>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back everyone. We're so glad that you're still with us. It's the Cube Live at the MGM Grand. This is our second day of coverage of Palo Alto Networks Ignite. This is takeaways from Ignite 22. Lisa Martin here with two really smart guys, Dave Valante. Dave, we're joined by one of our cube alumni, a friend, a friend of the, we say friend of the Cube. >>Yeah, otc. A friend of the Cube >>Karala joined us. Guys, it's great to have you here. It's been an exciting show. A lot of cybersecurity is one of my favorite topics to talk about. But I'd love to get some of the big takeaways from both of you. Dave, we'll start with you. >>A breathing room from two weeks ago. Yeah, that was, that was really pleasant. You know, I mean, I know was, yes, you sat in the analyst program, interested in what your takeaways were from there. But, you know, coming into this, we wrote a piece, Palo Alto's Gold Standard, what they need to do to, to keep that, that status. And we hear it a lot about consolidation. That's their big theme now, which is timely, right? Cause people wanna save money, they wanna do more with less. But I'm really interested in hearing zeus's thoughts on how that's playing in the market. How customers, how easy is it to just say, oh, hey, I'm gonna consolidate. I wanna get into that a little bit with you, how well the strategy's working. We're gonna get into some of the m and a activity and really bring your perspectives to the table. Well, >>It's, it's not easy. I mean, people have been calling for the consolidation of security for decades, and it's, it's, they're the first company that's actually made it happen. Right? And, and I think this is what we're seeing here is the culmination of this long term strategy, this company trying to build more of a platform. And they, you know, they, they came out as a firewall vendor. And I think it's safe to say they're more than firewall today. That's only about two thirds of their revenue now. So down from 80% a few years ago. And when I think of what Palo Alto has become, they're really a data company. Now, if you look at, you know, unit 42 in Cortex, the, the, the Cortex Data Lake, they've done an excellent job of taking telemetry from their products and from the acquisitions they have, right? And bringing that together into one big data lake. >>And then they're able to use that to, to do faster threat notification, forensics, things like that. And so I think the old model of security of create signatures for known threats, it's safe to say it never really worked and it wasn't ever gonna work. You had too many day zero exploits and things. The only way to fight security today is with a AI and ML based analytics. And they have, they're the gold standard. I think the one thing about your post that I would add the gold standard from a data standpoint, and that's given them this competitive advantage to go out and become a platform for a security. Which, like I said, the people have tried to do that for years. And the first one that's actually done it, well, >>We've heard this from some of the startups, like Lacework will say, oh, we treat security as a data problem. Of course there's a startup, Palo Alto's got, you know, whatever, 10, 15 years of, of, of history. But one of the things I wanted to explore with you coming into this was the notion of can you be best of breed and develop a suite? And we, we've been hearing a consistent answer to that question, which is, and, and do you need to, and the answer is, well, best of breed in security requires that full spectrum, that full view. So here's my question to you. So, okay, let's take Esty win relatively new for these guys, right? Yeah. Okay. And >>And one of the few products are not top two, top three in, right? Exactly. >>Yeah. So that's why I want to take that. Yeah. Because in bakeoffs, they're gonna lose on a head-to-head best of breed. And so the customer's gonna say, Hey, you know, I love your, your consolidation play, your esty win's. Just, okay, how about a little discount on that? And you know, these guys are premium priced. Yes. So, you know, are they in essentially through their pricing strategies, sort of creating that stuff, fighting that, is that friction for them where they've got, you know, the customer says, all right, well forget it, we're gonna go stove pipe with the SD WAN will consolidate some of the stuff. Are you seeing that? >>Yeah, I, I, I still think the sales model is that way. And I think that's something they need to work on changing. If they get into a situation where they have to get down into a feature battle of my SD WAN versus your SD wan, my firewall versus your firewall, frankly they've already lost, you know, because their value prop is the suite and, and is the platform. And I was talking to the CISO here that told me, he realizes now that you don't need best of breed everywhere to have best in class threat protection. In fact, best of breed everywhere leads to suboptimal threat protection. Cuz you have all these data data sets that are in silos, right? And so from a data scientist standpoint, right, there's the good data leads to good insights. Well, partial data leads to fragmented insights and that's, that's what the best, best of breed approach gives you. And so I was talking with Palo about this, can they have this vision of being best of breed and platform? I don't really think you can maintain best of breed everywhere across this portfolio this big, but you don't need to. >>That was my second point of my >>Question. That's the point. >>Yeah. And so, cuz cuz because you know, we've talked about this, that that sweets always win in the long run, >>Sweets >>Win. Yeah. But here's the thing, I, I wonder to your your point about, you know, the customer, you know, understanding that that that, that this resonates with them. I, my guess is a lot of customers, you know, at that mid-level and the fat middle are like still sort of wed, you know, hugging that, that tool. So there's, there's work to be done here, but I think they, they, they got it right Because if they devolve, to your point, if they devolve down to that speeds and feeds, eh, what's the point of that? Where's their valuable? >>You do not wanna get into a knife fight. And I, and I, and I think for them the, a big challenge now is convincing customers that the suite, the suite approach does work. And they have to be able to do that in actual customer examples. And so, you know, I I interviewed a bunch of customers here and the ones that have bought into XDR and xor and even are looking at their sim have told me that the, the, so think of soc operations, the old way heavily manually oriented, right? You have multiple panes of glass and you know, and then you've got, so there's a lot of people work before you bring the tools in, right? If done correctly with AI and ml, the machines would do all the heavy lifting and then you'd bring people in at the end to clean up the little bits that were missed, right? >>And so you, you moved to, from something that was very people heavy to something that's machine heavy and machines can work a lot faster than people. And the, and so the ones that I've talked that have, that have done that have said, look, our engineers have moved on to a lot different things. They're doing penetration testing, they're, you know, helping us with, with strategy and they're not fighting that, that daily fight of looking through log files. And the only proof point you need, Dave, is look at every big breach that we've had over the last five years. There's some SIM vendor up there that says, we caught it. Yeah. >>Yeah. We we had the data. >>Yeah. But, but, but the security team missed it. Well they missed it because you're, nobody can look at that much data manually. And so the, I I think their approach of relying heavily on machines to fight the fight is actually the right way. >>Is that a differentiator for them versus, we were talking before we went live that you and I first hit our very first segment back in 2017 at Fort Net. Is that, where do the two stand in your >>Yeah, it's funny cuz if you talk to the two vendors, they don't really see each other in a lot of accounts because Fort Net's more small market mid-market. It's the same strategy to some degree where Fort Net relies heavily on in-house development and Palo Alto relies heavily on acquisition. Yeah. And so I think from a consistently feature set, you know, Fort Net has an advantage there because it, it's all run off their, their their silicon. Where, where Palo's able to innovate very quickly. The, it it requires a lot of work right? To, to bring the front end and back ends together. But they're serving different markets. So >>Do you see that as a differentiator? The integration strategy that Palo Alto has as a differentiator? We talk to so many companies who have an a strong m and a strategy and, and execution arm. But the challenge is always integrating the technology so that the customer to, you know, ultimately it's the customer. >>I actually think they're, they're underrated as a, an acquirer. In fact, Dave wrote a post to a prior on Silicon Angle prior to Accelerate and he, he on, you put it on Twitter and you asked people to rank 'em as an acquirer and they were in the middle of the pack, >>Right? It was, it was. So it was Oracle, VMware, emc, ibm, Cisco, ServiceNow, and Palo Alto. Yeah. Or Oracle got very high marks. It was like 8.5 out of, you know, 10. Yeah. VMware I think was 6.5. Nice. Era was high emc, big range. IBM five to seven. Cisco was three to eight. Yeah. Yeah, right. ServiceNow was a seven. And then, yeah, Palo Alto was like a five. And I, which I think it was unfair. >>Well, and I think it depends on how you look at it. And I, so I think a lot of the acquisitions Palo Altos made, they've done a good job of integrating their backend data and they've almost ignored the front end. And so when you buy some of the products, it's a little clunky today. You know, if you work with Prisma Cloud, it could be a little bit cleaner. And even with, you know, the SD wan that took 'em a long time to bring CloudGenix in and stuff. But I think the approach is right. I don't, I don't necessarily believe you should integrate the front end until you've integrated the back end. >>That's >>The hard part, right? Because UL ultimately what you're gonna get, you're gonna get two panes of glass and one pane of glass and it might look pretty all mush together, but ultimately you're not solving the bigger problem, right. Of, of being able to create that big data like the, the fight security. And so I think, you know, the approach they've taken is the right one. I think from a user standpoint, maybe it doesn't show up as neatly because you don't see the frontend integration, but the way they're doing it is the right way to do it. And I'm glad they're doing it that way versus caving to the pressures of what, you know, the industry might want >>Showed up in the performance of the company. I mean, this company was basically gonna double revenues to 7 billion from 2020 to >>2023. Three. Think about that at that, that >>Make a, that's unbelievable, right? I mean, and then and they wanna double again. Yeah. You know, so, well >>What did, what did Nikesh was quoted as saying they wanna be the first cyber company that's a hundred billion dollars. He didn't give a timeline market cap. >>Right. >>Market cap, right. Do what I wanna get both of your opinions on what you saw and heard and felt this week. What do you think the likelihood is? And and do you have any projections on how, you know, how many years it's gonna take for them to get there? >>Well, >>Well I think so if they're gonna get that big, right? And, and we were talking about this pre-show, any company that's becoming a big company does it through ecosystem >>Bingo. >>Right? And that when you look around the show floor, it's not that impressive. And if that, if there's an area they need to focus on, it's building that ecosystem. And it's not with other security vendors, it's with application vendors and it's with the cloud companies and stuff. And they've got some relationships there, but they need to do more. I actually challenge 'em on that. One of the analyst sessions. They said, look, we've got 800 cortex partners. Well where are they? Right? Why isn't there a cortex stand here with a bunch of the small companies here? So I do think that that is an area they need to focus on. If they are gonna get to that, that market caps number, they will do so do so through ecosystem. Because every company that's achieved that has done it through ecosystem. >>A hundred percent agree. And you know, if you look at CrowdStrike's ecosystem, it's pretty similar. Yeah. You know, it doesn't really, you know, make much, much, not much different from this, but I went back and just looked at some, you know, peak valuations during the pandemic and shortly thereafter CrowdStrike was 70 billion. You know, that's what their roughly their peak Palo Alto was 56, fortune was 59 for the actually diverged. Right. And now Palo Alto has taken the, the top mantle, you know, today it's market cap's 52. So it's held 93% of its peak value. Everybody else is tanking. Even Okta was 45 billion. It's been crushed as you well know. But, so Palo Alto wasn't always, you know, the number one in terms of market cap. But I guess my point is, look, if CrowdStrike could got to 70 billion during Yeah. During the frenzy, I think it's gonna take, to answer your question, I think it's gonna be five years. Okay. Before they get back there. I think this market's gonna be tough for a while from a valuation standpoint. I think generally tech is gonna kind of go up and down and sideways for a good year and a half, maybe even two years could be even longer. And then I think there's gonna be some next wave of productivity innovation that that hits. And then you're gonna, you're almost always gonna exceed the previous highs. It's gonna take a while. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. But I think their ability to disrupt the SIM market actually is something I, I believe they're gonna do. I've been calling for the death of the sim for a long time and I know some people at Palo Alto are very cautious about saying that cuz the Splunks and the, you know, they're, they're their partners. But I, I think the, you know, it's what I said before, the, the tools are catching them, but they're, it's not in a way that's useful for the IT pro and, but I, I don't think the SIM vendors have that ecosystem of insight across network cloud endpoint. Right. Which is what you need in order to make a sim useful. >>CISO at an ETR roundtable said, if, if it weren't for my regulators, I would chuck my sim. >>Yes. >>But that's the only reason that, that this person was keeping it. So, >>Yeah. And I think the, the fact that most of those companies have moved to a perpetual MO or a a recurring revenue model actually helps unseat them. Typically when you pour a bunch of money into something, you remember the old computer associate days, nobody ever took it out cuz the sunk dollars you spent to do it. But now that you're paying an annual recurring fee, it's actually makes it easier to take out. So >>Yeah, it's it's an ebb and flow, right? Yeah. Because the maintenance costs were, you know, relatively low. Maybe it was 20% of the total. And then, you know, once every five years you had to do a refresh and you were still locked into the sort of maintenance and, and so yeah, I think you're right. The switching costs with sas, you know, in theory anyway, should be less >>Yeah. As long as you can migrate the data over. And I think they've got a pretty good handle on that. So, >>Yeah. So guys, I wanna get your perspective as a whole bunch of announcements here. We've only been here for a couple days, not a big conference as, as you can see from behind us. What Zs in your opinion was Palo Alto's main message and and what do you think about it main message at this event? And then same question for you. >>Yeah, I, I think their message largely wrapped around disruption, right? And, and they, in The's keynote already talked about that, right? And where they disrupted the firewall market by creating a NextGen firewall. In fact, if you look at all the new services they added to their firewall, you, you could almost say it's a NextGen NextGen firewall. But, but I do think the, the work they've done in the area of cloud and cortex actually I think is, is pretty impressive. And I think that's the, the SOC is ripe for disruption because it's for, for the most part, most socks still, you know, run off legacy playbooks. They run off legacy, you know, forensic models and things and they don't work. It's why we have so many breaches today. The, the dirty little secret that nobody ever wants to talk about is the bad guys are using machine learning, right? And so if you're using a signature based model, all they're do is tweak their model a little bit and it becomes, it bypasses them. So I, I think the only way to fight the the bad guys today is with you gotta fight fire with fire. And I think that's, that's the path they've, they've headed >>Down and the bad guys are hiding in plain sight, you know? >>Yeah, yeah. Well it's, it's not hard to do now with a lot of those legacy tools. So >>I think, I think for me, you know, the stat that we threw out earlier, I think yesterday at our keynote analysis was, you know, the ETR data shows that are, that are that last survey around 35% of the respondents said we are actively consolidating, sorry, 44%, sorry, 35 says we're actively consolidating vendors, redundant vendors today. That number's up to 44%. Yeah. It's by far the number one cost optimization technique. That's what these guys are pitching. And I think it's gonna resonate with people and, and I think to your point, they're integrating at the backend, their beeps are technical, right? I mean, they can deal with that complexity. Yeah. And so they don't need eye candy. Eventually they, they, they want to have that cuz it'll allow 'em to have deeper market penetration and make people more productive. But you know, that consolidation message came through loud and clear. >>Yeah. The big change in this industry too is all the new startups are all cloud native, right? They're all built on Amazon or Google or whatever. Yeah. And when your cloud native and you buy a cloud native integration is fast. It's not like having to integrate this big monolithic software stack anymore. Right. So I I think their pace of integration will only accelerate from here because everything's now cloud native. >>If a customer comes to you or when a customer comes to you and says, Zs help us with this cyber transformation we have, our board isn't necessarily with our executives in terms of execution of a security strategy. How do you advise them where Palo Alto is concerned? >>Yeah. You know, a lot, a lot of this is just fighting legacy mindset. And I've, I was talking with some CISOs here from state and local governments and things and they're, you know, they can't get more budget. They're fighting the tide. But what they did find is through the use of automation technology, they're able to bring their people costs way down. Right. And then be able to use that budget to invest in a lot of new projects. And so with that, you, you have to start with your biggest pain points, apply automation where you can, and then be able to use that budget to reinvest back in your security strategy. And it's good for the IT pros too, the security pros, my advice to, to it pros is if you're doing things today that aren't resume building, stop doing them. Right? Find a way to automate the money your job. And so if you're patching systems and you're looking through log files, there's no reason machines can't do that. And you go do something a lot more interesting. >>So true. It's like storage guys 10 years ago, provisioning loans. Yes. It's like, stop doing that. Yeah. You're gonna be outta a job. And so who, last question I have is, is who do you see as the big competitors, the horses on the track question, right? So obviously Cisco kind of service has led for a while and you know, big portfolio company, CrowdStrike coming at it from end point. You know who, who, who do you see as the real players going for that? You know, right now the market's three to 4%. The leader has three, three 4% of the market. You know who they're all going for? 10, 15, maybe 20% of the market. Who, who are the likely candidates? Yeah, >>I don't know if CrowdStrike really has the breadth of portfolio to compete long term though. I I think they've had a nice run, but I, we might start to see the follow 'em. I think Microsoft is gonna be for middle. They've laid down the gauntlet, right? They are a security vendor, right? We, we were at Reinvent and a AWS is the platform for security vendors. Yes. Middle, somewhere in the middle. But Microsoft make no mistake, they're in security. They've got some good products. I think a lot of 'em are kind of good enough and they, they tie it to the licensing and I'm not sure that works in security, but they've certainly got the ear of a lot of it pros. >>It might work in smb. >>Yeah. Yeah. It, it might. And, and I do like Zscaler. I, I know these guys poo poo the proxy model, but they've, they've done about as much with proxies as you can. And I, I think it's, it's a battle of, I love the, the, the near, you know, proxies are dead and Jay's model, you know, Jay over at c skater throw 'em back at 'em. So I, it's good to see that kind of fight going on between the two. >>Oh, it's great. Well, and, and again, ZScaler's coming at it from their cloud security angle. CrowdStrike's coming at it from endpoint. I, I do think CrowdStrike has an opportunity to build out the portfolio through m and a and maybe ecosystem. And then obviously, you know, Palo Alto's getting it done. How about Cisco? >>Yeah. Cisco's interesting. And I, I think if Cisco can make the network matter in security and it should, right? We're talking about how a lot of you need a lot of forensics to fight security today. Well, they're gonna see things long before anybody else because they have all that network data. If they can tie network security, I, I mean they could really have that business take off. But we've been saying that about Cisco for 20 years. >>But big install based though. Yeah. It's hard for a company, any company to just say, okay, hey Cisco customer sweep the floor and come with us. That's, that's >>A tough thing. They have a lot of good peace parts, right? And like duo's a good product and umbrella's a good product. They've, they've not done a good job. >>They're the opposite of these guys. >>They've not done a good job of the backend integration that, that's where Cisco needs to, to focus. And I do think g G two Patel there fixed the WebEx group and I think he's now, in fact when you talk to him, he's doing very little on WebEx that that group's running itself and he's more focused in security. So I, I think we could see a resurgence there. But you know, they have a, from a revenue perspective, it's a little misleading cuz they have this big legacy base that's in decline while they're moving to cloud and stuff. So, but they, but they, there's a lot of work there're trying to, to tie to network. >>Right. Lots of fuel for conversation. We're gonna have to carry this on, on Silicon angle.com guys. Yes. And Wikibon, lets do see us. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me giving us your insights as to this event. Where are you gonna be next? Are you gonna be on vacation? >>There's nothing more fun than mean on the cube, so, right. What's outside of that though? Yeah, you know, Christmas coming up, I gotta go see family and do the obligatory, although for me that's a lot of travel, so I guess >>More planes. Yeah. >>Hopefully not in Vegas. >>Not in Vegas. >>Awesome. Nothing against Vegas. Yeah, no, >>We love it. We >>Love it. Although I will say my year started off with ces. Yeah. And it's finishing up with Palo Alto here. The bookends. Yeah, exactly. In Vegas bookends. >>Well thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Dave. Always a pleasure to host a show with you and hear your insights. Reading your breaking analysis always kicks off my prep for show and it's always great to see, but predictions come true. So thank you for being my co-host bet. All right. For Dave Valante Enz as Carla, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube, the leader in live, emerging and enterprise tech coverage. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: "TheCUBE" presents Ignite 22. Brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to "TheCUBE's" live coverage of Palo Alto Network's Ignite 22 from the MGM Grand in beautiful Las Vegas. I am Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, we just had a great conversa- First of all, we got to hear the keynote, most of it. We also just had a great conversation with the CEO and chairman of Palo Alto Networks, Nikesh Arora. You know, this is a company that was founded back in 2005, he's been there four years, a lot has happened. A lot of growth, a lot of momentum in his tenure. You were saying in your breaking analysis, that they are on track to nearly double revenues from FY 20 to 23. Lots of momentum in this cloud security company. >> Yeah, I'd never met him before. I mean, I've been following a little bit. It's interesting, he came in as, sort of, a security outsider. You know, he joked today that he, the host, I forget the guy's name on the stage, what was his name? Hassan. Hassan, he said "He's the only guy in the room that knows less about security than I do." Because, normally, this is an industry that's steeped in deep expertise. He came in and I think is given a good compliment to the hardcore techies at Palo Alto Network. The company, it's really interesting. The company started out building their own data centers, they called it. Now they look back and call it cloud, but it was their own data centers, kind of like Salesforce did, it's kind of like ServiceNow. Because at the time, you really couldn't do it in the public cloud. The public cloud was a little too unknown. And so they needed that type of control. But Palo Alto's been amazing story since 2020, we wrote about this during the pandemic. So what they did, is they began to pivot to the the true cloud native public cloud, which is kind of immature still. They don't tell you that, but it's kind of still a little bit immature, but it's working. And when they were pivoting, it was around the same time, at Fortinet, who's a competitor there's like, I call 'em a poor man's Palo Alto, and Fortinet probably hates that, but it's kind of true. It's like a value play on a comprehensive platform, and you know Fortinet a little bit. And so, but what was happening is Fortinet was executing on its cloud strategy better than Palo Alto. And there was a real divergence in the valuations of these stocks. And we said at the time, we felt like Palo Alto, being the gold standard, would get through it. And they did. And what's happened is interesting, I wrote about this two weeks ago. If you go back to the pandemic, peak of the pandemic, or just before the peak, kind of in that tech bubble, if you will. Splunk's down 44% from that peak, Okta's down, sorry, not down 44%. 44% of the peak. Okta's 22% of their peak. CrowdStrike, 41%, Zscaler, 36%, Fortinet, 71%. Not so bad. Palo Altos maintained 93% of its peak value, right? So it's a combination of two things. One is, they didn't run up as much during the pandemic, and they're executing through their cloud strategy. And that's provided a sort of softer landing. And I think it's going to be interesting to see where they go from here. And you heard Nikesh, we're going to double, and then double again. So that's 7 billion, 14 billion, heading to 30 billion. >> Lisa: Yeah, yeah. He also talked about one of the things that he's done in his tenure here, as really a workforce transformation. And we talk all the time, it's not just technology and processes, it's people. They've also seemed to have done a pretty good job from a cultural transformation perspective, which is benefiting their customers. And they're also growing- The ecosystem, we talked a little bit about the ecosystem with Nikesh. We've got Google Cloud on, we've got AWS on the program today alone, talking about the partnerships. The ecosystem is expanding, as well. >> Have you ever met Nir Zuk? >> I have not, not yet. >> He's the founder and CTO. I haven't, we've never been on "theCUBE." He was supposed to come on one day down in New York City. Stu and I were going to interview him, and he cut out of the conference early, so we didn't interview him. But he's a very opinionated dude. And you're going to see, he's basically going to come on, and I mean, I hope he is as opinionated on "TheCUBE," but he'll talk about how the industry has screwed it up. And Nikesh sort of talked about that, it's a shiny new toy strategy. Oh, there's another one, here's another one. It's the best in that category. Okay, let's get, and that's how we've gotten to this point. I always use that Optive graphic, which shows the taxonomy, and shows hundreds and hundreds of suppliers in the industry. And again, it's true. Customers have 20, 30, sometimes 40 different tool sets. And so now it's going to be interesting to see. So I guess my point is, it starts at the top. The founder, he's an outspoken, smart, tough Israeli, who's like, "We're going to take this on." We're not afraid to be ambitious. And so, so to your point about people and the culture, it starts there. >> Absolutely. You know, one of the things that you've written about in your breaking analysis over the weekend, Nikesh talked about it, they want to be the consolidator. You see this as they're building out the security supercloud. Talk to me about that. What do you think? What is a security supercloud in your opinion? >> Yeah, so let me start with the consolidator. So Palo Alto obviously is executing on that strategy. CrowdStrike as well, wants to be a consolidator. I would say Zscaler wants to be a consolidator. I would say that Microsoft wants to be a consolidator, so does Cisco. So they're all coming at it from different angles. Cisco coming at it from network security, which is Palo Alto's wheelhouse, with their next gen firewalls, network security. What Palo Alto did was interesting, was they started out with kind of a hardware based firewall, but they didn't try to shove everything into it. They put the other function in there, their cloud. Zscaler. Zscaler is the one running around saying you don't need firewalls anymore. Just run everything through our cloud, our security cloud. I would think that as Zscaler expands its TAM, it's going to start to acquire, and do similar types of things. We'll see how that integrates. CrowdStrike is clearly executing on a similar portfolio strategy, but they're coming at it from endpoint, okay? They have to partner for network security. Cisco is this big and legacy, but they've done a really good job of acquiring and using services to hide some of that complexity. Microsoft is, you know, they probably hate me saying this, but it's the just good enough strategy. And that may have hurt CrowdStrike last quarter, because the SMB was a soft, we'll see. But to specifically answer your question, the opportunity, we think, is to build the security supercloud. What does that mean? That means to have a common security platform across all clouds. So irrespective of whether you're running an Amazon, whether you're running an on-prem, Google, or Azure, the security policies, and the edicts, and the way you secure your enterprise, look the same. There's a PaaS layer, super PaaS layer for developers, so that that the developers can secure their code in a common framework across cloud. So that essentially, Nikesh sort of balked at it, said, "No, no, no, we're not, we're not really building a super cloud." But essentially they kind of are headed in that direction, I think. Although, what I don't know, like CrowdStrike and Microsoft are big competitors. He mentioned AWS and Google. We run on AWS, Google, and in their own data centers. That sounds like they don't currently run a Microsoft. 'Cause Microsoft is much more competitive with the security ecosystem. They got Identity, so they compete with Okta. They got Endpoint, so they compete with CrowdStrike, and Palo Alto. So Microsoft's at war with everybody. So can you build a super cloud on top of the clouds, the hyperscalers, and not do Microsoft? I would say no. >> Right. >> But there's nothing stopping Palo Alto from running in the Microsoft cloud. I don't know if that's a strategy, we should ask them. >> Yeah. They've done a great job in our last few minutes, of really expanding their TAM in the last few years, particularly under Nikesh's leadership. What are some of the things that you heard this morning that you think, really they've done a great job of expanding that TAM. He talked a little bit about, I didn't write the number down, but he talked a little bit about the market opportunity there. What do you see them doing as being best of breed for organizations that have 30 to 50 tools and need to consolidate that? >> Well the market opportunity's enormous. >> Lisa: It is. >> I mean, we're talking about, well north of a hundred billion dollars, I mean 150, 180, depending on whose numerator you use. Gartner, IDC. Dave's, whatever, it's big. Okay, and they've got... Okay, they're headed towards 7 billion out of 180 billion, whatever, again, number you use. So they started with network security, they put most of the network function in the cloud. They moved to Endpoint, Sassy for the edge. They've done acquisitions, the Cortex acquisition, to really bring automated threat intelligence. They just bought Cider Security, which is sort of the shift left, code security, developer, assistance, if you will. That whole shift left, protect right. And so I think a lot of opportunities to continue to acquire best of breed. I liked what Nikesh said. Keep the founders on board, sell them on the mission. Let them help with that integration and putting forth the cultural aspects. And then, sort of, integrate in. So big opportunities, do they get into Endpoint and compete with Okta? I think Okta's probably the one sort of outlier. They want to be the consolidator of identity, right? And they'll probably partner with Okta, just like Okta partners with CrowdStrike. So I think that's part of the challenge of being the consolidator. You're probably not going to be the consolidator for everything, but maybe someday you'll see some kind of mega merger of these companies. CrowdStrike and Okta, or Palo Alto and Okta, or to take on Microsoft, which would be kind of cool to watch. >> That would be. We have a great lineup, Dave. Today and tomorrow, full days, two full days of cube coverage. You mentioned Nir Zuk, we already had the CEO on, founder and CTO. We've got the chief product officer coming on next. We've got chief transformation officer of customers, partners. We're going to have great conversations, and really understand how this organization is helping customers ultimately achieve their SecOps transformation, their digital transformation. And really moved the needle forward to becoming secure data companies. So I'm looking forward to the next two days. >> Yeah, and Wendy Whitmore is coming on. She heads Unit 42, which is, from what I could tell, it's pretty much the competitor to Mandiant, which Google just bought. We had Kevin Mandia on at September at the CrowdStrike event. So that's interesting. That's who I was poking Nikesh a little bit on industry collaboration. You're tight with Google, and then he had an interesting answer. He said "Hey, you start sharing data, you don't know where it's going to go." I think Snowflake could help with that problem, actually. >> Interesting. >> Yeah, little Snowflake and some of the announcements ar Reinvent with the data clean rooms. Data sharing, you know, trusted data. That's one of the other things we didn't talk about, is the real tension in between security and regulation. So the regulators in public policy saying you can't move the data out of the country. And you have to prove to me that you have a chain of custody. That when you say you deleted something, you have to show me that you not only deleted the file, then the data, but also the metadata. That's a really hard problem. So to my point, something that Palo Alto might be able to solve. >> It might be. It'll be an interesting conversation with Unit 42. And like we said, we have a great lineup of guests today and tomorrow with you, so stick around. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante are covering Palo Alto Networks Ignite 22 for you. We look forward to seeing you in our next segment. Stick around. (light music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Altos studios with continuing coverage of the Dell Technology World 2020, The Digital Experience. We've been covering this for over 10 years. It's virtual this year, but still have a lot of great content, a lot of great announcements, and a lot of technology that's being released and talked about. So we're excited. We're going to dig a little deep with our next two guests. First of all we have Paul Perez. He is the SVP and CTO of infrastructure solutions group for Dell technologies. Paul's great to see you. Where are you coming in from today? >> Austin, Texas. >> Austin Texas Awesome. And joining him returning to theCUBE on many times, Kit Colbert. He is the Vice President and CTO of VMware cloud for VMware Kit great to see you as well. Where are you joining us from? >> Yeah, thanks for having me again. I'm here in San Francisco. >> Awesome. So let's jump into it and talk about project Monterrey. You know, it's funny I was at Intel back in the day and all of our passwords used to go out and they became like the product names. It's funny how these little internal project names get a life of their own and this is a big one. And, you know, we had Pat Gelsinger on a few weeks back at VM-ware talking about how significant this is and kind of this evolution within the VMware cloud development. And, you know, it's kind of past Kubernetes and past Tanzu and past project Pacific and now we're into project Monterey. So first off, let's start with Kit, give us kind of the basic overview of what is project Monterey. >> Yep. Yeah, well, you're absolutely right. What we did last year, we announced project Pacific, which was really a fundamental rethinking of VMware cloud foundation with Kubernetes built in right. Kubernetes is still a core to core part of the architecture and the idea there was really to better support modern applications to enable developers and IT operations to come together to work collaboratively toward modernizing a company's application fleet. And as you look at companies starting to be successful, they're starting to run these modern applications. What you found is that the hardware architecture itself needed to evolve, needed to update, to support all the new requirements brought on by these modern apps. And so when you're looking at project Monterey, it's exactly that it's a rethinking of the VMware cloud foundation, underlying hardware architecture. And so you think about a project model or excuse me, product Pacific is really kind of the top half if you will, Kubernetes consumption experiences great for applications. Project Monterey comes along as the second step in that journey, really being the bottom half, fundamentally rethinking the hardware architecture and leveraging SmartNic technology to do that. >> It's pretty interesting, Paul, you know, there's a great shift in this whole move from, you know, infrastructure driving applications to applications driving infrastructure. And then we're seeing, you know, obviously the big move with big data. And again, I think as Pat talked about in his interview with NVIDIA being at the right time, at the right place with the right technology and this, you know, kind of groundswell of GPU, now DPU, you know, helping to move those workloads beyond just kind of where the CPU used to do all the work, this is even, you know, kind of taking it another level you guys are the hardware guys and the solutions guys, as you look at this kind of continuing evolution, both of workloads as well as their infrastructure, how does this fit in? >> Yeah, well, how all this fit it in is modern applications and modern workloads, require a modern infrastructure, right? And a Kit was talking about the infrastructure overlay. That VMware is awesome at that all being, I was coming at this from the emerging data centric workloads, and some of the implications for that, including Phillip and diversity has ever been used for computing. The need to this faculty could be able to combine maybe resources together, as opposed to trying to shoehorn something into a mechanical chassis. And, and if you do segregate, you have to be able to compose on demand. And when you start comparing those, we realized that we were humping it up on our conversion trajectory and we started to team up and partner. >> So it's interesting because part of the composable philosophy, if you will, is to, you know, just to break the components of compute store and networking down to a small pieces as possible, and then you can assemble the right amount when you need it to attack a particular problem. But when you're talking about it's a whole different level of, of bringing the right hardware to bear for the solution. When you talk about SmartNics and you talk about GPS in DPS data processing units, you're now starting to offload and even FPG is that some of these other things offload a lot of work from the core CPU to some of these more appropriate devices that said, how do people make sure that the right application ends up on the right infrastructure? This is that I'm, if it's appropriate using more of a, of a Monterey based solution versus more of a traditional one, depending on the workload, how is that going to get all kind of sorted out and, and routed within the actual cloud infrastructure itself? That was probably back to you a Kit? >> Yeah, sure. So I think it's important to understand kind of what a smart NIC is and how it works in order to answer that question, because what we're really doing is to kind of jump right to it. I guess it's, you know, giving an API into the infrastructure and this is how we're able to do all the things that you just mentioned, but what does a SmartNic? Well, SmartNic is essentially a NIC with a general purpose CPU on it, really a whole CPU complex, in fact, kind of a whole system on server right there on that, on that Nic. And so what that enables is a bunch of great things. So first of all, to your point, we can do a lot of offload. We can actually run ESX. >> SXI on that. Nic, we can take a lot of the functionality that we were doing before on the main server CPU, things like network virtualization, storage, virtualization, security functionality, we can move that all off on the Nic. And it makes a lot of sense because really what we're doing when we're doing all those things is really looking at different sort of IO data paths. You know, as, as the network traffic comes through looking at doing automatic load balancing firewall and for security, delivering storage, perhaps remotely. And so the NIC is actually a perfect place to place all of these functionalities, right? You can not only move it off the core server CPU, but you can get a lot better performance cause you're now right there on the data path. So I think that's the first really key point is that you can get that offload, but then once you have all of that functionality there, then you can start doing some really amazing things. And this ability to expose additional virtual devices onto the PCI bus, this is another great capability of a SmartNic. So when you plug it in physically into the motherboard, it's a Nic, right. You can see that. And when it starts up, it looks like a Nic to the motherboard, to the system, but then via software, you can have it expose additional devices. It could look like a storage controller, or it could look like an FPGA look really any sort of device. And you can do that. Not only for the local machine where it's plugged in, but potentially remote machines as well with the right sorts of interconnects. So what this creates is a whole new sort of cluster architecture. And that's why we're really so excited about it because you got all these great benefits in terms of offload performance improvement, security improvement, but then you get this great ability to get very dynamic, just aggregation. And composability. >> So Kit, how much of it is the routing of the workload to the right place, right? That's got the right amount of say, it's a super data intensive once a lot of GPU versus actually better executing the operation. Once it gets to the place where it's going to run. >> Yeah. It's a bit of a combination actually. So the powerful thing about it is that in a traditional world, where are you want an application? You know, the server that you run it, that app can really only use the local devices there. Yes, there is some newer stuff like NVMe over fabric where you can remote certain types of storage capabilities, but there's no real general purpose solution to that. Yet that generally speaking, that application is limited to the local hardware devices. Well, the great part about what we're doing with Monterey and with the SmartNic technology is that we can now dynamically remote or expose remote devices from other hosts. And so wherever that application runs matters a little bit less now, in a sense that we can give it the right sorts of hardware it needs in order to operate. You know, if you have, let's say a few machines with a FPGA is normally if you have needed that a Fiji had to run