>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, welcome back to the cubes coverage of combo go 19. Stu Miniman is here with me, Lisa Martin and we are wrapping up two days of really exciting wall to wall coverage of the new vault and we're very pleased to welcome a couple of special guests onto the program. To help us wrap up our two days, we have Miranda foster, the vice president of worldwide communications for comm vault and Al Bunty is here, the co founder, former COO and board member. Welcome Miranda and Al. Great to have you on the program. Thanks Lisa. So a lot of energy at this event and I don't think it has anything to do with our rarefied air here in the mile high city. Al, let's start with you. >>Well, there's other things in Colorado. >>There are, yeah, they don't talk about it. They talked about that on stage yesterday. So owl, you have been with convo ball as I mentioned, co-founder. What an evolution over the last 20 years. Can you take us back? >>Surely. So, um, yeah and it's been, it's, it's really kind of cool to see it coming together at this point. But if you go back 20 years when we started this, the whole idea was around data. And remember we walked into a company that was focused on optical storage. Um, we decided it would be a good company to invest in. Um, for two reasons. One, we thought they were really great people here, very creative and innovative and two, it was a great space. So if we believed we believe data would grow and that was a pretty decent thesis to go with. Yeah. And then, then it started moving from there. So I tell people I wasn't burdened with facts so I didn't understand why all these copies were being made of the same set of data. So we developed a platform and an architecture focused on indexing it so you just index at once and then could use it for many different purposes. >>And that just kept moving through the years with this very data centric approach to storage, management, backup protection, etc. It was all about the data. I happened to be lucky and said, you know, I think there's something to this thing called NAS and sand and storage networks and all those things. And I also said we have to plan for fur on scale on our solution of a million X. Now it was only off a magnitude of about a thousand on that, but it was the right idea. You know, you had to build something to scale and, and we came in and we wanted to build a company. We didn't want to just flip a company but we thought there is a longterm vision in it and if you take it all the way to the present here it's, it's really, um, it's, it feels really good to see where the company came from. It's a great foundation and now it will propel off this foundation, um, with a similar vision with great modern execution and management. >>Yeah. Al, when we had the chance to talk with you last year at the show in Nashville, it was setting up for that change. So I want to get your view there. There are some things that the company was working on and are being continued, but there's some things that, you know, Bob hammer would not have happened under his regime. So want to get your viewpoint as to the new Convolt, you know, what, what is, what are some of those new things that are moving forward with the company that might not have in the previous days? >>Yeah, that's a good questions. Do I think Mo, a lot of the innovation that you've seen here, um, would have happened maybe not as quickly. Um, we, the company obviously acquired Hedvig. Uh, we were on a very similar path but to do it ourselves. So you had kind of been a modern, we need to get to market quicker with some real pros. I think, um, the, the evolution of redoing sales management essentially was probably the biggest shift that needed to be under a new regime, if you will. Yeah. >>So Miranda, making these transitions can be really tricky from a marketing standpoint. Talk, talk us through a bit, some of the, how do you make sure trusted yet innovative and new that you've accomplished at this show? >>Well, trust it is obviously the most important because the Bob, the brand that Bob and Al built really embodies reliability for what we provide to our customers. I mean that's what gives them the peace of mind to sleep at night. But I'll tell you, Sanjay has been with us for just eight months now, February of 2019 and it's been busy. We've done a lot of things from a points on J transition with Bob and now to his point we've, we've acquired Hedvig, we've introduced this new SAS portfolio and you're exactly right. What we need to do is make sure that the reliability that customers have come to rely on Convolt for translates into what we're doing with the new Convolt and I think we've done a really good job. We've put a lot of muscle behind making sure, particularly with metallic that it was tried, it was trusted, it was beta tested, we got input from customers, partners, industry influencers. We really built it around the customer. So I think the brand that comm brings will translate well into the things that we've done with these, with these new shifts and movements within the company >>on, on that questions too as well. Um, I think Miranda is a good example of somebody that was with the company before a tremendous talent. She's got new opportunities here and she's run with it. So it's kinda that balance of some, uh, understood the fundamentals and the way we're trying to run the business. And she's grasped the new world as well. So, >>and Rob as well, right? Robin in his new, >>yeah, that's another good point. So that was all part of the transitioning here and Sanjay and the team had been very careful on trying to keep that balance. >>Change is really difficult anywhere, right? Dissect to any element of life. And you look at a business that's been very successful, has built a very strong, reliable brand for 20 years. Big leadership changes, not just with Sanjay, but all of the leadership changes. You know, analysts said, all right, you've got to upgrade your Salesforce. We're seeing a lot of movement in the area. You got to enhance your marketing. We're seeing metallic has the new routes to market, new partner focus, so PSI focuses. We're also seeing this expansion in the market, so what folks were saying, you know a year ago come on is answering in a big way and to your point in a fast way that's not easy to do. You've been here nine years since the beginning. Can you give us a little bit of a perspective, Miranda, about some of the things that were announced at the show? >>How excited everybody is, customers, partners, combo folks. How do you now extend the message and the communications from go globally after the show ends? That's an awesome question. I'm really passionate about this. So you know, Monday we announced metallic, we announced a new head of channels and alliances and Mercer Rowe, we had crazy technology innovation announcements with activate, with the acceleration of the integration with Hedvig with the momentum release that we put out today. We're also doing cool stuff with our corporate social responsibility in terms of sponsoring the new business Avengers coalition. That's something that Chris Powell is really championing here at, at the show and also within combo. So we're very excited about that. And then when you add people like yourselves, you know the tech field day folks, because not everybody can be here, right? Not everybody can be at go. So being able to extend the opportunity for, for folks to participate in combo, go through things like the cube through things like tech field day and using our social media tools and just getting all of the good vibes that are here. Because as Al says, this really is an intimate show, but we try to extend that to anybody who wants to follow us, to anybody who wants to be a part of it. And that's something that we've really focused on the last couple of years to make sure that folks who aren't here can, can get an embrace the environment here at Commonweal go. >>It's such an important piece that you're here helping with the transition I talked about. It's important that some of the existing >>get new roles and do responsibility going forward. What's your role going to be and what should we expect to see from you personally? Somebody has got to mow the lawn. >>Yeah. >>But yes, do I, I'll stay on the board. Um, we're talking through that. I think I'll be a very active board, not just the legal side of the equation. Um, try and stay involved with customers and, and strategies and, and even, uh, potential acquisitions, those kinds of things. Um, I'm also wandering off into the university environment. Uh, my Alma mater is a university of Iowa. I'm on the board there and uh, I'm involved in setting up innovation centers and entrepreneurial programs and that kind of thing. Um, I'll keep doing my farming thing and uh, actually have some ideas on that. There's a lot of technology as you guys know, attacking Nat space. So, and like I said, I'll try to keep a lot of things linked back into a combo. >>What Al can have confidence in is that I will keep him busy. So there's that. And then I will also put on the table, we agree to disagree with our college athletic loyalties. So I'm a big kid just because we don't compete really. Right. So I mean, but if I won Kansas wherever to play, then we would just politely disagree. Yeah. Well that's good that you have this agreement in place. I would love to get some anecdotal feedback from you of some of the things that you've heard over the last three days with all this news, all these changes. What are you hearing from customers and partners who you've had relationships with for a very long time? >>I think they're, I think they're all really excited, but, and maybe I'm biased, but they liked the idea that we're trying to not throw out all the old focus on customers, focus on technologies, continue the innovation. I'm pleased that we, Miranda and the team started taking this theme of what we do to a personal level, you know, recovery and those kinds of things. It isn't just the money in the business outages. It's a really a effect on a personal lives. And that resonates. I hear that a lot. Um, I asked our bigger customers and they've loved us for our support, how we take care of them. The, the intimacy of the partnership, you know, and I think they feel pleased that that's staying yet there's lot of modern Emity if that's a good word. I think fokai was what you, I think it's the blend of things and I think that really excites people. >>We've heard that a lot. You guys did a great job with having customers on stage and as a marketer who does customer marketing programs, I think there's nothing more validating than the voice of a customer. But suddenly today that I thought was a pivot on that convo, did well as Sonic healthcare was on main stage. And then he came onto the program and I really liked how he talked about some of the failures that they've been through. You know, we had the NASA talking yesterday, NASA, 60 years young, very infamous, probably for failure is not an option, but it is a very real possibility whether you're talking about space flight or you're talking about data protection and cyber attacks and the rise of that. And it was really, I'd say, refreshing to hear the voice of a customer say, these are the areas in which we failed. This is how come they've helped us recover and how much better and stronger are they? Not just as a company as Sonic healthcare, but even as an individual person responsible for that. That was a really great message that you guys were able to extend to the audience today and we wanted to get that out. >>I loved that as well. I think that was good. I have also back on driving innovation, I always felt one of my biggest jobs was to not punish people that failed. Yeah. I, you know, with the whole engineering team, the bright people in marketing, I, I would be very down on them if they didn't try, but I never wanted them to feel bad about trying and never punish them. >>And one of the things Matthew said on main stage, first of all, I love him. He's great. He's been a longtime CommonWell supporter. I love his sense of humor. He said, you know, combo came to me and said, can you identify, you know, your biggest disaster recovery moment? And he was like, no, because there's so many. Yes. Right? Like there's so many when you're responsible for this. It's just the unpredictability of it is crazy. And so he couldn't identify one, but he had a series of anecdotes that I think really helped the audience identify with and understand this is, these are big time challenges that we're up against today. And hearing his use case and how con ball is helping him solve his heart problems, I think was really cool. You're right. I loved that too. He said, I couldn't name one. There are so many. That's reality, right? As data proliferates, which every industry is experiencing, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. There's also great risk as technology advances for good. The bad actors also have access to that sort of technology. So his honesty, I thought was, was refreshing, but spot on. And what a great example for other customers to listen to the RA. To your point, I, if I punish people for failure, we're not going to learn from it. >>Yeah, you'll never move forward. >>Miranda. So much that we learn this week at the shows. Some, a lot of branding, a lot of customers, I know some people might be taking a couple of days off, but what should we expect to be seeing from con vault post go this year, >>continue to innovation. We're not letting our foot off the gas at all. Just continuing innovation as as as we integrate with Hedvig continued acceleration with metallic. I mean those guys are aggressive. They were built as a startup within an enterprise company built on Comvalt enterprise foundation. Those guys are often running, they are motivated, they're highly talented, highly skilled and they're going to market with a solution that is targeted at a specific market and those guys are really, really ready to go. So continued innovation with Hedvig integrate, sorry, integration with Hedvig with metallic. I think you're just going to be seeing a lot more from Combalt in the future on the heels of what we consider humbled, proud leadership with the Gartner magic quadrant. You know the one two punch with the Forrester wave. I think that you're just going to be seeing a lot more from Combalt and in terms of how we're really getting out there and aggressive. And that's not to mention Al, you know what we do with our core solutions. I mean today we just announced a bunch of enhancements to the core technology, which is, which is the bread and butter of, of what we do. So we're not letting the foot off the gas to be sure >>the team stay in really, really aggressive too. And the other thing I'd add as a major investor that I'm expecting is sales. Now I'd love to just your, your final thoughts that the culture of Convolt because while there's some acceleration and there's some change, I think some of the fundamentals stay the same. Yeah, it's, it's right to, and again, that's why I feel we're at a good point on this transition process. You alluded to it earlier, but I feel really good about the leadership that's in, they've treated me terrifically. I'm almost almost part of the team. I love that they're, they're trying to leverage off all the assets that were created in his company. Technology, obviously platform architecture, support base, our support capabilities. I, I told Sandy today I wish she really would have nailed the part about, and by the way, support and our capabilities with customers as a huge differentiator and it was part of our original, Stu knows he's heard me forever. Our original DNA, we wanted to focus on two things. Great technology, keep the great technology lead and customer support and satisfaction. So those elements, now you blend that stew with really terrific Salesforce. As Ricardo says, have you guys talk with Ricardo soon? But anyway, the head of sales is hiring great athletes, particularly for the enterprise space. Then you take it with a real terrific marketing organization that's focused, Oh, had modern techniques and analytics on all those things. You know, it's, it's in my opinion, as an investor especially, I'm expecting really good things >>bar's been set well. I can't think of a better way for Sue and me to our coverage owl veranda. Thank you. This has been fantastic. You've got to go. You get a lawn to mow, you've got a vacation to get onto and you need some wordsmithing would focus your rights. You have a flight ticket. They do five hours. Hi guys. Thank you. This has been awesome. Hashtag new comm vault for our guests and I, Lisa Martin, you've been watching the cubes coverage of Convault go and 19 we will see you next time.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combalt. >>Hey, welcome back to the cube Lisa Martin with steam and man we are live on the show floor of comm vault go 2019 fourth annual event, a couple thousand customers here and Steve and I are welcoming back the COO of combo. Chris pal. Chris, welcome back. Thanks. Great to be here. We're excited to be here. We just came out of the keynote. Some interesting news to talk about but let's, let's to talk about what's happened. Combat is a 20 year young company, tremendous amount of acceleration in the last nine months. Lot of leadership changes he must be going to hold onto the table cause you got like the whiplash, right? So tell us, here we are at the fourth annual go news in terms of sales leadership changes go to market opportunities with metallic, with a new partner programs for the enterprise. Tell us what are some of the things that are exciting to you and how come vault is really in 20 FYE 2020 position? Like, Hey, we're listening to our customers and partners. >>Yeah, yeah. Well, and a lot of the things that you're seeing here at this show is just that it's, it's, it's market-driven. It's us responding to what we're seeing in the market, working with our partners. And a show like this is all about working with partners. Our customers and the, the announcements that we're making here are really releasing a completely new combo that the brand refresh that we've done just over the last month or so is been tied to a lot of the things that are changing with regards to the product portfolio. Uh, that Hedvig acquisition and a lot of the different leadership changes that you're seeing and the leadership changes are really driving a lot of this shift of focus. And really, I shouldn't say shift really extended focus for the organization from a technological standpoint as well as from working with our partners. >>Yeah, it's interesting. The news ahead of the show of metallic Convult now a SAS providers. So it's interesting to get you give us your, your view as a marketer. On the one hand you need to be the trusted enterprise supplier with a lot of customers. And the other one, you know, they've got cloud microservices, all the latest buzz words and you know sasses the model that a lot of customers want to be able to consume their software standpoint. So, so >>I know you have Rob Kalusi and who's going to be coming on. So I'll steal some of his thunder and I'll try not to steal too much to don't tell them the what excites me so much about the metallic product when leap, when we first started down this path, it was we, we really started looking at the market and the challenge that came from Sanjay when he just first entered the building really was we have industry leading technology. A lot of folks will talk about how we have industry leading technology. But if you really took a step back, you would have to have an honest view and say, sometimes they would say, well look, if it's a, if it's a really straight forward installation, maybe Commonwealth and might be a bit bring too much to the party, so why don't you look at some of the other solutions. >>And as we were talking to different customers out there, they were looking for SAS solutions and but they at the same time, they didn't want to make any compromises. And so much of the research that Rob and team working with Janet and with David, no, we're seeing is that as they were going out there, the Seuss solutions that were available today, and this sounds like marketing spin, right? But it's really what we were hearing back, that they weren't very good there, that they weren't SAS solutions. They're supposed to be easy. The customers really didn't see them as easy. They were running into scale issues, they were running into flexibility issues. So from the standpoint of building the solution, what we quickly realized is if we could reach Sanjay's challenge to us, which is bringing this fundamentally solid technology to a broader audience with a simplified use cases that there's a great opportunity for us to bring value to more companies. So that's, that's where this went. And then the beginning reviews of this as we brought this into beta and different people were seeing at different customers, different partners, they even came into the conversation a little bit pessimistic and they all left excited about what they were seeing. It's it's, it's really good. It's really good. >>So targeted towards mid market companies with around 2,500 or 500 to 2,500 employees. Give me just a little bit of a perspective on the choice that Commonweal is now offering the midmarket with complete backup and recovery. That's one of your flagship and metallic. >>So the the metallic offerings your men for some of the most common use cases that are out there. So 65 and the what we're, what we're trying to inject into the market and the target of 500 to 2,500 employees is really just where we see the sweet spot of most of the customers of those sizes are the ones that are looking at SAS solutions right now. But that's not to say as we've talked to larger enterprises, many of them are considering the addition of metallic as into their either subsidiaries or other areas of their business. And what Sanjay talks about, he sort of refers to as the data brain is really bringing this together where you can add SAS solutions onto your existing on prem solution. So if you're running combo complete, you can also be running metallic across other aspects of your business. So that's, that's one of the things that makes it powerful upmarket, but then we're also targeting the more common use cases that are more turnkey down-market. Yeah. >>Let's switch gears a little bit. So your team had a little bit of fun opening up the keynote. You had some of the stunt doubles a for Thor from Starwood and the woman has done both star Wars and Marvel on and talking about the unsung heroes behind the scenes. Kind of like your, your customers here. But there was another connection because they were vendors and con vault is, I believe it's the global Avengers and it has to do with sustainability, which I know is something near and dear to your heart. So explain a little bit about why that's important in what it is. >>So it's definitely a passion of mine and something that we accumbent are looking to every company as we're driving this should try to stand for something bigger than themselves. And as we look at this all started two years ago when we sponsored and I joined Robert Swan's expedition to the South pole. We were the data sponsor for that expedition and it was the first expedition to rely solely on renewable energy. And what has evolved from that from different conversations, we started having discussions throughout about the carbon footprint of data and with 5g the internet of things coming and more and more data on the horizon. The people that we're speaking with. And the reality I think that tech has come to is that we can't be part of the problem. We have to be part of the solution. So through a series of connections, we ended up speaking with the folks who were responsible for the UN global goals. Um, it's the 17 global goals around the world that were endorsed by all of the UN countries five years ago and there's 10 more years of it. And Kamahl is extremely proud to be joining some of the largest companies in the world. Coca Cola, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, many in our industry and outside, obviously to sponsor one of the global global goals. But the way the program works is it 17 global goals and there's one company for each one of them in order to try to represent it and drive it forward. >>Chris, you actually took a few of us around the show floor before it opened last night. We know conferences can have a bit of an impact from a negative standpoint. So tell some of what Combolt's doing to make sure that this conference, you know, doesn't have such an impact. >>So as you mentioned before, it's about 2000 people that are here and I was shocked to learn and a lot of this is all in education. As you go through life, the, an event of this size typically will generate 25,000 pounds of rubbish of trash. So what we've done is partner with our good customer, which is the Gaylord Gaylord hotel systems and leaf put together a model where we're trying to minimize the overall footprint. So we donate a lot of what you see around here. Construction materials are donated to schools and local organizations. We're using all of the natural plants that will go back into the, uh, into the environment after this. Um, no plastic. I'm trying. And then the, uh, the cups you see here on the table are all plant based. So we're, we're trying to be very conscientious about everything that we're doing here at the show and minimize the footprint. >>When you're talking with customers, as I'm sure as cou are doing a lot, we talk, we often Sue and I and the rest of the cube crew. Sustainability is a topic that comes up at every event. We're, is that when you're talking with customers in any industry, whether it's healthcare or oil and gas, where is sustainability in >>terms of conversation? Is that one of the key things that comes up? That was also really important for Commonwealth to say, Hey, we want to be able to make sure that the technologies we're delivering are going to help our customers meet their sustainability goals. >>Absolutely. And it's, it's increasingly part of some, a number of RFPs. They will come in for Combalt. So they're there. Companies are looking to have us be able to really represent what our sustainability, what our corporate social responsibility systems are and what we put in place. And so we look at this through the lens of what do we do within our facilities? What do we do in events like this? And then also what can we do with our customers? So it's increasingly relevant and their sons of research, I'm sure you guys have seen the, the, as the millennial generation becomes more and more part of either significant influencers or decision makers, they're looking for companies that have a mission, you know, and that that stand for something all. >>So Chris, we're talking about sustainability is something you're passionate about. How does that tie into the broader brand discussion of Convolt companies going through, we talked about the executive change and you've got a lot of new products. So when people leave Combalt go 2019 how do you want them to think of Convult? >>That's a great question. I think what we're hoping that we were really using combo Alco as a combination of so many of the things that have been happening over the last couple of quarters. And certainly as I looked through what we're representing now, it's what are we as an organization, what's the story we're trying to tell? So we launched just in the last few weeks a new tagline, which is be ready. And that whole concept of data readiness is something that we're having within this show and it'll be in a lot of our messaging as we move forward. So this, I'm thinking of as the organization that enables you to be ready and then extending that should of saying, well what does that mean? And that's around how we protect the data, help you control where it resides, help you manage it for compliance and different regulatory needs, and then help you use it and get value from it. So that's the big takeaway we're hoping that people have. The other piece of this that we have each year is we expose people to such expertise here at the show. This is not combo talking about combo. 70% of our sessions in the breakout theaters are partners or customers or other influencers. So we want people to come here and really see convolve as data experts, as the people who are willing to work with them. >>Yeah. One little nugget you shared also, you've been growing. How many developers you bring from internal to the show. I have to think that Sanjay has a little bit of push from that based on his last. Yeah, yeah. >>Roll. Yeah. Certainly the DevOps community is increasingly, especially with some of the moves we've made in Hedvig, the dev community is going to be increasingly an audience for us to, to engage with. But the, we bring 45 developers to the show this year. It's about 40 from a combo and five more that have joined with Hedvig and they have 30 or 60 minute whiteboard sessions and they're completely jam packed. There's, I think last year there was over 150 whiteboard sessions over two days with customers just coming in and going through the details of this because a lot of organizations, they're there, they're faced with right now and in Sanjay's words, they have to move from something to something and they need people to be able to sit down and have honest conversations with them. Um, I joke with people sometimes that one of the terrible things that happened has happened to marketing with the advent of technology is we have to be truthful now when you know you can't, you can't just spin things. And so we're stuck having to tell the truth. But, but combo has a great truth that sets, we've got a really solid truth to tell. We just need to tell it. >>Well, and I love how marketing is so scientific these days. You're right, you have to tell the truth. But you also have, if you have the right foundation within your organization, the ability to access data actually glean insights from it, develop, whether it's a new partner program or new technologies, new routes to market. That's the power of that. Having visibility and access to the data can deliver to any type of organization. When you, when you talk with customers who've been, we've got some on the show today, Hey, we've been using Convolt for 10 years. When you talk to them today, this theme of be ready more than ready. How are they perceiving their foundation with combo and all of the changes that you've made, not just in the last 10 years, but in the last nine months alone. Which like customer feedback. Yeah, >>the customer feedback has been tremendous. I think they, they, so many customers are something that's so great about combo. Does our customers want us to succeed and they, they see this market shifting tremendously. They've been with us for a while and they want us to succeed. When they look at the changes that they're having to overcome, they're excited about really beginning to learn that as they move from something to something that we can help them on that journey. That they don't have to go somewhere else for that journey. So whether that's looking into SAS areas, whether it's modernizing their infrastructure, whether it's moving to multi-cloud and those environments, we, we have the right solutions in the right way for them to be able to make this transition for their company. So >>Chris, we're relatively early still in this show, so I hate to ask, but give us a little bit of a go forward. Lot of change in the last nine months. What should your customers be expecting from comm vault through the rest of the year? And by the time we come back to Convolt go 20, 20? >>Well, I think when you talk to Sanjay, he always says, puts me back on my heels a little bit and tells me that it's a, there's more coming, there's more coming, we're going to keep going. So it, Sanjay is a very dynamic leader and he's looking to make sure that the company isn't just driving to combo go and then it's going to sort of be smooth sailing with these things. I think this is an exciting time to be here at combo. This is an exciting time to be in the industry. So as we look forward to, um, the new leadership that's come in and some of the things they'll be able to do in terms of our go to market, I think we're going to be exciting. Avinash coming into this organization and his expertise, his skill set and all of the brilliant engineers he's, he's brought in to sort of join our industry leading engineering team. Uh, it's, it's going to be, uh, I can't wait to see what they come up with from a marketing standpoint. You know, we, we had a solid product for a number of years, but it's always challenging to sort of continue to tell a story and come up with new ways to tell it. As you get new things in your, in your box to be able to talk about, it's, it's great to be here. >>Well, Chris, we want to thank you for joining us on the queue today. We're excited about the next two days of all of the folks, leaders, new leaders, customers, partners that we're going to be talking to you and really unpacking what being ready means to them. So we thank you for your time and we look forward to a great event. Thanks very much for Steven. Amen. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the Q from ball go 19.

