>> 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]

>> Cisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering vmworld 2015, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystems sponsors. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vallante. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in San Francisco at Moscone North Lobby. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vallante. And our next guest is Jayshree Ullal, The President of, CEO of Arista Networks. Welcome back to theCUBE. We haven't seen you in couple years, welcome back. You look great. >> Good to be here, John, Dave. I see you don't put me in the middle anymore. (laughter) >> I know, we want to stare right at you and get all the data from out of your head, and get it, share it with the audience. Well, first thing I want to say is last time we spoke, you were a private company, now you've gone public, IPO. Congratulations. What's it like? What's it like from private company to public company? Share the experience. >> It's definitely different, for starters we're not Arista Networks, we're ANET. We are a four-letter symbol, I guess. So abbreviate everything. And then people just track us a whole lot more. And, you know, there's an automatic branding, an awareness of the company, and anything we do, every time we sneeze, we get written about. Good, bad, or not. >> You guys are pacing the market, and I remember, Dave and I, when we first started theCUBE, we were in the Cloudera office, and then when we first chatted, we'd see the boxes of Arista coming in. You guys made a great mark early on around people doing large scale, lot of networking. But the market's changed. SDN has exploded, VMware bought Nicira, SDN's the hot thing. NSX is doing well, as Pat Gelsinger said. What's going on? You guys have done some things. SDN certainly is, takes the market to where you guys had originally had your vision. What's the update with that whole SDN and how does Arista play into that? >> I think if you step back and look at SDN in the beginning, there was a lot of confusion. And my favorite acronym for SDN is Still Don't Know. But I actually think we still do know now, and we've gone from it being a marketing hype to really about openness, programmability, and building an infrastructure to do network management correctly. Software clearly drives our industry, and more importantly drives capxn OPX reduction. And what's really happening is there's a lot of change where it's not just devices and users and traditional applications, but really it's about workloads and workflows. And if you can realize there's so many different types of workloads that need control, and so many different types of workflows that need telemetry, that fundamentally is the essence of SDN in my view, and it takes a whole village. Arista can't do it alone. We're doing a lot of things on programatizing our stack and making network more open and programmable, but we work with a whole slew of vendors to really make it possible. >> During the early days, open flow was the buzzword, came out of a lot of academic stuff that was being what the geeks were working on. What do people get right? And there was lot of missteps early on with open flow, and only because it's early on. What did SDN get right, or did they get it wrong? And how did you guys see that 'cause you guys were already out shipping product when this hit. So what's your observation of what went right, what didn't go right, what's going right now, can you share your insight? >> Yeah, I think, you know, our founder Ken Duda would say this very well, which is when you look at open flow, it's a little bit of a technology searching for a problem. When you look at what Arista did with our extensible operating system, we built a state-oriented, publish subscribe model to solve a problem. And the fundamental problem we were solving was, we saw the industry building monolithic enterprise stacks when everybody was moving to the cloud. What are the three attributes a cloud meets? You got to be always on, you got to have scale, right, and you have to have tremendous agility. You got to move across your workloads fast. And that, to me, is the trick behind SDN not latching onto a technology, but whether it's open stack or big data analytics or new cloud applications or bringing the LAN and the WAN together, or places in the network converging, fundamentally, we were cloudifying everything whether it's public, private, or hybrid. >> So I got to ask you, I know you're going to see Pat Gelsinger shortly after this interview. Two themes that are coming on the queue over the past year around networking has been resiliency and agile, agility. Those two factors 'cause you have vertical and now horizontally scalable things going on. What's your take on that? As someone who's been in the industry, you've seen kind of the old generation now transition to the new generation, cloudification, API-ification, these are are new dynamics that are table stakes now in cloud. >> No, they are. And yet, if you look at the, both problems are hard problems. They cannot be solved by sprinkling some pixie dust. And what I mean by that is when you look at something like high availability, in the past in networking, you had two of everything, two supervisors, two operating systems. You had something called in