>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Welcome back to The Cube's, continuous coverage with day two of UI Path forward. Five. My name is Dave Ante. I'm here with my co-host Dave Nicholson. And you are watching The Cube. It's all about the robots, the automations, the transformations and beyond. Audi Gana is here. She's group executive at Vodacom and Niva is back. She's senior director of telecommunications industry for UiPath. Ladies, welcome to the Cube. >>I thank you very much. >>So Vodacom a leading telco in in Africa across the continent. Tell us more about the company. >>The company is a traditionally telecommunications company, but our vision 2025 is first to transition from being a telco to a technology company. So you'll find that a lot of the use cases that we've actually started embarking on, combined the combination of telco and FinTech. And we've got a lot of RPA bot also supporting the FinTech platform, which is quite a major step in our strategy. >>So, you know, it's interesting Mark Andreessen's famous comment, Every company's a software company. I like to think every company's a technology company, technology driven. So what does that actually mean for you? Is it like a split brain between FinTech? Cuz it's pretty clear that FinTech is always a highly, you know, technology oriented and telecom. Are they sort of together driving a, a technology business? How does that >>Work? It's, it's a, it's a converge use of the technology to add value to the customer. So what we wanna do is to get to the point where we have converged services where the Telecommunicate, cuz at the end of the day in the African market, you'll find that there's a lot of markets that are unbanked. So you find that a cell phone is a means of communication and a a mobile platform for the users. So it's a natural progression for our company to actually play in both spaces. And I think one of the things I find quite interesting is the levels of trust that a lot of citizens have in our financial platform. In that even some of the governments are paying social grants using the platform. And so it almost becomes, without the phones a lot of people cannot function type of scenario. >>Nevas is your role a global role? >>Yes, it is a global role. >>Okay. So it's interesting cause you're I think based down under, right? I am. Is that true? Okay. Obviously spent some time in, in, in the African continent. How are you, what are you seeing in terms of the, the trends in, in telecommunications that, and are you noticing there's gotta be differences across different regions? You know, a lot of times you hear, oh no, there's really kind of a global world out and I know it is, but telco seems to be one of the industries that has some uniqueness within the different breaches. What are you seeing? >>Look, we are privileged to work with more than 200 telecoms around the world. But clearly from a technology perspective, there are some regions that have embraced technology sooner than the others, particularly when it comes to automation. Now we do have use cases with all of them that we are, you know, the 200 we are working with. But the extent to which they become strategic partners, Varie is, you know, what I find is in, in the US we are doing a lot in the customer experience space with the telecoms in aj it's more back of house. And with telecoms like Vodacom, it's really strategic. You know, automation is being applied practically in every facet of work. And you know, sometimes that could be because the demand is just so great for connectivity, you know, at times there's a skills gap, but it does vary. But what's reassuring is that there is a journey and you know, at this event what I have seen is telecoms wanting to learn from other telecoms. And I must say Artie has been in huge demand. We did about 22 meetings yesterday with others wanting to know, which again is that strategic trend. >>Artie, my understanding is you've been at this for a while, this automation journey for quite some time and p i pass. Interesting. I mean it's a company that's founded in 2005 and kind of did sort of its own thing for a long time and then realized it had lightning in a bottle Yeah. For a mid last decade. But my understanding is you've seen it all. You've seen the, the legacy platforms. And so tell me about your personal journey with automation and then the companies. >>Okay, so there's the automation pre rpa, which was strangely enough, I come from banking, got a finance degree, did automated ations in one of the bigger banks. And somehow I transitioned. And I mean from a history perspective, the one of the previous platforms, which was the biggest one at the time, that's where I got to learn about rpa. And then there's another vendor that we then use in another company. So this is almost my third vendor that I'm experiencing in the RPA space. Having joined RPA space in 2015, apparently I'm kind of a veteran, >>So, So what are you seeing is what's the difference between, I mean let's call UI path, that was sort of a modern focus on simple to deploy. That's really how they get started when I first found them. How do you compare what UiPath has? And there are others, there are other modern platforms to sort of the legacy platforms. What's the >>Difference? I think it's the diversity and the applicability of the technology across multiple industries is something that still amazes me up until today. Because the kind of customers I've been meeting today, I, I would not, I met a guy who owns an ice cream company and I'm like, where would automation come in here? But he's actually quite a big customer of, of UiPath, you know. So I think that's one thing I appreciate. I think the ease of use, it has actually allowed for a lot of people to be part of the digital transformation. I think in the his, in the past technology has been seen as something that was a bit elite and that you needed to have X amount of skills and level of education. Whereas the RPA industry has almost bridged that gap in actually bringing along as many people in the journey in terms of digital transformation. And the fourth industrial revolution is now starting to become more inclusive >>Horizontal across industries. >>Yeah. >>So Vodacom headquartered in South Africa. Okay. But presence throughout the continent. Yes. I imagine that various geographies have various twists and quirks to them and different needs. But as a general premise, the African continent has led the rest of the world in terms of embracing these little mobile devices for the most mission. Critical from a personal perspective things, right? Yeah. So if you, if you're already trusting all of your finances and even interaction with your government from a financial perspective. Yeah. When you say technology platform technology is moving forward, what's more critical from that? Or how do you, how do you, how do you branch off from that? What are some of the other things that you can share with us that you're looking towards in the future that may, that that may trickle over here eventually? >>So I think what one of the things we started playing around with quite well is actually the convergence of machine learning, AI and rpa. You would find that a lot of research will tell you that this is the future of the automation and for us, we are actually living the future in that we have civil use cases that are actually extracting a lot of business value. Where we've realized that RPA in of itself, and this is obviously oversimplifying the technology is almost the unlimited hands on keyboards that you could ever have, right? And then machine learning and AI almost the becomes the unlimited brains. So when you then combine the tool, you almost have this strong technology that can revolutionize how we operate and service our customers. >>Well how do, how does that translate? Can you translate that into a user experience at this point? So I mean, we're talking about people who they, they have a motor license, they don't have a desktop computer at home. Yeah. This is their portal into the world. >>So you find that if you're speaking pure telco, and I'm obviously over simplifying there some nowhere an engineer, right? But I think at, at a very simplified level, there's a lot of legacy technology that is used in the telco space and you'll find that because of that, there's a lot of lack of integration. And you'll find that the reasons why a lot of customers call corners is because there's poor integration in a lot of instances. And it's, it's, it's, it's ad hoc. So it's not as if the system is failed completely. So what we've now done is to try and see how do we use machine learning to pick up on those anomalies on the network, right? And because each time something breaks, right, it's almost a fixed way to fix it and therefore the machine learning picking up there normally almost the hands over to the RPA bot to fix the problem within the network element. But that means is that from a customer experience perspective, instead of you actually realizing there's a problem, we've fixed it before you even know that there's a problem. And therefore, and as you can imagine, it means that you then call the course into less because now you don't have the reason to complain because we've proactively identified the problem and we proactively use RPA then to fix it. So we almost have the almost like a self-healing element in within the, the, the RPA AI space. >>You know, I think of, we don't talk about the data, we haven't talked about the data much this week. I think in many respects this industry is, is data industry. Our automation is all about what you can do with the data. You said unlimited hands, unlimited brains. Cuz to me you have unlimited data and a lot of times you just can't handle it. Yeah. So what's the data angle on all this? >>So firstly, I know a lot of people will say data is the new oil. No, >>Right? So I would never >>Say that. I always though, I think I always ask people if I give you a bucket of brain crude oil, right? What are you gonna do with it? Right? Right. And similar to data, right? So I want to almost equate data to that crude oil element, but if you don't know how to refine it, process it, get it to be reliable, it's very useless in of its natural sense. So I think one of the things we've realized is that leveraging of the analogy of the, the machine learning in the brain, if you are in the sales space, you forever trying to push new sales, right? And then chances are when a customer leaves you, you are almost in a reactor state. So, and I imagine a world where you could proactively identify a customer with the propensity to leave your company because a lot of customers don't just, they are situations where they'll be walking down the street competitor calls them, they leave, not because they were unhappy, but a lot of customers actually had several engagements with us that were not pleasant, whatever the definition is. >>So we then saw there was almost five types of attributes that resulted in customers leaving us. So what then that said was imagine if you are an account manager, right? And you got told UiPath P two I limited has experienced 1, 2, 3, 4. Right? Actually, please go engage with them because something is happening. It means that as an account manager, you are then equipped to have a meaningful engagement with the customer because you're saying, hi UiPath, I see you've had X amount of job calls and you've had x amount of complaints in our call center. What is happening is it could be, could be your network, maybe the tower where you are, do you, And then the conversation becomes so meaningful. And I think even during covid what we found is lot of customers started using less of our data, not because they were unhappy, but it became an affordability thing, right? >>Because this is a thousands and thousands of, of data elements and pieces around Yeah. About customer transactions. There's no way one human would be able to go through all of the data and make me meaningful decisions out of it. So we then found that some customers were complaining about affordability. So we then built another model that says if an account manager is talking to a customer and they're struggling from an affordability perspective, what's the next best offer you can make to your customer while you're engaging? And then if in, if, if now your UiPath takes up that offer, then you'd find that the bot does the post engagement provisioning on the system. Because now if you then said, I've only, I can only afford 10 lines, but only pay 10 gigs, but not 10 lines and 20 gigs, that is at least better than us losing the customer. >>Yeah. Right? And we offering them almost a downward migration type of situation. Then the bot does that on the system. So you would find that we almost playing in the space of a human, human centered, intelligent automation where machine learning becomes the brain, the person is amplified in how they operate at the customer. And then the RPA bot becomes the hands that executes on that. And as the account manager you focusing on engagement and convincing, which is really what people are great and selling as opposed to going through all of the pro cause VOCA is a lot of products. So as opposed to having a person going through the products and trying to find the best product for you, you know, so we, we are using machine learning to assist the >>Humans. I I mean in every, every interaction is consistent in that case. I know I sometimes have to call three or four times to find a professional that knows enough that can help me. Yes. Such a frustrating thing as a consumer. So you are, are you, you're attacking churn with automation. So we haven't even talked about how you guys are working together, your journey and all that stuff, but, but how are you guys working here? What are you, what are you doing? You know, in addition to what you just described with with ui. iPad? >>So I think my portfolio's quite wide. So I am, my team is in every single vertical in the organization from customer care to the consumer enterprise business units to finance technology, network compliance. And we do all of this in about six countries, right? So one of the things we've actually realized is that if we are looking at customer service, we wanted to understand why do customers call us? And I think I came from a point of ignorance because I'm not from telco, so I actually realized that if we're talking billing and finance revenue assurance, customers call us because we build them arly. But technically speaking it's our systems that there's something that resulted in the customer calling us. So why do we not know about our own systems? Why are we waiting for the customers to call us? And literally those are the questions I was asking cuz I felt like why are we, why are we waiting for the customers to call us? >>So we then then found a way to try and see within the billing systems where do the breakages happen, right? So that we fix them before the customer has to call us again. So then again from a billing perspective, it means that cuz it the billing element can come in two ways where we are giving you a service and not charging you for it. We then have revenue leakage or we, you are consuming something and we are overcharging you. Then you call us and say, Whatcom is stealing my data. Yeah, you're right out there. I promise you nobody wakes up in the morning and wants to take one gig of your data. So it almost becomes a day integrity initiative that results in good customer service but then result in eradication of course. As opposed to us waiting for customers to tell us what the problem is and trying to help them fast. Cuz that's generally always been what I've picked up the energy around customer service. How do we help you fast? I'm saying why must you call us when our systems had fail that? So we almost trying to see how do we use the technology internally to give customers a better experience and then also have the financial benefits that we are now starting to see happening in the, >>What's the scope of, of your like how many automations, how many bots? Can you give us a sense >>Of this? So right now I think we over on with all of the four, five countries that we are in, we over 400 bots. Wow. Okay. So we started in 2004 years ago, this is my fourth year in Voca. We, and we are not using just one product with UiPath. It became a platform because as we became across more kinds of problems, I think what I've appreciated about part is how we've actually created a partnership. Instead of them trying to sell me products for the sake of consuming products, it became a, this is my problem, right? And then somehow they would whip out the product that solves my problem type of thing. So it became a ecosystem of solutions that >>You must love hanging out with Artie. >>I absolutely do and love, you know, I've spent a career in telecommunications myself and you know, the best days were when you could deliver an outstanding customer experience. And as you can see from what Artie has achieved when you were more proactive and predictive, you can serve your customers so much more effectively and that just lift the morale of the team because we all, you know, have this purpose in doing our jobs. But this is automation and AI built into every part of that customer journey. So end to end, you know, the customer's much happier. You know there's a problem before the customer knows you can solve the problem in most cases before they even know. And that's just what we are all in business to do to make things better. >>Great story. Thank you so much for sharing. Appreciate coming back >>In the queue. Thank you very much. Thank >>You. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Don't forget, go to silicon angle.com, all the news, go to the cube.net. You'll see me all these videos are available on demand as well as the other events that we do. Dave VTE for Dave Nicholson. Keep it right there. Right back at forward five UI.

