>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Welcome to the Cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 The digital edition I'm Lisa Martin and with Me is Eugene Kostov, VP of product and engineering at FTO. Eugene's Great to see you. >>Thanks for having me. So >>So talk to your audience a little bit about a PTO. What is it that you guys do? Help them understand that >>absolutely. Abdo provides leading tools for technology business management. We help our customers understand their technology costs where they're spending money where they're not spending money and how they can optimize those and help translate that into the language of whether you're a business person or finance person or working directly and technology department. You all can come together and understand what your technology costs are and where they're headed in the future. And then we also provide Cem tools for you to dive deeper into your cloud specific cost. For example, >>speaking of Cloud Cross, one of the things that is happening that we all know is that cloud spend has never been mawr important because of all the changes the surgeon SAS Applications Enterprise Cloud with everybody shifting Thio work from home Talk to me about some of the trends that you're seeing. >>Yeah, it's really interesting to see right. It's It's an interesting time. And as we see more and more folks come online working from home consuming digital products, we're seeing the demand really grow for well cloud services and the services that our customers consumed to provide that digital content. However, at the same time those customers are being asked to do more with less less. Resource is less. Spending on resource is providing mawr information, more data, more content. So it's in that world that we look to help our customers as much as possible achieve those goals. How do I make sure that my dollar goes as far as possible on my infrastructure? Spend with AWS? I get the tremendous benefit of elasticity, lead and flexibility with my cloud resource is from AWS, and how do I make sure that I'm using my dollar on the right set of resource is that my teams are looking at the right set of products or discount models that can allow them to save more money as they consume more of those services. It'll be just provide some really great opportunities to do just that. We're the ones who look to help you achieve that with AWS. >>So customers that air as to be, you know, do more with less, but also companies that need more technical capabilities. How does Abdul >>help that trade >>off that balance? >>Yeah, it's definitely a balanced. It's one that we look to help folks with even folks that aren't our customers, necessarily, right. We're one of the founding members of the Thin Ops Foundation. We provide our own content as well, where you can simply consume and understand. What is it that you're gonna get from eight of us in terms of your costs and usage data? What are you going to see when you get your bill? How can you consume that more efficiently processed that information so that you can again make your dollar go further again? There's tremendous benefits with cloud, but that also means that you get a lot more data with the consumption that you have tens of thousands, millions of rows of data because you can actually spin up and spin down resource is, as you see fit means that you have more data to process and more data to consume. So it's imperative. It's really important that you understand how to look at that data, had a process it and then how to make decisions from that data. And that really boils down to the financial management practices, because you have to look at it as both a technologist and the financial lens that you have from the cost that are coming from those data. >>So let's impact that because as we talk about data is the new goal. That's oil it is. Organizations can harness it and extract insights quickly as possible. Make to your point decisions in real time but affect the business. And so many businesses the last nine months have had to pivot multiple times to get to. How do we survive this? How do we thrive during this? So how does that do you help customers be ableto leverage the power of cloud to get access to all that data, but also really manage their cloud financial financials? >>Yeah, we've got a few ways toe help you with that. We have tools like Cloud ability which provide provide the ability to dive into your data, get that process from AWS, and then we'll actually visualize that for U. S. So instead of you having to go into those gargantuan data files, you actually can get that right in front of you in the tool and share that with your internal stakeholders. So it's important that you share the information is not just about Lisa knowing what she spent on cloud cost, it's about the entirety organization knowing what each part is consuming and subsequently spending. The other bit of it is making sure you're not overspending. You mentioned it right? There's a lot more demand on cloud Resource is what that means that you mean to be really careful that you're not overspending. You're not over provisioned. Both in the resource is you use using a resource that might be too large for the application of workload. You're running or not, taking advantage of all the great commitment based products that AWS provides to you. Credibility seeks to help you do that, but we also