>>Hey everyone, welcome to this cube conversation. I'm your host Lisa Martin, and I have the pleasure of welcoming back our most prolific guest on the cube in its history, the CMO of Fin Ad, Eric Herzog. Eric, it's great to see you. Welcome back, >>Lisa. It's great to be here. Love being on the cube. I think this might be number 55 or 56. Been doing 'em a long time with the Cube. You guys are great. >>You, you have, and we always recognize you lately with the Hawaiian shirts. It's your brand that's, that's the Eric Hizo brand. We love it. But I like the pin, the infin nut pin on brand. Thank you. >>Yeah. Oh, gotta be on brand. >>Exactly. So talk about the current IT landscape. So much change we've seen in the last couple of years. Specifically, what are some of the big challenges that you are talking with enterprise customers and cloud service providers? About what, what are some of those major things on their minds? >>So there's a couple things. First of all is obviously with the Rocky economy and even before covid, just for storage in particular, CIOs hate storage. I've been doing this now since 1986. I have never, ever, ever met a CIO at any company I've bid with. And I've been with four of the biggest storage companies on this planet. Never met a cio. Used to be a storage guy. So they know they need it, but boy, they really don't like it. So the storage admins have to manage more and more storage. Exabytes, exabytes, it just ballooning for what a storage admin has to do. Then you then have the covid and is it recession? No. Is it a growth? And then clearly what's happened in the last year with what's going on in Europe and the, is it a recession, the inflation. So they're always looking to, how do we cut money on storage yet still get what we need for our applications, workloads, and use cases. So that's definitely the biggest, the first topic. >>So never met a CIO that was a storage admin or as a fan, but as you point out, they need it. And we've seen needs changing in customer landscapes, especially as the threat landscape has changed so dramatically the last couple of years. Ransomware, you've said it before, I say it too. It's no longer if it's when it's how often. It's the frequency. We've gotta be able to recover. Backups are being targeted. Talk to me about some of, in that landscape, some of the evolutions of customer challenges and maybe those CIOs going, We've gotta make sure that our, our storage data is protected. >>So it's starting to change. However, historically with the cio and then when they started hiring CISOs or security directors, whatever they had, depending on the company size, it was very much about protecting the edge. Okay, if you will, the moat and the wall of the castle. Then it was the network in between. So keep the streets inside the castle clean. Then it was tracking down the bad guy. So if they did get over, the issue is, if I remember correctly, the sheriff of Nottingham never really caught Robinhood. So the problem is the dwell time where the ransomware malware's hidden on storage could be as much as 200 days. So I think they're starting to realize at the security level now, forget, forget the guys on the storage side, the security guys, the cso, the CIO, are starting to realize that if you're gonna have a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy, must include storage. And that is new >>That, well, that's promising then. That's new. I mean obviously promising given the, the challenges and the circumstances. So then from a storage perspective, customers that are in this multi-cloud hybrid cloud environment, you talked about the the edge cloud on-prem. What are some of the key things from a storage perspective that customers have to achieve these days to be secure as data volumes continue to grow and spread? >>So what we've done is implement on both primary storage and secondary storage and technology called infin safe. So Infin Safe has the four legs of the storage cyber security stool. So first of all is creating an air gap. In this case, a logical air gap can be local or remote. We create an immutable snapshot, which means it can't be changed, it can't be altered, so you can't change it. We have a fenced forensic environment to check out the storage because you don't wanna recover. Again, malware and rans square can is hidden. So you could be making amenable snapshots of actually malware, ransomware, and never know you're doing it right. So you have to check it out. Then you need to do a rapid recovery. The most important thing if you have an attack is how fast can you be up and going with recovery? So we have actually instituted now a number of cyber storage security guarantees. >>We will guarantee the SLAs on a, the snapshot is absolutely immutable. So they know that what they're getting is what they were supposed to be getting. And then also we are guaranteeing recovery times on primary storage. We're guaranteeing recovery of under one minute. We'll make the snapshot available under one minute and on secondary storage under 20 minutes. So those are things you gotta look for from a security perspective. And then the other thing you gotta practice, in my world, ransomware, malware, cyber tech is basically a disaster. So yes, you got the hurricane, yes, you got the flood, yes, you got the earthquake. Yes, you got the fire in the building. Yes you got whatever it may be. But if you don't practice malware, ransomware, recoveries and protection, then it might as well be a hurricane or earthquake. It will take your data, >>It will take your data on the numbers of customers that pay ransom is pretty high, isn't it? And and not necessarily able to recover their data. So it's a huge risk. >>So if you think about it, the government documented that last year, roughly $6 trillion was spent either protecting against ransomware and malware or paying ransomware attacks. And there's been several famous ones. There was one in Korea, 72 million ransom. It was one of the Korea's largest companies. So, and those are only the ones that make the news. Most of 'em don't make the news. Right. >>So talk to me then, speaking and making the news. Nobody wants to do that. We, we know every industry is vulnerable to this. Some of the ones that might be more vulnerable, healthcare, government, public sector education. I think the Los Angeles Unified School district was just hit as well in September. They >>Were >>What, talk to me about how infin out is helping customers really dial down the risk when the threat actors are becoming more and more sophisticated? >>Well, there's a couple things. First of all, our infin safe software comes free on our main product. So we have a product called infin Guard for Secondary Storage and it comes for free on that. And then our primary storage product's called the Infin Box. It also comes for free. So they don't have to use it, but we embed it. And then we have reference architectures that we give them our ses, our solutions architects and our technical advisors all up to speed on why they should do it, how they should do it. We have a number of customers doing it. You know, we're heavily concentrated the global Fortune 2000, for example, we publicly announced that 26% of the Fortune 50 use our technology, even though we're a small company. So we go to extra lengths to a B, educated on our own front, our own teams, and then B, make sure they portray that to the end users and our channel partners. But the end users don't pay a dime for the software that does what I just described, it's free, it's included when you get you're Infin box or you're ingar, it's included at no charge. >>That's pretty differentiating from a competitive standpoint. I might, I would guess >>It is. And also the guarantee. So for example, on primary storage, okay, whether you'd put your Oracle or put your SAP or I Mongo or your sequel or your highly transactional workloads, right? Your business finance workload, all your business critical stuff. We are the first and only storage company that offers a primary guarantee on cyber storage resilience. And we offer two of them on primary storage. No other vendor offers a guarantee, which we do on primary storage. Whether you the first and right now as of here we are sitting in the middle of October. We are still the only vendor that offers anything on primary storage from a guaranteed SLA on primary storage for cyber storage resilience. >>Let's talk about those guarantees. Walk me through what you just announced. There's been a a very, a lot of productivity at Infin DAT in 2022. A lot of things that you've announced but on crack some of the things you're announcing. Sure. Talk to me specifically about those guarantees and what's in it for me as a customer. It sounds pretty obvious, but I'd love to hear it from you. >>Okay, so we've done really three different types of guarantees. The first one is we have a hundred percent availability guarantee on our primary storage. And we've actually had that for the last, since 2019. So it's a hundred percent availability. We're guaranteed no downtime, a hundred percent availability, which for our customer base being heavily concentrated, the global Fortune 2000 large government enterprises, big universities and even smaller companies, we do a lot of business with CSPs and MSPs. In fact, at the Flash Memory Summit are Infin Box ssa All Flash was named the best product for hyperscaler deployment. Hyperscaler basically means cloud servers provider. So they need a hundred percent availability. So we have a guarantee on that. Second guarantee we have is a performance guarantee. We'll do an analysis, we look at all their workloads and then we will guarantee in writing what the performance should be based on which, which of our products they want to buy are Infin Box or Infin Box ssa, which is all flash. >>Then we have the third one is all about cyber resilience. So we have two on our Infin box, our Infin box SSA for primary storage, which is a one the immutability of the snapshot and immediately means you can't erase the data. Right? Camp tamper with it. Second one is on the recovery time, which is under a minute. We just announced in the middle of October that we are doing a similar cyber storage resilience guarantee on our ARD secondary product, which is designed for backup recovery, et cetera. We will also offer the immutably snapshot guarantee and also one on the recoverability of that data in under 20 minutes. In fact, we just did a demo at our live launch earlier this week and we demoed 20 petabytes of Veeam backup data recovered in 12 minutes. 12 >>Minutes 2012. >>20 petabytes In >>12 bytes in 12 minutes. Yes. That's massive. That's massively differentiating. But that's essential for customers cuz you know, in terms of backups and protecting the data, it's all about recovery >>A and once they've had the attack, it's how fast you get back online, right? That that's what happens if they've, if they can't stop the attack, can't stop the threat and it happens. They need to get that back as fast as they can. So we have the speed of recovery on primary stores, the first in the industry and we have speed on the backup software and we'll do the same thing for a backup data set recovery as well. Talk >>To me about the, the what's in it for me, For the cloud service providers, they're obviously the ones that you work with are competing with the hyperscalers. How does the guarantees and the differentiators that Fin out is bringing to market? How do you help those cloud SPS dial up their competitiveness against the big cheeses? >>Well, what we do is we provide that underlying infrastructure. We, first of all, we only sell things that are petabyte in scale. That's like always sell. So for example, on our in fitter guard product, the raw capacity is over four petabytes. And the effective capacity, cuz you do data reduction is over 85 petabytes on our newest announced product, on our primary storage product, we now can do up to 17 petabytes of effective capacity in a single rack. So the value to the service rider is they can save on what slots? Power and floor. A greener data center. Yeah, right. Which by the way is not just about environmentals, but guess what? It also translate into operational expense. >>Exactly. CapEx office, >>With a lot of these very large systems that we offer, you can consolidate multiple products from our competitors. So for example, with one of the competitors, we had a deal that we did last quarter 18 competitive arrays into one of ours. So talk about saving, not just on all of the operational expense, including operational manpower, but actually dramatically on the CapEx. In fact, one of our Fortune 500 customers in the telco space over the last five years have told us on CapEx alone, we've saved them $104 million on CapEx by consolidating smaller technology into our larger systems. And one of the key things we do is everything is automated. So we call it autonomous automation use AI based technology. So once you install it, we've got several public references who said, I haven't touched this thing in three or four years. It automatically configures itself. It automatically adjusts to changes in performance and new apps. When I put in point a new app at it automatically. So in the old days the storage admin would optimize performance for a new application. We don't do that, we automatically do it and autonomously the admin doesn't even click a button. We just sense there's new applications and we automate ourselves and configure ourselves without the admin having to do anything. So that's about saving operational expense as well as operational manpower. >>Absolutely. I was, one of the things that was ringing in my ear was workforce productivity and obviously those storage admins being able to to focus on more strategic projects. Can't believe the CIOs aren't coming around yet. But you said there's, there's a change, there's a wave coming. But if we think about the the, the what's in it for me as a customer, the positive business outcomes that I'm hearing, lower tco, your greener it, which is key. So many customers that we talk to are so focused on sustainability and becoming greener, especially with an on-prem footprint, workforce productivity. Talk about some of the other key business outcomes that you're helping customers achieve and how it helps them to be more competitive. >>Sure. So we've got a, a couple different things. First of all, storage can't go down. When the storage goes down, everyone gets blamed. Mission. When an app goes down, no one really thinks about it. It's always the storage guy's fault. So you want to be a hundred percent available. And that's today's businesses, and I'd actually argue it's been this way for 20 years are 24 by seven by 365. So that's one thing that we deliver. Second thing is performance. So we have public references talk about their SAP workload that used to take two hours, now takes 20 minutes, okay? We have another customer that was doing SAP queries. They improved their performance three times, Not 3%, not 3%, three times. So 300% better performance just by using our storages. They didn't touch the sap, they didn't touch the servers. All they do is to put our storage in there. >>So performance relates basically to applications, workloads and use cases and productivity beyond it. So think the productivity of supply chain guys, logistics guys, the shipping guys, the finance guys, right? All these applications that run today's enterprises. So we can automate all that. And then clearly the cyber threat. Yeah, that is a huge issue. And every CIO is concerned about the cyber threat. And in fact, it was interesting, Fortune magazine did a survey of CEOs, and this was last May, the number one concern, 66% in that may survey was cyber security number one concern. So this is not just a CIO thing, this is a CEO thing and a board level >>Thing. I was gonna say it's at at the board level that the cyber security threats are so real, they're so common. No one wants to be the next headline, like the colonial pipeline, right? Or the school districts or whatnot. And everybody is at risk. So then what you're enabling with what you've just announced, the all the guarantees on the SLAs, the massively fast recovery times, which is critical in cyber recovery. Obviously resilience is is key there. Modern data protection it sounds like to me. How do you define that and and what are customers looking for with respect to modern cyber resilience versus data protection? >>Yeah, so we've got normal data protection because we work with all the backup vendors. Our in ARD is what's known as a purpose built backup appliance. So that allows you to back at a much faster rate. And we work all the big back backup vendors, IBM spectrum Protect, we work with veritas vem com vault, oracle arm, anybody who does backup. So that's more about the regular side, the traditional backup. But the other part of modern data protection is infusing that with the cyber resilience. Cuz cyber resilience is a new thing. Yes, from a storage guy perspective, it hasn't been around a long time. Many of our competitors have almost nothing. One or two of our competitors have a pretty robust, but they don't guarantee it the way we guarantee it. So they're pretty good at it. But the fact that we're willing to put our money where our mouth is, we think says we price stand above and then most of the other guys in the storage industry are just starting to get on the bandwagon of having cyber resilience. >>So that changes what you do from data protection, what would call modern data protection is a combination of traditional backup recovery, et cetera. Now with this influence and this infusion of cybersecurity cyber resilience into a storage environment. And then of course we've also happened to add it on primary storage as well. So whether it's primary storage or backup and archive storage, we make sure you have that right cyber resilience to make it, if you will, modern data protection and diff different from what it, you know, the old backup of your grandfather, father, son backup in tape or however you used to do it. We're well beyond that now we adding this cyber resilience aspect. Well, >>From a cyber resilience perspective, ransomware, malware, cyber attacks are, that's a disaster, right? But traditional disaster recovery tools aren't really built to be able to pull back that data as quickly as it sounds like in Trinidad is able to facilitate. >>Yeah. So one of the things we do is in our reference architectures and written documentation as well as when we do the training, we'd sell the customers you need to practice, if you practice when there's a fire, a flood, a hurricane, an earthquake or whatever is the natural disaster you're practicing that you need to practice malware and ran somewhere. And because our recovery is so rapid and the case of our ingar, our fenced environment to do the testing is actually embedded in it. Several of our competitors, if you want the fenced environment, you have to buy a second product with us. It's all embedded in the one item. So A, that makes it more effective from a CapEx and opex perspective, but it also makes it easier. So we recommend that they do the practice recoveries monthly. Now whether they do it or not separate issue, but at least that's what we're recommending and say, you should be doing this on a monthly basis just like you would practice a disaster, like a hurricane or fire or a flood or an earthquake. Need to be practicing. And I think people are starting to hear it, but they don't still think more about, you know, the flood. Yeah. Or about >>The H, the hurricane. >>Yeah. That's what they think about. They not yet thinking about cybersecurity as really a disaster model. And it is. >>Absolutely. It is. Is is the theme of cyber resilience, as you said, this is a new concept, A lot of folks are talking about it, applying it differently. Is that gonna help dial up those folks just really being much more prepared for that type of cyber disaster? >>Well, we've made it so it's automated. Once you set up the immutable snapshots, it just does its thing. You don't set it and forget it. We create the logical air back. Once you do it, same thing. Set it and forget it. The fence forensic environment, easy to deploy. You do have to just configure it once and then obviously the recovery is almost instantaneous. It's under a minute guaranteed on primary storage and under 20 minutes, like I told you when we did our launch this week, we did 20 petabytes of Veeam backup data in 12 minutes. So that's pretty incredible. That's a lot of data to have recovered in 12 minutes. So the more automated we make it, which is what our real forte is, is this autonomous automation and automating as much as possible and make it easy to configure when you do have to configure. That's what differentiates what we do from our perspective. But overall in the storage industry, it's the recognition finally by the CISOs and the CIOs that, wait a second, maybe storage might be an essential part of my corporate cybersecurity strategy. Yes. Which it has not been historically, >>But you're seeing that change. Yes. >>We're starting to see that change. >>Excellent. So talk to me a little bit before we wrap here about the go to market one. Can folks get their hands on the updates to in kindergar and Finn and Safe and Penta box? >>So all these are available right now. They're available now either through our teams or through our, our channel partners globally. We do about 80% of our business globally through the channel. So whether you talk to us or talk to our channel partners, we're there to help. And again, we put our money where your mouth is with those guarantees, make sure we stand behind our products. >>That's awesome. Eric, thank you so much for joining me on the program. Congratulations on the launch. The the year of productivity just continues for infinit out is basically what I'm hearing. But you're really going in the extra mile for customers to help them ensure that the inevitable cyber attacks, that they, that they're complete storage environment on prem will be protected and more importantly, recoverable Very quickly. We appreciate your insights and your input. >>Great. Absolutely love being on the cube. Thank you very much for having us. Of >>Course. It's great to have you back. We appreciate it. For Eric Herzog, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation live from Palo Alto.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS Summit New York 2022. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I am thrilled to be joined by Ramkumar Pandurangan. He is Practice Leader of the Cloud Advisory and Consulting Organization at Kyndryl. Ram, welcome. >> Thanks for having me, David, it's a pleasure. >> First time on theCUBE I believe. >> Ah, yes it is, so a little excited, and anxious as well, but it's great to be here. >> Fantastic. Well, when we're done, you'll be a CUBE alumni, which is actually a very distinguished badge of honor to have so. So, let's get started. Tell me about Kyndryl. I'm particularly interested in a bit of the history, how did Kyndryl come about? >> Yeah, so -- >> And what do you do now? >> I'm sorry. Before we talk about who we are and what we do, let me talk about Kyndryl's, philosophy, right? Basically so, people don't buy the cloud, people buy outcomes, and with this explosive growth in the market, as well as the complexity in which the technology has evolved, it's very challenging for everybody to find the right partner, as well as who to go to deliver it for them. And we do understand that technology is supposed to help drive your business capabilities, but not hinder. So, Kyndryl's primary philosophy is to how we can help enable our clients get the business capabilities using technology. So, having said that, we are a spinoff from IBM in 2021, and we have a strong base of 90,000 skilled professionals across a hundred countries. And, you know, we have almost 75 of the 100 Fortune 100 companies, and we almost cater half of the Fortune 500 companies, just to give you a background. And we have people across applications, data, AI, you know, network, edge, security and resiliency across the globe, but of course, cloud. >> So, do you work with partners from a cloud perspective? What does that look like? >> We have a whole broad ecosystem of partners, and, you know, anywhere from all the hyper scalers, to all the large product companies. And we understand that with a combined force of our years of experience helping our clients to be successful, partnering with our partners to help drive their capabilities. And you know, let's talk about AWS. Everybody knows that AWS has been a pioneer in the public cloud, coming up with a whole catalog of services, which is there, available for anybody. And I would like to call them as construction materials. Right? So, you could take these services, assemble them, and it could be a simple house, or it could be as big as a very complex model, kind of an environment. So, this is where we partner with AWS and bring our years of experience and help our clients go through the journey and successfully deliver in whatever complexity that they have, their existing environments. So, just an example of how we partner with our partners. >> Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. In fact, I heard someone once describe AWS as being like Home Depot, in the sense that they offer all of the bits and bytes. Of course, the AWS folks were like, "What? No, we're nothing like Home Depot!" It's like, well, you kind of are. (laughs) Because it really is important for an organization like Kyndryl to be there, to bridge the divide between the tools and the outcomes, as you mentioned. Well, what are some of the customers, or kinds of customers that you work with in this arena? >> Yeah. So, just to double click on what I said about the 75 of the 100 Fortune 100 companies, we currently manage the top five ad lanes of all ad lanes, we probably manage four of the five largest retailers, and 49% of the mobile connections are supported for the customers, and 61%, or roughly around 60% of the top 50 banks assets are managed by our service. So, we have a huge portfolio across the financial services, public sector, you know, communications, and distribution market across the globe. >> So is it fair to say that each of these customers is somewhere along the digital transformation timeline? Are they all thinking in terms of transforming digitally, what that means? Whether it's application modernization, of course, movement to cloud is part of that, does that sound like the profile of a lot of your customers? >> Exactly. So, each of them are in various, what I call in the paradigm of everybody are trying to modernize, right? Modernization is the way to go. Even though in the last three years we saw that the physical slowdown of the world, like digital transformation took an explosive growth, so everybody realized that not doing the business in a traditional way is going to get to where they want to go. And traditionally, people are cutting costs, or trying to trim down, and trying to see how they can, you know, do incremental modernization. And then they realize, especially in the last three years, that they need to holistically look at how they need to be modernizing it. Right? And that is where either it's a datacenter-driven modernization, or it's an application-centric modernization, which is moving the transformation journey. Or in general, people are holistically looking at how they can improve their overall presence in the digital world. >> So, do you think that the pandemic accelerated that? >> Absolutely. I would say that everybody started realizing how critical, and the businesses who were already a leg up in that world were quickly able to grab that opportunity, and they were able to run with that, and everybody are trying to catch up on that journey. And, you know, a lot of people who started that journey have realized that if they do not have a proper strategy to start off with, they get stuck somewhere. And that is where we can go and help them, wherever they are. >> Talk to me about some of the challenges that you see out in the field working with the actual organizations that are seeking to transform, to go through this digital transformation. What are some of the things that might surprise someone looking in from the outside? >> Again, if you go back to the basics, right, in the digital transformation world, it's not just the technology which is driving everything. People who have not clearly mapped their business objectives to the technology drivers, or the imperatives, are the ones which are, you know, feeling the pinch, that they have some technology driven transformation, but once it is done, they don't see that it's translating back to a business objective which they are trying to accomplish. That's one of the larger things which I see. So, we are trying to go back and help clients to bridge that gap, to make sure that, first, their strategy is in place, and the strategy is holistically looked at. That's one part of it. The second, larger challenge, which I'm seeing a lot of people is, they were able to quickly, you know, grapple around the technology explosion and able to start the journey, but the process and the people associated the transformation regarding those two are a lot more associated with the culture and everything else. So, it's a combination of technical resources, with not able to quickly adapt the operating model, which is the newer operating model required for the digital transformation, are the challenge which is an ongoing one. And none of this is news to anybody, but, practically, when I walk into a company, those are the areas which I continue to see where people are struggling. >> So, Kyndryl isn't solely involved with the virtual movement of workloads from one place to another, you actually work with customers to make those kinds of organizational changes and operational environment changes that need to take place. Is that right? >> Absolutely. So, as I told you, we have a whole suite of clients whom we have been supporting for decades. So, we have one set of those clients who have trusted us for years. And then we have another set of clients who we are providing some kind of services, and now we have newer clients. So between all of them, they're starting to realize that we have the end-to-end capabilities. The differentiator is, we can start from building a business case for somebody, and then strategizing it, creating a roadmap, and then actually doing the design, implement it, and help them to migrate it. And once the migration is done, continue to help optimizing it, and then not only stopping there, but the key thing where everybody have, you know, fallen behind, is how do you operate, manage it once you start migrating it. So, this is where Kyndryl is sitting in a very sweet spot, because we already are managing most of our clients, or we have the client base, they're operating theirs either holistically, or some portions of it, and now when they're trying to go on their journey we are very well suited because we already understand their environment. And while they are transforming into the cloud space, we are also able to bridge that gap by managing their existing and to manage to the cloud. So, we can, end-to-end. >> And yeah, talking about true end-to-end, you know, we're talking to you from AWS Summit New York 2022, of course, so the focus is AWS, but Kyndryl works with other hyperscale cloud partners as well. So I mean, you are primarily an advocate for the customer. Is that a fair? That's what they call in the business "a softball question." (Ramkumar and David laughing) Because if you answer, "no, we're not primarily in involved in the business of advocating for our customers," we should just stop this conversation right now. But seriously, the point is, you are truly an objective consultant in this game. >> Absolutely. Thank you for asking that, (David laughing) because we are a vendor neutral service provider. So we go, and when we walk into the client, we like to hear from the client what their challenges are. Right? Where are they trying to be? If they already started the journey, where they are. They could be anywhere from an on-premises trying to just modernize some aspects of their, you know, operational, or from the application side, or they could be anywhere in the hybrid cloud. And most of them are hybrid multicloud. So, it's not just AWS, it could be Azure, GCP, OCI, Oracle, or IBM cloud. It doesn't matter. We go and meet the client where they are. If they ask us for a point of view, we will provide them once we understand what their objectives, and their technology workloads they are having, and how they want to do it based on that we can. But if they already started journey, we are more than happy to partner with them on any of the cloud journeys. And most of them are in the hybrid multi-cloud as I said, so we are very well suited to help them. And as I said, we are not completely an agnostic service provider. >> Well, if I am an existing business that's seeking to go through digital transformation, I would recognize that there is a lot of power in this idea that you have a history in on-premises IT, going back to, you know, the sort of DNA for IBM global services. And the reason why I think that's important is because anyone can stand up a net new service with nothing existing, in one of the hyperscale clouds. It's a whole different proposition when you have decades of legacy infrastructure and processes that need to be massaged and moved over. I wonder, does Kyndryl get a lot of mileage out of that in terms of being able to say, "Hey, we understand your existing environment because we've been working in this world for decades." Or is the message more, "Hey, we are super cool cloud kids too?" How do you come down on that? Maybe that's a little bit of inside info. (Ramkumar laughing) >> No, the reality on the ground basically, David, is not everybody can move all their workloads to cloud, and not all workloads are suited to go to cloud as well. So, it is us who need to make sure that we can help our clients make the right choices by doing a rationalization of their workloads, and make sure that we understand their business, their end clients whom they're servicing, their capabilities, and then based on that, we can help them to do both, right? Whether it's just on-premises modernization, or help them to take them in a hybrid cloud mode. So the answer is both, right? Even though we currently manage their environment, doesn't mean that we need to continue to support, but, you know, we are moving up the stack to help them, to support them in their hybrid cloud journey as well. And not only that, this gives us a capability or an ability to help them in a much more holistic way by looking at their full ops, right? That's a huge area where people are trying to go into the cloud, or they already started to go into the cloud, but how do they optimize their environment? Right? These are the areas where, and then if you want to modernize some of their operating model, right, how do we deploy the SRE, or the DevSecOps, or the DevOps? So, we kind of look up all those aspects as people are trying to move into the cloud aspect so we can help them both on-premises, or if they want to modernize much more we can do it in the hybrid cloud as well. I don't know whether that fully answered your question. >> Absolutely, it does. In fact, Ram, what you and Kyndryl are doing is what we at theCUBE refer to as having adult conversations about cloud with the clients that you serve. With that, looks like we are at the end of our time together. I really appreciate the chance to hear about what you're doing, and to hear all about Kyndryl. From me, Dave Nicholson, at theCUBE, I'd like to say, stay tuned for a continuing coverage of AWS Summit New York 2022, and always stay tuned to theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to "theCUBE" coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE". We're here with Ed Lynch, vice president of IBM Business Automation. Topic here is AI Powered Business Automation as he leads the team, the Business Automation offering management team driving the automation platform altering multicloud and built in AI and low code tools. Ed, thanks for joining me on "theCUBE" today. >> Thank you John. Thanks for having me. >> So, automation is really the focus of this event. If you peel back all the announcements and automation which is data process, transformation, innovation scale, all kind of points to automation. How has the past year changed the automation market? >> It's been a fascinating ride. Fascinating ride more than just the COVID part, but some interesting, interesting observations as we look back over the year. I called this the AD for BC before COVID and AD, the Anno, not the Anno Domini, but Anno Domuo meaning year of the house, living in the house. The thing that we really learned is that clients are engaging differently with their, let's say the companies that they work with. They're engaging digitally. Not a big surprise. You look at all of the big digital brands. You look at the way that we engage. We buy things from home. We don't go to the store anymore. We get delivery at home. Work from home completely different. If you think about what happened to the business on the business side, work from home changed everything. And the real bottom line is companies that invested ahead of time in automation technology, they've flourished. The companies that didn't, they're not so flourishing. So, we're seeing, right now we're seeing skyrocketing demand. That's bonus for us. Skyrocketing demand and also that this demand on the supply side we're seeing competition. More competition in the automation space. And I believe any company that's got more than two guys in a go in the back in a basement are entering the automation space. So, it's a fun time. It's a really fun time to be in this space. >> Great validation on the market. Great call out there on the whole competition thing. Cause you really look at this competition from you know, two guys in the garage or you know, early stage startup but the valuations are an indicator. It's a hot market. Most of those startups have massive valuations. Even the pre IPO ones are just like enormous valuations. This is a tell sign. That process automation and digital supply chains, value chains, business is being rewritten with software right? So, you know, there's an underlying hybrid cloud kind of model that's been standardized. Now you have all these things now on top thousand flowers, blooming or apps, if you will more apps and more apps, more apps, less of the kind of like CRM, like the... you're going to have sub systems large subsystems, but you're going to have apps everywhere. Everything's an app now. So this means things have to be re-automated. >> Yeah. >> What's your advice for companies trying to figure this out? >> So my advice is start small. Like one of the big temptations is that you can jump in and say, God almighty we've got this perfect opportunity for rejiggering, rebuilding the entire company from scratch. That's a definition of insanity. Like you don't want to do that. What you want to do is you want to start small and then you want to prove. Second big thing is you want to make sure that you start with the data. Just like any, any good management system you have to start with the facts. You have to discover what's going on. You have to decide which piece you're going to focus on. And then you have to act. And then act leads to optimization. Optimization allows them to say, I'm looking at a dashboard I'm making progress or I'm heading in the wrong direction. Stop. Those kinds of things. So start small, start with the data and make sure that you line up your allies. You have to have, this is a culture change that you have to have your CEO lined up from the top and you have to have buy-in from the bottom. If any of those pieces are missing you're asking for trouble. >> Can you share an example of a customer of yours that's using intelligent automation. Take me through that process. And what's the drivers behind. >> Yeah, sure. A good example. There's a, there's a client of ours in Morocco and it's not a big country but it's a very interesting story. They, the company is called CDG Prevoyance. CDG Prevoyance, this is a, it's a French company, obviously. That was my French accent. But there they are a company that does pension benefits. So think of this as you're putting money away, you're in in the US you have, 401ks. In Canada we have RSPs. You're putting money away for the future. And the company that you're putting money into has to manage your account along with millions of other accounts. And this is where CDG started. It was a very paper-based business. Extremely paper-based. Like the forms that you had to fill out. The way that you engage with, with CDG was was a very form-based thing. Like document based thing. They, the onboarding time to actually enter a new account for a new employee, looking to get their pension plan done was weeks. With automation they changed from being a paper-based thing to being an electronic based thing. They changed the workflow associated with gathering information, getting on onboarded. They onboard now in minutes, as opposed to weeks. This is an example of the kind of thing. Now, if you go back to the first question that you asked, Old companies change. The companies that you engage with digitally are the ones that give you that kind of experience where it doesn't, you know you don't have to crawl through broken glass in order to engage with them. That's what CDG did. And they managed to really ring out some of the human labor out of that onboarding process. >> Great, great stuff. You know, this Mayflower is an exciting story. I've been checking out the, using this decisioning together with you guys with automation. Can you tell me about that? >> Mayflower is really exciting. This is one of those things that just jazzes me. It jazzes me because I think to myself how the heck did they do that? So the Mayflower is a boat. It's like a sailing vessel, like any other sailing vessel. It's 15 meters long. It's powered entirely by solar. It's making a voyage from England to Plymouth. The landing place, you know, where the pilgrims landed, and this, this, this whole voyage is going to be done without human interaction. It's all going to be powered by the machine. So you think about autonomous vehicles. You think about this whole story of autonomous vehicles piloting across the ocean is way different than piloting the car down a highway. >> So this is an autonomous ship, then. >> This is an autonomous ship. Exactly. So think of this as there is there's nobody piloting this thing. It's all piloted by software. The software is, is my business software, interestingly. It has all these sensors that allow you to say, Oh there's a boat over there, steer clear of the boat. But more importantly, when you come to the Harbor you have to negotiate the marks. You have to, you know, steer in the lanes. Different from steering a car you steer a car between the two white lines. You know, you might have a dashed line here and a white line here. You steer the car to come in the middle. Very easy. Steering a boat, that's really hard. Steering a boat in the middle of the ocean when you've got monstrous waves and you've got, you know, potential this, potential that. Like this, this thing is really exciting. I find this whole data, AI decisioning, fascinating. >> Dave, Dave Alonzo is going to love this next question I'm going to ask you. He's my co-host of theCUBE. You always talk about data lakes. How about data ocean? Now we have a data ocean out here which I've always used the metaphor ocean so much more dynamic, but here literally the data is the ocean. You got to factor in conditions that are going to be completely dynamic, wave height, countermeasures on, on navigation. All this is being done. Is that, how does it all work? I mean, has it all been driven by data scenarios? I mean... >> No, it's so it's all driven so it starts with the sensors, the sensor, you have a vision sensor that tells you what it sees. So it sees boats and it sees marks. It sees big waves coming. It's all powered by weather data. So there is a weather feed, but more importantly like the sailing across the ocean part you don't have to worry other than when you know a boat comes or a whale comes. You steer clear of it, fine. That part's relatively easy. When you come close to the shore then you have to make decisions about where to go. And the decisions are all informed by data. So you gather all this data you run machine learning algorithms against the data. You run a decision priorities mechanism. And then you have to, you have to confer with the rules. Like, what are the rules of navigation? I don't know if you're a sailor, but the rules of navigation on the open sea are actually really simple to understand because it's, you know the person on the left has the, has the priority. If you're overtaking, you have to steer clear. All those kind of things. In a Harbor it's way different. And so you have to be able to demonstrate to the government that you have open decisions an open decision-making mechanism to steer around the marks. The government wants to know that you can do that. Otherwise they say, stay out of my Harbor. Very interesting. >> It actually is. It actually encapsulates a lot of business challenges too. You have a lot of data mashing up going on. I mean, you've got navigation, what's under the water. What's on top of the water. You got weather data over the top. It's good to own the weather company for IBM. That helps probably a lot. Then you've got policies, you know? And policy based decision-making. It sounds like a data center and multicloud opportunity. >> It is exactly. That's why I love this opportunity because it's, it's it's almost the, the complete stall from being a business problem to being an experiment problem. Because the way that these, these guys, these engineers built this thing, they're, they're looking for research. They're looking for the ability to really press that edge of where AI and uh you know, machine learning and decisioning come together with ocean research, because what they're doing is social research. They're looking for water temperature and whales and that kind of stuff. >> Unmanned vehicles, unmanned drones is another another big thing we're seeing that with, with, from from managing this. This brings up the point I see about leaders in the industry, and I know we don't have a lot of time. I want to get back to the the announcement that you guys made a while back but I want to stay on this point real quick. If you can just comment. Business leaders that are curious around automation, really the ones that have to invent this. Think about the autonomous ship. On top of the autonomous business I mean, here at theCUBE, we have a studio. What about autonomous studio work? So the notion of automation if you're not thinking about it, you can't do it. What's your advice to people? >> So, so I think the, the advice is that you look for areas of opportunity, like be, be discreet and be like just choose the thing that you want to go after. In the, in the Mayflower case what they were doing was they were looking for a way to navigate in the Harbor. Opens, you've got this big wide ocean. You can go wherever you want to. Navigating in the Harbor is much trickier. And so what they did was they applied technology very specific pieces of technology to that specific problem. That's the advice that I would give to a business. Don't look to turn everything upside down. That's craziness. Like, you're in business for a reason. What you want to do is you want to pick a specific thing to go after and go and fix that. Then pick adjacent things, go fix that. And eventually it gets to the point where you have straight through processing, which is where everybody wants to get. >> I can imagine great opportunities for you guys and your team. Congratulations on all that work. 'Cause there's certainly more to do. I can see so much happening as you guys are building out the stack and acquiring companies. You know, last month you guys had announced to acquire process mining company, myInvenio. what does that announcement mean for IBM and the AI powered automation? Because you guys also have business deals with others in the industry. Take, take us through the, the what this acquisition means for IBM. >> Sure. So myInvenio is a, is a business. First, just get the facts. myInvenio is a business and it's a it's a company that's based in Italy. They do what's called process mining. Process mining is a tool that does what I was just talking about. It allows you to identify places where you have weakness in your workflows. Workflows, like big macro workflows like procure to pay the ability to go all the way from buying something to paying for. Companies spend noodles of money on procure to pay as an example. But inevitably there are humans in that, in that process humans means that there are ways to become more efficient. You could change a person's job. You can change a person's profile. All of that is what this tool is about. This, this tool gives us an excellent addition to our portfolio, our automation portfolio which allows clients to understand where the weaknesses are. And then we can apply specific automations to fix those weaknesses. That's what myInvenio means to us. It puts us in a position of having a complete set of technologies that match up with Gartner's hyper automation market texture. That gives us a very powerful advantage in the marketplace. So I'm very, very happy about this acquisition. >> Yeah. Ed, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Final word. I'd love to get you spend the last minute just talking about IBM's commitment to open and also integration um, integrating with other companies. Take a minute to explain that. >> Yeah, sure. So the, the, the open part is something that we've understood for very, very long time. One of the jobs that I had a long time ago was open source and bringing open source into IBM. I'm a very strong proponent of open source. Open means no barriers to entry no barriers to substitution. And what it means is you have a fair fight. You have, we all have proprietary technology. We all have intellectual property. Sure. But if you have an open base then what that gives you is the ability to inter-operate with other people, other, you know other competitors, frankly, that to me is goodness for the client, because at the end of the day, the client doesn't get locked in. That's the thing that they are really looking for. They want to have the flexibility to move. They want to have the flexibility to put the best, you know best technology in place. So we are strong proponents of open. >> All right. Ed Lynch, vice president of IBM Business Automation. AI powered business automation is coming. Autonomous vehicles, autonomous ships, autonomous business. Everything's going automation soon. We're going to have the autonomous cube. And so, Ed, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. >> Okay, John. Thank you. >> Okay. Cube coverage of IBM Think 2021, virtual launch. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

