(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to London. You're watching The Cube, and we have a special coverage here of the pre-day at AWS headquarters in London. I'm Dave Vellante and The Cube, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Alastair Allen is here, the chief technical officer of Healthcare Kainos Software. It's a Belfast based company, publicly traded company. Alastair, welcome to The Cube. Great to see you, thanks for coming out. You were downstairs earlier addressing the audience, we're gonna talk about that. But first of all, tell us about Kainos. >> So Kainos, Belfast based company, formed in the late '80's a spin out of Queens University in Belfast. We've grown to now over 1300 people and we build digital technology to help people work faster, smarter and better. There's two things we do. We provide digital services, bespoke services for public and private sector organizations across the world, and we provide digital platforms for work day customers and also for healthcare organizations. >> So, when you say digital platforms. What exactly do you mean by that? Tell our audience. >> So, our digital platforms in healthcare is something that we can talk about. So platforms to enable both hospitals to digitize their workflow and also regions, so CCG's , STP's within the NHS. To bring information together using a platform and normalizing that data and making it available to clinicians and patients. >> And this is, your flagship product is called Evolve. Correct? >> Correct. >> And you're one of the sort of founders or inventors of Evolve. Tell us more about Evolve. >> So Evolve, originated just over ten years ago, our first customer was Ipswich Hospital and Ipswich had a big problem with paper, with a large medical records library and they asked us to come in and help them digitize that and make it available in an easy to view, accessible format for their clinicians. >> So tell me more about that. So you digitize it, you take all this mounds of paper and what does that do? Other than reduce the amounts of paper. Does it make it searchable? >> Yeah, we index the content, we apply metadata whenever we capture it, trying to make it accessible for clinicians. I think when you digitize paper , the one good thing paper had going for it was you could pick it up and it was tactile. So we've done a lot of work to try and make it mobile, make it accessible, make it searchable and increasingly now with some of the services that AWS provide, we're able to look at taking that even further and getting more information out of that content. >> Add some color to that. So how has the AWS cloud affected your ability to deliver these capabilities to your customers? >> Well I think, the breathe and depth of services that AWS provide, enables us to be able to innovate quickly, to use services like I've mentioned like comprehend medical. That take the heavy lifting, away from us and helps us focus on delivering better applications for our customers. >> So part of what you do, is you architected the software that's running on the cloud. Can you talk a little bit about the architecture? What you guys have built. Presumably the cloud allows you to scale. >> Alastair Allen: Yeah. >> And take advantage of more innovations. But discuss the architecture if you would. >> So, the product that I originally talked about in 2009 and about four years ago in 2015, we decided to re-platform for the cloud. And that was in response to a number of problems that we were seeing in the market. And moved to patient centered care, a drive to try and standardize care away from the variable nature that was there and also to get away from closed silos of information. And we decided at that point to create our platform natively in the cloud and using the services of Amazon web services. So we created a microservices based architecture that runs in multi-candidate cloud native way. With a AWS. That allows us to adopt disciplines like continuous delivery and cultures like DeVops. We've been able to release value quickly and often to our customers. >> So it was a total rewrite of the platform? >> Yes. So we started again from scratch and we developed that using the modern cloud services. And we've used that then for all use cases as well so we've moved beyond just settings within a hospital. And been able to take that beyond the walls of a hospital, out into the community, into primary care, mental health. And delivering solutions like that, across regions within the NHS, to join up information. Where before clinicians would simply not have had access to those. >> In a sense you're migrating your existing install base to the cloud based platform, as I presume it's a SAS based platform. Is that right? >> So, Evolve Integrated Care is a platform it's a SAS based platform. So we run it, we monitor it, we maintain it and we deliver that as a service to our customers. >> And so your existing customers now have an opportunity to migrate and how does that all work? >> Yeah, so we're talking to our existing customers, how they can leverage the cloud based platform and the breathe of different services that it provides. We very much see an opportunity for helping to digitize a hospital. So how do you optimize the flow of patients through a hospital and making sure that clinicians have access to the information. Many of customers have hundreds of applications, information spread across their estate, bringing that together and orchestrating the workflow for particular pathways or particular conditions. >> Plus they have to manage their own infrastructure, I presume. >> Absolutely, and we want to build applications quickly, they want to focus on delivering healthcare. They don't want to focus on managing ten and server rooms within their hospitals. So, our move to the cloud really came about because of our customers telling us that they're struggling to manage this infrastructure. They wanted us to take some of that burden away from them and to help them with some of their security challenges, availability challenges. Quite often their local infrastructure was not very resilient. And by moving to AWS, we were able to use native cloud services to address many of those challenges. >> So you're taking away that heavy lifting for them. AWS takes it away for you. >> Alastair Allen: Yeah. >> In a large regard as well. While your engineers can obviously program the infrastructure. But how have you seen the customers that have moved and taken advantage of this. What has it done for their business specifically? What's the impact? >> So, what I think, it frees up people within their organization to scale up in other areas to do other things. It frees up physical space as well in many cases. It takes away risks and we've all heard of some of the recent security incidents. Wanna Cry was a huge thing in the NHS not so long ago. Coming around from just simple things like not patching servers and work stations. So, by taking on that responsibility we're freeing up those hospital systems to focus on what they do best. >> How do they do that? Do they kind of retrain folks? What's that been like? I presume it wasn't frictionless but it's an opportunity for people to advance their careers. Do you have any visibility on how your customers have handled that? >> To be honest, not a huge amount. It has, I agree, there has been some friction there. It's not always an easy journey, there's a whole mindset change of what people used to do before and the types of activity that they'll do tomorrow. And it's something that our customers are still on a journey on. And so we're quite early on in that process. >> But I would say to folks in the IT community of your expertise's of managing storage arase, there's probably a better future for you if you can move up the stack and learn more about applications , data, machine intelligence. >> Absolutely, higher up the value chain and getting closer to the user, closer to the customer. >> I mean, that's where the difference is. And it's particularly in healthcare right? You try to balance the cost of healthcare, everybody's aware of the rising cost of healthcare with the patient outcomes. And technology is a way to address that problem. Isn't it? >> Absolutely, and I think never before. I think it's just a great time to work in health IT. We've now got access to some fantastic services the rise of artificial intelligence, the machine learning has never before been so available. And really having organizations such as ourselves to really solve those problems that our customers have and introduce those efficiencies and ultimately better patient outcomes. >> So how are you using the data that lives in Evolve, I presume you're looking at applying artificial intelligence and the like, talk about that. But also, how do you ensure security, privacy, etcetera? >> So, a couple things on data, I think one of the things we've done recently is the adoption of the FHIR standard within healthcare and all the data that we aggregate from the various clinical systems, we normalize that down into a single FHIR data profile and that really helps us then have a common data model that our application can use. But that's only the start, that creates the potential then to use that for secondary usage, such as publishing health data analytics and ultimately machine learning. And we're looking at a number of errors in machine learning, I think there are some ethical challenges there to be aware of and we've started with a recent examples of understanding how we can use machine learning to try and get that structured data out of the documents, that's something that we're working on with data with the AWS team at the minute, to leverage a lot of that scanned content that we have and evolve and be able to create the structured outcome. Really to make it easier for clinicians to find information within the medical record. >> So the AWS reinvent last fall, you know Sage Maker was of course buzzing. Is that something that you're looking at? >> It's something, so we haven't used it in Evolve so far but within Kainos we have an AI practice and we have a group of guys that are focused on the AI capability. Evaluating those tools, working with AWS and helping us understand how we can use that technology to solve the problems of our customers. >> Yeah, it's early days. So you talk about helping solve the problems of the customers. Summarize for us the key problems that you see machine intelligence, AI solving. >> I think there's probably different categories of how you could use it. There's the diagnostic sort of use case where you could use AI to help process imagery, to help with the diagnostic process. There's being able to add personalization to whether that be to patients or to clinicians, helping to provide insight into whatever the use case may be and all the use cases similar to that. >> Last words, so you're addressing the pre-day healthcare reform that's going on here at AWS. What's that like, what's going on downstairs, what did you tell the audience? >> Yeah, great day. So we had a group of healthcare professionals across the NHS in Ireland, very interesting group. We spoke this morning, I spoke with our customer Gloucester CC chief and we talked about the shared care record solution that we've delivered into Gloucester. So that's bringing information together for over 600,000 patients across the region and providing information in a single joined up view that was not available before. So great feedback, great interaction, lots of questions afterwards so looking forward to going back down and chatting some more to the group. >> Excellent. Hard to do that without the cloud I would imagine , accommodating all of the 600,000 customers right. >> Not possible. >> Alastair thanks so much for coming to The Cube. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Appreciate having you. Alright, thanks for watching everybody. Keep it right there, we'll be back with our next guest. You're watching The Cube from AWS headquarter in London. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

