>> Voiceover: Live, from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering CITRIX Synergy, Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by: CITRIX. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend coming to you live from Atlanta Georgia, our first day of coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Keith and I are very pleased to welcome you to theCUBE. For the first time, Bob O'Donnell, the founder and president of Technalysis. Bob, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Great to be here I really appreciate it. It's my first chance to do theCUBE. It's exciting. >> We're so excited because you are no stranger to TV. Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC, Squawk Box, now theCUBE! >> Bob: And the now theCUBE! >> Keith: Most importantly- >> Bob: It completes the circle. >> He's a friend of Leo Laporte, which makes him a super star. >> All: (laughing) >> Well there you go. >> We're sitting in the presence of greatness. >> Oh, I don't know about that. But anyway, no, it's a pleasure to be here and it's nice to chat with you guys. It's a very interesting time that we're in. I mean, when we think about what's happening in the world. For years we've seen this move to cloud-based computing, and SaaS, and everything else. And everybody's excited about all of this stuff, and there's all these tools. And then on top of that, we thought, we have all these devices, right? We've got this amazing range of different devices we can use. But ironically, what it is, is we're in a state of too much of a good thing. It's too much. Even though if you think about it, you'd say, "Well, objectively, there's so much that "we could potentially do here. "I mean, we've got these tools that can do "this and this and this." But all of a sudden, "Well, except I got this one and this one, and this one. "And oh, by the way, if I want to send a message, "I can send it five different ways to Sunday, "and therefore if I want to read a message, "I have to be able to read it "five different ways from Sunday." And so, the challenge that you face is, and Citrix talked about it, I thought, quite nicely in their keynote this morning, is people get overwhelmed. And they just can't get productive with what they're trying to do. And so, what you need to do it figure out ways to turn that chaos into structure and order. And that's what they're trying to do with the workspace. And it looks pretty cool. >> Yeah, one of the offline conversations I had was you get all these tools. It's like somebody took a box of 10,000 Legos and just jumped it on your desk and said, "Build a masterpiece." And what I head this morning was the equivalent of what was like a Star Wars kid of like, "This is what you can build. Here's the directions, "and now you can start to deviate and customize it "for your environment." So one of the things that I'd love to get your input on is this concept of AI ML. This ideal of taking tasks and automating them. It's nothing new. We've tried this with macros and other areas. But the thing that was missing was, these tools were pretty dumb. >> Bob: Right. So the promise of ML AI should make these tools become real. What's your impression of the state of the technology versus what was presented today. >> Well, look, we're in very early days of AI and ML. There are some fascinating things out there. There's a lot of the high profile things that we hear about. The ImageNet and the ability to recognize every kind of dog known to mankind, and all the demos we've all seen at every other trade show. It really is, the fascinating part, exactly, to your point, is that the goal with AI and machine learning is to actually makes things understand. And it's fascinating because... I'll take a bit of a sidetrack but bring it back. When devices started to be able to recognize our words, we assumed, because we're human beings, that they recognized what we meant. But, no. There's a big jump between the words that you can transcribe, and what you actually mean. >> Yeah. That context. >> Context is everything. And context is something that, again as human beings, we take it for granted. But you can't take that for granted when it comes to technology and products. So, the beauty of AI as it starts to get deployed is how do we get the context around what it is that we're trying to do, what we meant to say. Of course, we all want that in real life: "What I meant to say was..." But, "what I meant to do was this." Or, "the task I want to do is that." So, taking that back to what Citrix is talking about is there are a lot of rote procedural things that people do in most organizations. And they gave the classic examples of proving the expense reports and this and that. So, clearly, some of those things they can pre-build. The micro apps, in a lot of ways, they really are macros. It's kind of a fancy macro. And that's fine, but the question is are they smart enough to kind of deviate, "Oh, well, there's a conditional branch "that it automatically builds in a macro "that I didn't have to think about "because it realizes in the context of what I'm doing "that it means something else." Or something like that. >> At the end of the day, I want to get the account balance, however that translates. As opposed to: take this column from row A and put it in row B. No, sometimes row A won't be the correct destination. I want the account balance. >> Right, right. >> And the other truth of the matter is we're still getting used to actually talking to our devices. We do that at home to some degree for people who have Alexas, unless they've decided to stop recording everything, and then that's a whole different subject. But, at work we don't. Interestingly, I remember when I first saw Cortana, for example, on a Windows machine. I thought, in a weird way, Cortana makes more sense because I should want... But it hasn't really happened. It hasn't played out. So there's some level of discomfort of talking to our devices and recognizing these things. So, I think there are cultural issues you still have to overcome. There are physical issues in the workplace, now. Now, when you have these open office environments, which doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that that was going to be a disaster. Whoever thought that was smart, man, let's take a look at where their degree came from. But that's the reality that people are in. So, you've got the physical environment challenges. You've got the cultural "how do I work with this?" environment. And then just starting to realize what it can actually do. And then, of course, you have the problem that it didn't recognize what it actually said. That's something stupid, and the original Siri problems that we all had. But, all of these things tie together because they're all different takes on what machine learning has the potential to do and what we think it should do, and what it can actually do. The one thing I will say is as we head towards 2020, I think we're going to start to finally see some of these things do what we thought they were going to do. They're going to start to have the context. They're going to start to have the intelligence. So, in the work space, it's going to have the ability to know what I mean when I say, "I need the account balance." Or, "I need to know where in the sales pipeline "this particular project is," or whatever task it is that I've got to deal with. And so, understanding that and then building the plumbing to do that is critical. One of the interesting things, if you look at what Citrix does, they're really all about plumbing. They have this ability to pull together all these different elements. From the beginning, what we started talking about. All these different applications over different types of network speeds and connections and make them all work. And yet, they present this very simplified, beautiful, nice little, you're like, "oh, this is great!" But, man, buried beneath there is a lot of stuff. And that's, to give them credit, that's what they're really good at doing. And companies now, the challenge is, a lot of companies have really old applications that they've got to kind of modernize in some way shape or form. And some of them are doing it on their own. They're doing the containerization and all the things we hear about as well. Some of them are wrapping them. Citrix, some of their original business, XenApp, was about app virtualization. Taking an old app and giving access in a modern way. So, again, it's doing that, but the other problem you have to bear in mind, excuse me, is that every company has a different combination of apps. They said 500 apps is normal. A lot of companies have more than that. >> Keith: Mhm. (affirmative) >> The problem is, it's not the same five hundred apps. This company has this set of 500 apps. This company has this set of 500 apps. This company has this set of 500 apps, and maybe 150 of them overlap, which means the long tail of 350 per company has to be dealt with and figured out. And that's, again, those are the problems that they're trying to solve and bring in to a unified environment. >> And also manage these growing expectations that all of us that are workers have from the consumer side of our lives. You mentioned Alexa and Siri, and we have these growing experiences that whether I'm talking to a device or I'm going on Amazon, I want it to know what I want. Don't show me something I've already purchased. And we have these expectations as humans and consumers that we want the apps when we get to work to understand the context and of course, we're asking a lot. In your opinion, where is Citrix in starting to help manage, helping their customers, rather, manage those growing expectations? >> I think Citrix has done a lot in that area. Even many, many years ago they were the first to come up with the notion of an enterprise app store. In the early days of the app store, they came out with this concept of, "We want to do an enterprise equivalent of that." When I download an app that I need to install on a work PC, make it easy to get at. So, from way back when they've been building on that. And then, the examples they gave today, the notification from the airline that your flight has changed, or whatever. Those are all the experiences that we're now used to thanks to cloud-based services. And their point is like, "Hey, why shouldn't we "have that at work, as well?" And so that's exactly what they're trying to work towards, is that notion of cloud-based notifications and services, and things, but related to the specific tasks I have to do. Because at the end of the day, they want to drive productivity. Because we all waste stupid amounts of time, and truth be told, the bigger the company you're at, the more time you waste because of just keeping up. I used to work at a big research firm of 1200 people, and literally half my day, every day, was just procedural stuff. I didn't actually work on the stuff that I thought I was hired to do, except for maybe half the day. And with a lot of people, that's very common. So, anything that can be done to reduce that and allow people to get through the procedural stuff a little bit more efficiently, and then actually let them do the work that they were hired to do and that they'd like to do, and oh, by the way, gives them more satisfaction. All of these things tie together. People tend to say, "Oh well, you know, "that's nice to do, this consumerization of IT, "that's nice." It's not just nice. It's actually practical. It's actually a real productivity enhancing capability. And I think Citrix has done an excellent job of driving that message. It's hard to to do because, again, the complexity of the plumbing necessary is super difficult. But their head and their heart are in the right place in terms of trying to achieve that. >> Well, it sounds absolutely like not a "nice to have," but business-critical. One of the stats that David Henshall, their CEO, said this morning, and Keith's been mentioning a number of times, is that he said there's 7 trillion dollars wasted on output because employees are not able to get to their functions that they were hired for in a timely manner. >> Right. >> So, there's a huge addressable market there of opportunity but also the consumerization that's personalization expectation is huge to not just making me, Lisa Martin, as an employee happy, but my business's customers that I'm dealing with. I think of a sales person, or even a call center support person. If they don't have access to that information, "She already called in about this problem 'with her cable ISP," that person is going to go turn, and go find another option that's going to fulfill their needs much better. >> That's absolutely right. And that was the interesting point that they made. And that's what they're trying to do with the intelligent work space is to move beyond just providing these apps, but actually personalizing it to each individual and being able to say, "All right, each of us are going to have a workspace." Sort of, it looks kind of like a news feed kind of a thing. Each one is going to be different though, based upon, obviously, the different tasks that we do, the order with which we do them, the manner with which we do them." So it does get personalized. The notifications, you know, I