(upbeat electronic music plays) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCube's coverage of .NEXT 2021 Virtual. I'm John Furrier, hosts of theCube. We have two great guests, Rajiv Mirani, who's the Chief Technology Officer, and Thomas Cornely, SVP of Product Management. Day Two keynote product, the platform, announcements, news. A lot of people, Rajiv, are super excited about the, the platform, uh, moving to a subscription model. Everything's kind of coming into place. How are the customers, uh, seeing this? How they adopted hybrid cloud as a hybrid, hybrid, hybrid, data, data, data? Those are the, those are the, that's the, that's where the puck is right now. You guys are there. How are customers seeing this? >> Mirani: Um, um, great question, John, by the way, great to be back here on theCube again this year. So when we talk to our customers, pretty much, all of them agreed that for them, the ideal state that they want to be in is a hybrid world, right? That they want to essentially be able to run both of those, both on the private data center and the public cloud, and sort of have a common platform, common experience, common, uh, skillset, same people managing, managing workloads across both locations. And unfortunately, most of them don't have that that tooling available today to do so, right. And that's where the platform, the Nutanix platform's come a long way. We've always been great at running in the data center, running every single workload, we continue to make great strides on our core with the increased performance for, for the most demanding, uh, workloads out there. But what we have done in the last couple of years has also extended this platform to run in the public cloud and essentially provide the same capabilities, the same operational behavior across locations. And that's when you're seeing a lot of excitement from our customers because they really want to be in that state, for it to have the common tooling across work locations, as you can imagine, we're getting traction. Customers who want to move workloads to public cloud, they don't want to spend the effort to refactor them. Or for customers who really want to operate in a hybrid mode with things like disaster recovery, cloud bursting, workloads like that. So, you know, I think we've made a great step in that direction. And we look forward to doing more with our customers. >> Furrier: What is the big challenge that you're seeing with this hybrid transition from your customers and how are you solving that specifically? >> Mirani: Yeah. If you look at how public and private operate today, they're very different in the kind of technologies used. And most customers today will have two separate teams, like one for their on-prem workloads, using a certain set of tooling, a second completely different team, managing a completely different set of workloads, but with different technologies. And that's not an ideal state in some senses, that's not true hybrid, right? It's like creating two new silos, if anything. And our vision is that you get to a point where both of these operate in the same manner, you've got the same people managing all of them, the same workloads anyway, but similar performance, similar SaaS. So they're going to literally get to point where applications and data can move back and forth. And that's, that's, that's where I think the real future is for hybrid >> Furrier: I have to ask you a personal question. As the CTO, you've got be excited with the architecture that's evolving with hybrid and multi-cloud, I mean, I mean, it's pretty, pretty exciting from a tech standpoint, what is your reaction to that? >> Mirani: %100 and it's been a long time coming, right? We have been building pieces of this over years. And if you look at all the product announcements, Nutanix has made over the last few years and the acquisitions that made them and so on, there's been a purpose behind them. That's been a purpose to get to this model where we can operate a customer's workloads in a hybrid environment. So really, really happy to see all of that come together. Years and years of work finally finally bearing fruit. >> Furrier: Well, we've had many conversations in the past, but it congratulates a lot more to do with so much more action happening. Thomas, you get the keys to the kingdom, okay, and the product management you've got to prioritize, you've got to put it together. What are the key components of this Nutanix cloud platform? The hybrid cloud, multi-cloud strategy that's in place, because there's a lot of headroom there, but take us through the key components today and then how that translates into hybrid multi-cloud for the future. >> Cornely: Certainly, John, thank you again and great to be here, and kind of, Rajiv, you said really nicely here. If you look at our portfolio at Nutanix, what we have is great technologies. They've been sold as a lot of different products in the past, right. And what we've done last few months is we kind of bring things together, simplify and streamline, and we align everything around a cloud platform, right? And this is really the messaging that we're going after is look, it's not about the price of our solutions, but business outcomes for customers. And so are we focusing on pushing the cloud platform, which we encompasses five key areas for us, which we refer to as cloud infrastructure, no deficiencies running your workloads. Cloud management, which is how you're going to go and actually manage, operate, automate, and get governance. And then services on top that started on all around data, right? So we have unified storage, finding the objects, data services. We have database services. Now we have outset of desktop services, which is for EMC. So all of this, the big change for us is this is something that, you know, you can consume in terms of solutions and consume on premises. As Rajiv discussed, you know, we can take the same platform and deploy it in public cloud regions now, right? So you can now get no seamless hybrid cloud, same operating model. But increasingly what we're doing is taking your solutions and re-targeting issues and problems at workers running native public clouds. So think of this as going, after automating more governance, security, you know, finding objects, database services, wherever you're workload is running. So this is taking this portfolio and reapplying it, and targeting on prem at the edge in hybrid and in christening public cloud in ATV. >> Furrier: That's awesome. I've been watching some of the footage and I was noticing quite a lot of innovation around virtualized, networking, disaster, recovery security, and data services. It's all good. You guys were, and this is in your wheelhouse. I know you guys are doing this for many, many years. I want to dive deeper into that because the theme right now that we've been reporting on, you guys are hitting right here what the keynote is cloud scale is about faster development, right? Cloud native is about speed, it's about not waiting for these old departments, IT or security to get back to them in days or weeks and responding to either policy or some changes, you got to move faster. And data, data is critical in all of this. So we'll start with virtualized networking because networking again is a key part of it. The developers want to go faster. They're shifting left, take us through the virtualization piece of how important that is. >> Mirani: Yeah, that's actually a great question as well. So if you think about it, virtual networking is the first step towards building a real cloud like infrastructure on premises that extends out to include networking as well. So one of the key components of any cloud is automation. Another key component is self service and with the API, is it bigger on virtual networking All of that becomes much simpler, much more possible than having to, you know, qualify it, work with someone there to reconfigure physical networks and slots. We can, we can do that in a self service way, much more automated way. But beyond that, the, the, the notion of watching networks is really powerful because it helps us to now essentially extend networks and, and replicate networks anywhere on the private data center, but in the public cloud as well. So now when customers move their workloads, we'd already made that very simple with our clusters offering. But if you're only peek behind the layers a little bit, it's like, well, yea, but the network's not the same on the side. So now it, now it means that a go re IP, my workloads create new subnets and all of that. So there was a little bit of complication left in that process. So to actual network that goes away also. So essentially you can repeat the same network in both locations. You can literally move your workloads, no redesign of your network acquired and still get that self service and automation capabilities of which cookies so great step forward, it really helps us complete the infrastructure as a service stack. We had great storage capabilities before, we create compute capabilities before, and sort of networking the third leg and all of that. >> Furrier: Talk about the complexity here, because I think a lot of people will look at dev ops movement and say, infrastructure is code when you go to one cloud, it's okay. You can, you can, you know, make things easier. Programmable. When, when you start getting into data center, private data centers, or essentially edges now, cause if it's distributed cloud environment or cloud operations, it's essentially one big cloud operation. So the networks are different. As you said, this is a big deal. Okay. This is sort of make infrastructure as code happen in multiple environments across multiple clouds is not trivial. Could you talk about the main trends and how you guys see this evolving and how you solve that? >> Mirani: Yeah. Well, the beauty here is that we are actually creating the same environment everywhere, right? From, from, from point of view of networking, compute, and storage, but also things like security. So when you move workloads, things with security, posture also moves, which is also super important. It's a really hard problem, and something a lot of CIO's struggle with, but having the same security posture in public and private clouds reporting as well. So with this, with this clusters offering and our on-prem offering competing with the infrastructure service stack, you may not have this capability where your operations really are unified across multicloud hybrid cloud in any way you run. >> Furrier: Okay, so if I have multiple cloud vendors, there are different vendors. You guys are creating a connection unifying those three. Is that right? >> Mirani: Essentially, yes, so we're running the same stack on all of them and abstracting away the differences between the clouds that you can run operations. >> Furrier: And when the benefits, the benefits of the customers are what? What's the main, what's the main benefit there? >> Mirani: Essentially. They don't have to worry about, about where their workloads are running. Then they can pick the best cloud for their workloads. It can seamlessly move them between Cloud. They can move their data over easily, and essentially stop worrying about getting locked into a single, into a single cloud either in a multi-cloud scenario or in a hybrid cloud scenario, right. There many, many companies now were started on a cloud first mandate, but over time realized that they want to move workloads back to on-prem or the other way around. They have traditional workloads that they started on prem and want to move them to public cloud now. And we make that really simple. >> Furrier: Yeah. It's kind of a trick question. I wanted to tee that up for Thomas, because I love that kind of that horizontal scales, what the cloud's all about, but when you factor data into it, this is the sweet spot, because this is where, you know, I think it gets really exciting and complicated too, because, you know, data's got, can get unwieldy pretty quickly. You got state got multiple applications, Thomas, what's your, what can you share the data aspect of this? This is super, super important. >> Absolutely. It's, you know, it's really our core source of differentiation, when you think about it. That's what makes Nutanix special right? In, in the market. When we talk about cloud, right. Actually, if you've been following Nutanix for years, you know, we've been talking a lot about making infrastructure invisible, right? The new way for us to talk about what we're doing, with our vision is, is to make clouds invisible so that in the end, you can focus on your own business, right? So how do you make Cloud invisible? Lots of technology is at the application layer to go and containerize applications, you know, make them portable, modernize them, make them cloud native. That's all fine when you're not talking of state class containers, that the simplest thing to move around. Right. But as we all know, you know, applications end of the day, rely on data and measure the data across all of these different locations. I'm not even going to go seconds. Cause that's almost a given, you're talking about attribution. You can go straight from edge to on-prem to hybrid, to different public cloud regions. You know, how do you go into the key control of that and get consistency of all of this, right? So that's part of it is being aware of where your data is, right? But the other part is that inconsistency of set up data services regardless of where you're running. And so this is something that we look at the cloud platform, where we provide you the cloud infrastructure go and run the applications. But we also built into the cloud platform. You get all of your core data services, whether you have to consume file services, object services, or database services to really support your application. And that will move with your application, that is the key thing here by bringing everything onto the same platform. You now can see all operations, regardless of where you're running the application. The last thing that we're adding, and this is a new offering that we're just launching, which is a service, it's called, delete the dead ends. Which is a solution that gives you visibility and allow you to go and get better governance around all your data, wherever it may live, across on-prem edge and public clouds. That's a big deal again, because to manage it, you first have to make sense of it and get control over it. And that's what data answer's is going to be all about. >> Furrier: You know, one of the things we've we've been reporting on is data is now a competitive advantage, especially when you have workflows involved, um, super important. Um, how do you see customers going to the edge? Because if you have this environment, how does the data equation, Thomas, go to the edge? How do you see that evolving? >> Cornely: So it's yeah. I mean, edge is not one thing. And that's actually the biggest part of the challenge of defining what the edge is depending on the customer that you're working with. But in many cases you get data ingesting or being treated at the edge that you then have to go move to either your private cloud or your public cloud environment to go and basically aggregate it, analyze it and get insights from it. Right? So this is where a lot of our technologies, whether it's, I think the object's offering built in, we'll ask you to go and make the ingest over great distances over the network, right? And then have your common data to actually do an ethics audit over our own object store. Right? Again, announcements, we brought into our storage solutions here, we want to then actually organize it then actually organize it directly onto the objects store solution. Nope. Using things, things like or SG select built into our protocols. So again, make it easy for you to go in ingest anywhere, consolidate your data, and then get value out of it. Using some of the latest announcements on the API forms. >> Furrier: Rajiv databases are still the heart of most applications in the enterprise these days, but databases are not just the data is a lot of different data. Moving around. You have a lot a new data engineering platforms coming in. A lot of customers are scratching their head and, and they want to kind of be, be ready and be ready today. Talk about your view of the database services space and what you guys are doing to help enterprise, operate, manage their databases. >> Mirani: Yeah, it's a super important area, right? I mean, databases are probably the most important workload customers run on premises and pretty close on the public cloud as well. And if you look at it recently, the tooling that's available on premises, fairly traditional, but the clouds, when we integrate innovation, we're going to be looking at things like Amazon's relational database service makes it an order of magnitude simpler for our customers to manage the database. At the same time, also a proliferation of databases and we have the traditional Oracle and SQL server. But if you have open source Mongo, DB, and my SQL, and a lot of post-grads, it's a lot of different kinds of databases that people have to manage. And now it just becomes this cable. I have the spoke tooling for each one of them. So with our Arab product, what we're doing is essentially creating a data management layer, a database management layer that unifies operations across your databases and across locations, public cloud and private clouds. So all the operations that you need, you do, which are very complicated in, in, in, in with traditional tooling now, provisioning of