>> If you really want to make an impact to your business, it takes more than just moving your workloads into the cloud. So-called lift and shift is fine to reduce data center footprints and associated costs, but to really drive change, you don't want to simply "pave the cow path," as the saying goes. Rather, you need to think about the operating model, and that requires more comprehensive systems thinking. In other words, how will changes in technology affect business productivity? Or, you know what? Even flip that. What changes in my business process could lower cost, cut elapse times, and accelerate time to market, increase user productivity, and lower operational risks? And what role can technology play in supporting these mandates through modernization, automation, machine intelligence, and business resilience? And that's what we're here to discuss today. Welcome to Driving Business Results with Cloud Transformation, made Possible by Dell and DXC. My name is Dave Vellante, and today we're going to zoom out and explore many aspects of cloud transformation that leading organizations are acting on today. Yeah, sure, we're going to look at optimizing infrastructure, but we'll also dig deeper into cloud considerations, governance, compliance, and security angles, as well as the impact of emerging opportunities around edge and Industry 4.0. Our focus will be on how to remove barriers and help you achieve business outcomes. And to do this, our program features the long-term partnership between Dell and DXC. And we bring to this program six experts in three separate sessions, who are working directly with top organizations in virtually every industry to achieve high impact results. We're going to start with a conversation about cloud, the cloud operating model, and transforming key aspects of your infrastructure. And then we'll look into governance, security, and business resilience. And in our third session, we'll discuss exciting transformations that are occurring in smart manufacturing and facilities innovations. So let's get right into it with our first session. Enjoy the program. (bright music) Hello, and welcome to what is sure to be an insightful conversation about getting business results with cloud transformation. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with James Miller, Chief Technologist for Cloud and Infrastructure Services, and Jay Dowling, Americas Sales Lead for Cloud and Infrastructure Services, both with DXC Technology. Gentlemen, thanks for your time today. Welcome to theCube. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you Dave. Appreciate it. >> So let's get right into it. You know, I've talked to a lot of practitioners who've said, "Look, if you really want to drop zeros, like a lot of zeros to the bottom line, you can't just lift and shift." You really got to think about modernizing, the application portfolio. You got to think about your business model, and really think about transforming your business, particularly the operating model. So my first question, Jim, is, What role does the cloud play in modernization? >> Well, there are really three aspects that the, the cloud plays in modernization. You mentioned multiple zeros. One is cost optimization, and that can be achieved through business operations, through environmental, social, and governance. Also being more efficient with your IT investments. But that's not the only aspect. There's also agility and innovation. And that can be achieved through automation and productivity, speed to market for new features and functions, improvements in the customer experience, and the capability to metabolize a great deal more data in your environment, which the end result is an improvement in releasing of new things to the field. And finally, there's resilience. And I'm not really talking about IT resilience, but more of business resilience, to be able, to be able to handle operational risk, improve your securities and controls, deal with some of the talent gap that's in the industry, and also protect your brand reputation. So modernization is really about balancing these three aspects, cost optimization, agility and innovation, and resilience. >> So, so thank you for that. So Jay, I got to ask you, in the current climate, everybody's, you know, concerned, and there's not great visibility on the macro. So, Jim mentioned cost optimization. That seems to be one of the top areas that customers are focused on. The two I hear a lot are consolidating redundant vendors and optimizing cloud costs. So that's, you know, top of mind today. I think everybody really, you know, understands the innovation and, and, and agility piece, at least at a high level, maybe realizing it is different. And then the business resilience piece is really interesting because, you know, prior to the pandemic people, you know, they had a DR strategy, but they realized, "Wow, my business might not be that resilient." So Jay, my question to you is, What are you hearing when you talk to customers? What's the priority today? >> Yeah, the priority is an often overused term of digital transformation. You know, people want to get ready for next generation environments, customer experience, making sure they're improving, you know, how they engage with their clients and what their branding is. And what we find is a lot of clients don't have the underlying infrastructure in place today to get to where they want to get to. So cloud becomes an important element of that. But, you know, with DXC's philosophy, not everything goes to, not everything necessarily needs to go to cloud to be cost optimized, for instance. In many cases, you can run applications, you know, in your own data center, or on-prem, or in other environments, in a hybrid environment, or multi-cloud environment, and, and still be very optimized from a cost spend standpoint and also put yourself in position for modernization and for be able to do the, bring the things to the business that the clients are, you know, that their clients are looking for, like the CMO and the CFO, et cetera. Trying to use IT as a lever to drive business and to drive, you know, business acceleration and drive profitability, frankly. So there's a lot of dependency on infrastructure, but there's a lot of elements to it. And, and we advocate for, you know, there's not a single answer to that. We like to evaluate clients' environments and work with them to get them to an optimal target operating model, you know, so that they can really deliver on what the promises are for their departments. >> So if, let's talk about some of the, the barriers to realizing value in, in a context of modernization. We talked about cost optimization, agility, and, and, and resilience. But there's a business angle, and there's a technical angle here. 'Cause we always talk about people, process, and technology. Technology, oftentimes, CIOs will tell us, "Well, that's the easy part. We'll figured that out," whether it's true or not. But I agree, people and process is sometimes the tough one. So Jay, why don't you start. What do you see as the barriers, particularly from a business standpoint? >> I think people need to let their guard down and be open to the ideas that are, that are out there in the market from, you know, the, the standards that are being built by, you know, best in class models. And, and there's many people that have gone on, you know, cloud journeys and been very successful with it. There's others that have set high expectations with their business leaders that haven't necessarily met the goals that they need to meet or maybe haven't met them as quickly as they promised. So there's a, you know, there's a change management aspect that you'd need to look at with the, you know, with the environments. There's a, you know, there's a skillset set environment that they need to be prepared for. Do they have the people, you know, to deliver with the, you know, with the tools and the skills and the, and the models that that they're putting themselves in place for in the future versus where they are now? There's just a lot of, you know, there's a lot of different elements. It's not just a, "This price is better," or, "This can operate better than one environment over the other." I think we like to try to look at things holistically and make sure that, you know, we're being, you know, as much of a consultative advocate for the client, for where they want to go, what their destiny is, and based on what we've learned with other clients. You know, and we can bring those best practices forward because we've worked, you know, across such a broad spectra of clients versus them being somewhat contained and sometimes can't see outside of their own, you know, their own challenges, if you would. So they need, they need advocacy to help, you know, bring them to the next level. And we like to translate that through, you know, technology advances, which, you know, Jim's really good at doing for us. >> Yeah, Jim, is, is it, is it a, is the big barrier a skills issue, you know, bench strength? Are there other considerations from your perspective? >> Well, we, we've identified a number of factors that inhibit success of, of customers. One is thinking it's only a technology change in moving to cloud when it's much broader than that. There are changes in governance, changes in process that need to take place. The other is evaluating the cloud providers on their current pricing structure and performance. And, and we see pricing and structure changing dramatically every few months between the various cloud providers. And you have to be flexible enough to, to determine which providers you want. And it may not be feasible to just have a single cloud provider in this world. The other thing is a big bang approach to transformation, "I want to move everything, and I want to move it all at once." That's not necessarily the best approach. A well thought out cloud journey and strategy and timing your investments are really important to get at maximizing your business return on the journey to the cloud. And finally, not engaging stakeholders early and continuously. You have to manage expectations in moving to cloud on what business factors will get affected, how you will achieve your cost savings, and, and how you will achieve the business impact over the journey and reporting out on that with very strict metrics to all of the stakeholders. >> You know, mentioned multi-cloud just then. We had, in January 17th, we had our Supercloud 2 event. And Supercloud is basically, it's really multi, what multi-cloud should have been, I, I like to say. So it's this creating a common experience across clouds. And you guys were talking about, you know, there's different governance, there's different security, there's different pricing. So, and, and one of the takeaways from this event in talking to customers and practitioners and technologists is, you can't go it alone. So I wonder if you could talk about your partnership strategy, what do partners bring to the table, and what is, what is DXC's, you know, unique value? >> I'd be happy to lead with that if you'd like. >> Great. >> I, you know, we've got a vast partner ecosystem at DXC, given the size and, and the history of the company. I could use several examples. One of the larger partners in my particular space is Dell Technology, right? They're a great, you know, partner for us across many different areas of the business. It's not just a storage and compute play anymore. They're, they're on the edge. They're, you know, they're, they've got intelligence in their networking devices now. And they've really brought, you know, a lot of value to us as a partner. And, you know, there, there's somebody, you could look at Dell technology as somebody that might, you know, have a victim, you know, effect because of all the hyperscale activity and all the cloud activity. But they've really taken an outstanding attitude with this and say, "Listen, not all things are destined for cloud, or not all things would operate better in a cloud environment." And they like to be part of those discussions to see how they can, you know, how we can bring a multi-cloud