server software upgrade, so that you'd bring one down and then bring the other. But today, there's no tolerance for two of everything. You know, no customer wants to pay for two of everything even if the vendors want it, right. So what you really need is smart system upgrade where you're doing everything real time. You know, at the colonel level, you need to automatically repair your faults. Software has memory leaks. Software has faults. It's how quickly you diagnose them, troubleshoot them, trap them and recover from them. And then if you look at hitless upgrades, you got to do them real time, you can't wait to have an enterprise window and bring it down and bring it up. Your boot time, your convergence time has to move from minutes to seconds, and the biggest thing you have to do is, let's look at simple command like copy paste. We do this over and over and over again. Change control has to improve. Rather than doing it every time, a hundred times, wouldn't it be nice if you could just press one command and it happens across the entire switch, across all the ports, across the entire network. So I think the definition of high availability has completely changed where it's really about network rollback, time stamping, real time recovery, and not just two or three of everything. >> So, it's, tight time here with you. John mentioned a public company, you guys have beat five quarters in a row, of course, you know, you get on that slope and the pressures go. But you can't fight the whims of the market. You just have to execute, and you guys are executing very well. Great growth, you're clearly gaining share. Partnerships. You announced a deal with HP in converged infrastructure. Just saw this week, or maybe it was late last week, that HP is OEMing NSX. So now it's got a really interesting converged play with Arista against Cisco. I want to talk about the competition and that partnership. >> Well, it's not so much against Cisco. It's following the trends. And I think there are two major trends, right? And they're actually C letters, too. Cloud and converged. So if you look at what Arista's really doing, we're serving a big public crowd trend. We're in six out of the seven major cloud operators. And there's no doubt that the cloud is happening, it's not just a buzzword. >> You call 'em cloud titans. >> They're called the cloud titans. You've done your homework. Good job. And hopefully, I'll be able to come back to the theCUBE and say we're in seven out of seven, but today we're in six out of seven. >> And the cloud titan is the big hyperscale guys, is that right? >> Absolutely, and we're just in a very early inning with them. Everybody thinks we're already saturated. We're just beginning. How many innings are there in a baseball game? >> Nine. >> Nine, in cricket there are only two. >> What inning are we in? >> No, we're in the first. Of two in cricket, a long way to go. (laughter) >> Cloud Native's right around the corner. What do you think of Cloud Native? What does Cloud Native mean to you? >> So, the Cloud Native really means bringing the cloud experience to public, private, or the hybrid. So you talked about the HP partnership. And over there, it's not really building a public cloud. It's about bringing a private cloud where you bring in the compute, the storage, the virtualization, and the network as a converged experience. Now, that one we can't do alone. And I couldn't think of two strong partners, better partners or stronger partners than VMware and HP to help do that for us. >> Well, you said it's not against Cisco, but that's a great alternative for the leading products in the number one marketshare. >> Absolutely, I think the enterprise companies have to have a wake up call. They need to understand that the one neck to choke or one lock in that's all proprietary is a thing of the past. And really, it's about building best of breed building blocks. >> So I want to ask you, just on some current events, and I'll see buzzwords that get recycled in every trend, is QOS policy-based fill in the blank. Everything's policy-based now, so that makes a lot of sense, I get that. Apple just announced a deal with Cisco where they are throttling, I shouldn't say throttling, or deep packet inspection, I won't say those two things. (laughter) Giving iOS users a preferred fast lane with Cisco gear, so it brings up this notion that workloads are driving infrastructure or devops, if you will. What's your take on all that? Are we going to see more things like that? Are we going to see more customization around prioritization? >> Well, I think QOS and especially policy are definitely overused words. First step, I don't think you'd apply policy to an application to make your network better. What you really have to do is make your workloads and workflows go better and have some control for them. So I'm not a big fan of tweaking every application of the policy 'cause the applications are changing, right? But if you look at what Apple's doing, I think this is a great thing for Apple because what they're really doing is consumerizing and enterprising their systems and devices, right. You're seeing the convergence of consumer and enterprise coming together. So I see this is really about improving all of our iPhone experiences across the enterprise. >> We got to wrap up 'cause you got to go see Pat Gelsinger. But I want to ask you one final question. You're an inspiration to the industry. You've been around a long time, you know a lot and you're leading a public company. What are the opportunities that you see for folks out there, boys and girls, men and women, in science and technology and in entrepreneurial opportunities? >> Yeah, I'm glad you ask this question because I think it's too easy with everything being hot for everybody to want to go straight to the top rung of the ladder. And I was telling Dave and you before, one step at a time. First you have to build your foundation on education. Boys and girls, education is important. Follow your heart, follow your dreams with math and science. You know, my dad started the IITs and he pushed me in engineering, and I didn't like it then but I realized you can be a cool engineer, and before Moscone got started, I actually went into the manhole of every PG&E circuit to make sure that the electrical circuits were okay for this now fantastic convention center. >> Can you help with the wifi? >> Back in those days, there was no wifi. That's the next step. So I definitely say, build your foundation, follow your dreams, but go one step at a time. Don't expect to be at the top rung right away. >> I know you're a parent. We are friends on Facebook. What's your advice to the younger generation in terms of opportunities that they could pursue in science and math? There's a lot more opportunities, interdisciplinary, not just computer science or electrical engineering, like it used to be when we were growing up, but now it's much broader. What are some of the things that you get excited about? >> I get excited about science. I think when you look at engineering, it's about applying science. You know, know your fundamental math, science, you know, physics, chemistry, bio, whatever turns you on. And don't make an assumption that it's tough or hard til you've been through it. You know, I had seven years of physics in high school. I don't recommend seven for everybody, but, you know, but I didn't really care for biology. So I would say never shy away from trying something til you know. And then, of course, there's applied science, whether it's computers or programming or media arts or visualization that you can add on top of that. So you're very right. I think there's the cake, which is your foundation, and then there's the icing where you can build on top of it. >> And will they find their passion? >> Absolutely, find your aptitude and passion. You know, you don't try to do drawing or needlework if you're not good at it. I wasn't. And I know my mom despaired about that, but you go, follow both what you're good at and what you're passionate about. >> Jayshree, thanks so much for spending time. I know you're super busy. Congratulations on your successes. >> Thanks for having me here, it's always a lot of fun. >> And we got to get you back on. This is theCUBE, bringing you more signal here all the data here in the theCUBE. We'll be right back, more live from San Francisco after this short break.

(upbeat music) >> From Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE covering the 15th annual GROW! Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hey, Lisa Martin with theCUBE on the ground at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, for the 15th annual ACG SV GROW! Awards. Can you hear the energy and all the innovation happening behind me? Well, I'm here with one of the board members of ACG SV, Ashley Tarver, big data evangelist for Cloudera. Ashley, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE tonight. >> My pleasure, I'm glad to be here. >> Lot of collaboration going on behind us, right? >> It's a great networking event. >> It is. >> 'Cause so many people have showed up. >> There's over 230 people. >> Oh, easily. >> Expected tonight, over 100 of those are C-levels. Before we get into your association with ACG SV, talk to us a little bit about what's going on at Cloudera, just the Hortonworks acquisition was just completed, the merger, a couple months ago, what's going on there? >> It's very exciting. As most people might know, we just did a major collaboration merger with a company called Hortonworks. And the two companies together, we're about twice the size as we were before and for the industry and for our customers, it's been really exciting because we've been able to really create what we call the enterprise data cloud that really enables our customers to bring all their data together into one single platform and we call it an edge-to-AI solution. We're really one of the only companies right now in the world who have the ability to do that in a comprehensive manner and we can do it on the premise, we can do it in the cloud, a hybrid cloud environment, so it gives you the ultimate flexibility and the merger has allowed us to really accomplish that for our customers. >> As we and every company that's succeeding today is living in this hybrid, multi-cloud environment where the edge is proliferating, the security perimeters are morphing dramatically, companies need to be able to transform digitally in a secure way, but also enable access to data from decades ago. >> Yeah, most anybody's who's listening to the media will hear IoT is really the big play and the ability to capture all that data from multiple in-points, edge devices, and