(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021 brought to you by EDB. >> Well, hi everybody John Walls here on theCUBE and we're now welcoming Jeremy Wilmot who is the chief product officer at ACI Worldwide part of the Postgres movement, you might say or certainly benefiting from the great value that Postgres is providing a number of enterprises across the globe. Jeremy good to see you today and first off, congratulations you are the first guest I've talked to maybe in a year and a half in their office. So good for you. >> Thanks (chuckles) John that's very kind of you John and great to see you and thanks for having me here. Yeah, it's great to be in the office, it really is. I'm here in Miami in South Florida and getting some sort of normalcy back is great for all of us and I'm certainly enjoying it. So thank you before (indistinct) has been. >> I'm sure you are, yeah, congratulations on that front. First off, let's talk about ACI Worldwide for the folks in our audience who aren't familiar with the payments, your role in terms of that payment ecosystem. Tell us a little bit about ACI Worldwide. >> Sure, well, primarily we're a software company. That's ACI, we started 1975 in Omaha, Nebraska built the first debit card system and ATM system for first National Bank of Omaha and over the last 45 years, we've globalized ourselves, we have, we are delivering mission-critical real-time payment systems across the world to banks to merchants to billers, we help them meet the payment needs of their consumers and their corporates. So we process, manage digital payments, we power omni-commerce and e-commerce payments, we present and process bill payments, we manage fraud, we manage the risk all within that and as I said on a global basis 13 of the G20 countries with a leading DDA account or current account payment processing software in those countries and have been for many years. >> So, as the CPO then quite obviously in the financial space your plate is quite full these days in terms of providing for your client base. How would you characterize maybe the evolution in terms of product development that you've been through in the financial world here over the past say, three to five years, where were you back then to where you are now and what role has Postgres played in that journey? >> Sure, yeah. So, specific to the Postgres part of the ecosystem, previously five-plus years ago our previous database solution was complex, it was expensive, it was hard to change and maintain and we leveraged multiple pieces of software from multiple vendors as a result of that. So at that time we looked for an alternative that was simpler and better and we went through a very comprehensive due diligence process, we explored both open source and license models of database to support our solution and when we looked at all of the options we determined that 2ndQuadrant Postgres was the one that provided the most comprehensive solution we were looking for. It had the right mix of capabilities and performance at the right total cost of ownership that we were looking for. And in the payments world as you can imagine, you've got to to be 24/7 365. And we also required a lower cost of ownership than we had before. But we also wanted a greater flexibility and time to market that we could pass on to our customers. And then the last thing I'd say that we were looking for was a multi-deployment capability. And what I mean by that is that we would be able to use this new platform, Postgres platform in our own data centers in our own private cloud, but we could also deploy it in the public cloud, whether we would run it or whether our customers would run it. We wanted that ability to mix and match between these different deployment options. >> So you've talked about a lot of key elements here attributes in terms of availability, accessibility reliability, security obviously. Walk us through those in terms of why you think 2ndQuadrant was addressing your needs in those particular areas or any others for that matter but what it was that checked the box specifically about what Postgres was offering you as opposed to what these other possible solutions and services were that you were looking at. >> Yeah, I think, we're very focused on being able to identify what our customers need and when they're offering services to consumers and to their corporates what is it that they require that's going to enable them to win and compete. And payments industry has a lot of cost pressures within it. It has regulation, it has consumer convenience and the whole movement of digitalization that puts a lot of downward pressure on the cost space. And those who are going to win in the payment space need to be able to address that. So, that is relevant for our banks, for our merchants, for the billers. They all come under very similar regulatory pressure and market pressure and as a result, the ability to reduce dramatically in a very significant way, the total cost of ownership upon which the payment software was going to be operating that was one of the key elements that was very important to us as we made that decision. The second one I think was to enable us to be able to do what we are good at and what our customers expect us to do. And that in turn enables them to focus on their core competencies. We're a software company, we own our own IP we manage our own software for the needs of the 24/7 365 payment requirements and therefore the merchant or the biller or the bank can really focus in on the digital experience for their customers, focusing on their core competencies and what they need to do to win. That was a second key factor for us. I think the third one for us was as well speed to market. Speed to market for ourselves and being competitive to the alternative to ACI, but also more importantly a speed to market for our customers. And there are, the payment world is highly regulated requires significant certification in order to launch new services that's often the long pole in the tent. So we want to be able to get to that point as quickly as possible. And being able to have a public cloud deployment open systems capabilities that would really allow us to pass on that speed to market to those customers. So for example, an acquirer, a payment acquirer moving into a new geographical country they want to compete in they can (indistinct) on their competitors by launching minimum viable products in six to nine months that is five years ago, that could have been a 24 to 30 months endeavor for them to take on. So I, those were important considerations for us as we were choosing a longterm partner for the Postgres world and the public cloud world. >> Obviously, so you've talked a lot about your relationship with your clients and I know you have a really keen awareness of the need to ensure that trust, to ensure that reliability to ensure the collaboration. How about your relationship on the other side with EDB and in terms of all those elements so how has that evolved over a period of time and what kind of service and what kind of value do you think are you deriving from that relationship now? >> So with EDB, first of all, our journey started with 2ndQuadrant and now EDB. And we were specifically looking at the, one area was at the Bi-Directional Replication BDR that we were wanting