(upbeat techno) [Announcer] Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018 There's over 5000 customers, partners, Netappians, analysts, press here. TheCUBE is here as well, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman back for our second year of covering. We're joined by two guests, one an alumni and one a new guest to theCUBE, Henri Richard EVP a worldwide field and customer operations from NetApp, welcome. >> Good morning. >> Morning. And Kamran Amini, the VP and GM of data center infrastructure from Lenovo, welcome back! >> Glad to be here. >> So guys, Lenovo, NetApp, just about a month ago announced some exciting news, Henri let's start with you, kind of give our viewers who may not be that familiar with the news announcement what this new technology partnership is all about. >> Well, it's a multi-faceted partnership. I think it's important to understand that for us there is a component that has to do with a worldwide engagement of Lenovo around storage solutions that will be infused with NetApp technology. There's a second element, which is the opportunity for us to pull or go to market organization in certain countries, and get to critical mass to cover the needs of customers. And then the last part, the one that's probably the most talked about, is a joint venture in China where we will combine our forces to serve the needs of the very fast-growing Chinese market. >> Alright, yeah. Henri, I was at the Lenovo event where this was announced, want you to give us a little bit about the field engagement, because it really does seem a place where NetApp and Lenovo, there's good synergies there, but there's not a ton of overlap. Maybe explain a little bit from the field engagement. >> That is really one of the reasons we were excited, I think, on both sides to do this agreement. You know, we feel that Lenovo is a fantastic server company, that's demonstrated incredible momentum in the last 12 months. We have ourselves, you know, modestly a pretty nice momentum in the storage business, and in coming together I think we can be stronger in serving the needs of customers that have both compute and storage needs. When we did the analysis of our market coverage, it so happens that there's a lot of places where we're strong and Lenovo can benefit from that, and other places where they're strong, and we can benefit from it, so you're correct in stating that there was not that much overlap. And then lastly, we've put in place a process where our go-to-market organizations are going to combine their strength and help each other in some of accounts where both a strong compute story and a strong storage - needs to be integrated to serve the needs of the customer. >> Let's talk a little bit more, guys, about the impetus from the customers. The keynote this morning, as I was mentioning was jam packed, and we heard a lot, Stu, about the customer experience, and how NetApp is an enabler of customers to harness their data to become data-driven. Kamran, from your perspective, what was some of the customer input that really sort of brought this partnership - and this multi-faceted partnership - together? >> I think as we see customers looking their applications, not only current applications, but emerging applications, data's becoming very critical. And be able to accelerate data and the availability of data is going to be key for them, alright? As you heard earlier this morning, data's gold, right? It's the next oil, as we think about it. So we looked at our customers and at their transforming moving toward machine learning and AI, big data analytics, and it's driving massive amount of data that you have to be able to accelerate and be able to give results back. The partnership was the best of breed here. Looking at a leader partner around all flash and growing massively with their data-management solutions, and us leveraging our server technology and the capability we bring as a data center group, bring the both of best breeds to deliver an end solution for customers is really what we're focused on. And it's all being driven, really, by data, really where we see the acceleration happening in the workload aspect of it. >> You know, I was listening to the keynote this morning it talked about how customers today, it's a hybrid, multi-cloud world, is what NetApp positioned, and what I actually like is both NetApp and Lenovo are really aware and work with, really, the hyper scalers out there. There's a bunch of years that we kind of - there was this fighting from certain vendors out there, it was like, "Don't go that, that's not the future," you know, "We know what we're telling." Maybe talk a little bit about how that plays into philosophy, how you deal with customers, and how that leads to co engineered solutions that you'll work with together. >> Well, I think that both companies have a history of being good partners in the industry. Let's start there. Secondly, you're right, that some vendors in what we call traditional IT, are still fighting the reality of the hybrid multi-cloud, and I think that that's the path to death. Lenovo doesn't have that position, we certainly don't have that position, and we believe that combining our strength, when we're serving the customer to help them go to the public cloud, to help them leverage both great compute capabilities on prem and the extraordinary innovation that happens in the cloud is the right way to serve the customers. >> No, absolutely. I think that customers are looking to be more agile, all right? As their business evolves, and they're seeing competitive nature in their line of business, agility is becoming more and more important. Everybody also has to fit within a budget, so the hybrid-cloud story is really the path. And today, again, Lenovo is serving six of the top 10 hyper-scalers today from a technology, and we believe the hybrid-cloud story for on prem is the path of the future, where the customer adopt and deploy, to be more agile and reactive to their markets. >> George Kurian talked about, in his keynote this morning, that we seemed to kind of initially address, stand up has a massive install base, a lot of enterprises that were not born in the digital age, so he kind of talked about something that reminded me of what you said, Henri, is, "If customers don't adapt, transform rapidly at scale, they're out of business." So NetApp itself has undergone a very significant transformation, I'd love to understand from both of your perspectives, Henri, we'll start with you. How does the NetApp Lenovo multi-faceted partnership deliver differentiators? Presumably Lenovo has a lot of choices to do a partnership with a cloud storage data management company. What are some of those unique things from NetApp's field? >> So, one of the salient points that George made this morning is that for legacy companies, you know, they have to understand that the fact that they already have data is a huge asset that they need to leverage, right? That's using that data is how they're not going to become disrupted by a new company. Startups have agility, but they don't have the data. So jumping on that opportunity was certainly something we did at NetApp, and we have an application called Active IQ that actually takes a massive data lake of information we get from our systems, and is helping our customers make better usage of our technology. So just an example of our digital transformation. To the point of the relationship with Lenovo, the nice thing about our data fabric strategy is that it is not related to NetApp hardware, it's really all encompassing, it's there to serve the needs of the customer to be able to leverage the value of their data. And so it makes it very easy to partner with us, because really we're not parochial about, how we go about leveraging the technology. >> Yeah, I think what we see is, you know this digital transformation is driving many new use cases. IOT's becoming a big thing, putting edge to the cloud. So, data and our understanding data, and what you can do with data, is going to become more relevant across all lines of business. And that's where we're really focused on, and our transformation as Lenovo it's all around, "How do we address that shift that's happening in the market, where customers are moving away from data being just there to actually leveraging data and being able to create an outcome out of that data so it's going to be effective?" >> Alright, so this was announced about a month ago. Give us a little insight, how's the rollout been going? What's the reaction been from customers, channel partners, and the like? >> So I think channel partners, analysts, and press have been very positive, right? I think as we talked about being frictionless, it's been there, right? I think people see that what we said is actually out there. We're seeing good success in parts of geography worldwide already for the parts that have been shipping as of 09/14. We have our DE series shipping shortly, in early November, and we're going to continue acceleration in our channel partners and our customers. So we're very excited, I think as we saw prior to announcement we were growing triple digits in all flash as Lenovo. I think that with the expanded TAM going from 15% to averaging above 90% on market with the storage portfolio, we're excited here. We're anxious to keep going. >> Yeah, I'll go a little further, I would tell you that I think many channel partners felt hostage to some of the other choices in the industry. And the overwhelming feedback to the announcement of this relationship is, "Thank God, I now have an alternative that is powerful, with great focus on the compute