>> Voiceover: Live from New York it's theCUBE, covering Machine Learning Everywhere: Build Your Ladder to AI. Brought to you by IBM. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back to New York City as theCUBE continues our coverage here at IBM's Machine Learning Everywhere: Build Your Ladder to AI. Along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. We're now joined by Vitaly Tsivan who is Executive Vice President at AMC Networks. And Vitaly, thanks for joining us here this morning. >> Thank you. >> I don't know how this interview is going to go, frankly. Because we've got a die-hard Yankee fan in our guest, and a Red Sox fans who bleeds Red Sox Nation. Can you guys get along for about 15 minutes? >> Dave: Maybe about 15. >> I'm glad there's a bit of space between us. >> Dave: It's given us the off-season and the Yankees have done so well. I'll be humble. Okay? (John laughs) We'll wait and see. >> All right. Just in case, I'm ready to jump in if we have to separate here. But it is good to have you here with us this morning. Thanks for making the time. First off, talk about AMC Networks a little bit. So, five U.S. networks. You said multiple international networks and great presence there. But you've had to make this transition to becoming a data company, in essence. You have content and you're making this merger in the data. How has that gone for you? And how have you done that? >> First of all, you make me happy when you say that AMC Networks have made a transition to be a data company. So, we haven't. We are using data to help our primary business, which is obviously broadcasting our content to our viewers. But yes, we use data to help to tune our business, to follow the lead that viewers are giving us. As you can imagine, in the last so many years, viewers have actually dictating how they want to watch. Whether it's streaming video rather than just turning their satellite boxes or TV boxes on, and pretty much dictating what content they want to watch. So, we have to follow, we have to adjust and be at the cutting edge all for our business. And this is where data come into play. >> How did you get there? You must have done a lot of testing, right? I mean, I remember when binge watching didn't even exist, and then all of a sudden now everybody drops 10 episodes at once. Was that a lot of A-B testing? Just analyzing data? How does a company like yours come to that realization? Or is it just, wow, the competition is doing it, we should too. Explain how -- >> Vitaly: Interesting. So, when I speak to executives, I always tell them that business intelligence and data analytics for any company is almost like an iceberg. So, you can actually see the top of it, and you enjoy it very much but there's so much underwater. So, that's what you're referring to which is that in order to be able to deliver that premium thing that's the tip of the iceberg is that we have to have state of the art data management platforms. We have to curate our own first by data. We have to acquire meaningful third party data. We have to mingle it all together. We have to employ optimization predictive algorithms on top of that. We have to employ statistics, and arm business with data-driven decisions. And then it all comes to fruition. >> Now, your company's been around for awhile. You've got an application -- You're a developer. You're an application development executive. So, you've sort of made your personal journey. I'm curious as to how the company made its journey. How did you close that gap between the data platforms that we all know, the Googles, the Facebooks, etc., which data is the central part of their organization, to where you used to be? Which probably was building, looking back doing a lot of business intelligence, decision support, and a lot of sort of asynchronous activities. How did you get from there to where you are today? >> Makes sense. So, I've been with AMC Networks for four years. Prior to that I'd been with Disney, ABC, ESPN four, six years, doing roughly the same thing. So, number one, we're utilizing ever rapidly changing technologies to get us to the right place. Number two is during those four years with AMC, we've employed various tactics. Some of them are called data democratization. So, that's actually not only get the right data sources not only process them correctly, but actually arm everyone in the company with immediate, easy access to this data. Because the entire business, data business, is all about insights. So, the insights -- And if you think of the business, if you for a minute separate business and business intelligence, then business doesn't want to know too much about business intelligence. What they want insights on a silver plate that will tell them what to do next. Now, that's the hardest thing, you can imagine, right? And so the search and drive for those insights has to come from every business person in the organization. Now, obviously, you don't expect them to build their own statistical algorithms and see the results in employee and machine learning. But if you arm them with that data at the tip of their fingers, they'll make many better decisions on a daily basis which means that they're actually coming up with their own small insights. So, there are small insights, big insights, and they're all extremely valuable. >> A big part of that is cultural as well, that mindset. Many companies that I work with, they're data is very siloed. I don't know if that was the case with your firm, maybe less prior to your joining. I'd be curious as to how you've achieved that cultural mindset shift. Cause a lot of times, people try to keep their own data. They don't want to share it. They want to keep it in a silo, gain political power. How did you address that? >> Vitaly: Absolutely. One of my conversations with the president, we were discussing the fact that if we were to go make recordings of how people talk about data in their organization today and go back in time and show them what they will be doing three years from now, they would be shocked. They wouldn't believe that. So, absolutely. So, culturally, educationally, bringing everyone into the place where they can understand data. They can take advantage of the data. It's an undertaking. But we are successful in doing that. >> Help me out here. Maybe I just have never acquired a little translation here, or simplification. So, you think about AMC. You've got programming. You've got your line up. I come on, I click, I go, I watch a movie and I enjoy it or watch my program, whatever. So, now in this new world of viewer habits changing, my behaviors are changing. What have you done? What have you looked for in terms of data and telling you about me that has now allowed you to modify your business and adapt to that. So, I mean, health data shouldn't drive that on a day to day basis in terms of how I access your programming. >> So, good example to that would be something we called TV everywhere. So, you said it yourself, obviously users or viewers are used to watching television as when the shows were provided via television. So, with new technologies, with streaming opportunities, today, they want to watch when they want to watch, and what they want to watch. So, one of the ways we accommodate them with that is that we don't just television, so we are on every available platform today and we are allowing viewers to watch our content on demand, digitally, when they want to watch it. So, that is one of the ways how we are reacting to it. And so, that puts us in the position as one of the B to C type of businesses, where we're now speaking directly to our consumers not via just the television. So, we're broadcasting, their watching which means that we understand how they watch and we try to react accordingly to that. Which is something that Netflix is bragging about is that they know the patterns, they actually kind of promote their business so we on that business too. >> Can you describe your innovation formula, if you will? How do you go about innovating? Obviously, there's data, there's technology. Presumably, there's infrastructure that scales. You have to be able to scale and have massive speed and infrastructure that heals itself. All those other things. But what's your innovation formula? How would you describe it? So, informally simple. It starts with business. I'm fortunate that business has desire to innovate. So, formulating goals is something that drives us to respond to it. So, we don't just walk around the thing, and look around and say, "Let's innovate." So, we follow the business goals with innovation. A good example is when we promote our shows. So, the major portion of our marketing campaigns falls on our own air. So, we promote our shows to our AMC viewers or WE tv viewers. When we do that, we try to optimize our campaigns to the highest level possible, to get the most out of ROI out of that. And so, we've succeeded and we managed today to get about 30% ROI on that and either just do better with our promotional campaigns or reallocate that time for other businesses. >> You were saying that after the first question, or during responding to the first question, about you saying we're really not ... We're a content company still. And we have incorporated data, but you really aren't, Dave and I have talked about this a lot, everybody's a data company now, in a way. Because you have to be. Cause you've got this hugely competitive landscape that you're operating in, right? In terms of getting more odd calls. >> That's right. >> So, it's got to be no longer just a part of what you do or a section of what you do. It's got to be embedded in what you do. Does it not? Oh, it absolutely is. I still think that it's a bit premature to call AMC Networks a data company. But to a degree, every company today is a data company. And with the culture change over the years, if I used to solicit requests and go about implementing them, today it's more of a prioritization of work because every department in the company got educated to the degree that they all want to get better. And they all want those insights from the data. They want their parts of the business to be improved. And we're venturing into new businesses. And it's quite a bit in demand. >> So, is it your aspiration to become a data company? Or is it more data-driven sort of TV network? How would you sort of view that? >> I'd like to say data-driven TV network. Of course. >> Dave: Okay. >> It's more in tune with reality. >> And so, talk about aligning with the business goals. That's kind of your starting point. You were talking earlier about a gut feel. We were joking about baseball. Moneyball for business. So, you're a data person. The data doesn't lie, etc. But insights sometimes are hard. They don't just pop out. Is that true? Do you see that changing as the time to insight, from insight to decision going to compress? What do you see there? >> The search for insights will never stop. And the more dense we are in that journey the better we are going to be as a company. The data business is so much depends on technologies. So, that when technologies matures, and we manage to employ them in a timely basis, so we simply get better from that. So, good example is machine learning. There are a ton of optimizations, optimization algorithms, forecasting algorithms that we put in place. So, for awhile it was a pinnacle of our deliveries. Now, with machine learning maturing today. We are able or trying to be in tune with the audience that is changing their behavior. So, the patterns that we would be looking for manually in the past, machine is now looking for those patterns. So, that's the perfect example for our strength to catch up with the reality. What I'm hoping for, and that's where the future is, is that one day we won't be just reacting utilizing machine learning to the change in patterns in behavior. We are actually going to be ahead of those patterns and anticipate those changes to come, and react properly. >> I was going to say, yeah, what is the next step? Because you said that you are reacting. >> Vitaly: I was ahead of your question. >> Yeah, you were. (laughter) So, I'm going to go ahead and re-ask it. >> Dave: Data guy. (laughter) >> But you've got to get to that next step of not just anticipating but almost creating, right, in your way. Creating new opportunities, creating news data to develop these insights into almost shaping viewer behavior, right? >> Vitaly: Totally. So, like I said, optimization is one avenue that we pursue and continue to pursue. Forecasting is another. But I'm talking about true predictability. I mean, something goes beyond just to say how our show will do. Even beyond, which show would do better. >> John: Can you do that? Even to the point and say these are the elements that have been successful for this genre and for this size of audience, and therefore as we develop programming, whether it's in script and casting, whatever. I mean, take it all the way down to that micro-level to developing almost these ideals, these optimal programs that are going to be better received by your audience. >> Look, it's not a big secret. Every company that is in the content business is trying to get as many The Walking Deads as they can in their portfolio. Is there a direct path to success? Probably not, otherwise everyone would have been-- >> John: Over do it. >> Yeah, would be doing that. But yeah, so those are the most critical and difficult insights to get ahold of and we're working toward that. >> Are you finding that your predictive capabilities are getting meaningfully better? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit in terms of predicting those types of successes. Or is it still a lot of trial and error? >> I'd like to say they are meaningfully better. (laughter) Look, we do, there are obviously interesting findings. There are sometimes setbacks and we learn from it, and we move forward. >> Okay, as good as the weather or better? Or worse? (laughs) >> Depends on the morning and the season. (laughter) >> Vitaly, how have your success or have your success measurements changed as we enter this world of digital and machine learning and artificial intelligence? And if so, how? >> Well, they become more and more challenging and complex. Like, I gave an example for data democratization. It was such an interesting and telling company-wide initiative. And at the time, it felt as a true achievement when everybody get access to their data on their desktops and laptops. When we look back now a few years, it was a walk in the park to achieve. So, the more complex data and objectives we set in front of ourselves, the more educated people in the company become, the more challenging it is to deliver and take the next step. And we strive to do that. >> I wonder if I can ask you a question from a developers perspective. You obviously understand the developer mindset. We were talking to Dennis earlier. He's like, "Yeah, you know, it's really the data scientists that are loving the data, taking a bath in it. The data engineers and so forth." And I was kind of pushing on that saying, "Well, but eventually the developers have to be data-oriented. Data is the new development kit. What's your take? I mean, granted the 10 million Java developers most of them are not focused on the data per se. Will that change? Is that changing? >> So, first of all, I want separate the classical IT that you just referred to, which are developers. Because this discipline has been well established whether it's Waterfall or Agile. So, every company has those departments and they serve companies well. Business intelligence is a different animal. So, most of the work, if not all of the work we do is more of an R&D type of work. It is impossible to say, in three months I'll arrive with the model that will transform this business. So, we're driving there. That's the major distinction between the two. Is it the right path for some of the data-oriented developers to move on from, let's say, IT disciplines and into BI disciplines? I would highly encourage that because the job is so much more challenging, so interesting. There's very little routine as we said. It's actually challenge, challenge, and challenge. And, you know, you look at the news the way I do, and you see that data scientists becomes the number one desired job in America. I hope that there will be more and more people in that space because as every other department was struggling to find good people, right people for the space, and even within that space, you have as you mentioned, data engineers. You have data scientists or statisticians. And now it's maturing to the point that you have people who are above and beyond that. Those who actually can envision models not to execute on them. >> Are you investigating blockchain and playing around with that at all? Is there an application in your business? >> It hasn't matured fully yet in our hands but we're looking into it. >> And the reason I ask is that there seems to me that blockchain developers are data-oriented. And those two worlds, in my view, are coming together. But it's earlier days. >> Look, I mean, we are in R&D space. And like I said, we don't know exactly, we can't fully commit to a delivery. But it's always a balance between being practical and dreaming. So, if I were to say, you know, let me jump into a blockchain right now and be ahead of the game. Maybe. But then my commitments are going to be sort of farther ahead and I'm trying to be pragmatic. >> Before we let you go, I got to give you 30 seconds on your Yankees. How do you feel about the season coming up? >> As for with every season, I'm super-excited. And I can't wait until the season starts. >> We're always excited when pitchers and catchers show up. >> That's right. (laughter) >> If I were a Yankee fan, I'd be excited too. I must admit. >> Nobody's lost a game. >> That's right. >> Vitaly, thank you for being with us here. We appreciate it. And continued success at AMC Networks. Thank you for having me. >> Back with more on theCUBE right after this. (upbeat techno music)

(ethereal music) >> Good morning, everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's day-two coverage of Snowflake Summit '22. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We are live in Las Vegas at Caesar's Forum, looking forward to an action-packed day here on theCUBE. Our first guest joins us, Bill Stratton, the global industry lead, media, entertainment and advertising at Snowflake. Bill, great to have you on the program talking about industry specifics. >> Glad to be here, excited to have a conversation. >> Yeah, the media and entertainment industry has been keeping a lot of us alive the last couple of years, probably more of a dependence on it than we've seen stuck at home. Talk to us about the data culture in the media, entertainment and advertising landscape, how is data being used today? >> Sure. Well, let's start with what you just mentioned, these last couple of years, I think, coming out of the pandemic, a lot of trends and impact to the media industry. I think there were some things happening prior to COVID, right? Streaming services were starting to accelerate. And obviously, Netflix was an early mover. Disney launched their streaming service right before the pandemic, Disney+, with ESPN+ as well. I think then, as the pandemic occurred these last two years, the acceleration of consumers' habits, obviously, of not just unbundling their cable subscription, but then choosing, you know, what services they want to subscribe to, right? I mean, I think we all sort of grew up in this era of, okay, the bundle was the bundle, you had sports, you had news, you had entertainment, whether you watched the channel or not, you had the bundle. And what the pandemic has accelerated is what I call, and I think a lot of folks call, the golden age of content. And really, the golden age of content is about the consumer. They're in control now, they pick and choose what services they want, what they watch, when they watch it. And I think that has extremely, sort of accelerated this adoption on the consumer side, and then it's creating this data ecosystem, as a result of companies like Disney having a direct-to-consumer relationship for the first time. It used to be a Disney or an NBC was a wholesaler, and the cable or satellite company had the consumer data and relationship. Now, the companies that are producing the content have the data and the consumer relationships. It's a fascinating time. >> And they're still coming over the top on the Telco networks, right? >> Absolutely right. >> Telco's playing in this game? >> Yeah, Telco is, I think what the interesting dynamic with Telco is, how do you bundle access, high speed, everybody still needs high speed at their home, with content? And so I think it's a similar bundle, but it takes on a different characteristic, because the cable and Telcos are not taking the content risk. AT&T sold Warner Media recently, and I think they looked at it and said, we're going to stay with the infrastructure, let somebody else do the content. >> And I think I heard, did I hear this right the other day, that Roku is now getting into the content business? >> Roku is getting into it. And they were early mover, right? They said the TVs aren't, the operating system in the television is not changing fast enough for content. So their dongle that you would slide into a TV was a great way to get content on connected televisions, which is the fastest growing platform. >> I was going to say, what are the economics like in this business? Because the bundles were sort of a limiting factor, in terms of the TAM. >> Yeah. >> And now, we get great content, all right, to watch "Better Call Saul", I have to get AMC+ or whatever. >> You know, your comment, your question about the economics and the TAM is an interesting one, because I think we're still working through it. One of the things, I think, that's coming to the forefront is that you have to have a subscription revenue stream. Okay? Netflix had a subscription revenue stream for the last six, eight, 10 years, significantly, but I think you even see with Netflix that they have to go to a second revenue model, which is going to be an ad-supported model, right? We see it in the press these last couple days with Reid Hastings. So I think you're going to see, obviously subscription, obviously ad-supported, but the biggest thing, back to the consumer, is that the consumer's not going to sit through two minutes of advertising to watch a 22 minute show. >> Dave: No way. >> Right? So what's then going to happen is that the content companies want to know what's relevant to you, in terms of advertising. So if I have relevancy in my ad experience, then it doesn't quite feel, it's not intrusive, and it's relevant to my experience. >> And the other vector in the TAM, just one last follow-up, is you see Amazon, with Prime, going consumption. >> Bill: That's right. >> You get it with Prime, it's sort of there, and the movies aren't the best in the world, but you can buy pretty much any movie you want on a consumption basis. >> Yeah. Just to your last quick point, there is, we saw last week, the Boston Red Sox are bundling tickets, season tickets, with a subscription to their streaming service. >> NESN+, I think it is, yeah. So just like Prime, NESN+- >> And it's like 30 bucks a month. >> -just like Prime bundling with your delivery service, you're going to start to see all kinds of bundles happen. >> Dave: Interesting. >> Man, the sky is the limit, it's like it just keeps going and proliferating. >> Bill: It does. >> You talk about, on the ad side for a second, you mentioned the relevance, and we expect that as consumers, we're so demanding, (clears throat) excuse me, we don't have the patience, one of the things I think that was in short supply during COVID, and probably still is, is patience. >> That's right. >> I think with all of us, but we expect that brands know us enough to surf up the content that they think we watched, we watched "Breaking Bad", "Better Call Saul", don't show me other things that aren't relevant to the patterns I've been showing you, the content creators have to adapt quickly to the rising and changing demands of the consumer. >> That's right. Some people even think, as you go forward and consumers have this expectation, like you just mentioned, that brands not only need to understand their own view of the consumer, and this is going to come into the Snowflake points that we talk about in a minute, but the larger view that a brand has about a consumer, not just their own view, but how they consume content, where they consume it, what other brands they even like, that all builds that picture of making it relevant for the consumer and viewer. >> Where does privacy come into the mix? So we want it to be relevant and personalized in a non-creepy way. Talk to us about the data clean rooms that Snowflake launched, >> Bill: That's right. >> and how is that facilitating from a PII perspective, or is it? >> Yeah. Great question. So I think the other major development, in addition to the pandemic, driving people watching all these shows is the fact that privacy legislation is increasing. So we started with California with the CCPA, we had GDPR in Europe, and what we're starting to see is state by state roll out different privacy legislations. At some point, it may be true that we have a federal privacy legislation, and there are some bills that are working through the legislature right now. Hard to tell what's going to happen. But to your question, the importance of privacy, and respecting privacy, is exactly happening at the same time that media companies and publishers need to piece together all the viewing habits that you have. You've probably watched, already this morning, on your PC, on your phone, and in order to bring that experience together a media company has to be able to tie that together, right? Collaborate. So you have collaboration on one side, and then you have privacy on the other, and they're not necessarily, normally, go together, Right? They're opposing forces. So now though, with Snowflake, and our data clean room, we like to call it a data collaboration platform, okay? It's not really what a data warehouse function traditionally has been, right? So if I can take data collaboration, and our clean room, what it does is it brings privacy controls to the participants. So if I'm an advertiser, and I'm a publisher, and I want to collaborate to create an advertising campaign, they both can design how they want to do that privacy-based collaboration, Because it's interesting, one company might have a different perspective of privacy, on a risk profile, than another company. So it's very hard to say one size is going to fit all. So what we at Snowflake do, with our infrastructure, is let you design how you create your own clean room. >> Is that a differentiator for Snowflake, the clean rooms? >> It's absolutely a very big differentiator. Two reasons, or probably two, three reasons, really. One is, it's cross cloud. So all the advertisers aren't going to be in the same cloud, all the publishers aren't going to be in the same cloud. One big differentiator there. Second big differentiator is, we want to be able to bring applications to the data, so our clean room can enable you to create measurement against an ad campaign without moving your data. So bringing measurement to the data, versus sending data to applications then improves the privacy. And then the third one is, frankly, our pricing model. You only pay for Snowflake what you use. So in the advertising world, there's what's called an ad tech tax, there is no ad tech tax for Snowflake, because we're simply a pay-as-you-go service. So it's a very interesting dynamic. >> So what's that stack look like, in your world? So I've pulled up Frank's chart, I took a picture of his, he's called it the new, modern data stack, I think he called it, but it had infrastructure in the bottom, okay, that's AWS, Google, Azure, and then a lot of you, live data, that would be the media data cloud, the workload execution, the specific workload here is media and entertainment, and then application development, that's a new layer of value that you're bringing in, marketplace, which is the whole ecosystem, and then monetization comes from building on top. >> Bill: Yes. >> So I got AWS in there, and other clouds, you got a big chunk of that, where do your customers add value on top of that? >> Yeah. So the way you described it, I think, with Frank's point, is right on. You have the infrastructure. We know that a lot of advertisers, for example, aren't going to use Amazon, because the retailer competes with Amazon, So they want to might be in Google or Azure. And then sort of as you go up the stack, for the data layer that is Snowflake, especially what we call first-party data, is sitting in that Snowflake environment, right? But that Snowflake environment is a distributed environment, so a Disney, who was on stage with me yesterday, she talked about, Jaya talked about their first-party datas in Snowflake, their advertisers' datas in their own Snowflake account, in their own infrastructure. And then what's interesting is is that application layer is coming to the data, and so what we're really seeing is an acceleration of companies building that application natively on Snowflake to do measurement, to do targeting, to do activation. And so, that growth of that final application layer is what we're seeing as the acceleration in the stack. >> So the more data that's in that massive distributed data cloud, the more value your customers can get out of it. And I would imagine you're just looking to tick things off that where customers are going outside of the Snowflake data cloud, let's attack that so they don't have to. >> Yeah, I think these partners, (clears throat) excuse me, and customers, it's an interesting dynamic, because they're customers of ours. But now, because anybody who is already in Snowflake can be their customer, then they're becoming our partner. So it's an interesting dynamic, because we're bringing advertisers to a Disney or an NBCU, because they already have their data in Snowflake. So the network effect that's getting created because of this layer that's being built is accelerated. >> In 2013, right after the second reinvent, I wrote a piece called "How to Compete