locally, but now can actually run remotely and you can better balance out things like compute requirements versus, you know, specialized Accella Requirements. And so I think what we're looking at is, especially in the context of VMware cloud foundation, is bringing that all together. We can look through the scheduling, figure out what the best host for it to let run on based on all these considerations. And that's it, we are missing, let's say a physical device that needs, well, we can remote that and sort of a deal at that, a missing gap there. >> Right, right. That's great. Paul, I want to go back to you. You just talked about, you know, kind of coming at this problem from a data centric point of view, and you're running infrastructure and you're the poor guy that's got to catch all the ASAM Todd i the giant exponential curves up into the right on the data flow and the data quantity. How is that impacting the way you think about infrastructure and designing infrastructure and changing infrastructure and kind of future proofing infrastructure when, you know, just around the corners, 5g and IOT and, Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet in terms of the data flow. >> Yeah. So I come at this from two angles. One that we talked about briefly is the evolution of the workloads themselves. The other angle, which is just as important is the operating model that customers are wanting to evolve to. And in that context, we thought a lot about how cloud, if an operating model, not necessarily a destination, right? So what I, and when way we laid out, what Kit was talking about is that in data center computing, you have operational control and data plane. Where did data plane run from the optimized solution? GPU's, PGA's, offload engines? And the control plane can run on stuff like it could be safe and are then I'm thinking about SmartNic is back codes have arm boards, so you can implement some data plane and some control plane, and they can also be the gateway. Cause, you know, you've talked about composability, what has been done up until now is early for sprint, right? We're carving out software defined infrastructure out of predefined hardware blocks. What we're talking about is making, you know, a GPUs residents in our fabric consistent memory residence of a fabric NVME over fabric and being able to tile computing topologies on demand to realize and applications intent. And we call that intent based computer. >> Right. Well, just, and to follow up on that too, as the, you know, cloud is an attitude or as an operating model or whatever you want to say, you know, not necessarily a place or a thing has changed. I mean, how has that had to get you to shift your infrastructure approach? Cause you've got to support, you know, old school, good old data centers. We've got, you know, some stuff running on public clouds. And then now you've got hybrid clouds and you have multi clouds, right. So we know, you know, you're out in the field that people have workloads running all over the place. So, but they got to control it and they've got compliance issues and they got a whole bunch of other stuff. So from your point of view, as you see the desire for more flexibility, the desire for more infrastructure centric support for the workloads that I want to buy and the increasing amount of those that are more data centric, as we move to hopefully more data driven decisions, how's it changed your strategy. And what does it mean to partner and have a real nice formal relationship with the folks over at VMR or excuse me, VMware? >> Well, I think that regardless of how big a company is, it's always prudent. As I say, when I approached my job, right, architecture is about balance and efficiency and it's about reducing contention. And we like to leverage industry R and D, especially in cases where one plus one equals two, right? In the case of, project Monterey for example, one of the collaboration areas is in improving the security model and being able to provide more air gap isolation, especially when you consider that enterprise wants to behave as service providers is concerned or to their companies. And therefore this is important. And because of that, I think that there's a lot of things that we can do between VMware and Dell lending hardware, and for example, assets like NSX and a different way that will give customers higher scalability and performance and more control, you know, beyond VMware and Dell EMC i think that we're partnering with obviously the SmartNic vendors, cause they're smart interprets and the gateway to those that are clean. They're not really analysis, but also companies that are innovating in data center computing, for example, NVIDIA. >> Right. Right. >> And I think that what we're seeing is while, you know, ambivalent has done an awesome job of targeting their capability, AIML type of workloads, what we realized this applications today depend on platform services, right. And up until recently, those platform services have been debases messaging PI active directory, moving forward. I think that within five years, most applications will depend on some form of AIML service. So I can see an opportunity to go mainstream with this >> Right. Right. Well, it's great. You bring up in NVIDIA and I'm just going to quote one of Pat's lines from, from his interview. And he talked about Jensen from NVIDIA actually telling Pat, Hey Pat, I think you're thinking too small. I love it. You know, let's do the entire AI landscape together and make AI and enterprise class workloads from being more in TANZU, you know, first class citizens. So I, I love the fact, you know, Pat's been around a long time industry veteran, but still, kind of accepted the challenge from Jensen to really elevate AI and machine learning via GPS to first class citizen status. And the other piece, obviously this coming up is ed. So I, you know, it's a nice shot of a, of adrenaline and Kit I wonder if you can share your thoughts on that, you know, in kind of saying, Hey, let's take it up a notch, a significant notch by leveraging a whole another class of compute power within these solutions. >> Yeah. So, I mean, I'll, I'll go real quick. I mean, I, it's funny cause like not many people really ever challenged Pat to say he doesn't think big enough, cause usually he's always blown us away with what he wants to do next, but I think it's, I think it's a, you know, it's good though. It's good to keep us on our toes and push us a bit. Right. All of us within the industry. And so I think a couple of things you have to go back to your previous point around this is like cloud as a model. I think that's exactly what we're doing is trying to bring cloud as a model, even on prem. And it's a lot of these kinds of core hardware architecture capabilities that we do enable the biggest one in my mind, just being enabling an API into the hardware. So the applications can get what they need. And going back to Paul's point, this notion of these AI and ML services, you know, they have to be rooted in the hardware, right? We know that in order for them to be performing for them to run, to support what our customers want to do, we need to have that deeply integrated into the hardware all the way up. But that also becomes a software problem. Once we got the hardware solved, once we get that architecture locked in, how can we as easy as possible, as seamlessly as possible, deliver all those great capabilities, software capabilities. And so, you know, you look at what we've done with the NVIDIA partnership, things around the NVIDIA GPU cloud, and really bringing that to bear. And so then you start having this, this really great full stack integration all the way from the hardware, very powerful hardware architecture that, you know, again, driven by API, the infrastructure software on top of that. And then all these great AI tools, tool chains, capabilities with things like the NVIDIA NGC. So that's really, I think where the vision's going. And we got a lot of the basic parts there, but obviously a lot more work to do going forward. >> I would say that, you know, initially we had dream, we wanted this journey to happen very fast and initially we're baiting infrastructure services. So there's no contention with applications, customer full workload applications, and also in enabling how productive it is to get the data over time, have to have sufficient control over a wide area. there's an opportunity to do something like that to make sure that you think about the probation from bare metal vms (conversation fading) environments are way more dynamic and more spreadable. Right. And they expect hardware. It could be as dynamic and compostable to suit their needs. And I think that's where we're headed. >> Right. So let me, so let me throw a monkey wrench in, in terms of security, right? So now this thing is much more flexible. It's much more software defined. How is that changing the way you think about security and basic security and throughout the stack go to you first, Paul. >> Yeah. Yeah. So like it's actually enables a lot of really powerful things. So first of all, from an architecture and implementation standpoint, you have to understand that we're really running two copies of VXI on each physical server. Now we've got the one running on the X86 side, just like normal, and now we've got one running on the SmartNIC as well. And so, as I mentioned before, we can move a lot of that networking security, et cetera, capabilities off to the SmartNic. And so what does this going toward as what we call a zero trust security architecture, this notion of having really defense in depth at many different layers and many different areas while obviously the hypervisor and the virtualization layer provides a really strong level of security. even when we were doing it completely on the X86 side, now that we're running on a SmartNic that's additional defense in depth because the X86 ESX doesn't really know it doesn't have direct access to the ESX. I run it on the SmartNic So the ESXI running on the SmartNic, it can be this kind of more well defended position. Moreover, now that we're running the security functionality is directly on the data path. In the SmartNic. We can do a lot more with that. We can run a lot deeper analysis, can talk about AI and ML, bring a lot of those capabilities to bear here to actually improve the security profile. And so finally I'd say this notion of kind of distributed security as well, that you don't, that's what I want to have these individual points on the physical network, but I actually distribute the security policies and enforcement to everywhere where a server's running, I everywhere where a SmartNic is, and that's what we can do here. And so it really takes a lot of what we've been doing with things like NSX, but now connects it much more deeply into hardware, allowing for better performance and security. >> A common attack method is to intercept the boot of the server physical server. And, you know, I'm actually very proud of our team because the us national security agency recently published a white paper on best practices for secure group. And they take our implementation across and secure boot as the reference standard. >> Right? Moving forward, imagine an environment that even if you gain control of the server, that doesn't allow you to change bios or update it. So we're moving the root of trust to be in that air gap, domain that Kit talked about. And that gives us a way more capability for zero across the operations. Right. >> Right, right. Paul, I got to ask you, I had Sam bird on the other day, your peer who runs the P the PC group. >> I'm telling you, he is not a peer He's a little bit higher up. >> Higher than you. Okay. Well, I just promoted you so that's okay. But, but it's really interesting. Cause we were talking about, it was literally like 10 years ago, the death of the PC article that came out when, when Apple introduced the tablet and, you know, he's talked about what phenomenal devices that PCs continue to be and evolve. And then it's just funny how, now that dovetails with this whole edge conversation, when people don't necessarily think of a PC as a piece of the edge, but it is a great piece of the edge. So from an infrastructure point of view, you know, to have that kind of presence within the PCs and kind of potentially that intelligence and again, this kind of whole another layer of interaction with the users and an opportunity to define how they work with applications and prioritize applications. I just wonder if you can share how nice it is to have that kind of in your back pocket to know that you've got a whole another, you know, kind of layer of visibility and connection with the users beyond just simply the infrastructure. >> So I actually, within the company we've developed within a framework that we call four edge multicloud, right. Core data centers and enterprise edge IOP, and then off premise. it is a multicloud world. And, and within that framework, we consider our client solutions group products to be part of the yes. And we see a lot of benefit. I'll give an example about a healthcare company that wants to develop real time analytics, regardless of whether it's on a laptop or maybe move into a backend data center, right? Whether it's at a hospital clinic or a patient's home, it gives us a broader innovation surface and a little sooner to get actually the, a lot of people may not appreciate that the most important function within Centene, I considered to be the experienced design thing. So being able to design user flows and customer experience looked at all of use is a variable. >> That's great. That's great. So we're running out of time. I want to give you each the last word you both been in this business for a long time. This is brand new stuff, right? Container aren't new, Kubernetes is still relatively new and exciting. And project Pacific was relatively new and now project Monterrey, but you guys are, you know, you're, multi-decade veterans in this thing. as you look forward, what does this moment represent compared to some of the other shifts that we've seen in IT? You know, generally, but you know, kind of consumption of compute and you know, kind of this application centric world that just continues to grow. I mean, as a software is eating everything, we know it, you guys live it every day. What is, where are we now? And you know, what do you see? Maybe I don't want to go too far out, but the next couple of years within the Monterey framework. And then if you have something else, generally you can add as well. Paul, why don't we start with you? >> Well, I think on a personal level, ingenuity aside I have a long string of very successful endeavor in my career when I came back couple years ago, one of the things that I told Jeff, our vice chairman is a big canvas and I intend to paint my masterpiece and I think, you know, Monterey and what we're doing in support of Monterey is also part of that. I think that you will see, you will see our initial approach focus on, on coordinator. I can tell you that you know how to express it. And we know also how to express even in a multicloud world. So I'm very excited and I know that I'm going to be busy for the next few years. (giggling) >> A Kit to you. >> Yeah. So, you know, it's funny you talk to people about SmartNic and especially those folks that have been around for awhile. And what you hear is like, Hey, you know, people were talking about SmartNic 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that sort of thing. Then they kind of died off. So what's different now. And I think the big difference now is a few things, you know, first of all, it's the core technology of sworn and has dramatically improved. We now have a powerful software infrastructure layer that can take advantage of it. And, you know, finally, you know, applications have a really strong need for it, again, with all the things we've talked about, the need for offload. So I think there's some real sort of fundamental shifts that have happened over the past. Let's say decade that have driven the need for this. And so this is something that I believe strongly as here to last, you know, both ourselves at VMware, as well as Dell are making a huge bet on this, but not only that, and not only is it good for customers, it's actually good for all the operators as well. So whether this is part of VCF that we deliver to customers for them to operate themselves, just like they always have, or if it's part of our own cloud solutions, things like being more caught on Dell, this is going to be a core part about how we deliver our cloud services and infrastructure going forward. So we really do believe this is kind of a foundational transition that's taking place. And as we talked about, there is a ton of additional innovation that's going to come out of it. So I'm really, really excited for the next few years, because I think we're just at the start of a very long and very exciting journey. >> Awesome. Well, thank you both for spending some time with us and sharing the story and congratulations. I'm sure a whole bunch of work for, from a whole bunch of people in, into getting to getting where you are now. And, and as you said, Paul, the work is barely just begun. So thanks again. All right. He's Paul's He's Kit. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cubes, continuing coverage of Dell tech world 2020, that digital experience. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (Upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, CUBE Virtual's coverage, CUBE digital coverage, of AWS Summit, virtual online, Amazon Summit's normally in face-to-face all around the world, it's happening now online, follow the sun. Of course, we want to bring theCUBE coverage like we do at the events digitally, and we've got a great guest that usually comes on face-to-face, he's coming on virtual, Sanjay Poonen, the chief operating officer of VMware. Sanjay great to see you, thanks for coming in virtually, you look great. >> Hey, John thank you very much. Always a pleasure to talk to you. This is the new reality. We both happen to live very close to each other, me in Los Altos, you in Palo Alto, but here we are in this new mode of communication. But the good news is I think you guys at theCUBE were pioneering a lot of digital innovation, the AI platform, so hopefully it's not much of an adjustment for you guys to move digital. >> It's not really a pivot, just move the boat, put the sails up and sail into the next generation, which brings up really the conversation that we're seeing, which is this digital challenge, the virtual world, it's virtualization, Sanjay, it sounds like VMware. Virtualization spawned so much opportunity, it created Amazon, some say, I'd say. Virtualizing our world, life is now integrated, we're immersed into each other, physical and digital, you got edge computing, you got cloud native, this is now a clear path to customers that recognize with the pandemic challenges of at-scale, that they have to operate their business, reset, reinvent, and grow coming out of this pandemic. This has been a big story that we've been talking about and a lot of smart managers looking at projects saying, I'm doubling down on that, and I'm going to move the resources from this, the people and budget, to this new reality. This is a tailwind for the folks who were prepared, the ones that have the experience, the ones that did the work. theCUBE, thanks for the props, but VMware as well. Your thoughts and reaction to this new reality, because it has to be cloud native, otherwise it doesn't work, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I think, John, you're right on. We were very fortunate as a company to invent the term virtualization for an x86 architecture and the category 20 years ago when Diane founded this great company. And I would say you're right, the public cloud is the instantiation of virtualization at its sort of scale format and we're excited about this Amazon partnership, we'll talk more about that. This new world of doing everything virtual has taken the same concepts to whole new levels. We are partnering very closely with companies like Zoom, because a good part of this is being able to deliver video experiences in there, we'll talk about that if needed. Cloud native security, we announced an acquisition today in container security that's very important because we're making big moves in security, security's become very important. I would just say, John, the first thing that was very important to us as we began to shelter in place was the health of our employees. Ironically, if I go back to, in January I was in Davos, in fact some of your other folks who were on the show earlier, Matt Garman, Andy, we were all there in January. The crisis already started in China, but it wasn't on the world scene as much of a topic of discussion. Little did we know, three, four weeks later, fast forward to February things were moving so quickly. I remember a Friday late in February where we were just about to go the next week to Las Vegas for our in-person sales kickoffs. Thousands of people, we were going to do, I think, five or 6,000 people in Las Vegas and then another 3,000 in Barcelona, and then finally in Singapore. And it had not yet been categorized a pandemic. It was still under this early form of some worriable virus. We decided for the health and safety of our employees to turn the entire event that was going to happen on Monday to something virtual, and I was so proud of the VMware team to just basically pivot just over the weekend. To change our entire event, we'd been thinking about video snippets. We have to become in this sort of virtual, digital age a little bit like TV producers like yourself, turn something that's going to be one day sitting in front of an audience to something that's a lot shorter, quicker snippets, so we began that, and the next thing we began doing over the next several weeks while the shelter in place order started, was systematically, first off, tell our employees, listen, focus on your health, but if you're healthy, turn your attention to serving your customers. And we began to see, which we'll talk about hopefully in the context of the discussion, parts of our portfolio experience a tremendous amount of interest for a COVID-centered world. Our digital workplace solutions, endpoint security, SD-WAN, and that trifecta began to be something that we began to see story after story of customers, hospitals, schools, governments, retailers, pharmacies telling us, thank you, VMware, for helping us when we needed those solutions to better enable our people on the front lines. And all VMware's role, John, was to be a digital first responder to the first responder, and that gave tremendous amount of motivation to all of our employees into it. >> Yeah, and I think that's a great point. One of the things we've been talking about, and you guys have been aligned with this, you mentioned some of those points, is that as we work at home, it