environment, you know, both private and public, you know, to clients. And let's look at the applications and the infrastructure and, and what's, you know, what's the best optimal running environment, you know, for us to be able to bring, you know, the greatest value to the business with speed, with security, with, you know. And, you know, the things that they want to keep closest to the business are often things that you want to kind of, you know, keep on your premise or keep in your own data center. So they're, they're an ideal model of somebody that's resourced us well, partners with us well in the market. And, and we continue to grow that relationship day in and day out with those guys. And we really appreciate, you know, their support of our strategy, and, and we like to also compliment their strategy and work, you know, work together hand in hand in front of our clients. >> Yeah, you know, Jim, Matt Baker, who's the head of strategic planning at Dell talks about, "It's not a zero sum game." And I think, you know, you're right, Jay. I think initially people felt like, "Oh wow, it's, it is a zero sum game." But it's clearly not, and this idea of of, whether you call it supercloud or ubercloud or multicloud, clearly Dell is headed in in that direction. And I, you know, look at some of their future projects. There's their narrative. I'm curious from a technology standpoint, Jim, what your role is. Is it to make it all work? Is it to, you know, end to end? I wonder if you could help, you know, us understand that. >> Help us figure this out, Jim, here. (group laughing) >> Glad to expand on that. One of my key roles is developing our product roadmap for DXC offerings. And we do that roadmap in conjunction with our partners where we can leverage the innovation that our partners bring to the table. And we often utilize engineering resources from our partners to help us jointly build those offerings that adapt to changes in the market and also adapt to many of our customers changing needs over time. So my primary role is to look at the market, talk to our customers, and work with our partners to develop a product roadmap for delivering DXC products and services to our clients so that they can get the return on investment on their technology journeys. >> You know, we've been working with these two firms for a while now. Even predates, you know, the, the name DXC and that, that transformation. I'm curious as to what's, how you would respond to, "What's unique?" You know, you hear a lot about partnerships. You guys got a lot of competition. Dell has a lot of competition. What's specifically unique about this combination? >> I think, go ahead, Jim. >> I would say our unique approach, we call it cloud right. And that, that approach is making the right investments, at the right time, and on the right platforms. And our partners play a, play a key role in that. So we, we encourage our customers to not necessarily have a cloud first approach, but a cloud right approach where they place the workloads in the environment that is best suited from a technology perspective, a business perspective, and even a security and governance perspective. And, and the right approach might include mainframe. It might include an on-premises infrastructure. It could include private cloud, public cloud, and SaaS components all integrated together to deliver that value. >> Yeah, Jay, please. >> If you were... >> That is a complicated situation for a lot of customers. Chime in here. (Jay chuckles) >> And now, if you were speaking specifically to Dell here, like they, they also walk the talk, right? They invest in DXC as a partnership. They put people on the ground that their only purpose in life is to help DXC succeed with Dell in, you know, arm in arm in front of clients. And it's not, you know, it's not a winner take all thing at all. It's really a true partnership. They, they, they've brought solution resources. We have an account CTO. We've got executive sponsorship. We do regular QBR meetings. We have regular executive touchpoint meetings. It's really important that you keep a high level of intimacy with the client, with the partners, you know, and, and the, and the GSI community. And I, I've been with several GSIs, and, and this is an exceptional example of true partnership and commitment to success with Dell technology. I'm really extremely impressed on, on the engagement level that we've had there and, you know, continue to show a lot of support, you know, both for them. You know, there's other OEM partners, of course, in the market. There's always going to be other technology solutions for certain clients, but this has been a particularly strong element for us in our partnership and in our go-to-market strategy. >> Well, I think too, just my observation, is a lot of it's about trust. You guys have both earned the trust, the kind of, over the, over the years taking your arrows, you know, of over decades. And, and you know, that just doesn't happen overnight. So guys, I appreciate it. Thanks for your time. It's all about getting cloud right, isn't it? >> That's right. (chuckles) (Dave chuckles) >> Thank you Dave. Appreciate it very much. >> Dave, thank you. >> Jay, Jim, great to have you on. Keep it right there for more action on theCube. Be right back. (upbeat guitar music) (keyboard clicks) Welcome back to the program. My name is Dave Vellante, and in this session we're going to explore one of the more interesting topics of the day. IoT for smart factories and with me are Todd Edmunds, the Global CTO of Smart Manufacturing Edge and Digital Twins at Dell Technologies. That is such a cool title. (Todd chuckles) I want to be you. And Dr. Aditi Banerjee who's the Vice President, General Manager for Aerospace Defense and Manufacturing at DXC Technology. Another really cool title. Folks, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. Great to be here. >> Nice to be here. So, Todd, let's start with you. We hear a lot about Industry 4.0, smart factories, IIoT. Can you briefly explain like what is Industry 4.0 all about, and why is it important for the manufacturing industry? >> Yeah, sure, Dave. You know, it's been around for quite a while. And it's got, it's gone by multiple different names, as you said, Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, industrial IoT, smart factory, but it all really means the same thing. Its really applying technology to get more out of the factories and the facilities that you have to do your manufacturing. So being much more efficient, implementing really good sustainability initiatives. And so we really look at that by saying, "Okay, what are we going to do with technology to really accelerate what we've been doing for a long, long time?" So it's really not, it's not new. It's been around for a long time. What's new is that manufacturers are looking at this not as a one-off, two-off, individual use case point of view. But instead they're saying, "We really need to look at this holistically, thinking about a strategic investment in how we do this, not to just enable one or two use cases, but enable many, many use cases across the spectrum." I mean, there's tons of them out there. There's predictive maintenance, and there's OEE, overall equipment effectiveness, and there's computer vision. And all of these things are starting to percolate down to the factory floor. But it needs to be done in a little bit different way. And, and, and really, to really get those outcomes that they're looking for in smart factory, or Industry 4.0, or however you want to call it, and truly transform. Not just throw an Industry 4.0 use case out there, but to do the digital transformation that's really necessary and to be able to stay relevant for the future. You know, I heard it once said that you have three options. Either you digitally transform and stay relevant for the future, or you don't and fade into history like 52% of the companies that used to be on the Fortune 500 since 2000, right? And so really that's a key thing, and we're seeing that really, really being adopted by manufacturers all across the globe. >> Yeah so, Aditi, that's like digital transformation is almost synonymous with business transformation. So is there anything you'd add to what Todd just said? >> Absolutely. Though, I would really add that what really drives Industry 4.0 is the business transformation, what we are able to deliver in terms of improving the manufacturing KPIs and the KPIs for customer satisfaction, right? For example, improving the downtime, you know, or decreasing the maintenance cycle of the equipments, or improving the quality of products, right? So I think these are a lot of business outcomes that our customers are looking at while using Industry 4.0 and the technologies of Industry 4.0 to deliver these outcomes. >> So Aditi, I wonder if I could stay with you. And maybe this is a bit esoteric. But when I first started researching IoT and, and, and Industrial IoT 4.0, et cetera, I felt, you know, while there could be some disruptions in the ecosystem, I kind of came to the conclusion that large manufacturing firms, aerospace defense companies, the firms building out critical infrastructure, actually had kind of an incumbent advantage in a great opportunity. Of course, then I saw on TV, somebody now they're building homes with 3D printers. Its like, blows your mind. So that's pretty disruptive, but, so, but they got to continue. The incumbents have to continue to invest in the future. They're well capitalized. They're pretty good businesses, very good businesses. But there's a lot of complexities involved in kind of connecting the old house to the new addition that's being built, if you will, or this transformation that we're talking about. So my question is, How are your customers preparing for this new era? What are the key challenges that they're facing and the, the blockers, if you will? >> Yeah, I mean the customers are looking at Industry 4.0 for greenfield factories, right? That is where the investments are going directly into building the factories with the new technologies, with the new connectivities, right, for the machines. For example, industrial IoT, having the right type of data platforms to drive computational analytics and outcomes, as well as looking at edge versus cloud type of technologies, right? Those are all getting built in the greenfield factories. However, for the install-based factories, right, that is where our customers are looking at, "How do I modernize these factories? How do I connect the existing machine?" And that is where some of the challenges come in on, you know, the legacy system connectivity that they need to think about. Also, they need to start thinking about cybersecurity and operation technology security, right, because now you are connecting the factories to each other, right? So cybersecurity becomes top of mind, right? So there is definitely investment that is involved. Clients are creating roadmaps for digitizing and modernizing these factories and investments in a very strategic way, right? So perhaps they start with the innovation program, and then they look at the business case, and they scale it up, right? >> Todd, I'm glad Aditi brought up security. Because if you think about the operations technology, you know, folks, historically, they air gapped, you know, the systems. That's how they created security. That's changed. The business came in and said, "Hey, we got to, we got to connect. We got to make it intelligent." So that's, that's got to be a big challenge as well. >> It, it, it absolutely is Dave. And, and you know, you can no longer just segment that because really, to get all of those efficiencies that we talk about, that IoT and Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0 promise, you have to get data out of the factory. But then you got to put data back in the factory. So no longer is it just firewalling everything is really the answer. So you really have to have a comprehensive approach to security, but you also have to have a comprehensive approach to the cloud and what that means. And does it mean a continuum of cloud all the way down to the edge, right down