(bright upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this exclusive Cube Conversation. We have the pleasure today to welcome, Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president of software development at Oracle. Wim, it's good to see you. How you been, sir? >> Good, it's been a while since we last talked but I'm excited to be here, as always. >> It was during COVID though and so I hope to see you face to face soon. But so Wim, since the Barron's Article declared Oracle a Cloud giant, we've really been sort of paying attention and amping up our coverage of Oracle and asking a lot of questions like, is Oracle really a Cloud giant? And I'll say this, we've always stressed that Oracle invests in R&D and of course there's a lot of D in that equation. And over the past year, we've seen, of course the autonomous database is ramping up, especially notable on Exadata Cloud@Customer, we've covered that extensively. We covered the autonomous data warehouse announcement, the blockchain piece, which of course got me excited 'cause I get to talk about crypto with Juan. Roving Edge, which for everybody who might not be familiar with that, it's an edge cloud service, dedicated regions that you guys announced, which is a managed cloud region. And so it's clear, you guys are serious about cloud. These are all cloud first services using second gen OCI. So, Oracle's making some moves but the question is, what are customers doing? Are they buying this stuff? Are they leaning into these new deployment models for the databases? What can you tell us? >> You know, definitely. And I think, you know, the reason that we have so many different services is that not every customer is the same, right? One of the things that people don't necessarily realize, I guess, is in the early days of cloud lots of startups went there because they had no local infrastructure. It was easy for them to get started in something completely new. Our customers are mostly enterprise customers that have huge data centers in many cases, they have lots of real estate local. And when they think about cloud they're wondering how can we create an environment that doesn't cause us to have two ops teams and two ways of managing things. And so, they're trying to figure out exactly what it means to take their real estate and either move it wholesale to the cloud over a period of years, or they say, "Hey, some of these things need to be local maybe even for regulatory purposes." Or just because they want to keep some data locally within their own data centers but then they have to move other things remotely. And so, there's many different ways of solving the problem. And you can't just say, "Here's one cloud, this is where you go and that's it." So, we basically say, if you're on prem, we provide you with cloud services on-premises, like dedicated regions or Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer and so forth so that you get the benefits of what we built for cloud and spend a lot of time on, but you can run them in your own data center or people say, "No, no, no. I want to get rid of my data centers, I do it remotely." Okay, then you do it in Oracle cloud directly. Or you have a hybrid model where you say, "Some stays local, some is remote." The nice thing is you get the exact same API, the exact same way of managing things, no matter how you deploy it. And that's a big differentiator. >> So, is it fair to say that you guys have, I think of it as a purpose built club, 'cause I talk to a lot of customers. I mean, take an insurance app like Claims, and customers tell me, "I'm not putting that into the public cloud." But you're making a case that it actually might make sense in your cloud because you can support those mission critical applications with the exact same experience, same API, same... I can get, you know, take Rack for instance, I can't get, you know, real application clusters in an Amazon cloud but presumably I can get them in your cloud. So, is it fair to say you have a purpose built cloud specifically for the most demanding applications? Is that a right way to look at it or not necessarily? >> Well, it's interesting. I think the thing to be careful of is, I guess, purpose built cloud might for some people mean, "Oh, you can only do things if it's Oracle centric." Right, and so I think that fundamentally, Oracle cloud provides a generic cloud. You can run anything you want, any application, any deployment model that you have. Whether you're an Oracle customer or not, we provide you with a full cloud service, right? However, given that we know and have known, obviously for a long time, how our products run best, when we designed OCI gen two, when we designed the networking stack, the storage layer and all that stuff, we made sure that it would be capable of running our more complex environments because our advantage is, Oracle customers have a place where they can run Oracle the best. Right, and so obviously the context of purpose-built fits that model, where yes, we've made some design choices that allow us to run Rack inside OCI and allow us to deploy Exadatas inside OCI which you cannot do in other clouds. So yes, it's purpose built in that sense but I would caution on the side of that it sometimes might imply that it's unique to Oracle products and I guess one way to look at it is if you can run Oracle, you can run everything else, right? Because it's such a complex suite of products that if you can run that then it it'll support any other (mumbling). >> Right. Right, it's like New York city. You make it there, you can make it anywhere. If I can run the most demanding mission critical applications, well, then I can run a web app for instance, okay. I got a question on tooling 'cause there's a lot of tooling, like sometimes it makes my eyes bleed when I look at all this stuff and doesn't... Square the circle for me, doesn't autonomous, an autonomous database like Autonomous Linux, for instance, doesn't it eliminate the need for all these management tools? >> You know, it does. It eliminates the need for the management at the lower level, right. So, with the autonomous Linux, what we offer and what we do is, we automatically patch the operating system for you and make sure it's secure from a security patching point of view. We eliminate the downtime, so when we do it then you don't have to restart applications. However, we don't know necessarily what the app is that is installed on top of it. You know, people can deploy their own applications, they can run third party applications, they can use it for development environments and so forth. So, there's sort of the core operating system layer and on the database side, you know, we take care of database patching and upgrades and storage management and all that stuff. So the same thing, if you run your own application inside the database, we can manage the database portion but we don't manage the application portion just like on the operating system. And so, there's still a management level that's required, no matter what, a level above that. And the other thing and I think this is what a lot of the stuff we're doing is based on is, you still have tons of stuff on-premises that needs full management. You have applications that you migrate that are not running Autonomous Linux, could be a Windows application that's running or it could be something on a different Linux distribution or you could still have some databases installed that you manage yourself, you don't want to use the autonomous or you're on a third-party. And so we want to make sure that we can address all of them with a single