we're running what i would call a little mini series and we're exploring the convergence of file and object storage what are the key trends why would you want to converge file an object what are the use cases and architectural considerations and importantly what are the business drivers of uffo so-called unified fast file and object in this program you'll hear from matt burr who is the gm of pure's flashblade business and then we'll bring in the perspectives of a solutions architect garrett belsner who's from cdw and then the analyst angle with scott sinclair of the enterprise strategy group esg he'll share some cool data on our power panel and then we'll wrap with a really interesting technical conversation with chris bond cb bond who is a lead data architect at microfocus and he's got a really cool use case to share with us so sit back and enjoy the program from around the globe it's thecube presenting the convergence of file and object brought to you by pure storage we're back with the convergence of file and object a special program made possible by pure storage and co-created with the cube so in this series we're exploring that convergence between file and object storage we're digging into the trends the architectures and some of the use cases for unified fast file and object storage uffo with me is matt burr who's the vice president and general manager of flashblade at pure storage hello matt how you doing i'm doing great morning dave how are you good thank you hey let's start with a little 101 you know kind of the basics what is unified fast file and object yeah so look i mean i think you got to start with first principles talking about the rise of unstructured data so um when we think about unstructured data you sort of think about the projections 80 of data by 2025 is going to be unstructured data whether that's machine generated data or um you know ai and ml type workloads uh you start to sort of see this um i don't want to say it's a boom uh but it's sort of a renaissance for unstructured data if you will we move away from you know what we've traditionally thought of as general purpose nas and and file shares to you know really things that focus on uh fast object taking advantage of s3 cloud native applications that need to integrate with applications on site um you know ai workloads ml workloads tend to look to share data across you know multiple data sets and you really need to have a platform that can deliver both highly performant and scalable fast file and object from one system so talk a little bit more about some of the drivers that you know bring forth that need to unify file an object yeah i mean look you know there's a there's there's a real challenge um in managing you know bespoke uh bespoke infrastructure or architectures around general purpose nas and daz etc so um if you think about how a an architect sort of looks at an application they might say well okay i need to have um you know fast daz storage proximal to the application um but that's going to require a tremendous amount of dams which is a tremendous amount of drives right hard drives are you know historically pretty pretty pretty unwieldy to manage because you're replacing them relatively consistently at multi-petabyte scale um so you start to look at things like the complexity of daz you start to look at the complexity of general purpose nas and you start to just look at quite frankly something that a lot of people don't really want to talk about anymore but actual data center space right like consolidation matters the ability to take you know something that's the size of a microwave like a modern flash blade or a modern um you know uffo device uh replaces something that might be you know the size of three or four or five refrigerators so matt what why is is now the right time for this i mean for years nobody really paid much attention to object s3 already obviously changed you know that course most of the world's data is still stored in file formats and you get there with nfs or smb why is now the time to think about unifying object and file well because we're moving to things like a contactless society um you know the the things that we're going to do are going to just require a tremendous amount more compute power network um and quite frankly storage throughput and you know i can give you two sort of real primary examples here right you know warehouses are being you know taken over by robots if you will um it's not a war it's a it's a it's sort of a friendly advancement in you know how do i how do i store a box in a warehouse and you know we have we have a customer who focuses on large sort of big box distribution warehousing and you know a box that carried a an object two weeks ago might have a different box size two weeks later well that robot needs to know where the space is in the data center in order to put it but also needs to be able to process hey i don't want to put the thing that i'm going to access the most in the back of the warehouse i'm going to put that thing in the front of the warehouse all of those types of data you know sort of real time you can think of the robot as almost an edge device is processing in real time unstructured data in its object right so it's sort of the emergence of these new types of workloads and i give you the opposite example the other end of the spectrum is ransomware right you know today you know we'll talk to customers and they'll say quite commonly hey if you know anybody can sell me a backup device i need something that can restore quickly um if you had the ability to restore something in 270 terabytes an hour or 250 terabytes an hour uh that's much faster when you're dealing with a ransomware attack you want to get your data back quickly you know so i want to add i was going to ask you about that later but since you brought it up what is the right i guess call it architecture for for for ransomware i mean how and explain like how unified object and file which appointment i get the fast recovery but how how would you recommend a customer uh go about architecting a ransomware proof you know system yeah well you know with with flashblade and and with flasharray there's an actual feature called called safe mode and that safe mode actually protects uh the snapshots and and the data from uh sort of being a part of the of the ransomware event and so if you're in a type of ransomware situation like this you're able to leverage safe mode and you say okay what happens in a ransomware attack is you can't get access to your data and so you know the bad guy the perpetrator is basically saying hey i'm not going to give you access to your data until you pay me you know x in bitcoin or whatever it might be right um with with safe mode those snapshots are actually protected outside of the ransomware blast zone and you can bring back those snapshots because what's your alternative if you're not doing something like that your alternative is either to pay and unlock your data or you have to start retouring restoring excuse me from tape or slow disk that could take you days or weeks to get your data back so leveraging safe mode um you know in either the flash for the flash blade product uh is a great way to go about architecting against ransomware i got to put my my i'm thinking like a customer now so safe mode so that's an immutable mode right can't change the data um is it can can an administrator go in and change that mode can you turn it off do i still need an air gap for example what would you recommend there yeah so there there are still um uh you know sort of our back or roll back role-based access control policies uh around who can access that safe mode and who can right okay so uh anyway subject for a different day i want to i want to actually bring up uh if you don't object a topic that i think used to be really front and center and it now be is becoming front and center again i mean wikibon just produced a research note forecasting the future of flash and hard drives and those of you who follow us know we've done this for quite some time and you can if you could bring up the chart here you you could and we see this happening again it was originally we forecast the the the death of of quote-unquote high spin speed disc drives which is kind of an oxymoron but you can see on here on this chart this hard disk had a magnificent journey but they peaked in volume in manufacturing volume in 2010 and the reason why that is is so important is that volumes now are steadily dropping you can see that and we use wright's law to explain why this is a problem and wright's law essentially says that as you your cumulative manufacturing volume doubles your cost to manufacture decline by a constant percentage now i won't go too much detail on that but suffice it to say that flash volumes are growing very rapidly hdd volumes aren't and so flash because of consumer volumes can take advantage of wright's law and that constant reduction and that's what's really important for the next generation which is always more expensive to build uh and so this kind of marks the beginning of the end matt what do you think what what's the future hold for spinning disc in your view uh well i can give you the answer on two levels on a personal level uh it's why i come to work every day uh you know the the eradication or or extinction of an inefficient thing um you know i like to say that uh inefficiency is the bane of my existence uh and i think hard drives are largely inefficient and i'm willing to accept the sort of long-standing argument that um you know we've seen this transition in block right and we're starting to see it repeat itself in in unstructured data and i'm going to accept the argument that cost is a vector here and it most certainly is right hdds have been considerably cheaper uh than than than flash storage um you know even to this day uh you know up up to this point right but we're starting to approach the point where you sort of reach a a 3x sort of um you know differentiator between the cost of an hdd and an std and you know that really is that point in time when uh you begin to pick up a lot of volume and velocity and so you know that tends to map directly to you know what you're seeing here which is you know a a slow decline uh which i think is going to become even more rapid kind of probably starting around next year um where you start to see sds excuse me ssds uh you know really replacing hdds uh at a much more rapid clip particularly on the unstructured data side and it's largely around cost the the workloads that we talked about robots and warehouses or you know other types of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence type applications and workflows you know they require a degree of performance that a hard drive just can't deliver we are we are seeing sort of the um creative innovative uh disruption of an entire industry right before our eyes it's a fun thing to live through yeah and and we would agree i mean it doesn't the premise there is that it doesn't have to be less expensive we think it will be by you know the second half or early second half of this decade but even if it's a we think around a 3x delta the value of of ssd relative to spinning disk is going to overwhelm just like with your laptop you know it got to the point where you said why would i ever have a spinning disc in my laptop we see the same thing happening here um and and so and we're talking about you know raw capacity you know put in compression and d-dupe and everything else that you really can't do with spinning discs because of the performance issues you can do with flash okay let's come back to uffo can we dig into the challenges specifically that that this solves for customers give me give us some examples yeah so you know i mean if we if we think about the examples um you know the the robotic one um i think is is is the one that i think is the marker for you know kind of of of the the modern side of of of what we see here um but what we're you know what we're what we're seeing from a trend perspective which you know not everybody's deploying robots right um you know there's there's many companies that are you know that aren't going to be in either the robotic business uh or or even thinking about you know sort of future type oriented type things but what they are doing is green field applications are being built on object um generally not on not on file and and not on block and so you know the rise of of object as sort of the the sort of let's call it the the next great protocol for um you know for uh for for modern workloads right this is this is that that modern application coming to the forefront and that could be anything from you know financial institutions you know right down through um you we've even see it and seen it in oil and gas uh we're also seeing it across across healthcare uh so you know as as as companies take the opportunity as industries to take this opportunity to modernize you know they're modernizing not on things that are are leveraging you know um you know sort of archaic disk technology they're they're they're really focusing on on object but they still have file workflows that they need to that they need to be able to support and so having the ability to be able to deliver those things from one device in a capacity orientation or a performance orientation uh while at the same time dramatically simplifying uh the overall administration of your environment both physically and non-physically is a key driver so the great thing about object is it's simple it's a kind of a get put metaphor um it's it scales out you know because it's got metadata associated with the data uh and and it's cheap uh the drawback is you don't necessarily associate it with high performance and and and as well most applications don't you know speak in that language they speak in the language of file you know or as you mentioned block so i i see real opportunities here if i have some some data that's not necessarily frequently accessed you know every day but yet i want to then whether end of quarter or whatever it is i want to i want to or machine learning i want to apply some ai to that data i want to bring it in and then apply a file format uh because for performance reasons is that right maybe you could unpack that a little bit yeah so um you know we see i mean i think you described it well right um but i don't think object necessarily has to be slow um and nor does it have to be um you know because when you think about you brought up a good point with metadata right being able to scale to a billions of objects being able to scale to billions of objects excuse me is of value right um and i think people do traditionally associate object with slow but it's not necessarily slow anymore right we we did a sort of unofficial survey of of of our of our customers and our employee base and when people described object they thought of it as like law firms and storing a word doc if you will um and that that's just you know i think that there's a lack of understanding or a misnomer around what modern what modern object has become and perform an object particularly at scale when we're talking about billions of objects you know that's the next frontier right um is it at pace performance wise with you know the other protocols no uh but it's making leaps and grounds so you talked a little bit more about some of the verticals that you see i mean i think when i think of financial services i think transaction processing but of course they have a lot of tons of unstructured data are there any patterns you're seeing by by vertical market um we're you know we're not that's the interesting thing um and you know um as a as a as a as a company with a with a block heritage or a block dna those patterns were pretty easy to spot right there were a certain number of databases that you really needed to support oracle sql some postgres work et cetera then kind of the modern databases around cassandra and things like that you knew that there were going to be vmware environments you know you could you could sort of see the trends and where things were going unstructured data is such a broader horizontal thing right so you know inside of oil and gas for example you have you know um you have specific applications and bespoke infrastructures for those applications um you know inside of media entertainment you know the same thing the the trend that we're seeing the commonality that we're seeing is the modernization of you know object as a starting point for all the all the net new workloads within within those industry verticals right that's the most common request we see is what's your object roadmap what's your you know what's your what's your object strategy you know where do you think where do you think object is going so um there isn't any um you know sort of uh there's no there's no path uh it's really just kind of a wide open field in front of us with common requests across all industries so the amazing thing about pure just as a kind of a little you know quasi you know armchair historian the industry is pure was really the only company in many many years to be able to achieve escape velocity break through a billion dollars i mean three part couldn't do it isilon couldn't do it compellent couldn't do it i could go on but pure was able to achieve that as an independent company and so you become a leader you look at the gartner magic quadrant you're a leader in there i mean if you've made it this far you've got to have some chops and so of course it's very competitive there are a number of other storage suppliers that have announced products that unify object and file so i'm interested in how pure differentiates why pure um it's a great question um and it's one that uh you know having been a long time puritan uh you know i take pride in answering um and it's actually a really simple answer um it's it's business model innovation and technology right the the technology that goes behind how we do what we do right and i don't mean the product right innovation is product but having a better support model for example um or having on the business model side you know evergreen storage right where we sort of look at your relationship to us as a subscription right um you know we're going to sort of take the thing that that you've had and we're going to modernize that thing in place over time such that you're not rebuying that same you know terabyte or you know petabyte of storage that you've that you that you've paid for over time so um you know sort of three legs of the stool uh that that have made you know pure clearly differentiated i think the market has has recognized that um you're right it's it's hard to break through to a billion dollars um but i look forward to the day that you know we we have two billion dollar products and i think with uh you know that rise in in unstructured data growing to 80 by 2025 and you know the massive transition that you know you guys have noted in in in your hdd slide i think it's a huge opportunity for us on you know the other unstructured data side of the house you know the other thing i'd add matt i've talked to cause about this is is it's simplicity first i've asked them why don't you do this why don't you do it and the answer is always the same is that adds complexity and we we put simplicity for the customer ahead of everything else and i think that served you very very well what about the economics of of unified file an object i mean if you bring in additional value presumably there's a there there's a cost to that but there's got to be also a business case behind it what kind of impact have you seen uh with customers yeah i mean look i'll i'll i'll go back to something i mentioned earlier which is just the reclamation of floor space and power and cooling right um you know there's a you know there's people people people want to search for kind of the the sexier element if you will when it comes to looking at how we how you derive value from something but the reality is if you're reducing your power consumption by you know by by a material percentage power bills matter in big in big data centers um you know customers typically are are facing you know a paradigm of well i i want to go to the cloud but you know the clouds are not being more expensive than i thought it was going to be or you know i figured out what i can use in the cloud i thought it was going to be everything but it's not going to be everything so hybrid's where we're landing but i want to be out of the data center business and i don't want to have a team of 20 storage people to match you know to administer my storage um you know so there's sort of this this very tangible value around you know hey if i could manage um you know multiple petabytes with one full-time engineer uh because the system uh to yoran kaz's point was radically simpler to administer didn't require someone to be running around swapping drives all the time would that be a value the answer is yes 100 of the time right and then you start to look at okay all right well on the uffo side from a product perspective hey if i have to manage a you know bespoke environment for this application if i have to manage a bespoke environment for this application and a bespoke environment for this application and this book environment for this application i'm managing four different things and can i actually share data across those four different things there's ways to share data but most customers it just gets too complex how do you even know what your what your gold.master copy is of data if you have it in four different places or you try to have it in four different places and it's four different siloed infrastructures so when you get to the sort of the side of you know how do we how do you measure value in uffo it's actually being able to have all of that data concentrated in one place so that you can share it from application to application got it i'm interested we use a couple minutes left i'm interested in the the update on flashblade you know generally but also i have a specific question i mean look getting file right is hard enough uh you just announced smb support for flashblade i'm interested in you know how that fits in i think it's kind of obvious with file and object converging but give us the update on on flashblade and maybe you could address that specific question yeah so um look i mean we're we're um you know tremendously excited about the growth of flashblade uh you know we we we found workloads we never expected to find um you know the rapid restore workload was one that was actually brought to us from from from a customer actually and has become you know one of our one of our top two three four you know workloads so um you know we're really happy with the trend we've seen in it um and you know mapping back to you know thinking about hdds and ssds you know we're well on a path to building a billion dollar business here so you know we're very excited about that um but to your point you know you don't just snap your fingers and get there right um you know we've learned that doing file and object uh is is harder than block um because there's more things that you have to go do for one you're basically focused on three protocols s b nfs and s3 not necessarily in that order um but to your point about smb uh you know we we are uh on the path through to releasing um you know smb uh full full native smb support in in the system that will allow us to uh service customers we have a limitation with some customers today where they'll have an s b portion of their nfs workflow um and we do great on the nfs side um but you know we didn't we didn't have the ability to plug into the s p component of their workflow so that's going to open up a lot of opportunity for us um on on that front um and you know we continue to you know invest significantly across the board in in areas like security which is you know become more than just a hot button you know today security's always been there but it feels like it's blazing hot today um and so you know going through the next couple years we'll be looking at uh you know developing some some um you know pretty material security elements of the product as well so uh well on a path to a billion dollars is the net on that and uh you know we're we're fortunate to have have smb here and we're looking forward to introducing that to to those customers that have you know nfs workloads today with an s p component yeah nice tailwind good tam expansion strategy matt thanks so much really appreciate you coming on the program we appreciate you having us and uh thanks much dave good to see you [Music] okay we're back with the convergence of file and object in a power panel this is a special content program made possible by pure storage and co-created with the cube now in this series what we're doing is we're exploring the coming together of file and object storage trying to understand the trends that are driving this convergence the architectural considerations that users should be aware of and which use cases make the most sense for so-called unified fast file in object storage and with me are three great guests to unpack these issues garrett belsner is the data center solutions architect he's with cdw scott sinclair is a senior analyst at enterprise strategy group he's got deep experience on enterprise storage and brings that independent analyst perspective and matt burr is back with us gentlemen welcome to the program thank you hey scott let me let me start with you uh and get your perspective on what's going on the market with with object the cloud a huge amount of unstructured data out there that lives in files give us your independent view of the trends that you're seeing out there well dave you know where to start i mean surprise surprise date is growing um but one of the big things that we've seen is we've been talking about data growth for what decades now but what's really fascinating is or changed is because of the digital economy digital business digital transformation whatever you call it now people are not just storing data they actually have to use it and so we see this in trends like analytics and artificial intelligence and what that does is it's just increasing the demand for not only consolidation of massive amounts of storage that we've seen for a while but also the demand for incredibly low latency access to that storage and i think that's one of the things that we're seeing that's driving this need for convergence as you put it of having multiple protocols consolidated onto one platform but also the need for high performance access to that data thank you for that a great setup i got like i wrote down three topics that we're going to unpack as a result of that so garrett let me let me go to you maybe you can give us the perspective of what you see with customers is is this is this like a push where customers are saying hey listen i need to converge my file and object or is it more a story where they're saying garrett i have this problem and then you see unified file and object as a solution yeah i think i think for us it's you know taking that consultative approach with our customers and really kind of hearing pain around some of the pipelines the way that they're going to market with data today and kind of what are the problems that they're seeing we're also seeing a lot of the change driven by the software vendors as well so really being able to support a disaggregated design where you're not having to upgrade and maintain everything as a single block has really been a place where we've seen a lot of customers pivot to where they have more flexibility as they need to maintain larger volumes of data and higher performance data having the ability to do that separate from compute and cache and those other layers are is really critical so matt i wonder if if you could you know follow up on that so so gary was talking about this disaggregated design so i like it you know distributed cloud etc but then we're talking about bringing things together in in one place right so square that circle how does this fit in with this hyper-distributed cloud edge that's getting built out yeah you know i mean i i could give you the easy answer on that but i could also pass it back to garrett in the sense that you know garrett maybe it's important to talk about um elastic and splunk and some of the things that you're seeing in in that world and and how that i think the answer to dave's question i think you can give you can give a pretty qualified answer relative what your customers are seeing oh that'd be great please yeah absolutely no no problem at all so you know i think with um splunk kind of moving from its traditional design and classic design whatever you want you want to call it up into smart store um that was kind of one of the first that we saw kind of make that move towards kind of separating object out and i think you know a lot of that comes from their own move to the cloud and updating their code to basically take advantage of object object in the cloud uh but we're starting to see you know with like vertica eon for example um elastic other folks taking that same type of approach where in the past we were building out many 2u servers we were jamming them full of uh you know ssds and nvme drives that was great but it doesn't really scale and it kind of gets into that same problem that we see with you know hyper convergence a little bit where it's you know you're all you're always adding something maybe that you didn't want to add um so i think it you know again being driven by software is really kind of where we're seeing the world open up there but that whole idea of just having that as a hub and a central place where you can then leverage that out to other applications whether that's out to the edge for machine learning or ai applications to take advantage of it i think that's where that convergence really comes back in but i think like scott mentioned earlier it's really folks are now doing things with the data where before i think they were really storing it trying to figure out what are we going to actually do with it when we need to do something with it so this is making it possible yeah and dave if i could just sort of tack on to the end of garrett's answer there you know in particular vertica with neon mode the ability to leverage sharded subclusters give you um you know sort of an advantage in terms of being able to isolate performance hot spots you an advantage to that is being able to do that on a flashblade for example so um sharded subclusters allow you to sort of say i'm you know i'm going to give prioritization to you know this particular element of my application and my data set but i can still share those share that data across those across those subclusters so um you know as you see you know vertica advance with eon mode or you see splunk advance with with smart store you know these are all sort of advancements that are you know it's a chicken in the egg thing um they need faster storage they need you know sort of a consolidated data storage data set um and and that's what sort of allows these things to drive forward yeah so vertica eon mode for those who don't know it's the ability to separate compute and storage and scale independently i think i think vertica if they're if they're not the only one they're one of the only ones i think they might even be the only one that does that in the cloud and on-prem and that sort of plays into this distributed you know nature of this hyper-distributed cloud i sometimes call it and and i'm interested in the in the data pipeline and i wonder scott if we could talk a little bit about that maybe we're unified object and file i mean i'm envisioning this this distributed mesh and then you know uffo is sort of a node on that that i i can tap when i need it but but scott what are you seeing as the state of infrastructure as it relates to the data pipeline and the trends there yeah absolutely dave so when i think data pipeline i immediately gravitate to analytics or or machine learning initiatives right and so one of the big things we see and this is it's an interesting trend it seems you know we continue to see increased investment in ai increased interest and people think and as companies get started they think okay well what does that mean well i got to go hire a data scientist okay well that data scientist probably needs some infrastructure and what they end what often happens in these environments is where it ends up being a bespoke environment or a one-off environment and then over time organizations run into challenges and one of the big challenges is the data science team or people whose jobs are outside of it spend way too much time trying to get the infrastructure to to keep up with their demands and predominantly around data performance so one of the one of the ways organizations that especially have artificial intelligence workloads in production and we found this in our research have started mitigating that is by deploying flash all across the data pipeline we have we have data on this sorry interrupt but yeah if you could bring up that that chart that would be great um so take us through this uh uh scott and share with us what we're looking at here yeah absolutely so so dave i'm glad you brought this up so we did this study um i want to say late last year uh one of the things we looked at was across artificial intelligence environments now one thing that you're not seeing on this slide is we went through and we asked all around the data pipeline and we saw flash everywhere but i thought this was really telling because this is around data lakes and when when or many people think about the idea of a data lake they think about it as a repository it's a place where you keep maybe cold data and what we see here is especially within production environments a pervasive use of flash storage so i think that 69 of organizations are saying their data lake is mostly flash or all flash and i think we have zero percent that don't have any flash in that environment so organizations are finding out that they that flash is an essential technology to allow them to harness the value of their data so garrett and then matt i wonder if you could chime in as well we talk about digital transformation and i sometimes call it you know the coveted forced march to digital transformation and and i'm curious as to your perspective on things like machine learning and the adoption and scott you may have a perspective on this as well you know we had to pivot we had to get laptops we had to secure the end points you know and vdi those became super high priorities what happened to you know injecting ai into my applications and and machine learning did that go in the back burner was that accelerated along with the need to digitally transform garrett i wonder if you could share with us what you saw with with customers last year yeah i mean i think we definitely saw an acceleration um i think folks are in in my market are still kind of figuring out how they inject that into more of a widely distributed business use case but again this data hub and allowing folks to now take advantage of this data that they've had in these data lakes for a long time i agree with scott i mean many of the data lakes that we have were somewhat flash accelerated but they were typically really made up of you know large capacity slower spinning near-line drive accelerated with some flash but i'm really starting to see folks now look at some of those older hadoop implementations and really leveraging new ways to look at how they consume data and many of those redesigned customers are coming to us wanting to look at all flash solutions so we're definitely seeing it we're seeing an acceleration towards folks trying to figure out how to actually use it in more of a business sense now or before i feel it goes a little bit more skunk works kind of people dealing with uh you know in a much smaller situation maybe in the executive offices trying to do some testing and things scott you're nodding away anything you can add in here yeah so first off it's great to get that confirmation that the stuff we're seeing in our research garrett's seeing you know out in the field and in the real world um but you know as it relates to really the past year it's been really fascinating so one of the things we study at esg is i.t buying intentions what are things what are initiatives that companies plan to invest in and at the beginning of 2020 we saw a heavy interest in machine learning initiatives then you transition to the middle of 2020 in the midst of covid some organizations continued on that path but a lot of them had the pivot right how do we get laptops to everyone how do we continue business in this new world well now as we enter into 2021 and hopefully we're coming out of this uh you know the pandemic era um we're getting into a world where organizations are pivoting back towards these strategic investments around how do i maximize the usage of data and actually accelerating those because they've seen the importance of of digital business initiatives over the past year yeah matt i mean when we exited 2019 we saw a narrowing of experimentation and our premise was you know that that organizations are going to start now operationalizing all their digital transformation experiments and and then we had a you know 10 month petri dish on on digital so what do you what are you seeing in this regard a 10 month petri dish is an interesting way to interesting way to describe it um you know we saw another there's another there's another candidate for pivot in there around ransomware as well right um you know security entered into the mix which took people's attention away from some of this as well i mean look i'd like to bring this up just a level or two um because what we're actually talking about here is progress right and and progress isn't is an inevitability um you know whether it's whether whether you believe that it's by 2025 or you or you think it's 2035 or 2050 it doesn't matter we're on a forced march to the eradication of disk and that is happening in many ways uh you know in many ways um due to some of the things that garrett was referring to and what scott was referring to in terms of what are customers demands for how they're going to actually leverage the data that they have and that brings me to kind of my final point on this which is we see customers in three phases there's the first phase where they say hey i have this large data store and i know there's value in there i don't know how to get to it or i have this large data store and i've started a project to get value out of it and we failed those could be customers that um you know marched down the hadoop path early on and they they got some value out of it um but they realized that you know hdfs wasn't going to be a modern protocol going forward for any number of reasons you know the first being hey if i have gold.master how do i know that i have gold.4 is consistent with my gold.master so data consistency matters and then you have the sort of third group that says i have these large data sets i know how to extract value from them and i'm already on to the verticas the elastics you know the splunks etc um i think those folks are the folks that that ladder group are the folks that kept their their their projects going because they were already extracting value from them the first two groups we we're seeing sort of saying the second half of this year is when we're going to begin really being picking up on these on these types of initiatives again well thank you matt by the way for for hitting the escape key because i think value from data really is what this is all about and there are some real blockers there that i kind of want to talk about you mentioned hdfs i mean we were very excited of course in the early days of hadoop many of the concepts were profound but at the end of the day it was too complicated we've got these hyper-specialized roles that are that are you know serving the business but it still takes too long it's it's too hard to get value from data and one of the blockers is infrastructure that the complexity of that infrastructure really needs to be abstracted taking up a level we're starting to see this in in cloud where you're seeing some of those abstraction layers being built from some of the cloud vendors but more importantly a lot of the vendors like pew are saying hey we can do that heavy lifting for you uh and we you know we have expertise in engineering to do cloud native so i'm wondering what you guys see uh maybe garrett you could start us off and other students as some of the blockers uh to getting value from data and and how we're going to address those in the coming decade yeah i mean i i think part of it we're solving here obviously with with pure bringing uh you know flash to a market that traditionally was utilizing uh much slower media um you know the other thing that i that i see that's very nice with flashblade for example is the ability to kind of do things you know once you get it set up a blade at a time i mean a lot of the things that we see from just kind of more of a you know simplistic approach to this like a lot of these teams don't have big budgets and being able to kind of break them down into almost a blade type chunk i think has really kind of allowed folks to get more projects and and things off the ground because they don't have to buy a full expensive system to run these projects so that's helped a lot i think the wider use cases have helped a lot so matt mentioned ransomware you know using safe mode as a place to help with ransomware has been a really big growth spot for us we've got a lot of customers very interested and excited about that and the other thing that i would say is bringing devops into data is another thing that we're seeing so kind of that push towards data ops and really kind of using automation and infrastructure as code as a way to now kind of drive things through the system the way that we've seen with automation through devops is really an area we're seeing a ton of growth with from a services perspective guys any other thoughts on that i mean we're i'll tee it up there we are seeing some bleeding edge which is somewhat counterintuitive especially from a cost standpoint organizational changes at some some companies uh think of some of the the the internet companies that do uh music uh for instance and adding podcasts etc and those are different data products we're seeing them actually reorganize their data architectures to make them more distributed uh and actually put the domain heads the business heads in charge of the the data and the data pipeline and that is maybe less efficient but but it's again some of these bleeding edge what else are you guys seeing out there that might be yes some harbingers of the next decade uh i'll go first um you know i think specific to um the the construct that you threw out dave one of the things that we're seeing is um you know the the application owner maybe it's the devops person but it's you know maybe it's it's it's the application owner through the devops person they're they're becoming more technical in their understanding of how infrastructure um interfaces with their with their application i think um you know what what we're seeing on the flashblade side is we're having a lot more conversations with application people than um just i.t people it doesn't mean that the it people aren't there the it people are still there for sure they have to deliver the service etc um but you know the days of of i.t you know building up a catalog of services and a business owner subscribing to one of those services you know picking you know whatever sort of fits their need um i don't think that constru i think that's the construct that changes going forward the application owner is becoming much more prescriptive about what they want the infrastructure to fit how they want the infrastructure to fit into their application and that's a big change and and for for um you know certainly folks like like garrett and cdw um you know they do a good job with this being able to sort of get to the application owner and bring those two sides together there's