>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its eco-system partners. >> Hello, everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for theCUBE's exclusive coverage for three days, VMworld 2018. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Andy Bechtolsheim who's the founder and chief development officer and chairman of Arista Networks. More importantly, he's also the co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Invested in Larry and Sergey when they were in their PhD programs. Legend in the industry. Great to have you on. Super excited to have you join this conversation. >> A pleasure to be here today. >> So, first question is, besides all the luminary things you've done in your career, what's it like working with Jayshree at Arista? >> Well, I actually met Jayshree 30 years ago when she was at AMD selling us SDDR chips at Sun Microsystems, so I guess this dates both of us, but I worked with her, of all the years when I was at Cisco, obviously, and then we both start at Arista in 2008. So we have both been there now for 10 years together. In fact, our 10-year anniversary's coming up next month. >> Jayshree's a great Cube alumni. She's an amazing person. Great technologist, we miss her. Wish she was here, having more conversations with us on the Cube, but stepping back, over your career you've seen many ways of innovation. You were involved in all of them, big ones happening. Semi-conductor computers, and now with Arista going forward and now Cloud, did you know the rocket ship of Arista was going to be this big? I mean, when you designed it at the beginning, what was the itch you were scratching, and did you know it was going to be a rocket ship? >> Well, we had some very early, what led to the founding of Arista was, we had lunch with our best friends at Google, and Larry himself told me that the biggest problem they had was not service, but actually the networking, and scaling that to the future size of their data centers, and they were going go off to build their own network, products because there was no commercial product on the market that would meet that need, so we thought with the emergence of Immersion Silicon We could make a contribution there, and the focus of the company was actually on the cloud networking from the very beginning, even though that wasn't even fell in this industry as being a major opportunity. So when we shipped our first products in 2009, 2010 many of them besides we had some business on Wall Street on latency, but the majority of the opportunity was over the cloud. >> It's interesting you mention the Google and Larry and Sergey, Larry in particular about that time in history, you go back and look at what Google was doing at that particular time, and now what they talk about at Google Cloud. They were building their own large-scale system, and there was massive scale involved. >> Yeah they had about a hundred thousand servers in the early 2004 before they went public, now they have, who knows how many millions, right? And all of course the latest technology now. So the sheer size of the cloud, the momentum the cloud has, I think was hard to forecast. We did think there was going to be a shift, but the shift was in fact more rapid than we expected. >> Andy, you talked about cloud networking, but today we still see there's such a huge discrepancy between what networking is happening in the data center and the networking that's happening in the hyperscalers. At this show, we're starting to hear about some of the multi-cloud, you had some integrations between Arista and VMware that are starting to pull some of those together. Maybe you could give us a little bit about what you're seeing between, you know, the data center and the enterprise versus the hyperscalers, when it comes to networking. >> So the data enterprise has still largely what we would call a legacy approach networking, which dates back, you know, 10, 20, 30 years, and many of those networks are still in place and progressing very slowly. But there also are enterprise customers who want to take advantage of what the cloud has done in terms of cloud networking, including the much further scalability, the much further resiliency, the much greater automation, so all of these benefits do imply equally well to the enterprise. But it is a transition for customers, you know, to fully embrace that. So the work we are doing together with VMware on integrating our cloud vision, our physical swiches with the microsegrentation is one element of that. But the bigger topic is simply an enterprise that wants to move into the future really should look at how did the cloud people build their networks, how can they run a very large data center with, you know, 10 network admins instead of, you know, hundreds of people. And especially the automation that we've been able to provide to our customers, automating updating of software, being able to bring out new releases into a running network without bringing the network down. You know, nobody could even think about doing that 10 years ago. >> Yeah, you bring up a great point about automation. In the keynote this morning, Pat Gelsinger talked about, what was it, 39 years ago he did something in intel, said we're going to do AI. Didn't quite call it AI back then, but he said, and now, we're starting to see the fruits of what come out. In the networking world, we've been talking about for decades, automating the network more. You've lived through the one gig, 10 gig, 40 gig, 400 gig you're talking about. Are we ready for automation now? Is now that moment in networking? >> I think that we were ready for 30 years, but the weird thing is, there always was a control planted in network, you know, the routing protocols, but for management there was never really a true management plan, meaning the legacy way is you dial in with S and a P into each switch and configure, your access is manually more or less, and that's really a bad way of doing it because humans do make mistakes, you end up with inconsistencies and a lot of network outages virtually has been traced to literally human mistake. So our approach with what we call Cloud Vision, which is a central point that can manage the entire base of Arista switches in a data canter, its all automated. You want to update a thing, you push a button and it happens and there's no no more dialing into a S and a P, into individual switches. >> How would you advise people who were looking at the architecture of the cloud, who are re-platforming, large enterprises have been legacy all day long, you mentioned earlier just now in the CUBE, that how the cloud guys were laying out the network was fundamental how they grew. How should, and how do people lay out the networks for cloud today? How do you see that? >> So the three big things that happened was, immersion silicon has taken over because it's, quote frankly, much more scalable than traditional chips. And that's just the hardware, right? Then the leaf-spine architecture that really our customers pioneered but is the standard in the cloud. It is use ECP for load balancing, it works. It's the most resilient, maybe the one thing, the single most important thing of the cloud is, no outages, no down time, the network works. No excuses, right? [Laughter] And our customers tell us that with our products and the leaf-spine approach, they have a better experience in terms of resiliency than any other vendor. So that's a very strong endorsement and that's as relevant to an enterprise customer as to a cloud customer. And then the automation benefit. Now, to get the automation benefit, you have to standardize on the new way of doing it, that's true, but it's just such a reduction in complexity and simplification. You can actually look at this as an Opex saving opportunity, quite frankly, and in the cloud they wouldn't have it any other way, they couldn't afford it. They're very large data centers. And they only could offer these things in a fully automatic fashion. >> Andy, I want to get your reaction to what Pat Gelsinger said on stage this morning. He said, in the old days, I'm paraphrasing, the network would dictate what the applications could do, it would enable that, and we saw an enabling capability. Now with Cloud, the apps can program the network, I'm paraphrasing that. As networks become more programmable and no outages, he made a quote, he said, the old adage was the network is the computer, the new adage is, the application is a network. >> Okay so let me sort of translate this, so. >> What's your reaction to those things? >> Sounds like an old Sun slogan, doesn't it? >> Translate that for us. >> So, the virtual networking, the NSX environment which provides security at the application level, right, it's the natural way to do network security. Cuz, you really want to be as close to the application as you can physically be, or virtually be, which is right in the VM environment. So VMware clearly has the best position in the industry to provide that level of security, which is all software, softlevel networking, you do your, you know, security policies at that level. Where we come in is, with Cloud Vision now, we have announced a way to integrate with NSX Microsegmentation, such that we can learn the policies and map them back down to the access list of the physical network to further enhance that security. So we don't actually create a separate silo for yet another policy management, we truly offer it within their policy framework, which means you have the natural segmentation between the security engineers which manages future policies and networking engineers that manage the physical network. >> Highly optimized for the environment >> Which actually works. >> Is that what you call Macrosegmentation then on the University side? >> Well we used to call it macro but it's part of their micro thing because we truly learn their policies. So if you update a policy, it gets reflected back down to cloud vision and your physical networks and it applies to physical switches, physical assets, physical servers, mainstream storage, whatnot, right? So it's a very smooth integration and we think it's a demo at this point but it will work and it's an open framework that allows us to work with VMware. >> Let me ask you a personal question. Looking at the industry, even look back in history as an illustration. TCPIP opened up remember the old OSI stack that everyone tried to do that. TCPIP opened up so much on networking, internetworking, is there a technology enabler in Cloud that you see that's going to have that kind of impact? Is it an NSX? How do customers going to deal with the multiple clouds? I mean, is there an interoperability framework coming, do you see a real disruptive technology enable that'll have that kind of impact that TCP spawned massive opportunity and wealth creation in start-ups and functionality? Is there a moment coming? >> So TCP of course was the proper layering of a network between the physical layer, layer one layer two, and the routing or the internet layer, which is layer three. And without that, this is back to the old intern argument, we wouldn't have what we have today on data. That was the only rational way to build an architecture that could actually, and I'm not sure people had a notion in 1979 when TCP was submitted that it would become that big, they probably would have picked a bigger adverse space, but it was not just the longevity but the impact it had was just phenomenal, right? Now, and that applied in terms of connectivity and how many things you have to sell with measure to talk from Point A to B. The NSX level of network management is a little different because it's much higher level. It's really a management plan, back to the point I made earlier about management plans, that allows you to integrate a cloud on your premise with what an Amazon or at IBM or the future Google and so on, in a way that you can have full visibility and you see you know exactly what's going on, all the security policies. Like, this has been a dream for people to deliver, but it requires to actually have a reasonable amount of code in each of these places. Both on your server, it's not just a protocol, it's an implementation of a co-ability, right? And, we are aware NSX is the best solution that's available today that I could see for that use-case, which is going to be very important to a large number of enterprises, many of which want to have a smooth connection between on-premise and off-premise, and in the future to add TelCo and other things to the bloody run of VMenvironment today. But that will allow them to be fully securely linked into social network. >> So you see that as a leading product in Connect. >> It's definitely a leading product. They have the most customers the most momentum the most market share, there isn't anything even close in terms of the, call it the software-defined networking layer, which is what NSX implements. And we are very proud to partner with them at the physical layer to interact with their policies. >> You think that's going to have an impact of accelerating the multi-cloud world? >> Yes because, the whole point about multi-cloud is it has to be sort of vendor-independent or, I don't know, vendor-neutral. You are going to see solutions from Amazon and Azzure to bring their own sort of public load into the premise. But that only works with their package, right? >> Yeah. >> So there will be other offerings there but in terms of true multi-cloud, I don't see any competition. >> Andy, we'd love to get your viewpoint on the future of ethernet. I hear so many people the last few years that it's like well, on the processor side Moor's Laws played out. We can't get smaller. On the ethernet side, there's not going to be the investment to be able to help get us to the next generation, there's limits in the technology, you've lived through so many of these architectural changes. Are we at the end of innovation for ethernet? >> Not at all. So, my history with ethernet dates back 40 years. So, I worked on the first three mega-ethernet 0x parts til. Then it was 10 mega-bit, hundred mega-bit, gigabit and forty hundred and now 400 coming out. So, ethernet speed transitions are really just substitutions of the previous layer to technology meaning, assuming they're more cost-effective, they do get adopted very quickly. Of course, you need the right optics, you need the right equipment, but it's a very predictable road map. I mean, I guess, it's not like adopting a new protocol, right? It's just faster. And more, and with cost efficient. So, we are on the verge of 400 gigabits becoming available in the market. It will really roll out at any kind of volume next calendar year and then it will pick up volume next year in 2000. But in the meanwhile, 100 meg ethernet- excuse me, 100 gigabit ethernet is still the fastest growing thing the industry's ever seen. Even from a million ports back in 2016, to call it five million ports last calendar year expected to what 10 million ports this year, expected 20 million ports next year. But this is a speed of adoption that's unheard of. And we are at Arista we are fortunate enough to be actually the market leader on gigabit adoption. We have shipped more hundred-gig ports than any vendor including Cisco for the last three years. So our ability to embrace new speeds and bring new technologies to market is, I would say, unparalleled. We have a very good track record there and we are working really hard, sort of burning the midnight oil to extend this to the 400-gig era, which is going to be another important upgrade, especially in the cloud. I should mention that the cloud is the early adopter of all the higher speeds. Those in the hundred gig will be more than 400-gig. I'm not sure too many enterprises need 400-gig but the cloud is ready to get going as soon as it's cost effective. >> Andy, for the folks that are looking at this 20 year wave coming that we're seeing kind of cloud has been talked about on stage and here on theCUBE. Oh, it's going to be a 20 year run, transforming the infrastructure. What's the in your minds eye, what do you see as the most disruptive thing that people aren't talking about in networking? What's going to be some things that might happen in the next 10 years in your mind that might happen that people aren't really aware of, that might not see it coming, any ovations on the horizon that you're excited about or people might not expect? >> Yeah well the cloud trend is fairly predictable. I would say, all the IDC, all the analysts have predicted like that are big numbers on adoption have been pretty spot on. And if you look at the annual growth rate for cloud adoption it's 40, 45, 50 and more percent. Now there's a good question of course how the big cloud winners in the end will compete against each other. You got Amazon, that's the biggest, Microsoft is actually growing purely faster than Amazon right now but they have some catching up to do. And Google working overtime to get bigger. They may differentiate in terms of their specific focus, for example, Google has a lot AI technology, internally, that they have used for their own business, and with this influence they're arguably ahead of others, and they may just bet the farm on AI and big data analytics and things like that, which are very compelling business opportunities for any enterprise customer. So the potential value that can be created deploying AI correctly is in the perhaps trillions of dollars the next 10 years, but it probably doesn't make sense for a company for most companies to build their own AI data center, that you need a huge capital expense a huge, what hardware to use, it's going to evolve very quickly. So that maybe one of the classical cases where, you won't actually start on the cloud, and the only reason ever moving on site is your well defined environment, right, so I would actually say it's the new applications that may start in the cloud, that haven't even rolled out in volume, like AI, that will may be the biggest change that people didn't expect. >> Final question, what's the future of Arista? >> We're just working really hard to, you know, be the best provider of products, making the best products for our customers, both for the cloud and for enterprise. One thing I was going to mention about Arista is that people think we're selling network boxes which is what is which we do. But the vast majority of our investment's actually software and not hardware. So we have over 90% of our R&D headcount is in software and so the right way to think about it is actually we are a software company not really a hardware company and the saying we have internally is that hardware is easy software is hard because it's actually true. Software is much much harder than building hardware these days and the EOS software sells well over 10 million slants of codes written by over thousands of man years of engineering. So it has been a tremendous journey we've been on, but we're still scratching the surface of what we can do. >> And the focus of the software obviously makes sense. Software defined is driving everything. What are the key focus areas on the software that you guys are looking at? What's the key priorities for Arista? >> We have talked about extending our business beyond the data center into the campus. We announced our very first acquisition recently which is actually a wifi company, but I can guarantee you it's going to be a very software-defined wifi network, not a legacy controller-based approach right, for enterprise, right? We're not that interested in the hardware we're interested in providing managed solutions to our customers. >> A lot of IOT action on Andy. Thanks for taking the time to come on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Great to meet you and have you on theCUBE. Great conversation here, it's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman breaking down all the top coverage of VMworld 2018 getting the input and the commentary from industry legends and also key leaders in the innovation cloud networking. This is theCUBE. Stay with us for more after this short break. [Technical Music]

