>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering IFS World Conference 2018. Brought to you by IFS. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference here in Atalanta, Georgia. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. It is late in the day here, the reception is about to start, the drinks are flowing, but we are still interviewing guests, and we've got a great panel right now. Joining us is Scott Helmer. He is the Senior Vice President at the Aviation and Business Defense Unit at IFS, and Henry Canaday, who is a contributing editor at Aviation Week. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> I wonder if you could walk our viewers a little bit through the idea, where does aviation and defense sit within the IFS business strategy? >> I'm happy to answer that. I think our new CEO of IFS, Darren Roos, has been very clear that there are three things that IFS will be best at. Number one, we will be best at mid-market ERP in those vertical markets that we care about. We will be number one in field service management. And we will be number one in maintenance management solutions in aviation and defense. So aviation and defense is one of the pillars on which IFS's strategy is currently based, and we have formed a global business unit inside of IFS that is specifically responsible, it's a 300 person strong team that is responsible for distributing a comprehensive portfolio of A and D solutions to the A and D market globally. >> What are the some of the biggest challenges that you're setting out to solve for your customers? >> Also a good question. We address the full range of management solution capability across A and D. So whether you're an operator in commercial or defense sector, or whether you're an inservice support provider, we provide solutions and support, all of your MRO capabilities, some of your performance-based logistics requirements, some of your supply chain requirements. Basically leveraging the core processes that IFS is differentiated around. Those being manufacturing, asset and service management, supply chain and project management. >> What's special about aviation and defense that's not been marketed or service delivery, which captures a lot of industry verticals, but the fact that you guys got carved out as a separate vertical, what are some of those unique challenges? >> What is chiefly unique about aviation and defense is the overall complexity in the marketplace. You're talking about very very complex capital intense of mobile assets, where managing the maintenance obligations in order to maintain the availability of the aircraft is under the scrutiny of compliance and is required to be done efficiently, without compromising safety. >> Not to mention the fact, your assets are flying all over the world, so they might not necessarily be able just to roll into the maintenance yard at the end of a bad day. >> And they're large and expensive, that's for sure. >> (laughs) Large and expensive. >> Henry, you've been covering the aviation industry for more than 20 years now. What do you see as the biggest trends, biggest concerns that a company like IFS is trying to grapple with right now, in terms of servicing its clients? >> Well the interesting thing about the airline industry is that it technically in many areas it's extremely advanced and very fast moving industry. In selling tickets, the industry has been going through a continual IT revolution for the last 20 years. Things like giving you notices about when your planes arrive and stuff like that. Very fast moving, changing all the time. But this is stuff, it's just money. There's no safety involved, so they can take chances, if they get it 99% right, they make enough money, they can solve the one percent errors. The problem with maintenance is it's messy, it's complex as Scott says. It's also safety critical. They can't screw it up one tenth of one percent of the time. They've been very, very cautious and very, very slow, and they look sluggish and stagnant on the maintenance side. But fortunately, now, especially the U.S. airlines are making some good money, so there's actually an opportunity for companies like IFS to come in here and really reform the maintenance program. >> We cover a lot of autonomous vehicle shows. Autonomous vehicles are coming. Obviously, a big element of autonomous vehicles will ultimately be safety. One of the things that comes up over and over again, if you look at the number of accidents, the fatalities that happen on our streets, compared to what happens in aviation, if a week on the streets happened at a week in the aviation industry, the planes would be shut down. >> Scott: There'd be no aviation. >> The threshold that you guys have to achieve in terms of safety is second to none. I don't know if there's anything even close, especially in terms of volume of people, and then, oh by the way, everyone globally is getting richer, so the amount of passenger flow. I don't know if you can speak to that in terms of the growth of passenger miles, I imagine is the metric, continues to explode. >> You've had basically 18 straight years without a fatal crash by a major American airline. That's unheard of, that's unheard of. We used to have one crash a year up till around 2000. Every time somebody annoys me with customer service in an airline, I think of this, they're doing the important stuff right, so I don't care. (laughs) >> Very well. >> Right. >> And, then do you think the efficiency, right? At least here domestically, I always