to the factory? It absolutely does because no one approach has the answer to everything. The more you go to the cloud, the broader the attack surface is. So what we're seeing is a lot of our customers approaching this from a, kind of that, that hybrid, you know, "write once, run anywhere" on the factory floor down to the edge. And one of the things we're seeing, too, is to help distinguish between what is the edge, and that, and, and bridge that gap between, like Dave, you talked about IT and OT. And also help that, what Aditi talked about, is the greenfield plants versus the brownfield plants that they call it, that are the legacy ones and modernizing those. Is, it's great to kind of start to delineate. What does that mean? Where's the edge? Where's the IT and the OT? We see that from a couple of different ways. We start to think about really two edges in a manufacturing floor. We talk about an industrial edge that sits, or some people call it a far edge or a thin edge, sits way down on that plan. It consists of industrial hardened devices that do that connectivity. The hard stuff about, "How do I connect to this obsolete legacy protocol and what do I do with it?" And create that next generation of data that has context. And then we see another edge evolving above that, which is much more of a data and analytics and enterprise grade application layer that sits down in the factory itself that helps figure out where we're going to run this. Does it connect to the cloud? Do we run applications on-prem? Because a lot of times that on-prem application is, is, needs to be done because that's the only way that its going to, it's going to work because of security requirements, because of latency requirements, performance, and a lot of times cost. It's really helpful to build that multiple edge strategy because then you kind of, you consolidate all of those resources, applications, infrastructure, hardware, into a centralized location. Makes it much, much easier to really deploy and manage that security. But it also makes it easier to deploy new applications, new use cases, and become the foundation for DXC's expertise and applications that they deliver to our customers as well. >> Todd, how complex are these projects? I mean, I feel like it's kind of the, the digital equivalent of building the Hoover Dam. I mean, it, it, it's, (chuckles) it, it, so. Yeah, how long does a typical project take? I know it varies, but what, you know, what are the critical success factors in terms of delivering business value quickly? >> Yeah, that's a great question in that, in that we're, you know, like I said at the beginning, we, this is not new. Smart factory and Industry 4.0 is not new. It's been, it's, people have been trying to implement the holy grail of smart factory for a long time. And what we're seeing is a switch, a little bit of a switch, or quite a bit of a switch, to where the enterprise and the IT folks are having a much bigger say and have a lot to offer to be able to help that complexity. So instead of deploying a computer here, and a gateway there, and a server there, I mean, you go walk into any manufacturing plant and you can see servers sitting underneath someone's desk or a, or a PC in a closet somewhere running a critical production application. So we're seeing the enterprise have a much bigger say at the table, much louder voice at the table to say, "We've been doing this at enterprise all the time. We, we know how to really consolidate, bring hyper-converged applications, hyper-converged infrastructure, to really accelerate these kind of applications, really accelerate the outcomes that are needed to really drive that smart factory, and start to bring that same capabilities down into the, on the factory floor." That way, if you do it once to make it easier to implement, you can repeat that. You can scale that. You can manage it much easily. And you can then bring that all together because you have the security in one centralized location. So we're seeing manufacturers, yeah, that first use case may be fairly difficult to implement and we got to go down in and see exactly what their problems are. But when the infrastructure is done the correct way, when that, think about how you're going to run that and how are you going to optimize the engineering. Well, let's take that, what you've done in that one factory, and then set. Let's that, make that across all the factories, including the factory that we're in, but across the globe. That makes it much, much easier. You really do the hard work once and then repeat, almost like a cookie cutter. >> Got it. Thank you. Aditi, what about the skillsets available to apply these, to these projects? You got to have knowledge of digital, AI, data, integration. Is there a talent shortage to get all this stuff done? >> Yeah, I mean definitely, a lot. Different types of skillsets are needed from a traditional manufacturing skillset, right? Of course, the basic knowledge of manufacturing is, is important. But the, the digital skillset sets like, you know, IoT, having a skillset in different protocols for connecting the machines, right, that experience that comes with it, data and analytics, security, augmented virtual reality programming. You know, again, looking at robotics and the digital twin. So you know, it's a lot more connectivity software, data driven skillsets that are needed to smart factory to life at scale. And, you know, lots of firms are, you know, recruiting these types of skill, resources with these skillsets to, you know, accelerate their smart factory implementation, as well as consulting firms like DXC Technology and others. We, we, we recruit. We, we train our talent to, to provide these services. >> Got it. Aditi, I wonder if we could stay on you. Let's talk about the partnership between DXC and Dell. What are you doing specifically to simplify the move to Industry 4.0 for customers? What solutions are you offering? How are you working together, Dell and DXC, to, to bring these to market? >> Yeah, Dell and DXC have a very strong partnership. You know, and we work very closely together to, to create solutions, to create strategies, and how we, we are going to jointly help our clients, right? So areas that we have worked closely together is edge compute, right, how that impacts the smart factory. So we have worked pretty closely in that area. We're also looked at vision technologies, you know. How do we use that at the edge to improve the quality of products, right? So we have several areas that we collaborate in. And our approach is that we, we want to bring solutions to our client, and as well as help them scale those solutions with the right infrastructure, the right talent, and the right level of security. So we bring a comprehensive solution to our clients. >> So, Todd, last question, kind of similar but different. You know, why Dell DXC? Pitch me. What's different about this partnership? You know, where do you, are you confident that, you know, you're going to be, deliver the best value to, to customers? >> Absolutely. Great question. You know, there's no shortage of bespoke solutions that are out there. There's hundreds of people that can come in and do individual use cases and do these things. And just, and, and, and that's, that's where it ends. What Dell and DXC Technology together bring to the table is, we do the optimization, the optimization of the engineering of those previously bespoke solutions upfront, together, right? The power of our scalables, enterprise-grade, structured, you know, industry standard infrastructure, as well as our expertise in delivering package solutions that really accelerate with DXC's expertise and reputation as a global, trusted, trusted advisor. Be able to really scale and repeat those solutions that DXC is so really, really good at. And, and Dell's infrastructure, and our, what, 30,000 people across the globe that are really, really good at that, at that scalable infrastructure, to be able to repeat. And then it really lessens the risk that our customers have and really accelerates those solutions. So it's again, not just one individual solutions, it's all of the solutions that not just drive use cases, but drive outcomes with those solutions. >> Yeah, the, you're right, the partnership has gone, I mean, I first encountered it back in, I think it was 2010, May of 2010, we had you, you guys both on theCube. I think you were talking about converged infrastructure. And I had a customer on, and it was, actually a manufacturing customer, was quite interesting. And back then it was, "How do we kind of replicate what's coming in the cloud?" And, and you guys have obviously taken it into the digital world. Really want to thank you for your time today. Great conversation, and love to have you back. >> Thank you so much. >> Absolutely. >> It was a pleasure speaking with you. >> I agree. >> All right, keep it right there for more discussions that educate and inspire on theCube. (bright music) Welcome back to the program and we're going to dig into the number one topic on the minds of every technology organization. That's cybersecurity. You know, survey data from ETR, our data partner, shows that among CIOs and IT decision makers, cybersecurity continues to rank as the number one technology priority to be addressed in the coming year. That's ahead of even cloud migration and analytics. And with me to discuss this critical topic area are Jim Shook, who's the Global Director of Cybersecurity and Compliance Practice at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Andrew Gonzalez, who focuses on Cloud and Infrastructure consulting at DXC Technology. Gents, welcome. Good to have you. >> Thanks Dave. Great to be here. >> Thank you. >> Jim, let's start with you. What are you seeing from the front lines in terms of the attack surface, and, and how are customers responding these days? >> It's always up and down and back and forth. The bad actors are smart. They adapt to everything that we do. So we're seeing more and more kind of living off the land. They're not necessarily deploying malware. Makes it harder to find what they're doing. And I think though, Dave, we've, we've adapted, and this whole notion of cyber resilience really helps our customers figure this out. And the idea there goes beyond cybersecurity, it's, "Let's protect as much as possible, so we keep the bad actors out as much as we can. But then, let's have the ability to adapt to and recover to the extent that the bad actors are successful." So we're recognizing that we can't be perfect a hundred percent of the time against a hundred percent of the bad actors. Let's keep out what we can, but then recognize and have that ability to recover when necessary. >> Yeah, thank you. So Andrew, you know, I like what Jim was saying about living off the land, of course, meaning using your own tooling against you, kind of hiding in plain sight, if you will. But, and, and as Jim is saying, you, you can't be perfect. But, so given that, what's your perspective on what good cybersecurity hygiene looks like? >> Yeah, so you have to understand what your crown jewel data looks like, what a good copy of a recoverable asset looks like. When you look at an attack, if it were to occur, right, how you get that copy of data back into production. And not only that, but what that golden image actually entails. So, whether it's networking, storage, some copy of a source code, intellectual property, maybe CMBD data, or an active directory, or DNS dump, right? Understanding what your data actually entails so that you can protect it and that you can build out your recovery plan for it. >> So, and where's that live? Where's that gold copy? You put on a yellow sticky? No, it's got to be, (chuckles) you got to be somewhere safe, right? So you have to think about that chain as well, right? >> Absolutely. Yeah. You, so, a lot of folks have not gone through the exercise of identifying what that golden copy looks like. Everyone has a DR scenario, everyone has a DR strategy, but actually identifying what that golden crown jewel data, let's call it, actually entails is one aspect of it. And then where to put