set of tools, right. >> Okay, so I wonder, can you give us just an overview, just briefly of the products that comprise into the cloud services, your management solution, what's in that portfolio? How should we think about it? >> Yeah, so it basically starts with Enterprise Manager on-premises, right? Which has been the tool that our Oracle database customers in particular have been using for many years and is widely used by our customer base. And so you have those customers, most of their real estate is on-premises and they can use enterprise management with local. They have it running and they don't want to change. They can keep doing that and we keep enhancing as you know, with newer versions of Enterprise Manager getting better. So, then there's the transition to cloud and so what we've been doing over the last several years is basically, looking at the things, well, one aspect is looking at things people, likes of Enterprise Manager and make sure that we provide similar functionality in Oracle cloud. So, we have Performance Hub for looking at how the database performance is working. We have APM for Application Performance Monitoring, we have Logging Analytics that looks at all the different log files and helps make sense of it for you. We have Database Management. So, a lot of the functionality that people like in Enterprise Manager mentioned the database that we've built into Oracle cloud, and, you know, a number of other things that are coming Operations Insights, to look at how databases are performing and how we can potentially do consolidation and stuff. So we've basically looked at what people have been using on-premises, how we can replicate that in Oracle cloud and then also, when you're in a cloud, how you can make make use of all the base services that a cloud vendor provides, telemetry, logging and so forth. And so, it's a broad portfolio and what it allows us to do with our customers is say, "Look, if you're predominantly on-prem, you want to stay there, keep using Enterprise Manager. If you're starting to move to Oracle cloud, you can first use EM, look at what's happening in the cloud and then switch over, start using all the management products we have in the cloud and let go of the Enterprise Manager instance on-premise. So you can gradually shift, you can start using more and more. Maybe you start with analytics first and then you start with insights and then you switch to database management. So there's a whole suite of possibilities. >> (indistinct) you mentioned APM, I've been watching that space, it's really evolved. I mean, you saw, you know, years ago, Splunk came out with sort of log analytics, maybe simplified that a little bit, now you're seeing some open source stuff come out. You're seeing a lot of startups come out, you saw Cisco made an acquisition with AppD and that whole space is transforming it seems that the future is all about that end to end visibility, simplifying the ability to remediate problems. And I'm thinking, okay, you just mentioned, you guys have a lot of these capabilities, you got Autonomous, is that sort of where you're headed with your capabilities? >> It definitely is and in fact, one of the... So, you know, APM allows you to say, "Hey, here's my web browser and it's making a connection to the database, to a middle tier" and it's hard for operations people in companies to say, hey, the end user calls and says, "You know, my order entry system is slow. Is it the browser? Is it the middle tier that they connect to? Is it the database that's overloaded in the backend?" And so, APM helps you with tracing, you know, what happens from where to where, where the delays are. Now, once you know where the delay is, you need to drill down on it. And then you need to go look at log files. And that's where the logging piece comes in. And what happens very often is that these log files are very difficult to read. You have networking log files and you have database log files and you have reslog files and you almost have to be an expert in all of these things. And so, then with Logging Analytics, we basically provide sort of an expert dashboard system on top of that, that allows us to say, "Hey! When you look at logging for the network stack, here are the most important errors that we could find." So you don't have to go and learn all the details of these things. And so, the real advantages of saying, "Hey, we have APM, we have Logging Analytics, we can tie the two together." Right, and so we can provide a solution that actually helps solve the problem, rather than, you need to use APM for one vendor, you need to use Logging Analytics from another vendor and you know, that doesn't necessarily work very well. >> Yeah and that's why you're seeing with like the ELK Stack it's cool, you're an open source guy, it's cool as an open source, but it's complicated to set up all that that brings. So, that's kind of a cool approach that you guys are taking. You mentioned Enterprise Manager, you just made a recent announcement, a new release. What's new in that new release? >> So Enterprise Manager 13.5 just got released. And so EM keeps improving, right? We've made a lot of changes over over the years and one of the things we've done in recent years is do more frequent updates sort of the cloud model frequent updates that are not just bug fixes but also introduce new functionality so people get more stuff more frequently rather than you know, once a year. And that's certainly been very attractive because it shows that it's a lively evolving product. And one of the main focus areas of course is cloud. And so a lot of work that happens in Enterprise Manager is hybrid cloud, which basically means I run Enterprise Manager and I have some stuff in Oracle cloud, I might have some other stuff in another cloud vendors environment and so we can actually see which databases are where and provide you with one consolidated view and one tool, right? And of course it supports Autonomous Database and Exadata in cloud servers and so forth. So you can from EM see both your databases on-premises and also how it's doing in in Oracle cloud as you potentially migrate things over. So that's one aspect. And then the other one is in terms of operations and automation. One of the things that we started doing again with Enterprise Manager in the last few years is making sure that everything has a REST API. So we try to make the experience with Enterprise Manager be very similar to how people work with a cloud service. Most folks now writing automation tools are used to calling REST APIs. EM in the early days didn't have REST APIs, now we're making sure everything works that way. And one of the advantages is that we can do extensibility without having to rewrite the product, that we just add the API clause in the agent and it makes it a lot easier to become part of the modern system. Another thing that we introduced last year but that we're evolving with more dashboards and so forth is the Grafana plugin. So even though Enterprise Manager provides lots of cool tools, a lot of cloud operations folks use a tool called Grafana. And so we provide a plugin that allows customers to have Grafana dashboards but the data actually comes out of Enterprise Manager. So that allows us to integrate EM into a more cloudy world in a cloud environment. I think the other important part is making sure that again, Enterprise Manager has sort of a cloud feel to it. So when you do patching and upgrades, it's near zero downtime which basically means that we do all the upgrades for you without having to bring EM down. Because even though it's a