with the Amazon Gorilla." And it seemed to us pretty obvious at the time, you're not going to win an infrastructure again, you got to build on top of it, you got to build ecosystems within industries, and the data, the connection points, that network effect that you just talked about, it's actually quite thrilling to see you guys building that. >> Well, and I think you know this too, I mean, Amazon's a great partner of ours as well, right? So they're part of our media data cloud, as Amazon, right? So we're making it easier and easier for companies to be able to spin up a clean room in places like AWS, so that they get the privacy controls and the governance that's required as well. >> What do you advise to, say, the next generation of media and advertising companies who may be really early in the data journey? Obviously, there's competition right here in the rear view mirror, but we've seen services that launch and fail, what do you advise to those folks that maybe are early in the journey and how can Snowflake help them accelerate that to be able to launch services they can monetize, and get those consumers watching? >> I think the first thing for a lot of these brands is that they need to really own their data. And what I mean by that is, they need to understand the consumer relationship that they have, they need to take the privacy and the governance very seriously, and they need to start building that muscle. It's almost, it's a routine and a muscle that they just need to continue to kind of build up, because if you think about it, a media company spends two, three hours a day with their customer. You might watch two hours of a streaming show, but how much time do you spend with a single brand a day? Maybe 30 seconds, maybe 10 seconds, right? And so, their need to build the muscle, to be able to collect the data in a privacy-compliant way, build the intelligence off of that, and then leverage the intelligence. We talked about it a few days ago, and you look at a retailer, as a really good example, a retailer is using Snowflake and the retail data cloud to optimize their supply chain. Okay? But their supply chain extends beyond their own infrastructure to the advertising and marketing community, because if I can't predict demand, how do I then connect it to my supply chain? So our media data cloud is helping retailers and consumer product goods companies actually drive demand into their reconstructed supply chain. So they both work together. >> So you have a big focus, obviously, on the monetization piece, of course, that's a great place to start. Where do you see the media data cloud going? >> Yeah. I think we'll start to expand beyond advertising and beyond marketing. There's really important sub-segments of media. Gaming is one. You talk about the pandemic and teenagers playing games on their phones. So we'll have an emphasis around gaming. We'll have an emphasis in sports. Sports is going through a big change in an ecosystem. And there's a big opportunity to connect the dots in those ecosystems as well. And then I think, to what we were just talking about, I think connecting commerce and media is a very important area. And I think the two are still very loosely connected today. It used to be, could I buy the Jennifer Aniston sweater from "Friends", right? That was always the analogy. Now, media and social media, and TikTok and everything else, are combining media and commerce very closely. So I think we'll start to see more focus around that as well. So that adds to your monetization. >> Right, right. And you can NFT that. (Lisa laughs) >> Bill: That's right, there you go, you can mint an NFT on that. >> It's the tip of the iceberg. >> Absolutely. >> There's so much more potential to go. Bill, thank you so much for joining us bright and early this morning, talking about what snowflake is doing in media, entertainment and advertising. Exciting stuff, relevant to all of us, we appreciate your insights and your forward-looking statements. >> Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Good >> Bill: Bye now. >> For our guest and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're up early with us watching theCUBE's day-two coverage of Snowflake Summit '22. We'll be back in a moment with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>>We're seeing green here at Vemo in 2022, you're watching the cube, Dave ante and David Nicholson wrapping up our second day of coverage. Dave, good show. Good to be, you know, again, good to be back. This is our third show in a row. We're a Cuban as well. So the cube is, is out there, but same every, every show we go to so far has been most of the people here haven't been out in two plus years. Yeah. Right. And, and, and they're like, Hey, let's go. Let's hug. Let's shake. I got my red band on cuz we've been on a lot of shows or just being careful <laugh> um, you know, Hey, but it's great to see people back, uh, >>Absolutely >>Such a different vibe than virtual virtual sucks. Everybody hates it now, but now it's going hybrid. People are trying to figure that out. Yeah. Uh, but it's, it's in your view, what's different. What's the same >>In terms of, uh, in person versus hybrid kind of what's happened since what's >>Different being here now versus say 2019, not that you were here in 2019, but a show in 2019. >>I, I think there's right now, there's a certain sense of, uh, of appreciation for the ability to come and do this. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, >>As opposed to on we or oh, another show, right? >>Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, and, uh, a personal opinion is that, um, I think that the hybrid model moving forward is going to end up being additive. I don't know that I don't, you know, people say we'll never go back to having in person the way we did before. Um, I'm holding out hope that that's not the case because I, I think so there's so much value to the kinds of conversations that we have, not only here on the set with folks in person, but just the hallway conversations, uh, the dinner conversations, um, those are so critical, uh, not only with between vendors and customers, but between different business units. Um, you know, I, I, I came into this thinking, you know, I know Veeam very well. I've known them since the beginning. Um, but you think I'm going to a conference to talk about backup software and it wasn't like that at all. I mean, this is, this is an overarching, very, very interesting subject to cover. So how is it different? I think people are appreciative. I wouldn't say we're backed full throttle a hundred percent, um, uh, back in the game yet. But, uh, but we we're getting there. Some >>Of the highlights Veeam now, number one, statistical tie for first place in revenue. There aren't a lot of segments, especially in storage where Dell is not number one, I guess technically Dell is like, I don't know, half a percentage point ahead, but Veeam's gonna blow by that. Unless Dell gets its data, >>Protect me as the luxury of focus, they can focus >>Like a laser on it focus. Right? That, that we, we saw this in the P PC where focused, we saw Dell's ascendancy cuz they were focused on PCs, right? Yeah. We saw Seagate on dis drives Intel and microprocesors Oracle on databases and, and, and Veeam applied that model to what they call modern data protection. Um, and, and the, so the reason why we think they're gonna go past is they growing at 20 plus percent each year. And, and I can almost guarantee Dell's data protection business isn't although it's been in a, I, I sense a downward slope lately, they don't divulge that data. Um, but if they were growing nicely, they would be talking about it. So I think they've been kind of hiding that ball, but Dell, you know, you can't count those guys out they're baby. >>No, you can't. And there's always >>A, they don't like to lose. They get that EMC DNA still in >>There. Yeah. You take, you can, you might take your eye off the ball for a little while to focus on other things. But uh, I think it'll be healthy for the industry at large, as Veeam continues to take market share. There's definitely gonna be pushback from, from others in the field, but >>The pure software play. Um, and you know that no hardware agenda thing and all that I think is, is clearly in Veeam's favor. Uh, but we'll see. I mean, Dell's got other, other strengths as do others. I mean, this is, this is, let's not forget this, this, this market is crowded and getting kind. I mean, you got, you got other players, new, new entrants, like cohesive in Rubrik Rubic, by the way is the one I was kind of referring to. That seems to be, you go to their LinkedIn, they seem to be pivoting to security. I was shocked when I saw that. I'm like, wow, is that just like a desperation move? Is that a way to get your valuation up? Is that, is there something I'm missing? I, I don't know. I haven't talked to those guys in a little bit, need to get, get there, but cause he and Rubrik couldn't get to IPO prior to, uh, you know, the, the, the, the, the tech sell off the tech lash. >>If you will Veeam, didn't need toves. We have 30% EBITDA and, and has had it for a while. So they've been, they caught lightning in a bottle years ago, and then now they got the inside capital behind them. Um, you got new entrance, like, like Kuo, you got com. Vault is out there. You still got, you know, Veritas is still out there competing and you know, a number of other, you get you got is wherever HP software landed in, in the MicroStrategy, uh, micro strategy. <laugh> um, no not micro strategy anyway, in that portfolio of companies that HP sold its software business to, you know, they're still out there. So, you know, a lot of ways to, to buy backup and recovery software, but these guys being the leader is no surprise. >>Yeah. You know, it's, I, I, I have to say it to me. It's a classic story of discipline >>Microfocus, sorry, >>Microfocus. Yeah, that's right. That's right. You know, it's funny. I, I, I could see that logo on a, I know I've got a notebook at home. Um, but, but theme is a classic example of well disciplined growth where you're not playing the latest buzzword game and trying to create adjacent businesses that are really, that might sound sexy, but have nothing to do with your core. They've been very, very disciplined about their approach, starting with, you know, looking at VMFS and saying, this is what we're gonna do, and then branching out from there in a logical way. So, so they're not out ahead of the tips of their skis in a way that some others have have gotten. And those, you know, sometimes swinging for the fence is great, but you can strike out that way also. And they've been hitting, you know, you could say they've been hitting singles and doubles just over and over and over again for years now. Well, that's been a great strategy. >>You've seen this a lot. I mean, I, I think you watched this at EMC when you were there as you, it was acquisitions to try to keep the growth up. It was, it was great marketing. I mean, unbelievable marketing cloud meets big data. Oh yeah. And you'd hear on CNBC. AMC is the cloud company. You're like, eh, fucking have a cloud. So, so you, you you've seen companies do that to your point about getting ahead of your skis. VMs never done that EMS like, eh, this is the product that works great. Yeah. Customers love it. They buy it, you know, we got the distribution channel set up and so that's always been, been, been part of their DNA. Um, and I think the other piece is putting meat on the bone of the tagline of modern data protection. When I first heard that I'm like, mm, okay. >>But then when you peel the onion on that, the core is back up in recovery, a lot of focus on recovery. And then the way they, I remember it was there in the audience when they announced, you know, support for bare metal, people went crazy. I'm like, wow, okay. They cuz they used to say, oh, never virtualization forever. Okay. So they beat that drum and you never say never in this business, do you, and then moving on to cloud and hybrid and containers and we're hearing about super cloud now, and maybe there'll be an edge use case there it's still unclear what that pattern is. You've talked about that with Zs, but it's not clear to me where you put your muscle yet in, um, in edge, but really being able to manage all that data that is people talk about data management that starts to be data management. And they've got a footprint that enables 'em to do that. >>Yeah. And, and I'd like to see that same discipline approach. That's gotten them here to continue no need to get on board a hype cycle. Um, what I really love from a business execution perspective from Veeam is the fact that they know their place in terms of the, their strategic advisory role for end user customers and their places largely in partnership with folks in the channel partners, large and small, um, in a couple of the conversations we had over the last few days, we talked about this idea that there are fewer and fewer seats at the table. Uh, working with customers, customers can't have 25 strategic vendor partners and a lot of smaller niche players that focus on something even as important as backup will pretend that they are, that they hold the same sort of strategic weight as a hyperscale cloud provider. Does they pretend that they're gonna be there in the CX O meetings? Um, when they're not Veeam knows exactly how to best leverage what they do with customers and that's through partners in the channel. >>The other thing is, um, new CEO, a non Eron, uh, the fifth CEO, I think I'm correct. Is that right at, at VE yes. Um, so two founders, uh, and then when Peter McKay came on, he was co CEO. Um, and then, um, yep. And let's see, I think yep. You the fifth. Okay. So each of the CEOs kind of had their own mark. Right. Um, and we asked an on in the analyst thing, what do you want your legacy to be? And I, I loved his answer. He's like, this is a fragmented business with a lot of adjacencies and we are the leader in revenue, but we only have 12% revenue share. I want to take that to 25%, 40%. That's like EMC at 30 plus percent of the storage market, Cisco of 60% of the networking market. Wow. If anybody could ever get there, but so 25 to 30% of a market that's that's big. Yeah. I liked his demeanor thought he had a really good style philosophy. Well-spoken well spoken. So new leadership, obviously insight brought him in to take them to the next level. Um, and, and really drive. I gotta believe get ready for IPO. We kind of admitted that. >>Yeah. And I, and IPO for them, one thing he mentioned is that, um, in this case, this is not an IPO let's high five and go to Vegas and get table service because now we finally have money. Uh, they're not doing, you know, obviously an injection in capital from an IPO is always a good thing or should be a good thing if handled properly, but that's not their primary driver. So it'll be very interesting to see if they can hit the timing. Right. Um, how that, how that works out >>Well and, and bill large is his was predecessor. Uh, he, he, he took over, uh, once the company, excuse me, went private. Um, >>Yeah, that phone backed up. >>I still good in the mic once the company went private, uh, well, no, they were always private. Once they got acquired for five plus billion dollars from inside capital, um, they, they put bill in charge, perfect choice for the transition. And it was like, okay, bill. It's like, when you, my brother's a sailor. He says, Hey, take, take the wheel, see that lighthouse or see that tree go for it, keep it on track. And that's what bill did. Perfect. And he knew the company knew where all the skeletons were buried and, and was perfect. Perfect transition for that. Now they're bringing in somebody who they feel can take it to the next level. They're at a billion. He said he could see 5 billion and, and beyond. So that's kind of cool. Um, the other thing was ecosystem as companies got a really robust ecosystem, all the storage array vendors came on. >>The, the, the backup appliance companies, you know, came on to the cube and had a presence here. Why? Because this is where all the customers are. This is the leader in backup in recovery. Yeah. They all want to partner with that leader. Now they're at out the other shows as well, uh, for the Veeam competitors, but frankly, Veeam, Veeam competitors. They don't have, like you said, they're pure play. Many of them don't have a show like this, or it's a smaller event. Um, and so they gotta be here. Uh, and I think the, the, the other thing was the ransomware study. What I really liked about Veeam is they not only just talked about it, they not only talked about their solution. They sh they did deep dive surveys and shared a ton of data with guys that knew data. Um, Dave Russell and Jason Buffington, both former analysts, Russell was a Gartner very well respected top Gartner analyst for years. Jason buff, Buffington at ESG who those guys did always did some really good, still do deep research. So you had them representing that data, but sharing it with the community, of course, it's, it's gonna be somewhat self-serving, but it wasn't as blatant. It that wasn't nearly as blatant as I often see with these surveys, gender surveys, I'll look at 'em. I can tell within like, seconds, whether it's just a bunch of marketing, you know, what, or there's real substance. Yeah. And this one had real substance to >>It. Yeah. And it's okay. When substance supports your business model. >>Yeah. Cool. >>It's great. Good >>Marketing. But yeah, as an best marketing, I'm not gonna use it. The whole industry can use this and build on it. Yeah. I think there were a lot of unanswered questions. I, what I love about Vema is they're going back and they, they did it in February. They, they updated it just recently. Now they're going back and doing more cuz they want to get it by country. So they're making investments. And then they're sharing that with the industry. I love that. >>It'll be interesting to see if they continue it over time, how things change if things change. Um, one of the things that we really didn't talk a lot about is, uh, and you know, it's, I know it's talked about behind closed doors, um, this idea of, uh, stockpiling day zero exploits, and the fact that a lot of these, these >>Things, >>A lot of these problems arguably could have been headed off, had our taxpayer funded organizations, shared information with private industry in a more timely fashion. Um, um, we had, um, uh, uh, was it, uh, Gina from AWS who gave the example of, uh, the not Petia, uh, experience in the hospital environment. And that came directly out of frankly a day zero exploit that the NSA had identified years earlier within Microsoft's operating system. And, uh, somehow others got ahold of that and used it for nefarious means. So the intent to stockpile and hang onto these things is always, um, noble, but sometimes the result is, uh, less than desirable. So that's, it'll be an interesting conversation. >>We'd be remiss if we didn't mention the, the casting acquisition, the, the, the container data protection, small piece of the business today. Uh, but strategic in the sense that, yeah, absolutely. If you want to appeal to developers, if, if, if, if, if you want to be in the cloud, you know, you better be able to talk containers generally in Kubernetes specifically. So they gotta play there as well. >>Well, they, they, they hit virtualization cloud containers. Maybe I'm missing something in between, but they seem to be >>Ransomware >>Catching waves effectively. Yeah. Ransomware, uh, catching waves effectively, uh, again, not in an artificial buzzword driven way, but in a legitimate disciplined business growth approach that, uh, that's impressive. >>And I, and I think Danny mentioned this, we, he said we've been a PLG product led growth company. Um, and I think they're evolving now. We talked about platforms versus product. We still got still a product company. Uh, but they're bill wants to build out a Supercloud. So we're watching that very closely. I, I think it is a thing. You got a lot of grief for the term, super cloud. Some people wince at it, but it's, there's something brewing. There's something different. That's not just cloud public cloud, not hybrid cloud, not private cloud it's across cloud it's super cloud. All right, Dave, Hey, it was a pleasure working with you this week. Always kind of funny. I mean, we're, the crew was out in, uh, in Valencia, Spain. Yeah. Uh, they'll in fact, they'll be broadcasting, I believe all the way through Friday. Uh, that's an early morning thing for the, uh, for the west coast and, but east coast should be able to catch that easily. >>Of course you can all check out all the replays on the cube.net, also YouTube, youtube.com/silicon angle go to wikibon.com. There's some, you know, research there I publish every week and, and others do, uh, as well, maybe not as frequently, but, uh, we have a great relationship with ETR. I'm gonna poke into some data protection stuff in their survey. See if I can find some interesting, uh, data there. And don't forget to go to Silicon an angle.com, which is all the news. This is the cube, our flagship production we're out at VEON 2022. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome back to the cubes. Continuous live coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 live from Las Vegas. It's I'm Lisa Martin. And it's so great to say that we are doing with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners. One of the most important hybrid tech events of the year. We've two sets over a hundred guests to remote studios, lots going on. I've got an alumni back with me and a new guest. Please. Welcome back. Sabina. Jo said the GM of technology partners at AWS and Neil Fowler joins her is the GM of micro-focus AMC. And you're going to tell me what AMC stands for >>Application modernization and >>Connectivity. I love it. Awesome guys. It's great. It's great to see you again in person. Thank you for having us. It's great to have the buzz. I know it's gonna be a little bit hard to hear, but great to have. AWS has done a phenomenal job of getting everyone in here safely. I want to give them kudos to that. So being to talk to me with, it's been a while since I've seen you in person, but talk to me about your current role at AWS. What's going on? >>Yeah, so I'm the general manager for technology partnerships globally out of the Americas. We also help partners out of EMEA and APAC grow in the Americas. And one of the great examples of a successful partnership is micro-focus with their solutions across application modernization security, database services, mainframes. >>And so from your perspective, through your lens, how do you think they're performing as a partner? Yes. >>So, um, first of all, kudos to Neil and the entire micro-focus team. They have done a great job leaning in with a cloud first strategy with SAS solutions on AWS and these solutions help customers across application modernization, application, delivery, security, cyber resiliency, database services, and also it performance management. And we've been working with them now for a few years. And in fact, today we have actually 400 customer wins together regulations and then also eight digit annual recurring revenue. They have six active listings in marketplace and all of this is really helping customers move their workloads and modernize their workloads into AWS. >>We've seen that such an acceleration nail in the digital transformation cloud adoption. The pandemic has really been a forcing function for that. There are some silver linings, but talk to me about some of the things that you've seen at micro-focus the last 20 months or so. And how have you helped those 400 customers, you know, getting to that big ARR, how are you helping them with that acceleration? >>Well, I think as you're saying that there's lots of changes in the last 12 to 18 months, some of it brought on by the pandemic and the change in business in business to having to respond, deliver solutions more quickly to the market, as well as remote working. So optimizing and the economic environment of costs, but being there to be more dynamic, it really has caused businesses to have to do something different than just to be able to survive and serve their customers better. That was a >>Big thing that we saw in the very beginning. It was not survival mode. And then of course it wasn't too long when we started seeing those survivors really start to thrive. And you started seeing who were going to be the winners of tomorrow. Cause the thing is every company, these days is a data company. If it's not, it's going to be passed up by competitor, that's right there in the rear view mirror. >>For sure. And so we've got, you know, organizations, so running mainframes, you know, older applications, legacy applications, modernization, where are most industries in terms of adopting that, the mindset, first of all, that they need to change? Well, I think across the whole industry, I mean, it doesn't matter whether it's retail. I mean, if you think about airlines with when the, when the pandemic hit business went down to, unless they've got that elastic nature of flashy to respond to it, but everyone had to bring in new services, new offerings very quickly. So the ability to be able to innovate in their environments and bring more solutions to their customers in a really fast way, you know, they couldn't just sit there and work with what they had. They had to move forward just to be able to stay in the business, but also be able to reduce the costs out of what they're trying to do. So running and transforming at the same time. >>Absolutely. And so how can organizations integrate existing core applications with new technologies to really be able to thrive in today's dynamic market? >>We look at modernization overall. We think of it in sort of three different ways with application process and infrastructure. So with a move to cloud, that's the infrastructure modernization they've immediately got far more access to more scalable dynamic elastic, compute resources, as well as all the technology platforms they have around. And then if you look at the application size and that's where the Microfocus platform comes in, we can help customers actually move those applications forward in terms of making them available through API APIs, maybe as a journey to microservices and cloud native. But once that core business logic and that data is available, it can be integrated into artificial intelligence machine learning and actually rained out the whole solution. So the final part of that from the process modernization, if you, as they're developing these applications with new tools, new ranges, in terms of where they can deploy on the AWS platform, they can automate the build deployment and operations so that all those existing applications and they were running on to contemporary platform with full access to the technologies that were available. >>That's fantastic and so necessary for businesses in any industry. So can you talk about some of the different business units of micro-focus? Are there any ones in particular that you want to call out? >>Yeah, so we work with them across all of their business units, but some of them that come to my mind is of course, Neil and team are doing a great job with application modernization and connectivity, really helping customers modernize the applications. And as customers are modernizing the applications, their cyber resiliency business unit is helping customers secure those applications. And then they also have their it operations management bridge product listed in marketplace. And then just since September are verdict a business unit launch Vertica accelerator on AWS. So I think they have a very holistic story to help customers >>On AWS. Talk to me a little bit, Neil, about cyber resiliency. We have seen such a dramatic change in cybersecurity in the threat landscape the last 20 months. I think I saw a stat recently that ransomware was up almost 11 X in the first half of 2021. Every, every day that companies had had a company, that data is gotta be secure. It's no longer a nice to have. That is a core requirement. How are you helping customers achieve that cyber? >>Well, the thing is, I mean, as you say, across the whole spectrum from cyber, from, from the identity access management through data encryption, through data protection, it's not, it's not a nice to actually say it's not a nice to have Kate take capability. You really have to have an integrated solution to be able to manage access control it, and also generating the events in terms of being able to, if anyone tries to get into the systems and log it because, you know, before, by the time you've discovered something it's too late, so you really need a combined solution for multi-factor authentication to really take it to that next level. >>Absolutely. Right. Once you've detected it, it's too late. And I mean, with ransomware as a service, cyber criminals are getting so much more sophisticated and also more brazen. There's so much money in it that the security front is, is I think even more interesting now than it's ever been. Talk to me about some joint customers and how you've helped them together with AWS with micro-focus achieve some of those key outcomes that you were talking about earlier. Well, I think >>Obviously with AWS as a platform has quite over a technology solutions going in, what we often find with our customers is a lots of, um, they're coming from an existing on-prem solution. So they need that hybrid model. So as part of taking that forward, been able to have that integrated solution that allows them to work both on-prem and as part of the cloud, most of it all being hooked up now, even that from even down to the, uh, as they're developing the applications now to do static code analysis, to help those applications be more secure with things like 40 pound demand, as well as integrating internet security platform for multifactor. So I think as you know, it's a combination of Brunel to bridge between all the different technologies, but have one single view of mail to protect the whole real estate, multiple layers for both external and internal threat. So that's, that's the other thing you also need to take into and can be able to protect all, all layers multi-layered approach. >>Absolutely. But you're right. The internal threats is something that we don't talk about as much, but that is obviously a substantial problem for organizations and most, if not any industries to be, to talk to me a little bit about, let's kind of get into the, the responsibilities that you have a little bit more in there. You've got responsibility for multiple solutions segments at AWS. You told me before we went live, you have 50 meetings this week. My goodness. And since day one, it taught all good. It's fun, fun. It is. Talk to me about AWS approach to partnering. What does it look like? What are some of the things that you think are really critical components? Yeah. >>So as you may have heard, we always start with the, at Amazon and AWS, we start with the customer. We work backwards when we are relaunching our products, our programs or services, you really go and ask the customers, what do you want us to develop? Where do you want us to focus the resources? It takes a lot of discipline to do that, but it's something that where we really want to walk the talk and we use the same approach with our partners when we started to work with micro-focus, we really kind of want to make sure that what we are working on together is what customers want, because we firmly believe that once you lay that foundation of that solution, you can scale your business a lot more quicker. Your story is a lot more simple and the customers are going to find a lot of value in what you are doing together. So it's really all about the customer for us. It is >>Absolutely critical, right? That's the whole point that the whole reason that we're here now, talk to me a little bit about maybe some cultural alignment with AWS, that customer first customer obsession. It sounds like at Microfocus, very similar. >>Absolutely. I mean, the way that we always think about how we're building our products, it's all around customer centric innovation. So that aspect of trying to make sure that we can solve what the business, understanding what the customers are trying to do to then help develop, to deliver solutions that meet that and that combination of a, the way that we look at it from that infrastructure modernization and the range of technologies that are available and that relentless focus on making customer successful is so key. But we have to make sure that that collaboration works together to make sure that the solutions align and we're helping customers get there together >>In your customer conversations. I imagine they've changed quite a bit during the pandemic with so many things being escalated to the C-suite to the board. How have your, how important is that cultural alignment between AWS and Microfocus from your customer's perspective? Is it something that comes up fairly often? Well, >>It's, it's a, I think it, when you actually get a mismatching culture, it's more obvious. So don't think that necessarily people are looking for it to say, I need organizations, but if you're not thinking the same way, you're not behaving the same way and actually partnering. I think that partnering part of it is really important because you're both working together to come up with that desired outcome. So I think it's more, more obvious when it isn't a good match as opposed to what it looking for that particular site. But I think that's a really key aspect in the sense of working together to help that customer be successful. >>Right? That's a great point that you bring up, but it's probably more obvious when it isn't working than when it's beautifully aligned, falling into place and really focused on that customer. So what are some of the things that attendees can, can feel and see and learn at the micro-focus booth at this year's reinvent nail, >>As well as obviously the key Roundup application modernization, where we're looking at the mainframe modernization on the site, we've got the full range of the Microsoft booth in terms of cyber resilience, as well as our, uh, item, my top, uh, it operations management or ADM portfolios. So we've got a lot of technologies which we can learn about in the booth interactive as well as all by experts to understand how we can do all these things and work together as part of the AWS platform to be able to deliver those solutions. >>Excellent. I'm sure there will be plethora of, of knowledge shared at the booth there. Last question, Neil, for you, talk to me about the vision going forward with the partnership. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to as we end 2021 and go into hopefully what is a better year, 2022? >>You know, one of the key things, you know, especially range, no one might, my passionate areas is helping our customers really look in terms of building the platform of the future. We can help solve their customer the problems today, but we're really trying to create that innovation platform to going through. So again, that combination of the technologies that we can bring to help our customers and the breadth and the investment that AWS continue making in the platform, those two combinations really helps us help our customers, not just solve today's problems, who really move into the forward to be the platform for innovation for the next decade. >>And that's really critical that that future ready state that is so undefined most of the time, I mean, none of us saw the pandemic coming, all right. That was a complete shock, but to be able to partner together, to help your customers really set up the foundation to be innovative as things happen that we can't even predict is really critical. So congratulations on your 400 customer wins your eight digit ARR. That's fantastic. Yes, we thank you so much for joining us on the queue, talking about the Microfocus AWS partnership and all of the successes that you guys have had. Great job. And I hope that you have cough drops and a lot of water this week. Sabina. I hope you do too guys. Thanks for joining me. Pleasure for my is I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the global leader in live tech coverage.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Everyone welcome back to the cubes coverage of a Davis reinvent 2020. It's a virtual conference this year. This is the Cube virtual. I'm John for your host. We're not in person this year. We're doing it remote because of the pandemic, but it's gonna be wall to wall coverage for three weeks. We've got you covered. And we got a great interview signature interview here with Two Cube alumni's Matt Garment, vice president of sales and marketing at AWS, formerly head of the C two and, of course, Sanjay Poon in CEO of VM Ware. Both distinguished guests and alumni of the Cube. Good to see you, Sanjay. Matt. Thanks for coming on. Uh, let's just jump into it. How are you guys doing? >>Great. Exciting. Excited for reinvent and, uh, excited for the conversation. So thanks for having us on. >>Yeah, I'm great to be here. We are allowed to be 6 ft away from each other, so I came in, but super excited about the partnership. Matt and I have been friends for several years on. You were so excited about another reinvent, the different circumstances doing all virtual. But it's a fantastic partnership. >>You know, I look forward to reinvent one of my most favorite times of the year, and it's also kind of stressful because it's backs up against Thanksgiving. And but, you know, you get through it, you have your turkey and you do the Friday and you guys probably Kino, perhaps, and all things going on and then you go to Vegas is a few celebration. We're not doing it this year. Three weeks eso There's gonna be a lot of big content in the first week, and we're gonna roll that out. We're gonna cover it, But it's gonna be a different celebrations so mad. I know you're in front center on this, Uh, just real quick. What are what do you expect people to be doing on the system? What's your expectations and how is this all going to play out? >>Yeah, you know, it's gonna be different, but I think we have Justus much exciting news as ever. And, you know, it's gonna be over a three week period. I think it actually gives people an opportunity to Seymour things. I think a lot of times we heard from, uh, from customers before was they love the excitement of being in Vegas, and we're not gonna be able to exactly replicate that, but But we have a lot of exciting things planned, and it'll enables customers to get two more sessions Seymour of the content and really see more of the exciting things that are coming out of AWS. And there's a lot s over the three weeks I encourage folks toe to dive in and really learn things is a This is the opportunity for customers to learn about the cloud and and some really cool things coming out. We're excited. >>Well, congratulations on all the business performs. I know that there's been a tailwind with the pandemic as people wanna go faster and smarter with cloud and on premise and Sanjay, you guys have a great results as well. Before I get into some of my point. Of course, I have a lot of I know we don't a lot of time, but I want to get a nup date on the relationship we covered in three years ago when, uh, Andy Jassy and team came down to San Francisco with Pat Gelsinger, Raghu, Sanjay. All this went down. There were skeptics. Relationship has proven to be quite strong and successful for both parties because you guys take a minute so you will start with you and talk about the relationship update. Where you guys at, What's the status? The relationship people want to know. >>Yeah, I think John, the relationship is going really well. Uh, it's rooted in first off, a clear understanding that there's value for customers. Um, this is the best of the public cloud in the private cloud in a hybrid cloud journey. And then, secondly, a deep engineering effort. This wasn't a Barney announcement. We both decided Matt in his previous role, was running a lot of the engineering efforts. Uh, we were really keen to make this a deep engineering effort, and often when we have our connected Cube ers, we're doing one little later this afternoon. I often can't tell when a Amazon personal speaking when a VM ware person speaking we're so connected both the engineering and then the go to market efforts. And I think after the two or three years that the the solution has had to just state and now we have many, many customers started to get real value. The go to market side of the operations really starting take off. So we're very excited about it. It is the preferred and the best offering. We think in the market, Um, and for Vienna, where customers. We message it as the best place for Vienna workload that's running on V sphere to move into Amazon. >>Matt, what's your take on the relationship update from your >>standpoint, I agree with Sanjay. I think it's been it's been fantastic. I think like you said, some folks were skeptical when we first announced it. But But, you know, we knew that there was something there and I think as we've gotten even deeper into this partnership, Onda figured out how we can continue Thio integrate more deeply both with on Prem and into the cloud. Our customers have really guided us and I think that's that's enabled us to further strengthen that partnership, and customers continue to get more excited when they see how easy it is to move and operate their VM where in their V sphere workloads inside of a W S on how it integrates well with the AWS environment, Um on they can still use all of the same functions and capabilities that they they built their business on the inside of the sphere. We're seeing bigger and bigger customers really just embrace us, and the partnerships only grown stronger. I think you know, Sanjay and I, we do joint sales calls together. I think that the business has really, really grown. It's been it's been a fantastic partnership. >>I was talking about that yesterday with being where in eight of us teams members as well. I want to get your thoughts on this cultural fit. Sanjay mentioned e think the engineering cultures air there. The also the corporate culture, both customer focused. Remember Andy Jassy told me, Hey, we're customer focused like you're making big. You make big, big statements Public Cloud and now he goes toe hybrid. He's very reactive to the customers and this is a cultural thing for me, was an VM where what are the customers saying to you now? What are you working backwards from this year? Because there's a lot to work backwards from. You got the pandemic. You got clear trends around at modernization automation under the covers, if you will. And you got VM Ware successful software running on their cloud on AWS. You got other customers. Matt, what's the big trends right now that are highlighted in your in your world? >>Yeah, it's a good question. And I think you know, it really does highlight the strength of this this hybrid model, I think, you know, pre pandemic. We had huge numbers of customers, obviously kind of looking at the cloud, but some of the largest enterprises in the world, in the more traditional enterprises, they really weren't doing a lot, you know, they were tipping their toes in, and some of the forward leaning enterprises were being really aggressive about getting into the cloud. But, you know, many people were just, you know, kind of hesitant or kind of telling, saying, Yes, we'll go learn about the cloud. I think as soon as the pandemic hit, we're really starting to see some of those more traditional enterprises realize it's a business imperative for them. Toe have ah, big cloud strategy and to move there quickly, and I I think our partnership with VM Ware and the VMC offering really is allowing many of these large enterprises to do that. And we see we see big traditional enterprise is really accelerating that move into the cloud. It gives them the business agility they need that allows them to operate their environment in uncertain world that allows them to operate remotely on DSO. We're seeing all of those trends, and I think I think we're going to continue to see the acceleration of our joint business. >>Sanjay, your thoughts. Virtualization has hit ah, whole nother level. It's not like server virtualization like it's cultural, it's societal. What's your take? >>Yeah, I think you know, virtualization is that fabric that connects the private cloud to the public cloud. It's the basis for a lot of the public cloud infrastructure. So when we listen to customers, I think the first kind of misconception we had to help them with was that it had to be choice between one or the other and being able to take Vienna Cloud, which was basically compute storage networking management and put that into the bare metal capabilities of AWS, an engineer deep into the stack and all the services that Matt and the engineering team were able to provide to us now allows that sort of application that sitting on premise to move like a house on wheels into a W s. And that's a beautiful experience we've even shown in in conferences, like a virtual reality moving of a workload, throwing a workload into a W s and a W s catches it. It's a good metaphor in a good way to think of those things that VM were like like the most playing the customers like like the emotional moves nicely. But then the other a misconception we had thio kind of illustrate to our customers was that you could once you were there, uh, let's take that metaphor. The house and wheels renovate the house with all the I think there's probably $200 services that Amazon AWS has. Um, all of a I data services be I I o t. Whatever. You have all the things that Andy and Matt kind of talk about in any of the reinvents. You get to participate and build on those services so it has. It's not like you take this there, and then it's sort of a dead end. You get to modernize your app after you migrated. So this migrate and modernize motion is something that we really start to reinforce with our customers, and it doesn't matter which one you do. First, you may modernize first and then migrate or migrate first and modernize. And in the modernized parts we've also made some significant investments and containers and Tan Xue. We could talk about that at this time and optimizing that for both the private cloud world and the public cloud world like Amazon. >>You know, Matt, this is something that we're talking about a lot this week. These few weeks with reinvent going on this everything is a service trend has a lot of things under it, like automation. Higher level services. One of the critics would say, Three years ago, when this announcement relationship between VM Ware enables came out was, Oh, Amazon's is going to steal all of their customers and VM we're screwed. Turns out that's not the case. You guys are both winning and rising. Tide floats all boats because VM Ware has an operator kind of market. People are operating their business with VM ware and they're adding higher level services with Cloud native, So it Xan overall win, so that was proven false. So clearly the new trend You guys are gaining a large enterprises that wanna go faster, have that existing operator kind of legacy stuff or pre conditions of the enterprise like VM ware. So how do you guide the technology teams and how do you look at this? Because this is where customers are like saying, Hey, I cannot operate my business house on wheels, modernize it in real time, come out a covert with the growth strategy and go faster your interview on all that. >>So I think you're exactly right. I think we see a lot of customers who see I don't want to necessarily lose what I have. I want to add on top of that, And so whether that's adding machine learning and kind of figuring out how they can take their data from various different data silos and put them into a large data lake and gets the machine learning insights on top of that, whether they want to do analytics, um, whether they want to d i o T. Whether they want to modernize two containers, I think there's there's a whole bunch of ways in which customers are looking at that. But you're absolutely right. It's not a I'm gonna go from a to B. It's I'm gonna take a and add B to it and, um, we see that's that's over and over again. I think what we've seen from customers doing it and, um and they're really taking advantage of that, right? And I think customers see all the announcements that we're making a reinvent over the next three weeks, and they wanna be able to take advantage of those things right? It's it's they want to be able to add that onto their production environment. They want to take a lot of the benefits they've gotten from their VM Ware environment, but also add some of these innovations from AWS. And I think that Z that really is what we focus on is what our engineering teams focus on. You know, we have joint engineering efforts to figure out how we can bridge that gap, right, so that they BMR environments can very easily reach into their A W s environment and take advantage of all the new services and offerings that we have there. So, um, that's that's exactly what our joint teams really pushed together. >>Sanjay, I wanna get your thoughts on this and we talk. Two years ago, we had a conversation with Cuba. I ask you since this is a great move for VM Ware because it simplifies the messaging and clears up the whole cloud strategy. And you had said something that I'm gonna bring this back today. You said it's not just simplifying the messaging to customers about what we're gonna do in the cloud. It's going to simplify their life is gonna make things easier. Have them set up for better bitterness. Goodness down the road. Can you take him in to explain what that what that goodness was? What came out of the simplicity of the messaging, the simplicity of solution? Where are we now? How does that all kind of Italian together? Can you take him in to explain that? >>Yeah, I think when the history books are written, John, um, this partnership will be one of the most seminal partnerships because from VM Ware's perspective, maybe a little from Amazon Let Matt talk about if you feel the same way. This is a headwind turning into a tailwind. I think that's sort of narrative that VM ware in Amazon were competing each others that maybe was the early story. In the early days of A W s Progress and VM, we're trying to build our own public cloud and then divesting that, uh, Mats, a Stanford grad. I'm a Harvard grad. So one day there'll be a case study. I think in both schools about how this partnership we have a strong partnership with deadlines, sometimes joke. That's a little bit of an arranged marriage we don't have. We didn't have much saying that because AMC Bardhyl so that's an important partnership. But this one we have to work hard to create. And I tell our customers, Del on AWS are top partners. And as you think about what we've been able to do here, the simplicity to the customer for you, as you describe this, is being able to really lower cost of ownership in any process, in terms of how they're building and migrating APs to be the best optimization of hardware, software and services. And the more you could make that better, simpler, cheaper through software and through the movement to the cloud. Um, I think customers benefit, and then you know, Of course, the innovation machine of both companies. Uh, Amazon's really building. I mean, every time I go to read and I'm just amazed at the Yeah, I think it's a near 200 services that they're building in all of these rich layers. All of those developers, services and, I don't know, two million customers. The whatever number of people that have it reinvent this year get to participate on top of all the applications and the virtualization infrastructure we built over the 20 years of our history. Uh eh. So I hope, you know, as we continue do this, this is all now, but customers success large and small customers being able to. And I'm very gratified to three years since we announced this that we're getting very good customer traction. And for us, that's gonna be a key focus to the reinvent, uh, presence we >>have at their show. It really just goes to show you when you built, when you invest in relationships up and down the spectrum from engineering Ah, product and executive. It kind of does pay off. Congratulations to you guys on that matter. I want to get your thoughts on where this kind of going because you're talking about the messaging from VM ware in the execution that comes behind it is the best, you know, Private public cloud hybrid cloud success. There's momentum there. What are the customers saying to you when you look at customer proof points? Um, what do you point to? Because you're now in charge of sales and marketing, you have to take now the installed base of Amazon Web services, which is you got the Debs and startups and, you know, cloud scale to large enterprises. Now you got the postcode growth. Go fast, cloud scale. You've got a huge customer base. You've got a target. These guys, you gotta bring this solution. What are they saying about the VM ware AWS success? Can you share some? Some >>days I'd be happy to, I think I mean, look, this this is what gets, uh, us excited. I know Sanjay gets just as excited about this. It's and it's really it's resonating across our customer base. You know, there's folks like S and P Global who's a large enterprise, right? They had, uh, they had a hardware procurement cycle. They were looking at them on front of implementation and they looked at a WSMV I'm wearing. They said, Look, we want to migrate. All of our applications want to migrate. Everything we have into the cloud, I think it was 150 critical financial applications that they seamlessly migrated with zero downtime Now all running on BMC in the cloud. Um, you look at governments, right? We have thing folks like the Scottish government on many government customers. We have folks that are like Penny Mac and regulated industries. Um, that really took critical parts of their application. Andi seamlessly migrated them to to A W S and BMC, and they looked at us. And when we talk to these customers, we really say, like, where is the best place for us to run these v sphere workloads? And, um and the great thing is we have a consistent message. We we know that it's the right that that aws nbn where's the best place to run those VCR workloads in the cloud? And so as we see enterprises as we see regulated industries as we see governments really looking to modernize and take advantage of the cloud, we're seeing them move whole swaths of their applications. And this is not just small parts. These are the critical really mission critical applications that they know that they need to get out flexibility on, and they want to get that agility. And so, um, you know, there's been a broad swath of customers like that that have really moved large large pieces of their application in date of us. So it's been fun to see. >>And John, if I might add to that what we've also sought to do is pick some of those great customers like the ones that Matt talked about and put them on stage. Uh, VM world. In previous, we had Freddie Mac and we had, you know, I h s market and these are good examples in the few that Matt talked about. So I'm super excited. I expect there'll be many more reinvent we did. Some also be in world. So we're getting these big customers to talk about this because then you get the 10 phenomenon. Everyone wants to come to this, tend to be able to participate in that momentum. The other thing I'm super excited about it started off as a US phenomenon. Just the U s customers, but I'm starting to see riel interest from European and a p J customers. Asia Pacific customers in countries Australia, Japan, U. K, France, Germany. So this becomes a global phenomenon where customers understand that this doesn't have to be just the U. S centric customers that are participating. And then that was, for me a very key objective because the early customers always gonna start in the Geo where, um, you know, there's the most resonance with the public cloud. But now we're starting to see this really take off in many parts of the world. >>Yeah, that's a great point at something we can talk about another conversation. Maybe we will bring you guys into some of our live check ins throughout the three weeks we're doing here. Reinvent. But this global regional approach Matt has been hugely successful. Um, we're on Amazon. We have Q breaches because by default, we're on top of Amazon. You're seeing companies build on top of Amazon. Look a snowflake. The largest I po in the history of Wall Street behind VM Ware. They run Amazon, right? And I will probably have other clouds to down the road. But the point is you guys are enabling this. >>Yeah, global. And it's it is one of the things that we hear from customers that they that they love about running in the cloud is that, you know, think about if you had Teoh, you know you mentioned snowflake. Imagine if your snowflake and you have to go build data centers everywhere. If you had to go roll out toe to Europe and then you have to build data centers in Germany and then you have to build data centers and the U. K. And then you had to go build data centers in Australia like that would be an enormous cost and complexity, and they probably wouldn't do it frankly, at their early stage, Um, you know, now they just they spin up another stack and their ableto serve their customers anywhere around the world. And we're seeing that from our VM or customers where, you know, they actually are spinning up brand new vmc clusters, uh, where they weren't able to do it before, where they either had toe operate from a single stack. Um, now they're able to say, you know what? I'd love to have Ah, vm or stack in Australia, and they're able to get that up and running quickly. And so I do think that this is actually enabling new business it z, enabling customers to think about. How do they put their computer environment close to where their end users are or where they need that computer environment to be sometime just close to end users? Sometimes it's for data residency requirements, but it really kind of enables customers to do that. Where think about in a cove in world, if you have to go launch a data center in a new country, you probably just I mean, maybe it wouldn't even be possible to do that way are today. And now it's just FBI calls. So >>I mean, your point about going slows in an option. The imperative we have, you know, even expression here inside silicon and on the Cube team. Is there a problem? Yes. Is it important? Yes. What are the consequences if you don't solve the problem? Can you quantify those consequences? And then you gotta look at solutions and look at the timing. So you got timing. You got cost. You got the consequences of not doing it. And speed all those things. No. No one's gonna roll out of data center in six months if they if they tried so again, Cloud. And I'm trying to come into play here. You gotta operate something. It's a hand in the glove, its's. I'm seeing the cream rise to the top with covert. You're seeing real examples of riel scale riel value problems that you solve that important that have consequences that can be quantified. I mean, it's simple. Is that >>you know, John, I was gonna say, in addition to this via McLeod on aws were also pretty, you know, prominent AWS customer for some of our services. So some of the services that we've seen accelerate through Covic Are these distributed workforce security capabilities? Eso we resume internally, that obviously runs on AWS. But then surrounding that with workspace one and carbon like to secure the laptop that goes home. Those services of us running A W. S two. So this is one of those places where we're grateful that we could run those cloud services because we're also just like Snowflake and Zoom and others. Many of the services that we build that our SAS type services run on Amazon, and that reinforces the partnership for us. Almost like a SAS customer. >>Well, gentlemen, really appreciate your insight. As always, a great conversation. We could go for another hour. You guys with leaders of your organizations, you're at the front lines as managing through the pandemic will have you guys come into our check ins throughout the three weeks now here during reinvent from or commentary. But I'd like to end this segment by sharing. In your opinion, what is the most important thing that the audience should pay attention to this year at Reinvent? I know there's a lot of things going on. It's three weeks, not four days. It's so it's longer, but still there's a lot of announcements, man, on your side vm where you got the moment and you got your announcements. What should customers pay attention to this reinvent Virtual 2020. >>So, do you wanna go first? >>No, man, it's your show. You go first. E >>I would encourage folks toe Really think about and plan the three weeks out. This this is the opportunity to really dive in and learn. Right? Reinvent is as as many of you know, this This is just a different type of conference. It's not American Conference. This is a learning conference, and and even virtually that doesn't change. And so I encourage. Look across the broad swath of things that we're doing. Learn about machine learning and what we're doing in that space. Learn about the new compute capabilities or container capabilities. Learn about you know what, what is most relevant to your business if you're looking about. Hey, I have an on premise data center, and I'm looking about how I extend into the cloud. There's a lot of new capabilities around BMC and AWS that makes sense, but there's also a lot of cool announcements around just other services. Um, that could be interesting. We have a ton of customers. They're giving talks. And learning from other customers is often the best way to really understand how you can get the most value out of the cloud. And so I encourage folks toe really kind of block that time. I think it's easy when your remote to get distracted by, you know, watching Netflix or answering emails or things like that. But this is this is a great opportunity to block that schedule. Find the time that you have to really spend time and dive into the sessions because we have a ton of great content on a lot of really cool launches coming up. >>Yeah, I'm just very quickly. I would like one of things I love about Amazon's culture and were similar. VM Ware is that sort of growth mindset. Learn it all and I'm looking forward myself personally to going to reinvent university. This is three weeks of learning, uh, listening to many of those those things. I learned a ton and I've tried to have my own sort of mindset of have being a learn it all as opposed to know it. Also these air incredible sessions and I would also reinforce what Matt said which is going find pure customers of yours that are in your same vertical. We're seeing enormous success in the key verticals Vienna plays in which itself called financial services public sector healthcare manufacturing, CPG retail. I mean, whatever it is so and many of those customers will be, uh, you know, doing virtual talks or we have case studies of use cases because often these sort of birds of a feather allow you to then plan your migration of modernization journey in a similar >>fashion, Matt Sanjay, always great to get the leaders of the two biggest companies in our world A, W s and VM where to share their perspectives. Uh, this year is gonna be different. I'm looking forward to, you know, really kinda stepping up and leaning into the virtual because, you know, we're gonna do three weeks of cube coverage. We have, like, special coverage days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday for each of the three weeks that we're in. And we're gonna try to make this fun as possible. Keep everyone engaged on tryto navigate, help people navigate through the virtual world. So looking forward to having you guys back on and and sharing. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Okay, this is the cubes. Virtual coverage of virtual reinvent 2020. I'm John for your host. Stay with us. Silicon angle dot com. The cube will be checking in with our live coverage in and out of the sessions and stay with us for more wall to wall coverage. Thanks for watching. Yeah,

