Facebook, I think it's been beat up. I think, two billion users is hard to replicate, but what's your thoughts on their crypto play? >> Well it's kind of a middle finger to the United States of America but it's a great catalyst for the international market because crypto needed a whale to come in and bring all those users in. Bad timing, in my mind, for Facebook, because given all the anti-trust and regulatory conversations, what better way to show your threat to the world order when you say we're going to run a banking system with a collection of international companies. I think the US is going to look at this and say, "Oh my God! They can't even be trusted to handle personal information and we're going to now let them run a banking system? Run monetary, basically World Bank equivalent infrastructure?" No frickin way! I think this is going to to be a major road to home. I think Facebook has to really make this an ecosystem play if they want to make it work, that's their telegraphic move they're saying, "Hey we want to do for the community but we got our own wallet and we got our own network". But they bring a lot to the table so it's going to be a really interesting dynamic to see the coalescing around Facebook because they could make the market. Look what Instagram did to Snapchat. They literally killed the company, took all their users. That is what's going to happen in the digital money economy when Facebook brings billions of users user experience with money. What happened with Snapchat with Instagram is going to happen to the World Bank if this continues. >> Where do you stand on the government breaking up big tech? >> So Dave, you know, you look in these companies, it's not easy to pull those apart. I don't think our government understands how most of big tech works. You know, take Amazon and AWS, that's one company underneath it. You know, Facebook, Microsoft. You know, Microsoft went through all these issues. Question Dave, we've had lots of debates on Twitter you know, are they breaking the law, are they not doing trust? I have some trust issues with Facebook myself, but most of the big companies up there I don't think the anti-trust kicks in, I don't think it makes sense to pull them apart. >> Stu, the Facebook story and the YouTube story are simply this, they have been hiding under the platform rules, of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and they are an editing platform so you can't sue them. Okay, once they become a publisher they could be sued. Just like CNN, Fox News, and everybody else. And we're publishers. So they've been hiding behind the platform. That gig is up. They're going to have to address are you a platform or are you a publisher? You're making editing decisions around what users can see with software, you are essentially editing the feed, that is a publisher role, with that becomes responsibility, and then obviously regulartory. >> Well Facebook is conflicted right now. They're trying to figure out which side of the fence to go on. >> No no no! They want one side! The platform side! They're make billions of dollars! >> Yeah but so they're making decisions about you know, which content to show and whether they monetize it. And when it's controversial content, they'll turn down the ads a little bit but they won't completely eliminate it sometimes. >> So, Dave, the only thing that the partisans in politics seem to agree on though is that big tech has too much power. You know, What's your take on that? >> Well so I think that if they are breaking the law then they should be moderated. But I don't think the answer is to go hard after Elizabeth Warren. Hard after them and break them up. I think you got to start with okay, because you break these companies up what's going to happen is they're going to be worth more, it's going to be AT&T all over again. >> While you guys were at Sysco Live, we covered this at Amazon Web Service and Public Sector Summit. The real issue in government, Stu, is there's too much tech for bad on the PR side, and there's not enough tech for good. Tech is not bad, tech is good. There's not enough promotion around the apps around there. There's real venture funds being created to promote tech for good. That's going to where the tide will turn. When does the tech industry start doing good stuff, not bad stuff. >> All right we've got to wrap. John, thanks for sitting in. Thank you for watching. Be right back, we're here at Actifio Data Driven 2019. From Boston this is theCUBE, be right back. (upbeat techno music)