side, great momentum on the storage side, bringing together best of great portfolio, and now I've got choice that I didn't have before." So I think there's a very high level of expectation, excitement, and I expect the momentum with channel partners and distributors to be very high. >> Let's unpack that joint go-to-market GTM strategy a little bit more. Let's talk about it first from the NetApp side. How are you going to market with an image and your partners? The selling motion, how do customers engage? Help us understand that. >> So NetApp is really coming from a very high-touch sales model, you know the beauty of our partnership with Lenovo is they have a velocity model. So for the part of the markets that are really about having velocity, I think it's a perfect marriage. The second thing is, they have a much larger world-wide presence than we do, I mean they've got physical location in many countries where we are not present. So that's expanding the footprint of potential close in service to NetApp customers. And then lastly, you know, the world is evolving very quickly, it's all about the apps, and I am excited about the fact that my go-to-market team rubbing shoulders with the Lenovo team is going to get more intelligent about compute, which is important for us to understand the real needs of the customers. >> Lisa: And Kamran, from your view? >> I mean I think we - And Lenovo serves over 160 countries, as you know, Henri, so we have a very expanded. We serve customers all the way from SMB all the way to very large enterprise like cloud service providers and MSBs. I think the momentum we have based on the park announcement is really provides an alternative solution to the HPE 3PAR and Delhi AMC, right? As Henri stated I think a lot of our channel partners, our disties, our value-added resellers are looking for an alternative route of a solution between the two leading platform solution providers here. And I think we're seeing that momentum, right? I think as of 09/13 when we made the announcement at Transform, we're seeing the excitement and the pull coming from the field and driving it, and of course we of course have a direct sales model, right? Having that high touch with a customer, selling the value prop of this storage solution and entire portfolio we can bring in, and the partnership value that brings in with NetApp here. >> Alright, so what should we expect to see from this partnership in the near future? >> Well, I think, you know, expansion of the product portfolio, particularly in the case of the China JV. One of the mission of that JV will be to design products specifically for the Chinese market, which we all know is very big and growing extremely fast, so that's one aspect that is yet to be seen. And then the second thing is as we collaborate on solving real customer problems, I expect to see a higher level of innovation, as we understand both sides of the equation and how we can bring our technologies together to solve real customer problems. >> The last question for both of you. You both talked about this joint partnership gives both NetApp and Lenovo and your respective install bases choice. What is the one differentiator? Why would a customer choose to go this route versus, as you mentioned, Delhi MC, HPE...? >> So I think you look at where NetApp has had leadership performance in all flash, and Ontap's amazing software, data management software solution. And look at Lenovo, we've been the fastest-growing server provider in the world. We see where we're bleeding in HPC environments, and really driving software to find. So I think customers are looking for, "How do I take the best of breed of things and bring it together? And making sure when you bring it together it is working together." So part of having the relationship of leveraging the NetApp technology is that Lenovo storage portfolio also provides that ability that says, it's a proven technology, the server technologies and the storage are proven. So it doesn't matter if a customer wants to leverage a NetApp technology with a Lenovo server, it is a proven solution for them, and they can depend on the value it's going to deliver. >> From my standpoint, you've got two credible, long term, solid people in the industry, partnering to get best-of-breed solutions with an eye towards being leaning into the cloud, and I think that in two days, IT business with a new wave of IT, if you don't embrace the cloud, the cloud will kill you. And so I think that's our unique differentiation, is that we have two companies that can serve our customers on prem needs, but have a very comprehensive private cloud, public cloud, and on prem strategy. And I think that nobody else can claim that differentiation. >> Henri, Kamran, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting and sharing a little bit more about this exciting partnership. We look forward to hearing news next year! >> It's been a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and we are live from NetApp Insight 2018, we'll be back after a short break. (upbeat techno)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Justin Warren on day one of VMworld 2018. This is the twentieth anniversary of VMware. Lots of momentum this morning kicking things off. Justin and I are happy to be joined by some folks from NetApp. We have Nancy Hart, the Head of Marketing for Cloud Infrastructure. >> Good afternoon. >> Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you Julie, it's so great to be here. And an alumni, Gabe Chapman. I love your Twitter handle @bacon_is_king. Senior Manager of NetApp HCI. Hey, Gabe. >> Hi, how are you doing? >> Good. Guys, lots of momentum. Pat Gelsinger was probably one of my favorite keynotes cause he's really energetic. He even went full-in with his faux tap this morning. I was impressed. >> Impressive. >> You guys have some news. >> Yes. >> Tell us about what's new with NetApp and VMware today. >> Fantastic, exciting times at NetApp these days. NetApp is really focused on becoming the data authority for hybrid cloud. Part of that is what we're excited to announce today here at VMworld, is a NetApp-verified architecture for VMware private cloud for HCI. What you heard today in Pat's keynote was a lot about connection on-premises private clouds with hyperscalers public clouds. That's what we're doing in our partnership with VMware here and this validated architecture for private clouds. Exciting news for us. In addition, we're also really be thrilled to be announcing new storage nodes for our NetApp HCI product and SolidFire product, as well. Lots going on today. >> Wow, that's really cool. >> Gabe, you've been in the field a lot. What are some of the things that you're hearing? Some of the signage around here is about VMware's making things possible, making momentum possible. What are some of the things that you're seeing in the field in terms of customer's momentum? Leveraging HCI from NetApp to drive new business models, new revenue streams. >> I think one of the things I see commonly is that the hyperconverge as a platform has been around for about six, seven years now. Customers are seeing that some of the first generational approaches have got them to a certain level in terms of addressing simplicity and kind of that turnkey infrastructure stack, but where they would like to go next is more cloud integrated, more scalability, more enterprise class or enterprise scale technology. Therefore, they're kind of looking at the NetApp HCI product and the architecture that we've brought to market, and seeing the potential to not only do things on-premise that they'd normally do in terms of a infrastructure platform but also move in to new services. How do we integrate with existing investments that they've had? How do we become connected into the hybrid cloud model with the hyperscalers themselves and really push towards a all-encompassing cloud infrastructure platform other than just a box. >> Yeah, one of the things I noticed in the keynote today that, I think, relates to that, and I'm interested to hear, Nancy and Gabe, a little bit more about what customers are doing here, because it seems that the idea of it must be all cloud or all on-site, that's gone away now. It's very much hybrid cloud world, multi cloud world, where customers have choice. Are you hearing that from customers? Clearly, there seems to be some demand here because we've seen the change in messaging. >> Absolutely, and I think what you're seeing is customers want the option to take advantage of all the resources. Regardless if those resources are on-premises or in public clouds, and that's what we're doing here at NetApp with our own HCI solution. As the market evolves under our feet, Gabe talked about those first generation vendors weren't quite enough, that our customers are choosing NetApp cause they want more then what they can get from those first generation vendors. What you really want to see is that convergence continues to march on and that there is more to collapse into this stack, particularly that connection up into the public cloud. Customers are definitely looking today, they're making buying decisions today based on that option. >> Right, and clearly, there's lots of customers who have substantial investment already in NetApp so being able to use what've you already got and extend it with a vendor that you're already familiar with and you know how it works. There's a lot of value there. >> We're a trusted vendor. NetApp is a trusted enterprise vendor with the reliability and customers can come to us with confidence and choose NetApp with confidence. >> We were with you guys at SAP just a couple