points out that digital and technology is now part of lifestyle. So we used to talk about consumerization of IT, or immersion with augmented reality and virtual reality, and then talk about the edge of the network as an endpoint, we are at the edge of the network, we're at home, so this highlights some of the things that are in demand, workspaces, VPN provisioning, these new tools, that some cases we've been hearing people that no one ever thought of having a forecast of 100% VPN penetration. Okay, you did the AirWatch deal way back when you first started, these are now fruits of those labors. So I got to ask you, as managers of your customer base are out there thinking, okay, I got to double down on the right growth strategy for this post-pandemic world, the smart managers are going to look at the technologies enabled for business outcome, so I have to ask you, innovation strategies are one thing, saying it, putting it place, but now more than ever, putting them in action is the mandate that we're hearing from customers. Okay I need an innovation strategy, and I got to put it into action fast. What do you say to those customers? What is VMware doing with AWS, with cloud, to make those innovation strategies not only plausible but actionable? >> That's a great question, John. We focused our energy, before even COVID started, as we prepared for this year, going into sales kickoffs and our fiscal year, around five priorities. Number one was enabling the world to be multicloud, private cloud and public cloud, and clearly our partnership here with Amazon is the best example of that and they are our preferred cloud partner. Secondly, building modern apps with microservices and cloud native, what we call app modernization. Thirdly, which is a key part to the multicloud, is building out the entire network stack, data center networking, the firewalls, the load bouncing in SD-WAN, so I'd call that cloud network. Number four, the modernization of workplace with an additional workspace solution, Workspace ONE. And five, intrinsic security from all aspects of security, network, endpoint, and cloud. So those five priorities were what we began to think through, organize our portfolio, we call them solution pillars, and for any of your viewers who're interested, there's a five-minute version of the VMware story around those five pillars that you can watch on YouTube that I did, you just search for Sanjay Poonen and five-minute story. But then COVID hit us, and we said, okay we got to take these strategies now and make them more actionable. Exactly your question, right? So a subset of that portfolio of five began to become more actionable, because it's pointless going and talking about stuff and it's like, hey, listen, guys, I'm a house on fire, I don't care about the curtains and all the wonderful art. You got to help me through this crisis. So a subset of that portfolio became kind of what was those, think about now your laptop at home, or your endpoint at home. People wanted, on top of their Zoom call, or surrounding their Zoom call, a virtual desktop managed easily, so we began to see Workspace ONE getting a lot of interest from our customers, especially the VDI part of that portfolio. Secondly, that laptop at home needed to be secured. Traditional, old, legacy AV solutions that've worked, enter Carbon Black, so Workspace ONE plus Carbon Black, one and two. Third, that laptop at home needs network acceleration, because we're dialoguing and, John, we don't want any latency. Enter SD-WAN. So the trifecta of Workspace ONE, Carbon Black and VeloCloud, that began to see even more interest and we began to hone in our portfolio around those three. So that's an example of where you have a general strategy, but then you apply it to take action in the midst of a crisis, and then I say, listen, that trifecta, let's just go and present what we can do, we call that the business continuity or business resilience part of our portfolio. We began to start talking to customers, and saying, here's our business continuity solution, here's what we could do to help you, and we targeted hospitals, schools, governments, pharmacies, retailers, the ones who're on the front line of this and said again, that line I said earlier, we want to be a digital first responder to you, you are the real first responder. Right before this call I got off a CIO call with the CIO of a major hospital in the northeast area. What gives me great joy, John, is the fact that we are serving them. Their beds are busting at the seam, in serving patients-- >> And ransomware's a huge problem you guys-- >> We're serving them. >> And great stuff there, Sanjay, I was just on a call this morning with a bunch of folks in the security industry, thought leaders, was in DC, some generals were there, some real thought leaders, trying to figure out security policy around biosecurity, COVID-19, and this invisible disruption, and they were equating it to like the World Wars. Big inflection point, and one of the generals said, in those times of crisis you need alliances. So I got to ask you, COVID-19 is impactful, it's going to have serious impact on the critical nature of it, like you said, the house is on fire, don't worry about the curtains. Alliances matter more than ever when you need to come together. You guys have an ecosystem, Amazon's got an ecosystem, this is going to be a really important test to the alliances out there. How do you view that as you look forward? You need the alliances to be successful, to compete and win in the new world as this invisible enemy, if you will, or disruptor happens, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I'll answer in a second, just for your viewers, I sneezed, okay? I've been on your show dozens of time, John, but in your live show, if I sneezed, you'd hear the loud noise. The good news in digital is I can mute myself when a sneeze is about to happen, and we're able to continue the conversation, so these are some side benefits of the digital part of it. But coming to your question on alliance, super important. Ecosystems are how the world run around, united we stand, divided we fall. We have made ecosystems, I've always used this phrase internally at VMware, sort of like Isaac Newton, we see clearly because we stand on the shoulders of giants. So VMware is always able to be bigger of a company if we stand on the shoulders of bigger giants. Who were those companies 20 years ago when Diane started the company? It was the hardware economy of Intel and then HP and Dell, at the time IBM, now Lenovo, Cisco, NetApp, DMC. Today, the new hardware companies Amazon, Azure, Google, whoever have you, we were very, I think, prescient, if you would, to think about that and build a strategic partnership with Amazon three or four years ago. I've mentioned on your show before, Andy's a close friend, he was a classmate over at Harvard Business School, Pat, myself, Ragoo, really got close to Andy and Matt Garman and Mike Clayville and several members of their teams, Teresa Carlson, and began to build a partnership that I think is one of the most incredible success stories of a partnership. And Dell's kind of been a really strong partner with us on private cloud, having now Amazon with public cloud has been seminal, we do regular meetings and build deep integration of, VMware Cloud and AWS is not some announcement two or three years ago. It's deep engineering between, Bask's now in a different role, but in his previous role, that and people like Mark Lohmeyer in our team. And that deep engineering allows us to know and tell customers this simple statement, which both VMware and Amazon reps tell their customers today, if you have a workload running on vSphere, and you want to move that to Amazon, the best place, the preferred place for that is VMware Cloud and Amazon. If you try to refactor that onto a native VC 2, it's a waste of time and money. So to have the entire army of VMware and Amazon telling customers that statement is a huge step, because it tells customers, we have 70 million virtual machines running on-prem. If customers are looking to move those workloads to Amazon, the best place for that VMware Cloud and AWS, and we have some credible customer case studies. Freddie Mac was at VMworld last year. IHS Markit was at VMworld last year talking about it. Those are two examples and many more started it, so we would like to have every VMware and Amazon customer that's thinking about VMware to look at this partnership as one of the best in the industry and say very similar to what Andy I think said on stage at the time of this announcement, it doesn't have to be now a trade-off between public and private cloud, you can get the best of both worlds. That's what we're trying to do here-- >> That's a great point, I want to get your thoughts on leadership, as you look at COVID-19, one of our tracks we're going to be promoting heavily on theCUBE.net and our sites, around how to manage through this crisis. Andy Jassy was quoted on the fireside chat, which is coming up here in North America, but I saw it yesterday in New Zealand time as I time shifted over there, it's a two-sided door versus a one-sided door. That was kind of his theme is you got to be able to go both ways. And I want to get your thoughts, because you might know what you're doing in certain contexts, but if you don't know where you're going, you got to adjust your tactics and strategies to match that, and there's and old expression, if you don't know where you're going, every road will take you there, okay? And so a lot of enterprise CXOs or CEOs have to start thinking about where they want to go with their business, this is the growth strategy. Then you got to understand which roads to take. Your thoughts on this? Obviously we've been thinking it's cloud native, but if I'm a decision maker, I want to make sure I have an architecture that's going to carry me forward to the future. I need to make sure that I know where I'm going, so I know what road I'm on. Versus not knowing where I'm going, and every road looks good. So your thoughts on leadership and what people should be thinking around knowing what their destination is, and then the roads to take? >> John, I think it's the most important question in this time. Great leaders are born through crisis, whether it's Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Roosevelt, any of the leaders since then, in any country, Mahatma Gandhi in India, the country I grew up, Nelson Mandela, MLK, all of these folks were born through crisis, sometimes severe crisis, they had to go to jail, they were born through wars. I would say, listen, similar to the people you talked about, yeah, there's elements of this crisis that similar to a World War, I was talking to my 80 year old father, he's doing well. I asked him, "When was the world like this?" He said, "Second World War." I don't think this crisis is going to last six years. It might be six or 12 months, but I really don't think it'll be six years. Even the health care professionals aren't. So what do we learn through this crisis? It's a test of our leadership, and leaders are made or broken during this time. I would just give a few guides to leaders, this is something tha, Andy's a great leader, Pat, myself, we all are thinking through ways by which we can exercise this. Think of Sully Sullenberger who landed that plane on the Hudson. Did he know when he flew that airbus, US Airways airbus, that few flock of birds were going to get in his engine, and that he was going to have to land this plane in the Hudson? No, but he was making decisions quickly, and what did he exude to his co-pilot and to the rest of staff, calmness and confidence and appropriate communication. And I think it's really important as leaders, first off, that we communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate to our employees. First, our obligation is first to our employees, our family first, and then of course to our company employees, all 30,000 at VMware, and I'm sure similarly Andy does it to his, whatever, 60, 70,000 at AWS. And then you want to be able to communicate to them authentically and with clarity. People are going to be reading between the lines of everything you say, so one of the things I've sought to do with my team, all the front office functions report to me, is do half an hour Zoom video conferences, in the time zone that's convenient to them, so Japan, China, India, Europe, in their time zone, so it's 10 o'clock my time because it's convenient to Japan, and it's just 10 minutes of me speaking of what I'm seeing in the world, empathizing with them but listening to them for 20 minutes. That is communication. Authentically and with clarity, and then turn your attention to your employees, because we're going stir crazy sitting at home, I get it. And we've got to abide by the ordinances with whatever country we're in, turn your attention to your customers. I've gotten to be actually more productive during this time in having more customer conference calls, video conference calls on Zoom or whatever platform with them, and I'm looking at this now as an opportunity to engage in a new way. I have to be better prepared, like I said, these are shorter conversations, they're not as long. Good news I don't have to all over the place, that's better for my family, better for the carbon emission of the world, and also probably for my life long term. And then the third thing I would say is pick one area that you can learn and improve. For me, the last few years, two, three years, it's been security. I wanted to get the company into security, as you saw today we've announced mobile, so I helped architect the acquisition of Carbon Black, very similar to kind of the moves I've made six years ago around AirWatch, very key part to all of our focus to getting more into security, and I made it a personal goal that this year, at the start of the year, before COVID, I was going to meet 1,000 CISOs, in the Fortune 1000 Global 2000. Okay, guess what, COVID happens, and quite frankly that goal's gotten a little easier, because it's much easier for me to meet a lot more people on Zoom video conferences. I could probably do five, 10 per day, and if there's 200 working days in a day, I can easily get there, if I average about five per day, and sometimes I'm meeting them in groups of 10, 20. >> So maybe we can get you on theCUBE more often too, 'cause you have access to a video camera. >> That is my growth mindset for this year. So pick a growth mindset area. Satya Nadella puts this pretty well, "Move from being a know-it-all to a learn-it-all." And that's the mindset, great company. Andy has that same philosophy for Amazon, I think the great leaders right now who are running these cloud companies have that growth mindset. Pick an area that you can grow in this time, and you will find ways to do it. You'll be able to learn online and then be able to teach in some fashion. So I think communicate effectively, authentically, turn your attention to serving your customers, and then pick some growth area that you can learn yourself, and then we will come out of this crisis collectively, individuals and as partners, like VMware and Amazon, and then collectively as a society, I believe we'll come out stronger. >> Awesome great stuff, great insight there, Sanjay. Really appreciate you sharing that leadership. Back to the more of technical questions around leadership is cloud native. It's clear that there's going to be a line in the sand, if you will, there's going to be a right side of history, people are going to have to be on the right side of history, and I believe it's cloud native. You're starting to see this emersion. You guys have some news, you just announced today, you acquired a Kubernetes security startup, around Kubernetes, obviously Kubernetes needs security, it's one of those key new enablers, disruptive enablers out there. Cloud native is a path that is a destination opportunity for people to think about, why that acquisition? Why that company? Why is VMware making this move? >> Yeah, we felt as we talked about our plans in security, backing up to things I talked about in my last few appearances on your show at VMworld, when we announced Carbon Black, was we felt the security industry was broken because there was too many point benders, and we figured there'd be three to five control points, network, endpoint, cloud, where we could play a much more pronounced role at moving a lot of these point benders, I describe this as not having to force our customers to go to a doctor and say I've got to eat 5,000 tablets to get healthy, you make it part of your diet, you make it part of the infrastructure. So how do we do that? With network security, we're off to the races, we're doing a lot more data center networking, firewall, load bouncing, SD-WAN. Really, reality is we can eat into a lot of the point benders there that I've just been, and quite frankly what's happened to us very gratifying in the network security area, you've seen the last few months, some firewall vendors are buying SD-WAN players, kind of following our strategy. That's a tremendous validation of the fact that the network security space is being disrupted. Okay, move to endpoint security, part of the reason we acquired Carbon Black was to unify the client side, Workspace ONE and Carbon Black should come together, and we're well under way in doing that, make Carbon Black agentless on the server side with vSphere, we're well on the way to that, you'll see that very soon. By the way both those things are something that the traditional endpoint players can't do. And then bring out new forms of workload. Servers that are virtualized by VMware is just one form of work. What are other workloads? AWS, the public clouds, and containers. Container's just another workload. And we've been looking at container security for a long time. What we didn't want to do was buy another static analysis player, another platform and replatform it. We felt that we could get great technology, we have incredible grandeur on container cell. It's sort of Red Hat and us, they're the only two companies who are doing Kubernetes scales. It's not any of these endpoint players who understand containers. So Kubernetes, VMware's got an incredible brand and relevance and knowledge there. The networking part of it, service mesh, which is kind of a key component also to this. We've been working with Google and others like Istio in service mesh, we got a lot of IP there that the traditional endpoint players, Symantec, McAfee, Trend, CrowdStrike, don't know either Kubernetes or service mesh well. We add now container security into this, we really distinguish ourselves further from the traditional endpoint players with bringing together, not just the endpoint platform that can do containers, but also Kubernetes service mesh. So why is that important? As people think about their future in containers, they'll want to do this at the runtime level, not at the static level. They'll want to do it at build time And they'll want to have it integrated with some of their networking capabilities like service mesh. Who better to think about that IP and that evolution than VMware, and now we bring, I think it's 12 to 14 people we're bringing in from this acquisition. Several of them in Israel, some of them here in Palo Alto, and they will build that platform into the tech that VMware has onto the Carbon Black cloud and we will deliver that this year. It's not going to be years from now. >> Did you guys talk about the-- >> Our capability, and then we can bring the best of Carbon Black, with Tanzu, service mesh, and even future innovation, like, for example, there's a big movement going around, this thing call open policy agent OPA, which is an open source effort around policy management. You should expect us to embrace that, there could be aspects of OPA that also play into the future of this container security movement, so I think this is a really great move for Patrick and his team, I'm very excited. Patrick is the CEO of Carbon Black and the leader of that security business unit, and he came to me and said, "Listen, one of the areas "we need to move in is container security "because it's the number one request I'm hearing "from our CESOs and customers." I said, "Go ahead Patrick. "Find out who are the best player you could acquire, "but you have to triangulate that strategy "with the Tanzu team and the NSX team, "and when you have a unified strategy what we should go, "we'll go an make the right acquisition." And I'm proud of what he was able to announce today. >> And I noticed you guys on the release didn't talk about the acquisition amount. Was it not material, was it a small amount? >> No, we don't disclose small, it's a tuck-in acquisition. You should think of this as really bringing us some tech and some talent, and being able to build that into the core of the platform of Carbon Black. Carbon Black was the real big move we made. Usually what we do, you saw this with AirWatch, right, anchor on a fairly big move. We paid I think 2.1 billion for Carbon Black, and then build and build and build on top of that, partner very heavily, we didn't talk about that. If there's time we could talk about it. We announced today a security alliance with top SIEM players, in what's called a sock alliance. Who's announced in there? Splunk, IBM QRadar, Google Chronicle, Sumo Logic, and Exabeam, five of the biggest SIEM players are embracing VMware in endpoint security, saying, Carbon Black is who we want to work with. Nobody else has that type of partnership, so build, partner, and then buy. But buy is always very carefully thought through, we're not one of these companies like CA of the past that just bought every company and then it becomes a graveyard of dead acquisition. Our view is we're very disciplined about how we think about acquisition. Acquisitions for us are often the last resort, because we'd prefer to build and partner. But sometimes for time-to-market reasons, we acquire, and when we acquire, it's thoughtful, it's well-organized within VMware, and we take care of our people, 'cause we want, I mean listen, why do acquisitions fail? Because the good people leave. So we're excited about this team, the team in Israel, and the team in Palo Alto, they come from Octarine. We're going to integrate them rapidly into the platform, and this is a good evidence of VMware investing more in security, and our Q3 earnings pulled, John, I said, sorry, we said that the security business was a billion dollar business at VMware already, primarily from network, but some from endpoint. This is evidence of us putting more fuel behind that fire. It's only been six, seven months and Patrick's made his first acquisition inside Carbon Black, so you're going to see us investing more in security, it's an important priority for the company, and I expect us to be a very prominent player in these three pillars, network security, endpoint security, endpoint is both client and the workload, and