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018 brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel and, their Ecosystem Partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Day three, we're live in Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent 2018. It's our sixth year covering Amazon re:Invent and AWS, Amazon Web Services meteoric rise in value, profitability, market share, just a rising tide floating all boats. I'm here with Dave Vellante. We're kicking off day three analyzing, you know, Vernon's keynote. Things start to wind down. Yesterday was kind of the big day with Andy Jassy. Dave, after yesterday it's pretty clear that there's a couple big mega trends that people are talking about. One AWS Outpost, okay, that is going to be a one year conversation about what that means, what implications. I mean basically if you're a Cloud-native company you order a data center and Amazon Prime will deliver it in two days, why would anyone want to buy hardware again from HPE or other companies? This is a huge risk, huge challenge, a huge shot across the bow to the industry because this essentially the thing. This is essentially Cloud in a box. Put it in, plug it in, we'll service, turn it on and it works and developers can just do their thing, that's amazing. So I think that's going to be a very hotly-contested topic throughout, at least one year until they ship that and all the posturing and jockeying's going to go on there. And then the other thing that was interesting was there was a lot of coolness, the F1, Racing car with analytics. You had Lockheed Martin with space satellite provisioning, that was pretty cool. And, you know, you got robots and IoT. That's cool, you got space, you got robots, you got, you know, sports cars all using analytics, all using AI, all using large-scale compute storage and networking, very elastic, all with all kinds of new tools and reference engines, but Jerry Chen laid it out from Greylock yesterday around the strategy. Amazon drives the cost down on the infrastructure side and bring the API concept up to AI and bring the marketplace together. So, a lot of action. Today we're going to see the impact and the fallout of that. What's your thoughts? >> Well, first of all John, there's so much to talk about. I want to say, so Werner Vogels this morning gave the keynote. When, when I first joined, you know this industry, we, IBM was everything, IBM was the dominant player. So we used to pour over IBM system and technology guides, and IBM white papers, because they set the technical standard for the industry and they shared that knowledge obviously with their customers to inspire them to buy more stuff, but they were giving back to the community as well to help people understand architectures and core computer science. Listening to Werner Vogels today, Amazon is now the beacon of technology in the industry. He went through the worse day of his life, which was December 12, 2004 when their Oracle Database went down for 12 hours because of a bug in the code and because they were pushing it beyond its limits. And so he described how they solved that problem over a multi-year effort and really got heavy into the technology of database, and recovery, and it was actually quite fascinating. But my takeaway was Amazon is now the company that is setting the technical direction of the industry for the next wave of Cloud-based applications. So that was actually really fascinating. We heard similar things on S3 and S3 recovery, even though they're still using some Oracle stuff it was really, really fascinating to see and very, very impressive. So that's one. As you say, there's so much to talk about. The IoT pieces, John, I really like what Amazon is doing with IoT. They're coming at it from a bottoms up approach, what do I mean by that? Do you remember when mobile first came out Microsoft basically said, hey we're going to put Windows on a phone, top down. We're going to take our existing IT Desktop standards, we're going to push 'em down to mobile, didn't work. And I see a lot of IT companies trying to do that with IoT today, not Amazon. Amazon's saying, look we're going to go bottoms up and serve the operation's technology people with a software development platform that's secure, that allows it, that's fully managed and allows them to build applications for IoT. I think it's the right approach. >> I think the other thing that's coming out is a Tweet here from Bobby Allen who we know from theCUBE days. I, you know, when we, I shared a Tweet about, you know, the future of the converged infrastructure on the outpost he says, software should be where tech companies differentiation value lies. This is back to our beating of the drum about software, software, software, you know. Andy Bechtolsheim, the Rembrandt of motherboards, Pat Gelsinger calls him, said, he's the founder of Arista, hardware's easy, software's hard. Software's where the action is. What Amazon's doing is essentially pushing large-scale platform capabilities and trying to make that as cheap and affordable as possible, the range of services, while creating a new shim layer around API concepts and microservices up the stack to enable people to write software faster, more compelling, more meaningful, and to iterate, and this is resonating with customers, Dave, because if I'm a business I got to write software, okay. I don't want to be in the running data center business because the data center powers the business. So the end doesn't justify the means in that regard. You say, hey, I need a data center to power my top-line revenue which is either going to be software-based or some sort of Edge network scenario, or even a human interface wearable or whatever. Software is the key. So if Amazon can continue to push the cost structure the lock-in spec is locked in because the better value so if it's going to be 80% less cost, and you call that a lock-in spec? A lot of lock-in spec, it's not like a technical lock-in spec, that's just called value. >> I'm locked in to Google Search. I mean, you know, I don't know what to tell ya. I'm not going to use any alternative search I'm just familiar with it, I like it, it's better. >> But software's the key, your thoughts. >> Okay, so, my thoughts on lock-in are, lock-in is one of the most overstated concepts in the business. I'm not saying that lock-in doesn't happen, it does happen, it happens everywhere. It happens across open-source. You do open-source you're locked-in to your developers. I've done research on this John and my research shows that 15% of the buyers really make primary decisions based on whether or not they're going to be locked-in. 85% look at the business value and they trade that off against lock-in so, you know, yeah, buyer beware, blah, blah, blah, but I think it's just really overstated. Yes, it's a Cloud, mother of all lock-ins, but what's the value that you get out of it? Speaking about another lock-in. I want to talk about Intel a little bit because the press has been like chirping about, about Intel and alternative processors, and the arm-based stuff that Amazon is doing. >> Well hold on, let's just set the table on this conversation. Intel announced a series of proprietary processors, their own silicon, you know the-- >> Amazon you mean. >> I mean Amazon, yeah, proprietary processors that are specific to certain workloads, inference engines, and other things around network-- >> Based on the Annapurna acquisition of 2015, a small Israeli-based company that they acquired. >> Yeah, so the press, I've been sharing on, oh, chips must be confronting Intel, your thoughts. >> Yeah, so here's the deal. Look it, Intel is massive and they do a huge amount of business with the Cloud players. Now, here's the thing about Intel, it's really, I've observed Intel for decades. Intel wants a level playing field amongst its customer base and so it wants a lot of different Cloud suppliers even though there's three, four, five, you know, worldwide, there's, there's many dozens, and hundreds of Cloud players out there. Intel wants to support them all. They're an arms dealer, right? They love all their customers and so, so what they do is they sprinkle around the innovation in the industry, they try to open up their architecture such that people can, you know, write software to their architecture and they try to support all their customers. We see it at all the shows. You see it at Lenovo, you see it at Dell, you see it here at AWS, you see at Google, Intel is everywhere and they are by far the biggest supplier. Now, Amazon, of course, has to have alternatives, right? They care about data-center power, you know, they do buy some stuff AMD, why not, why wouldn't you second-source some of this stuff? They do a lot of work with Invidia, ARM has its place, and so, but it's a rounding error in the grand scheme in the market. Now why people get excited is they say, okay, ARM now has a foot in the door, oh, Intel's in trouble. Intel obviously still a dominant player. I think it's, you know-- >> Is Intel in trouble? >> The press likes to glom onto that. Intel's like the dominant player in the microprocessor business and it has to move, and it has to move fast. I would not say Intel is in trouble, I'd say it continues to be the dominant player in the data center. It's got opportunities for alternative processors like Invidia. Intel strategy is to put as much function on the DI as possible and to grab that function, it's always the way it's behaved. You see people like Invidia trying to create opportunities, and doing a very good job of it, and so, there's white space there. It's competition, we love competition, right? >> Here's my, here's my. >> Intel needs some competition frankly. >> Here's my take. One, Intel pays, Amazon pays Intel a lot of money. >> Huge amount of money. >> So it's not like Intel's hurting, Intel's not in trouble. Here's why Intel's not in trouble. One, the Cloud service provider business that Raejeanne runs, she was on theCube yesterday, is growing significantly. A new total adjustable market, they call TAM expansion, is happening. >> So, you know, if you're looking at microprocessors it's not a one, or few, suppliers, it's a total TAM expansion and of course with that expansion of the market Intel's going to take a big chunk of the shares, so they are not in trouble, Amazon pays them a lot of money, they're a big-time supplier to AWS, check. Two, Intel is on a cadence on processor design that spans years. And Raejeanne and other Intel executives have spoken to us off the record, and here on theCUBE that hey, you know, sometimes there's use cases where they're not responding fast enough that are outside they're operating cycles, but as Raejeanne said, Amazon makes them get better, okay? So, they have to manage that, but there's no way Intel's in trouble. I think the press are using this as, to create link bait, for news that is sensational. But, yeah, I mean, on the surface you go, oh, chip, Intel, oh that's Intel's business, it must be bad for Intel. So, yeah, Amazon made their own processor. They got some specific things they want to build specialized processors for like GP Alternative, or inference engines that are tied to the stack, why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't they? >> What Intel will do, what Intel will do is they'll learn from that and they'll respond with functionality for maybe others, or maybe they'll earn Amazon's business, we'll see, but yield to your point, you know, Intel's exposure to the desktop and the laptop, a lot of people wrote about that, that Intel is, the (mumbles) entry is Intel's business, they're so huge, the cost of doing what they do, Intel's such a strategic supplier to so many companies and as we talked to Raejeanne about yesterday the Cloud has completely changed that dynamic and actually brought more suppliers. The data center consolidation that you've seen has been offset by the Cloud explosions, that's a good trend for Intel. And of course the mobile dynamic, you know more about that then I do, but, everybody said mobile's going to kill Intel, it obviously didn't happen. >> Look it, Intel, Intel's smart, they've been around, they're going to not miss the ball. They got a big team that services a lot of these big players. >> Are they still paranoid in your opinion? >> I think they are. >> I do too. >> I do too, I mean I, look it, Intel is, have a cadence of Moore's law. They have a execution style that's somewhat similar to AWS, they've very strict about how they execute and they have a great execution engine. So I would bet the farm that Intel's talking to Amazon and saying, what do you need for us to be better? And if Amazon does what they do best, which is tell them what they need, Intel will deliver. So I'm kind of not worried about Intel on that front. I think in the short term maybe this processor doesn't fit for that, but, that's why GPUs became popular, floating point was a unique thing that CPUs didn't do well on so a GPU comes out, there it is. And we're going to see processors like data-processing units, Pradeep Sindu, former founder of Juniper's, got a venture called, Fungible, that's building a data-processing unit. It's a dedicated chip to serve analytic workloads. These are specialized silicon chips that are going to come on faster, and, to the marketplace. So , just because there's more chips doesn't mean Intel dies 'cause if the TAM expands it's a, it's an overall bigger market so their share might not be as dominant on a smaller market, but it's-- >> You know, I got a, I got to come back to your John Chambers interview. I've watched it a couple times now and I would recommend people would go to, thecube.net, and see John Furrier's interview with John Chambers. The great companies of this industry have survived, you know, I talked about paranoia, Andy Grove, they've survived because they were not dogmatic about the past. So for the past several decades this industry has marched to the cadence of Moore's law and that was obviously very favorable to Intel. Well, that's changing, and it's changed, the innovation engine now, you've called it the innovation sandwich, which is data, machine intelligence applied to that data, in the scale of Cloud. So Intel has to pivot to that to take advantage of that and that's exactly what they're doing. So the great companies of the future, the Microsoft's, the Intel's, the AWS's, they survive because they can evolve. It's the Wang's that didn't, they denied, it was the PC-- >> They were entitled. >> The digital, right. They thought they were entitled and the point that John Chambers made is there's no entitlement and he kept referring to Boston 128, it used to be the Silicon Valley. And the leading executives today, of companies like, like Cisco, like Intel, like Microsoft, can see a vision to the future and they change when they have to change. >> So companies that are entitled, who are they (chuckling)? >> Wow, that' a really-- >> Is Oracle entitled? >> A good question. >> HPE, Dell? >> I think Oracle absolutely acts as though they're entitled and they're bunkering down into their red stack. Now, you know I've often said, don't bet against Larry Ellison, and I wouldn't make that bet against Larry Ellison, but his TAM is confined to Oracle customers. He's not currently going after, non-Oracle customers in my opinion at least not with a strategy that's obvious to me. And I think that's part of the reason why Thomas Kurian left the company is I think they had a battle about that, at least that's what my sources tell me. I haven't talked to him directly, I actually don't know him, but I know people who know him and have worked with him. HPE, I think HPE is more confused as to what the next step is. When they split the company apart they kind of gave up on software, they gave up on an integrated-supply chain. Mike Odell took the other approach, and thanks to VMware he's got a wining strategy. So, I think today's leading executives realize that they have to change. Look at Ginni Rometty, remember IBM was in trouble in my opinion because Watson failed, and their Cloud strategy essentially failed. So they just made a 34 billion dollar acquisition, a Red Hat, which is a bold move. And that, again, demonstrated a company who said, okay, hey it's not working, we have to pivot and we have to invest and go forward. >> Alright Dave, great kickoff day three. Andy Jassy coming up at the end of the day and he's going to do his annual, kind of, end of the last day roundup on theCUBE, kind of lean back, talk about what's going on and how he feels from the quotes, what people missed, what people got, and do a full review of re:Invent 2018. Day three kicks off here, CUBE, two sets on the floor gettin' all the content. We already have over a hundred videos. We'll have 500 total video assets, go to siliconangle.com and check out the blog there. A lot of stories flowing, a lot of flow, a lot of demand for the content. Stay with us for more after this short break.