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes coverage of Del Tech World 2020 the virtual del tech world. Of course, the virtual queue with me is Alison Do. She's the CMO and a member of the executive leadership team at Dell Technologies. Hey there, Alison. Good to see you. >>Hi, David. Good to see you too. I'm gonna see you alive, but it's so good to see on the feed. >>Yeah, I miss you, too. You know, it's been it's been tough, but we're getting through it and, you know, it's a least with technology. We're able to meet this way and, you know, for us continue the cube for you to continue del Tech world, reaching out to your to your customers. But, you know, maybe we could start there. It's like I said the other day else into somebody. I feel like everybody I know in the technology industry has also become a covert expert in the last six months. But but, you know, it changed so much. But I'm interested in well, first of all, you're a great communicator. I have met many, many members of your team. They're really motivated group. How did you handle the pandemic? Your communications. Uh, did you increase that? Did you? Did you have to change anything? Or maybe not. Because like I say, you've always been a great communicator with a strong team. What was your first move? >>Eso There's obviously there's many audiences that we serve through communications, but in this instance, the two most important our customers and our team members. So I'll take the customers first. You have likely seen the spoof Real's Going Around the Internet of Here's How Not to Talk to Customers, Right? So you saw early in February and March in April, all of these communications that started with in these troubled times We are here to help you and, you know, we're already in a crisis every single day, all day long. I don't think people needed to be reminded that there was a crisis happening. So you've got this one end where it's over crisis mongering and the other side where it was just ignoring the crisis. And so what we did was we really looked at all of our communications a new So, for example, in our small business space, we were just about I mean days away from launching a campaign that was about celebrating the success of small businesses. It's a beautiful piece of creative. I love it, and we made the very tough decision to put that work on the shelf and not launch it. Why? Because it would have been incredibly tone deaf in a moment where small businesses were going out of business and under incredible struggle to have a campaign that was celebrating their success. It just wouldn't have worked. And what we did very quickly was a new piece of creative that had our own small business advisers, lower production values, them working from home and talking about how they were helping customers. But frankly, even that then has a shelf life, because ultimately you have to get back to your original story. So as we thought about our own communications, my own leadership team and I went through every single piece of creative toe. Look for what's appropriate now what's tone deaf, and that was a very heavy lift and something that we had to continue to do and I'm really proud of the work. We did pivot quickly, then on the employee side. If you'd asked me in January, was Team member Communications the most important thing I was doing? I would have said It's an important thing I'm doing and I care deeply about it, But it's not the most important thing I'm doing. Where there was a period from probably February to June where I would have said it became the most important thing that I was doing because we had 120,000 people pivot over a weekend toe. Working from home, you had all of the demands of home schooling, the chaos that stress whilst also were obviously trying to keep a business running. So this engagement with our employees and connecting the connecting with them through more informal means, like zoom meetings with Michael and his leadership team, where once upon a time we would have had a more high value production became a key piece of what we did. So it sounds so easy, but this increase of the frequency with our own employees, while also being really honest with ourselves about the tone of those communications, so that's what we did and continue to dio >>Well, you've done a good job and you struck a nice balance. I mean, you weren't did see some folks ambulance chasing and it was a real turn off. Or like you said, sometimes tone deaf. And we can all look back over history and see, you know, so many communications disasters like you say, people being tone deaf or ignoring something. It was sloughing it off, and then it really comes back to bite them. Sometimes security breaches air like that. So it seems like Dell has I don't know, there's a methodology. I don't know if you use data or it's just a lot of good good experience. How have you been able to sort of nail it? I guess I would say is it is. >>But there's some secret method that I'm cautiously optimistic. And the superstitious part of me is like, Don't say that, Okay, I'm not gonna would alright eso so that it's it's both it z experience, obviously. And then what? I What I talk a lot about is this intersection of data versus did data and creativity, and you spend a lot of time in marketing circles. Those two things can be sometimes pitched is competing with each other. Oh, it's all about the creativity, or it's all about the data. And I think that's a silly non argument. And it should be both things And this this time like this. This point that I make about ambulance chasing and not re traumatizing people every single day by talking about in these troubled times is actually from a piece of research that we did, if you believe it or not. In 2008 during the middle of the global financial crisis, when we started to research some of our creative, we found that some of the people who have seen our creative were actually less inclined to buy Dell and less positive about Dell. Why? Because we started with those really hackneyed lines of in these troubled times. And then we went on to talk about how we could take out I t costs and were targeted at I T makers, who basically we first played to their fear function and they said, and now we're going to put you out of a job, right? So there's this years of learning around where you get this sweet spot from a messaging perspective to talk about customer outcomes while also talking about what you do is a company, and keeping the institutional knowledge is knowledge of those lessons and building and refining over time. And so that's why I think we've been able to pivot as quickly as we have is because we've been data driven and had a creative voice for a very long time. The other piece that has helped us be fast is that we've spent the last 2.5 3 years working on bringing our own data, our own customer data internally after many, many years of having that with the third party agency. So all the work we had to do to retarget to re pivot based on which verticals were being successful in this time and which were not we were able to now due in a matter of hours, something that would have taken us weeks before. So there's places where it's about the voice of who we are as a brand, and that's a lot of that is creative judgment. And then there's places about institutional knowledge of the data, and then riel getting too real time data analysis where we're on the cusp of doing that. >>Yeah, so I like the way you phrase that it's not just looking at the data and going with some robotic fashion. It reminds me of, you know the book. Michael Lewis, Moneyball, the famous movie, You know, it's like for a while it was it was in baseball, like whoever had the best nerds they thought we were gonna win. But it really is a balance of art and science, and it seems like you're on this journey with your customers together. I mean, how much how much? I mean, I know there's a lot of interaction, but but it seems like you guys are all learning together and evolving together in that regard. >>Absolutely. David, One of the things that has been really interesting to watch is we have had a connected workplace program for 10 years, so we've had flexible work arrangements for a very long time, and one of the things that we have learned from that is a combination of three key factors. The technology, obviously, can you do it? The three culture, and then the process is right. So when you have a the ability to work from home doesn't mean you should work from home 22 out of 24 hours. And that's where culture comes in. And I frankly, that's where this moment of cumulative global stress is so important to realize as a leader and to bring out to the Open and to talk about it. I mean, Michael's talked a lot about this is a marathon. This is not a sprint. We've done a lot of things to support our employees. And so if you think about those three factors and what we've learned, one of the things that we found as we got into the pipe pandemic was on the technology side. Even customers who thought they had business continuity plans in place or thought that they had worked from home infrastructure in place found that they didn't really so there was actually a very quick move to help our customers get the technology that would enable them to keep their businesses running and then on the other two fronts around processes and culture and leadership. We've been ableto have smaller, more intimate conversations with our customers than we would have historically, because frankly, we can bring Michael, Jeff. Other parts of the leadership team me together to have a conversation and one of the benefits of the fact that those of us who've been road warriors for many, many, many years as I know you have a swell suddenly found yourself actually staying in one place. You have time to have that conversation so that we continue to obviously help our customers on the technology front, but also have been able to lean in in a different way on what we've learned over 10 years and what we've learned over this incredibly dramatic eight months, >>you know, and you guys actually have some work from Home Street cred? I think, Del, you're the percentage of folks that were working from home Pre Koven was higher than the norm, significantly higher than normal. Wasn't that long ago that there were a couple of really high profile companies that were mandating come into the office and clear that they were on the wrong side of history? I mean, that surprised me actually on. Do you know what also surprised me? I don't know. I'm just gonna say it is There were two companies run by women, and I would have thought there was more empathy there. Uh, but Dal has always had this culture of Yeah, we were, You know, we could work. We could be productive no matter where. Maybe that's because of the the heritage or your founders. Still still chairman and CEO. I don't know. >>You know those companies and obviously we know who they are. Even at the time, what I thought about them was You don't have a location problem. You have a culture problem and you have a productivity problem and you a trust problem with your employees. And so, yes, I think they are going to be proven to be on the wrong side of history. And I think in those instances they've been on the wrong side of history on many things, sadly, and I hope that will never be us. I don't wanna be mean about that, but but the truth of the matter is one of the other benefits of being more flexible about where and how you work is. It opens up access to different talent pools who may or may not want to live in Austin, Texas, as an example, and that gives you a different way to get a more diverse workforce to get a younger workforce. And I think lots of companies are starting to have that really ization. And, you know, as I said, we've been doing this for 10 years. Even with that context, this is a quantum leap in. Now we're all basically not 100% but mainly all working from home, and we're still learning. So there's an interesting, ongoing lifelong learning that I think is very, very court of the Dell culture. >>I want to ask you about the virtual events you had you had a choice to make. You could have done what many did and said, Okay, we're going to run the event as scheduled, and you would have got a covert Mulligan. I mean, we saw Cem some pretty bad productions, frankly, but that was okay because they had to move fast and they got it done. So in a way, you kind of put more pressure on your yourselves. Andi, I guess you know, we saw this with VM Ware. I guess Was, you know, just recently last >>few >>weeks. Yeah, and so but they kind of raise the bar had great, you know, action with John Legend. So that was really kind of interesting, but, you know, kind of what went into that decision? A Zeiss A. You put more pressure on yourself because now you But you also had compares what? Your thoughts on >>that. So there was a moment in about March where I felt like I was making a multimillion dollar decision every single day. And that was on a personal note, somewhat stressful to kind of wake up and think, What? What? Not just on the events front. But as I said on the creative front, What work that my team has been working on for the last two years? I am I going to destroy today was sort of. I mean, I'm kind of joking, but not entirely how that felt for me personally at the moment. And we had about we made the decision early on to cancel events. We also made the decision quite early on that when we call that, we said we're not going to do any in person events until the end of this calendar year. So I felt good about the definitiveness there. We had about a week where we were still planning to do the virtual world in May and what I did together with my head of communications and head of event is we really sat and looked at the trajectory in the United States, and we thought, this is not gonna be a great moment for the U. S. The week we were supposed to run in May, if you looked at the trajectory of diseases, you would have news be dominated by the fact that we had an increasing spike in number of cases and subsequent deaths. And we just thought that don't just gonna care about our launches. So we had to really, very quickly re pivot that and what I was trying to do was not turn my own organization. So make the decisions start to plan and move on. And at the same time, though, what that then meant is we still have to get product launches out the door. So we did nine virtual launches in nine weeks. That was a big learning learning her for my team. I feel really good about that, and hopefully it helps us. And what I think will be a hybrid future going forward. >>Yeah, so not to generalize, but I've been generalizing about the following. So I've been saying for a while now that a lot >>of the >>marketing people have always wanted to have a greater component of virtual. But, you know, sales guys love the belly. The belly closed the deals, you know? But so where do you land on that? How do you see? You know, the future of events we do, you expect to continue to have ah, strong virtual component. >>I think it's gonna be a hybrid. I think we will never go back to what we did before. I think the same time people do need that human connection. Honestly, I miss seeing the people that I work with face to face. I said at the beginning of this conversation, I would like to be having this discussion with you live and I hate Las Vegas. So I never thought I'd be that interested in, like, let's go to Las Vegas, you know, who knew? But but so I think you'll see a hybrid future going forward. And then we will figure out what those smaller, more direct personal relationship moments are that over the next couple of years you could do more safely and then also frankly give you the opportunity to have those conversations that are more meaningful. So I'm not entirely sure what that looks like. Obviously, we're gonna learn a lot this year with this event, and we're going to continue to build on it. But there's places in the world if you look at what we've done in China for many, many, many years, we have held on over abundance of digital events because of frankly, just the size of the population and the the geographic complexity. And so there are places that even early into this, we could say, Well, we've already done this in China. How do we take that and apply it to the rest of the world? So that's what we're working through now. That's actually really exciting, >>You know, when you look at startups, it's like two things matter the engineering and sales and that's all anything else is a waste of money in their minds when you and and all they talk about is Legion Legion Legion. You don't hear that from a company like Dell because you have so many other channels on ways Thio communicate with your customers and engage with your customers. But of course, legions important demand. Gen. Is important. Do you feel like virtual events can be a Z effective? Maybe it's a longer tail, but can they be as productive as the physical events? >>So one thing that I've always been a little bit cantankerous on within marketing circles is I refuse to talk about it in terms of Brand versus Li Jen, because I think that's a false argument. And the way I've talked about it with my own team is there are things that we do that yield short term business results, maybe even in corridor in half for a year. And there are things that we do that lead to long term business results. First one is demand, and the second one is more traditional brand. But we have to do both. We have to think about our legacy as a known primarily for many, many years as a PC maker. In order for us to be successful in the business businesses that we are in now, we love our PC heritage. I grew up in that business, but we also want to embrace the other parts of their business and educate people about the things that we do that they may not even know, right? So that's a little bit of context in terms of you got to do both. You got to tell your story. You've got to change perceptions and you got to drive demand in quarter. So the interesting things about digital events is we can actually reach more people than we ever could in an in person world. So I think that expands the pie for both the perceptions and long term and short term. And I hope what we are more able to do effectively because of that point that I made about our own internal marketing digital transformation is connect those opportunities to lead and pass them off to sales more effectively. We've done a lot of work on the plumbing on the back end of that for the last couple of years, and I feel really fortunate that we did that because I don't think we'd be able to do what we're doing now. If we hadn't invested there, >>Well, it's interesting. You're right. I mean, Del of course, renowned during the PC era and rode that wave. And then, of course, the AMC acquisition one of the most amazing transformations, if not the most amazing transformation in the history of the computer industry. But when you when you look to the future and of course, we're hearing this week about as a service and you new pricing models, just new mindsets I look at and I wonder if you could comment, I look at Dell's futures, you know, not really a product company. You're becoming a platform. Essentially, for for digital transformation is how I look atyou. Well, how do you see the brand message going forward? >>Absolutely. I think that one of the things that's really interesting about Dell is that we have proven our ability to constantly and consistently reinvent ourselves, and I won't go through the whole thing. But if you look at started as a direct to consumer company, then went into servers then and started to go into small business meeting business a little bit about when private acquired e. M. C. I mean, we are a company who is always moving forward and always thinking about what's next. Oftentimes, people don't even realize the breadth and depth of what we do and who we are now so as even with all of that context in place, the horizon that we're facing into now is, I believe, the most important transformation that we've done, which is, as you see, historical, I t models change and it becomes, yes, about customer choice. We know that many of our customers will continue to want to buy hardware the way they always have. But we also know that we're going to see a very significant change in consumption models. And the way we stay on top of our game going forward is we lean into that huge transformation. And that's what we're announcing this week with Project Apex, which is that commitment to the entire company's transformation around as a service. And that's super exciting for us. >>Well, I was saying Before, you're sort of in lockstep with your customers. Or maybe you could we could. We could close by talking a little bit about Dell's digital transformation and what you guys have going on internally, and maybe some of the cultural impacts that you've seen. >>So you, you you touched on it. It's so easy to make it about just the I t. Work, and in fact, you actually have to make it about the i t. The business process. Change in the culture change. So if you look at what we did with the AMC acquisition and the fact that you know that there's a lot of skepticism about that at the time, they're not gonna be able to absorb that. Keep the business running. And in fact, we have really shown huge strides forward in the business. One of the reasons we've been able to do that is because we've been so thoughtful about all of those things. The technology, the culture and the business process change, and you'll see us continue to do that. As I said in my own organization, just to use the data driven transformation of marketing. Historically, we would have hired a certain type of person who was more of a creative Brett bent. Well, now, increasingly, we're hiring quants who are going to come into a career in marketing, and they never would have seen themselves doing that a couple of years ago. And so my team has to think about okay, these don't look like our historical marketing profile. How do we hire them? How do we do performance evaluations for them. And how do we make sure that we're not putting the parameters of old on a very new type of talent? And so when we talk about diversity, it's not just age, gender, etcetera. It's also of skills. And that's where I think the future of digital transformation is so interesting. There has been so much hype on this topic, and I think now is when we're really starting to see those big leaps forward and peoples in companies. Riel transformation. That's the benefit of this cookie year we got here, Dave. >>Well, I think I do think the culture comes through, especially in conversations like this. I mean, you're obviously a very clear thinker and good communicator, but I think your executive team is in lockstep. It gets down, toe the middle management into the into the field and and, you know, congratulations on how far you've come. And, uh, and and also I'm really impressed that you guys have such a huge ambitions in so many ways. Changing society obviously focused on customers and building great companies. So, Alison, thanks so much for >>thank you, Dave. You virtually I'm very >>great to see it. Hopefully hopefully see Assumes. Hopefully next year we could be together. Until then, virtually you'll >>see virtual, >>huh? Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. Keep it right there. Our coverage of Del Tech World 2020. We'll be right back right after this short break.