think of Southwest, 'cause they were the first ones that really had fast turns, and they raced to the gate, they raced back out of the gate, in terms of really trying to get the maximum efficiency out of those assets. The pressure there, in translating to the other airlines is pretty significant to make sure you're really getting a high ROI. >> That's absolutely right. Again one of the levels of complexity that we were discussing. Certainly airlines are being forced to finally introduce some change into their maintenance operations, as the increasingly complex assets are part of the re-fleeting, as that faster traffic continues to grow. It's about both achieving greater efficiency in maintenance operations, not only without compromising safety, but ensuring the availability of that asset. Because revenue dollars still matter greatly, and those assets are your revenue producing assets that an airline has. >> Can you describe your approach in terms of of how you work together with your clients, the airlines, in terms of developing new products and new features. >> One of the unique characteristics about aviation and defense is not only the size of the client, but the length and duration of the relationships. So, we have a long and rich history, both at IFS and through the acquired MXI technologies, of working with our partners in their programs over the very long term. As much as we have domain expertise and a sizable team of domain experts inside of our business, we're able to recognize our partners that are visionaries in the industry, and we have established multiple levels of collaboration to involve them in the shaping of solution capability to support their businesses going forward. We are just launching today two new planning applications that were not only being launched with American Airlines and LATAM Airlines respectively, but were co-developed with subject matter experts at each. So they're tremendously valuable inputs into shaping our vision of what solutions are going to best drive business value for our customers over a very long relationship horizon. >> So, what have you unpack at MXI acquisition, what did that give you that you didn't have before and what's the total solution now? >> Certainly, I joined IFS through the MXI acquisition. I was previously it's Chief Operating Officer. MXI was focused on best of breed MRO capability for both defense and service port providers, as well as commercial airlines. In combining with IFS, that had a rich history in A and D, we now have the most comprehensive solution portfolio available on the market today. We are the only vendor that can provide best of breed capability, integrated into an end to end enterprise landscape, and we've got the team of subject matter experts or domain experts that are capable of delivering that value, not just the product, but the solution to the customers across all the segments of A and D. >> Just to be clear, your defense is more than aviation. I saw a military truck over on the expo hall, so it's assets beyond just airplanes when it comes to defense. >> Correct, we support on the defense side of things. We support multiple platforms, whether they're fighter jets, whether they're cargo carriers, whether they tanks, whether they're ships, we support for the operators, the offset optimization, performance based logistics, security, et cetera. For the in-service port providers, we similarly support supply chain requirements, MRO requirements, et cetera. >> Henry, as you look forward, you've been covering this space for a while, what are some big, new things coming down the road in the aviation industry that we should be looking for, 'cause we haven't seen a lot of big things from the outside looking in. I guess we had the next generation fighter planes, and then we had obviously the A380 and the 787 on the commercial side. What's new and coming that you're excited about? >> Well, technology changes slowly in commercial aviation, because of the safety aspect. The big, new things are the new aircraft, the 787 and the A350. They are really new generation aircraft, lot more composites, plastics if you will. They're using that instead of aluminum. The other things that's happening is additive manufacturing, this whole printing parts. That's real big, and I've been telling everybody the new Boeing 787 has two printed parts, one made by GE, $120 billion a year. The other made by a company called Norsk Titanium, with 140 people coming out of Norway, which is not exactly the center of innovation in aerospace programs. >> Jeff: With a printed part, like a 3D printed part? >> Yeah a printed part. Those are the two big changes in the aircraft. I mean, customers aren't going to see it, but these planes are now made largely of plastics and the metal parts are going to be more and more printed. Much more efficient way, lighter aircraft, less fuel use, more efficient, less environmental effects, etc. That's a big deal. More important than a huge airplane. >> Right, well I can imagine, we hear about the impacts of 3D printing. I haven't really seen it yet, but this vision where your ability to print parts on demand will have significant impacts on supply chains and inventory and huge, huge impacts down the road. >> And the airline industry is the most demanding. They've go to go through really massive proofs of concept and proof of materials, and it's starting to happen. >> Henry, what would you say is the most important area that IFS should focus on. If they can solve one problem in the airline