months ago at the beginning of the summer and #datadriven was everywhere, I'm seeing it in Twitter. We often hear many things about data is power, data is currency, data is fuel. Data is all of those things if it can be harnessed and acted upon in real time. How does NetApp HCI, what are some of the differentiators? Obviously, we talked about the trusted partnership, but how does NetApp help customers actually live a data-driven life within their organization? >> I think a lot of times it starts with understanding where your data lives. How you manage it, manipulate it, and secure it. We have things like GPDR that comes (mumbles). All the sudden, everybody's scrambling to come up with a solution or a reference architecture or some way that integrates with it. I think, naturally, NetApp being the product technology company that it's been and it's lived and breathed data all its life. We understand our customer's unique requirements around governance, around security, around mobility, and we've built technologies that don't lock you into any one mode of consumption. If you bought a filer, if you bought an HCI system, if you bought an object store platform, the data fabric piece is the glue that binds and allows data mobility and portability across multiple platforms. Not only from the edge to the core, but also to the cloud and kind of gives you that larger, bigger picture. We believe that as we start to see this transition, especially edge computing, especially as we look at things like NVMe over fabrics and getting in to new levels and also services that we are delivering across the hyperscalers. A cohesive picture and story around where your data lives, how you manage it, and who can access it is empowering customers to make their transition into the multi cloud space. >> Right, clearly that transition, I think, is what people weren't really understanding three or four years ago. It was like enterprises aren't going to be there in one spot. You can't just turn it on in five seconds, these things take time. >> (mumbles) flipped, yeah. >> With our data fabric we're able to cover the entire NetApp portfolio from edge to core to cloud. As you say, enterprises and different departments in those enterprises will make their own transition and go down their own journey of digital transformation in their own time. NetApp can really be that trusted partner for all these enterprises. >> With so much choice comes, I think, inherently a lot of complexity. I thought they did a great job this morning in the keynote, Pat Gelsinger and team, of really talking about their announcements, what VMware has done in their history pretty clearly. I can imagine from a customer's perspective, if it's an enterprise organization who doesn't want to get Uber-ized, they probably don't know where to start. Talk to us about sort of the business-level conversations that NetApp has with not just your existing customers who know they can come to NetApp to trust you but also some of those maybe newer businesses or newer enterprise businesses to NetApp. How can they come to you and say help us understand? We probably have, what did they say this morning? The average customer's eight clouds. How do you help them to sort of digest that, embrace it, and be able to maximize it so that their data can be available as soon as they need it? >> What it is is data's at the heart of the enterprise and how people help customers change their world with data, but there has to be a direct business outcome for that. When enterprise customers learn to mine the value of their data they can really build new revenue streams, they can create new touchpoints with their own customers to drive their businesses. For example, one of our early NetApp HCI customers was down in Australia. A company called Consatel, a service provider down in Australia. They were really struggling to set up new businesses and new services to their own customer base. When the conversation, when they worked with NetApp what they were able to do was deploy new services three times faster over their last vendor. Think about what that did for their top line. If this company Consatel could deploy new services, new revenue opportunities three times faster. >> Blowing their competitors out of the water. >> Blowing their competitors out of the water. That's a business-level conversation. This is not a conversation about technology. Yes, under the covers, there's some amazing, fantastic technology, but it has to serve the business. Consatel has now been so successful with NetApp HCI that they now are expanding into brand new geo and geo regions and bringing new services to a whole new set of customers and a whole new customer base working with us. >> That's what I'm hearing in the conversations that I have with customers. I'm interested to hear from yourself and Gabe as to whether you're hearing this across the board. You've got one example here of customers who are concerned more with additional revenues. New revenue streams, new ways of making money top line and not so much about cost savings. That was something that was being, we were concentrating on that maybe three or four years ago. That seems to have been de-emphasized now and people are much more interested in seeking out new ways to use things. New sources of revenue and focusing on top line. Is that something that you're seeing across the board or is that only leading edge companies that are looking at that? >> We see it across the board, I think, with a lot of customers across many different verticals. For instance, Children's Mercy Hospital bought our NetApp HCI product for a virtual desktop implementation and they did so for a lot of reasons. One of them being the traditional TCO/ROI discussion. But also allows them to provide a platform that isn't just a silo of resources because of the unique aspects and differentiation that we have on our platform. We're able to go and do mixed workloads and do consolidation so they're realizing savings and gains across collapsing silos, bringing multiple applications on the same, common infrastructure. The same way they would've gone and swiped their credit card at Amazon. When you do that, you don't care if you're putting a SQL database, an Oracle or what not. They're going to give you the resource that you need. We want to mimic that locally on-prem for customers. Then, also have that integration with cloud services. If we're building a cloud service that runs on Amazon or Google, or if we're integrating with VMware as it runs on AWS or whatever, we want to be able to extend those services from local on-premises environments into the cloud and back based on that. I think that's really where the value is. There's no turnkey public cloud in a hybrid cloud integration piece. It's a journey and you have to analyze all the applications and the way you've done business. NetApp, having been working in the enterprise space as a trusted advisor for such a long time, we understand the customer's needs. We've been in the cloud space for a number of years already and we kind of understand that space. We're bridging the gap at the data level and helping to expand that more at the infrastructure level as well and as we branch into new services as time goes on. >> You've got that challenge of every customer being different but there's also trends that are common across the industry and NetApp being the size and having the history that it does, you've seen all of these things before and you know that yes, this is unique to you as a customer, but also we've seen this in other customers. This would be of value to you and you can bring that to those customers. >> Not only that, we have this product called Active IQ and it tends to be a service and support and monitoring application but, like you said, we have a very large customer base and using features and functionalities in AI we're able to use the data that we get from Active IQ as a community wisdom in effect and then make suggestions to those users as well. NetApp does have a very large install base. What can we learn from that install base, how can we help existing customers run their operations better with that community wisdom? >> We've always referred to it as actionable intelligence for your data. We've all played Tetris as a kid, it's playing Tetris with your data, Tetris with your workloads, and making sure that they all line up so that you get all four blocks break at the same time and get the high score. It's really taking and really, truly mining your infrastructure, mining your workloads and your information, and making sure that you're getting the most effective resource utilization that you possibly can. Across not just virtual machine workloads but also data workloads and understanding what you have on the floor versus what you need six months from now to one year from now. That Active IQ platform is really an integral part to really understanding customer's data resource utilization, etc. >> As someone who has played storage Tetris, any help that you can do is very, very welcome. >> I got to bring that back. That's the second reference I've heard to that in the last couple days. One of the things that Pat Gelsinger and team talked about this morning during the general session was superpowers and the need to enable enterprises to be able to harness their superpowers and maximize AI, machine learning, IoT, the edge. How was NetApp and VMware uniquely positioned to help your customers be able to take that actionable intelligence, Gabe, that you mentioned on that data to drive the new business models and revenue streams? >> I think our superpower would be, information is