it, how to protect it, how to make it immutable and isolated, that's the other portion of it. >> You know, if I go back to sort of earlier part of last decade, you know, cybersecurity was kind of a checkoff item. And as you got toward the middle part of the decade, and I'd say clearly by 2016, it, security became a boardroom issue. It was on the agenda, you know, every quarter at the board meetings. So compliance is no longer the driver, is, is my point. The driver is business risk, real loss of reputation or data, you know, it's, or money, et cetera. What are the business implications of not having your cyber house in order today? >> They're extreme, Dave. I mean the, you know, the bad actors are good at what they do. These losses by organizations, tens, hundreds of millions into the billions sometimes, plus the reputational damage that's difficult to, to really measure. There haven't been a lot of organizations that have actually been put out of business by an attack, at least not directly on, if they're larger organizations. But that's also on the table, too. So you can't just rely on, "Oh we need to do, you know, A, B and C because our regulators require it." You need to look at what the actual risk is to the business, and then come up with a strategy from there. >> You know, Jim, staying with you, one of the most common targets we hear of attackers is to go after the backup corpus. So how should customers think about protecting themselves from that tactic? >> Well, Dave, you hit on it before, right? Everybody's had the backup and DR strategies for a long time going back to requirements that we had in place for physical disaster or human error. And that's a great starting point for resilience capability. But that's all it is, is a starting point. Because the bad actors will, they also understand that you have those capabilities, and, and they've adapted to that. In every sophisticated attack that we see, the backup is a target. The bad actors want to take it out, or corrupt it, or do something else to that backup so that it's not available to you. That's not to say they're always successful, and it's still a good control to have in place because maybe it will survive. But you have to plan beyond that. So the capabilities that we talk about with resilience, let's harden that backup infrastructure. You've already got it in place. Let's use the capabilities that are there like immutability and other controls to make it more difficult for the bad actors to get to. But then as Andrew said, that gold copy, that critical systems, you need to protect that in something that's more secure, which commonly we, we might say a cyber vault. Although, there's a lot of different capabilities for cyber vaulting, some far better than others, and that's some of the things that we focus on. >> You know, it's interesting, but I've talked to a lot of CIOs about this, is prior to the pandemic, they, you know, had their, as you're pointing out, Jim, they had their DR strategy in place, but they felt like they weren't business resilient. And they realized that when we had the forced march to digital. So Andrew, are there solutions out there to help with this problem? Do you guys have an answer to this? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I'm glad you brought up resiliency. We, we take a position that to be cyber resilient, it includes operational resiliency. It includes understanding at the C level what the implication of an attack means, as we stated, and then, how to recover back into production. When you look at protecting that data, not only do you want to put it into what we call a vault, which is a Dell technology that is an offline immutable copy of your crown jewel data, but also how to recover it in real time. So DXC offers a, I don't want to call it a turnkey solution since we architect these specific to each client needs, right, when we look at what client data entails, their recovery point, objectives, recovery time objectives, what we call quality of the restoration. But when we architect these out, we look at not only how to protect the data, but how to alert and monitor for attacks in real time, how to understand what we should do when a breach is in progress, putting together with our security operations centers, a forensic and recovery plan and a runbook for the client, and then being able to cleanse and remediate so that we can get that data back into production. These are all services that DXC offers in conjunction with the Dell solution to protect, and recover, and keep bad actors out. And if we can't keep them out to ensure that we are back into production in short order. >> You know, this, this discussion we've been having about DR kind of versus resilience, and, and you were just talking about RPO and RTO. I mean, it used to be that a lot of firms wouldn't even test their recovery 'cause it was too risky. Or, you know, maybe they tested it on, you know, July 4th or something like that. But, but it, I'm inferring that's changed. I wonder if we could, you know, double click on recovery? How hard is it to, to, to test that recovery, and, and how quickly are you seeing organizations recover from attacks? >> So it depends, right, on the industry vertical, what kind of data. Again, a financial services client compared to a manufacturing client are going to be two separate conversations. We've seen it as quickly as being able to recover in six hours, in 12 hours. In some instances we have the grace period of a day to a couple of days. We do offer the ability to run scenarios once a quarter where we can stand up in our systems the production data that we are protecting to ensure that we have a good recoverable copy. But it depends on the client. >> I really like the emphasis here, Dave, that you're raising and that Andrew's talking about. It's not on the technology of how the data gets protected. It's focused on the recovery. That's all that we want to do. And so the solution with DXC really focuses on generating that recovery for customers. I think where people get a little bit twisted up on their testing capability is, you have to think about different scenarios. So there are scenarios where the attack might be small. It might be limited to a database or an application. It might be really broadly based like the NotPetya attacks from a few years ago. The regulatory environment, we call those attacks severe but plausible. So you can't necessarily test everything with the infrastructure, but you can test some things with the infrastructure. Others, you might sit around on a tabletop exercise or walk through what that looks like to really get that, that recovery kind of muscle, muscle memory so that people know what to do when those things occur. But the key to it, as Andrew said before, have to focus down, "What are those critical applications? What do we need, what's most important? What has to come back first?" And that really will go a long way towards having the right recovery points and recovery times from a cyber disaster. >> Yeah, makes sense. Understanding the value of that data is going to inform you how to, how to respond and how to prioritize. Andrew, one of the things that we hear a lot on theCube, especially lately, is around, you know, IOT, IIOT, Industry 4.0, the whole OT security piece of it. And the problem being that, you know, traditionally, operations technologies have been air gapped, often by design. But as businesses, increasingly they're driving initiatives like Industry 4.0, and they're connecting these OT systems to IT systems. They're, you know, driving efficiency, preventative maintenance, et cetera. So a lot of data flowing through the pipes, if you will. What are you seeing in terms of the threats to critical infrastructure and how should customers think about addressing these issues? >> Yeah, so bad actors, you know, can come in many forms. We've seen instances of social engineering. We've seen, you know, a USB stick dropped in a warehouse. That data that is flowing through the IoT device is as sensitive now as your core mainframe infrastructure data. So when you look at it from a protection standpoint, conceptually, it's not dissimilar from what we've been been talking about where you want to understand, again, what the most critical data is. Looking at IoT data and applications is no different than your core systems now, right? Depending on what your, your business is, right? So when, when we're looking at protecting these, yes, we want firewalls, yes, we want air gap solutions, yes, we want front end protection, but we're looking at it from a resiliency perspective. Putting that data, understanding what what data entails to put in the vault from an IoT perspective is just as critical as as it is for your core systems. >> Jim, anything you can add to this topic? >> Yeah, I think you hit on the, the key points there. Everything is interconnected. So even in the days where maybe people thought the OT systems weren't online, oftentimes the IT systems are talking to them, or controlling them, SCADA systems, or perhaps supporting them. Think back to the pipeline attack of last year. All the public testimony was that the OT systems didn't get attacked directly. But there was uncertainty around that, and the IT systems hadn't been secured. So that caused the OT systems to have to shut down. It certainly is a different recovery when you're shutting them down on your own versus being attacked, but the outcome was the same that the business couldn't operate. So you really have to take all of those into account. And I think that does go back to exactly what Andrew's saying, understanding your critical business services, and then the applications and data and other components that support those and drive those, and making sure those are protected. You understand them, you have the ability to recover them if necessary. >> So guys, I mean, you made the point. I mean, you're right. The adversary is highly capable. They're motivated 'cause the ROI is so, it's so lucrative. It's like this never ending battle that cybersecurity pros, you know, go through. It really is kind of frontline sort of technical heroes, if you will. And so, but sometimes it just feels daunting. Why are you optimistic about the future of, of cyber from the good guy's perspective? >> I think we're coming at the problem the right way, Dave. So that, that focus, I'm so pleased with the idea that we are planning that the systems aren't going to be hundred percent capable every single time, and let's figure that out, right? That's, that's real world stuff. So just as the bad actors continue to adapt and expand, so do we. And I think the differences there, the common criminals, it's getting harder and harder for them. The more sophisticated ones, they're tough to beat all the time. And of course, you've raised the question of some nation states and other activities. But there's a lot more information sharing. There's a lot more focus from the business side of the house and not just the IT side of the house that we need to figure these things out. >> Yeah, to, to add to that, I think furthering education for the client base is important. You, you brought up a point earlier. It used to be a boardroom conversation due to compliance reasons. Now, as we have been in the market for a while, we continue to mature the offerings. It's further education for not only the business itself, but for the IT systems and how they interconnect, and working together so that these systems can be protected and continue to be evolved and continue to be protected through multiple frameworks as opposed to seeing it as another check the box item that the board has to adhere to. >> All right, guys, we got to go. Thank you so much. Great conversation on a, on a really important topic. Keep up the good work. Appreciate it. >> Thanks Dan. >> Thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching. Stay tuned for more excellent discussions around the partnership between Dell Technologies and DXC Technology. We're talking about solving real world problems, how this partnership has evolved over time, really meeting the changing enterprise landscape challenges. Keep it right there. (bright music) Okay, we hope you enjoyed the program and learned some things about cloud transformation and modernizing your business that will inspire you to action. Now if you want to learn more, go to the Dell DXC partner page shown here, or click on the URL in the description. Thanks for watching everybody and on behalf of our supporters, Dell and DXC, good luck. And as always, get in touch if we can be of any assistance. (bright music)