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube covering your storage accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. How >> do you all how to do Dave Great Legal garden with you? Yes, I am Lisa Martin with David Lantana. And can you guess we're in Texas were at pure Accelerate 2019 Day one of our coverage here and the Buzzy Expo Hall. Pleased to welcome one of Pierre's customers to the Q B of Jason Thomas, the CEO of Coal, Scott Hussein or C. S K Legal Jason. Welcome to the program. So talk to us a little bit about si es que legal. You're based out of Florida. You're CEO. Give us a little bit of a picture of the law firm, your I T environment and your role. ISS leader of information >> So cold, Scott is saying, >> has been around >> 20 plus years. I joined about three and 1/2 years ago, Um, and we have now this one. We have 13 officers. We just opened up 13th office. We're the largest law firm in Florida currently, and only in Florida. Interestingly enough, I actually live and work out of Boston, but you know, these days there's no reason why you can't work remote. I go, they're off enoughto needed. >> You can avoid the hurricanes by living in >> a snowstorm over >> hurting any >> day because I've been a >> good pro sports in Boston. Better, better college sports in Florida. >> Yeah, No one cares about college sports. >> Best of both worlds. All right, so we're here Appear. You guys have been appear customer for a while. But give us this This picture of the legal landscape from a data volume perspective, I could imagine tons of documentation. I think you guys have hundreds of attorneys. What were some of the challenges three years ago when you were looking for the ideal long? You know, storage service is that you were really looking to four companies like your help eliminate and allow you to really deliver on the business needs. >> So we're heavy, heavy volume, business tons and tons of documents. Um, And when I came on board 39 years ago, the ever start of iron was basically a lot of physical servers, a lot of local storage which, quite frankly, scared me. I came from my previous company. I was that I came from a nap shop And that was when my first initiatives was bringing in a sand into the firm and centralizing all the storage on also setting up D r a cz. Well, along with that. So it started evaluation process pretty much within a few months, coming on board the firm. >> So you knew Netapp. Sorry, Dave. You knew Net up your pure customer perspective. Of what? For some of those things that you were looking for that when you found pure was, like, checks all the boxes. >> I can tell you what I wasn't looking for. It was I wasn't looking to hire a storage admin. So I want to find something super simple demand something that I could manage or any of the guys could manage any this this admits, could manage. So that was like starting point of the evaluation. >> So you had a bunch of sounds like discreet Dad asked direct access storage, and he said that concern you, presumably because it was hard to manage to get a handle on. So you wanted to consolidate >> way had if we had our sequel No sequel box go down down for a day, and, uh, do you ever stole from backups in previous night. Not really a good set up at the time >> in our most of your attorneys century, located in one location. Are they distributed there? >> They're spread out all across up and down floors. So we have 13 offices. So between there, they're all over the place. But a lot of work remote down, too. So that's becoming a big thing as well. So the >> reason I asked you to get the pendulum swinging right, you had almost ass, and then you went to a sin. And now this. You got the head you get cloud. I don't know if you're taking advantage of cloud, are you? >> Uh, we are actually we a lot of our software now that we've slowly start to move a lot of our main main line products to the cloud or a cloud edition of this product. So I would say we're probably 50 to 60% cloud now. >> Yes. So you were tied up in the keynotes this morning, but one of the things we heard in the key notice you could have the pure management experience. No matter where your data lives, bring the the pure cloud experience to your date on Prim and the public cloud hybrid. Is that something that's appealing to you? Is that resonate? Yeah. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. It makes it. Look, I can I can actually blogging appear one of my phone if I want to, you know, and check the room. Not that I ever do. Quite. I'll say I never really need to look at >> it. Well, your c i o. Right. I mean, you got other things to worry about. Get my I would like >> to be involved with fingers in it. >> It's interesting. So I mean, you know, a lot of time CEOs, they don't they let, but your tech I love your technical. See a lot of that. A lot of technical CEOs as well, but But also, you don't want to hire a storage admin. Correct. So you want general is to be able to deal this stuff. Okay, so you know your question. Why? Why pure? What would you look at? And >> so we looked at, um, way looked at HP street power. Big name. Um, we looked at fewer and we looked at 10 tree and I pretty much especially with three part I knew that would be management heavy so that when I toss that one out pretty quickly, not that it's not a great product. But it just wasn't for me or what I was >> the right fit. >> You're not right for us. So we came down the pier and 10 tree. I had a had a buddy who worked at another law firm, and he's like and he was like, Look, just don't even waste time just go pure And it's a phrase that I use Sometimes I stole from him, but he he's like, Dude, this is like storage crack. You'll love it. >> Storage crack. Wow, They need a T shirt. That first >> first hit's free. Okay, so that was the right fit for you. It was your peer was appear that that enticed you. That's obviously take a bit. I presume you take a lot of hair advice. >> Lot appeared, but we didn't even do a POC. >> Wow, this is this is a good period that you obviously trust. >> All right, how to >> see was the interface yet you showed me the interface on a phone call one time, and he's like, this is it. I'm like, That's it. >> What did you actually bring in. What are you using? >> I'm sorry, >> What products That you're actually using, What? Or with pure >> Oh, so I'm sorry. Um Exchange sequel. Um, that our main line, our bookkeeping time, time and building. All that that that's that's the meaning of >> all the legal absent all the legal dated the data stores. Which product from pure is that? Do you know a fan? Is it? Uh, it's the all flash array. Yeah. >> I'm sorry. Yes, it's the FBI. >> Yeah. Okay. And so, thinking about before and after hell kind of a as is and the to be how would you compare and contrast two when you brought it in the pre in the post >> your environment. >> Oh, for your business. >> That's Ah, good question. I felt more comfortable sleeping at night. You know why? Just the reliability of the ease of management. You know, if we need to bring up a volume or expanded volume, we could do it very quickly. It doesn't. It doesn't take a rocket science to do it. And from everyone I spoke to I mean, I can't I'm not I can't speak to it, but I can't. I don't I don't believe I've ever talked anybody that's had an outage or whether you raise gone down. In fact, it seems that they tell me before we even know if there's, you know, an issue. Andi. They jump on it right away. So we've never had never had now has never had an issue, never had an issue with an upgrade. It's been fantastic. That supports awesome. >> No need for a rocket scientist or a storage admin, >> and you're sleeping better. This is very, very good thing so far this interview. So in terms of the traditional storage model that you're well familiar with, as you said, you know, being very familiar with netapp it a previous role, the whole every three years. Allies like it. We've got to switch things out, disrupting operations here, comes along with the Evergreen model, and we go, How much of that is marketing and how much of that really actually means? And I know you're a big >> you're in my mind. So yeah, I was like, Oh, so I'm pre paying for support or, you know, But you know what? One side. Once I understood what it really waas and the advantages of of it inmate sentence. We didn't. We didn't I didn't think we would upgrade as much as we have already. We've already gone through to storage up, raising two controller upgrades. So that's really where where it really makes sense is when you're doing storage controller upgrade. So if you want to start our small, which we do is start a little bit small in the beginning. And then then our business grew like crazy and our storage needs expanded. So we went through at least two upgrades for years. >> So you you bring in a rare you paying basically perpetual license up front boom. And then and then you're doing the evergreen model. And then now you're on a subscription in perpetuity, is that correct? Okay, so you you essentially go from cap Ex Op X over the life cycle, and then when you add capacity, you're paying for that capacity, and then >> you just like you return the equipment, you get your money back, and then, uh, you get new equipment >> is truly non disruptive. >> We've been through to upgrades and to control operates with your major upgrades and, um, both of them we did at 5 p.m. Just not that the firm close. If I were anything but, you know, just to feel comfortable. I don't know how you do it at five, and it's okay because you know, if anything goes down from five and if no one's working right, so But here, obviously, we're always attorneys are always on and know they're really smooth. No problems. Every I mean, they got a great strategy and method to the upgrades way stayed up the entire time. >> I mean, it is a big issue for practitioners. We we've done some quantification over the years, and it was like the minimum to migrate. Honore was $50,000. When you add it all in people's time, the cost of the array, the complexity and you're saying first of all, sound reasonable, right kind of number, right? I mean, that's probably gonna make room for the conservative right. Is that essentially been eliminated? I mean, it gives you some planning, I guess are >> pretty much. And as far as the planning goes, you know, these these guys take care of all that. So when we're ready to make the switch, they just log in and do their thing, and then it's done, >> and in terms of training for yourself or your team. When you've done these two upgrades that what's that process been like? >> Log in and figure it out. I mean, >> it sounds pretty simple. >> There's not much to it. Yeah. >> So what's on the C I ose mind these days? Obviously, you don't stay awake at night now thinking about story. >> I stay awake for security, for >> talk about that data >> breach security seems like every every week. Now it it seems I'm on my Twitter feed and this is there's a new breech home. It just it's It's almost got to the point where, you know, it's just another thing that happens. >> So what's your challenge there? Is it managing all these tools? Is it knowing what to respond to it? Is it the skill sets all of the above? My >> biggest thing is, I believe in lots of redundancy. So, um, so one. Starting with the pure we have, we have a second array in another data center outside the state, so we replicate the to raise between each other. That's that's what we started with that side. We also running, you know, regular backups. We run rubric for that. And we also now have just oh, establishing cloud strategy for backups. Immutable. Um, long, long retention. So we also send our backup to the cloud as well. So now I'm feeling like I can sleep. Probably can sleep late now. I just gotta wait for somebody for something to happen, I guess, and makes sure, and hopefully your strategy is pretty solid here. >> Okay, so D r and backup are part of that overall data protection and security strategy that extends obviously into the perimeter device, etcetera, etcetera. So you have a SEC ops team. How do you weigh? >> Don't have a dedicated no. See. So, >> Well, you're the C cell. >> I'm exactly exactly so. Sher Sher bulls with a small group of us that are also the security team. And we've got a pretty I think we've got at this point a pretty solid security sack. Always room for improvement. Always looking at the new stuff. What's out there? I mean, there's all kinds of cool tech out there. Sometimes I get a little overboard with the team, gets a little upset with me because, you know, I just want to see I want to do another POC, and they're like we have three running. >> Okay, Like you guys have a pretty solid foundation running on pure that you stone to me, like, kind of appear customer for life. So they should at least give you a T shirt. Um, Adam, >> give me atleast >> a T shirt. >> I'll tell you one what really sold me within the first year was we had a We had a B m that wouldn't wouldn't boot up and we couldn't figure out what was going on. So we thought initially thought was a V m where issue and so we call support and you can really figure out. They said it was a pure issue. We call so decide to call Pure. One night I was 89 o'clock at night and decide to give it a shot, and the guy got on the phone and come to find. Now there was some issue with the data stores of'em where it was crossed, her data stores and one was deleted. Oh, apparently maybe me had deleted a small data store that had nothing on it, but apparently it was linked to the data store. This b m for some unknown reason known. Behold, bmr issue. But the guy on the line actually knew of resource within pure. That was That was a big bm weren't guy and he came in. He actually logged in and help us unlinked to data stores. So totally not appear issue. But, you know, he went the extra mile to help us recover that GM gotta back up the same night. >> You know, we got to go, But I ask you a question. You work. You have a lot of vendors you've experienced. What, Avengers do that really tick you off? That they should stop doing? How's your chance? >> I don't like the term road map. >> Really? >> Any time I hear road map, it means, you know >> we don't have it. You >> don't have >> yet, >> But we're gonna look into that so don't do business with people that have no road. >> Jason, thank you so much for share your candor with David. Me on the key. We appreciate it. Congratulations on all your success. >> Thank you >> for David. Dante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube at pure accelerate 19. Thanks for watching

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Informatica World 2019 brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are joined by Amit Walia, President - Product and Marketing here at Informatica. Thank you for coming back on theCUBE. So we're here at Informatica World, there's a lot of buzz, a lot of energy, obviously CLAIRE is a big story, your company got great press yesterday from The Wall Street Journal teaming up with Google to tame the data. One of the themes we keep hearing is that data needs AI, but AI needs data. Elaborate on that a little bit. >> That's a great point, in fact I would extend that and say I believe, and I will talk about that today in the closing keynote, is the language that AI needs or speaks is data. Because to be honest, without data, there's no great AI. And I think something that we've known all this while, but now that AI is really becoming pervasive and has skill, you really, really need to give it relevant, good, contextual data for a Siri or a Cortana or Alexa to make some contextual decisions, right? And we see that happening a lot in the world of enterprise now. Finally enterprises are arriving at the point where they want to use AI for P-to-P use cases, not just consumer use cases that you and me are used to. And then, to your other question, AI is a part of everything that we do in data. Because, to be honest, it really helps improve productivity, automate mundane tasks. And I think we were talking before this, there is a massive skills gap. And I think you look around, the economy's kind of fully saturated with jobs, and there's still so much more work to be done with more data, different data, so AI's helping making some of those mundane activities become a lot more easier or autonomous, if I may. >> What's the use cases for CLAIRE in AI around as it grows? Because, you know, the data world, you guys have been doing it for 25 years at Informatica, private for 4 so, innovating on the products side, but it used to be, here's the data department, they handle it. The data warehousing in the fenced out area in the company, now it's strategically part of everything, right? So you guys have the MDM, you've got the Catalog, you've got all kinds of solutions. How is that role changing within your customer base? And what are some of those use cases? Because now they have to think end-to-end, you've got Cloud and On-premise, these are challenges and opportunities. But the role of data and the data teams is expanding rapidly. >> In a significant way. A significant way. I think I kind of was joking with our practitioners yesterday that they were all becoming, they were going from heroes to superheroes, if you are enjoying the Avengers movies, and that analogy. But genuinely, because if you think about it, right, I think what we are seeing in this world, we call it the data three data where the data is becoming a platform of a sort. It is getting decoupled from the data bases, from the applications, from the infrastructure, because to truly be able to leverage AI, and build applications on top, you cannot let it be siloed and be hostage to its individual infrastructure components. So we're seeing that fundamental change happening where data as a platform is coming along, and in that context the catalog becomes a very, very pivotal start, because you want to get a full view of everything. And look, you're not going to be able to move all your data in one place, it's impossible. But understanding that through metadata is where enterprises are going, and then from there, John, as Rebecca's talked about, you can have a customer experience journey with MDM. You can have a analytics journey in the Cloud with an AWS or (inaudible) or a JCP. Or you can have a complete governance and security and privacy journey understanding anomalous activity. >> So before I go any further I just want to ask you about this one point because you guys made a big bet with the Catalog >> Okay, and it's looking good. A lot of good bets. You know, AI, Catalog, Cloud, early on the Cloud, but one of the things I hear a lot is that data's at the blood stream, you want the blood flowing around the system, the body. People looking at data like an operating system kind of architecture where you got to have the data free flowing. So the Catalog seems to be a big bet there. How is that helping the AI peeps because if you can have the data flowing -- >> Yep. No I think -- >> You're going to have feeding the machine learning >> Absolutely. >> The machine learning feeds the application of AI, you got to have the data, the data's not flowing, you can't just inject it at certain times. >> The way we think about it is, you're exactly right. I would just, in fact it's so ah, interesting, the analogy I use is that data is everywhere. It's like the blood flowing through your body, right? You're not going to get all the data in one place to do any kind of analytics, right? You're going to let it be there. So we say metadata is the new OS. Bring the metadata, which is data about the data in one place. And from there let AI run on it. And what we think about AI is that, think about this. LinkedIn is a beautiful place where they leveraged the machine learning algorithm to create and social graph about you and me. So if I'm connected with John, I know now that I can be connected with you. The same thing can happen to the data layer. So when I'm doing analytics, and I'm basically searching for some report, I don't know, through that same machine learning algorithm at the catalog level, now we can tell you, you know what? This is another table. This is another report. This is another user. And so on. And we can give you back ratings within that environment for you to do what I call analytics on your fingertips at enterprise scale. So that's an extremely powerful use case of taking analytics which is the most commonly done activity in an enterprise and make it accurate at an enterprise scale. >> Well the LinkedIn example, you know, of course I have a different opinion on that. They're a siloed platform. They don't have any API's, it's only within LinkedIn. But it begs the question, since you're both that kind of consumer, look at a company like Slack, going public, very successful, their numbers are off the charts in terms of adoption, usage, a simple utility in IRC message chat room that has a great UI on it. But their success came when they integrated. >> Sure. >> Integration was a big part of their success. They wanted to have API's and let customers use the software, SAS software, with a lot of data. So they were really open. >> Yes. >> How were you guys from a business standpoint taking that concept of SAS openness connecting with other apps because I might have, bring my own app to the table as data, and integrate that piece into Informatica. How does that work? >> Very similarly. So the way we've done it is that our whole platform is fully API based. So we have opened up the API's, any application can hook on to that. So we believe that we are the Switzerland of data. So you may have any underlying infrastructure stack. On-prem, in the Cloud, multi-Cloud, whatever it is. Different applications, different Cloud applications, right? So our goal is that at the layer which is the metadata layer on which CLAIRE runs, we've opened up the API's, we've hooked to everything, and so we can consume the metadata, and there we truly provide a true data platform to our organization. So if you are running a Server Snap, a Salesforce.com, Adobe, Google, AWS, you can still bring all that stuff together and make contextual business decisions. >> One of the things you had talked about on the main stage is how the Millennials that you're hiring have higher expectations in their personal lives from the technology that they're using, and that's really pushing you to deliver different kinds of products and services that have the same level of innovation and high touch. Can you talk a little bit about that and how, and how this new generation of the workforce, and there's obviously Gen Y coming right behind it, is really pushing innovation in your company. >> Well you know, I have a fourteen-year-old, so I get a taste of that every day at home. (laughing) So you know, what they want to experience, so I, you know, I use this word, experiences are changing. And by the way they are pushing the boundary for us too. We grew up in the infrastructure software world which you know, twenty-five years ago was all, you can go down to the command line interface. Not any more. You really really have to make it simple. I think users today don't want to waste their time what I call doing mundane activities. They want to get to value fast. That's pushing the boundary for us. In fact that's where we're leveraging AI in our products to make sure we can remove the mundane clutter activities for them, for them to do value added activities. For example, I want to discover data to do some analysis. I don't want to go around discovering. Discover it for me. So that's where CLAIRE comes in and the catalog, right? Discover it for me. You know what? I don't want to figure out whether this data is accurate or not accurate. Tell me. So we are taking that philosophy, really really pushing the boundary for us, but in a good way. Because definitely those users want what I call very simplified and value added experiences. >> And that's really what SAS and consumer applications have shown us, and that's proven to be hard in the enterprise. So I got to ask you as you take this data concept to the infrastructure, a lot of enterprises are re-architecting, you hear words like multi-Cloud, hybrid Cloud, public Cloud, and you start to see a holistic new kind of persona, a Cloud architect. >> Yes. >> They're re-architecting their infrastructure to be SAS-like, to take advantage of data. >> Correct. >> That's kind of known out there, it's been reported on, we've been reporting on it. So the question is, that isn't alignment, that's not just the data people, it's data meets infrastructure. >> Absolutely. >> What's your advice to the companies out there that are doing this, because you guys have Cloud, Google, Amazon, Azure, Cloud, On-premise. You can work anywhere. What's you're advice? >> Yeah, no, I think it's a very good, it's a very topical question. Because I do think that the infra, the old days of separating different layers of the stack are are gone. Especially the old infrastructure all the way to platform as a server stack has to be very well though out together. To your point, customers running a hybrid multi-cloud world, right? So think about it, if you're in the world of improving customer experiences, I may have my marketing cloud running somewhere, I may have my sales cloud running somewhere, and a service cloud running somewhere. But to give a great experience I have to bring it all together. So you have to think about the infrastructure and the data together for enterprises to give a better experience to their customers. And I see innovative customers of companies truly think through that one and succeed. And the ones that are still lagging behind are still looking at that in silos. And then be able to have the data layer for hyper scale. Well these are all hyper scale platforms. You cannot run a little experiment over here. So we've invested in that whole concept of hyperscale, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and make sure it touches everything through API's. >> So we've been covering you guys for four years here at Informatica World. It's great to see the journey, nothing's really changed on the messaging and the strategy, you say you're going to do something and you keep doing it, and some little course corrections here, and acquisitions here and there to kind of accelerate it. But when we talk to your customers we hear a couple of different things. We hear platform, Informatica, when describing Informatica. You guys win the whole data thing, you're there, it's the business you're in. In the data business. But I'm hearing new words, platform. Scale. These are kind of new signals we're hearing from your customer base and some of the people here at the show. Talk about that impact, how you guys are investing in the platform, what it means for customers, and what does scale mean for your business and customers? >> No, we've heard that from our customers too. Customers said look, they all recognize that they have to invest in data as a platform. But you know, it's not like an original platform so they want it because we serve the broader state of management needs, so they want us to be like a platform. So we've invested that, couple of years ago we went completely ground-up, re-built everything, micro-services based. All API driven. Containerized. Modular. So the idea is that nobody is buying a monolithic platform. Nobody buying a platform, it just builds by itself. And they can compartmentize it, I want this now, I want that later, so like a Lego block it builds. And, you know what, through an API it also hooks into any of the existing infrastructure they have, or anything new that they want to bring in. So that really pushed the boundary for us. We invested in that. By the way, that platform today, in the Cloud, which you call IICS, runs eight trillion transactions a month. Eight trillion transactions a month. And by the way, last Informatica World, it was running two-and-a-half trillion transactions. So in one year it's gone from two-and-a-half to eight. So we are seeing that really hyper scale. >> And you, and I'm going to ask you if you believe, just, and you can answer yes or no or maybe, or answer on your own, do you believe that data is critical for SAS success? >> Oh absolutely. No doubt about it. I have not met a single customer who ever said anything different. In fact, the thing that I see is like, it's becoming more and more and more a sea-level conversation. That hey, what are we going to do with our data? How do we bring that data together to make decisions? How do we leverage AI and data together? It's truly in our sea-level discussion, whereas it was never a sea-level discussion years ago, it was more about what application am I going to use? What infrastructure am I going to use? Now they're all about, how do I manage this data? >> I wanted to talk about ethics (laughs) and this is, because recently had published a paper about Tech for Good, and it's about this idea of using AI and machine learning to help society achieve better outcomes, and then also to help us measure it's impact on our welfare beyond GDP. Because think about the value that technology brings to our lives. What's your take on this? I mean how much value do you think AI brings to the enterprise in terms of this Tech for Good idea? >> No, so, by the way one of Informatica's values is "Do good". And we are firm believers in that look, there is an economic value to everything in life. But then we all have something to give back to the society. There is something to create value out there which is outside the realm of just pure economics which is the point you were asking. And we are firm believers in that. I do think that by the way, there is a very high bar for all of us in the industry to make sure that not only, it's not just about ethics of AI also at the same time, because we cannot abuse the data. We're collecting a lot of information. You and me as consumers are giving a lot of information and I talked about that yesterday as well, that we believe that the ethics of AI are going to play a fundamental and differentiating role going forward. I think the Millennials we're talking about, they are very aware of that one. They are very purposeful. So they'll look back and say, who actually has a values system to take this technology innovation and do something better with it, not just creating money out of it. And I think I totally agree, and by the way in the very early stages, industry has to still learn that, and internalize that, then do something about it. >> Well Amit, yeah I think you're right on, early days, and I can give you an anecdotal example is that this year, University of California, Berkeley, graduated its first inaugural class of data science analytics. First! First ever class for them. They're a pioneer, they're usually having protests and doing things with revolutionary things. That shows it's so early. So the question I got to ask you is, you've got your fourteen-year-old, you know I have kids, we follow each other on Facebook. I'm always asked the question and I want to get this exposed. People are really discovering new ways to learn. Not just in school, you got YouTube videos, you've got CUBE videos, you got all kinds of great things out there. But really people are trying to figure out where to double down on, what dials to turn, what classes to take, what disciplines are going to help me. It used to be oh, go into computer science, you'll get a great job. And certainly that's still true. But there's now new opportunities for people, data's now grown from you know, programming deeply to ethics. And you don't need to have a CS degree to get in and be successful to fill the job openings or contribute to society. So what are those areas that you see that people who are watching might say hey you know what? I'm good at that, I'm good at art, I'm good at society or philosophy or I'm really good at math or, what skills do you, should people think about if they want to be successful in data? >> You know, I think it's a very foundational question. I think you're right, I think programming has become a lot easier. So I think if I'd stepped back to the days we graduated, right? It's become a lot easier so I don't think that necessarily learning programming is a differentiating, I do think that back where you were going, people who'd generally think about what to do with that. I think there is analytical skills that we all need, but I think the soft skills I believe in the society, we are kind of leaving behind, right? A little bit of the psychology of how users want to use something. Design thinking. By the way I still think that design thinking is not yet completely out there. Um, the ability to marry what I call the left brain to the right brain, I mean, I think that's key. And I do think that we cannot run away completely to the right brain, as much as I am an analytical person myself. I think marrying the left and the right, I do believe, like I, as I said I have a fourteen-year-old. My advice to all those who say, he wants to do Computer Science, is to take enough psychology or design classes to kind of have that balance. So my encouragement would be have the balance. We cannot all just be hyper-analytical. We have to kind of have the balance to see ... >> I think just be smart, balance, I mean again, I have not found one, well I guess the answers are stats and math, have the check, that's easy to say, but ... >> The emotional skills. But you need more of those, I think a little bit more of those left-brain skills also to complement them. >> Well and also for the experience, study art, music, what delights people. What inspires the passion? >> I agree with that. >> Yeah. Absolutely. Amit, always a pleasure to see you. Thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. Always a pleasure to be here. >> Great conversation. Good insight. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier, stay tuned at theCUBE's live coverage at Informatica World. (Upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From Washington D.C. it's theCUBE. Covering ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Brought to you by ScienceLogic. >> I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of ScienceLogic Symposium 2019 here at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington D.C. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest off the keynote stage this morning Bailey Szeto who is the Vice President of Customer and Seller Experience IT at Cisco. Thanks for coming and joining us. >> My pleasure. >> All right so Bailey, I've actually, you know I've watched, and partnered, and worked with Cisco my entire career but you actually changed my view of something about Cisco in your keynote this morning. And that's, you know, you said that 99% of Cisco's 50 billion dollars plus is transacted online so I should be thinking of you more as like Amazon.com you know, than as, you know the networking giant I've know my entire career. >> Well You know it's certainly true that most of our revenue comes through our online presence but it's perhaps in a different manner than what you're thinking right? So obviously we do do some business direct and we might have some stragglers selling, buying something with a credit card, but that's not the bulk of our business. The bulk of our business is through primarily partners, resellers and when I say online I meant B to B transactions. >> No no. I totally understand Bailey and what I love is you're in Cisco IT. >> That's right. >> And therefore we're not going to talk about a lot of the networking pieces. We're going to talk about what runs Cisco's business and you have the pieces and you know client success and support and all those run, and even, I didn't even realize the employee engagement all runs through you know Cisco.com >> That's right. >> And I love you did a nice little video. Gave all of those that have been in the industry. You kind of go through and look at the history of like oh okay there's the HTML stuff I used to code. >> That's right, that's right. >> Back in the 90s through all of the updates and yeah we definitely-- >> I was just expecting the little triangle with the guy like shoveling dirt under construction. You know the shovel right? >> Yeah the 404 not found. >> That's right, that's right. >> I know if I go to Cisco.com/go/product name that usually was a short cut to get me to some of the things I care about but for those people who weren't here for the key note or who might not know as much give us a little bit about you know your purview and kind of the scale and scope of what you do. >> Yeah so at Cisco I'm in Cisco IT. But I'm responsible for supporting all of the revenue generation portions of the company. So that's specifically marketing and what they do, sales and what sales does. Cisco services is a very big part of our company so I support the services organization. And most recently Cisco's been on a journey to really kind of move from a once and done hardware sales motion to a full reoccurring revenue type of stream. So we've stood up the whole customer success motion. And so I run the IT portions of that as well. And last but not least you heard me mention that 85% of our revenue actually comes through our partners. So I support all the systems that are partners interact with as well. >> Yeah it's interesting so we've done theCUBE at Cisco Live the last two years. >> Sure. >> And there's a observation I made a year ago when I started going to that show. And it was you know, if I'm a networking person but this applies to you know most people in IT, I used to manage stuff I could touch and go, I understand where it is and how I touch it and everything. Now a lot of what I have to deal with is outside of my purview and therefore I need to get into that environment kind of pair that with you know companies like yourself that are inquisitive. And so you have lots of change going on and lots of things that are in your environment there so we know change is the only constant in our industry. >> Without a doubt. >> So maybe give us a little bit of those dynamics and how that impact what's happening in your world. >> Yeah so I mean we talked a bit about my responsibilities and one of this is Cisco.com It's probably one of the more important platforms that I'm responsible for from an IT perspective. But I also mentioned that Cisco's a very, we grow through acquisitions a lot. It's one of our basic business strategies. And so every time we buy a company it's a big rush to kind of take that acquired company and integrate their online presence into Cisco.com right? So once a company is acquired we don't want people to think of it as a separate company both from a kind of marketing perspective but more importantly we're actually integrating that product into our Cisco ecosystem as well. So just having to move all that technology into Cisco.com is certainly a big job. But I think you are maybe asking this from a different perspective as well which is to say okay you know new technology is being introduced all the time and while it makes sense from a company portfolio perspective I think as a former IT person you're going to agree with me it makes our jobs a little bit more difficult. It's both a blessing and a curse right? From the perspective it's a blessing in that we get this great new technology to incorporate and use in our running of the business but it also adds a lot of complexity and so it's pretty important that we have both the systems and processes to be able to manage all that complexity in our infrastructure really. >> All right so infrastructure monitoring. >> Yes. >> Something you spent a lot of time talking about. I guess I'll set it up when I talked to my friends in the networking space these days or a lot of it, the joke is if you say single pane of glass they are going to spell it P-A-I-N because we understand that there's not one tool to rule them all. >> Right. >> Yes that I might have a primary piece but in the virtualization world I had to plug in to V Center and you know Cisco has you know you laid out a broad portfolio of various tools up and down and across the stack from you know security down to physical and upper layer and plus all the acquisitions. So can you lay out a little bit as to you know where ScienceLogic fits and there's a number of Cisco's tooling that that integrates in with. >> Yeah so when I talked about our journey with ScienceLogic you know Cisco of course has a number of tool and capabilities to take care of the pieces that we are known for. For example Application Dynamics is a great company that we bought and provides great insight into application health. But obviously in a network perspective right we have Cloud Management software, security software that type of thing and so I think what we realized in Cisco IT what my team realized is that it really isn't about a single system to rule them all it's about trying to find multiple platforms that can work together and really share data so as to drive richer insights. And so I think maybe the industry has been on a bit of a wrong path think it's you know it's not Lord of The Rings, one ring to rule them all or whatever right? It's about being able to use multiple applications but having the right data insides move around as needed so that depending on your lens or your role in IT whether you're a network guy or an application guy that you're going to use the tool that's more most natural to yourself but pulling in the right amount of data from those other parts to be able to get the right insight. >> Yeah I saw your closing slide mirrored the theme we've seen at the show of superheroes. So the super power everybody needs in IT today is how do I leverage my data and we understand that it probably takes more like the Avengers to be able to put those together because data is everywhere. >> Yeah the funny thing is that that wasn't actually a set theme. I think we must all have Avengers on our mind because everyone independently came up with the super hero concept. >> Yeah no spoilers on End Game either way though. >> That's right, that's right. >> Excellent so you know can you just bring us inside of some of that ScienceLogic journey? My understanding you're probably the largest enterprised employment of it so you know we always love to talk about scale and what that means and how it's been in your viewpoint. >> Yeah you know we actually before ScienceLogic we actually had our own system that Cisco IT wrote right and so you know as IT professionals we always think we can do it better than anyone else but we've reached a point where just so much technology and so much complexity came to the market that we really wanted to find a solution that would really kind of enable us to grow into the future with all the things that are happening right whether you're talking about Virtualization with Containers or you know Cloud native applications or Multicloud, these are all technology trends that have made our jobs in IT incredibly complex. And so we started to look for what could we replace our home grown monitoring platform with and ultimately we decided that ScienceLogic was the best fit for us. And since we've deployed it we as with most things we tend to stretch the scale especially with our vendors and so I think we are the largest ScienceLogic enterprise customer at this point. But we are seeing incredible benefits in terms of being able to connect ScienceLogic's Infrastructure Monitoring with our own Application Dynamics and really marry the two for those insightful bits that we get from both. >> All right so one of the big themed discussion here is that journey toward AI Ops. >> Yes. >> While we speak actually I've got a team in Mountainview that is at the DevNet Create Show which Cisco helped organize. >> Sure. >> We're doing two days of interviews there and DevSecOps is probably one of the key topics their going to be talking about. In your keynote this morning I heard IT Ops in a discussion there so bring us inside a little bit organizationally you know what you're seeing you know your viewpoint on these various trends that are you know helping to modernize you know transform operations. >> Yeah I think from a operations organization standpoint you're going to see the applications team and the infrastructure team work even closer together. Maybe one of the things that didn't really make super clear in my keynote this morning is I actually work on kind of the app side of the house right? I'm the direct interface to the business. And as such I actually don't interface with ScienceLogic directly but I'm a strong partner with my infrastructure team who are I think they are all sitting over there that do run ScienceLogic right and so in today's world you really can't just say oh this is infa problem they are going to deal with it. Because of that really big mix of well is it an infrastructure problem, is it an application health problem? And a lot of times it's both. And so organizationally it might be two separate organizations but the need to work together is you know even greater today than ever before. >> You're preaching to the choir. I mean when we launched Virtualization and then later when Containers came around there was the nirvana that oh I'm going to have some unit of infrastructure where the application people just don't need to worry about it. >> Right. >> You know serverless from it's name seems to imply that but we understand that eventually you know there's networking, there's storage, there's compute all underneath these kind of things. >> That's right. >> It's just repackaging so you know the applications important you know I'm long time infrastructure guy. >> That's right >> But, the number one rule is the reason we are here is to run that application and make sure your data you know gets where it needs to be otherwise you know we're not here just to power things. >> That's right. And I just realized I probably would get in trouble if I said it's actually the application, infrastructure, and of course the network all has to work together. >> Yeah well that's a given. Can you just we talked a little bit about App Dynamics you know when I think about Cisco you know broad portfolio, you know the SD-WAN, the ACI how do some of those fit into this discussion are there tie ins with what ScienceLogic is doing? >> It absolutely does. So as I talked about it when we talked about that collection of super heroes it's not a single super hero it's not a duo either it's really a big team. It's The Avengers right? And so when you think about Cisco's portfolio we have a lot of additional components needed to provide that modern operating IT operating platform right? So we talked about a lot about Application Dynamics we talked about ScienceLogic but what Cisco brings to the mix is things like ACI, Tetration, Policy Enforcement, Multicloud Management. So all those things again have to work together like The Avengers do to provide that modern platform. >> Yeah you mentioned multicloud and I know in your keynote you talked about AWS and GCP. >> That's right. >> How's Cloud changing things in your world? >> It absolutely is again it's I'll go back to the it's both a blessing and a curse right? The blessing is enormous capability that we get from the Cloud, enormous flexibility. As and example using Cisco.com as an example we host a lot of you know a lot of public information about our products and websites and data sheets and that type of thing on Cisco.com. And then a couple years ago we decided we're going to refresh the engagement of Cisco.com We wanted to make it much more personalized. We wanted to incorporate video. Those are all great things but the moment you try to throw video and guess what? Native video whether it be in English or French or Chinese or Japanese depending on where you are well that put an enormous strain on our infrastructure and if you had to travel if the packets had to travel from Japan to the United States to our data center that would slow things down. So we took advantage of Public Cloud to really kind of push out the content to the edges so that we could get localized content as close to the customer as possible. That's the great thing about it. But again the management of that increasing complexity right so both a blessing and a curse. AWS, GCP, we are using for doing a lot of video streaming work. And so again great capabilities from that platform as well. >> All right so we saw this week a lot of announcements of some of the integrations Service Now and App Dynamics were two of the ones that highlighted that I think impacted you. Anything from the announcements that is particularly excited you and I guess final on that is there anything roadmap wise that you know you'd be looking directionally for this phase to evolve towards? >> Yeah I think I was excited to see in fact that's one of the main reasons why we chose ScienceLogic in the first place was the quality and the amount of integrations that they have right? And so we're also a big Service Now customer and we see the benefits of automatically open cases in Service Now when ScienceLogic detects an issue as an example right? And I would say going forward we'll be looking to either have out of the box or if needed you know Cisco IT will build something even more integrations with the Cisco products. We already have App Dynamics but as I mentioned we have a lot of other components that are critical to the network and so we'll be looking for tighter integration and all this to drive really drive data together so that we can get to what I think what most people at this conference are hoping to achieve which is really driving towards automation and AI Ops right? So that's really the desire for I think for everyone attending this conference. It's certainly our desire in Cisco IT. And you know I'm looking forward to working with ScienceLogic to building out that roadmap. >> You know so I guess final question for you you talked about that automation, where are you when it comes to we look at you know things like machine learning and automation which if you listen to the analyst that spoke this morning is like you want to make sure you separate those things. >> That's right. >> We understand you know any of us that have done process and operations is you know you can automate a really bad process and it's not a good thing. >> That's right, that's right. >> So where are you on that journey? What do you see? You know what are the barriers that keep us from kind of the nirvana where you know oh geez I can actually just seal off the data center and let everything run? >> Right I think it's funny you mentioned Cisco Live so actually I present on a topic of AI at Cisco Live as well. So what this other speaker talked about really hit home with me understanding what is AI really. Because I think there's a general perception in the press that it's like this magical fairy dust you can just sprinkle on everything and it like makes everything perfect right? AI is really good at pattern recognition but you still need to put some check points and really have human beings kind of check the work of AI right? And so you know we actually have seen data center outages not Cisco but in the press when AI runs amok right? And so I think the first step of automation that's a given. We want to do that but that involves a lot of human beings kind of looking at the data and deciding okay these sequence of events can be cured by this set of automation. AI Ops is a something that's a whole different thing if you followed the definition of AI to say okay let the computer do it all on its own. I don't think we're there yet. I think we have a ways to go. And I certainly wouldn't trust want to trust our you know multi billion dollar business to AI Ops at this point in time. >> Well Bailey there's an event we did a couple years ago with a couple professors from MIT that are really forward looking on this and they say it's racing with the machines because people plus machines will always do better >> Yes. >> Than people alone or machines alone and hopefully that keeps some of us that are a little bit worried about the Skynets of the world taking over from getting a little bit too paranoid all of a sudden. >> I totally agree with that statement. In fact the quote that jumps in my head is "Better together". And I'll close with ScienceLogic App Dynamics better together. People AI better together. >> All right well Bailey since you ended on a perfect quote there thank you so much for joining and I hope to see you at Cisco Live San Diego. >> Fantastic, my pleasure. >> All right and thank you so much for watching theCUBE as always, I'm Stu Miniman here at ScienceLogic 2019 in Washington D.C. (upbeat music)

>> PA Announcer: Off the plastic tab, and we'll turn on the colors. Welcome to New Orleans. ♪ This is it ♪ ♪ The part when I say I don't want ya ♪ ♪ I'm stronger than I've been before ♪ ♪ This is the part when I set your free ♪ (New Orleans jazz music) ("When the Saints Go Marching In") (rock music) >> PA Announcer: Ladies and gentleman, would you please welcome state of Louisiana chief design officer Matthew Vince and Choice Hotels director of infrastructure services Stacy Nigh. (rock music) >> Well good morning New Orleans, and welcome to my home state. My name is Matt Vince. I'm the chief design office for state of Louisiana. And it's my pleasure to welcome you all to .Next 2018. State of Louisiana is currently re-architecting our cloud infrastructure and Nutanix is the first domino to fall in our strategy to deliver better services to our citizens. >> And I'd like to second that warm welcome. I'm Stacy Nigh director of infrastructure services for Choice Hotels International. Now you may think you know Choice, but we don't own hotels. We're a technology company. And Nutanix is helping us innovate the way we operate to support our franchisees. This is my first visit to New Orleans and my first .Next. >> Well Stacy, you're in for a treat. New Orleans is known for its fabulous food and its marvelous music, but most importantly the free spirit. >> Well I can't wait, and speaking of free, it's my pleasure to introduce the Nutanix Freedom video, enjoy. ♪ I lose everything, so I can sing ♪ ♪ Hallelujah I'm free ♪ ♪ Ah, ah, ♪ ♪ Ah, ah, ♪ ♪ I lose everything, so I can sing ♪ ♪ Hallelujah I'm free ♪ ♪ I lose everything, so I can sing ♪ ♪ Hallelujah I'm free ♪ ♪ I'm free, I'm free, I'm free, I'm free ♪ ♪ Gritting your teeth, you hold onto me ♪ ♪ It's never enough, I'm never complete ♪ ♪ Tell me to prove, expect me to lose ♪ ♪ I push it away, I'm trying to move ♪ ♪ I'm desperate to run, I'm desperate to leave ♪ ♪ If I lose it all, at least I'll be free ♪ ♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, I'm free ♪ >> PA Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome chief marketing officer Ben Gibson ♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, I'm free ♪ >> Welcome, good morning. >> Audience: Good morning. >> And welcome to .Next 2018. There's no better way to open up a .Next conference than by hearing from two of our great customers. And Matthew, thank you for welcoming us to this beautiful, your beautiful state and city. And Stacy, this is your first .Next, and I know she's not alone because guess what It's my first .Next too. And I come properly attired. In the front row, you can see my Nutanix socks, and I think my Nutanix blue suit. And I know I'm not alone. I think over 5,000 people in attendance here today are also first timers at .Next. And if you are here for the first time, it's in the morning, let's get moving. I want you to stand up, so we can officially welcome you into the fold. Everyone stand up, first time. All right, welcome. (audience clapping) So you are all joining not just a conference here. This is truly a community. This is a community of the best and brightest in our industry I will humbly say that are coming together to share best ideas, to learn what's happening next, and in particular it's about forwarding not only your projects and your priorities but your careers. There's so much change happening in this industry. It's an opportunity to learn what's coming down the road and learn how you can best position yourself for this whole new world that's happening around cloud computing and modernizing data center environments. And this is not just a community, this is a movement. And it's a movement that started quite awhile ago, but the first .Next conference was in the quiet little town of Miami, and there was about 800 of you in attendance or so. So who in this hall here were at that first .Next conference in Miami? Let me hear from you. (audience members cheering) Yep, well to all of you grizzled veterans of the .Next experience, welcome back. You have started a movement that has grown and this year across many different .Next conferences all over the world, over 20,000 of your community members have come together. And we like to do it in distributed architecture fashion just like here in Nutanix. And so we've spread this movement all over the world with .Next conferences. And this is surging. We're also seeing just today the current count 61,000 certifications and climbing. Our Next community, close to 70,000 active members of our online community because .Next is about this big moment, and it's about every other day and every other week of the year, how we come together and explore. And my favorite stat of all. Here today in this hall amongst the record 5,500 registrations to .Next 2018 representing 71 countries in whole. So it's a global movement. Everyone, welcome. And you know when I got in Sunday night, I was looking at the tweets and the excitement was starting to build and started to see people like Adile coming from Casablanca. Adile wherever you are, welcome buddy. That's a long trip. Thank you so much for coming and being here with us today. I saw other folks coming from Geneva, from Denmark, from Japan, all over the world coming together for this moment. And we are accomplishing phenomenal things together. Because of your trust in us, and because of some early risk candidly that we have all taken together, we've created a movement in the market around modernizing data center environments, radically simplifying how we operate in the services we deliver to our businesses everyday. And this is a movement that we don't just know about this, but the industry is really taking notice. I love this chart. This is Gartner's inaugural hyperconvergence infrastructure magic quadrant chart. And I think if you see where Nutanix is positioned on there, I think you can agree that's a rout, that's a homerun, that's a mic drop so to speak. What do you guys think? (audience clapping) But here's the thing. It says Nutanix up there. We can honestly say this is a win for this hall here. Because, again, without your trust in us and what we've accomplished together and your partnership with us, we're not there. But we are there, and it is thanks to everyone in this hall. Together we have created, expanded, and truly made this market. Congratulations. And you know what, I think we're just getting started. The same innovation, the same catalyst that we drove into the market to converge storage network compute, the next horizon is around multi-cloud. The next horizon is around whether by accident or on purpose the strong move with different workloads moving into public cloud, some into private cloud moving back and forth, the promise of application mobility, the right workload on the right cloud platform with the right economics. Economics is key here. If any of you have a teenager out there, and they have a hold of your credit card, and they're doing something online or the like. You get some surprises at the end of the month. And that surprise comes in the form of spiraling public cloud costs. And this isn't to say we're not going to see a lot of workloads born and running in public cloud, but the opportunity is for us to take a path that regains control over infrastructure, regain control over workloads and where they're run. And the way I look at it for everyone in this hall, it's a journey we're on. It starts with modernizing those data center environments, continues with embracing the full cloud stack and the compelling opportunity to deliver that consumer experience to rapidly offer up enterprise compute services to your internal clients, lines of businesses and then out into the market. It's then about how you standardize across an enterprise cloud environment, that you're not just the infrastructure but the management, the automation, the control, and running any tier one application. I hear this everyday, and I've heard this a lot already this week about customers who are all in with this approach and running those tier one applications on Nutanix. And then it's the promise of not only hyperconverging infrastructure but hyperconverging multiple clouds. And if we do that, this journey the way we see it what we are doing is building your enterprise cloud. And your enterprise cloud is about the private cloud. It's about expanding and managing and taking back control of how you determine what workload to run where, and to make sure there's strong governance and control. And you're radically simplifying what could be an awfully complicated scenario if you don't reclaim and put your arms around that opportunity. Now how do we do this different than anyone else? And this is going to be a big theme that you're going to see from my good friend Sunil and his good friends on the product team. What are we doing together? We're taking all of that legacy complexity, that friction, that inability to be able to move fast because you're chained to old legacy environments. I'm talking to folks that have applications that are 40 years old, and they are concerned to touch them because they're not sure if they can react if their infrastructure can meet the demands of a new, modernized workload. We're making all that complexity invisible. And if all of that is invisible, it allows you to focus on what's next. And that indeed is the spirit of this conference. So if the what is enterprise cloud, and the how we do it different is by making infrastructure invisible, data centers, clouds, then why are we all here today? What is the binding principle that spiritually, that emotionally brings us all together? And we think it's a very simple, powerful word, and that word is freedom. And when we think about freedom, we think about as we work together the freedom to build the data center that you've always wanted to build. It's about freedom to run the applications where you choose based on the information and the context that wasn't available before. It's about the freedom of choice to choose the right cloud platform for the right application, and again to avoid a lot of these spiraling costs in unanticipated surprises whether it be around security, whether it be around economics or governance that come to the forefront. It's about the freedom to invent. It's why we got into this industry in the first place. We want to create. We want to build things not keep the lights on, not be chained to mundane tasks day by day. And it's about the freedom to play. And I hear this time and time again. My favorite tweet from a Nutanix customer to this day is just updated a lot of nodes at 38,000 feed on United Wifi, on my way to spend vacation with my family. Freedom to play. This to me is emotionally what brings us all together and what you saw with the Freedom video earlier, and what you see here is this new story because we want to go out and spread the word and not only talk about the enterprise cloud, not only talk about how we do it better, but talk about why it's so compelling to be a part of this hall here today. Now just one note of housekeeping for everyone out there in case I don't want anyone to take a wrong turn as they come to this beautiful convention center here today. A lot of freedom going on in this convention center. As luck may have it, there's another conference going on a little bit down that way based on another high growth, disruptive industry. Now MJBizCon Next, and by coincidence it's also called next. And I have to admire the creativity. I have to admire that we do share a, hey, high growth business model here. And in case you're not quite sure what this conference is about. I'm the head of marketing here. I have to show the tagline of this. And I read the tagline from license to launch and beyond, the future of the, now if I can replace that blank with our industry, I don't know, to me it sounds like a new, cool Sunil product launch. Maybe launching a new subscription service or the like. Stay tuned, you never know. I think they're going to have a good time over there. I know we're going to have a wonderful week here both to learn as well as have a lot of fun particularly in our customer appreciation event tonight. I want to spend a very few important moments on .Heart. .Heart is Nutanix's initiative to promote diversity in the technology arena. In particular, we have a focus on advancing the careers of women and young girls that we want to encourage to move into STEM and high tech careers. You have the opportunity to engage this week with this important initiative. Please role the video, and let's learn more about how you can do so. >> Video Plays (electronic music) >> So all of you have received these .Heart tokens. You have the freedom to go and choose which of the four deserving charities can receive donations to really advance our cause. So I thank you for your engagement there. And this community is behind .Heart. And it's a very important one. So thank you for that. .Next is not the community, the moment it is without our wonderful partners. These are our amazing sponsors. Yes, it's about sponsorship. It's also about how we integrate together, how we innovate together, and we're about an open community. And so I want to thank all of these names up here for your wonderful sponsorship of this event. I encourage everyone here in this room to spend time, get acquainted, get reacquainted, learn how we can make wonderful music happen together, wonderful music here in New Orleans happen together. .Next isn't .Next with a few cool surprises. Surprise number one, we have a contest. This is a still shot from the Freedom video you saw right before I came on. We have strategically placed a lucky seven Nutanix Easter eggs in this video. And if you go to Nutanix.com/freedom, watch the video. You may have to use the little scrubbing feature to slow down 'cause some of these happen quickly. You're going to find some fun, clever Easter eggs. List all seven, tweet that out, or as many as you can, tweet that out with hashtag nextconf, C, O, N, F, and we'll have a random drawing for an all expenses paid free trip to .Next 2019. And just to make sure everyone understands Easter egg concept. There's an eighth one here that's actually someone that's quite famous in our circles. If you see on this still shot, there's someone in the back there with a red jacket on. That's not just anyone. We're targeting in here. That is our very own Julie O'Brien, our senior vice president of corporate marketing. And you're going to hear from Julie later on here at .Next. But Julie and her team are the engine and the creativity behind not only our new Freedom campaign but more importantly everything that you experience here this week. Julie and her team are amazing, and we can't wait for you to experience what they've pulled together for you. Another surprise, if you go and visit our Freedom booths and share your stories. So they're like video booths, you share your success stories, your partnerships, your journey that I talked about, you will be entered to win a beautiful Nutanix brand compliant, look at those beautiful colors, bicycle. And it's not just any bicycle. It's a beautiful bicycle made by our beautiful customer Trek. I actually have a Trek bike. I love cycling. Unfortunately, I'm not eligible, but all of you are. So please share your stories in the Freedom Nutanix's booths and put yourself in the running, or in the cycling to get this prize. One more thing I wanted to share here. Yesterday we had a great time. We had our inaugural Nutanix hackathon. This hackathon brought together folks that were in devops practices, many of you that are in this room. We sold out. We thought maybe we'd get four or five teams. We had to shutdown at 14 teams that were paired together with a Nutanix mentor, and you coded. You used our REST APIs. You built new apps that integrated in with Prism and Clam. And it was wonderful to see this. Everyone I talked to had a great time on this. We had three winners. In third place, we had team Copper or team bronze, but team Copper. Silver, Not That Special, they're very humble kind of like one of our key mission statements. And the grand prize winner was We Did It All for the Cookies. And you saw them coming in on our Mardi Gras float here. We Did It All for Cookies, they did this very creative job. They leveraged an Apple Watch. They were lighting up VMs at a moments notice utilizing a lot of their coding skills. Congratulations to all three, first, second, and third all receive $2,500. And then each of them, then were able to choose a charity to deliver another $2,500 including Ronald McDonald House for the winner, we did it all for the McDonald Land cookies, I suppose, to move forward. So look for us to do more of these kinds of events because we want to bring together infrastructure and application development, and this is a great, I think, start for us in this community to be able to do so. With that, who's ready to hear form Dheeraj? You ready to hear from Dheeraj? (audience clapping) I'm ready to hear from Dheeraj, and not just 'cause I work for him. It is my distinct pleasure to welcome on the stage our CEO, cofounder and chairman Dheeraj Pandey. ("Free" by Broods) ♪ Hallelujah, I'm free ♪ >> Thank you Ben and good morning everyone. >> Audience: Good morning. >> Thank you so much for being here. It's just such an elation when I'm thinking about the Mardi Gras crowd that came here, the partners, the customers, the NTCs. I mean there's some great NTCs up there I could relate to because they're on Slack as well. How many of you are in Slack Nutanix internal Slack channel? Probably 5%, would love to actually see this community grow from here 'cause this is not the only even we would love to meet you. We would love to actually do this in a real time bite size communication on our own internal Slack channel itself. Now today, we're going to talk about a lot of things, but a lot of hard things, a lot of things that take time to build and have evolved as the industry itself has evolved. And one of the hard things that I want to talk about is multi-cloud. Multi-cloud is a really hard problem 'cause it's full of paradoxes. It's really about doing things that you believe are opposites of each other. It's about frictionless, but it's also about governance. It's about being simple, and it's also about being secure at the same time. It's about delight, it's about reducing waste, it's about owning, and renting, and finally it's also about core and edge. How do you really make this big at a core data center whether it's public or private? Or how do you really shrink it down to one or two nodes at the edge because that's where your machines are, that's where your people are? So this is a really hard problem. And as you hear from Sunil and the gang there, you'll realize how we've actually evolved our solutions to really cater to some of these. One of the approaches that we have used to really solve some of these hard problems is to have machines do more, and I said a lot of things in those four words, have machines do more. Because if you double-click on that sentence, it really means we're letting design be at the core of this. And how do you really design data centers, how do you really design products for the data center that hush all the escalations, the details, the complexities, use machine-learning and AI and you know figure our anomaly detection and correlations and patter matching? There's a ton of things that you need to do to really have machines do more. But along the way, the important lesson is to make machines invisible because when machines become invisible, it actually makes something else visible. It makes you visible. It makes governance visible. It makes applications visible, and it makes services visible. A lot of things, it makes teams visible, careers visible. So while we're really talking about invisibility of machines, we're talking about visibility of people. And that's how we really brought all of you together in this conference as well because it makes all of us shine including our products, and your careers, and your teams as well. And I try to define the word customer success. You know it's one of the favorite words that I'm actually using. We've just hired a great leader in customer success recently who's really going to focus on this relatively hard problem, yet another hard problem of customer success. We think that customer success, true customer success is possible when we have machines tend towards invisibility. But along the way when we do that, make humans tend towards freedom. So that's the real connection, the yin-yang of machines and humans that Nutanix is really all about. And that's why design is at the core of this company. And when I say design, I mean reducing friction. And it's really about reducing friction. And everything we do, the most mundane of things which could be about migrating applications, spinning up VMs, self-service portals, automatic upgrades, and automatic scale out, and all the things we do is about reducing friction which really makes machines become invisible and humans gain freedom. Now one of the other convictions we have is how all of us are really tied at the hip. You know our success is tied to your success. If we make you successful, and when I say you, I really mean Main Street. Main Street being customers, and partners, and employees. If we make all of you successful, then we automatically become successful. And very coincidentally, Main Street and Wall Street are also tied in that very same relation as well. If we do a great job at Main Street, I think the Wall Street customer, i.e. the investor, will take care of itself. You'll have you know taken care of their success if we took care of Main Street success itself. And that's the narrative that our CFO Dustin Williams actually went and painted to our Wall Street investors two months ago at our investor day conference. We talked about a $3 billion number. We said look as a company, as a software company, we can go and achieve $3 billion in billings three years from now. And it was a telling moment for the company. It was really about talking about where we could be three years from now. But it was not based on a hunch. It was based on what we thought was customer success. Now realize that $3 billion in pure software. There's only 10 to 15 companies in the world that actually have that kind of software billings number itself. But at the core of this confidence was customer success, was the fact that we were doing a really good job of not over promising and under delivering but under promising starting with small systems and growing the trust of the customers over time. And this is one of the statistics we actually talk about is repeat business. The first dollar that a Global 2000 customer spends in Nutanix, and if we go and increase their trust 15 times by year six, and we hope to actually get 17 1/2 and 19 times more trust in the years seven and eight. It's very similar numbers for non Global 2000 as well. Again, we go and really hustle for customer success, start small, have you not worry about paying millions of dollars upfront. You know start with systems that pay as they grow, you pay as they grow, and that's the way we gain trust. We have the same non Global 2000 pay $6 1/2 for the first dollar they've actually spent on us. And with this, I think the most telling moment was when Dustin concluded. And this is key to this audience here as well. Is how the current cohorts which is this audience here and many of them were not here will actually carry the weight of $3 billion, more than 50% of it if we did a great job of customer success. If we were humble and honest and we really figured out what it meant to take care of you, and if we really understood what starting small was and having to gain the trust with you over time, we think that more than 50% of that billings will actually come from this audience here without even looking at new logos outside. So that's the trust of customer success for us, and it takes care of pretty much every customer not just the Main Street customer. It takes care of Wall Street customer. It takes care of employees. It takes care of partners as well. Now before I talk about technology and products, I want to take a step back 'cause many of you are new in this audience. And I think that it behooves us to really talk about the history of this company. Like we've done a lot of things that started out as science projects. In fact, I see some tweets out there and people actually laugh at Nutanix cloud. And this is where we were in 2012. So if you take a step back and think about where the company was almost seven, eight years ago, we were up against giants. There was a $30 billion industry around network attached storage, and storage area networks and blade servers, and hypervisors, and systems management software and so on. So what did we start out with? Very simple premise that we will collapse the architecture of the data center because three tier is wasteful and three tier is not delightful. It was a very simple hunch, we said we'll take rack mount servers, we'll put a layer of software on top of it, and that layer of software back then only did storage. It didn't do networks and security, and it ran on top of a well known hypervisor from VMware. And we said there's one non negotiable thing. The fact that the design must change. The control plane for this data center cannot be the old control plane. It has to be rethought through, and that's why Prism came about. Now we went and hustled hard to add more things to it. We said we need to make this diverse because it can't just be for one application. We need to make it CPU heavy, and memory heavy, and storage heavy, and flash heavy and so on. And we built a highly configurable HCI. Now all of them are actually configurable as you know of today. And this was not just innovation in technologies, it was innovation in business and sizing, capacity planning, quote to cash business processes. A lot of stuff that we had to do to make this highly configurable, so you can really scale capacity and performance independent of each other. Then in 2014, we did something that was very counterintuitive, but we've done this on, and on, and on again. People said why are you disrupting yourself? You know you've been doing a good job of shipping appliances, but we also had the conviction that HCI was not about hardware. It was about a form factor, but it was really about an operating system. And we started to compete with ourselves when we said you know what we'll do arm's length distribution, we'll do arm's length delivery of products when we give our software to our Dell partner, to Dell as a partner, a loyal partner. But at the same time, it was actually seen with a lot of skepticism. You know these guys are wondering how to really make themselves vanish because they're competing with themselves. But we also knew that if we didn't compete with ourselves someone else will. Now one of the most controversial decisions was really going and doing yet another hypervisor. In the year 2015, it was really preposterous to build yet another hypervisor. It was a very mature market. This was coming probably 15 years too late to the market, or at least 10 years too late to market. And most people said it shouldn't be done because hypervisor is a commodity. And that's the word we latched on to. That this commodity should not have to be paid for. It shouldn't have a team of people managing it. It should actually be part of your overall stack, but it should be invisible. Just like storage needs to be invisible, virtualization needs to be invisible. But it