power, so that's our superpower is being data-driven and understanding how we take the customer's data, leverage it to its most effective use, and allocate it and protect it properly. There's a whole bunch of different areas around what we're doing there. Ours would be understanding data, understanding how customers want to use it, and what kind of information they want to extract from it. I'll have to come up with a fancy term for, maybe data thrivers is my superpower. That could be definitely one part of it. >> You could make a logo out of that. >> That sounds pretty good. >> The Thriver. >> The Thriver, I like it. >> We're data thrivers. >> I like it. >> I think so. >> NetApp has been a partner of VMware's for a very long time. You have a large ecosystem of partners, as well. What you guys announced today, talk to us about some of the benefits or really the opportunities that's going to give to NetApp's channel partners. >> There's a lot of opportunity here for our channel partners. As our customers take this journey, they're going to turn to their trusted advisors, their partners, to help them take that journey as well. What we've done here with what we announced with the VMware private cloud for HCI, this is a significant opportunity for our channel partners to work with their customers and take them down that path to be that data thriver. To harness that superpower. New opportunities for all. Customers need someone to help them show the way and channel partners are really the community to do that. >> For those channel partners who are keen to go and do this, how should they engage with you? How should they start talking to NetApp about helping their customers to go down this journey? >> Honestly, we're making the announcement this week. That's the first step is come by our booths. >> It's a thing, yeah. >> If they're here, obviously. We have a very large channel organization. We have outreach, we'll have training, we'll have, the path to hybrid clouds starts with turnKey private cloud and that's kind of what we've done here. We're working on that turnkey private cloud with our partner VMware and NetApp together to kind of facilitate that first step. Then we go out and work with our channel partner organizations to find the customers that want to go down that path. Then they can bring their additional add-on to it. There's a lot of opportunity to go out and really push and help customers make this transition between the two different worlds and obviously we can go to netapp.com and come and take a look. We have plenty of information there, too. >> Just as we wrap up here, I'm curious, Nancy, to get your perspective, from a cloud infrastructure perspective or vision, the announcements that VMware made today. Big news with AWS. Launched that last year. Talked about a lot of expansion going to apache. A lot of work in Australia. >> Yep. >> What does that as well as some other product enhancements they announced today, what does that mean to NetApp? >> I think for NetApp and for our customers, cause really let's stay focused on NetApp's customers, some of the announcements you saw Pat make today provides new options, new opportunities for NetApp's customers globally. As there's these new features, new functionalities to that turnkey solution for private cloud, what you saw is VMware expanding that relationship with AWS just gives new options and new opportunities. >> Hopefully, people can go and maybe by tomorrow get a data thriver pin or sticker. >> Going to have to run out to Kinko's real quick and make some stickers. >> Maybe print it on some bacon. >> Actually, I think we have pretzel necklaces in our booth to go for the beer crawl. >> Oh wow. What time is that? >> Soon, not soon enough. >> Nancy and Gabe, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting with Justin and me. Very exciting to hear NetApp's continued transformation and what you're helping customers achieve. >> Thank you for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. For Justin Warren, I'm Lisa Martin. We're at VMworld, day one, stick around we'll be right back. (electronic tones)

>> Live, from San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering DataWorks Summit 2018. Brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of DataWorks here in San Jose, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost James Kobielus. We are joined by Mike McNamara, he is the Senior Product and Solutions Marketing at NetApp. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're a first timer, >> Yes, >> So this is very exciting! >> Happy to be here. >> Welcome. >> Thanks. >> So, before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about how NetApp has been in this space for a while, but is really just starting to be recognized as a player. So, talk a little bit about your company's evolution. >> Sure. So, in the whole analytic space, is something NetApp was in a long time ago, and then sort got out of it, and then over the last several years, we've gotten back in, and we recognize it's a huge opportunity for data storage, data management, if you look at IDC Data, massive, massive market, but, the opportunity for us, is like you know what, they're mainly using a direct attached storage model where compute and storage is tied together. And now, with data just exploding, and growing like crazy, it's always been growing, but now it seems like it's just growing like crazy now, that, and customers wanting to have data on-prem, but also being able to move it off to the cloud, we're like, hey this is a great opportunity for us to come in with a solution that's, external storage solution that can come in and show them the benefits of have a more reliable, have an opportunity to move their data off to the cloud, we've got great solutions with that, so it's gone well, but it's been a little bit different, like at this show, a lot of the people, the data scientists, data engineers, some who know us, some still don't like, so, NetApp, what do you guys do, and so it's a little bit of an education, 'cause it's not a traditional buyer, if you will, we look at them as influencers, but it's only one influence than we traditionally have sold to say Vice President of Infrastructure, as an example, or maybe a Director of Storage Admin, but most of those folks are not here, so we're, this is just kind of a new market for us that we're making inroads. >> How do data scientists, or do they influence the purchase of storage solutions, or data management solutions? >> Sure, so they want to have access to the data, they want to be able analyze it quickly and effectively, they want to make sure it's always available, you know, at their fingertips so to speak. We can help them by giving them very fast, very reliable solutions, and specially with our software, they want to do for example, do some virtual clone of that data, and just do some testing on that without impacting their production data, we can do that in a snap, so we can make their lives a lot easier, so we can show them how, hey, mister data scientist, we can make your life a little easier-- >> Or miss data scientist. >> Or miss, we were talking about that, >> There are a lot of women in this field. >> Yeah, yeah. >> More than we realize, and they're great. >> So we can help you do your job better, and then, that, him or her can then influence who's making the purchase decisions. >> Yeah, training sets, test sets, validation sets of data for the machine learning and analytics development pipeline, yes, you need a solid storage infrastructure to do it right. >> Absolutely. >> So, when you're getting inside the head of your potential buyer here, the VP of Infrastructure, or data admin, what is it that you're hearing from those people most, what are their concerns, what keeps them up at night, and where do you come in? >> Yeah, so one of the concerns is, often times, you're, hey, how do I, do you have a cloud storage, connected to the cloud, you know, I'm doing things on-prem now, but is there a path, so that's a big one. And we, NetApp, pride ourselves on being the most cloud-connected, all flash storage in the industry. So, that's a big focus, big push for us. If you saw our marketing, it shows data authority for the hybrid cloud, so we really honestly do, whether it's with Google, or Azure, or AWS, we know our software runs in those environments, it also runs on-premises, but because it's the same on-tap software, we can move data between those environments. So, we get a real good storage, so we can you know, boom, check the box, we got you covered if you want to utilize the cloud, and I think the next piece of that is just from a protecting, protecting the data, you know, again I said data is just growing so much, I want to make sure it's always available, and we can back it up and all that, and that's been a core, core strength, versus like a lot of these traditional solutions they've been using, these direct attached models, they just don't have anywhere near the enterprise-grade data protection that NetApp has always prided itself on, over many decades now. And so, we can help them do that, and quite honestly, a lot of people think, well you know, you guys are external storage, how do you compare versus direct attached storage from our total cost, that's another one. I can tell you definitively, and we've got data to back it up from a total cost of ownership point of view, because of the fact that, of the advantages we bring from, up-time, and you know from RAID, but you know, in a Hadoop environment, often times there's three copies of data. With our solution, a good piece of software, there's only one