a tremendous amount of value there for us it's been a little bit of a retooling we've traditionally sold to the i.t side of the house and um you know we've had to teach ourselves how to go talk the language of of applications so um you know i think you pointed out a good a good a good construct there and and you know that that application owner taking playing a much bigger role in what they're expecting uh from the performance of it infrastructure i think is is is a key is a key change interesting i mean that definitely is a trend that's put you guys closer to the business where the the infrastructure team is is serving the business as opposed to sometimes i talk to data experts and they're frustrated uh especially data owners or or data product builders who are frustrated that they feel like they have to beg beg the the data pipeline team to get you know new data sources or get data out how about the edge um you know maybe scott you can kick us off i mean we're seeing you know the emergence of edge use cases ai inferencing at the edge a lot of data at the edge what are you seeing there and and how does this unified object i'll bring us back to that and file fit wow dave how much time do we have um two minutes first of all scott why don't you why don't you just tell everybody what the edge is yeah you got it figured out all right how much time do you have matt at the end of the day and that that's that's a great question right is if you take a step back and i think it comes back today of something you mentioned it's about extracting value from data and what that means is when you extract value from data what it does is as matt pointed out the the influencers or the users of data the application owners they have more power because they're driving revenue now and so what that means is from an i.t standpoint it's not just hey here are the services you get use them or lose them or you know don't throw a fit it is no i have to i have to adapt i have to follow what my application owners mean now when you bring that back to the edge what it means is is that data is not localized to the data center i mean we just went through a nearly 12-month period where the entire workforce for most of the companies in this country had went distributed and business continued so if business is distributed data is distributed and that means that means in the data center that means at the edge that means that the cloud that means in all other places in tons of places and what it also means is you have to be able to extract and utilize data anywhere it may be and i think that's something that we're going to continue to and continue to see and i think it comes back to you know if you think about key characteristics we've talked about things like performance and scale for years but we need to start rethinking it because on one hand we need to get performance everywhere but also in terms of scale and this ties back to some of the other initiatives and getting value from data it's something i call that the massive success problem one of the things we see especially with with workloads like machine learning is businesses find success with them and as soon as they do they say well i need about 20 of these projects now all of a sudden that overburdens it organizations especially across across core and edge and cloud environments and so when you look at environments ability to meet performance and scale demands wherever it needs to be is something that's really important you know so dave i'd like to um just sort of tie together sort of two things that um i think that i heard from scott and garrett that i think are important and it's around this concept of scale um you know some of us are old enough to remember the day when kind of a 10 terabyte blast radius was too big of a blast radius for people to take on or a terabyte of storage was considered to be um you know an exemplary budget environment right um now we sort of think as terabytes kind of like we used to think of as gigabytes in some ways um petabyte like you don't have to explain anybody what a petabyte is anymore um and you know what's on the horizon and it's not far are our exabyte type data set workloads um and you start to think about what could be in that exabyte of data we've talked about how you extract that value we've talked about sort of um how you start but if the scale is big not everybody's going to start at a petabyte or an exabyte to garrett's point the ability to start small and grow into these products or excuse me these projects i think a is a really um fundamental concept here because you're not going to just go by i'm going to kick off a five petabyte project whether you do that on disk or flash it's going to be expensive right but if you could start at a couple hundred terabytes not just as a proof of concept but as something that you know you could get predictable value out of that then you could say hey this either scales linearly or non-linearly in a way that i can then go map my investments to how i can go dig deeper into this that's how all of these things are gonna that's how these successful projects are going to start because the people that are starting with these very large you know sort of um expansive you know greenfield projects at multi-petabyte scale it's gonna be hard to realize near-term value excellent we gotta wrap but but garrett i wonder if you could close when you look forward you talk to customers do you see this unification of of file and object is it is this an evolutionary trend is it something that is that that is that is that is going to be a lever that customers use how do you see it evolving over the next two three years and beyond yeah i mean i think from our perspective i mean just from what we're seeing from the numbers within the market the amount of growth that's happening with unstructured data is really just starting to finally really kind of hit this data deluge or whatever you want to call it that we've been talking about for so many years it really does seem to now be becoming true as we start to see things scale out and really folks settle into okay i'm going to use the cloud to to start and maybe train my models but now i'm going to get it back on prem because of latency or security or whatever the the um decision points are there this is something that is not going to slow down and i think you know folks like pure having the ability to have the tools that they give us um to use and bring to market with our customers are really key and critical for us so i see it as a huge growth area and a big focus for us moving forward guys great job unpacking a topic that you know it's covered a little bit but i think we we covered some ground that is uh that is new and so thank you so much for those insights and that data really appreciate your time thanks steve thanks yeah thanks dave okay and thank you for watching the convergence of file and object keep it right there right back after this short break innovation impact influence welcome to the cube disruptors developers and practitioners learn from the voices of leaders who share their personal insights from the hottest digital events around the globe enjoy the best this community has to offer on the cube your global leader in high-tech digital coverage [Music] okay now we're going to get the customer perspective on object and we'll talk about the convergence of file and object but really focusing on the object piece this is a content program that's being made possible by pure storage and it's co-created with the cube christopher cb bond is here he's a lead architect for microfocus the enterprise data warehouse and principal data engineer at microfocus cb welcome good to see you thanks dave good to be here so tell us more about your role at microfocus it's a pan microfocus role of course we know the company is a multinational software firm and acquired the software assets of hp of course including vertica tell us where you fit yeah so microfocus is uh you know it's like i said wide worldwide uh company that uh sells a lot of software products all over the place to governments and so forth and um it also grows often by acquiring other companies so there is the problem of of integrating new companies and their data and so what's happened over the years is that they've had a a number of different discrete data systems so you've got this data spread all over the place and they've never been able to get a full complete introspection on the entire business because of that so my role was come in design a central data repository an enterprise data warehouse that all reporting could be generated against and so that's what we're doing and we selected vertica as the edw system and pure storage flashblade as the communal repository okay so you obviously had experience with with vertica in your in your previous role so it's not like you were starting from scratch but but paint a picture of what life was like before you embarked on this sort of consolidated a approach to your your data warehouse what was it just disparate data all over the place a lot of m a going on where did the data live right so again the data was all over the place including under people's desks in just dedicated you know their their own private uh sql servers it a lot of data in in um microfocus is run on sql server which has pros and cons because that's a great uh transactional database but it's not really good for analytics in my opinion so uh but a lot of stuff was running on that they had one vertica instance that was doing some select uh reporting wasn't a very uh powerful system and it was what they call vertica enterprise mode where had dedicated nodes which um had the compute and storage um in the same locus on each uh server okay so vertica eon mode is a whole new world because it separates compute from storage you mentioned eon mode uh and the ability to to to scale storage and compute independently we wanted to have the uh analytics olap stuff close to the oltp stuff right so that's why they're co-located very close to each other and so uh we could what's nice about this situation is that these s3 objects it's an s3 object store on the pure flash plate we could copy those over if we needed to uh aws and we could spin up um a version of vertica there and keep going it's it's like a tertiary dr strategy because we actually have a we're setting up a second flashblade vertica system geo-located elsewhere for backup and we can get into it if you want to talk about how the latest version of the pure software for the flashblade allows synchronization across network boundaries of those flash plays which is really nice because if uh you know there's a giant sinkhole opens up under our colo facility and we lose that thing then we just have to switch the dns and we were back in business off the dr and then if that one was to go we could copy those objects over to aws and be up and running there so we're feeling pretty confident about being able to weather whatever comes along so you're using the the pure flash blade as an object store um most people think oh object simple but slow uh not the case for you is that right not the case at all it's ripping um well you have to understand about vertica and the way it stores data it stores data in what they call storage containers and those are immutable okay on disk whether it's on aws or if you had a enterprise mode vertica if you do an update or delete it actually has to go and retrieve that object container from disk and it destroys it and rebuilds it okay which is why you don't you want to avoid updates and deletes with vertica because the way it gets its speed is by sorting and ordering and encoding the data on disk so it can read it really fast but if you do an operation where you're deleting or updating a record in the middle of that then you've got to rebuild that entire thing so that actually matches up really well with s3 object storage because it's kind of the same way uh it gets destroyed and rebuilt too okay so that matches up very well with vertica and we were able to design this system so that it's append only now we had some reports that were running in sql server okay uh which were taking seven days so we moved that to uh to vertica from sql server and uh we rewrote the queries which were which had been written in t sql with a bunch of loops and so forth and we were to get this is amazing it went from seven days to two seconds to generate this report which has tremendous value uh to the company because it would have to have this long cycle of seven days to get a new introspection in what they call their knowledge base and now all of a sudden it's almost on demand two seconds to generate it that's great and that's because of the way the data is stored and uh the s3 you asked about oh you know is it slow well not in that context because what happens really with vertica eon mode is that it can they have um when you set up your compute nodes they have local storage also which is called the depot it's kind of a cache okay so the data will be drawn from the flash and cached locally uh and that was it was thought when they designed that oh you know it's that'll cut down on the latency okay but it turns out that if you have your compute nodes close meaning minimal hops to the flashblade that you can actually uh tell vertica you know don't even bother caching that stuff just read it directly on the fly from the from the flashblade and the performance is still really good it depends on your situation but i know for example a major telecom company that uh uses the same topology as we're talking about here they did the same thing they just they just dropped the cache because the flash player was able to to deliver the the data fast enough so that's you're talking about that that's speed of light issues and just the overhead of of of switching infrastructure is that that gets eliminated and so as a result you can go directly to the storage array that's correct yeah it's it's like it's fast enough that it's it's almost as if it's local to the compute node uh but every situation is different depending on your uh your knees if you've got like a few tables that are heavily used uh then yeah put them um put them in the cash because that'll be probably a little bit faster but if you have a lot of ad hoc queries that are going on you know you may exceed the storage of the local cache and then you're better off having it uh just read directly from the uh from the flash blade got it look it pure's a fit i mean i sound like a fanboy but pure is all about simplicity so is object so that means you don't have to you know worry about wrangling storage and worrying about luns and all that other you know nonsense and and file i've been burned by hardware in the past you know where oh okay they're building to a price and so they cheap out on stuff like fans or other things and these these components fail and the whole thing goes down but this hardware is super super good quality and uh so i'm i'm happy with the quality that we're getting so cb last question what's next for you where do you want to take this uh this this initiative well we are in the process now of we um when so i i designed this system to combine the best of the kimball approach to data warehousing and the inland approach okay and what we do is we bring over all the data we've got and we put it into a pristine staging layer okay like i said it's uh because it's append only it's essentially a log of all the transactions that are happening in this company just they appear okay and then from the the kimball side of things we're designing the data marts now so that that's what the end users actually interact with and so we're we're taking uh the we're examining the transactional systems to say how are these business objects created what's what's the logic there and we're recreating those logical models in uh in vertica so we've done a handful of them so far and it's working out really well so going forward we've got a lot of work to do to uh create just about every object that that the company needs cb you're an awesome guest to really always a pleasure talking to you and uh thank you congratulations and and good luck going forward stay safe thank you [Music] okay let's summarize the convergence of file and object first i want to thank our guests matt burr scott sinclair garrett belsener and c.b bohn i'm your host dave vellante and please allow me to briefly share some of the key takeaways from today's program so first as scott sinclair of esg stated surprise surprise data's growing and matt burr he helped us understand the growth of unstructured data i mean estimates indicate that the vast majority of data will be considered unstructured by mid-decade 80 or so and obviously unstructured data is growing very very rapidly now of course your definition of unstructured data and that may vary across across a wide spectrum i mean there's video there's audio there's documents there's spreadsheets there's chat i mean these are generally considered unstructured data but of course they all have some type of structure to them you know perhaps it's not as strict as a relational database but there's certainly metadata and certain structure to these types of use cases that i just mentioned now the key to what pure is promoting is this idea of unified fast file and object uffo look object is great it's inexpensive it's simple but historically it's been less performant so good for archiving or cheap and deep types of examples organizations often use file for higher performance workloads and let's face it most of the world's data lives in file formats what pure is doing is bringing together file and object by for example supporting multiple protocols ie nfs smb and s3 s3 of course has really given new life to object over the past decade now the key here is to essentially enable customers to have the best of both worlds not having to trade off performance for object simplicity and a key discussion point that we've had on the program has been the impact of flash on the long slow death of spinning disk look hard disk drives they had a great run but hdd volumes they peaked in 2010 and flash as you well know has seen tremendous volume growth thanks to the consumption of flash in mobile devices and then of course its application into the enterprise and that's volume is just going to keep growing and growing and growing the price declines of flash are coming down faster than those of hdd so it's the writing's on the wall it's just a matter of time so flash is riding down that cost curve very very aggressively and hdd has essentially become you know a managed decline business now by bringing flash to object as part of the flashblade portfolio and allowing for multiple protocols pure hopes to eliminate the dissonance between file and object and simplify the choice in other words let the workload decide if you have data in a file format no problem pure can still bring the benefits of simplicity of object at scale to the table so again let the workload inform what the right strategy is not the technical infrastructure now pure course is not alone there are others supporting this multi-protocol strategy and so we asked matt burr why pure or what's so special about you and not surprisingly in addition to the product innovation he went right to pure's business model advantages i mean for example with its evergreen support model which was very disruptive in the marketplace you know frankly pure's entire business disrupted the traditional disk array model which was fundamentally was flawed pure forced the industry to respond and when it achieved escape velocity velocity and pure went public the entire industry had to react and a big part of the pure value prop in addition to this business model innovation that we just discussed is simplicity pure's keep its simple approach coincided perfectly with the ascendancy of cloud where technology organizations needed cloud-like simplicity for certain workloads that were never going to move into the cloud they're going to stay on-prem now i'm going to come back to this but allow me to bring in another concept that garrett and cb really highlighted and that is the complexity of the data pipeline and what do you mean what do i mean by that and why is this important so scott sinclair articulated he implied that the big challenge is organizations their data full but insights are scarce scarce a lot of data not as much insights it takes time too much time to get to those insights so we heard from our guests that the complexity of the data pipeline was a barrier to getting to faster insights now cb bonds shared how he streamlined his data architecture using vertica's eon mode which allowed him to scale compute independently of storage so that brought critical flexibility and improved economics at scale and flashblade of course was the back-end storage for his data warehouse efforts now the reason i think this is so important is that organizations are struggling to get insights from data and the complexity associated with the data pipeline and data life cycles let's face it it's overwhelming organizations and there the answer to this problem is a much longer and different discussion than unifying object and file that's you know i can spend all day talking about that but let's focus narrowly on the part of the issue that is related to file and object so the situation here is that technology has not been serving the business the way it should rather the formula is twisted in the world of data and big data and data architectures the data team is mired in complex technical issues that impact the time to insights now part of the answer is to abstract the underlying infrastructure complexity and create a layer with which the business can interact that accelerates instead of impedes innovation and unifying file and object is a simple example of this where the business team is not blocked by infrastructure nuance like does this data reside in a file or object format can i get to it quickly and inexpensively in a logical way or is the infrastructure in a stovepipe and blocking me so if you think about the prevailing sentiment of how the cloud is evolving to incorporate on premises workloads that are hybrid and configurations that are working across clouds and now out to the edge this idea of an abstraction layer that essentially hides the underlying infrastructure is a trend we're going to see evolve this decade now is uffo the be all end-all answer to solving all of our data pipeline challenges no no of course not but by bringing the simplicity and economics of object together with the ubiquity and performance of file uffo makes it a lot easier it simplifies life organizations that are evolving into digital businesses which by the way is every business so we see this as an evolutionary trend that further simplifies the underlying technology infrastructure and does a better job supporting the data flows for organizations so they don't have to spend so much time worrying about the technology details that add a little value to the business okay so thanks for watching the convergence of file and object and thanks to pure storage for making this program possible this is dave vellante for the cube we'll see you next time [Music] you

>>Yeah. >>Welcome back for our last session of the day how to deliver career making business outcomes with Search and AI. So we're very lucky to be hearing from Canada. Canadian Tire, one of Canada's largest and most successful retailers, have been powered 4.5 1000 employees to maximize the value of data with self service insights. So today we're joining us. We have Yarrow Baturin, who is the manager of Merch analytics and planning to support at Canadian Tire and then also Andrea Frisk, who is the engagement manager manager for thoughts. What s O U R Andrea? Thanks so much for being here. And with >>that, >>I'll pass the mic to you guys. >>Thank you for having us. Um, already, I I think I'll start with an introduction off who I am, what I do. A Canadian entire on what Canadian pair is all about. So, as a manager of Merch analytics at Canadian Tire, I support merchant organization with reporting tools, and then be I platform to enable decision making on a day to day basis. What is? Canadian Tire's Canadian tire is one of the largest retailers in Canada. Um, serving Canadians with a number of lines of business spanning automotive fixing, living, playing and SNG departments. We have a number of banners, including sport check Marks Party City Phl that covers more than 1700 locations. So as an organization, we've got vast variety of different data, whether it's product or loyalty. Now, as the time goes on, the number of asks the number off data points. The complexity of the analysis has been increasing on banned traditional tools. Analytical tools such as Excel Microsoft Access do find job but start hitting their limitations. So we started on the journey of exploring what other B I platforms would be suitable for our needs. And the criteria that we thought about as we started on that journey is to make sure that we enable customization as well as the McCarthy ization of data. What does that mean? That means we wanted to ensure that each one of the end users have ability to create their own versions off the report while having consistency from the data standpoint, we also wanted Thio ensure that they're able to create there at hawks search queries and draw insights based on the desired business needs. As each one of our lines of business as each one of our departments is quite unique in their nature. And this is where thoughts about comes into play. Um, you checked off all the boxes? Um, as current customers, as potential customers, you will discover that this is the tool that allows that at hawks search ability within a matter of seconds and ability to visualize the information and create those curated pin boards for each one of the business units, depending on what the needs are. And now where? I guess well, Andrea will talk a little bit more about how we gained adoption, but the usage was like and how we, uh, implemented the tool successfully in the organization. >>Okay, so I actually used to work for Canadian tire on DSO. During that time, I helped Thio build training and engaging users to sort of really kick start our use cases. Andi, the ongoing process of adopting thought spot through Canadian Tire s 01 of the sort of reasons that we moved into using thought spot was there was a need Thio evolve, um, in order to see the wealth of data that we had coming in. So the existing reporting again. And this is this sort of standard thoughts bought fix is, um, it brings the data toe. Everyone on git makes it more accessible, so you get more out of your data. So we want to provide users with the ability to customize what they could see and personalized three information so that they could get their specific business requirements out of the data rather than relying on the weekly monthly quarterly reporting. That was all usually fairly generic eso without the ability to deep dive in. So this gave the users the agility thio optimize their campaigns, optimize product murder, urgency where products are or where there's maybe supply chain gaps. Andi just really bring this out for trillions of rose to become accessible. Thio the Canadian tire. That's what user base think. That's the slide. >>That's the slight, Um So as Andrea talked about the business use of the particular tool, let's talk a little bit about how we set it up and a wonderful journey of how it's evolved. So we first implemented 5.3 version of that spot on the Falcon server on we've been adding horsepower to it over time. Now mhm. What I want to stress is the importance off the very first, Data said. That goes into the tool toe. Actually engage the users and to gain the adoption and to make sure there is no argument whether the tool is accurate or not. So what we've started with is a key p I marked layer with all the major metrics that we have and all the available permutations and combinations off the dimensions, whether it's a calendar dimension, proud of dimension or, let's say, customer attribute now, as we started with that data set, we wanted to make sure that we're we have the ability to add and the dimensions right. So now, as we're implementing the tool, we're starting to add in more dimension tables to satisfy the needs off our clients if you want to call it that way as they want to evolve their analytics. So we started adding in some of the store attributes we started adding in some of the product attributes on when I refer to a product attributes, let's say, uh, it involves costs and involves prices involved in some of the strategic internal pieces that we're thinking about now as the comprehensive mark contains right now, in our instance, close to five billion records. This is where it becomes the one source of truth for people declaring information against right so as they go in, we also wanted to make sure when they Corey thought spot there, we're really Onley. According one source of data. One source of truth. It became apparent over time, obviously, that more metrics are needed. They might not be all set up in that particular mark. And that's when we went on the journey off implementing some of the new worksheets or some of the new data sets particularly focused on the four looking pieces. And uh, that's where it becomes important to say This is how you gain the interest and keep the interests of the public right. So you're not just implementing a number off data sets all at once and then letting the users be you're implementing pieces and stages. You're keeping the interest thio, the tool relevant. You're keeping, um, the needs of the public in mind. Now, as you can imagine on the Falcon server piece, um, adding in the horsepower capacity might become challenging the mawr. Billions of Rosie erratic eso were actually in the middle of transitioning our environment to azure in snowflake so that we can connect it. Thio embrace capability of thoughts cloud. And that's where I'm looking forward to that in 2021 I truly believe this will enable us Thio increase the speed off adoption Increase the speed of getting insights out of the tool and scale with regards Thio new data sets that we're thinking about implementing as we're continuing our thoughts about journey >>Okay, so how we drove adoption Thio 4500 plus users eso When we first started Thio approach our use case with the merchants within Canadian Tire We had meetings with these users with who are used place is gonna be with and sort of found out. What are they searching for, Where they typically looking at what existing reports are available for them. Andi kind of sought out to like, What are those things where you're pulling this on your own or someone else's pulling this data because it's not accessible yet And we really use that as our foundation to determine one what data we needed to initially bring into the system but also to sort of create those launchpad pin boards that had the base information that the users we're gonna need so that we could twofold, make it easy for them, toe adopt into the tool and also quickly start Thio, deactivate or discontinue those reports. And just like these air now only available in thought spot because with the sort of formatting within thought spot around dates, it's really easy to make this year's report last year report etcetera. Just have everything roll over every month or a recorder s. So that was kind of some of the pre work foundation when we originally did it. But really, it's been a lot of training, a lot of training. So we conducted ah, lot of in person training, obviously pre co vid eso. We've started to train the group that we targeted, which was the merchants and all of the like, surrounding support groups. Eso we had planners going in and training as well, so that everyone who was really closely connected to the merchants I had an idea of what thoughts about what was and how to use it and where the reports were, and so we just sort of rolled it out that way, and then it started to fly like wildfire. Eso the merchants start to engage with supply chain to have conversations, or the merchants were engaging with the vendors to sort of have negotiations about pricing. And they're creating these reports and getting the access to the information so quickly, and they're sharing it out that we had other groups just coming to us asking, How do I get into thoughts about how can I get in on DSO on top of those groups, we also sought out other heavy analytics groups such a supply chain where we felt like they could have the same benefits if they on boarded into thought spot with their data as well on Ben. Just continuing to evolve the training roll out. Um, you know, we continued to engage with the users, >>so >>we had a newsletter briefly Thio, sort of just keep informing users of the new data coming in or when we actually upgraded our system. So the here are the new features that you'll start seeing. We did virtual trainings and maintaining an F A Q document with the incoming questions from the users, and then eventually evolved into a self guided learning so that users that were coming to a group, or maybe we've already done a full rollout could come in and have the opportunity to learn how to use thought spot, have examples that were relevant to the business and really get started. Eso then each use case sort of after our initial started to build into a formula of the things that we needed to have. So you need to understand it. Having SMEs ready and having the database Onda worksheets built out sort of became the step by step path to drive adoption. Um, from an implementation timeline, I think they're saying, Took about two months and about half of that waas Kenny entire figuring out how figuring out our security, how to get the data in on, Do we need the time to set up the environment and get on Falcon? So then, after that initial two months, then each use case that we come through. Generally, we've got users trained and SMEs set up within about 2 to 3 weeks after the data is ingested. It's not obviously, once snowflakes set up on the data starts to get into that and the data feeds in, then you're really just looking at the 2 to 3 weeks because the data is easily connected in, >>um, no. All right, let's talk about some of the use cases. So we started with what data we've implemented. Andrea touched upon what Use a training look like what the back curate that piece wants. Now let's talk a little bit about use cases and how we actually leverage thoughts bought together the insights. So the very first one is ultimately the benefit of the tool to the entire organization. Israel Time insights. To reiterate what Andrea said, we first implemented the tool with our buyers. They're the nucleus of any retail organization as they work with everybody within the company and as the buyer's eyes, Their responsibility to ensure both the procurement and the sales channel, um, stays afloat at the end of the day, right? So they need information on a regular basis. They needed fast. They needed timely, and they needed in a fashion that they choose to digest it. It right? Not every business is the same. Not every individual is the same. They consume digest, analyze information differently. And that's what that's what allows you to dio whether it's the search, whether it's a customized onboard, please now supply chain unexpected things. As Andrea mentioned Irish work a lot of supply chain. What is the goal of supply chain to receive product and to be able to ship that product to the stores Now, as our organization has been growing and is doing extremely well, we've actually published Q three results recently. Um, the aspect off prioritization at D C level becomes very important, And what drives some of that prioritization is the analysis around what the upcoming sales would be for specific products for specific categories. And that's where again thoughts. But is one of the tools that we've utilized recently to set our prioritization logic from both inbound and outbound us. It's right because it gives you most recent results. It gives you most granular results, depending on the business problem that you're trying to tackle. Now let's chat a little bit about covert 19 response, because this one is an extremely interesting case as a pandemic hit back in March. Um, as you can imagine, the everyday life a Canadian entire became as business unusual is our executives referred to it under business unusual. This speed and the intensity of the insights and the analytics has grown exponentially. And the speed and the intensity of the insights is driven by the fact that we were trying Thio ensure that we have the right selection of products for our Canadian customers because that's ultimately bread and butter off all of the retailers is the customers, right? So thoughts bought allowed us to have early trends off both sales and inventory patterns, where, whether we were stalking out of some of the products in specific stories of provinces, whether we saw some of the upload off different lines of business, depending on the region, ality right as pandemic hit, for example, um, gym's closed restaurants closed. So as Canadian pack carries a wide variety of different lines of business, we actually offer a wide selection of exercise equipment and accessories, cycling products as well as the kitchen appliances and kitchen accessories pieces. Right? So all of those items started growing exponentially and in certain areas more than others. And this is where thoughts about comes into play. A typical analysis on what the region ality of the sales has been over the last couple of days, which is lifetime and pandemic terms, um, could have taken days weeks for analysts to ultimately cobbled together an Excel spreadsheet. Meanwhile, it can take a couple of seconds for 12 Korean tosspot set up a PIN board that can be shared through a wide variety of individuals rather than fording that one Excel spreadsheet that gets manipulated every single time. And then you don't get the right inside. So from again merch supply chain covert response aspect of things. That spot has been one of those blessings and one of those amazing tools to utilize and improve the speed off insights, improved the speed of analytics and improve the speed of decision making that's ultimately impacting, then consumer at the store level. So Andrea talked about 4500 users that we have that number of school. But what I owe the recently like to focus on, uh, Andrew and I laughing because I think the last time we've spoken at a larger forum with the fastball community, I think we had only 500 users. That was in the beginning >>of the year in in February, we were aiming to have like 1000 >>exactly. So mission accomplished. So we've got 4500 employees now. Everybody asked me, Yeah, that's a big number, but how many times do people actually log in on a weekly or daily basis? I'm or interested in that statistic? So lately, um, we've had more than 400 users on the weekly basis. What's what's been cool lately is, uh, the exponential growth off ad hoc ways. So throughout October, we've reached a 75,000 ad hoc ways in our system and about 13,000 PIN board views. So why is that's that's significant? We started off, I would say, in January of 2020 when Andrea refers to it, I think we started off with about 40 45,000 ad hoc worries a month. So again, that was cool. But at the end of the day, we were able to thio double that amount as more people migrate to act hawk searches from PIN board views, and that's that's a tremendous phenomena, because that's what that's about is all about. So I touched upon a little bit about exercise and cycling. So these are our quarterly results for Q two, um, that have showed tremendous growth that we did not plan for, that we were able to achieve with, ultimately the individuals who work throughout the organization, whether it's the merch organization or whether it's the supply chain side of the business. But coming together and utilizing a B I platform by tools such a hot spot, we can see triple digit growth results. Eso What's next for us users at Hawks searches? That's fantastic. I would still like to get to more than 1200 people on the weekly basis. The cool number to me is if all of our lifetime users were you were getting into the tool on a weekly basis. That would be cool. And what's proven to be true is ultimately the only way to achieve it is to keep surprising and delighting them and your surprising and delighting them with the functionality of the tool. With more of the relevant content and ultimately data adding in more data, um, is again possible through ET else, and it's possible through pulling that information manually. But it's expensive, expensive not from the sense of monetary value, but it's expensive from the size time, all of those aspects of things So what I'm looking forward to is migrating our platform to azure in snowflake and being able thio scale our insights accordingly. Toe adding more data to Adam or incites more, uh, more individual worksheets and data sets for people to Korea against helps the each one of the individuals learn. Get some of the insights. Helps my team in particular be, well, more well versed in the data that we have existing throughout the organization. Um, and then now Andrea, in touch upon how we scale it further and and how each one of the individuals can become better with this wonderful >>Yeah, soas used a zero mentioned theater hawk searches going up. It's sort of it's a little internal victory because our starting platform had really been thio build the pin boards to replicate what the users were already expecting. So that was sort of how we easily got people in. And then we just cut off the tap Thio, whatever the previous report waas. So it gave them away. Thio get into the tool and understand the information. So now that they're using ad hoc really means they understand the tool. Um, then they they have the data literacy Thio access the information and use it how they need. So that's it's a really cool piece. Um, that worked on for Canadian tire. A very report oriented and heavy organization. So it was a good starting platforms. So seeing those ad hoc searches go up is great. Um, one of the ways that we sort of scaled out of our initial group and I kind of mentioned this earlier I sort of stepped on my own toes here. Um is that once it was a proven success with the merchants and it started to spread through word of mouth and we sought out the analyst teams. Um, we really just kept sort of driving the insights, finding the data and learning more about the pieces of the business. As you would like to think he knows everything about everything. He only knows what he knows. Eso You have to continue to cultivate the internal champions. Um Thio really keep growing the adoption eso find this means that air excited about the possibility of using thought spot and what they can do with it. You need to find those people because they're the ones who are going to be excited to have this rapid access to the information and also to just be able to quickly spend less time telling a user had access it in thought spot. Then they would running the report because euro mentioned we basically hit a curiosity tax, right? You you didn't want to search for things or you didn't want to ask questions of the data because it was so conversed. Um, it was took too much time to get the data. And if you didn't know exactly what you were looking for, it was worse. So, you know, you wouldn't run a query and be like, Oh, that's interesting. Let me let me now run another query of all that information to get more data. Just not. It's not time effective or resource effective. Actually, at the point, eso scaling the adoption is really cultivating those people who are really into it as well. Um, from a personal development perspective, sort of as a user, I mean, one who doesn't like being smartest person in the room on bought spot sort of provides that possibility. Andi, it makes it easier for you to get recognized for delivering results on Dahlia ble insights and sort of driving the business forward. So you know, B b that all star be the Trailblazer with all the answers, and then you can just sort of find out what really like helping the organization realized the power of thought spot on, baby. Make it into a career. >>Amazing. I love love that you've joined us, Andrea. Such a such an amazing create trajectory. No bias that all of my s o heaps of great information there. Thank you both. So much for sharing your story on driving such amazing adoption and the impact that you've been able to make a T organization through. That we've got a couple of minutes remaining. So just enough time for questions. Eso Andrea. Our first questions for you from your experience. What is one thing you would recommend to new thoughts about users? >>Um, yeah, I would say Be curious and creative. Um, there's one phrase that we used a lot in training, which was just mess around in the tool. Um, it's sort of became a catchphrase. It is really true. Just just try and use it. You can't break. It s Oh, just just play around. Try it you're only limitation of what you're gonna find is your own creativity. Um, and the last thing I would say is don't get trapped by trying to replicate things. Is that exactly as they were? B, this is how we've always done it. Isin necessarily The the best move on day isn't necessarily gonna find new insights. Right. So the change forces you thio look at things from a different perspective on defined. Find new value in the data. >>Yeah, absolutely. Sage advice there. Andan another one here for Yaro. So I guess our theme for beyond this year is analytics meets Cloud Open for everyone. So, in your experience, what does What does that mean for you? >>Wonderful question. Yeah. Listen, Angela Okay, so to me, in short, uh, means scale and it means turning Yes. Sorry. No, into a yes. Uh, no, I'm gonna elaborate. Is interest is laughing at me a little bit. That's right. >>I can talk >>Fancy Two. Okay, So scale from the scale perspective Cloud a zai touched upon Throw our conversation on our presentation cloud enables your ability Thio store have more data, have access to more data without necessarily employing a number off PTL developers and going toe a number of security aspect of things in different data sources now turning a no into a yes. What does that mean with more data with more scalability? Um, the analytics possibilities become infinite throughout my career at Canadian Tire. Other organizations, if you don't necessarily have access thio data or you do not have the necessary granularity, you always tell individuals No, it's not possible. I'm not able to deliver that result. And quite often that becomes the norm, saying no becomes the norm. And I think what we're all striving towards here on this call Aziz part the conference is turning that no one say yes on then making a yes a new, uh, standard a new form. Um, as we have more access to the data, more access to the insights. So that would be my answer. >>Love it. Amazing. Well, that kind of brings in into this session. So thank you, everyone for joining us today on did wrap up this dream. Don't miss the upcoming product roadmap eso We'll be sticking around to speak thio some of the speakers you heard earlier today and I'll make the experts round table, and you can absolutely continue the conversation with this life. Q. On Q and A So you've got an opportunity here to ask questions that maybe keep you up at night. Perhaps, but yet stay tuned for the meat. The experts secrets to scaling analytics adoption after the product roadmap session. Thanks everyone. And thank you again for joining us. Guys. Appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thanks. Thanks.