management tool, it's used for operations. So if there were downtime for patching Enterprise Manager for an hour, then for that hour, it's a blackout window for all the monitoring we do. And so we want to avoid that from happening, so now EM is upgrading, even though all the events are still happening and being processed, and then we do a very short switch. So that help our operations people to be more available. >> Yes. I mean, I've been talking about Automated Operations since, you know, lights out data centers since the eighties back in (laughs). I remember (indistinct) data center one-time lights out there were storage tech libraries in there and so... But there were a lot of unintended consequences around, you know, automated ops, and so people were sort of scared to go there, at least lean in too much but now with all this machine intelligence... So you're talking about ops automation, you mentioned the REST APIs, the Grafana plugins, the Cloud feel, is that what you're bringing to the table that's unique, is that unique to Oracle? >> Well, the integration with Oracle in that sense is unique. So one example is you mentioned the word migration, right? And so database migration tends to be something, you know, customers obviously take very serious. We go from one place, you have to move all your data to another place that runs in a slightly different environment. And so how do you know whether that migration is going to work? And you can't migrate a thousand databases manually, right? So automation, again, it's not just... Automation is not just to say, "Hey, I can do an upgrade of a system or I can make sure that nothing is done by hand when you patch something." It's more about having a huge fleet of servers and a huge fleet of databases. How can you move something from one place to another and automate that? And so with EM, you know, we start with sort of the prerequisite phase. So we're looking at the existing environment, how much memory does it need? How much storage does it use? Which version of the database does it have? How much data is there to move? Then on the target side, we see whether the target can actually run in that environment. Then we go and look at, you know, how do you want to migrate? Do you want to migrate everything from a sort of a physical model or do you want to migrate it from a logical model? Do you want to do it while your environment is still running so that you start backing up the data to the target database while your existing production system is still running? Then we do a short switch afterwards, or you say, "No, I want to bring my database down. I want to do the migrate and then bring it back up." So there's different deployment models that we can let our customers pick. And then when the migration is done, we have a ton of health checks that can validate whether the target database will run through basically the exact same way. And then you can say, "I want to migrate 10 databases or 50 databases" and it'll work, It's all automated out of the box. >> So you're saying, I mean, you've looked at the prevailing way you've done migrations, historically you'd have to freeze the code and then migrate, and it would take forever, it was a function of the number of lines of code you had. And then a lot of times, you know, people would say, "We're not going to freeze the code" and then they would almost go out of business trying to merge the two. You're saying in 2021, you can give customers the choice, you can migrate, you could change the, you know, refuel the plane while you're in midair? Is that essentially what you're saying? >> That's a good way of describing it, yeah. So your existing database is running and we can do a logical backup and restore. So while transactions are happening we're still migrating it over and then you can do a cutoff. It makes the transition a lot easier. But the other thing is that in the past, migrations would typically be two things. One is one database version to the next, more upgrades than migration. Then the second one is that old hardware or a different CPU architecture are moving to newer hardware in a new CPU architecture. Those were sort of the typical migrations that you had prior to Cloud. And from a CIS admin point of view or a DBA it was all something you could touch, that you could physically touch the boxes. When you move to cloud, it's this nebulous thing somewhere in a data center that you have no access to. And that by itself creates a barrier to a lot of admins and DBA's from saying, "Oh, it'll be okay." There's a lot of concern. And so by baking in all these tests and the prerequisites and all the dashboards to say, you know, "This is what you use. These are the features you use. We know that they're available on the other side so you can do the migration." It helps solve some of these problems and remove the barriers. >> Well that was just kind of same same vision when you guys came up with it. I don't know, quite a while ago now. And it took a while to get there with, you know, you had gen one and then gen two but that is, I think, unique to Oracle. I know maybe some others that are trying to do that as well, but you were really the first to do that and so... I want to switch topics to talk about security. It's hot topic. You guys, you know, like many companies really focused on security. Does Enterprise Manager bring any of that over? I mean, the prevailing way to do security often times is to do scripts and write, you know, custom security policy scripts are fragile, they break, what can you tell us about security? >> Yeah. So there's really two things, you know. One is, we obviously have our own best security practices. How we run a database inside Oracle for our own world, we've learned about that over the years. And so we sort of baked that knowledge into Enterprise Manager. So we can say, "Hey, if you install this way, we do the install and the configuration based on our best practice." That's one thing. The other one is there's STIG, there's PCI and they're ShipBob, those are the main ones. And so customers can do their own way. They can download the documentation and do it manually. But what we've done is, and we've done this for a long time, is basically bake those policies into Enterprise Manager. So you can say, "Here's my database this needs to be PCI compliant or it needs to be HIPAA compliant and you push a button and then we validate the policies in those documents or in those prescript described files. And we make sure that the database is combined to that. And so we take that manual work and all that stuff basically out of the picture, we say, "Push this button and we'll take care of it." >> Now, Wim, but just quick sidebar here, last time we talked, it was under a year ago. It was definitely during COVID and it's still during COVID. We talked about the state of the penguin. So I'm wondering, you know, what's the latest update for Linux, any Linux developments that we should be aware of? >> Linux, we're still working very hard on Autonomous Linux and that's something where we can really differentiate and solve a problem. Of course, one of the things to mention is that Enterprise Manager can can do HIPAA compliance on Oracle Linux as well. So the security practices are not just for the database it can also go down to the operating system. Anyway, so on the Autonomous Linux side, you know, management in an Oracle Cloud's OS management is evolving. We're spending a lot of time on integrating log capturing, and if something were to go wrong that we can analyze a log file on the fly and send you a notification saying, "Hey, you