was a bold step, and I think you know at least when we look at our current numbers, 1/3rd of our customers are actually using AHV. At least every quarter that we look at it, our new deployments, at least 35% of it is actually being used on AHV itself. And again, a very preposterous thing to have said five years ago, four years ago to where we've actually come. Thank you so much for all of you who've believed in the fact that virtualization software must be invisible and therefore we should actually try out something that is called AHV today. Now we went and added Lenovo to our OEM mix, started to become even more of a software company in the year 2016. Went and added HP and Cisco in some of very large deals that we talk about in earnings call, our HP deals and Cisco deals. And some very large customers who have procured ELAs from us, enterprise license agreements from us where they want to mix and match hardware. They want to mix Dell hardware with HP hardware but have common standard Nutanix entitlements. And finally, I think this was another one of those moments where we say why should HCI be only limited to X86. You know this operating systems deserves to run on a non X86 architecture as well. And that gave birth to this idea of HCI and Power Systems from IBM. And we've done a great job of really innovating with them in the last three, four quarters. Some amazing innovation that has come out where you can now run AIX 7.x on Nutanix. And for the first time in the history of data center, you can actually have a single software not just a data plane but a control plane where you can manage an IBM farm, an Power farm, and open Power farm and an X86 farm from the same control plane and have you know the IBM farm feed storage to an Intel compute farm and vice versa. So really good things that we've actually done. Now along the way, something else was going on while we were really busy building the private cloud, we knew there was a new consumption model on computing itself. People were renting computing using credit cards. This is the era of the millennials. They were like really want to bypass people because at the end of the day, you know why can't computing be consumed the way like eCommerce is? And that devops movement made us realize that we need to add to our stack. That stack will now have other computing clouds that is AWS and Azure and GCP now. So similar to the way we did Prism. You know Prism was really about going and making hypervisors invisible. You know we went ahead and said we'll add Calm to our portfolio because Calm is now going to be what Prism was to us back when we were really dealing with multi hypervisor world. Now it's going to be multi-cloud world. You know it's one of those things we had a gut around, and we really come to expect a lot of feedback and real innovation. I mean yesterday when we had the hackathon. The center, the epicenter of the discussion was Calm, was how do you automate on multiple clouds without having to write a single line of code? So we've come a long way since the acquisition of Calm two years ago. I think it's going to be a strong pillar in our overall product portfolio itself. Now the word multi-cloud is going to be used and over used. In fact, it's going to be blurring its lines with the idea of hyperconvergence of clouds, you know what does it mean. We just hope that hyperconvergence, the way it's called today will morph to become hyperconverged clouds not just hyperconverged boxes which is a software defined infrastructure definition itself. But let's focus on the why of multi-cloud. Why do we think it can't all go into a public cloud itself? The one big reason is just laws of the land. There's data sovereignty and computing sovereignty, regulations and compliance because of which you need to be in where the government with the regulations where the compliance rules want you to be. And by the way, that's just one reason why the cloud will have to disperse itself. It can't just be 10, 20 large data centers around the world itself because you have 200 plus countries and half of computing actually gets done outside the US itself. So it's a really important, very relevant point about the why of multi-cloud. The second one is just simple laws of physics. You know if there're machines at the edge, and they're producing so much data, you can't bring all the data to the compute. You have to take the compute which is stateless, it's an app. You take the app to where the data is because the network is the enemy. The network has always been the enemy. And when we thought we've made fatter networks, you've just produced more data as well. So this just goes without saying that you take something that's stateless that's without gravity, that's lightweight which is compute and the application and push it close to where the data itself is. And the third one which is related is just latency reasons you know? And it's not just about machine latency and electrons transferring over the speed light, and you can't defy the speed of light. It's also about human latency. It's also about multiple teams saying we need to federate and delegate, and we need to push things down to where the teams are as opposed to having to expect everybody to come to a very large computing power itself. So all the ways, the way they are, there will be at least three different ways of looking at multi-cloud itself. There's a centralized core cloud. We all go and relate to this because we've seen large data centers and so on. And that's the back office workhorse. It will crunch numbers. It will do processing. It will do a ton of things that will go and produce results for you know how we run our businesses, but there's also the dispersal of the cloud, so ROBO cloud. And this is the front office server that's really serving. It's a cloud that's going to serve people. It's going to be closer to people, and that's what a ROBO cloud is. We have a ton of customers out here who actually use Nutanix and the ROBO environments themselves as one node, two node, three node, five node servers, and it just collapses the entire server closet room in these ROBOs into something really, really small and minuscule. And finally, there's going to be another dispersed edge cloud because that's where the machines are, that's where the data is. And there's going to be an IOT machine fog because we need to miniaturize computing to something even smaller, maybe something that can really land in the palm in a mini server which is a PC like server, but you need to run everything that's enterprise grade. You should be able to go and upgrade them and monitor them and analyze them. You know do enough computing up there, maybe event-based processing that can actually happen. In fact, there's some great innovation that we've done at the edge with IOTs that I'd love for all of you to actually attend some sessions around as well. So with that being said, we have a hole in the stack. And that hole is probably one of the hardest problems that we've been trying to solve for the last two years. And Sunil will talk a lot about that. This idea of hybrid. The hybrid of multi-cloud is one of the hardest problems. Why? Because we're talking about really blurring the lines with owning and renting where you have a single-tenant environment which is your data center, and a multi-tenant environment which is the service providers data center, and the two must look like the same. And the two must look like the same is that hard a problem not just for burst out capacity, not just for security, not just for identity but also for networks. Like how do you blur the lines between networks? How do you blur the lines for storage? How do you really blur the lines for a single pane of glass where you can think of availability zones that look highly symmetric even though they're not because one of 'em is owned by you, and it's single-tenant. The other one is not owned by you, that's multi-tenant itself. So there's some really hard problems in hybrid that you'll hear Sunil talk about and the team. And some great strides that we've actually made in the last 12 months of really working on Xi itself. And that completes the picture now in terms of how we believe the state of computing will be going forward. So what are the must haves of a multi-cloud operating system? We talked about marketplace which is catalogs and automation. There's a ton of orchestration that needs to be done for multi-cloud to come together because now you have a self-service portal which is providing an eCommerce view. It's really about you know getting to do a lot of requests and workflows without having people come in the way, without even having tickets. There's no need for tickets if you can really start to think like a self-service portal as if you're just transacting eCommerce with machines and portals themselves. Obviously the next one is networking security. You need to blur the lines between on-prem and off-prem itself. These two play a huge role. And there's going to be a ton of details that you'll see Sunil talk about. But finally, what I want to focus on the rest of the talk itself here is what governance and compliance. This is a hard problem, and it's a hard problem because things have evolved. So I'm going to take a step back. Last 30 years of computing, how have consumption models changed? So think about it. 30 years ago, we were making decisions for 10 plus years, you know? Mainframe, at least 10 years, probably 20 plus years worth of decisions. These were decisions that were extremely waterfall-ish. Make 10s of millions of dollars worth of investment for a device that we'd buy for at least 10 to 20 years. Now as we moved to client-server, that thing actually shrunk. Now you're talking about five years worth of decisions, and these things were smaller. So there's a little bit more velocity in our decisions. We were not making as waterfall-ish decision as we used to with mainframes. But still five years, talk about virtualized, three tier, maybe three to five year decisions. You know they're still relatively big decisions that we were making with computer and storage and SAN fabrics and virtualization software and systems management software and so on. And here comes Nutanix, and we said no, no. We need to make it smaller. It has to become smaller because you know we need to make more agile decisions. We need to add machines every week, every month as opposed to adding you know machines every three to five years. And we need to be able to upgrade them, you know any point in time. You can do the upgrades every month if you had to, every week if you had to and so on. So really about more agility. And yet, we were not complete because there's another evolution going on, off-prem in the public cloud where people are going and doing reserved instances. But more than that, they were doing on demand stuff which no the decision was days to weeks. Some of these things that unitive compute was being rented for days to weeks, not years. And if you needed something more, you'd shift a little to the left and use reserved instances. And then spot pricing, you could do spot pricing for hours and finally lambda functions. Now you could to function as a service where things could actually be running only for minutes not even hours. So as you can see, there's a wide spectrum where when you move to the right, you get more elasticity, and when you move to the left, you're talking about predictable decision making. And in fact, it goes from minutes on one side to 10s of years on the other itself. And we hope to actually go and blur the lines between where NTNX is today where you see Nutanix right now to where we really want to be with reserved instances and on demand. And that's the real ask of Nutanix. How do you take care of this discontinuity? Because when you're owning things, you actually end up here, and when you're renting things, you end up here. What does it mean to really blur the lines between these two because people do want to make decisions that are better than reserved instance in the public cloud. We'll talk about why reserved instances which looks like a proxy for Nutanix it's still very, very wasteful even though you might think it's delightful, it's very, very wasteful. So what does it mean for on-prem and off-prem? You know you talk about cost governance, there's security compliance. These high velocity decisions we're actually making you know where sometimes you could be right with cost but wrong on security, but sometimes you could be right in security but wrong on cost. We need to really figure out how machines make some of these decisions for us, how software helps us decide do we have the right balance between cost, governance, and security compliance itself? And to get it right, we have introduced our first SAS service called Beam. And to talk more about Beam, I want to introduce Vijay Rayapati who's the general manager of Beam engineering to come up on stage and talk about Beam itself. Thank you Vijay. (rock music) So you've been here a couple of months now? >> Yes. >> At the same time, you spent the last seven, eight years really handling AWS. Tell us more about it. >> Yeah so we spent a lot of time trying to understand the last five years at Minjar you know how customers are really consuming in this new world for their workloads. So essentially what we tried to do is understand the consumption models, workload patterns, and also build algorithms and apply intelligence to say how can we lower this cost and you know improve compliance of their workloads.? And now with Nutanix what we're trying to do is how can we converge this consumption, right? Because what happens here is most customers start with on demand kind of consumption thinking it's really easy, but the total cost of ownership is so high as the workload elasticity increases, people go towards spot or a scaling, but then you need a lot more automation that something like Calm can help them. But predictability of the workload increases, then you need to move towards reserved instances, right to lower costs. >> And those are some of the things that you go and advise with some of the software that you folks have actually written. >> But there's a lot of waste even in the reserved instances because what happens it while customers make these commitments for a year or three years, what we see across, like we track a billion dollars in public cloud consumption you know as a Beam, and customers use 20%, 25% of utilization of their commitments, right? So how can you really apply, take the data of consumption you know apply intelligence to essentially reduce their you know overall cost of ownership. >> You said something that's very telling. You said reserved instances even though they're supposed to save are still only 20%, 25% utilized. >> Yes, because the workloads are very dynamic. And the next thing is you can't do hot add CPU or hot add memory because you're buying them for peak capacity. There is no convergence of scaling that apart from the scaling as another node. >> So you actually sized it for peak, but then using 20%, 30%, you're still paying for the peak. >> That's right. >> Dheeraj: That can actually add up. >> That's what we're trying to say. How can we deliver visibility across clouds? You know how can we deliver optimization across clouds and consumption models and bring the control while retaining that agility and demand elasticity? >> That's great. So you want to show us something? >> Yeah absolutely. So this is Beam as just Dheeraj outlined, our first SAS service. And this is my first .Next. And you know glad to be here. So what you see here is a global consumption you know for a business across different clouds. Whether that's in a public cloud like Amazon, or Azure, or Nutanix. We kind of bring the consumption together for the month, the recent month across your accounts and services and apply intelligence to say you know what is your spent efficiency across these clouds? Essentially there's a lot of intelligence that goes in to detect your workloads and consumption model to say if you're spending $100, how efficiently are you spending? How can you increase that? >> So you have a centralized view where you're looking at multiple clouds, and you know you talk about maybe you can take an example of an account and start looking at it? >> Yes, let's go into a cloud provider like you know for this business, let's go and take a loot at what's happening inside an Amazon cloud. Here we get into the deeper details of what's happening with the consumption of a specific services as well as the utilization of both on demand and RI. You know what can you do to lower your cost and detect your spend efficiency of a dollar to see you know are there resources that are provisioned by teams for applications that are not being used, or are there resources that we should go and rightsize because you know we have all this monitoring data, configuration data that we crunch through to basically detect this? >> You think there's billions of events that you look at everyday. You're already looking at a billon dollars worth of AWS spend. >> Right, right. >> So billions of events, billing, metering events every year to really figure out and optimize for them. >> So what we have here is a very popular international government organization. >> Dheeraj: Wow, so it looks like Russians are everywhere, the cloud is everywhere actually. >> Yes, it's quite popular. So when you bring your master account into Beam, we kind of detect all the linked accounts you know under that. Then you can go and take a look at not just at the organization level within it an account level. >> So these are child objects, you know. >> That's right. >> You can think of them as ephemeral accounts that you create because you don't want to be on the record when you're doing spams on Facebook for example. >> Right, let's go and take a look at what's happening inside a Facebook ad spend account. So we have you know consumption of the services. Let's go deeper into compute consumption, and you kind of see a trendline. You can do a lot of computing. As you see, looks like one campaign has ended. They started another campaign. >> Dheeraj: It looks like they're not stopping yet, man. There's a lot of money being made in Facebook right now. (Vijay laughing) >> So not only just get visibility at you know compute as a service inside a cloud provider, you can go deeper inside compute and say you know what is a service that I'm really consuming inside compute along with the CPUs n'stuff, right? What is my data transfer? You know what is my network? What is my load blancers? So essentially you get a very deeper visibility you know as a service right. Because we have three goals for Beam. How can we deliver visibility across clouds? How can we deliver visibility across services? And how can we deliver, then optimization? >> Well I think one thing that I just want to point out is how this SAS application was an extremely teachable moment for me to learn about the different resources that people could use about the public cloud. So all of you who actually have not gone deep enough into the idea of public cloud. This could be a great app for you to learn about things, the resources, you know things that you could do to save and security and things of that nature. >> Yeah. And we really believe in creating the single pane view you know to mange your optimization of a public cloud. You know as Ben spoke about as a business, you need to have freedom to use any cloud. And that's what Beam delivers. How can you make the right decision for the right workload to use any of the cloud of your choice? >> Dheeraj: How 'about databases? You talked about compute as well but are there other things we could look at? >> Vijay: Yes, let's go and take a look at database consumption. What you see here is they're using inside Facebook ad spending, they're using all databases except Oracle. >> Dheeraj: Wow, looks like Oracle sales folks have been active in Russia as well. (Vijay laughing) >> So what we're seeing here is a global view of you know what is your spend efficiency and which is kind of a scorecard for your business for the dollars that you're spending. And the great thing is Beam kind of brings together you know through its intelligence and algorithms to detect you know how can you rightsize resources and how can you eliminate things that you're not using? And we deliver and one click fix, right? Let's go and take a look at resources that are maybe provisioned for storage and not being used. We deliver the seamless one-click philosophy that Nutanix has to eliminate it. >> So one click, you can actually just pick some of these wasteful things that might be looking delightful because using public cloud, using credit cards, you can go in and just say click fix, and it takes care of things. >> Yeah, and not only remove the resources that are unused, but it can go and rightsize resources across your compute databases, load balancers, even past services, right? And this is where the power of it kind of comes for a business whether you're using on-prem and off-prem. You know how can you really converge that consumption across both? >> Dheeraj: So do you have something for Nutanix too? >> Vijay: Yes, so we have basically been working on Nutanix with something that we're going to deliver you know later this year. As you can see here, we're bringing together the consumption for the Nutanix, you know the services that you're using, the licensing and capacity that is available. And how can you also go and optimize within Nutanix environments >> That's great. >> for the next workload. Now let me quickly show you what we have on the compliance side. This is an extremely powerful thing that we've been working on for many years. What we deliver here just like in cost governance, a global view of your compliance across cloud providers. And the most powerful thing is you can go into a cloud provider, get the next level of visibility across cloud regimes for hundreds of policies. Not just policies but those policies across different regulatory compliances like HIPA, PCI, CAS. And that's very powerful because-- >> So you're saying a lot of what you folks have done is codified these compliance checks in software to make sure that people can sleep better at night knowing that it's PCI, and HIPA, and all that compliance actually comes together? >> And you can build this not just by cloud accounts, you can build them across cloud accounts which is what we call security centers. Essentially you can go and take a deeper look at you know the things. We do a whole full body scan for your cloud infrastructure whether it's AWS Amazon or Azure, and you can go and now, again, click to fix things. You know that had been probably provisioned that are violating the security compliance rules that should be there. Again, we have the same one-click philosophy to say how can you really remove things. >> So again, similar to save, you're saying you can go and fix some of these security issues by just doing one click. >> Absolutely. So the idea is how can we give our people the freedom to get visibility and use the right cloud and take the decisions instantly through one click. That's what Beam delivers you know today. And you know get really excited, and it's available at beam.nutanix.com. >> Our first SAS service, ladies and gentleman. Thank you so much for doing this, Vijay. It looks like there's going to be a talk here at 10:30. You'll talk more about the midterm elections there probably? >> Yes, so you can go and write your own security compliances as well. You know within Beam, and a lot of powerful things you can do. >> Awesome, thank you so much, Vijay. I really appreciate it. (audience clapping) So as you see, there's a lot of work that we're doing to really make multi-cloud which is a hard problem. You know think about working the whole body of it and what about cost governance? What about security compliance? Obviously what about hybrid networks, and security, and storage, you know compute, many of the things that you've actually heard from us, but we're taking it to a level where the business users can now understand the implications. A CFO's office can understand the implications of waste and delight. So what does customer success mean to us? You know again, my favorite word in a long, long time is really go and figure out how do you make you, the customer, become operationally efficient. You know there's a lot of stuff that we deliver through software that's completely uncovered. It's so latent, you don't even know you have it, but you've paid for it. So you've got to figure out what does it mean for you to really become operationally efficient, organizationally proficient. And it's really important for training, education, stuff that you know you're people might think it's so awkward to do in Nutanix, but it could've been way simpler if you just told you a place where you can go and read about it. Of course, I can just use one click here as opposed to doing things the old way. But most importantly to make it financially accountable. So the end in all this is, again, one of the things that I think about all the time in building this company because obviously there's a lot of stuff that we want to do to create orphans, you know things above the line and top line and everything else. There's also a bottom line. Delight and waste are two sides of the same coin. You know when we're talking about developers who seek delight with public cloud at the same time you're looking at IT folks who're trying to figure out governance. They're like look you know the CFOs office, the CIOs office, they're trying to figure out how to curb waste. These two things have to go hand in hand in this era of multi-cloud where we're talking about frictionless consumption but also governance that looks invisible. So I think, at the end of the day, this company will do a lot of stuff around one-click delight but also go and figure out how do you reduce waste because there's so much waste including folks there who actually own Nutanix. There's so much software entitlement. There's so much waste in the public cloud itself that if we don't go and put our arms around, it will not lead to customer success. So to talk more about this, the idea of delight and the idea of waste, I'd like to bring on board a person who I think you know many of you actually have talked about it have delightful hair but probably wasted jokes. But I think has wasted hair and delightful jokes. So ladies and gentlemen, you make the call. You're the jury. Sunil R.M.J. Potti. ("Free" by Broods) >> So that was the first time I came out from the bottom of a screen on a stage. I actually now know what it feels to be like a gopher. Who's that laughing loudly at the back? Okay, do we have the... Let's see. Okay, great. We're about 15 minutes late, so that means we're running right on time. That's normally how we roll at this conference. And we have about three customers and four demos. Like I think there's about three plus six, about nine folks coming onstage. So we'll have our own version of the parade as well on the main stage for the next 70 minutes. So let's just jump right into it. I think we've been pretty consistent in terms of our longterm plans since we started the company. And it's become a lot more clearer over the last few years about our plans to essentially make computing invisible as Dheeraj mentioned. We're doing this across multiple acts. We started with HCI. We call it making infrastructure invisible. We extended that to making data centers invisible. And then now we're in this mode of essentially extending it to converging clouds so that you can actually converge your consumption models. And so today's conference and essentially the theme that you're going to be seeing throughout the breakout sessions is about a journey towards invisible clouds, but make sure that you internalize the fact that we're investing heavily in each of the three phases. It's just not about the hybrid cloud with Nutanix, it's about actually finishing the job about making infrastructure invisible, expanding that to kind of go after the full data center, and then of course embark on some real meaningful things around invisible clouds, okay? And to start the session, I think you know the part that I wanted to make sure that we are all on the same page because most of us in the room are still probably in this phase of the journey which is about invisible infrastructure. And there the three key products and especially two of them that most of you guys know are Acropolis and Prism. And they're sort of like the bedrock of our company. You know especially Acropolis which is about the web scale architecture. Prism is about consumer grade design. And with Acropolis now being really mature. It's in the seventh year of innovation. We still have more than half of our company in terms of R and D spend still on Acropolis and Prism. So our core product is still sort of where we think we have a significant differentiation on. We're not going to let our foot off the peddle there. You know every time somebody comes to me and says look there's a new HCI render popping out or an existing HCI render out there, I ask a simple question to our customers saying show me 100 customers with 100 node deployments, and it will be very hard to find any other render out there that does the same thing. And that's the power of Acropolis the code platform. And then it's you know the fact that the velocity associated with Acropolis continues to be on a fast pace. We came out with various new capabilities in 5.5 and 5.6, and one of the most complicated things to get right was the fact to shrink our three node cluster to a one node, two node deployment. Most of you actually had requirements on remote office, branch office, or the edge that actually allowed us to kind of give us you know sort of like the impetus to kind of go design some new capabilities into our core OS to get this out. And associated with Acropolis and expanding into Prism, as you will see, the first couple of years of Prism was all about refactoring the user interface, doing a good job with automation. But more and more of the investments around Prism is going to be based on machine learning. And you've seen some variants of that over the last 12 months, and I can tell you that in the next 12 to 24 months, most of our investments around infrastructure operations are going to be driven by AI techniques starting with most of our R and D spend also going into machine-learning algorithms. So when you talk about all the enhancements that have come on with Prism whether it be formed by you know the management console changing to become much more automated, whether now we give you automatic rightsizing, anomaly detection, or a series of functionality that have gone into it, the real core sort of capabilities that we're putting into Prism and Acropolis are probably best served by looking at the quality of the product. You probably have seen this slide before. We started showing the number of nodes shipped by Nutanix two years ago at this conference. It was about 35,000 plus nodes at that time. And since then, obviously we've you know continued to grow. And we would draw this line which was about enterprise class quality. That for the number of bugs found as a percentage of nodes shipped, there's a certain line that's drawn. World class companies do about probably 2% to 3%, number of CFDs per node shipped. And we were just broken that number two years ago. And to give you guys an idea of how that curve has shown up, it's now currently at .95%. And so along with velocity, you know this focus on being true to our roots of reliability and stability continues to be, you know it's an internal challenge, but it's also some of the things that we keep a real focus on. And so between Acropolis and Prism, that's sort of like our core focus areas to sort of give us the confidence that look we have this really high bar that we're sort of keeping ourselves accountable to which is about being the most advanced enterprise cloud OS on the planet. And we will keep it this way for the next 10 years. And to complement that, over a period of time of course, we've added a series of services. So these are services not just for VMs but also for files, blocks, containers, but all being delivered in that single one-click operations fashion. And to really talk more about it, and actually probably to show you the real deal there it's my great pleasure to call our own version of Moses inside the company, most of you guys know him as Steve Poitras. Come on up, Steve. (audience clapping) (rock music) >> Thanks Sunil. >> You barely fit in that door, man. Okay, so what are we going to talk about today, Steve? >> Absolutely. So when we think about when Nutanix first got started, it was really focused around VDI deployments, smaller workloads. However over time as we've evolved the product, added additional capabilities and features, that's grown from VDI to business critical applications as well as cloud native apps. So let's go ahead and take a look. >> Sunil: And we'll start with like Oracle? >> Yeah, that's one of the key ones. So here we can see our Prism central user interface, and we can see our Thor cluster obviously speaking to the Avengers theme here. We can see this is doing right around 400,000 IOPs at around 360 microseconds latency. Now obviously Prism central allows you to mange all of your Nutanix deployments, but this is just running on one single Nutanix cluster. So if we hop over here to our explore tab, we can see we have a few categories. We have some Kubernetes, some AFS, some Xen desktop as well as Oracle RAC. Now if we hope over to Oracle RAC, we're running a SLOB workload here. So obviously with Oracle enterprise applications performance, consistency, and extremely low latency are very critical. So with this SLOB workload, we're running right around 300 microseconds of latency. >> Sunil: So this is what, how many node Oracle RAC cluster is this? >> Steve: This is a six node Oracle RAC deployment. >> Sunil: Got it. And so what has gone into the product in recent releases to kind of make this happen? >> Yeah so obviously on the hardware front, there's been a lot of evolutions in storage mediums. So with the introduction of NVME, persistent memory technologies like 3D XPoint, that's meant storage media has become a lot faster. Now to allow you to full take advantage of that, that's where we've had to do a lot of optimizations within the storage stack. So with AHV, we have what we call AHV turbo mode which allows you to full take advantage of those faster storage mediums at that much lower latency. And then obviously on the networking front, technologies such as RDMA can be leveraged to optimize that network stack. >> Got it. So that was Oracle RAC running on a you know Nutanix cluster. It used to be a big deal a couple of years ago. Now we've got many customers doing that. On the same environment though, we're going to show you is the advent of actually putting file services in the same scale out environment. And you know many of you in the audience probably know about AFS. We released it about 12 to 14 months ago. It's been one of our most popular new products of all time within Nutanix's history. And we had SMB support was for user file shares, VDI deployments, and it took awhile to bake, to get to scale and reliability. And then in the last release, in the recent release that we just shipped, we now added NFS for support so that we can no go after the full scale file server consolidation. So let's take a look at some of that stuff. >> Yep, let's do it. So hopping back over to Prism, we can see our four cluster here. Overall cluster-wide latency right around 360 microseconds. Now we'll hop down to our file server section. So here we can see we have our Next A File Server hosting right about 16.2 million files. Now if you look at our shares and exports, we can see we have a mix of different shares. So one of the shares that you see there is home directories. This is an SMB share which is actually mapped and being leveraged by our VDI desktops for home folders, user profiles, things of that nature. We can also see this Oracle backup share here which is exposed to our rack host via NFS. So RMAN is actually leveraging this to provide native database backups. >> Got it. So Oracle VMs, backup using files, or for any other file share requirements with AFS. Do we have the cluster also showing, I know, so I saw some Kubernetes as well on it. Let's talk about what we're thinking of doing there. >> Yep, let's do it. So if we think about cloud, cloud's obviously a big buzz word, so is containers in Kubernetes. So with ACS 1.0 what we did is we introduced native support for Docker integration. >> And pause there. And we screwed up. (laughing) So just like the market took a left turn on Kubernetes, obviously we realized that, and now we're working on ACS 2.0 which is what we're going to talk about, right? >> Exactly. So with ACS 2.0, we've introduced native Kubernetes support. Now when I think about Kubernetes, there's really two core areas that come to mind. The first one is around native integration. So with that, we have our Kubernetes volume integration, we're obviously doing a lot of work on the networking front, and we'll continue to push there from an integration point of view. Now the other piece is around the actual deployment of Kubernetes. When we think about a lot of Nutanix administrators or IT admins, they may have never deployed Kubernetes before, so this could be a very daunting task. And true to the Nutanix nature, we not only want to make our platform simple and intuitive, we also want to do this for any ecosystem products. So with ACS 2.0, we've simplified the full Kubernetes deployment and switching over to our ACS two interface, we can see this create cluster button. Now this actually pops up a full wizard. This wizard will actually walk you through the full deployment process, gather the necessary inputs for you, and in a matter of a few clicks and a few minutes, we have a full Kubernetes deployment fully provisioned, the masters, the workers, all the networking fully done for you, very simple and intuitive. Now if we hop back over to Prism, we can see we have this ACS2 Kubernetes category. Clicking on that, we can see we have eight instances of virtual machines. And here are Kubernetes virtual machines which have actually been deployed as part of this ACS2 installer. Now one of the nice things is it makes the IT administrator's job very simple and easy to do. The deployment straightforward monitoring and management very straightforward and simple. Now for the developer, the application architect, or engineers, they interface and interact with Kubernetes just like they would traditionally on any platform. >> Got it. So the goal of ACS is to ensure that the developer ecosystem still uses whatever tools that they are you know preferring while at that same time allowing this consolidation of containers along with VMs all on that same, single runtime, right? So that's ACS. And then if you think about where the OS is going, there's still some open space at the end. And open space has always been look if you just look at a public cloud, you look at blocks, files, containers, the most obvious sort of storage function that's left is objects. And that's the last horizon for us in completing the storage stack. And we're going to show you for the first time a preview of an upcoming product called the Acropolis Object Storage Services Stack. So let's talk a little bit about it and then maybe show the demo. >> Yeah, so just like we provided file services with AFS, block services with ABS, with OSS or Object Storage Services, we provide native object storage, compatibility and capability within the Nutanix platform. Now this provides a very simply common S3 API. So any integrations you've done with S3 especially Kubernetes, you can actually leverage that out of the box when you've deployed this. Now if we hop back over to Prism, I'll go here to my object stores menu. And here we can see we have two existing object storage instances which are running. So you can deploy