copy of your data, so have three versus one is a big saving, but even what we do with the data, compressing it, and compacting it, a lot of benefits. So, we do have honest to goodness, outwards to 50% better total cost of ownership, versus a DAS model. >> Do you use machine learning within your portfolio? I'm hearing of more stories, >> Great question, yeah. >> Incorporating machine learning to automate or facilitate more of the functions in the data protection or data management life-cycle. >> Yeah, that's a great question, and we do use, so we've got a piece of software which we call Active IQ, it was referred to as Ace Update, you may have, it may ring a bell, but to answer your question, so we've got thousands of thousands of NetApp systems out there, and those customers that allow us, we have, think of it as kind of a call home feature, where we're getting data back from all our installed customers, and then we will go and do predictive analytics, and do some machine learning on that data, so then we can go back to those customers and say, hey you know what, you've got this volume that's unprotected, you should protect this, or we can show them, if you were to move that data off into our cloud environment, here's maybe performance you would see, so we do do a lot of that predictive-- >> Predictive performance assessment, it sounds like there's anomaly detection in there as well. >> Anomaly as well, letting them know, hey, you know, it's time for this drive, it may fail on you, let's ship you out a new drive now before it happens, so yeah, a lot of, from an analytics, predictive analysis going on. And you know, it's a huge benefit to our customers. Huge benefit. >> I know you're also doing a push toward artificial intelligence, so I'd like to hear more about that, and then also, if there's any best practices that have emerged. >> Sure, sure, so yes. That is another big area, so it's kind of a logical progression from where we were, if you will, in the analytics space, data lakes, but now moving into artificial intelligence, which has always been around, but it's really taking more of a more prominent role, I mean just a quick fun fact, I read that, you know that at the royal wedding that recently happened, did you know that Amazon used artificial intelligence to help us, the TV viewer, identify who the guests were. >> Ooh. >> So, you know it's like, it's everywhere, right? And so for us, we see that trend, a ton of data that needs to be managed, and so we kind of look at it from the edge to the core, to the cloud, those three, not pillars, but directional ways, taking data from IOT centers at the edge, bring it into the core, doing training, and then if the customer so chooses, out to the cloud. So, yeah it is a big push for us now, and we're going a lot with Nvidia, is a key partner with us. >> Really? This is a bit futuristic, but I can see a role going forward for AI to look into large data volumes, like video objects, to find things like faces, and poses and gestures and so forth, and see, to use that intelligence to be able to reduce the data sets down to where it's reduced, to de-duplicate, so that you can use less storage and then you can re-construct the original video objects or whatever going forward, I mean as a potential use of AI within the storage efficiency. >> Yep, yeah you're right, and that again, like in the analytic space, how we roll our in-line efficiency capabilities and data protection, is you know, very important, and then being able to move the data off into the cloud, if the customer so chooses, or just wants to use the cloud. So yeah, some of the same benefits from cloud connectivity, performance and efficiency that analytics apply certainly to AI. You know, another fun fact too about AI, which might help us, you and I living in the Boston area, is that I've read IBM has a patent out to use AI in traffic signaling, so in conjunction with cameras, to get AI, so hopefully that, you know, that works well it could alleviate-- >> Lead them out of the Tip O'Neill tunnel easy. (laughing) >> You got it maybe worse in D.C. (laughing) >> I'd like to hear though, if you have any best practices that with this moving into AI, how are you experimenting with it, and how are you finding it used most efficiently and effectively. >> Yeah, so I think one way we are eating our own dog food, so to speak, in that we're using it internally, we're using it on our customers' data, as I was explaining to help look at trends, and do analysis. So that's one, and then it's other things, just you know, partnering with companies like Nvidia as well and coming out with a joint solution, so we're doing work with them on different solution areas. >> Great, great. Well, Mike thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, >> Thanks for having me! >> It was fun having you. >> You survived! >> Yes! (laughs) >> We'll look forward to many more CUBE conversations. >> Great to hear from NetApp, you're very much in the game. >> Indeed, indeed. >> Alright, thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for James Kobielus, we will have more from theCUBE's coverage of DataWorks coming up in just a little bit. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: From Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2018 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live finishing up our first day of three days of coverage on theCUBE. From the inaugural IBM Think event I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante talking about snow conditions, we're in Vegas, though. It's a beautiful day, so we'll leave the snow to California and the east coast that's again getting slammed. Dave and I are joined by Mark Bregman, the SVP and CTO of NetApp. Great to have you on the show. >> Thank you. >> So what's new? I was talking about, before we started, that I was formerly at NetApp in marketing a few years ago. What's new at NetApp? What's going on with NetApp and IBM? >> Well first of all if you'd been at NetApp a few years ago you probably thought of us as a storage company but increasingly we think about ourselves as a data company because it's really all about the data and so we're doing a lot of work with IBM in a couple of different areas. One of those is extending our data fabric which is really the software capability to manage and move data across different types of storage, moving in and out of the Cloud and it's absolutely crucial, when you look at some of the things that IBM is trying to do with the IBM Cloud and with a lot of the machine learning applications. >> So Mark what's the difference between a storage company and a data company? >> Well, I think about it as, sort of, think about banking. 150 years ago if you wanted to get a bank you would probably go in and inspect whether they had a good solid vault to store your money. I guess when you opened your bank account you didn't do that. You just take that for granted but you want to know if they have the services to access my money, move my money, inspect my money and do those kind of things and the same thing is happening in our industry. Storage is still important, just as the vault is still important but it's not the first thing you think about. So the more important thing, the thing you do think about is what can I do with my data, how can I move my data, how can I get access to it, how do I protect it? And the actual storage is critical as an enabler but it's not what most people are focused on. >> So those activities that you just mentioned, those adjacent value producers, those are services that NetApp provides that it didn't use to provide or it provides them in a different way. How are things changing? >> Well, from the very beginning NetApp started as, actually, a software defined storage business long before that was a term. The first capabilities that NetApp delivered were software based on commodity hardware and over the years we had to also get into the hardware business. But most of our value historically has always been in the software and it's really been, how do we ensure the data doesn't get lost, how do we move the data efficiently, how do we make copies, and all of those things which are frankly more data oriented than storage oriented although they were sold with the storage systems. What's changed now is branching out beyond just the NetApp system, to be able to carry that capability to the Cloud and to other places that people want to keep their data. >> So what does that mean from a... Put your CTO hat on for a minute. It used to be it was WAFL and it was the operating system and that was sort of the core focus of the company, the products, still, I'm sure, great products. But it sounds like from a technical perspective you've had to evolve. Could you talk about that? >> Well we have. We've had to take those capabilities which we used to tightly integrate with hardware and build an appliance and sort of peel them apart and say we can take this capability and put it somewhere else. For example in the Cloud and that same capability in the cloud now allows us to essentially treat that element, from a data point of view treat the Cloud just like another NetApp target and that's what allows us to rapidly and easily move data back and forth. >> Talk to us about from an evolution perspective. I'm glad you brought that term Dave. How has NetApp's customer base helped facilitate this evolution to be able to give them the values that they're demanding in terms of Multi-Cloud, different vendors, What's that as a CTO that presumably meets up with your customers? >> I think it's been a very synergistic sort of thing which is, our customers as they move to the Cloud almost force us to figure out how can we continue to help them as they move their data to the Cloud and as we do that the customers and new customers say, oh that capability I didn't realize I could leverage and they find new ways to leverage their data in the Cloud and on traditional hardware in this kind of emerging hybrid environment and that's very crucial for a lot of our customers. >> So I want to go back to something you said before about you were always a software defined company. 