cloud. Network, endpoint, cloud, they are the three areas where we think there's lots of room for innovation in security. >> Well, we'll be watching, we'll be reporting and analyzing the moves. Great playbook, by the way. Love that organic partnering and then key acquisitions which you build around, it's a great playbook, I think it's very relevant for this time. The most important question I have to ask you, Sanjay, and this is a personal question, because you're the leader of VMware, I noticed that, we all know you're into music, you've been putting music online, kind of a virtual band. You've also hired a CUBE alumni, Victoria Verango from McAfee who also puts up music, you've got some musicians, but you kind of know how to do the digital moves there, so the question is, will the music at VMworld this year be virtual? >> Oh, man. Victoria is actually an even better musician than me. I'm excited about his marketing gifts, but I'm also excited to watch him. But yeah, you've heard him sing, he's got a voice that's somewhat similar to Sting, so we, just for fun, in our Diwali, which is an Indian celebration last year, Tom Corn, myself, and a wonderful lady named Divya, who's got a beautiful voice, had sung a song, which was off the soundtrack of the Bollywood movie, "Secret Superstar," and we just for fun decided to record that in our three separate homes, and put that out on YouTube. You can listen, it's just a two or three-minute run, and it kind of went a little bit viral. And I was thinking to myself, hey, if this is one way by which we can let the VMware community know that, hey, you know what, art conquers COVID-19, you can do music even socially distant, and bring out the spirit of VMware, which is community. So we might build on that idea, Victoria and I were talking about that last night and saying, hey, maybe we do a virtual music kind of concert of maybe 10 or 15 or 20 voices in the various different countries. Record piece of a song and music and put it out there. I think these are just ways by which we're having fun in a virtual setting where people get to see a different side of VMware where, and the intent here, we're all amateurs, John, we're not like great. There are going to be mistakes in this music. If you listen to that audio, it sounds a little tinny, 'cause we're recording it off our iPhone and our iPad microphone. But we'll do the best we can, the point is just to show the human spirit and to show that we care, and at the end of the day, see, the COVID-19 virus has no prejudice on color of skin, or nationality, or ethnicity. It's affecting the whole world. We all went into the tunnel at different times, we will come out of this tunnel together and we will be a stronger human fabric when we're done with this, We shall absolutely overcome. >> Sanjay, give us a quick update to end the segment on your thoughts around VMworld. It's one of the biggest events, we look forward to it. It's the only even left standing that theCUBE's been to every year of theCUBE's existence, we're looking forward to being part of theCUBE virtual. It's been announced it's virtual. What are some of the thinking going on at the highest levels within the VMware community around how you're going to handle VMworld this year? >> Listen, when we began to think about it, we had to obviously give our customers and folks enough notice, so we didn't want to just spring that sometime this summer. So we decided to think through it carefully. I asked Robin, our CMO, to talk to many of the other CMOs in the industry. Good news is all of these are friends of ours, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Adobe, and even some smaller companies, IBM did theirs. And if they were in the first half of the year, they had to go virtual 'cause we're sheltered in place, and IBM did theirs, Okta did theirs, and we began to watch how they were doing this. We're kind of in the second half, because we were August, September, and we just sensed a lot of hesitancy from our customers that wanted to get on a plane to come here, and even if we got just 500, 1,000, a few thousand, it wasn't going to be the same and there would always be that sort of, even if we were getting back to that, some worry, so we figured we'd do something that might be semi-digital, and we may have some people that roam, but the bulk of it is going to be digital, and we changed the dates to be a little later. I think it's September 20th to 29th. Right now it's all public now, we announced that, and we're going to make it a great program. In some senses like we're becoming TV producer. I told our team we got to be like Disney or ESPN or whoever your favorite show is, YouTube, and produce a really good several-hour program that has got a different way in which digital content is provided, smaller snippets, very interesting speakers, great brand names, make the content clear, crisp and compelling. And if we do that, this will be, I don't know, maybe it's the new norm for some period of time, or it might be forever, I don't know. >> John: We're all learning. >> In the past we had huge conferences that were busting 50, 70, 100,000 and then after the dot-com era, those all shrunk, they're like smaller conferences, and now with advent of companies like Amazon and Salesforce, we have huge events that, like VMworld, are big events. We may move to a environment that's a lot more digital, I don't know what the future of in-presence physical conferences are, but we, like others, we're working with AWS in terms of their future with Reinvent, what Microsoft's doing with Ignite, what Google's doing with Next, what Salesforce's going to do with Dreamforce, all those four companies are good partners of ours. We'll study theirs, we'll work together as a community, the CMOs of all those companies, and we'll come together with something that's a very good digital experience for our customers, that's really what counts. Today I did a webinar with a partner. Typically when we did a briefing in our briefing center, 20 people came. There're 100 people attending this, I got a lot more participation in this QBR that I did with this SI partner, one of the top SIs in the world, in an online session with them, than would I have gotten if they'd all come to Palo Alto. That's goodness. Should we take the best of that world and some physical presence? Maybe in the future, we'll see how it goes. >> Content quality. You know, you know content. Content quality drives everything online, good engagement creates community, that's a nice flywheel. I think you guys will figure it out, you've got a lot of great minds there, and of course, theCUBE virtual will be helping out as we can, and we're rethinking things too-- >> We count on that, John-- >> We're going to be open minded to new ideas, and, hey, whatever's the best content we can deliver, whether it's CUBE, or with you guys, or whoever, we're looking forward to it. Sanjay, thanks for spending the time on this CUBE Keynote coverage of AWS Summit. Since it's digital we can do longer programs, we can do more diverse content. We got great customer practitioners coming up, talking about their journey, their innovation strategies. Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware, thank you for taking your precious time out of your day today. >> Thank you, John, always a pleasure. >> Thank you. Okay, more CUBE, virtual CUBE digital coverage of AWS Summit 2020, theCUBE.net is we're streaming, and of course, tons of videos on innovation, DevOps, and more, scaling cloud, scaling on-premise hybrid cloud, and more. We got great interviews coming up, stay with us our all-day coverage. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios and Palo Alto in Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studio as kind of our on going leadership coverage of what's happening with the COVID crisis, and really looking out into our community to find experts who can provide tips and tricks, and some guidance as everyone is kind of charting these uncharted waters if you will. And we've got a great cube alarm in our database. He's a fantastic resourcer. We're excited to get him on. Share the information with you. We'd like to welcome once again, Darren Murph. He is the Head of Remote for GitLab. Darren, great to see you. >> Absolutely, great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so thank you and. First off, we had you on earlier this year, back when things were normal, in kind of a regular review. Who knew that you would be at the center of the work-from-home universe just a few short months later. I mean, you've been doing this for ever. So it's kind of a wile old veteran of the work-from-home, or not even from home, just work from some place else. What are some top level things that you can share for people that have never experienced this before? >> Yeah, on the working front. If you're one of the people that are working from home, I think there's a couple of things you can do to help acclimate, make your world a little bit better. The first is to try to create some sort of separation between your work life and your personal life. Now if you have a home big enough that you can dedicate a workspace to being your office, that's going to help a lot. Help from a focus standpoint and just. You don't want those lines between work and life to blur too much, that's where isolation kicks in. That's where burnout kicks in. You want to do whatever you can to avoid. You got to remember, when you're not physically walking out of a office and disconnecting from work. You have to replicate that and recreate that. I actually recommend for people that used to have a commute and now they don't. I would actually black something in your calendar, whether that's cooking, cleaning, spending time with your family. Resting more, anything so that you ramp into your day very deliberately and ramp out of very deliberately. Now on the team leading front. I'm going to say it may feel a little counter intuitive, but the further your team is from you, the more distributed they are. The more you really need to let go and allow them to have mechanism for feeding back to you. Managers job in a remote setting switches from just being a pure director, you're actually being an unblocker. A really active listener. And for people who have gotten to a certain point in their career through command and control, this is going to feel very strange, jarring and counter intuitive, but we've seen it time and time again. You need to trust that your workers are in a new environment. You have to give them a mechanism feeding back to you to help them unblock whatever it is. >> You know that's funny, we had someone on as part of this the other day, talking about leaders need to change their objectives that they're managing to, from kind of activity based, to deliverals based. And it actually floored me that someone is still writing in a blog in 2020, that people have to change their management deliverables from activity to deliverables. And it was so funny, you know, you had Martin Mikos on, we had him on too. My favorite comment was, "It's so easy to fake it in the office and look busy, "but when you're at home all you have is your deliverable." so it really, it seems like there's kind of a forcing function to get people to pay attention to the things they should be managing to anyway. >> You said it, forcing functions. I talk about this all the time, but there are so many forcing functions in remote that help you do remote well. But not only just do remote well, just run your business well. Even if you plan on going back to office. On some level there's a lot of things you can do now to help pave the infrastructure to creating a better and more effective team. And as a manager, if you have it in a writing down. The metrics or expectations for your direct reports in the office, now's the time to do it. Subjectivity is allowed to flourish in the office. You can praise or promote people just kind of how much you like them or how easy they are to work with. That really has nothing to do with metrics and results. I've often been asked, "How do you know if "someone's been working remotely?" And my response is, how do you know if they were working in the office. If you can't clearly answer that in the office, then you're not going to be able to answer it remotely. So frankly, in these times a lot of the burden falls more on the manager to actually take a hard look at what they're clarifying to their team. And if the metrics aren't laid out. It's on the manager to lay that out. It's not the responsibility of the direct report to figure out how to prove their worth. The manager has to be very articulant about what that value looks like. >> Right, and not only do they have to be articulate about what the deliverables are and what their expectations are, but. You guys have a remote play book GitLab has published, which is terrific. People should go online, it's 38 pages of dense, dense, dense material. It's a terrific resource, it's a open source, you got to love the open source, eat those. But one of the slides that jumped out to me, and it's consistent with a lot of these conversations that we're having, is that your frequency of communications when people are not in the same room together. Has to go up dramatically, which is a little counter intuitive, but what I found even more interesting was the variety of types of communication. Not just you kind of standard meeting, or you standard status on a project, or maybe a little bit of a look forward to some strategic stuff. But you outlined a whole variety of types of communication. Objectives or methods, or feel if you will, to help people stay connected and to help kind keep this team building going forward. >> So here's the thing about communication. You've got to be intentional about it in a remote setting. And in fact, you need to have more intentionality across the board in a remote setting. And communications is just a very obvious. So for a lot of companies, they leave a lot of things to spontaneity Inter-personal relationships and communications are two of the biggest ones. Where you may not actually lay out a plan for how work is communicated about, or what opportunities you give people to chat about their weekends, or sports, or anything like that. You just kind of put them in the same building and then people just kind of figure it out. In a remote setting that's unwise. You're going to get a lot of chaos and disfunction when people don't know how to communicate and on what channel. So at GitLab we're very prescriptive that work communication happens in a GitLab issue or a merge request. And then informal communication happens through Zoom calls or Slack. We actually expired our Slack messages after 90 days, specifically to force people not to do work in Slack. We want the work to begin where it needs to end up, and in that case it's a very, it's a tool, GitLab, that's built for asynchronous communication. We want to continue to encourage that bias towards asynchronous communication. So yeah, we write down everything about how we want people to communicate and through what channels. And that may sound like a lot of rules, but actually it's very much appreciated by our global team. We have over 1200 people, in more that 65 countries. And they all just need to know where communication is going to happen. And our team is really cohesive and on the same page because we're articulant about that. >> So I want to double down on that. On 'A secret is peace', 'cause you brought this up, or you and Stu brought it up in your conversation with Stu, and Stu raised an interesting point, right. Unfortunately in the day of email and connected phones, and this and that, there has grown an expectation that used to be business, okay was, "I'll get back to you within 24 hours "if you leave me a voicemail." And lord knows what it was when we were still typing letters and memos, and sticking stuff in the yellow envelop with the string, right, as multiple days. But somehow that all got changed to, "I need to hear back form you now." And often it feels like, if your trying to have just some uninterrupted work time, to get something done. It's like, why is your lack of planning suddenly my emergency. And you talked about, you can't operate that on a global, asynchronous team because everyone's in different timezones. And just by rule, there are going to be a lot of people that are not awake when you need the answer to that question. But that you've developed a culture that that's okay, and that that is kind of the flow and the pacing which A, forces people to ask in advance, not immediately when you need it. But also gives people unfettered time to actually plan to do work versus plan to answer communications. I wonder if you can dig into how did that evolve and how do you enforce that when somebody comes in from the outside world. >> The real key to that is something that might not be immediately apparent to everyone. Which is, at GitLab we try to shift as much burden as we possibly can humans to documentation. And this even starts at onboarding, where to get onboarded at GitLab, you get an onboarding issue within GitLab, with over 200 check boxes of things to read and knowledge assessments to take. And humans are a part of it, but very minimal compared to what most companies would do. And the thing that you just outlined was, we're talking about asking questions. Or tapping someone on the shoulder to fill in a knowledge gap. But at GitLab we want to write everything down in a very formalized structured way. We try to work handbook first. So we need to document all of our processes, protocols and solutions. Basically everything that we've ever seen or done, needs to be documented in the handbook. So it's not that GitLab team members just magically need less information, it's just that instead of having to ask someone on our team, we go ask the handbook. We go consult the documentation. And the more rich that your documentation is, the less you have to bother other people, and the less you need to rely on synchronicity. So for us it all starts with operating handbook first. That allows our humans to reserve their cycles for doing truly creative things, not just answering your question for the thousandth time. >> Right, another thing you covered, which I really enjoyed was getting senior executives to work from home for an extended period of time. Now obviously, before COVID that would probably be a lot harder to do. Well now COVID has forced that. And I think to your point about that is, it really forces the empathy for someone who had no interest in working from home. Didn't like to work from home. Loves going to the office, has their routine. Been doing it for decades, to kind of wake up to A, you need to have more empathy for what this is all about. And B, what's it all about by actually doing it. So I wonder, kind of your take in the movement to more of a work from anywhere future. Now that all the senior executives have been thrown into this work from home situation. >> Look Jeff, you never want to waste a crisis. We can't wish away the crisis that's in front of us, but we can choose how we respond to it. And this does present an opportunity to lay ground work, to lay infrastructure, to build a more remote organization. And I have absolutely advocated for companies to get their leadership teams out of the office for a meaningful amount of time. A month, ideally a quarter. So that they actually understand what the remote life is. They actually have some of those communication gaps and challenges so they can document what's happening. And then help fix it. But to your point, executives love going to the office because they're on a different playing field to begin with. They usually have an executive assistant. Things are just. There's less friction in general. So it behooves them to just kind of keep charging in that direction, but now what we have is a situation where all of those executives are remote. And I'm seeing a lot of them say, "You know what, I'm seeing the myths that I've perpetrated "break down in front of me." And this is even in the most suboptimal time ever to go remote. This isn't remote work, this is crisis induced work from home. We're all dealing with social isolation. Our parents are also doubling as homeschool teachers. We have a lot going on. And even on top of all of that, I'm amazed at how adaptable the human society has been. In just adjusting to this and figuring it out on the fly. And I think the companies that take this opportunity, to ask themselves the right question, and build this into their ongoing talent and operational strategy, will actually come out stronger on the other side. >> Yeah, as you said. This is as challenging as it's ever been. There was no planning ahead, you're spouse or significant other's also working from home. And has the same Zoom schedule as you do, for some strange reason, right. The kids are home as you said, and your homeschooling them. And they also have to get on Zoom to do their classes. So it's really suboptimal. But as you said, it's a forcing function and people are going to learn. One of the other things in your handbook is the kind of definitions. It's not just work from home or work at the office, but there's actually a continuum and a spectrum. And as people are doing this for weeks and months. And behaviors turn into habits. People are not going to want to go back to sitting on 101 for two hours every morning to go work on a laptop in the office. It just doesn't make sense. So as you kind of look forward. How do you see the evolution. How are people taking baby steps, if you will. To incorporate more of this learning as we go forward. And incorporate into more of their regular, everyday procedures. >> I'm really optimistic about the future because what I see happening here is people are unlocking their imaginations. So once they've kind of stabilized, they're starting to realize, "Hey, I'm getting a lot more time with my family. "I'm spending a lot less on gas. "I just feel better as a person because I don't show up "to work everyday with road rage. "So how can I keep this going." And I genuinely think what's going to happen in four or five months, we're going to have millions of people collectively look at each other and they say, "The boss just called me back into the office "but I just did my job from home. "Even in suboptimal conditions. "I saw my family more, I exercised more. "I had more time to cook and clean. "How about no, I'm not going to go back to the office "as my default location." And I think what's going to happen is the 80, 20 rule is going to flip. Right now people work from home only for a special occasion, like the cable company's coming or something like that. Going forward it think the offices are going to be the special occasion. You're only going to commute to the office, or fly to the office when you have a large contingent of people coming in and you need to wine and dine them, or something like that. And the second order of this