(bright instrumental music) >> Hi everyone, I'm John Furrier. Here in the Cube Studios in Palo Alto, for a special Cube conversation on some big news from PureStorage. We're here with Chadd Kenney, who's the Vice President of Product and Solutions at PureStorage. Big Cloud news. A historic announcement from PureStorage. One of the fastest growing startups in the storage business. Went public, I've been following these guys since creation. Great success story in Silicon Valley and certainly innovative products. Now announcing a Cloud product. Cloud data services, now in market. Chadd, this is huge. >> It's exciting time. Thank you so much for having us. >> So you guys, obviously storage success story, but now the reality is changed. You know we've been saying in the Cube, nothing changes, you get storage computer networking, old way, new way in the Cloud. Game is still the same. Storage isn't going away. You got to store the data somewhere and the data tsunami is coming. Still coming with Edge and a bunch of other things. Cloud more important than ever. To get it right is super important. So, what is the announcement of Cloud Data Service. Explain what the product is, why you guys built it, why now. >> Awesome. So, a couple different innovations that are part of this launch to start with. We have Cloud Block Store which is taking Purity, which is our operating system found on-prem and actually moving it to AWS. And we spent a bunch of time optimizing these solutions to make it so that, we could actually take on tier one, mission critical applications. A key differentiator is that most folks were really chasing after test-dev and leveraging the Cloud for that type of use case. Whereas Cloud Block Storage, really kind of industry strength and ready for mission critical applications. We also took protection mechanisms from FlashArray on-premises and actually made it so that you could use CloudSnap and move and protect data into the public Cloud via portable snapshot technology. Which we can dig into a little bit later. And then the last part is, we thought it was really ripe to change data protection, just as a whole. Most people are doing kind of disc to disc, to tape, and then moving tape offsite. We believe the world has shifted. There's a big problem in data protection. Restoring data is not happening in the time frame that its needed, and SLAs aren't being met, and users are not happy with the overall solution as a whole. We believe that restorations from Flash are incredibly important to the business, but in order to get there you have to offset the economics. So what we're building is a Flash to Flash to Cloud solution which enables folks to be able to take the advantages of the economics of Cloud and be able to then have a caching mechanism of Flash on-premises. So that they can restore things relatively quickly for the predominant set of data that they have out there. >> And just so I get everything right here. You guys only been on-premises only, this is now a cloud solution. It's software. >> Correct. >> Why now? Why wait 'til now, is the timing right? What's the internal conversation? And why should customers know, is this the right time. >> So, the evolution of cloud has been pretty interesting as we've gone through it. Most customers went from kind of a 100% on-premises, the Cloud came out and said, hey, I'm going to move everything to the Cloud. They found that didn't work great for enterprise applications. And so they kind of moved back and realized that hybrid cloud was going to be a world with they wanted to leverage both. We're seeing a lot of other shifts in the market. VMware already having RDS in platform. Now it's true hybrid cloud kind of playing out there. Amazon running an AWS. It's a good mixture just to showcase where people really want to be able to leverage the capabilities of both. >> So it's a good time because the customers are re-architecting as well. >> It's all about- >> Hybrid applications are definitely what people want. >> 100% and the application stack, I think was the core focus that really shifted over time. Instead of just focusing on hybrid cloud infrastructure, it was really about how applications could leverage multiple types of clouds to be able to leverage the innovation and services that they could provide. >> You know, I've always been following the IT business for 30 years or so and it's always been an interesting trend. You buy something from a vendor and there's a trade-offs. And there's always the payback periods, but now I think with this announcement that's interesting is you got the product mix that allows customers to have choice and pick what they want. There's no more trade-offs. If they like cloud, they go to cloud. If they like on-premise, you go on-premises. >> It sounds like an easy concept, but the crazy part to this is the Cloud divide is real. They are very different environments. As we've talked to customers, they were very lost on how it was going to take and enterprise application and actually leverage the innovations within the Cloud. They wanted it, they needed it, but at the same time, they weren't able to deliver up on it. And so, we realized that the data layer, fundamentally was the area that could give them that bridge between those two environments. And we could add some core values to the Cloud for even the next generation developer who's developing in the Cloud to bring in, better overall resiliency. Management and all sorts of new features that they weren't able to take advantage of in traditional public cloud. >> You know Chugg wants to do minimal about the serviceless trend and how awesome that is. It's just, look at the resource pool as a serviceless pool of resource. So is this storageless? >> So it's still backed by storage, obviously. >> No, I was just making a joke. No wait, that you're looking at it as what serviceless is to the user. You guys are providing that same kind of storage pool, addressable through the application of, >> Correct >> as if it's storageless. And what's great about taking 100% software platform and moving it to the Cloud is, customer can spin this up in like minutes. And what's great about it is, they can spend many, many, many instances of these things for various different use cases that they have out there, and get true utility out of it. So they're getting the agility that they really want while not having to offset the values that they really come to love about PureStorage on-premises. Now they can actually get it all on the public cloud as well. >> I want to dig into the products a little bit. Before we get there, I want you to answer the question that's probably on people's minds. I know you've been at Pure, really from the beginning. So, you've seen the history. Most people look at you guys and say, well you're a hardware vendor. I have Pure boxes everywhere, you guys doing a great job. You've pioneered the Flash, speed game on storage. People want, kill latency as they say. You guys have done a great job. But wait a minute, this is software. Explain how you guys did this, why it's important. People might not know that this is a software solution. They might be know you for hardware. What's the difference? Is there a difference? Why should they care and what's the impact? >> So, great question. Since we sell hardware products, most people see us as a hardware company. But at the end of the day, the majority of vinge and dev is software. We're building software to make, originally, off the shelf components to be enterprise worthy. Over time we decided to optimize the hardware too, and that pairing between the software and hardware gets them inherently great values. And this is why we didn't just take our software and just kind of throw it into every cloud and say have it, to customers. Like a lot of folks did. We spent a lot of time, just like we did on our hardware platform, optimizing for AWS to start with. So that we could truly be able to leverage the inherent technologies that they have, but build software to make it even better. >> It's interesting, I interviewed Andy Bechtolsheim at VMworld, and he's a chairman of Arista. He's called, Les Peckgesem calls him the Rembrandt of motherboards. And he goes, "John, we're in the software business." And he goes, "Let me tell ya, hardware's easy. Software's hard." >> I agree. >> So everyone's pretty much in the software business. This is not a change for Pure. >> No, this is the same game we've been in. >> Great. Alright, let's get into the products. The first one is Cloud Block Store for AWS. Which is the way Amazon does the branch. So it's on Amazon, or for Amazon as they say. They use different words. So this is Pure software in the Cloud. Your company, technically Pure software. >> Yup. >> In the Cloud as software, no hardware. >> Yup. >> A 100% storage, API support, always encrypted, seamless management and orchestration, DR backup migration between clouds. >> Yup. >> That's kind of the core premise. So what does the product do, what's the purpose of the product. On the Amazon piece, if I'm a customer of Pure or a prospect for Pure, what does the product give me? What's the capabilities? >> Great. I would say that the biggest thing that customers get is just leverage for their application stack to be able to utilize the Cloud. And let me give you a couple of examples 'cause they're kind of fun. So first off, Cloud Block Storage is just software that sits in the Cloud that has many of the same utilities that run on-premises. Any by doing so, you get the ability to be able to do stuff like I want to replicate, as a DR target. So maybe I don't have a secondary site out there, and I want to have a DR target that spin up in the event of a disaster. You can easily set up bi-directional replication to the instance that you have running in the Cloud. It's the exact same experience. The exact same APIs and you get our cloud data management with Pure1 to be able to see both sites. One single pane of glass, and make sure everything is up and running and doing well. You could also though, leverage a test-dev environment. So let's saying I'm running production on-premises, I can then go ahead and replicate to the Cloud, spin up an instance for test-dev, and running reporting, run analytics. Run anything else that I wanted on top of that. And spin up compute relatively quickly. Maybe I don't have it on-prem. Next, we could focus on replicating for protection. Let's say for compliance, I want to have many instances to be able to restore back in the event of a disaster or in the event that I just want to look back during a period of time. The last part is, not just on-prem to the Cloud, but leveraging the Cloud for even better resiliency to take enterprise applications and actually move them without having to do massive re-architecture. If you look at what happens, Amazon recommends typically, that you have data in two different availability zones. So that when you put an application on top of it, it can be resilient to any sort of failures within an AZ. What we've done is we've taken our active cluster technology which is active-active replication between two instances, and made it so that you can actually replicate between two availability zones. And your application now doesn't need to be re-architected whatsoever. >> So you basically, if I get this right, you had core software that made all that Flash, on the box which is on-premise, which is a hardware solution. Which sounds like it was commodity boxes so this, components. >> Just like the Cloud. >> You take it to the Cloud as an amazing amount of boxes out there. They have tons of data centers. So you treat the Cloud as if it's a virtual device, so to speak. >> Correct. I mean the Cloud functionally is just compute and storage, and networking on the back end has been abstracted by some sort of layer in front of it. We're leveraging compute resources for our controllers and we're leveraging persistent storage media for our storage. But what we've done in software is optimize a bunch of things. An example just as one is, in the Cloud when you, procure storage, you pay for all of it, whether you leverage it or not. We incorporate de-dupe, compression, thin provisioning, AES 256 encryption on all data arrest. These are data services that are just embedded in that aren't traditionally found in a traditional cloud. >> This makes so much sense. If you're an application developer, you focus on building the app. Not worrying about where the storage is and how it's all managed. 'Cause you want persistent data and uni-managed state, and all this stuff going on. And I just need a dashboard, I just need to know where the storage is. Is it available and bring it to the table. >> And make it easy with the same APIs that you were potentially running on, on-premises. And that last part that I would say is that, the layered services that are built into Purity, like our snapshot technology and being able to refresh test-dev environments or create 10 sandboxes for 10 developers in the Cloud and add compute instances to them, is not only instantaneous, but it's space saving as you actually do it. Where as in the normal cloud offerings, you're paying for each one of those instances. >> And the agility is off the charts, it's amazing. Okay, final question on this one is, how much is it's going to cost? How does a customer consume it? Is it in the marketplace? Do I just click a button, spin up things? How's the interface? What's the customer interaction and engagement with the product? How they buy it, how much it costs? Can you share the interaction with the customer? >> So we're just jumping into beta, so a lot of this is still being worked out. But what I will tell you is it's the exact same experience that customers have come to love with Pure. You can go download the Cloud formation template into your catalog with an AWS. So you can spin up instances. The same kind of consumption models that we've built on-prem will be applied to cloud. So it will be a very similar consumption model, which has been super consumer friendly that customers have loved from us over the years. And it will be available in the mid part of next year, and so people will be able to beta it today, test it out, see how it works, and then put it into full production in mid part of next year. >> And operationally, in the work flows, the customers don't skip a beat. It's the same kind of format, languages and the words, the word flow. It feels like Pure all the way through. >> Correct. And not only are we a 100% built on a rest API, but all of the things we've built in with, Python libraries that automate this for developers, to PowerShell toolkits, to Ansible playbooks. All the stuff we've built on codeupyourstorage.com are all applicable to both sites and you get Pure1, our Cloud based management system to be able to see all of it in one single pane of glass. >> Okay, let's move on. So the next piece I think is interesting. I'll get your thoughts on this is that the whole protection piece. On-premises, really kind of held back from the Cloud, mainly to protect the data. So you guys got CloudSnap for AWS, what does this product do? Is this the protection piece? How does this work? What is the product? What's the features and what's the value? >> So, StorReduce was a recent acquisition that we did that enables de-duplication on top of an S3 target. And so it allows you to store an S3 de-duplicated into a smaller form factor and we're pairing that with both an on-premises addition which will have a flash plate behind it for super fast restores. So think of that as a caching tier for your backups, but then also be able to replicate that out to the public cloud and leverage store reduce natively in the public cloud as well. >> So that's the store reduce product. So store reduce on it is that piece. As an object store? >> It is, yes. And we pair that with CloudSnap which is natively integrated within FlashArray, so you can also do snapshots to a FlashBlade for fast restores for both NFS, and you can send it also to S3 in the public cloud. And so you get the inherent abilities to even do, VM level granularity or volume level granularity as well from a FlashArray directly, without needing to have any additional hardware. >> Okay so the data services are the; Block Storage, Store Reduce and CloudSnap on a four AWS. >> Correct. >> How would you encapsulate this from a product and solution standpoint? How would you describe that to a customer in an elevator or just a quick value statement? What's in it for them? >> Sure. So Pure's been seen by customers as innovation engine that optimized applications and allowed them to do, I would say, amazing things into the enterprise. What we're doing now, is we're evolving that solution out of just an on-premises solution and making it available in a very agile Cloud world. We know this world is evolving dramatically. We know people really want to be able to take advantage of the innovations within the