however many of these as you wanted to. Now just like the Kubernetes deployment, deploying a new object instance is very simple and easy to do. So here I'll actually name this instance Thor's Hammer. >> You do know he loses it, right? He hasn't seen the movies yet. >> Yeah, I don't want any spoilers yet. So once we specified the name, we can choose our capacity. So here we'll just specify a large instance or type. Obviously this could be any amount or storage. So if you have a 200 node Nutanix cluster with petabytes worth of data, you could do that as well. Once we've selected that, we'll select our expected performance. And this is going to be the number of concurrent gets and puts. So essentially how many operations per second we want this instance to be able to facilitate. Once we've done that, the platform will actually automatically determine how many virtual machines it needs to deploy as well as the resources and specs for those. And once we've done that, we'll go ahead and click save. Now here we can see it's actually going through doing the deployment of the virtual machines, applying any necessary configuration, and in the matter of a few clicks and a few seconds, we actually have this Thor's Hammer object storage instance which is up and running. Now if we hop over to one of our existing object storage instances, we can see this has three buckets. So one for Kafka-queue, I'm actually using this for my Kafka cluster where I have right around 62 million objects all storing ProtoBus. The second one there is Spark. So I actually have a Spark cluster running on our Kubernetes deployed instance via ACS 2.0. Now this is doing analytics on top of this data using S3 as a storage backend. Now for these objects, we support native versioning, native object encryption as well as worm compliancy. So if you want to have expiry periods, retention intervals, that sort of thing, we can do all that. >> Got it. So essentially what we've just shown you is with upcoming objects as well that the same OS can now support VMs, files, objects, containers, all on the same one click operational fabric. And so that's in some way the real power of Nutanix is to still keep that consistency, scalability in place as we're covering each and every workload inside the enterprise. So before Steve gets off stage though, I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about something that you know how many of you been to our Nutanix headquarters in San Jose, California? A few. I know there's like, I don't know, 4,000 or 5,000 people here. If you do come to the office, you know when you land in San Jose Airport on the way to longterm parking, you'll pass our office. It's that close. And if you come to the fourth floor, you know one of the cubes that's where I sit. In the cube beside me is Steve. Steve sits in the cube beside me. And when I first joined the company, three or four years ago, and Steve's if you go to his cube, it no longer looks like this, but it used to have a lot of this stuff. It was like big containers of this. I remember the first time. Since I started joking about it, he started reducing it. And then Steve eventually got married much to our surprise. (audience laughing) Much to his wife's surprise. And then he also had a baby as a bigger surprise. And if you come over to our office, and we welcome you, and you come to the fourth floor, find my cube or you'll find Steve's Cube, it now looks like this. Okay, so thanks a lot, my man. >> Cool, thank you. >> Thanks so much. (audience clapping) >> So single OS, any workload. And like Steve who's been with us for awhile, it's my great pleasure to invite one of our favorite customers, CSC Karen who's also been with us for three to four years. And I'll share some fond memories about how she's been with the company for awhile, how as partners we've really done a lot together. So without any further ado, let me bring up Karen. Come on up, Karen. (rock music) >> Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, thank you. So I remember, so how many of you guys were with Nutanix first .Next in Miami? I know there was a question like that asked last time. Not too many. You missed it. We wished we could go back to that. We wouldn't fit 3/4s of this crowd. But Karen was our first customer in the keynote in 2015. And we had just talked about that story at that time where you're just become a customer. Do you want to give us some recap of that? >> Sure. So when we made the decision to move to hyperconverged infrastructure and chose Nutanix as our partner, we rapidly started to deploy. And what I mean by that is Sunil and some of the Nutanix executives had come out to visit with us and talk about their product on a Tuesday. And on a Wednesday after making the decision, I picked up the phone and said you know what I've got to deploy for my VDI cluster. So four nodes showed up on Thursday. And from the time it was plugged in to moving over 300 VDIs and 50 terabytes of storage and turning it over for the business for use was less than three days. So it was really excellent testament to how simple it is to start, and deploy, and utilize the Nutanix infrastructure. Now part of that was the delight that we experienced from our customers after that deployment. So we got phone calls where people were saying this report it used to take so long that I'd got out and get a cup of coffee and come back, and read an article, and do some email, and then finally it would finish. Those reports are running in milliseconds now. It's one click. It's very, very simple, and we've delighted our customers. Now across that journey, we have gone from the simple workloads like VDIs to the much more complex workloads around Splunk and Hadoop. And what's really interesting about our Splunk deployment is we're handling over a billion events being logged everyday. And the deployment is smaller than what we had with a three tiered infrastructure. So when you hear people talk about waste and getting that out and getting to an invisible environment where you're just able to run it, that's what we were able to achieve both with everything that we're running from our public facing websites to the back office operations that we're using which include Splunk and even most recently our Cloudera and Hadoop infrastructure. What it does is it's got 30 crawlers that go out on the internet and start bringing data back. So it comes back with over two terabytes of data everyday. And then that environment, ingests that data, does work against it, and responds to the business. And that again is something that's smaller than what we had on traditional infrastructure, and it's faster and more stable. >> Got it. And it covers a lot of use cases as well. You want to speak a few words on that? >> So the use cases, we're 90%, 95% deployed on Nutanix, and we're covering all of our use cases. So whether that's a customer facing app or a back office application. And what are business is doing is it's handling large portfolios of data for fortune 500 companies and law firms. And these applications are all running with improved stability, reliability, and performance on the Nutanix infrastructure. >> And the plan going forward? >> So the plan going forward, you actually asked me that in Miami, and it's go global. So when we started in Miami and that first deployment, we had four nodes. We now have 283 nodes around the world, and we started with about 50 terabytes of data. We've now got 3.8 petabytes of data. And we're deployed across four data centers and six remote offices. And people ask me often what is the value that we achieved? So simplification. It's all just easier, and it's all less expensive. Being able to scale with the business. So our Cloudera environment ended up with one day where it spiked to 1,000 times more load, 1,000 times, and it just responded. We had rally cries around improved productivity by six times. So 600% improved productivity, and we were able to actually achieve that. The numbers you just saw on the slide that was very, very fast was we calculated a 40% reduction in total cost of ownership. We've exceeded that. And when we talk about waste, that other number on the board there is when I saved the company one hour of maintenance activity or unplanned downtime in a month which we're now able to do the majority of our maintenance activities without disrupting any of our business solutions, I'm saving $750,000 each time I save that one hour. >> Wow. All right, Karen from CSE. Thank you so much. That was great. Thank you. I mean you know some of these data points frankly as I started talking to Karen as well as some other customers are pretty amazing in terms of the genuine value beyond financial value. Kind of like the emotional sort of benefits that good products deliver to some of our customers. And I think that's one of the core things that we take back into engineering is to keep ourselves honest on either velocity or quality even hiring people and so forth. Is to actually the more we touch customers lives, the more we touch our partner's lives, the more it allows us to ensure that we can put ourselves in their shoes to kind of make sure that we're doing the right thing in terms of the product. So that was the first part, invisible infrastructure. And our goal, as we've always talked about, our true North is to make sure that this single OS can be an exact replica, a truly modern, thoughtful but original design that brings the power of public cloud this AWS or GCP like architectures into your mainstream enterprises. And so when we take that to the next level which is about expanding the scope to go beyond invisible infrastructure to invisible data centers, it starts with a few things. Obviously, it starts with virtualization and a level of intelligent management, extends to automation, and then as we'll talk about, we have to embark on encompassing the network. And that's what we'll talk about with Flow. But to start this, let me again go back to one of our core products which is the bedrock of our you know opinionated design inside this company which is Prism and Acropolis. And Prism provides, I mentioned, comes with a ton of machine-learning based intelligence built into the product in 5.6 we've done a ton of work. In fact, a lot of features are coming out now because now that PC, Prism Central that you know has been decoupled from our mainstream release strain and will continue to release on its own cadence. And the same thing when you actually flip it to AHV on its own train. Now AHV, two years ago it was all about can I use AHV for VDI? Can I use AHV for ROBO? Now I'm pretty clear about where you cannot use AHV. If you need memory overcome it, stay with VMware or something. If you need, you know Metro, stay with another technology, else it's game on, right? And if you really look at the adoption of AHV in the mainstream enterprise, the customers now speak for themselves. These are all examples of large global enterprises with multimillion dollar ELAs in play that have now been switched over. Like I'll give you a simple example here, and there's lots of these that I'm sure many of you who are in the audience that are in this camp, but when you look at the breakout sessions in the pods, you'll get a sense of this. But I'll give you one simple example. If you look at the online payment company. I'm pretty sure everybody's used this at one time or the other. They had the world's largest private cloud on open stack, 21,000 nodes. And they were actually public about it three or four years ago. And in the last year and a half, they put us through a rigorous VOC testing scale, hardening, and it's a full blown AHV only stack. And they've started cutting over. Obviously they're not there yet completely, but they're now literally in hundreds of nodes of deployment of Nutanix with AHV as their primary operating system. So it is primetime from a deployment perspective. And with that as the base, no cloud is complete without actually having self-service provisioning that truly drives one-click automation, and can you do that in this consumer grade design? And Calm was acquired, as you guys know, in 2016. We had a choice of taking Calm. It was reasonably feature complete. It supported multiple clouds. It supported ESX, it supported Brownfield, It supported AHV. I mean they'd already done the integration with Nutanix even before the acquisition. And we had a choice. The choice was go down the path of dynamic ops or some other products where you took it for revenue or for acceleration, you plopped it into the ecosystem and sold it at this power sucking alien on top of our stack, right? Or we took a step back, re-engineered the product, kept some of the core essence like the workflow engine which was good, the automation, the object model and all, but refactored it to make it look like a natural extension of our operating system. And that's what we did with Calm. And we just launched it in December, and it's been one of our most popular new products now that's flying off the shelves. If you saw the number of registrants, I got a notification of this for the breakout sessions, the number one session that has been preregistered with over 500 people, the first two sessions are around Calm. And justifiably so because it just as it lives up to its promise, and it'll take its time to kind of get to all the bells and whistles, all the capabilities that have come through with AHV or Acropolis in the past. But the feature functionality, the product market fit associated with Calm is dead on from what the feedback that we can receive. And so Calm itself is on its own rapid cadence. We had AWS and AHV in the first release. Three or four months later, we now added ESX support. We added GCP support and a whole bunch of other capabilities, and I think the essence of Calm is if you can combine Calm and along with private cloud automation but also extend it to multi-cloud automation, it really sets Nutanix on its first genuine path towards multi-cloud. But then, as I said, if you really fixate on a software defined data center message, we're not complete as a full blown AWS or GCP like IA stack until we do the last horizon of networking. And you probably heard me say this before. You heard Dheeraj and others talk about it before is our problem in networking isn't the same in storage. Because the data plane in networking works. Good L2 switches from Cisco, Arista, and so forth, but the real problem networking is in the control plane. When something goes wrong at a VM level in Nutanix, you're able to identify whether it's a storage problem or a compute problem, but we don't know whether it's a VLAN that's mis-configured, or there've been some packets dropped at the top of the rack. Well that all ends now with Flow. And with Flow, essentially what we've now done is take the work that we've been working on to create built-in visibility, put some network automation so that you can actually provision VLANs when you provision VMs. And then augment it with micro segmentation policies all built in this easy to use, consume fashion. But we didn't stop there because we've been talking about Flow, at least the capabilities, over the last year. We spent significant resources building it. But we realized that we needed an additional thing to augment its value because the world of applications especially discovering application topologies is a heady problem. And if we didn't address that, we wouldn't be fulfilling on this ambition of providing one-click network segmentation. And so that's where Netsil comes in. Netsil might seem on the surface yet another next generation application performance management tool. But the innovations that came from Netsil started off at the research project at the University of Pennsylvania. And in fact, most of the team right now that's at Nutanix is from the U Penn research group. And they took a really original, fresh look at how do you sit in a network in a scale out fashion but still reverse engineer the packets, the flow through you, and then recreate this application topology. And recreate this not just on Nutanix, but do it seamlessly across multiple clouds. And to talk about the power of Flow augmented with Netsil, let's bring Rajiv back on stage, Rajiv. >> How you doing? >> Okay so we're going to start with some Netsil stuff, right? >> Yeah, let's talk about Netsil and some of the amazing capabilities this acquisition's bringing to Nutanix. First of all as you mentioned, Netsil's completely non invasive. So it installs on the network, it does all its magic from there. There're no host agents, non of the complexity and compatibility issues that entails. It's also monitoring the network at layer seven. So it's actually doing a deep packet inspection on all your application data, and can give you insights into services and APIs which is very important for modern applications and the way they behave. To do all this of course performance is key. So Netsil's built around a completely distributed architecture scaled to really large workloads. Very exciting technology. We're going to use it in many different ways at Nutanix. And to give you a flavor of that, let me show you how we're thinking of integrating Flow and Nestil together, so micro segmentation and Netsil. So to do that, we install Netsil in one of our Google accounts. And that's what's up here now. It went out there. It discovered all the VMs we're running on that account. It created a map essentially of all their interactions, and you can see it's like a Google Maps view. I can zoom into it. I can look at various things running. I can see lots of HTTP servers over here, some databases. >> Sunil: And it also has stats, right? You can go, it actually-- >> It does. We can take a look at that for a second. There are some stats you can look at right away here. Things like transactions per second and latencies and so on. But if I wanted to micro segment this application, it's not really clear how to do so. There's no real pattern over here. Taking the Google Maps analogy a little further, this kind of looks like the backstreets of Cairo or something. So let's do this step by step. Let me first filter down to one application. Right now I'm looking at about three or four different applications. And Netsil integrates with the metadata. So this is that the clouds provide. So I can search all the tags that I have. So by doing that, I can zoom in on just the financial application. And when I do this, the view gets a little bit simpler, but there's still no real pattern. It's not clear how to micro segment this, right? And this is where the power of Netsil comes in. This is a fairly naive view. This is what tool operating at layer four just looking at ports and TCP traffic would give you. But by doing deep packet inspection, Netsil can get into the services layer. So instead of grouping these interactions by hostname, let's group them by service. So you go service tier. And now you can see this is a much simpler picture. Now I have some patterns. I have a couple of load balancers, an HA proxy and an Nginx. I have a web application front end. I have some application servers running authentication services, search services, et cetera, a database, and a database replica. I could go ahead and micro segment at this point. It's quite possible to do it at this point. But this is almost too granular a view. We actually don't usually want to micro segment at individual service level. You think more in terms of application tiers, the tiers that different services belong to. So let me go ahead and group this differently. Let me group this by app tier. And when I do that, a really simple picture emerges. I have a load balancing tier talking to a web application front end tier, an API tier, and a database tier. Four tiers in my application. And this is something I can work with. This is something that I can micro segment fairly easily. So let's switch over to-- >> Before we dot that though, do you guys see how he gave himself the pseudonym called Dom Toretto? >> Focus Sunil, focus. >> Yeah, for those guys, you know that's not the Avengers theme, man, that's the Fast and Furious theme. >> Rajiv: I think a year ahead. This is next years theme. >> Got it, okay. So before we cut over from Netsil to Flow, do we want to talk a few words about the power of Flow, and what's available in 5.6? >> Sure so Flow's been around since the 5.6 release. Actually some of the functionality came in before that. So it's got invisibility into the network. It helps you debug problems with WLANs and so on. We had a lot of orchestration with other third party vendors with load balancers, with switches to make publishing much simpler. And then of course with our most recent release, we GA'ed our micro segmentation capabilities. And that of course is the most important feature we have in Flow right now. And if you look at how Flow policy is set up, it looks very similar to what we just saw with Netsil. So we have load blancer talking to a web app, API, database. It's almost identical to what we saw just a moment ago. So while this policy was created manually, it is something that we can automate. And it is something that we will do in future releases. Right now, it's of course not been integrated at that level yet. So this was created manually. So one thing you'll notice over here is that the database tier doesn't get any direct traffic from the internet. All internet traffic goes to the load balancer, only specific services then talk to the database. So this policy right now is in monitoring mode. It's not actually being enforced. So let's see what happens if I try to attack the database, I start a hack against the database. And I have my trusty brute force password script over here. It's trying the most common passwords against the database. And if I happen to choose a dictionary word or left the default passwords on, eventually it will log into the database. And when I go back over here in Flow what happens is it actually detects there's now an ongoing a flow, a flow that's outside of policy that's shown up. And it shows this in yellow. So right alongside the policy, I can visualize all the noncompliant flows. This makes it really easy for me now to make decisions, does this flow should it be part of the policy, should it not? In this particular case, obviously it should not be part of the policy. So let me just switch from monitoring mode to enforcement mode. I'll apply the policy, give it a second to propagate. The flow goes away. And if I go back to my script, you can see now the socket's timing out. I can no longer connect to the database. >> Sunil: Got it. So that's like one click segmentation and play right now? >> Absolutely. It's really, really simple. You can compare it to other products in the space. You can't get simpler than this. >> Got it. Why don't we got back and talk a little bit more about, so that's Flow. It's shipping now in 5.6 obviously. It'll come integrated with Netsil functionality as well as a variety of other enhancements in that next few releases. But Netsil does more than just simple topology discovery, right? >> Absolutely. So Netsil's actually gathering a lot of metrics from your network, from your host, all this goes through a data pipeline. It gets processed over there and then gets captured in a time series database. And then we can slice and dice that in various different ways. It can be used for all kinds of insights. So let's see how our application's behaving. So let me say I want to go into the API layer over here. And I instantly get a variety of metrics on how the application's behaving. I get the most requested endpoints. I get the average latency. It looks reasonably good. I get the average latency of the slowest endpoints. If I was having a performance problem, I would know exactly where to go focus on. Right now, things look very good, so we won't focus on that. But scrolling back up, I notice that we have a fairly high error rate happening. We have like 11.35% of our HTTP requests are generating errors, and that deserves some attention. And if I scroll down again, and I see the top five status codes I'm getting, almost 10% of my requests are generating 500 errors, HTTP 500 errors which are internal server errors. So there's something going on that's wrong with this application. So let's dig a little bit deeper into that. Let me go into my analytics workbench over here. And what I've plotted over here is how my HTTP requests are behaving over time. Let me filter down to just the 500 ones. That will make it easier. And I want the 500s. And I'll also group this by the service tier so that I can see which services are causing the problem. And the better view for this would be a bar graph. Yes, so once I do this, you can see that all the errors, all the 500 errors that we're seeing have been caused by the authentication service. So something's obviously wrong with that part of my application. I can go look at whether Active Directory is misbehaving and so on. So very quickly from a broad problem that I was getting a high HTTP error rate. In fact, usually you will discover there's this customer complaining about a lot of errors happening in your application. You can quickly narrow down to exactly what the cause was. >> Got it. This is what we mean by hyperconvergence of the network which is if you can truly isolate network related problems and associate them with the rest of the hyperconvergence infrastructure, then we've essentially started making real progress towards the next level of hyperconvergence. Anyway, thanks a lot, man. Great job. >> Thanks, man. (audience clapping) >> So to talk about this evolution from invisible infrastructure to invisible data centers is another customer of ours that has embarked on this journey. And you know it's not just using Nutanix but a variety of other tools to actually fulfill sort of like the ambition of a full blown cloud stack within a financial organization. And to talk more about that, let me call Vijay onstage. Come on up, Vijay. (rock music) >> Hey. >> Thank you, sir. So Vijay looks way better in real life than in a picture by the way. >> Except a little bit of gray. >> Unlike me. So tell me a little bit about this cloud initiative. >> Yeah. So we've won the best cloud initiative twice now hosted by Incisive media a large magazine. It's basically they host a bunch of you know various buy side, sell side, and you can submit projects in various categories. So we've won the best cloud twice now, 2015 and 2017. The 2017 award is when you know as part of our private cloud journey we were laying the foundation for our private cloud which is 100% based on hyperconverged infrastructure. So that was that award. And then 2017, we've kind of built on that foundation and built more developer-centric next gen app services like PAS, CAS, SDN, SDS, CICD, et cetera. So we've built a lot of those services on, and the second award was really related to that. >> Got it. And a lot of this was obviously based on an infrastructure strategy with some guiding principles that you guys had about three or four years ago if I remember. >> Yeah, this is a great slide. I use it very often. At the core of our infrastructure strategy is how do we run IT as a business? I talk about this with my teams, they were very familiar with this. That's the mindset that I instill within the teams. The mission, the challenge is the same which is how do we scale infrastructure while reducing total cost of ownership, improving time to market, improving client experience and while we're doing that not lose sight of reliability, stability, and security? That's the mission. Those are some of our guiding principles. Whenever we take on some large technology investments, we take 'em through those lenses. Obviously Nutanix went through those lenses when we invested in you guys many, many years ago. And you guys checked all the boxes. And you know initiatives change year on year, the mission remains the same. And more recently, the last few years, we've been focused on converged platforms, converged teams. We've actually reorganized our teams and aligned them closer to the platforms moving closer to an SRE like concept. >> And then you've built out a full stack now across computer storage, networking, all the way with various use cases in play? >> Yeah, and we're aggressively moving towards PAS, CAS as our method of either developing brand new cloud native applications or even containerizing existing applications. So the stack you know obviously built on Nutanix, SDS for software fine storage, compute and networking we've got SDN turned on. We've got, again, PAS and CAS built on this platform. And then finally, we've hooked our CICD tooling onto this. And again, the big picture was always frictionless infrastructure which we're very close to now. You know 100% of our code deployments into this environment are automated. >> Got it. And so what's the net, net in terms of obviously the business takeaway here? >> Yeah so at Northern we don't do tech for tech. It has to be some business benefits, client benefits. There has to be some outcomes that we measure ourselves against, and these are some great metrics or great ways to look at if we're getting the outcomes from the investments we're making. So for example, infrastructure scale while reducing total cost of ownership. We're very focused on total cost of ownership. We, for example, there was a build team that was very focus on building servers, deploying applications. That team's gone down from I think 40, 45 people to about 15 people as one example, one metric. Another metric for reducing TCO is we've been able to absorb additional capacity without increasing operating expenses. So you're actually building capacity in scale within your operating model. So that's another example. Another example, right here you see on the screen. Faster time to market. We've got various types of applications at any given point that we're deploying. There's a next gen cloud native which go directly on PAS. But then a majority of the applications still need the traditional IS components. The time to market to deploy a complex multi environment, multi data center application, we've taken that down by 60%. So we can deliver server same day, but we can deliver entire environments, you know add it to backup, add it to DNS, and fully compliant within a couple of weeks which is you know something we measure very closely. >> Great job, man. I mean that's a compelling I think results. And in the journey obviously you got promoted a few times. >> Yep. >> All right, congratulations again. >> Thank you. >> Thanks Vijay. >> Hey Vijay, come back here. Actually we forgot our joke. So razzled by his data points there. So you're supposed to wear some shoes, right? >> I know my inner glitch. I was going to wear those sneakers, but I forgot them at the office maybe for the right reasons. But the story behind those florescent sneakers, I see they're focused on my shoes. But I picked those up two years ago at a Next event, and not my style. I took 'em to my office. They've been sitting in my office for the last couple years. >> Who's received shoes like these by the way? I'm sure you guys have received shoes like these. There's some real fans there. >> So again, I'm sure many of you liked them. I had 'em in my office. I've offered it to so many of my engineers. Are you size 11? Do you want these? And they're unclaimed? >> So that's the only feature of Nutanix that you-- >> That's the only thing that hasn't worked, other than that things are going extremely well. >> Good job, man. Thanks a lot. >> Thanks. >> Thanks Vijay. So as we get to the final phase which is obviously as we embark on this multi-cloud journey and the complexity that comes with it which Dheeraj hinted towards in his session. You know we have to take a cautious, thoughtful approach here because we don't want to over set expectations because this will take us five, 10 years to really do a good job like we've done in the first act. And the good news is that the market is also really, really early here. It's just a fact. And so we've taken a tiered approach to it as we'll start the discussion with multi-cloud operations, and we've talked about the stack in the prior session which is about look across new clouds. So it's no longer Nutanix, Dell, Lenova, HP, Cisco as the new quote, unquote platforms. It's Nutanix, Xi, GCP, AWS, Azure as the new platforms. That's how we're designing the fabric going forward. On top of that, you obviously have the hybrid OS both on the data plane side and control plane side. Then what you're seeing with the advent of Calm doing a marketplace and automation as well as Beam doing governance and compliance is the fact that you'll see more and more such capabilities of multi-cloud operations burnt into the platform. And example of that is Calm with the new 5.7 release that they had. Launch supports multiple clouds both inside and outside, but the fundamental premise of Calm in the multi-cloud use case is to enable you to choose the right cloud for the right workload. That's the automation part. On the governance part, and this we kind of went through in the last half an hour with Dheeraj and Vijay on stage is something that's even more, if I can call it, you know first order because you get the provisioning and operations second. The first order is to say look whatever my developers have consumed off public cloud, I just need to first get our arm around to make sure that you know what am I spending, am I secure, and then when I get comfortable, then I am able to actually expand on it. And that's the power of Beam. And both Beam and Calm will be the yin and yang for us in our multi-cloud portfolio. And we'll have new products to complement that down the road, right? But along the way, that's the whole private cloud, public cloud. They're the two ends of the barbell, and over time, and we've been working on Xi for awhile, is this conviction that we've built talking to many customers that there needs to be another type of cloud. And this type of a cloud has to feel like a public cloud. It has to be architected like a public cloud, be consumed like a public cloud, but it needs to be an extension of my data center. It should not require any changes to my tooling. It should not require and changes to my operational infrastructure, and it should not require lift and shift, and that's a super hard problem. And this problem is something that a chunk of our R and D team has been burning the midnight wick on for the last year and a half. Because look this is not about taking our current OS which does a good job of scaling and plopping it into a Equinix or a third party data center and calling it a hybrid cloud. This is about rebuilding things in the OS so that we can deliver a true hybrid cloud, but at the same time, give those functionality back on premises so that even if you don't have a hybrid cloud, if you just have your own data centers, you'll still need new services like DR. And if you think about it, what are we doing? We're building a full blown multi-tenant virtual network designed in a modern way. Think about this SDN 2.0 because we have 10 years worth of looking backwards on how GCP has done it, or how Amazon has done it, and now sort of embodying some of that so that we can actually give it as part of this cloud, but do it in a way that's a seamless extension of the data center, and then at the same time, provide new services that have never been delivered before. Everyone obviously does failover and failback in DR it just takes months to do it. Our goal is to do it in hours or minutes. But even things such as test. Imagine doing a DR test on demand for you business needs in the middle of the day. And that's the real bar that we've set for Xi that we are working towards in early access later this summer with GA later in the year. And to talk more about this, let me invite some of our core architects working on it, Melina and Rajiv. (rock music) Good to see you guys. >> You're messing up the names again. >> Oh Rajiv, Vinny, same thing, man. >> You need to back up your memory from Xi. >> Yeah, we should. Okay, so what are we going to talk about, Vinny? >> Yeah, exactly. So today we're going to talk about how Xi is pushing the envelope and beyond the state of the art as you were saying in the industry. As part of that, there's a whole bunch of things that we have done starting with taking a private cloud, seamlessly extending it to the public cloud, and then creating a hybrid cloud experience with one-click delight. We're going to show that. We've done a whole bunch of engineering work on making sure the operations and the tooling is identical on both sides. When you graduate from a private cloud to a hybrid cloud environment, you don't want the environments to be different. So we've copied the environment for you with zero manual intervention. And finally, building on top of that, we are delivering DR as a service with unprecedented simplicity with one-click failover, one-click failback. We're going to show you one click test today. So Melina, why don't we start with showing how you go from a private cloud, seamlessly extend it to consume Xi. >> Sounds good, thanks Vinny. Right now, you're looking at my Prism interface for my on premises cluster. In one-click, I'm going to be able to extend that to my Xi cloud services account. I'm doing this using my my Nutanix credential and a password manager. >> Vinny: So here as you notice all the Nutanix customers we have today, we have created an account for them in Xi by default. So you don't have to log in somewhere and create an account. It's there by default. >> Melina: And just like that we've gone ahead and extended my data center. But let's go take a look at the Xi side and log in again with my my Nutanix credentials. We'll see what we have over here. We're going to be able to see two availability zones, one for on premises and one for Xi right here. >> Vinny: Yeah as you see, using a log in account that you already knew mynutanix.com and 30 seconds in, you can see that you have a hybrid cloud view already. You have a private cloud availability zone that's your own Prism central data center view, and then a Xi availability zone. >> Sunil: Got it. >> Melina: Exactly. But of course we want to extend my network connection from on premises to my Xi networks as well. So let's take a look at our options there. We have two ways of doing this. Both are one-click experience. With direct connect, you can create a dedicated network connection between both environments, or VPN you can use a public internet and a VPN service. Let's go ahead and enable VPN in this environment. Here we have two options for how we want to enable our VPN. We can bring our own VPN and connect it, or we will deploy a VPN for you on premises. We'll do the option where we deploy the VPN in one-click. >> And this is another small sign or feature that we're building net new as part of Xi, but will be burned into our core Acropolis OS so that we can also be delivering this as a stand alone product for on premises deployment as well, right? So that's one of the other things to note as you guys look at the Xi functionality. The goal is to keep the OS capabilities the same on both sides. So even if I'm building a quote, unquote multi data center cloud, but it's just a private cloud, you'll still get all the benefits of Xi but in house. >> Exactly. And on this second step of the wizard, there's a few inputs around how you want the gateway configured, your VLAN information and routing and protocol configuration details. Let's go ahead and save it. >> Vinny: So right now, you know what's happening is we're taking the private network that our customers have on premises and extending it to a multi-tenant public cloud such that our customers can use their IP addresses, the subnets, and bring their own IP. And that is another step towards making sure the operation and tooling is kept consistent on both sides. >> Melina: Exactly. And just while you guys were talking, the VPN was successfully created on premises. And we can see the details right here. You can track details like the status of the connection, the gateway, as well as bandwidth information right