industry, what do you think it should be? >> Availability would be one. Just aircraft availability, that's what. The airlines are concerned about two things. Dollar cost per flight hour to maintain and what they call a technical dispatch reliability. They want to get that plane launched 99.99% of the time. Get rid of the unpredictive maintenance problems. Schedule everything, make it quick, I want to get the planes off on time. >> It's amazing that unscheduled maintenance, regardless of industry, still continues to be such a bug-a-boo to productivity and profitability. It's one of these things that just has huge impact. >> I would completely agree with Henry. I think asset availability is the number one focus for commercial operators. Our focus has certainly been around trying to remove the impacts of unscheduled maintenance. One of the applications that we launched today allows you to react very, very quickly to unplanned or unscheduled maintenance events, and to do some what-if modeling, so that you can implement the best plan for your fleet, in order to maximize the availability of that asset. Not just in terms of bolstering or producing a better plan. We're attempting to do that even with line planning, where we're adjusting the traditional planning perimeters away from what must be done to what should be done in order to maximize the availability of that aircraft. Of course, as Henry said, everybody's focused on faster, tighter turnaround times. All of our software is designed to try and drive tighter turnaround times and greater efficiency. >> What percentage is scheduled versus predictive versus prescriptive? Maintenance. >> I think it varies by airline. The great majority of maintenance is scheduled, I mean, there's no doubt about that. They put these aircraft down for a week or a month. It's a massive amount of money. It's not the amount of maintenance, it's when unscheduled maintenance happens, it really throws things off. It may only be one or two percent of the maintenance tasks are unscheduled, but that's what throws the aircraft off the schedule. That's what leaves passengers sitting in the departure lounges, ticked off. Not getting there till the next day or the next week, whenever, so it's a very, very small percentage, these unscheduled maintenance events, but it's crucial to the airlines' economics. >> Exactly. Crucial to our itineraries, as well, as the economics. Exactly. >> Making sure that the airlines continue to do what they do best, which is get us from place A to place B. >> Precisely. Well, Scott Henry, thank you so much, it's been a really fun conversation. >> I enjoyed being here, thank you. >> Jeff: Thank you. >> Thanks, Henry. >> Thanks. >> We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference just after this. (digital music)

ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking we will soon be taking off on our way to altitude please keep your seatbelts fastened and remain in your seats we will be experiencing turbulence until we are above the clouds ladies and gentlemen we are now cruising at altitude sit back and enjoy the ride [Music] altitude is a community of thought leaders and pioneers cloud architects and enlightened network engineers who have individually and are now collectively leading their own IT teams and the industry on a path to lift cloud networking above the clouds empowering Enterprise IT to architect design and control their own cloud network regardless of the turbulent clouds beneath them it's time to gain altitude ladies and gentlemen Steve Mulaney president and CEO of aviatrix the leader of multi cloud networking [Music] [Applause] all right good morning everybody here in Santa Clara as well as to the what millions of people watching the livestream worldwide welcome to altitude 2020 alright so we've got a fantastic event today really excited about the speakers that we have today and the experts that we have and really excited to get started so one of the things I wanted to just share was this is not a one-time event this is not a one-time thing that we're gonna do sorry for the aviation analogy but you know sherry way aviatrix means female pilot so everything we do as an aviation theme this is a take-off for a movement this isn't an event this is a take-off of a movement a multi-cloud networking movement and community that we're inviting all of you to become part of and-and-and why we're doing that is we want to enable enterprises to rise above the clouds so to speak and build their network architecture regardless of which public cloud they're using whether it's one or more of these public clouds so the good news for today there's lots of good news but this is one good news is we don't have any powerpoint presentations no marketing speak we know that marketing people have their own language we're not using any of that in those sales pitches right so instead what are we doing we're going to have expert panels we've got Simone Rashard Gartner here we've got 10 different network architects cloud architects real practitioners they're going to share their best practices and there are real-world experiences on their journey to the multi cloud so before we start and everybody know what today is in the u.s. it's Super Tuesday I'm not gonna get political but Super Tuesday there was a bigger Super Tuesday that happened 18 months ago and maybe eight six employees know what I'm talking about 18 months ago on a Tuesday every enterprise said I'm gonna go to the cloud and so what that was was the Cambrian explosion