hello everybody and thank you for joining us today at the virtual Vertica BBC 2020 today's breakout session is entitled the road to autonomous database management how Domo is delivering SLA for less my name is su LeClair I'm the director of marketing at Vertica and I'll be your host for this webinar joining me is Ben white senior database engineer at Domo but before we begin I want to encourage you to submit questions or comments during the virtual session you don't have to wait just type your question or comment in the question box below the slides and click Submit there will be a Q&A session at the end of the presentation we'll answer as many questions as we're able to during that time any questions that we aren't able to address or drew our best to answer them offline alternatively you can visit vertical forums to post your questions there after the session our engineering team is planning to join the forum to keep the conversation going also as a reminder you can maximize your screen by clicking the double arrow button in the lower right corner of the slide and yes this virtual session is being recorded and will be available to view on demand this week we'll send you notification as soon as it's ready now let's get started then over to you greetings everyone and welcome to our virtual Vertica Big Data conference 2020 had we been in Boston the song you would have heard playing in the intro would have been Boogie Nights by heatwaves if you've never heard of it it's a great song to fully appreciate that song the way I do you have to believe that I am a genuine database whisperer then you have to picture me at 3 a.m. on my laptop tailing a vertical log getting myself all psyched up now as cool as they may sound 3 a.m. boogie nights are not sustainable they don't scale in fact today's discussion is really all about how Domo engineers the end of 3 a.m. boogie nights again well I am Ben white senior database engineer at Domo and as we heard the topic today the road to autonomous database management how Domo is delivering SLA for less the title is a mouthful in retrospect I probably could have come up with something snazzy er but it is I think honest for me the most honest word in that title is Road when I hear that word it evokes for me thoughts of the journey and how important it is to just enjoy it when you truly embrace the journey often you look up and wonder how did we get here where are we and of course what's next right now I don't intend to come across this too deep so I'll submit there's nothing particularly prescient and simply noticing the elephant in the room when it comes to database economy my opinion is then merely and perhaps more accurately my observation the office context imagine a place where thousands and thousands of users submit millions of ad-hoc queries every hour now imagine someone promised all these users that we could deliver bi leverage at cloud scale in record time I know what many of you should be thinking who in the world would do such a thing of course that news was well received and after the cheers from executives and business analysts everywhere and chance of Keep Calm and query on finally started to subside someone that turns an ass that's possible we can do that right except this is no imaginary place this is a very real challenge we face the demo through imaginative engineering demo continues to redefine what's possible the beautiful minds at Domo truly embrace the database engineering paradigm that one size does not fit all that little philosophical nugget is one I would pick up while reading the white papers and books of some guy named stone breaker so to understand how I and by extension Domo came to truly value analytic database administration look no further than that philosophy and what embracing it would mean it meant really that while others were engineering skyscrapers we would endeavor to build Datta neighborhoods with a diverse kapala G of database configuration this is where our journey at Domo really gets under way without any purposeful intent to define our destination not necessarily thinking about database as a service or anything like that we had planned this ecosystem of clusters capable of efficiently performing varied workloads we achieve this with custom configurations for node count resource pool configuration parameters etc but it also meant concerning ourselves with the unattended consequences of our ambition the impact of increased DDL activities on the catalog system overhead in general what would be the management requirements of an ever-evolving infrastructure we would be introducing multiple points of failure what are the advantages the disadvantages those types of discussions and considerations really help to define what would be the basic characteristics of our system the database itself needed to be trivial redundant potentially ephemeral customizable and above all scalable and we'll get more into that later with this knowledge of what we were getting into automation would have to be an integral part of development one might even say automation will become the first point of interest on our journey now using popular DevOps tools like saltstack terraform ServiceNow everything would be automated I mean it discluded everything from larger multi-step tasks like database designs database cluster creation and reboots to smaller routine tasks like license updates move-out and projection refreshes all of this cool automation certainly made it easier for us to respond to problems within the ecosystem these methods alone still if our database administration reactionary and reacting to an unpredictable stream of slow query complaints is not a good way to manage a database in fact that's exactly how three a.m. Boogie Nights happen and again I understand there was a certain appeal to them but ultimately managing that level of instability is not sustainable earlier I mentioned an elephant in the room which brings us to the second point of interest on our road to autonomy analytics more specifically analytic database administration why our analytics so important not just in this case but generally speaking I mean we have a whole conference set up to discuss it domo itself is self-service analytics the answer is curiosity analytics is the method in which we feed the insatiable human curiosity and that really is the impetus for analytic database administration analytics is also the part of the road I like to think of as a bridge the bridge if you will from automation to autonomy and with that in mind I say to you my fellow engineers developers administrators that as conductors of the symphony of data we call analytics we have proven to be capable producers of analytic capacity you take pride in that and rightfully so the challenge now is to become more conscientious consumers in some way shape or form many of you already employ some level of analytics to inform your decisions far too often we are using data that would be categorized as nagging perhaps you're monitoring slow queries in the management console better still maybe you consult the workflows analyzing how about a logging and alerting system like sumo logic if you're lucky you do have demo where you monitor and alert on query metrics like this all examples of analytics that help inform our decisions being a Domo the incorporation of analytics into database administration is very organic in other words pretty much company mandated as a company that provides BI leverage a cloud scale it makes sense that we would want to use our own product could be better at the business of doma adoption of stretches across the entire company and everyone uses demo to deliver insights into the hands of the people that need it when they need it most so it should come as no surprise that we have from the very beginning use our own product to make informed decisions as it relates to the application back engine in engineering we call it our internal system demo for Domo Domo for Domo in its current iteration uses a rules-based engine with elements through machine learning to identify and eliminate conditions that cause slow query performance pulling data from a number of sources including our own we could identify all sorts of issues like global query performance actual query count success rate for instance as a function of query count and of course environment timeout errors this was a foundation right this recognition that we should be using analytics to be better conductors of curiosity these types of real-time alerts were a legitimate step in the right direction for the engineering team though we saw ourselves in an interesting position as far as demo for demo we started exploring the dynamics of using the platform to not only monitor an alert of course but to also triage and remediate just how much economy could we give the application what were the pros and cons of that Trust is a big part of that equation trust in the decision-making process trust that we can mitigate any negative impacts and Trust in the very data itself still much of the data comes from systems that interacted directly and in some cases in directly with the database by its very nature much of the data was past tense and limited you know things that had already happened without any reference or correlation to the condition the mayor to those events fortunately the vertical platform holds a tremendous amount of information about the transaction it had performed its configurations the characteristics of its objects like tables projections containers resource pools etc this treasure trove of metadata is collected in the vertical system tables and the appropriately named data collector tables as a version 9 3 there are over 190 tables that define the system tables while the data collector is the collection of 215 components a rich collection can be found in the vertical system tables these tables provide a robust stable set of views that let you monitor information about your system resources background processes workload and performance allowing you to more efficiently profile diagnose and correlate historical data such as low streams query profiles to pool mover operations and more here you see a simple query to retrieve the names and descriptions of the system tables and an example of some of the tables you'll find the system tables are divided into two schemas the catalog schema contains information about persistent objects and the monitor schema tracks transient system States most of the tables you find there can be grouped into the following areas system information system resources background processes and workload and performance the Vertica data collector extends system table functionality by gathering and retaining aggregating information about your database collecting the data collector mixes information available in system table a moment ago I show you how you get a list of the system tables in their description but here we see how to get that information for the data collector tables with data from the data collecting tables in the system tables we now have enough data to analyze that we would describe as conditional or leading data that will allow us to be proactive in our system management this is a big deal for Domo and particularly Domo for demo because from here we took the critical next step where we analyze this data for conditions we know or suspect lead to poor performance and then we can suggest the recommended remediation really for the first time we were using conditional data to be proactive in a database management in record time we track many of the same conditions the Vertica support analyzes via scrutinize like tables with too many production or non partition fact tables which can negatively affect query performance and life in vertical in viral suggests if the table has a data a time step column you recommend the partitioning by the month we also can track catalog sizes percentage of total memory and alert thresholds and trigger remediations requests per hour is a very important metric in determining when a trigger are scaling solution tracking memory usage over time allows us to adjust resource pool parameters to achieve the optimal performance for the workload of course the workload analyzer is a great example of analytic database administration I mean from here one can easily see the logical next step where we were able to execute these recommendations manually or automatically be of some configuration parameter now when I started preparing for this discussion this slide made a lot of sense as far as the logical next iteration for the workload analyzing now I left it in because together with the next slide it really illustrates how firmly Vertica has its finger on the pulse of the database engineering community in 10 that OS management console tada we have the updated work lies will load analyzer we've added a column to show tuning commands the management console allows the user to select to run certain recommendations currently tuning commands that are louder and alive statistics but you can see where this is going for us using Domo with our vertical connector we were able to then pull the metadata from all of our clusters we constantly analyze that data for any number of known conditions we build these recommendations into script that we can then execute immediately the actions or we can save it to a later time for manual execution and as you would expect those actions are triggered by thresholds that we can set from the moment nyan mode was released to beta our team began working on a serviceable auto-scaling solution the elastic nature of AI mode separated store that compute clearly lent itself to our ecosystems requirement for scalability in building our system we worked hard to overcome many of the obstacles they came with the more rigid architecture of enterprise mode but with the introduction is CRM mode we now have a practical way of giving our ecosystem at Domo the architectural elasticity our model requires using analytics we can now scale our environment to match demand what we've built is a system that scales without adding management overhead or our necessary cost all the while maintaining optimal performance well we're really this is just our journey up to now and which begs the question what's next for us we expand the use of Domo for Domo within our own application stack maybe more importantly we continue to build logic into the tools we have by bringing machine learning and artificial intelligence to our analysis and decision making really do to further illustrate those priorities we announced the support for Amazon sage maker autopilot at our demo collusive conference just a couple of weeks ago for vertical the future must include in database economy the enhanced capabilities in the new management console to me are clear nod to that future in fact with a streamline and lightweight database design process all the pieces should be in place versions deliver economists database management itself we'll see well I would like to thank you for listening and now of course we will have a Q&A session hopefully very robust thank you [Applause]

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with top leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante, and welcome to the Vertica Big Data Conference virtual. This is our digital presentation, wall to wall coverage actually, of the Vertica Big Data Conference. And with me is Jeff Healy, who directs product marketing at Vertica. Jeff, good to see you. >> Good to see you, Dave. Thanks for the opportunity to chat. >> You're very welcome Now I'm excited about the products that you guys announced and you're hardcore into product marketing, but we're going to talk about the Vertica Big Data Conference. It's been a while since you guys had this. Obviously, new owner, new company, some changes, but that new company Microfocus has announced that it's investing, I think the number was $70 million into two areas. One was security and the other, of course, was Vertica. So we're really excited to be back at the virtual Big Data Conference. And let's hear it from you, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, Dave, thanks. And we love having theCUBE at all of these events. We're thrilled to have the next Vertica Big Data Conference. Actually it was a physical event, we're moving it online. We know it's going to be a big hit because we've been doing this for some time particularly with two of the webcast series we have every month. One is under the Hood Webcast Series, which is led by our engineers and the other is what we call a Data Disruptors Webcast Series, which is led by all customers. So we're really confident this is going to be a big hit we've seen the registration spike. We just hit 1,000 and we're planning on having about 1,000 at the physical event. It's growing and growing. We're going to see those big numbers and it's not going to be a one time thing. We're going to keep the conversation going, make sure there's plenty of best practices learning throughout the year. >> We've been at all the big BDCs and the first one's were really in the heart of the Big Data Movement, really exciting time and the interesting thing about this event is it was always sort of customers talking to customers. There wasn't a lot of commercials, an intimate event. Of course I loved it because it was in our hometown. But I think you're trying to carry that theme obviously into the digital sphere. Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, Dave, absolutely right. Of course, nothing replaces face to face, but everything that you just mentioned that makes it special about the Big Data Conference, and you know, you guys have been there throughout and shown great support in talking to so many customers and leaders and what have you. We're doing the same thing all right. So we had about 40 plus sessions planned for the physical event. We're going to run half of those and we're not going to lose anything though, that's the key point. So what makes the Vertica Big Data Conference really special is that the only presenters that are allowed to present are either engineers, Vertica engineers, or best practices engineers and then customers. Customers that actually use the product. There's no sales or marketing pitches or anything like that. And I'll tell you as far as the customer line up that we have, we've got five or six already lined up as part of those 20 sessions, customers like Uber, customers like the Trade Desk, customers like Phillips talking about predictive maintenance, so list goes on and on. You won't want to miss it if you're on the fence or if you're trying to figure out if you want to register for this event. Best part about it, it's all free, and if you can't attend it live, it will be live Q&A chat on every single one of those sessions, we promise we'll answer every question if we don't get it live, as we always do. They'll all be available on demand. So no reason not to register and attend or watch later. >> Thinking about the content over the years, in the early days of the Big Data Conference, of course Vertica started before the whole Big Data Conference meme really took off and then as it took off, plugged right into it, but back then the discussion was a lot of what do I do with big data, Gartner's three Vs and how do I wrangle it all, and what's the best approach and this stuff is, Hadoop is really complicated. Of course Vertica was an alternative to RDBMS that really couldn't scale or give that type of performance for analytical databases so you had your foot in that door. But now the conversation that's interesting your theme, it's win big with data. Of course, the physical event was at the Encore, which is the new Casino in Boston. But my point is, the conversation is no longer about, how to wrangle all this data, you know how to lower the cost of storing this data, how to make it go faster, and actually make it work. It's really about how to turn data into insights and transform your organizations and quote and quote, win with big data. >> That's right. Yeah, that's great point, Dave. And that's why I mean, we chose the title really, because it's about our customers and what they're able to do with our platform. And it's we know, it's not just one platform, all of the ecosystem, all of our incredible partners. Yeah it's funny when I started with the organization about seven years ago, we were closing lots of deals, and I was following up on case studies and it was like, Okay, why did you choose Vertica? Well, the queries went fast. Okay, so what does that mean for your business? We knew we're kind of in the early adopter stage. And we were disrupting the data warehouse market. Now we're talking to our customers that their volumes are growing, growing and growing. And they really have these analytical use cases again, talk to the value at the entire organization is gaining from it. Like that's the difference between now and a few years ago, just like you were saying, when Vertica disrupted the database market, but also the data warehouse market, you can speak to our customers and they can tell you exactly what's happening, how it's moving the needle or really advancing the entire organization, regardless of the analytical use case, whether it's an internet of things around predictive maintenance, or customer behavior analytics, they can speak confidently of it more than just, hey, our queries went faster. >> You know, I've mentioned before the Micro Focus investment, I want to drill into that a bit because the Vertica brand stands alone. It's a Micro Focus company, but Vertica has its own sort of brand awareness. The reason I've mentioned that is because if you go back to the early days of MPP Database, there was a spate of companies, startups that formed. And many if not all of those got acquired, some lived on with the Codebase, going into the cloud, but generally speaking, many of those brands have gone away Vertica stays. And so my point is that we've seen Vertica have staying power throughout, I think it's a function of the architecture that Stonebraker originally envisioned, you guys were early on the market had a lot of good customer traction, and you've been very responsive to a lot of the trends. Colin Mahony will talk about how you adopted and really embrace cloud, for example, and different data formats. And so you've really been able to participate in a lot of the new emerging waves that have come out to the market. And I would imagine some of that's cultural. I wonder if you could just address that in the context of BDC. >> Oh, yeah, absolutely. You hit on all the key points here, Dave. So a lot of changes in the industry. We're in the hottest industry, the tech industry right now. There's lots of competition. But one of the things we'll say in terms of, Hey, who do you compete with? You compete with these players in the cloud, open source alternatives, traditional enterprise data warehouses. That's true, right. And one of the things we've stayed true within calling is really kind of led the charge for the organization is that we know who we are right. So we're an analytical database platform. And we're constantly just working on that one sole Source Code base, to make sure that we don't provide a bunch of different technologies and databases, and different types of technologies need to stitch together. This platform just has unbelievable universal capabilities from everything from running analytics at scale, to in Database Machine Learning with the different approach to all different types of deployment models that are supported, right. We don't go to our companies and we say, yeah, we take care of all your problems but you have to stitch together all these different types of technologies. It's all based on that core Vertica engine, and we've expanded it to meet all these market needs. So Colin knows and what he believes and what he tells the team what we lead with, is that it lead with that one core platform that can address all these analytical initiatives. So we know who we are, we continue to improve on it, regardless of the pivots and the drastic measures that some of the other competitors have taken. >> You know, I got to ask you, so we're in the middle of this global pandemic with Coronavirus and COVID-19, and things change daily by the hour sometimes by the minute. I mean, every day you get up to something new. So you see a lot of forecasts, you see a lot of probability models, best case worst case likely case even though nobody really knows what that likely case looks like, So there's a lot of analytics going on and a lot of data that people are crunching new data sources come in every day. Are you guys participating directly in that, specifically your customers? Are they using your technology? You can't use a traditional data warehouse for this. It's just you know, too slow to asynchronous, the process is cumbersome. What are you seeing in the customer base as it relates to this crisis? >> Sure, well, I mean naturally, we have a lot of customers that are healthcare technology companies, companies, like Cerner companies like Philips, right, that are kind of leading the charge here. And of course, our whole motto has always been, don't throw away any the data, there's value in that data, you don't have to with Vertica right. So you got petabyte scale types of analytics across many of our customers. Again, just a few years ago, we called the customers a petabyte club. Now a majority of our large enterprise software companies are approaching those petabyte volumes. So it's important to be able to run those analytics at that scale and that volume. The other thing we've been seeing from some of our partners is really putting that analytics to use with visualizations. So one of the customers that's going to be presenting as part of the Vertica Big Data conferences is Domo. Domo has a really nice stout demo around be able to track the Coronavirus the outbreak and how we're getting care and things like that in a visual manner you're seeing more of those. Well, Domo embeds Vertica, right. So that's another customer of ours. So think of Vertica is that embedded analytical engine to support those visualizations so that just anyone in the world can track this. And hopefully as we see over time, cases go down we overcome this. >> Talk a little bit more about that. Because again, the BDC has always been engineers presenting to audiences, you guys have a lot of you just mentioned the demo by Domo, you have a lot of brand names that we've interviewed on theCUBE before, but maybe you could talk a little bit more about some of the customers that are going to be speaking at the virtual event, and what people can expect. >> Sure, yeah, absolutely. So we've got Uber that's presenting just a quick fact around Uber. Really, the analytical data warehouse is all Vertica, right. And it works very closely with Open Source or what have you. Just to quick stat on on Uber, 14 million rides per day, what Uber is able to do is connect the riders with the drivers so that they can determine the appropriate pricing. So Uber is going to be a great session that everyone will want to tune in on that. Others like the Trade Desk, right massive Ad Tech company 10 billion ad auctions daily, it may even be per second or per minute, the amount of scale and analytical volume that they have, that they are running the queries across, it can really only be accomplished with a few platforms in the world and that's Vertica that's another a hot one is with the Trade Desk. Philips is going to be presenting IoT analytical workloads we're seeing more and more of those across not only telematics, which you would expect within automotive, but predictive maintenance that cuts across all the original manufacturers and Philips has got a long history of being able to handle sensor data to be able to apply to those business cases where you can improve customer satisfaction and lower costs related to services. So around their MRI machines and predictive maintenance initiative, again, Vertica is kind of that heartbeat, that analytical platform that's driving those initiatives So list goes on and on. Again, the conversation is going to continue with the Data Disruptors in the Under Hood webcast series. Any customers that weren't able to present and we had a few that just weren't able to do it, they've already signed up for future months. So we're already booked out six months out more and more customer stories you're going to hear from Vertica.com. >> Awesome, and we're going to be sharing some of those on theCUBE as well, the BDC it's always been intimate event, one of my favorites, a lot of substance and I'm sure the online version, the virtual digital version is going to be the same. Jeff Healey, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and give us a little preview of what we can expect at the Vertica BDC 2020. >> You bet. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, Dave, thanks to you and the whole CUBE team. Appreciate it >> Alright, and thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right here for all the coverage of the virtual Big Data conference 2020. You're watching theCUBE. I'm Dave Vellante, we'll see you soon

(electronic music) >> From Santa Clara, California in the heart of Silicon Valley, its theCUBE. Covering Altitude 2020, brought to you by Aviatrix. (electronic music) >> Female pilot: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, we will soon be taking off on our way to altitude. (upbeat music) Please keep your seat belts fastened and remain in your seat. We will be experiencing turbulence, until we are above the clouds. (thunder blasting) (electronic music) (seatbelt alert sounds) Ladies and gentlemen, we are now cruising at altitude. Sit back and enjoy the ride. (electronic music) >> Female pilot: Altitude is a community of thought leaders and pioneers, cloud architects and enlightened network engineers, who have individually and are now collectively, leading their own IT teams and the industry. On a path to lift cloud networking above the clouds. Empowering enterprise IT to architect, design and control their own cloud network, regardless of the turbulent clouds beneath them. It's time to gain altitude. Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Mullaney, president and CEO of Aviatrix. The leader of multi-cloud networking. (electronic music) (audience clapping) >> Steve: All right. (audience clapping) Good morning everybody, here in Santa Clara as well as to the millions of people watching the livestream worldwide. Welcome to Altitude 2020, all right. So, we've got a fantastic event, today, I'm really excited about the speakers that we have today and the experts that we have and really excited to get started. So, one of the things I wanted to share was this is not a one-time event. This is not a one-time thing that we're going to do. Sorry for the Aviation analogy, but, you know, Sherry Wei, aviatrix means female pilot so everything we do has an aviation theme. This is a take-off, for a movement. This isn't an event, this is a take-off of a movement. A multi-cloud networking movement and community that we're inviting all of you to become part of. And why we're doing that, is we want to enable enterprises to rise above the clouds, so to speak and build their network architecture, regardless of which public cloud they're using. Whether it's one or more of these public clouds. So the good news, for today, there's lots of good news but this is one good news, is we don't have any PowerPoint presentations, no marketing speak. We know that marketing people have their own language. We're not using any of that, and no sales pitches, right? So instead, what are we doing? We're going to have expert panels, we've got Simon Richard, of Gartner here. We've got ten different network architects, cloud architects, real practitioners that are going to share their best practices and their real world experiences on their journey to the multi-cloud. So, before we start, everybody know what today is? In the U.S., it's Super Tuesday. I'm not going to get political, but Super Tuesday there was a bigger, Super Tuesday that happened 18 months ago. And Aviatrix employees know what I'm talking about. Eighteen months ago, on a Tuesday, every enterprise said, "I'm going to go to the cloud". And so what that was, was the Cambrian explosion, for cloud, for the enterprise. So, Frank Cabri, you know what a Cambrian explosion is. He had to look it up on Google. 500 million years ago, what happened, there was an explosion of life where it went from very simple single-cell organisms to very complex, multi-cell organisms. Guess what happened 18 months ago, on a Tuesday, I don't really know why, but every enterprise, like I said, all woke up that day and said, "Now I'm really going to go to cloud" and that Cambrian explosion of cloud meant that I'm moving from a very simple, single cloud, single-use case, simple environment, to a very complex, multi-cloud, complex use case environment. And what we're here today, is we're going to go undress that and how do you handle those, those complexities? And, when you look at what's happening, with customers right now, this is a business transformation, right? People like to talk about transitions, this is a transformation and it's actually not just a technology transformation, it's a business transformation. It started from the CEO and the Boards of enterprise customers where they said, "I have an existential threat to the survival of my company." If you look at every industry, who they're worried about is not the other 30-year-old enterprise. What they're worried about is the three year old enterprise that's leveraging cloud, that's leveraging AI, and that's where they fear that they're going to actually wiped out, right? And so, because of this existential threat, this is CEO led, this is Board led, this is not technology led, it is mandated in the organizations. We are going to digitally transform our enterprise, because of this existential threat and the movement to cloud is going to enable us to go do that. And so, IT is now put back in charge. If you think back just a few years ago, in cloud, it was led by DevOps, it was led by the applications and it was, like I said, before the Cambrian explosion, it was very simple. Now, with this Cambrian explosion, an enterprise is getting very serious and mission critical. They care about visibility, they care about control, they care about compliance, conformance, everything, governance. IT is in charge and that's why we're here today to discuss that. So, what we're going to do today, is much of things but we're going to validate this journey with customers. >> Steve: Did they see the same thing? We're going to validate the requirements for multi-cloud because, honestly, I've never met an enterprise that is not going to be multicloud. Many are one cloud today but they all say, " I need to architect my network for multiple clouds", because that's just what, the network is there to support the applications and the applications will run in whatever cloud it runs best in and you have to be prepared for that. The second thing is, is architecture. Again, with IT in charge, you, architecture matters. Whether its your career, whether its how you build your house, it doesn't matter. Horrible architecture, your life is horrible forever. Good architecture, your life is pretty good. So, we're going to talk about architecture and how the most fundamental and critical part of that architecture and that basic infrastructure is the network. If you don't get that right, nothing works, right? Way more important than compute. Way more important than storage. Network is the foundational element of your infrastructure. Then we're going to talk about day two operations. What does that mean? Well day one is one day of your life, where you wire things up they do and beyond. I tell everyone in networking and IT -- it's every day of your life. And if you don't get that right, your life is bad forever. And so things like operations, visibility, security, things like that, how do I get my operations team to be able to handle this in an automated way because it's not just about configuring it in the cloud, it's actually about how do I operationalize it? And that's a huge benefit that we bring as Aviatrix. And then the last thing we're going to talk and it's the last panel we have, I always sayyou can't forget about the humans, right? So all this technology, all these things that we're doing, it's always enabled by the humans. At the end of the day, if the humans fight it, it won't get deployed. And we have a massive skills gap, in cloud and we also have a massive skills shortage. You have everyone in the world trying to hire cloud network architects, right? There's just not enough of them going around. So, at Aviatrix, we said as leaders do, "We're going to help address that issue and try to create more people." We created a program, what we call the ACE Program, again, aviation theme, it stands for Aviatrix Certified Engineer. Very similar to what Cisco did with CCIEs where Cisco taught you about IP networking, a little bit of Cisco, we're doing the same thing, we're going to teach network architects about multicloud networking and architecture and yeah, you'll get a little bit of Aviatrix training in there, but this is the missing element for people's careers and also within their organizations. So we're going to go talk about that. So, great, great event, great show. We're going to try to keep it moving. I next want to introduce, my host, he is the best in the business, you guys have probably seen him multiple, many times, he is the co-CEO and co founder of theCUBE, John Furrier. (audience clapping) (electronic music) >> John: Okay, awesome, great speech there, awesome. >> Yeah. >> I totally agree with everything you said about the explosion happening and I'm excited, here at the heart of silicon valley to have this event. It's a special digital event with theCUBE and Aviatrix, where we're live-streaming to, millions of people, as you said, maybe not a million. >> Maybe not a million. (laughs) Really to take this program to the world and this is really special for me, because multi-cloud is the hottest wave in cloud. And cloud-native networking is fast becoming the key engine, of the innovations, so we got an hour and a half of action-packed programming. We have a customer panel. Two customer panels. Before that Gartner's going to come out, talk about the industry. We have global system integrators, that will talk about, how their advising and building these networks and cloud native networking. And then finally the ACE's, the Aviatrix Certified Engineers, are going to talk more about their certifications and the expertise needed. So, let's jump right in, let's ask, Simon Richard to come on stage, from Gartner. We'll kick it all off. (electronic music) (clapping) >> John: Hi, can I help you. Okay, so kicking things off, getting started. Gartner, the industry experts on cloud. Really kind of more, cue your background. Talk about your background before you got to Gartner? >> Simon: Before being at Gartner, I was a chief network architect, of a Fortune 500 company, that with thousands of sites over the world and I've been doing everything in IT from a C programmer, in the 90, to a security architect, to a network engineer, to finally becoming a network analyst. >> So you rode the wave. Now you're covering the marketplace with hybrid cloud and now moving quickly to multi-cloud, is really what everyone is talking about. >> Yes. >> Cloud-native's been discussed, but the networking piece is super important. How do you see that evolving? >> Well, the way we see Enterprise adapting, cloud. The first thing you do about networking, the initial phases they either go in a very ad hoc way. Is usually led by none IT, like a shadow IT, or application people, sometime a DevOps team and it just goes as, it's completely unplanned. They create VPC's left and right with different account and they create mesh to manage them and they have Direct Connect or Express Route to any of them. So that's the first approach and on the other side. again within our first approach you see what I call, the lift and shift. Where we see like enterprise IT trying to, basically replicate what they have in a data center, in the Cloud. So they spend a lot of time planning, doing Direct Connect, putting Cisco routers and F5 and Citrix and any checkpoint, Palo Alto device, that in a sense are removing that to the cloud. >> I got to ask you, the aha moment is going to come up a lot, in one our panels, is where people realize, that it's a multi-cloud world. I mean, they either inherit clouds, certainly they're using public cloud and on-premises is now more relevant than ever. When's that aha moment? That you're seeing, where people go, "Well I got to get my act together and get on this cloud." >> Well the first, right, even before multi-cloud. So there is two approach's. The first one, like the adult way doesn't scare. At some point IT has to save them, 'cause they don't think about the tools, they don't think about operation, they have a bunch of VPC and multiple cloud. The other way, if you do the lift and shift way, they cannot take any advantages of the cloud. They lose elasticity, auto-scaling, pay by the drink. All these agility features. So they both realize, okay, neither of these ways are good, so I have to optimize that. So I have to have a mix of what I call, the cloud native services, within each cloud. So they start adapting, like all the AWS Construct, Azure Construct or Google Construct and that's what I call the optimal phase. But even that they realize, after that, they are all very different, all these approaches different, the cloud are different. Identities is constantly, difficult to manage across clouds. I mean, for example, anybody who access' accounts, there's subscription, in Azure and GCP, their projects. It's a real mess, so they realized, well I don't really like constantly use the cloud product and every cloud, that doesn't work. So I have, I'm going multi-cloud, I like to abstract all of that. I still want to manage the cloud from an EPI point of view, I don't necessarily want to bring my incumbent data center products, but I have to do that and in a more EPI driven cloud environment. >> So, the not scaling piece that you where mentioning, that's because there's too many different clouds? >> Yes. >> That's the least they are, so what are they doing? What are they, building different development teams? Is it software? What's the solution? >> Well, the solution is to start architecting the cloud. That's the third phase. I called that the multi-cloud architect phase, where they have to think about abstraction that works across cloud. Fact, even across one cloud it might not scale as well, If you start having like ten thousand security agreement, anybody who has that doesn't scale. You have to manage that. If you have multiple VPC, it doesn't scale. You need a third-party, identity provider. In variously scales within one cloud, if you go multiple cloud, it gets worse and worse. >> Steve, weigh in here. What's your thoughts? >> I thought we said this wasn't going to be a sales pitch for Aviatrix. (laughter) You just said exactly what we do, so anyway, that's a joke. What do you see in terms of where people are, in that multi-cloud? So, like lot of people, you know, everyone I talk to, started at one cloud, right, but then they look and then say okay but I'm now going to move to Azure and I'm going to move to... (trails off) Do you see a similar thing? >> Well, yes. They are moving but there's not a lot of application, that uses three cloud at once, they move one app in Azure, one app in AWS and one app in Google. That's what we see so far. >> Okay, yeah, one of the mistakes that people think, is they think multi-cloud. No one is ever going to go multi-cloud, for arbitrage. They're not going to go and say, well, today I might go into Azure, 'cause I get a better rate on my instance. Do you agree? That's never going to happen. What I've seen with enterprise, is I'm going to put the workload in the app, the app decides where it runs best. That may be Azure, maybe Google and for different reasons and they're going to stick there and they're not going to move. >> Let me ask you guys-- >> But the infrastructure, has to be able to support, from a networking team. >> Yes. >> Be able to do that. Do you agree with that? >> Yes, I agree. And one thing is also very important, is connecting to the cloud, is kind of the easiest thing. So, the wide area network part of the cloud, connectivity to the cloud is kind of simple. >> Steve: I agree. >> IP's like VPN, Direct Connect, Express Route. That's the simple part, what's difficult and even the provisioning part is easy. You can use Terraform and create VPC's and Vnet's across your three cloud provider. >> Steve: Right. >> What's difficult is that they choose the operation. So we'll define day two operation. What does that actually mean? >> Its just the day to day operations, after you know, the natural, lets add an app, lets add a server, lets troubleshoot a problem. >> Something changes, now what do you do? >> So what's the big concerns? I want to just get back to the cloud native networking, because everyone kind of knows what cloud native apps are. That's been the hot trend. What is cloud native networking? How do you guys, define that? Because that seems to be the hardest part of the multi-cloud wave that's coming, is cloud native networking. >> Well there's no, you know, official Gartner definition but I can create one on the spot. >> John: Do it. (laughter) >> I just want to leverage the Cloud Construct and the cloud EPI. I don't want to have to install, like a... (trails off) For example, the first version was, let's put a virtual router that doesn't even understand the cloud environment. >> Right. If I have if I have to install a virtual machine, it has to be cloud aware. It has to understand the security group, if it's a router. It has to be programmable, to the cloud API. And understand the cloud environment. >> And one thing I hear a lot from either CSO's, CIO's or CXO's in general, is this idea of, I'm definitely not going API. So, its been an API economy. So API is key on that point, but then they say. Okay, I need to essentially have the right relationship with my suppliers, aka you called it above the clouds. So the question is... What do I do from an architectural standpoint? Do I just hire more developers and have different teams, because you mentioned that's a scale point. How do you solve this problem of, okay, I got AWS, I got GCP, or Azure, or whatever. Do I just have different teams or do I just expose EPI's? Where is that optimization? Where's the focus? >> Well, I think what you need, from a network point of view is a way, a control plane across the three clouds. And be able to use the API's of the cloud, to build networks but also to troubleshoot them and do day to day operation. So you need a view across the three clouds, that takes care of routing, connectivity. >> Steve: Performance. >> John: That's the Aviatrix plugin, right there. >> Steve: Yeah. So, how do you see, so again, your Gartner, you see the industry. You've been a network architect. How do you see this this playing out? What are the legacy incumbent client server, On Prem networking people, going to do? >> Well they need to.. >> Versus people like a Aviatrix? How do you see that playing out? >> Well obviously, all the incumbents, like Arista, Cisco, Juniper, NSX. >> Steve: Right. >> They want to basically do the lift and shift part, they want to bring, and you know, VMware want to bring in NSX on the cloud, they call that "NSX everywhere" and Cisco want to bring in ACI to the cloud, they call that "ACI Anywhere". So, everyone's.. (trails off) And then there's CloudVision from Arista, and Contrail is in the cloud. So, they just want to bring the management plane, in the cloud, but it's still based, most of them, is still based on putting a VM in them and controlling them. You extend your management console to the cloud, that's not truly cloud native. >> Right. >> Cloud native you almost have to build it from scratch. >> We like to call that cloud naive. >> Cloud naive, yeah. >> So close, one letter, right? >> Yes. >> That was a big.. (slurs) Reinvent, take the T out of Cloud Native. It's Cloud Naive. (laughter) >> That went super viral, you guys got T-shirts now. I know you're loving that. >> Steve: Yeah. >> But that really, ultimately, is kind of a double-edged sword. You can be naive on the architecture side and ruleing that. And also suppliers or can be naive. So how would you define who's naive and who's not? >> Well, in fact, their evolving as well, so for example, in Cisco, it's a little bit more native than other ones, because there really is, "ACI in the cloud", you can't really figure API's out of the cloud. NSX is going that way and so is Arista, but they're incumbent, they have their own tools, its difficult for them. They're moving slowly, so it's much easier to start from scratch. Even you, like, you know, a network company that started a few years ago. There's only really two, Aviatrix was the first one, they've been there for at least three or four years. >> Steve: Yeah. >> And there's other one's, like Akira, for example that just started. Now they're doing more connectivity, but they want to create an overlay network, across the cloud and start doing policies and things. Abstracting all the clouds within one platform. >> So, I got to ask you. I interviewed an executive at VMware, Sanjay Poonen, he said to me at RSA last week. Oh, there'll only be two networking vendors left, Cisco and VMware. (laughter) >> What's you're response to that? Obviously when you have these waves, these new brands that emerge, like Aviatrix and others. I think there'll be a lot of startups coming out of the woodwork. How do you respond to that comment? >> Well there's still a data center, there's still, like a lot, of action on campus and there's the wan. But from the cloud provisioning and cloud networking in general, I mean, they're behind I think. You know, you don't even need them to start with, you can, if you're small enough, you can just keep.. If you have AWS, you can use the AWS construct, they have to insert themselves, I mean, they're running behind. From my point of view. >> They are, certainly incumbents. I love the term Andy Jess uses at Amazon web services. He uses "Old guard, new guard", to talk about the industry. What does the new guard have to do? The new brands that are emerging. Is it be more DevOp's oriented? Is it NetSec ops? Is it NetOps? Is it programmability? These are some of the key discussions we've been having. What's your view, on how you see this programmability? >> The most important part is, they have to make the network simple for the Dev teams. You cannot make a phone call and get a Vline in two weeks anymore. So if you move to the cloud, you have to make that cloud construct as simple enough, so that for example, a Dev team could say, "Okay, I'm going to create this VPC, but this VPC automatically associates your account, you cannot go out on the internet. You have to go to the transit VPC, so there's lot of action in terms of, the IAM part and you have to put the control around them to. So to make it as simple as possible. >> You guys, both. You're the CEO of Aviatrix, but also you've got a lot of experience, going back to networking, going back to the, I call it the OSI days. For us old folks know what that means, but, you guys know what this means. I want to ask you the question. As you look at the future of networking, you hear a couple objections. "Oh, the cloud guys, they got networking, we're all set with them. How do you respond to the fact that networking's changing and the cloud guys have their own networking. What's some of the paying points that's going on premises of these enterprises? So are they good with the clouds? What needs... What are the key things that's going on in networking, that makes it more than just the cloud networking? What's your take on it? >> Well as I said earlier. Once you could easily provision in the cloud, you can easily connect to the cloud, its when you start troubleshooting applications in the cloud and try to scale. So that's where the problem occurred. >> Okay, what's your take on it. >> And you'll hear from the customers, that we have on stage and I think what happens is all the clouds by definition, designed to the 80-20 rule which means they'll design 80% of the basic functionality. And then lead to 20% extra functionality, that of course every Enterprise needs, to leave that to ISV's, like Aviatrix. Because why? Because they have to make money, they have a service and they can't have huge instances, for functionality that not everybody needs. So they have to design to the common and that, they all do it, right? They have to and then the extra, the problem is, that Cambrian explosion, that I talked about with enterprises. That's what they need. They're the ones who need that extra 20%. So that's what I see, there's always going to be that extra functionality. In an automated and simple way, that you talked about, but yet powerful. With the up with the visibility and control, that they expect of On Prem. That kind of combination, that Yin and the Yang, that people like us are providing. >> Simon I want to ask you? We're going to ask some of the cloud architect, customer panels, that same question. There's pioneer's doing some work here and there's also the laggards who come in behind their early adopters. What's going to be the tipping point? What are some of these conversations, that the cloud architects are having out there? Or what's the signs, that they need to be on this, multi-cloud or cloud native networking trend? What are some of the signal's that are going on in the environment? What are some of the thresholds? Are things that are going on, that they can pay attention to? >> Well, once they have the application on multiple cloud and they have to get wake up at two in the morning, to troubleshoot them. They'll know it's important. (laughter) So, I think that's when the rubber will hit the road. But, as I said, it's easier to prove, at any case. Okay, it's AWS, it's easy, user transit gateway, put a few VPC's and you're done. And you create some presents like Equinox and do a Direct Connect and Express Route with Azure. That looks simple, its the operations, that's when they'll realize. Okay, now I need to understand! How cloud networking works? I also need a tool, that gives me visibility and control. But not only that, I need to understand the basic underneath it as well. >> What are some of the day in the life scenarios. you envision happening with multi-cloud, because you think about what's happening. It kind of has that same vibe of interoperability, choice, multi-vendor, 'cause they're multi-cloud. Essentially multi-vendor. These are kind of old paradigms, that we've lived through with client server and internet working. What are some of the scenarios of success, that might be possible? Will be possible, with multi-cloud and cloud native networking. >> Well, I think, once you have good enough visibility, to satisfy your customers, not only, like to, keep the service running and application running. But to be able to provision fast enough, I think that's what you want to achieve. >> Simon, final question. Advice for folks watching on the Livestream, if they're sitting there as a cloud architect or CXO. What's your advice to them right now, in this market, 'cause obviously, public cloud check, hybrid cloud, they're working on that. That gets on premises done, now multi-cloud's right behind it. What's your advice? >> The first thing they should do, is really try to understand cloud networking. For each of their cloud providers and then understand the limitations. And, is what the cloud service provider offers enough? Or you need to look to a third party, but you don't look at a third party to start with. Especially an incumbent one, so it's tempting to say "I have a bunch of F5 experts", nothing against F5. I'm going to bring my F5 in the Cloud, when you can use an ELB, that automatically understand eases and auto scaling and so on. And you understand that's much simpler, but sometimes you need your F5, because you have requirements. You have like iRules and that kind of stuff, that you've used for years. 