>> From the SiliconAngle media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to theCUBE's Boston-area studio. Welcome back to the program, CUBE alum, Ashok Ramu, Vice President and General Manager of Cloud at Actifio, great to see you. >> Happy New Year, Stu, happy to be here. >> 2020, hard to believe it said, it feels like we're in the future here. And talking about future, we've watched Actifio for many years, we remember when copy data management, the category, was created, and really, Actifio, we were talking a lot before Cloud was the topic that we spent so much talking about, but Actifio has been on this journey with its customers in Cloud for many years, and of course, that is your role is working, building the product, the team working all over it, so give us a little bit of a history, if you would, and give us the path that led to 10C announcement. >> Sure thing. We started the Cloud journey early on, in 2014 or 2013-ish, when Amazon was the only Cloud that really worked. We built our architecture, in fact, we took our enterprise architecture and put it on the Cloud and realized, "Oh my god," you know, it's a world of difference. The economics don't work, the security model is different, the scale is different. So, I think with the 8.0 version that came out in 2017, we really kind of figured out the architecture that worked for large enterprises, particularly enterprises that have diverse data sets and have requirements around, you know, marrying different applications to data sets anywhere they want, so we came up with efficient use of object, we came up with the capability of migrating workloads, taking VMware VMs, bringing up on Azure, bringing up on DCP, et cetera. So that was the first foray into Actifio's Cloud, and since then, we've been just building strength after strength, you know. It's been a building block, understanding our customers, and thank you to the customers and the hyperscalers that actually led us to the 10C release. So this, I believe, we've taken it up a notch wherein, we understand the Cloud, we understand the infrastructure, the software auto-tunes itself to know where it's running on, taking the guessing game out of the equation. So 10C really represents what we see as a launchpad for the rest of the Cloud journey that Actifio's going to embark upon. We have enabled a number of new use cases like AI and ML, data transformation is key, we tackled really complicated workloads like HANA and Sybase and MySQL, et cetera, and in addition to that, we also adopt different native Cloud technologies, like Cloud snapshots, like recovery orchestration of the Cloud, et cetera. >> Yeah, I think it's worth reminding our audience there that Actifio's always been software. And when you talk about, you know, I think back to 2013, 2014, it was the public Cloud versus the data center, and we have seen the public Cloud in many ways looks more and more like what the enterprise has been used to. >> Absolutely. >> And the data centers have been trying to Cloud-ify for a number of years, and things like containerization and Kubernetes is blurring the line, and of course, every hyperscaler out there now has something that reaches their public Cloud into the data center and of course, technologies like VMware are also extending into the public Cloud, or, SAP now, of course is all of the Cloud environment. So with hybrid Cloud and multi-Cloud as kind of the waves of driving, help us understand that Actifio lives in all of these environments, and they're all a little bit different, so how does Actifio make sure that it can provide the functionality and experience that users want, regardless of where it is? >> Absolutely, you said it right. Actifio has always been a software company. And it is our customers that showed us, by Cloudifying their data centers, that we had to operate in the Cloud. So we had on premises VMware Clouds, not before we had Amazon and Azure and Google. So that evolution started much early on. And so, from what, you know, Actifio's a very customer-driven company, be it, you know, all segments of the company are driven by the customers, and in 2019, and even before, when you see a strong trend to migrate workloads, to move workloads, we realized, there is a significant opportunity, because the hardest thing to migrate is the volume of data because it's ever-changing, and it is ever-growing. So, the key element of neutrality was the application itself. Microsoft SQL's a SQL no matter how you run it. It could be on a big Windows machine in your data center or a NGCP, it makes no difference. So Actifio's approach to start application down basically gave us the freedom to say, we're going to create SQL to SQL. I don't know if you're running in Azure, Google, DOP data center, or AliCloud, it makes no difference to me. I understand SQL, I understand SQL's availability groups, I understand logs, I can capture it and give it back to you, so when we took that approach, it kind of automatically gave us infrastructure neutrality, really didn't care. So when we have a conversation with a customer, it basically goes around lines of, "Okay, Mr. Customer, how much data do you have? And what are your key applications? Can you categorize them in terms of priority?" It usually comes out to be databases are the crown jewels, so they're the number one priority in terms of data management, migration, test Av, et cetera. And then, we basically drill down into the ecosystem the databases live into. So, because we walk application down, the conversation is the same whether the customer is in the data center, or in the Cloud. So that is how we've evolved, and that's how we're thinking from a product standpoint, from a support standpoint, and then the overall company is built that way. So it makes it easy for us to adapt a new platform that comes in. So, when you talked about, you know, how does, each Cloud is different, you're absolutely right, the security concepts are different, right? Microsoft is built on active directory, Google is built on something very different. So how do you utilize and how do you make this work? We do have an infrastructure layer that basically provides Cloud-specific capabilities for various Cloud platforms. And that has gotten to a point where it understands and tunes itself from a security standpoint and a performance standpoint. Once that's taken care of, the rest of the application stack, which is over 90% of our software, stays the same, there's no change. And so that is how we kind of tackle this. Because the ecosystem we live in, we have to keep up with two people. We have to keep up with the infrastructure people who are making it bigger, faster, and we also have to keep up with the application people who are making it fancier and more complicated. So that's unfortunately the ecosystem we live in, and taking this approach has given us a mechanism to insulate us from a lot of the complexities of these two environments. >> Yeah, that's great, 'cause when you talk to customers and you say, "What's going on in your environment," change is difficult. So, how many different pieces of what I'm doing do I need to move to be able to take advantage of the modern economics. On the one hand, you know, if I have an application and I like it, well, maybe I could just lift and shift it, but if I'm just lifting, shifting, I'm not necessarily taking advantage of the full Cloud native environments, but I need to make sure that my data is protected, backup, you mentioned security, are of course the top concerns, so. It sounds like, in many ways, you're talking, helping customers work through some of those initiatives, being able to take advantage of new environments, but not need to completely change everything. Maybe, I'd love to hear a little bit, when you talk about the developers and DevOps initiatives that are happening inside customers, where does that impact, where does that connect with what Actifio's doing? >> Well, that's a great question. So, let me start with a real customer example. We have this customer, SEI Investments, who basically, their business model is to grow by acquisition, so they're adding on tens, hundreds of developers every quarter. So it's impossible to keep up with infrastructure needs when you grow at that pace. They decided to adopt a Cloud platform. And with each Cloud platform comes some platform-specific piece that all these developers now have to re-tool themselves. So, I'm a developer, I used to come in the morning, open up my machine and start working away on the application, now I have to do something different, and if there is 300 of me, and the cost of moving to the Cloud was a lot less than training the developers. It was much harder to train the developers because it has been ongoing process. So we were presented the challenge of how do you avoid it? So, when we are able to separate the application layer from the data layer, because of the way we operate, what we present as a solution was to say, just move your, what is the heaviest layer you have? That's the database, okay. And what are the copies you're creating? I'm creating hundreds of copies of my Oracle database, okay. Let's just move that to the Cloud. All of the front-end application doesn't see a change, thanks to the great infrastructure work the Cloud providers do, you add 10 Gigabyte to everywhere. So network is not a problem, computer's not a problem, it's just available on an API call, so you provision that. All they did was a data movement, moved it from Point A to Point B, gives you the flexibility to spend up any number of copies you want in the Cloud, now, your developer tool sets haven't changed, so there's no training required for developers, but from an operations standpoint, you've completely eased the burden of creating a hundred more copies every month, because Cloud is built for that. So you take the elasticity of the Cloud, advantage of that, and provide the data in the last mile to the Cloud, thereby, developers, they will access the application with the same level of ease. So, that is the paradigm we're seeing, we're seeing, you know, in some of our customers, there is faster and better storage provision for Actifio because there are 190 developers working off Actifio, where there's only about a handful of people running production. So, it's a paradigm shift is where we see it. And the pace at which we bring up the application wherein we're able to bring up 150 terabyte article database in three hours. Before Actifio, it used to be, maybe, 30 days, if you were lucky. So it's not just an order of magnitude, it's what you can do with that data, is where we're seeing the shift going to. >> Yeah, it's interesting, when you go back and look at some of the changes that have happened in the Cloud, Cloud storage was one of the earliest discussed use cases there, and backup to the Cloud was one of the earlier pieces of the Cloud storage discussion. Yet, we've seen changes and maturation into what can actually be done, explain a little bit how Actifio enables even greater functionality when you're talking about backup to the Cloud. >> Absolutely. You know, the object storage technology, it's probably the most scalable and stable piece of storage known to mankind, because nobody can build that level of scale that Amazon, Azure, and Google have put into it. From a security standpoint, performance standpoint, and scale standpoint. So I'm able to drop my data in Boston and pick it up in Tokyo seamlessly, right? That's unheard of before. And the biggest impediment to that, was a lot of legacy application data didn't know how to consume this object storage. So what Actifio came up with on onboard technology was to light up the object storage for everybody, and basically make it a performance neutral platform, wherein you take the guessing game out of the customer. The customer doesn't need to go research S3 or Google Nearline or Google Persistent Disk and say I want ten copies there versus five copies there, Actifio figures it out for you. You give us your SLA, you give us your RTOs and RPOs, and we tell you, okay, this is the most cost effective way to store your data. You get the multi-year retention for free, you get the GDPR, appchafe and protection for free, you get the geo-redundancy for free. All this is built into the platform. In addition, you also can run DevOps off the object store. You can run DR off the object store. So we enabled a lot of the legacy use cases using this new technology, so that is kind of where we see the cusp, wherein, in the Cloud, there's always a question and a debate, does D-doop make sense? D-doop consumes a lot of compute, takes a lot of memory, you need to have that memory and compute whether you want it or not. We're seeing a lot more adoption of encryption, where the data is encrypted at source. When you encrypt data, D-doop is just a big compute-churning platform, it doesn't do much for you. So we went through this debate actively, I think four or five years ago, and we figured out, object store's the way to go. You cannot get storage, I mean, it's a buck a terabyte in Google, and dropping. How can you get storage that's reliable, scalable, at a lower cost? All we had to do was actuate the use of that storage, which is what we did. >> Yeah. I'm just laughing a little bit because, you know, gosh, I think back a dozen years ago, the industry knew that the future of storage would be object, yet it's taken a long time to really be able to leverage it and use it, and the Cloud, the hyperscalers of course, have been a huge enabler on that, but we don't want customers to have to think about that it's object underneath, and that's the bridging the gap that I think we've been looking for. There, what else. We talk about really being able to extract the value out of Cloud, you know, data protection, disaster recovery, migrations are all things that are top of mind. >> Yeah, absolutely. All those use cases, and we're seeing some of the top rating CIOs talk about AI and ML. We've had a couple of customers who want to basically take their manufacturing data from remote sites and pump it into Google bit query. Now we all know manufacturing happens in Taiwan and Singapore and all those locations, now how do you take data from all those applications, normalize it, and pump it into Google bit query and get your predictable results on a quarterly basis, it's a challenge. Because the data volumes are large. So with our Cloud technology and our onboard capability, we're able to funnel data directly into Google Nearline, and on a quarterly basis, on a scheduled basis, transform it, push it into bit query, and bring out the results for the end user. So that journey is pretty transformated, from a customer standpoint. What they used to have five people do maybe once a year, now with a push of a button happens every quarter. So it's a change in how the AI and ML analytics evolve. The other element is also you know, our partnership with IBM, we're working very closely with their Cloud bag for data. Cloud bag for data is an awesome platform built to analyze any kind of data that you might have. With Actifio's normalization platform, you basically can feed any data into Actifio and it presents a unified interface into the slow pack, so you can build your analytics workloads very