know there was this bug and here's the cause." And it was potentially a fix for it to Autonomous Linux and we're putting a lot of effort into that. And then also sort of IT/operation management where we can look at the different applications that are running. So you're running a web server on a Linux environment or you're running some Java processes, we can see what's running. We can say, "Hey, here's the CPU utilization over the past week or the past year." And then how is this evolving? Say, if something suddenly spikes we can say, "Well, that's normal, because every Monday morning at 10 o'clock there's a spike or this is abnormal." And then you can start drilling this down. And this comes back to overtime integration with whether it's APM or Logging Analytics, we can tie the dots, right? We can connect them, we can say, "Push this thing, then click on that link." We give you the information. So it's that integration with the entire cloud platform that's really happening now >> Integration, there's that theme again. I want to come back to migration and I think you did a good job of explaining how you sort of make that non-disruptive and you know, your customers, I think, you know, generally you're pushing you know, that experience which makes people more comfortable. But my question is, why do people want to migrate if it works and it's on prem, are they doing it just because they want to get out of the data center business? Or is it a better experience in the cloud? What can you tell us there? >> You know, it's a little bit of everything. You know, one is, of course the idea that data center maintenance costs are very high. The other one is that when you run your own data center, you know, we obviously have this problem but when you're a cloud vendor, you have these problems but we're in this business. But if you buy a server, then in three years that server basically is depreciated by new versions and they have to do migration stuff. And so one of the advantages with cloud is you push a button, you have a new version of the hardware, basically, right? So the refreshes happen on a regular basis. You don't have to go and recycle that yourself. Then the other part is the subscription model. It's a lot easier to pay for what you use rather than you have a data center whether it's used or not, you pay for it. So there's the cost advantages and predictability of what you need, you pay for, you can say, "Oh next year we need to get x more of EMs." And it's easier to scale that, right? We take care of dealing with capacity planning. You don't have to deal with capacity planning of hardware, we do that as the cloud vendor. So there's all these practical advantages you get from doing it remotely and that's really what the appeal is. >> Right. So, as it relates to Enterprise Manager, did you guys have to like tear down the code and rebuild it? Was it entire like redo? How did you achieve that? >> No, no, no. So, Enterprise Manager keeps evolving and you know, we changed the underlying technologies here and there, piecemeal, not sort of a wholesale replacement. And so in talking about five, there's a lot of new stuff but it's built on the existing EM core. And so we're just, you know, improving certain areas. One of the things is, stability is important for our customers, obviously. And so by picking things piecemeal, we replace one engine rather than the whole thing. It allows us to introduce change more slowly, right. And then it's well-tested as a unit and then when we go on to the next thing. And then the other one is I mentioned earlier, a lot of the automation and extensibility comes from REST APIs. And so instead of basically re-writing everything we just provide a REST endpoint and we make all the new features that we built automatically be REST enabled. So that makes it a lot easier for us to introduce new stuff. >> Got it. So if I want to poke around with this new version of Enterprise Manager, can I do that? Is there a place I can go, do I have to call a rep? How does that work? >> Yeah, so for information you can just go to oracle.com/enterprise manager. That's the website that has all the data. The other thing is if you're already playing with Oracle Cloud or you use Oracle Cloud, we have Enterprise Manager images in the marketplace. So if you have never used EM, you can go to Oracle Cloud, push a button in the marketplace and you get a full Enterprise Manager installation in a matter of minutes. And then you can just start using that as well. >> Awesome. Hey, I wanted to ask you about, you know, people forget that you guys are the stewards of MySQL and we've been looking at MySQL Database Cloud service with HeatWave Did you name that? And so I wonder if you could talk about what you're doing with regard to managing HeatWave environments? >> So, HeatWave is the MySQL option that helps with analytics, right? And it really accelerates MySQL usage by 100 x and in some cases more and it's transparent to the customer. So as a MySQL user, you connect with standard MySQL applications and APIs and SQL and everything. And the HeatWave part is all done within the MySQL server. The engine itself says, "Oh, this SQL query, we can offload to the backend HeatWave cluster," which then goes in memory operations and blazingly fast returns it to you. And so the nice thing is that it turns every single MySQL database into also a data warehouse without any change whatsoever in your application. So it's been widely popular and it's quite exciting. I didn't personally name it, HeatWave, that was not my decision, but it sounds very cool. >> That's very cool. >> Yeah, It's a very cool name. >> We love MySQL, we started our company on the lamp stack, so like many >> Oh? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, yeah. That's great. So, yeah. And so with HeatWave or MySQL in general we're basically doing the same thing as we have done for the Oracle Database. So we're going to add more functionality in our database management tools to also look at HeatWave. So whether it's doing things like performance hub or generic database management and monitoring tools, we'll expand that in, you know, in the near future, in the future. >> That's great. Well, Wim, it's always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming back in "The Cube" and letting me ask all my Colombo questions. It was really a pleasure having you. (mumbling) >> It's good be here. Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. And thank you for watching, everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (bright music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering .conf2018 brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back to Splunk's .conf2018. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're here in Orlando. Day one of two days of wall to wall coverage, this is our seventh year doing Splunk .conf, Stu amazing show, a lot of action, partnership is growing, ecosystem is growing. And we're going to to talk to one ecosystem partner, Gemini Data. J.R. Murray's here as the vice president of technical services. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Happy to be here. >> Yeah so when we first started this, Splunk ecosystem was really tiny and it's just sort of growing and growing and now is exploding. But tell us about Gemini Data what are you guys all about. What's your role? >> Sure, so my role is VP of technical services. I manage our sales engineers and professional services consultants as well as our managers services practice, based in the United States. So what I do is I go through and help make sure all the operations go pretty smoothly. And in terms of the company and what we do we've got a couple different things that we work on. Primarily our focus is around big data platforms and making them easier to deploy and manage. We offer a hardware appliances as part of that package and we also have an investigate software platform that we feed data into and it helps analysts jobs be a little bit more easier and quicker to do investigations. >> And you guys started the company three and a half, four years ago, is that right? >> That's right, that's right. >> Back when big data was and kind of still is a mess. >> That's right. >> Doug even said that in his conversations today. He said that we live in a world filled with change. The messiest landscape is the data. >> That's right. >> The bigger, the faster, the more complex the data, the messier it is. So you guys kind of started to solve a problem. Why did you start the company? What was the problem you were trying to solve? >> So really where we started is we focused on there's a problem with deploying big data platforms, customers have poor experiences in terms of it's too complicated, there are a lot of very technical details you have to worry about. And if you're a little bit lower on the maturity curve of technology solution implementation you might need some help along the way or if you are a little bit further along in the technical maturity curve you may actually need some help in getting something that's more turn-key in order to alleviate a lot of the challenges that go along with IT bureaucracy. You've got maybe something that you need that's purpose built because you've got something that's very central to your security strategy. You need to make sure that it's up and running, and reliable, and dependable. So that's where we come in. We have a platform that we allow you to implement. It's a turn-key solution, multiple systems get your Splunk deployment up and running. >> And when you do that on your website looking at, you support various technologies, I see Splunk on there, FireEye, Cloud Era, Service Now, Amazon, Azure, so those are sort of systems, RSA. I mean they've got a lot of products and a lot of cases it's cloud or, they've got a platform like Splunk. Will you actually do like bottoms up stuff with Hadoop and pig and hive or are you really focused on sort of that higher level helping customers integrate those platforms that they brought in. >> Right. >> Kind of helping them be a platform of platforms if you will, is it the former or the latter? >> Yeah so that's kind of the idea right? We come in and we go through and we say what are your actual goals here do you just want to go through and install Splunk or do you actually have a big data strategy that we can help you execute on. So it's kind of a cohesive holistic approach in terms of, what you need to deploy and how we help you get there. So if you need to deploy Splunk we help you install Splunk. If you want to do Splunk and have a Hadoop data role for example you can have hadub just alongside your Splunk all on the same platform. You can go through and manage that centrally and make it a little bit easier to manage via policy push out jobs centrally all the automation and orchestration is there and the under pendings for all those solutions. >> Yeah J.R. who who are you typically selling to? One of the things we look at data is pervasive in the company in companies but who owns it, I've talked to a number of people at this company that are like well I've got Splunk and everybody comes and asks me questions right now. So where do you fit in in the organization? >> So we've got a few different things going on. So in terms of who we sell to and where we focus, its kind of across the board we've got very large enterprises who are pushing tens of terabytes into the deployment, and we help them out with getting a solution that's going to be something that's a little bit more manageable. You've got a limited staff, the knowledge of Splunk is hard to hard to actually cultivate and then actually keep and retain folks that know Splunk. They are generally very well paid. So its easy for them to find opportunities elsewhere. You've invested a lot in these people, your success is very critical and they're a critical part of it. And it's important to keep those people around. So we've got a manage service to help with customers like that. We call it Gemini Care. We come in and we are actually able to have an automated monitoring and break fix type of resolution service that factors into those types of deployments. And as part of that we go through and offer some services and touch points throughout the month to make sure they're getting what they need from a value standpoint. I mean its one thing to have the platform and the deployment, and the data but in fact if you're not getting any value out of that what good is it? So if you don't have the talent the skills you're able to go through it and use us to implement some of those used cases and things like that. >> Yeah yeah one of the other things that changed a lot in the last 3, 4 years is the on the premises of course is where a lot of the customers are and a lot of data is but partner with the cloud, you partner with the Ager's and Amazon's in the world even if you start talking about edge that diversity of where my data lives. How how is that playing into your solution? >> So it's funny you mention that we came to arka we led with and applied base solution and we said customers that are having problems either getting hardware common thing is you want to put a box in or 10 or 20 boxes but you've got the storage team saying hey we need to hook up to our our sand we spent millions of dollars on this, we're going to get some use out of it and guess what Splunk you're going to be our biggest consumer of all of our storage internally on this brand new sand we got. A lot of times its not attractive to a lot of interim customers. You've got IOPS requirements, you've got all these other requirements. Folks don't understand you've got hard requirements for CPU's and and the band width there. So if you're using virtual solutions which a lot of customers are forced into doing you actually have a very difficult time getting reserved resources on those virtual hosts. So you get a bare metal box in there, you get a platform on it you have none of those issues. So in terms of where we pivoted from there the industry is obviously going towards cloud. So what we're trying to do is actually, we have a solution in the market today. Customers are really interested in us helping them on that journey so we've got plenty of customers who are on premise today they have a cloud strategy they want to get out of the data center business and they need to get into cloud. So what we're doing is we're helping them we've got equipment who in a code located data center and what we're doing is migrating customers over to that infrastructure as more of a subscription basis. So it's the same platform but now it's in the cloud. There are benefits to that. >> So I want to I want to actually let me follow up now, so the subscription basis >> Right. How does that work? So it used to be what sort of an upfront perpetual license and then here you go and then we'll you when there's another upgrade. >> Right >> And now how's it work I know 75% last quarter of Splunk's bookings or revenue I'm not sure which one. Were subscription based irratible and there was a big long discussion about whatever it was 606 and all the Wall Street guys trying to part through it. What does it mean for the customer? What does that