to support with our solutions particularly in the public cloud. And that was going to enable us to replace multiple pieces of software from multiple vendors. And so we were to create that solution that was right for ACI, it was right for our customers from a functionality and agility and a cost perspective. So technologically with the non-functional requirements and the reliability, availability, serviceability aspects that we were looking for that was in partnership with 2ndQuadrant and EDB, that was a key element. I think the second piece of it is we worked really well with 2ndQuadrant EDB in terms of partnering to meet the needs of the market. It's great to have the right technology in place but then you need your partners really to be able to work with you tactically real-time in order to win in the market and make it work. And I found that they'd been a great partner for us to be able to do that and to be able to react quickly, do the right thing and really enable us to be a great partner to our customers as we deliver real-time payments, as we deliver the acquiring capabilities, as we deliver a modernization for the big banks that we work with as well. >> Now, before I let you go, I'm going to give you a two-part question here. That's always one way to squeeze a little more info (laughing) to the guest. First off advice. You've been through this transformation obviously you're very happy with all that has transpired, so your advice to others who are considering this journey. And then secondly, what can they and you do you think expect in terms of future challenges, opportunities how we might want to frame that with Postgres? Like, where are we going from here, basically? So, two parts, advice and then where do you think this is headed? >> So advice, I certainly learnings from us versus advice is number one, be very thorough in the due diligence that you do and be very clear on what you want and what are your goals that you're looking for. So from an AGI perspective, we were clear that total cost of ownership in terms of the stack that we were going to be providing to our customers. That was very important, number one number two, nonfunctional requirements. So I've talked about the mission criticality of payments 24/7 365. That was a key second piece. And then the third one, ease of deployment. I talked about that, multi-cloud deployment that we were looking for. So we were clear what we wanted and we we took our time from a due diligence point of view. It's a multi-year decision being made so it's not something specifically I think we want to rush into. In terms of looking forward and where do we go from here? Performance is critical so further up performance enhancements, ability for rapid failover availability, near 100% availability that we're looking for five-nines and above, working together with Postgres in order to make those failovers more seamless because they will happen, particularly in the real-time payments world, where we're now seeing billions of transactions happening in a week and soon that will be in a day, they will need to be able to deal with. And for all of this to happen in a public cloud environment, we, I think all understand a lot of the benefits of public cloud and we need to be able to provide this failover availability capability in the public cloud but also in a hybrid cloud environments we're in a multi-cloud environment, so we need to keep working that and make that happen that will make Postgres a payment-grade infrastructure that could power the world's real-time payments and we would love to be able to do that into the future. >> Well, Jeremy thanks for the insights, we appreciate that and once again, congratulations on getting back in that office. I know it's probably a pretty welcomed addition to your regimen now. >> Yeah, John, thank you very much and thanks to everyone who's dialed in for this and John I look forward to welcoming you in the office soon. >> Very good sir, I look forward to that as well. I'll take you up on that in Miami for sure. John Walls here on theCUBE talking with Jeremy Wilmot is the chief product officer at ACI Worldwide. part of our Postgres Vision 2021 coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021 brought to you by EDB. >> Well, hi everybody John Walls here on theCUBE and we're now welcoming Jeremy Wilmot who is the chief product officer at ACI Worldwide part of the Postgres movement, you might say or certainly benefiting from the great value that Postgres is providing a number of enterprises across the globe. Jeremy good to see you today and first off, congratulations you are the first guest I've talked to maybe in a year and a half in their office. So good for you. >> Thanks (chuckles) John that's very kind of you John and great to see you and thanks for having me here. Yeah, it's great to be in the office, it really is. I'm here in Miami in South Florida and getting some sort of normalcy back is great for all of us and I'm certainly enjoying it. So thank you before (indistinct) has been. >> I'm sure you are, yeah, congratulations on that front. First off, let's talk about ACI Worldwide for the folks in our audience who aren't familiar with the payments, your role in terms of that payment ecosystem. Tell us a little bit about ACI Worldwide. >> Sure, well, primarily we're a software company. That's ACI, we started 1975 in Omaha, Nebraska built the first debit card system and ATM system for first National Bank of Omaha and over the last 45 years, we've globalized ourselves, we have, we are delivering mission-critical real-time payment systems across the world to banks to merchants to billers, we help them meet the payment needs of their consumers and their corporates. So we process, manage digital payments, we power omni-commerce and e-commerce payments, we present and process bill payments, we manage fraud, we manage the risk all within that and as I said on a global basis 13 of the G20 countries with a leading DDA account or current account payment processing software in those countries and have been for many years. >> So, as the CPO then quite obviously in the financial space your plate is quite full these days in terms of providing for your client base. How would you characterize maybe the evolution in terms of product development that you've been through in the financial world here over the past say, three to five years, where were you back then to where you are now and what role has Postgres played in that journey? >> Sure, yeah. So, specific to the Postgres part of the ecosystem, previously five-plus years ago our previous database solution was complex, it was expensive, it was hard to change and maintain and we leveraged multiple pieces of software from multiple vendors as a result of that. So at that time we looked for an alternative that was simpler and better and we went through a very comprehensive due diligence process, we explored both open source and license models of database to support our solution and when we looked at all of the options we determined that 2ndQuadrant Postgres was the one that provided the most comprehensive solution we were looking for. It had the right mix of capabilities and performance at the right total cost of ownership that we were looking for. And in the payments world as you can imagine, you've got