have and are expanding on that suite of products because we view as more than just the infrastructure you have with eight of us. It's also the SAS products, the software the service that you are using to help run your cloud services. We give you the ability with credibility, SAS to look at that data as well and look at all the applications you used to run those services. >>So credibility and the credibility staff. I'm just curious as things have evolved so much the last, you know, a few months, as I mentioned, How is your conversation within a customer organization changing like Has your target audience changed for cloud ability? Are they now? Is it now at the C suite or you're target audience not going. We need to be able to justify leveraging this tool to optimize our spend all the way up to our CEO and our >>board. Yeah, you know, that's uninterested point. We're definitely seeing Mawr Eyes on Cloud spend as it becomes a larger proportion of your overall technology spending right after you. Asshole has been very used to having eyes on our products and our data at the C suite love. But that's because it was the overall technology spending. Now, as cloud becomes a bigger and bigger portion of that spend a SAS becomes a bigger and bigger portion of that spending worldwide technology spend is gonna approach $4 trillion and assassin and infrastructure the service of the fastest growing segments of that spend. So we get more of those eyeballs. Uh, we also get more of the well, Hey, Eugene, prove to me why it's worth it. Why should we move to the cloud? Why should we move our workloads to the cloud? Because we think we get it. We hear a lot about it, but show me hard dollars in hard data. Why is that valuable? Why is that important for us? And what is the guy that I'm going to realize from that? That's what we seek to dio. That's we do pretty well on. What we also look to do is to be able to drive that information down. Is the organisation's well. It's not just enough. Thio explain to the C suite why it's Ah, hi are y Overall. It's important to empower folks within the organization to actually achieve that All that's a very important part of it as well. So we really look at it that way. >>That's a great point that you make. It's not just about justifying the you know, these cloud cost management and optimization or C CMO tools. It's about empowering the individuals to be able to use them to extract that value. That's a great point that you brought up. So let's dig into the R o I a little bit more like How are you helping a W S customers contain their costs? And what are some of the r. A. Y figures that you're saying >>We're seeing great results from our customers? We do in primarily three ways. We talked about visibility just simply being able to see what you're spending on what your teams are consuming. The second is actually providing proactive recommendations for you. What can you do with reservations or savings plans in AWS? What's the optimal point at which you can commit and get a high r a y for the commitment you're making Tate of us for one or three years? What are the resource is you're running and which ones are over provision. Which ones are unattached or idle, were able to actually highlight that for you. The Third Way is actually providing proactive anomaly detection. We run our own algorithms and determine when and where we're seeing spend or usage that doesn't really fit your historical patterns. And we highlight those for you. Now it may be that you expected this, and this was something that you knew was coming. You're launching a new product in a new market. Or maybe you've got higher demand for your services because you're a media company and there's a lot of media being consumed recently, but we will still highlighted for you. We've been able to find many instances where you're actually unaware of that. Spend. That anomaly that we've detected is something that you could stop right at the source. >>So given this sort of urgency that we're all living in, how quickly, uh, from a tournament time frame, can you work with customers to show them proactively these air, all the areas in which you are overspending under spending? This is where you need to optimize. What's that? What's the customer looking for in terms of time frame to make that impact? >>Well, she asked customer, they probably say real time, right, right away. And we come pretty darn close to that. We do it throughout the month so historically, folks who are consuming infrastructure very usedto we know we're spending. We bought this server many years ago, were depreciating it, and we know exactly what we're spending for that month. But with the cloud, you're actually getting that bill in real time. You're getting your estimated charges every day, every hour, and we're right there with you looking at that data as it goes by. So that's what customers are really looking forward Now there's some things that you won't get right away, right? There's some things that come in, you know, in your monthly invoices or things that you'll see that we help you allocate and understand who's spending where. But by and large, we actually do this right at the time that you're seeing this data come through, and that's really important. The real time nature of it, the ability to look at your costs and usage and who is actually using it is critical to your success. Otherwise, things could run away