>>Hey everyone, welcome to the Cube's coverage of AWS Reinvent 2022. Lisa Martin here with you with Subaru ier, one of our alumni who's now the CEO of Aerospike. Sabu. Great to have you on the program. Thank you for joining us. >>Great as always, to be on the cube. Luisa, good to meet you. >>So, you know, every company these days has got to be a data company, whether it's a retailer, a manufacturer, a grocer, a automotive company. But for a lot of companies, data is underutilized, yet a huge asset that is value added. Why do you think companies are struggling so much to make data a value added asset? >>Well, you know, we, we see this across the board when I talk to customers and prospects. There's a desire from the business and from it actually to leverage data to really fuel newer applications, newer services, newer business lines, if you will, for companies. I think the struggle is one, I think one the, you know, the plethora of data that is created, you know, surveys say that over the next three years data is gonna be, you know, by 2025, around 175 zetabytes, right? A hundred and zetabytes of data is gonna be created. And that's really a, a, a growth of north of 30% year over year. But the more important, and the interesting thing is the real time component of that data is actually growing at, you know, 35% cagr. And what enterprises desire is decisions that are made in real time or near real time. >>And a lot of the challenges that do exist today is that either the infrastructure that enterprises have in place was never built to actually manipulate data in real time. The second is really the ability to actually put something in place which can handle spikes yet be cost efficient if you'll, so you can build for really peak loads, but then it's very expensive to operate that particular service at normal loads. So how do you build something which actually works for you, for both you, both users, so to speak? And the last point that we see out there is even if you're able to, you know, bring all that data, you don't have the processing capability to run through that data. So as a result, most enterprises struggle with one, capturing the data, you know, making decisions from it in real time and really operating it at the cost point that they need to operate it at. >>You know, you bring up a great point with respect to real time data access. And I think one of the things that we've learned the last couple of years is that access to real time data, it's not a nice to have anymore. It's business critical for organizations in any industry. Talk about that as one of the challenges that organizations are facing. >>Yeah. When, when, when we started Aerospike, right when the company started, it started with the premise that data is gonna grow, number one, exponentially. Two, when applications open up to the internet, there's gonna be a flood of users and demands on those applications. And that was true primarily when we started the company in the ad tech vertical. So ad tech was the first vertical where there was a lot of data both on the supply side and the demand side from an inventory of ads that were available. And on the other hand, they had like microseconds or milliseconds in which they could make a decision on which ad to put in front of you and I so that we would click or engage with that particular ad. But over the last three to five years, what we've seen is as digitization has actually permeated every industry out there, the need to harness data in real time is pretty much present in every industry. >>Whether that's retail, whether that's financial services, telecommunications, e-commerce, gaming and entertainment. Every industry has a desire. One, the innovative companies, the small companies rather, are innovating at a pace and standing up new businesses to compete with the larger companies in each of these verticals. And the larger companies don't wanna be left behind. So they're standing up their own competing services or getting into new lines of business that really harness and are driven by real time data. So this compelling pressures, one, the customer exp you know, customer experience is paramount and we as customers expect answers in, you know, an instant in real time. And on the other hand, the way they make decisions is based on a large data set because you know, larger data sets actually propel better decisions. So there's competing pressures here, which essentially drive the need. One from a business perspective, two from a customer perspective to harness all of this data in real time. So that's what's driving an inces need to actually make decisions in real or near real time. >>You know, I think one of the things that's been in short supply over the last couple of years is patients we do expect as consumers, whether we're in our business lives, our personal lives that we're going to be getting, be given information and data that's relevant, it's personal to help us make those real time decisions. So having access to real time data is really business critical for organizations across any industries. Talk about some of the main capabilities that modern data applications and data platforms need to have. What are some of the key capabilities of a modern data platform that need to be delivered to meet demanding customer expectations? >>So, you know, going back to your initial question Lisa, around why is data really a high value but underutilized or underleveraged asset? One of the reasons we see is a lot of the data platforms that, you know, some of these applications were built on have been then around for a decade plus and they were never built for the needs of today, which is really driving a lot of data and driving insight in real time from a lot of data. So there are four major capabilities that we see that are essential ingredients of any modern data platform. One is really the ability to, you know, operate at unlimited scale. So what we mean by that is really the ability to scale from gigabytes to even petabytes without any degradation in performance or latency or throughput. The second is really, you know, predictable performance. So can you actually deliver predictable performance as your data size grows or your throughput grows or your concurrent user on that application of service grows? >>It's really easy to build an application that operates at low scale or low throughput or low concurrency, but performance usually starts degrading as you start scaling one of these attributes. The third thing is the ability to operate and always on globally resilient application. And that requires a, a really robust data platform that can be up on a five, nine basis globally, can support global distribution because a lot of these applications have global users. And the last point is, goes back to my first answer, which is, can you operate all of this at a cost point? Which is not prohibitive, but it makes sense from a TCO perspective. Cuz a lot of times what we see is people make choices of data platforms and as ironically their service or applications become more successful and more users join their journey, the revenue starts going up, the user base starts going up, but the cost basis starts crossing over the revenue and they're losing money on the service, ironically, as the service becomes more popular. So really unlimited scale, predictable performance always on, on a globally resilient basis and low tco. These are the four essential capabilities of any modern data platform. >>So then talk to me with those as the four main core functionalities of a modern data platform. How does aerospace deliver that? >>So we were built, as I said, from the from day one to operate at unlimited scale and deliver predictable performance. And then over the years as we work with customers, we build this incredible high availability capability which helps us deliver the always on, you know, operations. So we have customers who are, who have been on the platform 10 years with no downtime for example, right? So we are talking about an amazing continuum of high availability that we provide for customers who operate these, you know, globally resilient services. The key to our innovation here is what we call the hybrid memory architecture. So, you know, going a little bit technically deep here, essentially what we built out in our architecture is the ability on each node or each server to treat a bank of SSDs or solid state devices as essentially extended memory. So you're getting memory performance, but you're accessing these SSDs, you're not paying memory prices, but you're getting memory performance as a result of that. >>You can attach a lot more data to each node or each server in your distributed cluster. And when you kind of scale that across basically a distributed cluster you can do with aerospike, the same things at 60 to 80% lower server count and as a result 60 to 80% lower TCO compared to some of the other options that are available in the market. Then basically, as I said, that's the key kind of starting point to the innovation. We layer around capabilities like, you know, replication change, data notification, you know, synchronous and asynchronous replication. The ability to actually stretch a single cluster across multiple regions. So for example, if you're operating a global service, you can have a single aerospace cluster with one node in San Francisco, one northern New York, another one in London. And this would be basically seamlessly operating. So that, you know, this is strongly consistent. >>Very few no SQL data platforms are strongly consistent or if they are strongly consistent, they will actually suffer performance degradation. And what strongly consistent means is, you know, all your data is always available, it's guaranteed to be available, there is no data lost anytime. So in this configuration that I talked about, if the node in London goes down, your application still continues to operate, right? Your users see no kind of downtime and you know, when London comes up, it rejoins the cluster and everything is back to kind of the way it was before, you know, London left the cluster so to speak. So the op, the ability to do this globally resilient, highly available kind of model is really, really powerful. A lot of our customers actually use that kind of a scenario and we offer other deployment scenarios from a higher availability perspective. So everything starts with HMA or hybrid memory architecture and then we start building out a lot of these other capabilities around the platform. >>And then over the years, what our customers have guided us to do is as they're putting together a modern kind of data infrastructure, we don't live in a silo. So aerospace gets deployed with other technologies like streaming technologies or analytics technologies. So we built connectors into Kafka, pulsar, so that as you're ingesting data from a variety of data sources, you can ingest them at very high ingest speeds and store them persistently into Aerospike. Once the data is in Aerospike, you can actually run spark jobs across that data in a, in a multithreaded parallel fashion to get really insight from that data at really high, high throughput and high speed, >>High throughput, high speed, incredibly important, especially as today's landscape is increasingly distributed. Data centers, multiple public clouds, edge IOT devices, the workforce embracing more and more hybrid these days. How are you ex helping customers to extract more value from data while also lowering costs? Go into some customer examples cause I know you have some great ones. >>Yeah, you know, I think we have, we have built an amazing set of customers and customers actually use us