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hey welcome back to ready Jeff Rick here with the cube we're on Apollo Alto studios today for a cute conversation with some of our friends from VMware big announcement today and we're excited to have a kick Kolbert come on he is the VP at CTO of cloud platform business unit kid great to see you again I'm gonna be here absolutely so big announcement it's the second generation of the VMware cloud on Dell EMC now you guys just brought this to market barely a year ago tell us about about the new announcement and some of the excitement around the changes that you guys put in place yeah absolutely yeah so this has been a project that's been in the making for a few years now we first announced the product version of this in April of last year and then we announced the general availability of it in August at our VMworld conference and so as we've been engaging with customers since we went GA what we've seen and heard from them was that you know they're looking for more data center style options traditionally when we first started this project you may remember it was called project dimension before in the product of VMware Colin Dell AMC beccarose project dimension we had more of an edge computing focus we were focused on how can we get compute in our VMware infrastructure out to factories and retail settings and so on and so forth and so we designed the system for those types of environments a half rack configuration smaller number of servers things like a power supply and UPS built in but as we heard back from customers what they said was hey this is great but we have a lot of needs in our data center today and so the idea there was let's rethink this offering for the data center and actually produced the types of rack architectures and server types that customers are looking for just goes to show you try to give them yin and they want yang right it's yeah so so it's a very different kind of challenge than going into the data center environment and you know one of the promises of cloud is is obviously provisioning right and spinning things up so that's a really important piece of the puzzle how are you guys addressing you know letting people add capacity and kind of changes configuration if it's actually you know in my data center yeah yeah so you seen a number of different things that we're doing here really yeah enhancing the maturity across the board of this offering so it's important to realize that this is a cloud service yes even though the physical servers in the rack reside on premises for a customer again in their data center at a retail location it is a cloud service and that we are running this and managing this like cloud service and so like any good cloud service merge have to interact with any human being right they can just call any guy and indeed that's the way it works either through an API or through our UI workflow today a customer can come on and order a new esidisi rack for their environment and that initial provisioning you know we fully automated that we had a dell service technician coming out you know actually figure the hardware on on-site but then after that and you know we didn't have many options for customers let's say that they started out with maybe four nodes on-site but then they realize Oh Ashley needs six or eight nodes right they're getting more applications on there greater usage and they just need more capacity and so what we support now is this ability to actually again use an API using the UI request additional servers or their existing racks and this is again something very simple to do in just a few weeks that those things will arrive the the service ignition will be there to install them and get that customer up right so I was gonna say you know typically it's order and then you got you got to put the stuff in and deploy it right and then support it so you just touched a little bit on the deployment did you basically take that order and then just with your existing process get into the data center and and light up that additional hardware yeah so we're doing a lot to really automate this whole process and the powerful thing here is that you know this partnership that we have between VMware and difficult runs really deep so we've actually engaged and integrated into their manufacturing process so that as we get that order through the API through the UI from a user we can ship that over to Dell tell them specifics of what that customer ordered and Dell can get started manufacturing that we actually again as for that manufacturing process integration we can get the latest version of our cloud software onto those servers we can install unique cryptographic keys on those servers so we can identify them and then we work with the Dell shipping and the Dell service technicians to actually meet those physical servers when they arrive and properly set them up and configure them taking the customer it's a completely hands-off experience I think that's a really powerful they're not you know they don't need to give the nitty-gritty of hardware configuration and installing our software and managing the lifecycle of it it's much much simpler than that and so you know I think we've really taken that and extended it here both with the additional rack type scene we have for a full rack now for the data center new host types a new host type that's much beefier better for datacenter workloads and finally for that expanded capacity that we just talked about as well right and then on the support side I assume you know even though it's it's VMware cloud on Dell EMC that probably the first line of support is still VMware it's still the software on top of the infrastructure yeah that's a good question and yeah you're right it is it's a VMware on VMware operated service and absolutely VMware provides that first line of support so it's not one of these situations where you've got two different vendors pointing the finger at each other and the customer has to figure all that out now it's on VMware and we need to figure it out we obviously work with Dell on the backend we've also integrated with their telemetry systems so we can pull all the different sort of hardware telemetry monitoring data that they that they're getting so we can understand the health of those servers that are running and when we detect a problem is that something that we can fix remotely by just accessing it with our engineers or do we need a service technician to actually go out there and it's this whole issue right right so it's just interesting you guys launched this really thinking more edge and you're getting drawn into more of a data center so why are you getting drawn in what are some of the advantages you know that the sky O's and the CTOs are seeing with this type of a deployment yeah so the data center part is really interesting and again sir processing they thought we thought there would be more need at the edge initially just because hey these edge environments are really difficult to manage and they're kind of distributed and people don't have IT staff there but we're surprised to hear about is the very urgent need customers have their data centers now again they have servers in the data centers that they're running these things today but what they find is that it just doesn't work that well and that they're spending a lot of time and resources on just keeping the lights on and it's you know these things don't differentiate them as a business you know one of things I talk to customers a lot about is that no customer has ever differentiated itself by how well they run VMware infrastructure and that might sound kind of crazy at first right but yeah it's true I can differentiate themselves negatively by how poorly and they run an infrastructure and then you know their apps don't work very well but some degrees have been working VMware infrastructure is just table sticks right and then what they do in an app level is what differentiates them and so this idea that we can come in with VMware cloud on Dell EMC just take care of all of that operational overhead is really really powerful and so as you see folks and customers and companies going through these digital transformation cycles modernizing their applications they're like oh man I need to actually modernize my infrastructure as well and so that's a compelling event that we say it's like oh there's gonna be think this right as are we thinking that they're like well why am i doing all this work in the first place let's actually rethink the whole thing and take them better fundamentally better approach ie a cloud approach and so that's where VM were caught in delians he comes in again I think that's why we're seeing so much interest from customers and again we're CIA knows and CTOs can really see a lot of benefits right I'm just curious you're taking from kind of a product development a product release point of view right is this kind of a typical VMware you know kind of speed and pacing or is this really you know getting to the second gen and this shift you know kind of in your data market has really more of a response to the market because again as as I was preparing and looking up when the initial launch was it really wasn't that long ago - so - to kind of pivot and call it second gen and include features and functions that are coming back from the market would you say that's kind of typical or you guys get it a little bit more agile in your own you know kind of product development cycle and getting away from those massive PR d's and mr d's and actually you know trying to respond more quickly to the to the pace of the marketplace yeah that's a great point and yeah you're right we are going through our own digital transformation here at VMware all right now we are shifting from a company that primarily sold shrink-wrapped software to a company that sells all services and so you know as you look at that it actually changes a lot of what we can do we can respond much much more quickly much quicker to this sort of customer feedback now we can ship new updates much more frequently and so you know if you look at our traditional vSphere release cycles those were what every 12 months 18 months may be at most but what we can do now with our con releases is actually update and do major updates every three months and so we call this kind of the second you know major advance of VMware kondalian see but in reality it's our third our fourth actual release of our underlying software and so we're actually doing these underlying releases much much quicker I think the reason that we're focusing on this launch in particular is because of the fact that again customers have been asking for this data center level support and really optimizing this solution for the data center and so now we've gone and done that and again I think we're gonna see a lot more interest from the customers on the data center side because of it great well okay thanks for giving us the quick update congratulations on the release and just keep rolling it let's listen to those customers and they'll tell you what they want definitely yeah we're excited - thank you alright kit thanks again he's kid I'm Jeff you're watching the cube thanks for watching we'll see you next time you [Music]

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube covering your storage accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome back to the Q. We are wrapping up day two of two days of coverage. We're getting some applause. I'm pretty sure that's for us. At pure accelerate. 2019. Lisa Martin flanked by two gents Day Volante and Justin Warren. You probably know Justin, who's been on the Cube many times and less. Chief analyst. A pivot. Nine. Justin. You have been covering this event and well as an independent, so we want to get your take on this two days. We've had our 1st 2 day for the Cube covering pier storage. We've spoken with lots of people, cause Charlie kicks. I'm sure there's more nicknames that I'm forgetting customers. Partners. Dave. Let's do a quick recap of some of the trends and the themes that we've heard the last couple days. And then we'll get some independent analysis. Justin on Not just what you've heard the last three days, starting with a tech field day, but also just your history of covering and working with here. >> Well, so for my sample, its story of growth they even started pure starts all the press releases with the only company that's growing on the growth storage company. The growth in the first. So so this growth is a financial story there. Um pure is going for growth, the markets rewarding growth right now. So it's smart, double down on growth. That might change at some point on. We talked about Charlie Jean Carlo about this, and they'll decide what what they do at that point time. But But from a financial standpoint, growing fast, uh, like their balance sheet, be interesting to see if they can leverage it. Maur. But maybe they're using it for Optionality. They'll do 1.7 this fiscal year. 1.7 billion. That's good. They got 70% gross margins. It a little bit of free cash flow. Not much because they pour it back into the business. So story a growth that's number 12 was differentiation. Um, I think it it's pretty clear that their products are differentiated from the sort of big portfolio companies. I mean, it's it shows up in the numbers and the income statement, and it shows up when you talk to customers simplicity, the whole A P I thing. I guess the third is products. I mean, they're embracing the cloud, which is kind of interesting. I don't think they're gonna do a ton of business with block storage for AWS, but it's an interesting hedge, and I think it's really cool from an engineering standpoint on, I think you know, two other things. Culture but orange. They're different, They're cool. They're hip and customers, which at the end of the day, that's where the rubber meets the road. Customers happy you talk to companies are customers of companies like pure service now Splunk Nutanix >> Uh uh, >> and some others. And they're happy. They love it. It's transforming their business. Snowflake is another one. Really? How come you AI path is another one? These are the hottest companies in the business right now, and you can tell when you talk to their customers is good story >> and their customers articulate their differentiation for them pretty darn while what? You know, we've spoken to a number. I think four or five customers the last couple of days, and they're not talking about Flash Ray flash blade X M flashback. They're talking about their business and how the I T is benefiting from that and how the business is benefiting from that. You also see piers very vibrant culture being embraced organically by their customers. There's plenty of customers walking around and the brightest orange I think I've even seen here. So there they're differentiation. Their culture, their customer experience and their ability to really differentiate three that are were loud and clear for what I heard through the voice of the customer and the partners, Frankly, as well. >> So I guess, Justin, I mean, the other pieces Tam expansion 1st 10 years, Cloud New Way I workloads partnerships with backup companies growing. The Tim I've said the 1st 10 years is probably gonna be easier, and I know that's a terrible thing to say, but don't hate me for saying it pure. But then the next 10 because they're up against the flat footed E. M. C. That was getting pounded by Elliott management with pressures to go private, trying to hang on to its legacy business and then got acquired and distracted by Del. So that was a really tailwind for Pierre. Now it's like Cloud guys got their act together, you know? Aye, aye. Everybody's doing A s. Oh, so they get some challenges. But what's your take? I think I've >> still got an advantage. Talking to some customers, 11 in particular was quite clear. That they saw pure is having at least a 2 to 3 lead through 2 to 3 year lead on the technology from some of their competitors. So they shopped around and they had a look at some of his competitors, and they thought that actually they were trying to sell me technology that's 234 years old and they quite from them, was that this is something that I could do myself, so they clearly see that pure provides them with something that they can't do themselves. So pure has an advantage there. I also think that the way that the market is changing advantage is pure, a little bit as well. So you mentioned Cloud there, Dave and I think that we've all seen that people have realized that multi cloud is a thing and that not every workload is going to go to the cloud. A lot of it is going to stay on Prem, so now that that's kind of allowed, people are allowed to talk about that, That there are CEOs who would have been being pressured by boards and so on to say we have to go all in on the cloud. Now they can come back to them and say, Well, actually, weaken, stay on side. That means that we should be looking at some of these onside products, like pure so that we can go on put in storage. A race in a data center may not be our Dana Senate might be in Coehlo, but we have this on site method of doing things. Not everything has to go to the cloud. So I think that will help them with some of the growth. >> So I'm left thinking, What would Andy say? Okay to >> be >> It's the number one hottest company, you know, notwithstanding some smaller companies right now, cos moving the market is a W s obviously Microsoft with the trillion dollar valuation. But Amazon, to me, is the benchmark it. So I feel like Jassy would say, Well, so Hey, Andy, you've acknowledged hybrid, you know? Actually, yeah, I guess he uses that word. Um, and you're doing some stuff one prim, but I think he would say we still believe that the vast majority of workloads are gonna land in the public cloud. And what you just said is what everybody else believes. And to me, they're in conflict and I don't necessarily have the answer. But you got the big gorilla. Now the big claw gorilla is moving. The markets say with one philosophy and they've made some good calls and the entire i t industry. Yeah, the other the inspector. >> Except that AWS has outpost have a product that actually sits on site. And they did. And Jesse last year said that he did say that the boat inward, multi cloud, >> you know, So, uh, sorry. Used the word multi cloud used hybrid hybrid cloud. They don't say that. That's for Boden, but no. But my point is they've acknowledged hybrid, which they never used to talk about hybrid. So they capitulated there The end where capitulated on their claws on its cloud strategy. But he has not capitulated on the belief the firm belief that most workloads are gonna be in the club. I'm not sure he's wrong. >> That may be true, but on what Time horizon? So that's not going to happen next year. But I >> think for sure, >> I pointed out that the agile manifesto came out in 2001. That's 18 years ago. Not every shop is doing software in agile, so enterprises take a long time to change, so there's plenty of room for pure to grow. While that changes going on, even if it if it does go all their own cloud, it's gonna take a long time to get there. And people can make plenty of money in the meantime. >> But I believe you're sorry. I believe pure is growing in what is a crappy market. Yeah, I think the storage market is a crap market right now. It's one that's very difficult. The leader Deli emcees growing at 0%. And that's a goodness because they're gaining share. Ned ABS down last quarter, not minus 16% IBM, minus 21% hp thrilled with whatever 3% or whatever. They're at a minus three. I can't remember now. Here is the only one that showing any substantive growth on my premises there, doing that by having a superior product and business model, and they're stealing share. So and then I ask you this. I I believe in hybrid, by the way. But I'm just playing kind of devil's advocate here. Cloud is growing and it's consistently growing and everybody talks about repatriation. You don't see it in the numbers. Every talks about the large of the law of large numbers like in other words, they hit a wall. You don't see that in the numbers. What you see is the traditional IittIe spaces flattish. The new stuff that they're all developing is not growing fast enough to offset the old stuff. You see that? Certainly. See that IBM. You see that now? Adele, even though they had good bounce back last year. But now you're seeing that Adele Oracle ekes out 1% growth. So the big, uh, legacy companies are growing there, hanging on there, throwing off tons of cash. They got good, strong balance sheets, maybe taking on some cheap debt. But the cloud continues to grow at a pace that I think it's stealing share from traditional I t. >> That's that's a reasonable sort of announcing something. Yeah, whether or not we'll see an increase in growth of onsite, particularly things like EJ computing way, maybe you need Thio redefine what we think of as a data center, and maybe we're not thinking about a broad enough market. I actually think that a lot of those workloads that we would traditionally have said would go on site and cola. I don't think Cola Data Center is actually growing all that much, but I think we are going to see growth in things like EJ. >> So that's a really great point I want. I want to come back to that. But the big question is, then okay. Can cloud be before we get ahead, you can cloud be a tail wind for pure. They've embraced it. 20 years ago, the leaders of a company would say, Oh, no, it's cloud his crap about a peace Caesar of toys You remember that pure embracing cloud, I think, is impressive only from an engineering perspective but business model. So can they make in your opinion cloud a tail wind and an opportunity? Maybe that's where Multi Cloud comes in. >> Yeah, it's tricky. I think it will become more of an advantage once good things like kubernetes and containers matures a bit further and people are used to being able to deploy things in that way, both in Cloud and on site. I think that that's the portability play, and it's more about making onsite more cloudy rather than making the cloud more enterprising, which I think was one of the messages that we had here. Because enterprises a lot of what yours messaging so far. And it's product development, particularly around cloud block stories, to make the cloud look more like an enterprise. Where's what we actually needed it to go the other way. Pure is doing things in that in that regard with pure storage optimizer, which which takes a lot of the decision making a way that from the way you would normally do things on side the way we've gotten used to it, manually configuring things, it's actually turning it into software on just letting computers handle it. That integration with things like the M, where is making things operate a lot more like cloud? So once enterprises become used to operating on a lot more like clouds, I think that's going to be an advantage for pure. To be ableto have that operations be in cloud and then they'll bring in products into in time for that to happen. >> You have the opportunity just in a couple days ago to tend the technical field day, the TFT that pure dead. So you got that double click the day before all the press releases broke about. Some of you know, we talked about the expansion into cloud with aws Maur, their portfolio delivered as a service. The aye aye data hub. But if we look at one of the things that stuck out today was differentiation. We've talked about that a number of levels in the last minutes. But talk to us about the technical differentiation that you've not only heard this week from pure, but that you've been engaging with them for years. You have an interesting story of Of John Cosgrove caused their CEO and founder really describing something very unique. That seems to be quite a technical level of differentiation that you even said We don't see this from a lot of their competitors. Give us a little snapshot of that. >> Yeah, you don't sort of get that level of detail in some of the briefings as well. So it was another tech Field day event some years ago on was talking about flash array and we sat in a room, and they had a flash array in front of us, and I think they were talking about the newest kind of flash they were putting into this. But they described some of the technical decisions they made about the architecture inside the blade. So at that time, and I hope I'm getting all these details correct, they had designed and asic, so to go in front, off the flash so that they could essentially create a layer above above the flash that they could speak to within their software. That meant that it didn't matter which flash foundry they bought it from, because it's slut. There are certain differences around the way that flash works, and they do address the flash directly, unlike buying SS D's and putting them inside the box. So that gives them a performance advantage because you don't have a whole bunch of software translation going on to get into the flash. But that decision meant that they could then change flash foundry without changing the experience off the awful. The software developers up the stack inside their array, so that meant that there cadence of being able to bring out new products and gradually dropped down the cost of the supply of flash, which makes up a large amount of the calls on these particular devices. It provided them with better options so they could maintain, maintain optionality essentially and be very, very flexible and react to the things that they can't predict. So Charlie mentioned in the briefing yesterday that you know, in this industry, you might get a 20% drop in the cost of flash in one month, which will then affect them their revenues in coming months after that, because clearly they want to pass on some of those cost drops to customers. But it needs to be done a certain, more manage way. When you have that kind of dynamic behavior happening in the market, being able to react to that well in something where the hardware design time can be 18 months to two years, building that into your product so that it then provides you with business options as a technology, that's a really impressive way of thinking about how all the different pieces of your company have to interact with each other. So it's not just about the technology, it's about the business and the technology working hand in hand, >> and those lower flash prices should open up new markets for them. Flash a racy I think they call it, is still not at the price of hybrid, I wouldn't think, although they saying it will be. Hybrid arrays are priced around 70 60 70 cents a gigabyte today is according Thio Gardner analysis. Big >> Challenge with hybrid of rays Which flat, which flash around flash or a C wouldn't actually wouldn't have? This problem is the reliability of the Leighton see and predictability. So with an old flash array, you don't get Layton. See sparks if you suddenly exhaust the amount of flash that you have in a hybrid of rain that has to go back to the disk. So if you need that predictable performance, that's why people have gone with flesh arrayed very beginning, absolutely getting that as a capacity tear. I think that provides a lot of reliability, for particularly when you've got large amounts of data need to write flesh >> and the price is coming down and it's maybe it's double now on a per gigabyte basis, that'll come down further. But I welcome back to EJ because I think you bring up a good point And we didn't Thankfully, here a ton about EJ. I think we heard anything about EJ at this show. We didn't get inundated with edge, which we always do with these big shows. And I'm happy about that because I think that that a lot of the companies that we re attend I think they got it wrong. They're taking a box and they're throwing over the fence to trying to do a top down model to the edge. Hey, here's a server or here's a storage device and we're gonna put it at the edge. It's like, OK, well, I think the edge is going to evolve as a software development. You know, play not isn't over. The top is gonna be bottoms up innovation. Now, I don't know question about you know, whether Amazon at the edge vm wear at the edge. Um, but I don't see any traditional i t companies crushing it at the edge there talking about it. They're trying to build out ecosystems, and but nobody's has meaningful revenue today at the edge. But it's a new way to think about this. Distributed massive compute engine >> on. I think we'll start to see that mature as people start to bring out products that actually do operated the way heard from Nvidia about some of their ideas that they have about doing a I processing at the edge for things like image recognition systems, where you train your model on leg large data sets in a cloud or in a data center. And then you shoot those models out two devices that operate on a smaller data set. But for a lot of these things, you need to do data collection at the edge. So Formula One is a classic example based given for the F one racing team is an I. O. T. Company that is connected to a nail and analytics company. Really? >> Yeah, that's right. We did hear about EJ and that an actual use case is in college edge, so there's going to be >> a lot more of that. We have things like sensors are just all over the place, so you know, in anything in retail, if you have fridges in retail and you need to monitor the sensors in those to find out whether or not is the temperature going out out of control or outside of your control limits because that will affect the food that's in that. There's a whole bunch of kind of boring examples that are actually all I OT. So I think some of those will start to push more data into into devices at the edge. And as people's understanding of how to use machine learning and I matures away from the hype, I think we're pretty peak hype at the moment. Once we do actually drop that back a notch and we see that people they're doing really use riel riel world use cases with real world business value that will start to drive a lot more of the growth of practical. And that will drive growth in data, which will need to get close throughout the weather's device. >> I think you're right. I think that date is gonna be at the edge of a lot of that data. I would say most of that date is going to stay at the edge. It's probably it's not gonna says it. Probably it's definitely not going to sit in a million dollar storage array, and it's gonna comprise a lot of alternative processing arm, Uh, GP use versus conventional microprocessors. So >> and that's where I think he was thinking about, like the white pure One works, for example, pure. One works the same no matter what products you have from pure, and they have been very clear in stating that they want to make sure that when they bring out a new array or a new product, it works with pure one. So it's that consistency of experience for their customers, which I think is fairly unique in the industry, is a lot of other products that will come out. And they only partly supported, not full support for their entire race tagging. AMC struggle with that for a long time simply because it has so many products and needed to kill a whole bunch of them first. So when when you have that kind of engineering discipline built built into your company, when you go out and you have customers who have edge devices or you have stuff in the cloud and they have devices on their phones which they used to showing off a conference and say, Hey, come and have a look at my array, it runs on software on my phone that's pure one that software ability that pure has of being able to address this data wherever it is. I think >> there's >> a real opportunity for pure that put that kind of intelligence on to age things. Even if they don't actually sell any flash a raise to those people, they could start to sell them software. >> All right, guys. So 15 seconds each since arose at a time. Computers competitive. Positioning your thoughts in a quick summary about what you've heard the last few days and what Justin has >> to me if I would expect continued growth, forgetting about the macro for a moment, even in gonna grow faster than the market place. Um and yeah, they said they don't throw off as much cash as the big guys. So it's gonna be a game of the big guys do in stock buybacks, free cash flow and pure storage. Investing in growth. >> Excellent. Justin. >> Yes, I agree. I think they're going to double down on the R and D spend to make sure that they maintain a technological advantage over their competitors. The biggest risk of pure is if the other players, you know, the deal emcee other plays in that big online storage market. If they actually get their act together and start bringing out competitive products, that's the biggest threat to fuel. But pure has a big lead on them. I would say, >> Yeah, I think the last thing cloud, you know, kind of a question Mark. And I think the m where to me, Del. Of course I care about storage is huge business for them. They're all above the M where and to the extent that they can leverage VM where, you know, as a competitive weapon, they'll use it against anybody you know. Damn the ecosystem. >> Excellent. Well, thanks, guys, for a great wrap up to our two days here for Justin Warren and Day Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching the cubes. Coverage of pure accelerate 2019.