to to be 24/7 365. And we also required a lower cost of ownership than we had before. But we also wanted a greater flexibility and time to market that we could pass on to our customers. And then the last thing I'd say that we were looking for was a multi-deployment capability. And what I mean by that is that we would be able to use this new platform, Postgres platform in our own data centers in our own private cloud, but we could also deploy it in the public cloud, whether we would run it or whether our customers would run it. We wanted that ability to mix and match between these different deployment options. >> So you've talked about a lot of key elements here attributes in terms of availability, accessibility reliability, security obviously. Walk us through those in terms of why you think 2ndQuadrant was addressing your needs in those particular areas or any others for that matter but what it was that checked the box specifically about what Postgres was offering you as opposed to what these other possible solutions and services were that you were looking at. >> Yeah, I think, we're very focused on being able to identify what our customers need and when they're offering services to consumers and to their corporates what is it that they require that's going to enable them to win and compete. And payments industry has a lot of cost pressures within it. It has regulation, it has consumer convenience and the whole movement of digitalization that puts a lot of downward pressure on the cost space. And those who are going to win in the payment space need to be able to address that. So, that is relevant for our banks, for our merchants, for the billers. They all come under very similar regulatory pressure and market pressure and as a result, the ability to reduce dramatically in a very significant way, the total cost of ownership upon which the payment software was going to be operating that was one of the key elements that was very important to us as we made that decision. The second one I think was to enable us to be able to do what we are good at and what our customers expect us to do. And that in turn enables them to focus on their core competencies. We're a software company, we own our own IP we manage our own software for the needs of the 24/7 365 payment requirements and therefore the merchant or the biller or the bank can really focus in on the digital experience for their customers, focusing on their core competencies and what they need to do to win. That was a second key factor for us. I think the third one for us was as well speed to market. Speed to market for ourselves and being competitive to the alternative to ACI, but also more importantly a speed to market for our customers. And there are, the payment world is highly regulated requires significant certification in order to launch new services that's often the long pole in the tent. So we want to be able to get to that point as quickly as possible. And being able to have a public cloud deployment open systems capabilities that would really allow us to pass on that speed to market to those customers. So for example, an acquirer, a payment acquirer moving into a new geographical country they want to compete in they can (indistinct) on their competitors by launching minimum viable products in six to nine months that is five years ago, that could have been a 24 to 30 months endeavor for them to take on. So I, those were important considerations for us as we were choosing a longterm partner for the Postgres world and the public cloud world. >> Obviously, so you've talked a lot about your relationship with your clients and I know you have a really keen awareness of the need to ensure that trust, to ensure that reliability to ensure the collaboration. How about your relationship on the other side with EDB and in terms of all those elements so how has that evolved over a period of time and what kind of service and what kind of value do you think are you deriving from that relationship now? >> So with EDB, first of all, our journey started with 2ndQuadrant and now EDB. And we were specifically looking at the, one area was at the Bi-Directional Replication BDR that we were wanting to support with our solutions particularly in the public cloud. And that was going to enable us to replace multiple pieces of software from multiple vendors. And so we were to create that solution that was right for ACI, it was right for our customers from a functionality and agility and a cost perspective. So technologically with the non-functional requirements and the reliability, availability, serviceability aspects that we were looking for that was in partnership with 2ndQuadrant and EDB, that was a key element. I think the second piece of it is we worked really well with 2ndQuadrant EDB in terms of partnering to meet the needs of the market. It's great to have the right technology in place but then you need your partners really to be able to work with you tactically real-time in order to win in the market and make it work. And I found that they'd been a great partner for us to be able to do that and to be able to react quickly, do the right thing and really enable us to be a great partner to our customers as we deliver real-time payments, as we deliver the acquiring capabilities, as we deliver a modernization for the big banks that we work with as well. >> Now, before I let you go, I'm going to give you a two-part question here. That's always one way to squeeze a little more info (laughing) to the guest. First off advice. You've been through this transformation obviously you're very happy with all that has transpired, so your advice to others who are considering this journey. And then secondly, what can they and you do you think expect in terms of future challenges, opportunities how we might want to frame that with Postgres? Like, where are we going from here, basically? So, two parts, advice and then where do you think this is headed? >> So advice, I certainly learnings from us versus advice is number one, be very thorough in the due diligence that you do and be very clear on what you want and what are your goals that you're looking for. So from an AGI perspective, we were clear that total cost of ownership in terms of the stack that we were going to be providing to our customers. That was very important, number one number two, nonfunctional requirements. So I've talked about the mission criticality of payments 24/7 365. That was a key second piece. And then the third one, ease of deployment. I talked about that, multi-cloud deployment that we were looking for. So we were clear what we wanted and we we took our time from a due diligence point of view. It's a multi-year decision being made so it's not something specifically I think we want to rush into. In terms of looking forward and where do we go from here? Performance is critical so further up performance enhancements, ability for rapid failover availability, near 100% availability that we're looking for five-nines and above, working together with Postgres in order to make those failovers more seamless because they will happen, particularly in the real-time payments world, where we're now seeing billions of transactions happening in a week and soon that will be in a day, they will need to be able to deal with. And for all of this to happen in