10 years ago if you looked at it hardware companies, storage companies would sell a product. It would mark up a C8 disk drive 10X. But the real value was in the software wasn't it? >> Right. >> I don't know how many hardware versus software engineers work at NetApp but I'm guessing there's way more software engineers than there are hardware engineers. So is that essentially what you're doing to change your business? You're now selling software function? >> We are and we're doing it in two different ways. We sell software that you, a customer can put on their own hardware, sort of traditional software defined storage but increasingly we also sell software as essentially sell storage or data management as a service in a Cloud platform and then the customer doesn't have to even think about the software. The Cloud provider may have to think about it and we have a lot of relationships with cloud providers to do that but at that point it just becomes a service to the developer or the user that's building on that platform. >> Some of the announcements coming out this week with IBM with respect to Cloud, AI for example. What are some of the things that excites NetApp about what you're going to be able to help your customers achieve based on some of these new innovations? >> Well I think that the work that IBM is doing in the whole area of AI and machine learning is tremendous and we're benefiting in many ways. One is we are a user of that technology ourselves. We are increasingly using machine learning to analyze mass amounts of data from our customer base so that we can get, we have a solution called Active IQ which collects that data, 70 billion data elements, and allows us then to understand the behavior of our systems and our software in the field, make recommendations proactively to customers, for example, a single customer may have a configuration that isn't optimal. We know that because we see all the other customers. We can see that their configurations are getting better results and so that allows the whole marketplace to benefit and that's leveraging a lot of the AI and machine learning technologies. That is one of the areas where there's a lot of synergy between, in our work with IBM, we're often the storage that's underlying the machine learning and we're using the machine learning at the same time. >> So as you sort of go to market or partner with IBM. NetApp actually, people maybe don't know this, has always had a long relationship with IBM. IBM for years resold your filers and probably still does for all I know but how is that relationship evolving and changing? >> Well I would say it's mostly evolving in the sense that it's not just at the level of storage. It really is moving to this data layer as IBM is defining their platform we're a key partner in helping understand how to bring new capabilities in storage and data management to support their new capabilities in cognitive computing, AI, and machine learning. >> How does that change the way in which you develop products? Do you have to be more API friendly? >> Absolutely. As we build our products today we have to think about how to make our products at each layer a kind of platform for the next layer. So even though IBM is building a platform, at a lower layer they're also accessing our capabilities through API's and you could argue we're turning our data fabric into a platform. >> Does it change? You know people use the word future proof. How do you future proof your products in that world? >> Well I think the beauty of API's is that allows you to continually innovate just below the API's without having to disrupt everything above it and that's why this sort of layered approach between API's allows innovation at the storage layer, innovation in the data management layer, innovation in the AI and machine learning layers, all the way up to the end user application. Without the old world model where everything was monolithically built but if you make one change everything breaks. And so it's allowing us to move much more quickly with our rates of innovation independently of the other layers, the other players who are innovating as well. >> So NetApp has reinvented itself a number of times. >> Yeah. >> You've done it again. I remember NetApp when it started out it was like work station storage and then it was internet storage and then after the dot.com bubble blew up it was enterprise storage and then you changed your name. >> And we started with just filers as you said earlier. >> Right. >> And then we expanded into unified storage doing both NAS and SAN. We also supported initially just NFS and then we supported SIFs. We supported a huge transformation as we went into the virtualization world of VMware. So we've continually evolved and we're doing it again. >> And so how would you characterize the current wave? You said before it's about the data. >> I think the current wave is really, if you think about out traditional or our historical businesses being the appliance business I think we're going in three directions right now. One of which is extending away from the integrated appliance to the software defined, put the software on your own storage or your own system. We're also moving in a direction to put it on the Cloud and partnering with Cloud vendors and we're moving in a third direction which is moving higher up in value to data management, not just the storage elements. So certainly a customer could take our software today and use it purely for storage in the Cloud or on a WhiteBox but what they find is there's a lot of value in the higher value data management and that's where we're working with IBM and others. >> Now you've always focused on the data management piece of it. NetApp, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're kind of reluctant to go out and, for instance, buy a backup software company. You'd rather partner with folks like that, Is that-- >> We do that through partnerships, and we'll-- >> That philosophy has not changed, is that correct? >> It hasn't changed dramatically. There may be some areas where we have deep expertise and we extend a little further and there will be other areas where, frankly, we don't have that deep domain expertise and we provide the capability for others to extend that into broader data management. >> So as we've kind of touched on the evolution of NetApp we talked with a number of folks today alone, Dave, about this spirit of innovation as a culture within an organization. Is there a programatized innovation group or lab within NetApp that really helps to drive those three directions that you talked about? >> Well, yes and no. I have a small advanced technology group that experiments and looks at things well beyond the roadmaps, but really innovation is done across the company. Every engineering team is thinking about how to go beyond their road map, their driving innovation. We have a lot of communication across the company between my advanced technology groups and the individual business unit development of the teams because in many cases those feed each other. We find new challenges talking to the current business unit developers and they find new ideas talking to some of my team might be looking three or four years out into the future. A great example of that is a very hot topic right now is Blockchain and we're looking very hard at how could we use Blockchain to, again, rethink the way that you handle and manage data through its life cycle? Could you use this as a way to organize data management so that we know the authenticity of the data, we know who's seen the data, we know who's touched the data, and once you can do that you can think of lots of applications in data security, in data life cycle management, in data prominence, across the whole spectrum. >> So as a multi-multi-billion dollar company storage company, software defined, whatever you want to call it, when you see a company like Filecoin get launched, you know, cryptocurrency, peer-to-peer storage, the tendency of established, very credible players might be to laugh that off but we've laughed off a lot of folks, right? We've learned our lesson there but what do you make of a company like that trying to disrupt S3 for example. >> I think it's very interesting and we look at those very carefully. We try to understand what's the unique proposition that has value? Sometimes there's a unique proposition that just has visibility, let's say. Maybe that's not as valuable and sometimes there is really no uniqueness, they're just playing the game a slightly different way. My own personal view is that all of the excitement about, and whenever you put the name coin in it, that's always disturbing right now. All the excitement about the cryptocurrency relationship to Blockchain, I don't think is going to, in the long term matter that much. On the other hand these distributed ledger technologies which Blockchain has won I think are going to be fundamentally important and I think that we're going to find them turning up in core elements. You mentioned WAFL early on, if you think about, several years ago there was a lot of discussion about