for cloud for the price so Frank kibrit you know what a Cambrian explosion is he had to look it up on Google 500 million years ago what happened there was an explosion of life where it went from very simple single-cell organisms to very complex multi-celled organisms guess what happened 18 months ago on a Tuesday I don't really know why but every enterprise like I said all woke up that day and said now I'm really gonna go to cloud and that Cambrian explosion of cloud went meant that I'm moving from very simple single cloud single use case simple environment to a very complex multi cloud complex use case environment and what we're here today is we're gonna go and dress that and how do you handle those those those complexities and when you look at what's happening with customers right now this is a business transformation right people like to talk about transitions this is a transformation and it's actually not just the technology transformation it's a business transformation it started from the CEO and the boards of enterprise customers where they said I have an existential threat to the survival of my company if you look at every industry who they're worried about is not the other 30 year old enterprise what they're worried about is the three year old enterprise that's leveraging cloud that's leveraging AI and that's where they fear that they're going to actually get wiped out right and so because of this existential threat this is CEO lead this is board led this is not technology led it is mandated in the organization's we are going to digitally transform our enterprise because of this existential threat and the movement to cloud is going to enable us to go do that and so IT is now put back in charge if you think back just a few years ago in cloud it was led by DevOps it was led by the applications and it was like I said before their Cambrian explosion is very simple now with this Cambrian explosion and enterprises getting very serious and mission critical they care about visibility they care about control they care about compliance conformance everything governance IT is in charge and and and that's why we're here today to discuss that so what we're going to do today is much of things but we're gonna validate this journey with customers did they see the same thing we're gonna validate the requirements for multi-cloud because honestly I've never met an enterprise that is not going to be multi-cloud many are one cloud today but they all say I need to architect my network for multiple clouds because that's just what the network is there to support the applications and the applications will run and whatever cloud it runs best in and you have to be prepared for that the second thing is is architecture again with IT in charge you architecture matters whether it's your career whether it's how you build your house it doesn't matter horrible architecture your life is horrible forever good architecture your life is pretty good so we're gonna talk about architecture and how the most fundamental and critical part of that architecture and that basic infrastructure is the network if you don't get that right nothing works right way more important and compute way more important than storm dense storage network is the foundational element of your infrastructure then we're going to talk about day 2 operations what does that mean well day 1 is one day of your life that's who you wire things up they do and beyond I tell everyone in networking and IT it's every day of your life and if you don't get that right your life is bad forever and so things like operations visibility security things like that how do I get my operations team to be able to handle this in an automated way because it's not just about configuring it in the cloud it's actually about how do I operationalize it and that's a huge benefit that we bring as aviatrix and then the last thing we're going to talk and it's the last panel we have I always say you can't forget about the humans right so all this technology all these things that we're doing it's always enabled by the humans at the end of the day if the humans fight it it won't get deployed and we have a massive skills gap in cloud and we also have a massive skill shortage you have everyone in the world trying to hire cloud network architects right there's just not enough of them going around so at aviatrix we as leaders do we're gonna help address that issue and try to create more people we created a program and we call the ACE program again an aviation theme it stands for aviatrix certified engineer very similar to what Cisco did with CCI ease where Cisco taught you about IP networking a little bit of Cisco we're doing the same thing we're gonna teach network architects about multi-cloud networking and architecture and yeah you'll get a little bit of aviatrix training in there but this is the missing element for people's careers and also within their organization so we're gonna we're gonna go talk about that so great great event great show when to try to keep it moving I'd next want to introduce my my host he's the best in the business you guys have probably seen him multiple million times he's the co CEO and co-founder of tube Jon Fourier okay awesome great great speech they're awesome I'd totally agree with everything you said about the explosion happening and I'm excited here at the heart of Silicon Valley to have this event it's a special digital event with the cube and aviatrix were we live streaming to millions of people as you said maybe not a