a public cloud environment, we, I think all understand a lot of the benefits of public cloud and we need to be able to provide this failover availability capability in the public cloud but also in a hybrid cloud environments we're in a multi-cloud environment, so we need to keep working that and make that happen that will make Postgres a payment-grade infrastructure that could power the world's real-time payments and we would love to be able to do that into the future. >> Well, Jeremy thanks for the insights, we appreciate that and once again, congratulations on getting back in that office. I know it's probably a pretty welcomed addition to your regimen now. >> Yeah, John, thank you very much and thanks to everyone who's dialed in for this and John I look forward to welcoming you in the office soon. >> Very good sir, I look forward to that as well. I'll take you up on that in Miami for sure. John Walls here on theCUBE talking with Jeremy Wilmot is the chief product officer at ACI Worldwide. part of our Postgres Vision 2021 coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Reporter: From New York City, it's theCUBE, covering New Relic FutureStack 2019, brought to you by New Relic. >> I'm Stu Miniman, we're here in New York City right next door to Grand Central Station, at the Grand Hyatt. This first year of theCUBE, attending New Relic's Futurestack, the seventh year of the show, and happy to welcome to the program, Guy Fighel, who's the vice president and general manager of New Relic AI of course, CEO was up on stage this morning announcing New Relic AI, it's in beta, Lew said expect early 2020 for to come out, so thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for being here. >> All right, so Guy, you came to New Relic by way of the acquisition of signifAI. And that ends in AI of course, even though we pronounce it signify, so help us understand is this a repackaging, rebranding you know, New Relic-izing the product that was through the acquisition, tell us how we've gotten here. >> Yes, sure, so New Relic AI is a whole new set of capabilities, it's a suite of capabilities that we are launching today in beta that pretty much augments the site reliability engineers with AI and ML capabilities. It runs on top of the New Relic One platform, which is the first observability platform that is connected, open, and programmable so you have all of the existing information and data that you already have inside New Relic. And we've incorporated a lot of the technologies and the techniques that we have developed as part of signifAI with existing capabilities that New Relic already had, and pretty much integrated all of that into single user experience and single type of capabilities across the stack. >> All right so, Guy, AI is a really broad category you know, you got your AI and ML and cognitive and you know all these things, what was kind of the core IP of SignifAI when they came in. >> Sure, so we really focused on correlating and reducing the noise of all of your different alerts and incidents but not just that, we've actually built a recommendation engine on top of that, to provide you much faster context to get into potential root cause of all of your different information focused on events. And now we're combining that with all the time series data that New Relic as a platform has to offer, so you're getting a much broader capabilities for understanding. >> Yeah, you know, definitely there's that promise of AI as we know that humans alone or my traditional tooling just can't keep up, you know, talk about all the different sources of data, the volume of data. I just saw Lew talking about the amount of the millions of items being ingested into the New Relic database, and the billions of items that are being read basically per second. So, help us understand. You say we love, we talk about our videos or extracting the signal from the noise, so, did I hear it was like 80, 85% your early customers are helping to reduce that noise Bring us in a little bit more. >> True, yes, so definitely early results shows us over 80% noise reduction for some of the customers and it is important to understand this is automatic relations, so this is truly based on the engines with no human interaction. Now, we actually have even greater results when some user input is driven into the system and that raises the capabilities as well. In terms of the number of events, yes, we are dealing with huge amount of events and information in the platform and I think it's, all around, not replacing the humans, but actually augmenting the site reliability engineers, so you talked about how systems, you know, there is a great promise for those capabilities. We believe that applied intelligence is a much better term, because it gives really enabling the augmentation for the site reliability engineers. We don't believe that site reliability engineers needs to go away or can even be replaced anytime soon. We definitely think that we can help them understand better and faster, what is the type of problems that they see in their production environments, and then help them resolve that much faster and better. >> Yeah, absolutely, we're huge supporters of really, the best solutions are when you have the people plus machines, there are certain things the machines are going to do on their own, but it's the marrying, so help us understand who's going to be using New Relic AI how is it going to change their day-to-day life and maybe even kind of organizationally, what the impact will be. >> Sure, so if you're a site reliability engineer, or a DevOps themed depending on, how you want to call yourself and, you know, there's a big debate in the industry, whether it's DevOps or site reliability engineers. Pretty much anyone who is responsible for Op time in the digital production environments you're a relevant user, If you carry the pager, if you're on call, you're a relevant user, so you're going to be interacting with the system to be able to actually see what are the problems with potential recommendations and then, you can infuse the system with your own logic. Whether it's based on the logic, we also provide very easy user experience we'd like thumbs up, thumbs down, different types of feedbacks as part of the workflow and I think the most important piece is that we're connecting to users where they are. Meaning, we don't believe we need to change the workflows so, if you're a user and you're already using with a specific internet management providers and you've already connected some of the additional monitoring tools to those providers, we now offer you a streamline of syncing to those instant management platforms and then, in reaching them with all of the information that we already have on the platform. >> So Guy, we've talked about AI but, let's talk a little bit about AI Ops. So, you know I've talked to the number of the vendors I actually went to an AI ops conference earlier this year and some of the talk track was, APM is the old way, AI ops is going to replace what you were doing before Let's take all your scattered tools and consolidate them down. some of the messaging reminds me of what I heard this morning, the New Relic One platform is going to replace a number of tools, pull everything together. Help us kind of, you know, square that circle of APM and