for some really mission critical applications. So, you know, before I get into specific customer examples, let me talk to you about some of kind of the use cases which we see out there. We see a lot of aerospace being used in fraud detection. We see us being used in recommendations and since we use get used in customer data profiles or customer profiles, customer 360 stores, you know, multiplayer gaming and entertainment, these are kind of the repeated use case digital payments. We power most of the digital payment systems across the globe. Specific example from a, from a specific example perspective, the first one I would love to talk about is PayPal. So if you use PayPal today, then you know when you actually paying somebody your transaction is, you know, being sent through aero spike to really decide whether this is a fraudulent transaction or not. >>And when you do that, you know, you and I as a customer not gonna wait around for 10 seconds for PayPal to say yay or me, we expect, you know, the decision to be made in an instant. So we are powering that fraud detection engine at PayPal for every transaction that goes through PayPal before us, you know, PayPal was missing out on about 2% of their SLAs, which was essentially millions of dollars, which they were losing because, you know, they were letting transactions go through and taking the risk that it, it's not a fraudulent transaction with the aerospace. They can now actually get a much better sla and the data set on which they compute the fraud score has gone up by, you know, several factors. So by 30 x if you will. So not only has the data size that is powering the fraud engine actually grown up 30 x with Aerospike. Yeah. But they're actually making decisions in an instant for, you know, 99.95% of their transactions. So that's, >>And that's what we expect as consumers, right? We want to know that there's fraud detection on the swipe regardless of who we're interacting with. >>Yes. And so that's a, that's a really powerful use case and you know, it's, it's a great customer, great customer success story. The other one I would talk about is really Wayfair, right? From retail and you know, from e-commerce. So everybody knows Wayfair global leader in really, you know, online home furnishings and they use us to power their recommendations engine and you know, it's basically if you're purchasing this, people who bought this but also bought these five other things, so on and so forth, they have actually seen the card size at checkout go by up to 30% as a result of actually powering their recommendations in G by through Aerospike. And they, they were able to do this by reducing the server count by nine x. So on one ninth of the servers that were there before aerospace, they're now powering their recommendation engine and seeing card size checkout go up by 30%. Really, really powerful in terms of the business outcome and what we are able to, you know, drive at Wayfair >>Hugely powerful as a business outcome. And that's also what the consumer wants. The consumer is expecting these days to have a very personalized, relevant experience that's gonna show me if I bought this, show me something else that's related to that. We have this expectation that needs to be really fueled by technology. >>Exactly. And you know, another great example you asked about, you know, customer stories, Adobe, who doesn't know Adobe, you know, they, they're on a, they're on a mission to deliver the best customer experience that they can and they're talking about, you know, great customer 360 experience at scale and they're modernizing their entire edge compute infrastructure to support this. With Aerospike going to Aerospike, basically what they have seen is their throughput go up by 70%, their cost has been reduced by three x. So essentially doing it at one third of the cost while their annual data growth continues at, you know, about north of 30%. So not only is their data growing, they're able to actually reduce their cost to actually deliver this great customer experience by one third to one third and continue to deliver great customer 360 experience at scale. Really, really powerful example of how you deliver Customer 360 in a world which is dynamic and you know, on a dataset which is constantly growing at north, north of 30% in this case. >>Those are three great examples, PayPal, Wayfair, Adobe talking about, especially with Wayfair when you talk about increasing their cart checkout sizes, but also with Adobe increasing throughput by over 70%. I'm looking at my notes here. While data is growing at 32%, that's something that every organization has to contend with data growth is continuing to scale and scale and scale. >>Yep. I, I'll give you a fun one here. So, you know, you may not have heard about this company, it's called Dream 11 and it's a company based out of India, but it's a very, you know, it's a fun story because it's the world's largest fantasy sports platform and you know, India is a nation which is cricket crazy. So you know, when, when they have their premier league going on, you know, there's millions of users logged onto the dream alone platform building their fantasy lead teams and you know, playing on that particular platform, it has a hundred million users, a hundred million plus users on the platform, 5.5 million concurrent users and they have been growing at 30%. So they are considered a, an amazing success story in, in terms of what they have accomplished and the way they have architected their platform to operate at scale. And all of that is really powered by aerospace where think about that they are able to deliver all of this and support a hundred million users, 5.5 million concurrent users all with you know, 99 plus percent of their transactions completing in less than one millisecond. Just incredible success story. Not a brand that is you know, world renowned but at least you know from a what we see out there, it's an amazing success story of operating at scale. >>Amazing success story, huge business outcomes. Last question for you as we're almost out of time is talk a little bit about Aerospike aws, the partnership GRAVITON two better together. What are you guys doing together there? >>Great partnership. AWS has multiple layers in terms of partnerships. So you know, we engage with AWS at the executive level. They plan out, really roll out of new instances in partnership with us, making sure that, you know, those instance types work well for us. And then we just released support for Aerospike on the graviton platform and we just announced a benchmark of Aerospike running on graviton on aws. And what we see out there is with the benchmark, a 1.6 x improvement in price performance and you know, about 18% increase in throughput while maintaining a 27% reduction in cost, you know, on graviton. So this is an amazing story from a price performance perspective, performance per wat for greater energy efficiencies, which basically a lot of our customers are starting to kind of talk to us about leveraging this to further meet their sustainability target. So great story from Aero Aerospike and aws, not just from a partnership perspective on a technology and an executive level, but also in terms of what joint outcomes we are able to deliver for our customers. >>And it sounds like a great sustainability story. I wish we had more time so we would talk about this, but thank you so much for talking about the main capabilities of a modern data platform, what's needed, why, and how you guys are delivering that. We appreciate your insights and appreciate your time. >>Thank you very much. I mean, if, if folks are at reinvent next week or this week, come on and see us at our booth. We are in the data analytics pavilion. You can find us pretty easily. Would love to talk to you. >>Perfect. We'll send them there. So Ira, thank you so much for joining me on the program today. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you Lisa. >>I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cubes coverage of AWS Reinvent 2022. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live form Berlin, Germany, it's the Cube, covering NetApp insight 2017, brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to the Cube's live coverage of NetApp insight 2017, we're here in Berlin, Germany, I'm your host, Rebecca Night along with my cohost Peter Burris. We have two guests on the program now, we have Rory McBride, who is the technical account manager at Aero and Bryan Mclosky, who is the vice president world wide for hyper converge infrastructure at NetApp. Bryan, Rory, thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks. >> Let me start with you, Bryan, talk a little bit, tell our viewers a little bit about the value, that HCI delivers to customers, especially in terms of simplifying the data. >> In a nutshell, what NetApp HCI does is it takes what wold normally be hours and hours to implement a solution and 100s of inputs, generally, over 400 inputs and it simplifies it down to under 30 inputs in an installation, that will be done within 45 minutes. Traditionally HCI solutions have similar implementation characteristics, but you lose some of the enterprise flexibility and scale, that customers of NetApp have come to expect over the years. What we've done is we've provided that simplicity, while allowing customers to have the enterprise capabilities and flexibility, that they've grown accustomed to. >> Is this something, that you are talking with customers, in terms of the simplicity, what were you hearing from customers? >> Most customers these days are challenged of, everybody has to find a way to do more with less or to do minimally a lot more with the same. If you think of NetApp, we've always been wonderful about giving customers a great production experience. When you buy a typical NetApp product, you're gonna own it for three, four or five years and it will continue. NetApp has always been great for that three, four and five year time frame and what we've done with HCI is we really simplified the beginning part of that curve of how do you get it from the time it lands on your dock to implement it and usable by our users in a short manner, that's what HCI has brought to the NetApp portfolio, that's incremental to what was there before. >> One of the advantages to third parties, that work closely with NetApp is, that by having a simpler approach of doing things, you can do more of them, but on the other hand, you want to ensure, that you're also focused on the value add. In the field, when you're sitting down with a customer and working with them to ensure, that they get the value, that they want from these products, how do you affect that balance? As the product becomes simpler to the customer now being able to focus more on other things, other than configuration of limitation. >> We've been able to get to doing something with your data is the key. You needed a little bar of entry, which a lot of the software and hardware providers are trying to do today. I think HCI just has to pull all of that together, which is great. We're hearing from third party vendors, that it's great, that from day one, they've been integrated into the overall portfolio message and I think customers are just gonna be pretty excited with what they can do from zero with this hardware. >> When you think about ultimately how they're gonna spend their time, what are they going to be doing instead of now all this all configuration work? What is Aero gonna be doing now, that you're not doing that value added configuration work? >> Hopefully, we'll be helping to realize the full potential of what they bought, rather than spending a lot of time trying to make the hardware work, they're concentrating more on delivering a service or an application back to the business, it's gonna generate some revenue. In Aero we're talking a lot to people about IOT and it's gonna be the next wave of information, that people are gonna have to deal with and having a stable product, that can support and provide value, you have information back to business, it's gonna be key. >> Bryan, HCI, as you noted, dramatically reduces the time to