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering pure storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome back to the Cube. The leader in live tech coverage. Lisa Martin and David Lantz wrapping up day one of our coverage of pure accelerate. 2019. Howdy. How do y'all Hey, I >> think I started a trend. >> I think you did. So, Dave, this has been a dice shot out of a cannon. I think, as only you know, pure does. Well, we had lots of conversations. Lots of news this morning, Which was nice to hear. As pure welcomes their 10th anniversary in a couple of weeks. We talked with customers. We talked in many different industries partners, Puritans. Lots of innovation has occurred in their 1st 10 years. Charlie got up on stage this morning. Then he came to the Cube and talked about this modern data experience and the 10 X improvements and many things that they're gonna deliver. Not in the next 10 years. In the next few years. >> Yes. So we're seeing a story of growth here. It's a theme. If you look read yours press releases, they start The first line is the only storage company that's growing, which is true, at least the storage company of size of a billion dollar plus storage company and talking a lot about modern storage. To me, it's a story of entering new markets their second decade tam expansion into new ai ai workloads. Certainly the cloud trying to make the cloud of a tailwind. We have just heard from Carrie Stanton of'em Data protection is an area. You know, years ago, Uh, I remember talking to executive at Netapp Tom George and saying, Hey, we're gonna buy ah, storage backup cos you know, we're gonna preserve our partnerships with whomever con vault and Veritas in vino, whoever they're working with time and you see pure taking a similar strategy E M. C at the time did something different. They vertically integrated. They they bought a company called Llegado. They integrated into compete. And of course, now they're that sort of their stack. And so, if you were small enough now still close to $2 billion at the at the end of this fiscal year that they don't have to necessarily vertically integrate, we'll see 10 Next 10. That's the third decade, what happens there and in the customer input you're seeing. Customers are continuing to invest in pure. They're very happy. What you've seen, Lisa is customers look at pure is shifting. And I said this on the Cube earlier shifting labor in tow. Pure czar and D. Now the hyper scale is like Amazon. They'll spend time of engineering time to save money. I t practitioners of the enterprise. They'll spend money to save time and so they will happily spend money on on products if they can lower the IittIe labor costs. So totally different mindsets and you're you're seeing that's taking hold and pure really has done a great job of that. Now, as I said in my my breaking analysis, you know, a couple weeks ago, analyzing the vendors pure, clearly growing. But these things go in cycles, right? There's hard compares. You're going to see. I guarantee you're going to see these other companies, you know, chewing their models. They're big, pure talks about 10 X. The reality is, you know, Delhi emcees 10 x the size of pure right, so they throw a farm or cash on. So if you're a big whale with a big install base, that's what you do, You mind it If you're pure and you're smaller, you're 1.51 point seven billion. You go hunting. And that's the dynamic worse we're seeing. I don't see that changing dramatically for quite some time until the economy shifts and in the mindset shifts and when. Then we'll see how pure adjusts its business model from, perhaps growth to more profitability. >> And speaking of growth, they're just coming off a very successful second quarter where they announced last month in August, 28% year on year, both adding about seven that new customers a day. A lot of that attributed to innovation and the channel. They did a good job in the last 18 months or so of pivoting. They're smaller medium customer business to the channel, allowing peer to focus on much more enterprise focus. And they actually I think, even in queue to close 50% more multi $1,000,000 deals this last quarter >> and well, and while those seem like great numbers, they actually the stock got hit after the quarter. Why? Because they lowered guidance. Why, Because of this NAND pricing confusion, Nan pricing drops so fast in the quarter faster. They expected it sort of hurt revenues a little bit. They expect that that softness that continue. So they've been conservative going for it. You know, who knows of this smart to be conservative cause I wouldn't say that they're sandbagging. I say they're being conservative, you know, makes a bigger question. You know, it's storage kind of a crappy business, and we'll see. I say, that is, if you're gonna win in storage right these days, you have to gain share. Pure is gaining share della. 0% growth appears to be gaining share 0% growth. It's not a great market. So what's happening, we don't really know is cloud siphoning off demand for the traditional on Prem surgeon Could be. Can these companies make cloud a tailwind or is cloud a zero sum game? I tend to think long term, the Maur cloud, the worse it is for on Prem. So that's why everybody's scrambling for this multi cloud strategy, which is very, very early days. Multi cloud today is largely a a symptom of multi vendor versus you know, a coherent user strategy with right we're management's. Now the Big Five are trying to change that pure is playing its role. Companies like Veum and others are playing their role, so we'll see how that plays out. I do think there's a clear opportunity and multi cloud, but, um, it you know, it's unclear how large that is or whether it's just going to be a series of horses for courses. In other words, the right strategic fit for the right workload. >> So your thoughts on the evolution of their AWS partnership really looking at what they're now doing with eight of us as this bridge toe hybrid cloud customers of choice on from hosted, you know, as a service public cloud your take on this forcing function of bringing pure and AWS together of the customer base. >> Yeah, I think it's actually pretty clever. Move by pure take their engineering. It's okay. We're gonna settle, do all the heavy lifting set up AWS with e c two priority E. C. Two instances networking we're gonna mirror. We're gonna the architect of the basically block storage inside of eight of its front ending s three, which is the cheap object store? Pretty innovative. What it does is it gives customers an option for hire availability block storage that looks like pure but runs on AWS in the cloud. Very clever. And so all the advantages of OPEC's versus cap ex. You know the cloud experience, but it's the pure management experience. Eso very clever. Give pure customers who were happy. An option is there. I'm sure they're hearing from the customers. Hey, we want to go to the cloud where we heard it from the the eight of us Speaker today. Gardner Data. 88% of customers have a cloud first strategy, but 86 continue to spend on print. Right? Okay. So smart by pure to do that, I don't know how big a business that's gonna be, but it's a nice hedge. In case that really, that trend takes off >> and your thoughts on one of the other announcements today. Another first rip your We've talked about that the number of times they have there been first in a lot of things in the last 10 years transitioning offering most of their portfolio as a service and your perspective against the other competitors that you mentioned. How do you see that? >> Yeah, you know, the first your lips, they're bigger than the small companies that people have never heard of, like Zadar, a storage who actually were probably one of the first. But but they're the first again $1,000,000,000 plus company to do this. That's what customers want Customers want. The cloud experience in a big part of that cloud experience is a pricing model in the utility model. That's cloud like when AWS announced outposts, it was a clear sign that the industry had had to respond. I'm not saying this is a response to Outpost, but it's clearly a response to the cloud model so paid by the drink. You know, Op X versus cap packs of being able to have that cloud pricing model and experience across the portfolio is goodness. >> So Charlie, their CEO, talked about this morning, this modern data experience going into the next decade, it's gonna be three. Us is simple, seamless, sustainable. We all want that. I think for anything in life, your take on that from marketing to reality >> I see is anything but simple. Let's be honest. It's seamless is probably the most overused word in a >> knot. I think in future proof >> it's the chance to say that and sustainable >> eh? Well >> sustained from the standpoint, what I love about the model is way. Heard this in the customer today. Well, you know, the five year TCO was kind of a wash, but then beyond five years, it was a no brainer because we're now in that subscription model. So I guess that's that's the sort of sustainability you think its sustainability in different ways. You know, green, I t >> right >> again. I t is not really green. So, you know, good marketing. >> Well, we heard from I think we had three or four customers on today with four to legal firms, one in New Zealand, one in the States we heard from a utility company out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and then Mercedes AMG, Petunias Motor Sport. Formula One free, very different industries, similar stories in terms of the management simplicity of pure the evergreen model of being able to swap out and take advantage of those innovations and the things that Piers is doing the r and d on from a cost perspective. But I think those were three kind of common business and I t benefits that I heard articulated by three very different industries of very different sizes. >> I mean, I think it's important. Remember, you get a really effusive commentary from the pure customers, and I'm not trying to B B negative on that. They're very, very clear that companies like pure Nutanix cohesive the rubric wien. They have great customer experiences, and they're different than what companies air used to buying very often. Having said that, when we get these, when we get into these, you know, benefit, cost benefit discussions Typically you're you're you're comparing a modern, you know, circa 2019 platform with something that's, you know, five years old, so you better have a significantly better metrics again. Having said that, you're seeing a different experience, and that's clearly coming through in the customers that you talk to with pure. They started with a clean sheet of paper, didn't have a lot of technical debt, not a lot of baggage, that alone some really smart people that, you know, in Silicon Valley, you know, inundated with all this cloud stuff, and then they brought it forth very hard to build a billion dollar storage company. Pure was the 1st 1 since Netapp. So >> that was a couple of guys going >> to do it compelling couldn't do it. Equal logic couldn't do it after you've never heard of half of these companies, right? It's been it's been many, many years, decades since you saw a billion dollar storage company. That's how hard it is and to achieve escape velocity and fewer did it, which is quite a feat. And now that now the challenge is their market cap. It's so large that four and 1/2 1,000,000,000 and growing right ostensibly that they may be become acquisition proof. Okay, that's a good thing on the one hand, cause we love independent companies. On the other hand, at some point, the Tam Tam expansion within that little niche gets very difficult. That's why, for example, e M. C. Had to go out and buy a company like Llegado, and it made some actually, you know, some other crappy Apple acquisitions that didn't work out. And then they stumbled into VM, where it was gonna part of a TAM expansion strategy, and they lucked out because they the greatest acquisition in the history of I T. But I guess my point is at some point, a billion dollar company becomes a $2 billion company. Maybe give becomes a $5 billion company, and then it's like, OK, what do we do next? How do and you're seeing that app is in there now. Netapp is a growth challenge, Um, and a Tam expansion challenge. But it's too big to get acquired. There were years for their. For years. There were rumors about Cisco required, kept the stock up. It never happened. So stock buybacks tuck in acquisitions, you know, refresh of the portfolio, squeezing out a little bit of growth, some bad quarters. You know, that's That's the nature of the big company so pure at some point we'll hit that, but I think we're a couple of 1,000,000,000 away. >> They have also done a robust job of building a robust partner ecosystem. We talked to a number of them today, Cisco in video we had on the team. Tomorrow's Blanc is on in terms of this growth that you talked about, How well positioned are they with with the strategic and technology partnerships that they are not only building but evolving quite quickly? Where does that factor into your thoughts about their future in the next decade? >> I think, um, I think the key to that is their architecture. In terms of their AP, I, uh, framework. It makes it easy to integrate. Wait, Um and to the extent that they continue to grow, the customers buy their products, loved their products. The high end p s scores all that stuff, it's easier to have a NPS score when you're a billion dollar company is when you're, you know, $50 billion company. But are you with a big portfolio? But customers, clearly you're has momentum. People want to be with a winner. If yours a winner there. Architectures easy to integrate. Relatively speaking. Thio, You know the legacy vendors and it's clean across the portfolio. And so that's that's why I think the ecosystem continues to grow. I'd like to see more growth, you know, I remember service now when they were a billion dollar company and thinking, Wow, it was about this size, you know? Now you go to service now. I mean, you see the big, uh s eyes. You see a lot of niche players bumping into him or jumping up. I'd like to see that here, and I think it will continue. >> Well, this is certainly ah good chunk larger than last year's accelerate, which was about a year and 1/2 ago. And look where we are, Dave, We're in Austin. This is Dell's backyard. This is a bold company. I was telling you earlier today when I was doing some research for our guests, something that catches my attention as a marketer that many companies cannot d'oh and that is very bold and very direct against their competitors and tell customers this is why you should be buying us. I applaud that as a marketer, and as somebody who gets to interview folks on the Q, because it's hard to do. They have this bullish culture that they've always had, and they have grown in the last 10 years. We're seeing expansion, and we're seeing them not afraid to tackle anybody that their customers are looking at. >> So I want to talk about some of the industry dynamics as well. The I T industry loves a vacuum, and I think in some respects the acquisition of the EMS see by Del created a vacuum and pure is taking advantage of that now. For a while, Gel took its eye off the ball and was storage business was affected, and then they got their act together. And now it's 0% growth. It's it's Yeah, okay, I'd like to see better growth there, but they've been doing a lot of work, and pure is referenced this and some of the pressure. This is Dallas consolidating its portfolio, which is exactly the right thing to do. Deli emcees Portfolio is way too complicated, but you have to be careful. You can't just consolidate overnight because you're alienating your customers. So there's still some of that going on. The linchpin of Del strategy is VM wear. That is the key. That's where the future is for those guys. So when AMC was an independent storage company, it would fight tooth and nail. You know, Jeremy Burton was gonna take out net app, and he didn't do it. You have all these crazy videos and they, you know, they were focused, competitive oriented company that loved its customers and was very customer focused in many respects. I mean, they're still competitive, very competitive, but they're not that independent, pure play anymore. It's now it's netapp and pure, and I feel like net episode distracted, you know, with some of the struggles that pure is really, you know, has an opportunity. You know, I I remember Scott decent years and years and years ago told me when they were nobody said We think we could be the next TMC in storage. And I was like, Really? That's a amazingly bold statement when it appeared that the storage industry was kind of disappearing and everybody was getting acquired and it was becoming this vertically integrated converged infrastructure player with storage and networking and service. And that still may happen. A cloud, everything else, Um, but, you know, if you're has an opportunity to really become the leader in in this business in, you know, has an opportunity become the number one storage company takes some time, Uh, for a while. I question is, it doesn't really make sense to have independent stores, But you still see a lot of innovation. Certainly the backup vendors startups, you know, you see smaller companies, VC money still coming in back to something you said earlier. I t generally, and storage specifically really isn't simple. It's very complicated, and it's very hard. >> Well, Dave, we have had a great first day. I'm excited to work with you tomorrow. We've got cause coming on. Kicks coming on some more customers. Lots of good stuff in store for day two. >> All right, Cool. >> Likewise for David. Dante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live coverage.

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum, World 2019 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back inside the Moscow The Center. We're here, Mosconi North, Wrapping up our coverage here. Veum World 2019 Glad to have you with us here on the Cuba's. We continue our 10th year of 10th consecutive year of coverage here of the events to minimum, along with John Wall's joined now by Robin's Lee, who was director of data protection, product marketing and L E M C Rob. Good to see you, sir. >> Hey, Joan. >> So you almost want to walk to the first person I saw when I walked in the room the other day? >> You. And >> now you won't be one of the last on effort to tell Shy, Who is the director of Data protection and Cloud native APS. Adele AMC Effort. Good to see you, sir. Good to see you. Yeah, First off, let's just let's just talk about the world of data protection in general here by sucking multi and hybrid and all these things. Your world's changing a little bit, right? Because of these new environments in these new opportunities. So if you could just paint that 30,000 foot picture first off thematically, how how your world is evolving. >> Yeah. I mean, I think the key would indebted protection is data, you know, and I think that wherever it is created, and wherever it is managed, customers need to look after it. You know this? The old adage that there's only two things that customers worry about one is their employees, and two, is there data. So as we've seen the adoption of of Cloud is a A zone infrastructure model on you're starting to see many customers extend their own premises infrastructure to the cloud on using the cloud for production level applications. They realize that on often they're told, you gotta do something about your data. So that's led to all vendors and especially ourselves over the last several years, really expanding the portfolio and the capabilities that we have from a non premises centric environment to the multi class. >> Yeah, so every ah, a lot of discussion about kubernetes. Before we get into that, you've got cloud native in your title, and Rob talked about data and talk about the applications I'm hoping you can bring us inside is to you know, what's different when we're talking about cloud native applications that from a data protection standpoint, you know, what do you have to think about differently? Is it the micro Service's architecture in containers Fundamentally changed the way things are done, is it, You know, similar what we've done in the past? >> Definitely. We see customers. Some customers are taking what they head back now and they move it in tow. Cloud native infrastructures. A lot of customers are building new applications and new workloads, and they build it on top off new applications. So they basically building a whole new set off applications and infrastructure and want to combine in together and they come to us on Dad, ask us, How do I protect this? And these things spin up, spin down, move around. They have very different life cycle than the traditional applications. >> Okay, Yeah, it's funny. You know, Rob, I think back to you know, it's like tape. You know how we dealt this because of the environment versus disc versus, you know, containerized application. Buoyed by the time I want to set something up isn't that gone and things move around all over the place. It's You gotta put a different different types of environments than you need to span. All of these >> I was chatting with with every earlier, and we were talking about what? What's what's changed, kind of in the last couple of years around the deployment and usage of of kubernetes, the deployment of containers. And after he was saying that one of the most fundamental changes is the introduction of persistent volumes on a Sooners. Persistency comes into the mix. You know, that's where things start to change. And, you know, Jeffrey's phone started ringing with respect to hate. What are you doing to bring dead protection into you know, this environment? >> I think two years ago, everything was Toby stateless on then suddenly, people understand that's not enough. You need to add states some states to existing applications. And then the notion of persistent volumes came along and then customers and developers so that it's actually working quite nicely. And they started relying more and more on moving more state in tow, their applications running on containers, environments. So the first thing that customers ask us about is where I store my data. Where's the primary volume that is done by our storage folks? The next question is, how do I protect my data? And this is where we come into the picture. And we offer an architecture that is built for containers environment and takes care off that life cycle that we talked about before. Containers are coming and going. You need to protect the data and the containers, the data and the meta data together in order to bring that protection level of customers. Looks from, >> you know, as as the concerns about data protection have been elevated now and sea sweet discussions now, um has that created a different approach, or maybe a change of tone or tenor from your clients to you, because the discussions are being elevated in their own businesses. And and so there's Is there a different kind of attention being paid to this or different kinds of concerns that maybe 34 years ago? Yeah, >> I mean, it's interesting. I mean, one of things we were on every couple of years is a ah, global study. We called it the Global Day Protection Index. This year, we we interviewed 2200 i t. Decision makers and we kind of asked them about you know, how how are they value in dead protection and also how the valuing data and the one thing that has definitely changed is that the value of data to them has become Maur critically important. I think it's always been important, but I think you know, if they start thinking about data is capital, you know they are starting to realize that it's only capital if you've got it. If you don't have it, it's It's nothing Thio >> and it's only yours if you have it. Well, yeah, and nobody else. Absolutely. Right here. >> Every kubernetes courses open source and everybody's got what they're what they're doing in it. You've got announcement, some work you're doing with VM, where it's open source. Also bring us inside a little bit. Valero, how did we get to this point? You know this, you know, part of the C n c f. Yet it kind of being submitted, or how does that fit into the whole community? >> Yeah, sure. So, as you said and we talked about earlier this week with Beth and people at the protection announcements We are working with collaboration with Valero now part off Veum, where in orderto being that data protection solution So Valero is an open source projects. It's out there in the open. You have thousands off stars get up. Stars are very popular among the Dev Ops community about communities users you can hear about it from customers that are looking for for solutions. There is very good at backing up cluster containers and applications. And we have a lot of experience in enterprise data protection making sure that you have a solution that, um, has compliance reporting. You contract your data, you can define policies scheduling all of that eso we are combining these two and collaborating with Valero in orderto have a solution that answers. Boston is off the back of that mean and they just want to go home knowing that the production environment is protected, the and the develops people in the communities administrators and they just want toe, get the volume and forget about the protection. Everybody can work in their environment with the tools that they know with permissions that they want, and they can both work together and be happy. And the companies that we work with are the ones that have good relationship between the devil steam and the backup administrators. And they see that the same table and talk to us, and everybody tells us what they want and what they need. As a result, we build a solution so that we'll be able to answer the needs of both of them. >> So do you have to build sometimes those relationships within a company to get them to talk or collaborate in a more conducive environment cause you see all kinds, right? I mean, you see, the full range just talked by then a free that some very successful, some very constructive, maybe some that that aren't on the same page agent. So that's almost part of your responsibility. Coming before you even get to where you could talk about the work, we've got to talk about the collaboration. Yeah, that they're not area >> we really come When there is a story, people try to move their applications to production. The developers are really already working on something, and now the developers want volumes on the I T ops people. Tell them No, no, no. If you can't protect it. According to our rules. We will not pass the audience. We can do that for you, and that creates the friction inside those teams in the organization that we talked with. There is recognition off that already and now they come together to the table and they want to hear something that would they would be able to work with us both on the management on the I T ops and and management on cube control and what develops people are using. >> And it's it's large companies that are coming in talking to us. And I think, you know, when you get a large companies, quite often you have some more of these things different fiefdoms of, of, of users inside. But because they're large companies, they have, you know, certain requirements from regulations and compliance is perspective. So they have those concerns, but and every has been saying is we look at the early design