AI ops and where you see New Relic compared to some of those competitors out there today. >> Sure, so APM is application performance monitoring. it's all about monitor and have that visibility to your application layer, it has nothing to do with AI ops it has nothing to do with replacing the tools. We believe that everyone should have visibility into their application, and that's, a lot of that messaging came through Lew's key note this morning, and opening it up to any type of open source instrumentation so we can bring it to the platform whether you want to drop an agent, whether you want to use any other open source SDK, we allow you to do that. Pretty much opening up the platform and giving you the option. AI ops is a term coined by Gardner actually, and it is pretty much applying some automation, AI capabilities, ML capabilities, statistical analysis capabilities on huge amount of data that you have in a centralized place. It has nothing to do with the monitoring, per se, so, I definitely think that the industry's going into a new space, where there is a consolidation obviously with different vendors. I believe that New Relic is giving customers the choice to make, whether they want to go and continue using their old tools, and that's okay, and we are an open platform so we will sync up with their data as part of New Relic AI we'll be able to bring in the new data whether by, again inter-connecting with their incident management platform or through a rest API or native integrations or if customer choose to do that, they can just send us all of the data directly and then, we apply the AI ops capabilities on top of the existing platforms. So, it's really opening up for the choice of the customer. >> All right it's been less than a year since the acquisition of SignifAI we know that some of the things when you do an acquisition it's an area of investment, you're going to get more resources, more people but, you've mentioned customers a couple of times, maybe give us a little bit of insight as to how the customer conversations have changed now working for New Relic, as opposed to being a customer understanding that piece of the New Relic ecosystem. >> Oh absolutely, I think, you know, as you transition from a small start up into a company like New Relic you get much more exposure to enterprise customer, your scaling capabilities are much better so we're in serious conversations with a lot of the enterprises customers that have a lot of interest in what we do. A lot of it is part of the branding recognition and all of the great capabilities that New Relic has already, and then marinade that with all of the capabilities that we're bringing or that we brought into New Relic as a young start-up with all of the latest technologies and a lot of the AI capabilities which are truly innovative ones, so definitely see a lot of traction from the enterprise customers, the more sophisticated ones as well. >> All right, so the solution announced today is in beta give us a little bit of a look forward as to what we should expect to see and what feedback you're hoping to get from customers along the way and how they might get engaged if they want to. >> Yeah so definitely we are in beta today. We've engaged with customers prior to the beta, so, we already got a lot of feedback and great feedback and we make some tweaks to the product based on that. We're actually announcing AGI of a small feature today which is enhanced incident context, which provides you active detection for time series data all the way to your slack channels but the overall solution is currently in beta and as we are progressing, within every month we're going to get more and more customers engaging with the platform, and then we're going to release a much more advanced capabilities even than what we have today in GA coming early next year. >> All right great, last thing, big mention and push about observability this morning, help us understand where AI fits into the broader discussion of observability. >> So again, as I mentioned before the observability will allow you to see all of your data in a centralized place. So, it's combining matrix, events, logs and traces in a specific place that now algorithms and different techniques such as AI and ML based algorithms really, really be successful in gathering, understanding, because you have all of that different information for the human brain, it's very hard to actually go and crawl and kind of ingest all of that vast amount of different data points for machines, they're very good at that. They're starving for broad amount of data and so having that capability, building on top of a true observability platform is what makes the AI and ML so successful and drive value to customers in really understanding what the data means. >> All right well, Guy thank you so much for sharing best of luck on the journey towards GA for the the full New Relic AI in the future. We look forward to, launching it. >> Thank you so much. >> All right and once more here, walking through at the New Relic Futurestack 2019, here in New York City. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're here live at theCUBE in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE with Stu Miniman. It's our third day of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Our next two guests are from NetApp. Russell Fishman, Director of Product Management, and Keith Barto, Director of Product Management, both directors of product management. One was the former CEO of Immersive, now with NetApp for a few years. Guys, great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us, John. Thank you. >> We saw you guys in Barcelona, obviously. The NetApp story just keeps on getting better. Also, you have core customer base. Cisco's going under transformation. You guys have been transforming ever since I started seeing NetApp arrive on the scene in the 90s. Every year there's always a new innovation. But now, more than ever, you're hearing even Cisco Bellwether in the routing networking business putting up old way network, hey there's a firewall. There's some devices in there. To a completely new, obviously, cloud made in the modern era really things are changing. So what's your reaction to that? Obviously, you guys are a part of that story. You have a relationship with Cisco. What's your reaction to that? And talk about your relationship with Cisco. >> So we obviously have a huge relationship with Cisco. And most folks will know about our FlexPods, I think that's probably the most famous way that we collaborate with these guys. We just came off the back of an amazing year, five straight quarters of double-digit, year-on-year growth, killing in the market. Obviously, we have to brag a little bit, right, come on. >> It's theCUBE, come on! >> It's theCUBE, we gotta be a little bit excited about it. So we're really excited about that, it just really talks to the strength of the relationship, right? So there's a very strong relationship there, and it's been there with FlexPod for eight years, and there's been a lot of transformation, exactly to your point John, a lot of transformation during that time, a lot of focus on the clouds. So one of the questions I always get asked, is why is converged infrastructure still relevant in a cloud-first world? And it is not obvious