quickly and easily. >> So we've talked a lot about Cloud, one of the other C's of course in 10C is containers, if we look at containerization, when it first started, it was stateless applications, most applications that are running in containers are running for very short period of time, so help us understand where Actifio fits there, what's the problem statement that you are solving? >> Oh, absolutely. So containers are coming up, up and coming and out of reality, and as we see more applications flow into containers, you see the data lives outside the container. Because containers are short-lived, they're microservices, they come up and they go down, and the state is maintained in a storage platform outside the container, so Actifio tackles containers by taking the data protection strategy we have for the storage platform already, Bell defined, but enhancing the data presentation into the container as it comes up. So a container can be brought up in seconds, maybe less. But the container is only brought to life when it can lead to data and start working again, so that's the bridge Actifio actuates. So we understand, you know, the architecture of how a container is put together, how the container system is put together, and basically, we marry the storage and the application consistent in the storage into the container so that the container's databases, or applications, come to life. >> And that could be in a customer's data center, in a public Cloud, Kubernetes enabled, all of that? >> Absolutely, it can be anywhere, and with 10C, what we have done is we've also integrated with Cloud Native Snapshot, so if you talk about net neutrality for the container platform, if it's on premises, we have all kinds of access to the storage, the infrastructure, and the platforms so our processing is very different. If you take it to the Cloud, let's say Google, Google Kubernetes platform is fairly, it's a black box. You get some storage, and you get containers. And you have an API access to the storage. So in Google, we automatically autotune and start taking the Google snapshots to take the storage perfection, so that's the other way we've kind of neutralized the platform. >> Yeah, you've got a, thinking about it just from a customer's standpoint, one of the big challenges there is they've got everything from their big monoliths, they're big databases, through these microservice Cloud native architectures there, and it sounds like you know, is that just one of the fundamental architectural designs to make sure that you can span across those environments and give customers a common look and feel between those environments? >> Absolutely. The single pane of glass is a big askt and a big focus for us, not just across infrastructure, it's across geos and across all platforms. So you could have workloads running AIX6, VMware, in the Cloud, all the way through containers, and manage it all to a single console, to know when was the last good backup, how many copies of the database am I running, and each of these databases could have their own security constructs. So we normalize all of those elements and put them in a single console. >> Okay, 10C, shipping today? >> 10C shipping today, we have early access to a few customers, the general availability releases possibly in the February timeframe. >> Okay, and if I'm an existing Actifio customer, what's the path for me to get to 10C? >> Our support will reach out and do a simple software upgrade, it's available on all Cloud platforms, it's available everywhere, so you will see that on all the marketplaces and the regular upgrade process will get you that. >> Okay, and if I'm not an Actifio customer today, how easy is it for me to try this out? >> Oh, it is very easy, with our Actifio go SAS platform, it's a one-click download, you can download and try it out, try all the capabilities of the platform, it's also available on all the Cloud marketplaces for you to go and access that. >> All right, well, Ashok, a whole lot of pieces inside of 10C, congratulations to you and the team for building that, and definitely look forward to hearing more about the customer deployments. >> Thank you, we have exciting times ahead. >> All right. Lots more coverage from theCUBE throughout 2020, be sure to check out theCUBE.net, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

(funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBEConversation. >> Everyone, welcome to this CUBEConversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Here in theCUBE Studios here with Abby Kearns, Executive Director, Cloud Foundry Foundation, CUBE alumni. Great to see you again. I think this is your eighth time on theCUBE chatting. Always great to get the update. Thanks for spending the time. >> My pleasure, and it's a joy to drive down to your actual studios. >> (laughs) This is where all happens Wednesdays and Thursdays when we're not on the road doing CUBE events. I think we'll have over 120 events this year. We'll certainly see you at a bulk of them. Cloud Foundry, give us the update. Yeah, we took 'em joking before we came on camera. Boy this cloud thing is kind of working out. I mean, I think IBM CEO calls it chapter two. I'm like, we're still in chapter one, two, three? Give us the update Cloud Foundry, obviously open-source. Things are rocking. Give us the update. >> I do feel like we're moving into chapter two. Chapter one was a really long chapter. (laughs) It spanned about 10 years. But I do think we're starting to see actual growth and actual usage. And I think a lot of people are like, no, there's actually been usage for a while. Me, no no no not on a real scale. And we haven't seen any of the workloads for organizations running at massive scale. At the scale that we know that they can run at. But we're starting to see interesting scale. Like 40, 50 thousand applications, you know. Billions of transactions now passing through. A lot of cloud native technology. So we're starting to see real interesting volume. And so that's going to actually dictate how the next five years unfold because scale is going to dictate how the technologies unfold, how they're used. And they're going to feed into this virtuous cycle of how the technologies unfold, and how they're going to be used, which feedback into how enterprises are using them, and you know, and the cycle continues. >> Give us the update on the foundation. What's going on with the foundation, status, momentum, clouds out there. Obviously open-source continues to drive however we saw a lot of acquisitions and fundings around people who are using open-source to build a business around that. >> I love that. >> Your favorite conversation. But, I mean you know the technical challenges with open-source allow for technical challenges but also the people side is they're learning. What's the update with the foundation? >> Well open-source is really tricky, and I think there is a lot of people that are really enthusiastic as it is a because model. I mean last year 2018 was a pretty substantial year for open-source. The year ended with Red Hat's acquisition by IBM. One of their biggest acquisitions, $34 billion. But we saw in December alone, we also saw Heptio get picked up by VMware which is a services company which is really based on Kubernetes on an open-source technology. But we also saw HashiCorp get another round of funding. And then earlier in the year, Pivotal IPO'd. And so if you look at 2018 at a bigger level, you saw a lot of momentum around open-source and how it's actually being commercialized. Now you and I were talking a little bit prior and I'm a big believer that open-source has the potential and is going to change fundamentally how technology is used and consumed. But at the end of the day for the commercial aspects of it you still have to have a business around that. And I think there's always going to be that fine line. And that line is actually always be going to be moving because how you provide value in, around, and on top of open-source, has to evolve with both the market and your customer needs. >> Yeah and where you are on that wave, whatever wave that is, is it an early wave or is it more mature so the metrization certainly matters? >> Sure. >> You could be early on setting the table or if it's growing when there's some complexity. So it kind of depends, it's always that depends is it the cloud air or is it the Red Hat? There's different approaches and people kind of get confused on that and your answer to that is just pick one that works for, that's a good business model. Don't get hung up on kind of the playbook if you will, is that kind of what you're saying? >> Well I think we're seeing this play out this week with AWS's Elastic announcement, right? And there's been a lot of conversation around how do we think about open-source. Who has access to it? Who has the right to commercialize it? What does commercialization look like? And I think, I've always cautioned people that are proceeding down the path to open-source is really be thoughtful about why you're doing open-source. Like what is your, what are you hoping to achieve? There's a lot of potential that comes with open sourcing your technology. You gain ecosystem, community, momentum. There's a lot of positives that come with that but there's also a lot of work that comes with that too. Managing your community. Managing a much more varied share of stakeholders and people that are going to have thoughts and opinions around how that technology unfolds. And then of course it's because it's open-sources there's more opportunity for people to use that and build their own ideas and their own solutions on top of that. And potentially their own commercial products. And so really figuring out that fine line and what works best for your business. What works best for the technology. And then what your hopes are at the end of the day with that. >> And what are some of the momentums or points for the Foundation, with Cloud Foundry, obviously seeing Pivotal went public, you mentioned that VMWare, I talk to Michael Dell all the time, the numbers are great coming from that operation. Pat Kelson near the Amazon deal think that clear and where VMWare was. But still you have a lot more cloud, multi-cloud conversations happening than ever before. >> Well, for sure I mean at Cloud Foundry, we've actually been talking about multicloud since 2016. We saw that trend coming based on user behavior. And now you've seen everyone is multicloud, even the public clouds are multicloud. >> I think you had the first study out on that, too on multicloud. We did. We were we were firm believers in multicloud. Last year we've actually moved more broadly to multi-platform. Because at the end of the day there isn't one technology that solves all of these problems. Multicloud is you know is pervasive and at the end of the day multicloud means a lot of different things to a lot of people. But for many enterprises what it gives is optionality. You don't want to be locked into a single provider. You don't want to be locked into a single cloud or single solution because you know if I'm an enterprise, I don't know where I'm going to be in five years. Do I want to make a five year or a 10 year or a 20 year commitment to a single infrastructure provider when I don't know what my needs are going to be. So having that optionality and also being able to use the best of what clouds can provide, the best services, the best outcomes. And so for me, I want to have that optionality. So I'm going to look at technologies that give me that portability and then I'm going to use that to allow me to choose the best cloud that I need for right now for my business and maybe again a different one in the future. >> I want to get your thoughts on this. I just doubled down on this conversation because I think there's two things going on that I'm saying we'll get your reaction to. One is I've heard things like pick the right cloud for the right workload and I heard analogies. Hey, if you got an airplane you need to have two engines. You have one engine if it works for that plane, but your whole fleet of planes could be other clouds. So, pick the right cloud for the right workload. Meaning workload is defined spec. >> Yeah. >> I've also heard that the people side of the equation, where people are behaving like they are comfortable with API's tooling is potentially a lock-in, kind of by default. Not a technical lock-in, but people are comfortable with the API's and the tooling. >> Yeah. >> And the workloads need a certain cloud. Then maybe that cloud would be it. That's not saying pick that cloud for the entire company. Right, so certainly that the trend seems to be coming from a lot of people in the news saying hey, this whole sole-cloud, multi-cloud thing argument really isn't about one cloud vs. multiple clouds. It's workload cloud for the use case in the tooling, if it fits and the people are there to do it. Then you can still have other clouds and that's in the multi-cloud architecture. So is that real? What's your thoughts on that? >> Let's dissect that 'cause I think that's actually solving for two different outcomes. Like one multi-cloud for optionality's purpose and workload specific. I think it's a great one. There's a lot of services that are native to certain clouds that maybe you really would like to get greater access to. And so I think you're going to choose the best. You know that's going to drive your workload. Now also factoring in that you know you're going to have a much more mediated access to cloud based on what people are comfortable with. I do think it's at some point as an organization you want to have a better control over that. You know historically over the last decade what we've seen. Shadow IT really dictates your Cloud spend right. You know everyone's got a credit card. I got I've got access to AWS. >> And they got most of that business. Amazon did. >> Yes and that served them quite well. If I am an organization that's trying to digitally transform, I'm also trying to get a better handle on what we're spending, how we're spending it and frankly, now if I have compliance requirements, where's my data? These are going to be important questions for you when you're starting to run production workloads at scale on multiple clouds and so, I predict we're going to see a lot more tension there in internal organizations. Like, hey I'd love for you to use cloud, you know? Where this no longer needs to be a shadow thing, but let's figure out a way to do it that's strategically and intentional versus just random pockets. Choosing to do cloud because of the workflow that they like. >> Well you bring up a good point. The cost thing was never a problem, but then you have sprawl and you realize there's a cost to Optimizer component which means you might be overpaying because as you think about the system aspects, you got networking and you got Cloud management factors. So you start as you get into that Shadow IT expansion. You got to realize, wait a minute, I'm still spending a lot of cash here. >> This adds up really really quickly. I mean, I think the information piece a couple weeks ago where they talked about the Pinterest bill, this stuff, it starts adding up. And for organizations, this is like not just thousands of dollars. It's now hundreds