million maybe not really take this program to the world this is a little special for me because multi-cloud is the hottest wave and cloud and cloud native networking is fast becoming the key engine of the innovation so we got an hour and a half of action-packed programming we have a customer panel two customer panels before that Gartner is going to come on talk about the industry we have a global system integrators we talk about how they're advising and building these networks and cloud native networking and then finally the Aces the aviatrix certified engineer is gonna talk more about their certifications and the expertise needed so let's jump right in and let's ask someone rashard to come on stage from Gartner check it all up [Applause] okay so kicking things off sitting started gartner the industry experts on cloud really kind of more to your background talk about your background before you got the gardener yeah before because gardener was a chief network architect of a fortune five companies with thousands of sites over the world and I've been doing everything and IT from a C programmer in a 92 a security architect to a network engineer to finally becoming a network analyst so you rode the wave now you're covering at the marketplace with hybrid cloud and now moving quickly to multi cloud is really was talking about cloud natives been discussed but the networking piece is super important how do you see that evolving well the way we see Enterprise adapt in cloud first thing you do about networking the initial phases they either go in a very ad hoc way is usually led by non non IT like a shadow I to your application people are some kind of DevOps team and it's it just goes as it's completely unplanned decreed VP sees left and right with different account and they create mesh to manage them and their direct connect or Express route to any of them so that's what that's a first approach and on the other side again it within our first approach you see what I call the lift and shift way we see like enterprise IT trying to basically replicate what they have in a data center in the cloud so they spend a lot of time planning doing Direct Connect putting Cisco routers and f5 and Citrix and any checkpoint Palo Alto divides that the audinate that are sent removing that to that cloud and I ask you the aha moments gonna come up a lot of our panels is where people realize that it's a multi cloud world I mean they either inherit clouds certainly they're using public cloud and on-premises is now more relevant than ever when's that aha moment that you're seeing where people go well I got to get my act together and get on this well the first but even before multi-cloud so these two approach the first one like the ad hoc way doesn't scale at some point idea has to save them because they don't think about the two they don't think about operations they have a bunch of VPC and multiple clouds the other way that if you do the left and shift wake they cannot take any advantages of the cloud they lose elasticity auto-scaling pay by the drink these feature of agility features so they both realize okay neither of these ways are good so I have to optimize that so I have to have a mix of what I call the cloud native services within each cloud so they start adapting like other AWS constructor is your construct or Google construct then that's what I call the optimal phase but even that they realize after that they are very different all these approaches different the cloud are different identities is completely difficult to manage across clouds I mean for example AWS has accounts there's subscription and in adarand GCP their projects it's a real mess so they realize well I can't really like concentrate use the cloud the cloud product and every cloud that doesn't work so I have I'm doing multi cloud I like to abstract all of that I still wanna manage the cloud from an API to interview I don't necessarily want to bring my incumbent data center products but I have to do that in a more API driven cloud they're not they're not scaling piece and you were mentioning that's because there's too many different clouds yes that's the piece there so what are they doing whether they really building different development teams as its software what's the solution well this the solution is to start architecting the cloud that's the third phase I call that the multi cloud architect phase where they have to think about abstraction that works across cloud fact even across one cloud it might not scale as well if you start having like 10,000 security group in AWS that doesn't scale you have to manage that if you have multiple VPC it doesn't scale you need a third party identity provider so it barely scales within one cloud if you go multiple cloud it gets worse and worse see way in here what's your thoughts I thought we said this wasn't gonna be a sales pitch for aviatrix you just said exactly what we do so anyway I'm just a joke what do you see in terms of where people are in that multi-cloud so a lot of people you know everyone I talked to started in one cloud right but then they look and they say okay but I'm now gonna move to adjourn I'm gonna move do you see a similar thing well yes they are moving but they're not there's not a lot of application that use a tree cloud at once they move one app in deserve one app in individuals one get happen Google that's what we see so far okay yeah I mean one of the mistakes that people think is they think multi-cloud no one is ever gonna go multi-cloud for arbitrage they're