is, people that are only living in expensive cities because of their location. When their lease comes up for renewal, they're going to cast a glance at places like Wyoming and Idaho, and Ohio. Maybe even Vietnam and Cambodia, or foreign places. Because now you have them thinking of, "What could life look like if I decouple geography at work. "I still want to work really hard "and contribute this knowledge. "But I can go to a place with better air quality, "better schools, better opportunity to actually "invest in a smaller community, "where I can see real impact." And I think that's just going to have massive, massive societal impacts. People are really taking this time to consider how tightly their identity has been woven into work. Now that they're home and they've become something more than just whatever the office life has defined them as. I think that's really healthy. I think a lot of people may have intertwined those two things too tightly in the past. And now it's a forcing function to really ask yourself, you aren't just your work, you're more than your work. And what can that look like when you can do that job from anywhere. >> Right, right. And as you said, there's so many kind of secondary benefits in terms of traffic and infrastructure, and the environment and all kinds of things. And the other thing I think that's interesting what you said, 80, 20 I think that was pretty generous. I wouldn't give it a 20 percent. But if people, even in this hybrid steps, do more once a week, twice a week. Once every two weeks, right. The impact on the infrastructure and peoples lives is going to be huge. But I wanted to drill on something as we go into kind of this hybrid mode at some point in time. And you talked about, and I thought it was fascinating, about the norms and really coming out from a work from home first, or a work from anywhere first. Your very good at specifying anywhere doesn't mean home. Could be the library, could be the coffee shop. Could be an office, could be a WeWork. Could be wherever. Because if you talked about the new norms and the one I thought was really interesting, which probably impacts a lot of teams, is when some of the team's in the office and some of the team isn't. The typical move, right, is to have everyone in the office go into the conference room. We sit around one big screen. So you get like five people sitting around one table and you got a bunch of heads on Zoom. And you said, "You know, no. "Let's all be remote. So if we just be happen to be sitting at our desk. If we happen to be in the office, that's okay. But really normalize. And like we saw the movement from Cloud got to Cloud-e to Cloud first, why not Cloud. And then you know, kind of mobile and does it work in a mobile. No, no, no it has to. It's mobile first. Really the shift to not, can it be done at home, but tell me why it shouldn't be done at home, a really different kind of opening position as to how people deploy resources and think about staffing and assigning teams. It's like turning the whole thing upside down. >> Completely upside down. I think remote first to your point, is going to be the default going forward. I think we're just one or two quarters away from major CEO's sitting on the hot seat on CNBC, when it's their turn for quarterly earnings. And they're going to have to justify why they're spending what they spend on real estate. Is if your spending a billion dollars a year on real estate, you could easily deploy that to more people, more R&D. Once that question is asked in mass, that is when you're going to see the next phase of this. Where you really have to justify, even from a cost stand point, why are you spending so much? Why are you tying so much of your business results to geography. The thing about remote first is that it's not a us versus them. A lot of what we've learned at GitLab, and how we operate so efficiently. They work really well for remote teams, and they are remote first. But they would work just as well in an office. We attach a Google doc agenda to every single business meeting that we have, so that there's always an artifact. There's always a documented thread on what happened in a meeting. Now this would work just as well in a co-located meeting. Who wouldn't want to have a meeting where it's not just in one ear and out the other. You're going to give the time to the meeting, you might as well get something out of it. And so a lot of these remote forced. Remote first forcing functions, they do help remote teams work well. But I think it's especially important for hybrid teams. Offices aren't going to vanish overnight. A lot of these companies are going to have some part of their company return to the office, when travel restrictions are lifted. It think the key here is that its going to be a lot more fluent. You're never going to know on a day to day basis, who is coming into the office, and who is not. So you need to optimize for everyone being out of the office. And if they just so happen to be there, they just so happen to be there. >> Right, right. So before we. I want to get into one little nitty gritty subject, in terms of investment into the home office. You know, we're doing 100% remote interviews now on theCUBE, we used to go to pretty much. Probably 80% of our business was at events, or at peoples offices, or facilities. Now it's all dial-in. You talked a lot about people need to flex a little bit on enabling people to invest in the little bits and pieces of infrastructure for their home office, that they just don't have the same set ups. You're talking about multiple monitors, a comfortable chair, a good light. That there's a few things you can invest in, not tremendous amounts of money. But a couple of hundred bucks here and there, to make a big difference on the home work environment. And how people should think about making that investment into a big monitor that they don't see. It's not sitting at the desk in the office. >> 100%, look if you're coming from a co-located space, you're probably sitting in a cube that costs five, 10, maybe 20 thousand dollars put together. You might not notice that, but it's not cheap to build cubicles in a high rise. And if you go to your home and you have nothing set up, I would say it's on the people group to think really hard about being more lax and more lenient about spending policy. People need multiple monitors. You need a decent webcam, you need a decent microphone. You need a chair that isn't going to kill your back. You want to help people create healthy ergonomics. Sustainable workspaces in their home. This is the kind of thing that will inevitably impact productivity. You force someone to just be hunched over on their couch, in front of a 13 inch laptop. I mean, what kind of productivity do you really expect from that. That's not a great long term solution. I think the people group actually has a higher burden to bare all the way around. You know when it comes to making sure teams feel like teams and they have the atmosphere to connect on a meaningful level. It comes down to the people group, to not letting that just go to spontaneity. You want to have a happy hour virtually, you're going to have to put a calendar invite on peoples calendar. You're going to create topical channels in Slack for people to talk about things other than work. Someone's going to have to do that. They don't just happen by default. So, from hardware all the way to communication. The people group really needs to use this opportunity to think about, "Okay, what can we unlock in this new world." >> Right, I'm glad you said the people group and not the resources group because they're not coal, or steel, or a factory. >> No, if anything COVID has humanized this in a way, and I think it's actually a really big silver lining, where we're all now peering into each others homes. And it is glaringly obvious, that we're all humans first, colleagues second. And of course that always been the case, but there's something about a sterile or co-located work environment. You check a piece of you at the door. And you just kind of get down to business. Why is that, we have technology at out fingertips. We can be humans with each other. And that going to actually encourage more empathy. As we've seen at GitLab, more empathy leads to better business results. It leads to more meaningful connections. I mean, I have people, friends, located all over the world that I feel like I have a closer bond with. A closer, more intimate connection with that a lot of people I've met in office. To some degree you don't know who they really are. You don't know what they really love and what makes them tick. >> Right, right. All right Darren, so before I let you go and again thank you for the time, the conversation. I'm sure everyone is calling you up and I just love the open source ETHOS and the sharing. It's made such a huge impact on the technology world and second order impacts that a lot of people take advantage. Again, give us the place that people can go for the playbook, so they can come and leverage some of the resources. And again, thank you guys for publishing 'em. >> Absolutely, so we're an open source. We try to open source all of our learnings on remote. So go to allremote.info that will redirect you right into the All Remote section of GitLab handbook. All of which is open source. Right at the top you can download the remote playbook, which is PDF that we talked about. Download that, it takes you through all of our best information on getting started and thriving as a remote team. Just under that there's a lot of comprehensive guides on how we think about everything. And how we operate synchronously. How we handle meeting, and even hiring and compensation. allremote.info and of course you're welcome to reach out to me on Twitter, I'm @darrenmurph. >> All right, well thanks a lot Darren. And I find it somewhat ironic that you have a jetliner over your shoulder. Waiting for the lockdown and the quarantine to end so you can get back on the airplane. And we're looking forward to that day. >> Can't wait man, I miss, I miss the airplanes. I told someone the other day, I never thought I'd say I miss having a middle seat at the very back of the airplane, with someone reclined into my nose. But honestly, I can't wait. Take me anywhere. >> I think you'll be fighting people for that seat in another month or so. All right, thanks a lot, Darren. >> Absolutely, take care all. >> All right, he's Darren. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, from our Palo Altos Studios. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to Palo Altos Cube Studios for CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE. We're with Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision, CUBE Alumni. He's been on before. Building one of the most compelling companies that's disrupting and changing the game in Comms, advertising, PR, with Cloud technologies. Kevin, great to see you again, thanks for coming in. >> Likewise John, It's really good to be back. >> So, we haven't chatted in two years. You've been busy. Our last conversation was the beginning of 2017. Cision's done a lot of interesting things. You've got a lot of M and A under your belt. You're putting this portfolio together with Cloud technologies. Really been interesting. I really got to say I think you cracked the code on I think a new reality, a new economic reality. Also new capabilities for comms folks. Congratulations. >> Thank you, it's been a fun ride. >> So give us the update. So two years since we talked, how many deals, companies have you bought? What's the headcount, what's the revenue? Give us an update. >> In the four years, 12 acquisitions, seven of which have happened since I've been here. Up to 4,500 employees in over 40 countries. Customer count has grown to over 50,000 customers globally. Revenue's kind of gone from 500s to just shy of 800 million. A lot of leadership changes, and as you just mentioned, pretty seismic change, finally. We've certainly been the catalyst and the cattle prod for that seismic change around tech, data, measurement and analytics finally becoming mature and adopted inside this line of business like the Chief Communication Officer, the earn media folks. To say that they were not tech savvy a few years ago would be an understatement. So, a lot's been going on. >> Yeah, and certainly the trend is your friend, in my opinion, for you. But I think the reality is not yet upon people's general mindset. It's coming quickly, so if you look at some of the big trends out there. Look at fake news, look at Facebook, look at the Google effect. Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Big Tech, Amazon. Cloud computing, in that time period that you were, prior to just going to Cision, you had Oracle Cloud, done a lot of great things on the Marketing Cloud side. But the timing of Cloud computing, the timing of how media has changed. There's not many journalists anymore. We had Andy Cunningham, a legendary industry veteran, formerly of Cunningham Communications. He did the PR for Steve Jobs. You said, there's no more journalists, a few left, but you got to tell your story direct to the consumer. >> You do. >> This is now a new marketing phenomenon. This is a tailwind for you at Cision because you guys, although put these cubbies together, have a unique vision around bringing brand value advertising at PR economics. >> Yeah, that's a good way to put it. >> Tell us the vision of Cision and specifically the shift that's happening. Why are you guys important? What wave are you riding? >> So, there's a couple shifts, John. You and I have talked about this in previous programs There's this shift of the line of business, having to work in a whole bunch of non-integrated point solutions. The CFO used to live in 17 different applications from 17 vendors. That's all squished together. Now I buy from one Cloud platform, right, from Oracle or SAP. Same thing happened in Human Capital Management. 22 things squished into the Cloud, one from Workday, right. Same thing happened, you had 25 different things for sales and service. That all squished together, into one CRM in the Cloud, I buy from Salesforce, right. And our last rodeo, the early part of this stack, it was me and Adobe battling it out for the right to go squish the entire the LUMAscape into a marketing cloud, right, so there could be one ring to rule them all for the CMO. So, it happens in every single category. It just hasn't had over here, happened on the earned media side and the Chief Communications Officer. So, bringing the tech stack so that now we are for the CCO what Adobe is for the CMO what Salesforce is for the CRO, Workday is for the CHRO. That has to happen. You can't do, you can't manage it this way without sophisticated tech, without automation, without integration, you can't do it. The second thing that had to happen, especially in marketing and advertising, they all figured out how to get revenue credit. Advertising was a slow single-digit CAGR industry for 50 years. And then something happened. After 5% CAGR for 50 years, and then something happened over the next 10 years. Digital paid went from like 15 billion to 150 billion. And what happened is that old, I know half my advertising is wasted on this one half. That went bye-bye. Now I know immediately, down to the page, down the ad unit, down to this, exactly what worked, right. When I was able to put Pixels on ads, John, you'd go to that page, Pixel would go on you, It would follow you around If you ended up putting something in the e-commerce shop that ad got credit. I'm not saying that's right, I'm just saying that's how the entire-- >> But that's how the infrastructure would let you, allowed you, it enabled you to do that. Then again, paid advertising, paid search, paid advertising, that thing has created massive value in here. >> Massive value. But my buyer, right, so the person that does the little ad on the most regional tech page got credit. My buyer that got Bob Evans, the Cloud King, to write an article about why Microsoft is going to beat AWS, he's a credible third party influencer, writing objectively. That article's worth triple platinum and has more credibility than 20,000 Microsoft sales reps. We've never, until Cision, well let's Pixel that, let's go figure out how many of those are the target audience. Let's ride that all the way down to the lead form that's right. Basically it's super simple. Nobody's ever tracked the press releases, the articles or any of the earned media content, the way people have tracked banner ads or e-commerce emails. Therefore this line of business never get revenue credit. It stayed over here in the OpEx pile where things like commerce and advertising got dumped onto the revenue pile. Well, you saw the crazy investment shift. So, that's really the more important one, is Comms is finally getting quantified ROI and business's attribution like their commerce and advertising peers for the first time ever in 2018 via what Cision's rolled out. That's the exciting piece. >> I think, I mean, I guess what I hear you saying is that for the first time, the PR actually can be measured, similar to how advertising >> You got it. >> Couldn't be measured then be measured. Now PR or communications can be measured. >> They get measured the same way. And then one other thing. That ad, that press release, down to the business event. This one had $2 million dollars of ad spend, this one had no ad spend. When it goes to convert, in CRM or it goes to convert on a website, this one came from banner ad, this one came from credible third party content. Guess which one, not only had zero ad spend instead of $2 million in ad spend. Guess which one from which source actually converts better. It's the guy that chose to read credible third-party article. He's going to convert in the marketing system way better that somebody who just clicked on the ad. >> Well certainly, I'm biased-- >> So all the way down the funnel, we're talking about real financial impact based on capturing earned media ID, which is pretty exciting. >> Well, I think the more exciting thing is that you're basically taking a value that is unfunded quote by the advertising firm, has no budget basically, or thin budgets, trying to hit an organic, credible outlet which is converting in progression to a buyer, an outcome. That progression is now tracked. But let's just talk about the economics because you're talking about $2 million in spend, it could be $20 million. The ratio between ad spend and conversion to this new element you mentioned is different. You're essentially talking about the big mega trend, which is organic content. Meaning connecting to sources. >> That's right. >> That flow. Of course, we believe and we, at the Cube, everyone's been seeing that with our business. Let's talk about that dynamic because this is not a funded operationalized piece yet, so we've been seeing, in the industry, PR and comms becoming more powerful. So, the Chief Communication Officer isn't just rolling out press releases, although they have to do that to communicate. You've got medium posts now, you've got multiple channels. A lot of places to put the story. So the Chief Communication Officer really is the Chief Storyteller Officer, Not necessarily the CMO. >> Emphatically. >> The Martech Stack kind of tracking. So talk about that dynamic. How is the Chief Communication Officer role change or changing? Why is that important and what should people be thinking about, if they are a Chief Communication Officer? >> You know, it's interesting. There's a, I'm just going to call it an actual contradiction on this front. When you and I were getting out of our undergrad, 7 out of 10 times that CCO, the Chief Communication Officer, worked for the CEO and 30% of time other. Yet the role was materially narrow. The role has exploded. You just said it pretty eloquently. This role has really exploded and widened its aperture. Right now though 7 out of 10 of them actually do work for the CMO, which is a pretty interesting contradiction. And only 30% of them work for the CEO. Despite the fact that from an organizational stand point, that kind of counter intuitive org move has been made. It doesn't really matter because, so much of what you just said too, you was in marketing's purview or around brand or around reputation or around telling the story or around even owning the key assets. Key assets isn't that beautiful Budweiser frog commercial they played on Super Bowl anymore. The key assets are what's getting done over in the communications, in part. So, from a storytelling standpoint, from an ownership of the narrative, from a, not just a product or a service or promotion, but the whole company, the whole brand reputation, the goodwill, all of that is comms. Therefore you're seeing comms take the widest amount of real estate around the boardroom table than they've ever had. Despite the fact that they don't sit in the chair as much. I mentioned that just because I find it very interesting. Comms has never been more empowered, never had a wider aperture. >> But budget wise, they're not really that loaded up with funding. >> And to my earlier point, it's because they couldn't show. Super strategic. Showing ROI. >> So, showing ROI is critical. >> Not the quality of clippings. >> It was the Maslow of Hierarchy of Needs if you can just show me that I put a quarter in and I got a dollar out. Like the ads and the e-commerce folks do. It simply drives the drives me. >> So take us through some of those analytics because people who know about comms, the old school comms people who are doing this, they should really be thinking about what their operation is because, can I get an article in the Wall Street Journal? Can Silicon Angle write about us? I've got to get more clippings. That tend to be the thing. Did we get the press release out on time? They're not really tied into some of the key marketing mix pieces. They tend to be kind of a narrow scope. Those metrics were pretty clear. What are the new metrics? What's the new operational playbook.? >> Yeah, we call those Vanity Metrics. I cared about theoretical reach. Hey, Yahoo tells me I reached 222 billion people, so I plug in 222 billion people. I reached more people than there are on the planet with this PR campaign. I needed to get to the basic stuff like how many people did I actually reach, number one. But they don't, they do theoretical reach. They work in things like sentiment. Well, I'm going to come up with, 100 reporters wrote about me. I'm going to come up with, how many of them I thought were positive, negative, neutral. Sentiment analysis, they measure number of reporters or hits versus their competitors and say, Proctor and Gamble rolled out this diaper product, how did I do this five days? How much did Proctor and Gamble diapers get written about versus Craft diapers versus Unilever's. Share a voice. Not irrelevant metrics. But not metrics the CEO and the CFO are going to invest in. >> Conversion to brand or