'cause you cannot do it. Okay, I have requirement and that's not met, I'm going to use Legacy Star and then you have to start thinking, okay, what about visibility control, above the true cloud. But before you do that you have to understand the limitations of the existing cloud providers. First, try to be as native as possible, until things don't work, after that you can start thinking of the cloud. >> Great insight, Simon. Thank you. >> That's great. >> With Gartner, thank you for sharing. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to ALTITUDE 2020. For the folks in the live stream, I'm John Furrier, Steve Mullaney, CEO of Aviatrix. For our first of two customer panels with cloud network architects, we've got Bobby Willoughby, AEGON Luis Castillo from National Instruments and David Shinnick with FactSet. Guys, welcome to the stage for this digital event. Come on up. (audience clapping) (upbeat music) Hey good to see you, thank you. Customer panel, this is my favorite part. We get to hear the real scoop, we get the Gardener giving us the industry overview. Certainly, multi-cloud is very relevant, and cloud-native networking is a hot trend with the live stream out there in the digital events. So guys, let's get into it. The journey is, you guys are pioneering this journey of multi-cloud and cloud-native networking and are soon going to be a lot more coming. So I want to get into the journey. What's it been like? Is it real? You've got a lot of scar tissue? What are some of the learnings? >> Absolutely. Multi-cloud is whether or not we accept it, as network engineers is a reality. Like Steve said, about two years ago, companies really decided to just bite the bullet and move there. Whether or not we accept that fact, we need to not create a consistent architecture across multiple clouds. And that is challenging without orchestration layers as you start managing different tool sets and different languages across different clouds. So it's really important to start thinking about that. >> Guys on the other panelists here, there's different phases of this journey. Some come at it from a networking perspective, some come in from a problem troubleshooting, what's your experiences? >> From a networking perspective, it's been incredibly exciting, it's kind of once in a generational opportunity to look at how you're building out your network. You can start to embrace things like infrastructure as code that maybe your peers on the systems teams have been doing for years, but it just never really worked on-prem. So it's really exciting to look at all the opportunities that we have and all of the interesting challenges that come up that you get to tackle. >> And effects that you guys are mostly AWS, right? >> Yeah. Right now though, we are looking at multiple clouds. We have production workloads running in multiple clouds today but a lot of the initial work has been with Amazon. >> And you've seen it from a networking perspective, that's where you guys are coming at it from? >> Yup. >> Awesome. How about you? >> We evolve more from a customer requirement perspective. Started out primarily as AWS, but as the customer needed more resources from Azure like HPC, Azure AD, things like that, even recently, Google analytics, our journey has evolved into more of a multi-cloud environment. >> Steve, weigh in on the architecture because this is going to be a big conversation, and I wanted you to lead this section. >> I think you guys agree the journey, it seems like the journey started a couple of years ago. Got real serious, the need for multi-cloud, whether you're there today. Of course, it's going to be there in the future. So that's really important. I think the next thing is just architecture. I'd love to hear what you, had some comments about architecture matters, it all starts, every enterprise I talked to. Maybe talk about architecture and the importance of architects, maybe Bobby. >> From architecture perspective, we started our journey five years ago. >> Wow, okay. >> And we're just now starting our fourth evolution over network architect. And we call it networking security net sec, versus just as network. And that fourth-generation architecture should be based primarily upon the Palo Alto Networks and Aviatrix. Aviatrix to new orchestration piece of it. But that journey came because of the need for simplicity, the need for a multi-cloud orchestration without us having to go and do reprogramming efforts across every cloud as it comes along. >> I guess the other question I also had around architecture is also... Luis maybe just talk about it. I know we've talked a little bit about scripting, and some of your thoughts on that. >> Absolutely. So for us, we started creating the network constructs with cloud formation, and we've stuck with that for the most part. What's interesting about that is today, on-premise, we have a lot of automation around how we provision networks, but cloud formation has become a little bit like the new manual for us. We're now having issues with having to automate that component and making it consistent with our on-premise architecture and making it consistent with Azure architecture and Google cloud. So, it's really interesting to see companies now bring that layer of abstraction that SD-WAN brought to the wound side, now it's going up into the cloud networking architecture. >> Great. So on the fourth generation, you mentioned you're on the fourth-gen architecture. What have you learned? Is there any lessons, scratch issue, what to avoid, what worked? What was the path that you touched? >> It's probably the biggest lesson there is that when you think you finally figured it out, you haven't. Amazon will change something, Azure change something. Transit Gateway is a game-changer. And listening to the business requirements is probably the biggest thing we need to do upfront. But I think from a simplicity perspective, like I said, we don't want to do things four times. We want to do things one time, we want be able to write to an API which Aviatrix has and have them do the orchestration for us. So that we don't have to do it four times. >> How important is architecture in the progression? Is it do you guys get thrown in the deep end, to solve these problems, are you guys zooming out and looking at it? How are you guys looking at the architecture? >> You can't get off the ground if you don't have the network there. So all of those, we've gone through similar evolutions, we're on our fourth or fifth evolution. I think about what we started off with Amazon without Direct Connect Gateway, without Transit Gateway, without a lot of the things that are available today, kind of the 80, 20 that Steve was talking about. Just because it wasn't there doesn't mean we didn't need it. So we needed to figure out a way to do it, we couldn't say, "Oh, you need to come back to the network team in a year, and maybe Amazon will have a solution for it." We need to do it now and evolve later and maybe optimize or change the way you're doing things in the future. But don't sit around and wait, you can't. >> I'd love to have you guys each individually answer this question for the live streams that comes up a lot. A lot of cloud architects out in the community, what should they be thinking about the folks that are coming into this proactively and, or realizing the business benefits are there? What advice would you guys give them on architecture? What should be they'd be thinking about, and what are some guiding principles you could share? >> So I would start with looking at an architecture model that can spread and give consistency to the different cloud vendors that you will absolutely have to support. Cloud vendors tend to want to pull you into using their native tool set, and that's good if only it was realistic to talk about only one cloud. But because it doesn't, it's super important to talk about, and have a conversation with the business and with your technology teams about a consistent model. >> And how do I do my day one work so that I'm not spending 80% of my time troubleshooting or managing my network? Because if I'm doing that, then I'm missing out on ways that I can make improvements or embrace new technologies. So it's really important early on to figure out, how do I make this as low maintenance as possible so that I can focus on the things that the team really should be focusing on? >> Bobby, your advice there, architecture. >> I don't know what else I can add to that. Simplicity of operations is key. >> So the holistic view of day two operations you mentioned, let's can jump in day one as you're getting stuff set up, day two is your life after. This is kind of of what you're getting at, David. So what does that look like? What are you envisioning as you look at that 20-mile stair, out post multi-cloud world? What are some of the things that you want in the day two operations? >> Infrastructure as code is really important to us. So how do we design it so that we can start fit start making network changes and fitting them into a release pipeline and start looking at it like that, rather than somebody logging into a router CLI and troubleshooting things in an ad hoc nature? So, moving more towards a dev-ops model. >> You guys, anything to add on that day two? >> Yeah, I would love to add something. In terms of day two operations you can either sort of ignore the day two operations for a little while, where you get your feet wet, or you can start approaching it from the beginning. The fact is that the cloud-native tools don't have a lot of maturity in that space and when you run into an issue, you're going to end up having a bad day, going through millions and millions of logs just to try to understand what's going on. That's something that the industry just now is beginning to realize it's such a big gap. >> I think that's key because for us, we're moving to more of an event-driven or operations. In the past, monitoring got the job done. It's impossible to monitor something that is not there when the event happens. So the event-driven application and then detection is important. >> Gardner is all about the cloud-native wave coming into networking. That's going to be a serious thing. I want to get your guys' perspective, I know you have each different views of how you come into the journey and how you're executing. And I always say the beauty's in the eye of the beholder and that applies to how the network's laid out. So, Bobby, you guys do a lot of high-performance encryption, both on AWS and Azure. That's a unique thing for you. How are you seeing that impact with multi-cloud? >> That's a new requirement for us too, where we have an increment to encrypt. And then if you ever get the question, should I encrypt, should I not encrypt? The answer is always yes. You should encrypt when you can encrypt. For our perspective, we need to migrate a bunch of data from our data centers. We have some huge data centers, and getting that data to the cloud is a timely expense in some cases. So we have been mandated, we have to encrypt everything, leave in the data center. So we're looking at using the Aviatrix insane mode appliances to be able to encrypt 10, 20 gigabits of data as it moves to the cloud itself. >> David, you're using Terraform, you've got FireNet, you've got a lot of complexity in your network. What do you guys look at the future for your environment? >> So many exciting that we're working on now as FireNet. So for our security team that obviously have a lot of knowledge base around Palo Alto, and with our commitments to our clients, it's not very easy to shift your security model to a specific cloud vendor. So there's a lot of SOC 2 compliance and things like that were being able to take some of what you've worked on for years on-prem and put it in the cloud and have the same type of assurance that things are going to work and be secure in the same way that they are on-prem, helps make that journey into the cloud a lot easier. >> And Louis, you guys got scripting, you got a lot of things going on. What's your unique angle on this? >> Absolutely. So for disclosure, I'm not an Aviatrix customer yet. (laughs) >> It's okay, we want to hear the truth, so that's good. Tell us, what are you thinking about? What's on your mind? >> When you talk about implementing a tool like this, it's really just really important to talk about automation focus on value. When you talk about things like encryption and things like so you're encrypting tunnels and encrypting the path, and those things should be second nature really. When you look at building those back-ends and managing them with your team, it becomes really painful. So tools like Aviatrix that add a lot automation it's out of sight, out of mind. You can focus on the value, and you don't have to focus on this. >> So I got to ask you guys. I see Aviatrix was here, they're supplier to this sector, but you guys are customers. Everyone's pitching your stuff, people knock on you, "Buy my stuff." How do you guys have that conversation with the suppliers, like the cloud vendors and other folks? What's it like? We're API all the way? You've got to support this? What are some of your requirements? How do you talk to and evaluate people that walk in and want to knock on your door and pitch you something? What's the conversation like? >> It's definitely API driven. We definitely look at the API structure that the vendors provide before we select anything. That is always first of mine and also, what problem are we really trying to solve? Usually, people try to sell or try to give us something that isn't really valuable, like implementing a Cisco solution on the cloud doesn't really add a lot of value, that's where we go. >> David, what's your conversation like with suppliers? Do you have a certain new way to do things? As it becomes more agile, essentially networking, and getting more dynamic, what are some of the conversations with either in commits or new vendors that you're having? What do you require? >> Ease of use is definitely high up there. We've had some vendors come in and say, "Hey, when you go to set this up, "we're going to want to send somebody on-site." And they're going to sit with you for a day to configure it. And that's a red flag. Well, wait a minute, do we really, if one of my really talented engineers can't figure it out on his own, what's going on there and why is that? Having some ease of use and the team being comfortable with it and understanding it is really important. >> Bobby, how about you? Old days was, do a bake-off and the winner takes all. Is it like that anymore? What's evolving? Bake-off last year for but still win. But that's different now because now when you get the product, you can install the product in AWS and Azure, have it up running in a matter of minutes. So the key is that can you be operational within hours or days instead of weeks? But do we also have the flexibility to customize it, to meet your needs? Because you don't want to be put into a box with the other customers when you have needs that are past their needs. >> I can almost see the challenge that you guys are living, where you've got the cloud immediate value, depending how you can roll up any solutions, but then you might have other needs. So you've got to be careful not to buy into stuff that's not shipping. So you're trying to be proactive and at the same time, deal with what you got. How do you guys see that evolving? Because multi-cloud to me is definitely relevant, but it's not yet clear how to implement across. How do you guys look at this baked versus future solutions coming? How do you balance that? >> Again, so right now, we're taking the ad hoc approach and experimenting what the different concepts of cloud are and really leveraging the native constructs of each cloud. But there's a breaking point for sure. You don't get to scale this like someone said, and you have to focus on being able to deliver, developers their sandbox or their play area for the things that they're trying to build quickly. And the only way to do that is with some consistent orchestration layer that allows you to-- >> So you expect a lot more stuff to becoming pretty quickly in that area. >> I do expect things to start maturing quite quickly this year. >> And you guys see similar trend, new stuff coming fast? >> Yeah. Probably the biggest challenge we've got now is being able to segment within the network, being able to provide segmentation between production, non-production workloads, even businesses, because we support many businesses worldwide and isolation between those is a key criteria there. So the ability to identify and quickly isolate those workloads is key. So the CIOs that are watching are saying, "Hey, take that hill, do multi-cloud." And then you have the bottoms up organization, "Pause, you're like off a little bit, it's not how it works." What is the reality in terms of implementing as fast as possible? Because the business benefits are clear, but it's not always clear on the technology how to move that fast. What are some of the barriers, what are the blockers, what are the enablers? >> I think the reality is that you may not think you're multi-cloud, but your business is. So I think the biggest barrier there is understanding what the requirements are and how best to meet those requirements in a secure manner. Because you need to make sure that things are working from a latency perspective that things work the way they did and get out of the mind shift that it was a tier-three application and the data center, it doesn't have to be a tier-three application in the cloud. So, lift and shift is not the way to go. >> Scale is a big part of what I see is the competitive advantage by these clouds and used to be proprietary network stacks in the old days, and then open systems came, that was a good thing. But as cloud has become bigger, there's an inherent lock-in there with the scale. How do you guys keep the choice open? How are you guys thinking about interoperability? What are some of the conversations that you guys are having around those key concepts? >> When we look at from a networking perspective, it's really key for you to just enable all the class to be able to communicate between them. Developers will find a way to use the cloud that best suits their business needs. And like you said, it's whether you're in denial or not, of the multi-cloud fact that your company is in already that's it becomes really important for you to move quickly. >> Yeah. And a lot of it also hinges on how well is the provider embracing what that specific cloud is doing? So, are they swimming with Amazon or Azure and just helping facilitate things, and they're doing the heavy lifting API work for you? Or are they swimming upstream and they're trying to hack it all together in messy way? And so that helps you stay out of the lock-in because there, if they're using Amazon native tools to help you get where you need to be, it's not like Amazon is going to release something in the future that completely makes you have designed yourself into a corner. So the closer, more than cloud-native they are, the more, the easier it is to deploy. >> Which also need to be aligned in such a way that you can take advantage of those cloud-native technologies. Will it make sense? TGW is a gamechanger in terms of cost and performance. So to completely ignore that, would be wrong. But if you needed to have encryption, TGW is not encrypted, so you need to have some type of Gateway to do the VPN encryption. So, the Aviatrix tool will give you the beauty of both worlds. You can use TGW or the Gateway. Real quick on the last minute we have, I want to just get a quick feedback from you guys. I hear a lot of people say to me, "Hey, pick the best cloud for the workload you got, then figure out multicloud behind the scenes." Do you guys agree with that? Do I go more to one cloud across the whole company or this workload works great on AWS, that workload works great on this. From a cloud standpoint, do you agree with that premise, and then when is multi-cloud stitching altogether? >> From an application perspective, it can be per workload, but it can also be an economical decision, certain enterprise contracts will pull you in one direction to add value, but the network problem is still the same. >> It doesn't go away. >> You don't want to be trying to fit a square into a round hall. If it works better on that cloud provider, then it's our job to make sure that service is there and people can use it. >> I agree, you just need to stay ahead of the game, make sure that the network infrastructure is there, security is available and is multi-cloud capable. >> At the end of the day, you guys are just validating that it's the networking game now. Cloud storage, compute check, networking is where the action is. Awesome. Thanks for your insights guys, appreciate you coming on the panel. Appreciate it, thanks. (upbeat music) >> John: Our next customer panel, got great another set of cloud network architects, Justin Smith with Zuora, Justin Brodley with EllieMae and Amit Utreja with Coupa. Welcome to stage. (audience applauds) (upbeat music) >> All right, thank you. >> How are ya? >> Thank you. Thank You. >> Hey Amit. How are ya? >> Did he say it right? >> Yeah. >> Okay he's got all the cliff notes from the last session, welcome back. Rinse and repeat. We're going to go into the hood a little bit. And I think they nailed what we've been reporting, we've been having this conversation around, networking is where the action is because that's at the end of the day you got to move packet from A to B and you got workloads exchanging data. So it's really killer. So let's get started. Amit, what are you seeing as the journey of multicloud as you go under the hood and say, "Okay, I got to implement this. "I have to engineer the network, "make it enabling, make it programmable, "make it interoperable across clouds." That almost sounds impossible to me. What's your take? >> Yeah, it seems impossible but if you are running an organization which is running infrastructure as a code it is easily doable. Like you can use tools out there that's available today, you can use third party products that can do a better job. But put your architecture first, don't wait. Architecture may not be perfect, put the best architecture that's available today and be agile, to iterate and make improvements over the time. >> We get to Justin's over here, so I have to be careful when I point a question to Justin, they both have the answer. Okay, journeys, what's the journey been like? Is there phases, We heard that from Gardner, people come into multicloud and cloud native networking from different perspectives? What's your take on the journey, Justin? >> Yeah, from our perspective, we started out very much focused on one cloud and as we've started doing acquisitions, we started doing new products to the market, the need for multicloud becomes very apparent, very quickly for us. And so having an architecture that we can plug and play into and be able to add and change things as it changes is super important for what we're doing in the space. >> Justin, your journey. >> Yes. For us, we were very ad hoc oriented and the idea is that we were reinventing all the time, trying to move into these new things and coming up with great new ideas. And so rather than it being some iterative approach with our deployments that became a number of different deployments. And so we shifted that toward and the network has been a real enabler of this. There's one network and it touches whatever cloud we want it to touch, and it touches the data centers that we need it to touch, and it touches the customers that we needed to touch. Our job is to make sure that the services that are available in one of those locations are available in all of the locations. So the idea is not that we need to come up with this new solution every time, it's that we're just iterating on what we've already decided to do. >> Before we get the architecture section, I want to ask you guys a question? I'm a big fan of let the app developers have infrastructure as code, so check. But having the right cloud run that workload, I'm a big fan of that, if it works great. But we just heard from the other panel, you can't change the network. So I want to get your thoughts, what is cloud native networking? And is that the engine really, that's the enabler for this multicloud trend? What's you guys take? We'll start with Amit, what do you think about that? >> Yeah, so you're going to have workloads running in different clouds and the workloads would have affinity to one cloud or other. But how you expose that it's a matter of how you are going to build your networks. How you're going to run security. How you're going to do egress, ingress out of it so -- >> You said networking is the big problem to solve. >> Yes. >> What's the solution? What's the key pain points and problem statement? >> The key pain point for most companies is how do you take your traditionally on premise network and then blow it out to the cloud in a way that makes sense. You have IP conflicts, you have IP space, you have public IPs on premise as well as in the cloud. And how do you kind of make sense of all of that? And I think that's where tools like Aviatrix make a lot of sense in that space. >> From our side, it's really simple. It's a latency, it's bandwidth and availability. These don't change whether we're talking about cloud or data center, or even corporate IT networking. So our job when these all of these things are simplified into like, S3, for instance and our developers want to use those. We have to be able to deliver that and for a particular group or another group that wants to use just just GCP resources. We have to support these requirements and these wants, as opposed to saying, "Hey, that's not a good idea." No, our job is to enable them not to disable them. >> Do you guys think infrastructure is code? Which I love that, I think that's the future in this. We even saw that with DevOps. But as you start getting the networking, is it getting down to the network portion where its network as code? Because storage and compute working really well, we're seeing all Kubernetes on service mesh trend. Network has code, reality is it there? Is it still got work to do? >> It's absolutely there, you mentioned net DevOps and it's very real. In Coupa we build our networks through terraform and not only just terraform, build an API so that we can consistently build VNets and VPC all across in the same way. >> So you guys are doing it? >> Yup. And even security groups. And then on top and Aviatrix comes in, we can peer the networks bridge all the different regions through code. >> Same with you guys. >> Yeah. >> What do you think about this? >> Everything we deploy is done with automation and then we also run things like Lambda on top to make changes in real time, we don't make manual changes on our network. In the data center, funny enough, it's still manual but the cloud has enabled us to move into this automation mindset. And all my guys, that's what they focus on is bringing, now what they're doing in the cloud into the data center, which is kind of opposite of what it should be or what it used to be. >> It's full DevOps then? >> Yes. >> For us, it was similar on-prem is still somewhat very manual, although we're moving more and more to ninja and terraform type concepts. But everything in the production environment is code, confirmation terraform code and now coming into the data center same (mumbles). >> So I just wanted to jump in Justin Smith, one of the comment that you made, because it's something that we always talk about a lot is that the center of gravity of architecture used to be an on-prem and now it's shifted in the cloud. And once you have your strategic architecture, what do you do? You push that everywhere. So what you used to see at the beginning of cloud was pushing the architecture on-prem into cloud. Now, I want to pick up on what you said, do you others agree that the center of gravity is here, I'm now pushing what I do in the cloud back into on-prem? And then so first that and then also in the journey, where are you at from zero to 100 of actually in the journey to cloud? Are you 50% there, are you 10%? Are you evacuating data centers next year? Where are you guys at? >> Yeah, so there's there's two types of gravity that you typically are dealing with, with the migration. First is data, gravity and your data set, and where that data lives. And then the second is the network platform that wraps all that together. In our case, the data gravity solely mostly on-prem but our network is now extending out to the app tier, it's going to be in cloud. Eventually, that data, gravity will also move to cloud as we start getting more sophisticated but in our journey, we're about halfway there. About halfway through the process, we're taking a handle of lift and shift and -- >> Steve: And when did that start? >> We started about three years ago. >> Okay, okay. >> Well for Coupa it's a very different story. It started from a garage and 100% on the cloud. So it's a business plan management platform, software as a service run 100% on the cloud. >> That was was like 10 years ago, right? >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> You guys are riding the wave of the architecture. Justin I want to ask you, Zuora, you guys mentioned DevOps. Obviously, we saw the huge observability wave, which essentially network management for the cloud, in my opinion. It's more dynamic, but this is about visibility. We heard from the last panel you don't know what's being turned on or turned off from a services standpoint, at any given time. How is all this playing out when you start getting into the DevOps down (mumbles)? >> This is the big challenge for all of us is visibility. When you talk transport within a cloud, very interestingly we we have moved from having a backbone that we bought, that we own, that would be data center connectivity. Zuora's a subscription billing company, so we want to support the subscription mindset. So rather than going and buying circuits and having to wait three months to install and then coming up with some way to get things connected and resiliency and redundancy. My backbone is in the cloud. I use the cloud providers interconnections between regions to transport data across and so if you do that with their native solutions, you do lose visibility. There are areas in that that you don't get, which is why controllers and having some type of management plane is a requirement for us to do what we're supposed to do and provide consistency while doing it. >> Great conversation. I loved what you said earlier latency, bandwidth, I think availability were your top three things. Guys SLA, just do ping times between clouds it's like, you don't know what you're getting for round trip time. This becomes a huge kind of risk management, black hole, whatever you want to call it, blind spot. How are you guys looking at the interconnect between clouds? Because I can see that working from ground to cloud on per cloud but when you start dealing with multiclouds workloads, SLAs will be all over the map, won't they just inherently. How do you guys view that? >> Yeah, I think we talked about workload and we know that the workloads are going to be different in different clouds, but they're going to be calling each other. So it's very important to have that visibility, that you can see how data is flowing at what latency and what availability is there and our authority needs to operate on that. >> So use the software dashboard, look at the times and look at the latency -- >> In the old days, Strongswan Openswan you try to figure it out, in the new days you have to figure out. >> Justin, what's your answer to that because you're in the middle of it? >> Yeah, I think the key thing there is that we have to plan for that failure, we have to plan for that latency in our applications. If certain things are tracking in your SLI, certain things are planning for and you loosely coupled these services in a much more microservices approach. So you actually can handle that kind of failure or that type of unknown latency and unfortunately, the cloud has made us much better at handling exceptions in a much better way. >> You guys are all great examples of cloud native from day one. When did you have the tipping point moment or the epiphany of saying a multiclouds real, I can't ignore it, I got to factor that into all my design principles and everything you're doing? Was there a moment or was it from day one? >> There are two reasons, one was the business. So in business, there were some affinity to not be in one cloud or to be in one cloud and that drove from the business side. So as a cloud architect our responsibility was to support that business. Another is the technology, some things are really running better in, like if you're running Dotnet workload or your going to run machine learning or AI so that you would have that preference of one cloud over other. >> Guys, any thoughts on that? >> That was the bill that we got from AWS. That's what drives a lot of these conversations is the financial viability of what you're building on top of. This failure domain idea which is fairly interesting. How do I solve our guarantee against a failure domain? You have methodologies with back end direct connects or interconnect with GCP. All of these ideas are something that you have to take into account but that transport layer should not matter to whoever we're building this for. Our job is to deliver the frames and the packets, what that flows across, how you get there? We want to make that seamless. And so whether it's a public internet API call or it's a back end connectivity through direct connect, it doesn't matter. It just has to meet a contract that you've signed with your application, folks. >> Yeah, that's the availability piece. >> Justin, your thoughts on that, any comment on that? >> So actually multiclouds become something much more recent in the last six to eight months, I'd say. We always kind of had a very much an attitude of like moving to Amazon from our private cloud is hard enough, why complicate it further? But the realities of the business and as we start seeing, improvements in Google and Azure and different technology spaces, the need for multicloud becomes much more important. As well as our acquisition strategies are matured, we're seeing that companies that used to be on premise that we typically acquire are now very much already on a cloud. And if they're on a cloud, I need to plug them into our ecosystem. And so that's really changed our multicloud story in a big way. >> I'd love to get your thoughts on the clouds versus the clouds, because you compare them Amazon's got more features, they're rich with features. Obviously, the bills are high to people using them. But Google's got a great network, Google's networks pretty damn good And then you got Azure. What's the difference between the clouds? Where do they fall? Where do they peak in certain areas better than others? What are the characteristics, which makes one cloud better? Do they have a unique feature that makes Azure better than Google and vice versa? What do you guys think about the different clouds? >> Yeah, to my experience, I think the approach is different in many places. Google has a different approach very DevOps friendly and you can run your workloads with your network can span regions. But our application ready to accept that. Amazon is evolving. I remember 10 years back Amazon's network was a flat network, we would be launching servers in 10.0.0/8, right. And then the VPCs came out. >> We'll have to translate that to English for the live feed. Not good. So the VPCs concept came out, multi account came out, so they are evolving. Azure had a late start but because they have a late start, they saw the pattern and they have some mature setup on the network. >> They've got around the same price too. >> I think they're all trying to say they're equal in their own ways. I think they all have very specific design philosophies that allow them to be successful in different ways and you have to kind of keep that in mind as you architect your own solution. For example, Amazon has a very regional affinity, they don't like to go cross region in their architecture. Whereas Google is very much it's a global network, we're going to think about as a global solution. I think Google also has advantage that it's third to market and so has seen what Azure did wrong, it seeing what AWS did wrong and it's made those improvements and I think that's one of their big advantage. >> They got great scale too. Justin thoughts on the cloud. >> So yeah, Amazon built from the system up and Google built from the network down. So their ideas and approaches are from a global versus original, I agree with you completely that is the big number one thing. But the if you look at it from the outset, interestingly, the inability or the ability for Amazon to limit layer to broadcasting and what that really means from a VPC perspective, changed all the routing protocols you can use. All the things that we had built inside of a data center to provide resiliency and make things seamless to users, all of that disappeared. And so because we had to accept that at the VPC level, now we have to accept that at the WAN level. Google's done a better job of being able to overcome those things and provide those traditional network facilities to us. >> Just a great panel, we could go all day here, it's awesome. So I heard, we will get to the cloud native naive questions. So kind of think about what's naive and what's cloud, I'll ask that next but I got to ask you I had a conversation with a friend he's like, "WAN is the new LAN?" So if you think about what the LAN was at a data center, WAN is the new LAN, cause you keep talking about the cloud impact? So that means ST-WAN, the old ST-WAN kind of changing. There's a new LAN. How do you guys look at that? Because if you think about it, what LANs were for inside a premises was all about networking, high speed. But now when you take the WAN and make it, essentially a LAN, do you agree with that? And how do you view this trend? Is it good or bad or is it ugly? What you guys take on this? >> Yeah, I think it's a thing that you have to work with your application architects. So if you are managing networks and if you're a server engineer, you need to work with them to expose the unreliability that it would bring in. So the application has to handle a lot of the difference in the latencies and the reliability has to be worked through the application there. >> LAN, WAN, same concept is that BS? Can you give some insight? >> I think we've been talking about for a long time the erosion of the edge. And so is this just a continuation of that journey we've been on for last several years. As we get more and more cloud native and we talked about API's, the ability to lock my data in place and not be able to access it really goes away. And so I think this is just continuation. I think it has challenges. We start talking about WAN scale versus LAN scale, the tooling doesn't work the same, the scale of that tooling is much larger. and the need to automation is much, much higher in a WAN than it wasn't a LAN. That's why you're seeing so much infrastructure as code. >> Yeah. So for me, I'll go back again to this, it's bandwidth and its latency that define those two LAN versus WAN. But the other thing that's comes up more and more with cloud deployments is whereas our security boundary and where can I extend this secure aware appliance or set of rules to protect what's inside of it. So for us, we're able to deliver VRFs or route forwarding tables for different segments wherever we're at in the world. And so they're trusted to talk to each other but if they're going to go to someplace that's outside of their network, then they have to cross the security boundary, where we enforce policy very heavily. So for me, there's it's not just LAN, WAN it's how does environment get to environment more importantly. >> That's a great point in security, we haven't talked it yet but that's got to be baked in from the beginning, this architecture. Thoughts on security, how you guys are dealing with it? >> Yeah, start from the base, have app to app security built in. Have TLS, have encryption on the data at transit, data at rest. But as you bring the application to the cloud and they're going to go multicloud, talking to over the internet, in some places, well have app to app security. >> Our principles day, security is day zero every day. And so we always build it into our design, build into our architecture, into our applications. It's encrypt everything, it's TLS everywhere. It's make sure that that data is secure at all times. >> Yeah, one of the cool trends at RSA, just as a side note was the data in use encryption piece, which is homomorphic stuff was interesting. Alright guys, final question. We heard on the earlier panel was also trending at re:Invent, we think the T out of cloud native, it spells cloud naive. They have shirts now, Aviatrix kind of got this trend going. What does that mean to be naive? To your peers out there watching the live stream and also the suppliers that are trying to supply you guys with technology and services, what's naive look like and what's native look like? When is someone naive about implementing all this stuff? >> So for me, because we are in 100% cloud, for us its main thing is ready for the change. And you will find new building blocks coming in and the network design will evolve and change. So don't be naive and think that it's static, evolve with the change. >> I think the biggest naivety that people have is that well, I've been doing it this way for 20 years, I've been successful, it's going to be successful in cloud. The reality is that's not the case. You got to think some of the stuff a little bit differently and you need to think about it early enough, so that you can become cloud native and really enable your business on cloud. >> Yeah for me it's being open minded. Our industry, the network industry as a whole, has been very much I'm smarter than everybody else and we're going to tell everybody how it's going to be done. And we fell into a lull when it came to producing infrastructure and so embracing this idea that we can deploy a new solution or a new environment in minutes as opposed to hours, or weeks or months in some cases, is really important in and so >> - >> It's naive being closed minded, native being open minded. >> Exactly. For me that was a transformative kind of where I was looking to solve problems in a cloud way as opposed to looking to solve problems in this traditional old school way. >> All right, I know we're at a time but I got to asked one more question, so you guys so good. Give me a quick answer. What's the BS language when you, the BS meter goes off when people talk to you about solutions? What's the kind of jargon that you hear, that's the BS meter going off? What are people talking about that in your opinion you here you go, "That's total BS?" What triggers you? >> So that I have two lines out of movies if I say them without actually thinking them. It's like 1.21 gigawatts are you out of your mind from Back to the Future right? Somebody's giving you all these wiz bang things. And then Martin Maul and Michael Keaton in Mr Mom when he goes to 220, 221, whatever it takes. >> Yeah. >> Those two right there, if those go off in my mind where somebody's talking to me, I know they're full of baloney. >> So a lot of speeds and feeds, a lot of speeds and feeds a lot of -- >> Just data. Instead of talking about what you're actually doing and solutioning for. You're talking about, "Well, it does this this this." Okay to 220, 221. (laughter) >> Justin, what's your take? >> Anytime I start seeing the cloud vendors start benchmarking against each other. Your workload is your workload, you need to benchmark yourself. Don't listen to the marketing on that, that's just awful. >> Amit, what triggers you in the BS meter? >> I think if somebody explains to you are not simple, they cannot explain you in simplicity, then it's all bull shit. >> (laughs) That's a good one. Alright guys, thanks for the great insight, great panel. How about a round of applause to practitioners. (audience applauds) (upbeat music) >> John: Okay, welcome back to Altitude 2020 for the digital event for the live feed. Welcome back, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE with Steve Mullaney, CEO Aviatrix. For the next panel from Global System Integrated, the folks who are building and working with folks on their journey to multicloud and cloud-native networking. We've got a great panel, George Buckman with DXC and Derrick Monahan with WWT, welcome to the stage. (Audience applauds) >> Hey >> Thank you >> Groovy spot >> All right (upbeat music) >> Okay, you guys are the ones out there advising, building, and getting down and dirty with multicloud and cloud-native networking, we just heard from the customer panel. You can see the diversity of where people come in to the journey of cloud, it kind of depends upon where you are, but the trends are all clear, cloud-native networking, DevOps, up and down the stack, this has been the main engine. What's your guys' take of this journey to multicloud? What do you guys think? >> Yeah, it's critical, I mean we're seeing all of our enterprise customers enter into this, they've been through the migrations of the easy stuff, ya know? Now they're trying to optimize and get more improvements, so now the tough stuff's coming on, right? They need their data processing near where their data is. So that's driving them to a multicloud environment. >> Yeah, we've heard some of the Edge stuff, I mean, you guys are-- >> Exactly. >> You've seen this movie before, but now it's a whole new ballgame, what's your take? Yeah, so, I'll give you a hint, our practice is not called the cloud practice, it's the multicloud practice, and so if that gives you a hint of how we approach things. It's very consultative. And so when we look at what the trends are, like a year ago. About a year ago we were having conversations with customers, "Let's build a data center in the cloud. Let's put some VPCs, let's throw some firewalls, let's put some DNS and other infrastructure out there and let's hope it works." This isn't a science project. What we're starting to see is customers are starting to have more of a vision, we're helping with that consultative nature, but it's totally based on the business. And you've got to start understanding how lines of business are using the apps and then we evolve into the next journey which is a foundational approach to-- >> What are some of the problems some of your customers are solving when they come to you? What are the top things that are on their mind, obviously the ease of use, agility, all that stuff, what specifically are they digging into? >> Yeah, so complexity, I think when you look at a multicloud approach, in my view is, network requirements are complex. You know, I think they are, but I think the approach can be, "Let's simplify that." So one thing that we try to do, and this is how we talk to customers is, just like you simplify in Aviatrix, simplifies the automation orchestration of cloud networking, we're trying to simplify the design, the plan, and implementation of the infrastructure across multiple workloads, across multiple platforms. And so the way we do it, is we sit down, we look at not just use cases, not just the questions we commonly anticipate, we actually build out, based on the business and function requirements, we build out a strategy and then create a set of documents, and guess what? We actually build it in a lab, and that lab that we platform rebuilt, proves out this reference architectural actually works. >> Absolutely, we implement similar concepts. I mean, they're proven practices, they work, right? >> But George, you mentioned that the hard part's now upon us, are you referring to networking, what specifically were you getting at there when you said, "The easy part's done, now the hard part?" >> So for the enterprises themselves, migrating their more critical apps or more difficult apps into the environments, ya know, we've just scratched the surface, I believe, on what enterprises are doing to move into the cloud, to optimize their environments, to take advantage of the scale and speed to deployment and to be able to better enable their businesses. So they're just now really starting to-- >> So do you guys see what I talked about? I mean, in terms of that Cambrian explosion, I mean, you're both monster system integrators with top fortune enterprise customers, you know, really rely on you for guidance and consulting and so forth, and deploy their networks. Is that something that you've seen? I mean, does that resonate? Did you notice a year and a half ago all of a sudden the importance of cloud for enterprise shoot up? >> Yeah, I mean, we're seeing it now. >> Okay. >> In our internal environment as well, ya know, we're a huge company ourselves, customer zero, our