bring it all into a single data repository is a major challenge. So, having the ability to do that in a. You can do it now with the way we're doing it, the way your company wants to do it. So if you're already in the cloud, you can stay there, if you wanted to keep it on the premise. So there's a lot of options that we now bring to the table. So hopefully, it becomes a little easier for our customers. >> So when you're talking with customers that maybe have a lot of workloads, enterprise workloads, maybe legacy still on prem, and you're talking to them in your role as the big data evangelist, where does the topic of AI come up? I mean, are you talking to them about here is a massive opportunity for you to actually leverage AI, you got to go to the cloud to do it? >> Absolutely. I mean, AI is kind of a marketing term that you hear a lot about. For us, it's really about machine learning and machine learning is taking large sets of data and putting logic on top of it and so you can tease out valuable insights that you might not otherwise get. So the ability to then apply that in an AI environment becomes extremely important and the ability to do that across a large data set is what's really complicated. But if you're a real data scientist, you want to have as much data as you can so your models can run more accurately. And as soon as you can do that, you'll have the ability to really improve your models, extract better insights out of the data you do own, and provide more value to your own company and your own customers. >> Absolutely, it's a fascinating topic, but since we're low on time here, we are at the 15th annual GROW! Awards. ACG SV recognizing Arista Networks for the Outstanding Growth Award and Adesto Technologies for the Emerging Growth Award. You've been involved as a board member of ACG SV for about a year now. What makes this organization worthy of your time? >> Well, it's really exciting 'cause in Silicon Valley, it's unique 'cause it's all about collaboration. The innovation that we create out of this location of the globe is through networking with our peers and ACG opens up that window, provides a door that allows you to meet with your peers, your competitors, your friends, and as a result, you can create insights and capabilities about your own company and technology directions that's really helpful. So, it's the networking, they also put on excellent C-circle events, which is really good because if your company is looking at growing as a startup, you might be able to get some valuable insights from peers who know how to do HR, merger acquisitions, finance. And so, the ability to do networking like at an event like this, the ability to come in and learn how to do business processes more effectively, it all plays a really important role at ACG. >> Well Ashley, thank you so much for carving out some time to join us on theCUBE tonight. >> My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> (Announcer) From Mountain View, California it's the Cube. Covering the 15th Annual Grow! Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube, on the ground at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for the 15th Annual Grow! Awards for the Association of Corporate Growth Silicon Valley, ACG SV. That's a mouthful. I'm here with one of the ACG SV board members, Zac Mutrux, the District Sales Manager at Insperity. Hey, Zack, it's great to have you on the Cube. >> Thank you so much, Lisa, I'm pleased to be here. >> So before we talk about what you're doing here at the 15th Annual Grow! Awards, tell our audience about Insperity. I was reading, I love taglines. >> Yes. >> And I see on your homepage, Insperity is obsessed with delivery HR mastery. Wow. >> Oh yeah. >> Obsessed and mastery. Those two words just jumped out. Tell us a little bit about what you guys do. >> Impressive, isn't it? Well, we actually just adjusted our tagline to HR that makes a difference. And that's really what it's all about. We feel like companies that are growing, if they're going to make it from good to the best, it has everything to do with the people. Attracting the best people and keeping them, developing them over time, and that's exactly what we do with our clients. >> So Insperity has been in business since 1986, and if I think of today's modern workforce, highly mobile, distributed, there's the whole on-demand industry. You guys have seen a tremendous amount of change that now can be massively influenced, and your customers can, using technology. Give me a little bit of that historical perspective on Insperity's inception and today's workforce, and how you're helping them attract and retain the best talent. >> Oh, absolutely. Well, when the company started it was in a maybe a 200 square foot room with one telephone between the two co-founders. There's no such thing as email. So, absolutely, there's been immense technological changes and there continues to be. I think that's one of the things that has been responsible for Insperity's success is its adoption of technology. Today we are as much a technology company as we are an employee benefits company, or an HR consulting company. It's really about creating a positive experience for the employees. That's part of being a competitive employer. >> Well it has to be a positive experience, right? For your customers. Because acquiring great