databases backing up and restoring them providing a true time machine capabilities, so you can pull back transactions. We can copy data management for your data first. All of that has been tested in Era for a wide variety of database engines, your choice of database engine at the back end. And so the new capabilities are adding sort of extend that lead that we have in that space. Right? So, so one of the things we announced at .Next is, is, is, is one-click storage scaling. So one of the common problems with databases is as they grow over time, it's not running out of storage capacity. Now re-provisions to storage for a database, migrate all the data where it's weeks and months of look, right? Well, guess what? With Era, you can do that in one click, it uses the underlying AOS scale-out architecture to provision more storage and it does it have zero downtime. So on the fly, you can resize your databases that speed, you're adding some security capabilities. You're adding some capabilities around resilience. Era continues to be a very exciting product for us. And one of the things, one of the real things that we are really excited about is that it can really unify database operations between private and public. So in the future, we can also offer an aversion of Era, which operates on native public cloud instances and really excited about that. >> Furrier: Yeah. And you guys got that two X performance on scaling up databases and analytics. Now the big part point there, since you brought up security, I got to ask you, how are you guys talking about security? Obviously it's embedded in from the beginning. I know you guys continue to talk about that, but talk about, Rajiv, the security on, on that's on everyone's mind. Okay. It goes evolving. You seeing ransomware are continuing to happen more and more and more, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. What do you guys, how are you guys helping customers stay secure? >> Mirani: Security is something that you always have to think about as a defense in depth when it comes to security, right? There's no one product that, that's going to do everything for you. That said, what we are trying to do is to essentially go with the gamut of detection, prevention, and response with our security, and ransom ware is a great example of that, right. We've partnered with Qualys to essentially be able to do a risk assessment of your workloads, to basically be able to look into your workloads, see whether they have been bashed, whether they have any known vulnerabilities and so on. To try and prevent malware from infecting your workloads in the first place, right? So that's, that's the first line of defense. Now not systems will be perfect. Some, some, some, some malware will probably get in anyway But then you detect it, right. We have a database of all the 4,000 ransomware signatures that you can use to prevent ransomware from, uh, detecting ransom ware if it does infect the system. And if that happens, we can prevent it from doing any damage by putting your fire systems and storage into read-only mode, right. We can also prevent lateral spread of, of your ransomware through micro-segmentation. And finally, if you were, if you were to invade, all those defenses that you were actually able to encrypt data on, on, on a filer, we have immutable snapshots, they can recover from those kinds of attacks. So it's really a defense in depth approach. And in keeping with that, you know, we also have a rich ecosystem of partners while this is one of them, but older networks market sector that we work with closely to make sure that our customers have the best tooling around and the simplest way to manage security of their infrastructure. >> Furrier: Well, I got to say, I'm very impressed guys, by the announcements from the team I've been, we've been following Nutanix in the beginning, as you know, and now it's back in the next phase of the inflection point. I mean, looking at my notebook here from the announcements, the VPC virtual networking, DR Observability, zero trust security, workload governance, performance expanded availability, and AWS elastic DR. Okay, we'll get to that in a second, clusters on Azure preview cloud native ecosystem, cloud control plane. I mean, besides all the buzzword bingo, that's going on there, this is cloud, this is a cloud native story. This is distributed computing. This is virtualization, containers, cloud native, kind of all coming together around data. >> Cornely: What you see here is, I mean, it is clear that it is about modern applications, right? And this is about shifting strategy in terms of focusing on the pieces where we're going to be great at. And a lot of these are around data, giving you data services, data governance, not having giving you an invisible platform that can be running in any cloud. And then partnering, right. And this is just recognizing what's going on in the world, right? People want options, customers and options. When it comes to cloud, they want options to where they're running the reports, what options in terms of, whether it be using to build the modern applications. Right? So our big thing here is providing and being the best platform to go and actually support for Devers to come in and build and run their new and modern applications. That means that for us supporting a broad ecosystem of partners, entrepreneur platform, you know, we announced our partnership with Red Hat a couple of months ago, right? And this is going to be a big deal for us because again, we're bringing two leaders in the industry that are eminently complimentary when it comes to providing you a complete stack to go and build, run, and manage your client's applications. When you do that on premises, utilizing like the preferred ATI environment to do that. Using the Red Hat Open Shift, or, you're doing this open to public cloud and again, making it seamless and easy, to move the applications and their supporting data services around, around them that support them, whether they're running on prem in hybrid winter mechanic. So client activity is a big deal, but when it comes to client activity, the way we look at this, it's all about giving customers choice, choice of that from services and choice of infrastructure service. >> Furrier: Yeah. Let's talk to the red hat folks, Rajiv, it's you know, it's, they're an operating system thinking company. You know, you look at the internet now in the cloud and edge, and on-premise, it's essentially an operating system. you need your backup and recovery needs to disaster recovery. You need to have the HCI, you need to have all of these elements part of the system. It's, it's, it's, it's building on top of the existing Nutanix legacy, then the roots and the ecosystem with new stuff. >> Mirani: Right? I mean, it's, in fact, the Red Hat part is a great example of, you know, the perfect marriage, if you will, right? It's, it's, it's the best in class platform for running the cloud-native workloads and the best in class platform with a service offering in there. So two really great companies coming together. So, so really happy that we could get that done. You know, the, the point here is that cloud native applications still need infrastructure to run off, right? And then that infrastructure, if anything, the demands on that and growing it since it's no longer that hail of, I have some box storage, I have some filers and, you know, just don't excite them, set. People are using things like object stores, they're using databases increasingly. They're using the Kafka and Map Reduce and all kinds of data stores out there. And back haul must be great at supporting all of that. And that's where, as Thomas said, earlier, data services, data storage, those are our strengths. So that's certainly a building from platform to platform. And then from there onwards platform services, great to have right out of the pocket. >> Furrier: People still forget this, you know, still hardware and software working together behind the scenes. The old joke we have here on the cube is server less is running on a bunch of servers. So, you know, this is the way that is going. It's really the innovation. This is the infrastructure as code truly. This is what's what's happened is super exciting. Rajiv, Thomas, thank you guys for coming on. Always great to talk to you guys. Congratulations on an amazing platform. You guys are developing. Looks really strong. People are giving it rave reviews and congratulations on, on, on your keynotes. >> Cornely: Thank you for having us >> Okay. This is theCube's coverage of.next global virtual 2021 cube coverage day two keynote review. I'm John Furrier Furrier with the cube. Thanks for watching.

>> Instructor: From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of Dell technologies world, digital experience brought to you by Dell technologies. >> Hi, welcome to the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world 2020, the virtual experience. I am Lisa Martin and I've got a couple of guests joining me. One of them is a longtime cube alumni. Jon Siegel is back the VP of product marketing for Dell technologies. Jon, it's great to see you. >> Great to be back (indistinct), thank you. >> And also joining us is Troy Massey the director of enterprise engagements from iron bow technologies. Troy, welcome to the cube. >> Hi, thank you for having me. >> So we're going to be talking about VxRail, how it's driving the future of HCI to the edge, but first let's get choice perspective. I would like the audience to understand who iron build technologies is and what you do. And then we'll kind of look at it as what you're doing with the extra rail, as well as your channel partner business with Dell technologies. So Troy, take it away. >> Yeah. So IML is a global company, we're a value added reseller. Having partnered with Dell. We have people physically living from Europe all the way through Korea from kind of based the globe, primarily in wherever there's DOD or federal government agencies. >> And tell me about from a channel partner perspective what you guys are doing together. >> Yeah, so we have a lot of efforts going on channel partner together. Specifically ,iron (murmurs) is a huge effort to what we're doing together. It's a on-premise cloud that's it's basis VxRail, VMware cloud foundation on top with Intel all throughout, so there's Intel Xeon processors with Optane drives. So just the perfect elegant On-Prem cloud and hybrid cloud solution Dell, I remember driving together. >> So let's talk about the edge cause a big focus of Dell technologies world this year is about the edge. How do you see Troy iron bow extending services to the edge? And what do you anticipate from your customers in terms of what their needs are as they're changing? >> Great, great question. So for one I've got to talk a little bit about what the edge and what the edges and the edge is different things to different people. So I'm going to explain a little bit of the edge and what we're seeing and in the federal government. So I'll give you one example and that's you know, (indistinct). So they have a an entire squadron that does all of the firefighting, the large fires you see across California or whatever state and Gulfton fires that year where they take the entire squadron of airplanes out. When they, they sort of water overall the whole fire, they don't just bring planes. They bring entire squatters of military personnel to help communicate with the police and with the local fire and all of that takes information. So they need to bring information data with them. Is there a building over there? Do people live over there where? We got to actually concentrate on site and that's higher priority wise? So it doesn't make a lot of sense to try to do that remotely over satellite it's large, large chunks of data that needs to be local to the customer. So VxRail is the power in the HCI world. So a VxRail at that edge provides and what's the performance I need to get that job (indistinct). >> I think that's going to be a new segment here in Silicon Valley. That thinking about all the fires we've had and it's really VxRail at the edge that's helping fight the fires. (Murmurs)That's thanks for sharing that. (indistinct chatting) >> So there's all kinds of workings in that same deal. They need to know where to go rescue those people and it's all data. >> Exactly, it's going to be data that's, that as you said it was not delayed sent over the wire but obviously being able to be transmitted in real time so that actions can be taken which is one of the things we talk about with data all the time you have to be able to get the insight and act on it quickly. So Jon, the theme of this year's virtual Dell technologies world is the edge is a big part of the theme. So talk to us about driving the future of HCI at the edge with VxRail, how there's been a lot of growth I think 9,600 plus customers so far. So talk to us about the future of HCI at the edge with VxRail as a driver of that. >> Absolutely. So first of all, I want to thank iron bow for being one of our nearly 10,000 customers for VxRail and you know, absolutely. So, you know, overall the edge is going to be a major theme for Dell tech world this week. And specifically for VxRail, we of course continue to play with VxRail, a key role in modernizing data centers, as well as hybrid cloud. And this week we really want to highlight some of the recent innovations we have around extending the simplified operations of VxRail that many like iron bow and others are experiencing today in the core or in the cloud in extending those that automation to the edge. And you heard a lot about what the edge can do in the implications and the value of the edge. While we have lots of customers today including (indistinct) that are using VxRail at their edge locations, we have others like large retail, home improvement chains, financial institutions. We expect the edge to soon explode. We like to think that we are at the edge of the edge opportunity in IT. In fact, IDC recently stated that by 2023 over 50% of new enterprise data that is generated can going to be generated outside the core data center and outside the cloud. That's up in 10% today. So this is, this is massive edge locations. Of course come with their own challenges, whether it's sometimes less than ideal conditions around power and cooling or they may not have typically skilled IT staff at the edge, right? So they need, they need new special configurations, they need operational efficiencies. And I think VxRail is uniquely positioned to help address that. >> Let's kind of dig into this operational challenges because in the last seven months so much of what we all do has become remote and a good amount of that is going to be probably permanent, right? So when you think about the volume of remote devices that VxRail can potentially manage. Jon, how do you see the actual being able to help in this sort of very distributed environment that might be very well much permanent? >> Yeah, I know. And like you said, it's going to just grow and grow the distributed environment and what that means for each company might be slightly different but regardless of what they do need to seamless operations across all of those different edge locations and again, a big focus for us. So we're really doing three things to extend the automated operations of VxRail to the edge and doing so at scale. The first thing I want to say, talk about is that we did unveil just two VxRail platforms designed specifically for the edge, the new VxRail E Series, which is ideal for remote office locations, where space is limited the remote, the VxRail D series. I think of D as in durable, this is our ruggedized platform built from the ground up for harsh environments. You know, such as DOD environments like in the, in the desert. And both of these VxRail platforms are fully automated. They automate everything from deployment to expansions to life cycle management overall. And now what we're doing now with extending that automation is the second thing we doing you know, to the edge from an operational perspective. And what we're doing first and foremost is we are introducing a new software as a service multi cluster management. This is part of the VxVRail ACI system software that we deliver today as part of the X rail. This not only provides a global view of the infrastructure performance and capacity analysis across all the locations, but even more importantly it actively ensures that all the clusters and the remote locate locations always stay in a continuously validated state. This means that I can automatically determine which software components need to be upgraded you know, and also automatically execute the full stack upgrades, right? Without any technical expertise at the site, it can be done centrally further automating the lifecycle management process and process that we do at the core and the cloud, and now extending out to the edge. So imaginely the operational efficiencies for customers with tens or hundreds or even thousands of edge sites. So this is we think truly a game changer from that perspective. And then in addition to that, we're also adding the support for BCF on VxRail. So just at VMware, just a couple of weeks ago VMware announced remote edge cluster support for BCF. So those customers that run them on BCF on VxRail now can get the, they can enjoy a consistent cloud operating model you know, for those edge locations. So you know, in somewhere you're getting consistency you're getting automation regardless of where your VxRail is located. >> And this is something that I