internal IT, so, we're experiencing that internally and every one of our other customers as well. >> So I have another question and I don't know the answer to this, and a lawyer never asks a question that you don't know the answer to, but I'm going to ask it anyway. DXC and WWT, massive system integrators, why Aviatrix? >> Great question, Steve, so I think the way we approach things, I think we have a similar vision, a similar strategy, how you approach things, how we approach things, at World Wide Technology. Number one, we want a simplify the complexity. And so that's your number one priority. Let's take the networking, let's simplify it, and I think part of the other point I'm making is we see this automation piece as not just an after thought anymore. If you look at what customers care about, visibility and automation is probably at the top three, maybe the third on the list, and I think that's where we see the value. I think the partnership that we're building and what I get excited about is not just putting yours and our lab and showing customers how it works, it's co-developing a solution with you. Figuring out, "Hey, how can we make this better?" >> Right >> Visibility is a huge thing, just in security alone, network everything's around visibility. What automation do you see happening, in terms of progression, order of operations, if you will? What's the low hanging fruit? What are people working on now? What are some of the aspirational goals around when you start thinking about multicloud and automation? >> So I wanted to get back to his question. >> Answer that question. >> I wanted to answer your question, you know, what led us there and why Aviatrix. You know, in working some large internal IT projects, and looking at how we were going to integrate those solutions, you know, we like to build everything with recipes. Network is probably playing catch-up in the DevOps world but with a DevOps mindset, looking to speed to deploy, support, all those things, so when you start building your recipe, you take a little of this, a little of that, and you mix it all together, well, when you look around, you say, "Wow, look, there's this big bag of Aviatrix. "Let me plop that in. That solves a big part "of my problems that I had, the speed to integrate, "the speed to deploy, and the operational views "that I need to run this." So that was what led me to-- >> John: So how about reference architectures? >> Yeah, absolutely, so, you know, they came with a full slate of reference architectures already out there and ready to go that fit our needs, so it was very easy for us to integrate those into our recipes. >> What do you guys think about all the multi-vendor inter-operability conversations that have been going on? Choice has been a big part of multicloud in terms of, you know, customers want choice, they'll put a workload in the cloud if it works, but this notion of choice and interoperability has become a big conversation. >> It is, and I think that our approach, and that's the way we talk to customers is, "Let's speed and de-risk that decision making process, "and how do we do that?" Because interoperability is key. You're not just putting, it's not just a single vendor, we're talking, you know, many many vendors, I mean think about the average number of cloud applications a customer uses, a business, an enterprise business today, you know, it's above 30, it's skyrocketing and so what we do, and we look at it from an interoperability approach is, "How do things inter-operate?" We test it out, we validate it, we build a reference architecture that says, "These are the critical design elements, "now let's build one with Aviatrix "and show how this works with Aviatrix." And I think the important part there, though, is the automation piece that we add to it and visibility. So I think the visibility is what I see lacking across industry today. >> In cloud-native that's been a big topic. >> Yep >> Okay, in terms of Aviatrix, as you guys see them coming in, they're one of the ones that are emerging and the new brands emerging with multicloud, you've still got the old guard encumbered with huge footprints. How are customers dealing with that kind of component in dealing with both of them? >> Yeah, I mean, we have customers that are ingrained with a particular vendor and you know, we have partnerships with many vendors. So our objective is to provide the solution that meets that client. >> John: And they all want multi-vendor, they all want interoperability. >> Correct. >> All right, so I got to ask you guys a question while we were defining Day-2 operations. What does that mean? You guys are looking at the big business and technical components of architecture, what does Day-2 operations mean, what's the definition of that? >> Yeah, so I think from our perspective, with my experience, we, you know, Day-2 operations, whether it's not just the orchestration piece in setting up and let it automate and have some, you know, change control, you're looking at this from a Day-2 perspective, "How do I support this ongoing "and make it easy to make changes as we evolve?" The cloud is very dynamic. The nature of how fast it's expanding, the number features is astonishing. Trying to keep up to date with the number of just networking capabilities and services that are added. So I think Day-2 operations starts with a fundamental understanding of building out supporting a customer's environments, and making the automation piece easy from a distance, I think. >> Yeah and, you know, taking that to the next level of being able to enable customers to have catalog items that they can pick and choose, "Hey I need this network connectivity "from this cloud location back to this on-prem." And being able to have that automated and provisioned just simply by ordering it. >> For the folks watching out there, guys, take a minute to explain as you guys are in the trenches doing a lot of good work. What are some of the engagements that you guys get into? How does that progress? What happens there, they call you up and say, "Hey I need some multicloud," or you're already in there? I mean, take us through how someone can engage to use a global SI, they come in and make this thing happen, what's the typical engagement look like? >> Derrick: Yeah, so from our perspective, we typically have a series of workshops in the methodology that we kind of go along the journey. Number one, we have a foundational approach. And I don't mean foundation meaning the network foundation, that's a very critical element, we got to factor in security and we got to factor in automation. So when you think about foundation, we do a workshop that starts with education. A lot of times we'll go in and we'll just educate the customer, what is VPC sharing? You know, what is a private link in Azure? How does that impact your business? We have customers that want to share services out in an ecosystem with other customers and partners. Well there's many ways to accomplish that. Our goal is to understand those requirements and then build that strategy with them. >> Thoughts George, on-- >> Yeah, I mean, I'm one of the guys that's down in the weeds making things happen, so I'm not the guy on the front line interfacing with the customers every day. But we have a similar approach. We have a consulting practice that will go out and apply their practices to see what those-- >> And when do you parachute in? >> Yeah, when I parachute in is, I'm on the back end working with our offering development leads for networking, so we understand and are seeing what customers are asking for and we're on the back end developing the solutions that integrate with our own offerings as well as enable other customers to just deploy quickly to meet their connectivity needs. So the patterns are similar. >> Right, final question for you guys, I want to ask you to paint a picture of what success looks like. You don't have to name customers, you don't have to get in and reveal who they are, but what does success look like in multicloud as you paint a picture for the folks here and watching on the live stream, if someone says, "Hey I want to be multicloud, I got to to have my operations Agile, I want full DevOps, I want programmability and security built in from Day-zero." What does success look like? >> Yeah, I think success looks like this, so when you're building out a network, the network is a harder thing to change than some other aspects of cloud. So what we think is, even if you're thinking about that second cloud, which we have most of our customers are on two public clouds today, they might be dabbling in it. As you build that network foundation, that architecture, that takes in to consideration where you're going, and so once we start building that reference architecture out that shows, this is how to approach it from a multicloud perspective, not a single cloud, and let's not forget our branches, let's not forget our data centers, let's not forget how all this connects together because that's how we define multicloud, it's not just in the cloud, it's on-prem and it's off-prem. And so collectively, I think the key is also is that we provide them an HLD. You got to start with a high level design that can be tweaked as you go through the journey but you got to give it a solid structural foundation, and that networking which we think, most customers think as not the network engineers, but as an after thought. We want to make that the most critical element before you start the journey. >> George, from your seat, how does success look for you? >> So, you know it starts out on these journeys, often start out people not even thinking about what is going to happen, what their network needs are when they start their migration journey to the cloud. So I want, success to me looks like them being able to end up not worrying about what's happening in the network when they move to the cloud. >> Steve: Good point. >> Guys, great insight, thanks for coming on and sharing. How about a round of applause for the global system integrators? (Audience applauds) (Upbeat music) >> The next panel is the AVH certified engineers, also known as ACEs. This is the folks that are certified, they're engineering, they're building these new solutions. Please welcome Toby Foss from Informatica, Stacey Lanier from Teradata, and Jennifer Reed with Viqtor Davis to the stage. (upbeat music) (audience cheering) (panelists exchanging pleasantries) >> You got to show up. Where's your jacket Toby? (laughing) You get it done. I was just going to rib you guys and say, where's your jackets, and Jen's got the jacket on. Okay, good. >> Love the Aviatrix, ACEs Pilot gear there above the Clouds. Going to new heights. >> That's right. >> So guys Aviatrix aces, I love the name, think it's great, certified. This is all about getting things engineered. So there's a level of certification, I want to get into that. But first take us through the day in the life of an ACE, and just to point out, Stacy is a squad leader. So he's, he's like a-- >> Squadron Leader. >> Squadron Leader. >> Yeah. >> Squadron Leader, so he's got a bunch of ACEs underneath him, but share your perspective a day in the Life. Jennifer, we'll start with you. >> Sure, so I have actually a whole team that works for me both in the North America, both in the US and in Mexico. So I'm eagerly working to get them certified as well, so I can become a squad leader myself. But it's important because one of the critical gaps that we've found is people having the networking background because you graduate from college, and you have a lot of computer science background, you can program you've got Python, but networking in packets they just don't get. So, just taking them through all the processes that it's really necessary to understand when you're troubleshooting is really critical. Because you're going to get an issue where you need to figure out where exactly is that happening on the network, Is my issue just in the VPCs? Is it on the instance side is a security group, or is it going on prem? This is something actually embedded within Amazon itself? I mean, I troubleshot an issue for about six months going back and forth with Amazon, and it was the VGW VPN. Because they were auto scaling on two sides, and we ended up having to pull out the Cisco's, and put in Aviatrix so I could just say, " okay, it's fixed," and actually helped the application teams get to that and get it solved. But I'm taking a lot of junior people and getting them through that certification process, so they can understand and see the network, the way I see the network. I mean, look, I've been doing this for 25 years when I got out. When I went in the Marine Corps, that's what I did, and coming out, the network is still the network. But people don't get the same training they got in the 90s. >> Was just so easy, just write some software, and they were, takes care of itself. I know, it's pixie dust.  >> I'll come back to that, I want to come back to that, the problem solved with Amazon, but Toby. >> I think the only thing I have to add to that is that it's always the network's fault. As long as I've been in networking, it's always been the network's fault. I'm even to this day, it's still the network's fault, and part of being a network guy is that you need to prove when it is and when it's not your fault. That means you need to know a little bit about 100 different things, to make that work. >> Now you got a full stack DevOps, you got to know a lot more times another hundred. >> Toby: And the times are changing, yeah. >> This year the Squadron Leader and get that right. What is the Squadron Leader firstly? Describe what it is. >> I think is probably just leading on the network components of it. But I think, from my perspective, when to think about what you asked them was, it's about no issues and no escalations. So of my day is like that, I'm happy to be a squadron leader. >> That is a good outcome, that's a good day. >> Yeah, sure, it is. >> Is there good days? You said you had a good day with Amazon? Jennifer, you mentioned the Amazon, and this brings up a good point, when you have these new waves come in, you have a lot of new things, new use cases. A lot of the finger pointing it's that guy's problem , that girl's problems, so how do you solve that, and how do you get the Young Guns up to speed? Is there training, is it this where the certification comes in? >> This is where the certifications really going to come in. I know when we got together at Reinvent, one of the questions that we had with Steve and the team was, what should our certification look like? Should we just be teaching about what AVH troubleshooting brings to bear, but what should that be like? I think Toby and I were like, No, no, no, no. That's going a little too high, we need to get really low because the better someone can get at actually understanding what's actually happening in the network, and where to actually troubleshoot the problem, how to step back each of those processes. Because without that, it's just a big black box, and they don't know. Because everything is abstracted, in Amazon and in Azure and in Google, is abstracted, and they have these virtual gateways, they have VPNs, that you just don't have the logs on, is you just don't know. So then what tools can you put in front of them of where they can look? Because there are full logs. Well, as long as they turned on the flow logs when they built it, and there's like, each one of those little things that well, if they'd had decided to do that, when they built it, it's there. But if you can come in later to really supplement that with training to actual troubleshoot, and do a packet capture here, as it's going through, then teaching them how to read that even. >> Yeah, Toby, we were talking before we came on up on stage about your career, you've been networking all your time, and then, you're now mentoring a lot of younger people. How is that going? Because the people who come in fresh they don't have all the old war stories, like they don't talk about it, There's never for, I walk in bare feet in the snow when I was your age, I mean, it's so easy now, right, they say. What's your take on how you train the young People. >> So I've noticed two things. One is that they are up to speed a lot faster in generalities of networking. They can tell you what a network is in high school level now, where I didn't learn that til midway through my career, and they're learning it faster, but they don't necessarily understand why it's that way here. Everybody thinks that it's always slash 24 for a subnet, and they don't understand why you can break it down smaller, why it's really necessary. So the ramp up speed is much faster for these guys that are coming in. But they don't understand why and they need some of that background knowledge to see where it's coming from, and why is it important, and that's old guys, that's where we thrive. >> Jennifer, you mentioned you got in from the Marines, it helps, but when you got into networking, what was it like then and compare it now? Because most like we heard earlier static versus dynamic Don't be static is like that. You just set the network, you got a perimeter. >> Yeah, no, there was no such thing. So back in the day, I mean, we had Banyan vines for email, and we had token ring, and I had to set up token ring networks and figure out why that didn't work. Because how many of things were actually sharing it. But then actually just cutting fiber and running fiber cables and dropping them over shelters to plug them in and all crap, they swung it too hard and shattered it and now I got to figure eight Polish this thing and actually should like to see if it works. I mean, that was the network , current cat five cables to run an Ethernet, and then from that I just said, network switches, dumb switches, like those were the most common ones you had. Then actually configuring routers and logging into a Cisco router and actually knowing how to configure that. It was funny because I had gone all the way up, I was the software product manager for a while. So I've gone all the way up the stack, and then two and a half, three years ago, I came across to work with Entity group that became Viqtor Davis. But we went to help one of our customers Avis, and it was like, okay, so we need to fix the network. Okay, I haven't done this in 20 years, but all right, let's get to it. Because it really fundamentally does not change. It's still the network. I mean, I've had people tell me, Well, when we go to containers, we will not have to worry about the network. And I'm like, yeah, you don't I do. >> And that's within programmability is a really interesting, so I think this brings up the certification. What are some of the new things that people should be aware of that come in with the Aviatrix A certification? What are some of the highlights? Can you guys share some of the highlights around the certifications? >> I think some of the importance is that it doesn't need to be vendor specific for network generality or basic networking knowledge, and instead of learning how Cisco does something, or how Palo Alto does something, We need to understand how and why it works as a basic model, and then understand how each vendor has gone about that problem and solved it in a general. That's true in multicloud as well. You can't learn how Cloud networking works without understanding how AWS and Azure and GCP are all slightly the same but slightly different, and some things work and some things don't. I think that's probably the number one take. >> I think having a certification across Clouds is really valuable because we heard the global s eyes as you have a business issues. What does it mean to do that? Is it code, is it networking? Is it configurations of the Aviatrix? what is, he says,the certification but, what is it about the multiCloud that makes it multi networking and multi vendor? >> The easy answer is yes, >> Yes is all of us. >> All of us. So you got to be in general what's good your hands and all You have to be. Right, it takes experience. Because every Cloud vendor has their own certification. Whether that's SOPs and advanced networking and event security, or whatever it might be, yeah, they can take the test, but they have no idea how to figure out what's wrong with that system. The same thing with any certification, but it's really getting your hands in there, and actually having to troubleshoot the problems, actually work the problem, and calm down. It's going to be okay. I mean, because I don't know how many calls I've been on or even had aviators join me on. It's like, okay, so everyone calm down, let's figure out what's happening. It's like, we've looked at that screen three times, looking at it again is not going to solve that problem, right. But at the same time, remaining calm but knowing that it really is, I'm getting a packet from here to go over here, it's not working, so what could be the problem? Actually stepping them through those scenarios, but that's like, you only get that by having to do it, and seeing it, and going through it, and then you get it. >> I have a question, so, I just see it. We started this program maybe six months ago, we're seeing a huge amount of interest. I mean, we're oversubscribed on all the training sessions. We've got people flying from around the country, even with Coronavirus, flying to go to Seattle to go to these events where we're subscribed, is that-- >> A good emerging leader would put there. >> Yeah. So, is that something that you see in your organizations? Are you recommending that to people? Do you see, I mean, I'm just, I guess I'm surprised or not surprised. But I'm really surprised by the demand if you would, of this MultiCloud network certification because there really isn't anything like that. Is that something you guys can comment on? Or do you see the same things in your organization? >> I see from my side, because we operate in a multiCloud environments that really helps and some beneficial for us. >> Yeah, true. I think I would add that networking guys have always needed to use certifications to prove that they know what they know. >> Right. >> It's not good enough to say, Yeah, I know IP addresses or I know how a network works. A couple little check marks or a little letters body writing helps give you validity. So even in our team, we can say, Hey, we're using these certifications to know that you know enough of the basics and enough of the understandings, that you have the tools necessary, right. >> I guess my final question for you guys is, why an ACE certification is relevant, and then second part is share with the live stream folks who aren't yet ACE certified or might want to jump in to be aviatrix certified engineers. Why is it important, so why is it relevant and why should someone want to be a certified aviatrix certified engineer? >> I think my views a little different. I think certification comes from proving that you have the knowledge, not proving that you get a certification to get an army there backwards. So when you've got the training and the understanding and you use that to prove and you can, like, grow your certification list with it, versus studying for a test to get a certification and have no understanding of it. >> Okay, so that who is the right person that look at this and say, I'm qualified, is it a network engineer, is it a DevOps person? What's your view, a little certain. >> I think Cloud is really the answer. It's the, as we talked like the edges getting eroded, so is the network definition getting eroded? We're getting more and more of some network, some DevOps, some security, lots and lots of security, because network is so involved in so many of them. That's just the next progression. >> Do you want to add something there? >> I would say expand that to more automation engineers, because we have those now, so I probably extend it beyond this one. >> Jennifer you want to? >> Well, I think the training classes themselves are helpful, especially the entry level ones for people who may be "Cloud architects" but have never done anything in networking for them to understand why we need those things to really work, whether or not they go through to eventually get a certification is something different. But I really think fundamentally understanding how these things work, it makes them a better architect, makes them better application developer. But even more so as you deploy more of your applications into the Cloud, really getting an understanding, even from people who have traditionally done Onprem networking, they can understand how that's going to work in Cloud. >> Well, I know we've got just under 30 seconds left. I want to get one more question then just one more, for the folks watching that are maybe younger than, that don't have that networking training. From your experiences each of you can answer why should they know about networking, what's the benefit? What's in it for them? Motivate them, share some insights of why they should go a little bit deeper in networking. Stacy, we'll start with you, we'll go then. >> I'll say it's probably fundamental, right? If you want to deliver solutions, networking is the very top. >> I would say if you, fundamental of an operating system running on a machine, how those machines start together is a fundamental changes, something that start from the base and work your way up. >> Jennifer? >> Right, well, I think it's a challenge. Because you've come from top down, now you're going to start looking from bottom up, and you want those different systems to cross-communicate, and say you've built something, and you're overlapping IP space, note that that doesn't happen. But how can I actually make that still operate without having to re IP re platform. Just like those challenges, like those younger developers or assistant engineers can really start to get their hands around and understand those complexities and bring that forward in their career. >> They get to know then how the pipes are working, and they're got to know it--it's the plumbing. >> That's right, >> They got to know how it works, and how to code it. >> That's right. >> Awesome, thank you guys for great insights, ACE Certified Engineers, also known as ACEs, give them a round of applause. (audience clapping) (upbeat music) >> Thank you, okay. All right, that concludes my portion. Thank you, Steve Thanks for having me. >> John, thank you very much, that was fantastic. Everybody round of applause for John Furrier. (audience applauding) Yeah, so great event, great event. I'm not going to take long, we got lunch outside for the people here, just a couple of things. Just to call the action, right? So we saw the ACEs, for those of you out of the stream here, become a certified, right, it's great for your career, it's great for not knowledge, is fantastic. It's not just an aviator's thing, it's going to teach you about Cloud networking, MultiCloud networking, with a little bit of aviatrix, exactly like the Cisco CCIE program was for IP network, that type of the thing, that's number one. Second thing is learning, right? So there's a link up there to join the community. Again like I started this, this is a community, this is the kickoff to this community, and it's a movement. So go to community.avh.com, starting a community of multiCloud. So get get trained, learn. I'd say the next thing is we're doing over 100 seminars across the United States and also starting into Europe soon, we will come out and we'll actually spend a couple hours and talk about architecture, and talk about those beginning things. For those of you on the livestream in here as well, we're coming to a city near you, go to one of those events, it's a great way to network with other people that are in the industry, as well as to start alone and get on that MultiCloud journey. Then I'd say the last thing is, we haven't talked a lot about what Aviatrix does here, and that's intentional. We want you leaving with wanting to know more, and schedule, get with us and schedule a multi hour architecture workshop session. So we sit down with customers, and we talk about where they're at in that journey, and more importantly, where they're going, and define that end state architecture from networking, computer, storage, everything. Everything you've heard today, everybody panel kept talking about architecture, talking about operations. Those are the types of things that we solve, we help you define that canonical architecture, that system architecture, that's yours. So many of our customers, they have three by five, plotted lucid charts, architecture drawings, and it's the customer name slash Aviatrix, network architecture, and they put it on their whiteboard. That's the most valuable thing they get from us. So this becomes their 20 year network architecture drawing that they don't do anything without talking to us and look at that architecture. That's what we do in these multi hour workshop sessions with customers, and that's super, super powerful. So if you're interested, definitely call us, and let's schedule that with our team. So anyway, I just want to thank everybody on the livestream. Thank everybody here. Hopefully it was it was very useful. I think it was, and Join the movement, and for those of you here, join us for lunch, and thank you very much. (audience applauding) (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >> Good afternoon everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite, one of Microsoft's biggest shows of the year 26,000 people here in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We are joined by Phoummala Schmitt. She is the Senior Cloud Advocate, Microsoft Azure Engineering. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Well thank you for having me. >> Rebecca: For coming back on the show. >> Yeah, last year we were here-- Well, actually, we were what, a month earlier last year? It's November. >> Rebecca: We were indeed, we were indeed. >> Hoping the weather was better, but still warm. >> Well we're not getting much fresh air, but, we're going to talk today about cloud governance. So this is something that companies that are moving to the cloud, often as an experiment and then suddenly it's live. How do you make sure that your governance is in order and how do you help companies wrap their brains around getting things buttoned up? >> Part of it is enabling developers, operations. See, governance, typically is a negative, right? Oh my gosh, governance! It's a road blocker. We have to stop thinking in that way and think of it as an enabler and instead of governance, they're guardrails. We put those guardrails in place in the beginning, enable our developers. Now you've got control and speed, because everything is about speed right now, because if you are not, you know, developing at speed you're not at velocity. You're not meeting business and then developers are off doing their own thing and then, often times, when you're off doing things really, really fast, you forget about the little things. Like leaving a port open, or you're doing a POC and you're like oh we'll come back and fix all that stuff later, let's just get this out the door. And then next thing you know it, you're like, oh, wait! What happened here? >> Phoummala, it reminds me of just a lot of things when you talk about when you rollout DevOps. I need to think about things like security, governance and compliances. Part of what I'm doing and if I'm going to be releasing code constantly, it's not something that I can go back to later, 'cause you're never going to catch up, you're always going to be, you know, N minus X behind what you're doing. So, organizationally, what do companies need to do to make sure that governance is taken care of just as part of the ongoing day-to-day activity and development? >> Well, building is checks and balances, right? So we put those guardrails in place. Let's start with infrastructure guardrails. Your ports, do those audits, just making sure that what you have on premises is the same in the cloud. Once you do that, that's like one checkbox you've done. And then there's the app development portion of it. That's where we're going to get developers thinking let's build security into our application. It's going to make life a lot easier, like you said, than going back and trying to build and trying to put, you now, new code in. And then when you're doing DevOps and that's just like a combination of everything, keeping governance in mind helps the flow of all those different transactions. Personally, I think DevOps is probably the hardest, in terms of just maintaining governance, because you do have different teams working together. You know, it's these different principles all coming together, but it comes down to doing things right. You know, doing what's right, ultimately, because at the end of the day if there's something that's missing and then next you know it you're on the front of the page. Nobody wants to be on the front page. And it's those little things. Like, checking permissions, just making sure that we have the right identity access management. And it's just throwing in some audit, just making sure our ports are closed, multifactor, you can audit and check you know, your root accounts, your administrative accounts. Little things like that just making sure that we have like the proper authentication, multifactor all that good stuff and then you just start building upon that once you have a little bit of governance in play. >> Well, Phoummala, I think, you know, identity management's one of the real strengths that Microsoft has, you know? So, maybe give us a little viewpoint as to how that's gone from, you know, identity just about Outlook or Office 365 to, you know, today's environment where, my users can be anywhere, my applications are everywhere and I still need to make sure that, you now, those corporate guidelines and identity go with me wherever I am and whatever I'm doing? >> So from an Azure standpoint identity management we have Azure AD, we've got all that component, but when you're coming into Azure, we like to emphasize using our back, role-based access control. Let's just make sure that the people that we're giving access to, have access to what they really need to. Building those roles out and people can have multiple roles. I mean, it's as simple as that, right? We started off just defining what's your job? Right, Stu, you've got a job, what are your roles? Let's just make sure we give you those roles and then we build upon that. If you need a little bit more, okay. And then you can give external users access, as well and you can give them roles, but just giving anybody full access to everything... Do you really need it? And it's the same thing with, you know Office and E-mail and SharePoint. So we're just taking those concepts from those applications and putting it into access into the Azure infrastructure. And then developers can actually build that into their applications, as well. >> One of the things that we keep talking a lot about, because Satya Nadella was talking a lot about it is trust and that is really the bedrock of good governance and making sure that people have confidence in your systems and that things are going to be done right, as you say. How much does that play into your work with customers and clients in terms of there's just an inherent trust right now that Microsoft is worthy of this and it is sort of the grown up in the room when it comes to big technology? >> Trust is huge. If you have trust in us as a customer that's, you know, that's amazing. We're going to give you the tools, we're going to give you the features, so that you and your customers have trust. You know, Azure policies. I mean that's just one component of governance and it's-- Policies isn't about completely control, but it's about auditing. Just checking, right? Checks and balances, 'cause that's really what governance is. Those checks and balances make sure that your operations is meeting your business needs. So if we can just do those little checks, simple trust like check marks, it goes a long way. And then, then we've got Azure blueprints which is our governance at scale. So we've taken everything that we've learned about governance in general, those different tools that we had and now you're just going to stamp it. Every time you build a new subscription you're just going to rollout governance and it's just-- I don't want to say as easy as a button, but it sort of is, right? You can do it through the portal. And everything that you've built as a team, those roles that you've created, the policies you've been submitted from your audit checks to controlling who creates what, where they can create that from, because, you know, GDPR that's huge. Because we can actually help you control where you resources are being deployed from. I mean that's going to be huge for most organizations right now. So, knowing that we have the right tools in place for you to run your business, that's trust. >> Phoummala, give us a little bit of a walk-around the show in your shoes. You're speaking at the show, you're hosting people on channel 9, you're behind the scenes helping a lot of people. Give us what you're most looking forward to, what you're most looking to share at the event this week. >> Most looking forward to just meeting all my friends that I've made throughout the years, but meeting new friends and, of course, there's puppies with therapy dogs, as well. Thursday I'm doing several channel 9 live interviews and I've got two sessions-- Well diversity sessions, which, typically, I do technical sessions, but diversity sessions I feel are very, very important. We talk about stuff nobody really wants to talk about all the time, right? We actually have a parenting and tech session tomorrow. How do we handle being a parent and working full time? And then I'm talking about the career journey and those two actually kind of go together, in some way, I mean, I'm-- And everyone's been asking me how I'm doing, my son just went off to bootcamp and so as a parent, I felt it was really important to be part of that session and talk about how, how do I handle it? Where I wasn't here yesterday, the first day, I was off sending my son, starting off his life, his new career and my career, you know, has gone on for several years, but it's a new change now for me and balancing that, that FOMO right? Fear of missing out, like everyone's at work and I have to be here with my son. There is an adjustment and a lot of parents have actually reached out to me and said how do you handle that? So there's several of us speaking tomorrow that, we're going to talk to the attendees and then here are some tips to how we do it. Especially with our traveling schedule. >> Well, I'm interested to hear, because we had another guest who was talking about stress, I mean, I think it was your best friend, Teresa Miller. >> Yes! >> Talking about stress as endemic to this high, stressed, fast-paced industry. Where, as you said, there's a lot of demands on your time, a lot of demands on your travel schedule and really a push for excellence add-all time. How is it to be a hard driving professional and also want to make time for your family, because your kids matter, of course? >> It is-- There's a balance. So the tech career includes that balance. We always want more in that career, right? We all do, but sometimes we have to step back. We've got to play the game a little bit, you know? You can't always have everything all at once and I've learned that. So tomorrow's session's about sharing what I've gone through, you know, as a parent, as a woman in tech. It's been a tough journey, but it's been fulfilling. So I work for Microsoft now and here's what I've done. I've made some bad mistakes, I've made some, you know, some good choices, but overall, there's been a balance. There's been a give-and-take I've had to do and I feel like the journey I've been through could be helpful for others. I've had a lot of people ask me, especially about career journeys now with the cloud, it's very, very scary. And a lot of people are worried, will I still have a job? My job transitions, what do I do? And I'm like, let's talk about this. I went through the same thing, I mean, exchange got us, exchange servers. Most people don't deploy exchange anymore. It's Office 365. So I went through that several years ago, that transition, where do I go next? 'Cause I know I really don't have that much of a life anymore. Like the AS/400 engineers, right? >> And diversity is another, of course, hot button issue in the technology industry. There is a dearth of women, there is dearth of underrepresented groups and LGBTQ. How are you as someone who is a woman of color navigating these thorny issues and helping the next generation come up and to create a different technology industry for the future? >> So it's tough. I navigate through with a lot of candles, a lot of wine. (the ladies laugh) With friends, I've got a great support system, but I strongly believe in paying it forward. There's a lot of stuff I do behind the scenes a lot of people do not know. A lot of forwarding of hey, this person is really good, you know, in this space, you might want to speak with them. I, Tech Field Day, I'm sure you all know the great people over there. I've forwarded a lot of names over there. I feel like I'm-- I've come up the ladder or the elevator, it's time to push that button, send it back down to help others and I've been doing it a lot more, I've always felt it, but now I feel I'm in a position that I can really help others and it just feels really good when someone I've helped Tweets about it. Obviously they're not going to mention my name, but when I see them being so happy, it just makes me feel really, really good, like, wow, you know, you just feel-- Like your heart just fills up like okay. This is good. >> Rebecca: Contributing to their success. >> Yeah and it becomes addictive almost. Like, how can I, you know-- If I see an opportunity to help somebody I will, I'll help 'em, anyway I can. >> So you are an avid blogger and you are considered one of the top 50 tech influencers and thought leaders you should follow. So congratulations on that. >> Phoummala: Thank you. >> I'm interested to hear, how do you keep up on the news and what do you read, who do you talk to, what do you pay attention to? And tell our viewers, too, because they want to know. >> Twitter is probably my source of everything now, 'cause it's quick, but pretty much just keeping up on the internet. Honestly, it's a lot, between my travel schedule, my family, it is almost impossible to stay up to date on everything. And I've learned that I can't. I just-- 'Cause I don't want to get burnout. I've been burnout several times and now I just, I take one day at a time. Oh, there was something that was announced, I didn't hear about it and someone said something I'm like oh, okay, oh that's cool. I'll read up on that later. But I don't feel like I need to know everything all at once. I think when you get to a certain place you're just comfortable knowing what you know and, you know, I'll read, I'll read the news when I get home. You know, something like that where you're-- You've got to be at that place where you're comfortable and not always feeling like I have to know everything, 'cause we're humans, we can't know everything all at once. >> And as we've talked about there has been, talking about not being able to keep up with everything, this conference, Microsoft Ignite. So many new product announcements, new buzzwords, new strategies that are all washing over us. What has been most interesting to you, most exciting? Who have you talked to? What sessions have you seen, that have sort of, sparked your interest the most? >> Azure Arc. Now I'm just reading into it, I haven't gotten real deep into it, but from what I know, from what I've seen, I like it. I like it a lot. It's, when we think about the cloud, it's multicloud, you know, it is right? It's every organization, they're dipping in their toes into just about everything and Azure Arc is giving that opportunity to our customers to be able to say, hey, we know you're in the cloud, in different clouds, here's a view into it. And, you know, you're able to manage these environments and see what's going on. Because that is the future and... Its a hybrid, multicloud. I think that's going to be my word, you know. Hybrid-multi, because we're in everything. I expect every organization to be in a little bit of everything, because it's... It's like, you know, your personal lives, right? You're in that little bit of everything. It makes it more dynamic and I just don't think one, one thing is going to be an organization's like, you know, that's all they're doing. I truly believe everyone's meant to dip their toes in a little bit of everything. They'll have one defined set of, here we're just going to use this one cloud, or this one's servers, but for the most part, they are going to dabble. And we're-- Azure Arc is giving customers the opportunity to manage those environments, where they've decided to dabble a little bit or because of business needs. They need to be in different environments. >> Exactly, renaissance organizations. >> Phoummala: Yeah. >> I love it. Phoummala, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Always a pleasure having you. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (theCUBE theme song)

>> Hello, Room. Welcome back to London. You watching the Cube? The leader and tech coverage. My name is Dave Volante. We're here in a special program that we've constructed. It's the day before the eight of US London summit and we wanted to come and talk to some customers, some executives of startups, and really dig into what's going on in the public sector. Chris Heman is here. He's the director of UK and Ireland Public sector for eight of us. Chris, Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Thanks for vitamins. Christ. >> Yeah. So you guys have a special public sector healthcare pre day that's going on downstairs? What's that all about? >> Yes. So obviously we'LL remain summit tomorrow expecting about twelve thousand people, which is phenomenal today that we could do something with one of our special industries, which is health care. So we've invited a number of customers and executives along for that today to learn more about cloud, how they can get going with the cloud and get, you know, start adopting a pace. So I believe you spoke with the missus about earlier on. So he misses a supplies the n hs, but also people and hs digital and so on her adopting the platform. So that's what today's all about. >> So health care is one of those sectors. It's ripe for disruption. It really hasn't been, you know, disrupted in a big way and digitized and it's starting. But the challenge is, how do you balance the cost of health care? Everybody's sensitized to that with the quality. Yeah, here. And so that's what really the problem. Show yourself. How does he ws in the cloud? Help solve that. >> Yeah, I think across the public sex. Really not just for the healthcare, but, you know, one of the things organizations are trying to do is reduce that large legacy footprint of infrastructure and really deliver against their mission, whether it be patients or citizens or whatever it may be. Ah, good example. In the in the case of the health care is we're working with a partner and I just school Business Services Authority on they have a large call center that was a really, you know, costly experience having traditional call center set up. So they've used our connect platform, our call center platform, and also some voice technologic called Lex. And they're able to reduce they stood up in about three weeks is a phenomenal effort, and they reduce their call volume by forty two percent. So basically getting the computer's towards some of the really easy queries, which, of course, meant that some of the tougher call center queries went to the actual humans and the call center handlers. So you know those sort things, I really think impact the bottom line for the HS and save some cost, but really helping to innovate a swell for for their patients and sis isn't so. >> Let's stay in health care for a second. So any just has, ah, nearly half a billion pound initiative to modernize. So if had they asked me, they didn't ask me. But had they ask me, I say, Well, part of that should be to get rid of the heavy lifting, so moved to the cloud and then really try toe transform your labor force to focus on more value added areas. It's actually helps to solve your problems. Is that essentially, what's happening? >> Understand, so that the contacts into very you know, that the people are now answering fines aren't doing those sort of Monday enquiries were it's just going to take four to six weeks. It's Maur, you know, transferring that. You know that's the computer and letting the humans do the heavy lifting. So I think that's you know, certainly one thing. But I think it's also enabling these organizations to really be closer to their citizens into their patients as well. With free liquor organizations like in the local authority, space, like else prevail. There are also using voice technology with Alexa to enable citizens to answer queries like You know who is my counselor or to update about various things within their sort of council record. And socially public sector organizations love that because they've now got this unique touch point with the sisters and at scale, whereas they would never have been able to do that previously. So that's a really good, you know, close engagement for them. >> So you hear the bromide people say data is the new oil. It's it's the it's the new natural resource. We actually think date is more valuable than oil because you can only use oil in one place. The data you can use many, many places, so data becomes increasingly important. But the problem that most traditional companies have is there, Their data is locked in silos. It's hardened into an application. And so so how are you guys attacking that problem? What do you see? A CZ trends in the customer base in terms of being able tto have sort of, ah, unified data model. And what role does the cloud >> play there? Yeah, I think it's really good questions. So there's a number of things that we're doing. First of all, we're very passionate about public date sets. So we host a number of public day sets like Lanza imagery and these sort of things, you know, fundamentally, we believe data has gravity, so, you know, for overto host and provide this data at scale for researchers and so on. That has tremendous huge benefit. But you're right about public sector organizations, and I silos a good example. Where we've we've worked is with transport for London. Obviously, if you want to get in and around the city of London, typically you go to tear filled look after UK, which runs on a dress, and you'LL say, I want to get from you know, Frank and to Liverpool Street, and that's all kind of running on top of a dress. But the really cool thing is they've opened up all that information so they don't have to develop. Those ups themselves are effectively crowd sourcing the development of those APS. So they've got some four thousand developers now working against all this data. Ah, Delight recently did a study. They reckon it's goingto generate economic benefits of one hundred thirty million pounds per annum just by making this really time data available. So So you're gaining unique business in size. But not only that, you've got organizations like city mapper who can commercialize that data develop, perhaps, and sell those apse on behalf of you know, you took to the community and so on. So you've got double bubble of s on the engagement, but also the public benefit as well. So that's really cool >> now, years ago Ah, in a past life, I had an opportunity when I worked for I d see the research company to run the government business. And when I went around and talked to the heads of military heads, the heads of agencies, there was a common theme. They were trying to close the gap between public sector and commercial. Yeah, and they never quite could get there. The cloud seems to me, Chris, to be changing that. I mean, to me, the CIA deal in twenty thirteen was a seminal moment for just the cloud and need of us specifically. But increasingly, you're seeing innovation. Yeah, it's still very difficult because you get turnover and agencies and administrations and so forth. But what are you seeing in terms of of those trends? Are you seeing public sector organizations leaning in modernizing? And again, what role does the cloud play there? >> Yeah, one hundred cent. I think you're absolutely rise. It is a unifier. In that sense we worked with, you know, we're moving mission systems to the cloud now with our customers. Ah, we worked with Dr Vehicle Stands Agency. So they're responsible for making sure our car's unroadworthy in the UK. They migrated their entire platform, which supports on thirty thousand small businesses. Try the rest in ten weeks. So it's amazing what public sector organizations are able to achieve with the pace of cloud. And a lot of it starts with experimentation. You know, that's the great thing is that you can try something. If it doesn't work, you can turn it off and you haven't lost anything but that that pace of being out to move, even mission systems. So the cloud is happening in public sexual across the board, >> and I mentioned the CIA before they start to be the American sort of parachuting in, and it's obviously a bias that I have. I'm working on my accent. But But But But the CIA was significant because everybody in the early days were so concerned about security that the head of tea in the CIA stood up last year at the D. C. Public sector Summit and said, My worst day of security in the cloud is better, far better than my client server ever. Wass. Yeah. So what about security concerns? Have they abated? They they still there? How is that evolving? >> Well, I think first of always, absolutely right that public sector organizations one hundred percent laser focused on security. But the good news is that we are to you know, its job. Zero for us is absolutely everything that we don't live and breathe by. And I think we've demonstrated that in a number of ways. I mean first of all, just the way in which we operate our physical infrastructure and everything that we do it physical pace, but then above the layer with the kind of the things that are a customer's responsible for. We have something called a shared responsibility model, so the responsibility for kind of everything above the physical infrastructure, but we provide the tools that they just never would've been able to get access to in a in a physical world, you know what our CEO's in public sector organizations do You know every servant you have, you know, just things like that. And they would just be like Now I've got no idea, but with a cloud, you have that visibility. You can see every single thing that's happening in the environment. So you get farm or visibility in control that he ever was ever were able to in a physical world. So I think that's first thing and obviously everything that we do around certification atter stations around. I so certification all the reporting and so on that we do Teo to assure our customers that we do a good job of that level as well. Ministry of Justice actually came out and said you could be more secure in the cloud than on premises and you have to focus on those areas where you're not in the cloud. So I think that was a huge testament by the UK. Come and say, Actually, this is this is secure, and this is fit for purpose, which is which is good. >> One of the things I've observed boat just technology adoption in general. You know, Silicon Valley's unique, obviously, And but, you know, outside of Silicon Valley, maybe technology adoption, you know, twenty years ago occurred more slowly. It seems like cloud adoption is very much consistent across the globe. I wonder if you could talk about that, But then specifically, public sector jobs in the cloud Do you see this Very similar sort of cadence from, you know, us rest of >> world? Yeah, I do. And I think you know, we were doing a fantastic job in the UK, Actually. Really fantastic job. Talked about some of stuff we're doing round. I I am machine learning. You know, some of these things are really leading edge on DH. If you speak to a miss earlier, they're investigating things like Blockchain for their tops of solution. So these sort of things are really pushing the boundary. But Paramount, All of that is this idea that you can experiment to try things. There's no longer there's a kind of is no longer a disparity around. Think something's fundamentally when you when you log into the console, you got access to one hundred sixty five different things and you can get going with you in the UK whether you're in the candor or in North America. So our customers are picking these things up on DH, accelerating a pace, which is which is fantastic trying all different types of things and work lights. >> Okay, if I were to ask Alexa what's gonna happen with Brexit, what would what would you tell me? I think first of >> almost, you know, with the way we think about it is it's just business as usual for us. You know, it's a fairly mundane answer, but fundamentally, you know, organization still need to adapt. This stone is transformed. They still need to evolve, and that's where we're helping and we're leaning in, you know, we're helping them with some of their EU accept programs around tooling and process and things like that. But I still came to adopt cloud a place which is which is also >> so come back to the session that you guys are running downstairs. I saw some of descriptions of it and I think there were three areas of focus. The public payers, the health care providers in the publicly funded research organizations is kind of what you guys are focused on today. So maybe close there and give us a vision for where you see eight of us public sector in the UK and >> I I think this were obviously healthcare's really fast growing vertical for us, which is fantastic upper across the board. Demand has never been greater, which is phenomenal on DH were really pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved. Yeah, we're working with, you know, I talked about some the public sector organizations with working with, you know, partners like he miss, but also small businesses as well as great example. Working with a company called Ad Zuna, which provides job search functionality. They run on a dress and they want a contract for Jobcentre Plus, which part of our department work and pensions. So it's not just the direct engagement we have with our customers. But it's also a ll the partners that we're working with to enable that in tow and functionality, which is which is really good. So we're doing a lot, lots of work in that space. And I could liken see Maura Mohr organizations not just customers in customers, but also partners technology providers coming to talk to us. Ah, and then across the spectrum, in health care, whether it's supplies to the chess or at the NSS himself, an individual trusts and and hospitals and so on, the kind of using our technology. So it's a real broad mixing spectrum of adoption. >> Outstanding, Chris, thanks so much for coming on. The Cube really appreciate it. And they were seeing the growth of a device is a DBS is actually astounding thirty billion dollars run rate company growing at forty plus percent a year. But more importantly, you're starting to see not only region expansion, but you're seeing expansion into specific verticals and ecosystems forming startups. And you guys are doing a great job of attracting these. Thanks very much for coming. Thanks. Thanks. Alright, Keep it right there. Buddy. This is David, Dante and the Cuba right back. Right after this short break. Wait