[Music] hi I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Cube conversation from our outstanding studios in Palo Alto California got a great conversation today we're gonna be talking about some of the challenges and changes taking place in the MSP the managed service provider part of the marketplace made possible by software to find when SD Wang technologies and to do that we've got Alastair Johnson as a principal architect at nuage Networks here with us on the cube today Alastair welcome to the cube Thank You Peter it's great to be here so let's start corporate update nuage Networks what's going on well we've had a pretty good year so far a number of customers that we'll be announcing over the next few months that we've established this year in addition to the the major wins that I'm sure most of the markets familiar with over the last few years we're really seeing that in the managed services space that Sdn is gaining a lot of traction we're finding that particularly outside of North America but with increasing North American interest that enterprises are looking towards a managed SD wine service as opposed to doing it themselves going down the path of having a carrier come in and provide them with both connectivity and the service layer or looking at taking the service layer from a managed services provider and sourcing the connectivity themselves so this is an area that's especially fruitful and open for some significant innovation and innovation that's going to have enormous impact in how the market pays so let me let me run something by you so here's the observation I've made over the years that servers Moore's law meant that there was this kind of smooth growth and performance and even in software it would kind of followed Moore's law but network because of its because of the degree of interplay and natural integration amongst the components there was always this kind of weird step function where every four or five years the big telecommunications companies our managed service providers would make major investments in their networks and you got this very rough course odd step function and that sometimes scared some of these companies away from participating in all the innovation of the cloud have I got that right absolutely I mean the tradition of having both your service layer and your transport layer being coupled you know an IP Network is offering both the IP transport but also the services like MPLS VPNs or layer 2 VPNs has meant that you know the tech lifecycle became relatively long the process to qualify deploy managed and then eventually automate services and the delivery of those services took a long time Sdn has presented a really interesting opportunity for the carrier's as long along with the broader audience in the industry to really leverage software and the frequency of updates the software can give you without needing to make those hardware changes at the same time so you can still do the hardware changes but you get a smoother upward innovation curve absolutely so the underlying transport platforms the routers the DWDM systems etc those can be changed as needed to buy capacity demands or vendor changes or new technology that comes out in those spaces but we can use Sdn or in this case st wan to smooth out the service offering on the top and as it becomes a software delivered function we can upgrade that much faster and we can roll it out much more like we update our you know cell phones our tablets etc and introduce new functionality into the service layer much faster than we were able to do in the past where we had a very much a hardware coupled service offering now I made a comment that in many respects some of the big telecommunications companies some of the beginner Spees have not participated in this explosive innovation that's associated with the cloud and part of the reason is because when you think about cloud someone can say I can think of a new service and then they can create it and deploy because it's largely in software whereas a lot of the telecommunications MSP type companies go I get to give a new service but then they look around and they say oh the hardware's not ready and I don't wait for the hardware to be ready how does this notion of SD win and this software to find service layers start to alter the way that some of these big companies think about their underlying infrastructure cost structures how they think about automation how they go about competing for new services well well it's it becomes a very big competitive differentiator because you know I can be a carrier and I can offer new services much faster a we touched on I'm getting a benefit of automation very quickly because Sdn was heavily around automating the configuration in the service elements and I can become a lot more cost-effective with that you know customers are looking for more self control more self management information Diagnostics tooling etc but without the overheads of running very large IT and network specialized personnel so the carrier's get that advantage the enterprise's get that advantage everyone is getting you know effectively a much more modern service experience we saw that with the cloud I guess revolution if you want to put it that way that you know I no longer needed to order a server put it in a rack deploy an operating system put my application on it take six months that changed with the cloud everyone understands that the network layer did not change it's fast and that's where we saw Sdn and the data centers come along to address that problem that's what we're solving with sd1 as well so when we think about the relationship between big cloud players and some of these nm msps it is that we've got the big cloud pairs that are virtualizing everything the msps are still kind of physically stuck but still have the vast majority of those last miles that are so crucial to having that end and productivity and compatibility absolutely does that start to change as we start to think about new wireless technologies how does SD LAN improve the MS Pease ability to both bring new automation and bri new but also introduced some of these new technologies that will bring make it easier to think cloud last-mile in the same breath well it's an interesting point I mean you could look at an MSP that has no lost mile infrastructure at all.they or maybe reselling a carriers infrastructure or procuring a full their enterprise customers now they have the ability to actually manage the service layer and they could be using carrier a today to reach the customers location but they strike a new deal tomorrow with carry a B and they can swap that customer over effectively changing the engines on the airplane in flight the customer experience doesn't change for the enterprise they're still getting the same Sdn service but maybe they swapped from DSL to cable as a transport or they've added an MPLS service to a new site as well for greater reliability so this allows the msps and the carriers to you know get services out to the customers faster decoupling it from whatever the last mile technology may be and this where there's opportunities for wireless you know we're seeing a lot of interest from enterprises to augment with LTE and in the future 5g as a backup connectivity to their sites particularly in retail I mean I'm sure in Silicon Valley you've seen everyone here is swiping your card on a tablet well you know you don't want that tablet to be offline it needs connectivity or they're not making money so making sure you have reliable connectivity with the same experience is a big deal for these enterprises and and they're msps but it's not becomes part of a coherent solution as opposed to I'm gonna do my cloud thing and I'm gonna do my MSP thing absolutely and so that's another area where we're seeing a lot of interest I mean even if I look at what our internal IT is doing which is you know we need to make sure that the cloud is part of our LAN and we need to make sure that we can you know drop an application in our private data center but have resources in our public infrastructure also using that and the experience for me sitting at my desk down the street from here is the same regardless of where that application is being accessed from all right the last thing I want to talk to you about Alastair is this this notion I have I'm going to test something by you and see if I if I got it right and if I can if I'm anticipating some of the changes over in C so a lot of people presume that the cloud was a one-way ticket to something centralized and big and that had an enormous impact on how people think about the cloud we actually think about the cloud as a strategy in the technology for more easily and coherently distributing data and distributing function to where it needs to be on location basis and in certain respects I can look at the cloud kind of as a network programming model where the some of those hybrid cloud services are they're being introduced by some of the big cloud players now are really almost a layer 7 they're providing some structure to the developer about how to think about building hybrid distributed applications now I want to test that does that resonate with you from a networking standpoint absolutely and again that's something we see a lot of interest in a reasonable amount of demand as enterprises and their internal developers are getting their heads around that concept that the application can live anywhere whether it be on premises at the branch data center or in the cloud and that cloud as you point out can be rightly geographically distributed and being able to be the network glue that binds all of those locations together allows the developer and the IT organization supporting that developer to have you know if the effect of a single fabric regardless of where the application or the user is seamlessly connecting them and so it also suggestions there's nothing on a test with you that that that we are it makes it possible to imagine greater specialization in what those distributed services look like especially from a networking perspective which means that if MSPs and big teller codes do successfully incorporate some of these technologies improve their automate ability their ability to think about the service and then deliver the service very rapidly then we could see them actually being able to pick up a sizeable piece of this cloud business because they can introduce services that are specialized with a network strong network affinity that have that build on that heritage of distribution of function absolutely and you see that today you know the carriers are already providing a valuable service connecting the enterprises to the cloud but that goes beyond in you know an SDN 2.0 model I need to move certain applications to the branch there's some things that always need to live there and as an IT manager I need to manage that networking effectively but I have applications that I want to have that are running you know in a very public cloud you know SAS applications etc and I want to give my users the most efficient path to them but I also have my private applications that it may be running in a public environment but I want to carry that as if it was part of my internal corporate one and being able to get that the from an enterprise you know services perspective from an MSP from a carrier that can bundle all of this together that's a huge advantage and a time-saving for me yeah the one other thing I'd say is that we're actually talking some very large enterprises right now that are discovering that their customers there their customers are demanding very concrete strict and well-documented notions of the capabilities that they provide and this idea of SD wine is making it easier for them to sell services in to companies that want that digital interface that highly competent working digital interface absolutely so it's what last thing is we think about where this is going is there any technology on the horizon that you think Sdn is going to make easier to deploy or that's gonna make SD went that much more important oh that's an interesting question and I think as you know the ongoing digital transformation of business happens you know we're connectivity is more important than ever making sure it's reliable and available and that the user experience regardless of what type of site I'm visiting as a you know an enterprise employee making sure that you know my telephony works that my can access my documents that my R&D teams can span the globe that is a key requirement of today's enterprise at Nokia that's how we need to work internally and that's how we do work I travel around the world visit our offices my experience is seamless in the same and that I think is where Sdn is bringing a huge amount of automation value security in many cases and tell you some great anecdotes that we found in the Sdn world there and just the management and control layer well let's save another cube conversation to talk about those security antidotes well but this is Peterborough's we've been talking to Alastair Johnson who's a principal architect at nuage networks about the potential for SD when to increase the relevance of MSPs telecom providers in a marketplace that is being dominated by the cloud experience and how greater automation leads to improve service opportunities for a lot of customers and a lot of cloud related service providers Alastair thanks very much for being on the cube thanks Peter and once again on Peter Burris and you've been watching another cube conversation until next time [Music] you

(light peppy electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman And I'm here with John Troyer. And you're watching theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's live production of VMworld 2017. We're in Las Vegas. Happy to have back to the program Alastair Cooke, who is the Chief Video Officer of vBrownBag. Al, great to see you, thanks so much. It is of course not only great to see you, but great to see vBrownBag here at VMworld which was for I think 24 or 48 hours, actually in question. >> It was probably the most stressful 48 hours of my life when it looked like we might not be as welcome on the floor here at VMworld as we have been for the last five years prior. >> Yeah, you know, Pat Gelsinger last year said I couldn't imagine VMworld without theCUBE. I think most of the community couldn't imagine the show without vBrownBag. So we don't need to hash through all of it. Everybody in IT knows that sometimes you get those stressful periods and you look back and say we went through it. The outcome worked. >> The outcome is awesome. So for those who have not come across what we do, vBrownBag is a community podcast. You guys have followed the rise, and John's been instrumental in part of the rise. The podcast is about education for the practitioner of IT, the person working in data centers or designing solutions to go into data centers. We focus on education, so we're a video podcast. I was looking at our stats. There's a couple of thousand videos sitting in our YouTube channel that we've produced over the last six or seven years. And in the last six years at VMworld, we've had an open stage. We sort of set a little bit of a parallel to the rise of theCUBE at VMworld, the massive estate that you have here now. We also have grown over the years, not nearly as massive, but we have an open stage for those same IT practitioners, the hands-on engineering people to come and share the things they've learned with the rest of the community. >> Could you speak a little on the breadth and depth of the offering that you'll do during this week here? One of the differences here, we get a lot of people that come take photos, they'll come watch for a few minutes. You guys have an audience coming through the entire time, participating and the like. >> Well this year, we have a big upswing in our audience because all of our sessions are listed in the schedule folder. So normal attendees at the show are seeking out our content and saying that's interesting, I want to hear about that. And that's always been previously our issue, was discoverability. Nobody knew that there were these really awesome speakers who were presenting at VMworld. Now they're in the schedule folder, and so we have a space for 50 people. We've had a few talks where pretty much every seat's been full. And the walkway past our stage has been filled with another 30 people wanting to see and consume the content that we produce. >> That's super nice. How many videos over the course of the week? >> We have 77 booked in for this week. >> I think you'll have more than us then. >> Yes, so we're already at 16. We do a much lower production standard than you do here on theCUBE. But we do a really high velocity. So as I walked away from my station to come to yours, I'd already uploaded the previous presenter's videos up onto YouTube. So as I walked away, 16 presentations were complete, 16 videos were on YouTube. My awesome crew still manning the stage while I'm away, and while I've been here I think we're now into the second video that's been produced as I've been watching you guys talking with your previous guest. >> Come on, video's all in. As long as the internet's solid, we get 'em up pretty fast too. >> Oh yeah. The key thing for us is that we do it with next to nothing. We do it on a shoestring compared to what... Your rent and people bill here is probably larger than my equipment bill. >> Well hey, that's the beautiful thing about tech, right? I started filming stuff at VMworld years ago, right? And you just buy a consumer camera and just go. And you can stream, and you built it up from there. It's a sort of affordable tech that anybody can do. And even, you use CommonWeb, GoToMeeting, and things like that on your weekly podcast. This is super. You don't need a lot of money to reach a global audience. What are some of the themes that you're seeing this year at VMworld in terms of the tech talks? >> It's a little challenging to try and work out a theme out of the 77... Because there isn't so much coherence to what we get. We don't have streams or anything like that. On the stage, we accept everything that comes in. And my acceptance criteria is chronology. The order in which you submit your session is the priority in which it's scheduled, rather than doing a lot of reviewing. I've seen quite a bit of container stuff in there. There's a lot of interest in AWS, and vSphere on AWS. And there's quite a lot of interest in free tools. So we had two sessions today on free tools for vSphere adminstrators. They're things that can get you going in your job without having to go asking cap-in-hand for money to buy a new tool. >> Which is nice, because these are things that might not be in an official session at VMworld with 800 people in it, but free tools are very relevant to the technical community. >> And that's the thing. Our audience is all about that engineer who's going to be hands on the keyboard, building things. Quite possibly you're still going to be racking and stacking hardware. And configuring the products that are being bought that are being chosen by somebody further up the management chain. >> I know some of the more popular sessions are when you touch on certification type issues. Did those happen here, or is that different pieces? Maybe speak a bit to the broader charter of vBrownBag. >> So the broader objective is that the virtualization community and the data center infrastructure community can teach one another. We all feel like we know a little tiny amount of this vast amount that everyone around us knows. The reality is that each of us has our own little island. And if I share my island of knowledge with you, and you share your island of knowledge with me, then we all learn more. And the internet and the use of podcasts and the rise of iTunes has given us the ability to do that at massive scale. We only need a very small number of people who are prepared to share their circle of knowledge, to be able to educate a vast number of people. >> But what I also think is interesting, you started with VMware certs, right? >> We did. >> That was a brownbag to learn and study for our certifications together. And now, over the years, it's brought OpenStack, it's brought AWS, containers. Can you talk about some of all the different topics that you're dealing with? >> So we absolutely cover as far as I'm aware, every released VMware certification we've got some content for. And have done since ESX 3. Those kinds of days. And that's how long the podcast has been running. We've always been helping community members to study for their VMware certifications. And then we found that VMware didn't release certifications as fast as we could produce training for them. And so we started looking broader, and started looking at, well, you work in virtualization, you need to know storage, you need to know networking. And so we started covering some elements of those. And then, oh, there are certifications in these things! And that's good for career advancement for the engineer. And so we started covering some of the Cisco certifications. And we did have the foray into OpenStack, because Cody Bunch, the guy who started the podcast, who I refer to as the Podfather, his work took him from building a product based on vSPhere, for a large hosting provider, to a product based on OpenStack. And so he was very much keen on OpenStack. Unfortunately our audience weren't so keen. So the OpenStack series went for a little while and didn't get a huge traction. But we started doing AWS last year. We covered the Solution Architect Associate certification early last year. Huge interest from the community! Really popular content. Another popular certification content is NSX. One of the top videos for a long time was Frank Buchsel doing an introduction to VMware's NSX. We're covering the VCP-NV certification. >> That's really interesting. What kind of people attend a vBrownBag? What are the characteristics? Obviously there are people who, some are of sort of driven, they want to expand their horizons, they want to advance their careers. I mean, any comments on that? >> I see a split between those of us who produce the content who are very much forward looking, getting excited about the next thing, and so now we're doing Kubernetes, and we're just starting a series on API's. Every Christmas we do a thing called Commitmas where we cover source code management in Git. With Git commits. So we've got this whole group of forward thinking, telling the infrastructure people, these are the skills we're going to need to be relevant in the future. If the cloud is eating your lunch in your data center, here's a whole set of skills that you're going to need in order to still be able to learn. What we see is there's a huge middle audience who are just starting virtualization. So crazy as it seems, there are customers who are just starting to virtualize now. And they're not all in Southeast Asia. >> Stu: Laggards! >> But the people who are coming into the industry, also younger people coming into the industry who don't have 20 years of virtualization or 200 years of virtualization in their back pockets. Using the vBrownBags is a way of getting some education and getting education that they don't need to get a purchase order for. >> John: This is all free, right? Everything you do is free. >> Everything we do is free to consume. That's one of our core principles. All the content we produce is free to consume. We do produce... in a typical month we'll produce six hours of video training content. And stack that up over a few years. >> So Al, put your consultant hat on. What so far, I mean we're only day one here. But what's your take on what VMware is saying, Pat Gelsinger gave his morning keynote, applause for Andy Jassy coming out. We spend a lot of time talking about VMware and AWS. But kind of across the board, what's your take so far? What are you liking, what aren't you liking? >> Well I'm liking that the video production on the vBrownBag stage has been really smooth so far and that I have an awesome team of volunteers there. To be honest, that's been the biggest thing because that's what I'm here for. The keynote... To an engineer the keynote's not hugely interesting because the keynote is a business-focused message. And I want to know, when I am deploying a vSphere on AWS environment, what does it look like? So there's some quiet briefings going on that you can book in for if you get the invitation to see how it's actually going to work. That's the stuff that would, if I were still doing regular day-to-day working for a company, that's the stuff I'd be wanting to get while I was here at VMworld. Yes, we've got Andy Jassy here, well that's great, there's a serious commitment from AWS to the conference. >> Pivoting back a little bit to new technology, video is really democratizing at some level. The affordability of the equipment and the ability to do it from anywhere. vBrownBag to support itself does have sponsors. You have some sponsors here. So the webinar's all free, and mostly very educational. You're here on site. You also do several tech events throughout the year, all around the world. And you've actually started a new exercise where you go and you work with a vendor or something as a technologist, and basically it's build day, where you build something with your hands, some system, some rack of something, and stream the whole thing live. Can you talk a little... Again, fascinating from a production and technology point of view. But can you talk a little bit about what you're trying to bring as a trainer and an educator and a community member with that kind of an offering. >> Sure, so vBrownBag's content is all free to consume, but it's not free to produce. And so we have wonderful sponsors that help us to be here, make sure I can bring a crew of people here to be able to make those 77 videos. And I haven't done the count of how many we're doing in Barcelona, but I'm doing an outrageous number of miles in a month because I'm going home to New Zealand in between the two VMworlds. I've got to pick up my wife and take her to Barcelona. So awesome sponsors for that, and we go to other events. This is I think the second event in Vegas where we've been making TechTalks this year. But John you're talking about the wonderful new thing we started doing this year of the vBrownBag build days. And the objective is really to show day one experience of implementing a piece of technology. And it's the engineer's day one experience. So we're very used to seeing keynote demonstrations. I'll show you this wonderful new technology, and it is an awesome piece of technology. It's just that A, you're not going to get it fr two years' time. And B, when you do get it, it's going to be possibly very difficult to deploy, or possibly really easy. A lot of vendors say, our technology's really easy. And so we put them to the test on that. We work with a vendor, they bring us in to usually their site. The two that we've done, we go to their site. I bring in a customer's vSphere environment. So I have a pelican case full of servers, and we turn up with that, and then on top of that vSphere environment we deploy whatever the technology is. Be it a hyper-converged platform, a storage platform, management platform. And we livestream that process. So the requirement for them is we need to start as it arrives to the customer from the factory. And we need to go through the actual deployment process. We need to hit the fissures that real customers are going to hit. Because I've been the engineer who turns up on site thinking he's going to deploy Product A, when the salesman said he was going to be deploying Product A, and in fact he's deploying Product Cucumber. And that's what he's got to go and push out. And that terror, of I've got to not make this go wrong, I've got to look good deploying this and give my customer a good experience, when I've not really had any preparation. Now it wouldn't help me if it was the day that I arrived, but often it's a new piece of technology. The first time we deploy it, we're rather concerned. And we don't believe what's in the marketing, and we don't necessarily believe that the steps in the installation guide are current. So vBrownBag's objective is to go through that process and take an educational approach to showing you how that first day goes. And as you mentioned John, my background is as a trainer. I taught VMware's public sector training courses for years. And so I very much like to go into this process as training. And you can see that reflected out in what we do with vBrownBag. It's all about education. That's part of what attracted me. >> One last question I have for you is vBrownBag has been doing this for many years. Any major shifts, changes... Of course the scope has broadened quite a bit, you're talking about things like NSX and everything like that. Anything else in kind of the community, in educating, and what people look for from your organization that you could share? >> So there's sort of different angles on that. We definitely have seen that move from being, I really need to get my VCP or my VCAP certifications, and then my career will be complete. Which of course we know is a little naive. Now we've seen a diversification that there are additional skills required. The other thing that we're seeing is that although VMworld is home base for this community, it's not the only place this community is. And so as I go to other conferences, I'm often surprised by the proportion of the people there that are actually my friends from the virtualization, the VMware community are at other things. And I suspect if I was to go to AWS re:Invent I would find a fair few of my friends there. >> Absolutely. Lots of them. Especially I'd say last year was where I saw a significant uptick. Are we going to see you at re:Invent this year? >> I've not had any interest from AWS to bring me there and I can't afford to come out to these conferences on my own dime until I sell a few more build days. >> I really appreciate everything that vBrownBag's been doing here with the community. Always a pleasure to catch up with you. Here on theCUBE we always love to support the community and many of those organizations. We will be at AWS re:Invent. Definitely lots of need for education there, lots of growth in what's happening there. And here, so for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here at VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (light peppy electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering HPE Discover 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're live in Las Vegas. This is the Cube's coverage, exclusive coverage, of Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPE Discover 2017. And I'm John Furrier, co-founder SiliconAngle Media with my co-founder David Latte and also cohost. Our next guest is Alastair Winner, vice president HPE point next portfolio. Welecome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Alastair: Thank you. Great to be here. >> So, okay, Pointnext Portfolio, Pointnext, new presence, take a minute, Alastair just explain Pointnext, how everything fits together. I know it's a little bit redundant for you but let's that start that off. >> Sure, no, I'd be delighted to explain. So, as you're aware the company has gone though a number of transformations and transitions. One of which was the spin merge of enterprise services to CSC, now DXC technology, we're, they're here on the show floor, so great partner of ours. But of course that created a lot of noise in the market and confusion honestly with our customers as to whether or not HPE was in the services business or not. So, the idea of the rebranding was to make it very clear, service is critically important. It's like the third part of our company strategy. So we have Hybrid IT, IT Edge and the expertise to make it happen and that expertise is HPE Pointnext. And the branding was chosen deliberately not to, to sort of replicate what you'd find in other traditional vendors. We don't talk about services in our brand. And Pointnext is literally to help our customers point at what's next in their digital transformation journey. So, that's where the brand comes from. >> David: So what's the brand promise? For Pointnext? >> I mean for us, it's about giving customers access to our expertise and we talk about really, a complete life cycle of a experience. So, previously we had consulting and support. Those terms have gone now. So we're looking clearly end to end of customer's experience and really starting with the outcome they're looking for, and having advisory, professional and operation services that connect those things together to deliver the, deliver the outcome. >> And what is the spin merge made up of? HPE Services and was it, the CSC combo? >> So we had a very significant, really IT outsourcing business, which was called enterprise services that was the previous EDS business. So yeah, that spun out and joined to CSC to become DXC Technology. >> How should customers look at you vis a vis HPE and the Enterprise partners? Obviously there, there the combination, how do you guys, where' the lines, where do you guys shake hands, where's the handoff, what are some of the engagements, like share with us some of the day to day tactical execution of your, of the portfolio? >> So I guess, we're still relatively new in terms of the brand and we're trying to really connect the dots internally to ensure that we present to our customers a seamless experience. I guess one of the things that the spin merge has enabled us to do is to engage much more actively with systems integrators and other consulting companies where perviously it was quite challenging to do so. So, with the likes of PWC and KMPG and Wipro and so previously we had, I mean they were interested in buying our technology. But from a services point of view, there was always some conflict. Now we have clarity, right? So, so part of our strategy is to really ensure we're engaging very actively with systems integrators. And likewise, we're also working very actively with our reseller partners. So, clearly HP has a long history of partnering and.. >> John: Channel. >> And as we call it it channel. And our channel partners are also going through a transformation because selling hardware is no longer a sustainable business for them in the long term. So, really helping them to transform their business from being product led to services led. I guess, I mean, the other thing we're really focused on is you know what are the solution areas. What are the business outcomes that we as an organization can really focus on because as you know digital transformation is huge, I mean it's a, you know.. >> Well, I'm glad you brought that up about the decline in the service, from a business model stand point, but we were saying in our opening, on our editorial segment that, you know a lot of people get hung up on that, but in reality, the numbers are all pointed to massive growth. Wikibon just put out a seminal report around true private cloud at a twenty to fifty billion dollar opportunity, market TAM. So, that's just private cloud. That's just. >> Yes. >> Cloud liking your infrastructure on PRAM. That's not including Hybrid Cloud. So when you factor in true private cloud, which is current state, situation, with Hybrid Cloud and then now, the, what I call the kind of the long reaching but viable vision of multicloud, >> Yep. those are really key dots that are connection for customers. So, okay margins of hardware might shift to places but the services, whether its IOT, an app integration, really it's a the center of this. >> It absolutley is at the center of it. And of course, I mean there is still clearly value from our products and our product innovation. But the way we present that value to our customers has to, has to change. And you're quite right, many of the customers, in fact the majority of the customers I talked to really view private cloud as their principal delivery vehicle, internally. IT view as their principal delivery vehicle. What we're doing through solutions like flexible capacity is enabling an IT team, to you know, to align the supply and demand of IT through an opex model rather than a capex model and really helping them right size the environment. So they can manage the fluctuations that they see because with digital there are, you know, there are many many more, the frequency of change is much a, much more... >> So the dollars are shifting to services, certainly the Edge but you brought up channel. This is a huge opportunity because now channel is reconfiguring both at the global systems integrator side as well as what was traditionally as VARS and VABS and ISBs, >> Yes. as they get closer to the customer. So you guys are kind of the glue layer between what was once HBE, get some training, speeds and feeds, to much more solution oriented. And trends there that you can highlight that should be notable for customers in around how the services is leading some of that change at the front lines? >> Well, I mean, you're absolutely right and I would say you know for us it's about outcomes, looking. We're not trying to sell the customers something. We're looking for an outcome that customer needs and then translating that into, into a chain of technology, people and process changes that they need to implement. And there I mean there are many examples on the show floor actually of services-led solutions. You know, we have the intelligent spaces cube for example where we're helping customers to manage, very valuable real estate in their, in their property, you know where you're always looking for spaces to meet your colleagues. When you turn up you want it to be digitally enabled. You know, we can combine all of these great technologies whether you know that HP or partner ISV technology into a solution. And then present it to the customer as a service. So you consume it as you use it as oppose to buying all the pieces, having to integrate together yourself, you'll own and operate, that's clearly the model, that, that's the model of the past. >> Alastair, the CIO's in our community, if I could summarize, they're telling us, I got to run the business, I got legacy systems that I have to manage, I have to grow the business. I have new apps. Maybe some of those are IOT, certainly many of them are data oriented, AI, big data, whatever you want to call it. And then I have to transform the business. So that's their digital transformation, >> Alastair: Yes. >> certainly their IT transformation, their hybrid component. So is that a valid way, to sort of look at the business, and then how specifically is Pointnext helping in those three broad areas? >> So, I would, I would completely agree. In fact the way we think about our portfolio is one of accelerating what's next. So this, you know this digital transformation, this change, and how do we accelerate and make customers much more agile in addressing the business requirements. Because, you know IT and the business are really synonymous now with each other. It's not a, it's not a back office anymore. It's the way the customer engages with their customers, with their employees, with their partners. I mean it is the interface now in which we work. So, we're all about accelerating. How can we accelerate that. And then, you're absolutely right the majority of our customers have an existing in store bays. The have many layers of, or previous generations of technology. You know it's, it's homogenous, it's complex. You know there, there are different ways of managing all of these assets. And the way we help there is really by simplifying. So we're encouraging our customers to work with us, allow us to manage the complexity, which frees up resources and money for them to then to go in and invest in the accelerate, accelerating what's next. So we're doing, for example, activities like, we call it operational support service. So we're monitoring and managing remotely the assets of the company that the IT team would have historically have done. You know, you go into like a mission control center and see all the, you know, all the lights, monitors. I mean we can do that for a customer. You know, the customer doesn't have to do that anymore. And the resources that frees up, they can go in and invest in the, in the, in their digital transformation. >> So that's not outsourcing, per se. >> No. >> You're certainly managing infrastructure on behalf of your customer. They on the assets, it's on their books? >> So, so we can do it traditional, you know capex model where it's on their books. Or we can include it inside a flexible capacity arrangement where, they're, you know they're actually paying per use. And that experience is part of the, of the solution. So we can integrate it into a pay per use model. >> I mean it seems like one of the things that HP services has done over the last several years, is sort of envision and reimagine that entire services experience and try to make it as cloud like as possible. >> Yes. >> I mean you got a head of that, I mean this has been, I don't know, three, four five years in the making. So, kind of give us an update that's gone and then, you know on a scale of one to 10, how far did you get? Are you at a five, a six, a nine? And what's new from here? >> So it's a great question. So, I'd probably give us a six, we're probably at a six I would say. So the, the offer itself, so flexible capacity, is, you know we've had in them market for five years now so yeah, we know how to do this. And it's very successful. We've never lost a customer. We have net promoter scores in the high 90's, so yeah, where we have landed it, customers love it right? So, we know it's very successful. And really what we now need to do as a company is sort of amplify that model as our principal go to market. Okay, so we're a product company, we sell products. So, there's a pivot that we're approaching I would say where we need to you know, use that as really being the lead, the lead model. So, I think, I think a solution designed for IT, where IT consume units of IT, we've got that nailed, right? I think, I think it's great. But flexible capacity doesn't address every customer's requirement. So for an enterprise customer, it works really nicely. For a tier two, tier three service provider, it works very nicely. We've got a whole tranche of customers, who really don't have the scale to benefit from flexible capacity that still want insights into their utilization, and their capacity. So we're actually, as part of our Gen 10 launch, we introducing something called HPE Capacity Care Service. So we're sort of extracting the secret source from flexible capacity. We're not actively managing the capacity on behalf of the customer, but we're giving the customer the assets to do it themselves. So that will be available by the end of this calendar year, so we're very excited about that. And the other thing we're doing is actually, to move away from selling units of IT service, like virtual machine containers or cause, and actually trying to focus on outcomes. So were starting to talk about things like back up as service, big data as service with Hadoop. So, again, really trying to create a platform that the customer can consume and all the complexity is abstracted and we present it as a service. So, we're at the early stages there. We've got very big aspirations for that. We think that's the way that our customers will want to buy from us. You know, they don't want the pieces, they want, they want the platform, the want an outcome as a service. >> Alastair, great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for sharing. My final question for you, to end the segment is pretend I'm a CXO, CIO, CDO, CSO, whatever, CEO, Alastair, bottom line me. How are you going to make IT easier for me and simpler? Go. >> So, I'm going to make it easier by ensuring that we present you with our expertise. We're going to create an environment though which you can consume IT. And we're going to accelerate your digital transformation. >> Alright. Accelerate change, obviously congeeled economies here. There's no doubt about it. It's got a little cloud flavor, hybrid cloud, multi cloud. It's theCUBE bringing you all the data here from HPE Discover. More live action for three days of exclusive coverage with theCUBE. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (light techno music)

live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020s brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back to Barcelona Spain everybody this is the cube the leader and live tech coverage and we're here day one for us at Cisco live Barcelona even though we did a little preview game preview yesterday my good friend kena Reilly is here he's the director of customer experience at Cisco and he's joined by Kyle winters Technical Marketing engineer for the customer experience technology and transformation group it's six to go guys great to see you thanks for coming on and you know we love talking customer experience Cisco is a it's a big company big portfolio and a lot of complexity for clients and so bring it all together and customer experience is very important can't we have it a conversation with Alastair early today and he was talking about Cisco's commitment from the top chuck Robbins on down to really improve that customer experience bring essentially a digital virtual experience to your customers and you guys obviously fit into that right absolutely so about two years ago when Chuck brought in Maria Martinez that was the first step into really pushing Cisco to focus more on successful outcomes for customers so we had already always sold that way but with the complexity of technology and how fast technology is moving accelerating value realization for customers has never been bigger especially in the security space because as we've talked before you know with everything that goes on today and the fact that the bad guys are trying to get data faster quicker and different getting the technology in play operational and production it has never been more important and we're gonna dig in with Kyle with some detail and double click into the lifecycle specifically and the different points of that journey but that's really important for any customer experience is really understanding that lifecycle that maturity model can you talk about that a little bit yeah so so with us you know we've been at it for about six years when we started as Lancope so we've got a great model and you know our approach to getting outcomes for customers is completely in line with with the strategy of our products and technologies and all security so it's really important that you align with that strategy because salespeople sell and they sell you the what we sell the how we're gonna get you and so you have to understand what it is that customers need and how that technology maps because you don't want a shelf where and you don't want products or technology sitting there waiting to be implemented because you know these days especially with the move to the cloud it's got to get up and running you know within an hour so our model has always been that way we built our model with customer first and so we are you know we are the security experts we're the trusted security adviser so when we go in and work with customers we completely know exactly those outcomes that they need and with all the sort of technologies and products that we have not only with stealthWatch but the other products that sent ulema tree to us we have in Kyle will talk about how our service is completely aligned with those outcomes and the journeys that we will take our customers on yes a faster adoption means faster time to value obviously let's focus in on stealthWatch Kenneth you came in with the stealthWatch acquisitions been very successful I mean Cisco security business grew 22% last quarter we'll talk more about the sort of umbrella but let's drill in with Kyle to stealthWatch services specifically maybe you could sort of take us through you know at a high level what what the areas are and then we can sort of follow up on yeah yes so so our customer maturity model when it comes to services there's kind of three different stages to it it starts with the visibility stage so we have services around being able to deploy an operational I stealthWatch will bring in our best practices and help customers get up to speed and using the system quickly and efficiently from there we also have services around detection capabilities so being able to use automation and integrations to further the detection capabilities of stealthWatch things like being able to classify host groups through automation from source like IP address management systems things like asset discovering classification service that helped drive segmentation efforts all of these things help improve the behavioral algorithms and processes that stealthWatch is using to detect these threats in real time and then from there we have an integration stage as well - which is all about bridging the gap between stealthWatch and the rest of not only Cisco's portfolio but the entirety of our customer security portfolio as well and some of those services include things like sim integrations being able to integrate stealthWatch with Splunk we have services such as our proxy integration service as well a lot of different types of services that we're able to help get our customers to the next stage with their stealth watch environments I got a lot of questions yeah we could get to it and you guys could take it by stage so yes the sort of visibility that's where you start that's when you do the discovery right so what what are you discovering how do you actually do that discovery so a lot of that is about making sure that we've got all the flow and telemetry that we need from the various different sources of our network coming into stealthWatch feeding into the processes and algorithms that are going on there so a lot of things is not only net flow data but getting ice integrated in there as well being able to pull that user attribution data and being able to find sources of data where we maybe can convert it into net flow if it's not already net flow and be able to ingest that data as well we also in that space typically to help set up customers with a lot of different best practices that kind of get them operationalized very quickly and things like being able to build custom reports and dashboards for them will work through them which is kind of understanding the system from a base level to more of a professional fully operational level a lot of times we come in during the stage two and customers don't even understand what's going on in their network they're seeing things that maybe they've never seen before one stealthWatch turns on a great example actually as we were at a large financial firm and we were able within 30 minutes of being on site with them through our services team we were able to identify rogue DNS servers unsecured telnet going on sequel injections suspicious SMB and that's the sage traffic this is all just within 30 minutes of us coming on there and taking a look at this stuff you don't even want to look at sometimes yeah so who's doing this can I mean is this sort of all automated you've got professionals sort of overseeing it in our society yeah so the team that we have the technology transformation team when we've talked about it before that team is kind of on the bleeding edge of helping customers and you know a lot of these services that that Kyle talked about is we are building services that customers are consuming based on their needs today and that's why the team is very flexible we build you know a lot of these integrations with those requirements in mind and then we take those and we can scale that so these are all field engineers we have developers so in in essence it is like a mini development team that goes out and works on the specific things that customers need to protect themselves okay and my understanding is there's a there's an ongoing learning with the customers and a it's a transfer of knowledge from day one right there the customer is with you on this in each of these phases and you're sort of learning as they go along and that's sort of part of the transfer of knowledge it's I would say even a tool a transfer knowledge too because we're teaching them our best practices and how to best be successful with these systems but we also learn from them what's going on what are the trends that they're seeing how can we help get them to the next stage and that's where our technology and transformation group comes and they're able to be on the cutting edge here the problems that the customers are talking about and be able to take stealthWatch to the next level okay let's dig it to the detection phase so this is where you're classifying things like host groups etc I'm interested in how that happens is that you know it used to be you'd get everybody in a room you start drawing pictures and that just doesn't scale it's too complicated today so can you auto classify stuff how does that all work and use them oh yeah genius math to do that so so traditionally the the you know the MIT's a manual effort to classify your whole group somebody who's very familiar with the network comes in and they say okay these are the DNS servers these are the web servers these are this network scanners oh oh today but the problem is that today's networks are so dynamic and fluid that what the network looks like today is not necessarily going to be the same tomorrow so there needs to be that relief from the analyst to be able to come in there needs to be that automation that they can go in each day and know that their system is going to be classified accurately and meaningfully that way the behavioral detection that is built into stealthWatch is also driven and accurate and meaningful - so we have this service so for example our host group automation service and through that we're able to pull in telemetry and data from various different sources such as IP address management systems cmdbs we can do threat feeds as well external threat feeds and we're able to drive the classification based off of the metadata that we see from these different sources so we're able to write different types of automation rules that essentially pull this data in detect the different patterns that we're seeing with that metadata and then drive that classification stealthWatch that way when you come in that next day you know that your network scanners are gonna be classified as Network scanners and your web servers are gonna be web servers etc etc so you you have that integrity of data coming in every single day yeah so a lot of different data sources data quality obviously really important I mean you'd love it if somebody had like you know a single CMDB from ServiceNow boom and pop it right in but that's not always the case we never always the case there's always a challenge and that's where kind of our services engineers come in they're able to work through these different environments and understand what the main admit what the metadata is where we need to go and how we need to classify and driving the classification from there so it does require a little bit of a human element on the front-end but once we get it worked out it can be fully automated you know there's lots of different sources and the quality of the data is not always there we've seen for example customers who have Excel spreadsheets and everything is just you're all over the place and we have to figure out a way to work with that and that's part of what our engineer success is so before we get to the integration piece can you been following this industry for for a while um security is really exciting space it's growing like crazy it's really hard I did a braking analysis piece you know a few weeks ago just talking about the fragmentation in the business you see startups coming out like crazy big valuations at the same time you see companies like Cisco with big portfolios yeah you mentioned Splunk before and they've kind of become a gold standard for for log files but very complex and you talk to security practitioners and they'll tell you our number one problem is just skillsets so get you know paint a picture of what's going on in the security world and what's in the house cisco is trying to address that so the security teams the analysts all the way up the management chain to the sea so they're under tremendous pressure their businesses are growing and so when their businesses are growing the sort of a tax base is growing and the business is growing faster than they can protect it so with the sort of increase in the economy more money more investment to build more point products so you've got a very stressed team a lot of turnover skill sets aren't great and what do we do as an industry we just give them more technology right more tools more tools complexity avalanche ok they're buried all right so we feel and we've made great strides within the security group within Cisco is we're taking the products that we have and we're integrating them under one platform so that it is in a bunch of point products and so that the that's what everybody else is doing I mean the other guys are acquiring companies then they're trying to integrate those because the customers are saying I don't need another point protocol yeah yeah it's too much so you know with us that's the way we approach it and now with the platform that's going to be launching this year the cisco threat response that we've launched you're gonna see later on in this year that we will be selling and positioned in implementing the entire platform yeah so I have a stat I came up with this and my one of my analyses it was the the worldwide economy is like 86 trillion and we spent about 0.014 percent on security so we're barely scratching the surface so this sort of tools avalanche probably isn't gonna change though integration becomes an extremely important aspect of the customer journeys and it's through that and to continue on that point you just made as well - I believe in our Cisco cybersecurity report from 2017 only fifty four six percent or fifty seven percent of actual threats are being investigated remediated so there's always that need to kind of help build bridge that gap make it easier for people to understand these threats and and mitigate and prioritize know what to go after right which part the integration exactly so we do have a lot of different integration services as well - for example I mentioned our sim integration service one thing that we can really do that's really awesome with that is we're able to deploy for example with Splunk a full-fledged stealthWatch for Splunk application that allows you to utilize stealth watches capabilities directly inside of Splunk without having to actually store an index any data inside of Splunk so all these api's are on demand inside of this app and available throughout the rest of the Splunk capabilities as well so you can extend it into other search reporting correlate that against other sets of data that you have and Splunk you can do quite a bit with it we also have other ways absolutely advantage of that is just obviously integration you're not leaving the environment plus its cost you're saving customers money a lot of a lot of customers kind of see their sim as a single pane of glass so being able to bring that stealthWatch value into that single pane is a huge win for our customers not to mention that reduction in licensing costs as well we have other ways to that we can reduce licensing costs some customers like to send their flow data into their sim for deeper analytics and long-term retention and we have a service we call it our flow adapter service and through this service we're essentially able to take buy flow off of the stealthWatch flow collectors and the buy flow is essentially when the raw net flow hits the stealthWatch flow collectors it's coming from multiple different routers and switches on the network this is gets converted into bi flow which is bi-directional deduplicated stitched together flow records so right there by sending that data into a sim or a data Lake as opposed to ronette flow we see data reduction cost anywhere from 15 to 80% depending on how the customers network is architected great any any favorite customer examples you have that you can share where ya guys have gone in you know provided these services and and it's had an outcome that got the customer excited or you found some bad guys or there's one that's one of my favorites so we have this service we call it our asset discovering classification service and I mentioned the host tree of automation service that's if you have some sort of authoritative source we can pull that information in but if a customer doesn't have that authoritative source they don't know what's on their network and a lot of times too they want to do a segmentation effort they're undergoing network segmentation but they need to understand what's on their network how these devices are communicating and that's where our asset discovery classification service comes in we're able to pull in telemetry not just from stealthWatch but other sources such as ice tetration Active Directory I Pam's again as well and we're able to essentially profile these different devices based off of the nature of their behavior so we were at a kind of a large technology company and we were essentially in this effort trying to segment their security cameras and upon segmenting their security cameras we were able to build this report where we can see the security camera and how its communicating with the other parts of the network and we noticed that there was essentially two IP addresses from inside of their network that were accessing all these different security cameras but they were not authorized to so with this service we were able to see that these different these two hosts were unauthorized actually accessing these devices that got reported up through the management chain and ultimately those two employees were no longer at that technology permanence that was discovered nice to love it alright bring us on we're here in the dev net zone sort of all about hit for structures code and software and and and and talk a little bit about the futures where you see this all going yeah so for us for Cisco security the future is really bright we've either built or acquired a portfolio that the customers really need that get absolute outcomes that customers need and through the customer experience organization certainly stealthWatch is fitting into the broader play to to get customers who have all those technologies get that operational and get them success so when we talked last summer I told you the jury was still out we would see how the journeys gonna go and the journey has started it has gotten much better since the summer and this year I think we're gonna be doing some great things for our customers just we can't get in too much of the business but stealthWatch customers are still expanding because I think we told you last time customers can never get enough stealthWatch okay the attack surface is too big right so so we we feel really good about that and the other technologies that they're building really fit into what customers need we're going to the cloud so they're gonna be able to consume cloud on-prem hybrid protect networks the campus protect their cloud infrastructure so we're really checking a lot of boxes in our group brings it all together and takes all the complexity out of that for customers just to get them the outcomes that I named us Cisco is one of my four star security companies for 2020 okay based on spending data that we share from our friends at ETR and the reason was because cisco has both a large presence in the market and but also you have spending momentum I mentioned 22% you know growth last quarter and the security business but you've also got the expertise you put your money where your mouth is you know the big portfolio which helps if you can bring it together and do these types of integrations it simplifies the customers environment and so that's a winner in my book so I named you along with some other high fliers right you know and you see some really interesting startups coming out and probably acquisition targets probably something that aren't your radar but guys thanks so much for coming on the cube thank you thank you I keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest is a Dave Volante for the cubes 2 min Amanda John Faria are also in the house at Cisco live Barcelona right back

live from San Francisco it's the cube covering IB time thing 2019 brought to you by IBM welcome back to the cubes coverage day one IBM think 2019 I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Volante we're in San Francisco where IBM think the second IBM think is at this new rejuvenated Moscone Center we're welcoming back to the cube being a home and VP of offering management from IBM being it's great to have you back on the program good morning and we're welcoming to the cube Alistair Simon VP of storage development at IBM welcome yeah thank you good to be here so we're gonna be here for four days big event being and we were talking before we went live expecting 25 to 30,000 people at the second annual IBM think which is this conglomeration of what five just six what used to be disparate shows talk to us about some of the exciting announcements coming out from with respect to data protection storage cyber resiliency yeah no this is a great event as you said this is our second first time in San Francisco here and a great venue we have close to 30,000 clients and participants here is a big event right you know the topics around an announcements you'll hear about around you know cloud multi cloud solutions ai security infrastructure right so in general quite a broad set of new topics at announcements that think but from a storage perspective you know we've done a number of new announcements or doing number of new announcements around things were doing around made-up data protection around solutions in general whether it's blockchain cyber resiliency private cloud solutions those types of things and then of course around our Flash systems offerings so we have a great set of announcements occurring this week I know you guys have to think about you know put on your binoculars and think about what's coming next so wonder if we could talk about some of the big drivers vina that you're seeing in the marketplace and Alister that you're driving in in development I mean data obviously if we talks about data but we talk about data differently than we used to talk about a ten years ago cloud obviously is a mega trend you're mentioning some new technologies like blockchain Nai what are the big drivers that you guys look at and how does that affect your development roadmaps yes certainly from a you know industry perspective and what clients are dealing with and looking to for solutions for from us you mentioned few you know AI having that end-to-end data pipeline and set of capabilities we made a number of announcement second half of last year around AI solutions that allow clients to start from the beginning all the way to the end and meet their data needs from whether its high performance you know storage and and ingest to capacity tiers being able to hold large amounts of data and having that complete into in solution whether it's with our power AI enterprise or some of the things we did around our spectrum storage for AI within Nvidia so you know a lot of focus around AI but also as clients are getting more and more into moving some of their cloud were close to the cloud or leveraging multi-cloud you know today clients are about 20% on their cloud journey there's still that 80% that's there that we need to help them with and a lot of the solutions today they tend to from a cloud perspective proprietary potentially you know inconsistent set of management tools so being able to help clients and focus on multi cloud solutions that's a big area for us as well and then cyber resilience ease the other yeah and I think just talking about the multi cloud aspect clearly when we develop our products were very focused on being able to connect to the different cloud protocols that are required to move the data from the storage out there to the cloud and do it in a performance related way I think the other thing from an analytic standpoint is really important is we've been very focused in delivering the performance in the storage system that's required both from a bandwidth and sheer I UPS perspective very low latency and you'll see that with some of the technologies we brought out very recently in our all-flash arrays where we're all nvme based both connected to the servers and to the storage so really low latency for applications so you can get the data as fast as you can into the annum engines so very focused on these new technologies that enhance the new capabilities Benny you mentioned something interesting I always love stats a geek out Dave knows this about me the customers are about 20% of the way into their cloud journey we we talk about it as a journey all the time right Dave digital transformation that's an interesting number you also mention some of the something that IBM is really poised to help customers achieve is this this AI journey from beginning to end if a customer is in this process of digital transformation and has what are the stats and average Enterprise has you know between five private and public clouds what is that AI journey obviously it has to be concurrent with a cloud journey there's no time that actually do one person than the other but I'm curious what is the beginning of that ai journey for a customer who is going alright we're in this hybrid multi cloud world that's where we live we have to start preparing our data for AI because we know on multiple levels there's a tremendous amount of opportunity how do you help them start yeah you know and what we typically see for clients says they'll start out on some small AI projects in different different parts of their you know environment and those can start and you know server with internal storage or internal SSDs etc but pretty soon as they want to move that to an enterprise or more of the complete set of solution that requires more of the enterprise capability so as Alistair talked about right for ingests to be able to have the right set of solution whether it's you know having the right set of performance of latency attributes etc and making sure we're working and then and then the capacity tier so it's really important that you know and we do this with our clients as help them start with the with the initial footprint but then make sure that you know from an architecture perspective they're set up to be able to grow into that larger because analytics is all about you know that volume of data and you're kind of mining it so that's kind of the key there how's the first time I ever went to Tucson it was I was there for on a tape mission we had a largely a tape facility lots has changed I'm sure since then the development protocol the environment to hear a lot about two Pizza teams you know speed and agile can you talk a little bit about IBM's process development process yeah we're actually very much well down the road towards a drive to agile development throughout all of our development teams worldwide not just in Tucson and that brings a number of benefits to us it allows us to to quickly prototype new functions so that we can test them out with our clients very early in the development process we're not just waiting till the end of the cycle to try something just like a beta test which we do to a large extent but we want to forget with clients early in the cycle so we can get that initial feedback on designs to make sure that we've done the right thing and an example of that would be what we did with cyber resiliency and our safeguarded copy on our PS 8000 Enterprise array we worked with a large financial institution early on to model the design we were going to provide for that and then we worked with them through the introduction of it and through the early testing and we've put that out at the end of last year and seeing great demand for it so that allows you to take snapshots of your data make those snapshots immutable bad actors can't come in and delete that data and if somebody does correct corrupt your your production copy you can do a quick restore from it all done hand-in-hand with a client through the process this is a ransomware play is that right or not necessarily maybe we could take us through like a likely solution for a client you're creating ransomware you hear about air-gap but there's more to it there yeah so you know typical solution you know it's really around being able to work with clients to plan for because given these events are happening more and more frequently and if you assume that the bad guys are going to get in or they're already in and you need to you notice it's a matter of time then storage plays a huge role in the cyber resiliency plan right so it's really around planning then detect and recovery so we talked about it in that way and from a planning perspective we do a lot of things we insure clients data is on infrastructure that can't be compromised we ensure that they have things like air gap being air gapping is where you know if a bad actor gets into one environment they can't do something bad with the other environment think as you know creating a physical separation we have our tape solutions as a classical example but there's also technologies like immutable right ones read many we have that on our cloud object storage our spectrum scale software-defined storage offerings and then also around data data protection in general making sure you know your copies well snapshots it's essentially that you're setting up the snapshots in a way that they are secure you create that separation but that's the the planning phase another aspect of it that we hope clients was you know model that baseline operation what is the environment look like in under normal operations what are these storage you know infrastructure patterns what are the systems that are the most critical for your business and you know operations what's their day-to-day usage where are they once you have that established then it's all about monitoring and looking for abnormal activities and and if you do see some set of abnormal activities being able to detect that are spectrum protect offering that's a data protection we've built in analytics to look for things and patterns like malware ransomware right and be able to alert now once you've detected something like that being able to quickly recover from that is really important get the business up and running and that's where you know a lot of our storage offerings are automated from a data restore perspective being able to bring those copies back very quickly get your business running very quickly that's important and so all of these you know plan detect recover is where storage plays a huge role across all of that I'm curious we know that security issues are unfortunately commonplace every day through the at and I saw stopped the other day the average security breach will cost an organization upwards of 3.8 million dollars one of the the things I'm curious about is in your customer conversations we're talking about data protection at the storage level and infusing that technology with the intelligence and the automation to facilitate that recovery where are your conversations in a customer are they at the business level because I imagine you know security and protection is at the c-suite yeah this is about some of those how are those business objectives helping to officer facilitate development of the actual technology yeah these are definitely CIO types of conversations but we also you know once we engage in that conversation and go down that journey we work with the clients very closely we do the what we call design thinking kind of workshop so together with the client we work on what types of what are some of the you know top three things that from a business need perspective that they see and then we work to ensure that we come to what we call these Hills these goals that we define jointly and then Alistair and his team work to go over find those and as they're developing then work closely with the client to ensure that we're achieving what the you know what we both expected and deliver it to whether it's a starting with a minimal viable product to product izing or or full product ization and again I would say engaging with the clients early in the process is really important because we'll find out things like what are their you know security requirements within their own data centers which can vary from client to client and it helps us understand how to build in things like how do they want to manage their encryption keys in which particular ways they want for that to meet their own security requirements and it can drive different development strategies from that you guys were talking about spectrum protect earlier and just data protection in general it's a space that's heating up I was talking about Tucson before and tape and tape used to be backup that was it even the language is changing it's called data protection now some people call it data management which of course could mean a lot of things to a lot of different people if you're talking to a database person and different maybe from your storage person but the parlance is evolving and it fits into multi cloud people are trying to get more out of their backup than just insurance so what are you seeing is some of the drivers there how does it fit into your multi cloud strategy and what is ultimately IBM's data protection portfolio strategies yeah so you know tape in general one of the you know when you've got large amounts of data that you're looking to archive tape is a great solution and we are seeing more and more interest from you know cloud service providers leveraging tape as their archives here from overall data protection and data management perspective we think that that base is you know basic data protection and making sure that the data is available when you need it is there but we think that has also evolved to where you do things like snapshots write snapshots that uh that are in the native format so you can for operational recovery very quickly be able to restore those and over a period of time if you no longer need it you can back it up to traditional data protection from that snapshot based technology of course and you have the different cloud consumption models in cloud scale that are enabling you know clients to leverage other types of storage whether it's cloud tier or you know cloud object storage and in our portfolio so you've got the consumption models the scale that's driving some of that put on top of that some of the things we talked about like cyber resiliency right ensuring security and protecting that data from things like malware the bad actors right that's very important and then at the you know what we see coming forward from a transformation prospective client transformation is really bringing all of that together so you have your your data protection you've got your unstructured data whether you know I talked about cloud object storage our scale offerings you've got you know your your archive data but also then being able to put it all together and get value out of that a data by looking at the metadata we've introduced an offering in second half of last year or fourth quarter we call spectrum discover allows clients to be able to you know get a catalog of that metadata and very quickly be able to get view and insights into their environment but also be able to integrate that into their analytic workflow and be able to customize that metadata so you can see a holistic solution coming together from not just data protection all the way up through a complete a is DevOps analytics exact that's the recovery really I'm kind of you know if we think about this the matically from a transformation perspective is this really what you're talking about facilitating security transformation absolutely I mean you know security at all aspects whether it's you know the basic encryption of data at rest encryption of data and flying to the the higher level you know detection of these types of security breaches or events and also the protection even if somebody does breach you you still got the recovery point and say a safeguarded copy that you can go back to to make sure your data is restored so even going beyond the protecting against the breach itself fully encompassing and last question and in terms of that data protection where's the people element right because we all know that that's some common denominator of of any Toto sort of security issue is is people where where are what's the human element in the conversation about what you guys are delivering are there may be some human error proof components that are essential that you're helping to develop based on all the history that we've seen with breaches yeah I think you know overall from helping the client ensure that they've got their environment set up properly from a role based access control perspective ensuring that that separation and that in the overall solution is architected to include some of these capabilities whether it's air gap being or or you know the immutable technologies those types of things look you know whether the bad actors whether they're outside the company getting in or someone you know within the company you have to have the right set of measures that are implemented and it is around security encryption you know role based access control all of that well being Alastair thank you so much for joining David me on the cube this morning we appreciate your time and look forward to hearing a lot of more news coming out over the next four days great thank you very much yeah thank you for Dave Volante I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube live at IBM think 2019 stick around we'll be right back with our next guest [Music]