get to value, not only now, but it also sustains that level of simplicity over the life of the utilization of the product. How does it fit into the rest of the NetApp product set, the rest of the NetApp portfolio? What does it make better, what makes it better in addition to just the HCI product? >> NetApp has a really robust portfolio of offerings, that we, at a high level categorize into our next generation offerings, which are Solid Fire, Flexpod Solid Fire, storage grid and hyper converge and then the traditional NetApp on tap based offerings. What the glue between the whole portfolio is the data fabric and HCI is very tightly integrated into the data fabric, one of the innovations we are delivering is snap mirror integration of the RHCI platform into the traditional on tap family of products. You can seamlessly move data from our hyper converge system to a traditional on tap base system and it also gives you seamless mobility to either your own private cloud or to public cloud platforms. As a company with a wide portfolio, it gives us the ability to be consultative with our partners and our customers. What we want is and we feel customers are best served on NetApp and we want them to use NetApp, and if an on tap base system is a better solution for them than hyper converge, then that's absolutely what we will recommend for them. Into your earlier question about the partners, one of the interesting things with HCI is it's the first time as NetAPP were delivering an integrated system with compute and with a hyperviser, it comes preconfigured with the emware and it's a wonderful opportunity for our partners to add incremental value through the sale cycle to what they've brought to NetApp in the past. Because as NetApp, we're really storage experts, where our partners have a much wider and deeper understanding of the whole ecosystem than we do. It's been interesting for us to have discussions with partners, cuz we're learning a lot, because we're now involved in layers and we're deeply involved at higher levels of the stack, than we have been. >> I'm really interested in that, because you say, that you have this consultative relationship with these customers, how are you able to learn from them, their best practices and then do you transfer what you've learned to other partners and other customers? >> From the customer and we try and disseminate the learning as much as we can, but we're a huge organization with many account teams, but it all starts with what the customers wants to accomplish, minimally they need a solution, that's gonna plug in and do what they expect it to do today. What's the more important part is where what their vision is for where they wanna be three years down the road, five years down the road, 10 years down the road. It's that vision piece, that tends to drive more towards one part of the portfolio, than the other. >> Take us through how this works. You walk into an account, presumably Aero ECS has a customer. The Aero ECS customer says, "Well, we have an issue, that's going to require some specialized capabilities and how we use our data". You can look at a lot of different options, but you immediately think NetApp, what is it, that leads you to NetApp HCI versus on tap, versus Solid Fire, is there immediate characteristic, that you say, "That's HCI"? >> I would say, that the driving factor was the fact, that they wanted something that's simple and easy to manage, they want to get a mango data base up and running or they've got some other application, that really depends on their business. The underlying hardware needs to function. Bryan was saying, that it's got element OS sitting underneath it, which is in its 10th iteration and you've got VM version six, which is the most adopted virtualization platform out there. These are two best breed partnerships coming together and people are happy with that, and can move, and manage it from a single pane of glass moving forward from day one right the way through when they need to transition to a new platform, which is seamless for them. That's great from any application point, because you don't wanna worry about the health of things, you wanna be able to give an application back to the business. We talked about education, this event is gauged towards bringing customers together with NetApp and understanding the messaging around HCI, which is great. >> What are the things, that you keep hearing form customers, does this need for data simplicity, this need for huge time saving products and services? What do you think, if you can think three to five years down the road, what will the next generation of concerns be and how are you, I'm gonna use the word, that we're hearing a lot, future proof, what you're doing now to serve those customers needs of the future? >> Three to five years down the road. I can't predict three to five years out very reliably. >> But you can predict, that they're gonna have more data, they're going to merge it in new and unseen ways and they need to do it more cheaply. >> The future proofing really comes in from the data fabric. With the integration into the data fabric, you could have information, that started on a NetApp system, that was announced eight years ago, seamlessly moves into a solid fire or flash array, which seamlessly moves to a hyperconverge system, which seamlessly moves to your private cloud, which eventually moves off to a public cloud and you can bring it back into any tiers and wherever you want that data in six, seven, eight years, the data fabric will extend to it. Within each individual product, there are investment protection technologies within each one, but it's the data fabric, that should make customers feel comfortable, that no matter where they're gonna end up, taking their first step with NetApp is a step in the right direction. >> The value added ecosystem, that NetApp and others use and Aero ECS has a big play around that, has historically been tied back into hardware assets, how does it feel to be moving more into worrying about your customers data assets? >> I think it's an exciting time to be bringing those things together. At the end of the day, it's what the customer wants, they want a solution, that integrates seamlessly from whether that be the rack right the way up to the application, they want something, that they can get on their phone, they want something they can get on their tablet, they want the same experience regardless whether they're in an airplane or right next to the data center. The demand on data is huge and will only get bigger over the next five years. I was looking at a recent cover of forest magazine, it was from a number of years ago about Nokia and how can anybody ever catch them and where are they now? I think you need to be able to spot the changes and adapt quickly and to steal one of the comments from the key note yesterday, is moving from a survivor to a thriver with your data, it's gonna be key to those companies. >> In talking about the demands on data growing, it's also true, that the demands on data professionals are growing too. How is that changing the way you recruit and retain top talent? >> For us, as NetApp, if you were to look at what we wanted in the CV five years ago, we wanted people, that understood storage, we wanted people, that knew about volumes, that knew about data layouts, that knew how to maximize performance by physical placement of data and now what we're looking for is people, that really understand the whole stack and that can talk to customers about their application needs their business problems, can talk to developers. Because what we've done is we've taken those people, that were good in all those other things I mentioned, when you ask them what did you love about this product, none of them ever came back and said I love the first week I spent installing it. We've taken that away and we've let them do more interesting work. A challenge for us is, us is a collective society, is to make sure we bring people forward from an education perspective skills enablement, so they're capable of rising to that next level of demand, but we're taking a lot of the busy work out. >> Making sure, that they have the skills to be able to take what they're seeing in the data and then take action. >> We want our customers to look at NetApp as data expert, that can work with them on their business problem, not a storage expert, that can explain how an array works. >> Bryan, Rory, thank you so much for coming on the show, it's been a great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> You are watching the Cube, we will have more from NetApp insight, I'm Rebecca Night for Peter Burris in just a little bit.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to DC everybody. Welcome back to Nutanix NEXTConf. This is the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Stu Miniman. Rich Napolitano is here as the CEO of Plexxi. Good friend, long time CUBE alum. Great to see you. >> Great to see you guys. Pleasure to be here with you again. >> Yeah, so you know, I love the fact that you're back in startup land. I mean, you did unbelievable things at EMC, but really this is your real love, alright, runnin' startups, you know, eating glass as we call it. So, when we first heard about Plexxi, I have to admit, Rich, we were down at Strada that time and it was kind of heavy and really geeky. I'm not a networky guy. You've really done a great job of sort of transforming the messaging and the company's vision. Share with us what's up with Plexxi. >> Yeah, I know, again thank you for inviting me here and it's a pleasure. It's an exciting time for the company. You know, we're actually breaking out, right and so it's great to see the momentum. And, the team has done a fabulous job. The challenge in the early days is, you know, you have the technology and you're trying to establish your product market fit and we've done that now. And so, it's exciting to be at this important inflection point, you know, tremendous revenue growth this year. You know, we could probably be profitable if we want to be this year which there's not many startups that can say that. And, what's happened is fundamentally we really connected now what we have built, our technology to the ping points in the marketplace and we have, you know, deep deep clarity and understanding of that now. >> So, talk a little bit more about the sort of value proposition and kind of why you guys, why Dave started the company and why you joined, what you're all about. >> Yeah, so we're building the next generation networks. We're not building additional networks and so we're very focused on the next era of computing, you know, third platform, you know, and scaled down infrastructure, cloud, where the requirements on the infrastructure are very different. You need to just build a much more agile and flexible infrastructure. You know, the choice the public cloud is there and it's going to be there forever, but how do you build an agile infrastructure for private and for hybrid infrastructure? And, what we've realized, and Dave realized this early on, is that the networking architectures haven't fundamentally changed in a very, very long time. And, you know, there's an emergence now, and this is what we've really learned in the last two years, there's an emergence of this other data center network. You know, Sysco has been dominant and done a phenomenal job in traditional data sending networking, but there's this emergence of this other network and we now we call it by a name, which is the Hyper Converge Network, HCN. And so, in very simple terms, what is Plexxi? Plexxi builds the HCN for the HEI infrastructure. >> Okay, Rich, you're just going to have to unpack this a little bit so, you know, people in the networking world will be said, we understand that it was a lot of the east, west traffic, the traffic between those, but you know, architecturally you know, we kind of got rid of the sand and now we've got this distributed software model that I've got these nodes, so where was the gap that you were lookin' to fill and you know, does Nutanix understand that this was a challenge? >> Those are all great