not gonna go and say well today I might go into Azure because I got a better rate of my instance that's never do you agree with that's never going to happen what I've seen with enterprise is I'm gonna put the workload in the app the app decides where it runs best that may be a sure maybe Google and for different reasons and they're gonna stick there and they're not gonna move let me ask you infrastructure has to be able to support from a networking team be able to do that do you agree with that yes I agree and one thing is also very important is connecting to that cloud is kind of the easiest thing so though while their network part of the cloud connectivity to the cloud is kind of simple I agree IPSec VP and I reckon Express that's a simple part what's difficult and even a provisioning part is easy you can use terraform and create v pieces and v nets across which free cloud providers right what's difficult is the day-to-day operations so it's what to find a to operations what is that what does that actually mean this is the day-to-day operations after you know the natural let's add an app let's add a server let's troubleshoot a problem so so your life something changes how would he do so what's the big concerns I want to just get back to this cloud native networking because everyone kind of knows with cloud native apps are that's been a hot trend what is cloud native networking how do you how do you guys define that because that seems to be the oddest part of the multi cloud wave that's coming as cloud native networking well there's no you know official garner definition but I can create one on and if another spot is do it I just want to leverage the cloud construct and a cloud epi I don't want to have to install like like for example the first version was let's put a virtual router that doesn't even understand and then the cloud environment right if I have if I have to install a virtual machine it has to be cloud aware it has to understand the security group if it's a router it has to be programmable to the cloud API and and understand the cloud environment you know one things I hear a lot from either see Saussure CIOs or CXOs in general is this idea of I'm definitely on going API so it's been an API economy so API is key on that point but then they say okay I need to essentially have the right relationship with my suppliers aka clouds you call it above the clouds so the question is what do i do from an architecture standpoint do I just hire more developers and have different teams because you mentioned that's a scale point how do you solve this this problem of okay I got AWS I got GCP or Azure or whatever do I just have different teams or just expose api's where is that optimization where's the focus well I take what you need from an android point of view is a way a control plane across the three clouds and be able to use the api of the cloud to build networks but also to troubleshoot them and do they to operation so you need a view across a three cloud that takes care of routing connectivity that's you know that's the aviatrix plug of you right there so so how do you see so again your Gartner you you you you see the industry you've been a network architect how do you see this this plane out what are the what are the legacy incumbent client-server on-prem networking people gonna do well these versus people like aviatrix well how do you see that plane out well obviously all the incumbent like Arista cisco juniper NSX right they want to basically do the lift and ship or they want to bring and you know VM I want to bring in a section that cloud they call that NSX everywhere and cisco monks bring you star and the cloud recall that each guy anywhere right so everyone what and and then there's cloud vision for my red star and contrail is in the cloud so they just want to bring the management plane in the cloud but it's still based most of them it's still based on putting a VM them in controlling them right you you extend your management console to the cloud that's not truly cloud native right cloud native you almost have to build it from scratch we like to call that cloud naive clown that so close one letter yeah so that was a big con surgeon reinvent take the tea out of cloud native it's cloud naive that went super viral you guys got t-shirts now I know you love but yeah but that really ultimately is kind of double edged sword you got to be you can be naive on the on the architecture side and rolling out but also suppliers are can be naive so how would you define who's naive and who's not well in fact they're evolving as well so for example in Cisco you it's a little bit more native than other ones because they're really scr in the cloud you can't you you really like configure API so the cloud and NSX is going that way and so is Arista but they're incumbent they have their own tools is difficult for them they're moving slowly so it's much easier to start from scratch Avenue like and you know a network happiness started a few years ago there's only really two aviatrix was the first one they've been there for at least three or four years and there's other ones like al kira for example that just started now that doing more connectivity but they wanna create an overlay network across the cloud and start doing policies and trying abstracting all the clouds within one platform so I gotta ask you I interviewed an executive at VMware Sanjay Pune and he said to me at RSA last week oh the only b2 networking vendors left Cisco and VMware what's your respect what's your response