saw in the notes, Jon is described as a curated experience. Can you describe what that is if I think of reference architectures and things of that what is a curated experience and how is it different? >> Yeah, I know I'm curious to experience for the exhale, really what it is it's about seamless. It's about we, we have taken the burden if you were integrating infrastructure off of the customer's shoulders and onto ours right? So what we do is we ensure VxRail is, in fact the only jointly engineered ATI system in the market, that's doing engineering with VMware, for VMware to enhance VMware environments. And so what we've done there is, we have a pre-integrated full stack experience that we're providing the customer from deployment to again to everyday operations, to making changes, et cetera. We've essentially what we've done here is that we've taken again, that burden off our customers and allowed them to spend more time innovating in less, you know, less time integrating. >> That sounds good to everyone, right? Simplifying less time to troubleshoot more time to be able to be strategic and innovative, especially in such a rapidly changing world. Troy overview now. Oh, go ahead Jon >> As you can say, to add to that you know, we've seen a real acceleration this year to digital transformation to your point earlier just with remote everything. And I think a lot of the projects and so including a shift that we've seen to consuming infrastructure overall, whether you know, and that's the onset of the cloud and wherever that cloud might be, right, it could be on-prem, it could be on premises, could be off premises. And so, you know, that focused on consuming infrastructure versus in that preference for consuming infrastructure versus building and maintaining it is something that we're going to continue to see accelerate over time. >> You're right, that digital transformation acceleration has been one of the biggest topics in the last seven months and looking at which businesses really are set up and have the foundation and the culture to be able to make those changes quickly to not just survive in this environment, but win tomorrow. So let's talk over to you for a second, in terms of, of the edge. What are your thoughts on as a partner, with VxRail got a solution built on it? What are your thoughts about what VxRail is going to be able to deliver enable you to deliver at the edge? You know you gave us that great example of the air force reserve but what are iron boast thoughts there, what do you envision going forward? >> Yeah absolutely, thank you. And first expand a little bit on what Jon was paying for a picture. You talked about tens, hundreds even thousands of different sites that all need their data. They all need processing compute, but those types of scale of sites don't necessarily need to have an IT on staff at those sites, (murmurs) army Corps of engineers. They have to have one or two people out at every dam to monitor the dam but that doesn't mean that justifies it. And then 19 staff are out there with them. So the idea to remotely manage that VxRail they're, they're just industry leaders in the ability to deploy this somewhere where there's not an IT person and be able to manage it but not just manage it predictive analysis on when they're starting to run out of storage give alerts so that we can, we can start the operating. So, we see that as part of our path forward with our iron target on-premise cloud is the ability to get people back to doing their job away from doing IT. >> And Jon, I'm curious what your thoughts are in Del tech thoughts are about, some of these really interesting DOD use cases that Troy talked about really compelling. What do you see in terms of influence into the enterprise space or the consumer space as the world is so different now as we go into 2021? >> Yeah I mean, I think you know, as I mentioned earlier, I think the you know, we're talking a lot about the edge today and I think what I described earlier about the trend towards the, in the preference to consume infrastructure versus build and maintain it is something that we're seeing you know, of course, you know across highly distributed environments, more and more now. And I think that use cases are going to continue to expand whether it's financial institutions with edge, edge offices spread across the world, you know, to manufacturing, to you know logistics companies, et cetera, et cetera. These are retail's another great example. We have a number of retail companies that are going to leverage and want to have data again processed and analyzed more importantly at the edge to make more informed decisions more quickly. And this, and that's just the beginning. I mean, obviously the automotive industries and other one that frequently comes up, it's something that can take full advantage of the edge where decisions need to be made in real time at the edge. So where, you know, I think the use cases are endless and the promises is just beginning now. We're really excited to help companies of all shapes and sizes, you know, really thrive in this new world. >> Speaking of excitement, I'm sure exciting Dell technologies world obviously challenging to not be able to gather in one place in Las Vegas with what 14,000 or so, folks including many many partners. Jon talked to us about the engagement that you're expecting your customers to have with Dell technologies during this virtual events. >> Absolutely, I think so. First of all, yeah virtual is different, but there's lot of advantages to that. One of them is that we can have an ongoing dialogue during a number of the sessions that we have why some of the sessions might be prerecorded. There are alive chats all the way through including a number of breakouts on VxRail specifically, as well as the edge, as well as a number of different topics that you can imagine. We've also just launched a new game a fun game for mobile called data center sin where customers can have some fun learning about VxRail, the experience, the takes and balancing the budget and staffing and capacity to address the needs of the business. So we're always looking for fun and engaging ways to experience the real life benefits of our HCI platform, such as VxRail. And so customers can check that out as well by searching their app store of choice for Dell technologies data center sin and have at it and have some fun. But again, whether it's playing the game online through it, augmented reality experience or it's, you know connecting directly with any of our subject matter experts there's going to be a lot of opportunity to learn more about how VxRail and HCI can help our customers thrive. >> Excellent, I like that game idea. Well, Troy and Jon, thank you for joining me today and letting me know what you guys are doing with VxRail. What's coming with the edge. And the fact that they use cases are just going to proliferate. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you as well. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world 2020. (upbeat music)

>> Jeff: Hello everybody, and thank you for joining us today, in the virtual Vertica BDC 2020. Today's Breakout session is entitled, "Sizing and Configuring Vertica in Eon Mode for Different Use Cases". I'm Jeff Healey, and I lead Vertica Marketing. I'll be your host for this Breakout session. Joining me are Sumeet Keswani, and Shirang Kamat, Vertica Product Technology Engineers, and key leads on the Vertica customer success needs. But before we begin, I encourage you to submit questions or comments during the virtual session, you don't have to wait, just type your question or comment in the question box below the slides, and click submit. There will be a Q&A session at the end of the presentation, we will answer as many questions as we're able to during that time, any questions we don't address, we'll do our best to answer them off-line. Alternatively, visit Vertica Forums, at forum.vertica.com, post your question there after the session. Our Engineering Team is planning to join the forums to keep the conversation going. Also as reminder, that you can maximize your screen by clicking the double arrow button in the lower-right corner of the slides, and yes, this virtual session is being recorded, and will be available to view on-demand this week. We'll send you a notification as soon as it's ready. Now let's get started! Over to you, Shirang. >> Shirang: Thanks Jeff. So, for today's presentation, we have picked Eon Mode concepts, we are going to go over sizing guidelines for Eon Mode, some of the use cases that you can benefit from using Eon Mode. And at last, we are going to talk about, some tips and tricks that can help you configure and manage your cluster. Okay. So, as you know, Vertica has two modes of operation, Eon Mode and Enterprise Mode. So the question that you may have is, which mode should I implement? So let's look at what's there in the Enterprise Mode. Enterprise Mode, you have a cluster, with general purpose compute nodes, that have locally at their storage. Because of this tight integration of compute and storage, you get fast and reliable performance all the time. Now, amount of data that you can store in Enterprise Mode cluster, depends on the total disk capacity of the cluster. Again, Enterprise Mode is more suitable for on premise and cloud deployments. Now, let's look at Eon Mode. To take advantage of cloud economics, Vertica implemented Eon Mode, which is getting very popular among our customers. In Eon Mode, we have compute and storage, that are separated by introducing S3 Bucket, or, S3 compliant storage. Now because of this separation of compute and storage, you can take advantages like mapping all dynamic scale-out and scale-in. Isolation of your workload, as well as you can load data in your cluster, without having to worry about the total disk capacity of your local nodes. Obviously, you know, it's obvious from what they accept, Eon Mode is suitable for cloud deployment. Some of our customers who take advantage of the features of Eon Mode, are also deploying it on premise, by introducing S3 compliant slash web storage. Okay? So, let's look at some of the terminologies used in Eon Mode. The four things that I want to talk about are, communal storage. It's a shared storage, or S3 compliant shared storage, a bucket that is accessible from all the nodes in your cluster. Shard, is a segment of data, stored on the communal storage. Subscription, is the binding with nodes and shards. And last, depot. Depot is a local copy or, a local cache, that can help query in group performance. So, shard is a segment of data stored in communal storage. When you create a Eon Mode cluster, you have to specify the shard count. Shard count decide the maximum number of nodes that will participate in your query. So, Vertica also will introduce a shard, called replica shard, that will hold the data for replicated projections. Subscriptions, as I said before, is a binding between nodes and shards. Each node subscribes to one or more shards, and a shard has at least two nodes that subscribe to it for case 50. Subscribing nodes are responsible for writing and reading from shard data. Also subscriber node holds up-to-date metadata for a catalog of files that are present in the shard. So, when you connect to Vertica node, Vertica will automatically assign you set of nodes and subscriptions that will process your query. There are two important system tables. There are node subscriptions, and session subscriptions, that can help you understand this a little bit more. So let's look at what's on the local disk of your Eon Mode cluster. So, on local disk, you have depot. Depot is a local file system cache, that can hold subset of the data, or copy of the data, in communal storage. Other things that are there, are temp storage, temp storage is used for storing data belonging to temporary tables, and, the data that spills through this, when you are processing queries. And last, is catalog. Catalog is a persistent copy of Vertica, catalog that is written to this. The writes happen at every commit. You only need the persistent copy at node startup. There is also a copy of Vertica catalog, stored in communal storage, called durability. The local copy is synced to the copy in communal storage via service, at the interval of five minutes. So, let's look at depot. Now, as I said before, depot is your file system cache. It's help to reduce network traffic, and slow performance of your queries. So, we make assumption, that when we load data in Vertica, that's the data that you may most frequently query. So, every data that is loaded in Vertica is first entering the depot, and then as a part of same transaction, also synced to communal storage for durability. So, when you query, when you run a query against Vertica, your queries are also going to find the files in the depot first, to be used, and if the files are not found, the queries will access files from communal storage. Now, the behavior of... you know, the new files, should first enter the depot or skip depot can be changed by configuration parameters that can help you skip depot when writing. When the files are not found in depot, we make assumption that you may need those files for future runs of your query. Which means we will fetch them asynchronously into the depot, so that you have those files for future runs. If that's not the behavior that you intend, you can change configuration around return, to tell Vertica to not fetch them when you run your query, and this configuration parameter can be set at database level, session level, query level, and we are also introducing a user level parameter, where you can change this behavior. Because the depot is going to be limited in size, compared to amount of data that you may store in your Eon cluster, at some point in time, your depot will be full, or hit the capacity. To make space for new data that is coming in, Vertica will evict some of the files that are least frequently used. Hence, depot is going to be your query performance enhancer. You want to shape the extent of your depot. And, so what you want to do is, to decide what shall be in your depot. Now Vertica provides some of the policies, called pinning policies, that can help you pin of statistics table or addition of a table, into a depot, at subcluster level, or at the database level. And Sumeet will talk about this a bit more in his future slides. Now look at some of the system tables that can help you understand about the size of the depot, what's in your depot, what files were evicted, what files were recently fetched into the depot. One of the important system tables that I have listed here is DC_FILE_READS. DC_FILE_READS can be used to figure out if your transaction or query fetched with data from depot, from communal storage, or component. One of the important features of Eon Mode is a subcluster. Vertica lets you divide your cluster into smaller execution groups. Now, each of the execution groups has a set of nodes together subscribed to all the shards, and can process your query independently. So when you connect one node in the subcluster, that node, along with other nodes in the subcluster, will only process your query. And because of that, we can achieve isolation as well as, you know, fetches, scale-out and scale-in without impacting what's happening on the cluster. The good thing about subclusters, is all the subclusters have access to the communal storage. And because of this, if you load data in one subcluster, it's accessible to the queries that are running in other subclusters. When we introduced subclusters, we knew that our customers would really love these features, and, some of the things that we were considering is, we knew that our customers would dynamically scale out and in, lots of-- they would add and remove lots of subclusters on demand, and we had to provide that ab-- we had to give this feature, or provide ability to add and remove subclusters in a fast and reliable way. We knew that during off-peak hours, our customers would shut down many of their subclusters, that means, more than half of the nodes could be down. And we had to make adjustment to our quorum policy which requires at least half of the nodes to be up for database to stay up. We also were aware that customers would add hundreds of nodes in the cluster, which means we had to make adjustments to the catalog and commit policy. To take care of all these three requirements we introduced two types of subclusters, primary subclusters, and secondary subclusters. Primary subclusters is the one that you get by default when you create your first Eon cluster. The nodes in the primary subclusters are always up, that means they stay up and participate in the quorum. The nodes in the primary subcluster are responsible for processing commits, and also maintain a persistent copy, of catalog on disk. This is a subcluster that you would use to process all your ETL jobs, because the topper more also runs on the node, in the primary subcluster. If you want now at this point, have another subcluster, where you would like to run queries, and also, build this cluster up and down depending on the demand or the, depending on the workload, you would create a new subcluster. And this subcluster will be off-site secondary in nature. Now secondary subclusters have nodes that don't participate in quorums, so if these nodes are down, Vertica has no impact. These nodes are also not responsible for processing commit, though they maintain up-to-date copies of the catalog in memory. They don't store catalog on disk. And these are subclusters that you can