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to Palo Altos Cube Studios for CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE. We're with Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision, CUBE Alumni. He's been on before. Building one of the most compelling companies that's disrupting and changing the game in Comms, advertising, PR, with Cloud technologies. Kevin, great to see you again, thanks for coming in. >> Likewise John, It's really good to be back. >> So, we haven't chatted in two years. You've been busy. Our last conversation was the beginning of 2017. Cision's done a lot of interesting things. You've got a lot of M and A under your belt. You're putting this portfolio together with Cloud technologies. Really been interesting. I really got to say I think you cracked the code on I think a new reality, a new economic reality. Also new capabilities for comms folks. Congratulations. >> Thank you, it's been a fun ride. >> So give us the update. So two years since we talked, how many deals, companies have you bought? What's the headcount, what's the revenue? Give us an update. >> In the four years, 12 acquisitions, seven of which have happened since I've been here. Up to 4,500 employees in over 40 countries. Customer count has grown to over 50,000 customers globally. Revenue's kind of gone from 500s to just shy of 800 million. A lot of leadership changes, and as you just mentioned, pretty seismic change, finally. We've certainly been the catalyst and the cattle prod for that seismic change around tech, data, measurement and analytics finally becoming mature and adopted inside this line of business like the Chief Communication Officer, the earn media folks. To say that they were not tech savvy a few years ago would be an understatement. So, a lot's been going on. >> Yeah, and certainly the trend is your friend, in my opinion, for you. But I think the reality is not yet upon people's general mindset. It's coming quickly, so if you look at some of the big trends out there. Look at fake news, look at Facebook, look at the Google effect. Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Big Tech, Amazon. Cloud computing, in that time period that you were, prior to just going to Cision, you had Oracle Cloud, done a lot of great things on the Marketing Cloud side. But the timing of Cloud computing, the timing of how media has changed. There's not many journalists anymore. We had Andy Cunningham, a legendary industry veteran, formerly of Cunningham Communications. He did the PR for Steve Jobs. You said, there's no more journalists, a few left, but you got to tell your story direct to the consumer. >> You do. >> This is now a new marketing phenomenon. This is a tailwind for you at Cision because you guys, although put these cubbies together, have a unique vision around bringing brand value advertising at PR economics. >> Yeah, that's a good way to put it. >> Tell us the vision of Cision and specifically the shift that's happening. Why are you guys important? What wave are you riding? >> So, there's a couple shifts, John. You and I have talked about this in previous programs There's this shift of the line of business, having to work in a whole bunch of non-integrated point solutions. The CFO used to live in 17 different applications from 17 vendors. That's all squished together. Now I buy from one Cloud platform, right, from Oracle or SAP. Same thing happened in Human Capital Management. 22 things squished into the Cloud, one from Workday, right. Same thing happened, you had 25 different things for sales and service. That all squished together, into one CRM in the Cloud, I buy from Salesforce, right. And our last rodeo, the early part of this stack, it was me and Adobe battling it out for the right to go squish the entire the LUMAscape into a marketing cloud, right, so there could be one ring to rule them all for the CMO. So, it happens in every single category. It just hasn't had over here, happened on the earned media side and the Chief Communications Officer. So, bringing the tech stack so that now we are for the CCO what Adobe is for the CMO what Salesforce is for the CRO, Workday is for the CHRO. That has to happen. You can't do, you can't manage it this way without sophisticated tech, without automation, without integration, you can't do it. The second thing that had to happen, especially in marketing and advertising, they all figured out how to get revenue credit. Advertising was a slow single-digit CAGR industry for 50 years. And then something happened. After 5% CAGR for 50 years, and then something happened over the next 10 years. Digital paid went from like 15 billion to 150 billion. And what happened is that old, I know half my advertising is wasted on this one half. That went bye-bye. Now I know immediately, down to the page, down the ad unit, down to this, exactly what worked, right. When I was able to put Pixels on ads, John, you'd go to that page, Pixel would go on you, It would follow you around If you ended up putting something in the e-commerce shop that ad got credit. I'm not saying that's right, I'm just saying that's how the entire-- >> But that's how the infrastructure would let you, allowed you, it enabled you to do that. Then again, paid advertising, paid search, paid advertising, that thing has created massive value in here. >> Massive value. But my buyer, right, so the person that does the little ad on the most regional tech page got credit. My buyer that got Bob Evans, the Cloud King, to write an article about why Microsoft is going to beat AWS, he's a credible third party influencer, writing objectively. That article's worth triple platinum and has more credibility than 20,000 Microsoft sales reps. We've never, until Cision, well let's Pixel that, let's go figure out how many of those are the target audience. Let's ride that all the way down to the lead form that's right. Basically it's super simple. Nobody's ever tracked the press releases, the articles or any of the earned media content, the way people have tracked banner ads or e-commerce emails. Therefore this line of business never get revenue credit. It stayed over here in the OpEx pile where things like commerce and advertising got dumped onto the revenue pile. Well, you saw the crazy investment shift. So, that's really the more important one, is Comms is finally getting quantified ROI and business's attribution like their commerce and advertising peers for the first time ever in 2018 via what Cision's rolled out. That's the exciting piece. >> I think, I mean, I guess what I hear you saying is that for the first time, the PR actually can be measured, similar to how advertising >> You got it. >> Couldn't be measured then be measured. Now PR or communications can be measured. >> They get measured the same way. And then one other thing. That ad, that press release, down to the business event. This one had $2 million dollars of ad spend, this one had no ad spend. When it goes to convert, in CRM or it goes to convert on a website, this one came from banner ad, this one came from credible third party content. Guess which one, not only had zero ad spend instead of $2 million in ad spend. Guess which one from which source actually converts better. It's the guy that chose to read credible third-party article. He's going to convert in the marketing system way better that somebody who just clicked on the ad. >> Well certainly, I'm biased-- >> So all the way down the funnel, we're talking about real financial impact based on capturing earned media ID, which is pretty exciting. >> Well, I think the more exciting thing is that you're basically taking a value that is unfunded quote by the advertising firm, has no budget basically, or thin budgets, trying to hit an organic, credible outlet which is converting in progression to a buyer, an outcome. That progression is now tracked. But let's just talk about the economics because you're talking about $2 million in spend, it could be $20 million. The ratio between ad spend and conversion to this new element you mentioned is different. You're essentially talking about the big mega trend, which is organic content. Meaning connecting to sources. >> That's right. >> That flow. Of course, we believe and we, at the Cube, everyone's been seeing that with our business. Let's talk about that dynamic because this is not a funded operationalized piece yet, so we've been seeing, in the industry, PR and comms becoming more powerful. So, the Chief Communication Officer isn't just rolling out press releases, although they have to do that to communicate. You've got medium posts now, you've got multiple channels. A lot of places to put the story. So the Chief Communication Officer really is the Chief Storyteller Officer, Not necessarily the CMO. >> Emphatically. >> The Martech Stack kind of tracking. So talk about that dynamic. How is the Chief Communication Officer role change or changing? Why is that important and what should people be thinking about, if they are a Chief Communication Officer? >> You know, it's interesting. There's a, I'm just going to call it an actual contradiction on this front. When you and I were getting out of our undergrad, 7 out of 10 times that CCO, the Chief Communication Officer, worked for the CEO and 30% of time other. Yet the role was materially narrow. The role has exploded. You just said it pretty eloquently. This role has really exploded and widened its aperture. Right now though 7 out of 10 of them actually do work for the CMO, which is a pretty interesting contradiction. And only 30% of them work for the CEO. Despite the fact that from an organizational stand point, that kind of counter intuitive org move has been made. It doesn't really matter because, so much of what you just said too, you was in marketing's purview or around brand or around reputation or around telling the story or around even owning the key assets. Key assets isn't that beautiful Budweiser frog commercial they played on Super Bowl anymore. The key assets are what's getting done over in the communications, in part. So, from a storytelling standpoint, from an ownership of the narrative, from a, not just a product or a service or promotion, but the whole company, the whole brand reputation, the goodwill, all of that is comms. Therefore you're seeing comms take the widest amount of real estate around the boardroom table than they've ever had. Despite the fact that they don't sit in the chair as much. I mentioned that just because I find it very interesting. Comms has never been more empowered, never had a wider aperture. >> But budget wise, they're not really that loaded up with funding. >> And to my earlier point, it's because they couldn't show. Super strategic. Showing ROI. >> So, showing ROI is critical. >> Not the quality of clippings. >> It was the Maslow of Hierarchy of Needs if you can just show me that I put a quarter in and I got a dollar out. Like the ads and the e-commerce folks do. It simply drives the drives me. >> So take us through some of those analytics because people who know about comms, the old school comms people who are doing this, they should really be thinking about what their operation is because, can I get an article in the Wall Street Journal? Can Silicon Angle write about us? I've got to get more clippings. That tend to be the thing. Did we get the press release out on time? They're not really tied into some of the key marketing mix pieces. They tend to be kind of a narrow scope. Those metrics were pretty clear. What are the new metrics? What's the new operational playbook.? >> Yeah, we call those Vanity Metrics. I cared about theoretical reach. Hey, Yahoo tells me I reached 222 billion people, so I plug in 222 billion people. I reached more people than there are on the planet with this PR campaign. I needed to get to the basic stuff like how many people did I actually reach, number one. But they don't, they do theoretical reach. They work in things like sentiment. Well, I'm going to come up with, 100 reporters wrote about me. I'm going to come up with, how many of them I thought were positive, negative, neutral. Sentiment analysis, they measure number of reporters or hits versus their competitors and say, Proctor and Gamble rolled out this diaper product, how did I do this five days? How much did Proctor and Gamble diapers get written about versus Craft diapers versus Unilever's. Share a voice. Not irrelevant metrics. But not metrics the CEO and the CFO are going to invest in. >> Conversion to brand or sales, those kind of things? >> They never just never existed. Those never existed. Now when we can introduce the same exact metrics that the commerce and the ad folks do and say, I can tell you exactly how many people. I can tell you exactly who they were, demographic, firmographic, lifestyle, you name it. I can tell you who the audience is you're reaching. I can tell you exactly what they do. When those kind of people read those kind of articles or those kind of people read those kind of press releases, they go to these destinations, they take these behaviors. And because I can track that all the way down to whatever that success metric is, which could be a lead form if I'm B2B for pipe. It could be a e-commerce store from B2C. It could be a rating or review or a user generation content gourd. It could be a sign up and register, if I'm trying to get database names. Whatever the business metric is. That's what the commerce and the ad people do all day every day. That's why they are more funded than ever. The fact that press releases, articles, tweets, blogs, the fact that the earned media stuff has never been able to do those things is why they just continue to suffer and have had a real lack of investment prices going on for the last 20 year. >> Talk about the trend around-- >> It's simple stuff. >> I know, if you improve the ROI, you get more budget. >> It really is that simple. >> That's been the challenge. I think PR is certainly becoming, comms is becoming more powerful. People know I talk about it all the time. I think comms is the new CMO I think command and control and organic content work together in the organic. We've seen it first hand in our business. But, it's an issue of tech savviness and also vision. A lot of people just are uncomfortable shifting to the new realities. >> That's for sure. >> What are some of the people tech savvy look at when they look at say revamping comms platform or strategy versus say old school? >> I'll give you two answers on that, John. Here is one thing that is good for us, that 7 out of 10 to the CCOs work for the CMO. Because when I was in this seat starting to light that fire under the CMO for the first time, which was not that long ago, and they were not tech savvy, and they were not sophisticated. They didn't know how to do this stuff either. That was a good 10 year journey to get the CMO from not sophisticated to very sophisticated. Now they're one of the more sophisticated lines of business in the world. But that was a slog. >> So are we going to see a Comms Stack? Like Martech, ComTech. >> ComTech is the decision communication Cloud, is ComTech. So we did it. We've built the Cloud stack. Again like I said, just like Adobe has the tech stack for marketing, Cision has the tech stack for comms, and we've replicated that. But because the CCO works for the CMO and the CMO's already been through this. Been through this with Ad Techs, been through this with MarTech, been through this with eCommerce, been through this with Web. You know, I've got a three or four year sophistication path this time just because >> The learnings are there >> The company's already done it everywhere else. The boss has already done it everywhere else. >> So the learnings are there from the MarTech so it's a pretty easy leap to take? >> That's exactly right. >> It's just-- >> How CommTech works is shocking. Incredibly similar to how MarTech and AdTech work. A lot of it is the same technology, just being applied different. >> That's good news >> So, the adoption curve for us is a fantastic thing. It's a really good thing for us that 70% of them work for CMOs because the CMO is the most impatient person on the planet, to get this over because the CMO is sick of doing customer journeys or omni channel across just paid and owned. They recognize that the most influential thing to influence you, it's not their emails, it's not their push notifications, It's not their ads. It's recognizing which credible third-party content you read, getting them into that, so that they're influencing you. >> It's kind of like Google PageRank in the old days. This source is more relevant than that one, give it more weight. >> And now all of a sudden if I have my Cision ID, I can plug in the more weight stuff under your profile. I want to let him go across paid and owned too, I materially improve the performance of the paid and owned because I'm putting in the really important signal versus what's sitting over there in the DMP or the CDP, which is kind of garbage. That's really important. >> I really think. >> I thinks you've got a home run here. I think you've really cracked the code on this. I think you are absolutely right on the money with comms and CommsTech. I see it all the time. In my years of experiences, it's so obvious. Then again, the tailwind is that they've been through the MarTech. The question I have for you is cultural shift. That's a big one. So, I'm out evangelizing all the time about the CUBE Cloud and some of the things we're doing. I run into the deer in the headlights on one side, what do you mean? And then people like, I believe, I totally understand. The believers and the non believers. What's the cultural shift? Because some chief comms op, they're very savvy, progressive, we've got to make the shift. How do they get the ship to turn? What are some of the cultural challenges? >> And boy is that right. I felt the same thing, getting more doing it with the CMO. A lot of people kept their head in the sand until they got obsoleted. They didn't know. Could they not see the train coming? They didn't want to see the train coming. Now you go look at the top 100 CMOs in the world today. Pretty different bunch than who those top 100 CMOs were 10 years ago. Really different bunch. History's repeating itself over here too. You've got the extremely innovative CCOs that are driving that change and transformation. You've got the deer in the headlight, okay, I know I need to do this, but I'm not sure how, and you do have your typical, you know, nope, I've got my do not disturb sign and police tape over my office. I won't even let you in my door. I don't want to hear about it. You've got all flavors. The good news is we are well past the half point where the innovators are starting actually to deploy and show results, the deer in the headlights are starting to innovate, and these folks are at least opening up the door and taking down some tape. >> Is there pressure on the agency side now? A lot of agencies charge a lot of monthly billings for these clients, the old school thing. Some are trying to be progressive and do more services. Have you seen, with the Cision Cloud and things that you're doing, that you're enabling, those agencies seem to be more productive? >> Yes. >> Are the client's putting pressure on those agencies so they see more value? Talk about the agency dynamic. >> That's also a virtuous cycle too, right? That cycle goes from, it's a Bell Curve. At the beginning of the bell curve, customers have no clue about the communications. They go to their agencies for advice. So, you have to educate the agencies on how to say nice things about you. By the time you're at the Bell Curve, the client's know about the tech or they've adopted the tech, and the agencies realize, oh, I can monetize the hell out of this. They need strategy and services and content and creative and campaign. This is yet another good old fashioned >> High gross profit. >> A buck for the tech means six bucks for me as the service agency. At the bottom, over here, I'll never forget this when we did our modern marketing experiences, Erik, the CMO of Clorox said, hey, to all you agencies out there, now that we're mature, you know, we choose our our agency based on their fluency around our tech stack. So it goes that violently and therefore, the agencies really do need to try to get fluent. The ones that do, really reap rewards because there is a blatant amount of need as the line of business customer tries to get from here to here. And the agency is the is the very first place that that customer is going to go to. >> So, basically the agency-- >> The customer has first right of refusal to go provide these services and monetize them. >> So, the agency has to keep up. >> They certainly do. >> Because, if the game gets changed by speed, it's accelerated >> If they keep up, yup. >> Value is created. If they don't have their running shoes on, they're out. >> If they keep up and they stay fluent, then they're going to be great. The last thing back in the things. We've kind of hit this. This is one of those magic points I've been talking about for 20 years. When the CFO or the CEO or the CMO walk down to the CCOs office and say, where are we on this, 'cause it's out in the wild now, there are over 1200 big brands doing this measurement, Cision ID, CommsTech stuff. It's getting written about by good old fashioned media. Customer says, wow, I couldn't do this for 50 years, now I am, and look what I just did to my Comms program. That gets read. The world's the same place as it always has been. You and I read that. We go down to our comms department and say, wow, I didn't know that was possible, where are we on this? So the Where Are We On This wave is coming to communications, which is an accelerant. >> It's an accountability-- >> Now it's accountability, and therefore, the urgency to get fluent and changed. So now they're hiring up quantums and operations and statisticians and database people just like the marketers did. The anatomy of a communications department is starting to like half science half art, just like happened in marketing. Whereas before that, it was 95% art and 5% science. But it's getting to be 50/50. >> Do you have any competition? >> We have, just like always. >> You guys pretty much have PR Newswire, a lot of big elements there. >> We do. >> You've got a good foothold. >> This is just an example. Even though Marketo is part of Adobe, giant. And Eloqua is part of Oracle, giant and Pardot is part of Salesforce. You've got three goliaths in marketing automation. Hubspot's still sticking around. PeerPlay, marketing Automation. You can just picture it. CRM giants, Microsoft and Salesforce have eaten the world Zendesk's still kicking around. It's a little PeerPlay. That equivalent exists. I have nobody that's even one fifth as big as I am, or as global or complete. But I do have some small, point specific solution providers. They're still hanging out there. >> The thing is, one, first you're a great leader. You've seen the moving on the marking tech side. You've got waves of experience under your belt. But I think what's interesting is that like the Web 1.0, having websites and webpages, Web 2.0 and social networks. That was about the first generation. Serve information, create Affiliate programs, all kind of coded tracking. You mentioned all that. I over-simplified it, but you get the idea. Now, every company needs a new capability. They need to stand up media infra structure. What does that mean? They're going to throw a podcast, they're going to take their content, put them into multiple channels. That's a comms function. Now comms is becoming the new CMO-like capability in this earned channel. So, your Cloud becomes that provisioning entity for companies to stand up capabilities without waiting. Is that the vision? >> You've nailed it. And that is one of the key reasons why you have to have a tech stack. That's a spot on one, another one. Early in my career, the 20 influences that mattered, they were all newspaper reporters or TV folks. There was only 20 of them. I had a Rolodex. so I could take each one of them out for a three Martini lunch, they'd write something good about me. >> Wish is was that easy now. >> Now, you have thousands of influencers across 52 channels, and they change in real time, and they're global in nature. It's another example of where, well, if you don't automate that with tech and by the way. >> You're left behind. >> If you send out digital content they talk back to you in real time. You have to actually not only do influencer identification, outreach and curation, you've got to do real time engagement. >> There's no agility. >> There's none. >> Zero agility. >> None, exactly. >> There's no like Dev Ops mindset in there at all. >> Then the speed with which, it's no longer okay for comms to call the agency and say, give me a ClipBook, I've got to get it to my CEO by Friday. That whole start the ClipBook on Tuesday, I've got to have the ClipBook, the physical ClipBook on the CEO as an example. Nope, if I'm not basically streaming my senior executives in real time, curated and analyzed as to what's important and what it means, I can't do that without a tech stack. >> Well, Andy Cunningham was on the Cube. >> This whole thing has been forced to get modernized by cloud technology and transformation >> Andy Cunningham, a legend in the comms business who did all Steve Jobs comms, legend. She basically said on The Cube, it's not about waiting for the clips to create the ClipBook, create your own ClipBook and get it out there. Then evaluate and engage. This is the new command and control with digital assets. >> Now, it's become the real-time, curated feed that never stops. It sure as hell better not. Because comms is in trouble if it does. >> Well this is a great topic. But let's have you in this, I can go deep on this. I think this is a really important shift, and you guys are the only ones that are on it at this level. I don't think the Salesforce and the Adobe yet, I don't think they're nimble enough to go after this wave. I think they're stuck on their wave and they're making a lot of money. >> You know John, paid media and owned media. The Google Marketing Cloud, that SAP Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce Marketing Clouds. They don't do anything in earned. Nothing. This is one of the reasons I jumped because I knew this needed to happen. But, you know, they're also chasing much bigger pots of money. Marketing and Advertising is still a lot more money. We're working on it to grow the pie for comms. But, bottom line is, they're chasing the big markets as I was at Oracle. And they're still pretty much in a violent arms race against each other. Salesforce is still way more focused on what Adobe's doing. >> You're just on a different wave. >> So, we're just over here doing this, building a billion dollar cloud leader, that is mission critical to everyone of their customers. They're going to end up being some pretty import partners to us, because they've been too focused on the big arms race against each other, in paid and owned and have not had the luxury to even go here. >> Well I think this wave that you're on is going to be really big. I think they don't see it, in my opinion, or can't get there. With the right surfboard, to use a surfing analogy, there's going to be a big wave. Thanks for sharing your insights. >> Absolutely. >> While you're here, get the plug in for Cision. What's going on, what's next? What's the big momentum? Get the plug in for the company. What are you guys still going to do? >> Plugin for the company. The company has acquired a couple of companies in January. You might see, one of which is Falcon. Basically Falcon is one of the big four in the land of Hootsuite, Sprinklr, Spredfast. Cloud companies do this. Adobe has Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Parking Cloud. Salesforce has Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud. Cision has just become a multi cloud company. We now have the Cision Social Cloud and the Cision Communications Cloud. And we're going to go grab a couple hundred million dollars of stuff away from Sprinklr, Hootsuite and collapse social into this. Most of social is earned as well. So, look for a wing spread, into another adjacent market. I think that's number one. Then look for publishing of the data. That's probably going to be the most exciting thing because we just talked about, again our metrics and capabilities you can buy But, little teaser. If we can say, in two months here's the average click through on a Google ad, YouTube ad, a banner ad, I'll show it to you on a Blog, a press release, an article. Apples to apples. Here is the conversion rate. If I can start becoming almost like an eMarketer or publisher on what happens when people read earned, there's going to be some unbelievable stats and they're going to be incredibly telling, and it's going to drive where are we on that. So this is going to be the year. >> It's a new digital advertising format. It's a new format. >> That's exactly right. >> It's a new digital advertising format. >> And its one when the CEO understands that he or she can have it for earned now, the way he's had it for marketing and advertising, that little conversation walking down the hall. In thousands of companies where the CCO or the VP of PR looks up and the CEO is going where are we on that? That's the year that that can flip switches, which I'm excited about. >> Every silo function is now horizontally connected with data, now measured, fully instrumented. The value will be there and whoever can bring the value gets the budget. That's the new model. Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision, changing the game in the shift around the Chief Communications Officer and how that is becoming more tech savvy. Really disrupting the business by measuring earned media. A big wave that's coming. Of course, it's early, but it's going to be a big one. Kevin, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure, John, thank you. >> So, CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto Thanks for watching. >> Thanks John. (upbeat music)

>> Over and welcome to this special cube conversation here in the Palo Alto Studios of Cube. Part of our People. First project with Mayfield Fund and Co creation with Cuban John Very your host. Very special guest. Judy Estrin. She's the CEO of J Labs and author of the book Closing the Innovation Gap. She's also well known for being an Internet entrepreneur. Pioneer worked on the initial TCP IP protocol with Vin Cerf from When the A Stanford Great History Computer Science. You have computer systems in your blood, and now you're mentoring a lot of companies. Author you a lot of work, and you're lending your voice to some cutting edge issues here in Silicon Valley and around the world. Thanks for joining me today for the conversation. >> Thank you. It's fun to be here, >> So I love the fact that you're here. You're a celebrity in the commute computer industry circles. You were there at the beginning, when the computer systems or the Internet were being connected as they built out of stone of the whole system's revolution in the eighties, and the rest is history. Now we have cloud computing, and now we're seeing a whole nother level step function of scale. And so you've kind of seen it all. You've seen all all the waves. Actually, something like make is they have seen some of the ways, but you've seen all of them. The most compelling thing I think that's happening now is the convergence of social science and computer science. Kind of our motto. Silicon Angle. You recently wrote to Post on Medium that that has been kind of trending and going viral. I want to get your perspective on that. And they're They're interesting because they they bring a little bit of computer science called the authoritative Authority Terrian Technology Reclaiming Control far too attention, part one. We go into great detail to lay out some big picture computer industry discussions. What's it all about? What's what's the What's the idea behind these stories? >> So let me back up a little bit in that, a Sze Yu said. And we can go into this if you want. I was very involved in a lot of thie, ah, innovation that happened in the Village Valley in terms of microprocessors, the Internet, networking, everything that laid the foundation for a lot of the things we see today incredible opportunities for my career for problems we solved over the last ten years. Ten, twelve years. Um, I began to see a shift and a shift in the culture and a shift in the way technology was impacting us. And it's not all good or bad. It's that it felt like we were out of balance and that we were becoming shorter and shorter, term focused and actually my book in two thousand eight closing the innovation gap. The main message there is let's not forget about the seeds you plant that all of this comes from because we're reaping the benefit of those seeds. We're not planning new seats and that we were becoming in the Valley in the nation the way we thought about things more and more short term focused and technology was causing some of that and benefitting and not been and at a disadvantage because of that. So that started with my book in two thousand eight and then in twenty fourteen, I think it was I did a Ted talk a Ted X talk called Balancing our Digital Diets, and I was even Mohr concerned that we were out of whack in terms of the consequences of innovation, and I drew an analogy to our food's systems, where so much innovation and creating cheap calories and energy and things like high fructose corn syrup that it took years to realize that, Oh, there's some negative consequences of that innovation. And so that was kind of a warning that, um, we weren't thinking enough about the consequences of at that point. Social media. That was before fake news, and I talked about tweets and how truth that lies went faster than truth, not knowing how bad that situation was going to be and then leading up to the election and after the election. We all know and have all learned now about the impacts of these technologies on our democracy, and I believe on our society and humanity. And I don't think it's just about our election system. I think it's about our psyches and how the technology's air impacting the way we think our fear and anxiety level of our kids and us is adults. So I been talking to people about it and advising, and I finally decided as, uh, I was collaborating with people that I felt that a lot of the awareness was in pockets that we talked about data privacy or we talked about addiction. But these air things were all interrelated, and so I wanted to one ad. My voices is technologists because I think a lot of the people who are writing the building, the awareness and talking about it if you are in government or a journalist's or even a social scientist people, it's really easy to say, Yeah, you say that, but you don't understand. It's more complicated than that. You don't understand the technology. So one, I do understand that technology. So I felt adding my voice as a technologist. But I'm also, uh, just increasingly concerned about what we do about it and that we take a more holistic view. So that's what, what what the pieces are about. And the reason I broke it into two pieces is because they're too long for most people, even the way they are. But the first is to build awareness of the problems which we can dig into it a high level if you want. And then the second is to throw out ideas as we move towards discussing solutions. So let me take a breath because you were goingto jump in, and then I can. >> No, it's just because you're connecting the foundational of technology foundation technology, identifying impact, looking at pockets of awareness and then looking at how it's all kind of coming together when you talk like that The first time I saw O subsystem interrupt us connection so someone could get like a operating system. And I think the society that you're pointing out in the article, the first one intention was there only to relate. And I think that's the key part. I think that's interesting because we run into people all the time when we do our cue broadcasts that have awareness here and don't know what's going on this. So this context that's highly cohesive. But there's no connection, right? So the decoupled right but highly cohesive, That's kind of systems. Architecture concept. So how do we create a robust technology's society system where technology and I think that's a threat that we're seeing this? What I cleaned out of the articles was your kind of raising the flag a little bit to the notion of big picture right system, kind of a foundational, but let's look at consequences and inter relationships, and how can we kind of orchestrate and figure out solutions? So what was the reaction to expand on that concept? Because this is where I was. It was provocative to me, >> right? So I think there are two thought trains that I just went down. One is that one of the problems we have that has been created by technology and technology is suffering from again. It's causing both cause and effect is not enough seats, system thinking and so one issue, which is not just this is not just about social media and not just about a I, but over the last twenty years we've increasingly trained, I think, are, Ah, engineers and computer scientists in Mohr transactional thinking. And as we move quicker and quicker to solve problems, we are not training our leaders or training our technologist to think in terms of systems. And so what I mean by systems is two things that you can break, that any problems have pieces. But those pieces air inter connected. We are interconnected, and that you, if you don't keep those things in mind, then you will not design things in a way, I believe that have the longevity and make the right type decisions. The second is the law of consequences when you have a system, if you do something here, it's going to impact something here. And so that whole notion of taking was thinking through consequences. I'm afraid that we're training people as we are focusing on being more and more agile, moving more and more quickly that it's in technology and in society that we're losing some of that system, thinking >> that they kind of think that's the trade off is always around. Whenever he had systems conversations in the past, but my old systems had on trade offs, we have overhead, so we have more memory. How do we handle things? So this is kind of That's just what happens. You tell about consequence, but >> we don't have all those we I'm older than you. But we started at a time when that we were limited. We were limited by memory. We were limited by processing. We were limited by band with and a different times. As thie industry emerged, the constraints were in different areas. Today, you don't have any of those constraints. And so, if you don't have any of those constraints. You don't get trained in thinking about trade offs and thinking about consequences. So when when we come into just what drove me to write, this one set of things are foundational issues and what I mean by foundational it's it's our relationship to technology. And the fact of the matter is, as a society, um, we put technology on a pedestal, and we have, uh, this is not to be taken out of Cut is not to be taken the extreme of talking about people, but overall, our relationship with technology is a bullying, controlling relationship. That's why I called it authoritarianism. >> Upgrade your iPhone to the new version. >> Well, whether it's as a user that you're giving up your your your authority to all these notifications and to your addiction, whether it is the fact that it is the control with the data, whether it is predictive ai ai algorithms that are reading your unconscious behaviors and telling you what you think, because if it's suggesting what you by putting things in front of you. So there are all of these behaviors that our relationship with technology is not a balanced relationship and you could one. You have a culture where the companies that are that have that power are driving towards. It's a culture of moving fast growth only don't think about the consequences. It's not just the unintended consequences, but it's the consequences of intended use. So the business models and at which we don't need to go into, because I think a lot of other people talk about that all end up with a situation which is unhealthy for us as people and humanity and for us as a society. So you take that part and it is. There's a parallel here, and we should learn from what happened with industrial Ah, the industrial revolution. We want progress. But if we don't pay attention to the harm, the harmful byproducts and trade offs of progress, it's why we have issues with climate. It's why we have plastic in our oceans. It's because you, you judge everything by progresses just growth and industrialization without thinking about well being or the consequences. Well, I believe we now face a similar challenge of digitization, so it's not industrialization. But it's digitalization that has byproducts in a whole number of areas. And so what the the article does is get into those specifics, whether it's data or anxiety, how we think our cognitive abilities, our ability to solve problems, All of those things are byproducts of progress. And so we should debate um, where we what we're willing to give up one last thing. And then I'll have to come in, which is one of the problems with both of these is is humans value convenience. We get addicted to convenience, and if somebody gives us something that is going to make things more convenient, it sure is held to go backward. And that's one of the reasons the combination of measuring our goodness as a country or a CZ. Globalization by economic growth and measuring our personal wellness by convenience, if something is more convenient, were happier. Take those two together, and it makes a dangerous cop combination because then our need for community convenience gets manipulated for continued economic growth. And it doesn't necessarily end up in, Ah, progress from, ah, well being perspective. >> It's interesting point about the digitization, because the digital industrial revolution, when the digital revolution is happening, has consequences. We're seeing them and you point them out in your post Facebook and fake news. There's also the global landscape is the political overlay. There's societal impact. There's not enough scholars that I've been trained in the art of understanding into relationships of technology, and Peg used to be a nerd thing. And now my kids are growing up. Digital natives. Technology is mainstreams, and there it is. Politics. You know, the first hack collection, Some of the control, The first president actually trolled his way. That president, I said that I'm the kid. That was my position. He actually was a successful troll and got everyone he trolled the media and you got the attention. These air new dynamics, This is reality. So is you look forward and bring these ideas, and I want to get your thoughts on ideas on how to bring people together. You've been on a CTO Cisco Systems. I know you've been sleeping on a board. This is a cross pollination opportunity. Bring people together to think about this. How do you do You look at that? How do you view how to take the next steps as a as an industry, as a society and as a global nations? It eventually, because cyber security privacy is becoming polarized. Also on a geography bases in China they have. GPR is hard core there. In Europe, he got Asia. With Chinese. You got America being American. It's kind of complicated as a system architecture thinking. How do you look at this? What is the playing field where the guard rails? What's your thoughts on this? Because it's a hard one, >> right? So it is a hard one and it isn't. It isn't easy to pave out a path that says it's solvable. Um, nor does Climate right now. But you have to believe we're going to figure it out because we have to figure it out. So I think there are a lot of pieces that we need to start with, and then we need to adjust along the way. And, um, one piece is and let me back up. I am not. I don't believe we can leave this up to the industry to solve the incentives and the value systems and the understanding of the issues. The industry is coming from an industry perspective, and you can't also. You also can't leave it just two technologists because technologists have a technology person perspective. I don't believe that you just can have government solve it for a variety of reasons. One is, if it takes a spectrum of things to legislation, tends to be retroactive, not forward looking. And you need to be really careful not to come up with regulation that actually reinforces the status quo as opposed to making something better. But I think we need to. We do need to figure out how to govern in a way that includes all of these things. So once >> it's running, it's clear that watching the Facebook hearing and watching soon dark sky in front of the house. Our current elected officials actually don't even know how the Internet works, so that's one challenge. So you have a shift in its every beat >> and it and it's actually, if you think about the way legislation often gets made one of the problems with our democracy right now, I'm not going to put it in quotes. But I want to put it >> out. >> Is that the influence of money on our democracy means that so often the input toe legislation comes from industry. So whether it's again big tech, big pharma, big Oil, big. That's the way this cycle works in places where we have had successful legislation that industry input, what you need