log-structured file systems. Could you use something like a distributed ledger technology to create that log in an immutable, distributed way where I don't have to trust any individual system, I don't have to worry about availability the same way because there are multiple copies. The Blockchain or the distributed ledger manages that. It could change fundamentally the way we architect these systems. It's not going to happen overnight but that's what we're looking at. We are looking at every one of these little startups that have new ideas. >> Well what I'm fascinated about, Filecoin is interesting because they raise 250 million dollars in like 30 minutes which is, forget about the crypto craze, that's more than a Series A for a storage company. So seemingly some smart guys, we'll see what happens with the innovation piece. The other interesting thing to me about Blockchain is there's these whole new sets of protocols being built out and there's an incentive for developers to actually develop them versus the government who years and years ago developed SNTP and DNS and IP, etc. >> Well to be fair, the government funded that but it was done by the same developers but this way there's a different source of money. >> Yeah but those guys didn't make any money. >> No, that's true. >> Nobody made any money off of Linux really. >> Yeah, you're right. >> So now there's a huge incentive for developers to do that so I'm really curious as to where the next wave of innovation is going to come from as a advanced technologist you got to look at that and say hmmm, I want to keep an eye on that. >> Oh absolutely, I mean that's why we're watching it. >> Do you think Blockchain, I know we got to go, but a lot of concerns about scaling. >> Well that's why I try to distinguish between Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. There are a lot of emerging technologies that are fundamentally similar to very abstract level to Blockchain but are implemented differently. You have to remember Blockchain was built for cryptocurrency and it was built to be inefficient by design. >> Yes, right. >> And so taking that same idea and saying we're going to use it for these high performance applications is probably not the right approach but going back to the idea that I can have a distributed, fundamentally untrusted network and I can create a trusted ledger, that's pretty interesting and there are a lot of interesting emerging technologies that I think some of those will become the core. >> Dave: In use cases for sure. >> Yeah. >> Dave: Distributed databases have never been easy. >> Yeah. >> It's always been challenging for scale, performance, latency, etc., I wonder can those problems be solved? >> You think about the challenge of data prominence and in the world of GDPR and all of these things, the ability to say I know where all the data is, I know where it came from, I know who's touched it, all of the discussion going on, probably here at this conference about GANs where you can make video that looks just like you but you weren't in it, for example. How do you keep track of the data so I know this really came from that camera, it was really you and not a video reproduction, that's going to become more and more important and that's where I think these technologies could become really valuable. Something we've talked about, data prominence, for twenty years but we've never really been able to implement it at scale. >> Well, and you see the explosion of fake news and the like. Facebook is now more powerful than the UN and the 2020 election is going to be about fake news and so things like that are really technologies that could solve that problem, hopefully have legs. >> Mark: I think so. >> Awesome. Thank you. >> Great. Thank you. >> Mark, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing what's going on at NetApp, kind of walking us through you're evolution and some of the exciting things coming. We wish you a great rest of your fiscal year. >> Great, thank you very much. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin and you've been watching theCUBE live from day one of IBM's inaugural Think event. Check out thecube.net where you can find all of the replays of our videos today and check over to siliconangle.com for the written articles about that. We want to thank you for sticking with us and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Thanks. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of NetApp Insight 2017. I'm John Furrier, the cohost of theCUBE; co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media here with Keith Downson, my cohost for the day. CTO Advisor. Our next guest is Brett Roscoe; vice president of process solutions marketing at NetApp; and Madge Miller, who's the director of Worldwide Public Relations PR. So, how're you guys feeling? The end of the day. A lot of action. >> A lot of stuff going on. >> I thought that was why they reinvent; all these announcements. Almost we needed another keynote. >> We do. We definitely do. A lot of really great announcements happening this week, and a lot of really big excitement in the halls about what is happening with our announcements. And you know Microsoft, HCL. >> John: How many did you have, roughly? >> We had three but we wrapped them into our >> John: Oh really? >> Only three, three big ones >> John: Three big ones? >> Three press releases, right? >> Yeah three big ones >> We had multiple functions, multiple products in each one. >> I mean it felt like it was 60 announcements >> Yeah, yeah it did >> But you packaged them up into three >> Yes, to map to our three IT imperatives and to map back to the data visionary transformation that NetApp has been undergoing this past year. >> John: So you've been busy? >> Very busy. >> Herding the cats internally putting it all into blocks so three transformation zones are: 1. Data center, traditional data center modernization and extension. Next generation data center, and then power of cloud. >> Brett: Yeah, harnessing the power of cloud, absolutely. >> Harnessing the power of the cloud. Which is on everyone's mind. As a portfolio, not a product any more, because in the old days you had the product, now it's a portfolio the data fabric is really kicking new territory now. How do you put that together when you take it to the market? Because you know representative notations are great but customers are different; you can't just put one customer in a box and say there are ten other customers like that because they might have a mix of hybrid cloud, a little bit of on-prem. >> Yeah well if you hear, I'm sure you've heard, Data Fabric that is our, that's how we talk about connecting the hybrid cloud so that spans really all three of those so whether you're in a modernized next gen data center or a hard sparrow cloud the data fabric kind of spans all of those and it creates a unique story for NetApp about how we break down boundaries between traditional on-prem and cloud-based environments. So that really spans a portfolio right but then when you get into these different solutions even though there might be something around modernize we still talk about how you're going to harness the power of the cloud within that modernized capability. So all our announcements this week, it's really cool to see that hybrid cloud capability coming through all of that. It's one of the key investments in our product roadmap and you're seeing that come as we new capabilities. >> OK Jean did a great job on the marketing but I get excited by Sheila FitzPatrick because she's driving the passion around privacy which is not so much security but it's data security, data privacy, data as tech, data for developers. You've got governance going on, you got privacy; GDPR going on in Europe. So you guys are in a lot of touch-points you've got a lot of irons in the fire relative to the market opportunities outside the core base. >> Brett: Right. >> What's the plan, because everyone's like "What's my reference implementation, how do I use NetApp?" >> Well we started using use case terminology. We have nine different use cases that we use. So that's really about the issue or the problem or the project the customer's working on right so if they're trying to build, if they're trying to accelerate a traditional application or if they're trying to harness new modern data services from the cloud. Or if they're trying to build DevOps environments. So we use that buyer journey to come in and talk to the customer and say "This is what we think you're trying to do. Here's the unique capabilities with our portfolio that we can bring to that solution." So we really try to make the product the last part and we really talk about the capabilities across the portfolio; how they address and differentiate us into each of those use case environments. So that's really the way we try to simplify it so we're not talking about all these different products, we're talking about NetApp's capabilities. >> So I was pretty impressed with the keynote yesterday we got an hour into the keynote without even mentioning a product. However this conference has typically, has traditionally been a storage conference. So how has the average attendee as you've walked the floor and as you've talked to the customers and attendees. How have they been receptive of that message of data first and now today we get to the meat of actual speeds and fees? >> I think really the thing about the conversation that NetApp is having now and just like you saw on stage at the keynote is that we are allowing people to elevate their role within their organization. So everyone is coming to the IT department and saying you