of thousands of dollars. If not you know, tens of millions of dollars. And so, if I'm trying to figure out ways to optimize my business and my scale, I'm going to look at that because that is not an insignificant amount of money. And so if I'm in it, that's money that could be better invested in more developers, better outcomes, a better alignment with my business, then that's where I want to spend my time and money, and so, I'm going to spend more time being really thoughtful about what clouds we're using, what infrastructure we're using, and the tools we're using to allow us to have that optionality. >> So you would agree with the statement if I said, generally, multi-cloud is here, it already exists. >> Yes. >> And that multi-cloud architecture thinking is really the conversation that needs to be had. Not so much cloud selection, per say. It's not a mutually exclusive situation. Meaning, I'm not all in on Amazon. I'm going to have clouds plural? >> Well, yeah you are. Like we have already seen as of early last year over half of our users. Which right now over half the Fortune 500 are multi-cloud already, and that number has gone up since last year I'm for sure. Some workloads were on-prem and some are in a public cloud. Be it GCP, AWS, Azure, or AliCloud. And so that is a statement of fact. And I have every executive that I've talked to with every enterprise has been like, yes, we're doing multi-cloud. >> Yeah, they're going to have some kind of on-prem anyway, So we know that's there. That's not going to go away. >> No, PRIM is not going to go away. >> Then an IOT edge, and an Enterprise Edge, SDWAN comes back into vogue as people start using SAS across network connections. >> Yeah. >> I mean, SDWAN is essentially the internet basically. >> I feel like the older I get the more I'm like, wow, didn't I have this conversation like, 20 years ago? (laughs) >> I was talking about something earlier when I came in. The old becomes the new again. It's what's happening, right? Distributor computing now goes to cloud, you got the Enterprise. What are the big players doing? Google Next is coming up next month, big event. >> It is the week after Cloud Foundry Summit. >> They got Amit Zavery, big news over there they poached from Oracle. So Thomas Kurian brought in his Oracle, who is Cube alumni as well. Really smart guy. Diane is not there. What do you expect from Google Next for the week? What are we going to see there? What's the sentiment? What's the vibe? What do you see happening? >> Well, I think it's going to be all about the Enterprise right. That's why Thomas was brought in. And then I think they really give Google that Enterprise focus and say, how do we end up? As it's not just about I'm going to sell to enterprises. That's not, you know, when you're selling to an enterprise there is a whole different approach and you have to write how to the teams, the sales teams. You have to write how to the ecosystem, the services, the enablement capabilities, the support, the training, the product strategy? All of that takes a very different slant when you're thinking about an enterprise. And so I'm sure, that's going to be front-and-center for everything that they talk about. >> And certainly he's very public about, you know, the position Oracle Cloud, he knows the Enterprise Oracle was the master of enterprise gamesmanship for sure. >> Yes, for sure. You don't get a whole lot more enterprising than Oracle. >> What's going on in the CNCF any news there? What's happening on the landscape? What's the Abby take on the landscape of cloud? >> Well, speaking as someone that does not run CNCF. >> Feel free to elaborate. >> Cloud Native Computing Foundation, for those of you that aren't aren't, you know, aren't familiar is a sister open-source organization that is a clearing house or collective of cloud made of technologies. The anchor project is the very well-known Kubernetes, but it also spans a variety of technologies from everything from LINKerD to SEDA to Envoy, so it's just a variety of cloud-native technologies. And you know they're continuing to grow because obviously cloud-native is becoming you know it's coming into its own time right now. Because we're starting to really think about how to do better with workloads. Particularly workloads that I can run across a cloud. I mean and that seems pretty pedantic but we've been talking about Cloud since 2007. And we were talking about what cloud brings. What did cloud bring, it brings resiliency. You can auto-scale. You can burst into the cloud, remember bursting? Now all the things we talked about in 2007 to 2008 but weren't really reality because the applications that were written weren't necessarily written to do that. >> And that's exactly the point. >> So now we're actually seeing a lot more of these applications written we call them microservices, 12 Factor apps, serverless apps. What have you but it's applications written to run and scale across the cloud. And that is a really defining point because now these technologies are actually relevant because we're starting to see more of these created and run and now run at scale. >> Yeah, I think that's the point. I think you nailed it. The applications are driving everything And I think that's the chapter two narrative. In my opinion, chapter one was, let's get infrastructures code going. And chapter two is apps dictating policy and then you're going to see microservices start to emerge. Kind of new different vibe in terms of like what it means for scale as less of about, hey, I'm doing cloud, I got some stuff in the public cloud. Here the conversation is around apps, the workloads and that's where the business value is. It's not like people who is trying to do transformation. They're not saying hey I stood up a Kubernetes Cluster. They're saying I got to deploy my banking app or I got to do, I got to drive this workload. >> And I have to iterate now. I can't do a banking app and then update it in a year. That's not acceptable anymore. You are constantly having to update. You're constantly having to iterate, and that is not something you can do with a large application. I mean the whole reason we talk a lot about monolithic vs 12 factor or cloud in a box is because it isn't that my monolithics are inherently bad, it's just they're big and they're complex. Which means in order to make any updates it takes time. That's where the year comes in, the 18-months come in. And I think that is no longer acceptable you know. I remember the time and I'm going to date myself here, but I remember the time when you know banks would or any e-commerce site would be down. They'd have what they call the orange page. But the orange page would come up, site down tonight 'cause we're doing maintenance for the weekend, right? >> Under construction. >> Under construction. Okay, well I'll just come back on Monday. That's fine. And now, you're like, if it's down for 5 minutes you're like what is actually happening right now. Why is this not here. >> Yeah like when Facebook went down the other day. I was like, what the hell? Facebook sucks. >> You know, the internet blows up if Instagram is down. Oh my God, my life is over and I think our our expectation now is not only constant availability. So you know always available. But also our expectation is real-time access to data transparency and a visibility into what's actually happening at all times. That I've said something that a lot of organizations are really having to figure out. How to develop the applications to expose that. And that takes time and that takes change. And there's a ton of culture change. it has to happen and that is the more important thing if I'm a business I care more about how do I make that a reality and I should care a lot less about the technologies that you use. >> It's interesting you mention about the monolith versus the decomposed application of being agile. Because if you don't have the culture and the people to do it it's still a monolithic effort in the sense of the holistic thinking and the architectural, it's a systems architecture. You have to look at it like a system and that's not easy either. Once get that done the benefits are multifold in terms of like what you can do. But its it's that systems thinking setup is becoming more of an architectural concept that's super important. >> For sure if I have a microservice app, but it takes a 150 people to get that through change management and get it into production well that will still take me a year. Does it matter if there's maybe 12 lines of code in that application? It doesn't matter and so, you know I spend a lot of time. Even though I run Cloud Foundry, I spend a lot of time talking about culture change. All the writing I do is really around cultural change and what does that look like. Because at the end of the day if you're not willing to make those changes, you're not willing to structure your teams and allow for that collaboration and if you're doing iterative work, feedback loops from your customers. If you're not willing to put those pieces into place there is no technology that's going to make you better. >> I totally agree, so let me ask you a question on that point, great point, by the way. Most followed your you're writing your blog posts in the links, but I think that's the question. When do you know when it's not working? So I've seen companies that are rearranging the deckchairs, if you will, to use an analogy with all the culture rah, rah! And then nothing ever happens right? So they've gone into that paralysis mode. When do you look at a culture? When does the executive, what should they be thinking about because people kind of aspire to do this execution that you said is critical? When do you know it's not working or what should they be doing? What's the best practice? How does someone say hey you know what I really want is to be more holistic in my architecture. I don't want to spend two years on that the architecture and then find out it's now just starting. I want to get an architecture in place. I want to hit the ground running. >> I mean it's twofold, one, start small. I mean you're not going to change you know if you're an 85 year old company with 200,000 people you're not going to change that overnight and you should expect that's going to be an 8 to 10 year process now what that's also going to mean is you're going to have to have a really clear vision and you're going to have to be really committed like this is going to be a hard road but conversely when someone says what does success look like, when you're looking at a variety of companies how do you know which ones which ones you think are going to be the most successful at the end of the day because no one's ever actually done any of this before there's no one that's ever gone through this digital transformation and it should have come out on the other side no one. There isn't and so I think what does success look and I said well for me, what I look for are companies that are investing and re-skilling their workforce. That's what I'm looking for. I get real excited when companies talk about their internal boot camps or their programs to rescale or upscale their teams because it's not like you're going to lay off 20,000 people and hire 20,000 cloud native developers, they don't exist and they're certainly not going to exists for thousands of companies to go and do that so you know how are you investing in re-skilling because-- >> It's easy to grow your own internally from pre-existing positions. >> Well sure, they know your business. >> Rather than go to a job board that has no one available. >> And you know at the end of the day that needs to be your new business model what is digital transformation actually it's just a different way of working and there isn't, there is no destination to the digital trend. This isn't a journey that has an end and so you need to really think about how are you going to invest differently in your people so that they can continuously learn continuously learning needs to be part of your model and your mantra and that needs to be in everything you do from hiring to HR to MBO's to you know how do you how do you structure your teams like how do you make sure that people can constantly learn and evolve because if that's not happening it doesn't you know everything else is going to fall by the wayside >> Is the technology gap easy to fill? Lot of tech out there. Talent gap hard to fill. >> For sure. >> That's the real challenge. >> If you have all the best tech in the world but you don't have the right people or the right structure are you going to be successful, probably not. >> Yeah, that's a challenge. Alright, so final question for you where are you going to be, what's your schedule look like, where can people find you, what events going to be at? You guys have an event coming up? >> April 2nd through 4th in Philly. We're going to have a summit you want to see some people that are actually running cloud at scale that's the place to go >> April 5th? >> 2nd through 4th. First week of April Philly, fingers crossed good weather lots of cloud talk and it's a great way. >> City of Brotherly Love >> Yes, we're bringing it. >> Philadelphia. The Patriots couldn't make it to the playoffs last year but love the Philly fans down there Paul Martino and friends down there. Abby thanks for coming on. Appreciate it-good to see you. Thanks for the update. We'll see you around the events, I won't be able to make your event I'll be taking the week off skiing. >> Well one of us has to. >> First vacation of the year, two years. Thanks for coming in. >> You should do that. >> Abby Kearns here inside theCUBE for CUBEConversation I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching (funky music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon web services, intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent, here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Furrier. We're joined by Clement Pang. He is the co-founder of Wavefront by VMware. Welcome. >> Thank you Thank you so much. >> It's great to have you on the show. So, I want you tell our viewers a little bit about Wavefront. You were just purchased by VMware in May. >> Right. >> What do you do, what is Wavefront all about? >> Sure, we were actually purchased last year in May by VMware, yeah. We are an operational analytics company, so monitoring, I think is you could say what we do. And the way that I always introduce Wavefront is kind of a untold secret of Silicon Valley. The reason I said that is because in the, well, just look at the floor. You know, there's so many monitoring companies doing logs, APM, metrics monitoring. And if you really want to look at what do the companies in the Valley really use, right? I'm talking about companies such as Workday, Watts, Groupon, Intuit, DoorDash, Lyft, they're all companies that are customers of Wavefront today. So they've obviously looked at all the tools that are available on the market, on the show floor, and they've decided to be with Wavefront, and they were with us before the acquisition, and they're still with us today, so. >> And they're the scale-up guys, they have large scale >> That's right, yeah, container, infrastructure, running clouds, hybrid clouds. Some of them are still on-prem data centers and