pretty quickly. >>It is absolutely critical, and it's kind of one of those things. As consumers, we sort of had this on demand expectation for so long and now, with things changing so quickly and organizations having to make so many pivots and probably continue to do so. Being able to have that visibility that inside in real time, make decisions on it. It's critical because there's very likely a competitor, er, right in the rear view mirror that might be smaller and more agile and, you know, kind of willing toe and ready to come in and and kind of bulldozed down. So with that said how and as things continue to change, and I think we can expect that for a while longer as we approach the or 2021 how do you advise organizations think about cloud in the context of their overall technology spend? >>Yeah, that's a great question. The first is to think of it more than just a budget line item. It's more than just an entering your general ledger of spending this much money is really about driving the growth of your organization and making sure that you drive the optimal growth in the resource is and infrastructure and software that you consume in order to increase your own broke. The second is to actually plan for it. There's this sort of feeling that that folks get when I talk to that, they can't really plan for cloud spend, right. It's just gonna happen. What my organization you can consume is what they're going to consume. But that couldn't be further from the truth. You can plan for your cloud spend you can look at the demand for your resource is you can plan for different scenarios and what might happen in the future, as you put it. And you can actually look at that yourself. You can also look at tools like plan, ability, demand in the video suite. You could look at cloud ability itself to forecast that demand you can actually plan for. So don't be daunted by, Well, it's a lot of data. I'm not sure what's gonna happen. It's just gonna We're just gonna roll with it. A zit happens, right? You need to be able to plan for you need to be proactive with it. I mean, you understand what you might spend depending on what well, the economy does, what the world does and what your customers at the end of that, they do >>great advice that you can plan for it and you should plan for it and be proactive. I think all of us could use a little bit of that in our lives. Eugene, thank you so much for joining me on the Cube today, Talking about after you and the big impact that you're making at organizations across the globe. >>Lisa, thank you very much for having me. >>My pleasure for Eugene. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching a cube?

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of AWS re:Invent, day two of our three days of coverage, happy Wednesday to you, wherever you might be watching. We're joined by Yaron Haviv, who is the founder and CPO of iguazio, and Yaron, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE, once again. >> Thank you, hi. >> For folks at home who might be watching or at their office and not familiar with iguazio, tell us a little bit about the history of the company, what you saw as the need, as the founder, and what your primary focus is. >> So our key focus is delivering advanced services, the same one that you see in the Cloud, high-performance for real time analytics, essentially what we've seen as a gap, you have all the Cloud services in the Cloud, but when you're fanning into an Edge or an on-prem environment, you're usually consuming, like IT, VAMs, et cetera. So what we are doing, we're matching the same level of services, we provide serverless functions, AI as a service, and manage databases that can run, either in the Cloud or on-prem, or in federated Edge environment. So one consistent application development environment brought where we are. >> So, on the AI side, you mentioned that, as you're looking at your client base, your customers, and you're introducing this concept now, right? For those who aren't there yet. What do you sell them on, if you will? Or what do they want to know, what don't they understand, you think, generally speaking? >> Yeah, so in AI and ML, there are a lot of companies solving that problem, okay? Where we master is the notion of real-time AI, okay? What people are looking, is into embedding AI into business applications. Okay? The traditional notion is, you have a data lake, you throw all the data, and then your data sign, just go learn stuff, create nice, you know, desk-origin tableau. Great. So what? You know? What people really want is to build recommendation engines. You know, someone is logging into a website, he gets recommendations, so that requires very short latency of response, okay? You are doing front-detection and financial applications, so you're freighting a lot of data. You need to make decisions now, okay? You're doing cyber security analysis, so you're feeding data from routers and firewalls and switches, and you need react immediately to whatever is happening. You think about retail stores, things like Amazon Go. Cameras examining your behavior et cetera, you need to respond very very quickly. And now this is a much harder problem to deliver AI in real time, than it is in a sort-of a data-science workbench or just a batching notion. And traditionally, the way people address that problem is by profiling, creating sort-of a, every time, I'm going to see