answer, now clearly our customers think that it is, and so do our partners. But it is not obvious why that is. NetApp has gone through, you talked about transformation, NetApp has gone through this massive transformation, huge focus on clouds, I mean, we have these cloud-first, cloud-native, focus around our data management platforms. We talk about a concept called the data fabric, I don't know if you've heard of the data fabric before. >> Yeah. >> And the data fabric really talks to how, our vision for how enterprises want to manage that new digital currency that is data across all the silos that they want to leverage, right? We've been able to bring some of that goodness into FlexPod, and that's why we're still relevant now. >> Yeah, so Keith, I think back to when converging infrastructure was built as about simplification, we were gonna take all these boxes and put it down to a box and that was the new unit of measurement. Well, Russell was just talking about we've got multi-cloud, when I think of NetApp now, it's always been a software company, but now software in that multi-cloud world, help connect the dots for us, as to management of converged infrastructure into that whole multi-cloud story. >> Yeah, we were very privileged to be acquired by NetApp last March, and my company Immersive, a lot of us came actually out of Cisco. So I was one of the original FlexPod architects from Cisco and had the privilege of helping to build the network, the storage that we brought into FlexPod, and a lot of our customers and our retailers kept on saying, "How do we know we put it together properly? "How are we following the best practices from the CVDs, "from the NVAs, from the TRs?" And so we took those rules and those analytics and we put them into platform, into a SaaS-based platform, and we were able to analyze that, coming from our customers' FlexPods, from within their deployments, from within their multi-data centers, and bring that into our service, run those analytics, prove those best practices, show the deficiencies, get our resellers out there to help our customers, 'cause FlexPod is a meet in the channel play, and we relied heavily on our resellers to make it a success. >> What was the driver for that product? When you started that company and that happened, what was the main motivation behind that? Was it analytics, was it insight, what was some of the things that you guys were building in, was it operational data? >> The real reason was people kept on asking, "How do I know?" Because it's a reference architecture, not a product, "How do I know I did it right?" Because it's really important, we're gonna run our key business applications on this platform, right? My SAP, my Oracle, my Sequel, my SharePoint, my Outlook. I gotta make sure this stuff is really gonna work properly, and it's going to grow in scale with the business. So I need to make sure that those redundant links are there. I need to make sure that when I do VMWare upgrade, or a Microsoft upgrade, that the firmware is alignment with the best practices in the interoperability matrix, so we wanted to make that as easy as possible, so that from a single dashboard, you can see all of those things, you can diagnose it quickly, you can get those email alerts and notifications, and because you end up with disparate operation teams, the server team, the network team, the storage team, the hypervisor team, sometimes they don't always talk effectively with each other, and from one single dashboard, we're now able to show everybody where things are today, and then, one of my favorites, when there is a problem, you call either Services or Support, and you say, "Hey it's not working," and they say, "What did you change?" And you say, "I didn't change anything." We have that historical-- >> Finger pointing kicks in, it was his fault! >> Yeah we have the historical snapshot and trending, so we can go back and look at where things were and do a comparison to where they are today, and it allows us to have a much faster mean time to resolution. >> And what do you guys call that product now within Cisco? What's it... >> It's now called Converged Systems Advisor in NetApp. >> Awesome, so what's next for convergers. Obviously, people, both cloud growth, we're seeing the on-premise, Wikibon has reported, the true private cloud numbers, which basically say there's a lot of on-premise activity going on, that's gonna look like cloud, it's gonna operate like cloud, so they need to have that. There's migration going on, but it's not a lift and shift, to cloud, there's gonna be, obviously, the hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. So, cloud folks still buy hardware, too. You gotta still run stuff, networks aren't going away, storage isn't going away, so what's next for the converged infrastructure play with FlexPod? How do you guys manage that roadmap? >> So, we just announced some things coming into, jointly with Cisco, coming into Cisco Live. One of those things we announced was something called Managed Private Cloud on FlexPods, or actually no, FlexPod Managed Private Cloud, sorry, I switch it around. And FlexPod Managed Private Cloud, it really talks to exactly what you're talking about, John, which is... What we find, cloud has fundamentally changed customers' expectations of what they want on-prem. They recognize the need on-prem, we live in a hybrid world. Those of us that've been in the industry long enough, and have a couple of gray hairs, know that there are very few transitions that are really absolute in the business. A lot of people pronounce that it's gonna be this way or that way, and the reality is, it's something in between. And that's fine because cloud is just another tool in the toolbox, and you don't want to hit every nail with the same hammer, you want to find the right tool for the right job. So what we've done is we've taken some of that cloud goodness, which really means not having to worry about the underlying infrastructure, all right. Worrying about the applications, being more application-focused, more business-value-focused, more line-of-business-focused. And being able to deliver that in a way that people can consume it on-premise. So it really feels like a FlexPod delivered like a cloud, but from a management day-to-day perspective, you don't have to do it-- >> So, it's flexible. >> It's flexible-- >> FlexPod. >> But it's done for you, so it's your little piece of cloud, sitting on-prem, and you don't have to manage it or run it day-to-day. >> Let's talk about what you just said about the whole transformation, people say a certain way, basically you're kind of saying, a lot of press, and a lot of analysts say, "Oh, you've got to do this digital transformation." Customers will take a pragmatic approach, but you guys at NetApp have been talking for a long time, I've been following it, non-disruptive operations. >> Yes. >> So what you see in the cloud if people wanna take those first three steps, but they don't want to have to overhaul anything, containers have proved to be great resource there, Kubernetes is showing a great way to have life cycle management on the app side of infrastructure. How does your customers, and Cisco customers, maintain that non-disruptive operational playbook, because Cisco guys are gonna start changing, moving up