sales, those kind of things? >> They never just never existed. Those never existed. Now when we can introduce the same exact metrics that the commerce and the ad folks do and say, I can tell you exactly how many people. I can tell you exactly who they were, demographic, firmographic, lifestyle, you name it. I can tell you who the audience is you're reaching. I can tell you exactly what they do. When those kind of people read those kind of articles or those kind of people read those kind of press releases, they go to these destinations, they take these behaviors. And because I can track that all the way down to whatever that success metric is, which could be a lead form if I'm B2B for pipe. It could be a e-commerce store from B2C. It could be a rating or review or a user generation content gourd. It could be a sign up and register, if I'm trying to get database names. Whatever the business metric is. That's what the commerce and the ad people do all day every day. That's why they are more funded than ever. The fact that press releases, articles, tweets, blogs, the fact that the earned media stuff has never been able to do those things is why they just continue to suffer and have had a real lack of investment prices going on for the last 20 year. >> Talk about the trend around-- >> It's simple stuff. >> I know, if you improve the ROI, you get more budget. >> It really is that simple. >> That's been the challenge. I think PR is certainly becoming, comms is becoming more powerful. People know I talk about it all the time. I think comms is the new CMO I think command and control and organic content work together in the organic. We've seen it first hand in our business. But, it's an issue of tech savviness and also vision. A lot of people just are uncomfortable shifting to the new realities. >> That's for sure. >> What are some of the people tech savvy look at when they look at say revamping comms platform or strategy versus say old school? >> I'll give you two answers on that, John. Here is one thing that is good for us, that 7 out of 10 to the CCOs work for the CMO. Because when I was in this seat starting to light that fire under the CMO for the first time, which was not that long ago, and they were not tech savvy, and they were not sophisticated. They didn't know how to do this stuff either. That was a good 10 year journey to get the CMO from not sophisticated to very sophisticated. Now they're one of the more sophisticated lines of business in the world. But that was a slog. >> So are we going to see a Comms Stack? Like Martech, ComTech. >> ComTech is the decision communication Cloud, is ComTech. So we did it. We've built the Cloud stack. Again like I said, just like Adobe has the tech stack for marketing, Cision has the tech stack for comms, and we've replicated that. But because the CCO works for the CMO and the CMO's already been through this. Been through this with Ad Techs, been through this with MarTech, been through this with eCommerce, been through this with Web. You know, I've got a three or four year sophistication path this time just because >> The learnings are there >> The company's already done it everywhere else. The boss has already done it everywhere else. >> So the learnings are there from the MarTech so it's a pretty easy leap to take? >> That's exactly right. >> It's just-- >> How CommTech works is shocking. Incredibly similar to how MarTech and AdTech work. A lot of it is the same technology, just being applied different. >> That's good news >> So, the adoption curve for us is a fantastic thing. It's a really good thing for us that 70% of them work for CMOs because the CMO is the most impatient person on the planet, to get this over because the CMO is sick of doing customer journeys or omni channel across just paid and owned. They recognize that the most influential thing to influence you, it's not their emails, it's not their push notifications, It's not their ads. It's recognizing which credible third-party content you read, getting them into that, so that they're influencing you. >> It's kind of like Google PageRank in the old days. This source is more relevant than that one, give it more weight. >> And now all of a sudden if I have my Cision ID, I can plug in the more weight stuff under your profile. I want to let him go across paid and owned too, I materially improve the performance of the paid and owned because I'm putting in the really important signal versus what's sitting over there in the DMP or the CDP, which is kind of garbage. That's really important. >> I really think. >> I thinks you've got a home run here. I think you've really cracked the code on this. I think you are absolutely right on the money with comms and CommsTech. I see it all the time. In my years of experiences, it's so obvious. Then again, the tailwind is that they've been through the MarTech. The question I have for you is cultural shift. That's a big one. So, I'm out evangelizing all the time about the CUBE Cloud and some of the things we're doing. I run into the deer in the headlights on one side, what do you mean? And then people like, I believe, I totally understand. The believers and the non believers. What's the cultural shift? Because some chief comms op, they're very savvy, progressive, we've got to make the shift. How do they get the ship to turn? What are some of the cultural challenges? >> And boy is that right. I felt the same thing, getting more doing it with the CMO. A lot of people kept their head in the sand until they got obsoleted. They didn't know. Could they not see the train coming? They didn't want to see the train coming. Now you go look at the top 100 CMOs in the world today. Pretty different bunch than who those top 100 CMOs were 10 years ago. Really different bunch. History's repeating itself over here too. You've got the extremely innovative CCOs that are driving that change and transformation. You've got the deer in the headlight, okay, I know I need to do this, but I'm not sure how, and you do have your typical, you know, nope, I've got my do not disturb sign and police tape over my office. I won't even let you in my door. I don't want to hear about it. You've got all flavors. The good news is we are well past the half point where the innovators are starting actually to deploy and show results, the deer in the headlights are starting to innovate, and these folks are at least opening up the door and taking down some tape. >> Is there pressure on the agency side now? A lot of agencies charge a lot of monthly billings for these clients, the old school thing. Some are trying to be progressive and do more services. Have you seen, with the Cision Cloud and things that you're doing, that you're enabling, those agencies seem to be more productive? >> Yes. >> Are the client's putting pressure on those agencies so they see more value? Talk about the agency dynamic. >> That's also a virtuous cycle too, right? That cycle goes from, it's a Bell Curve. At the beginning of the bell curve, customers have no clue about the communications. They go to their agencies for advice. So, you have to educate the agencies on how to say nice things about you. By the time you're at the Bell Curve, the client's know about the tech or they've adopted the tech, and the agencies realize, oh, I can monetize the hell out of this. They need strategy and services and content and creative and campaign. This is yet another good old fashioned >> High gross profit. >> A buck for the tech means six bucks for me as the service agency. At the bottom, over here, I'll never forget this when we did our modern marketing experiences, Erik, the CMO of Clorox said, hey, to all you agencies out there, now that we're mature, you know, we choose our our agency based on their fluency around our tech stack. So it goes that violently and therefore, the agencies really do need to try to get fluent. The ones that do, really reap rewards because there is a blatant amount of need as the line of business customer tries to get from here to here. And the agency is the is the very first place that that customer is going to go to. >> So, basically the agency-- >> The customer has first right of refusal to go provide these services and monetize them. >> So, the agency has to keep up. >> They certainly do. >> Because, if the game gets changed by speed, it's accelerated >> If they keep up, yup. >> Value is created. If they don't have their running shoes on, they're out. >> If they keep up and they stay fluent, then they're going to be great. The last thing back in the things. We've kind of hit this. This is one of those magic points I've been talking about for 20 years. When the CFO or the CEO or the CMO walk down to the CCOs office and say, where are we on this, 'cause it's out in the wild now, there are over 1200 big brands doing this measurement, Cision ID, CommsTech stuff. It's getting written about by good old fashioned media. Customer says, wow, I couldn't do this for 50 years, now I am, and look what I just did to my Comms program. That gets read. The world's the same place as it always has been. You and I read that. We go down to our comms department and say, wow, I didn't know that was possible, where are we on this? So the Where Are We On This wave is coming to communications, which is an accelerant. >> It's an accountability-- >> Now it's accountability, and therefore, the urgency to get fluent and changed. So now they're hiring up quantums and operations and statisticians and database people just like the marketers did. The anatomy of a communications department is starting to like half science half art, just like happened in marketing. Whereas before that, it was 95% art and 5% science. But it's getting to be 50/50. >> Do you have any competition? >> We have, just like always. >> You guys pretty much have PR Newswire, a lot of big elements there. >> We do. >> You've got a good foothold. >> This is just an example. Even though Marketo is part of Adobe, giant. And Eloqua is part of Oracle, giant and Pardot is part of Salesforce. You've got three goliaths in marketing automation. Hubspot's still sticking around. PeerPlay, marketing Automation. You can just picture it. CRM giants, Microsoft and Salesforce have eaten the world Zendesk's still kicking around. It's a little PeerPlay. That equivalent exists. I have nobody that's even one fifth as big as I am, or as global or complete. But I do have some small, point specific solution providers. They're still hanging out there. >> The thing is, one, first you're a great leader. You've seen the moving on the marking tech side. You've got waves of experience under your belt. But I think what's interesting is that like the Web 1.0, having websites and webpages, Web 2.0 and social networks. That was about the first generation. Serve information, create Affiliate programs, all kind of coded tracking. You mentioned all that. I over-simplified it, but you get the idea. Now, every company needs a new capability. They need to stand up media infra structure. What does that mean? They're going to throw a podcast, they're going to take their content, put them into multiple channels. That's a comms function. Now comms is becoming the new CMO-like capability in this earned channel. So, your Cloud becomes that provisioning entity for companies to stand up capabilities without waiting. Is that the vision? >> You've nailed it. And that is one of the key reasons why you have to have a tech stack. That's a spot on one, another one. Early in my career, the 20 influences that mattered, they were all newspaper reporters or TV folks. There was only 20 of them. I had a Rolodex. so I could take each one of them out for a three Martini lunch, they'd write something good about me. >> Wish is was that easy now. >> Now, you have thousands of influencers across 52 channels, and they change in real time, and they're global in nature. It's another example of where, well, if you don't automate that with tech and by the way. >> You're left behind. >> If you send out digital content they talk back to you in real time. You have to actually not only do influencer identification, outreach and curation, you've got to do real time engagement. >> There's no agility. >> There's none. >> Zero agility. >> None, exactly. >> There's no like Dev Ops mindset in there at all. >> Then the speed with which, it's no longer okay for comms to call the agency and say, give me a ClipBook, I've got to get it to my CEO by Friday. That whole start the ClipBook on Tuesday, I've got to have the ClipBook, the physical ClipBook on the CEO as an example. Nope, if I'm not basically streaming my senior executives in real time, curated and analyzed as to what's important and what it means, I can't do that without a tech stack. >> Well, Andy Cunningham was on the Cube. >> This whole thing has been forced to get modernized by cloud technology and transformation >> Andy Cunningham, a legend in the comms business who did all Steve Jobs comms, legend. She basically said on The Cube, it's not about waiting for the clips to create the ClipBook, create your own ClipBook and get it out there. Then evaluate and engage. This is the new command and control with digital assets. >> Now, it's become the real-time, curated feed that never stops. It sure as hell better not. Because comms is in trouble if it does. >> Well this is a great topic. But let's have you in this, I can go deep on this. I think this is a really important shift, and you guys are the only ones that are on it at this level. I don't think the Salesforce and the Adobe yet, I don't think they're nimble enough to go after this wave. I think they're stuck on their wave and they're making a lot of money. >> You know John, paid media and owned media. The Google Marketing Cloud, that SAP Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce Marketing Clouds. They don't do anything in earned. Nothing. This is one of the reasons I jumped because I knew this needed to happen. But, you know, they're also chasing much bigger pots of money. Marketing and Advertising is still a lot more money. We're working on it to grow the pie for comms. But, bottom line is, they're chasing the big markets as I was at Oracle. And they're still pretty much in a violent arms race against each other. Salesforce is still way more focused on what Adobe's doing. >> You're just on a different wave. >> So, we're just over here doing this, building a billion dollar cloud leader, that is mission critical to everyone of their customers. They're going to end up being some pretty import partners to us, because they've been too focused on the big arms race against each other, in paid and owned and have not had the luxury to even go here. >> Well I think this wave that you're on is going to be really big. I think they don't see it, in my opinion, or can't get there. With the right surfboard, to use a surfing analogy, there's going to be a big wave. Thanks for sharing your insights. >> Absolutely. >> While you're here, get the plug in for Cision. What's going on, what's next? What's the big momentum? Get the plug in for the company. What are you guys still going to do? >> Plugin for the company. The company has acquired a couple of companies in January. You might see, one of which is Falcon. Basically Falcon is one of the big four in the land of Hootsuite, Sprinklr, Spredfast. Cloud companies do this. Adobe has Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Parking Cloud. Salesforce has Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud. Cision has just become a multi cloud company. We now have the Cision Social Cloud and the Cision Communications Cloud. And we're going to go grab a couple hundred million dollars of stuff away from Sprinklr, Hootsuite and collapse social into this. Most of social is earned as well. So, look for a wing spread, into another adjacent market. I think that's number one. Then look for publishing of the data. That's probably going to be the most exciting thing because we just talked about, again our metrics and capabilities you can buy But, little teaser. If we can say, in two months here's the average click through on a Google ad, YouTube ad, a banner ad, I'll show it to you on a Blog, a press release, an article. Apples to apples. Here is the conversion rate. If I can start becoming almost like an eMarketer or publisher on what happens when people read earned, there's going to be some unbelievable stats and they're going to be incredibly telling, and it's going to drive where are we on that. So this is going to be the year. >> It's a new digital advertising format. It's a new format. >> That's exactly right. >> It's a new digital advertising format. >> And its one when the CEO understands that he or she can have it for earned now, the way he's had it for marketing and advertising, that little conversation walking down the hall. In thousands of companies where the CCO or the VP of PR looks up and the CEO is going where are we on that? That's the year that that can flip switches, which I'm excited about. >> Every silo function is now horizontally connected with data, now measured, fully instrumented. The value will be there and whoever can bring the value gets the budget. That's the new model. Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision, changing the game in the shift around the Chief Communications Officer and how that is becoming more tech savvy. Really disrupting the business by measuring earned media. A big wave that's coming. Of course, it's early, but it's going to be a big one. Kevin, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure, John, thank you. >> So, CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto Thanks for watching. >> Thanks John. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada. It's the CUBE. Coverage OpenStack Summit North American 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Stu: Welcome to SiliconANGLE Media's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018. This is the CUBE. We're on day two of three days of live coverage. I'm Stu Miniman here with my co-host, John Troyer. Beautiful city here in Vancouver. There's been a bunch of parties last night, community things going on and to help us kind of set the stage for day two happy to welcome back to the program Lisa-Marie Namphy whose an OpenStack ambassador and also now a developer advocate with Portworx. Lisa, great to see you. >> Lisa: Thank you, guys, always great to be here. >> Stu: So, you're wearing a new logo ?????? Why don't you bring us up to speed on some of the many hats you're wearing. >> Lisa: Yeah, I joined the team at Portworx a few months back, super exciting, cognitive storage. If you want to run safe provocations like databases and containers, that's where Portworx comes in. So, it's a great space and as you know I've been in the cognitive space for a long time so I'm very happy to join the team of Portworx. >> Stu: I love, there's the open dev stuff going on here at the show. There was a keynote this morning, Forrest did a nice job of it. We'll actually have Immam on the CUBE tomorrow to talk some more about this, but you're at that nice intersection of how the developers fit into this, containers has been a hot discussion here for a few years, that whole cloud-native term that you've brought up, what is that mean to the OpenStack community, give us your level set as to what you see happening here in the OpenStack and beyond. >> Lisa: Yes, as you intimated I am still the tech ambassador for North America and have been for a long time, so I have seen this change coming, this progression, super-exciting at this conference how they've embraced those technologies that have been part of the story, but they really embraced at a very serious way as you saw from the keynotes yesterday. All the other technologies like works being done around containers, like Edge, ioT, all these wonderful stories that are getting showcased at this conference and customers and partners and communities coming together and working together, I think that's the most exciting part. >> John: Well, Lisa you run the meetup formally known as the Bay Area OpenStack meetup which just changed it name. Can you talk a little bit about that? >> Lisa: Yeah, well we just thought that, after looking at our schedule, and over the last two years I think that I've run 18 meetups on Kubernetes and Docker and Mesos and I just felt like networking and storage and all of the stuff we showcased I would keep. We didn't feel like the name was really reflective of the content that we were delivering and Cloud-native and Open-infrastructure is more of a broad term and that's the content that we've been delivering, and that's what the community has been wanting to talk about and wanting to come together over. So I changed the name. >> John: You guys have had great success, right? It's one of the biggest, or one of the biggest, meetup in this space. >> Lisa: It is, yeah, it's the world's largest ever tech issue group. We have over 6,000 members. >> John: People show up >> Lisa: They do. >> John: I've been to meetings. >> Lisa: A nice note to everybody, I didn't want anyone to panic, we still love OpenStack, and remember, OpenStack is a foundation of this, it was the first OpenStack meetup, but OpenStack is at the core of all of this technology, so it's built on OpenStack OpenStack's inside and so it's open infrastructure's a better, more encompassing title. >> Stu: I think that's great, we actually in some of the interviews we did yesterday, we had a COB provider from Australia and you go look around their website and it's not like they're saying, "Hey, OpenStack" all over the place, they're infrastructure and service for government and when you dig down underneath, what do you know, there's OpenStack there. Talk to a number of software companies that, when you dig into their IP, it's like "Oh, okay, we're using one of these projects from OpenStack." So, the premise I had had a few years ago is we know Opensource is a bunch of tools out there and it's not necessarily just like Linux permeated throughout the data center, OpenStack has that opportunity to that next generation of helping us to build everything from structure to service to all of these software products that are inside. >> Lisa: Absolutely and we saw during all those keynotes yesterday all the different projects when they did show what was being shown as the demo, all these projects coming together, maybe only two of them, that an OpenStack project, it's all of these communities coming together, working together, and it's kind of changed because everything's been focusing on business problems and this, I think, is the biggest shift that this shows. You know, these user communities not being so focused on the project that they're working on, but really focusing on use cases and trying to solve those problems, and now, I haven't said this to Lauren and Jonathan, I feel like when they pull the design from it out, I think that went a long way to taking away the project focus, because when you have a design summit and everyone runs off into