partners, customers that were looking to work with, you know, the big the big companies coming to us. >> Rob, can you just help us understand? We talked about Valero there says some open, soft, soft, soft words. That's the power tech. Just sit on top of that >> s Oh, it's a great question. So, you know, as you know, we introduced power protects after exile technologies world. It started shipping to customers at the end of July. And Coop, in any support, is really the first example of what we said that we were going to be able to do, which is more rapidly bring new workload to new capabilities into our power, protect softer offering than we've ever been able to do before. You know, we're really embarking on a quarterly release cadence, you know, which will allow us to, you know, to do things that, you know in our existing portfolio are released cadences. What's being measured in in many, many months and quite often is long as a year and beyond. So what we will do is the tech preview that we that we announced this week. You know, we will roll that out in a nup coming release in production on that will become available to any of the parent protect software users. So right within the power protect software match me interface. You know that has the VMS support Oracle sequel in file systems. We'll add the additional workload support have been able to protect kubernetes using the same workloads, the abilities to create protection policies and I'm interested every is is with protection policies. Because that she was saying about how the environment can change quite rapidly is that by using a policy, you don't need to watch for those changes as changes happen, the policy. We'll keep track of what it needs to do as far as protecting the new applications as they come up and have to go away. >> What happens is the ones we find. The policies are the arty operations in the back apartments. They want to comply with the rules that they have, and they define the gold, silver, bronze policies, whatever have you and then they can give it to the Cuban, said Means. And, the criminalist admits, can say OK, these are my volumes. These are more applications I will just use keep control and potatoes objects We will discover that will automatically create a schedule that would create that that backup. So in essence, the community suddenly doesn't need really need to care about the compliance rules they need to care about policies and the Becca pod mean can take care of other wrist >> and the applications of driving the policies and not not the other way around. >> Yeah, I mean, the creepiest ad means are used to defining policies in terms of five day provisions, their storage, for example. We want to do the same in the data protection area. >> So as far as things like retention periods, as far as whether or not the data needs to be replicated, where not the data needs to be a tear to the cloud that those are all things that the I T admin team can do on it sort of separates kind of orchestration and governance is, is a big part of perfect ex often >> love to get your viewpoint on is data protection historically was not one of the faster moving things in the I T. Realm Last two or three years at VM World, it's been one of the hottest topic, I said. You know, the keynote on Monday felt like we were kubernetes world. Not quite Cube con just yet, because there's a lot of projects there, but I walked down to the the show floor. It's not storage world like Thursday. Its data protection world is Cygnus lots of glowing parties of people so that customers, you know, the embracing change. And what does that mean for your portfolio? >> Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, I think over the years, if you think about where you go if you want to learn about data protection, VM world is probably one of the best shows to go to because >> we're >> all here. I mean, I mean, you know when you know, you know, I've you know, I've been crazy enough to be in the debt protection business for almost 15 years now. Um, and it hasn't changed. If you if you want to talk to data protection vendors than VM World, is a really good show to go to. You know, I think that that for us, you know what I am. Where has done is It's It's It's It's It's provoked provided a common foundation, you know, And that's also providing a common foundation to get us from on premises into the multi cloud environment. So once she developed, um uh, great data protection solutions in the van, where environment is that you're your target market becomes quite broad because, you know, there's so much VM were virtual ization out there in the market, but you're absolutely correct. Is that you on the show floor? And it's It's It's an interesting sight >> thinking. In addition to that, you also have obviously been at this in the show, and I think what we have seen over the last couple of years is that customers were coming tow us, asking for solutions. And this is why we were able, with the power, protect architecture and platform to innovate more quickly and respond to those faster changing trends. Because now you have persistency of volumes. Now you have protection. The M were acquired. Help tell, you know, we could work together on creating the solution. >> Yeah, absolutely. Have we've been at the Cube contract for number years. Help Theo. Of course, the president's last year VM were had a bigger presence, but that maturation of the storage component with something we knew would take time. You know, we watched it in the virtual ization world. Those of us that lived through that, you know, 10 to 15 years ago and container ization. It's starting to reach that maturity, and we're getting that inflection point >> if you also want to think about the announcement that path made on the keynote on Monday where he said we're goingto work much more with park protects, toe address, spot data protection capabilities. This is one of the things we're collaborating With the help to your team, we're contributing to the open source. We're building together things that can move in the pace off communities and address the needs off our more legacy. Companies that needed protection with complaints. >> So, Rob, that will keep you in business for another 15 years? >> I hope >> so, gentlemen. Thanks for the time. Thank you. Appreciate that. Especially on your birthday. Right? Tomorrow. Tomorrow, Right here. Tomorrow. Your birthday home for that Happy early birthday. >> Thank you very much. >> We should have a cute cake, but should especially >> the end of the day. >> I know, I know. I'll end of the day. We got something better than a cake. Gentlemen. Thank you again. Thanks. We'll be back in a little bit. Streaming content. Continuing coverage here. Avian World 2019 with some final thoughts from our panelists. Just a little bit. See on the other side for that

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019. Brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. Day three Q coverage here in San Francisco for V emerald. 2019. I'm just for a student, Um, in here with David Lan. Take days free kick off. We have two sets wall to wall coverage. Guys, this is the time where we get to take a deep breath two days under our belts look and reflect on all the news we've covered in a dark to last analysis sessions but also kind of riff on. We got two nights in hallway conversations we learned a lot of the party means do. I learned a lot last night. Dave. I know you. You learned a lots, do you, Thomas? When things that the chatter Certainly twittersphere hashtag the emerald. A lot of action on there, but it's the hallway conversations. It's the party that people have a few cocktails in them day that you start to hear the truth. The real deal comes out, >> No doubt. And and again Jon Stewart, there's real concern over from the from the practitioners we talked to about this acquisition spree. Are they going to be integrated? Are they going to just throw all this stuff at us and keep jamming products and service is down our throats? Or is this going to be a coherent set of solutions that solves our problem? We also had a little little interesting side conversation about, you know, Snowflake, Frank's lumens new company and how basically Frank is bringing back the Pirates from Data Domain and from service. Now Mike Scarpelli is over there. He's a rock star. CFO Beth White is eventually is back over there. And Frank's Lupin. He's the guy who takes companies from, you know, 100 million to a billion, so that's gonna be >> very serious money making him going on there. >> We have been following his career for a number of years now. We watched him take data domain. We watched him pull that that rabbit out of his hat with the sale with net app, and then the emcee swooped in. And then we saw what he did service. Now we've documented this is an individual to watch, you know, >> he's a world class management team member I mean, he's executes. >> Oh, yeah, no doubt. And >> he has >> a formula that's been proven and in time and time again. And to me, the biggest testament salute Min is the success of the continued success of Data Domain. After he left Hey, he really helped clean up the emcees data protection mess. Um, and then the second thing is, look at service now is performance after he left, I haven't missed a beat. And, yeah, John Donahoe, great executive and all, but it's because Frank's Lubin had everything in place and that was a really well run >> dry. And they got a nice little oracle like business model. >> Yeah. No, you're right. They kind of, you know, the big complaint now as well. Your price is too high that Oracle. >> What have you learned? What you hear in the hallways? I mean, a lot of chatter. >> Yes, John, we We've been reflecting back a lot. It's 10 years in 10th year of the Cube here and back here in San Francisco. The new Mosconi, our third show that I've been at this year in Mosconi and we always track year to year. But since it's been what 45 years since we were here for VM World. When I talked to the average vendor. When I talk to you know, the analysts here were like, Oh, thank goodness we're not in Vegas. When I talked to the average attendee, they're like, Oh my God, what happened to San Francisco since last time we were here? It is too expensive. And the experience walking around San Francisco has really not nearly as nice as it might have been five or 10 years ago. And many of them we were talking to, Ah, woman that runs an event that has been Vegas in San Francisco. And she said, Oh, we did in San Francisco and got tremendous feedback. Don't do it there again. Brings back to Vegas both for costs and the enjoyment of being around the environment. >> Where was a shit show here in San Francisco is horrible right now, I got to say to your right eye was walking this morning from my hotel. Literally. A homeless person passed out the middle of the sidewalk. Um, your smells like urine. It's P, and it's It's just I mean, it's really bad this tense now. I mean City of San Francisco is gonna do some. Mosconi, by the way, has been rebuilt. Awesome. So, you know, in terms of the new Mosconi stew, that's a serious upgrade. Hotel rooms are scarce and just the homeless problem. It's just ridiculous. I don't know what they're >> doing. So one of the other big things when I was reflecting coming into here two years ago when VM wear really started down right before the war on AWS announcement, they made a big announcement. IBM because they had sold off the cloud air toe Oh, VH And for two years Oh, VH was a big partner, Talked about that transition, said we handed off this great asset over h isn't here at the show. I was like, Oh, my gosh, you know, that was, you know, such a big story and other companies like New >> 12. That's good. One lets someone who's not at the show and why. Yeah, oh, VH wired to hear >> They aren't here because, well, they've got customers. More of them are in Europe That was supposed to be a big entry into the United States. Obviously, it wasn't as valuable for them to be here, even though I'm sure they're still part of that service provider ecosystem. They have other big one for us, and we've had on the Cube Nutanix. You know, we've had Dheeraj Pandey. First time we had him on was that this show is still the majority of Nutanix. Customers are VM where customers I've talked to lots of Nutanix customers at the event, even part of the analyst event. Some of the customers I talked to were like, Oh, yeah, my hardware stacks Nutanix and amusing NSX. And I'm using other things there. But they are not here. They're not allowed to be at the show. And I >> mean, they were blatantly told they can't come. >> They can't come here. They can't come to the regional things. They can't do the partner things. So that that that relationship is definitely >> from red hat. What kind of presence have you seen from Red s? >> So their number companies like red Hat that they're kept at a lower level of sponsorship. So they're here. They participate, you know. Open shift, of course, is you know, big enemy for cloud native. Lots of open shift runs on V sphere. So many of those companies that are part of the ecosystem, but not the ones that they want to celebrate and put front and forward. So it's always interesting kind of walk around on those. Even Microsoft is an interesting relationship for, you know, decades with the M wear. You know, of course, azure they partner with. But hyper V was long a competitors. So, you know, we understand those competitive relationships >> could be interesting. Stew and Dave on the ecosystem Jerry Chan Day when we just doing my interview yesterday on the other set mentioned that the ecosystem reinvents itself the community. The question now is with Delhi emceeing Del Technologies obviously heard Michael Dell essentially laying out his plan, which is he's got. He's trying to keep people distracted, but the bottom line is going to top people putting together the cloud right well service provider model. So you know, that's what he's gonna be a big impact. VM wear the crown jewel of Del Technologies certainly is looking more and more like It's >> well and yesterday remember the first VM world we did in 2010? It was It was del I mean course and see only the time Who's Del? It was H p Yes, the emcee was there, but it was net app. I mean, everybody could've had equal standing yesterday at the keynotes. It was Project Dimension of V M, where cloud on Delhi emcee and long keynotes >> data protection into the VM were >> also it's It's all very heavily, you know, Jeff Clarke has his his thumb on, you know, the the deli emcee folks pushing that through Veum where Michael is orchestrating the whole thing. Pat obviously is allowing it. I was sitting in the audience Next next, Some folks from Netapp they're like, you know, this kind of a bummer. Calvin Sito from h p e tweeted Wow how to stick it in the face of your ecosystem partners. He then later went on Facebook saying, Hey, I love this ecosystem, so sort of balancing it out because, you know, he wants to be a good, good citizen, but clearly the ecosystem partners who basically brought VM where you know, to the the position where it's in through distribution, our little ruffled. Right now you can't blame him, But at the same time, the mandate is clear. Michael Dell is driving his products and his solutions through VM were period the end. And, you know, if you don't like it, leave >> right. They had such great success with V San and VX rail in that joint product development and go to market. If they can replicate that with a number of other solutions, they get that the synergies. If >> you don't like it, don't leave. That leave is worse than that. They say you don't like it, you know, invited you. But >> how about what Pat said yesterday in the Cube about when they announced on Gwen heavily leaned into V san. He said publicly that Joe Tucci was pissed and I hate her. They were going at it so that so that shows you the change, right? I mean, so so so e m. C. When it owned VM where was very cautious about allowing Veum wears a software company to drive value somewhere Now is just acting like a software company. >> Well, I think I mean, I learned last night's do, um and you can appreciate this. I learned that the top executives of'em where are looking heavily and working hard at understanding and drive them kubernetes cloud native thing because this is not a throwaway deal. This is not a you know, far anything that they are investing. They get their top brass tech execs on kubernetes fto. Two big players job. Ada, Craig McCaw calumnies. We know interviews since day one, but I think the cloud native thing is going to be interesting. And I think it's gonna be evolution. I think there's gonna be a very dynamic road thing's gonna be a series, of course, corrections, but directionally they're all in on. They're going for it, they're not. >> And actually, I had a, you know, good discussion with Chad Attack. It's a good friend of the program now working at GM, where for the first time, but came from AMC worked at Pivotal. He said, culturally, such a gap between VM wear don't have to touch your app, you know, move everything along lifted shift is nice and easy versus pivotal, you know must go completely You know, dual programming, you know, agile everything there, so bridging those because there's multiple paths and the rail pharaoh announcement is that would be cloud native stuff that won't necessarily go to the EMS. We're going to retool V EMS to now be a platform for kubernetes so that they have a few passed to bridge or to build towards the future. Here's the >> answer strategy. Discussion That and Rayo Farrell was now running Cloud native. Think this is just really >> ties in the interesting discussion that I had with some folks was that you've essentially got well, Jerry Chen brought this up last time we had him on it and reinventing because >> we have >> a conversation all the time about this Amazon have to go up the stack. And Jerry Chen made a really he said, Look, it they're not They're not gonna become an e r peace offer company. What they're gonna do is give tools to the builders so that they can disrupt Europea. They can disrupt service. Now they can disrupt Oracle. That's their strategy, at least for now. Okay, so what does that say? I think the strategy discussion inside of'em were and and l is about by whatever clouds gonna be 35 to 50% of the market. Fine. And the cloud native abs. Great. But you got this mission critical. E r p is an example. Database saps that are on Prem. What we have to do is keep them there. So we're going to sell to the incumbents and we're going to give them cloud native tools, toe modernize. Those APS have build new acts on Prem, and that's the that is the collision course that's coming. So the big question is, can the cloud native guys and AWS disrupt that >> huge? I've always said I'm is on and like the way they're coming in, a tsunami is coming in. And who's gonna build that sea wall to stop it right? And that's essentially only hope that these guys have. You look at all the competitive strategy. Was Oracle. Whoever just gotta stop it? You can't like >> the sea >> wall. That's a great building. A sea wall I was, I would say, is Is that you know, they're only hope at this point is to, you know, get in the game because see Amazon is the stack. They're not really moving up the stack. You hear that from Cisco and Dale and other people? That's where it's a game of musical chairs. Right now, the music's you know, there's still a lot of shares left, but soon chairs getting pulled away and Cisco Deli emcee VM, where they're all fighting for these big chairs. And one >> thing >> we talked about yesterday is that VM wears very directional, product driven. Otherwise they pick a direction, is a statement of direction and don't really have a lot of meat on the bone. In the product side, Sister is actually in market with service providers there in market with NETWORKINGS to this no vapor there that's installed basis and incumbent business. You have developers Esso Baton talks about suffered to find data center, suffer defined networking. I mean, come on, Really. I mean, they're getting there, but it didn't have the complete solution. Cisco >> Coming into this week, I expected here a bit more about the progress and all the customers of'em wear on AWS and feel like Vienna actually downplayed the AWS. We know what a strong partnership it is at every Amazon show we go to, and we got a lot of them Now there's a big presence there, and I can talk to customers that are starting to roll out and move there, but it felt like it was David's. You pointed out there are some messaging differences when you talk about multi cloud and how they're positioning it. So, you know, put those >> here Amazon. If your Amazon you're not happy with Microsoft Dell Technologies World The big announcement that was positioned a cloud foundation Although it wasn't a joint engineering, But the press picked it up as though the Amazon deal has been replicated with Microsoft and Google. I mean, you gotta be gotta be hurt if your Amazon >> So I've I've just been taking notes this this event, there's I've noted at least five major points of difference between a W s what they're saying and their philosophy and the anywhere so eight of us. We know they they don't talk multi cloud. They've told their partners, If you're doing joint marketing with us, you cannot say multi cloud aws that reinforce John. We saw this. Steven Schmidt said that this narrative that security is broken doesn't help the industry. Security's not broken, you know, we're doing great. The state of the nation is wonderful. Aws Matt. Not really. I agree. By the way. Uh, that's not the case. I agree with Pat saying Security's broken. It's a do over VM where wants to be the best infrastructure and developer software company. Who's the best infrastructure and software development platform. Eight of us. The M one wants to be the security cloud. Who's the security cloud? Eight of us. And then, uh, they talked about 10,000 cloud data Listeners are those really cloud data centers at Vienna. And the last one was this was a little nuanced Veum was talking about We know about migrating, modernize, lifted ship shift and then modernize The empire's not talking about modernize and then migrate. If you want to. I totally in conflict >> as a collision course. That's got Look, look, look at the data center was Look, it looks like we're going. We're going away, right to the data center. Staying. That's music to Michael Dell's VM. Where's years they live in the Data City? Do you pointed out yesterday? Data Senate goes away. So does begin. Where's business? >> One of things. I'm surprised. I'm wondering you both have talked to some of the service fighter telco pieces of'em, where they're doing that project dimension, which is the VM where stack on del that looks just like outposts on. And I know they had deployments on this for months. If I was them, you know, it's everybody's hearing about Outpost to talk about it, being more like we're already doing it in. This has you in that Amazon ecosystem. It might be a little strong for the Amazon story, but have you been hearing any about that this week? >> I think they keep a lot of cards close to the chest, but it's clear from the announces that they're doing certainly del the VM, where on Delhi Emcee Cloud or whatever it's called, it's not a cloud but their their infrastructure that is essentially a managed service. That's gonna be really strong for I t. People, because I think that the value proposition of going toe i t and saying we have this, you don't need to do anything. It's very strong, I mean, because I didn't want him >> and justified because this the project to mention it is that single, that thinner stack like what we saw on Outpost in the Amazon video, as opposed to Veum, where cloud on AWS, which is the full C i r h d. I stack. >> I haven't heard anything still on >> well, but the conversation I had from from Vienna, where standpoint, they could make money on that manage service. That's why it's the preferred partnership, right? And so that's their part of their cloud play. If you don't have a public cloud, I said this yesterday, you have to redefine Cloud and you have to get into cloud service. And that's what's happening. And that's exactly what's happening. And what I like about what V M where is doing is they are transitioning their model to a sass based model. Now it's only 12 and 1/2 percent of the revenues today. But both pivotal and carbon black are gonna add, you know, ah, $1,000,000,000 next year to that subscription based $3 billion in year two. Um, and so you know, Pat said the other day, I think we could get to 50 50. I don't necessarily think in the near term we're gonna go beyond that. It's not the Adobe >> way could be critical. Critical of'em were in some areas, but I gotta tell you their core strength that they went to a software operators on the data center friend of prices. That's been a great strategy. Focusing on their core building from there is Jerry 10 point out adding other products so their software company, So I think they're really got a good solution. And you? The data shows that people are increasing their spending, John. Just one based on >> that. Because I had a couple of really good conversation with customers, customers that would deploy VCF So they've got the full stack on there. So using H C I, but not necessarily on Dell hardware, could be Cisco Hardware. Could be HB hardware in the like or they're buying NSX. But the virtual ization team owns it, and they get kind of put in. A box storage team says That's not the array I'm used to buy. Well, maybe I'll put a pure storage box and put it in between. The networking team says I'm refreshing my Cisco hardware. You know, we're like, but we have NSX, and it's great. Well, you can use NSX over there. We're going to use a C I over here. So the term I heard from a number of customers is organizations still have hardware to find roles, and they're trying to figure out how to move to that software world. Which hurts me, cause I spent years trying to get beyond silos and helping people you know, move through those environments. And still, in 2019 it's a big challenge. That organizational shift is we know how tough that is. >> So just couple points in the data, because you're right. There are some countervailing trends, though. So, yes, people are spending Maurin VM where in the second half. But at the same time, the data shows that cloud is hurting VM wear spend. So this that's kind of gets interesting. Our containers gonna kill VM where? No, there's no evidence that container's air hurting VM where spend. But there's clearly risks there, you know, as we've talked about who's best position of multi cloud. Well, it turns out three guys with the public cloud are best positioned in multi Google and Microsoft on, and so and then the pivotal thing is interesting, and ties ties all this in so that the data is actually really interesting. It's like you're seeing tugs at both sides, and I think your your notion about the seawall is dead on. That's exactly what they're doing. >> You see that with Oracle's trying to stop jet. I just want they can't win this one to stop Amazon just on the tracks gave great data. Great reporting, Stoop. Good observations. Get all the day that night and parties we're gonna certainly keep doing that. Day three of wall to wall coverage here. You bringing to the insights and interviews here live from the Emerald Twin 19. Stay with us for more after this short break.