industry input. You just don't want industry to be the on ly input that is balanced with other input. And so we need infrastructure in the world. In the country that has policy ideas, technology. This needs to come from civil society, from the academy from non profits. So you need the same way we have environmental sciences. We need to fund from government, not just industry funded that science. That's number one. And then we need ways to have conversations about influencing companies to do the right thing. Some of it is going to be through legislation some of it is going to be for through pressure. This, in some ways is like tobacco in some ways, like it's like food. In some ways, it's like climate on DH. It's so and an underlying any of this to happen. We need people to understand and to speak up because awareness amongst whether it's individuals, parents, teachers, we need to give people the information to protect themselves and to push back on companies and to rally pushback on government. Because if if there's not an awareness of people are walking around saying, Don't take away my service, don't make this less convenient don't tax my soda. Don't tell me my text messages. That's right, so and I'm not saying taxes of the way. But if there isn't what what I'm focused on is, how do we build awareness? How do we get information out? How do we get companies like yours and others that this becomes part of >> our >> messaging of understanding so we can be talking about I >> think it's, you know back, Teo, The glory days of the TCP epi Internet revolution. He sent a package from here to there. It's a step. Take a first step. I personally listening to you talk feel and I said, It's on The Cuban people know that. You know, my my rap know that I've been pounding this. There's a counter culture in there somewhere. Counter culture's is where action happens, and I think you know, tax regulation and, you know, the current generations inherited. It is what it is we have. You're laying out essentially the current situation. John Markoff wrote a great book, What the door Mail said, talking about how the sixties counterculture influence the computer industry from breaking in for getting computer time for time sharing, too hippy revolution question I have for you put you on the spot. Is Is there a counterculture in your mind? Coming a digital hippie quotes is because I feel it. I feel that that let the air out of the balloon before it pops. Something has to happen and I think has to be a counterculture. I yet yet can't put my finger on it. Maybe it's a digital kind of a revolution, something compelling that says Whoa time out. >> All right? I think we need a couple of counter culture's in that in layers of it, because, um, I think there is going to be or is starting to be a counterculture amongst technologist and the technology industry and entrepreneurs who are some it's still small who are saying, You know what? This chasing unicorns and fastest growth and scale, you know, move faxed and break things. But, um, we want to move fast, but we want to think about whether we're breaking what we're breaking is really dangerous, you know, move fast and break things is fine, but if it's oops, we broke democracy. That isn't something that, uh that is I'm sorry you have to think about and adapt more quickly. So I think there is Are people who are talking about let's talk openly about the harm. Let's not just be tech optimists. Let's understand that it's small, but it's beginning and you're seeing it in a I for instance, the people who are saying Look, were technologists, we want to be responsible. This is a powerful weapon or tool. And let's make sure we think about how we use it. Let me just say one thing, which is, I think we needed another kind of counterculture, which I'm hoping is happing in a number of areas, which is societally saying, You know, we have a slow food movement. Maybe we just need a slow down, a little bit movement. So if you look at mindfulness, if you look at kids who are starting to say, You know what? I want to talk to someone in person, I don't. So we we need some of that counter movement where I'm hoping the pedestal starts to come back. In terms of people looking for real connectivity and not just numbers of connections, >> it's interesting, You know, everything has a symmetrical, responsible thing about it. For every fake news payload and network effect is potentially an opposite reaction of quality network effect. It's interesting, and I don't know where it is, but I think that's got it could be filled, certainly on the economic side, by new entrepreneurial thinking, like one observation I'm making is you know this. Remember, they'll bad boys of tech and he's smiling. Now It's bad gals, too, which is growing still lower numbers. So I think there's gonna be a shift to the good, the good folks right moment. But she's a she's a good entrepreneur. She's not just out there to make a quick buck or hey, mission driven za signal we're seeing. So you start to see a little bit more of a swing to Whoa, hey, let's recognize that it's not about, you know, could Buck or >> so, yes, but between you and I, it's teeny compared to the other forces. So that's what those of us who believe that needs to happen need to continue to >> one of those forces money making. >> I think it's a combination of, Ah, money and how much money, Dr. Celebrity culture, um, the forces, the power that's in place is so strong that it's hard to break through, um, short term thinking, not even being trained. So like so many things in our culture, where you have entrenched power and then you see uprising and you get hope and that's where you need the hope. But, um, we've seen it so often in so many movements, from race to gender, where you think, Oh, that's solved, it's not solved and then you come back in and come back at it. So I just I would argue that there is little bits of it, but it needs fuel. It needs continuity. It it. And the reason I think we need some government regulation is it needs help because it's not gonna >> happen. You should question, you know, some successes that I point out Amazon Web services, Google even having a long game kind of narrative they're always kind of were misunderstood at first. Remember, Google was loud by search is not doing too well. Then the rest is history. Amazon was laughed. Amazon Web services was laughed at. So people who have the long game seemed to be winning in these transitions. And that's kind of what you're getting at. You think long term, the long game. If you think in terms of the long term vision, you then going look at consequences differently. How many people do you run in? The valleys actually think like that. Okay, >> so we're talking about two different things. One is long term thinking, and I do think that apple, Google, Amazon have taken long term thinking's. So there are a good example. But if you look at them, if we look at the big companies in terms of the way they approached the market and competition and their potential negative impacts on overall society, they're part of the power. They're not doing anything to change the systems, to not >> have good and continue to benefit. The rich get richer. >> So there this This is why it's complicated. There are not good guys and bad guys there are. These people are doing this and that. So do I think overall dough? I see more long term thinking. Um, not really. I think that the incentives in the investment community, the incentives in the stock market. The incentives culturally are still very much around shorter term thinking. Not that there aren't any, but >> yeah, I would agree. I mean, it tends to be, you know, Hey, we're crushing it. We're winning, you know? Look at us. Growth hack. I mean, just the languages. Semantics. You look at that. I think it's changed. I think Facebook is, I think, the poster child of short term thinking growth hacks move fast, break stuff and look where they are, you know, they can't actually sustaining and brand outside of Facebook, they have to buy Instagram and these other companies to actually get the kind of growth. But certainly Facebook is dominate on the financial performance, but they're kind of sitting in their situation. I think you know the bro Grammer movement, I think is kind of moving through the white common ear culture of Okay, let's get some entrepreneurship going. Great. Rod. I think that's stabilising. I think we're seeing with cloud really science and thinking for good. That's a positive sign. >> Well, I'm I'm glad to hear that from you, you know, and all >> you're probably going with. >> No, no, no, I'll take that and take that into feeding my hope because I hope, >> well, the movement is classic. Look, we're not gonna tolerate this anymore. I think transparency in my final question to you before you get to some of the more entrepreneur Question says, If you look at the role of community on data, science and connectedness, one of the things about being connected is you got potential potential for collective intelligence. So if you look at data, as I said, networks, what if there was a way to kind of hone that network to get to the truth fast? Esther, something we've been working on here, and I think that's something that, you know changes media. It changes the game. But collective intelligent, the role of the community now becomes a stakeholder and potentially laying out. So his problems and you're part of the Mayfield community was co created this video with roll community, super important people. The rule of the of the person your thoughts on >> so I community is a word that is has takes on a lot of meetings, and the problem is when you mean it one way and use it the other way, the same as data driven. So I think there's at one level which is community and conductivity that has to do with collecting input from lots of sources. And when you talk about investigative journalism or they're in environmental situations or all sorts of areas where the ability to collect information from lots of sources that air interested and analyze that information that is one level of community and connectivity and networking because of people you know which is great, there's another type. When people talk about community, they mean a sense of community in terms of what humans need and what that connectivity is. And most online networks don't give you that level. The online needs to be augmented by, Ah, inter personal understanding. And one of the problems. I think with today's technology is we're fitting humans into bits that technology Khun Support, as opposed to recognizing what are our human needs that we want to hold on to and saying There are some things that are not going to fit into somebody's data set. So in that first type of community than absolutely, I think there's lots of benefits of the cloud and wisdom of the crowd. But if you're talking about humans connecting in people. You don't have the same type of, uh, that that really community online tools can help. But we should never confuse what happens in our online world >> with your final question for, you know, we got We're pushing the time here. Thank you for spending time. First of all, it's great conversation. You've seen the movie with venture capital from the beginning. You know, all the original players seeing what is now just where's that come from? Where are we? What's the state of VC? Then? He hope to the future, they all adding value. How do you see that evolving and where are we with? >> You know, I would. I think venture capital has gone through a lot of different phases. And like so many things, especially those of us who want computers, we liketo lump them all together. They're not altogether. There are some small, Yes, like they field. And the I do think, though, that something shifted in the lead up to the dot com. Ah, and later the burst. And what shifted is venture capitalists. Before that time were company builders. They were the financiers, but they saw themselves with the entrepreneur building companies because of the expansion leading up to two thousand, and the funds grew and the people coming into the field were, they became more bankers and they took more financial supposed to balancing financing and entrepreneurship. It felt like it moved. Maurin toe. This is a private equity play, Um, and I think the dynamic with entrepreneurs and the methodology overall shifted, and I don't know that that's changed Now again, not across the board. I think there are some, uh, those firms that have identified our partners within firms who still very much want Teo filled companies and partner with entrepreneurs. But I think the dynamic shifted, and if you view them as that's what they are, is private equity investors. And don't expect something else. If people need money, that's a good pick. Ones that are the best partner >> is your partner. If you want a banker, go here. If you want Builder, go their key distinction. Judy. Thanks for sharing that insight. We're Judy Estrin. Sea of Jail as author of Closing Innovation. Gabbas Wellman's well known entrepreneur advisor board member formally CTO of Cisco. And again, Great gas. Thanks for coming on I'm John for Herewith. Cube conversation. Part ofmy Mayfield. People first with the Cube. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida It's theCUBE! Covering UiPathForward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to South Beach everybody. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman is here. This is UiPathForward Americas. UiPath does these shows all around the world and they've done, I don't know how many. But they've reached 14,000 customers this year. But Bobby Patrick knows, he's the CMO of UiPath. Bobby, great to see you again. >> It's great to be on again. >> So, how many of these events have you done in the last 12 months? >> We've probably done a dozen, all major cities. We still have Beijing and Dubai coming up. Over 14,000 people at our events alone. We go to a lot of other industry events obviously, but yeah, at our own events, every single event we break our records. We're always undersizing our events, it drives everyone nuts. >> You're always riding the wave, Bobby. You hit Cloud, right as the wave was building. How did you find this company? >> Yeah, so I was the HP of Cloud, they were, split assets off and took a little time, got a call and robotic process automation. Of course, I thought of physical robots. I look online and say wow that's interesting. I did some search terms on it and I saw RPA kind of sky rocketing in search and my background is actually in integration, data integration before Cloud. And then I met Daniel and I fell in love with Daniel and this was a year ago. I was employee 270, right? We'll have 2,000 by the end of the year. So, it's been everything I expected which was a rocket ship, has completely, constantly I've underestimated, it's amazing. >> So, you're the one who turned me onto this whole space. You sent me the Forrester Wave, >> Bobby: Right >> Where it was last year's and you guys were third this year, you leapfrogged into first. >> Bobby: Right. >> And then we said wow that's kind of cool. Let's download this and play with it. And we tried to download the other ones but we couldn't. You, know it was kind of too complicated. They wanted us to talk to resellers and, it was like, no no no. you guys were, like, really open. >> Bobby: It's part of our culture. >> And we found it super simple to use. It was, one of our guys wasn't a coder. Smart dude, but it was low code, no code type of situation. You were explaining to me at Legal Seafoods last week that you actually have written some automations. So, it's pretty simple to get started but there's a spectrum, right, and it's pretty powerful too. >> Yeah, it's an epiphany that hits everybody. This is the part where I see it, even in myself, when I realized every morning I was getting up and going to Google Trends and I was looking at us versus Automation Anywhere versus Blue Prism and we're pulling away. It's great, I'll get happy in the morning and I'll screen shot it and then I'll go to Slack and send it to the comp team. Why am I doing this? So, in 20 minutes now I have a robot everyday, every morning that does it for me. And I get a text and I get an email. We have, in marketing, a dozen of these. I've got one that does our Google Ad Words around the world. I've got one that takes all of our 30,000 inbound new contacts a month, in different languages, translates, finds out what country they are in, and routes them to the right country. These are simpler examples, but once you realize that anything you do that's routine and mundane that a robot can do for you. It brings, it makes you happy first of all, right? And you realize the vision we have for a robot for every person, its a very realistic vision and its two, three years out. >> Bobby, one on the things that has really interested me today is talking about what this means for jobs and careers. Dave and I were at Splunk earlier this week, talking about Splunkers, data is at the center of what they do and everybody comes to them, how do I leverage my data? I did operations for a bunch of my career and I'd spend lots of time with my team saying, what do you hate doing, what are you manually doing? What can you get rid of and there's a collaboration between, I hear, that your customers. It's not just oh some consultancy comes in and they cut something away and they took it away from you. Oh no wait, you're actually involved with this, it seems like an ongoing process and you're making people's jobs better. Can you talk a little about that dynamics of how this transforms a company? The vision for, I hear from UiPath, is that you're going to change the world. >> Yeah, so you have to sit in, you're talking about the future of work, or digital, you have to sit in a conference room and watch a bunch of workers sit around and I'll give you an example. At DISA, big federal government agency, federal government has lifetime workers, right? In the room, where 30 workers, who everyday download assets and then they compile them and then they analyze them. They have their best, fastest kind of human go against the UiPath robot that they automated. In 15 minutes, the human downloaded two assets or archives and the robot did 17. The entire room of 30 cheered! Cheered. No longer do we have to do that crap ever again. And this is, we see this in every industry. It's so much fun because you see just, people just radiating with excitement, right? Because, I was out with a customer today that says they can't even fulfill today with the humans they have, the 25% of the work they got. So, your robots are creating capacity, they're filling the void. You probably heard about Japan, right, and the aging population? And RPA and UiPath addressing suicide rates. This about making society better. This is about robots doing the work that we hate, right? One of our great customers, Holly Uhl from State Auto, said on stage that, you know, robots do the work nobody misses. And, I think that's trivial. Now what about job impacts, right? So, we worry everyday about what this means, right? So, we spend a lot of time on our academy, making it easier to train people, build digital era skills. We announced our academic alliance, right? We hired an amazing Chief of Learning Officer. You saw Tom Clancy. You know him and his team. We're going to train a million students in three years. You know, we're worried about the middle class. We're worried about people who are farther along in their careers and helping them re-skill. So, we take that as a part of our job as a company to figure out how to up-skill people and make them a part of this. And I'm really excited because a year ago when I joined, everybody said, the big problem you have is people going to worry about taking away jobs. I don't hear that from the 1500 customers in here today. >> Well, isn't a part of that re-skilling? Learning how to apply automation, maybe even learning how to apply RPA? Maybe even doing some automation? >> Yeah, so obviously there is-- World Economic Forum came out two weeks ago with a study that said, automation will add net 60 million jobs, I think that was for the people that losses, it will two x gains in jobs. Now those are different jobs in some cases. Some of those jobs are digital era skills, some of those jobs are AI, data science. So, I think that there's... But there are some cubicle jobs that will be affected, right? There are some swivel chair jobs that will be affected, but no different than when they automated toll booths, right? Or automated different parts of mundane work that we've all seen throughout our lives, right? So I think the speed at which this is happening is what worries people. Unlike, in the past, it took a little longer for automation or industrialization to impact jobs. But we're focused on this, right? We're going to put money towards this and we're just not seeing that today. Maybe it's because the economy is doing so great. People have a workforce shortage, but we're just not hearing it. >> Well, I mean, maybe a number of factors. I mean, there's no question, machines have always replaced humans. This is the first time in history of replacing humans in cognitive functions. >> Bobby: Augmenting >> Yes, absolutely, but It does suggest that there's opportunities for whether it's for education, you guys are investing there, training, and re-skilling whether it's around creativity and that's really where the discussion, in our view anyway, should be. Not about, okay lets protect our future, the past from the future. You don't want to just repave the cow path and use another bromide. You got to move forward and education is a key part of that. And you guys are putting your money where your mouth is. >> Yeah, we are and I think our academy that we launched a little over a year and a half ago has a quarter of a million people in it. They are already diplomas on LinkedIn. I watch everyday, people post their new diplomas, the different skills they've earned, right? Go through the courses, it's free. Democratization runs at the heart of this company, it's why we're growing so much faster than at automation anywhere, right? It's why we are a different kind of company. They're a very commercial minded kind of company. They're a marketplace, you have to be a customer. If your URL when you type in your email isn't a customer, you can't go to their store and do anything. We're free, open, share your automations and it's a very different mindset and community runs at our heart. If you're a small business, you know, under a million dollars, you get to use our software for free. And you can run your robots and we have one of our orchestrators run a manager. So, I think all of this is helping get companies and people more comfortable with our technology. There are kids and students now, we had University of Maryland up here. The professor, he's building whole classes now at the University of Maryland. All in the business school, all using our technology. Every student should have a robot, through their entire career, through their entire time at University of Maryland. That's every university, this is going to go so fast, Dave and Stu, so fast. And when I think back again, a year ago, I mean next year when we do this again, right? At our big flagship event, at three or four thousand people, you'll have felt that progression but the year I've been here, it's night and day already. >> Alright, so Bobby you know we're big fans of community. The open source stuff, you've for a long background in that. Help us put together some of these stats here. When I looked in your keynote, you said there's 114,000 certified RPA developers out there across the globe. 139 countries, 250,000 people have downloaded. You've only got at UiPath about 2,000 customers. So, you know, we talk business model and how your business grows, the industry grows, you know? Help us understand that dynamic. >> These are going to go exponential. So, we have large companies now that are committing to deploy UiPath to every employee. Every employee becomes a user then, so you're going to see that user number go like this. While the enterprise customer number goes like this. We're adding six new customers a day right now. The real opportunity for us is every one of our customers, very few are down their journey like an SMBC is. SMBC, RPA is in their annual reports, right? They say 500 million dollars already, right? It's a societal thing. They actually in Japan share together, to help each company. Here, in the U.S., we're a little competitive, right? Banks don't share with other banks typically, right? But, this is kind of what we're driving. It's, when you make an automation at UiPath. While we're not open source as a platform, the automation is open source. You put it on go, I can take that, you can take that. I had the same kind of problem. Put in the studio right away, modify it a bit and you're good to go. Now you've sped your implementation which is already fast by 70, 80, 90%. This is, we're just getting started. So, you're going to see companies adopting across HR, across supply chain, contact centers, you know. Today we're, for the most of our customers we're in one division. So, the opportunity to grow within a company, where we were barely 5% penetrated in our biggest client. >> And you've seen my prediction. A lot of the market forecast are under counting this space. >> Bobby: Right. >> There is a labor shortage, a skilled labor shortage There's more jobs than there are people to fill them. They don't have the right skills today. There is a productivity problem >> Bobby: Right. >> Productivity line is flat. RPA is going to become a fundamental component of digital transformations. It's about a billion dollar business today. I got it pegged at 10X by 2023. >> Craig at Forestry upped his guidance today, he may have told you all, to a 3.3 billion dollar market in 2021. Now I was a little disappointed, it was 2.9 before. I think he's still way under shooting it. But nevertheless, to grow 10% in one year, in his mind, is still pretty big. >> Yeah, a lot of those market forecasts are kind of linear. You're going to see, you know, an S curve, like growth in this market. I think there's no question about it. Just, in speaking to the customers today, we've seen this before in other major industry trends. We certainly saw it at ServiceNow, we saw it at Splunk, we saw it at Tableau. UiPath feels like a very similar vibe here. In Tenex, when we did the show here. I just feel an explosion coming, I already see it. It's palpable. >> One other reason for the explosion which is a little different than say most of the open source tech companies is that they were in IT sales. You don't have to use code to automate your tasks, right? The best developers for us are actually the subject matter experts in finance, in supply chain, in HR. So suddenly we've empowered them. Because IT everywhere is constrained, right? They're dealing with keeping systems current. So suddenly this these tools of software is available to any employee to go learn and automate what they do. The friction we've removed between business have to go to IT, IT be understaffed, IT have to get the requirements. All that's gone! So you create robots overnight, over the weekend. And make your life better. Again, most of the world still does not understand what's going on. I mean you can feel it now. But it's an epiphany for anyone when they see it. >> Well the open mindset that Daniel talked about today, he said, you know our competitors are doing what we do and that's okay. The rising tide lifts all boats kind of thing. That puts pressure on you guys to stay ahead of the pack. Big part of what Tom Clancy is doing is the training piece. That's huge. Free training. So you got to move faster than the market. You're confident you can do that. What gives you confidence? >> I think, one, is our product is simpler to use. So I think, you know, you go to Automation Anywhere and you need the code, right? You don't have to code with our design tool. We're told, we're about 40% faster to implement. And that's, look at the numbers. We shared our numbers again today. 100 million we announced in July 1st, for our first half of in ARR, 140 now, right? We are telling our numbers, we're open and transparent. Our competitors, well Blue Prism is public, right? We know they're growing slower. Another difference is the market, requirements are not created equal. Blue Prism only works in an unattended robot fashion, only in the back office. So, if you have front office automation, with call centers and customer service, they don't have the concept of an attended robot. You know, this idea of so, they lack the ability to serve all the requirements of a customer. I, think, it's just architecturally, I think what we're seeing in terms of simplicity and openness. And then market coverage very different then either Automation Anywhere or BluePrism. >> Alright Bobby, let me poke at something. So, if I look at, you came out this morning and said accelerate everything. One of the concerns I have is say okay, if I take existing processes, a lot of the time if you look at them, they're not ideal. They were manual in nature, it's great to do that but, how much do you need to wait and revisit and get consultants in to kind of fix things rather than just say oh okay. Faster is better for some things but not necessarily for all things unless you can make some adjustments first. >> You don't want to automate a bad process, right? So, we're not encouraging anyone to do that. So, you see a combination of... One thing about RPA is which great, is you don't have to go in and say, I'm going to go do procure to pay like Traditional IT guy. And so you can go into that process and say, oh look at all these errors, these tasks, these sub processes, these tasks. Where this huge friction and you can go automate that and get huge value. >> Almost like micro services. >> Yes, exactly. You're able to go in and that's really what people are doing. On the more ambitious projects, they're saying I'm also going to go optimize my process, think differently. But the reality is, people are going in, they're finding these few parts of a bigger process, automating it, getting immediate outcomes, immediate outcomes. And paying back that entire project in six months, including the fees on extension or PWC or other. That doesn't exist anywhere in technology. That kind of, you know, speed to an outcome and then payback period. It just doesn't exist. >> Well, the fact that the SIs are here. Yeah, we heard 15 day payback today. Super fast, ROI. The fact that the big SIs are here, especially given the relatively early days says a lot about the potential market size. I always joke, those guys like to eat at the trough. This is big business and it's important for you guys because they're strategic, they're at the board level. You need the top down support, at the same time, it sounds like there's a lot of bottom up activity. >> Bobby: Right. >> And that's where the innovations going to come from. What's next for you guys, you taking this show on the road again? >> Right, so the next Forward is in London. So, we had one in Europe and one in the U.S. We do what we call togethers, which is more intimate. Or all around the world, which are country specific or industry. I mean, we're going to go and call it the Automation First Tour. And we're going to go start our next tours up all through next year. Hit all the cities again, probably three times this size, each city. You know, I looked at Washington D.C. with federal government, we started federal government in January. Federal government for us next year should be a 60 million software business. For our partners, give them 6, 8, 10X on services on top of that. That's meaningful, that's why you see them here. That same calculation exists in every vertical and in every country. And so it's good for our partners. It's great, we want them to focus on building their skills though. Getting good skills and quality. So, we do a lot with them. We host a partner Forward yesterday with 500 partners, focusing on them. Look, we are investing in you, but you got to deliver quality, right? So, I think we amplify everything we did this year because it worked for us well. We amplify it big time and Forward in a year from now, whether it's Vegas or Orlando or we'll announce it soon, willl be substantially larger. >> Well, any company that's digitally transforming is going to put RPA as part of that digital transformation. It's not without its challenges but it's a tailwind. You better hop on that wave or you going to end up driftwood as Pat Gelsinger likes to say. Bobby, thanks so much. >> Bobby: Thank you Dave. >> Thanks for having us here. This has been a fantastic experience and congratulations and good luck going forward. >> Thank you. >> Alright guys, that's a wrap from here. This is theCUBE. Check out theCUBE.net Check out SiliconeANGLE.com for all the news. Cube.net's where all the videos are, wikimon.com for all the research. We are busy Stu, we're on the road a lot. So again, look at the upcoming events. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio this morning for a CUBE Conversation talking about content marketing, attention economy, a lot of really interesting topics that should be top of mind for marketers, that we're in very interesting times on the B2C side and even more, I think, on the B2B side. So we're excited to have Randy Wootton, he's the CEO of Percolate. Randy, great to see you. >> Thanks very much for having me. A real pleasure to be here. >> Absolutely, so for those who aren't familiar, give us kind of the quick and dirty on Percolate. >> Percolate has been around for about seven years. It started as a social media marketing platform. So helping people, helping brands, build their brands on the social landscape, and integrating campaigns to deploy across the different social channels. Over the last couple of years, it's been moving more into the space called content marketing, which is really an interesting new area that marketers are coming to terms with. How do you put together content and orchestrate it across all the different channels. >> And it's interesting, a lot of vocabulary on the website around experiences and content not a lot about products. So how should marketers think and how does experience and content ultimately map back to the products and services you're trying to sell. >> Well, I do think that's a great point. And the distinction between modern brands, who are trying to create relationships with their consumers, rather than pushing products, especially if you're B2B, or technology pushing speeds and feeds. Instead, you are trying to figure out what is going to enable you to create a brand that consumers pull through versus getting pushed at. And so I think the idea around content marketing is that in some ways advertising isn't working anymore. People aren't paying attention to display ads, they're not clicking, they aren't processing the information. But, they are still buying. So the idea for marketers is, how do you get the appropriate content at the right time, to the right person, in their purchase journey. >> Right, and there's so many different examples of people doing new things. There's more conversations kind of, of the persona of the company, of the purpose, purpose driven things, really trying to appeal to their younger employees as well as a younger customer. You have just crazy off the wall things, which never fail to entertain. Like Geico, who seems to break every rule of advertising by having a different theme every time you see a Geico ad. So people are trying humor, they're trying theater, they're trying a lot of things to get through because the tough thing today is getting people's attention. >> I think so, and they talk a lot about the attention economy. That we live in a world of exponential fragmentation. All the information that we are processing across all these different devices. And a brand trying to break through, there's a couple of challenges, one is you have to create a really authentic voice, one that resonates with who you are and how you show up. And then, I think the second point is you recognize that you are co-building the brand with the consumers. It's no longer you build the Super Bowl ad and transmit it on T.V., and people experience your brand. You have this whole unfolding experience in real time. You've seen some of the airlines, for example, that have struggled with the social media downside of brand building. And so how do control, not control, but engage with consumers in a way that feels very authentic and it continues to build a relationship with your consumers. >> Yeah, it's interesting, a lot of things have changed. The other thing that has changed now is that you can have a direct relationship with that consumer whether you want it or not, via social media touches, maybe you were before, that was hidden through your distribution, or you didn't have that, that direct connect. So, you know, being able to respond to this kind of micro-segmentation, it's one thing to talk about micro-segmentation on the marketing side, it's a whole different thing with that one individual, with the relatively loud voice, is screaming "Hey, I need help." >> That's right, and I think there are a couple of things on that point. One is, I've been in technology for 20 years. I've been at Microsoft, I was at Salesforce, I was at AdReady, Avenue A, and Quantive. And now, Rocket Fuel before I came to Percolate. And I've always been wrestling with two dimensions of the digital marketing challenge. One is around consumer identity, and really understanding who the consumer is, and where they've been and what they've done. The second piece is around the context. That is, where they are in the moment, and which device they're on. And so, those are two dimensions of the triangle. The third is the content, or in advertising it's the creative. And that's always been the constraint. You never have enough creative to be able to really deliver on the promise of personalization, of getting the right message to the right person at the right time. And that now is the blockade. That now is the bottleneck, and that now is what brands are really trying to come to terms with. Is how do we create enough content so that you can create a compelling experience for each person, and then if there's someone who is engaging in a very loud voice, how do you know, and how do you engage to sort of address that, but not loose connections with all your other consumers. >> Right, it's interesting, you bring up something, in some of the research, in micro-moments. And in the old days, I controlled all of the information, you had to come for me for the information, and it was a very different world. And now, as you said, the information is out there, there's too much information. Who's my trusted conduit for the information. So by the time they actually get to me, or I'm going to try to leverage these micro-moments, it's not about, necessarily direct information exchange. What are some of these kind of micro-moments, and how are they game changers? >> Well, I think the fact that we can make decisions in near real time. And when I was at Rocket Fuel, we were making decisions in less than 20 milliseconds, processing something like 200 billion bid transactions a day, and so I just think people are not yet aware of the amount, the volume and the velocity of data that is being processed each and every day. And, to make decisions about specific moments. So the two moments I give as examples are: One, I'm sitting at home watching the Oakland Raiders with my two boys, I'm back on the couch and we're watching the game, and Disney makes an advertisement. I'm probably open to a Disney advertisement with my boys next to me, who are probably getting an advertisement at the same time by Disney. I'm a very different person in that moment, or that micro-moment than when I'm commuting in from Oakland to San Francisco on BART, reading the New York Times. I'm not open to a Disney ad at that moment, because I'm concentrating on work, I'm concentrating on the commute. And I think the thing that brands are coming to terms with is, how much am I willing to pay to engage with me sitting on the couch versus me sitting on BART. And that is where the real value comes from, is understanding which moments are the valuable ones. >> So there's so much we can learn from Ad Tech. And I don't think Ad Tech gets enough kind of credit for operating these really large, really hyper speed, really sophisticated marketplaces that are serving up I don't even know how many billions of transactions per unit time. A lot of activity going on. So, you've been in that world for a while. As you've seen them shift from kind of people driving, and buyers driving to more automation, what are some of the lessons learned, and what should learn more from a B2B side from this automated marketplace. >> Well, a couple of things, one is the machines are not our enemies, they are there to enable or enhance our capabilities. Though I do think it's going to require people to re-think work, specifically at agencies, in terms of, you don't need people to do media mixed modeling on the front end in Excel files, instead, you need capacity on the back end after the data has come out, and to really understand the insights. So there is some re-training or re-skilling that's needed. But, the machines make us smarter. It's not artificial intelligence, it's augmented intelligence. I think for B2B in particular what you're finding is, all the research shows that B2B purchasers spend something like 70 or 80% of their time in making the purchase decision before they even engage with the sales rep. And as a B2B company ourselves, we know how expensive our field reps are. And so to make sure that they are engaging with people at the right time, understanding the information that they would have had, before our sales cycle starts, super important. And I think that goes back to the content orchestration, or content marketing revolution that we are seeing now. And, you know, I that there is, when you think about it, most marketers today, use PowerPoint and Excel to have their marketing calendar and run their campaigns. And we're the only function left where you don't have an automated system, like a sales force for marketers, or a service now for marketers. Where a chief of marketing or a SVP of marketing, has, on their phone the tool of record, they system of record that they want to be able to oversee the campaigns. >> Right, although on the other hand, you're using super sophisticated A/B testing across multiple, multiple data sets, rather than doing that purchase price, right. You can test for colors, and fonts, and locations. And it's so different than trying to figure out the answer, make the investment, blast the answer, than this kind of DevOps way, test, test, test, test, test, adjust, test, test, test, test, adjust. >> You're absolutely right, and that's what, at Rocket Fuel, and any real AI powered system, they're using artificial intelligence as the higher order, underneath that you have different categories, like neural networks, deep learning and machine learning. We were using a logistic regression analysis. And we were running algorithms 27 models a day, every single day, that would test multiple features. So it wasn't just A/B testing, it was multi variant analysis happening in real time. Again, the volume and velocity of data is beyond human comprehension, and you need the machine learning to help you make sense of all that data. Otherwise, you just get overwhelmed, and you drown in the data. >> Right, so I want to talk a little bit about PNG. >> I know they're close and dear to your heart. In the old days, but more recently, I just want to bring up, they obviously wield a ton of power in the advertising spin campaign. And they recently tried to bring a little bit more discipline and said, hey we want tighter controls, tighter reporting, more independent third party reporting. There's this interesting thing going now where before, you know, you went for a big in, 'causethen you timed it by some conversion rating you had customers at the end. But now people it seems like, are so focused on the in kind of forgetting necessarily about the conversion because you can drive promoted campaigns in the social media, that now there's the specter of hmm, are we really getting, where we're getting. So again, the PNG, and the consumer side, are really leading kind of this next revolution of audit control and really closer monitoring to what's happening in these automated ad marketplaces. >> Well, I think what you're finding is, there's digital transformation happening across all functions, all industries. And, I think that in the media space in particular, you're also having an agency business model transformation. And what they used to provide for brands has to change as you move forward. PNG has really been driving that. PNG because of how much money they spend on media, has the biggest stick in the fight, and they've brought a lot of accountability. Mark Pritchard, in particular, has laid down these gauntlets the last couple of years, in terms of saying, I want more accountability, more visibility. Part of the challenge with the digital ecosystem is the propensity for fraud and lack of transparency, 'cause things are moving so quickly. So, the fact, that on one side the machines are working really well for ya, on the other side it's hard to audit it. But PNG is really bringing that level of discipline there. I think the thing that PNG is also doing really well, is they're really starting to re-think about how CPG brands can create relationships with their consumers and customers, much like we were talking about before. Primarily, before, CPG brands would work through distributors and retailers, and not really have a relationship with the end consumer. But now as they've started to build up their first party profiles, through clubs and loyalty programs, they're starting to better understand, the soccer mom. But it's not just the soccer mom, it's the soccer mom in Oakland at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, as she goes to Starbucks, when she's picked up her kids from school. All of those are features that better help PNG understand who that person is, in that context, and what's the appropriate engagement to create a compelling experience. That's really hard to do at the individual level. And when you think about the myriad of brands, that PNG has, they have to coordinate their stories and conversations across all of those brands, to drive market share. >> Yeah, it's a really interesting transformation, as we were talking earlier, I used to joke always, that we should have the underground railroad, from Cincinnati to Silicone Valley to get good product managers, right. 'Cause back in the day you still were doing PRD's and MRD's and those companies have been data driven for a long time and work with massive shares and small shifts in market percentages. But, as you said, they now, they're having to transform still data driven, but it's a completely different set of data, and much more direct set of data from the people that actually consume our products. >> And it's been a long journey, I remember when I was at Microsoft, gosh this would have been back in 2004 or 2005, we were working with PNG and they brought their brands to Microsoft. And we did digital immersions for them, to help them understand how they could engage consumers across the entire Microsoft network, and that would include X-Box, Hotmail at the time, MSN, and the brands were just coming to terms with what their digital strategy was and how they would work with Portal versus how they would work with other digital touchpoints. And I think that has just continued to evolve, with the rise of Facebook, with the rise of Twitter, and how do brands maintain relationships in that context, is something that every brand manager of today is having to do. My father, I think we were chatting a little earlier, started his career in 1968 as a brand manager for PNG. And, I remember him telling the stories about how the disciplined approach to brand building, and the structure and the framework hasn't changed, the execution has, over the last 50 years. >> So, just to bring it full circle before we close out, there's always a segment of marketing that's driven to just get me leads, right, give me leads, I need barcode scans at the conference et cetera. And then there's always been kind of the category of kind of thought leadership. Which isn't necessarily tied directly back to some campaign, but we want to be upfront, and show that we're a leading brand. Content marketing is kind of in-between, so, how much content marketing lead towards kind of thought leadership, how much lead kind of towards, actually lead conversions that I can track, and how much of it is something completely different. >> That's a great question, I think this is where people are trying to come to terms, what is content, long form, short form video. I think of content as being applied across all three dimensions of marketing. One is thought leadership, number two is demand gen, and number three is actualization or enablement in a B2B for your sales folks. And how do you have the right set of content along each of those dimensions. And I don't think they're necessarily, I fundamentally think the marketing funnel is broken. It's not you jump in at the top, and you go all the way to the bottom and you buy. You have this sort of webbed touch of experiences. So the idea is, going back to our earlier conversation, is, who is that consumer, what do you know about him, what is the context, and what's the appropriate form of content for them, where they are in their own buyer journey. So, a UGC video on YouTube may be okay for one consumer in a specific moment, but a short form video may be better for someone else, and a white paper may be better. And I think that people don't necessarily go down the funnel and purchase because they click on a search ad, they instead may be looking at a white paper at the end of the purchase, and so the big challenge, is the attribution of value, and that's one of the things that we're looking at Percolate. Is almost around thinking about it as content insight. Which content is working for whom. 'Cause right now you don't know, and I think the really interesting thing is you have a lot of people producing a lot of content. And, they don't know if it's working. And I think when we talk to marketers, that we hear their teams are producing content, and they want to know, they don't want to create content that doesn't work. They just want a better understanding of what's working, and that's the last challenge in the digital marketing transformation to solve. >> And how do you measure it? >> How do you measure, how do you define it? And categorize it, so that's one of the challenges, we were chatting a little bit before, about what you guys are doing at CUBE, and your clipper technology and how you're able to dis-aggregate videos, to these component pieces, or what in an AI world, you'd call features, that then can be loaded as unstructured data, and you can apply AI against it and really come up with interesting insights. So I think there's, as much as I say, the transformation of the internet has been huge, AI is going to transform our world more than we even can conceive of today. And I think content eventually will be impacted materially by AI. >> I still can't help but think of the original marketing quote, I've wasted half of my marketing budget, I'm just not sure which half. But, really it's not so much the waste as we have to continue to find better ways to measure the impact of all these kind of disparate non-traditional funnel things. >> I think you're right, I think it was Wanamaker who said that. I think your point is spot on, it's something we've always wrestled with, and as you move more into the branding media, they struggle more with the accountability. That's one of the reasons why direct response in the internet has been such a great mechanism, is because it's data based, you can show results. The challenge there is the attribution. But I think as we get into video, and you can get to digital video assets, and you can break it down into its component pieces, and all the different dimensions, all of that's fair game for better understanding what's working. >> Randy, really enjoyed the conversation, and thanks for taking a minute out of your busy day. >> My pleasure, always enjoy it. >> Alright, he's Randy, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from Palo Alto Studios, thanks for watching. (digital music)