transition like? >> Okay >> Is it like hey good news. >> Right >> We're not going to go through the spike cycles we're going to smooth things out for you. But what's that conversation like? >> We've got a lot of flexibility with customers. We've got the ability to do OPX or CAPX, we've got the ability to ship as an appliance kind of as an all in one solution. However what we've really migrated to as what the market has demanded is customer feedback. Is, "hey we can buy this box anywhere" and we're like, "you know what you're right. If you want to go right ahead here's the software subscription. So now we have the option to sell the appliance and the software subscription together as one package that's also partially subscription but what happens when you migrate that into the cloud, is now you've got a cloud based subscription infrastructure and that software license is sort of included in that. >> I want to ask you about use cases. You were talking a little bit before but if you pre go back before the term big data came to fruition, you kind of had the EDW was the so called data big data used case and you had maybe a couple of analysts that knew the decision support systems and could build a cube and they were like the data gods. So big data comes in and you had used cases like a cheaper EDW that was kind of a really popular one. Certainly fraud detection was one, precision marketing, ad serving, obviously Splunk and the security and IT operations base although Splunk never really used the term big data so its only sort of more recent and line of business analytics. So you see all these sort of new uses for data very complex as you pointed out. You guys started the company to sort of help squint through some of that complexity and actually build solutions. So the brief history of big data by Dave Vellante. So given all that how has your customers use of data changed over the last since you guys have started and where do you see it going? >> So we originally started, originally we had some customers that came over into this new business venture existing relationships and what not they were using a different sim platform. You one of our primary objectives were to was to get them all in to Splunk and that's something that we were able to do successfully. So they were doing security analysis, log retention, those were their primary goals and that's it. Maybe compliance, okay. So their really focusing on that. Now today we're doing entirely different things. We're focusing on as you mentioned anti-fraud. Huge opportunity in the space there with Splunk the tools in that space today are prohibitively expensive, very complex and we come in with Splunk we're able to take in data from all sorts of places and technologies really know really know understanding of the data at that point required yet and then we convert that into business value for the customer by means of services. Because there's very little in the way of precan used cases for that and frankly when it comes to the fraud space a lot of customers their requirements are all different. There aren't really many shops that are very much alike at all. So you've got to sort of manage around that. Now that's one way but we're also seeing folks who want to do executive reporting out of their Splunk data. You're talking about being able to go through and do year to year reporting how are we doing from a risk management standpoint. These are the things you are starting to see trickle up to the Csuite in terms of what does that mean for us and the way we need to make these business decisions. >> So I understand that. So really started out kind of hard core IT and certainly security used cases. What I'm hearing is Splunk is expanding into lines of business actually using data in in ways that perhaps others were trying to do in the past but not really succeeding. >> That's right >> What is it about Splunk that allows you to do that. We heard a lot about 7dot2 today, performance improvements, some efficiency in your granular storage and compute. I'm sure that Csuite doesn't know or care about that but being able to analyze more data is something that they probably would care about, mobile is probably something that they care about. >> Absolutely. So what is that Splunk's doing that maybe others aren't doing or can't do, architecturally or technology wise? >> Now a couple things stand out right off the top. So you've got the ability to scale, you've got horizontal distribution of data which means you can spread that load across many many nodes. We're able to go through and distribute that load and it makes things actually perform. So we get an acceptable user experience and that means everything to a customer, right? So that's one thing. The second thing with Splunk you've skemead read you're able to pull in as much data as you want for as long as you want without having to understand that data. You can actually come back through later and and parse, interpret, report on, and get value out of that data historically without having to necessarily having to understand it upfront. That's in my personal experience been a huge impediment right up front to onboarding data with other we'll call them legacy solutions. But there still some in the market today that require and depend on that is knowing the data upfront. We can't pull in this data unless we know exactly what its supposed to look like and can sanitize it and parse it into fields. >> So Stu I want to follow up if I may. So a lot of people in the big data world talk about no scheme on write or scheme on read >> Sure >> And what they do is they toss everything into a data lake. The big joke is the lake becomes a swamp, they got to go and clean it up. Why is that not the case with Splunk? What's different about Splunk and that they're able to, I forget exactly how Doug said it but essentially structure the data when you need it. >> That's right >> In the moment >> So the difference with Splunk is that you're able to you're able to foster and really pull together the community resources more or less crowdsourcing how to parse all these data sources. You no longer have individuals at every given company with a very specific data source say Windows event logs that might be universal to many other applications and organizations, needing to roll their own. So you're able to socialize and share those things on a place like Splunk base and then suddenly everyone's able to really capitalize on the data, so I see that as more like a force multiplier. You've got the entire community behind you helping you parse your data because they have the same data and that's really what I think makes the difference. >> Whereas the so called data lake would be like the big data metaphor for a god box where only a few people know how to get to the data, right? >> Basically yeah, thats right? And the amount of skill required, okay, that's another big piece when you're in Splunk everything is very well documented so if you need to write a search and its there are plenty of resources you've got the Splunk community, you've also got all of the documentation, you've got the quick reference sheets. Its not hard to get into its hard to become an expert but if you just need to do something very quickly it's not that difficult. >> Well if we look at where Splunk is going next you talk a lot about the AI and the ML and one of the tensions you hear out there is, "how much am I willing to let the system just take that action?" So I'm curious on your product line and working with Splunk what you hear how real people are, the advances that we're getting with AI, ML and deep