know "How do I create these new services, how do I monetize data?" and now we're giving our folks that we've worked with traditionally for years the opportunity to step in that conversation and be experts and really come and be the hero in that conversation just like you saw on stage. So they can take their knowledge of those speeds and fees and they can come in and interpret them for new services new revenue models for data. >> And you guys did a great job with the A-team you had a bunch of them on here in theCUBE. They had the greatest analysts come in because they're on the front lines. They're a mix of tech geeks and also partners. >> Yeah they're great advocates right? And I also spent the whole day meeting with our analyst community as they come away to get their impressions and they were very positive, very excited. They've kind of been on this journey with us and watched us transform as we go through our own digital transformation about becoming a data-focused company. Around meeting customer needs and how they extract value and create new customer touchpoints and optimize operations and look for new innovative ways to use data. >> Alright so where is the focus in the solutions and also the comms. is important to because as you have comms. and solutions. You're like on the landscape looking at all the community action going on. You've also got to look at what's going on in the narrative of the industry; for thought leadership. You got to come in and pick and choose your resources for instance the Cloud Native Compute Foundation is one of the hottest things on the planet for Cloud. So that's more open source but there's a lot of influencers in there; a lot of A-tea potential. You've got to make some choices So as you go out to the market how do you look at the landscape because there's almost too much to do for you guys. If you hit every single piece, where is the focus? >> Yeah, I think that's really where our core message of being the data authority in the hybrid cloud world comes in and looking back at those three IT imperatives that we talked about. Really our focus is on building out those core strengths and that's really what you saw from our announcements at the show, is building up to those core strengths that we have and continuing to build them out. >> About customer and community sectors. Open source obviously is still growing like crazy. >> Open source is important for us. Looking at hyperscalers is very important for us looking at cloud native partners as we go forward you know which is part of what our announcement with Microsoft was about today is moving more into that cloud native conversation as NetApp with our core services and things that we're really known for and made us who we are today. >> Brett you've got to look at the cloud thing with Microsoft, I mean now not only are they a great channel for you guys >> Brett: Yeah. >> And you guys have got to step up to the plate and deliver some good value because you know they're finicky, they have sales guys out on the streets. Got to be reliable to be rock solid so pressure's on you but this opens up a lot of doors for NetApp doesn't it? >> Well yeah I think it's a fantastic opportunity for us right? It's an honor that Microsoft chose us as a partner in this space but at the same time I do believe that we are the best, we have the best capability in this space right? A true scalable enterprise capability that we bring to others I think is going to be right. It's going to hit the heart of the market for them and really provide a high quality, high enterprise scale kind of service. So I think, I'm super excited that this partnership came together; I think it makes total sense you look at the number one hyperscaler, the number one data vendor out there and you say they've come together to address customer needs. >> Alright here's the trick question at the end of the day to see what I can get out of you Dave Alanti and I.. >> All: (laughter) >> You know we're good at trick questions. >> OK this is good. >> We always fall for them, we're totally good at that. >> I shouldn't have said that on theCUBE. This is more of a philosophical question because David Alanti always thought like, "Never fight fashion." Fashion is key in success because you can ride the wave and be fashionable. So the question is what is the fashion in the market that you see? Because you guys now are at a level in my opinion where you can walk in the front door of all the thought leader theaters and say "Hey cloud native guys, we've got a great story for you." "Hey governance, we've got a great story there." So you have now a whole new level of territory that you can take down and have conversations in. So that comes to the fashion question. What's fashionable that you guys are focused on? If that's the fashion trend then what is NetApp wearing? >> Which designer, what designer? >> Are they wearing designer cloud native? Are they wearing..? >> Not my best analogy; you didn't hit my strong point. You could have used a sports analogy or something like that. >> If you were a baseball team? >> No, no, no she's all ready. >> No go ahead you do fashion. >> You do yours Brett no no no do a sports analogy. >> Go ahead, go ahead. >> West Coast offense of course. >> Yes we could totally do a fashion analogy I think that what you saw us wearing today around our data fabric momentum, around our cloud announcements, even around the digital customer experience with Elio and Active IQ. The way we're using our partnership with Watson, IBM Watson. Those are the types of things that you'll see from us in the future. The customer experience message really is around us using our own systems and amplifying those in a way that we hope our customers will in the future so you'll see a lot more of those types of things from us into, you know, into the next fashion season. >> And the old expression, if you've got sizzle a bit have the steak and again nice fabric you're wearing. >> So, since we're talking in analogies you guys are actually building up a lot of political capital. The Microsoft announcement gives you, from an optics perspective you can, that gets you into the door. "Hold on, this NFS thing is powered by NetApp?" Opens up a set of conversations with a completely different set of customers. How do you spend that capital next? What's the next level of conversations with CIOs, CDOs, CMOs? >> John: CXOs, yeah. >> Well you know we're in those conversations today right. So we've had on-tap cloud and several even pure SaaS-based products for a while and they're making great traction, there's huge growth in those new products. Obviously with the Microsoft partnership it allows us to actually reach, I'm excited about hitting new buyers that may have not seen NetApp as a vendor that that would leverage, maybe just through association or maybe their persona or the job they do wouldn't put NetApp right in front of them so now we have a new audience, right? We have a whole new audience that we can show our value. You know we, I think will have ways to work with Microsoft to bring additional capabilities into that service that they're going to provide, and how do we work with them to do that and make sure that customers see value, see additional future capabilities that they can leverage from us, it's a tremendous opportunity. It's now, it's our market, to go this is our opportunity to go show value to them. This is a great opportunity and we need to take advantage of it, and it ours to dip into. >> You guys are going to take more territory, great stuff. We're going to give you guys the final word in the segment. but for the folks who couldn't make it, they're watching this segment. Share with them what were the key things here happening that they should know about and take away from NetApp Insight? What are the key things? >> Brett, you want to take this one? >> You start and I'll finish. >> OK, we'll tag team this one. I think the big thing obviously is the Microsoft announcement. It's us moving more into that cloud native territory. That's a really big one. Also the digital customer experience the Elio and Active IQ for customer support. I think those are very big too showing us using our own capabilities for our customers as a company. >> OK, look I think you said it earlier; portfolio announce. We continue to come with multiple, with several new capabilities across the portfolio, right? And I think if you look at our focus which is hey we're building more software capability, we are building more hybrid, more capabilities in the cloud. More capabilities in hybrid; enforcing that data fabric message. I tell you, I know I'm biased, but nobody does it better. Nobody can come in and provide the position that NetApp has to help customers through this transformation leveraging cloud, leveraging new technologies, new microservices into their architecture in a way that we do it that is seamless and easy. >> And the cloud orchestrator is just one example of that's multi-cloud. >> Absolutely. >> You've got to shift to be first to market with true multi-cloud right out of the gate so congratulations and sorry to hear about all the tragedy that happened around your event you guys handled it with class and respect, thank you. >> Yeah it was definitely a tough situation I thought the entire leadership team did a fantastic job of working through that. >> Props to the NetApp leadership and the whole team. It's theCUBE here live in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay for the NetApp insight 2017. We'll be back with more after this short break. (technology music) >> Narator: Calling all barrier-breakers, status quo