>> From the Silicon Angle Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, It's theCUBE. (upbeat music) Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's Boston area studio; our actually brand-new studio, and I'm really excited to have I believe is a first-time guest, a long-time caller, you know, a long time listener >> Yeah, yep. first time caller, good buddy of mine Dave Graham, who is the director, is a director of emerging technologies: messaging at Dell Technologies. Disclaimer, Dave and I worked together at a company some of you might have heard on the past, it was EMC Corporation, which was a local company. Dave and I both left EMC, and Dave went back, after Dell had bought EMC. So Dave, thanks so much for joining, it is your first time on theCUBE, yes? >> It is the first time on theCUBE. >> Yeah, so. >> Lets do some, Some of the first times that I actually interacted with, with this team here, you and I were bloggers and doing lots of stuff back in the industry, so it's great to be able to talk to you on-camera. >> Yeah, same here. >> All right, so Dave, I mentioned you were a returning former EMC-er, now Dell tech person, and you spent some time at Juniper, at some startups, but give our audience a little bit about your background and your passions. >> Oh, so background-wise, yep, so started my career in technology, if you will, at EMC, worked, started in inside sales of all places. Worked my way into a consulting/engineer type position within ECS, which was, obviously a pretty hard-core product inside of EMC now, or Dell Technologies now. Left, went to a startup, everybody's got to do a start up at some point in their life, right? Take the risk, make the leap, that was awesome, was actually one of those Cloud brokers that's out there, like Nasuni, company called Sertis. Had a little bit of trouble about eight months in, so it kind of fell apart. >> Yeah, the company did, not you. >> The company did! (men laughing) I was fine, you know, but the, yeah, the company had some problems, but ended up leaving there, going to Symantec of all places, so I worked on the Veritas side, kind of the enterprise side, which just recently got bought out by Avago, evidently just. >> Broadcom >> Broadcom, Broadcom, art of the grand whole Avago. >> Dave, Dave, you know we're getting up there in years and our tech, when we keep talking about something 'cause I was just reading about, right, Broadcom, which was of course Avago bought Broadcom in the second largest tech acquisition in history, but when they acquired Broadcom, they took on the name because most people know Broadcom, not as many people know Avago, even those of us with backgrounds in the chip semiconductor and all those pieces. I mean you got Brocade in there, you've got some of the software companies that they've bought over the time, so some of those go together. But yeah, Veritas and Symantec, those of us especially with some storage and networking background know those brands well. >> Absolutely, PLX's being the PCI switched as well, it's actually Broadcom, those things. So yeah, went from Symantec after a short period of time there, went to Juniper Networks, ran part of their Center of Excellence, kind of a data center overlay team, the only non-networking guy in a networking company, it felt like. Can't say that I learned a ton about the networking side, but definitely saw a huge expansion in the data center space with Juniper, which was awesome to see. And then the opportunity came to come back to Dell Technologies. Kind of a everything old becoming new again, right? Going and revisiting a whole bunch of folks that I had worked with 13, you know, 10 years ago. >> Dave, it's interesting, you know, I think about, talk about somebody like Broadcom, and Avago, and things like that. I remember reading blog posts of yours, that you'd get down to some of that nitty-level, you and I would be ones that would be the talk about the product, all right now pull the board out, let me look at all the components, let me understand, you know, the spacing, and the cooling, and all the things there, but you know here it's 2019, Dave. Don't you know software is eating the world? So, tell us a little bit about what you're working on these days, because the high-level things definitely don't bring to mind the low-level board pieces that we used to talk about many years ago. >> Exactly, yeah, it's no longer, you know, thermals and processing power as much, right? Still aspects of that, but a lot of what we're focused on now, or what I'm focused on now is within what we call the emerging technology space. Or horizon 2, horizon 3, I guess. >> Sounds like something some analyst firm came up with, Dave. (Dave laughing) >> Yeah, like Industry 4.0, 5.0 type stuff. It's all exciting stuff, but you know when you look at technologies like five, 5G, fifth generation wireless, you know both millimeter waves, sub six gigahertz, AI, you know, everything old becoming new again, right? Stuff from the fifties, and sixties that's now starting to permeate everything that we do, you're not opening your mouth and breathing unless you're talking about AI at some point, >> Yeah, and you bring up a great point. So, we've spent some time with the Dell team understanding AI, but help connect for our audience that when you talk high AI we're talking about, we're talking about data at the center of everything, and it's those applications, are you working on some of those solutions, or is it the infrastructure that's going to enable that, and what needs to be done at that level for things to work right? >> I think it's all of the above. The beauty of kind of Dell Technologies that you sit across, both infrastructure and software. You look at the efforts and the energies, stuff like VMware buying, BitFusion, right, as a mechanism trying to assuage some of that low-level hardware stuff. Start to tap into what the infrastructure guys have always been doing. When you bring that kind of capability up the stack, now you can start to develop within the software mindset, how, how you're going to access this. Infrastructure still plays a huge part of it, you got to run it on something, right? You can't really do serverless AI at this point, am I allowed to say that? (man laughing) >> Well, you could say that, I might disagree with you, because absolutely >> Eh, that's fine. there's AI that's running on it. Don't you know, Dave, I actually did my serverless 101 article that I had, I actually had Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, who is the General Manager of Dell servers, holding the t-shirt that "there is no serverless, it's just, you know, a function that you only pay the piece that you need when you need and everything there." But the point of the humor that I was having there is even the largest server manufacturer in the world knows that underneath that serverless discussion, absolutely, there is still infrastructure that plays there, just today it tends to primarily be in AWS with all of their services, but that proliferation, serverless, we're just letting the developers be developers and not have to think about that stuff, and I mean, Dave, the stuff we've had background, you know, we want to get rid of silos and make things simpler, I mean, it's the things we've been talking about for decades, it's just, for me it was interesting to look at, it is very much a developer application driven piece, top-down as opposed to so many of the virtualization and infrastructure as a service is more of a bottom-up, let me try to change this construct so that we can then provide what you need above it, it's just a slightly different way of looking at things. >> Yeah, and I think we're really trying to push for that stuff, so you know you can bundle together hardware that makes it, makes the development platform easy to do, right? But the efforts and energy of our partnerships, Dell has engaged in a lot of partnerships within the industry, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Graphcore, you name it, right? We're out in that space working along with those folks, but a lot of that is driven by software. It's, you write to a library, like Kudu, or, you know pyEight, you know, PyTorch, you're using these type of elements and you're moving towards that, but then it has to run on something, right? So we want to be in that both-end space, right? We want to enable that kind of flexibility capability, and obviously not prevent it, but we want to also expose that platform to as many people within the industry as possible so they can kind of start to develop on it. You're becoming a platform company, really, when it comes down to it. >> I don't want to get down the semantical arguments of AI, if you will, but what are you hearing from customers, and what's some kind of driving some of the discussions lately that's the reality of AI as opposed to some of just the buzzy hype that everybody talks about? >> Well I still think there's some ambiguity in market around AI versus automation even, so what people that come and ask us are well, "you know, I believe in this thing called artificial intelligence, and I want to do X, Y, and Z." And these particular workloads could be better handled by a simple, not to distill it down to the barest minimum, but like cron jobs, something that's, go back in the history, look at the things that matter, that you could do very very simply that don't require a large amount of library, or sort of an understanding of more advanced-type algorithms or developments that way. In the reverse, you still have that capability now, where everything that we're doing within industry, you use chat-bots. Some of the intelligence that goes into those, people are starting to recognize, this is a better way that I could serve my customers. Really, it's that business out kind of viewpoint. How do I access these customers, where they may not have the knowledge set here, but they're coming to us and saying, "it's more than just, you know, a call, an IVR system," you know, like an electronic IVR system, right? Like I come in and it's just quick response stuff. I need some context, I need to be able to do this, and transform my data into something that's useful for my customers. >> Yeah, no, this is such a great point, Dave. The thing I've asked many times, is, my entire career we've talked about intelligence and we've talked about automation, what's different about it today? And the reality is, is it used to be all right. I was scripting things, or I would have some Bash processes, or I would put these things together. The order of magnitude and scale of what we're talking about today, I couldn't do it manually if I wanted to. And that automation is really, can be really cool these days, and it's not as, to set all of those up, there is more intelligence built into it, so whether it's AI or just machine learning kind of underneath it, that spectrum that we talk about it, there's some real-use cases, a real lot of things that are happening there, and it definitely is, order of magnitudes more improved than what we were talking about say, back when we were both at EMC and the latest generation of Symmetrix was much more intelligent than the last generation, but if you look at that 10 years later, boy, it's, it is night and day, and how could we ever have used those terms before, compared to where we are today. >> Yeah it's, it's, somebody probably at some point coined the term, "exponential". Like, things become exponential as you start to look at it. Yeah, the development in the last 10 years, both in computing horsepower, and GPU/GPGPU horsepower, you know, the innovation around, you know FPGAs are back in a big way now, right? All that brainpower that used to be in these systems now, you now can benefit even more from the flexibility of the systems in order to get specific workloads done. It's not for everybody, we all know that, but it's there. >> I'm glad you brought up FPGAs because those of us that are hardware geeks, I mean, some reason I studied mechanical engineering, not realizing that software would be a software world that we live in. I did a video with Amy Lewis and she's like, "what was your software-defined moments?" I'm like, "gosh, I'm the frog sitting in the pot, and, would love to, if I can't network-diagram it, or put these things together, networking guy, it's my background! So, the software world, but it is a real renaissance in hardware these days. Everything from the FPGAs you mentioned, you look at NVIDIA and all of their partners, and the competitors there. Anything you geeking out on the hardware side? >> I, yeah, a lot of the stuff, I mean, the era of GPU showed up in a big way, all right? We have NVIDIA to thank for that whole, I mean, the kudos to them for developing a software ecosystem alongside a hardware. I think that's really what sold that and made that work. >> Well, you know, you have to be able to solve that Bitcoin mining problem, so. >> Well, you know, depending on which cryptocurrency you did, EMD kind of snuck in there with their stuff and they did some of that stuff better. But you have that kind of competing architecture stuff, which is always good, competition you want. I think now that what we're seeing is that specific workloads now benefit from different styles of compute. And so you have the companies like Graphcore, or the chip that was just launched out of China this past week that's configurable to any type of network, enteral network underneath the covers. You see that kind of evolution in capability now, where general purpose is good, but now you start to go into reconfigurable elements so, I'll, FPGAs are some of these more advanced chips. The neuromorphic hardware, which is always, given my background in psychology, is always interesting to me, so anything that is biomorphic or neuromorphic to me is pinging around up here like, "oh, you're going to emulate the brain?" And Intel's done stuff, BraincChip's done stuff, Netspace, it's amazing. I just, the workloads that are coming along the way, I think are starting to demand different types or more effectiveness within that hardware now, so you're starting to see a lot of interesting developments, IPUs, TPUs, Teslas getting into the inferencing bit now, with their own hardware, so you see a lot of effort and energy being poured in there. Again, there's not going to be one ring to rule them all, to cop Tolkien there for a moment, but there's going to be, I think you're going to start to see the disparation of workloads into those specific hardware platforms. Again, software, it's going to start to drive the applications for how you see these things going, and it's going to be the people that can service the most amount of platforms, or the most amount of capability from a single platform even, I think are the people who are going to come out ahead. And whether it'll be us or any of our August competitors, it remains to be seen, but we want to be in that space we want to be playing hard in that space as well. >> All right Dave, last thing I want to ask you about is just career. So, it's interesting, at Vmworld, I kind of look at it in like, "wow, I'm actually, I'm sitting at a panel for Opening Acts, which is done by the VMunderground people the Sunday, day before VMworld really starts, talking about jobs and there's actually three panels, you know, careers, and financial, and some of those things, >> I'm going to be there, so come on by, >> Maybe I should join startin' at 1 o'clock Monday evening, I'm actually participating in a career cafe, talking about people and everything like that, so all that stuff's online if you want to check it out, but you know, right, you said psychology is what you studied but you worked in engineering, you were a systems engineer, and now you do messaging. The hardcore techies, there's always that boundary between the techies and the marketings, but I think it's obvious to our audience when they hear you geeking out on the TPUs and all the things there that you are not just, you're quite knowledgeable when it comes about the technology, and the good technical marketers I find tend to come from that kind of background, but give us a little bit, looking back at where you've been and where you're going, and some of those dynamics. >> Yeah, I was blessed from a really young age with a father who really loved technology. We were building PCs, like back in the eighties, right, when that was a thing, you know, "I built my AMD 386 DX box" >> Have you watched the AMC show, "Halt and Catch Fire," when that was on? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, so there was that kind of, always interesting to me, and I, with the way my mind works, I can't code to save my life, that's my brother's gift, not mine. But being able to kind of assemble things in my head was kind of always something that stuck in the back. So going through college, I worked as a lab resident as well, working in computer labs and doing that stuff. It's just been, it's been a passion, right? I had the education, was very, you know, that was my family, was very hard on the education stuff. You're going to do this. But being able to follow that passion, a lot of things fell into place with that, it's been a huge blessing. But even in grad school when I was getting my Masters in clinical counseling, I ran my own consulting business as well, just buying and selling hardware. And a lot of what I've done is just I read and ask a ton of questions. I'm out on Twitter, I'm not the brightest bulb in the, of the bunch, but I've learned to ask a lot of questions and the amount of community support in that has gotten me a lot of where I am as well. But yeah, being able to come out on this side, marketing is, like you're saying, it's kind of an anathema to the technical guys, "oh those are the guys that kind of shine the, shine the turd, so to speak," right? But being able to come in and being able to kind of influence the way and make sure that we're technically sound in what we're saying, but you have to translate some of the harder stuff, the more hardcore engineering terms into layman's terms, because not everybody's going to approach that. A CIO with a double E, or an MS in electrical engineering are going on down that road are very few and far between. A lot of these folks have grown up or developed their careers in understanding things, but being able to kind of go in and translate through that, it's been a huge blessing, it's nice. But always following the areas where, networking for me was never a strong point, but jumping in, going, "hey, I'm here to learn," and being willing to learn has been one of the biggest, biggest things I think that's kind of reinforced that career process. >> Yeah, definitely Dave, that intellectual curiosity is something that serves anyone in the tech industry quite well, 'cause, you know, nobody is going to be an expert on everything, and I've spoken to some of the brightest people in the industry, and even they realize nobody can keep up with all of it, so that being able to ask questions, participate, and Dave, thank you so much for helping me, come have this conversation, great as always to have a chat. >> Ah, great to be here Stu, thanks. >> Alright, so be sure to check out the theCUBE.net, which is where all of our content always is, what shows we will be at, all the history of where we've been. This studio is actually in Marlborough, Massachusetts, so not too far outside of Boston, right on the 495 loop, we're going to be doing lot more videos here, myself and Dave Vellante are located here, we have a good team here, so look for more content out of here, and of course our big studio out of Palo Alto, California. So if we can be of help, please feel free to reach out, I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Hi. I'm Stew Minimum. And this is a special on the ground here at the V Tug Summer Slam 2019. It is the 16th year of the event. We had hosted the Cube many times at the veto. Winter warmer and sad to say this actually the final interview for V tug it into the final V tug event. But before we can wrap up a friend of mine, Sean to lean, who is a vey architect with Delhi emcee. I've been promising him for years that we would one of these days do an interview on the Cube at the V tug. So it is the absolute final interview. So, Sean, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. All right. So, uh, not only do you work for Delhi emcee, but you're part of the social team, you know, here at the V tug event, I had conversations with Lee Ji. It was also his first time in a program on Matt. You know who I've spoken with in the past? Eso, you know, give us a little bit about your background at this event and what this community has meant to you. >> Oh, sure. Um So I'm trying to remember I think this is my fifth or sixth summer Slam. Um I mean, I basically once I started my professional career. You know, one of the first things that you know we did was look for user groups. And so when they usedto hold this event back a Gillette that was very close to home. Um and that was my first experience with the I think back then it was the New England V mug, but it's still the same community and community has always been a big part of my life and my career. I mean, I even joined, you know, AMC, Social Media Community team to basically work with influencers in the broader I t community. But I always make sure that I could do events like this, you know, in the New England area, because it's so important to be a part of this community and the I t crowd. Everybody knows everybody, and you can always learn something new just by talking to people. So, like I purposely go like during lunch and sit down with people who have never met before and introduce myself and see what they do for a living, and it's been a wonderful experience every year. It's a great >> point, you know, community is so important in these events, and especially in a regional event with local on your shirt doesn't matter as much because for the years we've been attending this, almost everybody has changed jobs. You know, companies have been acquired, companies go public, you know, people change their jobs. So it's about the learning as a community, the growth of what's happening, our careers more than kind of some of that day to day battle that, like you might happen in the storage community. >> Yeah, yeah, you got to be able to separate, Say, you know, your professional competitiveness and be able to, you know, just embrace people as people and be able to talk to them and share knowledge. And I think anyone else who's a part of the community is able to do that themselves as >> well. Yeah, it's been interesting. Virtualization was one of those galvanizing technology that brought a lot of people, you know, bloggers and people. Helping to participate in Cloud's been interesting in many ways. You know, there's some fragmentation. There's some tough competition out there yet we're all learning and you know it is most customers today. They've got, you know, hybrid cloud. They've got multi club, they've got lots of environment and therefore the user's, you know, don't necessarily look at some of those battles are going on, But they're looking to help run their business on and, you know, how are you seeing that environ? What? What? What do you hear from you know, users that you speak with today? >> So I'm here in a variety of things. There's a lot of people that are on different points. We'll call it in their cloud journey. There are some people who have just kind of gotten the edict from the board or upper management that says Cloud First, where we're gonna do everything in the cloud on dhe. Some people you know who have jumped all in with that are learning a very painful lesson, especially with their wallet. Um, we found that kind of the sweet spot in it is that hybrid cloud. There are some workloads that are absolutely great for cloud, and there are some that is just expensive. And so depending on the size of your infrastructure, you can actually save a good amount of money by setting up something local and having a cloud strategy as well. It's all about evaluating the workload. And I think earlier today during the keynotes this morning, that message was really coming across that it's not all about the cloud or even just one cloud. I mean, there's countless cloud providers out there with all sorts of different Ma operating models and pricing models. And the beauty of it is we're in a place now with the technology that people can almost nickel and dime and do what is best for them and not necessarily be told. This is how it's gonna be. This is your only option. >> Yeah. One of the things I took away from the keynotes this morning is you know, it is oh, so easy to get caught up on the latest cool tool or, you know, the wave or what people are talking about. But it's you know, what skill sets do I have? How do I make sure I understand what valuable for my business and my career? You know, it is. We bring this one to a close. You know, Sean, you know what you have on that >> Well, it's funny you brought up skill sets because a lot of that can be learned from the community. You know, if you don't have the professional skill sets Or maybe, you know, your employer might not pay the empty up for, you know, organized training. There are so many community based free trainings and webinar Siri's and stuff like that that can get you learned up in this. I remember, you know, in my career I was talking with a customer who was like, You know, we're making a shift. We're going to start being more cloud focused on here. My, I'm doing like updating their VM wear environment, and he's like, I need to get better at this. And I rattled off a few different community programs. I talked to him again six months later. He went through all that, and now he's playing around in Azure and Amazon and starting to learn some of that, and they almost gave him a promotion. They reorg, um, into a new role, where he's got more cloud responsibilities and effectively saved his job because he went to the out to the community and learned these skills. >> Yeah, but I always find in these events, right? If if you if you were open Thio, you know, new ideas, that intellectual curiosity. There is so much opportunity in tech these days. Sean won't want to give you the final word any, you know, memories you have from these events. Either you know, the main or the winter event. You know that you want to share, we bring our coverage to a close. >> I mean, you know, this event has been going on for so long, and it's always good stuff every single time. I'm going to miss the rubber chickens that that has always stuck out and to Mia's as one of the guys don't >> know that that's Hans from GM, where, you know, brings the rubber chickens will throw the little key chains at you when you go, Yeah, >> but you know, in general, you know, there's a lot of events out there where, you know, it's it's, you know, the morning and maybe the afternoon, the party afterwards and I'm not here to be like Party party party, but is almost just as important as the event itself. And I've never seen any other user group or event like that that really puts Satan's that time for networking. You get almost just as much business done. You know, they're talking to people, you know, when you're waiting in line for lobster and stuff like that Here, um, as you know, just kind of mingling around during the day. You meet so many people and make business connections and everything at the after party, Which is why I keep thinking they invest so much money in the after hours. Piece >> of it, I think Great point to end on, Shawn. The community is really central to what goes on there. This event. Listen to the customers and, you know, grew that the breath of the topics that they covered, they kept to keep on it. So 16 years of phenomenal run. I wanna have a big shout out to everyone that helped put the Vita gone. Of course, that is Chris and Don Harney at the court. Chris Williams did a lot of work there, but many other people that helped behind the scenes to make it happen. And of course, it was always the users at this event that with drivers for it, as well as the sponsors that helped participate And through this so Sean to lean. Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the Cube alumni. And I'm still minimum. Thank you. As always, for watching this program has been our pleasure. Tiu c All of the V tugs. If you go to the cube dot net, go up in the search bar in touch via tug. You could see previous years We've had so many great guests on the program. You know, I got to interview some of the alumni from the Patriots, which were some definite highlight for me as well as great technical content and good friends that I've made over the years. So with that, we're signing off from the final V tug here in Maine and thank you, as always for watching the Cube.

>> Hi. I'm stupid, man. And this is a special on the ground here a the be Tugg Summer Slam and happy to welcome Thio, the program A longtime friend. But first time on the program. Somebody that's known this community for many years. Louisiana Coast is a senior systems engineer in the hyper convert infrastructure space at BM. Where Luigi great to talk >> to you again. >> Thank you. Stew. Actually, this has been one of my bucket list item since e. M. C. World 2010 when the Cube actually first started. >> Yeah. So you've been watching since the beginning. You knew me back from, you know, disclosure. I used to work at AMC, and I've been working with being work for a long time. So you've had a number of jobs. One of those consistencies out there is. I know when I would go to the winter warmer, I would usually see them. There are. Your wife is helped out at the event here also, So give us a way to start off a little bit. Like what is this event being met? You, Your career. Oh, and your friendships over the years. Oh, >> man, that's That's a great question to do. Actually, um, I don't think I would be where I am today without this particular user group. It was my first ever user group in my first ever, really major exposure into the M. We're in January 2010 at the first winter warmer that I attended. So for me, it it actually gave me exposure into the technology and then to see the community and the user's behind that. And I was already following you on Twitter at the time. And you were kind of my mentor into the social space, Ian getting involved in there and to have it all accumulate together. And it was just for me, honestly was amazing. And it was life changing >> liberty. My apologies for introducing to the quagmire that is currently Twitter. But you know l series, right? You know, you got on. You've been in a huge proponent of community activities there. You've now attended. You really think so? You've been at PM world of numbers. Free tip. There one you've been Tonto discovers with H P. When you were there. You know what's different about, you know, a regional event like this compared >> to some of the big ones. >> Well, I think the conversations that you have at most of those events of the same, I think where the benefit regionally is, you can meet up with these people afterwards for coffee, for tea. You can continue that conversation in person a lot easier on and also having the same being in the same geographical region. It helps you relate to some of it. You can. You can laugh about some of the nuances with weather or just, you know, the local sports and what's happening there. And you could just It's more like home, Right? And you get that sense of comfort when you go out to a big conference, right? Yes, you're gonna know people. Were you in a strange environment? You kind of like your little more reserved. >> Like when I talked to Chris Giladi here. He says they don't like when we talk about the Patriots, but your big patriots, >> I have diarrhea. >> Okay. All right. The other thing, you really talk about jobs here. You know something? I know over the years, I've loved helping introducing people on helping them get jobs. The S E positions are always something that every company is going to walk around this expo floor. You're always going to see people that are hiring, and you're gonna find people that that that need jobs. You know what, your >> ears I I would say that's >> the biggest thing about the regional area is when you're actually in the market for a new job. I mean, for me, if you look at me. I started out years ago as a sys admin. Then I went to Tech marketing, and I went to Social Media Marketing. And now I'm doing Essie work for GM wear, which is still a dream, in my opinion, to be working at GM where but for me, it's you build those connections and you have those conversations, those real world conversations. I was just speaking with a gentleman earlier who's possibly contemplating a job change, right? That's not a conversation he would have. Just normally he feels comfortable with these users in the experiences that they've had and and he wants to learn from that. And I'm happily to share that information with anyone. >> Yeah, Luigi, what are some of the things that you've seen? You change the industry, that impact, you know, you were involved with, You know, Matt and Sean hoping Thio, with the social media aspect of this event, Really? You know, being an open 10 toe embrace, not just >> virtualization cloud computing, obviously things like Dev ops, achieving work words or something that a heavily focused on it. >> Yeah, I would think from, if I look at it, I was actually >> having this conversation last night with Hans and are a friend of his, and I was explaining to her about the V tug and how it came about. And, you know, if you really think about back in 2012 you know, companies weren't talking multi cloud or multi virtualization technologies and the user groups started that. And if you look at where the the trend is now in the marketplace, it's plowed. It's this. It's that, you know. So the user's started to dictate that back then. So for me, it's really about that right? He and you know it allows you to stay abreast with the thing. And I don't know if I really entered your question because I'm a went off on a tangent with my a d d. But it was more about that watching the technology change and being ableto have those conversations with with people in from from NSC roll perspective, it keeps you in the touch of actually what the user's they're going through because you listen to them, you know, they start talking to you, even if you could sit in on some of these sessions like they start posing real challenges to you. >> All right, So, Luigi, you know what? I want to give you the final word. You know, we talk a little about the community, how you participated in at the end of an error. So you know what? You're takeaways here in any final memories >> that you want from the >> final memories would have to be my very first V tug. Or at the time was New England. The mug summer slammed. It was my wife's birthday. And I said, Your baby, I'm going to Maine for the day. And she's like, What's my birthday? Yeah, but this is gonna be important for us in the long run, from a career perspective. And here it is, nine years later. You know, I came home that that day with three lobsters for her. You know, I got a sweet talker. >> Um, but, >> you know, nine years later, she works and participates in the user group and gets back. And I now work for the company that we were supporting as a user in community. So for me, that's gotta go full circle. It's pretty surreal if you ask me. >> I >> had a question for you. Stay. >> Oh, I don't know if you turn the mike on, >> I know that I'm a diehard Yankees fan, But which way do you go? Yankees Red Sox? >> Well, come on, we do. You know that Like you. And like a certain Tom Brady, I am still a Yankee fan born and raised in New Jersey S o. Just don't talk about it and we win too much. But my boss is a die hard Red Sox fan, and New England fans are pretty fanatical. And don't don't you understand? Like Patriots fans have become just like 80 perennial winners. You think that they're always going to drive that and a little bit too arrogant. So looking forward to the banner unveiling for the Patriots number nine. Number six for TB 12 man, Team it, of course I will be there I've been lucky enough to be. It was actually it was the Giants connection with a tree. It's that got me there. But I do love football, and I'll miss having the V tug event. There was fun, you know, not meeting one with the alumni from there s so, uh, already, you know, sharing my share in my allegiance is there. I have not converted to the Red Sox, then was a nice place to go. But I'm more of a football God and the Patriots are my number one t never. Yeah, I think I >> think that's the other thing that I respect about. Yours were both patriots in Yankee things that I had to throw that out there. >> All right, well, Luigi, welcome to the Cube, Alumni. Thanks so much always for your >> support over the year and your contributions community. >> And be sure to check out the cute Dunnett were, of course, at PM world. We've got the entire executive team on all the big flower shows. I'm student event as always. Thank you so >> much for watching