something very similar to that, I'm going to go to a database, pull, compare, and contrast, but the problem is that you need more and more multi-environment analysis on objects that keep on updating. You know, my location keeps on changing. If I'm going to stand in front of this store, I need to get this advertisement, or if I've just done some purchase with my card, and the bank knows my GPS location, it can cross-correlate that, and know if it's a fraud or not, okay? So there are more inputs going into the decision. This is where we master is, the ability to ingest lots of data in real time, cross-correlate that, in real time, to generate what's called feature vector. It's all those things that make up a decision. Run the decision, based on the traditional AI and deep learning algorithms, and they act on it. Whether it's response to customer requests or, you know, block some firewall, or whatever. And our focus is time to action. And the way we are implementing it, is using two major components. One is, real time serverless functions, which is an open-source we're promoting, called nuclio. A second is a real-time database, extremely high performance, it attaches to those functions and allow and help stitching the data and calculating and getting the results. So that's the general thing we're doing. >> So that idea of the serverless functions with nuclio, that's really about bringing, what you're used to in the Cloud, and bringing that out into the Edge. Which, I think, we were talking before, and that's I think a focus for a lot of developers who, I want to use all of the things I'm used to in the Cloud, where it's, I can just consume them as services, and it's quite easy to deal with. But then I come back into the on-site or on onto the Edge in this kind-of hybrid Cloud model, I don't actually have access to all of those things anymore. And I want to. >> Right, and it's even beyond that, because, you the Lambda came from more of like, WebHooks, Seoscases, et cetera. Extremely not concurrent, extremely low performance. You're talking about hundreds of milliseconds of latencies, you know, you're talking about, like, thousand invocations per second, you know? That's sort-of the concurrency, single-threaded applications. We're talking about real-time applications, you know. Hundreds of thousands of events per second. We're talking about latency in the range of milliseconds response time, that you have to respond. So we had to build a different serverless. Something that's real-time, something that has real-time access to data, et cetera. So that's originally where nuclio came in. And then, we started seeing pull from customers, saying, yes, but you're also a multi-Cloud serverless. And I can run your serverless on a laptop for debugging. I can run it on a mini Edge appliance, because this is my enforcement point. I can run it on-prem, because, you know, I'm stuck with some old gear in my on-prem application, and this is what started making nuclio very popular in lots of getup starts et cetera. And the fact that we're provided as a fully managed platform you know, it's open-source, consume it, whatever, but when you're using our managed platform, you get security, integration with active directory, integration with data, logging, monitoring. So, it really provides an alternative to Lambda, where you need high concurrency and everywhere. You know, Edge, Cloud, on-prem, but also high performance, high concurrency for those new workloads of real-time analytics. >> Yeah, so what are some of things that customers are using the platform to develop on? Like, could you give us an example of someone who's using some of these serverless functions for real-time application? Yeah, so, one of the applications is a, we do a lot of work with the network operators. You know, Verizon is one of our investors, but also working with different, other tel-cos. So we're doing real-time network monitoring, across all their firewalls and network equipment et cetera, to predict the network behavior. So, if there's going to be a failure, is it a cyber-security attack right now, things like that. The next level that they went into doing is actually a remediation. It's essentially re-routing the networks to bypass faults automatically, based on the predicted behaviors. Or, you know, stopping some attacks as they occur. So that's one use case. Another use case, in financial services and many other places, is predictive network operations. It's monitoring, again, behavior of services et cetera, like in trading platforms. And knowing that there is going to be a latency spike that's going to impact the trading, and essentially going and fixing that, in order to not lose millions of dollars of trades. Or real time tick analytics, you know? Until now, all the financial applications were very sort-of event driven, and complex event driven, not incorporating deep learning, things like that. Now, I think that there are many variants. You know, the, your president, you know, is going to tweet something about some company, and then it's going to impact the buyover or with stock. So, the current high-frequency trading algorithms are not designed for that, okay? Now, if you build all those serverless functions that listens on Twitter and Muse and all those things, and they can start cross-correlating that information to a much smarter decision. They fit in the real-time decision of buying