may want certain notifications that you don't really care about as much. But that's fine. We can each create that level of personalization and customization. And again, what Citrix is trying to do, and it was a key point that P.J. made, is, "Look, we're not just building an application. "We're building a platform." And that's... The significance of that is big. And remember, he came from Microsoft. He worked on Windows. He worked on Office. So, he's got a long history of working on building platform based tools that have tools that you can build on. That have APIs and ways for other people to add to. So, all of those are critical parts of how they tell that story, and how they get people enthralled enough to say, "Hey, I'm going to make the commitment to do it." Because look, it's a lot of work. Let's not kid ourselves. If I'm not a Citrix shop, but I go, "Damn, that's cool!" There's a fair amount of effort to make all this stuff actually happen. So, it's a commitment. But, once they get them hooked it's a pretty sticky type of environment. Especially as they continue to deliver value and personalization and customization. That, at the end of the day, drives productivity. And that's a pretty straight forward message: "Hey, we can save your workers time "and make them happier." Well, who doesn't want that, right? >> So, let's talk about engaging your customers. Like, I can look at this, and I can easily, say I can come to a conference like this and say, "Wow, I really want the output. I don't want "any of that employee experience stuff. "That stuff just sounds hard, "but the output I definitely want." Talk to me about the evolution of your customers as you walk them through if you want the output, here's what you have to do. And talk to me about, specifically, the success stories of where they didn't get it, and then after you've engaged them, they got it. >> Well, there's so many different variations out there. But, at the end of the day, every company out there is dealing with the fact that they have workers that work in a lot of places on a lot of devices and they have to allow them to get stuff done. And so, it's about how much are they willing to do to make that happen? But there's the psychology of it. There is the whole, "how much of this am I willing to outsource?" Versus, "I really want to keep it inside." So, it depends on the industry and the level of if they are a regulated industry, and all those things have an enormous impact on how they do this. But, if you think back, Citrix's original business was, a lot of it, was again, around desktop virtualization, and actually trying to get really old school stuff, I'm taking mainframe green screen stuff, to actually run on an old Windows PC. And that was kind of a lot of what they did, initially. And then, of course, they've built on from there. So, all along the way, you see different organizations. Citrix has been thought of more as more of the old school kind of enterprise software. Along with an SAP or an Oracle so something like that. I think they've done a particularly good job of being cloud native, cloud aware, and working with these cloud-based tools. Because early on, when we think about what happened with SaaS applications, people thought that was going to dramatically change how anybody did software. And it did, but not in the way people expected. So, I'm trying to get an answer, specifically, to your question, but I think what it is is what they're doing, and what companies who deploy it find is that they can take even these completely different types of software and services, and ServiceNow, and Salesforce, and Workday, and all these kinds of things that are dramatically different, but still, again, have overlapping functionality if I use all of them, and conflict or counteract or interact, or need to interact with other tools I already have that I'm working to change. So, again, what I think that what Citrix has done a good job is they're able to look at the wide range of stuff that people have in that 500 group of apps, or whatever it is, and be able to say, "All right, ten of those are cloud-based services. "But we've got 490 other ones we've got to deal with." And they have different levels of technologies to deal with those. So, what companies can do is they can also pick and choose. They can say, "Look, we're not going to get all 500 apps in our workspace." Maybe they just decide, "But we're going to do these twelve, "five of which are SaaS-based, "and then we've got a couple other critical ones "that we have to do, and that hits 80% of our workers." And they can tackle it that way. So, the bottom line is companies who... Look, it's a big investment up front. So the process is you have to psychologically say, "I'm willing to make an investment in," not obviously, just now, but their roadmap. What they're doing. What they're talking about. That's why they talk a lot about the future because if I buy into this ecosystem, I'm committed. Right? Again, I talking about that earlier: The stickiness question. So, companies who are doing this kind of thing, companies who are trying to make sense of all these applications have to be willing to make those big investments. It used to be, it used to have a huge Citrix server farms, as well. Obviously, with the development of the Cloud and Citrix Cloud, that's all changed. But, it's still a big investment, and they have to work to figure out ways to do this. And if they do, to finally get to, you know, they do see productivity savings. I mean, Citrix is, I don't remember the numbers, but they can qualify actual time saved when their solutions are installed, and that's the benefits that these companies get. So, they have to measure how much is my employee time worth versus the cost of getting these things deployed? >> Well, and I think that's going to be a differentiator for them. I wish we had more time because we could keep talking to you for a long time, but you got to add theCUBE to your list of TV: Bloomberg, CNBC, >> Bob: It's all there. Hey, I'm excited. >> Squawk Box, Now, theCUBE. Bob, it has been such a pleasure to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> We appreciate your time. >> Thanks so much. Appreciate being here, thank you. >> Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live from CITRIX Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California it's theCUBE covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT. We are wrapping a two-day show. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We saved the best for last. We have Ben Gibson, Chief Marketing Officer and Monica Kumar, SVP Products and Solutions at Nutanix. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having us. >> Yeah. >> So congratulations on a great show. 6,500 attendees and 20,000 were live streaming. We had Mark Hamill, Jessica Abel is speaking next. Energy, a great vibe. Congratulations, you both get a well-deserved vacation after this. But I want you to, Ben, close out the event and tell us a little bit about what you hope the attendees is come away with. >> Yeah thanks, and thanks to theCUBE for joining us here-- >> You are welcome. >> It's a long marathon, right, over the last two days. And thank you for the great coverage you provide for this event. Yeah, we're thrilled with the event, and for us, it really starts with getting even deeper, more connected with our customers, right? And so we do great keynotes and there's a lot of new product announcements which I know have been covered in good detail throughout the last two days. But at the core of it, it's how do we make our customers better positioned for how they do their jobs. So it's training and certification and networking with their peers, and you hear that all over the place. And so as excited as I've been over the last three days with the event and the grandeur of it all, the thing that really gets me pumped up the most is when I see these ad-hoc groups that just come together in a hallway, and they sit down. I go over and say, what're you guys up to? and we're like, well, this is like our AHV mashup group, and we get here and we talk about key challenges we have, key opportunities, best practices tips, and so it's that network effect for me above anything else is what is at the heart of this show. >> One of the highlights we pointed out yesterday and today in our intro was the community vibe you have here. You have a great loyal customer base, Net Promoter Score of 90 which is a monster number, congratulations. But it's a small intimate event, you guys were able to not make it a trade show but a conference that was intimate, content driven, content value with nice tracks. Lots of comments on the tracks. So a lot of good highlights. So my question to you Ben and Monica, what's your highlight so far? >> You know, I'll take this one. As a newbie, I'm one of the newest members of the team at Nutanix and this is my first .NEXT. Even though you say it's a small event, it's still 6,500 plus people and about 20,000 attendees online right. So I think it's still sizable, but the beauty is that we're still able to maintain that community feeling. And so for me the most exciting part was not only meeting with customers like our SisAdmins, DevOps folks, developers, IT directors, CIOs, partners, our own employees, we're like bringing everybody together here to discuss how we can make things better for the customers, and what are things that are working and how can we improve. So I think to me that's one of the biggest thing I'm taking away as I go back, is what we can take as a feedback and how we can do things better in how we bring products to the market. >> Ben, highlights for you? >> Yeah for me, well first of all, I got to interview my boyhood idol, Mark Hamill. (laughter) >> Pretty cool. >> And that was a lot of fun, right. And we've just gone through in an hour and half of great content, our Nutanix Mine announcement, that was great, we announced AHV support on frame. So that was exciting to me and then, the cool thing about our show is we like to mix it up with something that's really fun. And in my case and I know with many people in the arena, and I saw the meet and great afterwards, to bring out Mark Hamill. I had to contain myself because I am a big Star Wars geek at my core, and we had a great conversation. And you know when you feel the room, I felt the room of 6,500 hanging on his every word, right? And he talked about persistence in his career, how he started out, all the rejection he got earlier on. We talked about his career journey, so on a really fun way, it kinda connects with a lot of journeys we have with the professionals in the room that are going through a lot of change and rejection or taking a risk or a chance on new disruptive technology. >> Yeahm it's really been a home run. First of all, the theme of having of Star Wars and Mark here was really great because the demographic, we all love Star Wars, so nice connection-- >> Who doesn't? >> Nice connection to the tech audience but your customers consistently say in theCUBE and off theCUBE, in the hallways and other conversations that they took a bet with Nutanix and it paid off. And that's the rebel kind of mindset inside these cultures of pre-existing legacy, vendors, and so you guys are breaking through. This is a big part of the marketing, is to enable those rebels to be now the mainstream. >> Yeah it's, you know you're right, it's rebellion, you know, that's spreading and growing, but as a marketer here, there's plenty of conversation about how we differentiate, right, and the outcomes we create for the customers but then when I see one of our early customers, and we opened the conference, he shared a picture where he was flying in a Cessna plane over the Grand Canyon, and he had his iPhone, he was managing his clusters with Prism on his iPhone. And what he said was the outcome for me, yeah there's total cost of ownership, yes, there's high performance levels, you can go through the traditional outcomes that IT folks look at. But at the end of the day he said, I'm able to spend more time with my family, and that sounds kinda cheesy, but it's real, and you sense that and you learn about that when you're here with customers. And with Monica coming on board, yeah, we've always been great, I think, at marketing and communicating our technology advantage but it's about more than that, right? >> Yeah. >> Talk about about your role, you have a stellar career, you're now new to Nutanix, you're not new to the industry. What's your focus? What you're gonna be working on? >> As with everything we do at Nutanix, it's all about the customer, so we are obsessed with making sure that the customer has the best experience, whether it's with product quality or how we take our products to market. How we message it to connect to what problem that they need to solve. So I think the biggest challenge we have as a company, the opportunity is, we know the customers are moving to the cloud. Customers are embarking on journeys to a modernized infrastructure. They are embarking on journeys to be able to use multiple different clouds. There is a lot of complexity out there, so our opportunity is to simplify that complexity for the customer. So that's what I am going to undertake with Ben here, is come up with