Cloud, and so what we're doing is we're finally bridging the gap between on-premises and the Cloud. Giving them the same user experience that they've come to love with Pure and all of the Clouds that they potentially need to develop in. >> Okay so from the announcement standpoint, you guys got Cloud Block Storage limited public beta, right out of the gate. GA in mid 2019. CloudSnap is GA at announcement and Store Reduce is going into beta, first half of 2019. >> Correct, we're excited about it. >> So for the skeptics out there who are- Hey you know, Chadd, I got to tell ya. I love the Cloud, but I'm a little bit nervous. How do I test and get a feeling for- this is going to be simple, if I'm going to jump in and look at this. What should I look at first? What sequence, should I try this? Do you guys have a playbook, for them to either kick the tires or how should they explore to get proficient in the new solution. >> Good question. Right, so for one if you're a FlashArray customer, CloudSnap gives you the ability to be able to take this new entity, called a portable Snapshot. Which is data paired with metadata, and allow you to be able to move data off of a FlashArray. You can put it to an NFS target or you can send it to the Cloud. And so that's the most logical one that folks will probably leverage first because it's super exciting for them to be able to leverage the Cloud and spin up instances, if they'd like to. Or protect back to their own prem. Also, Cloud Block Storage, great because you can spin it up relatively quickly and test out applications between the two. One area that I think customers are going to be really excited about is you could run an analytics environment in the Cloud and spin up a bunch of compute from your production instance by just replicating it up into the Cloud. The last part is, I think backup is not super sexy. Nobody like to talk about it, but it's a significant pain point that's out there, and I think we can make some major in-roads in helping businesses get better SLAs. We're very, very interested to see the great solutions people bring with- >> So, I'm going to put you on the spot here and ask you, there's always the, love the cliche, is it a vitamin or is it an Asprin. Is there a pain point? So obviously backup, I would agree. Backup and recovery, certainly with the disaster, you see the wildfires going on here in California. You can't stop thinking about what the, disaster recovery plan and then you got top line growth with application developers. The kind of the vitamin, if you will. What are the use cases, low hanging fruit for someone to like test this out from a pain point standpoint. Is it backup and what's the growth angle? I wanted to test out this new solution, what should I look at first? What would you recommend? >> It's a very tough question. So, CloudSnap is obviously the easy one. I'd say Cloud Block Store is one that I think, people will. I look at my biggest, customers biggest challenges out there it's how do I get application portable. So I think Cloud Block Store really gives you the application portability. So I think it's finally achieving that whole, hybrid cloud world. But at the end of the day, backup is really big pain point that the enterprise deals with, like right this second. So there's areas where we believe we can add inherent values to them with being able to do fast restores from Flash. That meets SLA's very quickly and is an easy fix. >> And you guys feel good about the data protection aspect of this? >> Yes, very much so. >> Awesome. I want to get your personal take on this. You were early on in Pure. What's the vibe inside the company? This is Cloud and people love Cloud. There's benefits for Cloud, as well as on-premises. What's the mood like inside PureStorage? You've seen from the beginning, now you're a public company and growing up really, really fast. What's the vibe like inside PureStorage? >> It's funny, it hasn't really changed all that much, in the cultural side of the thing, of the business. I love where I work because of the people. The people bring so much fun to the business, so much innovation and we have a mindset that's heavily focused on customer first. And that's one of the things. I always tell this kind of story is, when we first started, we sat in a room on a whiteboard and wrote up, what is everything that sucks about storage. And instead of trying to figure out how we make a 2.0 version of some storage array, we actually figured out what are all the customer pain points that we needed to satisfy and then we built innovations to go do that. Not go chase the competition, but actually go alleviate customer challenges. And we just continue to kind of focus on customer first and so the whole company kind of, rallies around that. And I think you see a very different motion that what you do in most companies because we love hearing about customer results of our products. Engineering just will rally around when a customer shows up just to hear exactly their experience associated to it. And so with this, I think what they see is a continued evolution of the things we've been doing and they love seeing and providing customer solutions in areas that they were challenged to deal with in the past. >> What was some of the customer feedback when you guys started going, hey, you've got a new product, you're doing all of that early work. And you got to go talk to some people and knock on the, hey, what do you think, would you like the Cloud, a little bit of the Cloud. How would you like the Cloud to be implemented? What was some of the things you heard from customers? >> A lot of them said, if you can take your core tenets, which was simplicity, efficiency, reliability, and customer focus around consumption, and if you could give that to me in the Cloud, that would be the Nirvana. So, when we looked at this model, that's exactly what we did. We said, let's take what people love about us on-prem, and give 'em the exact same experience in the Cloud. >> That's great and that's what you guys have done. Congratulations. >> Thanks so much. >> Great to hear the Cloud story here Chadd Kenney, Vice President of Products and Solutions at PureStorage. Taking the formula of success on-premises with Flash and the success there, and bringing it to the Cloud. That's the big deal in this announcement. I'm John Furrier here in the Palo Alto studios, thanks for watching. (upbeat instrumental music)

>> From Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Presenting the People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here on Sand Hill Road at Mayfield's Venture Capital Headquarters for the People First Network. I'm here with Pradeep Sindhu, who's the co-founder of Juniper Networks and now the co-founder and CEO of Fungible. Thanks for joining me on this special conversation for the People First Program. >> Thank you, John. >> So I want to talk to you about entrepreneurship. You're doing a new startup, you've been so successful as an entrepreneur over the years, uh you keep building a great company at Juniper Networks, everyone kind of knows the success there, great success. We've interviewed you before on that, but now you got a new startup! >> I do. >> You're building a company I thought startups were for young people. (Pradeep laughs) Come on! We're nine years into our startup, we're still a startup. >> Well, I'm not quite over the hill yet. (John Laughs) One of the reasons I jumped back in to the startup world was I saw an opportunity to solve a very important industry problem and to do it rapidly and so, I took the step. >> Well, we're super excited that you shared your vision with us and folks can check that video out on theCUBE and deep dive on the future of that startup. So, it's exciting, check it out. Entrepreneurship has changed and one of the things that we're talking about here is how things have changed just since the last time you've done a round. I mean, you're now a couple years in, you've been stealth for a while building out this amazing chip, the the Data Processing Unit, the DPU. What's different about building companies now? I mean, are you a unicorn? You have a billion-dollar evaluation yet? I mean, that's the new bar, it's different. What are some of the differences now in building a company? >> You know, one thing, John, that I saw is a clear difference between when I started Juniper and started Fungible, is that the amount of bureaucracy and paperwork that one has to go through is tremendously larger. And this was disappointing because one of the things that the US does very well is to keep it light and keep it fast so that it's easy for people to create new companies. That was one difference. The other difference that I saw was actually reluctance on the part of Venture to take big bets. Because people had gotten used to the idea of a quick turn around with maybe a social media company or something. Now, you know, my tendency to work on problems is I tend to work on fundamental problems that take time to do, but the outcome is potentially large. So, I'm attracted to that kind of problem. And so, the number of VCs that were willing to look at those kinds of problems were far fewer this time around than last time. >> So you got some no's then? >> Of course, I got no's. Even from people that-- >> You're the Founder of Juniper Networks, you've done amazing things, like you created billions of dollars of value, you should be gold-plated. >> What you did 20 years ago only goes so far. I think what what people were reluctant, and remember, I started Fungible in 2015. At that time, silicon was still a dirty word. I think now there are several people who said, no, we're regretting because they see that it's kind of the second coming of silicon and it's for reasons that we have talked about in the other discussion that, you know, Moore's Law is coming to a close. And that the largest that it was distributing over the last 30, 40 years is going away so what we have to do is we have to innovate on silicon. You know, as we discussed, the world has only seen a few architectures for computing engines on silicon. One of the things that makes me very happy is that now people are going to apply their creativity to painting on this canvas. >> So, silicon's got some new life blood. What's your angle with your silicon strategy? >> So, our silicon strategy is really to focus on one aspect of computations in the data center and this aspect we call Data Centric Computing. Data Centric Computing is really computing where there's a lot more movement of data and lot less arithmetic on data. And today, giving scaled out architectures, data has to move and be stored and retrieved and so on as much as it has to be computed on. So, existing engines are not very good at doing these Data Centric Computations, so we are building a programmable DPU to actually do those computations much, much better than any engine can today. >> And that's great. And just a reminder, we got a deep dive on that topic, so check out the video on that. So, I got to ask you the question, why are people resistant at the silicon trend? Was it trendy? Was it the lack of information? You almost see people almost less informed on computer architecture these days as people Blitzscale for SASPA businesses. Cloud certainly is great for that , but there's now this renaissance. Why was it, what was the problem? >> I think the problem is very easy to identify. Building silicon is expensive. It takes very specialized set of skills. It takes a lot of money, and it takes time. Well, anything that takes a long time is risky. And Venture, while it likes risk, it tries to minimize it. So, it's completely understandable to me that, you know, people don't want to take, they don't want to put money in ventures that might take two, three years. Actually, you know, going back to the Juniper era, there are Venture folks, I won't name them, but who said, well, if you could do this thing in six months, we're in, but otherwise no. >> How long did it take? >> 2 1/2 years. >> And then the rest is history. >> Yeah. >> So, there's a lot of naysayers, it's just categorical kind of like, you know, courses for horses for courses, as they say, that expression. All right, so now with with your experience, okay, you got some no's, how did that, how did that make you feel? You're like, damn, I got to get out and do the rounds? >> Actually-- >> You just kind of moved on or? >> I just moved on because, you know, the fact that I did Juniper should not give me any special treatment. It should be the quality of the idea that I've come up with. And so, what I tried to do, my response was to make the idea more compelling, sharpen it further, and and try to convince people that, hey there was value here. I think that I've not been often wrong about predicting things maybe two, three years out, so on the basis of that people were willing to give me that credibility, and so, there were enough people who were interested in investing. >> What did you learn in the process? What was the one thing that you sharpened pretty quickly? Was it the story, was it the architecture message? What was the main thing that you just had to sharpen really fast? >> The thing I had to sharpen really fast was while the technology we were developing is disruptive, customers really, really care, they don't want to be disrupted. They actually want the insertion to be smooth. And so, this is the piece that we had to sharpen. Anytime you have a new technology, you have to think about, well, how can I make it easy for people to use? This is very, very important. >> So the impact to the architecture itself, if it was deployed in the use case, and then look at the impact of ripple effect. >> For example, you cannot require people to change their applications. That's a no-no. Nobody's going to rewrite their software. You also probably don't want to ask people to change their network architecture. You don't want to ask people to change their deployment model. So, there are certain things that need to be held constant. So, that was a very quick learning. >> So, one of the other things that we've been talking about with other entrepreneurs is okay, the durability of the company. You're going down, playing the long game, but also innovation and and attracting people and so you've done, built companies before, as with Juniper, and you've worked with a great team of people in your network. How did you attract people for this? Obviously, they probably were attracted on the merit of the idea, but how do you pick people? What's the algorithm? What's the method that you use to choose team members or partners? Because that's also super important. If you got a gestation period where you're building out. You got to have high quality DNA. How do you make that choice? What's the thought process? >> So John, the the only algorithm that I know works is to look for people that are either known to you directly or known to somebody that you trust because in an interview, it's a hit or miss. At least, I'm not so good at interviewing that I can have a 70, 80% success rate. Because people can fake it in an interview, but you cannot fake it once you've worked with somebody, so that's one very important test. The other one was, it was very important for me to have people who were collaborative. It is possible to find lots of people who are very smart but they are not collaborative. And in an endeavor like the one we're doing, collaboration is very important, and of course the base skill set is very important so, you know, almost half of our team is software because we are-- >> It's a programmable chip. >> It's a programmable chip. We're writing our own operating system, very lightweight. So, you need that combination of hardware and software skills which is getting more and more scarce regrettably. >> I had a chat with Andy Bechtolsheim at VMworld and he and I had a great conversation similar to this, he said, you know, hardware is hard, software is easier, (laughs) and that was his point, and he also was saying that with merchant silicon, it's the software that's key. >> It is absolutely the key. Software, you know, software is always important. But software doesn't run on air. We should also remember that. And there are certain problems, for example, switching packets inside a data center where the problem is reasonably well-solved by merchant silicon. But there are other problems for which there is no merchant silicon solution, like the DPU that we're talking about. Eventually, there might be. But today there isn't. So, I think Apple is a great example for me of a company that understands the value of software hardware integration. Everybody thinks of Apple as a software only company. They have thousands of silicon engineers, thousands. If you look at your Apple Watch, there are probably some 20 chips inside it. You look at the iPhone. It won't do the magic that it does without the silicon team that they have. They don't talk about it a lot on