the stack too-- >> Absolutely. >> Doesn't mean storage is gonna go away, but they don't want to disrupt anything, your thoughts? >> And it doesn't mean any of it goes away, that's the funny thing, we talk about where we want to focus, but it's as much about not having to worry about the things that we had to worry about that are just there in the future, right? So it's kind of like if you went back 200 years, going to get fresh water was a big hassle, now it isn't, it's delivered to you, right? I know it sounds like a crazy analogy, but the reality is is that we shouldn't have to worry about the basics of on-premise, private cloud, it should just be automatic, it should be simple to execute, simple to manage, simple to order, simple to deploy, and then you focus on the value, so that's what we've been really focused on. >> Keith, when I listen to my friends in the networking space management's still a challenge. The punchline is usually, they hear single pane of glass, and they said that's spelled P-A-I-N. >> I've heard that one too. >> Talk a little bit about how your solutions tie into some of the broader tools out there. >> Well, we first looked at the compute layer and said, because of the extensibility of USC Manager and the API integration, we're able to take advantage of that, and be able to pull that data out, and XOS, right? We're able to do that exact same thing, and the background that we had at Cisco, and knowing those products really well, we were able to gather all the specific data we need to look at those best practices. And it's a complex architecture, but it's a very elegant architecture, because of the high availability, it can provide the performance, the non-disruptive operations that you were bringing up, John. We want to make sure that we're able to keep those things in line, so as we bring our next release of CSA out, we're going to be adding Enterprise Fibre Channel, so the new MDS switches, we're gonna be bringing our relationship with VMWare in our engine to be able to ingest the configuration of VMWare in. We're also bringing back our partner-centric reseller portal so when customer is running Converged Systems Advisor, they can share it to their reseller, and the reseller's going to be able to provide managed services, support services, and professional services to expand, to repair, to augment those existing FlexPods in their customers' environments. So we're really excited to be able to bring that solution back to our resellers-- >> What's that going to do, what's the impact of that, because I almost imagine that's going to enable them to want to be tightly integrated but also get data from their customers. What do you guys see as the value for the partners to take advantage of that? >> Well, I just met with a partner at our booth, just a few moments ago, and walked them through the solution they had never seen it before. It takes a reseller a week, or even multiple weeks, depending on the size of the FlexPod, to actually go through the configuration of the servers, the network, the storage, the hypervisors, and correlate that into a deliverable to their customer. We can do that in sub-10 minutes, sub-15 minutes. >> So faster time to the customer value. >> Faster time to customer value, faster time to resolution if there is a problem, and then again, they're running in their key business applications on this platform, we've been doing it for eight years, we want to continue to expand upon the value the FlexPod can offer. >> But I wanted to add just a couple of things to what you were saying. We talked about FlexPod really being a channel play. That's important to us in product management, not so important to our customers. What it really means to our customers is they tend to have a very close relationship with their partners. Their partners are the ones that are really enabling FlexPod for them. What we're doing with Converged Systems Advisor, is we are creating such a close relationship at a technical level, technology level, between the customer and the partner, that the partner's there to help them on a daily basis. Where there is a problem, it's almost like the telematics in your car, right? All the cars now, they're phoning back home, they're telling where there's something wrong, you get this letter or an email, you need a service, you need... This is exactly what we're achieving with the Converged System Advisor-- >> When you call support, what don't you want to hear? What's your model number, what's your serial number, what's your contract ID? Wouldn't it be great if everybody's singing off the same sheet of music? >> Well, you bring a great point there. There was so much discussion, well, converged infrastructure a public lot, those are gonna be really simple, and they're gonna be homogenous, and they're all gonna be great, but yeah, you're smiling and laughing because the reality is you're never gonna find two customers that have the same environment, no matter what you're talking about. >> No. >> So I need the tooling, I need the data and the analytics, to help get through that. I shouldn't have to spend half an hour on level one support. >> And that's all-- >> I shouldn't have to go through multiple forms the same time. >> Yes, and you're right Stu, that's always been, that's always been the mantra for FlexPod since the word dot. We don't get to an 11 billion dollar install base unless you're doing something right, and the word, the reason the word flex is in there, it's a dichotomy, whenever you go into these sorts of discussions, do you make it really fixed, right? Which is almost like, I call it like straight jacket, right. But you know what you get, right? Or do you make it flexible, right? And the flexibility really addresses the business need as opposed to the technology need. So the product guys love it when it's fixed, the customers love it when it's flexible. >> Yeah, you're talking about basically, changes... You want changes to be rolling with the... Technology rolling with the changes. >> Yes. >> Not be stuck in the straight jacket, or we'll also say tailor-made suit, but things change, you wanna... Fashion changes, so this is a real big issue, and talk about support, I think the ideal outcome is not to even call support, with analytics and push notifications and AI, you can almost see what DevNet's doing here, around how developer are getting involved with DevOps and network DevOps. Coders can come in and use the analytics, if tightly integrated in, so that you get the notifications, or they know exactly your environment. Is that, how far along are you guys on that path, because analytics play a big role, you've got the command center there, the Converged Systems Advisor, implies advising, resolution, prescription, what's the vision? >> So Immersive was a Cisco solution partner at the very beginning, so we were a part of this group right behind us, and it was exciting to be a part of that, to attend Cisco Live and be a part of DevNet, and we expanded upon, as you mentioned, the API, integrations of all these platforms, and when cluster data ONTAP came out for NetApp, we did the exact same thing, right? So we get integrated with NetApp, and very easily able to bring all that data in. Now, massaging that data is the hard part, right? Understanding what is noise and what is the