and selling stocks into a lot more intelligent decision, you can make more money, okay? Another application, retailers, okay? We're working with locations where they have a thousand cameras in a single supermarket, because they just inspect the shelves to look into inventory levels, and eventually they're going to like, an Amazon Go model, where they actually want to know, to track what you're buying et cetera. So a thousand cameras in a store, you cannot shape all that bandwidth to the Cloud. And this is where it comes to a federated application model. Where, as a developer, the guys that are Cloud-born, or Cloud-first, they know containers, they know APIs, they know that stuff. They don't know how to build a box that sits in a store, okay? This is the other world of VMs and Venix, they don't care about that, they want APIs. They want Lambda functions, Dynamo, et cetera. So what we're providing is a mechanism where they can develop in the Cloud, test, simulate, run CICD pipelines, push our defects to the store, to actually go and do the work. And there we have strong partnerships with at least a couple of the major Cloud providers. We have co-ceiling agreements with Azure, we're working with Google, and, I assume, Amazon will be next, but those two, we have a strong relations with already. >> Alright, before we cut you loose, just gimme your idea about the show in general here, from what you've seen, and kind of how you feel about the conversations that you're a part of. >> Yeah, I was very busy talking to customers all day, so I haven't had a lot of time. I think interesting announcements, you know, they've made announcements with VMware, I'm still trying to figure out, what have they announced. You know, again, we spoke about the fact that the whole idea of Cloud is about service obstructions. Not virtual machines, not Kubernetes containers. It's about using APIs, using serverless functions, using AI workbenches that you can develop this new logic. If I'm going to use this VMware on-prem with Amazon, am I going to get all the SageMaker, Lambda, all that on-prem, or just more of a tactical thing, like Azure Stack, like, we're bringing UVMs, we're calling it Cloud, you know, just for marketing's sake. Is that a real Cloud services platform, okay? I think it aligns with what we're seeing now with the Kubernetes, I think we had some discussion about it. You know, IBM buys Reddit, you know, Cisco collaborates with Amazon, VMware buys Apptio. Kubernetes is containers, it's infrastructure. We speak to customers, we show them what we do serverless, you know AI workbenches, databases, service. That's the interesting part. That eliminates IT. If you're putting Kubernetes, it perpetuates IT. Now they need to take Kubernetes, tie it to their security system, build Spark on top of a container et cetera. Now that is a lot of IT and dev ops work involved. But many customers need agility. The reason they're going to Cloud, is not to use VMs, you know? It's to be able to take some Lambda function, some pre-bagged services, glue them together, and really come fast to market with an application. >> So what we really want to do is just to Cloud all the things. I think? (group chuckles) Cloud all the things. >> Mission accomplished. Yaron, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time you're on theCUBE. Good to see you, sir. >> Thank you. >> Alright, back with more, here at AWS re:Invent. You're watching it live, and we're on theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE SiliconeANGLE Media's independent live broadcast of Nutanix .NEXT here in Nice, France. Happy to have join with me a first-time guest, John McAdam, who is the former CEO of F5 and an independent board member for a number of companies including F5, Tableau, and Nutanix. The show that we're at. So John, thanks so much for joining us. No, thank you, thanks for having me. All right, so let's start, just for people who aren't familiar, I said, you know, you were CEO of F5 for quite a few years, just give us a little bit about your background in business and what brings you here. I graduated from Glasgow University, you probably can tell from the accent, I'm Scottish. >> Stu: Yes. I moved over to the States when I joined a company called Sequent in 1994, and I became president of Sequent in 1995, and I've actually been in the States since then, up until I retired in April this year. So I spent 11 years at Sequent, president and chief operating officer, big server company is what we did at the time. Mainly selling Oracle type databases running on the servers. We were purchased, we were acquired by IBM in '99. I stayed with IBM for a year. I was running the AIX business globally for IBM, and then I was headhunted by F5 Networks, and I joined them in 2000, just as the .com bust was about to happen, and we'll talk about that later maybe. And I was the CEO at F5 for 17 years, and during the last few years I joined the board of Tableau, as you mentioned, and a company called Apptio as well based in Seattle, and of course Nutanix. Yeah, so a lot of our audience are everything from CIOs to people that someday might want to be a CIO, but very much kind of a blend of business and technology, can you tell people, some people are like, I don't understand how somebody becomes an independent board member. You're not the former CEO of that company or you're not one of the people... What does it