purpose because-- >> 'Cause they don't want a China chip in there. >> Well, they don't want a China chip, but not only that, they don't know to advertise. It's part of their core value. >> Yeah. >> And so, as long as people keep believing that everything can be done in software, that's good for Apple. >> So, this is the trend, and this is why, Larry also brought this up years ago when he was talking about Oracle. He tried to make the play that Oracle would be the iPhone of the data center. >> Mm-hmm. >> Which people poo-pooed and they're still struggling with that idea, but he was pointing out the benefit of the iPhone, how they are integrating into the hardware and managing what Steve Jobs always wanted which was security number one >> Absolutely. >> for the customer. >> And seamlessness of use. And the reason the iPhone actually works as well as it does is because the hardware and the software are co-designed. And the reason it delivers the value that it does to the company is because of those things. >> So you see, this as a big trend, now you see that hardware and software will work together. You see cloud native heterogeneous almost server-less environments abstracted away with software and other components, fabric and specialized processors? >> Yes. >> And just application developers just programming at will? >> Correct, and edge data centers, so computing, I would say that maybe in a decade we will see roughly half of the computing and storage being done closer to the edge and the remaining half being done in these massively skilled data centers. >> I want to get geeky with you for a second, I want to ask you a question, I want to get your take on something. I've been thinking about and haven't really talked publicly about, kind of said on theCUBE a few times in a couple interviews, but I want to get your thoughts. There's been a big discussion about hybrid cloud, private cloud, multi-cloud, all that stuff going on, and I was talking with Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, and Diane Greene at Google and I'm like okay, I can buy all these definitions, I don't believe any of 'em, but, you know, what the hell does that mean, what I know. I said to Diane Greene, I said, well, if everyone's going cloud operations, if cloud operations and edge is the new paradigm, isn't the data center just a big fat edge? And she looked at me and said, hmm, interesting. So, is the data center ultimately just a device on this network? If the operating model is horizontally scalable, isn't it just a a big fat edge? >> So you can, so here's the thing, right, if we talk about, you know, what is cloud? It's essentially a particular architecture, which is scaled out architecture uh to build a data center and then having this data center be connected by a very fast network. To consumers anytime, anywhere. So, let's take that as the definition of cloud. Well, if that's the definition of cloud, now you're talking about what kind of data centers will be present over time, and I think what we observed was it's really important for many applications to come, and with the advent of 5G, with the advent of things like augmented reality, now, with the advent of self-driving cars, a lot of computing needs to be done close to the edge because it cannot be done, because of laws of physics reasons, it cannot be done far away. So, once you have this idea that you also have small scale out data centers close to the edge, all these arguments about whether it's a hybrid cloud or this cloud or that cloud, they kind of vanish because-- >> So, you agree then, it's kind of like an edge? >> It is. >> Because it's an operational philosophy if you're running it that way, then it's just what it is, it's a scale out entity. >> Correct. >> It could be a small sensor network or it could be a data center. >> Correct. So, the key is actually the operational model and the idea of using scaled out design principles, which is don't try to build 50,000 different types of widgets which are then hard to manage. Try to build a small set of things, tinker toys that you can connect together in different ways. Make it easy to manage, manage it using software, which is then centralized by itself. >> That's a great point. You you jumped the gun on me on this one. I was going to ask you that next question. As an entrepreneur who's looking at this new architecture you just mentioned, what advice would you give them? How should they attack this market? 'Cause the old way was you get a PowerPoint, you show a presentations of the VCs, they give you some money, you provision some hardware, you go on next generation, get a prototype, it's up and running, you got some users. Built it then you get some cash, you scale it (laughs). Now with this new architecture, what's the strategy of the eager entrepreneur who wants to create a valuable opportunity with this new architecture. What would you advise them? >> So I, you know, I think it really depends on what is the underlying technology that you have for your startup. There's going to be lots and lots of opportunities. >> Oh don't fight the trend, which is, the headwind would be, don't compete against the scale out. Ride that wave, right? >> Yeah, people who are competing against scale out by building large scale monolithic machines, I think they're going to have difficulty, there's fundamental difficulties there. So, don't fight the trend. There's plenty of opportunities for software. Plenty of opportunities for software. But it's not the vertical software stack that you have to go through five or six different levels before you get to doing the real work. It's more a horizontal stack, it's a more agile stack. So, if it's a software company, you can actually build prototypes very quickly today. Maybe on AWS, maybe on Google Cloud, maybe on Microsoft. >> So, maybe the marketing campaign for your company, or maybe the trend might that's emerging is data first companies. We heard cloud mobile first, cloud first, data first. >> Correct. We think that the world really, the world of infrastructure is going from compute centric to data centric. This is absolutely the case. So, data first companies, yes. >> All right, so final question for you, as someone who's had a lot of experience in building public company, multi-billions of dollars of value, embarking on a big idea that that we like, I love the idea. A lot of people struggle with the entrepreneurial equation of how to leverage their board, how to leverage their investors and advisors and service providers. What would you share to the folks watching that are out there that have struggled? Some think, oh the VCs, they don't add value. Some do, some don't. There's always missed reactions. There's different, different types out there. Some do, some don't. But in general, it's about leveraging the resources and the people involved. How should entrepreneurs leverage their advisors, their board, their investors? >> I think it's very important for an entrepreneur to look for complementarity. It's very easy to want to find people that think like you do. If you just find people that think like you do, you're not, they're not going to find weaknesses in your arguments. It's more difficult, but if you look to entrepreneurs to provide complementarity, you look to advisors to provide the complementarity, look to customers to give you feedback, that's how you build value. >> Pradeep, thanks so much for sharing the insight, a lot of opportunities. Thanks for sharing here on-- >> Thank you, John. >> The People Network. I'm John Furrier at Mayfield on Sand Hill Road for theCUBE's coverage of the People First Network series, part of Mayfield's 50th Anniversary. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're here live in Las Vegas for VMworld 2018 coverage. It's the final analysis, the final interview of three days, 94 interviews, two CUBE sets, amazing production, our ninth year covering VMworld. We've seen the evolution, we've seen the trials and tribulations of VMware and it's ecosystem and as it moves into the modern era, the dynamics are changing. We heard quotes like, "From playing tennis "to playing soccer," it's a lot of complicated things, the cloud certainly a big part of it. I'm John Furrier your host, Stu Miniman couldn't be here for the wrap, he had an appointment. I'm here with Dave Vallente and Jim Kobielus who's with Wikibon and SiliconANGLE and theCUBE team. >> Guys, great job, I want to say thanks to you guys and thanks to the crew on both sets. Amazing production, we're just going to have some fun here. We've analyzed this event, ten different ways from Sunday. >> So many people working so hard for such a steady clip as we have here the last three days, amazing. >> Just to give some perspective, I want to get, just lay out kind of what's going on with theCUBE. I've get a lot of people come up and ask me hey what's going on, you guys are amazing. It's gotten so much bigger, there's two sets. But every year, Dave, we always try to at VMworld, make VMworld our show to up our value. We always love to innovate, but we got a business to run. We have no outside finance, we have a great set of partners. I'm proud of the team, what Jeff Frick did and the team has done amazing work. Sonia's here's, the whole analyst team's here, our whole team's here. But we have an orchestrated system now, we have the blogging at SilconANGLE.com and Rob Hof leading the editorial. Working on a content immersion program. Jim you were involved in with Rob and Peter in the team, bringing content on the written word side, as fast as possible, the best quality, fast as possible, the analysts getting the pre-briefing and the NDAs, theCUBE team setting it up. Pretty unique formula at full stride right now, only going to get better. New photography, better pictures, better video, better guests, more content. Now with the video clipper tool and our video cloud service and we did a tech preview of our block chain, token economics, a lot of the insiders of VMworld, the senior executives and the community, all with great results, they all loved it, they want to do more. Opening up our platform, opening up the content's been a big success, I want to thank you guys for that. >> And I agree, I should point out that one of the things we have that say an agency doesn't offer, I used to be with a large multi national solutions provider doing kind of similar work but in a thought leadership market kind of, let me just state something here, what we've got is unique because we have analysts, market researchers, who know this stuff at the core of our business model, including, especially the content immersion program. Peter Boroughs did a bit, I did a fair amount on this one. You need subject matter experts to curate and really define the themes that the entire editorial team, and I'm including theCUBE people on the editorial team, are basically, so we're all aligned around we know what the industry is all about, the context, the vendor, and somebody's just curating making sure that the subject matter is on target was what the community wants to see. >> So I got to day, first of all, VMware set us up with two stages here, two sets, amazing. They've been unbelievable partners. They really put their money with their mouth is. They allow us to bring in the ecosystem, do our own thing, so that's phenomenal and our goal is to give back to the community. We had two sets, 94 guests this week, 70 interview segments, hundreds and hundreds of assets coming out, all free. >> It was amazing. >> SiliconANGLE.com, Wikibon.com, theCUBE.net, all free content was really incredible. >> It's good free content. >> It's great free content. >> We dropped a true private cloud report with market shares, that's all open and free. Floyer did a piece on VMware's hybrid cloud strategy, near to momentum, ice bergs ahead. Jim Kobelius, first of all, every day here you laid out here's what happened today with your analysis plus you had previews plus you have a trip report coming. >> Plus I had a Wikibon research note that had been in the pipeline for about a month and I held off on publishing until Monday at the show, the AI ready IT infrastructure because it's so aligned with what's going on. >> And then Paul Gillan and Rob Hof did a series in their team on the future of the data center. Paul Gillan, the walls are tumbling down, I mean that thing got amazing play, check that out. It's just a lot of detail in there. >> And more importantly, that's our content. We're linking, we're open, we're linking to other people's content, from Tech Field Day what Foskett's doing to vBrownBag to linking to stories, sharing, quoting other analysts, Patrick Moorehead for more insights. Anyone who has content that we can get it in fast, in real time, out to the marketplace, is our mission and we love doing it so I think the formula of open is working. >> Yeah Charles King, this morning I saw Charles, I thanked him for, he had great quotes. >> Yeah, great guy. >> He's like, "I love with Paul Gillan calls me." John, talk about the tech preview because the tech preview was an open community project that's all about bringing the community together, helping them and helping get content out into the marketplace. >> Well our goal for this event was to use the VMworld to preview some of our innovations and you're going to start to hear more from the siliconANGLE media, CUBE and siliconANGLE team around concepts like the CUBE cloud. We have technology we're going to start to surface and bring out to the marketplace and we want to make it free and open and allow people to use and share in what we do and make theCUBE a community brand and a community concept and continue this mission and treat theCUBE like an upstream project. Let's all co-create together because the downstream benefits in communities are significantly better when there's co-creation and self governance. Highest quality content, from highly reputable people, whether it's news, analysis, opinion, commentary, pontification, we love it all, let the content stand on it's own and let's the benefits come down so if you're a sponsor, if you're a thought leader, you're a news maker, you're an analyst, we love to do that and we love talking with the executives so that's great. The tech preview is about showcasing how we want to create a new network. As communities are growing and changing, VMware's community is robust, Dave, it's it's own subnet, but as the world grows in those multiple clouds, Azure has a community, Google has a community, and people have been trained to sit in these silos, okay? >> Mm-hmm. >> We go to so many events and we engage with so many communities, we want to connect them all through the CUBE coin concept of block chain where if someone's in a community, they can download the wallet and join theCUBE network. Today there's no mechanism to join theCUBE network. You can go to theCUBE.net and subscribe, you can go to YouTube and subscribe, you can get e-mail marketing but that's not acceptable to us we want a subscribe button that's going to add value to people who contribute value, they can capture it. That was the tech preview, it's a block chain based community. We're calling it the Open Community Project. >> Wow. >> Open Community Project is the first upstream content software model that's free to use, where if the community uses it, they can capture value that they create. It's a new concept and it's radical and revolutionary. >> In some ways were analogous to what VMware has evolved into where they bridge clouds and they say that, "We bridge clouds." We bridge communities all around thought leadership and to provide a forum for conversations that bridge the various siloed communities. >> Well Jim you and I talked about this, we've seen the movie and media. In the old school media days and search engine marketing and e-mail marketing and starting a blog, which we were part of, the blogging was the first generation of sharing economy where you linked to other bloggers and shared your traffic, because you were working together against the mainstream media. >> It's my major keyboard, by the way, I love blogs. >> And if you were funded you had to build an audience. Audience development, audience development. Not anymore, the audience is already there. They are now in networks so the new ethos, like blogging, is joining networks and not making it an ownership, lock in walled garden. So the new ethos is not link sharing, community sharing, co-creation and merging networks. This is something that we're seeing across all event communities and content is the nutrients and the glue for those communities. >> You got multi cloud, you got multi content networks. Making it together, it's exciting. I mean there were some people that I saw this week, I mean Alan Cohen as a guest host, amazingly articulate, super smart guy, plugged in to Silicon Valley. Christophe Bertrand, analyst at ESG, a great analysis today on theCUBE, bringing those guys, nominate them into the community