questions and very relevant to the challenge. So, when you really look at the problems we solved, we start, we pull it up to the top for a second and we've learned a lot about this the last couple of years. What people want is simplicity. They don't want complexity. And, we built a lot of complexity into every layer of the infrastructure. Everything from the applications to the operating environments, to compute, to the storage and to the network. And so, what we really bring to the marketplace is a much simpler approach to deploy infrastructure and we do that by simplifying the network dramatically. So, and we do that by having a software definable network that's built out of industry standard components. So, Plexxi really brings three things to the table. We figured out how to build this very elastic and agile fabric to allow you to compute storage, allow you to connect storaging a few things together. And, we do that on white box switches and that's dramatically reduced our cost point and is tremendously simple to deploy, but on top of that, we built our software abstractions. And, it really is the key to us is really our software control and our integrations into operating environments. So, what we bring to market is an integrated solution with a set of switches that build this fabric, but our software controller allows you to provision this network seamlessly in the same way that Nutanix talks about being the invisible infrastructure, we're the invisible network. >> So, when Nutanix first started they were like, we're going to kill that sand 'cause you don't need some of that complexity, so when do I need this you know, fabric as you call it, as that interconnected tissue, you know, what size customer, you know, what kind of challenges does that, you know, really knock down. And So, if you're living within a rack you don't have any of these problems really. Right, I mean our integration into Nutanix is so sophisticated now that even within the rack we dramatically simplify your network provisioning so even within a rack our value proposition of simplicity and ease of use is compelling. We make the network invisible in that context. So, as you provision your VM's or your storage in a Nutanix environment, the network comes along. The value proposition just is most compelling as you go to second, third or more racks. Some of our biggest customers deploy us in tremendous configurations, you know, 10 racks in 10 rows, thousands of servers. But, we can start as small as you know, one or two switches. And so, the value proposition really is, how seamlessly can you build your infrastructure, in other words, can you make the network invisible in these infrastructures? And, that's exactly what we do. >> You have this picture in your booth, these things that you're handing out, and it's really simple. You got the old way which is storage, server and networking all that complexity. Nutanix, really kind of attacked the server and storage piece, brought those together, connect to the network. What you guys are doing is collapsing that complexity even further. Is that right, so what does that mean for a customer from a scaling standpoint? >> So, if you look at the three tier architecture as you talked about, then we're maxing multiple networks. And, the first thing anyone does whey they deploy converged infrastructure, hyperconversions in particular, is they eliminate the SAD. So, that was another network, we just never really thought about it that way. And so, effectively what we do is we allow you to have the properties of a SAD on your network. So, for a storage guy, notions of like Fibre Channel zoning are inherent now in our IP oriented network. Our network is very low latency because of our architecture. So, as you scale your latency is constant as you would things like NVME, our latency is extremely low. It's not a multi tiered network, so you don't have the complexity of building a multi tiered network as you scale your converged infrastructure. The benefit of hyperconversion is that you can deploy these racks of infrastructure and easily deploy them. The challenge is that if you don't attack the networking problem you still bump into that as you deploy this infrastructure. >> That becomes your new bottleneck. >> It's your new bottleneck for performance, but it's really for administration. And so, our integration layer ties into Nutanix and makes us aware of Nutanix operating environment, its file system, when nodes are being added or removed, when you're doing STApps or backups, et cetera and the network is shaped in the context of that application called Nutanix. It'll do the same thing for VMware. >> And, when you say it's tied into Nutanix, is that you know, the Nutanix the kind of the software between nodes is also things like AHV. Do you have awareness of that? >> So, AHV or VMware and PRISM, so you know, our management console can be launched from PRISM now so you can seamlessly have an experience. You can't tell when you're really in Nutanix or when you're in Plexxi's management domain. But, more importantly, we're aware of when nodes are added. We understand if you're rebuilding your underlying file systems, et cetera, as the requirements on the network shift, as you add more workloads, as workloads move, as applications move on the infrastructure and you need more compute over here or more storage there, our network adapts to that. >> So, explain how this is different than, just say, Nutanix bringing its platform and partnering up with UCS, for example. What's different about what you're doing? >> So, we're, for one thing, we're only the network, right. And so, the compute infrastructure, we don't do that. We don't do storage. We don't compute. And so, we're just a network that is really, think about it as the fabric for compute and storage as opposed to a data center network where you connect, you know, your printers and your desktops and your infrastructure for your, you know, multiple sites, et cetera. That's the kind of Sysco, if you will, network. We're this embedded network in these hyperconvert solutions. Put one or two switches in your rack and as you pump out this converged infrastructure you just scale that fabric seamlessly. And, it's so well integrated inside of Nutanix you don't even realize it's another network. It's just embedded in the infrastructure. >> So, sorry Stu. From a buyer's standpoint, do I get to eliminate some other or limit my growth of my traditional network or do I have to throw that out and bring this in? >> So, we're totally compatible with existing networks. So, what you do is you do two or three things. We can insert into existing networks without modifying them, but you don't need to keep adding top rack switches and spines to your existing network because our, most of the traffic stays on this other network. The Nutanix guy, sales teams, are actually starting to call this the Nutanix Network or the Nutanix Fabric because it's embedded in their solution. So, most of the traffic between Nutanix and those goes on that network which minimizes your northbound traffic to your existing network which just frankly, removes a headache from traditional network admins to deal with this other stuff. And, that same way the network admin in the past didn't worry about sand traffic. You shouldn't have to worry about this other problems too. >> So, Rich, it's interesting, talking to Nutanix customers you're right, smaller customers don't have networking issues, some larger customers it depends on how good their network is. The thing coming on the horizon that's going to dramatically change this embedded network thing is got to be NVME over fabrics, so what does that mean for Nutanix standalone and you know, I got to think that that's a huge tie to bring you into a lot of accounts. >> I mean, it is clear that the next tsunami, I mean you know, we were all involved in the early days of Flash and we saw that coming when we were at EMC, you know, I probably saw more Flash than anybody in the world actually, in terms of petabytes actually. And, NVME is that next wave, right. So, whether it's embedded in Nutanix or it's standalone bricks, you know, it's going to elevate the, this east, west, this need for this other network and you know, to pitch Plexxi a little bit, there's no better network that's tuned for this. The nature of our network is it's flat, it's extremely low latency, so we're actually awaiting the day that, you know, NVME hits the market in a big way because it will blow apart every other network, every hierarchal network will just be blown apart because the latency characteristics of a multi tiered network are just, are just clear. You can measure it. Also, we're doing a lot of stuff like that. >> Are any of your solutions ready for this today? >> We're ready for it. >> And, when you simplify the network like that, the entire infrastructure, and you provide that infrastructure with virtually no latency impact, now you can start to see the way in which application development changes and, you know, everybody's talking about digital disruption and how they going to pay for it. They're going to pay for it by, I would think, shifting labor resource from non-differentiated infrastructure to some of these more exciting areas. We've just heard that from two CIOs. >> We see this a lot. Telecom Italia is here with us. Sparkle, one of our bigger customers, we have a session this afternoon at 3 o'clock and Sparkle's going to be in the session with us and I just met a good hour with them here. And, it's all about the operating expense. It's like, Nutanix plus Plexxi reduces my operating expense and he's going to repeatedly say that. And, it's just clear that people cannot afford the complexity associated with traditional networks anymore. They can't hire programmers to build out, you know, not to pick on ACI, but complicated scripts for ACI, they can't afford to build those programs. Our integration layer makes that seamless, it takes it away. >> So, what's your relationship with Nutanix? You're obviously doing some hardcore integration. How do you describe the partnership and do you have other partnerships that you can talk about? >> So, right now we have a number of large scale, service provider customers we sell through distribution and other partners. We're partnering a lot with Nutanix now, a little bit with SimpliVity, but we're going to go after all of the HCI vendors ultimately. But, pretty clearly Nutanix is the leader and we've been developing a relationship at the top and in the field and parallel we've been recruiting Nutanix partners. AERO's our master distributor, so we're recruiting AERO partners that sell Nutanix and we're building a set of solutions. We announce our reference architecture this week with Nutanix, so we're very focused on Nutanix. They're clearly the leader in this space and they get our value proposition. Invisible infrastructure meets the invisible network. I mean, it's perfect. >> You mentioned before you could be profitable if you wanted to be. It's kind of, it's not in vogue to be profitable, Rich. People want growth, but you know, hey, this booming market's not going to last forever. >> Timing's different, timing is different. I think, actually I think it plays to our strength that you know, I looked at our financials a couple of weeks ago and I realized some about 80% of all that we've spent has been in R and D, and that's not common. Most starters at this stage have invested a lot more in the go to market and now's our time to go do that, but we have, now we have the advantage that we have such tremendous revenue growth that we can fund a bunch of it ourselves and the capital markets are different than they were two or three years ago when Nutanix was growing. So, I think it's prudent for CEOs now to be just more, more capital efficient because the markets are different and I think we're in a unique position now given all of our growth. >> Well, Rich, congratulations on the early success. We know what you're capable of. We'll be watching. I really wish you the best. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Nutanix, NEXTConf. Be right back.