learning and are users ready to embrace that yet? >> Yeah so that's a technology that's truly made leaps and bounds even over the past five years. Right. So what we're seeing is customers are able to use machine learning to go through and do predictive analytics and to be able to have the machines to sort of speculate as to and you can say predict but its really I think speculation more like what a given categorical value might be. Is it yes or no, maybe for the answer to a question based on what those events say, or is it is there an outage coming up that potentially you could predict based on different values. And there all sorts of applications for that and all sorts of platforms that are trying to do that. Now what Splunk's done is sort of bring that to the masses with machine learning toolkit and made that a little bit easier to really digest for the common person. What they haven't done at least until very recently from what my understanding is that they're doing is that they're actually taking more of that function out and making it more intuitive helping customers understand the most common challenges I'll say. So you're really lowering the bar in terms of the amount of information or knowledge rather and skills to be able to leverage some of these more advanced algorithms and computing resources to go through and get the types of results you expect out of machine learning. >> Well J.R. Murray thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. >> Pleasure. Thank you >> Great to meet you. Alright everybody keep it right there Stu and I will be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from Splunk .Conf18 in Orlando. We'll be right back.

>> (narrator) Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMWorld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live-tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, David Floyer. Good to see you again David. VMWorld day three, wall to wall coverage. We got sets going on. 94 guests. Patrick Osborne is here, he's the Vice President of Big Data and Secondary Storage at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Patrick, it's great to see you again. >> Always a pleasure to be on the Cube. >> Big quarter, Antonio Neri early into his tenure. >> Yes. The earnings, raise guidance, great to see that. Got to feel good. Give us the update, VMworld 2018, what's happening with you guys? >> So Q3 was bang up quarter, for all segments of the business. It was great, you know. Obviously it's the kind of earnings you want to have from a CEO in a second quarter. Steering the ship here. I think everyone's jazzed up. He's brought a lot of new life to the company, in terms of technology leadership. He's someone who's certainly grown up, from the grounds up, starting off his career at HPE. So for us who have started off as a Product Manager, an individual contributor, making your way up to CEO is definitely possible. So that's been great and I think it's favorable micro economics and we're taking advantage of that. VMworld's been awesome. I think this whole story around Multicloud and obviously we talk about hybrid IT at HPE, so it fits very well. VMware Technology, partner of the year, again. Four years running, so it's been a really good show for us. >> As last year, data protection is the single, hottest topic. Data protection, obviously Cloud, The Edge, but The Edge is kind of new and it's hot, it's sexy. But in terms of actual business that's getting done, companies that are getting funded, companies getting huge raises, throwing big parties. We saw you back to back nights at Omnia, it's a lot happening in data protection. HPE has got a whole new strategy around data protection. Maybe talk about that a little bit and how it's going. >> So it's going really well, like you said, that part of the market, it's pretty hot right now. I think there's a couple of things playing into that, certainly this new style of IT, like applied to secondary storage. We saw that with primary storage the last few years. Multicloud, the move to all flash, low-latency workloads. And then, certainly a lot of the things, in that area, are disrupting secondary storage. People want to do it different ways, they want to be able to simplify this area. It's a growing area for data, in general. They want to make that data work for them. Test, Dev, workload placement, intelligent placement of data, for secondary and even tertiary storage in the cloud. So a lot of good things happening, from an HPE perspective. >> So not just back up? >> No, not just back up. >> I want more out of my insurance policy. >> Exactly. Something in the past that was moving from purely a TCO type of conversation. My examples are always like, who likes to pay their life insurance premium, right? Because at the end of the day, I'm not going to derive any utility from that payment. So now, it's moving into more ROI. So we have things like, the Hybrid Flash Array, from Nimble, for example. It allows you to put your workloads to work. We have a great cloud service, called HPE Cloud Volumes, that we use for our customers to be able to do intelligent DR, as a service, and be able to apply Cloud compute to your data. So there's a lot of things going on, in the space, that's just outside of your traditional move data from point A to point B. Now you want to make it work for you. >> And what about the big data portfolio? You hear a lot about data. You don't hear a ton about the Big Data, Hadoop piece of the world. I know Hadoop, nobody seems to be talking about that anymore. But everybody's talking about AI, Machine-Learning, Deep-Learning. Certainly The Edge is all about data. What's the Big Data story? >> So at HPE, we're definitely focused on the whole Edge to Core analytic story. So we have a great story and you can see in the numbers from Q3, The Edge business, The Edge line servers, Aruba, driving a lot of growth in the company, where a lot of that data is being created. And then back into the Core, so for Big Data, we see a number of customers, who are using these tools to affect digital transformation. They're doing it, we're doing it to ourselves. So they're moving from batch oriented, to now fast data, so streaming analytics. And then, incorporating concepts of AI and ML to provide better service or better experience for their customers. And we're doing that with, for example, InfoSight. So we have a great product, Nimble, 3PAR. And then we provide a service, on top of that, which is a SAS based service. It has predictive analytics and Machine Learning. And we're able to do that, by using Big Data analytics. >> You're offering that as a service, as a SAS service to your customers? >> Absolutely. And the way we're able to provide those predictive analytics and be able to provide those recommendations and that Machine-Learning across a entire portfolio and be able to scale that service, because it's a service, we got tens of thousands of users using the service on a daily basis, is moving from an ERP system, data warehouse, to batch analytics, to now we're doing Elasticsearch and Kafka and all these really cool techniques, so it's really helped us unlock a lot of value for our customers. >> So, the Nimble acquisision is interesting, it's bringing that sort of Machine-Learning and AI to infrastructure. You got a lot of automation in the portfolio and you can't really talk about Cloud without talking about automations. So talk a little about automation. >> In particular, even at the show here this week, we are a premier technology partner with VMware and I think more that you see in the VMware Ecosystem is all around Cloud and automation. That's really where they're going. And we've been day-zero partners on a lot of different fronts. So VMware Cloud Foundation integration, we do things on the storage level with Vvols and SRM and all these things that allow customers to essentially program that infrastucture and get out of the mundane tasks of having to do this manually. So for us, automation is key part of our story here. Especially with VMware. >> So going a little bit further with that, what sort of examples, what benefit is this to your customers? How are they justifying putting all this in? >> It's a hybrid world, so our customers are going to expect, from us, as a portfolio vendor, the ability to provide an automated solution, on premises, as automated as what you'd get in the cloud. So for us, the ability to have a sourcing experience, that we call GreenLake, so you can buy everything from us, from a solution perspective, in a pay-as-you-go elastic model where you can flex-up, flex-down. And then being able to, essentially provide a different view, depending on what persona you're coming from. Obviously we've been focused on the infrastructure persona, more often, we're getting into the DevOps persona, the Cloud engineer persona, providing all of our infrastructure, whether it's computer networking or storage, that plugs into all these frameworks. Whether it's Ansible, Chef and all these things that we do around our automation ecosystem, it's pretty ubiquitous. >> You're touching on all the Cloud basis and you're seeing a lot of discussion around that. What are you hearing from customers? Sometimes we have to squint through this, a lot of the guys here, we always like to say, move at the speed of the CIO, which sometimes is slow. At the same time, they're all afraid they're going to get disrupted. HPE, over the last two or three years, has really brought in and partnered with some of the guys your talking about. Whether it's containers and companies that do those types of offerings. How fast do the customers actually adopting, where they adopting them, how are they handling, you talked about a hybrid world; How are they bridging the old and the new? >> That's a great question. For a lot of our customers, it's always a brown field conversation. You do have these mission critical workloads that have to run, so there's no Edge to Core without your core ERP system, right? Your Core Oracle System or for smaller customers that are running their businesses on SQL and other things. But what we're seeing is that, by shoring up that Core and we provide a set of services and products that we feel are the best in the industry for that. And then allow them to provide adjacent services on top of that, it's exactly like the same example we had with InfoSight, where those systems use to call home, right now we're taking that data, we're providing a whole ancillary set of services and functions around it and our customers are doing that. Enormous customers, like British Telecom, folks like Wayfair, for example, they're doing this on premises and their disrupting their competitors, in the mean time. >> What do you make of some of the announcements we've heard this week? Obviously VMware making a big deal with what's going on with AWS. We're seeing AWS capitulate, David Floyer you made the call. Got to have an on-prem strategy. Many said no, that'll never happen. They just want to sweep the floor. So that's a tip to the hybrid cap. What are your thoughts on what's going on there? How does HPE sort of participate in those trends? >> I'd say it's, instead of battle and capitulate, we've been very laser-focused on the customers and helping them, along their way, on the journey. So you see a lot of acquisitions we've done around services, advisory service. CTP is a perfect example. So CTP has a whole cadre of experts who understand AGER, who understand ECS and all the services and functions that go along with them And we're able to help people, right size, right place, whatever you want to call it, within their infrastructure. Because we know, we've been in business for 75+ years and have a very loyal customer base, and we're going to help them along their maturity curve and certainly everyone's not on the same path, in the same race. It's been pretty successful so far. >> You guys tend to connect the dots between your HPE Discover in U.S., in Las Vegas and HPE Discover in December. So June to December, you're on these six month cycles, U.S. focus and Europe focus, Decembers in Madrid, again. Second year of Madrid. U.S. is always Vegas, like most of these conferences, what's the cadence that your on? What was the vibe like at Discover? What should we expect leading up to Q4, calendar Q4 in Madrid? >> I'd say that Discover was a big success in Vegas, always fun to spend time here. In Madrid, you'll see a focus around the value part of our business. So we've been growing in automation, we talked about hybrid IT, certainly the Core around storage. We're really focusing and very heavily invested in, not just storage, but intelligent data management. So we really feel that our offerings, especially doubling down and offering more services around InfoSight and some of those predictive and Cloud-ready user stories for our customers is something that definitely differentiates ourselves in the market. So we'll be very focused on the data plan, the data layer and helping customers transform in that area. >> So let's talk some tenor sax. >> (David laughs) >> This is not New Orleans. When we were down in New Orleans, we were at VeeamON, I think you had your sax with you, you jumped in. >> That's right, I played with the Soul Rebels. >> Playing with the Soul Rebels, you were awesome. Leonard, a big jazz man. Love it. I'm a huge TOP fan. What's new in that world? Are you still active? Are you still playing? >> Yeah, the band's still playing. Shout out to my buddies in Jolpe, sitting in with some friends at a Dead cover band coming up, in a couple weeks. So, should be fun. We're going to reenact The Grateful Dead and Branford Marsalis. >> That's wonderful. >> It should be fun. >> We've been getting a big dose of hip-hop this week. >> Yeah. But the new thing is that, in hip-hop, it's getting back to it's original roots, so a lot of folks in the jazz world, collaborating with the folks in the hip-hop world, so not very commercial, definitely underground, but pretty cool. >> I love it. That's right Leonard, you pointing out Miles Davis was one of the first to make that transformation. >> Yeah >> Good call. >> I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but it's about five percent technique and 95 percent attitude. (multiple laughs) >> Jazz, like hip-hop, there's a lot guys just doing their own thing. And somehow it all comes together. >> Absolutely. >> Okay Patrick, great to see you. >> Great to see you guys. Thank you Dave. Yeah, good to see you guys. >> Always a pleasure, go Sox. >> We got some time for talk stocks? >> Alright. >> What do you think? It's getting a little nerve wrecking. >> #Bucky Dent is trending in my Twitter. That's my problem, so hopefully we can..., I definitely don't want to be limping into the playoffs, and still not a fan of this one team wild card playoff, but I think we'll be alright. >> If we go deep... It's a great time to be a Boston fan. >> Celtics. >> Football starting, Celtics are coming in November, so awesome. Great to see you man. >> Thanks for having me. >> Keep it right there everybody, we'll be right back with our next guest. You're watching the Cube, live. Day three at VMWorld 2018, we'll be right back. (techno music)