in the same UI. >> Vinny: And networking is just tip of the iceberg of what we've had to work on to make sure that you get a consistent experience on both sides. So Melina, why don't we show some of the other things we've done? >> Melina: Sure, to talk about how we preserve entities from my on-premises to Xi, it's better to use my production environment. And first thing you might notice is the log in screen's a little bit different. But that's because I'm logging in using my ADFS credentials. The first thing we preserved was our users. In production, I'm running AD obviously on-prem. And now we can log in here with the same set of credentials. Let me just refresh this. >> And this is the Active Directory credential that our customers would have. They use it on-premises. And we allow the setting to be set on the Xi cloud services as well, so it's the same set of users that can access both sides. >> Got it. There's always going to be some networking problem onstage. It's meant to happen. >> There you go. >> Just launching it again here. I think it maybe timed out. This is a good sign that we're running on time with this presentation. >> Yeah, yeah, we're running ahead of time. >> Move the demos quicker, then we'll time out. So essentially when you log into Xi, you'll be able to see what are the environment capabilities that we have copied to the Xi environment. So for example, you just saw that the same user is being used to log in. But after the use logs in, you'll be able to see their images, for example, copied to the Xi side. You'll be able to see their policies and categories. You know when you define these policies on premises, you spend a lot of effort and create them. And now when you're extending to the public cloud, you don't want to do it again, right? So we've done a whole lot of syncing mechanisms making sure that the two sides are consistent. >> Got it. And on top of these policies, the next step is to also show capabilities to actually do failover and failback, but also do integrated testing as part of this compatibility. >> So one is you know just the basic job of making the environments consistent on two sides, but then it's also now talking about the data part, and that's what DR is about. So if you have a workload running on premises, we can take the data and replicate it using your policies that we've already synced. Once the data is available on the Xi side, at that point, you have to define a run book. And the run book essentially it's a recovery plan. And that says okay I already have the backups of my VMs in case of disaster. I can take my recovery plan and hit you know either failover or maybe a test. And then my application comes up. First of all, you'll talk about the boot order for your VMs to come up. You'll talk about networking mapping. Like when I'm running on-prem, you're using a particular subnet. You have an option of using the same subnet on the Xi side. >> Melina: There you go. >> What happened? >> Sunil: It's finally working.? >> Melina: Yeah. >> Vinny, you can stop talking. (audience clapping) By the way, this is logging into a live Xi data center. We have two regions West Coat, two data centers East Coast, two data centers. So everything that you're seeing is essentially coming off the mainstream Xi profile. >> Vinny: Melina, why don't we show the recovery plan. That's the most interesting piece here. >> Sure. The recovery plan is set up to help you specify how you want to recover your applications in the event of a failover or a test failover. And it specifies all sorts of details like the boot sequence for the VMs as well as network mappings. Some of the network mappings are things like the production network I have running on premises and how it maps to my production network on Xi or the test network to the test network. What's really cool here though is we're actually automatically creating your subnets on Xi from your on premises subnets. All that's part of the recovery plan. While we're on the screen, take a note of the .100 IP address. That's a floating IP address that I have set up to ensure that I'm going to be able to access my three tier web app that I have protected with this plan after a failover. So I'll be able to access it from the public internet really easily from my phone or check that it's all running. >> Right, so given how we make the environment consistent on both sides, now we're able to create a very simple DR experience including failover in one-click, failback. But we're going to show you test now. So Melina, let's talk about test because that's one of the most common operations you would do. Like some of our customers do it every month. But usually it's very hard. So let's see how the experience looks like in what we built. >> Sure. Test and failover are both one-click experiences as you know and come to expect from Nutanix. You can see it's failing over from my primary location to my recovery location. Now what we're doing right now is we're running a series of validation checks because we want to make sure that you have your network configured properly, and there's other configuration details in place for the test to be successful. Looks like the failover was initiated successfully. Now while that failover's happening though, let's make sure that I'm going to be able to access my three tier web app once it fails over. We'll do that by looking at my network policies that I've configured on my test network. Because I want to access the application from the public internet but only port 80. And if we look here under our policies, you can see I have port 80 open to permit. So that's good. And if I needed to create a new one, I could in one click. But it looks like we're good to go. Let's go back and check the status of my recovery plan. We click in, and what's really cool here is you can actually see the individual tasks as they're being completed from that initial validation test to individual VMs being powered on as part of the recovery plan. >> And to give you guys an idea behind the scenes, the entire recovery plan is actually a set of workflows that are built on Calm's automation engine. So this is an example of where we're taking some of power of workflow and automation that Clam has come to be really strong at and burning that into how we actually operationalize many of these workflows for Xi. >> And so great, while you were explaining that, my three tier web app has restarted here on Xi right in front of you. And you can see here there's a floating IP that I mentioned early that .100 IP address. But let's go ahead and launch the console and make sure the application started up correctly. >> Vinny: Yeah, so that .100 IP address is a floating IP that's a publicly visible IP. So it's listed here, 206.80.146.100. And that's essentially anybody in the audience here can go use your laptop or your cell phone and hit that and start to work. >> Yeah so by the way, just to give you guys an idea while you guys maybe use the IP to kind of hit it, is a real set of VMs that we've just failed over from Nutanix's corporate data center into our West region. >> And this is running live on the Xi cloud. >> Yeah, you guys should all go and vote. I'm a little biased towards Xi, so vote for Xi. But all of them are really good features. >> Scroll up a little bit. Let's see where Xi is. >> Oh Xi's here. I'll scroll down a little bit, but keep the... >> Vinny: Yes. >> Sunil: You guys written a block or something? >> Melina: Oh good, it looks like Xi's winning. >> Sunil: Okay, great job, Melina. Thank you so much. >> Thank you, Melina. >> Melina: Thanks. >> Thank you, great job. Cool and calm under pressure. That's good. So that was Xi. What's something that you know we've been doing around you know in addition to taking say our own extended enterprise public cloud with Xi. You know we do recognize that there are a ton of workloads that are going to be residing on AWS, GCP, Azure. And to sort of really assist in the try and call it transformation of enterprises to choose the right cloud for the right workload. If you guys remember, we actually invested in a tool over last year which became actually quite like one of those products that took off based on you know groundswell movement. Most of you guys started using it. It's essentially extract for VMs. And it was this product that's obviously free. It's a tool. But it enables customers to really save tons of time to actually migrate from legacy environments to Nutanix. So we took that same framework, obviously re-platformed it for the multi-cloud world to kind of solve the problem of migrating from AWS or GCP to Nutanix or vice versa. >> Right, so you know, Sunil as you said, moving from a private cloud to the public cloud is a lift and shift, and it's a hard you know operation. But moving back is not only expensive, it's a very hard problem. None of the cloud vendors provide change block tracking capability. And what that means is when you have to move back from the cloud, you have an extended period of downtime because there's now way of figuring out what's changing while you're moving. So you have to keep it down. So what we've done with our app mobility product is we have made sure that, one, it's extremely simple to move back. Two, that the downtime that you'll have is as small as possible. So let me show you what we've done. >> Got it. >> So here is our app mobility capability. As you can see, on the left hand side we have a source environment and target environment. So I'm calling my AWS environment Asgard. And I can add more environments. It's very simple. I can select AWS and then put in my credentials for AWS. It essentially goes and discovers all the VMs that are running and all the regions that they're running. Target environment, this is my Nutanix environment. I call it Earth. And I can add target environment similarly, IP address and credentials, and we do the rest. Right, okay. Now migration plans. I have Bifrost one as my migration plan, and this is how migration works. First you create a plan and then say start seeding. And what it does is takes a snapshot of what's running in the cloud and starts migrating it to on-prem. Once it is an on-prem and the difference between the two sides is minimal, it says I'm ready to cutover. At that time, you move it. But let me show you how you'd create a new migration plan. So let me name it, Bifrost 2. Okay so what I have to do is select a region, so US West 1, and target Earth as my cluster. This is my storage container there. And very quickly you can see these are the VMs that are running in US West 1 in AWS. I can select SQL server one and two, go to next. Right now it's looking at the target Nutanix environment and seeing it had enough space or not. Once that's good, it gives me an option. And this is the step where it enables the Nutanix service of change block tracking overlaid on top of the cloud. There are two options one is automatic where you'll give us the credentials for your VMs, and we'll inject our capability there. Or manually you could do. You could copy the command either in a windows VM or Linux VM and run it once on the VM. And change block tracking since then in enabled. Everything is seamless after that. Hit next. >> And while Vinny's setting it up, he said a few things there. I don't know if you guys caught it. One of the hardest problems in enabling seamless migration from public cloud to on-prem which makes it harder than the other way around is the fact that public cloud doesn't have things like change block tracking. You can't get delta copies. So one of the core innovations being built in this app mobility product is to provide that overlay capability across multiple clouds. >> Yeah, and the last step here was to select the target network where the VMs will come up on the Nutanix environment, and this is a summary of the migration plan. You can start it or just save it. I'm saving it because it takes time to do the seeding. I have the other plan which I'll actually show the cutover with. Okay so now this is Bifrost 1. It's ready to cutover. We started it four hours ago. And here you can see there's a SQL server 003. Okay, now I would like to show the AWS environment. As you can see, SQL server 003. This VM is actually running in AWS right now. And if you go to the Prism environment, and if my login works, right? So we can go into the virtual machine view, tables, and you see the VM is not there. Okay, so we go back to this, and we can hit cutover. So this is essentially telling our system, okay now it the time. Quiesce the VM running in AWS, take the last bit of changes that you have to the database, ship it to on-prem, and in on-prem now start you know configure the target VM and start bringing it up. So let's go and look at AWS and refresh that screen. And you should see, okay so the SQL server is now stopping. So that means it has quiesced and stopping the VM there. If you go back and look at the migration plan that we had, it says it's completed. So it has actually migrated all the data to the on-prem side. Go here on-prem, you see the production SQL server is running already. I can click launch console, and let's see. The Windows VM is already booting up. >> So essentially what Vinny just showed was a live cutover of an AWS VM to Nutanix on-premises. >> Yeah, and what we have done. (audience clapping) So essentially, this is about making two things possible, making it simple to migrate from cloud to on-prem, and making it painless so that the downtime you have is very minimal. >> Got it, great job, Vinny. I won't forget your name again. So last step. So to really talk about this, one of our favorite partners and customers has been in the cloud environment for a long time. And you know Jason who's the CTO of Cyxtera. And he'll introduce who Cyxtera is. Most of you guys are probably either using their assets or not without knowing their you know the new name. But is someone that was in the cloud before it was called cloud as one of the original founders and technologists behind Terremark, and then later as one of the chief architects of VMware's cloud. And then they started this new company about a year or so ago which I'll let Jason talk about. This journey that he's going to talk about is how a partner, slash customer is working with us to deliver net new transformations around the traditional industry of colo. Okay, to talk more about it, Jason, why don't you come up on stage, man? (rock music) Thank you, sir. All right so Cyxtera obviously a lot of people don't know the name. Maybe just give a 10 second summary of why you're so big already. >> Sure, so Cyxtera was formed, as you said, about a year ago through the acquisition of the CenturyLink data centers. >> Sunil: Which includes Savvis and a whole bunch of other assets. >> Yeah, there's a long history of those data centers, but we have all of them now as well as the software companies owned by Medina capital. So we're like the world's biggest startup now. So we have over 50 data centers around the world, about 3,500 customers, and a portfolio of security and analytics software. >> Sunil: Got it, and so you have this strategy of what we're calling revolutionizing colo deliver a cloud based-- >> Yeah so, colo hasn't really changed a lot in the last 20 years. And to be fair, a lot of what happens in data centers has to have a person physically go and do it. But there are some things that we can simplify and automate. So we want to make things more software driven, so that's what we're doing with the Cyxtera extensible data center or CXD. And to do that, we're deploying software defined networks in our facilities and developing automations so customers can go and provision data center services and the network connectivity through a portal or through REST APIs. >> Got it, and what's different now? I know there's a whole bunch of benefits with the integrated platform that one would not get in the traditional kind of on demand data center environment. >> Sure. So one of the first services we're launching on CXD is compute on demand, and it's powered by Nutanix. And we had to pick an HCI partner to launch with. And we looked at players in the space. And as you mentioned, there's actually a lot of them, more than I thought. And we had a lot of conversations, did a lot of testing in the lab, and Nutanix really stood out as the best choice. You know Nutanix has a lot of focus on things like ease of deployment. So it's very simple for us to automate deploying compute for customers. So we can use foundation APIs to go configure the servers, and then we turn those over to the customer which they can then manage through Prism. And something important to keep in mind here is that you know this isn't a manged service. This isn't infrastructure as a service. The customer has complete control over the Nutanix platform. So we're turning that over to them. It's connected to their network. They're using their IP addresses, you know their tools and processes to operate this. So it was really important for the platform we picked to have a really good self-service story for things like you know lifecycle management. So with one-click upgrade, customers have total control over patches and upgrades. They don't have to call us to do it. You know they can drive that themselves. >> Got it. Any other final words around like what do you see of the partnership going forward? >> Well you know I think this would be a great platform for Xi, so I think we should probably talk about that. >> Yeah, yeah, we should talk about that separately. Thanks a lot, Jason. >> Thanks. >> All right, man. (audience clapping) So as we look at the full journey now between obviously from invisible infrastructure to invisible clouds, you know there is one thing though to take away beyond many updates that we've had so far. And the fact is that everything that I've talked about so far is about completing a full blown true IA stack from all the way from compute to storage, to vitualization, containers to network services, and so forth. But every public cloud, a true cloud in that sense, has a full blown layer of services that's set on top either for traditional workloads or for new workloads, whether it be machine-learning, whether it be big data, you know name it, right? And in the enterprise, if you think about it, many of these services are being provisioned or provided through a bunch of our partners. Like we have partnerships with Cloudera for big data and so forth. But then based on some customer feedback and a lot of attention from what we've seen in the industry go out, just like AWS, and GCP, and Azure, it's time for Nutanix to have an opinionated view of the past stack. It's time for us to kind of move up the stack with our own offering that obviously adds value but provides some of our core competencies in data and takes it to the next level. And it's in that sense that we're actually launching Nutanix Era to simplify one of the hardest problems in enterprise IT and short of saving you from true Oracle licensing, it solves various other Oracle problems which is about truly simplifying databases much like what RDS did on AWS, imagine enterprise RDS on demand where you can provision, lifecycle manage your database with one-click. And to talk about this powerful new functionality, let me invite Bala and John on stage to give you one final demo. (rock music) Good to see you guys. >> Yep, thank you. >> All right, so we've got lots of folks here. They're all anxious to get to the next level. So this demo, really rock it. So what are we going to talk about? We're going to start with say maybe some database provisioning? Do you want to set it up? >> We have one dream, Sunil, one single dream to pass you off, that is what Nutanix is today for IT apps, we want to recreate that magic for devops and get back those weekends and freedom to DBAs. >> Got it. Let's start with, what, provisioning? >> Bala: Yep, John. >> Yeah, we're going to get in provisioning. So provisioning databases inside the enterprise is a significant undertaking that usually involves a myriad of resources and could take days. It doesn't get any easier after that for the longterm maintence with things like upgrades and environment refreshes and so on. Bala and team have been working on this challenge for quite awhile now. So we've architected Nutanix Era to cater to these enterprise use cases and make it one-click like you said. And Bala and I are so excited to finally show this to the world. We think it's actually Nutanix's best kept secrets. >> Got it, all right man, let's take a look at it. >> So we're going to be provisioning a sales database today. It's a four-step workflow. The first part is choosing our database engine. And since it's our sales database, we want it to be highly available. So we'll do a two node rack configuration. From there, it asks us where we want to land this service. We can either land it on an existing service that's already been provisioned, or if we're starting net new or for whatever reason, we can create a new service for it. The key thing here is we're not asking anybody how to do the work, we're asking what work you want done. And the other key thing here is we've architected this concept called profiles. So you tell us how much resources you need as well as what network type you want and what software revision you want. This is actually controlled by the DBAs. So DBAs, and compute administrators, and network administrators, so they can set their standards without having a DBA. >> Sunil: Got it, okay, let's take a look. >> John: So if we go to the next piece here, it's going to personalize their database. The key thing here, again, is that we're not asking you how many data files you want or anything in that regard. So we're going to be provisioning this to Nutanix's best practices. And the key thing there is just like these past services you don't have to read dozens of pages of best practice guides, it just does what's best for the platform. >> Sunil: Got it. And so these are a multitude of provisioning steps that normally one would take I guess hours if not days to provision and Oracle RAC data. >> John: Yeah, across multiple teams too. So if you think about the lifecycle especially if you have onshore and offshore resources, I mean this might even be longer than days. >> Sunil: Got it. And then there are a few steps here, and we'll lead into potentially the Time Machine construct too? >> John: Yeah, so since this is a critical database, we want data protection. So we're going to be delivering that through a feature called Time Machines. We'll leave this at the defaults for now, but the key thing to not here is we've got SLAs that deliver both continuous data protection as well as telescoping checkpoints for historical recovery. >> Sunil: Got it. So that's provisioning. We've kicked off Oracle, what, two node database and so forth? >> John: Yep, two node database. So we've got a handful of tasks that this is going to automate. We'll check back in in a few minutes. >> Got it. Why don't we talk about the other aspects then, Bala, maybe around, one of the things that, you know and I know many of you guys have seen this, is the fact that if you look at database especially Oracle but in general even SQL and so forth is the fact that look if you really simplified it to a developer, it should be as simple as I copy my production database, and I paste it to create my own dev instance. And whenever I need it, I need to obviously do it the opposite way, right? So that was the goal that we set ahead for us to actually deliver this new past service around Era for our customers. So you want to talk a little bit more about it? >> Sure Sunil. If you look at most of the data management functionality, they're pretty much like flavors of copy paste operations on database entities. But the trouble is the seemingly simple, innocuous operations of our daily lives becomes the most dreaded, complex, long running, error prone operations in data center. So we actually planned to tame this complexity and bring consumer grade simplicity to these operations, also make these clones extremely efficient without compromising the quality of service. And the best part is, the customers can enjoy these services not only for databases running on Nutanix, but also for databases running on third party systems. >> Got it. So let's take a look at this functionality of I guess snapshoting, clone and recovery that you've now built into the product. >> Right. So now if you see the core feature of this whole product is something we call Time Machine. Time Machine lets the database administrators actually capture the database tape to the granularity of seconds and also lets them create clones, refresh them to any point in time, and also recover the databases if the databases are running on the same Nutanix platform. Let's take a look at the demo with the Time Machine. So here is our customer relationship database management database which is about 2.3 terabytes. If you see, the Time Machine has been active about four months, and SLA has been set for continuously code revision of 30 days and then slowly tapers off 30 days of daily backup and weekly backups and so on, so forth. On the right hand side, you will see different colors. The green color is pretty much your continuously code revision, what we call them. That lets you to go back to any point in time to the granularity of seconds within those 30 days. And then the discreet code revision lets you go back to any snapshot of the backup that is maintained there kind of stuff. In a way, you see this Time Machine is pretty much like your modern day car with self driving ability. All you need to do is set the goals, and the Time Machine will do whatever is needed to reach up to the goal kind of stuff. >> Sunil: So why don't we quickly do a snapshot? >> Bala: Yeah, some of these times you need to create a snapshot for backup purposes, Time Machine has manual controls. All you need to do is give it a snapshot name. And then you have the ability to actually persist this snapshot data into a third party or object store so that your durability and that global data access requirements are met kind of stuff. So we kick off a snapshot operation. Let's look at what it is doing. If you see what is the snapshot operation that this is going through, there is a step called quiescing the databases. Basically, we're using application-centric APIs, and here it's actually RMAN of Oracle. We are using the RMan of Oracle to quiesce the database and performing application consistent storage snapshots with Nutanix technology. Basically we are fusing application-centric and then Nutanix platform and quiescing it. Just for a data point, if you have to use traditional technology and create a backup for this kind of size, it takes over four to six hours, whereas on Nutanix it's going to be a matter of seconds. So it almost looks like snapshot is done. This is full sensitive backup. You can pretty much use it for database restore kind of stuff. Maybe we'll do a clone demo and see how it goes. >> John: Yeah, let's go check it out. >> Bala: So for clone, again through the simplicity of command Z command, all you need to do is pick the time of your choice maybe around three o'clock in the morning today. >> John: Yeah, let's go with 3:02. >> Bala: 3:02, okay. >> John: Yeah, why not? >> Bala: You select the time, all you need to do is click on the clone. And most of the inputs that are needed for the clone process will be defaulted intelligently by us, right? And you have to make two choices that is where do you want this clone to be created with a brand new VM database server, or do you want to place that in your existing server? So we'll go with a brand new server, and then all you need to do is just give the password for you new clone database, and then clone it kind of stuff. >> Sunil: And this is an example of personalizing the database so a developer can do that. >> Bala: Right. So here is the clone kicking in. And what this is trying to do is actually it's creating a database VM and then registering the database, restoring the snapshot, and then recoding the logs up to three o'clock in the morning like what we just saw that, and then actually giving back the database to the requester kind of stuff. >> Maybe one finally thing, John. Do you want to show us the provision database that we kicked off? >> Yeah, it looks like it just finished a few seconds ago. So you can see all the tasks that we were talking about here before from creating the virtual infrastructure, and provisioning the database infrastructure, and configuring data protection. So I can go access this database now. >> Again, just to highlight this, guys. What we just showed you is an Oracle two node instance provisioned live in a few minutes on Nutanix. And this is something that even in a public cloud when you go to RDS on AWS or anything like that, you still can't provision Oracle RAC by the way, right? But that's what you've seen now, and that's what the power of Nutanix Era is. Okay, all right? >> Thank you. >> Thanks. (audience clapping) >> And one final thing around, obviously when we're building this, it's built as a past service. It's not meant just for operational benefits. And so one of the core design principles has been around being API first. You want to show that a little bit? >> Absolutely, Sunil, this whole product is built on API fist architecture. Pretty much what we have seen today and all the functionality that we've been able to show today, everything is built on Rest APIs, and you can pretty much integrate with service now architecture and give you your devops experience for your customers. We do have a plan for full fledged self-service portal eventually, and then make it as a proper service. >> Got it, great job, Bala. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, John. Good stuff, man. >> Thanks. >> All right. (audience clapping) So with Nutanix Era being this one-click provisioning, lifecycle management powered by APIs, I think what we're going to see is the fact that a lot of the products that we've talked about so far while you know I've talked about things like Calm, Flow, AHV functionality that have all been released in 5.5, 5.6, a bunch of the other stuff are also coming shortly. So I would strongly encourage you guys to kind of space 'em, you know most of these products that we've talked about, in fact, all of the products that we've talked about are going to be in the breakout sessions. We're going to go deep into them in the demos as well as in the pods. So spend some quality time not just on the stuff that's been shipping but also stuff that's coming out. And so one thing to keep in mind to sort of takeaway is that we're doing this all obviously with freedom as the goal. But from the products side, it has to be driven by choice whether the choice is based on platforms, it's based on hypervisors, whether it's based on consumption models and eventually even though we're starting with the management plane, eventually we'll go with the data plane of how do I actually provide a multi-cloud choice as well. And so when we wrap things up, and we look at the five freedoms that Ben talked about. Don't forget the sixth freedom especially after six to seven p.m. where the whole goal as a Nutanix family and extended family make sure we mix it up. Okay, thank you so much, and we'll see you around. (audience clapping) >> PA Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our morning keynote session. Breakouts will begin in 15 minutes. ♪ To do what I want ♪

>> Hello and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE on theCUBE. We're here in Sundance 2018 at the Intel Tech Lounge for a panel discussion with experts on the topic of The New Creative. We believe a new creative renaissance is coming in application development and also artistry. The role of craft and the role of technology and software coming together at the intersection. You're seeing results in the gaming industry. Virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality. A new wave is coming and it's really inspiring, but also there's a few thought leaders at the front end of this big wave setting the trends and they're here with us in this special panel for The New Creative. Here with us is Brooks Browne, Global Director of VR at Starbreeze Studios, a lot to share there, welcome to the panel. Lisa Watt, VR Marketing Strategist at Intel, Intel powering a lot of these VR games here. And Winslow Porter, co-founder and director of The New Reality Company. Many submissions at Sundance. Not this year, but a ton of experience talk about the role of Sundance and artistry. And then we have Gary Radburn who's a director of commercial VR and AR from media within Dell, Dell Technologies. Guys, welcome to this panel. Lisa, I want to start off with you at Intel. Obviously the Tech Lounge here, phenomenal location on Main Street in Sundance. Really drawing a massive crowd. Yesterday it was packed. This is a new generation here and you're seeing a younger demographic. You're seeing savvier consumers. They love tech, but interesting Sundance is turning into kind of an artistry tech show and the game is changing, your thoughts on this new creative. >> Yeah, it's been amazing to watch. I've been here for, this is my third year coming back with VR experiences. And it's really just been incredible to see. Sundance has been on the leading edge of exploring new technologies for a long time and I think this is, I feel like you know this feels like the break out year really. I mean, it's been successful the last few years, but something about this year feels a little bit different. And I think maybe it's the people are getting more familiar with the technology. I think the artists are getting more comfortable with how to push the boundaries. And then we certainly are getting a lot out of seeing what they're doing and how we can improve our products in the future. >> We were talking yesterday, Lisa, about the dynamic at Sundance. And you were mentioning that you see a few trends popping out. What is the most important story this year for the folks who couldn't make it, who might be watching this video that you see at Sundance? Obviously it's a great day today, it's snowing, it's a white day, it's beautiful powder, greatest snow on Earth. But there's some trends that are emerging. We had a march this morning, the Women's March. You're seeing interesting signals. What's your view? >> I think there's a lot less desire to put up with subpar experiences. I mean I think everyone is really starting to push the boundaries, I mean, we saw a lot of 360 video which we love for a linear narrative. But they're really breaking out and really exploring what does it mean to have autonomy especially in the virtual reality experiences, a lot more social is coming to the forefront. And then a lot more exploration of haptics and the new ways of extending into more 4D effects, etc. So I think it's very very exciting. We're really excited to see all the new innovations. >> Winslow, I want to ask you, if you can comment, you've been an active participant in the community with submissions here at Sundance. This year you're kind of chilling out, hanging out. You've been on the front lines, what is your take on the vibe? What's the sentiment out there? Because you're seeing the wave coming, we're feeling it. It feels early. I don't know how early it is, and the impact to people doing great creative work. What's that take? >> Well yeah, it's kind of like VR years are like dog years, you know. Like a lot can happen in a month in the VR space. So I had a piece here in 2014 called Clouds. It was an interactive documentary about Creative Code, but that was back when there was only two other VR pieces. It's interesting to see how the landscape has changed. Because CCP Games had a piece there. An early version of E Valkyrie. And unfortunately in the last three months, they had to close their VR wing. So, and then Chris Milk also had a Lincoln piece with Beck. Which was a multi camera 360, actually it was a flash video that they recorded to the DK1. And so that was, seeing that everyone was, saw the potential. The technology was still pretty rudimentary or crude even, we should say. Before any tracking cameras. But every year people learned from previous Sundances and other festivals. And we're seeing that Sundance kind of raises the bar every year. It's nice that it's in January because then there's all these other festivals that sort of follow through with either similar content, newer versions of content that's here, or people have just sort of learned from what is here. >> So I got to ask you. You know, obviously Sundance is known for pushing the boundaries. You see a lot of creative range. You see a lot of different stuff. And also you mentioned the VR. We've seen some failures, you've seen some successes, but that's growth. This market has to have some failures. Failures create opportunities to folks who are reiterating in that. What are some of the things that you can point to that are a positive? Things that have happened whether they're failures and/or successes, that folks can learn from? >> Well, I think that this year there's a lot more social VR. We're connecting people. Even though they're in the same space, they're able to be in this new virtual world together. There's something amazing about being able to interact with people in real life. But as soon as you have sort of a hyper reality where people are able to be experiencing a Sufi ritual together. Things that you wouldn't normally... That they're not possible in the real world. And also, I think that there's issues with lines too. Obviously every year, but the more that we can have larger experiences with multiple people, the more people we can get through. And then more impact we can make on the audience. It's really... We were in claim jumper last year. And we could only get one person in every 10 minutes. And that makes things pretty tricky. >> And what are you doing at Sundance this year? You've obviously got some stuff going on with some of the work you've done. What's your focus? >> So yeah we have a company called New Reality Company where we produce Giant and Tree. It's part of a trilogy where Breathe is going to be the third part. We're going to be completing that by the end of this year. And right now, I would say the best thing about Sundance is the projects, but also the people. Being able to come here, check in, meet new people, see partners that we've been working with in the past. Also new collaborations, everywhere you turn, there's amazing possibilities abound. >> I want to talk about empathy and social. I mentioned social's interesting in these trends. I want to go to Brooks Brown, who's got some really interesting work with Starbreeze and the Hero project. You know, being a pioneer, you've got to take a few arrows in your back, you've got to blow peoples' minds. You're doing some pretty amazing work. You're in the front lines as well. What's the experience that you're seeing? Talk about your project and its impact. >> Well for us, we set out with our partner's ink stories, Navid Khonsari, a wonderful creative, and his entire team to try to create that intensely personal experience kind of moving the opposite direction of these very much social things. The goal, ultimately being to try to put a person inside of an event rather than a game style situation where you have objective A, B, or C. Or a film that's a very, very hyper linear narrative. What is that sort of middle ground that VR itself has as unique medium? So we built out our entire piece. Deep 4D effects, everything is actually physically built out so you have that tactility as you walk around. Things react to you. We have smell, temperature, air movement, the audio provided by our partners at DTS is exceptional. And the goal is ultimately to see if we put you in a situation... I'm doing my best not to talk about what that situation is. It's pretty important to that. But to watch people react. And the core concept is would you be a hero? All over the world, every day people are going through horrific stuff. We're fortunate because we're the kind of people who, in order to