mean to be an independent board member? You know, it's an interesting story because the independent board members at F5 actually kept encouraging me to join the board, and I kept saying, no I don't need to do that, I'm really busy, focused on the company. And also I've been a board member since 1995 as an executive, as a board member of Sequent and a board member of F5, so why would I want to join a board. And then eventually, I actually got approached, first of all by Tableau, the CEO of Tableau at the time, and seemed a very interesting conversation. So I decided to join the board. It was pre-IPO. And I thought I could add some value there, in terms of growing the company, etc. So I went along to the first board meeting and I went to the second, and I came back to the F5 board and I said, I apologize. I should have done this earlier. I didn't appreciate how much I would realize and learn being at the other side of the table as an independent board member. Because remember, you're turning up once every three months or two months. You don't know the day-to-day what's going on, but you have a very different perspective. And I wish I had done it earlier, but really it's all about trying to give consultancy, support, advice, obviously there's governance things you do as well. And I've really enjoyed being on the boards and especially Nutanix. Okay, your career, you know we've had, I think since about the time you joined F5, there was the .com crash, there was the downturn in '07/'08, so you've seen some boom times, you've seen some down times. What do you take away for those and how do you help advise the companies that you're working with? You're absolutely right. It's been an interesting experience. When I joined, as I mentioned earlier, it was a .com about to crash happening, and the big issue for F5 was it was actually 90% .com business, so the revenue collapsed completely, the stock price dropped, from today's price, from $21 to $1.50. We've run out of cash in certain areas. We ended up selling off 10% of the company to actually Nokia, they took ownership. So it was very much a survival phase. And in that phase you really have to, you need to make quick decisions. There's no time for the coaching that you would normally do. It's not as inspirational. But once you're out of it, once you get the P and L, you know, the profit and loss, and the balance sheet in good shape. Then we moved into, I would call, the stability phase, and the deal there was that we really were building a new architecture of product. We knew it was going to take a couple years. So that's all about making sure that you're in a good environment, you're going to deliver the goods from a market perspective, and we did that. I remember this well, in September 2004, we announced a new version, a new architecture, boom, we jumped into the growth (mumbles). Fifty percent growth, not quite as much as Nutanix today, but 50, 55, 40%. That's different, that's an inspirational world, you know, where you're really trying to inspire the company, it's all about hiring, and it's fun. How much do companies, when you advise them, worry about kind of what's happening to them versus what's happening locally and globally from an economics standpoint? I talked to Dheeraj many times kind of leading up to the IPO, and it was like, well, we have no control over kind of the global economical pieces, so we're building for the long term, and we will just eventually have to be like, okay, we'll go out in the public market. You know, you can't, just like buying and selling stocks, you can't necessarily time it. So, how does that impact, you know, kind of balance some of those things? I mean the best example is 2008, 2009, where we had the financial crisis, and, as I mentioned, we were very much in growth phase in 2004, '05, '06, '07. Interesting enough, as we were moving into 2008, the timing wasn't great because we were doing a product transition, and then along came the financial crisis, and it was pretty mind boggling, And the end of 2008, December 2008, customers stopped buying. And at first we thought oh my God, is this just us? And then of course, pretty soon moving into January 2009 you realize it's not you. So we didn't ignore it, to be honest, we didn't ignore it. But what we did do was we kept hiring. We cut back a little bit on the hiring, and in fact, I wish we hadn't have done that. I wish we would have completely ignored it, and of course this is me now looking back, so I can say that. The reason I'm saying I wish we had ignored it and kept growing was six months after, moving into the second half of 2009, not only did we see our business starting to grow again, but it accelerated because a demand had built up during that time. So bottom line is I don't think you can ignore global issues going on. You certainly can't ignore big global issues like 2008, but you still have to focus on what you know as your business, especially if you know you've got a good market, you know there's a demand, and just see yourself through it. Yeah, you mentioned one of the companies you joined was pre-IPO from an advisor standpoint. Have you been a Nutanix advisor just before the IPO (mumbles)? I have, I've actually had the unique experience of being on Tableau pre-IPO, Nutanix pre-IPO, and also Apptio, all pre-IPO. So I've watched the three of them going through the IPO process. So of course, Dheeraj tries to