talent is one thing, retaining them is another. And I want to kind of pivot off the retention there for a second. As the District Sales Manager, I was asking you before we went live, tell me maybe one of your favorite stories, and you said, "Wow". One of the great things, you guys are coming off great growth and FY18 revenue growth. One of the great things that Insperity has been really successful at is customer retention. And that's hard. You're proud of this. Tell us about that statistic that you mentioned, and how it is that Insperity is evolving and innovating over the last few decades to keep that retention number as phenomenal as it is. >> Well, Insperity's been named one of the most admired corporations in the country, actually, five years in a row by Fortune magazine. And that's the kind of press that you can't buy. One of the accolades that I'm most proud of is that in the past year our own employees named us one of the top 100 companies to work for in the United States. Which is, I think, the proof that we really know what we're doing with our clients. Because there are a lot of different companies out there, various competitors, and almost none of them are on that list. So, it's living our values and expressing through our service team, our extraordinary service team, that, I think, keeps our clients coming back to us year after year. About 85% renew. That's been consistent. A high level of client retention for the past three years. Even more extraordinary is that we've been growing both top line and bottom line revenue at the same time. So there's just a testament to our leadership, to our co-founder and CEO, Paul Sarvadi, and to the best of team-- >> But it sounds like it's a lot of symbiotic relationships between the internal retention at Insperity that is maybe leading through to your customers seeing, hey, there's not a high turnover here. These people are doing, they love what they're doing. They're working for a good company. So there's probably a lot of symbiotic behaviors. >> Well, that's exactly right. I think you really hit the nail of the head. It's about culture. It's a culture that starts from the top with leadership, and it filters down throughout the organization. And we're not looking to do business with every single company. We're looking to do business with the companies that believe the things that we believe. That is, companies that have high levels of commitment, trust, communication. They do better financially then companies that don't have those things. >> And along those lines, mentioning just before we wrap here, we are at the 15th Annual ACG SV Awards tonight, where they're honoring two award winners. The Outstanding Growth Award winner is Arista Networks. And the Emerging Growth winner is Adesto Technologies. I'm excited to talk to them later. But I wanted to get a little bit of perspective on you've been involved as a board member of ACSG since last year. Tell me a little bit about what makes ACG SV worthy of your time. >> Oh, absolutely. That's a great question. It's just an extraordinary community, I think, of the top leaders in Silicon Valley come together. The monthly Key Notes add a lot of value. It's an intimate setting and there's real conversations that are taking place on topics that are relevant to today's professionals. So for me to be able to engage and hopefully add some value as a board member is privilege. >> And you can hear probably a lot of those conversations going on right behind Zac and me tonight. Zac, it's been a pleasure to have you on the Cube. Thank you so much for giving us some of your time. >> Oh, right, thank you, Lisa. >> For the Cube, I'm Lisa Martin on the ground. Thanks for watching. (pop electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back, everyone. Live here in Las Vegas, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage for three days at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Day two winding down, a lot of action happening, a lot of news, a lot of technology announced with a lot of ground-breaking stuff, and our next guest is Navin Mittal, Director, Products and Solutions Marketing at the Data Center Infrastructure Group. Welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you again. >> Good to see you, John. >> Thanks for coming on, I mean a lot of stuff going on under the hood. We heard from Susan about the servers with the security chip and the silicon. You guys got FlexFabric, you got all this capacity. It's really kind of like the new sports cars coming out with Gen 10, under the hood a lot of action happening. What's going on with the relationships? We're hearing a partner-centric message here at Discover this year. Give us the update. >> Yeah, so first of all, absolutely spot on on the whole Gen 10 servers. We are data crunchers. We will get the market right. But let's talk about networking, because that's something that actually combines everything, when you talk about server storage and networking and our customers as you very well know, can't just give it service alone. So, if you may or may not remember, six months back we announced the strategic relationship with Arista Networks where we basically said that they are our preferred network provider going forward. >> John: Yeah, we had them on in London. >> Okay great, yeah, so it's been going great so far. The giant go-to market has not been just go-to market but it's also been reference architecture designs. It's been creation of reference architectures with our server teams especially mission critical servers, SAP HANA talk about it so. >> John: Give us the update. What's new with the partnership? What's the progress in six months? >> Yeah, so in six months, our sales teams are completely trained and stoked to go out and sell there. Our customers are really excited with the partnership. The are asking for not only HPs servers and storage solutions but of course the Arista products also. 'Cause now they have a choice of products. If they are existing FlexFabric customers, they already worked very well with HPE, but now with the bringing in of the Arista switches, you can get the software to fine layer end-to-end. >> And you get the high end covered. A lot of service provider opportunities. What's the big take away in the marketplace from your standpoint? As you look at what's going on here at Discover 2017, and looking at what you're doing with Arista at the networking layer, a lot of interesting things are going on at the network layer, a lot of open source projects, a lot of new software, what's your take on what's going on at the network layer in the Cloud and whatnot? >> Open source has always been an integral part of HP's DNA, as you very well know, right? We have been a great contributor if you talk about Helion or you talk about OpenSwitch which was happening last year. Customers are looking for business outcomes. They don't really care whether it's open source or closed source at one point. We are all about outcomes and business solutions. So, we bring in the best of breed networking along with best of breed servers and storage, combine them to give a solution that we can offer to our customers whether they are in the Cloud-centric journey, they've already made the transition to Cloud or they trying to tackle with legacy (mumbles) >> So what are some examples of some of the solutions? >> Yeah, the SAP HANA solution architecture that we did recently, not many people know about this, but the HANA Cloud actually runs on the Arista switches already. Now think about power that our customers can get if we can bring that flexibility and agility that SAP uses internally in their Cloud into the Enterprise data centers today. So that's the reference architecture which we already have. >> Okay, and then in that example, so the core switch is Arista, and what do you guys bring to the table, everything else around it? >> Storage, yes. And don't forget the Pointnext consulting, right? So that is the switch, ties everything together so that customers can actually utilize not only our products and solutions, but the entire journey. >> And in that solution, for example, the HANA, when you mentioned Pointnext to consulting. What specifically is the service's organization doing? Is it tuned for SAP HANA? Is there some magic sauce that's sprinkled in? How does that all work? >> Yeah, so great point. And so the Pointnext to consulting of course makes a point to understand where you are currently in your journey, right? Depending on where you are, the SAP HANA Cloud solution may not be a perfect fit. In this example that I mentioned about SAP HANA itself we just wanted to highlight the fact that if you are ready to move to the Cloud like agility into your private data center, we have the solution ready with you, and you can apply it in your private data center. So your journey might begin with Pointnext, it might begin with coming to HPE. >> Alright, so here's the hard billion dollar question, not million, billion dollar question. >> It is a billion dollar question. >> Trillion dollar question. Well true private Cloud TAM is 260 billion. So that's not including hybrid. But Meg's up there too. >> Navin: Well it's 250 billion based on one of the reports that Wikibon put in. >> The true private Cloud. Ground-breaking again, another great Wikibon research that no one else is doing. Again, that number is legit, that's basically saying that On-prem isn't going away any time soon. I think this plays beautifully to what you guys are doing. But the question is this, how are you going to simplify as customers are transforming their operating model to Cloud-like, how are you going to simplify it with these relationships? >> Yeah, so for that, to talk about simplicity I need to take a step up, right? Because you saw Meg talk about the hybrid ID strategy, and then we also talked about the Gen 10 Silver announcement where we talk about control and agility and security. That's where the Arista portfolio fits in squarely across the hybrid ID and the Pointnext to consulting because now you're talking about the security solutions being end-to-end from service, storage, and networking, while giving you the agility that you're already accustomed to in some cases from (mumbles) solutions and having the capacity control from our financial services offering. >> So, from a customer standpoint, no real change, it's kind of like, it's enabling them extracted away, I'm just trying to get on the network side, what's your policy? A lot of policies going, a lot of automation opportunities. >> Yes. >> What's going on there? >> Yeah, so I don't know if you know about the product called the Spirit Cloud networking that we offer, where it is