add and remove very quickly, without impacting what is running on the other subclusters. We have customers running hundreds of nodes, subclusters with hundreds of nodes, and subclusters of size like 64 node, and they can bring this subcluster up and down, or add and remove, within few minutes. So before I go into the sizing of Eon Mode, I just want to say one more thing here. We are working very closely with some of our customers who are running Eon Mode and getting better feedback from that on a regular basis. And based on the feedback, we are making lots of improvements and fixes in every hot-fix that we put out. So if you are running Eon Mode, and want to be part of this group, I suggest that, you keep your cluster current with latest hot-fixes and work with us to give us feedback, and get the improvements that you need to be successful. So let's look at what there-- What we need, to size Eon clusters. Sizing Eon clusters is very different from sizing Enterprise Mode cluster. When you are running Enterprise Mode cluster or when you're sizing Vertica cluster running Enterprise Mode, you need to take into account the amount of data that you want to store, and the configuration of your node. Depending on which you decide, how many nodes you will need, and then start the cluster. In Eon Mode, to size a cluster, you need few things like, what should be your shard count. Now, shard count decides the maximum number of nodes that will participate in your query. And we'll talk about this little bit more in the next slide. You will decide on number of nodes that you will need within a subcluster, the instance type you will pick for running statistic subcluster, and how many subclusters you will need, and how many of them should be running all the time, and how many should be running in a dynamic mode. When it comes to shard count, you have to pick shard count up front, and you can't change it once your database is up and running. So, we... So, you need to pick shard count depending the number of nodes, are the same number of nodes that you will need to process a query. Now one thing that we want to remember here, is this is not amount of data that you have in database, but this is amount of data your queries will process. So, you may have data for six years, but if your queries process last month of data, on most of the occasions, or if your dashboards are processing up to six weeks, or ten minutes, based on whatever your needs are, you will decide or pick the number of shards, shard count and nodes, based on how much data your queries process. Looking at most of our customers, we think that 12 is a good number that should work for most of our customers. And, that means, the maximum number of nodes in a subcluster that will process queries is going to be 12. If you feel that, you need more than 12 nodes to process your query, you can pick other numbers like 24 or 48. If you pick a higher number, like 48, and you go with three nodes in your subcluster, that means node subscribes to 16 primary and 16 secondary shard subscription, which totals to 32 subscriptions per node. That will leave your catalog in a broken state. So, pick shard count appropriately, don't pick prime numbers, we suggest 12 should work for most of our customers, if you think you process more than, you know, the regular, the regular number that, or you think that your customers, you think your queries process terabytes of data, then pick a number like 24. Don't pick a prime number. Okay? We are also coming up with features in Vertica like current scaling, that will help you run more-- run queries on more than, more nodes than the number of shards that you pick. And that feature will be coming out soon. So if you have picked a smaller shard count, it's not the end of the story. Now, the next thing is, you need to pick how many nodes you need within your subclusters, to process your query. Ideal number would be node number equal to shard count, or, if you want to pick a number that is less, pick node count which is such that each of the nodes has a balanced distribution of subscriptions. When... So over here, you can have, option where you can have 12 nodes and 12 shards, or you can have two subclusters with 6 nodes and 12 shards. Depending on your workload, you can pick either of the two options. The first option, where you have 12 nodes and 12 shards, is more suitable for, more suitable for batch applications, whereas two subclusters with, with six nodes each, is more suitable for desktop type applications. Picking subclusters is, it depends on your workload, you can add remove nodes relative to isolation, or Elastic Throughput Scaling. Your subclusters can have nodes of different sizes, and you need to make sure that the nodes within the subcluster have to be homogenous. So this is my last slide before I hand over to Sumeet. And this I think is very important slide that I want you to pay attention to. When you pick instance, you are going to pick instance based on workload and query budget. I want to make it clear here that we want you to pay attention to the local disk, because you have depot on your local disk, which is going to be your query performance enhancer for all kinds of deployment, in cloud, as well as on premise. So you'd expect of what you read, or what you heard, depots still play a very important role in every Eon deployment, and they act like performance enhancers. Most of our customers choose Vertica because they love the performance we offer, and we don't want you to compromise on the performance. So pick nodes with some amount of local disk, at least two terabytes is what we suggest. i3 instances in Amazon have, you know, come up with a good local disk that is very helpful, and some of our customers are benefiting from. With that said, I want to pass it over to Sumeet. >> Sumeet: So, hi everyone, my name is Sumeet Keswani, and I'm a Product Technology Engineer at Vertica. I will be discussing the various use cases that customers deploy in Eon Mode. After that, I will go into some technical details of SQL, and then I'll blend that into the best practices, in Eon Mode. And finally, we'll go through some tips and tricks. So let's get started with the use cases. So a very basic use case that users will encounter, when they start Eon Mode the first time, is they will have two subclusters. The first subcluster will be the primary subcluster, used for ETL, like Shirang mentioned. And this subcluster will be mostly on, or always on. And there will be another subcluster used for, purely for queries. And this subcluster is the secondary subcluster and it will be on sometimes. Depending on the use case. Maybe from nine to five, or Monday to Friday, depending on what application is running on it, or what users are doing on it. So this is the most basic use case, something users get started with to get their feet wet. Now as the use of the deployment of Eon Mode with subcluster increases, the users will graduate into the second use case. And this is the next level of deployment. In this situation, they still have the primary subcluster which is used for ETL, typically a larger subcluster where there is more heavier ETL running, pretty much non-stop. Then they have the usual query subcluster which will use for queries, but they may add another one, another secondary subcluster for ad-hoc workloads. The motivation for this subcluster is to isolate the unpredictable workload from the predictable workload, so as not to impact certain isolates. So you may have ad-hoc queries, or users that are running larger queries or bad workloads that occur once in a while, from running on a secondary subcluster, on a different secondary subcluster, so as to not impact the more predictable workload running on the first subcluster. Now there is no reason why these two subclusters need to have the same instances, they can have different number of nodes, different instance types, different depot configurations. And everything can be different. Another benefit is, they can be metered differently, they can be costed differently, so that the appropriate user or tenant can be billed the cost of compute. Now as the use increases even further, this is what we see as the final state of a very advanced Eon Mode deployment here. As you see, there is the primary subcluster of course, used for ETL, very heavy ETL, and that's always on. There are numerous secondary subclusters, some for predictable applications that have a very fine-tuned workload that needs a definite performance. There are other subclusters that have different usages, some for ad-hoc queries, others for demanding tenants, there could be still more subclusters for different departments, like Finance, that need it maybe at the end of the quarter. So very, very different applications, and this is the full and final promise of Eon, where there is workload isolation, there is different metering, and each app runs in its own compute space. Okay, so let's talk about a very interesting feature in Eon Mode, which we call Hibernate and Revive. So what is Hibernate? Hibernating a Vertica database is the act of dissociating all the computers on the database, and shutting it down. At this point, you shut down all compute. You still pay for storage, because your data is in the S3 bucket, but all the compute has been shut down, and you do not pay for compute anymore. If you have reserved instances, or any other instances you can use them for different applications, and your Vertica database is shut down. So this is very similar to stop database, in Eon Mode, you're stopping all compute. The benefit of course being that you pay nothing anymore for compute. So what is Revive, then? The Revive is the opposite of Hibernate, where you now associate compute with your S3 bucket or your storage, and start up the database. There is one limitation here that you should be aware of, is that the size of the database that you have during Hibernate, you must revive it the same size. So if you have a 12-node primary subcluster when hibernating, you need to provision 12 nodes in order to revive. So one best practice comes down to this, is that you must shrink your database to the smallest size possible before you hibernate, so that you can revive it in the same size, and you don't have to spin up a ton of compute in order to revive. So basically, what this means is, when you have decided to hibernate, we ask you to remove all your secondary subclusters and shrink your primary subcluster down to the bare minimum before you hibernate it. And the benefit being, is when you do revive, you will have, you will be able to do so with the mimimum number of nodes. And of course, before you hibernate, you must cleanly shut down the database, so that all the data can be synced to S3. Finally, let's talk about backups and replication. Backups and replications are still supported in Eon Mode, we sometimes get the question, "We're in S3, and S3 has nine nines of reliability, we need a backup." Yes, we highly recommend backups, you can back-up by using the VBR script, you can back-up your database to another bucket, you can also copy the bucket and revive to a different, revive a different instance of your database. This is very useful because many times people want staging or development databases, and they need some of the data from production, and this is a nice way to get that. And it also makes sure that if you accidentally delete something you will be able to get back your data. Okay, so let's go into best practices now. I will start, let's talk about the depot first, which is the biggest performance enhancer that we see for queries. So, I want to state very clearly that reading from S3, or a remote object store like S3 is very slow, because data has to go over the network, and it's very expensive. You will pay for access cost. This is where S3 is not very cheap, is that every time you access the data, there is an ATI and access cost levied. Now the depot is a performance enhancing feature that will improve the performance of queries by keeping a local cache of the data that is most frequently used. It will also reduce the cost of accessing the data because you no longer have to go to the remote object store to get the data, since it's available on a local and permanent volume. Hence depot shaping is a very important aspect of performance tuning in an Eon database. What we ask you to do is, if you are going to use a specific table or partition frequency, you can choose to pin it, in the depot, so that if your depot is under pressure or is highly utilized, these objects that are most frequently used are kept in the depot. So therefore, depot, depot shaping is the act of setting eviction policies, instead you prevent the eviction of files that you believe you need to keep, so for example, you may keep the most recent year's data or the most recent, recent partition in the depot, and thereby all queries running on those partitions will be faster. At this time, we allow you to pin any table or partition in the depot, but it is not subcluster-based. Future versions of Vertica will allow you fine-tuning the depot based on each subcluster. So, let's now go and understand a little bit of internals of how a SQL query works in Eon Mode. And, once I explain this, we will blend into best practice and it will become much more clearer why we recommend certain things. So, since S3 is our layer of durability, where data is persistent in an Eon database. When you run an insert query, like, insert into table value one, or something similar. Data is synchronously written into S3. So, it will control returns back to the client, the copy of the data is first stored in the local depot, and then uploaded to S3. And only then do we hand the control back to the client. This ensures that if something bad were to happen, the data will be persistent. The second, the second types of SQL transactions are what we call DTLs, which are catalog operations. So for example, you create a table, or you added a column. These operations are actually working with metadata. Now, as you may know, S3 does not offer mutable storage, the storage in S3 is immutable. You can never append to a file in S3. And, the way transaction logs work is, they are append operation. So when you modify the metadata, you are actually appending to a transaction log. So this poses an interesting challenge which we resolve by appending to the transaction log locally in the catalog, and then there is a service that syncs the catalog to S3 every five minutes. So this poses an interesting challenge, right. If you were to destroy or delete an instance abruptly, you could lose the commits that happened in the last five minutes. And I'll speak to this more in the subsequent slides. Now, finally let's look at, drops or truncates in Eon. Now a drop or a truncate is really a combination of the first two things that we spoke about, when you drop a table, you are making, a drop operation, you are making a metadata change. You are telling Vertica that this table no longer exists, so we go into the transaction log, and append into the transaction log, that this table has been removed. This log of course, will be synced every five minutes to S3, like we spoke. There is also the secondary operation of deleting all the files that were associated with data in this table. Now these files are on S3. And we can go about deleting them synchronously, but that would take a lot of time. And we do not want to hold up the client for this duration. So at this point, we do not synchronously delete the files, we put the files that need to be removed in a reaper queue. And return the control back to the client. And this has the performance benefit as to the drops appear to occur really fast. This also has a cost benefit, batching deletes, in big batches, is more performant, and less costly. For example, on Amazon, you could delete 1,000 files at a time in a single cost. So if you batched your deletes, you could delete them very quickly. The disadvantage of this is if you were to terminate a Vertica customer abruptly, you could leak files in S3, because the reaper queue would not have had the chance to delete these files. Okay, so let's, let's go into best practices after speaking, after understanding some technical details. So, as I said, reading and writing to S3 is slow and costly. So, the first thing you can do is, avoid as many round trips to S3 as possible. The bigger the batches of data you load, the better. The better performance you get, per commit. The fact thing is, don't read and write from S3 if you can avoid it. A lot of our customers have intermediate data processing which they think temporarily they will transform the data before finally committing it. There is no reason to use regular tables for this kind of intermediate data. We recommend using local temporary tables, and local temporary tables have the benefit of not having to upload data to S3. Finally, there is another optimization you can make. Vertica has the concept of active partitions and inactive partitions. Active partitions are the ones where you have recently loaded data, and Vertica is lazy about merging these partitions into a single ROS container. Inactive partitions are historical partitions, like, consider last year's data, or the year before that data. Those partitions are aggressively merging into a single container. And how do we know how many partitions are active and inactive? Well that's based on the configuration parameter. If you load into an inactive partition, Vertica is very aggressive about merging these containers, so we download the entire partition, merge the records that you loaded into it, and upload it back again. This creates a lot of network traffic, and I said, accessing data is, from S3, slow and costly. So we recommend you not load into inactive partitions. You should load into the most recent or active partitions, and if you happen to load into inactive partitions, set your active partition count correctly. Okay, let's talk about the reaper queue. Depending on the velocity of your ETL, you can pile up a lot of files that need to be deleted asynchronously. If you were were to terminate a Vertica customer without allowing enough time for these files to get deleted, you could leak files in S3. Now, of course if you use local temporary tables this problem does not occur because the files were never created in S3, but if you are using regular tables, you must allow Vertica enough time to delete these files, and you can change the interval at which we delete, and how much time we allow to delete and shut down, by exiting some configuration parameters that I have mentioned here. And, yeah. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about a catalog at this point. So, the catalog is synced every five minutes onto S3 for persistence. And, the catalog truncation version is the minimum, minimal viable version of the catalog to which we can revive. So, for instance, if somebody destroyed a Vertica cluster, the entire Vertica cluster, the catalog truncation version is the mimimum viable version that you will be able to revive to. Now, in order to make sure that the catalog truncation version is up to date, you must always shut down your Vertica cluster cleanly. This allows the catalog to be synced to S3. Now here are some SQL commands that you can use to see what the catalog truncation version is on S3. For the most part, you don't have to worry about this if you're shutting down cleanly, so, this is only in cases of disaster or some event where all nodes were terminated, without... without the user's permission. And... And finally let's talk about backups, so one more time, we highly recommend you take backups, you know, S3 is designed for 99.9% availability, so there could be a, maybe an occasional down-time, making sure you have backups will help you if you accidentally drop a table. S3 will not protect you against data that was deleted by accident, so, having a backup helps you there. And why not backup, right, storage is cheap. You can replicate the entire bucket and have that as a backup, or have DR plus, you're running in a different region, which also sources a backup. So, we highly recommend that you make backups. So, so with this I would like to, end my presentation, and we're ready for any questions if you have it. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE! Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's fourth year of coverage at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, we're here in San Diego, it's 2019, I'm Stu Miniman, my host for this afternoon is Justin Warren, and happy to welcome two guests from the newly minted platinum member of the CNCF, NetApp, sitting to my right is Matt Baldwin, who is the director of cloud native and Kubernetes engineering, and sitting to his right is Rob Esker, who does product and strategy for Kubernetes, and is also a forward member on the CNCF, thank you both for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, so Matt, maybe start with you, NetApp, companies that know, I've got plenty of history with NetApp there, what I've been hearing from NetApp for the last few years is, the core of NetApp has always been software, and it is a multicloud world. I've been hearing this message since before the cloud native and Kubernetes piece was going. Of course there's been some acquisitions, and NetApp continuing to go through its transformations, if you will. So help us understand NetApp's positioning in this ecosystem. >> In Kubernetes? >> Yes. >> Okay, so, what we're doing is, we're building a product that allows you to manage cloud-native workloads on top of Kubernetes, so we've solved the infrastructure problem, and that's kind of the old problem we're bored to death talking about that problem, but what we try to do is try to provide a single pane of glass to manage on-premise workloads and off-premise workloads, and so that's what we're trying to do, we're trying to say, it's now more about the app taxonomy in Kubernetes, and then what type of tooling do you build to manage that application in Kubernetes, and so that's what we're building right now, that's where we're headed with the hybrid multicloud. >> There's a piece of it, though, that does draw from the historical strengths of NetApp, of course. So we're building, we are essentially already in market a capability that allows you to deploy Kubernetes, in an agnostic way, using pure open unmodified Kubernetes, on all of the major public clouds, but also on-prem. But over time, and some of this is already evident, you'll see it married to the storage and data management capabilities that we draw from the historical NetApp, and that we're starting to deploy into those public clouds. >> With the idea that you should be able to take a project, so a project being in a namespace, namespace having an application in it, so you have multiple deployments, I should be able to protect that namespace, or that project, I should be able to move that, and that data goes with it, so that we're very data-aware, that's what we're trying to do with our software is, make it very data-aware and have that align with apps inside of Kubernetes. >> Yeah, so Rob, maybe step back for a second, one of the things we've heard a few times at this show before, and it was talked about in the keynote this morning, is that it is project over company when it comes to the CNCF. Project over company, so it's about the ecosystem, the CNCF tries not to be opinionated, so it's okay for multiple projects to fit in a space. NetApp moving up to a platinum sponsor level, participated here, NetApp's got lots of histories in participating and driving standards, helping move where the industry's going, where does NetApp see its position in participating in the foundation and participating in this ecosystem? >> Yeah, so great question, and actually, I love it, it's one of my favorite topics, so, I think the way we look at it is, oftentimes projects, to the extent they become ubiquitous, define a standard, a defacto standard, so not necessarily ratified by some standards body, and so we're very interested in making sure that in the scenario where you want to employ this standard, from a technology integration perspective, our capabilities can operate as an implementation behind the standard. So you get the distinguishing qualities of our capabilities, our products and our services, vis-a-vis, or in the context of the standard, but we're not trying to take you down a walled garden path in a proprietary journey, if you will. We would rather compel you to work with us on the basis of the value, not necessarily operating off a proprietary set of interfaces. So Kubernetes, broadly perceive it as a defacto standard at this point, there's still some work to be done on rounding out the edges, a lot of it underway this week, it's definitely the case that there's an appeal to making this more offerable by, pardon the expression, mere mortals, and we think we can offer some help in that respect as well. >> Yeah, where is its usability? I mean, that's the reason I started stacked on cloud, was that there was a usability problem with Kubernetes. I had a usability problem with Kubernetes. That's what we're trying, that's how I'm looking at the landscape, and I look at all the projects inside of the CNCF, and I look at my role is, our role is to, how do we tie these together, how do we make these so they're very very usable to the users, and how we're engaging with the community is to try to align this, basically pure upstream projects, and create a usability layer on top of that. But we're not going to, we don't want to ever say we're going to fork any of these projects, but we're going to contribute back into these projects. >> So that's one concern that I have heard from some customers, which speaking of which, some of them yesterday, one of the concerns they had was that, when you add that manageability onto the base Kubernetes layer, that often, various vendors become rather opinionated about which way we think this is a good way to do that, and when you're trying to maintain that compatibility across the ecosystem, so some customers say, "Well I actually don't want to have to be too closely welded "to any one vendor, 'cause part of the benefit "of Kubernetes is I can move my workloads around." So how do you navigate what is the right level of opinion to have, and which part should actually just be part of a common standard? >> Think it needs to be along the lines of best practices, is how we do it. So, let's take network policy, for example, applying a sane, default network policy to every namespace. Defining a sane, default pod security policy, building a cluster in a best practices fashion, with security turned on, hardening done, where you would've done this already as a user, so we're not locking you in in any way there. So that's, we're not trying, I'm not trying to curate any type of opinion of the product, what we're trying to do is harmonize your experience across all this ecosystem, so that you don't ever have to think about, "I'm building a cluster on top of Amazon, "so I got to worry about how do I manage this on Amazon." I don't want you to have to think about those providers anymore. And then on top of those, on top of that infrastructure, I want to have a way that you're thinking about managing the applications on those environments in the exact same way, so I'm scaling, or I'm protecting an application on-premise, in the identical way I'm doing it in the cloud. >> So if it's the same everywhere, what's the value that you're providing that means that I should choose your option than something else? >> So, we do have, this is where we have controllers that live inside of the clusters, that manage this stuff for the users. So, you could rebuild what we're doing, but you would have to roll it all by hand. But you could, we don't stand in the way of your operations either, so if we go down, you don't go down, type of idea. But we do have controllers, we're using CRDs, and so our app management technology, our controllers are just watching for a workload to come into the environment, and then we show that in the interface, but you can just walk away as well, if you wanted to. >> There's also a constellation of other services that we're building around, this experience, that do draw, again, from some of the storage and data management capabilities, so staple sets, your traditional workloads that want to interact with or transact data against a block or a shared file system. We're providing capabilities for sophisticated qualities of persistence that can exist in all of those same public clouds, but moreover, over time, we're going to be, and on-premise as well, we're going to be able to actually move, migrate, place, cache, per policy, your persistent data, with your workloads, as you move, migrate, scale, burst, whatever the model is, as you move across and between clouds. >> How far down that pathway do you think we are, 'cause one criticism of Kubernetes is that a lot of the tooling that we're used to from more traditional ways of operating this kind of infrastructure, isn't really there yet, hence the question about, we actually need to make this easier to use. How far down that pathway are we? >> I'd argue that the tooling that I've built has already solved some of those problems. So I think we're pretty far down the path. Now, what we haven't done is open sourced all of my tooling, right, to make it easier on everybody else. >> Rob, NetApp's got strong partnerships across the cloud platforms, I had a chance to interview George at the Google Cloud event, I know you partner of the year, I believe, on some of these stuff, help us understand how some of the things Matt and the team are building interact with the public clouds, you look at Anthos, and Azure Arc, and of course Amazon has many different ways you can do your container and management piece there. Talk a little bit about that relationship and how, both with those partners and then across those partners, work. >> Yeah, it's, how much time do we have, so there's certainly a lot of facets to that, but drawing from the Google experience, we just announced the general availability of Cloud Volumes ONTAP, so the ability to stand up and manage your own ONTAP instance in Google's cloud. Likewise, we announced the general availability of the Cloud Volume service, which gives you the managed push button as a service experience of shared file system on demand, at Google, I believe it was either today or yesterday, in London, I guess maybe I'll blame that on the time zone conversion, not knowing what day it was, but the point is, that's now generally available. Some of those capabilities are going to be able to be connected to our ability from MKS, to deploy a on-demand Kubernetes cluster, and deploy applications from a marketplace experience, in a common way, not just with Google but Azure, with Amazon, and so frankly the story does differ a little bit from one cloud to the next, but the endeavor is to provide common capabilities across all of them. It's also the case that we do have people that are very opinionated about, I want to live only in the Google or the Microsoft or the Amazon ecosystem, we're trying to deliver a rich experience for those folks as well, even if you don't value the agnostic multicloud experience. >> Yeah, and Matt, I'm sure you have a viewpoint on this, but it's that skillset that's really challenging. I was at the Microsoft show, and you've got people, it's not just about .NET, they're embracing and open to all of these environments, but people tend to have the environments that they're used to, and for multicloud to be a reality, it needs to be a little bit easier for me to go between them, but it's still, we're making progress but there's work to do. >> Matt: Yeah, what's the question? >> Yeah, so, I know you're building tools and everything, but what more do we need to do, where are some of the areas that you're hopeful for, but where are the areas that we need to go further? >> So for me it's coming down to the data side. I need to be able to say that, when I turn on data services, inside of Kubernetes, I need to be able to have that workload go anywhere, because as a developer, I'm running a production, I'm running an Amazon, but maybe I'm doing tests locally on my bare metal environments, right, I want to be able to maybe sink down some of my data that I'm working with in production down to my test environment. That stuff's missing, there's no one doing that right now, and that's where we're headed, that's the path, that's where we're headed. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, actually, 'cause one of the things that I feel like I heard a little bit last year but it is highlighted more this year, is we're talking a little bit more to the application developers because, Kubernetes is a piece of the infrastructure, but it's about-- >> It's the kernel. >> Yeah, it's the kernel there, so, how do we make sure we're spanning between what the app developer needs and still making sure that infrastructure is taken care of, because storage and networking are still hard. >> It is, yeah, I mean I'm approaching, I'm thinking more along the lines of, I'm trying to think more about app developers, personally, than infrastructure at this point. For me, so I can give you a cluster in three minutes, right, so I don't really have to worry about that problem. We also put Istio on top of the clusters, so it's like we're trying to create this whole narrative that you can manage that environment on day one, day two type operations. But, and that's for an IT manager, right, so inside of our product, how I'm addressing this is you have personas, and so you have this concept, you have an IT manager, they can do these things, they can set limits, but for the developer, who's building the applications or the services and pushing those up into the environment, they need to have a sense of freedom, and so on that side of the house, I'm trying not to break them out of their tooling, so part of our product ties into Git, so we have cd, so you just do a git push, git commit to a branch, and we can target multiple clusters. But at no point did the developer actually draft DAML, or anything, we basically create the container for you, create the deployment, bring it online, and I feel like there's these lines, and the IT guys need to be able to say, "I need to create the guardrails for the devs, "but I don't want to make it seem like "I'm creating guardrails for the devs, "'cause the devs don't like that." So that's how I'm balancing it. >> Okay, 'cause that has always been the tension, in that there's a lot of talk about DevOps, but you go and talk to application developers, and they don't want to have anything to do with infrastructure, they just want to program to an API and get things done, they would like this infrastructure to be seamless. >> Yeah, and what we do, also what I'm giving them is service dashboards, because as a developer, you know, because now you're in charge of your QA, you're writing your tests, you're pushing it through CI, it's going to CD. You own your service and production, right? And so we're delivering dashboards as well for services that the developers are running, so they can dig in and say, "Oh, here's an issue," or "Here's where the issue's probably going to be at, "I'm going to go fix this." And we're trying to create that type of scenario for a developer, and for an IT manager. >> Slightly different angle on it, if I'm understanding the question correctly, part of the complexity of infrastructure is something we're also trying to provide a deterministic sort of easy button capability for, perhaps you're familiar with NetApp's Nason ATI product, which we kind of expand that as hybrid cloud infrastructure. If the intention is to make it a simple, private cloud capability, and indeed, our NetApp Kubernetes service operates directly off of it, it's a big part of actually how we deliver cloud services from it. So the point is that, if you're that application developer, if you want the effective NKS on-prem, the endeavor with our NetApp ATI product is to give you that sort of easy button experience, because you didn't really want to be a storage admin or a network admin, you didn't want to get into the, be mired in the details of infra, so that's obviously work in progress, but we think we're definitely headed down the right direction. >> It does seem that a lot of enterprises want to have the cloudlike experience, but they want to be able to bring it home, we're seeing that a lot more. >> Yeah, so this turnkey on-premise, turnkey cloud on-premise, and, with NKS we can, the same auto-scaling, so take the dynamic nature of Kubernetes, so I have a base cluster size of say four worker nodes, right, but my workload's going to maybe need to have more nodes, so my auto-scaler's going to increase the size of my cluster and decrease the size, right? Pretty much everybody only can do that in the public cloud. I can do that in public cloud and on-premise, now. And so that's what we're trying to deliver, and that's pretty cool stuff, I think. >> Well there's a lot of advantages to enterprises operating in that way, because people out here, I can go and buy them or hire them, and say "Hey, we need you to operate this gear," and you've already done it elsewhere, you can do it in cloud, you can do it on-site, I can now run my operations the same across, no matter where my applications live, which saves me a lot of money on training costs, on development costs, and generally it makes for a much more smooth and seamless experience. >> So Rob, if you could, just love your takeaway on NetApp's participation here at the event, and what you want people to take away from the show this year. >> So it's certainly the case that we're doing a lot of great work, we like people to become aware of it. NetApp of course is not, I think we talked about this in perhaps other contexts, not strictly a storage and data management company only. We do draw from the strengths of that as we're providing full stack capabilities, in a way that are interconnected with public cloud, things like our NetApp Kubernetes service as really the foundational glue in many ways, to how we deliver the application runtime, but over time we'll build a constellation of data-centric capabilities around that as well. >> Matt, I would just love to get your viewpoint as someone that built a company in this ecosystem, there's so many startups here, give us kind of that founder viewpoint of being in this sort of ecosystem. >> Of the ecosystem... So this is, I came into the ecosystem at the beginning. I would have to say that it does feel different at this point, I'm going to speak as Matt, not as NetApp. And so my thinking has always been it feels a lot like, you're a big fan of that rock band, right, and you go to a local club, and we all get to know each other at that local club, and there's maybe 500 of us or 1000 of us, and then that band gets signed to Warner Brothers, and goes to the top, and now there's 20,000 people or 12,000 people. That's how it feels to me right now. I think, but what I like about it is that, it just shows the power of the community is now at a point where it's drawing in cities now, not just a small collection of a tribe of people. And I think that's a very powerful thing with this community, and like all the, what are they called, the Kubernetes Summits that they're doing, we didn't have any of those back when we first got going, I mean it was tough to fill the room, and now we can fill the room, and it's amazing, and what I like seeing is people moving past the problem of Kubernetes itself, and moving into what other problems can I solve on top of Kubernetes, so you're starting to see all these really exciting startups doing really neat things, and I really like, like this vendor hall I really like, 'cause you get to see all the new guys, but there's a lot of neat stuff going on, and I'm excited to see where the community goes in the next five years, but it's, we've gone from zero to 60 insanely fast, 'cause you guys were at the original KubeCon, I think, as well. >> It's our fourth year doing theCUBE at this show, but absolutely, we've watched it since the early days. I'm not supposed to mention OpenStack at this show, but we remember talking to JJ and some of the early people there, and we interviewed Craig McLuckie back in his Google days, and the like, so we've been fortunate to be on here since really day zero here, and definitely great energy, congrats so much on the progress, I really appreciate the updates on everything going, as you said, we've reached a certain state, and adding more value on top of this whole environment. >> Yeah, we're in junior high now, right, and we were in grade school for a few years. >> All right, well Matt and Rob, thank you so much for the update, hopefully not an awkward dance tonight for the junior people. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here from KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 in San Diego. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, Lisa Martin with theCUBE, live day three of theCUBE's double set coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019 I am with Stu Miniman. We've got one alumni back. We've got Gil Schneorson, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Vxrail. Gil welcome back. >> Thank you nice to be back. >> And it's show and tell you brought Niv Raz CTO of Harel Insurance one of your successful customers, Niv it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you and great to be here. >> So Niv let's start with you. Give our audience an understanding of Harel Insurance where you're located, what it is that you do and then we'll get into why think Dell EMC is so fantastic. >> Harel Insurance is a insurance company doing a life, now life insurances very wide portfolio of business products in the insurance and investments in Israel. More than 5000 employees and three million customers managing around 240 billion shekels in 2018. So it's very innovative company to work in. >> So Niv interesting. Dell has a podcast and I'm just given a little plug here 'cause at the gym this morning the latest episode by Walter Issacson talks about transformation going on in the insurance business. Some people think, oh insurance has been around a long time, I mean heck to the Roman Era when they had some of this but today Insurance is changing fast. Can you give us at a macro level, give us what are some the changes and stresses on the company and how's that impact your job. >> It's funny you mentioning that. In 2015 our CEO has declared innovative program named Recalculating Routes. The purpose of the program the strategic plan was to take a role from traditional insurance company to more digital transform, data transform. We Israel has the brokers. The brokers are our sales person but once the customer and the sales part, the onboarding part, you want a more innovative service after that. The post service part is very hard in insurance and we investing a lot to make the post service customer experience very advantaged. >> We talk a lot about customer insurance at every, oh sorry, customer insurance, well that's important too, customer experience is the word I was going for. It's essential right because in 2019 customers of any type of product or service have so much choice. So talk to us Niv from looking through that lens of delivering an outstanding customer experience obviously your sales folks need to have innovative technology to deliver that outstanding customer experience. But when a company says we've got to transform digitally we've got to stay ahead of the market, delight our customers Where do you start? Talk to us about maybe a phased approach that you're taking to digital transformation. >> Digital transformation is all about how customer experience feel like in your environment. So if a person entering your website and trying to do some post service and running into some old fashionable process that is very hard to him and its really frustrating to do that. And actually if I look about what our approach about it, we're thinking about the digital transformation, we're thinking about how to take the onboarding part for our brokers, the post service for our customers, to make the process, the services we are offering to our customers easy as possible to just can submit. >> All right so Gil let's bring you into the discussion here. And I think back Converge Infrastructure, Hyper-converge Infrastructure you've been riding the rocket ship that is Vxrail, digital transformation wasn't the leading use for that when we started. It was simplification driving that wave of virtualization, we've heard Vxrail everywhere in the discussion this week. It was like all of these different cloud pieces, what's underneath them, VxRail. Help us connect the dots, the transformations that your customers are going where VxRail and the new solutions built with VxRail help enable your customers. >> Yeah thanks Stu. We talk about a digital transformation a lot. Reality is that many of the customers, not all of them are transformative like Harel Insurance right. Many of them look at ATI and VxRail as the next simple tech refresh. They see the agility, they see the economical benefit but there's a growing majority of customers who look to this is as transformational. And so that's where you see ATI and VxRail specifically in our case starting to grow beyond being an infrastructure for workloads to be an infrastructure for their hybrid cloud and multi cloud environment. So what is so exciting about this show is because we've been very successful we're growing very fast, but by putting this building block in many of our customers' data centers they've made the choice that will enable them to now embark on a more transformational strategy. And I think we demonstrated in the last two days that hybrid cloud is here and it's sellable, operational and with VxRail and the integration with VML cloud foundation and the ability to add and burst into a cloud move workloads It's here and its now, I thinks that's what's nice about this whole thing. >> All right so Gil it's great for you to say it even as an analyst as a media organization for us to say it but what we love is that you brought a customer here to tell us the reality as to where cloud fits into your overall discussion. And I would love your feedback as to what Gil's saying. What's the reality in your world and the impact on your work >> I would connect the previous question this one because it's like a very rolling on questions about it. So you as the customers your expectations about the company is to do every operation from everywhere very easy way and the mobility and the digital transformation itself all the mobile applications, all the things that's taking the customer experience to the next level will took the organization to a phase that I need understand how to scalable the systems. So in this journey when you're looking about digital transformation you must have a infrastructure that support the scalability, the elasticity, the availability that the customer demands. You don't think to yourself that you are enter some E-commerce customer and they will send you on application. sorry Sir, we currently offline the management reasons or maintenance reasons. That thing in 2019 you will not think about and it's not be acceptable. So to do a scalability our multi cloud strategy in Harel is to have infrastructure free environment to focus on the service applications and not to focus on the infrastructure management part. That's the big concerns of our IT teams was how to care about support and matrix's and compatibility and maintenance and when you go into the private cloud environment, the private cloud environment, that's VxRail on the bottom and VML cloud foundation on the top allow Harel is to start the journey to a phase that said okay we're going to our infrastructure free road map. >> Tell us about the outcomes that for example go back to, what we were talking about your brokers who need to be able to deliver any service. I imagine they're out in the field sometimes with customers depending on the types of services that they need to deliver. What has been some of the feedback or maybe the outcomes for the brokers. Are they able to do their jobs faster, deliver quotes faster to customers. What are some of the exciting outcomes that you're seeing as a result of the infrastructure that Dell EMC is helping you to establish. >> Part of digital transformation we're talking about micro servicing a lot of old virtual machines I'm saying that. So service applications on the password virtual machine now your micro services, why you micro servicing it because in 8:00 a.m, perhaps there is 20 persons that's selling your policies but perhaps on the 11:00 after some TV show said something about Harel you can have thousands of customers entering to your website. So how you can support that? So again brokers need the tools to support the operation, the sales operations and the customers need the tools to support the post service for themselves, how to claim, how to do claims how to do more preventives aspects of insurances. So basically again when you're looking about what exciting is, is the reality that I'm seeing a process of a customer and is saying, wow that was easy. So taking the digital transformation to make our customer experience better. >> All right Gil help us zoom out a little bit. We talked to one customer here but the business overall joint product development between Dell EMC and the VMware teams is something that we think was transformational and helped accelerate the HTI growth. What are some the big drivers what's changed in the business. Give us the overall update. >> Yeah look, I think that when we discovered that working together pays off through our joint leadership through examples like VxRail and others we started looking at every part of the business and how collaboration could enable us to add even more value and any value transfer to finances and there's a very strong interest in so this recent innovation we've introduced with integration with cloud foundation, people don't realize how much work goes into integrating two products regardless, even between 1 company you're talking about engineers co-location, you're talking about joint sprints you're talking about test fests, design workshop, customers interaction and so, but you know what I mean, it pays off. You deliver a new outcome that didn't exist before now with VCF and VxRail you can have a full life cycle management of the entire VMX stack and the entire hardware stack drivers, framework everything life cycled together, it's a very, very impressive outcome and it's ready now and I'm really thinking that shift is going to be more than just ATI, people are going to start embracing the full stack because they can, because we're simplifying it. In addition to that Stu I think it's important to understand or I'd like the people to know that the other way we're taking the ATI stack and the full stack is into much more intelligence so machine learning and predictability all the way eventually to remediation and so in this show we introduced the analytical consulting engine for VxRail and we put it out there as a field trial, as an early access. The thought process is we have a very large amount of intelligent customers that could tell us where they need this to take them. What's exciting about it is that every product these days is trying to be intelligent because we have a full stack we have a lot of context, a lot of things we could correlate. So we're very excited about this and we're hoping that our customers will participate in that design, I'm sure Harel will as soon as we can give it to them, the access and, not only full stack but make it much more intelligent, I think it's going to be very exciting year til next time we speak. >> Harel you have? >> Something to say about it. We are customers, us as an organization understand the public cloud allowed us to be infrastructure free and now they said okay some workloads are good for public cloud some workloads are good for private cloud and the multi cloud approach that VMcloud Foundation gives us the infrastructure free to just focus on the services. You need to understand the manageability of traditional infrastructure is very costly. Why? You need to manage it, you need to support it, you need to upgrade the frameworks, the buyers, the drivers and all the time to be concerned about if everything is supportable, how you do that all the job and again once you taking the VxRail as a hardware platform for that and the VMcloud foundation the software you getting a complete life cycle that assist you to just focusing about to be a service broker just add new services to the exist environment. >> Well Niv, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing with Stu and me where you guys are on this digital transformation journey, the successes you've achieved so far with Dell EMC, Gil again always great to have you on the program and we can't wait to hear more next year maybe Ace is going to give us some really insightful insights that will be groundbreaking. >> I believe so. Thank you very much. >> For Stu Minneman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching us on theCUBE, live from day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