so we just gobble up all that data. We are platform, we're not really opinionated about how you get the data. >> You call them hardcore devops. >> Yes, hardcore devops is the right word, yeah. >> Pushing the envelope, lot of new stuff. >> That's right. >> Doing their own innovation >> So even serverless and all the ML stuff that that's been talked about. They're very pioneering. >> Alright, so VMware, they're very inquisitive on technology, very technology buyers. Take a minute to explain the tech under the covers. What's going on. >> Sure, so Wavefront is a at scale time series database with an analytics engine on top of it. So we have actually since expanded beyond just time series data. It could be distributed histograms, it could be tracing, it includes things like events. So anything that you could gather up from your operation stack and application metrics, business metrics, we'll take that data. Again, I just said that we are unopinionated so any data that you have. Like sometimes it could be from a script , it could be from your serverless functions. We'll take that data, we'll store it, we'll render it and visualize it and of course we don't have people looking at charts all day long. We'll alert you if something bad is going on. So teams just really allow the ability to explore the data and just to figure out trends, correlations and just have a platform that scales and just runs reliably. >> With you is Switzerland. >> Yeah, basically I think that's the reason why VMware is very interested, is cause we work with AWS, work with Azure, work with GCP and soon to be AliCloud and IBM, right. >> Talk about why time series data is now more on board. We've got, we've had this conversation with Smug, we saw the new announcement by Amazon. So 'cause if you 're doing real-time, time matters and super important. Why is it important now, why are people coming to the realization as the early adopters, the pioneers. >> That's right, I think I used to work at Google and I think Google, very early on I realized that time series is a way to understand complex systems, especially if you have FMR workloads and so I think what companies have realized is that logs is just very voluminous, it's very difficulty to wield and then traditional APM products, they tend to just show you what they want to show you, like what are the important paying points that you should be monitoring and with Wavefront, it's just a tool that understands time series data and if you think about it, most of the data that you gather out of your operational environment is timer series data. CPU, memory, network, how many people logging in, how many errors, how many people are signing up. We certainly have our customer like Lyft. You know, how many of you are getting Rise, how many credit cards are off. You know all of that information drives, should we pay someone because a certain city, nobody is getting picked up and that's kind of the dimension that you want to be monitoring on, not on the individual like, okay this base, no network even though we monitor those of course. >> You know, Clement, I got to talk to you about the supporting point because we've been covering real time, we've been covering IoT, we've been doing a ton of stuff around looking at the importance of data and having data be addressable in real-time. And the database is part of the problem and also the overall architecture of the holistic operating environment. So to have an actual understanding of time series is one. Then you actually got to operationalize it. Talk about how customers are implementing and getting value out of time series data and how they differentiate that with data leagues that they might spin up as well as the new dupe data in it. Some might not be valuable. All this is like all now coming together. How do people do that? >> So I think there were a couple of dimensions to that. So it's scalability is a big piece. So you have to be able to take in enormous amount of data, (mumbles) data leagues can do that. It has to be real-time, so our latency from ingestion to maturalization on a chart is under our second So if you're a devops team, you're spinning up containers, you can't go blind for even 10 seconds or else you don't know what's going on with your new service that you just launched. So real-time is super important and then there's analytics. So you can't, you can see all the data in real-time but if it's like millions of time series coming in, it's like the matrix, you need to have some way to actually gather some insights out of that data. SO I think that's what we are good at. >> You know a couple of years ago, we were doing Open Compute, a summit that Facebook puts on, you eventually worked with Google so I see he's talking about the cutting edge tech companies. There's so much data going onto the scale, you need AI, you got to have machines so some of the processing, you can't have this manual process or even scrips, you got to have machines that take care of it. Talk about the at-scale component because as the tsunami of data continues to grow, I mean Amazon's got a satellite, Lockheed Martin, that's going to light up edge computing, autonomous vehicles, pentabytes moving to the cloud, time series matters. How do people start thinking about machine learning and AI, what do you guys do. >> So I think post-acquisition I would say, we really double down on looking at AI and machine learning in our system. We, because we don't down sample any of the data that we collect, we have actually the raw data coming in from weather sensors, from machines, from infrastructure, from cloud and we just is able to learn on that because we understand incidence, we understand anomalies. So we can take all of that data and punch it through different kinds of algorithms and figures out, maybe we could just have the computer look at the incoming time series data and tell you if its anomalist, right. The holy grail for VMware I think, is to have a self-driving data center and what that means is you have systems that understands, well yesterday there was a reinforcement learning announcement by Amazon. How do we actually apply those techniques so that we have the observability piece and then we have some way to in fact change against the environment and then we figure out, you know, just let the computer just do it. >> I love this topic, you should come into our studio, if I'm allowed to, we'll do a deep dive on this because there's so many implications to the data because if you have real-time data, you got to have the streaming data come in, you got to make sense of it. The old networking days, we call it differentiate services. You got to differentiate of the data. Machine learning, if the data's good, it works great, but data sucks, machine learning doesn't go well so if I want that dynamic of managing the data so you don't have to do all this cleaning. How do people get that data verified, how do they set up the machine learning. >> Sure, it still required clean data because I mean, it's garbage in, garbage out >> Not dirty data >> So, but the ability for us, for machine learning in general to understand anything in a high dimensional space is for it to figure out, what are the signals from a lot of the noise. A human may require to be reduces in dimensionality so that they could understand a single line, a single chart that they could actually have insights out of. Machines can technically look at hundreds or even tens of thousands of series and figures out, okay these are the two that are the signals and these are the knobs that I could turn that could affect those signals. So I think with machine learning, it actually helps with just the voluminous nature of the data that we're gathering. And figuring out what is the signal from the noise. >> It's a hard problem. So talk about the two functionalities you guys just launched. What's the news, what are you doing here at AWS. >> So the most exciting thing that we launched is our distributed tracing offering. We call it a three-dimensional micro service observability. So we're the only platform that marry metrics, histograms and distributed tracing in a single platform offering. So it's certainly at scale. As I said, it's reliable, it has all the analytical capabilities on top of it, but we basically give you a way to quickly dive down into a problem and realize what the root cause is and to actually see the actual request at it's context. Whether it's troubleshooting , root cause analysis, performance optimization. So it's a single shop kind of experience. You put in our SDK, it goes ahead and figures out, okay you're running Java, you're running Jersey or Job Wizard or Spring Boot and then it figures out, okay these are the key metrics you should be looking at. If there are any violations, we show you the actual request including multiple services that are involved in that request and just give you an out of the box turn keyway to understand at scale, microservice deployments, where are the pain points, where is latency coming from, where are the errors coming from. So that's kind of our first offering that we're launching. Same pricing mode, all that. >> So how are companies going to use this? What kind of business problem is this solving. >> So as the world transitions to a deployment architecture that mostly consists of Microservices, it's no longer a monolytic app, it's no longer an end-tier application. There are a lot of different heterogeneous languages, frameworks are involved, or even AWS. Cloud services, SAS services are involved and you just have to have some way to understand what is goin on. The classic example I have is you could even trace things like an actual order and how it goes through the entire pipeline. Someone places the orders, a couple days later there's someone who, the orders actually get shipped and then it gets delivered. You know, that's technically a trace. It could be that too. You could send that trace to us but you want to understand, so what are the different pieces that was involved. It could be code or it could be like a vendor. I could be like even a human process. All of that is a distributed tracing atom and you could actually send it to Wavefront and we just help you stitch that picture together so you could understand what's really going on. >> What's next for you guys. Now you're part of VMware. What's the investment area, what are you guys looking at building, what's the next horizon? >> So I think, obviously the (mumbles) tracing, we still have a lot to work on and just to help teams figure out, what do they want to see kind of instantly from the data that we've gathered. Again, we just have gathered data for so long, for so many years and at the full resolution so why can't we, what insights can develop out of it and then as I said, we're working on AI and ML so that's kind of the second launch offering that we have here where you know, people have been telling us, it's great to have all the analytics but if I don't have any statistical background to anything like that, can you just tell me, like, I have a chart, a whole bunch of lines, tell me just what I should be focusing on. So that's what we call the AI genie and so you just apply, call it a genie I guess, and then you would basically just have the chart show you what is going wrong and the machines that are going wrong, or maybe a particular service that's going wrong, a particular KPI that's in violation and you could just go there and figure out what's-- >> Yeah, the genie in the bottle. >> That's right (crosstalk) >> So final question before we go. What's it like working for VMware start-up culture. You raised a lot of money doing your so crunch based reports. VMware's cutting edge, they're a part with Amazon, bit turn around there, what's it like there? >> It's a very large company obviously, but they're, obviously as with everything, there's always some good points and bad points. I'll focus on the good. So the good things are there's just a lot of people, very smart people at VMware. They've worked on the problem of virtualization which was, as a computer scientist, I just thought, that's just so hard. How do you run it like the matrix, right, it's kind of like and a lot of very smart people there. A lot of the stuff that we're actually launching includes components that were built inside VMware based on their expertise over the years and we're just able to pull, it's just as I said, a lot of fun toys and how do we connect all of that together and just do an even better job than what we could have been as we were independent. >> Well congratulations on the acquisition. VMware's got the radio event we've covered. We were there, you got a lot of engineers, a lot of great scientists so congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> Great, Clement thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have more from AWS re:Invent coming up in just a little bit. (light electronic music)

(dramatic music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio for a CUBE conversation. It's really a great thing that we like to take advantage of. A little less hectic than the show world and we're right in the middle of all the shows, if you're paying attention. So we're happy to have a CUBE alumni on. He's been on many, many times. Saar Gillai , he's now the CEO of Teridion. And Saar, welcome. I don't think we've talked to you since you've been in this new role. >> Yeah, it's been about a year I think. >> Been 'about a year. So give us kind of the update on Teridion. What it's all about and really more importantly, what attracted you to the opportunity? >> Sure. First of all, great to be here. I don't know where John is. I'm looking for him. He ran away. Maybe he knew I was coming. >> Somewhere over the Atlantic I think. 