right solutions, the right packaging, the right messaging, the right offers for our customers that can make it easy for them to get on their journey that they choose to get on to the cloud. >> Rebecca and I were talking about on the kickoff yesterday, 10 years old, CUBE's ten years old, so we've been following you guys for a long time as well. You're growing up. You're still a young company, you've said you're a billion dollar startup. >> Yeah. >> That's the culture. What's next for you guys? What's the goal? What's the objective? Because you've built a great community organically, your content is on the mark at the conferences, also digitally, there's nice organic kind of discovery for your customers, are learning about Nutanix. Word of mouth is big, network effect you mentioned, new cultural, younger generation. So you got a lot of things working for you. What's next? >> Well, thank you. I agree with those things, (laughter) but I tell you, here's one thing I've been thinking about towards the opportunity. So if you look at the past year, and I talked about this in our recent investor day, that if you look at the amount of IT Spin tied to traditional three-tier data center architecture, storage, network, compute, running in separate silos, hundred billion plus in annual spin. Hyper conversions, great new modernizing infrastructure play, the market spend on that this year is probably five billion. So if you think about that, I think about only 5% of the legacy world been modernized. And I am not claiming a 100%, but I am claiming well north of an opportunity, well north of 5% to get there. So fundamentally, the first thing what's next is there's a lot of green field left to take advantage of here and for customers to understand the value, human value, as well as financial and operational value, of what we're up to here with our customers. And so that's next, and then at a higher level, and I know it's something Dheeraj and Sunil talk a lot about, it's, we've hyper-converged infrastructure, made that essentially invisible, much grander ambition, how do you hyper-converge clouds, how do you take the complexity Monica was just talking about and provide a lot of simplicity for App Mobility and the like and take that to the next level. So to me, there's still the core mission. We're just getting started right. >> You know I asked Sunil that question, I said, how do you make that happen? And he had a great comment. We weren't on camera, I wish he had said that on theCUBE. We were off theCUBE before. He said, "Well, people tasted Amazon, they tasted cloud, "and now they are gonna bring that "mojo to the enterprise on the premises, "because they realize the benefits of cloud by itself. "But they can't get everything to the cloud. "So they gotta get modernized on premises "and operating model, not so much a refresh." >> To add to that, if you think about the role of technology right, the role is to make our lives easier, whether it's at work or in our personal lives, so I think the next big frontier is all around automation. I think this whole move to the cloud is because people want to automate a lot of the mundane tasks, we've talked about that in the past with data and such. I think the same applies to infrastructure, so you're gonna see us really focused a lot more on, how can we help IT automate? A lot of the, you know, keeping the lights on type of tasks which could actually be easily be done by the machine or in the cloud or by the software, human beings then can focus on more important things. >> Right whether it's being over the Grand Canyon with your children or meaty tasks of our jobs. >> Exactly so it's about making IT become a service provider rather than a cost center. I think that's what we're gonna enable with our softwares, we continue to go forward. >> I'd love you to comment on Ayanna Howard, Dr. Ayanna Howard's keynote this morning, where she talked about actually smart machines working together with smart humans, and how that's really the collaborative AI, and that's really where the future is heading. How do you think about that, and how do you message that, and how do you approach that within Nutanix? >> Yeah I totally agree, it's not human versus the machine. It really is human plus the machine. It's the combination which is gonna be most powerful in how we adopt technology to make things better for us. Like I said, whether in our personal lives or work lives. I know a lot of examples in my own personal life that I can see how machines or softwares changed the things I used to do before which I don't do anymore. There's lots of examples, I know when growing up in India, we washed our clothes by hand and now we have, when I moved to U.S., we have the laundry machine, right? I mean, there's lots of small, small things that are happening now, we talk to our Alexas and we can command people, to call people, to turn the music on, to turn the lights off and what not. And I actually have benefited from those, my parents, I'll give you an example, I have older parents who live at home, and now it's amazing, my mom can say, Alexa turn off the light, or turn on the light if they have to wake in the middle of the night, guess what it's not dark anymore, the light gets turned on, it's a real use case, you know. (laughter) They won't trip and fall. So I'm like thank you Alexa (laughs). So I do think that power of machine and human is the combination where we're going next, and I think Sunil touched on it somewhat in his keynote too. We're talking about autonomous data centers, right. That's exactly what it is. We are injecting more of machine learning, more of AI technology in how we are analyzing the operations, and then how we act on the predictive intelligence that we're getting from the operations to fix things before they break. >> Ben, I want to ask you a question on the marketing side because one of the things that came out of the top stories that we identified here at the show was the move to software. It's a big part of Nutanix next generation shift and growth is gonna come from just software, not hardware, just a software company. And also Dheeraj mentioned that he has a new customer, Wall Street, (laughter) and so he has to manage that. He had a great answer on how he's gonna balance the short term Wall Street-ers and the long game that you guys play at the Nutanix, so you got the software transition, the middle of it, different economics, software economics are much more stronger than process improvement, box changing, changing boxes in a data center. So software's going to be a nice impact across the long game, but Wall Street may not understand that software, and as you guys go to the next level, from hiring and marketing software, how are you guys thinking about that? I know it's about a year under your belt now with software, what's the orientation? What's your posture for to the marketplace with the software play? >> That's a good question. I'm sure, you know, Dheeraj likes to talk about Wall Street and Main Street, right, and how do you balance the two. And yeah we are disrupting along established market. We are moving from hardware to software now rapidly in subscription-based consumption models, and we're doing all that at the same time we're growing at the rates we're growing. And so it's a lot of juggling in the air, right? >> And I'll throw channel in there too, you gotta channel the merging, your partner strategy is looking really good. The HPE relationship is I think a great signal, potentially, in more local expansion, more breadth channel marketing on the table (laughs). New things. >> I mean, the way I think about it, as a marketer here, is, you know, and Monica touched on this, how do we create and provide offers to market that take advantage of the freedom of choice of consumption of Nutanix, right. And then how do you take those to market through your sale organization, how do you increasingly take new offering and capability to market through the product itself, which is a well-worn practice in the SaaS world. And then the channel partners is a key part of this because the partners that really, and I met with many here this week that really on top of this, they want to build that value-added practices that are about providing new services and offerings on top of that software, and then to be able to offer it in effective ways. The marketer has think about how do we incentivize, how do we package, how do we message to bring these to the market. It's candidly a transition for us, but it's an exciting one. At the end-- >> And you guys, and you were open about it too, you recognize that it's happening. >> Yeah, and I see it, you know, those moves can be challenging, but those are also moves I think that Wall Street likes. >> Evaluational increase. >> So we're nearly finished with this conference, but we're already think ahead to the next one in Copenhagen. So talk a little about that, and then Nutanix Americas in 2020. >> Well good, so we're looking forward to taking the show across the pond to Copenhagen. We had a great, our Europe event last year in London was amazing, right. We had record turnout. We had close to, for a user conference, 35% of attendees were not even customers of Nutanix yet. And often for these conferences you see more existing users and then maybe some, and we so expect that trend to continue. We have a lot of traction across Europe, Copenhagen is a beautiful city. There'll be plenty new to announce there, so I can't leak anything early on that front yet. But that's gonna be exciting show. >> Come on. (laughter) >> It's taste. >> We won't tell anyone. >> And I'm sure he's gonna be hobnobbing with yet another celebrity in Copenhagen. I've renamed his title. He is the Chief Celebrity Officer at Nutanix now. >> Well, he and Mark Hamill are-- >> That's right. >> But we're best friends now. (laughter) >> And he was with Magic Johnson earlier. I have a long list of people he's been-- >> You're killing us. >> No, he is. (laughter) >> Yeah, Freddie Jackson. >> Well you know, all joking aside, it's customer experience. And if it's all business, it's all product and all technology, right, then you know, that's a certain level of experience, but part of this is the community and the happiness that we see in our customers is we make them happy, both in the technology we deliver, the partnership we enjoy with them, but then also some fun experiences we deliver to them. And that's the spirit of this show. >> Yeah you guys do a great job. I want it like highlight and also get your thoughts, and I want you to share with folks watching 'cause you guys do a great job on the content programs at your events, the mix and match up of the core meat on the tech bone, the solutions, but balance of guest hosts, guest celebrities kind of blend in the theme. What's the secret sauce? What's the playbook? What's the thinking behind lot of the content and how's that gonna translate digitally because you guys mix it up, it's not just all Nutanix all the time. You got partners, you got people from outside the industry, seems to reinforce, the threads kinda connect together. What's the, how do you guys think about that? >> Yeah well, the secret sauce at the core of this, Julie O'Brien, a woman named Erin Alonso on my team. We have a strong, small but mighty, very creative events team that understands that at the end of the day this is about learning, but it's also about show business too, right. And people want to come to relax, to learn, and to have fun too, and I think it's balancing the two. But it's not just, okay it's Mark Hamill, because he was in Star Wars. It's because we knew Mark had such a tight, iconic connection with our core demographic, in terms of the core customers we have, and I saw our customers, some with tears in their eyes when they were able to meet him afterwards. And so, okay there's, and I was joking hyper-convergence, I was talking to Mr. Hamill, I said, hyper-convergence, hyper-space, right, there's ways to connect the two together. But there's technology at the heart of both of that. So it's just a new and unique and surprising way, and one thing, I close with, we endeavor in marketing here when we run our campaigns, when we do our events, surprise and delight. Surprise and delight. It's inherent in the product with one click, and everything we do there, and we'd like to think it's inherent in our marketing and also an event like this. Surprise and delight. >> So Monica who'd your hero be up there on the stage? Who do you want to see at the next-- you boss is right here, (laughter) this is your chance to influence-- >> Oh my god, okay. If you really wanna know (laughs), he'll have to fly in from Bombay India, the movie star Shah Rukh Khan. He's got known as SRK. But he is a world-famous icon. So there you go, next one SRK. Talk to Sunil about it, he knows about SRK. >> We hear you. >> Note, noted. >> Well then Monica, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE, always a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You've been watching theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO, 2018. Brought to you by, Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee, this is Commvault Go and you're watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host, Keith Townsend And