Upbeat techno music >> Live, from Barcelona Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to The Cube's exclusive coverage, here in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier. With hosts this week: Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, here all for three days. So, we're wrapping up Cisco Live 2019, here in Europe. Guys, we're breaking it down. We had some great editorial segments, where we unpacked everything here. But, as we look back over the show, I want to get your observations and insights into, kind of what's going on with Cisco, the secret formula around why DevNet- their developer program; which also has Devnet Create, which is cloud native- is growing very rapidly. Huge resonance with the customer base in Cisco. It's created a revitalization of Cisco, as a company. And you can see that permeating throughout the organization with their branding, how the teams are organized, and they're engineering their products. Is this the future model for all infrastructure companies that don't have a cloud? And why is that successful? And then other observations. Guys, we'll start with DevNet. The very successful program, led by Susie Wee, Senior Vice President and CTO, executing flawlessly how to transform a community, without killing the old to bring in the new. Stu. >> Yeah, John, it's been fascinating to watch. We've talked about the ground effort, a lot of hard work by a small team, build a community. Last year, over 500,000. We hear they're at 560,000 people using this tool. Four and a half years ago, you know, Cisco- mostly a hardware company. It really- what I've seen over the last year or two, they were talking about software, but I've really seen deliverables here. You talk about CloudCenter Suite, you talk about the DNA Center platform; if they're a hardware company, there's a disconnect between what's going on in the DevNet zone, and what's happening in the company. But, we've seen rallying around software solutions. I've heard from the partnering system, from the customers: this isn't Cisco of a few years ago. Very fragmented, lots of lines of businesses, lots of different things. I remember back when Chambers announced, like, "oh, we've got, you know, 37 different adjacencies we're going to go into." No. Now it's: solution suites and platforms and, you know, DevNet- it is a unifying force of what they're doing. That's a great term, John. Love it. And see, that transformation of being a software company, that DevNet set some of the groundwork, and we heard the CIO of Cisco saying that, you know, security and the developer activity, are his partners in crime. Helping him, driving change, and... >> And they did a nice clever play on words: Data Centered. And that's kind of a shot across the bough of the classic data center, which shows it is a cloud world. And data is a center part of it. And, I think the API-centric economy's certainly doing it. But, Dave, I want to get your thoughts, because you asked a question to Susie Wee of DevNet- a very important question Other companies couldn't be successful with developer programs. Cisco has been. What's the secret formula? Well, I asked Amanda Whaley, who's her right-hand woman around what's going on, and she said, "well, there's no secret formula..." Guess what. There is a secret formula. They're being humble. But seems to be content- seems to be the unifying force of the community. They understood the need, they saw the future around cloud native and API's, being a very important connection tissue- connective tissue, for this cloud native world, and an upstream path for Cisco. They understood the future, knew the need, and they provided great content. The sessions and the education are open, inclusive, very education oriented. But, conversations with their peers have been key. TheCUBE's been here, talkin' to... They treat everyone the same, not the big pitches. Real authentic and genuine content that allowed people to learn and grow, and connect with others. To me, I think that is kind of- this is one of my observations. Your thoughts, Dave, on that. >> Yeah, so... First of all, there is a secret formula. And, this is the new blueprint, or the blueprint that infrastructure companies should be following. Cisco's clearly leading there. I think it's content and community. And, they're used their programmability, of their infrastructure, and they've socialized that. They've developed the technology. They say big companies can't innovate; DevNet is a real solid innovation. And it's- we witnessed all week, people coming in, training, learning; these are network engineers. They're learning new skills. They're learning how to be developers. And that is, to me, a huge innovation in business model, in technology. It's creating a flywheel for them. So, they've created- they've come up with the idea, that the network is a data platform. And it's now, also, become an application development platform. On which, they're deploying applications all over the place. Edge, we heard applications being deployed in police vehicles! And so, this is a very important trend, and from what I can tell, they're way ahead of other infrastructure companies: HP, I don't see this, they talk that game. Dell EMC; we talked about code. You know, IBM trying to make it happen with Bluemix. Oracle owns Java, and it still sort of struggles to own the development, developer marketplace. >> So, Dave, I love what you say there. I saw Jack Welch speak a number of years ago, and he's like, "eh, people always tell me all the time that big companies can't innovate." He's like, "well, maybe big companies, but what are companies made up of? Companies are made up of people, and people can innovate." And I think that's- you know, the key there is, it was very people-focused. Absolutely, content. When you talk about what were the big sessions here: oh, they're doin' Java, they're doin' kubernetes. It's like, okay, wait: is there a connection to Cisco products? Absolutely. Is it a product pitch in a product training? There's plenty of that going here! People need that. People built their careers out of Cisco. But this new career? A big question question I had coming in, is: it's a multi-cloud world, you know... Infrastructure, developer, and everything. Cisco's a piece of that. You know, how do they make sure that they get- sticking this with them, and helping them to build their career, and move forward. There's going to be some nice activity, there. And, you get a good glow, and you know, Cisco makes themselves relevant in those communities. >> The other observation that I saw, and I want to get your reactions to it, guys, is: that we saw Scale- and we talk about this all the time in theCUBE. Scale is now table stakes, to compete in this global landscape. But, complexity with multi-cloud, and these things, is there. Every major inflection point in the industry- abstraction layers and software, and/or hardware advances- certainly, Moore's Law kicks in and helps that. But, it's been software abstractions that have really moved the needle, because that's where you can have complexity, and still remove it; from an integration standpoint, from a consumption standpoint. This seems to be- Cisco's buying into this, across the companies, Stu- software. Not just hardware. They've coupled it, but they all work together. This is the magic of DevNet, the magic of API's. It's the magic of an internet operating system. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, and look- we talked to a number of the companies that were acquired by Cisco over the last few years, and I think those are helping to drive some of the change. You have, of course, APT is the big one, Duo in security; companies that were born in the cloud, and helping to move that change along the way, and John, as you said, that unifying factor of, "we're rallying," it's not just, the new Chip Stubbs standing up on the- and saying, "you know, okay, we spent millions of dollars in developing this thing, everybody go out and sell that." It's now- there's co-creation, you're seeing that evolution of that partner ecosystem. And, it's a challenging change, but Cisco is, you know, moving in the right direction. >> It starts at the top, too, Stu. And, I wanted to make a point of- we learned, also- and this is learning for me. Chuck Robbins is behind all this, okay. The CEO has identified DevNet, and said, "this is strategic to our company." All new products now, that are introduced at Cisco, will have API support and a DevNet component. This is a radical change from Cisco of the past. This means that every solution, out of the box- literally- and software, will have that in there. So, with API's and DNA Center, those are two areas to me, that I think will really be a tell sign. If Cisco can execute on the DNA Center, and bring in API's and a DevNet- a real supporting community behind every product; I think the programmable network will be a reality. >> So, help me squint through this. You know, we talk to a lot of people, we go to a lot of shows. We're gettin' the Kool-Aid injection from the DevNet crew here- but, there's real substance. We're going to challenge some of the other companies that we work with. Some of the other infrastructure companies. The IT business, it's like the NFL. It's a copycat league. So, HP is going to say, "oh, we got ATI's." EMC, Dell: they're going to say the same thing. But, what's different here... I mean, clearly, you see it in the evidence of being able to cultivate a community of developers. >> Of course. >> Is it because of the network? >> No, it's management. HP has people- I've talked to them on theCUBE- that believe in cloud native. The company just doesn't fund them properly. They've got the smallest booth at the events, they're always, you know, a partner booth. They're part of an adjunct of something else. HP and Tony O'Neary, I don't think is funding open cloud native... Or certainly the marketing people, or product people, are not funding developers. >> Well, certainly not to the degree that Cisco is, obviously. >> There's no physical signs of any kind. We go to all the shows. >> What about Dell? What about Dell EMC? >> I think Dell EMC is kind of keeping it open, but there's no coherent group. I can't, in my mind's eye, point to one group, saying, "wow, they're kickin' ass." >> They got bigger problems now. It's how you consolidate the portfolio... >> What is- Michael Dell's state of goal, is for Dell to be the leading infrastructu&re company out there. There's a big hardware component of that. Absolutely, they participate in open source, they have some developer- API's are great, and they love standards. But, you know, this is a software movement. >> Yeah. >> Infrastructure's code is where they're going. VMWare, you know, they've made some pushes and moves, in this space... >> With developers? >> Not big developers... >> But, where are the developers? They had their operators on the IT side, so- back to Dell for a second. I think Dell Boomi is one signal, I've seen some sign there. But then- and that's still relatively new, but there's no one- there's no DevNet for Dell. On VMWare... >> People Labs is someone that is helping customers learn to code, do that kind of activity. But, you know, broadly across the Dell family, I haven't seen as much. >> I think VMware has a good ecosystem. I think they have good technical people. I don't think they need a developer program, per se. I think they need more of an operator program. I think that's VMWorld. You go to VMWorld and you see a lot of the partners, and how they integrate in. >> So, who are the favorites in the developer world? Obviously, Microsoft, and MUS... >> I mean, to me, it's Amazon- as a kid in a candy store, if you're a developer, you're all over Amazon. They have great stuff, they're always introducing new candy for the kids, all the time. New services; Amazon, number one. Azure, I think- not so much, in my mind. I think it's a lot of legacy, there, with Azure. But, they are- they're puttin' up the numbers on the profit, and you know my stand on Azure. I think Azure's sandbagging the numbers. But, the growth's there, it's going to be a matter of time. I think, Azure, is on the path. And they have the legacy developer program, world class, Microsoft. Microsoft is in the Cisco kind of wheelhouse. If they can transform their existing developer community, to be cloud native, they hit a home run. >> Yeah, but, John, you were talking about IT ops, out there; Microsoft does great in that. They've got a lot of big push there. They absolutely- the DotNet developers are there. You go to the Build conference, they play. We go to CUBECon, and a lot of the developer shows, and Microsoft, strongly there... >> No, let me just clarify my point. Let me clarify my point on Microsoft. Yes, they have a pre-existing, huge, development. They've been successful by the core competancy, no doubt. Cisco had a developer community: all networking. So, I think Microsoft has that legacy win, but they have to transform, and go the next level. The question is, do they have that. So- with Azure, I'm saying... >> What about Google? You guys were at the Google Cloud Show last year, we'll be there again in April. >> Yeah, you got to put Google in the mix. No doubt, I mean, no question. And, what about Red Hat? With IBM, on the developer front? >> Yeah, look, when you talk to the developers, and all the- a lot of the training their doing, if you've got LITIC skill sets, you've got a leg up in a lot of these environments. There are a lot of developers. It's not like people at Red Hat- some, are like, "oh wait, 6here's my first hoodie, and I'm going to learn to start code." They're already there. They're in this ecosystem. Red Hat: huge part- everybody we just talked about, Red Hat has a strong piece in there. That's one of the reasons why IBM bought them, Dave, is to help ride that wave. >> That's expensive, but they got the ingredients now. >> Red Hat's- check, I love those guys. Google has a lot of developers. They contribute heavily in open source. But, in terms of a Google community, that's really the CNCF in my mind. I think they're doing great job stewarting CNCF, but there's not a lot of people- users, in the Google ecosystem, they've got tons of developers. And, that's an opportunity for Google, in my opinion. >> Well, let's bring it back to Cisco. So, are we in agreement that they've got a leg up on the other infrastructure competitors... >> Yeah, I do. >> Specifically, as it relates to developers. >> They have a huge leg up, but I think it's even bigger that that. I think that this company is going to skyrocket, if they crack the code on network programmability. They're at the early stages now, you're talking about intro to Python, they give more advanced classes... Give them 24 months, if they continue momentum on DevNet, that's the tipping point, in my mind. Two years, they could own everything, and just be a whole other level company, if they crack the code. 'Cause the network is the value. Payload, network effect, this is the new normal in today's.. >> It's a big challenger. I mean, it's really not- and, the networking companies, for years, haven't been able... The Aristas, and the Junipers, haven't been able to unseed them, as the leader. They still got 60 percent of the marketplace. >> DMWare- DMWare and Cisco. >> DMWare, alright. >> DMWare and Cisco, 'cause DMWare and Amazon, that's a lethal combination. I think that's what I'm going to watch, the frenemy action between DMWare and Cisco. I think that level of where NSX, and what Cisco's trying to do, within ten paces of that working. >> Well, and Outpost is the hybrid infrastructure. Does that eventually become a multi-cloud play? Maybe it's a few years off, but... >> Yeah, absolutely. Look, we've watched- a year ago, we were saying, "okay, Google's a strong partner to Cisco, how 'about AWO's?" Well, they're integrating with kubernetes, they're starting to do more with AWS. It's always an interesting partnership with Amazon. Cisco's got lots of products in the marketplace, they're growing in that environment, but Amazon's learning from everybody and can potentially be a threat down the road to where Cisco is. And, I'd love to see Cisco doing more in the Microsoft space, too. >> We'll be watching Cisco, over the year. We're going to continue to go deep on Cisco. We got the Cisco Live North America Show on the cal... >> San Diego. >> This year in San Diego. So, we'll see theCUBE there, for multiple days, as well. Of course, we'll be following all the traction of software define everything, as the world goes completely cyber, dark, encrypted; whatever it is, we're going to be covering it. Well, thanks for watching. I want to give a shout out to the crew. Good job, guys. Well done. Thanks for watching theCUBE here, in Barcelona. I'm Jeff Furrier with Dave Vellonte, Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)