to that obviously I mean when you have these waves as new brands that emerge like aviation others though I think there'll be a lot of startups coming out of the woodwork how do you respond to that comment well there's still a data center there's still like a lot of action on campus and there's the one but from the cloud provisioning and clown networking in general I mean they're behind I think you know in fact you don't even need them to start to it you can if you're small enough you can just keep if you're in AWS you can user it with us construct they have to insert themselves I mean they're running behind they're all certainly incumbents I love the term Andy Jesse's that Amazon Web Services uses old guard new guard to talk about the industry what does the new guard have to do the new and new brands that emerge in is it be more DevOps oriented neck Nets a cops is that net ops is the programmability these are some of the key discussions we've been having what's your view on how you this programmability their most important part is they have to make the network's simple for the dev teams and from you cannot have that you cannot make a phone call and get every line in two weeks anymore so if you move to that cloud you have to make the cloud construct as simple enough so that for example a dev team could say okay I'm going to create this VP see but this VP see automatically being associate to your account you cannot go out on the internet you have to go to the transit VP see so there's a lot of action in terms of the I am part and you have to put the control around them too so to make it as simple as possible you guys both I mean you're the COC aviatrix but also you guys a lot of experience going back to networking going back to I call the OSI mace which for us old folks know what that means but you guys know what this means I want to ask you the question as you look at the future of networking here a couple of objectives oh the cloud guys they got networking we're all set with them how do you respond to the fact that networking is changing and the cloud guys have their own networking what some of the pain points that's going on premises and these enterprises so are they good with the clouds what needs what are the key things that's going on in networking that makes it more than just the cloud networking what's your take on well as I said earlier that once you you could easily provision in the cloud you can easily connect to that cloud is when you start troubleshooting application in the cloud and try to scale so this that's where the problem occurs see what you're taking on it and you'll hear from the from the customers that that we have on stage and I think what happens is all the cloud the clouds by definition designed to the 80/20 rule which means they'll design 80% of the basic functionality and they'll lead to 20% extra functionality that of course every Enterprise needs they'll leave that to ISVs like aviatrix because why because they have to make money they have a service and they can't have huge instances for functionality that not everybody needs so they have to design to the common and that's they all do it right they have to and then the extra the problem is that Cambrian explosion that I talked about with enterprises that's holy that's what they need that they're the ones who need that extra 20% so that's that's what I see is is there's always gonna be that extra functionality the in in an automated and simple way that you talked about but yet powerful with up with the visible in control that they expect of on prep that that's that kind of combination that yin and the yang that people like us are providing some I want to ask you were gonna ask some of the cloud architect customer panels it's the same question this pioneers doing some work here and there's also the laggers who come in behind the early adopters what's gonna be the tipping point what are some of those conversations that the cloud architects are having out there or what's the signs that they need to be on this multi cloud or cloud native networking trend what are some the signals that are going on in their environment what are some of the thresholds or things that are going on that there can pay attention to well well once they have application and multiple cloud and they have they get wake up at 2:00 in the morning to troubleshoot them they don't know it's important so I think that's the that's where the robber will hit the road but as I said it's easier to prove it it's ok it's 80s it's easy use a transit gateway put a few V PCs and you're done and use create some presents like equinox and do Direct Connect and Express route with Azure that looks simple is the operations that's when they'll realize ok now I need to understand our car networking works I also need a tool that give me visibility and control not button tell me that I need to understand the basic underneath it as well what are some of the day in the life scenarios that you envision happening with multi Bob because you think about what's happening it kind of has that same vibe of interoperability choice multi-vendor because you have multi clouds essentially multi vendor these are kind of old paradigms that we've lived through the client server and internet working wave what are some of those scenarios of success and that might be possible it would be possible with multi cloud and cloud native networking well I think once you have good enough visibility to satisfy your customers you know not only like to keep the service