experience, say a tragedy in Syria, we're fortunate that we have to go to Park City, Utah and go in virtual reality to experience something that is tragic, real, and deeply emotional. And so our goal is to put people through that and come out of it changed. Traumatized actually. So that way you have a little bit more empathy into the real world into the actual experiences they went through. >> And what's the goal? This is interesting because most of the some stuff you see, the sizzle out there is look at the beautiful vistas and the beaches and the peaks and you can almost be there. Now you're taking a different approach of putting people in situations that probe some emotional responses. >> Yeah. It's a big deal to us. The way Navid like to put it, and I'm going to steal this from him, is you see a great deal of people prototyping on hardware and all of these things, and it's great cause we need that. We need to be able to stand on the shoulders of those giants to be able to do these things. But you see very few people really prototyping what is the concept of story as per VR? We've been doing, at Starbreeze, we've been doing location based for some time now and I've been getting thousands upon thousands of pitches. And whenever you get a pitch, you can pretty much identify, oh you come from a film background, you come from a games background. There's very few people who come down that middle line and go, well this is what VR is supposed to be. This is that interesting thing that makes it very deeply unique. >> What's the confluence and what's the trend in your mind as this changes? Cause you mentioned that gamers have affinity towards VR. We were talking about that before we came on the panel. You know, pump someone in mainstream USA or around the world who does email, does work, may not be there, you're seeing this confluence. How is that culture shifting? How do you see that? Cause you're bringing a whole nother dimension. >> We're trying to go back to a little bit, something about this Sundance being a little bit different. I think in general in VR, you're seeing this sort of shift from a few years ago it was all potentiality. And I think a lot of us, the projects were great, but a lot of us who work in VR were like oh I see what they're trying to do. And people like my dad would be like I don't. I don't see what they're trying to do. But that is shifting. And you're seeing a larger shift into that actuality where we're not quite there yet where we can talk about the experiences every day Americans are going to have. What is the real ready player one that we're actually going to have existing. We're not there yet, but we're much closer every time. And we're starting to see a lot of these things that are pushing towards that. Final question before I go to some of the speeds and feeds questions I want to get with Intel and Dell on is what is the biggest impact that you're seeing with your project and VR in general that will have the most important consequences for societal impact? >> Well, we were fortunate yesterday we had a number of people come through Hero. And a number of them simply actually couldn't handle it. Had to come out. We had to pull people out. The moment we took the headset off, they were, tears were streaming down their face. There's a level of emotional impact VR is extremely able to cut through. It's not that you're playing a character. It's not that you're in a separate world. You are you inside of that space. And that is a dangerous but very promising ability of VR. >> Winslow, could you take a stab at that, I'd like to get your reaction to that because people are trying to figure out the societal impact in a positive way and potentially negative. >> Yeah I mean, so with that, whenever you traumatize somebody else or have the ability to possibly re-traumatize somebody... In Giant, we made sure that we gave them a trigger warning because yeah these things can be intensely intimate or personal for somebody who already has that sort of baggage with them or could be living in a similar experience. In Giant, we witnessed the last moments of a family. As they're convincing their daughter that the approaching bomb blast is a giant that actually wants to play with her. And so we put haptics in the chair so the audience was also surprised. But we let them know that it was going to be taking place in a conflict zone. So if that was something that they didn't want to participate in, that they could opt out. But again, like we didn't know... We had to go and buy tissues like right off the bat because people were crying in the headset. And that's kind of a... It's an interesting problem to have for the sake of what are sort of the rules around that? But also it makes it more difficult to get people through the experience in a timely fashion as well. But yeah, but we're seeing that as things become more real then there's also a chance to possibly impact people. It's the... >> So it's social for you? You see it as a social impact? >> Well, I mean if everyone's experiencing the same thing that can be social, but again if it's a one on one experience, it's sort of like up to the filmmaker to make sure that they have the scruples that they are playing by the rules. Cause there's right now most every piece of content is being released through Oculus, Steam, or Viveport. But there will be... It's heavily regulated right now, but as soon as there's other means of distributing the content, it could take a different sort of face. >> Certainly some exciting things to grab on, great stuff. I want to get to the commercial angle. Then we're going to talk more about the craft and the role of artistry in the creating side of it. Gary, you're the commercial VR expert at Dell. You're commercializing this. You're making the faster machines. We want faster everything. I mean everyone... Anyone who's in VR knows that all the graphics cards. They know the speeds and feeds. They're totally hardware nerds. What's going on? Where's the action? >> Okay, that's such a large question. I mean we've had some great stuff here that I also want to comment on as well. But inside the commercial side, then yeah everybody wants bigger, stronger, better, faster. And to Winslow's comment about the dog years, that really puts the pressure on us to continue that innovation and working with partners like Intel to get those faster processors in there. Get faster graphics cards in there so that we can get people more emotionally bought in. We can do better textures, we can get more immersion inside the content itself. We're working a lot around VR in terms of opening peoples' eyes for societal impact. So VR for good for instance. Where we're taking people to far flung corners of the Earth. We work with Nat Geo explorer Mike Libecki to show the plight of polar bears in Greenland and how they're gradually becoming extinct for an edutainment and a learning tool. The boundaries are really being pushed in entertainment and film. That's always been the case. Consumer has always really pushed that technology. Commercial's always been a bit of a lagger. They want stability in what's going on. But the creation that's going on here is absolutely fantastic. It's taken what is essentially a prosumer headset and then taking it into that commercial world and lit it up. 360 video, its very inception, people are using it for training inside of their businesses and so that's now going out into businesses now. We're starting to see advances in 360 video with more compute power needed. Where, to the point about immersion and getting people emotionally bought in. Then you can start doing volumetric, getting them in there. And then we're also working with people like Dr. Skip Rizzo who was on our panel yesterday where we're starting to go into, okay, we can treat PTSD. Help people with autism, through the medium of VR. So again, that buys into... >> These are disruptive use cases that are legit? >> Yeah. >> These are big time, market moving, helping people... >> Absolutely. And that where it becomes really, really powerful. Yes, we want our companies to embrace it. Companies are embracing it for training. But when you start seeing the healthcare implications and people crying inside of headsets. That's effecting you deeply, emotionally. If you can make that for good, and change somebody's trigger points inside of PTSD, and the autism side of helping somebody in interview techniques to be able to be more self sufficient, it's absolutely awesome. >> This is the new creative. So what's your take on the new creative? What's your definition? Cause you're talking about a big range of use cases beyond just film making and digital artistry. >> Yeah, absolutely so the new creative is like with all the great work that's here, people are looking at film and entertainment. Now the world really is the oyster for all the creatives out there. People are clamoring out for modelers, artists, story tellers, story experiencers to be able to use that inside their commercial environments to make their businesses more effective. But they're not going to have a 360 video production company inside of their commercial organization. And it's then leveraging all of the creative here and all of the great stuff here. Which is really going to help the whole world a lot. >> Lisa, I want to get your thoughts on this cause you guys at Intel here at the Tech Lounge have a variety of demos, but there's a range of pro and entry level tools that can get someone up and running quickly to pro. And so there's a creative range not only just for digital artistry, but also business we're hearing. So what's the... Cause AI's involved in a lot of this too though. It's not just AI, it's a lot of these things. What's the Intel take on this. >> Well I think it's really an interesting time for us at Intel because one of the things that we have that I think probably nobody else has. We have this amazing slate of products that really cover the end to end process. Both from the creation side of the house all the way to the consumption side. And we talk a lot about our processors. We worked on an amazing project, a couple of huge scenes inside of the Sansar environment. Which is a great tool for really democratizing the creation of spaces. It's a cloud hosted service but it utilizes this amazing client-server architecture. We created four huge spaces in a matter of eight weeks to launch at CES. And some of the technologies that Gary was referring to just in pure processing power like two generations old processors were taking three hours to render just a small portion of a model where our newest generation Core i9s with our opting technology took that time to 15 minutes. So when we think about what we can do now, and those technologies are going to be available in even portable laptop form factors. We've got the piece where we were working here SPHERES. They were able to actually make some corrections and some tweaks basically immediately without having to send them off to some render farm. They were able to do those things. And I know Winslow has talked about that as well. What does it mean to you to be able to react real time. And be able to do your creative craft where you are and then be able to share that so readily. And then you know... I just think that's kind of an amazing equalizer. It's really democratizing the creation process. >> Okay the next question that begs for everyone to address is where are we in this progression? Early? What work needs to get done? Where are we holding back? Is it speeds and feeds? Is it the software? Is it the routines, libraries, art? Where's the bottleneck? Why isn't it going faster? Or is it going faster? >> I would, and I'm sure the team would agree here, I would say that one of the key things is the creator tools themselves, right. They are still somewhat cumbersome. We were talking to another filmmaker. He was like I can't even, I have to play the whole piece from the beginning, I can't just go in and edit, you know change control, being able to collaborate on these pieces with other people. I mean, if you can collaborate in a real world space, you should be able to also collaborate in VR and have change control and all those sorts of things that are necessary to the iteration of a project. So we're trying to work with our software partners. They're all doing a really great job of trying to iterate that, but it's going to take some time. I mean I think that's probably the bigger thing that's holding everything back. We're going to be right there with the processing power and the other technologies that we bring to the table. OEM partners are going to be right there with the best devices. I really think it's something we've all got to push for as far as those tools getting better. >> Brooks, comment on anything? You're in the... >> So for me, the thing that's holding back VR in general is actually the art form itself. One of the great challenges, if you look back, at say the history of film... We're at Sundance, so it's probably fairly apropo. Very early on in the early movies, aside from penny arcade machines that you'd actually stare at, they were 10 minute almost like plays that people would go to almost a playhouse and they'd watch this thing. There were not cuts, there were no angles. It was a single wide shot. Great Train Robbery came around and there was this crazy thing they did called an edit. Where they spliced film together. And if you go back and you read, and they did these dolly shots. People will have no idea what they're watching. There's no way people will be able to follow that. Like people were not happy with it at the time. Now it's stuff that children do on their iMacs at home. They do iMacs all the time, they do it on their iPhones, on their Android devices. These are normal languages of film that we have. VR doesn't have that yet. And there's not a great deal of effort being made in that direction. There's people here doing that. So I'm kind of speaking in the middle of the group, but outside of these people, there's only a handful who are really doing that and it's a significant challenge. When people who are the mainstream consumer put on a VR headset, it needs to be more than just a magic trick where they go oh that's cool. And that tends to be the vast majority of experiences. So what is the thing that is going to make someone go oh I get why we have VR as a medium. And we're not there yet. We're in the direction, but that's >> So you mentioned earlier the point where you can tell if someone's from film or gaming or whatever when you talk to them about VR. Who is the future VR developer? Is it a filmmaker? Is it a gamer? Is it a digital artist? What is this evolving? >> It's a kid in his basement who no one knows and is screwing around with it and is going to do something that everyone thinks is stupid. Like, it's going to be that. Basically every major leap in gaming is kind of the same thing. It's when we understand how ludonarrative dissonance works inside of telling how people move around a space. It's about how we do Dutch angle suddenly in film. And these things get invented. It's going to be some kid who's just screwing around who doesn't have the baggage of the language of film. A lot of the people I know in VR have been fortunate to work in film, in games and interactive or web dev. So you come from a lot of places but someone's going to come along who has none of that baggage. And they're going to be... >> Well you guys are pioneers and you're doing it. So for the first person out there that's in their basement, that inspirational soundbite or comment. How can you guys talk to that person or that group? Because this is the democratization, this is what's happening. It's not the gatekeepers. It's real creatives out there that could come from anywhere. YouTube generation, Twitch generation, gaming. What would you say to that person to motivate them and to give them that passion? >> Well it's only going to get easier, faster, cheaper, all these things are happening. But again, yeah I totally agree with what Brooks said. It's really about the culture and about educating the audience and getting them up to speed. There are some VR experiences that as soon as they put on the headset, like somebody who's never done it before, immediately will take it off cause they'll get nauseated. And then there's people, like kids who are like jet fighters. They've seen everything. You could throw like a 30 frames per second experience at them and that doesn't even phase them. They can be, all of a sudden their worlds are changing and they're like bring it because they're ready for that. So I think it's sort of about raising the bar for what the audience is comfortable with, familiar with, educating the community. There's a lot of tools right now, you know with Unreal and Unity that allow people who have very little... They don't need to know C# or C++, they can get started in a lot of like visual. What you see is what you get. Being able to drag things into a virtual room. And the windows headsets that are out. They refer to them as mixed reality, but just even having the ability to flip up the screen and transition from the virtual world to the real world in milliseconds, it allows you to be able to create things more at the speed of thought instead of coming up with an idea, coding it, and making sure it works, and then eventually putting on the headset. The sooner that we can actually be ideating inside this virtual environment is when things will get really interesting. >> So the next question is to take to the next level is what's the playbook? How does someone get involved? How does someone ingratiate into a community? If I'm an artist, I want to get, and I'm proficient with technology, or maybe not, how do they get involved? Is it community driven? Is it social? You guys mentioned seeing social's a big trend here. How do people get involved? What's the track? >> Well yeah you don't just need to go to a grad school or... There's a lot of programs out there that are popping up. Almost every single major state school has like an interactive art program now. And that wasn't the case like two or three years ago. So we're seeing that that's a big shift in the culture. But again, VR is still... It's expensive and it's you know, like VR, I refer to it's in the stage of it's almost like in the neo geo phase, maybe a little before that. But it's the really expensive thing that your friend's neighbor has. Or his older brother or something. You get to play it a little bit, you're like that's great but there's no way in hell I'm going to... You know, I can't afford that or like that just doesn't really work with my lifestyle right now so it needs to incorporate itself into our everyday, our habits. And it needs to be something that... If we're all doing it then it makes sense for us to do it together not just somebody in their basement doing it by themselves. >> Yeah feel free to comment, this is a good topic. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. So what we're doing is sort of about democratization and accessibility. So for people to get into the then they're going to need a rig, they're going to need a headset and previously it's actually been quite expensive to actually take that first plunge into it. So now by democratizing and bringing price points down, it makes it more accessible. That helps content creators because there's now more of an audience that can now consume that content. And the people that can then play with the medium and consume it now have a better reason to do it. So we're working on that. We're also working on the education pieces like Key. It's actually going out there to schools and actually letting them experience VR and play with VR. Because it is a whole new different medium. We've seen film directors and filmmakers go into the VR space and things that worked in 2D film like fast pans and whatever else so the points have already been made don't really translate into VR without somebody losing their lunch. So it is going to be somebody who's coming up who hasn't got the baggage of previous skill sets inside of 2D doing it inside of VR. So we're going to see that. And in terms of the technology, everybody's wanting things to progress. That shows the level of excitement out there. And everybody wants to get into it. Everybody wants to see it go further. And I'm reminded of the mobile phone. Mobile phone, 30 years ago? Two suitcases for batteries, a large brick on the ear and a car antennae. Okay, so where we are now, if you had a time machine and you went back in time to talk to the inventor of the mobile phone, well, I'd be a lot richer because I know sports results and all, but that aside, but you go back and talk to them and you said do you know in 30 years time, everybody is going to be carrying that device? Everybody's going to be dependent on that device? They're going to get social anxiety and separation anxiety if they lose it. And they will probably laugh in your face. >> Alright so since you brought up the phone analogy, since I love that example, are we in the Blackberry moment of VR and no one yet has built the iPhone? Because the iPhone was the seminal moment for smartphones. And you see what happened there. Is VR needing that kind of break? Or is it there? >> I think we're on the cusp. Where we are at the moment with technology, we've had the headsets, which I say have been more in the consumer space, they've been designed to hit a certain price point. We had CES the other week where we've had advancements now in the resolutions of headset that are now coming out. One of the issues was well I can't see texts, I can't read texts. So from a working environment, if you're actually using tools that you would normally use on a 2D screen, you can now translate that and read that text. However, in terms of the tools that people use, why are we trying to put 2D screens into a VR headset? We've got a whole new way of interacting with data. We've got a whole new way of doing things that are going to be more intuitive than the mouse and keyboard interaction that we're used to. Why just translate that. Let's push that envelope and those are the developments that we're pushing our partners and our ISVs to really embrace. >> So it's an evoution. >> It's absolutely an evolution. >> You guys have any thoughts on that comment. That we have that inflection point, are we hitting that, will we see it soon, is it here? >> Well I think it's a very interesting symbiotic relationship between multiple factors. So you know, we hear the cost factor, we hear the technology factor, then we have the content factor. You know I saw an interesting evolution at CES we had created this virtual booth experience so that you could still come to the CES Intel booth without actually having to be there. And I met a guy in there and I was like hey where are you? He goes I've been in here like all week. (laughter) And I was like oh yeah, where do you live? He goes oh I'm in my basement in Nebraska. But he had just, this was Friday when I met him. He'd been in there all week, but in 2D mode. And he had gone out the night before and bought a headset just so he could come back and go in VR mode. And I think, yes, all these factors have to kind of line up, but I do think that content, those experiences that are going to keep people coming back for more. Like these guys literally kept coming back to our booth. Right, to see... >> Content gain. >> To see who was there. And to them at that point, it wasn't really a barrier of cost. It was like there is something that I want to consume therefore I am going to go get what I need to consume it. And I use the analogy of HDTV, right. When we kind of moved over that hump where there was enough content people didn't really care how much that television cost. >> Sports was great. Sports really highlighted HD. >> Yeah. >> But this is a good point. This is a good question to ask. Brooks, I'd love to get your thoughts. Content drives experiences, amazing experiences, but we're building the scaffolding of everything at the same time. So where are we, what's your opinion? >> So here on the Starbreeze side, we're fortunate because we have our own headset. We have the StarVR headset we've been building with Acer. 5K all of that stuff and we're upgrading it over the next year. Our focus has been, we skipped the consumer market very much. We went straight to location based and enterprise. And the reason we did that is because there's a promise of VR at a basic, I don't want to say technology stand point, but from an experience perspective, when it comes to that resolution, when it comes to that field of view, when it comes to these things people expect. Average consumers who go to a movie and they see these giant screens. They want that translated. They don't have the understanding like we do of well, LED panels are actually a pain in the ass to build and it takes a little bit and they flip at their own speeds. Time to photon is not a thing my dad will ever see in his life. But there's a reality that people have a need for that. And it is extremely expensive. It's again the reason we went straight to LBE. But for us it's about marrying the two and consistently trying to match what's happening. So when we're talking about, as I mentioned earlier the technology and how we're standing on the shoulders of giants very very quickly, someone who's doing technology is going to see what we're doing content wise and go well I can do that better technology wise. And then we're just going to keep leap frogging. And it's very similar to the phone in the same way that we're not at the final stage of the phone. Like we're at our stage of the phone and no doubt in 30 years people will laugh at us for carrying anything. The same way we laugh about the briefcases and the giant batteries in the cars we had to pull with us. So it's one of those things that's continually transitional. And VR's in an odd, amazing place. >> Well you know, it was a lot of waves that we've all seen. You mentioned the mobile phone, that's a good one to point to. It feels like the PC revolution to me because the same culture of entrepreneurs and pioneers come from a bunch of different backgrounds. So I'd like to get Brooks perspective and Winslow's perspective on this because I think there's an entrepreneurial culture out there right now that's just emerging very fast. It's not like your classic entrepreneur software developer. So in this movement, in this wave, the entrepreneur is the filmmaker, it could be the kid in the basement, could be the gamer. Those entrepreneurs are trying to find a path. >> Yeah, it's a weird mix. VR is at this odd point where not only is it the people who are wanting to be cutting edge in terms of content or technology, but also that first mover strategy from the business side of things. And so everyone wants to be those guys who are charging ahead because in reality, if you look at the financials around all of this, VR is one of those things that you don't want to finance. It's not nearly as safe as say Marvel Avengers or the next Call of Duty. >> You've got to be, you've got to hustle. >> Yeah you've got to hustle. You've got to make... >> What's your advice? >> Start doing it. That's really it. It's the same advice I used to give to game makers when people would be like well I want to learn how to make games. It's like go to YouTube, download a thing and go do it. There's literally no reason why you can't. >> Are there meetups or like the Homebrew Computer Club that spawned the Mac. >> There are, there are infinite groups of VR people who are more than happy to give you all the terrible and wonderful opinions that come with that. There's no shortage of people. There's no shortage and it's an amazingly helpful group. Because everyone wants someone else to figure out something so they can steal that and then figure out something else. >> Winslow, your advice to entrepreneurs out there that are young and/or 14 to 50, what should they do? Jump right in obviously is a good one. >> Well yeah, experiment, break things, that's really the only way to learn. I would say watch as much VR as you can because sometimes bad VR is the best VR. Because you can learn don't do that. And if you learn, if you put all that together, you can really... It's like this lexicon that you can really follow. Also, I think we... As people in tech, we kind of get obsessed with things like resolution, frame rate, and these are very important, but it's also good to remember, or at least for me, I watch some of the best experiences from storytelling when I was a kid, eight years old on a 12 inch screen that was 640 by 480. You know, like scan lines on the VHS. But for me the story still resonated and it's important to think of story first, but obviously it's a dance between the story and the technology. They kind of have to both organically work together. And if they don't, one thing in the story that doesn't work because the tech isn't supporting it, can throw you out of the experience. >> Other concern entrepreneurs might have is financing. How do I get someone to help me build it? And then doing relationships. Finding relationships that could... One plus one equals more than two, right. So how do you? >> You have to get really creative when it comes to funding right now. Unless you're doing location based, which also requires a certain amount of investment to get it up to a bar where you want to be showing it to people with all the haptic effects when it's heat, smell, vibration, stuff like that. You know, it's not cheap to develop. But as far as like working with film foundations, we're fortunate enough to be sponsored by Fledgling Fund and Chicken and Egg. But we also were able to get partnerships with people like Intel and NVidia. And also work with people who come from a traditional film background. There's not one way to successfully fund a project. There's a million. And that's why it's interesting that the technology's innovating, but also the market place is as well. >> One of the things I want to ask is as any new industry gets building, is cultures form early. DNA forms in the entrepreneurs, in the pioneers. And one of the big hottest topics in the creative world is inclusion and diversity. So what's the makeup of the culture of this new generation? Because democratization means everyone can participate, everyone's involved. What's the state of the community vis a vis diversity, inclusion, and the role of the actors in the community. >> Well I think it's important to understand that VR has a profound ability to place you in somebody else's shoes. The trick though is to make sure that those feel like they're your shoes. But I think that we're learning a lot more about story telling techniques and we're able to empower people that their voices you know were previously not heard. The tricky thing is being able to yeah, educate all different groups of people how to use the technology, but once they're enabled and empowered to do it, it's amazing what you can experience inside the headset. >> So VR can be an enabler for education, outreach, a variety of things? >> Yes, I mean the term empathy, empathy machine gets thrown around a lot. You could do a drinking game around it. For panels when people are talking about it. But it's important to know there is a truth to that. And it's, yeah the perspective shift from looking at a screen, a 16 by 9 screen where you can look away, then dissolving the screen and becoming that person. Becoming the director, the actor, the camera person, the editor. When you're in the first person perspective, there's so much more... It feels more personal and that's a really interesting angle that we're going to continue to explore. >> So you could walk in someone's shoes, literally? >> Yes, you literally can. You just have to make sure that you got a... The tracking system's proper or else you'll look like there's... It can be come a horror movie pretty quickly if your leg is behind your head. >> Lisa, your thoughts on this, I know it's important to you. >> Yeah, I mean I think it's fascinating because I've been in tech for a really long time. And seen many, many trends. I mean the first job I had at Intel I was a PC tech and as you can imagine as a female, I think there was one other tech female in the department at the time and I would get funny looks when I would show up with my bag. They were like hi can I help you? I'm like I'm not here to deliver coffee, I'm here to fix your computer, you know. So I've seen a lot of trends and it's super exciting to me to see so much diversity cross culture, cross country, I mean we're having... We had guys come in from all over the world. From even war torn, they've escaped their country just several years ago and they're coming and they're bringing all that creativity to the market. We're seeing very, very strong female contingent from the filmmaker perspective so it's this wonderful, wonderful just primordial soup of people that I think are growing their own voice and their own power. They're breaking molds as far as how you actually get content produced. Distribution is kind of crazy right now. I mean, how do you get it distributed? There's like so many different ways. But all of those things are so important to the evolutionary and biological process of this. Yes, we need to let it go and sometimes we're frustrated. We're like where's the standards? Where's the one ring to rule them all? Where there's not going to be one. And it's good for us that there's not right now. It's frustrating from a business perspective sometimes. You're like, I can't peanut butter myself around all of these places, but I think it's just a very unique time where so many people are... The technology is accessible, that means that so many creators can now bring their fresh voice to this space and it's just going to be fascinating to continue to watch. >> That's awesome. Well two more questions and I'll give you some time to think about the last one which is your perspective on Sundance, what's happening this year, your personal view of what you think's happening, what might happen during this year. But the question I have for you now is to go down the line. We'll start with Brooks here, and talk about the coolest thing that you're involved in right now. >> It actually has to be Hero. We're debuting it here at Sundance. We've been working on it and not talking about it for about nine months. And it's been very difficult. Again it's sacrosanct to the experience that you don't know literally what you're getting in to. And the emotional response has been essentially our goal, trying to find out how far can we take that. You actually being in a space, moving around, having that interactivity, doing what you would do. But it being your story and how deeply we can absolutely effect a human being. And again, watching people come out, it's one of those things, I've been doing game development, I've worked on films, I've done all kinds of stuff. And you usually get a chance when someone experiences something you've made, you walk up to them and you go so what'd you think? And that's not at all what we can do with ours. >> How has it impacted you, that reaction? >> Well, I personally suffer significant PTSD and I've had some traumas in my life. And so it's been incredibly powerful to be able to share these things with people. Share this emotion in a deeply profound, yet amazingly personal way. Which I'm amazingly fortunate to be able to be a part of it. >> Alright thanks for sharing. Coolest thing that's going on with you right now here at Sundance. >> Just the fact that I'm here at all. I mean, it's incredible right? Personally was able to be an advisor on the SPHERES project that is premiering here with Eliza McNitt. She's someone who was an Intel Science Fair winner back in high school and kind of came back to us. So just to see the evolution of an artist really from the beginning to the point where they've been able to come here to Sundance. I'm also very passionate about the work that we're doing with Sansar. I kind of consider myself one of the chief storytellers at Intel around Virtual reality and this new move into social where people are like well what's this game. I'm like, it's not a game. It's you are the game, you are the interactivity. You become the person that makes the space interesting. We're just really setting the scene for you. And there's so many... You know there's a lot of different people kind of chasing this be togetherness. But what we've been able to produce there. And just to be able to explore some of my own personal ideas has just been such a gift. Then to be working with guys like these on the panels and see what they're doing and just be in touch is really just an exciting time. >> John: Awesome. >> Probably what, other than the people on the projects, or the projects that are being shown here, we're working on our new project, which we would have loved to premiere here, but we did... Basically when you get in, you have two months to create a piece, so you have a demo and you have to finish it, so we're taking a little bit more time. This one's going to be about a year development cycle. It's called Breathe where we take you from where Giant left off, where, in Giant, the ceiling collapses on a family. They're in front of you. In this experience, we use a breathing apparatus to basically bring yourself back to life. And then you realize you're trapped under rubble and you remove the... We actually want to have physical objects on top of you that are going to be tracked. So you're moving rubble from you and you realize that you're a six year old girl. You're the survivor from Giant. And you get to witness what it's like to be a future refugee sort of in different key moments of her life that use breath. Whether it's a flirtatious moment, blowing a dandelion, seeing your own breath in snow as a drone shows you a message that your parents pre-recorded on your 18th birthday. This is all in the future, obviously, but every time you walk around an object, you actually grow 10 to 15 years older in the experience. As you get older, the world becomes smaller. And then we witness what's like for her last breath. From being six years old to being 90 years old. But it's a profound personal experience. >> John: That sounds cool, cool. Gary, coolest thing that you're involved in right now at Sundance. >> Wow. I could say it's all cool that would be a bit trite. They say if you enjoy what you do, is it really a job? And I'm lucky enough to be in that position. Because working with all these guys here and like people around the place, they're doing such great things that every day I wake up and I'm astounded of where the industry's going. In terms of what we're doing here at Sundance, then we're really starting to push those envelopes as well. I've been lucky enough to be involved with Dunkirk and Spider-Man: Homecoming. Like last year, so some great pieces there. And moving out into this year, we've got some other developments which I can't mention at this point, but we're showing things like AR and VR mashup. So we haven't talked much about augmented reality here. It's an evolutionary, it's not a replacement. Both can be used and we've started to really start to blend those two technologies now. So you can still see the outside world. Just touching on the commercial side, and health care's very big for me. That's where I think the really cool stuff is happening. Entertainment is great and that's really pushing the envelope and allowing us to then take it for the good of human kind. >> It happens everywhere, it's not just entertainment. >> Yeah absolutely. You start looking at MRI scans inside of VR or AR. Talking a patient through it so they can actually see exactly what you're talking about. You're now no longer pointing at flat things on a screen. You're now actually taking them through it. If you're using AR, you can actually judge the responses of the patient as for how they're reacting to the news. And effectively, inside of the VR, and what's really cool for me is seeing people's reaction to that content and to the entertainment content. >> That's awesome. Okay final question. This is