say, look, you know, I'm not going to let Wall Street kind of dictate anything, but, you know, it has to be a little bit different when you've got kind of the financial people looking at things from the outside, always trying to second guess strategy and the like. How do you give advice through that? Yeah, my advice on this, and it is somewhat different, to say it's not different wouldn't be completely correct, however, you can't let Wall Street run your business, you can't, especially if you've got conviction in terms of what you're doing. The one area where you do need to be a bit careful is that, the thing I've always said when I was CEO of F5 was our business was all about, when I was asked, do you think you could be acquired? The answer has always been from me the following: We're focused on the business, we're focused on growing a company. When you do that you become more strategic and attractive to other companies. But as long as you keep growing, your market cap keeps high, and you keep going. Right. If your market cap drops as well as the stock price there is always a danger that you could become an acquisition target. So you can't ignore it completely. But frankly, both of those messages are win-wins for investors. Absolutely, what can you say about Nutanix? You know, a year after an IPO, 2800 employees, pushing globally, you know, this show's doubled in attendance from last year. Without getting into closed-doors things, what's your take on (mumbles). Yeah, and as an independent director, I have to be more generic, but clearly, fast-growing company in a great market, a leader in the hyperconvergent market. I love their concept of simplicity, invisible infrastructure. I think that's a place that customers want to be right now, so I think they're in really good position. What in the market is interesting you these days? I look across kind of the companies you work with, you know, data is becoming more and more valuable. I spent many years working for a large storage company, used to be it wasn't really about the data, it was about the storing, and now, data from the big data companies, everything else, it's about how do I leverage and get information out, you know, we're hearing Nutanix play into that message. Yeah, and really it's the three main areas, data, you know data in particular, the Cloud, I'm not going to give you anything new here, and security. They're the three hot topics today. And the three of those are twisted in a knot are they not? They're all linked together. We just interviewed a gentleman from a bank, and he said basically, all of our budget gets put on security these days. Yeah, I mean, what concerns you, is it kind of the geopolitical, the hackers and ransomware, security? I think back early in my career, security always got lip service as being important, but today, it absolutely comes to the front of mind and you know most companies I talk to are concern would probably be understating it as to kind of the state of security. No absolutely, I mean, it's touching everybody now, boards, independent board members, it's high up on the list of discussion topics at board meetings. You know, every company is vulnerable, and if you're a technology company that's got customer data and you're in the security business as well, you really have to make sure that you're well protected. How often is security a board-level discussion these days? Most board members, most board discussions, and certainly in the audit committee, it's almost every one now. What has to happen there? Making sure that it's being looked at properly by the executives, that they take it seriously, there's enough investment, making sure that all the tools are in place if there is an attack, all of the above. Do you touch on GDPR at all? I'm curious if that comes up in your conversations. No I haven't been involved in that. I know there's a breakout session on it today, but I've not been involved in that. It just reminds me of a similar thing is that people have said, you need to make sure you're doing your due diligence and doing as much as you can, which feels like the same for security, because nobody's going to say, yes, I'm 100% secure because there's no such thing anymore. There's no such thing and there's so many different attacks, and frankly, most companies have got security solutions from so many different vendors, even sometimes from your competitor. All right, so the last thing I have to say is I don't think we've ever done theCUBE in Scotland, and it's a beautiful country, so we've got to figure out how to do some small event there. I'll help you. (laugh) All right, John, I want to give you the final word, your take, you come, why do you attend? Obviously you're an independent board, you probably have some meetings, talk to us about a show like this, what brings you. Yeah, and this is the first one I've attended. I've actually attended one similar with Tableau and similar with Apptio as well. It's good for an independent board member to see some of the presentations, how the executives and management are talking to customers, so it's actually good to get more of a feel for the business. All right, well John McAdam, appreciate you bringing a different perspective to our programming. We always want to help give a taste of what's happening at these shows out to our audience. So thank you so much for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE.