>>We're back at your storage service. Emil Stan is here. He's the chief commercial officer and chief marketing officer of open line. Thank you, Emil, for coming on the cube. Appreciate your time. >>Thank you, David. Nice. Uh, glad to be here. >>Yeah. So tell us about open line. You're a managed service provider. What's your focus? >>Yeah, we're actually a cloud managed service provider and I do put cloud in front of the managed services because it's not just only the scripts that we manage. We have to manage the clouds as well nowadays. And then unfortunately, everybody only thinks there's one cloud. But's always multiple layers in the cloud. So we have a lot of work in integrating, uh, it where a cloud manages provider in the Netherlands, focusing on, uh, companies who have a head office in the Netherlands, mainly in the, uh, healthcare local government, social housing logistics department. And then in the midsize companies between say 250 to 10,000 office employees. Uh, and that's what we do. We provide them with excellent cloud managed services, uh, as it should be >>Interesting, you know, lot early on in the cloud days, highly regulated industries like healthcare government were somewhat afraid of the cloud. So I'm sure that's one of the ways in which you provide value to your customers is helping them become cloud proficient. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about the value prop to customers. Why do they do business with you? >>Yeah, I think, uh, there are a number of reasons why they do business with us or choose to choose for our managed services provider. Tracy, of course, are looking for stability and continuity, uh, and, and from a cost perspective, predict predictable costs, but nowadays you also have a shortage in personnel and knowledge. So, and it's not always very easy for them to access, uh, those skill sets because most it, people just want to have, uh, a great variety in work, what they are doing, uh, towards, towards the local government, uh, healthcare, social housing. They actually, uh, a sector that, uh, that are really in between embracing the public cloud, but also have a lot of legacy and, and bringing together best of all, worlds is what we do. So we also bring them comfort. We do understand what legacy, uh, needs from a manager's perspective. We also know how to leverage the benefits in the public cloud. Uh, and, uh, I'd say from a marketing perspective, actually, we focus on using an ideal cloud, being a mix of traditional and future based cloud. >>Thank you. I, you know, I'd like to get your perspective on this idea of as a service and the, as a service economy that we often talk about on the cube. I mean, you work with a lot of different companies. We talked about some of the industries and, and increasingly it seems like organizations are focused more on outcomes, continuous value delivery via, you know, suites of services and, and they're leaning into platforms versus one off product offerings, you know, do you see that? How do you see your customers reacting to this as a service trend? >>Yeah. Uh, to be honest, sometimes it makes it more complex because services like, look at your Android or iPhone, you can buy apps, uh, and download apps the way you went to. So they have a lot of apps, but how do you integrate it into one excellent workflow, something that works for you, David or works for me? Uh, so the difficulty, some sometimes lies in, uh, the easy accessibility that you have to those solutions, but nobody takes into account that they're all part of a chain or workflow supply chain, uh, and, and, uh, they're being hyped as well. So what, we also have a lot of time in, in, in, in, in managing our customers, is that the tremendous feature push feature push that there is from technology providers, SaaS providers. Whereas if you provide 10 features, you only need one or two, uh, but the other eight are very distracting from your prime core business. Uh, so there's a natural way in that people are embracing, uh, SA solutions, embracing cloud solutions. Uh, but what's not taken into account as much is that we love to see it the way that you integrate all those solutions to it's something that's workable for the person that's actually using them. And it's seldomly that somebody is only using one solution. There's always a chain of solutions. Um, so yeah, there are a lot of opportunities, but also a lot of challenges for us, but also for our customers. >>Do you see that trend toward, as a service continuing, or do you actually see based on what you're just saying that pendulum, you know, swinging back and forth, somebody comes out with a new sort of feature product and that, you know, changes the dynamic or do you see as a service really having legs? >>Ah, that's very, very good question, David, because that's something that's keeps our busy all the time. We do see a trend in as a service looking at, uh, talk about pure later on. We also use pure as a service more or less. Yeah. And it really helps us. Uh, but you see, uh, um, that sometimes people make a step too, too fast, too quick, not well thought of, and then you see what they call sort of cloud repatriation, tend that people go back to what they're doing and then they stop innovating or stop leveraging. The possibilities are actually there. Uh, so from a consultancy guidance and architecture point of view, we try to help them as much possible to think in a SA thought, but just don't use the, cloud's just another data center. Eh, and so it's all about managing the maturity on our side, but on our customer side as well. >>So I'm interested in how you're sort of your philosophy and it relates, I think, in, in, in terms of how you work with pure, but how do you stay tightly in lockstep with, with your customers so that you don't over rotate so that you don't them to over rotate, but then you're not also, you don't wanna be too late to the game. How, how do you manage all that? >>Oh, there's, there's, there's a world of interactions between us and our customers. And so I think a well known, uh, uh, uh, thing that people, the most customer intimacy, that's very important for us to get to know our customers and get to predict which way they're moving. But the, the thing that we add to it is also the ecosystem intimacy. So no, the application and services landscape, our customers know the primary providers and work with them, uh, to, to, to create something that, that really fits the customers to just not look at from our own silo where a cloud managed service provider that we actually work in the ecosystem with, with, with, with the primary providers. And we have, I think where the average customers, I think we have, uh, uh, uh, in a month we have so much interactions on our operational level and technical levels, strategic level. >>We do bring together our customers also, and to jointly think about what we can do together, what we independently can never reach, but we also involve our customers in defining our own strategy. So we have something we call a customer involvement board. So we present a strategy and today, does it make sense? Eh, this is actually what you need also. So we take a lot of our efforts into our customers and we do also, uh, understand the significant moments of truth. We are now in this, in this broadcast, David there. So you can imagine that at this moment, not thinking go wrong. Uh, if, if, if the internet stops, we have a problem. And now, so we, we actually know that this broadcast is going on for our customers. And we manage that. It's always on, uh, uh, where in the other moments in the week, we might have a little less attention, but this moment we should be there in these moments of truth that we really embraced. We got them well described. Everybody working out line knows what the moment of truth is for our customers. Uh, uh, so we have a big logistics provider. For instance, you does not have to ask us to, uh, have, uh, a higher availability on black Friday or cyber Monday. We know that's the most important part in the year for him or her. Does it answer your question, David? >>Yes. We know as well. You know, when these big, the big game moments you have to be on your top, uh, top of your game. Yeah. Uh, you know, the other thing, a Emil about this as a service approach that I really like is, is it's a lot of it is consumption based and the data doesn't lie, you can see adoption, you know, D daily, weekly, monthly. And so I wonder how you're leveraging pure as a service specifically in what kind of patterns you're seeing in, in, in the adoption, >>Uh, pure as a service for our customers. It's mainly never visible. Uh, we provide storage services, provide storage solutions, storage job is part of a bigger thing of a server of application. Uh, so the real benefits to be honest of, of course, towards our customer, it's all flash, uh, uh, and they have the fast, fastest storage is available. But for ourself, we, uh, we use less resources to manage our storage. We have far more that we have a near to maintenance free storage solution now because we have it as a service and we work closely together with pure. Uh, so, uh, actually the way we treat our customers is the way pure treats us as well. And that's why there's a used click. So the real benefits, uh, uh, how we leverage is it normally we had a bunch of guys managing us storage. Now we only have one and knowing that's a shortage of it, personnel, the other persons can well be, uh, involved in other parts of our services or in other parts of an innovation. So, uh, that's simply great. >>You know, um, my takeaway Emil is that you've made infrastructure, at least, least the storage infrastructure, invisible to your customers, which is the way it should be. You didn't have to worry about it. And you've, you've also attacked the, the labor problem. You're not, you know, provisioning lungs anymore, or, you know, tuning the storage, you know, with, with arms and legs. So that's huge. So that gets me into the next topic, which is business transformation. That, that means that I can now start to attack the operational model. So I've got a different it model. Now I'm not managing infrastructure same way. So I have to shift those resources. And I'm presuming that it's a bus now becomes a business transformation discussion. How are you seeing your customers shift those resources and focus more on their business as a result of this sort of as a service trend? >>I think I do not know if they, they transform their business. Thanks to us. I think that they can more leverage their own business. They have less problems, less maintenance, et cetera, et cetera. But we also add new, uh, certainties to it, like, uh, uh, the, the latest service we we released was imutable storage being the first in the Netherlands offering this thanks to, uh, thanks to the pure technology, but for customers, it takes them to give them a good night rest because, you know, we have some, uh, geopolitical issues in the world. Uh, there's a lot of hacking. People have a lot of ransomware attacks and, and we just give them a good night rest. So from a business transformation, doesn't transform their business. I think that gives them a comfort in running your business, knowing that certain things are well arranged. You don't have to worry about that. We will do that. We'll take it out of your hands and you just go ahead and run your business. Um, so to me, it's not really transformation. It's just using the right opportunities at the right moment. >>The imutable piece is interesting because of course, but speaking of as a service, you know, anybody can go on the dark web and buy ransomware as a service. I mean, as it's, he was seeing the, as a service economy hit, hit everywhere, the good and the, and the not so good. Um, and so I presume that your customers are, are looking at, I imutability as another service capability of the service offering and really rethinking, maybe because of the recent, you know, ransomware attacks, rethinking how they, they approach, uh, business continuance, business resilience, disaster recovery. Do you see that? >>Yep, definitely. Definitely. I, not all of them yet. Imutable storage. So it's like an insurance as well. Yeah. Which you have when you have imutable storage and you have, you have a ransomware attack, at least if you part the data, which never, if data is corrupted, you cannot restore it. If your hardware is broken, you can order new hardware. Every data is corrupted. You cannot order new data. Now we got that safe and well. And so we offer them the possibility to, to do the forensics and free up their, uh, the data without a tremendous loss of time. Uh, but you also see that you raise the new, uh, how do you say, uh, the new baseline for other providers as well? Eh, so there's security of the corporate information security officer, the CIO, they're all fairly happy with that. And they, they, they raise the baseline for others as well. So they can look at other security topics and look from, say a security operation center that now we can really focus on our prime business risks, because from a technical perspective, we got it covered. How can we manage the business risk, uh, which is a combination of people, processes and technology. >>Right. Makes sense. Okay. I'll give you the last word. Uh, talk about your relationship with pure, where you wanna see that, that going in the future. >>Uh, I hope we've be working together for a long time. Uh, I, I ex experienced them very involved. Uh, it's not, we have done the sell and now it's all up to you now. We really closely working together. I know if I talk to my prime marketing, Marcel height is very happy and it looks a little more or less if we work with pure, like we're working with colleagues, not with a supplier, uh, and a customer, uh, and, uh, the whole pure concept is quite fascinating. Uh, I, uh, I had the opportunity to visit San Francisco head office, and they told me to fish in how they launched pure being, if you want to implement it, it had to be on one credit card. The, the, the menu had to be on one credit card, just a simple thought of put that as your big hair, audacious goal to make the simplest, uh, implementable storage available. But for, uh, it gives me the expectation that there will be a lot of more surprises with puring in near future. Uh, and for us as a provider, what we, uh, literally really look forward to is that, that for us, these new developments will not be new migrations. It will be a gradual growth of our services on storage services. Uh, so that's what I expect, and that was what I, and we look forward to. >>Yeah, that's great. Uh, thank you so much, Emil, for coming on the, the cube and, and sharing your thoughts and best of luck to you in the future. >>Thank you. >>You're welcome. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. Okay. In a moment, I'll be back to give you some closing thoughts on at your storage service. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

(upbeat music) >> We're back with Steve McDowell, the Principal Analyst for Data & Storage at Moor Insights and Strategy. Hey Steve, great to have you on. Tell us a little bit about yourself. You've got a really interesting background and kind of a blend of engineering and strategy and what's your research focus? >> Yeah, so my research, my focus area is data and storage and all the things around that, whether it's On-Prem or Cloud or, you know, software as a service. My background, as you said, is a blend, right? I grew up as an engineer. I started off as an OS developer at IBM. I came up through the ranks and shifted over into corporate strategy and product marketing and product management, and I have been doing working as an industry analyst now for about five years at Moor Insights and Strategy. >> Steve, how do you see this playing out in the next three to five years? I mean, cloud got it all started, it's going to snowballing. You know, however you look at it percent of spending on storage that you think is going to land in as a service. How do you see the evolution here? >> IT buyers are looking at as a service and consumption base is, you know, a natural model. It extends the data center, brings all of the flexibility all of the goodness that I get from public cloud, but without all of the downside and uncertainty on cost and security and things like that, right, that also come with the public cloud and it's delivered by technology providers that I trust and that I know, and that I worked with, you know, for, in some cases, decades. So, I don't know that we have hard data on how much adoption there is of the model, but we do know that it's trending up, you know and every infrastructure provider at this point has some flavor of offering in the space. So, it's clearly popular with CIOs and IT practitioners alike. >> So Steve, organizations are at a they're different levels of maturity in their, their transformation journeys, and of course, as a result, they're going to have different storage needs that are aligned with their bottom line business objectives. From an IT buyer perspective, you may have data on this, even if it's anecdotal, where does storage as a service actually fit in and can it be a growth lever? >> It can absolutely be a growth leader. It gives me the flexibility as an IT architect to scale my business over time without worrying about how much money I have to invest in storage hardware. Right? So I, I get kind of, again, that cloud like flexibility in terms of procurement and deployment, but it gives me that control by oftentimes being on site within my premise, and then I manage it like a storage array that I own. So, you know, it's beautiful for for organizations that are scaling and it's equally nice for organizations that just want to manage and control cost over time. So, it's a model that makes a lot of sense and fits and certainly growing in adoption and in popularity. >> How about from a technology vendor perspective? You've worked for in the tech industry for companies? What do you think is going to define the winners and losers in this space? If you running strategy for a storage company, what would you say? >> I think the days of of a storage administrator managing, you know, rate levels and recovering and things of that sort are over, right? What these organizations like Pure delivering but they're offering is simplicity. It's a push button approach to deploying storage to the applications and workloads that need it, right? It becomes storage as a utility. So, it's not just the, you know the consumption based economic model of as a service. It's also the manageability that comes with that or the flexibility of management that comes with that. I can push a button, deploy bites to you know a workload that needs it, and it just becomes very simple, right, for the storage administrator, in a way that, you know kind of old school On-Prem storage can't really deliver. >> You know, I want to, I want to ask you, I mean I've been thinking about this because again, a lot of companies are, are you know, moving, hopping on the as a service bandwagon. I feel like, okay, in and of itself, that's not where the innovation lives. The innovation is going to come from making that singular experience from On-Prem to the clouds across clouds maybe eventually out to the edge. Do you, where do you see the innovation in as a service? >> Well, there's two levels of innovation, right? One, is business model innovation, right? I now have an organizational flexibility to build the infrastructure to support my digital transformation efforts, but on the product side and the offering side, it really is as you said, it's about the integration of experience. Every enterprise today touches a cloud in some way, shape or form. Right, I have data spread, not just in my data center, but at the edge, oftentimes in a public cloud, maybe a private cloud. I don't know where my data is, and it really lands on the storage providers to help me manage that and deliver that manageability experience to to the IT administrators. So, when I look at innovation in this space, you know, it's not just a a storage array and rack that I'm leasing, right, this is not another lease model. It's really fully integrated, you know end to end management of my data and yeah and all of the things around that. >> Yeah, so to your point about a lease model is if you're doing a lease, you know, yeah. You can shift CapEx to OPEX, but you're still committed to you have to over provision, whereas here and I wanted to ask you about that. It's an interesting model, right, because you got to read the fine print. Of course the fine print says you got to commit to some level typically, and then if, you know, if you go over you you charge for what you use and you can scale that back down and that's got to be very attractive for folks. I wonder if you we'll ever see like true cloud like consumption pricing, that has two edges to it, right? You see consumption based pricing in some of the software models and you know yeah, people like it, the, the lines of business maybe because they're paying in by the drink, but then procurement hates it because they don't have predictability. How do you see the pricing models? Do you see that maturing or do you think we're sort of locked in on, on where we're at? >> No, I do see that maturing, right? And when you work with a company like Pure to understand their consumption base and as a service and you know, when you work with a company like Pure to understand their consumption base and as a service offerings, it really is sitting down and understanding where your data needs are going to scale. Right? You buy in at a certain level, you have capacity planning. You can expand if you need to. You can shrink if you need to. So, it really does put more control in the hands of the IT buyer than, well certainly then traditional CapEx based On-Prem, but also more control than you would get, you know working with an Amazon or an Azure. >> Well the next 10 years, it ain't going to be like the last 10 years. Thanks Steve! We'll leave it there for now. Love to have you back. Look at, keep it right there. You don't want to miss this next segment where we dig into the customer angle. You're watching theCube production of At Your Storage Service, brought to you by PureStorage. One more. Okay, thanks Steve! We'll leave it there for now. I'd love to have you back. Keep it right there, At Your Storage Service continues in a moment. You're watching theCube. (upbeat music)

(bright intro music) >> The cloud has popularized many useful concepts in the past decade, working backwards from the customer to pizza teams and DevOps mindset, the shared responsibility model, and security, of course, the shift from CapEx to OPEX, and as a service consumption models. The last item is what we're here to talk about today. Pay for consumption is attractive because you're not over provisioning, at least not the way you used to. You'd have to buy for peak capacity events, but there are always two sides to every story, and while pay for use more closely ties IT consumption to business value, procurement teams don't always love the uncertainty of the cloud bill each month, but consumption pricing and as a service models are here to stay in software and hardware. Hello, I'm Dave Vellante and welcome to "At Your Storage Service" made possible by Pure Storage, and with me is Prakash Darji who's the General Manager of the Digital Experience Business Unit at Pure. Prakash, welcome to the program. >> Thanks Dave. Thanks for having me. >> You bet. Okay, we've seen this shift to as a service, the as a service economy, subscription models, and this as a service movement have gained real momentum. It's clear over the past several years. What's driving this shift? Is it pressure from investors and technology companies that are chasing the all important ARR, their annual recurring revenue stream? Is it customer driven? Give us your insights. >> Well, look, I think we'll do some definitional stuff first. I think we often mix the definition of a subscription and a service, but, you know, subscription is, "Hey, I can go for a pay up front or pay as I go." Service is more about, "How do I not buy something just by the outcome?" So, you know, the concept of delivering storage as a service means, what do you want in storage, performance, capacity, availability? Like that's what you want. Well, how do you get that without having to worry about the labor of planning, capacity management? Those labor elements are what's driving it. So I think in the world where you have to do more with less and in a world where security becomes increasingly important where standardization will allow you to secure your landscape against ransomware and those types of things, those trends are driving the SaaSification of storage, and the only way to deliver that is storage as a service. >> So that's good. You maybe thinking about it differently than some of the other companies that I talked to, but so you've made inroads here, pretty big inroads actually, and changed the thinking in enterprise data storage with a huge emphasis on simplicity. That's really Pure's raison d'etre. How does storage as a service fit in to your innovation agenda overall? >> Well, our innovation agenda started, as you mentioned, with the simplicity, you know, a decade ago with the Evergreen Architecture. That architecture was beyond the box. How do you go ahead and say, "I can improve performance or capacity as I need it." Well, that's a foundational element to deliver a service because once you have that technology, you can say, "Oh, you know what? You've subscribed to this performance level. You want to raise your performance level and yes, that'll be a higher dollar per gig or dollar per terabyte," but how do you do that without a data migration? How do you do that with a non-disruptive service change? How do you do that with a delivery via software update? Those elements of non-disruptive updates, when you think SaaS, Salesforce, you don't know when Salesforce doesn't update. You don't know when they're increasing something, adding a new capability. It just shows up. It's not a disruptive event. So to drive that standardization and SaaSification in service delivery, you need to keep that simplicity of delivery first and foremost, and you can't allow, like, if the goal was, "I want to change from this service here to that service here," and a person needed to show up and do a day data migration, that's kind of useless. You've broken the experience of flexibility for a customer. >> Okay, so I like the Salesforce analogy, but I want to jump out do a little side for a second. So I've got to make some commitment to Pure, right? Some baseline commitment, and if I do, then I can dial up and then pay for what I use, and I can dial it down, correct? >> Correct. >> Okay. I can't do that with Salesforce, all right? I could dial up, but then I'm stuck with those licenses. So you have a better model in Salesforce, I would argue. Okay. >> Yeah. I would agree with that. >> Okay, so, and I got to pay for everything up front. Anyway, let's go back to I was kind of pushing at you a little bit at my upfront, you know, about, you know, the ARR model, the all-important, you know, financial metric, but let's talk from the customer standpoint. What are the benefits of consuming storage as a service from your customer's perspective? >> Well, one is when you start your storage journey, do you really know what you need? And I would argue, most of the time, people are guessing, right? It's like, "Well, I think I need this. This is the performance I think I need or this is the capacity I think I need," and, you know, with the scientific method, you actually deploy something, and you're like, "Do I need more? Do I need less?" You find out as you're deploying. So in a storage as a service world, when you have the ability to move up performance levels or move out capacity levels, and you have that flexibility, then you have the ability to just to meet demand as you deploy, and that's the most important element of meeting business needs today. The applications you deploy are not in your control when you're providing storage to your end consumers. >> Yeah. >> They're going to want different levels of storage. They're going to want different performance thresholds. That's kind of a pay, you know, pay for performance type culture, right? You can use HR analogy for it. You pay for performance. You want top talent, you pay for it. You want top storage performance, you pay for it. You don't, you can pay less, and you can actually get lower performance tiers. Not everything is a tier one application, and you need the ability to deploy it, but when you start, how do you know the way your end customers are going to be consuming or do you need a dictated upfront? 'Cause that's infrastructure dictating business inflexibility, and you never want to be in that position. >> I got another analogy for you. It's like, you know, we do a lot of hosting at our home and you know, like Thanksgiving, right? And you go to the liquor store and say, "Okay, what should I get, should we get red wine? We got to go white wine, we got to get some beer. Should I get bubbles? Yeah, I get some bubbles." 'Cause you don't know what people are going to have, and so you over provision everything and then there's a run on bubbles and you're like, "Ah, we're running the bubbles," so you just over buy, but there's a liquor store that actually will take it back. So I got to do business with those guys every time 'cause it's way more flexible. I can dial up capacity or I can dial up performance, and dial it back down if I don't use it. >> Where you're going to be drinking a lot more the next few weeks. >> Yeah, exactly, like which is the last thing you want. Okay, so let's talk about how Pure kind of meets this as a service demand. You've touched upon your differentiators from others in the market. You know, love to hear about the momentum. What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, look, our business is growing well largely built on, you know, what customers need. Specifically, where the market is at today is there's a set of folks that are interested in the financial transformation of CapEx to OPEX. Like that definitely exists in the industry around, "How do I get a paper use model?" The next kind of more advanced customer is interested in, "How do I go ahead and remove labor to deliver storage?" And a service gets you there on top of a subscription. The most sophisticated customer says, "How do I separate storage production with consumption and production of storage?" Being a storage producer should be about standardization so I could do policy based management. Why is that important? You know, coming back to some of the things I said earlier, in the world where ransomware attacks are common, you need the standardized security policies. Linux has new vulnerabilities every other day, like find two, three critical vulnerabilities a week. How do you stay on top of it? The complexity of staying on top of it should be, "Look, let's standardize and make it a vendor problem, and assume the vendor's going to deliver this to me." So that standardization allows you to have business policies that allow you to stay current and modern. I would argue in, you know, the traditional storage and appliance world, you buy something and the day after you buy it, it's worthless. It's like driving a car off a lot, right? The very next day, the car's not worth what it was when you bought it. Storage is the same way. So how do you ensure that your storage stays current? How do you ensure that it gets a like a fine line that gets better with age? Well, if you're not buying storage and you're buying a performance SLA, it's up to the vendor to meet that SLA so it actually never gets worse over time. This is the way you modernize technology and avoid technology debt as a customer. >> Yeah, I mean, just even though words you're using and the way you're thinking about this precaution, I think are different, and I love the concept of essentially taking my labor cost and transferring them to Pure's R&D. I mean, that's essentially what you're talking about here. So let's stick with the tech for a minute. What do you see as new or emerging technologies that are helping accelerate this shift toward the as a service economy? >> Well, the first thing is I always tell people you can't deliver a service without monitoring because if you can't monitor something, how you're going to know whether you're meeting your service level obligation, right? So everything starts with data monitoring. The next step layering on the technology differentiation is if you need to deliver a service level obligation on top of that data monitoring, you need the ability to flexibly meet whatever performance obligations you have in a tight time window. So supply chain and being able to deliver anywhere becomes important. So if you use the analogy today of how Tesla works or a IoT system works, you have a SaaS management that actually provides instructions that pushes those instructions and policies to the edge. In Tesla's case, that happens to be the car. It'll push software updates to the car. It'll push new map updates to the car, but the car is running independently. It's not like if the car becomes disconnected from the internet, it's going to crash and drive you off the road. In the same way, what if you think about storage as something that needs to be wherever your application is? So people think about cloud as a destination. I think that's a fallacy. You have to think about the world in the view of an application. An application needs data, and that data needs to sit in storage wherever that application sits. So for us, the storage system is just an edge device. It can be sitting in your data center it can be sitting in a Equinix. It can be sitting in hosted and MSP can run it. It can even be sitting in the public cloud, but how do you have central monitoring and central management where you can push policies to update all those devices, very similar to an IOT system? So the technology advantage of doing that means that you can operate anywhere and ensure you have a consistent set of policies, a consistent set of protection, a consistent set of, you know, prevention against ransomware attack regardless of your application, regardless of, you know, where it sits, regardless of what content in it you're on. That approach is very similar to the way the IoT industry has been updating and monitoring edge devices, nest thermostats, you know, Tesla cars, those types of things. That's the thinking that needs to come to storage, and that's the foundation on which we built Pure as a service. >> So that implies or, at least I infer, that you've, obviously, got control of the experience on prem, but you're extending that into AWS, Google, Azure, which suggests to me that you have to hide the underlying complexity of the primitives and APIs in that world, and then eventually, actually today, 'cause you're treating everything like the edge out to the edge, you know, maybe mini Pure at some point in time, but so I call that super cloud, that abstraction layer that floats above all the clouds on-prem and adds that layer of value and is a singular experience, what you're talking about pushing, you know, policy throughout. Is that the right way to think about it? And how does this impact the ability to deliver true storage as a service? >> Oh, that's absolutely the right way of thinking about it. The things that you think about from an abstraction kind of fall in three buckets. First, you need management. So how do you ensure consistent management experience, creating volumes, deleting volumes, creating buckets, creating files, creating directories like management of objects and create a consistent API across the entire landscape? The second one is monitoring. How do you measure utilization and performance obligations or capacity obligations or, you know, policy violations, wherever you're at? And then the third one is more of a business one, which is procurement because you can't do it independent of procurement, meaning what happens when you run out? Do you need to increase your reserve commits? Do you want to go on demand? How do you integrate it into company's procurement models such that you can say, "I can use what I need," and any, it's not like every change order is a request of procurement. That's going to break an as a service delivery model. So to get embedded in a customer's landscape where they don't have to worry about storage, you have to provide that consistency on management, monitoring, and procurement across the tech, and yes, this is deep technology problems, whether it's running our storage on AWS or Azure or running it on prem or, you know, at some point in the future, maybe even, you know, Pure mini at the edge, right? So, you know, all of those things are tied to our Pure as a service delivery. >> Yeah, technically, non-trivial, but hey, you guys are on it. Well, we got to leave it there, Prakash. Thank you, great stuff, really appreciate your time. >> All right, thanks for having me, man. >> You're very welcome. Okay, in a moment, Steve McDowell. For more insights and strategies, he's going to give us the analyst perspective on as a service. You're watching "theCUBE", the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. (bright outro music)

>>When AWS introduced the modern cloud in 2006, many people didn't realize the impact that it would have on the industry, but some did see the future of an as a service economy coming. I mean, SAS offerings came out several years before. And the idea of applying some of these concepts to infrastructure and simplifying deployment and management, you know, kinda looked enticing to a lot of customers and a subscription model, or, but yet a consumption model was seen as a valuable proposition by many customers. Why not apply it to infrastructure? And why should the hyperscalers have all the fun welcome to at your storage service? My name is Dave ante. And as an analyst at the time, I was excited about the, as a service trend early on. And one of the companies that caught my attention back in the beginning of last decade was pure storage. >>Pure not only was delivering cloud- simplicity, but it's no forklift approach to infrastructure was ahead of its time. And that's why we're here today to dig into what's happening with the, as a service trends that we see popping up all over the world today, we're gonna dig into three sessions with noted experts in the field. First pre Darie is the general manager of the digital experience business unit at pure storage. He's gonna join us. And then we bring in Steve McDowell, Steve's a senior analyst for data and storage at more insights and strategy, a well known consultancy and analyst firm. And finally, we close with Amil sta Emil is the chief commercial officer and chief marketing officer at open line, open lines, a managed service provider. They serve the mid-market and Emil's got a very wide observation space. He's gonna share what he's seeing with customers. So sit back and enjoy the show. >>The cloud has popularized many useful concepts in the past decade, working backwards from the customer two pizza teams, a DevOps mindset, the shared responsibility model in security. And of course the shift from CapEx to OPEX and as a service consumption models. The last item is what we're here to talk about today. Pay for consumption is attractive because you're not over provisioning. At least not the way you used to you'd have to buy for peak capacity events, but there are always two sides to every story and well pay for use more closely ties. It consumption to business value procurement teams. Don't always love the uncertainty of the cloud bill each month, but consumption pricing. And as a service models are here to stay in software and hardware. Hello, I'm Dave ante and welcome to at your storage service made possible by pure storage. And with me is Pash DJI. Who's the general manager of the digital experience business unit at pure Pash. Welcome to the program. >>Thanks Dave. Thanks for having me. >>You bet. Okay. We've seen this shift to, as a service, the, as a service economy, subscription models, and this as a service movement have gained real momentum. It's it's clear over the past several years, what's driving this shift. Is it pressure from investors and technology companies that are chasing the all important ARR, their annual recurring revenue stream? Is it customer driven? Give us your insights. >>Well, look, um, I think we'll do some definitional stuff first. I think we often mix the definition of a subscription and a service, but, you know, subscription is, Hey, I can go for pay up front or pay as I go. Service is more about how do I not buy something just by the outcome. So, you know, the concept of delivering storage as a service means, what do you want in storage performance, capacity availability? Like that's what you want. Well, how do you get that without having to worry about the labor of planning capacity management, those labor elements are what's driving it. So I think in the world where you have to do more with less and in a world where security becomes increasingly important, where standardization will allow you to secure your landscape against ransomware and those types of things, those trends are driving the ation of storage and the only way to deliver that is storage as a service. >>So that's, that's good. You maybe thinking about it differently than some of the other companies that I talked to, but so you, you, you've made inroads here pretty big inroads actually, and changed the thinking in enterprise data storage with a huge emphasis on simplicity. That's really pures rayon Detra. How does storage as a service fit into your innovation agenda overall? >>Well, our innovation agenda started, as you mentioned with the simplicity, you know, a decade ago with the evergreen architecture, that architecture was beyond the box. How do you go ahead and say, I can improve performance or capacity as I need it? Well, that's a foundational element to deliver a service because once you have that technology, you can say, oh, you know what? You've subscribed to this performance level. You want to raise your performance level and yes, that'll be a higher dollar per gig or dollar per terabyte. But how do you do that without a data migration? How do you do that with a non disruptive service change? How do you do that with a delivery via a software update, those elements of non disruptive updates. When you think SAS, Salesforce, you don't know when Salesforce doesn't update, you don't know when they're increasing something, adding a new capability just shows up. It's not a disruptive event. So to drive that standardization and sation and service delivery, you need to keep that simplicity of delivery first and foremost, and you can't allow, like, if the goal was, I want to change from this service tier to that service tier and a person needed to show up and do a day data migration, that's kind of useless. You've broken the experience of flexibility for a customer. >>Okay. So I like the Salesforce analogy, but I wanna jump out, do a little side for a second. So I I've gotta, I've gotta make some commitment to pure, right. Some baseline commitment. And if I do, then I can dial up and pay for what I use and I can dial it down. Correct? Correct. Okay. I can't do that with Salesforce. <laugh> right. I could dial up, but then I'm stuck with those licenses. So you have a better model in Salesforce. I would argue. Okay. Yeah, >>I would, I would agree with that. >>Okay. So, and I gotta pay for everything up front anyway. Um, let's go back. I was kind of pushing at you a little bit at my upfront, you know, about, you know, the ARR model, the, the all important, you know, financial metric, but let's talk from the customers standpoint. What are the benefits of consuming storage as a service from your customer's perspective? >>Well, one is when you start your storage journey, do you really know what you need? And I would argue most of the time people are guessing, right? It's like, well, I think I need this. This is the performance I think I need. Or this is the capacity I think I need. And, you know, with the scientific method, you actually deploy something and you're like, do I need more? Do I need less? You find out as you're deploying. So in a storage as a service world, when you have the ability to move up performance levels or move out capacity levels, and you have that flexibility, then you have the ability to just to meet demand as you deploy. And that's the most important element of meeting business needs today. The applications you deploy are not in your control when you're providing storage to your end consumers. >>Yeah. They're gonna want different levels of storage. They're gonna want different performance thresholds. That's kind of a pay, you know, pay for performance type culture, right? You can use HR analogies for it. You pay for performance. You want top talent, you pay for it. You want top storage performance, you pay for it. Um, you don't, you can pay less and you can actually get lower performance, tiers, not everything is a tier one application. And you need the ability to deploy it. But when you start, how do you know the way your end customers are gonna be consuming? Or do you need a dictated upfront? Cause that's infrastructure dictating business inflexibility, and you never want to be in that position. >>I, I got another analogy for you. It's like, you know, we do a lot of hosting at our home and you know, like Thanksgiving, right? And you go to the liquor store and say, okay, what should I get? Should we get red wine? We gotta go white wine. We gotta get some beer. Should I get bubbles? Yeah, I get some bubbles. Cause you don't know what people are gonna have. And so you over provision everything <laugh> and then there's a run on bubbles and you're like, ah, we run outta bubbles. So you just over buy, but there's a liquor store that actually will take it back. So I gotta do business with those guys every time. Cuz it's way more flexible. I can dial up capacity or can dial up performance and dial it back down if I don't use it >>Or you or you're gonna be drinking a lot more the next few weeks. >>Yeah, exactly. Which is the last thing you want. Okay. So let's talk about how pure kind of meets this as a service demand. You've touched upon your, your differentiators from others in the market. Um, you know, love to hear about the momentum. What, what are you seeing out there? >>Yeah. Look, our business is growing well, largely built on, you know, what customers need. Um, specifically where the market is at today is there's a set of folks that are interested in the financial transformation of CapEx to OPEX, where like that definitely exists in the industry around how do I get a pay use model? The next kind of more advanced customer is interested in how do I go ahead and remove labor to deliver storage? And a service gets you there on top of a subscription. The most sophisticated customer says, how do I separate storage production with consumption and production of storage. Being a storage producer should be about standardization. So I could do policy based management. Why is that important? You know, coming back to some of the things I said earlier in the world where ransomware attacks are common, you need the standardized security policies. >>Linux has new vulnerabilities every, every other day, like find 2, 2, 3 critical vulnerabilities a week. How do you stay on top of it? The complexity of staying on top of it should be, look, let's standardize and make it a vendor problem. And assume the vendor's gonna deliver this to me. So that standardization allows you to have business policies that allow you to stay current and modern. I would argue in, you know, the traditional storage and appliance world, you buy something and the day a, the day after you buy it, it's worthless. It's like driving a car off a lot, right? The very next day, the car's not worth what it was when you bought it. Storage is the same way. So how do you ensure that your storage stays current? How do you ensure that it gets like a fine line that gets better, better with age? Well, if you're not buying storage and you're buying a performance SLA, it's up to the vendor to meet that SLA. So it actually never gets worse over time. This is the way you modernize technology and avoid technology debt as a customer. >>Yeah. I mean, just even though words you're using in the way you're thinking about this precaution, I think are, are, are different. Uh, and I love the concept of essentially taking my labor cost and transferring them to pures R and D I mean, that's essentially what you're talking about here. Um, so let's, let's, let's stick with the, the, the tech for a minute. What do you see as new or emerging technologies that are helping accelerate this shift toward the, as a service economy? >>Well, the first thing is I always tell people, you can't deliver a service without monitoring, because if you can't monitor something, how you're gonna know what your, whether you're meeting your service level obligation, right? So everything starts with data monitoring. The next step layering on the technology. Differentiation is if you need to deliver a service level, OB obligation on top of that data monitoring, you need the ability to flexibly, meet whatever performance obligations you have in a tight time window. So supply chain and being able to deliver anywhere becomes important. So if you use the analogy today of how Tesla works or a IOT system works, you have a SaaS management that actually provides instructions that push pushes those instructions and policies to the edge. In Tesla's case, that happens to be the car it'll push software updates to the car. It'll push new map updates to the car, but the car is running independently. >>It's not like if the car becomes disconnected from the internet, it's gonna crash and drive you off the road in the same way. What if you think about storage as something that needs to be wherever your application is? So people think about cloud as a destination. I think that's a fallacy. You have to think about the world in the world in the view of an application, an application needs data, and that data needs to sit in storage wherever that application sits. So for us, the storage system is just an edge device. It can be sitting in your data center, it can be sitting in a Equinix. It can be sitting in hosted, an MSP can run. It can, can even be sitting in the public cloud, but how do you have central monitoring and central management where you can push policies to update all those devices? >>Very similar to an I IOT system. So the technology advantage of doing that means that you can operate anywhere and ensure you have a consistent set of policies, a consistent set of protection, a consistent set of, you know, prevention against ransomware attack, regardless of your application, regardless of, uh, you know, where it sits, regardless of what content in you're on that approach is very similar to the way the T industry has been updating and monitoring edge devices, nest, thermostats, you know, Tesla cars, those types of things. That's the thinking that needs to come to. And that's the foundation on which we built PI as a service. >>So that implies, or at least I infer that you've obviously got control of the experience on Preem, but you're extending that, uh, into AWS, Google Azure, which suggests to me that you have to hide the underlying complexity of the primitives and APIs in that world. And then eventually, actually today, cuz you're treating everything like the edge out to the edge, you know, maybe, maybe mini pure at some point in time. But so I call that super cloud that abstraction layer that floats above all the clouds on-prem and adds that layer of value. And is this singular experience? What you're talking about pushing, you know, policy throughout, is that the right way to think about it and how does this impact the ability to deliver true storage as a service? >>Oh, uh, that's absolutely the right way of thinking about it. The things that you think about from a, an abstraction kind of fall in three buckets, first, you need management. So how do you ensure a consistent management experience creating volumes, deleting volumes, creating buckets, creating files, creating directories, like management of objects and create a consistent API across the entire landscape. The second one is monitoring, how do you measure utilization and performance obligations or capacity obligations or uh, you know, policy violations, wherever you're at. And then the third one is more of a business one, which is procurement because you can't do it independent of procurement. Meaning what happens when you run out, you need to increase your reserve commits. Do you want to go on demand? How do you integrate it into company's procurement models, such that you can say, I can use what I need and any, it's not like every change order is a request of procurement. That's gonna break an as a service delivery model. So to get embedded in a customer's landscape where they don't have to worry about storage, you have to provide that consistency on management, monitoring and procurement across the tech. And yes, this is deep technology problems, whether it's running our storage on AWS or Azure or running it on prem or, you know, at some point in the future, maybe even, um, you know, pure mini at the edge. Right. <laugh> so, you know, tho all of those things are tied to our pure, a service delivery. >>Yeah, technically non-trivial but uh, Hey, you guys are on it. Well, we gotta leave it there. Pash. Thank you. Great stuff. Really appreciate your time. >>All right. Thanks for having me, man. >>You're very welcome. Okay. In a moment, Steve McDowell from more insights and strategies, it's gonna give us the analyst perspective on, as a service, you're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >>Why are customers making the change to pure as a service >>Other vendors, offering flexible consumption models will promise you the world on the surface. It's just what you need. But then you notice the asterisk that dreaded fine print. That turns just what you need into long-term commitments, disruptive upgrades and unpredictable costs, pure storage, launched pure as a service to provide the flexibility to respond to your ever changing needs. With clear per unit costs, no large upfront purchases and no asterisks. A usage based model should be simple, innovative, and adapt with the changing market. Unlike other vendors, pure is offering exactly that with options, for service tiers and short term contracts in a single unified subscription that allows you to improve your discounts over time. Pure makes sure you can grow and upgrade without ever taking your environment offline and without the constant worry of hidden costs with complete billing, transparency, unlike any other, you only pay for what you use and pure one helps track and predict demand from day to day, making sure you never outgrow your storage. So why are customers making the change to pure as a service convenient solutions with unlimited potential without the dreaded fine print? It's as simple as that, >>We're back with Steve McDowell, the principal analyst for data and storage at more insights and strategy. Hey Steve, great to have you on, tell us a little bit about yourself. You got a really interesting background and kind of a blend of engineering and strategy and what's your research focus? >>Yeah, so my research, my focus area is data and storage and all the things around that, right? Whether it's OnPrim or cloud or, or, or, you know, software as a service. Uh, my background, as you said, is a blend, right? I grew up as an engineer. I started off as an OS developer at IBM. Uh, came up through the ranks and, and shifted over into corporate strategy and product marketing and product management. Uh, and I've been doing, uh, working as an industry analyst now for about five years, more insights and strategy. >>Steve, how do you see this playing out in the next three to five years? I mean, cloud got it all started. It's gonna snowballing, you know, however you look at it, percent of spending on storage that you think is gonna land in as a service. How, how do you see the evolution here? >>I think it buyers are looking at as a service, a consumption based is, is, uh, uh, you know, a natural model. It extends the data center, brings all of the flexibility, all of the goodness that I get from public cloud, but without all of the downside and uncertainty around cost and security and things like that, right. That also come with a public cloud and it's delivered by technology providers that I trust and that I know, and that I've worked with, you know, for, in some cases, decades. So I don't know that we have hard data on how much, uh, adoption there is of the model, but we do know that it's trending up, uh, you know, and every infrastructure provider at this point has some flavor of offering in the space. So it's, it's clearly popular with CIOs and, and it practitioners alike. >>So Steve organizations are at a they're different levels of maturity in their, their transformation journeys. And of course, as a result, they're gonna have different storage needs that are aligned with their bottom line business objectives. From an it buyer perspective, you may have data on this, even if it's anecdotal, where does storage as a service actually fit in and can it be a growth lever >>Can absolutely be, uh, a growth leader. Uh, it, it gives me the flexibility as, as an it architect to scale my business over time, without worrying about how much money I have to invest in, in storage hardware. Right? So I, I get kind of, again, that cloudlike flexibility in terms of procurement and deployment. Uh, but it gives me that control by oftentimes being on site within my permit. And I manage it like a storage array that I own. Uh, so you know, it, it's, it's beautiful for, for organizations that are scaling and, and it's equally nice for organizations that just wanna manage and control cost over time. Um, so it's, it's a model that makes a lot of sense and fits and, and certainly growing in adoption and popularity. >>How about from a technology vendor perspective you've worked for in the, in the tech industry mm-hmm <affirmative> for, for companies? What do you think is gonna define the winners and losers in this space? If you were running strategy for, uh, storage company, what would you say? >>I, I think the days of, of a storage administrator managing, you know, rate levels and recovering and things of that sort are over, right, what would, what these organizations like pure delivering, but they're offerings is, is simplicity. It's a push button approach to deploying storage to the