we're going to get a little cloudy. Happy to welcome to the program, Sabina Joseph, who's the Global Segment Director with Amazon Web Services, welcome back to the program. >> Thank you very much for having us here, >> Miniman: And also welcome to the program, first time, Jeanna James, who's the Worldwide Cloud Alliances Leader with Commvault, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Alright, so, we're looking at the ecosystem that Commvaults have, Sabina, why don't you give us a little bit on the history, and what's going on, between Amazon, and Commvault. >> I think I'm going to have Jeanna kind of kick that off, and then we will >> sure! Yeah! >> Add some comments! >> I'll take that, so we started our relationship over five years ago, and it's been a strong and growing relationship since that time. We started off with S3 integration, and we write natively to Amazon S3, and now our integration points have just become deeper and wider, so, S3, S3IA, Glacier, Snowball, we have full support across the Amazon services, and, about three years ago, Amazon started the storage Competency Program, and Commvault is a storage Competency Partner, and so with that launch, we started to do more on the go to market side, so we started off with that integration, and the technology side, and now today are expanding more on the go to market, and Sabina you want to talk a a little bit about that? >> Absolutely, thank you, Jeanna. Thank you for that question. So our collaboration indeed started five years ago, and Commvault has always embraced our best practices around technology and go to market. They've always focused on getting the technical integrations with our services right, prior to engaging on go to market and sales initiatives. They have launched a joint practices website on their webpages, which talks about our collaboration, our solutions, and also jointly validated reference architectures. We engaged early on in the channel. In addition, when AWS is about to launch services and new features, we engage Commvault's technical team early on, and wherever possible, Commvault has always participated in our beta launches. This is actually one of the reasons why Commvault has a wide integration across Amazon S3, S3IA, Glacier, Glacier Vault Lock, and different versions of Snowball. >> Yeah, so, Sabina, those of us that watch the industry, watching this storage segment, and how AWS relates to it has been one of the most fascinating stories there. At this conference, we're really enjoying getting to talk to some of the customers, we know that Amazon's always listening very much to the customers, what can you tell us about what you're hearing from the customers, and how is that impacting the focus of what you're doing together? >> Well, as you know, AWS is very focused on the customer, and Commvault has always embraced this vision, making sure to launch solutions that mutually delight our customers. Every year, our technical and our executive teams meet, to set the initiatives for the year, both on the business and the technical front. This is on of the reasons why solutions such as data disaster recovery, healthcare data protection solutions, and AIML solutions, really speak to Commvault's commitment to the Cloud, and we are also very open with each other on recommendations. They have given us recommendations on our services, and we have done the same with Commvault, and we very much welcome these suggestions. All of this has laid a very strong foundation for our collaboration, and we look forward, and we will expect to see continued strong growth in the coming years. >> So, data, we've heard it said time and time again, the new currency, super important, Amazon obviously a leader in Cloud storage, talk to us about what's happening around data protection, data management, at AWS Cloud. >> Well, when we talk to our customers, one of the very first workloads, there in fact moving into the Cloud is backup of data, and with this cloud-first initiative in mind, they are embracing cloud-based solutions around data protection and data management. As you might be aware, the amount of data that customers are needing to protect is growing two-fold every two years, and challenges around ransomware means that traditional industries, and heavily regulated industries, like financial services, healthcare, are moving data into the Cloud because of our collaboration for over five years, Commvault has a wide array of solutions to address these customer needs available on AWS globally. >> Yes, and just to add to that, with AWS over the last two years, we've seen 100% growth year over year, and we continue to expect additional growth >> absolutely >> with AWS and our customer base, and typically, what we see, is customers will start with backup and recovery and sending backup data into the could, and then once they get that data into the Cloud they start to use it. Let's test disaster recovery incident, and see if it works? Wow, it worked, great! Once it works, then they start moving more clothes into the Cloud, and protecting the data across regions, and all over the world, and so that's one of the great benefits that we have with Amazon and Commvault together. >> Congrats on the progress that you've been making, sounds like you've got some good proof points. As this is maturing, what feedback are you getting from customers, what are they asking you to do, to expand this partnership even further? >> Thank you for that question, as Jeanna knows, customers are always looking for a wide integration of Commvault solutions across our services. They want to use the rich features that Commvault has on premises, in the hybrid architecture model, and also for workloads that are running completely on AWS, and once this data moves into the Cloud they want to do more with this data. This is actually one of the reasons why we are working together, to have Commvault integrate across our machine learning services, like transcribe, translate, which means that customers can extract more value from this data, improve their time to market, and potentially even create net new solutions using this data. >> So from a Commvault perspective, we see, just like Sabina said, more and customers going through digital transformations, and when they go through those digital transformations, they've been sold on things like, we want to lower cost, and we want to have more agility with our business, and one of our big customers that's here today, Dow Jones, talks about that story, where they've gotten rid of a lot of their data centers, moved a lot of their infrastructure into the Cloud and so they've been able to become more agile as a business because of moving to the Cloud with Commvault and AWS, so, we hope that you'll take some time and hear some of the customers' stories out there, while you're here. >> Yeah, we'll listen to customers, and as customers are making that digital business transformation, what have you been hearing, or what are some of the trends you're seeing, and what are customers thinking about, and specifically in this collaboration, what are you guys thinking about when it comes to digital transformation and the impact on data protection? >> You want to start with that? So, again, lowering cost, scalability, global infrastructure, those are the big things for the digital transformation that we see customers wanting to embrace, and with Commvault, one of the big differentiators, I think, for the enterprise customers out there who are global, is they typically do have both an on-prem environment as well as an in Cloud environment, and even if they have an all in strategy, there is time between that, moving all into the Cloud where they need to be able to cover both the on-prem and in the Cloud workloads, and so Commvault really brings that together, we also work together with our HyperScale Appliance for those customers who want to have on-prem and in the Cloud so overall, it's simplicity, the ability to manage the data, wherever it needs to be, that's where Commvault and AWS really do well and shine. >> Alright, so, for people that are at this show, what flavor are they getting of AWS, or their sessions, or their labs, what's that kind of Cloud experience at this show? >> Well, we have a number of sessions that we are jointly presenting together at, focus around AIML, future SAAS solutions, and also healthcare data protection solutions. And in fact, at this show, we are launching over 2100 EC2 instances, every day at this show, through the hundreds of labs that Commvault has running. For customers and partners, you can come and try out the Commvault solutions on AWS for free at these labs, and for those of you listening out there, we are giving away two Alexas at each of our sessions. >> Wow. So, I think, still we're about eight weeks out, right, from the big show? >> Oh, my team's deep in planning already, I mean, this is a great show, but Amazon is one of the biggest shows that we do every year. What should we expect to see, this year? >> Well as you said, our team is preparing very hard, to make sure that we are providing value to the customers, and partners, attending re:INVENT, and there will be a number of announcements, we're looking forward to having our advanced technology partner and our storage competency partner, Commvault, at re:INVENT again this year. >> And we're excited to be there, so I hope that everybody who's here with us today, will join us at re:INVENT in November, and it's sure to be a great show. >> Alright, yeah, be sure to join theCUBE and over 50,000 of your closest friends >> (laughs) >> in the Cloud in Las Vegas the week right after Thanksgiving, if you haven't already, register quickly, because it will sell out, >> Townsend: That's right >> get your hotel, because they will sell out, what I'm saying is, it's a big show, so, we're excited to be there, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be be back here with more coverage, from Commvault GO in Nashville, Tennessee, thanks for watching theCUBE. >> Jeanna: Alright. 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>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering UiPathForward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to events, we extract the signal from the noise. A lot of noise here but the signal's all around automation and robotic process automation. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Stu Miniman, my co-host. Guy Kirkwood's here he's the UiPath chief evangelist otherwise known as the chief injector of Kool-Aid. Welcome. (guests chuckling) And Craig LeClair, the Vice President at Forrester. Covers this market, wrote the seminal document on this space. Knows it inside out. Craig, great to see you again. >> Yeah, nice to see you again. It's great to be back at theCUBE. >> So let's start with the analyst perspective. Take us back to when you first discovered RPA, why you got excited about it, and what Forrester Research is all about in that space. >> Yeah, it's been a very a interesting ride. Most of these companies, at least that are the higher value ones in the category they've been around for a long time. They've been around for over a decade, and no one ever heard of them three years ago. So I had covered at Forrester, business process management and some of the business rules engines, and I've always been in process. I just got this sense that there was a way that companies could make progress and digital transformation and overcome the technical debt that they had. A lot of the progress has been tepid in digital transformation because it takes tremendous amount of time and tons of consultants to modernize that core system that really runs the company. So along comes this RPA technology that allows you to build human equivalence that patch up the inefficiencies without touching. I came in on American Airlines and the system that cut my ticket was designed in 1960. It's the same Sabre reservation system. That's the big obstacle that a lot of companies have been struggling to really take advantage of AI in general. A lot of the more moonshot and more sophisticated promises haven't been realized. RPA is a very practical form of automation that companies can get a handle on right now, and move the dial for digital transformation. >> So Guy we heard a vision set forth by Daniel this morning. Basically a chicken in every pot, I call it, a robot for every person. Now what Craig was just saying about essentially cutting the line on technical debt, do you have clear evidence of that in your customer base? Maybe you could give some examples. >> What we're really seeing is that as organizations have to deal with the stresses, what Leslie Wilcox professor at LSE describes as the stresses within organizations and particularly in environments where the demographics are changing. What we're seeing is that organizations have to automate. So the best example of that is in Japan where the Japanese population peaked in 2010. It's now falling as a whole, plus all the baby boomers, people of Craig's and my age are now retiring. So we're now in a position where they measure levels of dangerous overwork as being more that 106 hours a week. That isn't 106 hour a week in total, that's 106 hours a week in addition to the 60 hours a week the Japanese people normally