really allowing the policies that are defined at the application level and translating that into the underlying infrastructure level. So think about this, in a typical data center you tend to have silos, where you have a server silo, networking silo, and a storage silo, and from the time the application defines the policies and the requirement from an application standpoint to reach the end customer, you would have to go through these silos in order to provision those. With bringing in distributor Cloud networking, and it's integration with other networks, those policies get automatically deployed. And guess what, it's a heterogeneous environment, so you can actually mix and match existing workloads along with existing infrastructure as well. >> And what happens to the IT pros that used to be associated with those different silos? I mean, what are they all doing today? >> Yeah, they get to do much better things, right? Because IT is now transitioning from a cost center to a revenue generator. And it's not about firing people, right? Let me make sure I clarify this, it's about realizing your resources so that they can now become more productive with the time that they have. I don't know about you, if I'm done at 5 pm, you could either go back to your home, and I'm sure you have families, or you could spend time figuring out the next network problem that you're having in the data center. That's where the true agility comes out, that's where the true economic savings come out. >> That's where software programmable infrastructure works. People can get their weekends back. That's really kind of like, I mean, a lot of time is spend on mundane tasks. Either chasing down some sort of automated provisioning, or I mean, manual provisioning, or configuring stuff. What's the big game-changer? Is it machine-learning that we're seeing there, how do you guys see that technology? What's the enabler? >> Yeah, so I think at the end of the day, customers are looking for a stack, end-to-end stack, that one company can bring to them with the flexibility of choosing every layer within the stack. So we at HP of course are very focused on openness, right? So the HPE stack actually has all the way from applications to computers, to servers, to storage, to networking, whether you're talking about Nimble or the SimpliVity acquisition, or the (mumbles) that we have, to the underlying networking layer. And in this case, we are contending that Arista switching is the fabric which brings in best of breed. But you're free to choose the other layers of the stack as well. >> And how do you differentiate in the marketplace? The competition or the customer says, well I should have you guys HP and Arista instead of whatever, vendor X,Y, or Z. What do you tell them? >> Yeah, so the famous thing that I tell is you are either in the legacy mode and stuck with a typical vendor, you know we all know what the name means but I won't mention it here, where they try to keep selling you newer and newer gear with newer operating systems, or you go with a vendor that is open, has a DNA of being open, will hold your hand until you actually deployed in the data center and give you the choice that you need in the data center to be successful. >> Surely making things easier has been key. Nimble, and SimpliVity really kind of put the design at the center, and then brought software in, that changes the game. That's more Cloud-like. That's certainly very DevOps friendly. >> Absolutely, and it doesn't even stop there, right? If you take the conversation up higher up to the virtualization or the container layer, discussion. When you start talking about digitally the containers bring into the world, then it's a completely game-changer. How do you ensure that the network traffic that and application sitting on a container somewhere in one of the Vms or in Silver, can be translated and traced all the way back to the switchboard. And ensuring that nothing goes down. >> And that's the whole ethos of infrastructure as code, is actually make it programmable. So the app guys don't have to get under the hood. >> Yes, that programmable is taking care of the agility side of the house. What I am talking about is visibility and security so that if something does go wrong, we all are human, something can go wrong, even in programming, you need to pinpoint and detect and create and automate and fix issues as fast as possible. And there are some fundamental underlying tenants of the Arista operating system which allows us to do that, and of course the secret sauce that we add on top of that is the combination with the server and storage. >> Navin, thank you for coming into theCUBE and sharing insights. Final question for you. What's your takeaway from this year at Discover? What's the vibe, what's your personal (mumbles) simplifying, IT, hybrid IT, and intelligent edge, outside of the core things, what's your big takeaway? >> Yeah, I think I am super excited after meeting our customers and partners here. We are back in the game. We are here to take the market by storm and we will be doing it. >> Alright, here breaking it down in the networking Arista relationship and all the great stuff in the networking life. Navin, thank you so much. It's theCUBE live coverage from Las Vegas, in HPE 2017. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. (futuristic music)