35,000 feet. >> I'll follow up on that later but hey, you're here. So, you know Teridion, let's talk about maybe the challenge that Teridion is addressing first so people will understand that, right. So if you look about what's going on these days with the advent of Cloud. and how people are really accessing stuff, things have really moved in the past. Most of the important services that people access were in a data center and were accessed through the LAN so the enterprise had control over them and if you wanted to access an app, if it didn't work, somebody when into the LAN, played around with some CISCO router and things maybe got better. >> But at least you had control. >> You had control and if you look at what's happened over the last decade, but certainly in the last five years, with SAS and the Cloud. Stating the obvious, more and more of your services now are actually being accessed through your WAN and in many cases, that actually means the internet itself. If you're accessing Salesforce or Box or Ignite or any of these services. The challenge with that is that now means that a critical part of your user experience, you don't control. The vendor doesn't control because you can make the best SAS up in the world but, and those apps are increasingly very dynamic. Caching doesn't solve this problem and the problem is now, okay, but I'm experiencing it over the internet. And while the internet is a great tool obviously, it's not really built for reliabilty, consistency, and consistent speed. Reality, if you look at the internet, it was designed to sent one packet to NORAD and tell them that some nuclear missile died somewhere. That's what it was designed for right? So the packet will get there but the jitter and all these things may work and so what happens is that, now you have a consistency problem. Historically, people will say well, that's all been addressed through traditional caching and that's true. Caching still has it's place. The reality is though that caching is more for stuff that doesn't change a lot and now, it's all very dynamic. If you're uploading a file, that's not a caching activity. If you're doing something in Salesforce, it's very dynamic. It's not cached. At Teridion, we looked at this problem. Teridion's been around about four years. I've been there for about a year. We felt that the best way to solve this problem was actually to leverage some of the Cloud technology that already exists to solve it. So what we do, actually, is we build an overlay network on top of the public Cloud surface area. So instead of traditionally, the way people did things is they would build a network themselves but today the public Cloud guys honestly are spending gazillions of dollars building infrastructure. Why not leverage it the same way that you don't buy CPUs, why buy routers? What we do is we create a massive overlay network on demand on the public Cloud surface area. And public Cloud means not just Amazon or Google but also people like AliCloud, DigitalOcean, Vulture, any Cloud provider really, some Russian Cloud providers. And then we monitor the internet conditions and then we build a fast path. If you think about it almost like a ways, a fast path for your packet from wherever the customer is to your service thereby dramatically increasing the speed but also providing much higher reliabilty. >> So, lot of thoughts. If I'm hearing right, you're leveraging the public Cloud infrastructure so they're pipes, if you will. >> And they're CPUs. >> And they're CPUs but then you're putting basically waypoints on that packet's journey to reroute to a different public Cloud infrastructure for that next leg if that's more appropriate. >> Yeah, and basically what I'm doing is I'm basically just saying if there's a, if your server's here whether they're on a public Cloud or somewhere else, it doesn't matter, and a customer is here, through some redirection, I will create a router on a public Cloud so a soft router, somewhere close from a network perspective to a user and somewhere close to the server and then between them, I'll create an overlay fast path. And then, what is goes over will be based on whatever the algorithm figures out. The way we know where to go over is we also have a sensor network distributed throughout the public Cloud surface areas and it's constantly creating a heat map of where there's capacity, where there's problems, where there's jitter and we'll create a fast path. Typically that fast path will give you, one of the challenges, I'll give you an example. So let's say you're on Comcast and let's say you've got 40 meg let's say, your connection at home. And then you connect to some server and theoretically that server has much more, right? But reality is, when you do that connection, it's not going to be 40 meg. Sometimes it's 5 meg, okay? So we'll typically give you almost your full capacity that you have from your first provider all the way there by creating this fast path. >> So how does it compare, we hear things about like Direct Connect between Equinix and Amazon or a lot of peer relationships that get set up. How does what you're doing kind o' compare, contrast, play, compare to those solutions? >> Direct Connect is sort of a static connection. If you have an office and you want to have a Direct Connection, it's got advantages and it's useful in certain areas. Part of the challenge there is that first of all, it has a static capacity. It's static and it has a certain capacity. What we do, because it's completely software oriented, is we'll create a connection and if you want more capacity, we'll just create more routers. So you can have as much capacity as you want from wherever you want where with Direct Connect, you say I want this connection, this connection, this much capacity and it's static. So if you have something very static, then that may be a good solution for you but if you're trying to reach people at other places and it's dynamic, and also you want variable capacities. For example, let's say you say I want to pay for what I use. I don't want to pay for a line. Historically, when you're using these things, you say okay, if the maximum I may want is 40 meg, you say okay, give me a 40 meg line. That's expensive. >> Right, right. >> But what if you say I want 40 meg only for a few hours a day right? So in my case, you just say look, I want to do this many terabytes. And if you want to do it at 40 meg, do it at 40 meg. It doesn't matter. So it's much more dynamic and this lends itself more to the modern way of people thinking of things. Like the same way you used to own a server and you had to buy the strongest server you needed for the end of the month because maybe the finance guy needed to run something. Today you don't do that right? You just go to public Cloud and when it's the end of the month, you get more CPUs. We're the same thing. You just set a connection. If you need more capacity, then you'll get more capacity that you need. We had a customer that we were working with that was doing some mobile stuff in China and all of a sudden, they needed to do 600,000 connections a minute from China. And so we just scaled up. You don't have to preconfigure any of this stuff. >> Right, right. So that's really where you make the comparison of public Cloud for networking because you guys are leveraging public Cloud infrastructure, you're software based so that you can flex so you don't have the old model. >> It's completely elastic, like I said. It's very similar. Our view is the compute in the last decade, obviously, compute has moved from a very static I own everything mode to let's use dynamic resources as much as possible. Of course, there's been a lot of advantage to that. Why wouldn't your connectivity, especially your connectivity outside which is increasing your connectivity also use that paradigm. Why do you need to own all this stuff? >> Right, right. As you said before we turned the cameras on the value proposition to your customers who are the people that basically run these big apps, is the fact that they don't have to worry about that but net is just flat out faster to execute the simple operations like uploading or downloading something to BOX. >> And again, you mentioned BOX, they're one of our big customers and we have a massive network if you thing about how much BOX uploads in a given day, right? 'Cause there's a lot of there traffic that goes through us. But if you think about these SAS providers, they really need to focus on making their app as good as possible and advancing it and making it as sophisticated as possible and so, the problem is then there's this last edge which is from their server all the way to the customer, they don't really control. But that is really important to the customer experience, right? If you're trying to upload something to BOX or trying to use some website and it's really slow, your user experience is bad. It doesn't matter if it's the internet's fault. You're still as a customer, So this gives them control. They give us that ability and then we have control that we can give it much faster speed. Typically in the US, it may be two to five times faster. If you're going outside the US, it could be much faster sometimes. In China, we go 15 times faster. But also, it's consistent and if you have issues, we have a knock, we monitor, we can go look at it. If some customer says I have a problem, right? We'll immediately be able to say okay, here's the problem. Maybe there's a server issue and so forth as opposed to them saying I have a problem and the SAS vendor saying well, it's fine on our side. >> Right, right. So, I'm curious on your go to market. Obviously, you said BOX is a example of a customer. You've got some other ones on the website. Who are these big application service providers, that term came up the other day, like flashback to 1990. 1998 >> I call them SAS >> It's funny, we were talking about the old days. >> To me, it's all the same, as a service guy. >> But then, as you go to market then going to include going out directly through the public Clouds in some of their exchanges so that basically, I could just buy a faster throughput with the existing service. Where do you go from here? I imagine, who doesn't want faster internet service period? >> Yeah, we started off going to the people who have the biggest challenge and easier to work with a small company right? You want to work with a few big guys. They also help you design your solution, make sure it's good. If you can run BOX and Traffic and Ignite. Traffic can probably handle other things, last year for example. We are looking at potentially providing some of the service, for example, if you're accessing S3 for example, we can access S3 at least three times faster. So we are looking potentially at putting something on the web where you could just go to Amazon and sign up for that. The other thing that we're looking at, which is later in the year, probably is that we haven't gotten a lot of requests from people that said hey, since the WAN is the new LAN, right, and they want to also try to use this technology for their enterprise WAN between branch offices where SD-WAN is sort of playing today, we've gotten a lot of requests to leverage this technology also in SD-WAN and so we're also looking at how that could potentially play out because again, people just say look, why can't I use this for all my WAN connectivity? Why is it only for SAS connectivity? >> Right, right. I mean it makes sense. Again, who doesn't want, the network never goes fast enough, right? Never, never, never. >> It's not only speed. I agree with you but it's not only speed. What you find, what people take for granted in the LAN but they only notice it when now they're running over the LAN is that it's a business critical service. So you want it to be consistent. If it's up, it needs to have latency, jitter, control. It needs to be consistent. It can't be one second it's great, the next second it's bad and you don't know why and visibility. No one's ever had that problem. >> I'm just laughing. I'm thinking of our favorite Comcast here. If they're not a customer, you need to get them on your list. Help make some introductions hopefully. >> So, people take that for granted when they're LAN and then when they move to the Cloud, they just assume that it's going to continue but it doesn't actually work that way. Then they get people from branch offices complaining that they couldn't upload a doc or the sales person was slow and all these problems happen and the bigger issue is, not only is this a problem, you don't have control. As a person providing a service, you want to have control all the way so you can say "yeah, I can see it. "I'm fixing it for you here. "I fixed it for you." And so it's about creating that connection and making it business critical. >> It's just a funny thing that we see over and over and over where cutting edge and brand new quickly becomes expected behavior very, very quickly. The best delivery by the best service, suddenly you have an expectation that that's going to be consistent across all your experiences with all your apps. So you got to deliver that QS. >> Yeah, and I think the other thing that we notice, of course, is because of the explosion of data right? It's true that the internet's capacity is growing but data is growing faster because people want to do more because CPUs are stronger, your handset is stronger and so, so much of it is dynamic. Like I said before, historically, some of this was solved by just let's cache everything. But today, everything is dynamic. It's bidirectional and the caching technology doesn't do that. It's not built for that. It's a different type of network. It's not built for this kind of capacity so as more and more stuff is dynamic, it becomes difficult to do these things and that's really where we play. And again, I think the key is that historically, you had to build everything. But the same way that you have all these SAS providers not building everything themselves but just building the app and then running on top of the public Cloud. The same thing is why would I go build a network when the public Cloud is investing a hundred billion dollars a year in building massive infrastructure. >> Yeah, and they are, big infrastructure. Well Saar, thanks for giving us the update and stopping by and we will watch the story unfold. >> Great to be here. >> Alright. And we'll send John a message. >> I'll have to track him down. >> Alright, he's Saar, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. It's a CUBE conversation at our Palo Alto Studio. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (dramatic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018 brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to the live CUBE coverage. This is day three of VMworld 2018. We're live in Las Vegas this is theCUBE's special coverage. Our ninth year covering VMworld. Kicking off day three, we've got two sets. Our next guest, Brian Reagan, who's the CMO of Actifio, theCUBE alumni. Great to see you. Great company doing some great things on the marketing side. You guys taking a different approach than others. Let the product do the talking. Let the solution speak for itself. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. It's great to be back and, Dave, it's always a pleasure. It's great to be at VMworld. >> You guys, I don't want to say, a different approach, but you're here at VMworld. There's a lot of pomp and circumstance. There's a lot of big booths, a lot of glam, a lot of attention getting. You got to do that but you don't want to overspend on that. You really want to just be in the community. What's your strategy? How are you as a CMO going into a world that wants more content? They want more data. They want to get solutions built. They love the glam, but the meat and potatoes is what they want. >> Monday night we had an event at TopGolf and I was talking to a couple customers and they basically were all saying the same thing to me which was, I come to VMworld to basically collect squeezy balls for my kids. They're going back to school. I'm going to collect a lot of toys. I'm going to do the solution expo. Great, great opportunity to really breakthrough from a swag standpoint, but no one's coming here to necessarily research the company that they want to disrupt or transform their business around. What we believe for VMware and, quite frankly, just in general is this is a great place to engage with customers. They're all here. This is the IT, this is COMDEX 2018. We need to be here, but we don't necessarily need to be in a solutions exchange where it's just an arms race about swag. >> What's your relationship with VMware? How do you guys fit in the ecosystem? What's the value proposition? What is the Actifio relationship to the community? How do you guys walk that line and how do you deliver those solutions? >> Pretty much throw a rock and you'll hit a vendor out here who has a great VMware solution, right? We are no exception. Everyone does VMware. Quite frankly, it's actually really easy nowadays. There's zero differentiation. I hate to say it, but everyone does VMware the same way. There is really no disruption in this marketplace because everyone does VADP. Everyone does Snapshot. Quite frankly, what we major on and what we focus on is actually the workloads that are franchise critical to businesses, which really are databases. Yeah, they might run out of VM, but often times they run on physical machines. Let's focus on databases. If they happen to be VMware, great. You know what, we like everybody else has a great VMware solution, but it's easy. Let's focus on the hard stuff which is databases which run the business and dX is all around databases and applications that run the business. That's where we major on. That's where our value comes in. That's where our customers see the most value from Actifio. >> My take away is, five/ten years ago it was all about integration and that was a differentiation, who could get the SDK faster, >> Exactly right, yeah. >> And you say, we were, we own them and that app would be right there. Okay, fine. That's done, okay. Fast forward to 2018, what's your perspective on VMware, what they're doing, the market momentum. You mentioned databases. You see them with Amazon bringing database now on prem. A lot has changed. What's your perspective? >> I think VMware is really... You talk to any CIO, any IT leadership, VMware is a critical part of the conversation so I don't mean to, in any way, diminish the value that VMware brings to the enterprise. And actually they are enabling cloud in every enterprise today whether it's private, whether it's hybrid, whether it's I'm going to do public, but I'm going to do public in VMware in the Amazon Cloud. VMware is table stakes in terms of running mission critical applications. What we believe is the next level of integration is what's the app running in VMware, right? What is it Oracle? I'm running Oracle rack inside of VMware. I'm running SAP inside of VMware. That's the next level of integration that becomes the differentiation and, quite frankly, the value creation in a lot of these enterprises. >> How do you guys differentiate, John was talking about all the glam and all the noise, a lot of noise, tons of noise around data protection. You guys pioneered the whole copy data management space. Where are you seeing growth? Where's the momentum, maybe you can give some examples. >> 2/3 of our business is now actually leading with DevOps and cloud. The real lever there is time. People want more time back in their day and they want more time back because whether it's-- there was a great article that SearchITOperations published about Aetna where they have tens of multi-terabyte databases and, quite frankly, it breaks every piece of infrastructure that they had, but they want to be able to serve those multi-terabyte databases out to their developers within minutes, as opposed to weeks or months or however long it takes traditional operations. Let's serve that need. Let's solve the time problem and all of a sudden digital transformation becomes a reality. dX and continuous integration, continuous development is really easy when you're talking about megabyte-sized JSON files. When you talk about 100 terabyte databases, it becomes really hard. With Actifio, we solve that problem. Now, we're enabling dX at scale in these large enterprises. It's really a time problem. >> Aetna's a customer obviously. We heard a similar story from Live Nation, which is another customer, but go ahead, John, sorry. >> What's the drivers in this because this is a unique thing? Because databases, as we said on theCUBE here on our analysis, the battleground in cloud, on premise in cloud database is the crucial thing. Look at Amazon, they're going after Oracle. RDS, their relational database service, on VMware on premise. Amazon's never done that before so clearly the database is a hard nut to crack, one. Two, it's super important. It's the pacing item on all migrations, all activity. What's driving your business because you're targeting that, trying to improve ease of use, but what's the market force? Migration, developer scale? What are some of the things that are driving your business? >> Yes and yes, right? It's help me collapse my cycle time. Typically, the time to actually get a copy of data for a developer is measured in weeks or months. >> In the old way. >> In the old way. CICD is talking about a daily check-in. And daily check-in, weeks and months, it just doesn't jive. If I can actually collapse that down into, yes, no matter how big that database is, I can give it to you in a 15 minute, 30 minute SLA. >> The mismatch between data pipelining to developer need is a gap, huge problem that you solve. What about some of the consequences if that's not solved? >> What do people do to compromise the time problem? They subset. They give their developers, it's a 100 terabyte production database, they give them a terabyte or 1/2 a terabyte of actual subsetted data so they run their queries in development and they work great. Then they roll them into production, all of a sudden they break because 100 terabytes is a different animal. >> And that could be a terrible experience for the application where data has to drive all the value. So speed of data insertion into the application is the critical cloud negative and/or developer need. >> It drives quality. It drives customer satisfaction. It drives, quite frankly, in regulated industries, it drives compliance. >> I feel like the Geico commercial. Everybody knows that this is a problem. Why aren't people doing this? Is it just too hard? I mean, this is a card. What specifically do you guys have for IP? What makes it happen? What do you guys do? >> 57 patents later, we have cracked the code on how to do really application native virtualization of data and the ability to serve it up through workflows, through automation in some of the largest enterprises in the world. We are enterprise tested, battle tested. Quite frankly, the applications and data that serves the largest enterprises, that's where we shine. >> What are some of the value points you can point to anecdotally or publicly around the value your customers have gotten from having thae ability to have data addressable and almost in real-time for developers because there's got to be some new experiences or new capabilities that they're realizing. Can you share just some of things that come out of this? >> An IT leader in a major bank that you've heard of said to us after we went through the initial phase of deployment, you've just given me an extra quarter of development in every year. >> Extra quarter of time. >> Extra quarter of time. We've collapsed down and we now have five quarters of development cycles as opposed to four. That, quite frankly, if you put a dollar value on it is measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. >> Developer productivity, any new cool things that have happened, top line revenue growth, any impact to applications? >> Absolutely, yeah. I mean, you think about what is the battle front now, whether it's online banking, whether it's retail, whether it's healthcare even. What is the battle front? It is your app, your phone, your mobile device. It is the ability to self-serve content, information and transactions. All of that is happening because people are transforming the way they're doing business around applications today. >> Customers are going to eat this up. You solve the holy grail problem. It's so obvious to us, but getting data in real-time, having speed and scale and relevance is super critical. How do you guys compare with the competition? Are you guys ahead? How do you guys compare versus other solutions? Are there anything like you guys? What's out in the marketplace? Share your perspective on the landscape on how you guys compare. >> You're asking a marketing guy how we compare to the competition. >> Of course you're going to say you blow them away? >> Of course, I have this very convenient chart that shows us being the leader compared to everybody. The reality is 3,000 customers, 37 countries, nine years in the marketplace. We have been there and done that at scale in the enterprise. Five of the top global 20 financial institutions. Four of the 10 energy companies in the world. Four of the 10 top retail organizations in the world. We have done it for the largest companies in the world and we continue to deliver value at scale in the enterprise. >> You said before hundreds of millions of value. That sounds like a lot and people might go, oh, but how do you do that? Your cloud and your devops which is all about agility and speed, if you take a net present value, a discounted cash flow, a break even or whatever curve you draw, and I think I heard three months, right? You compress that by a quarter and then look at the numbers, that's the value. >> Huge. >> So if it's $200 million in revenue, do the math. If it's $10 in revenue, okay, it's not going to be as much, but the companies that you're talking about, the industries, talking about big, big projects and a lot of revenue associated with them. You talked about cloud and devops, how is your business model cloud and devops? Can you talk about that in terms of the way we do business, customer to Actifio? >> Increasingly, cloud has been for us a place where all of these use cases are executed. As a result, the business model has been BYO. I'm going to buy a license from Actifio. I'm going to bring it to Amazon, Azure, Google, what have you. More and more we're seeing a mixture of marketplace transactions plus the traditional cloud marketplace. You mentioned Live Nation. They are in many ways way ahead of the curve in terms of just going wholesale. I'm out of the data center business. I'm all in on cloud and I'm just going to buy everything through the marketplace. Increasingly, we're seeing marketplace transactions becoming a relevant part of our business. The fact that we've integrated with the top six public cloud providers and increasingly we're going to expand out to Huawei and Alicloud and more, it's not just a destination to connect a use case. It is becoming a platform to conduct transactions as well. >> And a really important channel. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Brian, great to hear from you. Congratulations on your success. Love the business model. We've been saying on theCUBE, so many years, data's at the center and the time to get the data from any database or a database into the application speed is critical. That makes great value so thanks for doing that. Appreciate it. >> Thank you guys. Always a pleasure to be here. >> Check out Actifio. Of course, we're bringing the data to you in real-time here on theCUBE at VMworld. We're live in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018 brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018 here in Boston, Massachusetts, happy to welcome back to the program Abby Kearns who's the executive director and goddess of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Abby. >> Yes. >> Thanks so much for being here, good morning, good evening. >> Good afternoon. >> You've been running, doing so many sessions here, so, we're really glad that we get to have you on to help us wrap up our coverage. >> My pleasure, what better way to wrap up another amazing day at Cloud Foundry Summit than hanging out with you, Stu? >> Thanks, Abby, it's a pleasure. Look, really, I've said it a few times, but I mean it. One of the reasons I wanted to come here is, I get to talk to a bunch of users and they have great stories, so, it's always cool to talk to the startup doing something neat and different, but another thing, too, when you talk to the US Air Force and they talk about how they're doing drastic change, talk to T-Mobile, you talk to some of these bigger, older companies, and gosh, that's a bad word in the industry, right? But making some big changes, so, take a breath and tell us what your experience has been at the show so far. >> Well, I mean, you hit on my favorite part of the whole show, is getting to spend time with the community, but also the end users. What's so unique about Cloud Foundry Summit is half the attendees are end users. And it's so great to see them all come here and really be willing to put it all out there and get up on stage and talk about what they've done, how they got there, or hear them all fight about who's the more agile hundred-year-old company, which has been a funny conversation today. Allstate was chiming in that they were the young one in the group at 85 years old, so it's... But honestly, we get really caught up in the tech but hearing how people are using it and what they're doing and how it's changing their company is really I think the interesting story. If I'm a journalist, that's what I want to cover, because that's the interesting stuff. >> We had a media dinner and we're not supposed to share the details of them, but I love this discussion. This stuff isn't easy. We actually have the customers sharing the rewards, the challenges, the problems, well, working at a big company, change is definitely not easy. Working with some of this tech, it's not the simplest thing out there. We're working, there's lots of projects, there's lots of different interfaces there, but, still getting measurable great value out of what they're doing. To use an old term, moving the needle on what they're doing, so, it's exciting to see that. You've been in so many sessions, give us some highlights from, say, if you've got a couple of examples or things that, any customer story that you'd want to share. >> I mean, today, I heard a lot about Boeing. Boeing and the journey that they're on has been amazing to hear them talk about how they're changing their company, and even, in fact, they ask, all right, we're going to talk about this at Summit, but I don't want to talk about the tech. I don't want to talk about how we're using CICD, I don't want to talk about any of that. I want to talk about the culture change and having user after user say, I'm actually, want to get onstage and talk, but I don't want to talk about the tech, and that, I think, really shows the excitement and enthusiasm around the transformation process and what that means for them, and for me, as someone watching this outside, you're like, oh my god, this is amazing, and this is such a powerful story to really reflect the role technology has played in enabling that, but also the hard work that has to come into that. >> We often say that the technology is the easy part, it's the people and process stuff that'll be hard. The Foundation and this ecosystem and all the users that are involved, there's a lot of technical challenges, though, that are people working through, so, I wonder, do they underplay some of the technology things that they have to, I mean, learning new technologies, learning new skills, some of that is cultural, but, there is kind of that full spectrum that they have to get engaged with. >> Yeah, well, I just think that Cloud Foundry makes it easy (laughing) from the technology standpoint, because it really pulls a lot of things in together, but, collectively and particularly in open source, the opportunity exists for us to all move forward together. One of my big things I'm pushing for this year is interoperability, and continuing to let the technology evolve and taking advantage of new and innovative technologies, either alongside the platform or inside the platform, but really that's going to be a big focus and it was so great to hear from a lot of these end users, but that's important to them, too. >> Yeah, interoperability, you know, there are some that would look at this and they'd say, oh, they know Cloud Foundry because that thing that came out of VMware and there's this company, Pivotal, filed an S-1, they're going to go public, but, maybe talk a little bit about the ecosystem. There are so many solutions out there which don't yet have the Cloud Foundry branding on it but leverage the technologies in there. >> Yeah, it was really great to announce our eight certified distributions for 2018. We've had two new ones join SUSE Cloud Application Platform and, the most surprising one is Cloud.gov is now a certified distribution. Cloud.gov has done so much to bring digital transformation to the government, and so for them, and AT and F in particular, being able to offer up a platform like Cloud Foundry and the digital transformation initiatives around that, to federal agencies, is such a powerful story. They are literally changing our government, and hearing more and more stories like that have been really exciting, so to see that they now have a certified distribution, so regardless of what industry you're in, or what geo you're in, you have access to a certified distribution, the ability to run it on any cloud, for example, AliCloud is now, it's Cloud Foundry CPI is now available for AliCloud. You can run it on any cloud in the world and that is really showcasing that Cloud Foundry is not only leading the industry in terms of driving this change in these companies and with the technology but the ecosystem around it is continuing to grow and build. >> Maybe share a little bit, the tracks got kind of redone and there's some interesting tracks to kind of highlight, some of those focus areas that you had at the show this year. >> Yeah, for the first time ever, we had a government track. We had so many government use cases. You mentioned the Air Force earlier, AT and F. We have governments around the world that are running Cloud Foundry, so we added a government track. We had also a containers and serverless track. We actually added, last year we added an enterprise track, which is essentially users getting up on stage and talking about what they do. We added a whole track because we had so many submissions for that, and so it's really, again, an interesting opportunity to talk about the core technology and the platform, what's happening around that, but also more importantly how it's being used, and really being able to capture that is important for us. >> All right, the other kind of metric, if you look at the growth, is, when you talk about the ecosystem, there's, I believe it's the Foundry, which is the online marketplace. Speak a little bit to how that's been growing. >> Right, so we launched the Foundry last year in October at our summit in Basel. We launched in initially with 600 services. In short, it's an online marketplace for end users to find services, capabilities, and support, so it lists certified distributions, training partners, as well as technologies that are available that they could run on or alongside the platform and since October, we had now announced this week that we actually have over 4900 services in there now, so it's continuing to grow, but also, one thing I hadn't mentioned is it is our most highly trafficked page in our website, so it's continuing to drive the most traffic because end users care about it, but it's also really an area where we can showcase the breadth of the Cloud Foundry ecosystem. >> Yeah, I talked a little bit with Chip about this, but, there's not just one project, there's so many things getting involved. Maybe give us a little bit of the philosophy from the Foundation. What's the most important thing and how do you keep growing without sprawling? (laughing) >> Well, I think Cloud Foundry has always had really strong opinions about where we go and one of the things that we work, collectively work together on, is keeping a core shared vision, so there is a common core where the innovation continues to grow and happen, but allowing space and room for everyone to be able to differentiate from either different commercial go-to-market, or extensibility or extensions. For example, if you look at just our distributions alone, we've got one that focuses on federal government, we've got Pivotal Cloud Foundry, but we've got also an SAP cloud platform and really it's focusing on changing not only SAP customers, but also the way SAP thinks about software, and so seeing these different variations of the same core technology, is also a big driver of the inspiration, it's like, so many different perspectives around the table that really can drive and push the technology to do new and innovative things. >> All right, Abby, want to give the the final word. People that haven't been to the show, there's so much online. Any special things you'd want to call out, or final thoughts? >> Well, one, if you haven't been to the show, you should definitely come. We have another one coming up in October 11th and 12th in Basel, Switzerland, so if you've never been to Basel, it's a great way to come experience Summit for the first time. All the videos from all the sessions and key notes will be made available on YouTube usually within about a week, so anything that you missed if you were here, you can catch up there, and we're going to just keep talking about what we're doing and continuing to promote it and we'd love for more people to join us on the process. >> All right, well, Abby Kearns, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks to the Foundation again for helping us bring this coverage, all of our content, of course, is always out there. It will be on theCUBE.net. Talking to many of the people in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem at many shows throughout the year, so, thanks, Abby, and the whole Foundation. A great lineup of customers, partners, and thought leaders in this space. Thanks to Brian and Alex for helping us do this coverage and be sure to check out all of our coverage on theCUBE.net. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, it's theCube, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. >> Hello, welcome back everyone. We're live here at VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. We're actually in the hang space, broadcast booth It's theCube's SilliconANGLE's flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier and my co-host Stu Meneman, our next guest, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware. Great to see you again. Every VMworld, every year that we've done the VMworld, you've been on theCube. >> Well, it's always a pleasure. You guys are fun. You do your homework. I enjoy our time together, and I can't imagine VMworld without theCube. Look, we are really impressed with the vision you've laid out, because the number one question we get asked on theCube and in backchannels like CrowdChat and Twitter, is VMware ecosystem is looking for the straight and narrow, they want that, they want to see the path, the 90-mile stair if you will, so they can actually accelerate their business. >> Pat: Yeah. >> Can you laid that out, and just quickly review what your key points were for the folks that didn't capture the full keynote. >> Well, clearly we said, boy, we gave clear data with regard to what the cloud market looks like, what it's going to look like today, 2021, 2030, crossover points, and really the key summary of that is it's a complex world. It's going to be a multi-cloud environment for our customers, and they want to know, how do I not only build hybrid clouds, private clouds, and how do I take advantage of public clouds? And we gave a comprehensive view of what that looks like, the cross-cloud architecture. Here's a way that we can bring all cloud embodiments into a common framework. Cross-cloud architecture, two big components are part of it, build your private cloud, enable that as a service, that's a cloud foundation, bring it together, vSAN, vSphere, NSX, along with new lifecycle management capabilities, making that easy, do it as a service with IBM and our partnership that we announced there, but we expect many more of those with other vCloud Air Network partners, and then the cool new Cross-Cloud Services. Make those available, embrace any cloud, and then give our enterprise customers the tools to manage in this cross-cloud or multi-cloud environment. >> John: What's the catalyst for this announcement? Was it an epiphany, was it more that the market was ready for it? Because now, multi-cloud, but how you talk about it, any device anywhere, that's been the previous message. But now it catalyzes around this positioning. What was the moment of truth where you said okay, this is, we're going with this. It doesn't seem like you're betting the ranch on this, but it is betting the ranch on this in a way, because this is, as you said, the future, and it's going to be mostly your journey. So why did it come together? >> A couple of things happened. If you remember last year's VMworld, we did this little NSX demo where it says, we can connect NSX onto the cloud, you remember that? >> Yeah. >> Literally, Guido comes into Raghu and I, about two weeks before VMworld last night, and he says "we've got to work it. And can I demo it in my session?" Right, at the thing. Raghu looked at each other and he says, "Okay, let's do it. Let's see how people respond to it." So that was one catalyst. The second catalyst, we had a couple of customer meetings where the customer said to us, and he says, "This is my best. I'm doing this on Amazon, I'm exploring Azure over here, I've got a boatload of VMware, I'm doing this many- help me solve these problems. So it was clearly customer feedback, and there's a vibrant response we had from this little last-minute demo that we did at last year's VMworld, and sort of out of that, we said, "Let's really take this seriously. Let's go dive deeply into it." And as Guido said in the keynote, we've now talked to about a couple hundred customers and a huge response, and some, you know, usually when you do a cool new product, people say let me try that. In this case, the response we've gotten is, I need that now. I mean, it's a very definitive response. These are the kind of things I need to manage today's problems, so I guess Guido's already late in getting it done, so I've got to crack the whip harder and get this in the market. >> So it's not so much retooling, though we did talk about yesterday at the things, you're kind of mid-flight but you're adjusting to the market. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. And clearly our cloud journey's been one where, you know, if you go back and I gave some of the data 2011, no one expected the public cloud to be where it was, where it is today. I mean, it clearly accelerated faster, some of the ease of use, efficiency characteristics, hey, this is a capability that nobody quite expected to grow this rapidly. And it's now permeated Enterprise customers who are starting to take advantage of it. But they don't have the tools to really take advantage of it. >> So some key leads we were reading yesterday in your keynote, you know we always like to read between the lines, kind of like the messaging inside of it. >> Sometimes you get it right, sometimes, you know. >> We get it right most of the time. Your comment, your sit-down with Michael Dell was really interesting, okay. Because this is an open ecosystem play. His first point was about open ecosystem. You've been banging on this from day one since you've been CEO of VMware, since the throw of the first pitch of the NetApp event that got viral with that jersey on. >> I went to the NetApp customer partner event last night, every year I'm there as well. Just like theCube, I go to the NetApp event. >> He could say that you have been hardcore about open ecosystem from day one, and with the merger now set for the 7th, the merger that you can transact on the 7th, you still want to be independent. The open ecosystem is super important to you, and Michael, I heard it right from his mouth. Share some color on why and how that's going to evolve. Will everyone have untempered access to VMware, will all partners have the same level of access and visibility? >> The simple answer is yes. We're going to continue exactly on that strategy as we go forward. And clearly I'm going to do more with Michael and the Dell team, you know, as we see that going forward. But it's incumbent upon us, even as we do more with Dell, that we lean in more aggressively to our HP, to our Lenovo, to our Fujitsu, and our other partners as well. So we see that as a critical part. And I say the VMware ecosystem is evolving. Five years ago, would you have had the cadre of security and networking vendors? No. Would you have expected to have all the system integrators? No. I mean, we're clearly expanding. Service provider partners, our ecosystem has broadened our product portfolio, it's becoming a broader statement as well. So that's a commitment. We're going to remain a platform play, an ecosystem play, and obviously, with Michael's comments onstage, he's cheering us on. He's saying, I'm going to grow my business with VMware faster, and I hope all of the other ecosystem partners grow faster than I do. >> Is this going to be a persona change? Because now, if you look at VMware's ecosystem, which has been robust, there's some good salivation going on, there's a change-up as the ecosystem shifts. vCenter was once the big thing, now you've got NSX and all this other stuff in the cloud. Is there a persona changeover in who the target customers are in the ecosystem? >> Well, clearly, I mean, the customer's the same. It remains sort of that IT buyer, which increasingly, as I talked about in the keynote, is becoming a business buyer, but it's that core IT Enterprise customer. We're not a consumer company, we're not an app company, we're an infrastructure company and we're going to satisfy that broadly across the industry. >> John: Yeah. >> But in that context, I mean, look at it. You know, over here we have the Internet of Things. Wow, you know, we have the NFV zone. We're having a broader and broader set of who is our ecosystem, and that's absolutely going to continue as we go forward because solutions to things that we do are permeating more and more of the entire business landscape as we go forward. It's a really fun time. You know, even though I like to joke with Michael that he was younger when I first met him. And against that, you know, he and I have both been at this for over three decades. But in many regards, it feels like we're just getting started. It really is a fun period. >> So Pat, the management suite has been a challenge for the industry in