for the Open Community Project. >> You know what I like, Dave, was also Jeff Frick, Sonia and Gabe were all at the front there, greeting the guests. We had great speakers, it all worked. The stages worked but it's for the community, by the community, this is the model, right? This is what we want to do and it was a lot of fun, I had a lot of great interviews from Andy Bechtolsheim, Michael Dell, Pat Gellsinger to practitioners and to the vendors and suppliers all co-creating here in real time, it was really a lot of fun. >> Oh yes, amen. >> Well Dave, thanks for everything. Thanks for the crew, great job everybody. >> Awesome. >> Jim, well done. >> Thanks to Stu Miniman, Peter Burris and all the guests, Justin Warren, John Troyer, guest host Alan Cohen, great community participation. This is theCUBE signing off from Las Vegas, this is VMworld 2018 final analysis, thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat Techno music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live day two of VMworld in Las Vegas, Mandalay Bay. It's apparently very hot outside but we're in here getting all the exciting scoop. I'm Lisa Martin with my esteemed co-host John Furrier. Hey, John. >> Great to see you, welcome back to the set. >> Thank you so much. John and I are pleased to be joined by a Fortinet customer, Ken Busby, Keith Busby, excuse me, the executive director of information technology and security at the school district of Philadelphia. Keith, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So, the school district of Philadelphia, eight largest public school district in the United States. You've got over 134,000 students. >> Yes. >> Over 18,000 staff. If only your IT budget was enormous, right? >> Yes. (laughing) >> So you guys, something also interesting, this morning Malala Yousafzai was speaking with Sanjay Poonen. Very intriguing, on the whole spirit of education, let's talk about that. You guys gave Chromebooks to over maybe half the students, about 50, 60 thousand? >> Well it's not one to one, so they're shared resources, they have carts throughout the school. We have between 50 or 60 thousand Chromebooks on our network right now. >> So I imagine great for the students and the education, the firewall security maybe a bit challenged? >> As we started transitioning to the Chromebooks, it overwhelmed our legacy internet firewalls so we had to go out and do proof of concepts and test multiple vendors. >> Talk about the security, we had Pat Gelsinger sit in theCUBE, I think four years ago, Dave Vellante, co-host, asked him, "Is security a do over?" And he's like, "Yes, it's a do over, "we need to do a do over." I said mulligan, used all kinds of terms, resetting. How have you guys set up your security architecture because I've heard stories of fishing attacks just to get the bandwidth to do Bitcoin mining, to crazy things on the security front. How are you guys laying out your network security? >> Honestly, it changes on a day to day basis, right? Because as new vulnerabilities come out, you always have to adjust your posture. Over the last year and a half we redesigned to wear we're not, we were routing through web proxies, we're required to do web filtering for the students by the CIPA, Children's Internet Protection Act. When we replaced our legacy firewalls, we were able to transition everything over to that and just use the Fortinet firewall to do web filtering, intrusion prevention, anti-virus and traditional firewalling. >> How virtualized are you guys? >> Pretty much completely virtual. We still have a few legacy physical servers but pretty much all. >> One of the things that came up in keynote, today was Sanjay Poonen but yesterday Pat Gelsinger, referred it to, was the bridging of the ways, connecting computers together but he mentioned BYOD, bring your own device as one of the ways and that was really the iPhone kind of generation. Obviously kids got Instagrams and they're on all kind of devices these days, how is that impacting your IT? Is it up and running, is it solid? What are some of the details? >> We don't have a traditional BYOD policy. It's more teachers get devices and they bring them in and we just have to find ways to support it so it stretches us, we're a small staff so we can't always help the end user with their devices so if they bring their own device, we have issues, they're trying to use applications that we can't support for whatever reason so it's an issue. >> Obviously all the devices that come in to the school in addition to the 60,000 Chromebooks, needing to rethink your security architecture, what were some of the technical requirements that you were looking for that made Fortinet the obvious choice? >> Performance and cost, right? As we spoke about, we have budget constraints. They have an extremely high performing firewall at a reasonable price. After we did proof of concept with five different vendors, and theirs just out performed them all. >> How about automation? A big talk in cloud is automation. How are you guys handling automation? Are you micro segmenting? >> We're transitioning to the NSX and Fortinet VMX for our server firewall. That's going to allow us, since we're short staff, if our server team stands up a new server my policies automatically take effect, just through the use of their security tags. >> That's the Fortigate product, right? The VMX? >> Yes. >> How is that working for you guys? >> We just did the proof of concept, we haven't transitioned our live systems over to it. But so far all our tests have shown that it does what we expect it to do. >> What's it like working in such a huge school district? I mean it's basically like, it's probably like a case study in campus wide networking. (laughing) >> We look at it as we're an ISP, right? Every school comes through us. We always say that we're protecting the internet from our students. We have smart kids and they-- >> They're digitally native. >> Yeah. They find ways to do things and then next thing you know I'm getting a report by a website saying, "Hey, we got students coming and throwing attacks at us." >> I was talking to a guy in higher ed about the bandwidth, they have huge bandwidth so obviously people game, including gaming centers, have all kinds of IP management issues. Fortnite's pretty hot, I'm sure how many people are playing Fortnite on your-- >> Luckily we don't allow that, right? (laughing) >> But this is what kids want to do. They're like born hackers. >> It is. >> They're curious. >> Yes. >> And it's good thing but you also want to basically make sure they're safe. >> Yes, that's pretty much what my job is. I want them to learn but at the same time, don't use it for malicious purposes. >> Yeah, its' true. One of the things I liked about public sector is cloud really makes things more efficient. >> It does. >> What are some of the things that you've seen with virtualization and with cloud kind of on the horizon, how has tech helped you guys be efficient and be lean and mean, kind of the 10X IT kind of guy thing? >> Like you said, lean and mean, right? We have a very small staff. The school district's budget is 3.2 billion dollars and IT's operating budget is 20.8 million dollars so as you can see, we really have to be cost effective and that's where virtualization comes into play. >> What's some cool tech that you like on the horizon? We hear a lot about SDWAN, sure that might be something that's cool for you guys? >> I like the VPCs, right? AWS, virtual private clouds, where you can set up your own network out there in Amazon's world, attach it to your vSphere so you can have on premise virtualization and out in the cloud, I think that. >> One of things that Pat Gelsinger talked about yesterday we hear this a lot John, is tech for good. I liked how he described it as it's essentially neutral, it's up to us, VMware, everybody else, to shape it for good. I imagine that's challenging? We talked about the Fortnite explosion, which I have only heard of but you've got so many devices, I imagine there's some amount of security gaps that are probably acceptable. In terms of reducing the maliciousness of some of the things that happen in there, tell us about some of the things that you're achieving there, leveraging such things as the automation, how is that helping you guys to enable the Chromebooks and the BYOD for good? >> Well the automation frees up our time so that we can focus on the policies, the education, the different procedures for the district. This way we're not spending time hitting the keyboard, trying to review our traffic logs. >> You had a session yesterday which you were talking, a breakout session, and you were saying that there were some folks that were so interested in what you we had to say, you had limited time in your session. Give a little bit of an idea of some of the feedback or maybe even people that might be in your similar situation that want to learn from, hey, how did you guys tackle this huge problem? >> They were from a school district in Nebraska and they wanted to see how we were handling and they just became a Fortinet customer and they wanted to see what trials and tribulations we had implementing their equipment, any lessons learned and kind of, we just had a conversation about where we see our programs going. It was nice. >> What about compliance? One of the things that's come up is managing the laws of the land. >> Luckily, I don't have much compliance, right? So we're not PCI, CIPA's pretty much, and FERPA but the only reports that we really have to provide are for CIPA, we'll have to prove that we're doing web filtering. That's where the Fortinet analyzer comes into play. I'm able to just schedule the reports through there. Shows that I'm blocking based on categorization, and we're good. >> What's the biggest thing you've learned over the past couple years in tech and IT to be effective and to do your job, what's the learnings? (laughing) >> It's going to sound weird coming from a security guy but I think it's important to take the risk, right? Accept the risk. Most organizations won't try a piece of equipment live, right? I was the exact opposite, I put every firewall that we were going to try live and pushed our entire network through it. I mean, if it breaks some things, we figured it out but I think that's the only way to get a true test of whether or not it's going to fit your needs. >> One of the things that came up yesterday, I interviewed Andy Bechtolsheim, you know, legend, been called the Rembrandt of chips, Pat Gelsinger called him that down to Arista and other companies. He talked about how NSX has the security wrapped around the application, more around NSX, that's freed up his security teams from handling a lot of the network security which kind of like has been intertwined in the past. Are you seeing that same picture emerge? >> That's why I'm transitioning to that, to get out of the traditional IP base firewall rules. It's not really what it was designed for, it was more for a transport layer. So switching over to the NSX and the BMX, now we're basing it on the application, what it's purpose is. >> What's the impact to you guys? What's that mean for your operations and your benefits for staff, what's the impact? >> It frees us up. During the winter months when we're going to have a snow storm, our server team might have to deploy some more web servers to handle the traffic that's going to come in. Before they would have to reach out to my team, to get us to modify a policy because they have new device coming online, well now they just tag it as a web server and it's automatically in the roles. >> You know I love talking about this topic. I have four kids, two of them are still in high school, two are in college, so it's so funny how they all hacked their report cards because the sandbox was out there for testing the new curriculum so they all get it and they all share it and the school sends out a note, "Well, that's not actually officially updated yet." So the kids are smart, like you said, they're going to get what a sandbox is. They don't know why it's there, they know how to get to it, so you got student elections, all kinds of things that go on in the academic world that have been digitized that are vulnerable, you have to handle that. How do you stay on top, does Fortinet help you there? Or what's the main way to keep the secure access? >> I mean that's why we're going with the VMX, NSX, the micro segmentation, it really takes the effort off of us and allows the appliances to do what they're intended to do. >> That's awesome, well it's a great case study. Any advice for practitioners out there who are in your seat in their world who might be looking at, okay I got to reset, I got to start rethinking things, I got to do more with less, I got to be lean and mean? It's kind of command and control but you got to manage it, you got a lot going on, it's the battlefield of IT is changing. >> Yes. >> So what's your advice? >> Take the risk. (laughing) Try it out. I just recently hired another engineer and on his first day I pretty much told him, "Go ahead and break something, it's alright, "we'll figure it out, we'll fix it." He has his own little lab and I'm like, "Just go mess around and figure it out." >> Play, do some R and D. >> Yeah. >> Kick the tires, yeah, it's the best way to do it. Keith, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. It's theCUBE live here in Las Vegas, stick with us for more coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

(soft music) - [Narrator] Live CUBE coverage at VMworld 2018 continues in a moment. Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. - Hello everyone, and welcome to back to theCUBE, live coverage here in Las Vegas with VMworld 2018. This is our three days of exclusive wall-to-wall coverage, two sets, it's our ninth year covering VMworld, when Dave and I started theCUBE nine years ago, Paul Maritz was the CEO, he actually got referenced on stage by Pat Gelsinger. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, our next guest Ray O'Farrel, CTO, Chief Technology Officer at VMware, keynote today on stage with Pat; great to see you again, thanks for coming on. - Really good to see you guys again. - So, reaction from the keynote was very positive. Probably, from a content standpoint, probably one of the most meatiest content pieces I've seen, mega news, serious announcement with Amazon, with Andy Jassy coming on stage releasing the Relational Database Service, RDS, on VMware, on-premises. Monster news. That is like, I don't think the world has yet felt the reverb for this thing yet. - But that was only one of the many stories. - [John] That was just one, that was just like (makes explosion noise). And then the CloudHealth acquisition, and you had tons of demos, pretty intense. - [Ray] Well, it's been- - Summarize what you did (laughs) in ten seconds. - Summarize all of that. So, you know, the key thing that we wanted to achieve with the keynote was obviously to make sure Pat drives the the vision that VMware has and, a lot of focus on that was focused on multi-cloud, this view of the world that you've now got multiple clouds emerging. And you know one of our key rules is to make sure that enterprises are able to work across all of those, networking, how we do management, how we work across all of these, and CloudHealth is a key part of that, making it easier to use cloud, in particular multi-cloud. You know as the CTO I get the fun part of tryna you know let our customers know all the cool work that the engineering teams are doing, so one of the things we want to do is make sure we put a lot of good demos in there. The feedback we get from our customers at VMworld over and over again is they want to see demos, they want to know that stuff is real. You can take a look for instance at the hands on labs. I came in here on Saturday night, walked down there about 6:30 am on Sunday morning, and there was people lining up to go in there and use those labs. So what did we talk through? Broadly speaking we spoke to how you can use VMC on AWS, and the easy way it is to migrate vSphere applications onto vSphere on AWS; we had some new features there around live migration. The next thing we spoke about was around RDS itself and what this project is about. Broadly speaking, at its most basic, it allows you to take the RDS components from Amazon but run them in your data center. With all of the implications of that in terms of how your developers work and they build those applications. We spoke about Project Dimension, which is also around a now delivery as a service, a cloud experience, but again, at your infrastructure, whether it's at the edge or whether it's your data center. And, you know we spoke about what we're doing in blockchain, some opensource components that we're doing over there. New features of Workspace ONE, particularly around the relationship with Dell, and how that will now be combined with some of their laptops And, oh and of course, what