their rooms to talk about cinder or nova or whatever it was they argue about the next release, that has all been removed and now its happening elsewhere and it really let the community come together and work together and bring all the technologies together. >> Stu: What do you, the conference in general, what's the vibe here? Obviously, we're in a beautiful place, everyone's really kind of stunned by the mountains everyone, not the first time though OpenStack Summit's been here in Vancouver, but what's the vibe, what's the feeling? >> Lisa: Yeah, it's so great to be back here. Congratulations on the trained whales that you've got for the free tram behind us. Vancouver, I mean, yeah Canada. It's just everyone's been so nice, so wonderful, it's so beautiful, wow, extremely happy to be back here. I think the Summit's been going great, you know. Non-dairy options at the coffee stations, I love that, too. They've thought of everything, the marketplace was booming last night, we had a little ambassador stand where people could come up and do a meet and greet and I was like pilled that there was so many people coming by for the whole hour. The energy has been wonderful and everybody feels involved. You know, this is a very communal feeling to this Summit. >> Stu: Great, to tell us about Portworx, give us the update there, how that fits into what's happening at the show. You've been lost in shows lately, you've got more coming up in the next month. >> Lisa: Absolutely, I mean, people just think okay it's an OpenStack summit, is it really going to be relevant? I have so many customers here, it's been fantastic to catch up with people and Portworx, it's a startup out of Spokane Valley, based in Los Altos and we have almost a hundred customers now and it's live in production, running Kubernetes in production and the problem with when you wanted to run those fateful applications, people think of containers as stateless traditionally, particularly Kubernetes, but what are you going to do with the data, right? The database is still super important so whether it's Postscript or MySequal or Kassberg or Santros, those fateful applications are really important and not the problem that Portworx solves. It's a cognitive storage company, but it's really beyond that, things you would expect from traditional VM, high availability, things like that, we can solve those problems if you want to run Postscript in a container. We worked really closely with Nasos, say resallas, the Kubernetes team with Docker. We'll be at DockerCon, the other, next week, and so we are actually doing the next meetup in the San Francisco Bay area. The first one we're going to bring all of these group together, we're doing it in conjunctions with our french and code press who run the production ready container, used to be container 101 meetup, so we're going to get together with them and with our Cloud-native open-infra user group. So, we're going to a meetup on June 6th, so I hope you guys come? >> John: Great, so I mean you said there's a lot of, going back to the conflict of business users, you know, folks who actually need to get stuff done, anything you're looking at in a conference in terms of the news, the clean release is out, so in terms of technologies, you're hearing about, talked about, buzz, the VTBU stuff, I don't know all what different, I know there's a lot of other storage news coming out this week, but anything that you guys are hearing in the air? >> Lisa: I mean, around again the adjacent technologies, CASA containers, a big focus here, and I hope that they're going to be a big focus, I hope I can finally run the first ever robotic containment meetup. We're going to have them do a hands-on lab at our OpenStack birthday party event on the "8th" I put that in quotes because it's a half-day hands-on lab training, it's sorry the 10th, July 10th, we want to focus on product containers, we want to focus on some of the new technology, Akrana, you heard me mention that yesterday. That's coming out, Edge, so Edge technology is huge, Vast was on stage again, right, talking about what they are doing, OpenDev as a subtrack of this constant or however they say that, it's super exciting. I think Boris Sunstach this morning, Boris is a sponsor Lawrence was a sponsor of that and I think the OpenDev community is really, it's bringing kind of of the developers and technology back into the fold and having this kind of of un-conference or sub-conference going on as a track, which is fantastic. I'm speaking tomorrow on the container track, container info-structure track, so super-excited about that it's also a track, but that's what I loved about this conference, about how they're really focusing on these kind of new and up-and-coming areas that are super hot. >> Stu: Lisa-Marie Namphy, really appreciate you helping us kick off day two coverage, so much these blendings of these communities helping the users put together the overall solution to get done what they need to get done. >> Lisa: Yeah, Bob Obasek of that foundation they've done a fantastic job, the energy of this summit has been fantastic. >> Stu: We've got a full lineup today, we've got practitioners, we've got the ecosystem, and for John Troyer I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching the CUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Austin, Texas, It's The Cube. Covering KubeCon 2017 and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, The Lennox Foundation, and The Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here in Austin, Texas, this is The Cube's exclusive coverage of the CNCF CloudNativeCon which was yesterday, and today is KubeCon, for Kubernetes conference, and a little bit tomorrow as well, some sessions. Our next guest is Adrian Cockcroft, VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy at AWS, Amazon Web Services, and my co-host Stu Miniman. Obviously, Adrian, an industry legend on Twitter and the industry, formerly with Netflix, knows a lot about AWS, now VP of Cloud Architecture, thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. >> Thanks very much. >> This is your first time as an AWS employee on The Cube. You've been verified. >> I've been on The Cube before. >> Many times. You've been verified. What's going on now with you guys, obviously coming off a hugely successful reinvent, there's a ton of video of me ranting and raving about how you guys are winning, and there's no second place, in the rear-view mirror, certainly Amazon's doing great. But CloudNative's got the formula, here. This is a cultural shift. What is going on here that's similar to what you guys are doing architecturally, why are you guys here, are you evangelizing, are you recruiting, are you proposing anything? What's the story? >> Yeah, it's really all of those things. We've been doing CloudNative for a long time, and the key thing with AWS, we always listen to our customers, and go wherever they take us. That's a big piece of the way we've always managed to keep on top of everything. And in this case, the whole container industry, there's a whole whole market there, there's a lot of different pieces, we've been working on that for a long time, and we found more and more people interested in CNCF and Kubernetes, and really started to engage. Part of my role is to host the open source team that does outbound engagement with all the different open source communities. So I've hired a few people, I hired Arun Gupta, who's very active in CNCF earlier this year, and internally we were looking at, we need to join CNCF at some point. We got to do that eventually and venture in, let's go make it happen. So last summer we just did all the internal paperwork, and running around talking to people and got everyone on the same page. And then in August we announced, hey, we're joining. So we got that done. I'm on the board of CNCF, Arun's my alternate for the board and technical, running around, and really deeply involved in as much of the technology and everything. And then that was largely so that we could kind of get our contributions from engineering on a clear footing. We were starting to contribute to Kupernetes, like as an outsider to the whole thing. So that's why we're, what's going on here? So getting that in place was like the basis for getting the contributions in place, we start hiring, we get the teams in place, and then getting our ducks in a row, if you like. And then last week at Reinvent, we announced EKS, the EC2 Kubernete's Service. And this week, we all had to be here. Like last week after Reinvent, everyone at AWS wants to go and sleep for a week. But no, we're going to go to Austin, we're going to do this. So we have about 20 people here, we came in, I did a little keynote yesterday. I could talk through the different topics, there, but fundamentally we wanted to be here where we've got the engineering teams here, we've got the engineering managers, they're in full-on hiring mode, because we've got the basic teams in place, but there's a lot more we want to do, and we're just going out and engaging, really getting to know the customers in detail. So that's really what drives it. Customer interactions, little bit of hiring, and just being present in this community. >> Adrian, you're very well known in the open source community, everything that you've done. Netflix, when you were on the VC side, you evangelized a bunch of it, if I can use the term. Amazon, many of us from the outside looked and, trying to understand. Obviously Amazon used lots of open source, Amazon's participated in a number of open source. MXNet got a lot of attention, joining the CNCF is something, I know this community, it's been very positively received, everybody's been waiting for it. What can you tell us about how Amazon, how do they think about open source? Is that something that fits into the strategy, or is it a tactic? Obviously, you're building out your teams, that sends certain signals to market, but can you help clarify for those of us that are watching what Amazon thinks about when it comes to this space? >> I think we've been, so, we didn't really have a team focused on outbound communication of what we were doing in open source until I started building this team a year ago. I think that was the missing link. We were actually doing a lot more than most people realized. I'd summarize it as saying, we were doing more than most people expected, but less than we probably could have been given the scale of what we are, the scale that AWS is at. So part of what we're doing is unlocking some internal demand where engineering teams were going. We'd like to open source something, we don't know how to engage with the communities. We're trying to build trust with these communities, and I've hired a team, I've got several people now, who are mostly from the open source community, we were also was kind of interviewing people like crazy. That was our sourcing for this team. So we get these people in and then we kind of say, all right, we have somebody that understands how to build these communities, how to respond, how to engage with the open source community. It's a little different to a standard customer, enterprise, start up, those are different entities that you'd want to relate to. But from a customer point of view, being customer-obsessed as AWS is, how do we get AWS to listen to an open source community and work with them, and meet all their concerns. So we've been, I think, doing a better job of that now we've pretty much got the team in place. >> That's your point, is customer focus is the ethos there. The communities are your customers in this case. So you're formalizing, you're formalizing that for Amazon, which has been so busy building out, and contributing here and there, so it sounds like there was a lot of activity going on within AWS, it was just kind of like contributing, but so much work on building out cloud ... >> Well there's a lot going on, but if no one was out there telling the story, you didn't know about it. Actually one of the best analogies we have for the EKS is actually our EMR, our Hadoop service, which launched 2010 or something, 2009, we've had it forever. But from the first few years when we did EMR, it was actually in a fork. We kept just sort of building our own version of it to do things, but about three or four years ago, we started upstreaming everything, and it's a completely clean, upstreamed version of all the Hadoop and all the related projects. But you make one API call, a cluster appears. Hey, give me a Hadoop cluster. Voom, and I want Spark and I want all these other things on it. And we're basically taking Kubernetes, it's very similar, we're going to reduce that to a single API call, a cluster appears, and it's a fully upstreamed experience. So that's, in terms of an engineering relationship to open source, we've already got a pretty good success story that nobody really knew about. And we're following a very similar path. >> Adrian, can you help us kind of unpack the Amazon Kubernetes stack a little bit? One of the announcements had a lot of attention, definitely got our attention, Fargate, kind of sits underneath what Kubernetes is doing, my understanding. Where are you sitting with the service measures, kind of bring us through the Amazon stack. What does Amazon do on its own versus the open source, and how those all fit together. >> Yeah, so everyone knows Amazon is a place where you can get virtual machines. It's easy to get me a virtual machine from ten years ago, everyone gets that, right? And then about three years ago, I think it was three years ago, we announced Lambda - was that two or three years ago? I lose track of how many reinvents ago it was. But with Lambda it's like, well, just give me a function. But as a first class entity, there's a, give me a function, here's the code I want you to run. We've now added two new ways that you can deploy to, two things you can deploy to. One of them's bare metal, which is already announced, one of the many, many, many announcements last week that might have slipped by without you noticing, but Bare Metal is a service. People go, 'those machines are really big'. Yes, of course they're really big! You get the whole machine and you can be able to bring your own virtualization or run whatever you want. But you could launch, you could run Kubernetes on that if you wanted, but we don't really care what you run it on. So we had Bare Metal, and then we have container. So Fargate is container as a first class entity that you deploy to. So here's my container registry, point you at it, and run one of these for me. And you don't have to think about deploying the underlying machines it's running on, you don't have to think about what version of Lennox it is, you have to build an AMI, all of the agents and fussing around, and you can get it in much smaller chunks. So you can say you get a CPU and half a gig of ram, and have that as just a small container. So it becomes much more granular, and you can get a broader range of mixes. A lot of our instances are sort of powers of two of a ratio of CPU to memory, and with Fargate you can ask for a much broader ratio. So you can have more CPU, less memory, and go back the other way, as well. 'Cause we can mix it up more easily at the container level. So it gives you a lot more flexibility, and if you buy into this, basically you'll get to do a lot of cost reduction for the sort of smaller scale things that you're running. Maybe test environments, you could shrink them down to just the containers and not have a lot of wasted space where you're trying to, you have too many instances running that you want to put it in. So it's partly the finer grain giving you more ability to say -- >> John: Or consumption choice. >> Yeah, and the other thing that we did recently was move to per-second billing, after the first minute, it's per-second. So the granularity of Cloud is now getting to be extremely fine-grained, and Lambda is per hundred millisecond, so it's just a little bit -- >> $4.03 for your bill, I mean this is the key thing. You guys have simplified the consumption experience. Bare Metal, VM's, containers, and functions. I mean pick one. >> Or pick all of them, it's fine. And when you look at the way Fargate's deployed in ECS it's a mixture. It's not all one or all the other, you deploy a number of instances with your containers on them, plus Fargate to deploy some additional containers that maybe didn't fit those instances. Maybe you've got a fleet of GPU enhanced machines, but you want to run a bit of Logic around it, some other containers in the same execution environment, but these don't need to be on the GPU. That kind of thing, you can mix it up. The other part of the question was, so how does this play into Kubernetes, and the discussions are just that we had to release the thing first, and then we can start talking, okay, how does this fit. Parts of the model fit into Kubernetes, parts don't. So we have to expose some more functionality in Fargate for this to make sense, 'cause we've got a really minimal initial release right now, we're going to expose it and add some more features. And then we possibly have to look at ways that we mutate Kubernetes a little bit for it to fit. So the initial EKS release won't include Fargate, because we're just trying to get it out based on what everyone knows today, we'd rather get that out earlier. But we'll be doing development work in the meantime, so a subsequent release we'll have done the integration work, which will all happen in public, in discussion with the community, and we'll have a debate about, okay, this is the features Fargate needs to properly integrate into Kubernetes, and there are other similar services from other top providers that want to integrate to the same API. So it's all going to be done as a public development, how we architect this. >> I saw a tweet here, I want to hear your comments on, it's from your keynote, someone retweeted, "managing over 100,000 clusters on ACS, hashtag Fargate," integrated into ECS, your hashtag, open, ADM's open. What is that hundred thousand number. Is that the total number, is that an example? On elastic container service, what does that mean? >> So ECS is a very large scale, multi-tenant container operation service that we've had for several years. It's in production, if you compare it to Kubernetes it's running much larger clusters, and it's been running at production-grade for longer. So it's a little bit more robust and secure and all those kinds of things. So I think it's missing some Kubernetes features, and there's a few places where we want to bring in capabilities from Kubernetes and make ECS a better experience for people. Think of Kubernetes as some what optimized for the developer experience, and ECS for more the operations experience, and we're trying to bring all this together. It is operating over a hundred thousand clusters of containers, over a hundred thousand clusters. And I think the other number was hundreds of millions of new containers are launched every week, or something like that. I think it was hundreds of millions a week. So, it's a very large scale system that is already deployed, and we're running some extremely large customers on, like Expedia and Macbook. Macbook ... Mac Box. Some of these people are running tens of thousands of containers in production as a single, we have single clusters in the tens of thousands range. So it's a different beast, right? And it meets a certain need, and we're going to evolve it forwards, and Kubernetes is serving a very different purpose. If you look at our data science space, if you want exactly the same Hadoop thing, you can get that on prem, you can run EMR. But we have Athena and Red Shift and all these other ways that are more native to the way we think, where we can go iterate and build something very specific to AWS, so you blend these two together and it depends on what you're trying to achieve. >> Well Adrian, congratulations on a great opportunity, I think the world is excited to have you in your role, if you could clarify and just put the narrative around, what's actually happening in AWS, what's been happening, and what you guys are going to do forward. I'll give you the last minute to let folks know what your job is, what your objective is, what you're looking for to hire, and your philosophy in the open source for AWS. >> I think there's a couple of other projects, and we've talked, this is really all about containers. The other two key project areas that we've been looking at are deep learning frameworks, since all of the deep learning frameworks are open source. A lot of Kubernetes people are using it to run GPUs and do that kind of stuff. So Apache MXNet is another focus on my team. It went into the incubation phase last January, we're walking it through, helping it on its way. It's something where we're 30, 40% of that project is AWS contribution. So we're not dominating it, but we're one of its main sponsors, and we're working with other companies. There's joint work with, it's lots of open source projects around here. We're working with Microsoft on Gluon, we're working with Facebook and Microsoft on Onyx which is an open URL network exchange. There's a whole lot of things going on here. And I have somebody on my team who hasn't started yet, can't tell you who it is, but they're starting pretty soon, who's going to be focusing on that open source, deep learning AI space. And the final area I think is interesting is IOT, serverless, Edge, that whole space. One announcement recently is free AltOS. So again, we sort of acquired the founder of this thing, this free real-time operating system. Everything you have, you probably personally own hundreds of instances of this without knowing it, it's in everything. Just about every little thing that sits there, that runs itself, every light bulb, probably, in your house that has a processor in it, those are all free AltOS. So it's incredibly pervasive, and we did an open source announcement last week where we switched its license to be a pure MIT license, to be more friendly for the community, and announced an Amazon version of it with better Amazon integration, but also some upgrades to the open source version. So, again, we're pushing an open source platform, strategy, in the embedded and IOT space as well. >> And enabling people to build great software, take the software engineering hassles out for the application developers, while giving the software engineers more engineering opportunities to create some good stuff. Thanks for coming on The Cube and congratulations on your continued success, and looking forward to following up on the Amazon Web Services open source collaboration, contribution, and of course, innovation. The Cube doing it's part here with its open source content, three days of coverage of CloudNativeCon and KubeCon. It's our second day, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more live coverage in Austin, Texas, after this short break. >> Offscreen: Thank you.