a little bit of self serving because I'd like you to help me do my job at SiliconANGLE. If you were a reporter and you were going to report the most important stories happening this year at Sundance or really kind of what's really happening versus what's kind of being billed to be happening here. What's the story? What is the story this year at Sundance 2018 in your personal perspective? We'll go down the line and share your observations. >> Well, mine here, I'm a Sundance newbie. This is my first year of being here. I'm absolutely astounded by the community spirit that's around. I go to a lot of technical trade shows and technical presentations. People coming here with a willingness to learn. Wanting to learn from other people. It's been touched on already. It's the pool of knowledge that's available inside of Sundance that everybody that comes here can actually tap into to create better content, to learn not what to do as well as learn what to do. And I just think that's brilliant because in that community spirit, that's really going to help enable this industry quickly. >> John: Winslow, you've got some experience, what's your thoughts? >> Obviously, this Intel house, just a little plug for you Lisa. (laughter) Tech Lounge. We got that? Okay good. I mean, yeah, the people that's here. Every year we come here and see where the high water mark is. All these people are... Some of these teams first started with two people and then they grew to six and then by the end of it, there's 100 people working around the clock, pulling all-nighters to be able to give the latest and greatest of what's available with these current tools. So it's amazing because the work itself doesn't really mean anything until people get to experience it. So that's nice that they make a big splash. The people here are very attentive to it. It's a very nice audience and this will continue the momentum for future festivals throughout the year, but also will excite people that have never done VR before. People who have never been to Sundance before. We're seeing that there's a lot of new people. And that will continue to influence many years to come. >> John: So you think VR is the top story here being told? >> As far as like just to generalize, I would say last year kind of the big VR year. This is kind of the big AR year. Next year's going to be the AI year. Then after that we're going to start putting them all together. >> John: Great, great feedback. >> I think it's just exciting for Intel just to be back here. I think Intel hasn't been here in quite some time. Dell coming in here probably one of the breakout years for us to come back and really talk to creators what we're doing from the Intel Studios all the way through to the stuff you can take home and do at home. And I think coming in, we're coming back here with a purpose really, not just to be here to be seen. We're really here with real things and want to have real conversations on how tech can enable what people are doing. Not just from a brand perspective, but from a real hands on point of view. >> John: Yeah, some great demos too, phenomenal tech. >> Really just, yeah everything from the AI stuff we have to the social to the great new pieces that have been submitted here like we mentioned with SPHERES. So I think, yeah, it doesn't feel gratuitous to me you know that Dell or Intel is here this year. We've really come with a purpose. >> You guys are moving the needle, it's really awesome. We need more horsepower. >> Brooks, your thoughts on Sundance this year. Observation, the vibe, what would you tell your friend back home when you get back? >> If, for me, I think it's almost the non-story. It's like the opposite of a story. It's just the deep integration of VR into the normal Sundance flow I think has been interesting. Some people have been here for a few years. And back in the day when it was one or two, it was a lot of oh, you do VR? What's that then? Whereas now, you see a lot more people who are crossing over. Going to see documentaries, then they come to see a VR piece and it's just a part of the normal flow. And the team at New Frontier has done exceptional work to kind of make sure that they have this ridiculous high level of broad content for all kinds of people. All kinds of experiences, all high end things. But it's not that VR's here. Oh good, we have a VR section. It's a lot more of an integrated set up. And it's been really encouraging to see. >> Well you guys have been great. It's been very inspirational. Great information. You guys are reimagining the future and building it at the same time so entrepreneurially and also with content and technology. So thanks so much for sharing on this panel The New Creative. This is SiliconANGLE's coverage of Sundance 2018 here at the Intel Tech Lounge at the Sundance Film Festival. I'm John Furrier thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMWorld 2017. Brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. (bright music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with the Cube, here with my guest host, Justin Warren. Happy to have a returning Cube alum, but in a different role then we had. It's been a few years. Tal Klein, who is the author of The Punch Escrow. >> Au-tor, please. No, I'm just kidding. (laughing) Tal, thanks so much for joining us. It's great for you to be able to find time to hang out with the tech geeks rather than all the Hollywood people that you've been with recently. (laughing) >> You guys are more interesting. (laughing) >> Well thank you for saying that. So last time we interviewed you, you were working for a sizable tech company. You were talking about things like, you know, virtualization, everything like that. Your Twitter handle's VirtualTal. So how does a guy like that become not only an author but an author that's been optioned for a movie, which those of us that, you know, are geeks and everything are looking at, as a matter of fact, Pac Elsiger this morning said, "we are seeing science fiction become science fact." >> That's right. >> Stu: So tell us a little of the journey. >> Yeah, cool, I hope you read the book. (laughing) I don't know, the journey is really about marketing, right? Cause a lot of times when we talk about virtual, like, in fact last time I was on the Cube, we were talking about the idea that desktops could be virtual. Cause back then it was still this, you know, almost hypothetical notion, like could desktops be virtual, and so today, you know, so much of our life is virtual. So much of the things that we do are not actually direct. I was watching this great video by Apple's new augmented reality product, where you sit in the restaurant and you look at it with your iPad, and it's your plate, and you can just shift the menu items, and you see the menu items on your plate in the context of the restaurant and your seat and the person you're sitting across from. So I think the future is now. >> Yeah, it reminds of, you know, the movie Wall-E, the animated one. We're all going to be sitting in chairs with our devices or Ready Player One, you know, very popular sci-fi book that's being done by Speilberg, I believe. >> Yes, yeah, very exciting. >> Tell us a little bit about your book, you know, we talked, when I was younger and used to read a lot of sci-fi, it was like, what stuff had they done 50 years ago that now's reality, and what stuff had they predicted, like, you know, we're going to go away from currency and go digital currency, and it's like we're almost there. But we still don't have flying cars. >> Yeah, we're, I mean, the main problem with flying cars is that we need pilots. And I think actually we're very close to flying cars, cause once we have self-driving vehicles and we no longer need to worry about it being a person behind the joystick, then we're in really good shape. That's really the issue, you know, the problem with flying cars is that we are so incompetent at driving and or flying. That's not our core competency, so let's just put things that do understand how to make those things happen and eliminate us from the equation. >> Everything is a people problem. >> Yeah, so when I wrote the book, Punch Escrow, Punch Escrow, (laughing) when I wrote the book, I really thought about all the things that I read growing up in science fiction, you know, things like teleportation, things like nanotechnology, things like digital currency, you know, how do we make those, how do we present those in a viable way that doesn't seem too science fictiony. Like one of the things I really get when people read the book is it feels really near-future, even though it's set like 100 plus years in the future, all the concepts in it feel very pragmatic or within reach, you know? >> Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting, we look at, you know, what things happen in a couple of years and what things take a long time. So artificial intelligence, machine learning, it's not like these are new concepts, you know? I read a great book by, you know, it was Isaacson, The Innovators. You go back to like Aida Lovelace, and the idea of what a machine or computer would be able to do. So 100 years from now, what's real, what's not real? We still all have jobs or something? >> We have jobs but different. Remember, I don't know if you're a historian, but back in the industrial age, there was a whole bunch of people screaming doom and gloom. In fact, if we go way back to the age of the Luddites, who just hated machines of any kind. I think that in general, we don't like, you know, we're scared of change. So I do think a lot of the jobs that exist today are going to be done by machines or code. That doesn't mean the jobs are going away. It means jobs are changing. A lot of the jobs that people have today didn't exist in the industrial age. So I think that we have to accept that we are going to be pragmatic enough to accept the fact that humans will continue to evolve as the infrastructure powering our world evolves, you know? We talk about living in the age of the quantified self, right? There's a whole bunch that we don't understand how to do yet. For example, I can think of a whole industry that tethers my FitBit to my nutrition. You know, like there's so much opportunity that for us to say, oh that's going to be the end of jobs, or the end of innovation or the end of capitalism, is insane. I think this just ushers in a whole new age of opportunity. And that's me, I'm just an optimist that way, you know. >> So the Luddites did famously try to destroy the machines. But the thing is, the Luddites weren't wrong. They did lose their jobs. So what about the people whose jobs are replaced, as you say net new, there's a net new number of jobs. But specific individuals, like people who manufacture cars for example, lose their jobs because a robot can do that job safer and better and faster than a human can do it. So what do we do with those humans? Because how do we get people to have new jobs and retrain themselves? >> I address some of these notions in the book. For example, one of the weird things that we're suffering from is the lack of welders in society today, cause welding has become this weird thing that we don't think we need people for, so people don't really get trained up in it because, you know, machines do a lot of welding but there's actually specialty welding that machines can't do. So I think the people who are really good at the things that they do will continue to have careers. I think their careers will become more niche. Therefore they'll be able to create, to demand a higher wage for it because almost like a carpenter, you know, a specialist carpenter will be able to earn a much higher wage today by having fewer customers who want really custom carpentry versus things that can be carved up by a machine. So I think what we end up seeing is that it's not that those jobs go away. It's they become more specialized. People still want Rolls Royces. People still want McLarens. Those are not done by machines. Those are hand-made, you know? >> That's an interesting point, so the value of something being hand-made becomes, instead of it being a worse product, it's actually- >> Tal: That's a big concept in the book. >> Oh okay, right. >> A big concept in the book is that we place a lot of value on the uniqueness of an object. And that parlays in multiple ways. So one of the examples that I use in the book is the value of a Big Mac actually coming from McDonald's. Like, you can make a Big Mac. We know the recipe for a Big Mac. But there is a weird sort of nacent value to getting a Big Mac from McDonald's. It's something in our brain that clicks that tethers it to an originality. Diamonds, another really good example. Or you know, we know there's synthetic diamonds. We still want the ones that get mined in the cave. Why? We don't know. Right, they're just special. >> Because De Beers still has really good marketing. (laughing) >> So I think there's- >> That's interesting, so the concept of uniqueness, which again comes to scarcity and so on. As an author, someone who is no doubt, signed a lot of his book, that means that that book is unique because it's signed by the author, unlike something which is mass produced and there is hopefully thousands and thousands of copies that you sell. >> Going into this, I actually thought about that a lot. And that's why I've created like multiple editions of the book. So like the first 500 people who pre-ordered it, they get like a special edition of the book that's like stamped and all this kind of stuff. I even used different pens. (laughs) I appreciate that because I'm also a collector. I collect music, I collect books. And you know, so I see those aspects in myself. So I know what I value about them, you know? >> And the crossover between music and books is interesting. So as someone who has a musical background, I know that there's a lot of musicians who'll come out with special editions, and you know, because this is an age where we can download it. You can download the book. Do you think there is something, is there something that is intrinsic to having a physical object in a virtual world? >> I think to our generation, yes. I'm not so sure about millennials, when they grow up. But there are, for example, I'm going to see U2 next week, I'm very lucky to see that. But part of the U2 buying experience, to get access to the presale, you need to be part of their fan club. To be a part of their fan club, you need to get, you get like a whole bunch of limited edition posters, limited edition vinyl, and all this kind of stuff. So there's an experience. It's no longer just about going to see U2 at a concert. There's like the entire package of you being a special U2 fan. And they surround it with uniqueness. It's not necessarily limited, but there's an enhanced experience that can't just be, it's not just about you having a ticket to a single concert. >> Justin: Yeah, okay. >> I'm curious, the genre, if you'd call it, is hard science fiction. >> Yes. >> The challenge with that is, you know, what is an extension of what we're doing, and what is fiction? And people probably poke at that. Have you had any interesting experience, things like that? I mean, I've listened to a lot of stuff like Andy Weir, like let the community give feedback before he created the final The Martian. (laughing) But so yeah, what's it like, cause we can, the geeks can be really harsh. >> Yes, I've learned from my Reddit experience that, so what's really funny about it is the first draft of this novel was hard as nails. It was crazy. And my publisher read it, and it would have made all the hard science fiction guys super happy. My publisher read it, he was like, you've written a really great hard science fiction book, and all five people who read it are going to love it. (laughing) You know, but like, I came here with my buddy Danny. He couldn't even get through the first three pages of it. He's like, he wanted to read it. So part of working through the editorial process is saying, look, I care a lot about the science because one of my deep goals is to write a STEM-oriented book that gets people excited about technology and present the future as not a dystopian place. And so I wanted the science to be there and have a sort of gravity to the narrative. But yeah, it's tough. I worked with a physicist, a biologist, a geneticist, an anthropologist, and a lawyer. (laughs) Just to try to figure out, how do we carve out, you know, what does the future look like, what does the evolution of each individual sciences, we talked about the mosquitoes, right? You know, we're already doing a lot of crazy stuff with mosquitoes. We're modifying them so that the males mate with females that carry the Zika virus, you know, give birth to offspring that never reach maturity. I mean, this is just crazy, it's science fiction. And now that they're working on modifying female mosquitoes into vaccine carriers instead of disease carriers. I mean, this is science fiction, right? Like who believes this stuff? It's crazy. >> Christopher is amazing. >> Yeah, I've loved, there's been a bunch of movies recently that have kind of helped to educate on STEM some, you know, Martian got a lot of people excited, you know, Hidden Figures, the one that I could being my kids that are teenagers now into it and they get excited, oh, science is great. So the movie, how much will you be involved? You know, what can you share about that experience, too, so far? >> It's been, it's very surreal. That's the word is use to describe it, the honest, god's honest truth, I mean. I've been very lucky in that my representation in Hollywood is this rock-solid guy called Howie Sanders. And he's this bigger-than-life Hollywood agent guy. He's hooked me up, we've made a lot of business decisions that we're focused less on the money and more on the team, which is nice to be, like when you're in your 40s and you're more financially settled, you're not in the kind of situation where you might be in your 20s and just going to sign the first deal that people give you. So we really focused on hooking up with like the director, James Bovin is, you know, he's the guy who co-created Flight of the Concords. He did the Muppets movie, you know, Alice Through the Looking Glass. Really professional guy but also really understands the tone of the book, which is like humorous, you know, kind of sarcastic. It's not just about the technology. It's also about the characters. Same thing with the production team. The two producers, Mandeville Productions, I was just talking to Todd Lieberman, and we're talking about just what is augmented reality, like how does it look like on the screen? So I'm not- >> It's not going to look like Blade Runner is what I'm hearing. >> (laughs) I don't know. It's going to look real. I imagine, I don't know, they're going to make whatever movie they're going to make, but their perspective, one of the things we talked about is keeping the movie very grounded. Like you know, one of the big questions they ask first going into it is before we even had any sort of movie discussions is like is this more of like a Looper, Gattica, or District Nine, or is it more like The Fifth Element, you know, I mean, is it like, do you want it to be this sort of grounded movie that feels authentic and real and near future or do you want this to be like completely alien and weird and out of it. And the story is more grounded. So I think a lot, hopefully what we display on the screen will not feel that far away from reality. >> Okay, yeah. >> You do marketing in your day job. >> I do. >> I'm curious as you look at this, kind of the balance of educating, reaching a broad audience, you have passion for STEM, what's your thoughts around that? Is it, I worry there's so much general, like television or things like that, when I see the science stuff, it like makes me groan. Because you know, it's like I don't understand that. >> I am the worst, because I got a security background too, so that's the one I get scrambled on. The war, I mean, like. >> Wait, thank goodness I updated my firewall settings because I saved the world from terrorists. >> Hang on, we're breaking through the first firewall. Now we're through the second firewall. (laughing) Now we're going through the third firewall, like 15 firewalls. And let me upload the virus, like all that stuff. It's difficult for me. I think that, you know, hopefully, there's also a group in Hollywood called the Hollywood Science and Entertainment Exchange. And they're a group of scientists who work with film makers on, you know, reigning things in. And film makers don't usually take all their advice, i.e. Interstellar, (laughing) but you know, I think (laughing) in many cases there's some really good ideas that come to play into it that hopefully bring up, like I think Jarvis for example, in Iron Man or the Avengers is a really cool implementation of what the future of AI systems might be like. And I know they used the Hollywood Science Exchange to figure out how is that going to work? And I think the marketing aspect is, you know, the reason I came up with the idea for this book is because my CEO of a company I used to work for, he had this whole conversation about teleportation, like teleportation was impossible. And he's like, it's not because the science, yes, the science is a problem right now, but we'll get over it. The main issue is that nobody would ever step foot into a device that vaporizes them and then printed them out somewhere else. And I said, well that's great, cause that's a marketing problem. (laughing) >> Yeah, you're dead every time you do it. But it's the same you, I can't tell the difference. >> Well, you say you're dead, I'm saying you're just moving. (laughing) >> Artificial intelligence, you know, kind of a big gap between the hype to where we need to go. What's your thoughts on that space in general? >> I think that we have, it's a great question because I feel like that's a term that gets thrown around a lot, and I think as a result it's becoming watered down. So you've this sort of artificial intelligence that comes with like, you know, Google building an app that can beat the world's best Go player, which is a really, really difficult puzzle. The problem is, that app can do one thing, and that's play Go. You put in it a chess game, and it's like I don't know what's going on. >> It's a very specialized kind of intelligence, yeah. >> Now with Open AI, you know, they just had some pretty interesting implementations where they actually played video games with a real live competition and won. Again, you know, but without the smack talk, which really I think would add a lot. Now you got to get an AI to smack talk. So I think the problem is we haven't figured out a really good way of creating a general purpose AI. And there's a lot of parallels to the evolution of computing in general because if you look at how computers were before we had general purpose operating systems like Unix, every computer was built to do a very, very specific function, and that's kind of what AI is right now. So we're still waiting to have a sort of general purpose AI that can do a lot of specialized activities. >> Even most robots are still very single-purpose today. >> That's the fundamental problem. But you're seeing the Cambridge guys are working on sort of the bipedal robot that can do lots of things. And Siri's getting better, Cortana's getting better, Watson's getting better, but we're not there. We still need to find a really good way of integrating deep knowledge with general purpose conversational AI. Cause that's really what you need to like, Stu, what do you need? Here, let me give it to you, you know? >> Do you draw a distinction between AI that's able to simply sort of react as a fairly complex machine or something that can create new things and add something? >> That's in the book as well. So the fundamental thing that I don't think we get around even in the future is giving computers the ability to actually come up with new ideas. There's actually a career, the main job of the protagonist in the book, his job is a salter. And his job is to salt AI algorithms to introduce entropy so they can come up with new ideas. >> Okay, interesting. >> So based off the sort of chaos theory. >> Like chaos monkey, right? >> Yeah. And that's really what you're trying to do is like, okay, react to things that are happening because you can't just come up with them on their own. There's a whole, I don't want to bore you, but there's a whole bunch of stuff in the book about how that works. >> It's like hand-carving ideas that are then mass produced by machines. >> Yeah, I don't know if you guys are going to have Simon Crosby on here, he's kind of like an expert on that. He was the Dean of Kings College, which is where Turing came from. So he really knows a lot about that. He's got a lot of strong ideas about it. But I learned a lot from him in that regard. There's a lot of like, the snarky spirit of Simon Crosby lives on in my book somewhere. But he's just funny cause he's, coming from that field, he immediately sees a lot of BS right off the bat, whenever anybody's presenting. He's got like the ability to just cut through it. Because he understands what it would actually take to make that happen, you know? So I tried to preserve some of that in the book. >> That is refreshing in the tech industry. >> So Tal, I need to let you, you know, wrap this up. Give us a plug for the book, tell us, when are we going to be able to see this on the big screen? >> I don't know about the big screen, but the Punch Escrow is now available. You can get it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere books are sold. It's been optioned by Lionsgate. The director attached to it is James Bovin, production team is Mandeville Productions. I'm very excited about it. Go check it out. It's a pretty quick read, reads like a technothriller. It's not too hard. And it's fun for the whole family. I think one of the coolest things about it is that the feedback I've been getting has been that it really is appealing to everybody. I've got mother-in-laws reading it, you know, it's pretty cool. Initially I sold it, my initial audience is like us, but it's kind of cool, like, Stu will finish the book, he'll give it to, you know, wife, daughter, anything, and they're really digging it. So it's kind of fun. >> Justin: Thanks a lot. >> Tal Klein, really appreciate you coming. Congratulations on the book, we look forward to the movie. Maybe, you know, we'll get the Cube involved down the road. (laughing) >> And we're giving away 75 copies of it here at Lakeside booth, if you guys want to come. >> Tal Klein, author of The Punch Escrow, also CMO of Lakeside, who is here in the thing. But yeah, (laughing) a lot of stuff. Justin and I will be back with more coverage here from VMWorld 2017. You're watching the Cube. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. We are live in Las Vegas, at the NAB Show 2017. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm very excited to be joined by our next guest, Ted Harrington. Ted you are the executive partner at Independent Security Evaluators. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, we're excited to have you here. We're very excited also, because Ted has a very cool Twitter handle, @SecurityTed, super cool. So you are with Independent Security Evaluators. Tell us a little bit about what the ISE is. You were the first company to hack the iPhone and the Android, give our viewers a little bit of a backstory on ISE. >> Sure, so probably the simplest way to think about it is that we're the good guy hackers. Companies hire us to help them find security flaws and remediate those flaws in their technologies. And so we do that across a number of industries including heavy, prominent presence in the media and entertainment business. We also have a pretty strong focus on security research. Which is what you're referring to with the iPhone and the Android OS. We also, even the company came out of what is today known as car hacking. We found a way to build a weaponized software radio that we could start a Ford Explorer without the authentic key. >> Lisa: Wow. >> So we're tinkerers and problem solvers and we like to find issues before the bad guy does. >> And that's a great point about being the good kind of hackers, but also being able to highlight that these security challenges are real, across industries, and be able to I presume, influence or help companies, whether they're in media and entertainment or other industries. Understanding what is the type of cyber security protocol that we should be putting in place here to prevent the bad hackers from getting in. >> You hit the nail on the head. The core emphasis of what a security assessment with us entails, really is focusing on the technology problems, the deep technical issues. But at it's core, where all of these issues come from is the presence or lack thereof, of an effective mission. Many security, many companies when they think about security, are thinking of it as something that would be nice to have, not as a core business requirement. And changing that attitude is something that we spend a lot of our energy trying to influence. Because the companies that see security as the business enabler that it is, those companies are doing some tremendous things across industries today and they're really being the pioneers that are leading. >> One of the things that I was reading recently was what happened to La La Land, where screeners were leaked and fairly prolifically, and obviously that was a big massive box office hit, nearly a Best Picture winner, a few months ago. But I've also read reports where a leak like that can really negatively impact box office sales, like upwards to 20%. So if you look at a studio for example, and you were kind of saying, that maybe in general security is viewed as a nice to have. Is that a strong enough demonstration of the vulnerability of say a studio to make them go, "Okay, we need help here. "There are vulnerabilities we might not even be aware of." Are you seeing more uptake in the media and entertainment industry? Or is security still a, "It's a good idea "but we've got other things to focus on, "creating really, really cool content." >> The media and entertainment business, I think, does a fairly good job of prioritizing security. Now, of course, across the spectrum there are things that we would advocate doing better or in different ways, but the business driver that you mentioned, the idea of avoidance of box office decline. That's the core fundamental problem that we're trying to solve for the content owners and their vendors, because that window, the theatrical release, from a revenue perspective is the most important moment for, especially the blockbusters, La La Land, no one necessarily knew was going to be a blockbuster, before it came out, but when you look at things like, the next Star Wars, the next Avengers, the movies that are definitely going to make huge amounts of revenue, making sure that that movie makes it to the theater, without being released, that is the top priority for many organizations in this industry and we see a lot of organizations doing it well. >> That's good because the IP in that alone, for a company, the next Star Wars, the next whatever happens to be, the intellectual property that that studio owns, is probably nearly invaluable. So having the right strategy around that is key. Wanted to pick your brain, I know that you have started the IoT Village, and as we look at this proliferation of connected devices, the audience, we we're chatting earlier before we went live, the audience, you know, we're so empowered. We can make decisions, we can watch whatever we want whenever we want, from 35,000 feet in the air. We're binge watching, we're sharing on social. We've got multiple devices. Where that's concerned, and also you mentioned content, that's also not just a way that we're consuming content, that's a way that we're creating it. How, what is the IoT Village all about and is it down to the level of helping media and entertainment companies start providing security across the connected devices that are consuming and creating the content? >> We started IoT Village as a security research platform. Basically where, we invite other smart security researchers to help us focus on the problem of security issues in these connected devices that are being deployed. Everything from people's homes all the way to businesses and like you said even to the creation of content and consumption of content. The reason that we wanted to put some emphasis on this problem is that, that's an industry that I think, maybe by contrast, to some of the things we've talked about with media and entertainment, that still has a ways to go, in terms of how it's thinking about security. Security is not a priority in the development process for the majority of organizations in that industry. Now, there are definitely some that are doing it right, but they're more the minority. So what IoT Village does is helps us shine a spotlight on those issues. To connect the dot full circle, to what you were talking about, with media and entertainment, this is a conversation that I don't think, is happening loudly enough in this industry. Connected devices are being deployed for, a lot of the cases you said, consumption of content, for creation of content. Even for things that people don't necessarily equate with the process, like, the TVs that are used to screen the, whatever version is being reviewed right now, in the conference room. Those are often smart TVs with an internet connection and there's not necessarily an adequate control in place around how to think about the security implication of that. Fundamentally, connected devices expand the attack surface, and that's the way the organizations need to think about it. Not to say that they should not deploy those devices, but that they need to adequately consider that in the security model. >> Absolutely, and how does an organization get control over that, over those devices? >> Well, like any technology that's developed by a third party, one who procures that technology, can only do so much. You can't actually get into the source code, or whatever, unless that organization wants you to, but there definitely are things that organizations can do in a deployment model, to mitigate risk. So, those would be things like ensuring you have proper segmentation, where the highest risk types of devices are quarantined away from areas where the biggest, most impactful compromise could potentially exist. To absolutely implement a threat model, which is an exercise through which an organization identifies what you're trying to protect, who you're trying to protect against and how those adversaries will deploy their campaigns. >> Question for you about the devices now that are popping up in our homes, right, the Google Home, the Amazon Echo, as an owner of those, there's very little control, right? That an owner or a user has over those devices, any recommendations or insight into what can be done on the vendor side to, those devices listening all the time, right, that's their job, any insight there into recommendations that can be taken to help make those a bit more secure? >> So for the person who purchases and deploys that device, there are a handful of things you can do. First and foremost, change the default password. Seems like I should not have to say that, yeah. >> Yeah >> Change it from admin password. >> Yeah. >> But you'd be surprised how few people actually change the default password, and the default password is effectively publicly available information. There was a very significant distributed denial of service attack that happened in October, that basically took the internet offline for a few hours. >> Yes. >> And that was completely mobilizing connected devices that had not changed the default password. Attackers took them all over and then used those in the attack. So, change the default password. Check for updates to what extent that you can, and really think about whether or not you might need the connectivity of a certain device. So, for example, we talked about a moment ago, the smart TV. There are a lot of people out there, who buy a TV, not because they need the internet connectivity to it, but because they want to consume content. If they're not going to use that connectivity, turn it off. Effectively, all that it's doing if you're not using it, is introducing new ways to be attacked. >> So there's some simple remedies that, either people or industries can take for their internet of things or connected devices to be a little bit more secure? >> Yes, however, the real crux of the solution, definitely relies on those who manufacture the devices. So, manufacturers of connected devices need to do things like adopt an adversarial mindset. Think about how someone will attack this system. They need to think about things like, how are you going to update this system over time, especially given the fact that the average consumer of this device, probably is not technical, and probably will not proactively go on to be dealing with updates. They want to set it and forget it. So thinking about those things from that perspective, adhering to principals of secure design, going through security assessment, really looking at your system in terms of how it can be broken, that's how you build it to be resilient against attack. >> Wanted to ask you one final question about laws and regulations, what are you thoughts on that? Is that something that can either help a film studio protect their IP, all the way down to helping those of us that have at home connected devices? Laws, regulations, good, bad, indifferent, what are your thoughts? >> I'm very strongly not a proponent of regulation as a security measure. Laws and regulations, what winds up happening, they take too long to enact. The adversary has already evolved away from whatever the control is. They're usually very riddled with compromise, based on all the stakeholders who helped develop this law. They're usually developed by people who are not technically savvy. You know, lawmakers are not security analysts, though they rely on security analysts, it's still in the delivery of the execution, it doesn't really manifest itself effectively. That said, I recognize that in a lot of ways, that's just the way the world will move. Many organizations should anticipate that some sort of regulatory body at some point, is going to require compliance with some sort of law and while I don't think that it's a great solution to solve the problem, it's at least a start, because it does get those who will not invest in security, to at least start investing in security. So it lowers the minimum bar, it does not raise the highest bar. >> Very interesting insight, and one more question if I can squeak it in, and that is, you mention that media and entertainment is pretty good with respect to security, for those industries where it's still a nice to have, do you think it's going to take something like another DDoS attack, or something else to, something big that is quite, negatively impactful, to get some of those industries to go, "You know what, "this is no longer a nice to have. "This is a fundamental element that "we need to culturally adopt." Do you think it's going to be something almost catastrophic, that's going to drive that change? >> Most likely, but it won't be just the big issue. It will be whatever the big issue is combined with an individual, or collection of individuals with the political capital to drive for that pioneering change. Industries don't typically change on their own. They change because people make them change. >> Good point, well, Ted Harrington, thank you so much for spending time with us today. If you're not following Ted on Twitter, @SecurityTed, follow him, from Independent Security Evaluators. Thank you so much for sharing your insights. Have a great rest of the NAB Show. >> Thank you for having me. >> And with that said, you've been watching theCUBE live from NAB in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, stick around, we'll be right back. (light techno music)