work. And there is a word in Japanese, which is (speaking in foreign language), which means to work oneself to death. So there really is no choice. So what we're seeing happening in Japan will be replicated in Western Europe and certainly in the US over the next few years. So what's driving that is the rise of the ecosystems of technologies of which RPA and AI are part, and that's really what we're seeing within the market. >> Craig, sometimes these big waves particularly in infrastructure, you kind of saw it with virtualization and some other wonky techs, like data reduction. They could be a one-time step function, and not an ongoing business value creator. Where does RPA fit in there? How can organizations make sure that this is a continuous business value generator as opposed to a one time hit? >> Good question. >> Well, I like the concept of RPA as a platform that can lead to more intelligence and more integration with AI components. It allows companies to build an automation center or a center of excellence focused on automation. But the next thing they're going to do after building some simple robots that are doing repetitive tasks, is they're going to say "Oh well wouldn't it be better "if my employee could have a textual chat with a chatbot "that then was interacting with the digital worker "that I built with the bot." Or they're going to say "You know what? I really want to use that machine learning algorithm "for my underwriting process, but I can use these bots "to go out and collect all the data from the core systems "and elsewhere and from the web and feed the algorithms "so that I could make a better decision." So again it goes back to that backing off the moonshot approach that we've been talking about that AI has been taking because of the tremendous amount of money spent by the major players to lay out the promise of AI has really been a little dysfunctional in getting organizations' eye off the ball in terms of what could be done with slightly more intelligent automation. So RPA will be a flash in the pan unless it starts to embed these more learning-capable AI modules. But I think it has a very good chance of doing that particularly now with so much investment coming into the category right. >> Craig, it's really interesting. When I heard you describe that it reminds me of the home automation. The Cortanas and Alexas and consumer side where you're seeing this. You've got the consumer side where you can build skills yourself, you know teenagers people can do that. One of the challenges always on the business side is how do you get the momentum when you don't have the consumer side. How do those interact? >> It's the technical debt issue and it's just like the mobile peak in 2011. Consumers in their hands had much better mobility right away than businesses. It took businesses five, they're still not there in building a great mobile environment. So these Alexa in our kitchen snooping on our conversation and to some extent Netflix that observes our behavior. That's a light form of AI. There is a learning from that behavior that's updating an algorithm autonomously in Netflix to understand what you want to watch. There's no one with a spreadsheet back there right. So this has given us in a sense a false sense of progress with all of AI. The reality is business is just getting started. Business is nowhere with AI. RPA is an initial foray on that path. We're in Miami so I'll call it a gateway drug. >> In fact there's also an element that the Siris, the Cortanas, the Alexas, are very poor at understanding specific ontologies that are required for industry, and that's where the limitation is right now. We're working with an organization called Humly, they're focused on those ontologies for specific industries. So if the robot doesn't understand something, then you could say to the robot Okay sit that in the Wells account, if you're in a bank, and it understands that Wells in that case means Wells Fargo it doesn't mean a hole in the ground with water at the bottom or a town in Somerset in the UK, 'cause they're all wells. So it's getting that understanding correct. >> I wonder if you guys could comment on this. Stu and I were at Splunk earlier this week and they were talking up NLP and we were saying one of the problems is that NLP is sometimes not that great. And they made a comment that I thought was very interesting. They said frankly a lot of the stuff that we're ingesting is text and it's actually pretty good. I would imagine the same is true for RPA. Is that what you see? >> You were talking about that on stage. With regards to the text analytics. >> Yes. So RPA doesn't handle unstructured content the way that NLP does. So NLP can handle voice, it can handle text. For the bots to work in RPA today you have to have a layer of analytics that understands those documents, understands those emails and creates a nice clean file that the bots can then work with. But what's happening is the text analytics layer is slowly merging with the RPA bots platforms so it's going to be viewed as one solution. But it's more about categories of use cases that deal with forms and documents and emails rather than natural language, which is where it's at. >> So known business processes really is the starting point. >> Known business-- >> One example we've got live is an insurance company in South Africa called Hollard, and they've used a combination of Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, plus IBM Watson and it's orchestrated doing NLP and orchestrated by UiPath. So that's dealing with utterly unstructured data. That's the 1.5 million emails that that organization gets in a year. They've managed to automate 98% of that, so it never sees a human. And their reduction in cost is 91% cost in reduction per transaction. And that's done by one of our implementation partners, a company called LarcAI down there. It's superb. >> Yeah, so text analytics is hard. Last several years we have that sentiment out of it, but if I understand it correctly Craig, you're saying if you apply it to a known process it actually could have outcomes that can save money. >> Yes, absolutely yes. >> As Guy was just saying. >> I think it's moving from that rules-based activity to more experience-based activity as more of these technologies become merged. >> Will the technology in your view advance to the point, because the known processes. okay, there's probably a lot of work to be done there, but today there's so many unknown processes. It's like this messy, unpredictable thing. Will machine intelligence combined with robotic process automation get to the point, and if so when, that we can actually be more flexible and adapt to some of these unknown processes or is that just decades off? >> No, no, I think we talk at Forrester about the concept of convergence. Meaning the convergence of the physical world and the digital world. So essentially digital's getting embedded in everything physical that we have right. Think of IoT applications and so forth. But essentially that data coming from those physical devices is unstructured data that the machine learning algorithms are going to make sense of, and make decisions about. So we're very close to seeing that in factory environments. We're seeing that in self-driving cars. The fleet managers that are now understanding where things are based on the signals coming from them. So there's a lot of opportunity that's right here on the horizon. >> Craig, a lot of the technologies you mentioned, we may have had a lot of the technical issues sorted out, but it's the people interactions some things like autonomous vehicles, there's government policies going to be one of the biggest inhibitors out there. When you look at the RPA space, what should workers how do they prepare for this? How do companies, make sure that they can embrace this and be better for it? >> That's a really tough and thoughtful question. The RPA category really attacks what we call the cubicle population. And there are we're estimating four million cubicles will be emptied out in five years by RPA technology specifically. That's how we built the market forecast 'cause each one of the digital workers replacing a cubicle worker will cost $11,000 or what. That's how we built up the market forecast. They're going to be automation deficits. It's not all going to be relocating people. We think that there's going to be a lot of disruption in the outsource community first. So companies are going to look at contractors. They're going to look at the BPO contract. Then they're going to look at their internal staff. Our numbers are pretty clear. We think they're going to be four million automation deficits in five years due to RPA technology specifically. Now there will be better jobs for those that are remaining. But I think it's a big change management issue. When you first talk about robots to employees you can tell them that their jobs are going to get better, they're going to be more human. They're going to have a much more exhilarating experience. And their response to you is, What they're thinking is, "Damn robot's going to take my job." That's what they're thinking. So you have to walk them up the mountain and really understand what their career path is and move them into this motion of adaptive and continual learning and what we call constructive ambition. Which is another whole subject. But there are employees that have a higher level of curiosity and are more willing to adapt to get on the other side of the digital divide. Yep. >> You mentioned the market. You guys did a market forecast. I've seen, read stats, a little over a billion today. I don't know if that's consistent with your numbers? >> Yeah that's about right. >> Is this a 10X market? When does it get to 10 billion? Is it five, seven, 10 years? >> So we go out five years and have it be close to three billion. I think the numbers I presented on stage were 3.2 billion in five years. Now that's just software licenses and it's not the services community that surround that. >> You'd probably triple it if you add in services. >> I think two to three times service license ratio. There's always an issue at this point in emerging markets. Some of the valuations that are there, that market three billion has to be a bit bigger than that in eight or nine years to justify those valuations. That's always the fascinating capital structure questions we create with these sorts of things. >> So you describe this sort of one for one replacement. I'm presuming there's other potential use cases, or maybe not, that you forecast. Is that right? >> Oh no for the cubicles? >> Yes, it's not just cubicle replacement in that three billion right? It's other uplifts. >> No there are use cases that help in factory automation, in supply chain, in guys carrying around clipboards in warehouses. There are a tremendous number of use cases, but the primary focus are back office workers that tend to be in cubicles and contact center employees who are always in cubicles. >> And then we'll see if the non-obvious ones emerge. >> I think ultimately what's going to happen is the number of people doing back office corporate functions, so that's both finance and accounting procurement, HR type roles and indeed the industry specific roles. So claims processing insurance will diminish over time. But I think what we're going to see is an increase in the number of people doing customer experience, because it's the customer intimacy that is really going to differentiate organizations going forward. >> The market's moving very fast. Reading your report, it's like you were saying yesterday's features are now table steaks. Everybody's watching everybody else. You heard Daniel today saying, "Hey our competitors are watching. "We're open they're going to steal from us so be it." The rising tide lifts all boats. What do you advise clients in terms of where they should start, how they should get started? Obviously pick some quick wins. But what do you tell people? >> I always same pretty much the same advice you give almost on any emerging technology. Start with a good solution provider that you trust. Focus on a proof of concept, POC and a pilot. Start small and grow incrementally, and walk people up the mountain as you do that. That's the solution. I also have this report I call The Rule of Fives, that there are certain tasks that are perfect for RPA and they should meet these three rules of five. A relatively small number of decisions, relatively small number of applications involved, and a relatively small number of clicks in the click stream. 500 clicks, five apps, five decisions. Look for those in high volume that have high transaction volume and you'll hit RPA goal. You'll be able to offset 2 1/2 to four FTE's for one bot. And if you follow those rules, follow the proof of concept, good solution partner everyone's winning. >> You have practical advice to get started and actually get to an outcome. Anything you'd add to that? >> In most organizations what they're now doing, is picking one, two, or three different technologies to actually play with to start. And that's a really good way. So we recommend that organizations pick three, four, five processes and do a hackathon and very quickly they work out which organizations they want to work with. It's not necessarily just the technology and in a lot of cases UiPath isn't the right answer. But that is a very good way for them to realize what they want to do and the speed with which they'll want to do it. >> Great, well guys thanks for coming on theCUBE, sharing your knowledge. >> Thank you. >> Pleasure. >> Appreciate your time. >> Thanks very much indeed. >> Alright keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back from UiPathForward Americas. This is theCUBE. Be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome to day three of Knowledge18. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Day three is when ServiceNow brings together its audience and talks about its platform, the creators, the developers, the doers get together in the room. Jeff Frick and I, my co-host, we've seen this show now, Jeff, for many, many years. I joked on Twitter today, it's not often you see a full room and this room was packed on day three. Unless Larry Ellison is speaking. Well, Larry Ellison is not here, but Pat Casey is. He's the Senior Vice President of DevOps at ServiceNow and a Cube alum, Pat, great to see you again. >> Absolutely, just glad to be back. >> So, my head is exploding. With all the innovation that's comin' out. I feel like I'm at a AWS re:Invent with Andy Jassy up on stage with all these features that are coming out. But wow, you guys are on it. And part of that is because of the platform. You're able to put out new features, but how's the week going? >> So far it's been great. But you're sort of right, we are super proud of this year. I think there's more new stuff that's valuable for our customers coming out this year than probably the three years prior to this. I mean you got the chat bot designer, and you got some great application innovation, you got Flow Designer, you've got the entire integration suite coming online, and then in addition to that you've got a whole new mobile experience coming out. Just all stuff that our customers can touch. You can go downstairs and see all that and they can get their hands on it. Super exciting. >> So consistent too with the messaging. We've been coming here, I this is our sixth year, with kind of the low-code and no-code vision that Fred had way at the beginning. To let lots of people build great workflows and then to start taking some of these crazy new applications like chat bots and integration platform, pretty innovative. >> Yeah, I think it's a mindset when you get down to it. I mean we, the weird failure mode of technology is technology tends to get built by by technologists. And I do this for a living. There's a failure mode where you design the tool you want to use. And those tend to be programmer tools 'cause they tend to get designed by programmers. It does take an extra mental shift to say no, my user is not me. My user is a different person. I want to build the tool that they want to use. And that sort of user empathy, you know Fred had that in spades. That was his huge, huge, huge strength. Among other things. One of his huge strengths. It's something that we're really trying to keep foreground in the company. And you see that in some of the new products we released as well. It's really aimed at our customers not at our developers. >> The other thing I think that's been consistent in all the interviews we've done, and John talked on the day one keynote one of his kind of three keys to success was try to stay with out of the box as much as you can as a rule, and we've had all the GMs of the various application stacks that you guys have, they've all talked consistently we really try to drive, even as a group our specific requests back into development on the platform level so we can all leverage it. So even though then the vertical applications you guys are building, it's still this drive towards leverage the common platform. >> Yeah, absolutely. And there is, what's the word I'm looking for? There's a lot of value in using the product the way it was shipped. For easiest thing is when it advances or when we ship you new features you can just turn 'em on, and it doesn't conflict with anything else you got going in there. There's always an element of, you know, this is enterprise software. Every customer's a little bit different. GE does not work the same way as Bank of America. So you probably never get away entirely from configuring, but doing the minimum that you can get away with, the minimum that'll let you put your business-specific needs in there, and being really sure of it, you need to do it, it's the right approach to take. The failure mode of technologists, the other one, is we like writing technology. So give me a platform and I'm going to just write stuff. Applying that only when it makes sense to the business is where you really need to be. Especially in this day and age. >> Well I wanted to ask you about that 'cause you guys talk about many applications one platform. But you used to be one platform one app. >> Pat: Yep. >> So as you have more, and more, and more apps, how are you finding it regarding prioritization of features, and capabilities? I imagine the GMs like any company are saying, hey, this is a priority. >> Sure. >> And because you have a platform there's I'm sure a lot more overlap than if you're a stovepipe development organization. But nonetheless you still got to prioritize. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Sure, you end up with two different levels of it though. At one level, you tend to want to pick businesses to go into, which you're aligned with the technology stack you have. I don't think we're going to go into video streaming business. It's a good business, but it's not our business. >> Too bad, we could use some of that actually. >> Well, maybe next year. (laughs) But when you get down to it we mostly write enterprise business apps. So HR is an enterprise business app, CSM, SecOps, ITSM, they're all kind of the same general application area. So we don't tend to have something which is totally out to lunch. But you're right in the sense that A, what's important to CSM might be less important to ITSM. And so we do prioritize. And we prioritize partly based on what the perceived benefit across the product line is. If something that a particular BU wants that five other BUs are going to benefit from that's pretty valuable. If only them, not so much. And part of it too is based on how big the BUs are. You know if you're an emerging product line you probably get few less features than like Feryl Huff. Like she has a very big product line. Or Pabla, he has a very big product line. But there's also an over-investment in the emerging stuff. Because you have to invest to build the product lines out. >> The other thing I think is you guys have been such a great opportunity is I just go back to those early Fred interviews with the copy room and the color paper 'cause nobody knows what that is anymore. >> Pat: Yep. >> But workflow just by its very nature lends itself so much to leveraging, AI, and ML, so you've already kind of approached it while trying to make work easier with these great workflow tools, but what an opportunity now to apply AI and machine learning to those things over time. So I don't even have to write the rules and even a big chunk of that workflow that I built will eventually go away for me actually having to interact with it. >> Yeah, there's a second layer to it too, which I'll call out. The workflows between businesses are different. But we have the advantage that we have the data for each of the businesses. So we can train AI on this is the way this particular workflow works at General Electric and use that bot at GE and train a different bot at maybe at Siemens. You know it's still a big industrial firm. It's a different way of doing it. That gives us a really big advantage over people who commingle the data together. Because of our architecture, we can treat every customer uniquely and we can train the automation for the unique workflows for that particular customer. It gives a much more accurate result. >> So thinking about, staying on the theme of machine intelligence for a moment, you're not a household name in the world of AI, so you've done some acquisitions and-- >> Pat: Yep. >> But it's really becoming a fundamental part of your next wave of innovation. As a technologist, and you look out at the landscape, you obviously you see Google, Apple, Facebook, IBM, with Watson, et cetera, et cetera, as sort of the perceived leaders, do you guys aspire to be at that level? Do you need to be? What's the philosophy and strategy with regard to implementing AI in the road map? >> Well if you cast your eyes forward to where we think the future's going to be, I do think there are going to be certain core AI services that they're going to call their volume plays. You need a lot of engineers, a lot of resources, a lot of time to execute them. Really good voice-to-text is an example. And that's getting pretty good. It's almost solved at this point. A general case conversational agent, not solved yet. Even the stuff you see at Google I/O, it's very specialized. It does one thing really well and it's a great demo, but ask it about Russian history, no idea what to talk about. Whereas, maybe you don't know a lot about Russian history, you as a human would at least have something interesting to say. We expect that we will be leveraging other people's core AI services for a lot of stuff out there. Voice-to-text is a good example. There may well be some language parsing that we can do out there. There may be other things we never even thought of. Maybe stuff that'll read text for you and give you back summaries. Those are the kinds of things that we probably won't implement internally. Where you never know, but that's my guess, where you look at where we think we need to write our own code or own our own IP, it's where the domain is specific to our customers. So when I talked about General Electric having a specific workflow, I need to be able to train something specific for that. And if you look at some other things like language processing, there's a grammar problem. Which is a fancy way of saying that the words that you use describing a Cube show are different than the words that I would use describing a trade show. So if I teach a bot to talk about the Cube, it can't talk about trade shows. If you're Amazon, you train your bot to talk in generic language. When you want to actually speak in domain-specific language, it gets a lot harder. It's not good at talking about your show. We think we're going to have value to provide domain-specific language for our customers' individualized domains. I think that's a big investment. >> But you don't have to do it all as well. We saw two actually interesting use cases talking to some of your customers this week. One was the hospital in Australia, I don't know if you're familiar with this, where they're using Alexa as the interface, and everything goes into the ServiceNow platform for the nurses. >> Yep. >> And so that's not really your AI, it's kind of Amazon's AI, that's fine. And the other was Siemens taking some of your data and then doing some stuff in Azure and Watson, although the Watson piece was, my take away was it was kind of a fail, so there's some work to be done there, but customers are going to use different technologies. >> Pat: Oh, they will. >> You have to pick your spots. >> You know we're, as a vendor, we're pretty customer-centric. We love it when you use our technology and we think it's awesome, otherwise we wouldn't sell it. But fundamentally we don't expect to be the only person in the universe. And we're also not, like you've seen us with our chat bot, our chat bot, you can use somebody else's chat client. You can use Slack, you can use Teams, you can use our client, we can use Jabber. It's great. If you were a customer and want to use it, use it. Same thing on the AI front. Even if you look at our chat bot right now, there's the ability to plug in third-party AIs for certain things even today. You can plug it in for language processing. I think out of box is configured for Google, but you can use Amazon, you can use Microsoft if you want to. And it'll parse your language for you at certain steps in there. We're pretty open to partnering on that stuff. >> But you're also adding value on top of those platforms, and that's the key point, right? >> The operating model we have is we want it to be transparent to our customers as to what's going on in the back end. We will make their life easy. And if we're going to make their life easy by behind the scenes, integrating somebody else's technology in there, that's what we're going to do. And for things like language processing, our customers never need to know about that. We know. And the customers might care if they asked because we're not hiding it. But we're not going to make them do that integration. We're going to do it for them, and just they click to turn it on. >> Pat, I want to shift gears a little bit in terms of the human factors point of all this. I laugh, I have an Alexa at home, I have a Google at home, and they send me emails suggesting ways that I should interact with these things that I've never thought of. So as you see kind of an increase in chat bots and you see it increase in things like