we did with some of the Nvidia GPUs, demonstrating the ability to be able to run the most sophisticated AI workloads on a vSphere environment. And I suspect I forgot something in that list, but- - [John] You're going to have to hit the pillow tonight and have a good nap, and crash. - [Dave] Project Magma. - [Ray] Project Magma which is a very future looking concept around basically where we think AI and ML is going to be used to drive a lot of the automation moving forward. - [Dave] Self-driving data center, - Self-driving data center. - [Dave] I think you'd call it (John laughs) Are they coinin' a new term there? - No it's great, we can reuse an old term, and you know rebrand it. - Auto pilot. Put your data center on auto pilot. I want to just drill down on one, on the Amazon relationship, because that was obviously the height, big news in there what you're talking about is the depth of the relationship is deep on the partnership side. I want to, and you guys, you pointed that out, I want to amplify that, but I also want to ask you around the RDS demand. You know, talkin' to some of the Amazon sources, they tell me that the demand for this was very strong, over multiple years. So, first on the RDS, the demand, some of the customer feedback, this is not just you guys in a room goin' hey, let's just do this; it makes sense, but it's customer driven. - Yeah, when you look at what VMC on AWS actually is, it's creating this bridge between the on-prem and the private cloud, sorry, and the public cloud on Amazon. But, initially most of that is really an I as relationship, yes we can move workloads, yes we can move VMs, yes we can manage networking, but one of the key things you want from a public cloud or from cloud in general is access to services. So, as we went down that first part of saying we'll give you this basic infrastructure, very quickly customers began to ask for some other things, some other aspects of that, and that of course was services. So after lots of discussions around what are services, one, that are appropriate to be able to put into this new type environment, but which had to demand RDS certainly rode very quickly to the top of that. In the end almost everybody has some form of database in their application, and so it's a very likely start for us to make them. - So I remember when customers first started wanting to run, to virtualize Oracle, with of course VMware; and Oracle, didn't really embrace that early on. They would say things, their sales guys would scare the customers, we're not going to certify it, but then some of the customers said "Dam the torpedoes, we're going to do it." it actually worked great. - [Ray] Right. - Now, I don't know if that's 'cause, just that's the inherent nature of VMware, or you guys had to do some work, so my question is: two fold, was that just the inherent nature of VMware, and what did you have to do or will you have to do to get RDS running the way that customers want it, trust it on AWS, I mean on VMware? - So, in the case of the Oracle situation, we didn't have to do a whole lot to make that happen, we were virtualizing in x86, Oracle runs on x86, and so you got that basic pattern and mix. In the case of RDS, the actual database that you're running on your VMware infrastructure, our database is such as my SQL, we run an enormous amount of those databases already, so that core aspect of getting the database running is not something that's fundamentally difficult for us to do The challenging part is, how do bridge all the management aspects of that? The RDS components, the APIs, that a developer wants to use, and which are used to using over on, with RDS on AWS, so that's where the work is involved. Now by the way, you're implying that maybe this is a future thing, right? A lot of that work has already occurred, in fact, you know the demo you're seeing is not based on this is what we could do at some possible time in the future, it is actually tied to some very close future releases. - [Dave] So recovery, I'm going to be co-, that's future release of recovery and all the things, if something goes wrong, I'm going to be comfortable as a customer that - [Ray] Correct, correct. - You're going to be backed. - Some of those things we still need to work true, because there's tons of features that you can begin to add onto this, disaster recovery, backup, all of those sort of things, and they're not all going to be there on day one, but you can expect us to continue to add all of that. - [Dave] And you'll have all of those? - Correct. - Now the other question I got to ask you is about migration. When I hear the term migration I go, ugh, you know IT practitioners they tighten up, but what I heard on stage today is we're going to make this really easy. But moving data, help me square that circle, Ray, because, you know data, people say data has gravity, speed of light, network bandwidth, proximity. What's the secret sauce that enables you guys to solve those problems? - So the core secret sauce there is if you're virtualized on VMware on-premise, and you're using VMC on AWS, the basic unit of execution is still that virtual machine, and that virtual machine encapsulates the storage, the networking, everything associated with that box, right? So virtual machines have that very core strength of encapsulating not just the application, or some aspect of the, even some aspect of a minimal piece of the operating system, it encapsulates everything which is tied into that box almost on a physical level. So when you say I'm going to move a virtual machine, you're moving the disk, you're moving the storage, you're doing all of those things. So now think of a database running in a virtual machine, it might not even be the applications, just the database, we're able to capture that and represent that as we moved the virtual machine, you're moving all of that as well. Now there's two aspects of that, one of them is moving the underlying storage, the disk, which might well be even a a virtual disk on NFS or something like that, that's slower task, and that's why we leverage vSphere replication for that. And then the final live part which is, it's always the cool part, but is in fact in this stage maybe not the most difficult part, and what we're describing here is moving the actual memory contents of a given VM and flipping it over to VMC on AWS. - [Dave] Okay, so the key there, you've got the replication piece, and then you just unhook the original and then you're up and running. - Correct. Traditional vMotion relies that both servers access the same disk, so I don't need to move the disk, in this case I need to actually move the disk, and that's what the replication does. - [John] Ray, I want to ask you about something that Pat Gelsinger kind of cheesed out on the keynote. You could tell he had so much confidence, he wanted to expand on this one section but he got a couple digs in on it but, he did point out that the telco piece was very big; and only, he had a percent, I think 10% or 20% is virtualized when enterprises are like 80, I forget what now, I forget the exact numbers but his point was: huge opportunity in telco. What was he referring to there? - So, broadly speaking, if you look across most of you know where workloads run, you look at your IT infrastructure, you look at most of the public clouds and private clouds, they're virtualized to an enormous extent. Now when you go into the telco side of things and begin to look at what's happening at the edge, what's happening in the large telco infrastructure, both, a little bit from a cloud point of view, but also from everything to do from all the services and so on that the run; much of that is not virtualized. Now we actually made a very distinct focus on that over the last few years, we created a, basically a product line and a mini business unit, focused on telco, and that's where you see products like the virtual network functions, all of those technologies coming from. But actually the key product from that area is actually VIO, VMware Incubated Openstack, that's because the telco providers, to a large degree, attempted to leverage Openstack, had some challenges of getting the reliability, the stability you need on that, so what we did was merged the hypervisor, the infrastructure of VMware, with the Openstack management APIs, produced VMware Incubated Openstack, and the telco providers are very aggressively taking that on - [Dave] Now, I got to ask ya, whaddya got against capex? (Dave and Ray laugh) Pat said "You should never spend capex for DR again." it was basically- - [Ray] Yep. So I mean, I think the key part of that solution is it is now so, I will use the word easy, the technology behind it is not easy, but it easy for an end user to be able to say: "I can connect my application from a private infrastructure to a public infrastructure, in a way which is very highly connected using NSX, which is easily replicated, which is easily moved; therefore, I now have a ready ability to be able to create DR scenarios leveraging the public cloud." It is easier than it's ever been before, so instead of building another data center to do that, leverage VMC on AWS, leverage those type of technologies to be able to do that. - Ray, can you clarify, or amplify the VMware Cloud Foundations, how does, trials and tribulations over the years has evolved, it's now front and center in the conversation. How has that evolved from a product standpoint, tech, is it integration layer, how are you guys looking at that, what is the role of VMware Cloud Foundation, and what does it mean for your partners and customers? - Yeah, so I think that, your comments about it having a a kind of an early mixed reaction or so on is actually partially because a naming challenge that we called right? VMware Cloud Foundation is a unified story where we basically take the core elements of the SDDC and we combine in management infrastructure with that, which is actually called SDDC Manager, we don't necessarily spell that out but it's combined into that. But that's the key aspect of this, and then we build architectures based on that; so VxRack is based on VMware Cloud Foundation. The infrastructure which runs in Amazon which we manage as part of the VMC on AWS is built on VMware Cloud Foundation. So it's an architectural and, it's an architectural statement as opposed to a product statement. Where the confusion arises, we also have products that people call VMware Cloud Foundation. One of the ones they're with now as an instance of that is for instance VxRack, right? Which is basically a rack of infrastructure, think of it as a really big VxRail, but it's got all of this management software combined with it as well. And actually, you know your comment about that having some mixed reaction, some of that is because of our renaming that - [John] Renaming. - we've done along the way. But that is actually growing, and quite successful product at this stage, so. - It's been getting a lot of good buzz. - It's getting a lot of good buzz, yes. - [John] And the value is what? Times in market on, on solution building, or pull out, what's the main value? - In some way it goes back to the core value of hyper-converged infrastructure, somebody else is taking care of making sure that the software components all blend together; somebody else is making sure that there's any easy way to update and manage all of these things together, and in many cases, making sure it's well integrated with underlying hardware. So it's all around making it easy to get that basic SDDC up and running. - [Dave] So I got to question on your architecture, and I honestly don't even know how to ask it, but, maybe you can help me as a technologist; you've got, you know the VMware architecture which was developed initially decades ago, and now you've got all this microservices, and Kubernetes, and containers comin' into the fore, and you see the quote unquote modern architectures, speed of deployment, software release is much faster, much more cloud-like, cloud first. How do you go from you know the historical architecture to that level, how do you bridge the two worlds? - So, as with any company, as these transitions have taken place, we've had to be able to make sure we invest in those new techniques and new technologies as well. So you see for instance VMC on AWS, you see for instance Project Tango the cloud-based VR realms product. All of those are cloud-based infrastructure using, you know those more, well I guess they're described new or modern ways of developing applications, microservices, containerized, leveraging Kubernetes and so on in the mix. So just like the rest of the industry, we've been doing the same as part of that broader sorry, that broader industry momentum. There isn't a conflict that you, I think might think is there. The bottom line is our primary purpose is to deliver enterprise software which is solid, stable, secure, easily connected to the rest of the infrastructure. And that might sound a little bit boring, but it is the thing that keeps most of the data centers running and safe. VMware's ESX architecture, VMware's VC architecture has been at the very heart of that. And while they've matured over the years, right, they're still at the very heart of that virtualization part of what we do, but all of these other things we do, what we do in terms of cloud monitoring, what we do in terms of Wavefront, what we do in terms of VMC on AWS, they're new code, new architectures, broadly expanding that story, leveraging microservices and the things you would expect in that space. - Well, and VMware has proven to the gold standard in that regard. Maybe it is boring, but it's super important. - [John] So you got some compliments on theCUBE today, for the work you guys are doing, Andy Bechtolsheim was on earlier, a well-documented career he's had he knows a thing or two about networks. He said "VMware as NSX is ..." this is a quote from today, "... is the best solution that's available today that I can use for a use case of the large numbers I have between smooth connection between on-premise and off-premise public cloud, into the future, to edge, and telco, and all other things cloud." - Yeah, I'm not going to argue with that quote. (laughs) - [John] So, instant testimonial. Okay, NSX has become really this, and Pat was giddy about this last year, he's all like, you watch more NSX, you know more goodness coming; it seems to be the center piece to the a lot of the VMware's connection strategies to cloud and other things including manageability. What's the big thing about NSX, what should people know about NSX? - I think the single biggest thing is software-defined networking had a promise, and the promise is this highly flexible, easily configured, and in many ways, automated, or policy-driven in some cases; networking infrastructure. So it's all around that flexibility and fluidity of software-defined networking. The key strength that NSX does, it delivers on that promise, so it's easy to say software-defined networking, it's not easy to build it, right? And that's where I think NSX is proving all of its strength, it is a very strong implementation; I would argue, obviously, the best implementation of software-defined networking. So that testimonial is an echo of that, it's delivering on all the things you expect from a software-defined network. - [John] And what is NSX enabling? - In terms of the cloud connectivity story which you just described a second ago, what it enables is, really in some ways, because it is not tied to a specific infrastructure, I'm able to run NSX on a public cloud infrastructure and on a private cloud infrastructure, or on a hyper-converged infrastructure, but it's essentially the same NSX. It's the same control plane, it's managed in the same way, all of those different instances know how to interoperate with each other. So what it's enabling is this massive ability to have these networks very quickly brought up, connect to each other, and reliably communicate with each other, and be managed in a unified fashion. - [John] And it's targeting one of the hardest things people are working on which is interoperability. - [Ray] Correct, it's also targeting security. I mean one of the things when we think about networking that you should never forget is this key aspect of security, and NSX is clearly targeting that as well. So some of the things, even the features you see around app defense, a combination of app defense and NSX gives you enormous power. Pat's made a good presentation today where he was talkin' about the adaptive micro-segmentation. You can only do that because you have a great NSX underlying that network. - What's interesting about the NSX, just want to get your reaction to is that that the people are talking about here on theCUBE and also in the industry is that by having the security at the application portion of it, when NSX plays, takes the pressure of the network teams; security teams can have comfort in their piece, and then, (laughs) you don't intertwine them. Is that true, or is that ...? - So I'm reluctant to say it's true because the bottom line is, everybody needs to be paranoid, right? (John laughs) So- - Well from a segmentation standpoint, form a cohesiveness, not this finger pointings, there's not a lot of, it's not thorny. - [Ray] Because it moves the networking layer up a level, and that level is closer to the application. But, when I really I looked at, I think the key strength there is because it's software-defined, because it's flexible, where you get a lot of the problems is when applications change, there's a new version of the application, or we're now popping up a new instance of the application; now because NSX is this software layer beneath that, it is able to react to that. So instead of, you know the finger pointing back to the security or networking person saying you didn't reconfigure the network to deal with my new application; instead, the application and the network are intimately bound together. Actually Pat used some phrase today where he said "I think the app is the network" and so, or something like that, he was talking a little bit differently about it, but broadly speaking that's what's going on there. It's all around the flexibility and the fluidity that you get from NSX. - [John] The application is a network! - [Ray] Correct, that's what he said, yes. - Was his word. - [Ray] Yep, yep. - Which I love, to think he's right on the money. Complex and if some services evolve, the service measure are right around the corner. - [Ray] Yeah, highly interconnected, you know what app, think of any application on your iPhone or your Android device, which doesn't rely on about 20 other applications or databases or cloud services. - [John] Well, Ray, we'll have to get you on a white board sometime, and have you do a deeper dive, love this conversation, congratulations. Final word I'm going to ask you, what is this VMworld all about on stage, if you could knot down the technical engineering successes that you've had this year, what's it about this year, what's the scene from your perspective? - So I think one of the key things is, we've got a lot of products, a lot of technologies under development for the last few years, a lot of them are now starting to see fruition and the light of day; you know, you know you spoke about NSX, NSX is now reaching a real strength right? But that's work we've had to start two and three and four years ago. So to me, that's probably the strongest thing here, products, ideas, research that we've done over the years, development we've done over the years is now becoming real, is getting out and making available to customers; and in the end, that's what we're about, tryna get those technologies to hand to customers. - [John] And we're going to do our job to share that, and we're going to be tracking the successes; and also thank you for inviting us to your radio event where you had your top scientists. - Oh yeah it was great, very good to see you guys there, thank you. - [John] Great to see the energy, and the engineering prowess of VMware continuing strong, technical team, community, and customer base. This is theCUBE, bringing you our hardcore tech coverage here at VMworld 2018, three days, we're in day one, stay with us for more after this short break. (bubbly music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. It's the live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2018, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We got two sets. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Adam Rasner, who is Vice-President of Technology Operation of AutoNation. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. >> Yeah thanks for having me. >> So you guys are a customer of all this virtualization stuff. What's going on in your company? Tell us what's happening at AutoNation. What are you guys at now with IT operations? Where you guys going? How you guys building into the Cloud? What's the strategy? >> Sure, so AutoNation is exploding. We have 280 new car dealerships. We have 80 collision centers. We just launched our own precision parts line. We're also looking at other technologies to automate the car buying experience. So we want to make like an Amazon-like car buying experience online, so that requires a lot new technology and digitalization. >> Yeah, talk a little bit about that. 'Cause I know, I've looked at cars in the last couple of years and now you know, I do so much of it online. I feel like I could do the whole experience from my phone if I wanted. So how much are you a technology company? And how much of that's cloud? And what are those dynamics that you've been going through the last couple of years? >> Yeah I think the millennials this day, they're willing to go online and do the whole car buying experience end-to-end, from the buying of the car to the financing of the car all online. And we can roll a flat-bed up to their house, and deliver a car, and they sign on an iPad, and they're good to go. And I think that's where things are going. So to do all that requires a lot of technology on the back-end. So we have a lot of on-prem infrastructure. I'd say we're still 90% on-prem, 10% in an Azure, AWS infrastructure. But that's going to change in time as a lot of these new applications are written. >> As you guys are doing the digital transformation, and it sounds like there's a lot of action going on, new things happening, you're in the app business. You got to build apps for user experience. So you've got to make the infrastructure work for you, and make it be failover, fall-tolerant, all that good stuff, recovery, how do you look at that? How do you run at the speed you need to run at? What are some of they key things you guys have to do to keep on that treadmill, but yet not drop the ball in delivering apps to the users that drive the business? >> I think there's a few things. I think one is, we have to be able to keep the lights on with our existing infrastructure, our existing apps while we build these next generation of applications. We have to be able to scale up as needed and scale down, be able to support some of the new mobile platforms that we're going to be working on. So there's a lot of work going on and DR is a big part of this too. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. Because data is at the core here. So, can you tell us that role of data, and then you say data protection. How is that changing, what was it like before you went through this transformation? Then we'll of course get into what you're using. >> Sure, so we actually, were using an old Microsoft data protection manager product and just didn't scale the way we needed to, we were having some performance issues. And so, data protection, while not very sexy, it's something you have to do. It's table stakes in IT. It doesn't innovate, it doesn't make me sell more cars, it doesn't help the business sell more cars, but it's something we have to do. So we looked out there at what I call the legacy players and also the nextgen players and went through a full proof of concept with several of them. >> All right, and what were you looking for? What was kind of the key objective you said? Data protection doesn't make you money, or didn't make you money. We've talked to some customers, that's like, wait, might do some cool snapshotting, I can leverage that data, I can do some more things with my developers, and everything. So what was the goal of this transformation and then what was the criteria that you went through to make a decision? >> Yeah, so the data protection was the initial piece and we just needed a rock solid backup and recovery solution. And we started off with just a simple, hey, we wanted an integrated hardware software solution, we wanted something that could scale infinitely, we wanted a predictive cost model. And so a lot of those older legacy players don't play well in that space, they're expensive to support, eventually you hit a wall on hardware limitations and you have to use forklift upgrades. So we wanted something that was a little bit more nimble and then down the road, as we got into it, once the backup and recovery piece was kind of under control we started using our new solution for other things and secondary storage which was an added bonus. >> So you haven't mentioned, what is the solution that you chose and what were the key things that led to that? >> Yeah, so after going through several POCs with you know, NetBackup, Rubric and Cohesity, we ultimately chose Cohesity for performance, cost, ease of implementation, ease of the user interface, ease of management. >> And what was the comparison, on the floor here you see Rubric and Cohesity next in the huge booths. What's the difference between those two? >> Yeah, so we actually put them side by side in our data center, full blown POCs, and there was some performance differences, there were some technical challenges that we had with some of the other products. And ultimately the team, our engineering team felt most comfortable with Cohesity after spending six or eight months in a really in-depth POC. >> Big bake-off. I love the bake-offs. It's the only way to have the answer like that. So when you look at the solutions, are you guys mostly interested in the software side of the business that they had? What was they key piece of it? >> I think we're interested in the whole thing. I had been at other places where we had done the NetBackup and data domain story and you know, you're having a problem at three o'clock in the morning and you got the finger pointing, is it a software issue, is it a hardware issue? We wanted the one throat to choke kind of solution, and so, you know, that was a requirement right off the bat. Whatever we chose was going to be an integrated hardware software platform. >> Adam, walk us through from the deployment to the day two action. How did it go? What surprised you? What, you know, thrilled you? You know, what challenges did you have? >> Yeah, we've been a customer for- I think we were very early customer, probably almost about two years now. So, there's a lot we didn't know. There was a lot of things in the product that actually weren't fully mature when we first started the POC. And so we went through a full, a full blown bake-off, and one of the things we noticed it was much easier to implement, we didn't require any professional services to get it up and running and the technical support we were super impressed with. So I think, you know, the team, after going through the motions, really felt like this was the product for us. And again, really mainly around backup and recovery, but ultimately decided that we were going to use it for other things too. >> Adam, I was walking through the hallways yesterday, Stu and I were both checking out the booths. And I hear a lot of conversations and it comes up around the Cohesity, Rubric, all these different cloud solutions. Some are rinsed and repeat old models that just have, you know, not mostly those guys are, but the customers are concerned about I don't want the old way, I want the new way, I want to be cloud native, I want to work with cloud, One choke to throw, I need software, I need to have agility, and I need to have auto, you know, healing, all this kind of stuff. How do you sort through that? I know you've been through the POC but your peers that are out here at VMworld, they're squinting through the noise going okay, I got to really dig in here. What's your advice to those guys and gals? >> I think it's really challenging for the people that are, you know, neck deep in some of these other legacy products because it's a little bit hard to move. You know, it's costly, it's expensive, and it's a significant effort. I was in a rare position where I was able to start net new, and so that made it a little bit easier. But I think you start with a slow migration, start setting up your new infrastructure on a nextgen platform and then slowly migrate off. These next, these legacy players are very expensive, and they don't scale very well. That's probably one of our biggest challenges. >> One of the things you said, you started with a couple of use cases but you're now doing a bunch more. Talk about that, what more, what are the new things you're doing and what's the road map look forward at AutoNation? >> Sure. So we had a, a lot of apps, that we're probably not needing. Tier one, NetApp, all SSD, high performance SAN. I call it my Cadillac of storage, you know. It's our highest performance applications and we were having some apps that the hardware was starting to, you know, just go bad. And so the only place I could put it was either on my NetApp, or I didn't have any place else. So the story changed over time. Cohesity became not only our backup and recovery data protection appliance, we started landing some of our tier two storage on Cohesity. So moving things that we would normally put on NetApp, putting it on Cohesity for 40 percent of the cost and it's a win-win. >> All right, so, Adam, I couldn't help noticing you've got the Drive Pink pin on. >> Yes. >> So, maybe tell our audience a little bit about the, you know, AutoNation Drive Pink initiative and you know, do you have relationships with the suppliers here? Pat Gelsinger this morning talked about you know, we need to be as a technology community more doing good. It's foundational to what we're doing. >> Autonation, it's one of our core charities is cancer awareness. I think we've donated almost 30 million dollars. Every car that you buy, we try to put the Drive Pink license plate. And I think not only for business, I think in IT we also have to have a lens to some of these charities and some of these things that need our help. >> Issue driven businesses are doing well now, people expect that. Not just for profit, but the people involved. >> Yeah. >> Anyone can work anywhere these days, talent, it's also good. I mean, it's one of those things. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> All right, so, takeaway from this show, so far, your impression as a practitioner in the IT footprint space, looking at a cloud on the horizon, we just had Andy Bechtolsheim just on, been part of the early days. Cloud's coming fast, networking's got to get better, you got to, you know, seeing what solutions, integrating well together. How do you make sense of all this content coming out of VMworld? >> Yeah, I think what I get out of this and kind of AWS, all of these conferences, is that everything we buy has to be extendable to the cloud. You know, we still have a lot of on-premise infrastructure but everything we implement has to be cloudable, it has to be able to be used in our future use cases. >> I would love, we're talking a lot here in the keynote this morning it's like, right, this move, we know it's going to take time and Amazon's doing some things, VMware's doing some things, how's the industry doing, how do you see the progression, what would you like to see them do more better if we come back in a year, if I kind of give you that magic wand? >> Yeah. You know, I always leave a lot of these conferences and I feel like I'm behind the eight ball, in our cloud migration, but, companies like us that have a lot of legacy apps, they're slow to move. And so, I leave the conference, I feel like I'm behind the eight ball, but I get back and I talk to my peers and many of them are in the same situation I am. They're still maturing, but I think, yes, I think the net new generation apps that we're going to build are going to be in the cloud because the capabilities to autoscale and so I think that anything we buy, anything we implement we have to have a lens to that going forward. >> Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE, we really appreciate, sounds like you're happy with Cohesity? >> They've done a great job, we're really happy customers. >> How long was that bake-off by the way, that you ran that? >> We did it about six months. >> That's pretty good and long. >> Yeah, we actually had some, again we were very early to the game so there were features in the product that we needed that they didn't have yet and our agreement was we'll proceed after you can meet these requirements and they did. >> Yeah. And Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy on the stage, one of the things Andy Jassy, who's been on theCUBE talks about all the time is listening to customers. Sounds like they're listening to you guys. >> Absolutely, absolutely. You have to, it's such a competitive environment now. You know, if you can't meet the customer's minimal requirements, there's somebody else that can. >> You got to be cloud compatible. AutoNation breaking it down here, here at Vmworld bringing the practitioner perspective, the customer perspective, all of these suppliers try to bring cloud and on-premises together. It's theCUBE bringing you all the action here at Vmworld 2018. I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.