applications and workloads that need it, right. It becomes storage as a utility. So it's not just the, you know, the consumption based economic model of, of, uh, as a service. Uh, it, it's also the manageability that comes with that, or the flexibility of management that comes with that. I can push a button, deploy bites to, to, uh, you know, a workload that needs it. Um, and it just becomes very simple, right. For the storage administrator in a way that, you know, kind of old school OnPrim storage can't really deliver. >>You know, I wanna, I wanna ask you, I mean, I've been thinking about this because again, a lot of companies are, are, you know, moving, hopping on the, as a service bandwagon, I feel like, okay, in and of itself, that's not where the innovation lives, the innovation is gonna come from making that singular experience from on-prem to the clouds across clouds, maybe eventually out to the edge. Um, do you, do you, where do you see the innovation in as a service? >>Well, there there's two levels of innovation, right? One, one is business model innovation, right? I, I now have an organizational flexibility to build the infrastructure, to support my digital transformation efforts. Um, but on the product side and the offering side, it really is, as you said, it's about the integration of experience. Every enterprise today touches a cloud in some way, shape or form, right. I have data spread, not just in my data center, but at the edge, uh, oftentimes in a public cloud, maybe a private cloud, I don't know where my data is and it really lands on the storage providers to help me manage that and deliver that, uh, uh, manageability experience, uh, to, to the it administrators. So when I look at innovation in this space, you know, it's not just a storage array and rack that I'm leasing, right? This is not another lease model. It's really fully integrated, you know, end to end management of my data and, and, you know, and all of the things around that. >>Yeah. So you, to your point about a lease model is if you're doing a lease, you know, yeah. You can shift CapEx to OPEX, but you're still committed to, to, you have to over provision, whereas here, and I wanted to ask you about that. It's, it's, it's, it's an interesting model, right? Cuz you gotta read the fine print. Of course the fine print says you gotta commit to some level typically. And then if, you know, if you go over you, you charge for what you use and you can scale that back down and that's, that's gotta be very attractive for folks. I, I wonder if you will ever see like true cloud-like consumption pricing, that is two edges to it. Right. You see consumption based pricing in some of the software models and you know yeah. People like it, the lines of business maybe cuz they pay in by the drink, but then procurement hates it cuz they don't have predictability. How do you see the pricing models? Do you see that maturing or do you think we're sort of locked in on, on where we're at? >>No, I, I do. I do see that maturing. Right? And, and when you work with a company like pure to understand their consumption based and as a service offerings, uh, it, it really is sitting down and understanding where your data needs are going to scale, right? You, you buy in at a certain level, uh, you have capacity planning. You can expand if you need to, you can shrink if you need to. So it really does put more control in the hands of the it buyer than uh, well certainly then traditional CapEx based on-prem but also more control than you would get, you know, working with an Amazon or an Azure. >>Okay. Thanks Steve. We'll leave it there for now. I'd love to have you back. Keep it right there at your storage service continues in a moment. >>Some things are meant to last your storage should be one of them say hello to the evergreen storage program, say goodbye to refreshes and rebates. Forget planned downtime, performance impact and data migrations. Forget forklift upgrades. Evergreen storage starts with your agile storage architecture and covers the entire life cycle of the array from first purchase to ongoing use. And whenever it's time to modernize and grow, your satisfaction is covered with an evergreen subscription. You can get a full refund within 30 days for any reason, >>Our right size guarantee lets you buy just the storage you need never too much. Never not enough. Your array software is all inclusive. Even future releases and features maintenance and support costs remain constant throughout the life of your array. Proactive expert support is a true white glove experience. Evergreen maintenance ensures availability of any replacement components. Meet the demands of your business and protect your investment. Evergreen gold includes controller upgrades every three years. And if something unplanned comes up, evergreen gold provides upgrade flex the leading anytime upgrade feature to upgrade controllers whenever you need it. As you expand evergreen gold provides credits to consolidate storage with denser more modern flash. Evergreen is your subscription to continuous innovation for storage that lasts 10 years or more. Some things are meant to last make your storage. One of them >>We're back at your storage service. Emil Stan is here. He's the chief commercial officer and chief marketing officer of open line. Thank you Emil for coming on the cube. Appreciate your time. >>Thank you, David. Nice. Uh, glad to be here. >>Yes. Yeah. So tell us about open line. You're a managed service provider. What's your focus? >>Yeah, we're actually a cloud managed service provider and I do put cloud in front of the managed services because it's not just only the spheres that we manage. We have to manage the clouds as well nowadays. And then unfortunately, everybody only thinks there's one cloud, but it's always multiple layers in the cloud. So we have a lot of work in integrating it. We're a cloud manages provider in the Netherlands, focusing on, uh, companies who have head office in the Netherlands, mainly in the, uh, healthcare local government, social housing logistics department. And then in the midst size companies between say 250 to 10,000 office employees. Uh, and that's what we do. We provide 'em with excellent cloud managed services, uh, as it should be >>Interesting, you know, a lot early on in the cloud days, highly regulated industries like healthcare government were somewhat afraid of the cloud. So I'm sure that's one of the ways in which you provide value to your customers is helping them become cloud proficient. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about the value prop to customers. Why do they do business with you? >>And I think, uh, there are a number of reasons why they do business with us or choose to choose for our manage services provider that first of course are looking for stability and continuity. Uh, and, and from a cost perspective, predict predictable costs. But nowadays you also have a shortage in personnel and knowledge. So, and it's not always very easy for them to access, uh, those skill sets because most it, people just want to have, uh, a great variety in work, what they are doing, uh, towards, towards the local government, uh, healthcare, social housing. They actually, uh, a sector that, uh, that are really in between embracing the public cloud, but also have a lot of legacy and, and bringing together best of all, worlds is what we do. So we also bring them comfort. We do understand what legacy, uh, needs from a manager's perspective. We also know how to leverage the benefits in the public cloud. Uh, and, uh, I'd say from a marketing perspective, actually we focus on using an ideal cloud, being a mix of traditional and future based cloud. >>Thank you. I, you know, I'd like to get your perspective on this idea of as a service and the, as a service economy that we often talk about on the cube. I mean, you work with a lot of different companies. We talked about some of the industries and, and increasingly it seems like organizations are focused more on outcomes, continuous value delivery via, you know, suites of services and, and they're leaning into platforms versus one off product offerings, you know, do you see that? How do you see your customers reacting to this as a service trend? >>Yeah. Uh, to be honest, sometimes it makes it more complex because services like, look at your Android or iPhone, you can buy apps, uh, and download apps the way you want to. So they have a lot of apps about how do you integrate it into one excellent workflow, something that works for you, David or works for me. Uh, so the difficulty, some sometimes lies in, uh, the easy accessibility that you have to those solutions, but nobody takes into account that they're all part of a chain, a workflow supply chain, uh, and, and, uh, they're being hyped as well. So what we also have a lot of time in, in, in, in managing our customers is that the tremendous feature push feature push that there is from technology providers, SaaS providers. Whereas if you provide 10 features, you only need one or two, uh, but the other eight are very distracting from your prime core business. Uh, so there's a natural way in that people are embracing, uh, SA solutions, embracing cloud solutions. Uh, but what's not taken into account as much is that we love to see it is the way that you integrate all those solutions toward something that's workable for the person that's actually using them. And it's seldomly that somebody is only using one solution. There's always a chain of solutions. Um, so yeah, there are a lot of opportunities, but also a lot of challenges for us, but also for our customers, >>You see that trend toward, as a service continuing, or do you actually see based on what you're just saying that pendulum, you know, swinging back and forth, somebody comes out with a new sort of feature product and that, you know, changes the dynamic or do you see as a service really having legs? >>Ah, I, I think that's very, very good question, David, because that's something that's keeping our busy all the time. We do see a trend in a service looking at, uh, talk about pure later on. We also use pure as a service more or less. Yeah. And that really helps us. Uh, but you see, uh, um, that sometimes people make a step too, too fast, too quick, not well thought of, and then you see what they call sort of cloud repatriation, tend that people go back to what they're doing and then they stop innovating or stop leveraging. The possibilities are actually there. Uh, so from our consultancy, our guidance and architecture point of view, we try to help them as much as possible to think in a SA thought, but just don't use the, cloud's just another data center. Uh, and so it's all about managing the maturity on our side, but on our customer side as well. >>So I'm interested in how your sort of your philosophy and, and as relates, I think in, in, in terms of how you work with pure, but how do you stay tightly in lockstep with your customers so that you don't over rotate so that you don't and send them to over rotate, but then you're not also, you don't wanna be too late to the game. How, how do you manage all that? >>Oh, there's, there's, there's a world of interactions between us and our customers. And so I think a well known, uh, uh, thing that people is customer intimacy. That's very important for us to get to know our customers and get to predict which way they're moving. But the, the thing that we add to it is also the ecosystem intimacy. So no, the application and services landscape, our customers know the primary providers and work with them, uh, to, to, to create something that, that really fits the customers. They just not looked at from our own silo where a cloud managed service provider that we actually work in the ecosystem with, with, with, with the primary providers. And we have, I think with the average customers, I think we have, uh, uh, in a month we have so much interactions on our operational level and technical levels, strategic level. >>We do bring together our customers also, and to jointly think about what we can do together, what we independently can never reach. Uh, but we also involve our customers in, uh, defining our own strategy. So we have something we call a customer involvement board. So we present a strategy and say, does it make sense? Eh, this is actually what you need also. So we take a lot of our efforts into our customers and we do also, uh, understand the significant moments of truth. We are now in this, in this broadcast, David there. So you can imagine that at this moment, not thinking go wrong. Yeah. If, if, if the internet stops that we have a problem. And now, so we, we actually know that this broadcast is going on for our customers and we manage that. It's always on, uh, uh, where in the other moments in the week, we might have a little less attention, but this moment we should be there. And these moments of truth that we really embrace, we got them well described. Everybody working out line knows what the moment of truth is for our customers. Uh, uh, so we have a big logistics provider. For instance, you does not have to ask us to, uh, have, uh, a higher availability on black Friday or cyber Monday. We know that's the most important part in the year for him or her. Does it answer your question, David? >>Yes. We know as well. You know, when these big, the big game moments you have to be on your top, uh, top of your game, uh, you know, the other thing Emil about this as a service approach that I really like is, is it's a lot of it is consumption based and the data doesn't lie, you can see adoption, you know, daily, weekly, monthly. And so I wonder how you're leveraging pure as a service specifically in what kind of patterns you're seeing in, in, in the adoption. >>Uh, yeah, pure as a service for our customers is mainly never visible. Uh, we provide storage services to provide storage solutions, storage over is part of a bigger thing of a server of application. Uh, so the real benefits, to be honest, of course, towards our customer, it's all flash, uh, uh, and they have the fastest, fastest storage is available. But for ourself, we, uh, we use less resources to manage our storage. We have far more that we have a near to maintenance free storage solution now because we have it as a service and we work closely together with pure. Uh, so, uh, actually the way we treat our customers is that way pure treats us as well. And that's why there's a used click. So the real benefits, uh, uh, how we leverage is it normally we had a bunch of guys managing our storage. Now we only have one and knowing that's a shortage of it, personnel, the other persons can well be, uh, involved in other parts of our services or in other parts of an innovation. So, uh, that's simply great. >>You know, um, my takeaway the meal is that you've made infrastructure, at least, least the storage infrastructure, invisible to your customers, which is the way it should be. You didn't have to worry about it. And you've, you've also attacked the, the labor problem. You're not, you know, provisioning lungs anymore, or, you know, tuning the storage, you know, with, with arms and legs. So that's huge. So that gets me into the next topic, which is business transformation. That, that means that I can now start to attack the operational model. So I've got a different it model. Now I'm not managing infrastructure same way. So I have to shift those resources. And I'm presuming that it's a bus now becomes a business transformation discussion. How are you seeing your customers shift those resources and focus more on their business as a result of this sort of as a service trend? >>I think I do not know if they, they transform their business. Thanks to us. I think that they can more leverage their own business. They have less problems, less maintenance, et cetera, cetera, but we also add new, uh, certainties to it, like, uh, uh, the, the latest service we we released was imutable storage being the first in the Netherlands offering this thanks to, uh, thanks to the pure technology, but for customers, it takes them to give them a good night rest because, you know, we have some, uh, geopolitical issues in the world. Uh, there's a lot of hacking. People have a lot of ransomware attacks and, and we just give them a good night rest. So from a business transformation, does it transform their business? I think that gives them a comfort in running your business, knowing that certain things are well arranged. You don't have to worry about that. We will do that. We'll take it out of your hands and you just go ahead and run your business. Um, so to me, it's not really a transformation is just using the right opportunities at the right moment. >>The imutable piece is interesting because, because, but speaking of as a service, you know, anybody can go on the dark web and buy ransomware as a service. I mean, as it's seeing the, as a service economy hit, hit everywhere, the good and the, and the not so good. Um, and so I presume that your customers are, are looking at, I imutability as another service capability of the service offering and really rethinking, maybe because of the recent, you know, ransomware attacks, rethinking how they, they approach, uh, business continuance, business resilience, disaster recovery. Do you see that? >>Yep, definitely. Definitely. I tell not all of them yet. Imutable storage. So it's like an insurance as well, which you have when you have imutable storage and you have been, you have a ransomware attack at least have you part of data, which never, if data is corrupted, you cannot restore it. If your hardware is broken, you can order new hardware. Every data is corrupted. You cannot order new data. Now we got that safe and well. And so we offer them the possibility to, to do the forensics and free up their, uh, the data without tremendous loss of time. Uh, but you also see that you raise the new, uh, how do you say, uh, the new baseline for other providers as well? Eh, so there's security of the corporate information security officer, the CIO, they're all very happy with that. And they, they, they raise the baseline for us as well. So they can look at other security topics and look from say, security operation center. Cuz now we can really focus on our prime business risks because from a technical perspective, we got it covered. How can we manage the business risk, uh, which is a combination of people, processes and technology. >>Right. Makes sense. Okay. I'll give you the last word. Uh, talk about your relationship with pure, where you wanna see that that going in the future. >>Uh, I hope we've be working together for a long time. Uh, I, I ex experienced them very involved. Uh, it's not, we have done the sell and now it's all up to you now. We were closely working together. I know if I talk to my prime architect, Marcel height is very happy and it looks a little more or less if we work with pure, like we're working with colleagues, not with a supplier and a customer, uh, and uh, the whole pure concept is fascinating. Uh, I, uh, I had the opportunity to visit San Francisco head office and they told me to fish in how they launched, uh, pure being, if you want to implement it, it had to be on one credit card. The, the, the menu had to be on one credit card. Just a simple thought of put that as your big area, audacious goal to make the simplest, uh, implementable storage available. But for us, uh, it gives me the expectation that there will be a lot of more surprises with pur in the near future. Uh, and for us as a provider, what we, uh, literally really look forward to is that, that for us, these new developments will not be new migrations. It will be a gradual growth of our services or storage services. Uh, so that's what I expect. And that was what I, and we look forward to. >>Yeah, that's great. Uh, thank you so much, Emil, for coming on the, the cube and, and sharing your thoughts and best of luck to you in the future. >>Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. >>You're very welcome. Okay. In a moment, I'll be back to give you some closing thoughts on at your storage service. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >>Welcome to evergreen, a place where organizations grow and thrive rooted in the modern data experience in evergreen people find a seamless, simple way to leverage data through market leading sustainable technology, financial flexibility, and effortless management, allowing everyone to innovate with data confidently. Welcome to pure storage. >>Now, if you're interested in hearing more about Pure's growing portfolio of technology and services and how they're transforming the enterprise data experience, be sure to register for pure accelerate tech Fest. 22 digital event is also taking place as an in-person event. On June 8th, you can register at pure storage.com/accelerate, pure storage.com/accelerate. You're watching the cue, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(digital pulsing music) >> We're back at VeeamON 2022. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host David Nicholson. I've got another mass boy coming on. Patrick Osborne is the vice president of the storage business unit at HPE. Good to see you again, my friend. It's been a long time. >> It's been way too long, thank you very much for having me. >> I can't even remember the last time we saw each other. It might have been in our studios in the East Coast. Well, it's good to be here with you. Lots have been going on, of course, we've been following from afar, but give us the update, what's new with HPE? We've done some stuff on GreenLake, we've covered that pretty extensively and looks like you got some momentum there. >> Quite a bit of momentum, both on the technology front and certainly the customer acquisition front. The message is certainly resonating with our customers. GreenLake is, that's the transformation that's fueling the future of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. So the momentum is great on the technology side. We're at well over 50 services that we're providing on the GreenLake platform. Everything from solutions and workloads to compute, networking and storage. So it's been really fantastic to see the platform and being able to really delight the customers and then the momentum on the sales and the customer acquisition side, the customers are voting with their dollars, so they're very happy with the platform, certainly from an operational perspective and a financial consumption perspective and so our target goal, which we've said a bunch of times is we want to be the hyperscaler on on-prem. We want to provide that customer experience to the folks that are investing in the platform. It's going really well. >> I'll ask you a question, as a former analyst, it could be obnoxious and so forth, so I'll be obnoxious for a minute. I wrote a piece in 2010 called At Your Storage Service, saying the future of storage and infrastructure as a service, blah, blah, blah. Now, of course, you don't want to over-rotate when there's no market, there was no market for GreenLake in 2010. Do you feel like your timing was right on, a little bit late, little bit early? Looking back now, how do you feel about that? >> Well, it's funny you say that. On the timing side, we've seen iterations of this stops and start forever. >> That's true. Financial gimmicks. >> I started my career at Sun Microsystems. We talked about the big freaking Web-tone switch and a lot of the network is the computer. You saw storage networks, you've seen a lot, a ton of iterations in this category, and so, I think the timing's right right now. Obviously, the folks in the hyperscaler class have proved out that this is something that's working. I think for us, the big thing that's really resonating with the customers is they want the operational model and they want the consumption model that they're getting from that as a service experience, but they still are going to run a number of their workloads on-prem and that's the best place to do it for them economically and we've proved that out. So I think the time is here to have that bifurcated experience from operational and financial perspective and in the past, the technology wasn't there and the ability to deliver that for the customers in a manner that was useful wasn't there. So I think the timing's perfect right now to provide them. >> As you know, theCUBE has had a presence at HPE Discover. Previous, even HP Discover and same with Veeam. But we got a long history with HP/HPE. When Hewlett Packard split into two companies, we made the observation, Wow, this opens up a whole new ecosystem opportunity for HPE generally, in storage business specifically, especially in data protection and backup, and the Veeam relationship, the ink wasn't dry and all of a sudden you guys were partnering, throwing joint activities, and so talk about how that relationship has evolved. >> From my perspective, we've always been a big partnering company, both on the route to market side, so our distributors and partners, and we work with them in big channel business. And then on the software partnership side, that's always evolving and growing. We're a very open ecosystem and we like to provide choice for our customers and I think, at the end of the day, we've got a lot of things that we work on jointly, so we have a great value prop. First phase of that relationship was partnering, we've got a full boat of product integrations that we do for customers. The second was a lot of special sauce that we do for our customers for co-integration and co-development. We had a huge session today with Rick Vanover and Frederico on our team here to talk about ransomware. We have big customers suffering from this plague right now and we've done a lot together on the engineering side to provide a very, very well-engineered, well thought out process to help avoid some of these things. And so that wave, too, of how do we do a ton of co-innovation together to really delight our customers and help them run their businesses, and I think the evolution of where we're going now, we have a lot of things that are very similar, strategically, in terms of, we all talk about data services and outcomes for our customers. So at the end of the day, when we think about GreenLake, like our virtual machine backup as a service or disaster recovery, it's all about what workloads are you running, what are the most important ones, where do you need help protecting that data? And essentially, how can we provide that outcome to you and you pay it as an outcome. And so we have a lot of things that we're working on together in that space. >> Let's take a little bit of a closer look at that. First of all, I'm from California, so I'm having a really hard time understanding what either of you were saying. Your accents are so thick. >> We could talk in Boston. >> Your accents are so thick. (Dave laughing) I could barely, but I know I heard you say something about Veaam at one point. Take a closer look at that. What does that look like from a ransomware perspective in terms of this concept of air gaping or immutable, immutable volumes and just as an aside, it seems like Veeam is a perfect partnership for you since customers obviously are going to be in hybrid mode for a long time and Veeam overlays that nicely. But what does it look like specifically? Immutable, air gap, some of the things we've been hearing a lot about. >> I'm exec sponsor for a number of big HPE customers and I'll give you an example. One of our customers, they have their own cloud service for time management and essentially they're exploited and they're not able to provide their service. It has huge ripple effect, if you think about, on inability to do their service and then how that affects their customers and their customers' employees and all that. It's a disaster, no pun intended. And the thing is, we learn from that and we can put together a really good architectures and best practices. So we're talking today about 3-2-1-1, so having three copies of your data, two different types of media, having an offline copy, an offsite copy and an offline copy. And now we're thinking about all the things you need to do to mitigate against all the different ways that people are going to exploit you. We've seen it all. You have keys that are erased, primary storage that is compromised and encrypted, people that come in and delete your backup catalog, they delete your backups, they delete your snapshots. So they get it down to essentially, "I'm either going to have one set of data, it's encrypted, I'm going to make you pay for it," and 40 percent of the time they pay and they get the data back, 60 percent of the time they pay and they get maybe some of the data back. But for the most part, you're not getting your data back. The best thing that we can do for our customers that come with a very prescriptive set of T-shirt configuration sizes, standardization, best practices on how they can take this entire ecosystem together and make it really easy for the customers to implement. But I wouldn't say, it's never bulletproof, but essentially, do as much as you can to avoid having to pay that ransomware. >> So 3-2-1-1, three copies, meaning local. >> Patrick: Yeah. >> So you can do fast recovery if you need to. Two different types of media, so tape fits in here? Not necessarily flashing and spinning disks. Could it be tape? >> A lot of times we have customers that have almost four different types. So they are running their production on flash. We have Alletras with HPE networking and servers running specific workloads, high performance. We have secondary storage on-prem for fast recovery and then we have some form of offsite and offline. Offsite could be object storage in the cloud and then offline would be an actual tape backup. The tape is out of the tape library in a vault so no one can actually access it through the network and so it's a physical copy that's offline. So you always have something to restore. >> Patrick, where's the momentum today, specifically, we're at VeeamON, but with regard to the Veeam partnership, is it security and ransomware, which is a new thing for this world. The last two years, it's really come to the top. Is it cloud migration? Is it data services and data management? Where's the momentum, all of the above, but maybe you could help us parse that. >> What we're seeing here at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, especially through GreenLake, is just an overall focus on data services. So what we're doing is we've got great platforms, we always had. HPE is known as an engineering company. We have fantastic products and solutions that customers love. What we're doing right now is taking, essentially, a lot of the beauty of those products and elevating them into an operational experience in the cloud, so you have a set of platforms that you want to run, you have machine critical platform, business critical, secondary storage, archival, data analytics and I want to be able to manage those from the cloud. So fleet management, HCI management, protocol management, block service, what have you, and then I want a set of abstracted data services that are on top of it and that's essentially things like disaster recovery, backup, data immutability, data vision, understanding what kind of data you have, and so we'll be able to provide those services that are essentially abstracted from the platforms themselves that run across multiple types of platforms. We can charge them on outcome based. They're based on consumption, so you think about something like DR, you have a small set of VMs that you want to protect with a very tight RPO, you can pay for those 100 VMs that are the most important that you have. So for us driving that operational experience and then the cloud data service experience into GreenLake gives customers a really, gives them a cloud experience. >> So have you heard the term super cloud? >> Patrick: Yeah. (chuckles) >> Have you? >> Patrick: Absolutely. >> It's term that we kind of coined, but I want to ask you about it specifically, in terms of how it fits into your strategy. So the idea is, and you kind of just described it, I think, whether your data is on-prem, it's in the cloud, multiple clouds, we'll talk about the edge later, but you're hiding the underlying complexities of the cloud's APIs and primitives, you're taking care of that for your customers, irrespective of physical location. It's the common experience across all those platforms. Is that a reasonable vision, maybe, even from a technical standpoint, is it part of HPE strategy and what does it take to actually do that, 'cause it sounds nice, but it's probably pretty intense? >> So the proof's in the pudding for us. We have a number of platforms that are providing, whether it's compute or networking or storage, running those workloads that they plum up into the cloud, they have an operational experience in the cloud and now they have data services that are running in the cloud for us in GreenLake. So it's a reality. We have a number of platforms that support that. We're going to have a set of big announcements coming up at HPE Discover. So we led with Alletra and we have a block service, we have VM backup as a service and DR On top of that. That's something that we're providing today. GreenLake has over, I think, it's actually over 60 services right now that we're providing in the GreenLake platform itself. Everything from security, single sign on, customer IDs, everything, so it's real. We have the proof point for it. >> So, GreenLake is essentially, I've said it, it's the HPE cloud. Is that a fair statement? >> A hundred percent. >> You're redefining cloud. And one of the hallmarks of cloud is ecosystem. Roughly, and I want to talk more about you got to grow that ecosystem to be successful in cloud, no question about it. And HPE's got the chops to do that. What percent of those services are HPE versus ecosystem partners and how do you see that evolving over time? >> We have a good number of services that are based on HPE, our tried and true intellectual property. >> You got good tech. >> Absolutely, so a number of that. And then we have partners in GreenLake today. We have a pretty big ecosystem and it's evolving, too. So we have customers and partners that are focused, our customers want our focus on data services. We have a number of opportunities and partnerships around data analytics. As you know, that's a really dynamic space. A lot of folks providing support on open source, analytics and that's a fast moving ecosystem, so we want to support that. We've seen a lot of interest in security. Being able to bring in security companies that are focused on data security. Data analytics to understand what's in your data from a customer perspective, how to secure that. So we have a pretty big ecosystem there. Just like our path at HPE, we've always had a really strong partnership with tons of software companies and we're going to continue to do that with GreenLake. >> You guys have been partner-friendly, I'll give you that. I'm going to ask Antonio this at Discover in a couple of weeks, but I want to ask you, when you think about, again, to go back to AWS as the prototypical cloud, you look at a Snowflake and a Redshift. The Redshift guys probably hate Snowflake, but the EC2 guys love them, sell a lot of compute. Now you as a business unit manager, do you ever see the day where you're side by side with one of your competitors? I'm guessing Antonio would say absolutely. Culturally, how does that play inside of HPE? I'm testing your partner-friendliness. How would you- >> Who will you- >> How do you think about that? >> At the end of the day, for us, the opportunity for us is to delight our customers. So we've always talked about customer choice and how to provide that best outcome. I think the big thing for us is that, from a cost perspective, we've seen a lot of customers coming back to HPE repatriation, from a repatriation perspective for a certain class of workloads. From my perspective, we're providing the best infrastructure and the best operational services at the best price at scale for these costumers. >> Really? It definitely, culturally, HPE has to, I think you would agree, it has to open up. You might not, you're going to go compete, based on the merit- >> Absolutely. >> of your product and technology. The repatriation thing is interesting. 'Cause I've always been a repatriation skeptic. Are you actually starting to see that in a meaningful way? Do you think you'll see it in the macro numbers? I mean, cloud doesn't seem to be slowing down, the public cloud growth, I mean, the 35, 40 percent a year. >> We're seeing it in our numbers. We're seeing it in the new logo and existing customer acquisition within GreenLake. So it's real for us. >> And they're telling you? Pure cost? >> Cost. >> So it's that's simple. >> Cost. >> So, they get the cloud bill, you do, too. I'd get the email from my CFO, "Why the cloud bill so high this month?" Part of that is it's consumption-based and it's not predictable. >> And also, too, one of the things that you said around unlocking a lot of the customer's ability from a resourcing perspective, so if we can take care of all the stuff underneath, the under cloud for the customer, the platform, so the stores, the serving, the networking, the automation, the provisioning, the health. As you guys know, we have hundreds of thousands of customers on the Aruba platform. We've got hundreds of thousands of customers calling home through InfoSight. So we can provide a very rich set of analytics, automated environment, automated health checking, and a very good experience that's going to help them move away from managing boxes to doing operational services with GreenLake. >> We talk about repatriation often. There was a time when I think a lot of us would've agreed that no one who was born in the cloud will ever do anything other than grow in the cloud. Are you seeing organizations that were born in the cloud realizing, "Hey, we know what our 80 percent steady state is and we've modeled this. Why rent it when we can own it? Or why rent it here when we can have it as operational cost there?" Are you seeing those? >> We're seeing some of that. We're certainly seeing folks that have a big part of their native or their digital business. It's a cost factor and so I think, one of the other areas, too, that we're seeing is there's a big transformation going on for our partners as well, too, on the sell-through side. So you're starting to see more niche SaaS offerings. You're starting to see more vertically focused offerings from our service provider partners or MSPs. So it's not just in either-or type of situation. You're starting to see now some really, really specific things going on in either verticals, customer segmentation, specific SaaS or data services and for us, it's a really good ecosystem, because we work with our SP partners, our MSP partners, they use our tech, they use our services, they provide services to our joint customers. For example, I know you guys have talked to iland here in the past. It's a great example for us for customers that are looking for DR as a service, backup as a service hosting, so it's a nice triangle for us to be able to please those customers. >> They're coming on to tomorrow. They're on 11/11. I think you're right on. The one, I think, obvious place where this repatriation could happen, it's the Sarah Wong and Martin Casano scenario where a SaaS companies cost a good sold become dominated by cloud costs. And they say, "Okay, well, maybe, I'm not going to build my own data centers. That's probably not going to happen, but I can go to Equinix and do a colo and I'm going to save a ton of dough, managing my own infrastructure with automation or outsourcing it." So Patrick, got to go. I could talk with you forever. Thank you so much for coming back in theCUBE. >> Always a pleasure. >> Go, Celts. How you feeling about the, we always talk sports here in VeeamON. How are you feeling about the Celts today? >> My original call today was Celtics in six, but we'll see what happens. >> Stephen, you like Celtics? Celtics six. >> Stephen: Celtics six. >> Even though tonight, they got a little- >> Stephen: Still believe, you got to believe. >> All right, I believe. >> It'd be better than the Miami's Mickey Mouse run there, in the bubble, a lot of astronauts attached to that. (Dave laughing) >> I love it. You got to believe here on theCUBE. All right, keep it right- >> I don't care. >> Keep it right there. You don't care, 'cause you're not from a sports town. Where are you in California? >> We have no sports. >> All right, keep it right there. This is theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2022. Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back. (digital music)

>> Welcome to this "Cube" conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. Pleased to welcome back Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Management at Dell technologies. Caitlin it's great to see you again, though virtually. >> Yes, it's good to see you as well, Lisa. >> Tony Frank is here as well. Global client executive at Equinix, Tony, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. Good to be here. >> We're going to be talking about some news. Caitlin let's go back. You and I, before we started filming, we were trying to remember, when did we last see each other? Of course it was virtual. So APEX was announced product APEX, October 2021. Just about a year ago. Released it in may, but just refresh the audience's memories with respect to the catalyst for Dell to go into this as a service offering. >> Yeah, I think we're all losing track of the virtual months here, (all laugh) so go back in time a little bit. Yeah, exactly right. So in the fall of last year, we had announced Project APEX. The first actual APEX offers really came to market in the spring in May with our APEX Data Storage Services. And at that time we actually had pre-announced what we're going to talk more about here today with our partnership with Equinix. But if we take a step back, you know, why did Dell talk about this as a project and is now really investing for the future? It really connects to a lot of the conversations you guys have here in "theCube", right? What's happening in IT? What's happening with our customers? Is that they're looking for outcomes. Yes, they're predominantly still buying products today, but they're really starting to look for outcomes. They want to be buying those outcomes. They want to have something that is an operating expense for them. Something that we can take, we as the technology, the infrastructure experts can take on the management, can take on the ownership of that equipment and really enable them to focus on their business. So really consumption-based, usage based infrastructure, all being elastic resources that Dell owns and manages, but customers can still operate. And of course, one of the first offers was APEX Data Storage Services, which we're extending here this fall. >> Talk to me a little bit, Caitlin, about outcomes. I just want to understand what Dell actually is focusing on for its customers, where outcomes are concerned. >> Yeah. And it's interesting as a company, it's a pretty big transformation for us. We have always been a product led company, but it's not really about a product. So when I talk about APEX Data Storage Services, you're not going to hear me mention a product name or anything. Because what it's about, it's about offering our customers what they're actually looking for. Which in the case of storage, they're all looking for, I want either block or file storage. I want a certain tier, so it is at a higher performance. I want a certain capacity of it, and I want to commit for some period of time. That's it. Those are the questions we ask. There's no product names and sizing and it's really, really simple. And that's what we're talking about. It's really the beginning of really trying to deliver customers an outcome versus a product. >> Got it. APEX Data Storage Services. This is Dell's efforts to supply managed file and block Storage as Services. Talk to me about that. Talk to me about some of the things, how does it enable the fast time to value as little as 14 days for your customers? >> Yeah, so there's a lot of really important things we're doing here. We're not just taking the products we had and kind of packaging it up in a new financial model. There's a lot of parts to this. It all centers around the APEX console. So the APEX console is where you start, begin really ongoing manage and experience these outcomes from Dell Technologies. And it starts with selecting the service you want. So if you select that you want APEX Data Storage Services, you pick your type, you pick your tier, you pick your time period, and you pick your size, right? And then you're off to the races. And we will be able to, what we're committing to do is delivering that in as few, and as little as 14 days time to value. And for us, you know, one of the benefits of being able to do this as Dell, we have always really thrived in our supply chain and the ability to have that predictability and being able to deliver things as a service, including storage, is really something that's just an extension of what we've been able to do there. And our partnerships with Equinix actually is going to enable us to even look at that further and see what we can do to really bring value to our customers as quickly as possible. >> That speed, that time to value, is even more important as we've lived through the last tumultuous 18 months. Let's break into the news now. You guys pre-announced the partnership with Equinix, but talk to me about, with respect to APEX Data Storage Services, what's being announced? Caitlin, we'll start with you and then Tony we'll bring you into the conversation. >> Yeah, absolutely. So again, we first released APEX Data Storage Services in the spring, and we're already enhancing that today. Couple exciting things. So geographic expansion, so expanding out into additional regions across Europe and Asia, who are expanding our support. So we talked about the fact that it's block and it's file. Well, actually on our file capability here, on our file outcome, we now will have the ability to support an S3 protocol. So you can do that app development and run your operations all off the same platform. So that's an exciting new expansion there. We're also enabling partners sell through. Our partners are really, really important, whether the resell partners or technology partners like Equinix. So partner sell through is another important piece. And of course the most important for our conversation today, is the exciting new announcement of the fact that we are going to offer APEX Data Storage Services available in Equinix facilities, all integrated into the APEX console. The fifth question is, now, where do you want your APEX Data Storage Services? You can select a Dell provided facility and you get the choice to select the different cities of Equinix locations. And we're going to provide that single bill and experience through Dell, but on the backend, we've worked with Tony and team for months to get this to be a very streamlined experience for our customers. >> Tony, talk to us about this from Equinix's perspective. >> Yeah, we're very excited. Caitlin, thank you very much and Lisa, thank you. Very excited to be part of what Dell's doing with APEX and enable enterprise customers to get delivered to them at Equinix facilities Storage as a Service, in addition to additional Equinix capabilities, really enabling agile enterprises to distribute their infrastructure across the world, leveraging Dell product, Dell management, and to get access to partners, to their other footprints, to cloud service providers, et cetera, all within the footprints of Equinix. >> So Caitlin, APEX Data Storage Service in secure colo facilities in conjunction with Equinix. Talk to me about what the reception has been from Dell customers. >> Yeah, it's been really fun. I mean, first of all, when we thought about data center providers are a critical part of us being able to deliver that outcome to customers. And when we looked at the ecosystem of partners, it was very clear who we were going to be partnering with. Equinix was really the best partner for us. We already had been working together in many different ways and we're just taking this partnership to the next level. And what we've already seen actually, all the way since earlier this year, we've had many, many customers coming to us, at first it was separately, but now it's actually jointly to say, I'm having a challenge and here's my challenge. And most of these conversations start in one way. I'm getting out of the data center business. And the nice thing for us is that between our two companies, we can solve that. Right, we have the combination of the right infrastructure, and with our partnership with Equinix, you partner that with the data center services, you can actually give that full outcome to a customer. And we were solving those separately, and now we're solving those together. >> Those folks wanting to get out of the data center, if we think about in the last year and a half, how inaccessible the data centers were, Tony, I want to get your perspective on the colo market, and as we look at IT today, the acceleration of it and digital and cloud adoption and getting out of the data center that we've seen in the last 18 months. Help me understand why the colo market is really key today for the future of IT. >> Absolutely Lisa. So, you know, focusing on outcomes as Caitlin outlined earlier, is a really important part of, really how IT has managed this pandemic and thinking about how do we solve for this vast distributed set of employees that we used to have aggregated in a single building or multiple buildings, but really spearheaded in a couple locations. And all of a sudden everything became, you know, out in rural America, out in rural Europe, out everywhere, employees were spread out and they needed a way as an IT team, to bring together the network, the security and the ability to be very agile and focus on an outcome as opposed to, how am I going to get this next piece of equipment, this next storage device, this next compute system in my data center and add the cooling and the power and all the things that they have to think about. And really it was an outcome. How do I give my employees the best experience possible? My partners, that access they need to my systems and the various ways that we interact together. So the colo market as a whole has been really changed dramatically through the whole pandemic. And if you didn't know Zoom two years ago, it's your best friend now, or it's your, you know, least favorite way to do business, but the only way we have to do business in the world that we're living in today. >> A lifeline, and here we are Zooming with each other right now. (Caitlin and Tony laugh) Tony, I want to stick with you. Let's talk about this partnership between Dell and Equinix. Why is this such a compelling partnership? Talk to me about that from Equinix's perspective. >> Yeah. We're so excited to be able to be partnered with the number one leader and provider of infrastructure and infrastructure services. We have really been a niche provider for the last 15 years. We're a 21, 22 year old company, and we focused on developing ecosystems and those were at first the internet. We brought the telecom providers together to make the internet work. And then on top of that started enabling things like digital trading. Also enabling all sorts of ad exchanges so that you see the banner ads that apply to you when you go to a website. And so we were well known within those ecosystems that we worked within, but getting out to the enterprise has been a big challenge. And Dell brings us those relationships. They bring that expertise, that trusted advisor kind of role. And so being able to extend our sales team and really leverage what Dell has done across small, medium, large and very large enterprise is a real win for us. And it allows us to achieve a scale that we wouldn't have been able to achieve by ourselves without breaking the bank trying to hire people, and trying to get them familiar with those customers. And so Dell brings us into that. We're able to complete what I call the three legged stool. The compute, the storage, and now the networking aspects can be dealt with in a single conversation around an outcome. And APEX gives us a chance to really be agilely available as Dell's customers define that for themselves and to deploy the infrastructure where they need it and to achieve those outcomes that they're trying to get to. >> So it's an ostensible value that Equinix is getting by the Dell partnership. You said, pulling us into the enterprise, facilitating that scale. Caitlin, talk to me about this from Dell's lens. What makes this partnership so compelling for Dell and the future of it as a service? >> I'm laughing as Tony's talking through that because it tees it up perfectly. From Dell's perspective, when we looked at data center providers, one of the challenges for us is we're a global IT provider. So we had to partner with someone who understood what it meant to operate and manage data centers at a global scale and locations all over the world. There's a very short list to choose from once you look at it from that lens, but more importantly, and what Tony you already hit on, the networking. The interconnects that we have in our partnership with Equinix are incredibly valuable. Cause ultimately, although customers start going to a colo facility because they want out of data center business, they don't want to be managing racks and power and cooling and all of that. Oftentimes actually the value they find once they get there and why they stay and grow is those interconnects. The ability to connect to other tenants in these facilities and the ability to connect into the hyper-scalers. And the richness of those interconnects with Equinix was truly unmatched, and that's why it's been such an important partnership for us. >> Tony, what's been some feedback from the Equinix customer base? >> Well, it's really funny. I spent half of my time trying to figure out with my team, how we're going to solve for Storage as a Service. The next geography, the next product. But the other half of the time is spent, who on the team is the right person to go pair up with the Dell team and get the Dell team brought into a discussion. And it's going bi-directionally right now. The volume is picking up. The velocity is picking up and it really seems to be like that snowball just going down the hill. It's just picking up speed and with every interaction we're gaining trust with each other, we're gaining competence in what the message is and how to solve for it. And we're working out the various ways, you know, in a predictive way, what are most people asking for? But the wonderful thing is, there's custom availability to figure out a solution for just about any problem that the IT or infrastructure focused teams in the enterprise are looking to solve for. >> Tony, sticking with you for a final question or two, in terms of the last, you know, few months, have you seen any industries in particular that are really readily adopting this? We've seen so much change across industries in the last 18 months. I'm just curious if you're seeing any industries that are particularly taking advantage of this capability and this partnership. >> Yeah. I would point to highly regulated industries. Thinking about financial, thinking about governments, and it's not just a US situation. This is a global situation and data sovereignty where that matters to a particular customer, is really important that they keep that data in the geography that it needs to stay in. It's defined by the different governments around the world. You know, you see, the financial industry has been a first mover towards electronic trading and really disrupted, thankfully, prior to the pandemic, the way trading was done. Because in-person trading wasn't going to happen anymore. And so in the highly regulated world, that healthcares, the financials. Those folks are definitely looking for a solution that has certifications across the board to help them say to their auditors, we've got this covered. That's something we were able to bring to the table for Dell. And then it also helps that the first movers sort of towards a digital infrastructure were insurance companies and others that saw the value of leveraging partnerships and bringing together things as quickly and fast as they could, without deploying huge global networks to try and make it all happen. They can instead virtually meet in the same room, leveraging our software defined network called Equinix Fabric. It's been a real win for the regulated industries, certainly. >> Got it. Thanks for that, Tony. Caitlin, last question for you. This is Dell managed, so single bill from Dell. Where can the viewers go to learn more information about this new partnership? >> Delltechnologies.com/apex. You'll learn more about all things APEX. Really, the APEX consoles, the experience, so you can learn more about it there. And then of course, your friendly neighborhood, Dell EMC rep, and or channel partner, now that we've got that partner enablement as well. >> Delltechnologies.com/apex. Caitlin and Tony, thank you so much for joining us today, sharing the exciting news about what's new with Dell and Equinix and what's in it for your customers and your partners. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> For Caitlin Gordon and Tony Frank, I'm Lisa Martin, you've been watching a "Cube" conversation. (soft music playing)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Cloud computing has been the single most transformative force in IT over the last decade. As we enter the 2020s, we believe that cloud will become the underpinning of a ubiquitous, intelligent and autonomous resource that will disrupt the operational stacks of virtually every company in every industry. Welcome to this week's special edition of Wikibon's CUBE Insights Powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, and as part of theCUBE365's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, we're going to put forth our scenario for the next decade of cloud evolution. We'll also drill into the most recent data on AWS from ETR's October 2020 survey of more than 1,400 CIOs and IT professionals. So let's get right into it and take a look at how we see the cloud of yesterday, today and tomorrow. This graphic shows our view of the critical inflection points that catalyze the cloud adoption. In the middle of the 2000s, the IT industry was recovering from the shock of the dot-com bubble and of course 9/11. CIOs, they were still licking their wounds from the narrative, does IT even matter? AWS launched its Simple Storage Service and later EC2 with a little fanfare in 2006, but developers at startups and small businesses, they noticed that overnight AWS turned the data center into an API. Analysts like myself who saw the writing on the wall and CEO after CEO, they poo-pooed Amazon's entrance into their territory and they promised a cloud strategy that would allow them to easily defend their respective turfs. We'd seen the industry in denial before, and this was no different. The financial crisis was a boon for the cloud. CFOs saw a way to conserve cash, shift CAPEX to OPEX and avoid getting locked in to long-term capital depreciation schedules or constrictive leases. We also saw shadow IT take hold, and then bleed in to the 2010s in a big way. This of course created problems for organizations rightly concerned about security and rogue tech projects. CIOs were asked to come in and clean up the crime scene, and in doing so, realized the inevitable, i.e., that they could transform their IT operational models, shift infrastructure management to more strategic initiatives, and drop money to the bottom lines of their businesses. The 2010s saw an era of rapid innovation and a level of data explosion that we'd not seen before. AWS led the charge with a torrent pace of innovation via frequent rollouts or frequent feature rollouts. Virtually every industry, including the all-important public sector, got into the act. Again, led by AWS with the Seminole, a CIA deal. Google got in the game early, but they never really took the enterprise business seriously until 2015 when it hired Diane Green. But Microsoft saw the opportunity and leaned in heavily and made remarkable strides in the second half of the decade, leveraging its massive software stake. The 2010s also saw the rapid adoption of containers and an exit from the long AI winter, which along with the data explosion, created new workloads that began to go mainstream. Now, during this decade, we saw hybrid investments begin to take shape and show some promise. As the ecosystem realized broadly that it had to play in the AWS sandbox or it would lose customers. And we also saw the emergence of edge and IoT use cases like for example, AWS Ground Station, those emerge. Okay, so that's a quick history of cloud from our vantage point. The question is, what's coming next? What should we expect over the next decade? Whereas the last 10 years was largely about shifting the heavy burden of IT infrastructure management to the cloud, in the coming decade, we see the emergence of a true digital revolution. And most people agree that COVID has accelerated this shift by at least two to three years. We see all industries as ripe for disruption as they create a 360 degree view across their operational stacks. Meaning, for example, sales, marketing, customer service, logistics, etc., they're unified such that the customer experience is also unified. We see data flows coming together as well, where domain-specific knowledge workers are first party citizens in the data pipeline, i.e. not subservient to hyper-specialized technology experts. No industry is safe from this disruption. And the pandemic has given us a glimpse of what this is going to look like. Healthcare is going increasingly remote and becoming personalized. Machines are making more accurate diagnoses than humans, in some cases. Manufacturing, we'll see new levels of automation. Digital cash, blockchain and new payment systems will challenge traditional banking norms. Retail has been completely disrupted in the last nine months, as has education. And we're seeing the rise of Tesla as a possible harbinger to a day where owning and driving your own vehicle could become the exception rather than the norm. Farming, insurance, on and on and on. Virtually every industry will be transformed as this intelligent, responsive, autonomous, hyper-distributed system provides services that are ubiquitous and largely invisible. How's that for some buzzwords? But I'm here to tell you, it's coming. Now, a lot of questions remain. First, you may even ask, is this cloud that you're talking about? And I can understand why some people would ask that question. And I would say this, the definition of cloud is expanding. Cloud has defined the consumption model for technology. You're seeing cloud-like pricing models moving on-prem with initiatives like HPE's GreenLake and now Dell's APEX. SaaS pricing is evolving. You're seeing companies like Snowflake and Datadog challenging traditional SaaS models with a true cloud consumption pricing option. Not option, that's the way they price. And this, we think, is going to become the norm. Now, as hybrid cloud emerges and pushes to the edge, the cloud becomes this what we call, again, hyper-distributed system with a deployment and programming model that becomes much more uniform and ubiquitous. So maybe this s-curve that we've drawn here needs an adjacent s-curve with a steeper vertical. This decade, jumping s-curves, if you will, into this new era. And perhaps the nomenclature evolves, but we believe that cloud will still be the underpinning of whatever we call this future platform. We also point out on this chart, that public policy is going to evolve to address the privacy and concentrated industry power concerns that will vary by region and geography. So we don't expect the big tech lash to abate in the coming years. And finally, we definitely see alternative hardware and software models emerging, as witnessed by Nvidia and Arm and DPA's from companies like Fungible, and AWS and others designing their own silicon for specific workloads to control their costs and reduce their reliance on Intel. So the bottom line is that we see programming models evolving from infrastructure as code to programmable digital businesses, where ecosystems power the next wave of data creation, data sharing and innovation. Okay, let's bring it back to the current state and take a look at how we see the market for cloud today. This chart shows a just-released update of our IaaS and PaaS revenue for the big three cloud players, AWS, Azure, and Google. And you can see we've estimated Q4 revenues for each player and the full year, 2020. Now please remember our normal caveats on this data. AWS reports clean numbers, whereas Azure and GCP are estimates based on the little tidbits and breadcrumbs each company tosses our way. And we add in our own surveys and our own information from theCUBE Network. Now the following points are worth noting. First, while AWS's growth is lower than the other two, note what happens with the laws of large numbers? Yes, growth slows down, but the absolute dollars are substantial. Let me give an example. For AWS, Azure and Google, in Q4 2020 versus Q4 '19, we project annual quarter over quarter growth rate of 25% for AWS, 46% for Azure and 58% for Google Cloud Platform. So meaningfully lower growth rates for AWS compared to the other two. Yet AWS's revenue in absolute terms grows sequentially, 11.6 billion versus 12.4 billion. Whereas the others are flat to down sequentially. Azure and GCP, they'll have to come in with substantially higher annual growth to increase revenue from Q3 to Q4, that sequential increase that AWS can achieve with lower growth rates year to year, because it's so large. Now, having said that, on an annual basis, you can see both Azure and GCP are showing impressive growth in both percentage and absolute terms. AWS is going to add more than $10 billion to its revenue this year, with Azure growing nearly 9 billion or adding nearly 9 billion, and GCP adding just over 3 billion. So there's no denying that Azure is making ground as we've been reporting. GCP still has a long way to go. Thirdly, we also want to point out that these three companies alone now account for nearly $80 billion in infrastructure services annually. And the IaaS and PaaS business for these three companies combined is growing at around 40% per year. So much for repatriation. Now, let's take a deeper look at AWS specifically and bring in some of the ETR survey data. This wheel chart that we're showing here really shows you the granularity of how ETR calculates net score or spending momentum. Now each quarter ETR, they go get responses from thousands of CIOs and IT buyers, and they ask them, are you spending more or less than a particular platform or vendor? Net score is derived by taking adoption plus increase and subtracting out decrease plus replacing. So subtracting the reds from the greens. Now remember, AWS is a $45 billion company, and it has a net score of 51%. So despite its exposure to virtually every industry, including hospitality and airlines and other hard hit sectors, far more customers are spending more with AWS than are spending less. Now let's take a look inside of the AWS portfolio and really try to understand where that spending goes. This chart shows the net score across the AWS portfolio for three survey dates going back to last October, that's the gray. The summer is the blue. And October 2020, the most recent survey, is the yellow. Now remember, net score is an indicator of spending velocity and despite the deceleration, as shown in the yellow bars, these are very elevated net scores for AWS. Only Chime video conferencing is showing notable weakness in the AWS data set from the ETR survey, with an anemic 7% net score. But every other sector has elevated spending scores. Let's start with Lambda on the left-hand side. You can see that Lambda has a 65% net score. Now for context, very few companies have net scores that high. Snowflake and Kubernetes spend are two examples with higher net scores. But this is rarefied air for AWS Lambda, i.e. functions. Similarly, you can see AI, containers, cloud, cloud overall and analytics all with over 50% net scores. Now, while database is still elevated with a 46% net score, it has come down from its highs of late. And perhaps that's because AWS has so many options in database and its own portfolio and its ecosystem, and the survey maybe doesn't have enough granularity there, but in this competition, so I don't really know, but that's something that we're watching. But overall, there's a very strong portfolio from a spending momentum standpoint. Now what we want to do, let's flip the view and look at defections off of the AWS platform. Okay, look at this chart. We find this mind-boggling. The chart shows the same portfolio view, but isolates on the bright red portion of that wheel that I showed you earlier, the replacements. And basically you're seeing very few defections show up for AWS in the ETR survey. Again, only Chime is the sore spot. But everywhere else in the portfolio, we're seeing low single digit replacements. That's very, very impressive. Now, one more data chart. And then I want to go to some direct customer feedback, and then we'll wrap. Now we've shown this chart before. It plots net score or spending velocity on the vertical axis and market share, which measures pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. And in the table portion in the upper-right corner, you can see the actual numbers that drive the plotting position. And you can see the data confirms what we know. This is a two-horse race right now between AWS and Microsoft. Google, they're kind of hanging out with the on-prem crowd vying for relevance at the data center. We've talked extensively about how we would like to see Google evolve its business and rely less on appropriating our data to serve ads and focus more on cloud. There's so much opportunity there. But nonetheless, you can see the so-called hybrid zone emerging. Hybrid is becoming real. Customers want hybrid and AWS is going to have to learn how to support hybrid deployments with offerings like outposts and others. But the data doesn't lie. The foundation has been set for the 2020s and AWS is extremely well-positioned to maintain its leadership, in our view. Now, the last chart we'll show takes some verbatim comments from customers that sum up the situation. These quotes were pulled from several ETR event roundtables that occurred in 2020. The first one talks to the cloud compute bill. It spikes and sometimes can be unpredictable. The second comment is from a CIO at IT/Telco. Let me paraphrase what he or she is saying. AWS is leading the pack and is number one. And this individual believes that AWS will continue to be number one by a wide margin. The third quote is from a CTO at an S&P 500 organization who talks to the cloud independence of the architecture that they're setting up and the strategy that they're pursuing. The central concern of this person is the software engineering pipeline, the cICB pipeline. The strategy is to clearly go multicloud, avoid getting locked in and ensuring that developers can be productive and independent of the cloud platform. Essentially separating the underlying infrastructure from the software development process. All right, let's wrap. So we talked about how the cloud will evolve to become an even more hyper-distributed system that can sense, act and serve, and provides sets of intelligence services on which digital businesses will be constructed and transformed. We expect AWS to continue to lead in this build-out with its heritage of delivering innovations and features at a torrid pace. We believe that ecosystems will become the main spring of innovation in the coming decade. And we feel that AWS has to embrace not only hybrid, but cross-cloud services. And it has to be careful not to push its ecosystem partners to competitors. It has to walk a fine line between competing and nurturing its ecosystem. To date, its success has been key to that balance as AWS has been able to, for the most part, call the shots. However, we shall see if competition and public policy attenuate its dominant position in this regard. What will be fascinating to watch is how AWS behaves, given its famed customer obsession and how it decodes the customer's needs. As Steve Jobs famously said, "Some people say, give the customers what they want. "That's not my approach. "Our job is to figure out "what they're going to want before they do." I think Henry Ford once asked, "If I'd ask customers what they wanted, "they would've told me a faster horse." Okay, that's it for now. It was great having you for this special report from theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Keep it right there for more great content on theCUBE from re:Invent 2020 virtual. (cheerful music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe. It's The CUBE, with digital coverage of AWS public sector online, (upbeat music) brought to you by, Amazon Web Services. >> Everyone welcome back to The CUBE virtual coverage, of AWS public sector summit online. I'm John Furrier, your host of The CUBE. Normally we're in person, out on Asia-Pacific, and all the different events related to public sector. But this year we have to do it remote, and we're going to do the remote virtual CUBE, with Data Virtual Public Sector Online Summit. And we have two great guests here, about Digital Earth Africa project, Clive Charlton. Head of Solutions Architecture, Sub-Saharan Africa with AWS, Clive thanks for coming on, and Aditya Agrawal founder of D4DInsights, and also the advisor for the Digital Earth Africa project with AWS. So gentlemen, thank you for coming on. Appreciate you coming on remotely. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us, John. >> So Clive take us through real quickly. Just take a minute to describe what is the Digital Earth Africa Project. What are the problems, that you're aiming to solve? >> Well, we're really aiming to provide, actionable data to governments, and organization around Africa, by providing satellite imagery, in an easy to use format, and doing that on the cloud, that serves countries throughout Africa. >> And just from a cloud perspective, give us a quick taste of what's going on, just with the tech, it's on Amazon. You got a little satellite action. Is there ground station involved? Give us a little bit more color around, you know, what's the scope of the project. >> Yeah, so, historically speaking you'd have to process satellite imagery down link it, and then do some heavy heavy lifting, around the processing of the data. Digital Earth Africa was built, from the experiences from Digital Earth Australia, originally developed by a Geo-sciences Australia and they use container services for Kubernetes's called Elastic Kubernetes Service to spin up virtual machines, which we are required to process the raw satellite imagery, into a format called a Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF. This format is used to store very large volumes of data in a format that's really easy to query. So, organizations can just use NHTTP get range request. Just a query part of the file, that they're interested in, which means, the results are served much, much quicker, from much, much better overall experience, under the hood, the store where the data is stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service, which is S3, and the Metadata Index in a Relational Database Service, that runs the Open Data CUBE Library, which is allows Digital Earth Africa, to store this data in both space and time. >> It's interesting. I just did a, some interviews last week, on a symposium on space and cybersecurity, and we were talking about , the impact of satellites and GPS and just the overall infrastructure shift. And it's just another part of the edge of the network. Aditya, I want to get your thoughts on this, and your reaction to the Digital Earth, cause you're an advisor. Let's zoom out. What's the impact of people's lives? Give us a quick overview, of how you see it playing out because, explaining to someone, who doesn't know anything about the project, like, okay what is it about, and how does it actually impact people? >> Sure. So, you know, as, as Clive mentioned, I mean there's, there's definitely a, a digital infrastructure behind Digital Earth Africa, in a way that it's going to be able to serve free and open satellite data. And often the, the issue around satellite data, especially within the context of Africa, and other parts of the world is that there's a level of capacity that's required, in order to be able to use that data. But there's also all kinds of access issues, because, traditionally satellite data is heavy. There's the old model of being able to download the data and then being able to do something with it. And then often about 80% of the time, that you spend on satellite data is spent, just pre processing the data, before you can actually, do any of the fun analysis around it, that really sort of impacts the kinds of decisions and actions that you're looking for. And so that's why Digital Earth Africa. And that's why this partnership, with Amazon is a fantastic partnership, because it really allows us, to be able, to scale the approach across the entire continent, make it easy for that data to be accessed and make it easier for people to be able to use that data. The way that Digital Earth Africa is being operationalized, is that we're not just looking at it, from the perspective of, let's put another infrastructure into Africa. We want this program, and it is a program, that we want institutionalized within Africa itself. One that leverages expertise across the continent, and one that brings in organizations across the continent to really sort of take the leadership and ownership of this program as it moves forward. The idea of it is that, once you're able to have this information, being able to address issues like food security, climate change, coastal resilience, land degradation where illegal mining is, where is the water? We want to be able to do that, in a way that it's really looking at what are the national development priorities within the countries themselves, and how does it also then support regional and global frameworks like Africa's Agenda 2063 and the sustainable development goals. >> No doubt in my mind, obviously, is that huge benefits to these kinds of technologies. I want to also just ask you, as a follow up is a huge space race going on, right now, explosion of availability of satellite data. And again, more satellites going up, There's more congestion, more contention. Again, we had a big event on that cybersecurity, and the congestion issue, but, you know, satellite data was power everyone here in the United States, you want an Uber, you want Google Maps you've got your everywhere with GPS, without it, we'd be kind of like (laughing), wondering what's going on. How do we even vote these days? So certainly an impact, but there's a huge surge of availability, of the use of satellite data. How do you explain this? And what are some of the challenges, from the data side that's coming, from the Digital Earth Africa project that you guys hope to resolve? >> Sure. I mean, that's a great question. I mean, I think at one level, when you're looking at the space race right now, satellites are becoming cheaper. They're becoming more efficient. There's increased technology now, on the types of sensors that you can deploy. There's companies like Planet, that are really revolutionizing how even small countries are able to deploy their own satellites, and the constellation that they're putting forward, in terms of the frequency by which, you're able to get data, for any given part of the earth on a daily basis, coupled with that. And you know, this is really sort of in climbs per view, but the cloud computing capabilities, and overall computing power that you have today, then what you had 10 years, 15 years ago is so vastly different. What used to take weeks to do before, for any kind of analysis on satellite data, which is heavy data now takes, you know, minutes or hours to do. So when you put all that together, again, you know, I think it really speaks, to the power of this partnership with Amazon and really, what that means, for how this data is going to be delivered to Africa, because it really allows for the scalability, for anything that happens through Digital Earth Africa. And so, for example, one of the approaches, that we're taking us, we identify what the priorities, and needs are at the country level. Let's say that it's a land degradation, there's often common issues across countries. And so when we can take one particular issue, tested with additional countries, and then we can scale it across the whole continent because the infrastructure is there for the whole continent. >> Yeah. That's a great point. So many storylines here. We'll get to climb in a second on sustainability. And I want to talk about the Open Data Platform. Obviously, open data, having data is one thing, but now train data, and having more trusted data becomes a huge issue. Again, I want to dig into that for a second, but, Clive, I want to ask you, first, what region are we in? I mean, is this, you guys actually have a great, first of all, we've been covering the region expansion from Bahrain all the way, as moves around the world, probably soon in space. There'll be a region Amazon space station region probably, someday in the future but, what region are you running the project out of? Can you, and why is it important? Can you share the update on the regional piece? >> Well, we're very pleased, that Digital Earth Africa, is using the new Africa region in Cape Town, in South Africa, which was launched in April of this year. It's one of 24 regions around the world and we have another three new regions announced, what this means for users of Digital Earth Africa is, they're able to use region closest to them, which gives them the best user experience. It's the, it's the quickest connection for them. But more importantly, we also wanted to use, an African solution, for African people and using the Africa region in Cape Town, really aligned with that thinking. >> So, localization on the data, latency, all that stuff is kind of within the region, within country here. Right? >> That's right, Yeah >> And why is that important? Is there any other benefits? Why should someone care? Obviously, this failover option, I mean, in any other countries to go to, but why is having something, in that region important for this project? >> Well, it comes down to latency for the, for the users. So, being as close to the data, as possible is, is really important, for the user experience. Especially when you're looking at large data sets, and big queries. You don't want to be, you don't want to be waiting a long lag time, for that query to go backwards and forwards, between the user and the region. So, having the data, in the Africa region in Cape Town is important. >> So it's about the region, I love when these new regions rollout from Amazon, Cause obviously it's this huge buildup CapEx, in this huge data center servers and everything. Sustainability is a huge part of the story. How does the sustainability piece fit into the, the data initiative supported in Africa? Can you share some updates on that? >> Well, this, this project is also closely aligned with the, Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, which looks to accelerate sustainability research. and innovation, really by minimizing the cost, and the time required to acquire, and analyze large sustainability datasets. So the initiative supports innovators, and researchers with the data and tools, and, and technical experience, that they need to move sustainability, to the next level. These are public datasets and publicly available to anyone. In addition, to that, the initiative provides cloud grants to those who are interested in exploring, exploring the use of AWS technology and scalable infrastructure, to serve sustainability challenges, of this nature. >> Aditya, I want to hear your thoughts, on this comment that Clive made around latency, and certainly having a region there has great benefits. You don't need to hop on that. Everyone knows I'm a big fan of the regional model, but it brings up the issue, of what's going on in the country, from an infrastructure standpoint, a lot of mobility, a lot of edge computing. I can almost imagine that. So, so how do you see that evolving, from a business standpoint, from a project standpoint data standpoint, can you comment and react to that edge, edge angle? >> Yeah, I mean, I think, I think that, the value of an open data infrastructure, is that, you want to use that infrastructure, to create a whole data ecosystem type of an approach. And so, from the perspective of being able. to make this data readily accessible, making it efficiently accessible, and really being able to bring industry, into that ecosystem, because of what we really want as we, as the program matures, is for this program, to then also instigate the development of new businesses, entrepreneurship, really get the young people across Africa, which has the largest proportion of young people, anywhere in the world, to be engaged around what you can do, with satellite data, and the types of businesses that can be developed around it. And, so, by having all of our data reside in Cape Town on the continent there's obviously technical benefits, to that in terms of, being able to apply the data, and create new businesses. There's also a, a perception in the fact that, the data that Digital Earth Africa is serving, is in Africa and residing in Africa which does have, which does go a long way. >> Yeah. And that's a huge value. And I can just imagine the creativity cloud, if you can comment on this open data platform idea, because some of the commentary that we've been having on The CUBE here, and all around the world is data's great. We all know we're living with a lot of data, you starting to see that, the commoditization and horizontal scalability of data, is one thing, but to put it into software defined environments, whether, it's an entrepreneur coding up an app, or doing something to share some transparency, around some initiatives going on within the region or on the continent, it's about trusted data. It's about sharing algorithms. AI is also a consumer of data, machines consume data. So, it's not just the technology data, is part of this new normal. What's this Open Data Platform, And how does that translate into value in your opinion? >> I, yeah. And you know, when, when data is shared on, on AWS anyone can analyze it and build services on top of it, using a broad range of compute and data to data analytics products, you know, things like Amazon EC2, or Lambda, which is all serverless compute, to things like Amazon Elastic MapReduce, for complex extract and transformation processes, but sharing data in the cloud, lets users, spend more time on the data analysis, rather than, than the data acquisition. And researchers can analyze data shared on AWS, without needing to pay to store their own copy, which is what the Open Data Platform provides. You only have to pay for the compute that you use and you don't need to purchase storage, to start a new project. So the registry of the open data on AWS, makes it easy to find those datasets, but, by making them publicly available through AWS services. And when you share, share your data on AWS, you make it available, to a large and growing community of developers, and startups, and enterprises, all around the world. And you know, and we've been talking particularly around, around Africa. >> Yeah. So it's an open source model, basically, it's free. You don't, it doesn't cost you anything probably, just started maybe down the road, if it gets heavy, maybe to charging but the most part easy for scientists to use and then you're leveraging it into the open, contributing back. Is that right? >> Yep. That's right. To me getting, getting researchers, and startups, and organizations growing quickly, without having to worry about the data acquisition, they can just get going and start building. >> I want to get back to Aditya, on this skill gap issue, because you brought up something that, I thought was really cool. People are going to start building apps. I'm going to start to see more innovation. What are the needs out there? Because we're seeing a huge onboarding of new talent, young talent, people rescaling from existing jobs, certainly COVID accelerated, people looking for more different kinds of work. I'm sure there's a lot of (laughing) demand to, to do some innovative things. The question I always get, and want to get your reaction is, what are the skills needed to, to get involved, to one contribute, but also benefit from it, whether it's the data satellite, data or just how to get involved skill-wise >> Sure. >> Yes. >> Yeah. So most recently we've created a six week training course. That's really kind of taken users from understanding, the basics of Earth Observation Data, to how to work, with Python, to how to create their own Jupyter notebooks, and their own Use cases. And so there's a, there's a wide sort of range of skill sets, that are required depending on who you are because, effectively, what we want to be able to do is get everyone from, kind of the technical user, that might have some remote sensing background to the developer, to the policy maker, and decision maker, to understand the value of this infrastructure, whether you're the one who's actually analyzing the data. If you're the one who's developing new applications, or you're taking that information from a managerial or policy level discussion to actually deliver the action and sort of impact that you're looking for. And so, you know, in, in that regard, we're working with ITC in the Netherlands and again, with institutions across Africa, that already have a mandate, and expertise in this particular area, to create a holistic capacity development program, that will address all of those different factors. >> So I guess the follow up question I want to have is, how do you ensure the priorities of Africa are addressed, as part of this program? >> Yeah, so, we are, we've created a governance model, that really is both top down, and bottom up. At the bottom up level, We have a technical advisory committee, that has over 15 institutions, many of which are based across Africa, that really have a good understanding of the needs, the priorities, and the mandate for how to work with countries. And at the top down level, we're developing a governing board, that will be inclusive, of the key continental level institutions, that really provide the political buy-in, the sustainability of the program, and really provide overall guidance. And within that, we're also creating an operational models, such that these institutions, that do have the capacity to support the program, they're actually the ones, who are also going to be supporting, the implementation of the program itself. >> And there's been some United Nations, sustained development projects all kinds of government involvement, around making sure certain things would happen, within the country. Can you just share, some of the highlights, or some of the key initiatives, that are going on, that you're supporting, to make it a better, better world? >> Yeah. So this is, this program is very closely aligned to a sustainable development agenda. And so looking after, looking developing methods, that really address, the sustainable development goals as one facet, in Africa, there's another program looking overall, overall national development priorities and sustainability called the Agenda 2063. And really like, I think what it really comes down to this, this wouldn't be happening, without the country level involvement themselves. So, this started with five countries, originally, Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and the government of Kenya itself, has really been, a kind of a founding partner for, how Digital Earth Africa and it's predecessor of Africa Regional Data Cube, came to be. And so without high level support, and political buying within those governments, I mean, it's really because of that. That's why we're, we're where we are. >> I need you to thank you for coming on and sharing that insight. Clive will give you the final word, for the folks watching Digital Earth Africa, processes, petabytes of data. I mean the satellite data as well, huge, you mentioned it's a new region. You're running Kubernetes, Elastic Kubernetes Service, making containers easy to use, pay as you go. So you get cutting edge, take the one minute to, to share why this region's cutting edge. Does it have the scale of other regions? What should they know about AWS, in Cape Town, for Africa's new region? Take a minute to, to put plugin. >> Yeah, thank you for that, John. So all regions are built in the, in the same way, all around the world. So they're built for redundancy and reliability. They typically have a minimum of three, what we call Availability Zones. And each one is a contains a, a cluster of, of data centers, and all interconnected with fast fiber. So, you know, you can survive, you know, a failure with with no impact to your services. And the Cape Town region is built in exactly the same the same way, we have most of the services available in the, in the Cape Town region, like most other regions. So, as a user of AWS, you, you can have the confidence that, You can deploy your services and workloads, into AWS and run it in the same in the same way, with the same kind of speed, and the same kind of support, and infrastructure that's backing any region, anywhere else in the world. >> Well great. Thanks for that plug, Aditya, thank you for your insight. And again, innovation follows cloud computing, whether you're building on top of it as a startup a government or enterprise, or the big society better, in this case, the Digital Earth Africa project. Great. A great story. Thank you for sharing. I appreciate it. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us, John >> I'm John Furrier with, The CUBE, virtual remote, not in person this year. I hope to see you next time in person. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music) (upbeat music decreases)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante with "theCUBE", and I'm very excited to be here at Amazon in Boston at Storage Day. And when you go back to 2006 and you think about the launch of Amazon Web Services, S3 was the first storage service. You know very simple, object store, and it became very, very popular, and I remember when Amazon announced EBS. I said okay, was at re:Invent and it was an exciting time. Well today, we are going to cover the innovations that Amazon has in its expanding storage portfolio. We've got experts from Amazon that are going to help us drill in to actually what's being announced, how these announcements work for the customer and what the business impact is going to be. Now, if you think about the history of cloud generally, but AWS specifically, which got cloud started, you know, it really started this, okay, I can now put data into the cloud. I can spin up, compute and storage, and not have to do all heavy lifting. And that was really when infrastructure as a service was born. And you had, CFOs loved it because they could shift CAPEX to OPEX, developers loved it 'cause they could treat infrastructure as code, and it really has become the new model. But what happened initially was people either did a lot of development in the cloud, or they would take applications and workloads running on Prim, put them in the cloud, and get benefits: lower cost, better agility, much simpler management. And they would be able to sort of retrain people, or shift people to more strategic workloads and activities. This became critical starting at around the 2015-16 time frame with all the talk around digital transformation. But in and of itself, what customers tell us is what they really want to do with the cloud is change their operating model. So you think about new programming models, you think about agile programming, new methodologies, DevOps really comes into the fore. The whole big data meme involved into data and digital transformation, you're seeing people take advantage of data lakes, and then of course, you've got all this data, what's the next level of innovation? It's to take machine learning and put it on top of all that data. So the innovation engine is no longer Moore's Law, it's now a cocktail of data, plus machine intelligence, or AI, and then the cloud gives you scale. Global scale, which is very important. We're going to drill down today and talk about Amazon's philosophy on regions and availability zones, and really try to poke at how that's maybe different from some of the other cloud providers. But really the most important thing here I want you to think about is business impact. If you can change the operating model, you can get more out of your IT infrastructure and your infrastructure as a service than just lower cost or even better agility, you can actually transform your business, create new types of business models. Now, underneath all this is storage. You got to have sets of storage services that can support these new emerging workloads. So we started out with S3 which is object, EBS was file and supported database, and you've seen Amazon's database business explode, it's a multi-billion dollar business. And now, we're really digging into file, as an opportunity for customers, and of course, for AWS. So "theCube" is thrilled to be covering this. Stay with us, we got a full day of programming. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)