voice-to-text and these kind of automated systems in the background, how are you finding people's adoption of it? Do they get it? Do the younger folks just get it automatically? Are you able to bury it such where it's just served up without much thought in their proc, 'cause it's really the behavior thing I think's probably a bigger challenge than the technology. >> It is and frankly it's varied by domain. If you look at something like Voice that's getting pretty ubiquitous in the home, it's not that common in a business world. And partly there frankly is just you've got a background noise problem. Engineering-wise, crowded office, someone's going to say Alexa and like nobody even knows what they're talking about. >> Jeff: And then 50 of 'em all-- >> Exactly. There's ways to solve that, but this is actual challenge. >> Right. >> If you look at how people like to interact with technologies, I would argue we've already gone through a paradigm shift that's generational. My generation by default is I get out a laptop. If you're a millennial your default is you get out your phone. You will go to a laptop and the same says I will go to a phone, but that's your default. You see the same thing with how you want to interact. Chat is a very natural thing on the phone. It's something you might do on a full screen, but it's a less common. So you're definitely seeing people shifting over to chat as their preferred interaction paradigm especially as they move onto the phones. Nobody wants to fill out a form on a phone. It's miserable. >> Jeff: Right. >> I wonder if we could, so when Jeff and I have Fred on, we always ask him to break out his telescope. So as the resident technologist, we're going to ask you. And I'm going to ask a bunch of open-ended questions and you can pick whatever ones you want to answer, so the questions are, how far can we take machine intelligence and how far should we take machine intelligence? What are the things that machines can do that humans really can't and vice versa? How will humans and machines come together in the future? >> That's a broad question. I'll say right now that AI is probably a little over-marketed. In that you can build really awesome demos that make it seem like it's thinking. But we're a lot further away from an actual thinking machine, which is aware of itself than I think it would seem from the demos. My kids think Alexa's alive, but my son's nine, right? There's no actual Alexa at the end of it. I doubt that one's going to get solved in my lifetime. I think what we're going to get is a lot better at faking it. So there's the classical the Turing test. The Turing test doesn't require that you be self-aware. The Turing test says that my AI passes the Turing test if you can't tell the difference. And you can do that by faking it really well. So I do think there's going to be a big push there. First level you're seeing it is really in the voice-to-text and the voice assistance. And you're seeing it move from the Alexas into the call centers into the customer service into a lot of those rote interactions. When it's positive it's usually replacing one of those horrible telephone mazes that everybody hates. It gets replaced by a voice assist, and as a customer you're like that is better. My life is better. When it's negative, it might replace a human with a not-so-good chat. The good news on that front is our society seems to have a pretty good immune system on that. When companies have tried to roll out less good experiences that are based on less good AI, we tend to rebel, and go no, no, we don't want that. And so I haven't seen that been all that successful. You could imagine a model where people were like, I'm going to roll out something that's worse but cheaper. And I haven't seen that happening. Usually when the AI rolls out it's doing it to be better at something for the consumer perspective. >> That's great. I mean we were talking earlier, it's very hard to predict. >> Pat: Of course. >> I mean who would have predicted that Alexa would have emerged as a leader in NLP or that, and we said this yesterday, that the images of cats on the internet would lead to facial recognition. >> I think Alexa is one example though. The thing I think's even more amazing is the Comcast Voice Remote. Because I used to be in that business. I'm like, how could you ever have a voice remote while you're watching a TV and watching a movie with the sound interaction? And the fact that now they've got the integration as a real nice consumer experience with YouTube and Netflix, if I want to watch a show, and I don't know where it is, HBO, Netflix, Comcast, YouTube, I just tell that Comcast remote find me Chris Rock the Tamborine man was his latest one, and boom there it comes. >> There's a school of thought out there, which is actually pretty widespread that feels like the voice technologies have actually been a bit of a fail from a pure technologies standpoint. In that for all the energy that we've spent on them, they're sort of stuck as a niche application. There's like Alexa, my kids talk to Alexa at home, you can talk to Siri, but when these technologies were coming online, I think we thought that they would replace hard keyboard interactions to a greater degree than they have. I think there's actually a bit of a learning in there that people are not as, we don't mandatorily, I'm not sure if that's a real word, but we don't need to go oral. There's actually a need for non-oral interfaces. And I do think that's a big learning for a lot of the technology is that there's a variety of interface paradigms that actual humans want to use, and forcing people into any one of them is just not the right approach. You have to, right now I want to talk, tomorrow I want to text, I might want to make hand gestures another time. You're mostly a visual media, obviously there's talking too, but it's not radio, right? >> You're absolutely right. That's a great point because when you're on a plane, you don't want to be interacting in a voice. And other times that there's background noise that will screw up the voice reactions, but clearly there's been a lot of work in Silicon Valley and other places on a different interface and it needs to be there. I don't know if neural will happen in our lifetime. I wanted to give you some props on the DevOps announcement that you sort of pre-announced. >> We did. >> It's, you know CJ looked like he was a little upset there. Was that supposed to be his announcement? >> In my version of the script, I announced it and he commented on my announcement. >> It's your baby, come on. So I love the way you kind of laid out the DevOps and kind of DevOps 101 for the audience. Bringing together the plan, dev, test, deploy, and operate. And explaining the DevOps problem. You really didn't go into the dev versus the ops, throwing it over the wall, but people I think generally understand that. But you announced solving a different problem. 500 DevOps tools out there and it gets confusing. We've talked to a bunch of customers about that. They're super excited to get that capability. >> Well, we're super, it's one of those cases where you have an epiphany, 'cause we solved it internally. >> Dave: Right. >> And we just ran it for like three years, and we kept hearing customers say, hey, what are you guys going to do about DevOps? And we're never like quite sure what they mean, 'cause you're like, well what do you mean? Do you want like a planning tool? And then probably about a year ago we sort of had this epiphany of, oh, our customers have exactly the same problem we do. Duh. And so from that it kind of led us to go down the product road of how can we build this kind of management layer? But if you look across our customer base and the industry, DevOps is almost a rebellion. It's a rebellion against the waterfall development model which has dominated things. It's a rebellion against that centralized control. And in a sense it's good because there's a lot of silliness that comes out of those formal development methodologies. Slow everybody down, stupid bureaucracy in there. But when you apply it in an enterprise, okay some of the stuff in there, you actually did need that. And you kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater. So adding that kind of enterprise DevOps layer back in, you still do get that speed. Your developers get to iterate, you get the automated tests, you get the operating model, but you still don't lose those kind of key things you need at the top enterprise levels. >> And most of the customers we've talked to this week have straight up said, look, we do waterfall for certain things, and we're not going to stop doing waterfall, but some of the new cool stuff, you know. (laughs) >> Well if you look at us, it's at the, if you take the microscope far enough away from ServiceNow, we're waterfall in that every six months we release. >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> But if you're an engineer, we're iterating in 24-hour cycles for you. 24-hour cycles, two-week sprints. It's a very different model when you're in the trenches than from the customer perspective. >> And then I think that's the more important part of the DevOps story. Again, there's the technology and the execution detail which you outlined, but it's really more the attitudinal way that you approach problems. We don't try to solve the big problems. We try to keep moving down the road, moving down the road. We have a vision of where we want to get, but let's just keep moving down the road, moving down the road. So it's a very, like you said, cumbersome MRD and PRD and all those kind of classic things that were just too slow for 2018. >> Nobody goes into technology to do paperwork. You go into technology to build things to create, it's a creative outlet. So the more time you can spend doing that, and the less time you're spending on overhead, the happier you're going to be. And if you fundamentally like doing administration, you should move into management. That's great. That's the right job for you. But if you're a hands on the keyboard engineer, you probably want to have your hands on the keyboard, engineering. That's what you do. >> Let's leave on a last thought around the platform. I mentioned Andy Jassy before and AWS. He talks about the flywheel effect. Clearly we're seeing the power of the platform and it feels like there's the developer analog to operating leverage. And that flywheel effect going from your perspective. What can we expect going forward? >> Well, I mean for us there's two parallel big investment vectors. One is clearly we want to make the platform better for our apps. And you asked earlier about how do we prioritize from our various BUs, and that is driving platform enhancements. But the second layer is, this is the platform our customers are using to automate their entire workflow across their whole organization. So there's a series of stuff we're doing there to make that easier for them. In a lot of cases, less about new capabilities. You look at a lot of our investments, it's more about taking something that previously was hard, but possible, and making it easier and still possible. And in doing that, that's been my experience, is Fred Luddy's experience, the easier you can make something, the more successful people will be with it. And Fred had an insight that you could almost over-simplify it sometimes. You could take something which had 10 features and was hard to use, and replace with something that had seven features and was easy to use, everyone would be super happy. At some level, that's the iPhone story, right? I could do more on my Blackberry, it just took me an hour of reading the documentation to figure out how. >> Both: Right, right. >> But I still miss the little side wheel. (laughs) >> Love that side wheel. All right, Pat, listen thanks very much for coming. We are humbled by your humility. You are like a rock star in this community, and congratulations on all this success and really thanks for coming back on the Cube. >> Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure meeting you guys again. >> All right, great. Okay, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching the Cube live from ServiceNow Knowledge K18, #know18. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> We wanted to compete against the last >> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are here today with Joe Fitzgerald. He is the Vice President of Management at Red Hat. Thanks so much for joining us, Joe. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, I want to talk to you about automating the enterprise. This is really right in your wheelhouse. You came out with a few new product announcements this morning. Tell us more about those. >> So, as all these technologies change, it really puts a lot of pressure on enterprising to try and figure out how to manage all this stuff. IF you think about the complexity and the rate of change, it's a lot harder to follow that around with management and security in automation. So we have this vision around enterprise automation, which I'm really excited to talk about. >> So tell us more. How does it help reduce the workload or at least automate the workload, maybe? >> Well, so automation, if you think of what's going on in other sectors like self-driving cars or home automation, what's happening is you have these silos of automation that are now being sort of composed into systems of automation. One of the challenges that enterprises have faced for years is they've got lots of tools, sometimes dozens of tools that each tool is good at automating one little thing. So it's kind of like your cruise control on your car or your nav system or something like that but they don't talk to each other. So what we announced to day is we have this vision, and it's going to take time for people to get there, but they need to move towards enterprise automation. And there's some fundamentally new technology over the past coupla years that we're leveraging called Ansible, which will allow us to automate across many domains and tie things together. >> Rebecca: So that's the vision. >> Right. >> How will it work? >> Well, we actually announced some products today that are huge delivery and part of that vision, which is we announced CloudForms 4.5, which has Ansible inside. Ansible is this incredibly popular open-source technology that's sort of taken the world by storm. It's a couple years old, but it's gotten this incredible open-source community adoption, which Red Hat is certainly familiar with. We acquired this company about a year and a half ago and under Red Hat's nurturing, because we're really good at open-source, this things has really exploded in terms of the interest in the community. At the same time, we're seeing enterprises now adopt it in incredible rates. So they're telling us, "Look, we want this technology. "And it can help us automate everything "from our network to our compute and our storage. "We can use it in clouds. "We can use it on our physical stuff. "We can automate some of our old things "which are dragging us down, "as well as some of these really cool differentiating "new applications they're trying to get out." >> Joe, the headline in the press release says that this is analytics-driven automation, so talk about the operational impact here. Do I need to get a data scientist on my team now to manage all my things? Where does this fit with what they're doing today and how do they take advantage of it? >> That's a great question. So the second product announcement that we made, it's around an offering we have called Red Hat Insights, and it's a predictive analytics capability. So if you think about Red Hat's experience, we have tens of thousands of customers worldwide. We've dealt with millions of cases, we've got really smart engineers working in all these different technologies. In collecting data from our customers, we use big data, machine learning to derive insights into what's going on. Now we can analyze systems for our customers and tell them what's wrong. As the name implies, it gives them insights into what's going on. They don't have to hire data scientists, we have really smart people. But by basically getting insights into those system, we could tell you, "Hey the system's not secure "or it has some performance problems." But you would have to then go make changes to fix it. With this announcement today, we've tied together Ansible technology around automation so that we can say, "Here's what you need to change. "Would you like us to change it?" And we then dynamically generate the changes necessary. >> Joe, this resonates for me so much. I lived back a dozen years ago, I worked in an interoperability lab for a large storage company that's a partner of yours and we were like, "Well, we have a little bit of data "about what the customer's doing, "we know exactly how stuff should be configured," but matching that patches and early on in the API cycle, trying to figure that out, make sure that we could remediate or hey, is there a security issue or some patch that they should know about? Getting that flow of information just didn't exist 10, 12 years ago. So, why now? How can we make it better? You know, what's the impact going to be for the customers? >> So a coupla things. First of all, there's new technology. So this Ansible technology I described is fundamentally different. We believe that that can help us across a lot of different domains to automate. I think the other thing is that automation tools have been very, very difficult for people to use, and you hear about continuous development, continuous integration. You probably haven't heard much about continuous management or continuous automation or continuous security. Those things need to be automated. If you're going to be changing at the rate businesses would like to change, you're going to need some really new tools to be able to automate those things at the speed of business. >> Absolutely. I think that the joke I've had is, "Hey, what version of AWS are you running on? "Or what version of Azure you're running on?" They take care of that. The enterprise, there's some stuff that they're going to do internal, there's some stuff that they're going to do in the public cloud, but they need to be able to get to that newer version. My friends that are in security are always like, "The biggest challenge is right. "I haven't gotten that latest update "or there's some vulnerability that I need to do "so I need to have more that CICD mentality "in some of the other spaces." >> If you think the rate of change right now between multi-clouds, containers, new processes like DevOps, I mean there's just an incredible amount of technology changing. And a lot of the tools enterprises have, some of them are 10, 15 years old. They didn't even have these things around when those tools were created so they can't really deal with the physics of these new environments and how to do it. Now you can get a tool from each vendor or each cloud or each platform to manage it, but now you're the person who's got this arsenal of tools with teams that have to learn 27 tools. And then, your security example is a great one. How do I know everything's secure? Do I go to each of those 27 teams and go, "How's the network? How's my storage? "How's my compute? How's the app? "Oh, and by the way, it changed at noon today, "are we good?" That's really complicated. >> So the benefit of automation is that it does free up people's time to do other things in their jobs. So do you see that we will see more innovation coming out of these teams when they aren't having to check the network, check the network, and make sure that the patch is working. How do you see this changing the way people do their jobs? >> We see two ends of the spectrum that people automate. They automate some of the traditional stuff they have, which puts drag on them from a resource and a cost point of view. So they can modernize and optimize their old stuff, automate that, now they can focus on their new services, and really focus on the automation of what's going to change their business and help them compete in this world. So by optimizing the old, they can take some of those resources and put it into the new business services. >> Joe, you said Ansible was acquired about 18 months ago, and the announcement you went through looked like it's really weaving into the fabric of a lot of other products. Can you walk us through a little bit about that, about where Ansible's gone and maybe a little bit of vision toward where else it will end up in the portfolio? >> Sure. So we've leveraged it in our management portfolio with the announcements you see today, but we're also leveraging it in the rest of Red Hat's portfolio. If you look at Red Hat OpenStack or OpenShift, our Red Hat virtualization, and in the future, our Red Hat Enterprise Linux, will all have bits and pieces of Ansible technology in, because those things help customers consume that, to install it, configure it, manage it, and automate at a higher level. So we're trying to make the best automated products we can deliver. And then on the management side, whether you're using Red Hat products or you're managing a hybrid environment with other products, which is a lot of the case, then you're going to have a set of tools that's going to be able to automate that even further. So we're being good citizens by providing products that are inherently manageable and automatable when you get them from us and then we're providing tools that allow you to manage these very complex, multi-cloud environments. >> One of the big things we are talking about is the workplace culture, and Jim Whitehurst has done such an incredible job of really creating this open culture at Red Hat. How does it play out on a microscale in terms of how do IT leaders and managers give their employees, their teams time to innovate as well as the opportunity to take risks and to try things? >> Well, it's interesting because open-source has sort of changed over the years from sort of a commodity play where I can get something cheaper because it's the open-source version of something, let's say Linux. Now we've gone to the other end of the spectrum, where a lot of the new innovations, in this case management, is happening in an open-source community. So businesses can go and try that technology without contacting a vendor. They can sample it, they can follow it, they can see the rate of adoption. Everything's done in the open so they can see how transparent things are going. And basically, they can leverage that technology. A lot of them have no choice. If they don't leverage open-source innovations, their competitors will and they're going to be, basically at a disadvantage from a technology stack or management tool, whether it's containers in OpenShift or running in different platforms or storage, they really need to leverage the open-source communities. So we're seeing mandates. Some companies that, years ago, were fearful of open-source are now making investments and coming up with company policies for how to contribute to open-source. And we're seeing a lot more open-source consumption. >> Is that driven out of fear, as you said, if we don't do it our competitors will? Or has there been a real shift in mindset? >> No, I think it's more carrot than stick. I think that they see the innovation, whether it's big data or artificial intelligence, in my area, in automation in management, that that's where a lot of the innovation is going. So if they want the best technology to be able to bring to bear on their business and their IT needs, they're going to look in open-source because that's where it's happening. >> Let's look into the future a little bit, and think about where we will be 5, 10 years from now. What are your predictions? >> Well, I think there's just a huge trend towards automation. You're going to see it, we're seeing it in the consumer life. You're going to see it in business life. So automation across all different areas. And I think as things become more instrumentable and automatable, think about internet of things where you're going to have hundreds of devices in your house, you would like them to talk to each other. You'd like your smoke detector to talk to your camera to talk to your phone to talk to your light switch, etc. Those are examples of automation that people are going to tie these things together to try and make systems of automation. You're seeing it around personal digital assistants, the Alexas and the Siris and the different systems like that. >> Rebecca: Cortanas. >> Self-driving cars, we've gone from not having any of them to there's a bunch of vendors that are all vying for that. I think you're going to see those kind of system-wide automation in a lot of different industries. >> Joe, Red Hat really isn't a services business, it's very much a subscription model, but how much do you have to help companies to fix their processes before they automate because we all know it's like I can't just say, "Oh, let's take my existing process and automate it." Because many times you don't want to automate what's not working well. You want to fix the process a little bit first and then automate it. How does Red Hat get involved or what partners do you use for that? >> That's a great question. So, a number of things. First of all, we have a lot of partners. Red Hat is a trusted advisor. So we can tell customers what's working, especially on the new technologies because we're building a lot of them. When it comes to containers or object storage or different things, we're building them. You know, Ansible, we have a lot of developers working and pushing that, so we're a trusted advisor. We also work with a lot of partners, system integrators, service providers, VARs, people who are steeped in the technology and in the case of the open-source technologies, they can get involved. They're contributing code. They're providing a training. In the case of management, we have SIs now providing automation practices. So if you said, "Gee, I need help automating my old stuff," you could get one of the big SIs to come in who's got, you know, in some cases, they've got a thousand people trained up in Ansible to come in and help you automate your processes, whether they're the old ones or the shiny, new ones you're trying to deploy. >> Joe, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time. >> Joe: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we'll return with more of theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit after this. (electronic music)