real goodness, so you have to find those best practices, look at the hard work that our teams have done around validated designs between Cisco and NetApp, and look at the best practices that come from those particular pieces of hardware. And then once that intelligence is built, correlating that in the cloud service is really where the magic happens. So our teams are back there talking with the network experts the storage experts, the compute networks, the virtualization experts, and so when we have that data, and now you can decision-eer, right? You can start advising your resellers. So we bring up the rules dashboard, and then we do have alerting that we can send to ticketing systems to the remedies, the ServiceNows-- >> It's interesting, I'd love to get the product perspective on this, and across the bigger picture, because the trend we're seeing, certainly on theCUBE, over the past few years, and most recently this year, is the move from device, hardware, to system. So the systems approach really becomes more of a holistic view where, you're looking at the holistic view of multiple things happening. >> Yes. >> It's not just, this is the box, here's where the rack is, command line interface, you guys taking that same approach, can you just add some color on NetApp's vision on looking at holistically, 'cause that's really where software shines. >> No, no, and that's absolutely, so we have a way of seeing FlexPod as a, we call it a converged system, and for that exact reason. So what CSA is able to do is look at anything that happens within that converged system and the context of the overall system, and that really is the key, right? When you understand things in context it means so much more. Just think about when you listen to someone talk, a word taken out of context means nothing, right? So when we listen to that infrastructure, what it tells us is understood in context. And what it will ultimately do, and I think you were kind of hinting at this, John, the vision here is that there will be self-healing infrastructures, self-healing converged systems, just like the cloud, right? So we are continuously monitoring the configuration, the availability, and other aspects of your converged system and we are able to take action to make sure it stays on the rails. >> We saw you guys at the RSA event, you guys had a small little party we went to, and we were riffing, having fun with some of the NetApp folks, and the big trend in cloud is server-less. So the joke was, is this storage-less solution coming? To your point about this, if you think about it, it's just storage somewhere. This is kind of a joke, but it's also kind of nuanced. This is elastic-- >> No, no! It's absolutely true, if you look at NetApp's strategy, if you look at our cloud strategy, we're the first third-party branded services part of the AGI core services, we're not in the marketplace, we're actually part of AGI core. It's NetApp cloud volumes for AGI, and a customer doesn't know what's going on behind the scenes but let's be clear, we're talking about software-defined storage here, right? >> And cloud-ified, too, as well, talk about cloud operations. >> Yeah, still at the end of the day, for us, our intellectual property is not really tied to hardware, we obviously use that as a way to get our intellectual property in the hands of our customers. But we're not tied to a-- >> You guys made a good bet on cloud, I remember talking before Kurian took over, you guys were kicking the tires on Amazon years ago. >> Yes, yes, yes, that's right. >> So it's not like a Johnny-come-lately to the cloud, you guys have been deep in the core. >> Absolutely. >> To end this segment, I wanted to get your thoughts, because you guys are here at Cisco Live, what should the audience understand that couldn't make it out here as the top story at Cisco Live, and what is your role with Cisco here, what's the big story, top line, high-order bit, NetApp, Cisco story. >> So I'll go first, and I'll let my friend here go second. We were really excited coming into Cisco Live, right. We had this pretty big announcement last week, there were a few different aspects to it, but I'll talk about two of them. A new focus between Cisco and NetApp on verticals around FlexPod, and what that really means is that we're focused on very specific verticals, including healthcare, but there'll be others that come down the line. We announced a new solution base on Epic PHR. We announced some lead customers, including the Mercy Technology Services, which is part of the Mercy Hospital group. So that was super exciting, I think what it does is it just demonstrates that our focus is on the outcomes, as opposed to the actual infrastructure, the infrastructure is the way to deliver that. So we're very excited about that at Cisco. The second thing that we announced was, I said, mentioned this Managed Private Cloud, we actually announced it with four of our major joint partners, Dimension Data, ProAct, Microland, and oh my Lord, ePlus, yes of course. That was super exciting as well, and what it does is it captures the imagination, and it's always very fun when you're standing at a booth, and people say, "Oh, I've known FlexPod, "I've seen you guys around." But there's always something new to talk about. >> The relevance is more than ever. >> Absolutely. >> Keith, what wave is NetApp riding right now, if you look at the Cisco action going on, what they're going through, what should people know about the big wave that you guys are taking advantage of right now? >> I think the big wave is absolutely gotta be what we're doing with the hyperscalers. We by far have taken the industry by storm, when you think about what we've done with Microsoft, what we're doing with Google, you know, sorry? >> And Amazon. >> And Amazon, thank you. >> Small companies. >> Yeah, just small hyperscalers, right? It's amazing what we can do with cloud ONTAP, across those vendors, and when we look at what our customers have done with FlexPod, and their relationship with Cisco and NetApp, and our ability to work together to help customers get their data from their core data centers to cloud, back, to their customers, and for us to be able to use analytics the way we do on FlexPod, I think there's a real opportunity-- >> And riding the scale wave too, scaling is huge. Everyone's talking about large-scale, talking about hyperscale as that is the largest scale you can see. >> Well, and our ability to control where the data lives, right? Because you want to be able to hold control of your data, and being able to use familiar tools like what you're already using in your own data center and in your own converged infrastructures, being able to use that ONTAP operating system to be able to control that experience is gonna be very important. >> Guys, thanks for coming in for the NetApp update, great news, great alignment with Cisco. It's a large-scale world, and certainly, the world is changing, storage is gonna be a critical part of it, server, storage, infrastructure, cloud operations on-premise, and in the cloud. TheCUBE, bringing you live coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, stay with us for more day three of three days of coverage here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live, we'll be right back. (electronic music)