general. VMware has, as John said, strong presence with vCenter. As you start reaching out to some of these environments, why does VMware kind of have the right to think that it's going to be at the center of this discussion for some of your customers, especially as they talk about like Microsoft, they've got strong pieces there. Big partners like Intel, Amazon in the play, so why VMware? >> Well, I think there's a couple of aspects to it. And, who is better to be a neutral player, to enable people to have cloud freedom? Right? If you just start with that question, and we'd say hey, we enable people to have hardware freedom. It's in our ethos to have this platform play, to have a broader ecosystem, open APIs, it's what we do. And in the cloud world, hmm, Amazon, okay, they have a legitimate role. But are they going to be the best ones to do private and public, or enable Azure or AliCloud? I think we have a very legitimate position there to say, hey, we're a neutral player, we can be cross-player, cross-industry. Secondly, the technology assets that we have, what we demonstrated on stage yesterday with Guido, think if you didn't have NSX and vRealize and some of the storage assets? That was many, many years of engineering and we pulled all of those pieces together for a comprehensive demonstration of all of those pieces in nine months. That's because we have a rich set of technologies that we can bring to this Cross-Cloud Services. >> So VMware's got a pretty sophisticated stack there, lots of customer options. When we look at the cloud native states, things change a lot. You've got a lot of open source in there, most customers don't buy shrink-wrapped software, they take a lot of components, they tend to put some things together. There's been a little open source, but we've talked for many years about, open source isn't one of the primary revenue drivers for VMware. It's not kind of core to the business. Is that changing? How do you keep making money in the open source world? How do you compete? >> I think there's two different aspects to that that I'd like to, you know, one is, essentially our strategy is, enable these new environments on the VMware franchise. So what's my revenue model? I'm going to keep selling vSphere, I'm going to sell NSX, I'm going to sell vSAN, our management tools, et cetera, even as I add more open source components into those environments. And hey, I'm pretty happy. What's the price point of it going to be? It's free, if you're an Enterprise Plus customer. We're just adding it as another set of capabilities on top of it. It's all open source bits, you've, you know, Stu, have you downloaded it yet off GitHub? >> I have not. >> Pat: You have not? I'm disappointed to hear that. Get on it, right? Get back to work. >> You've got to code tonight, Stu. No party. >> Right? You know. Too much partying for you, Stu. But it's going to be available. We're engaging this open source community, in an open source way, but we're adding our industry rock-hard components, and that's important. Because enterprises are going to start deploying containerized applications. And then you're going to start asking questions. Are they secured? Are they managed? Do you have, like it said onstage, are they monitored? How are you going to network them? And all of the sudden, it's not going to be some lightweight stateless application, you're going to start saying, this is a better way to do stateful applications. What about resilience for that? Get back to the rock-hard questions that infrastructure guys know how to handle. So this is a way to saying yes to those problems but also saying yes to these cool new developer things as well. And in our sense, you know, we think we're well-positioned to go do it, but hey, some of it may be open source projects, and hey, we're showing that we're going to support those, we're going to deliver those, we're going to embrace those as well. So I'm sure that we hired Dirk Hohndel, a longtime friend. I hired him before at Intel, so now we brought him over here to VMware. Because we clearly see, we have to enhance our position overall in the open source community. Not a strong point for VMware in the past, and we're quite committed to changing that perception going forward. >> A lot of great code in the open source, but you mentioned those things about the infrastructure. I want to get back to that point. Those complex things. Automations now playing a big role, we saw the demo today with vSAN,Yanbing was just, one push of a button, a lot of policy, automatic policy automation, that's a great direction. >> Pat: Oh, yeah. >> So, I like that direction. But now I want to bring that back to Cross-Cloud. NSX with security and automation, and protection with the vSphere and then Cross-Cloud. How do you look at this? Because I know you're a strategist, so I think we'll get the strategist angle here. It's like the inter-networking data, I was riffing with Stu earlier about inter-networking has spawned because of all these networks needed to be connected together. And that became >> A whole industry. >> A huge industry. A lot of wealth created, a lot of innovation. Inter-clouding, or Cross-Cloud as you call it, is that dynamic. How do you play well? IBM's onstage, there's no Amazon onstage. I didn't see Microsoft. Are we going to see the other clouds come in to the fold, or are you going to go to them and partner with them? >> So let's, you know, one of the architectural principles of Cross-Cloud is public APIs. So I'm not requiring any unique support from Amazon and Azure, and that's an important statement as well, because now I go to a customer who's taken advantage of Amazon, and they can look at some of those Cross-Cloud Services and then says, well, what if Amazon doesn't support you in the future? And we say, these are standard APIs. They're supporting hundreds of customers on those APIs. It's important, right, that we're engaging with, I'll say, the way that the cloud is being presented to customers and giving them better tools to manage. Now that does not mean I'm not going to do more work in integrating more deeply and partnering with them. >> So does that support like the Amazon S3 API then? >> Pat: Of course. >> Okay. >> John: Well, Sling API's a little bit different. >> Management APIs is actually more appropriate to look at it in that respect as well. How do you spawn, how do you stop, how do you manage VMs, how do you do availability cells, those are the things more appropriate to a management tool in that regard. But those are public API, public interfaces, we're taking advantage of all of those. And we are going to work more closely with the Azures and the Amazons as well, we're going to invest in those partnerships. And there may be areas that we compete with them, but we're going to go do as much as we can, because that's what our customers are asking us to do. Give me better support for those environments, which workloads can I put there? Can I network? Can I secure? Maybe in some cases I don't want my groups using nonpub, or non, you know, multi-cloud APIs. Another case is, hey, I am fully comfortable saying, >> Pick the right cloud for the job kind of thing. >> Absolutely. Right >> Is your philosophy. So slinging APIs is pretty trivial relative to interfacing with the cloud, but the customer might want to go deeper, and, because that might create a complexity issue around, and also functionality might not be as robust as, say, deeper stack integration for data management and whatnot. Are you worried, or we're watching, certainly, like Microsoft, if they feel the proprietary aspect of their stack around data for instance, that's the holy grail, it can get sticky, but still be quote 'open' but not proprietary. >> Yeah. >> So the lock inspect is the lack of openness, per se, to say with data. >> And by the way, you know, I mean, in that respect, what we want to do is present to customers the tools that they can manage those decisions. For instance, a customer may say, hey, I love that machine learning API that Google offers. It's giving me a great competitive advantage, it's not available on any other cloud, and we're going to say, hey, it's proprietary API, if you use it and your data's there, you've picked that service, but we're still going to help you manage and secure it. Another workload, the customer might say, Hey, this workload, I want to make sure has multi-cloud landing zones associated with it. So we're going to help him manage those decisions as well, because if you stay in this domain, I can make it run anywhere, I'll be able to do cross-optimize it, maybe geo-optimize it, et cetera. So it's giving them the tools to manage those decisions. Because I think, hey, you know, Microsoft, they're going to do really well with things related to collaboration of 365. I think Google, I think they're going to do really well around data machine learning. IBM Enterprise, great cloud. Amazon, hey, they've won this round of the developer cloud. Each of them has sort of staked turfs that are very clear, they're going to present value to customers, and our view is, we're going to make those all more readily consumer, suitable for enterprises to run, manage, secure, and connect their workloads into those environments. And build the connectivity into their private clouds, their vCloud Air Networks, their manage clouds as well, that's what we can uniquely do. >> Amazon is going strong in the enterprise. I agree they've won the developer cloud, but they're aggressively going after the enterprise. Mainly Oracle for now, but I'm sure they might think about speech ed that you have. >> Oh, sure. Sure, absolutely. But, you know, in that space, moving a lightweight application, okay, done. Right, you do an OEF conversion, you're done, man, you sell it like that. Oh, you've got to move the full network configuration, IP address ability, right? I've got to deal with different- oh my gosh. Those are hard things to do. The easy stuff moves pretty easy. The hard stuff, okay, that's where we're at now as we address Enterprise customers, and you just don't pick those up and relocate those onto Amazon, Azure, or anyplace else. You know, that's really where the strength of VMware lies. >> So Pat, Dave Vellante is, you know, just at this point, he can't be here for the interview, so I'm a surrogate for him. >> I refuse this interview, not having Dave here. >> John: He says, Pat, I love you forever. That's what he says. >> He asked me to have your commentary on the new era of IT. Officially announced today, the Dell EMC deal, September 7th it will go down, you know, of course that has ramifications on VMware. HP split recently. Lots of, I mean, major signal changes to the industry. What's your take? >> Yeah, you know, as I described before, this is a very disruptive period of the IT industry. Consolidation of portions of it, we think as the hardware industry has matured, stabilized, you know, not growing, still cashflow rich but not growing, we think consolidation is a very natural phase of that industry's maturation. And against that, the Dell move, it's a very bold move given the size of it, but if you look at the cashflows of the companies, as Michael says, it's pretty easy math. It wasn't that hard to, you know, this is how much the cashflow is, this is how much the debt payment is, the math works. Do the deal. >> And Michael said, if you don't understand that VMware is hugely important to that, you don't understand the math. >> Right. For that, you know, clearly, having a controlling interest there, he gets it. We have a lot of growth potential as well, evaluation increase, potential strategic role, but he also realizes that the independence of VMware is critical as well. A software company is very different than a hardware company and our position in the industry, the ecosystem, he respects that greatly. We also think that we're far from done with disruptions elsewhere. We just saw Rackspace go private. Wow, you know, that's another structured shift. Changes in the structure of Citrix as a company, at Five, as they go through their transitions in this next phase of growth, Palo Alto, a good friend Mark McLaughlin, they're driving their software and service revenue growth from hardware. Lots of changes in the industry. Collectively, we look at those and we say, boy, this period of change, disruption, radical growth, consolidation of different places, VMware sits now at a very stable and comfortable place. I've got a great battle sheet, I've got a clear path in front of me, going back to the beginning of the interview, and, right, behind my battle sheet, is this huge turbo-charged engines that is cheering for our growth, distributing us, and even a bigger battle sheet behind us. So we sit in a very uniquely wonderful position. >> I have a final question for what a great, I know you've got another point, and thanks for, first of all, thanks for your time again. What's the biggest disruption that you're watching that's motivating you, whether it's lighting a fire under your feet, or just something that you see that's so epic, and get out for that next week, as you said, if you're not out for that next week, you're driftwood. >> Can I give you two? >> John: Yeah. >> So the one that I think is clearly the biggest is the shift to the public cloud. And I'll just say, that's why the Cross-Cloud announcement was so critical. Also, I wanted to demystify some of the numbers in the keynote. So we went out there and said, very specifically, this is where it's going to be, SaaS, and IaaS, and where it's going to be at different points in time, because I think there's been all sorts of numbers floating around the industry of what it's going to look like over time. But clearly, this public cloud's becoming a big deal. If we have to present ourselves as relevant and critical to our customers in that transition, so I'll say that's the one that we have to navigate through to really position VMware for the next couple decades. The other one that I point out is really, as we talked about, the IoT and the device picture. Wow, we're going to have more machine-connected devices in 2019, >> Love that stat, by the way. >> Than human-connected devices. And that presents enormous business opportunity, right, security threats and opportunities, data infrastructure to go with it, IT, as I would say, IT has left the nest. It's now permeated, >> And software's, a primary function of all the new software that has to be written to handle those situations. >> And in that sense, you want to say, even though I'm three and a half decades in the industry, it sort of feels like we're just getting started. >> You had a spring in your step until you had a cast on it, so you still, you've got to be careful you don't break down. As you get older, your bones get a bit more hard to recover. >> That's right. >> Pat, thanks so much for spending the time, great to see you again. >> Always a pleasure. >> Pat Gelsinger, inside theCube, here in VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas. >> Mr. Vellante must be here next year. >> Dave, man date. Stu Miniman and I, Stu, you did good. You held your own. Pat, as usual, great. This is theCube, you're watching theCube at VMworld, I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman. (techno beat)