running an application running but to be able to provision fast enough I think that's what you want to achieve small final question advice for folks watching on the live stream if they're sitting there as a cloud architect or a CXO what's your advice to them right now in this more because honestly public cloud check hybrid cloud they're working on that that gets on-premise is done now multi clouds right behind it what's your advice the first thing they should do is really try to understand cloud networking for each of their cloud providers and then understand the limitation and is what there's cloud service provider offers enough or you need to look to a third party but you don't look at a third party to start with especially an incumbent one so it's tempting to say on and I have a bunch of f5 experts nothing against that five I'm going to bring my five in the cloud when you can use a needle be that automatically understand Easy's and auto scaling and so on and you understand that's much simpler but sometimes you need you have five because you have requirements you have like AI rules and that kind of stuff that you use for years you cannot do it's okay I have requirement and that met I'm going to use legacy stuff and then you have to start thinking okay what about visibility control about the tree cloud but before you do that you have to understand the limitation of the existing cloud providers so first try to be as native as possible until things don't work after that you can start taking multi-cloud great insight somewhat thank you for coming someone in charge with Gardner thanks for sharing informatica is known as the leading enterprise cloud data management company we are known for being the top in our industry in at least five different products over the last few years especially we've been transforming into a cloud model which allows us to work better with the trends of our customers in order to see agile and effective in the business you need to make sure that your products and your offerings are just as relevant in all these different clouds than what you're used to and what you're comfortable with one of the most difficult challenges we've always had is that because we're a data company we're talking about data that a customer owns some of that data may be in the cloud some of that data may be on Prem some of that data may be actually in their data center in another region or even another country and having that data connect back to our systems that are located in the cloud has always been a challenge when we first started our engagement with aviatrix we only had one plan that was Amazon it wasn't till later that a jerk came up and all of a sudden we found hey the solution we already had in place for her aviatrix already working in Amazon and now works in Missouri as well before we knew what GCP came up but it really wasn't a big deal for us because we already had the same solution in Amazon and integer now just working in GCP by having a multi cloud approach we have access to all three of them but more commonly it's not just one it's actually integrations between multiple we have some data and ensure that we want to integrate with Amazon we have some data in GCP that we want to bring over to a data Lake assure one of the nice things about aviatrix is that it gives a very simple interface that my staff can understand and use and manage literally hundreds of VPNs around the world and while talking to and working with our customers who are literally around the world now that we've been using aviatrix for a couple years we're actually finding that even problems that we didn't realize we had were actually solved even before we came across the problem and it just worked cloud companies as a whole are based on reputation we need to be able to protect our reputation and part of that reputation is being able to protect our customers and being able to protect more importantly our customers data aviatrix has been helpful for us in that we only have one system that can manage this whole huge system in a simple easy direct model aviatrix is directly responsible for helping us secure and manage our customers not only across the world but across multiple clouds users don't have to be VPN or networking experts in order to be able to use the system all the members on my team can manage it all the members regardless of their experience can do different levels of it one of the unexpected advantages of aviatrix is that I don't have to sell it to my management the fact that we're not in the news at 3 o'clock in the morning or that we don't have to get calls in the middle of the night no news is good news especially in networking things that used to take weeks to build or done in hours I think the most important thing about a matrix is it provides me a Beatrix gives me a consistent model that I can use across multiple regions multiple clouds multiple customers okay welcome back to altitude 2020 for the folks on the livestream I'm John for Steve Mulaney with CEO of aviatrix for our first of two customer panels on cloud with cloud network architects we got Bobby Willoughby they gone Luis Castillo of National Instruments David should Nick with fact set guys welcome to the stage for this digital event come on up [Applause] [Music] hey good to see you thank you okay okay customer panelist is my favorite part we get to hear the real scoop gets a gardener given this the industry overview certainly multi clouds very relevant and cloud native networking is the hot trend with a live stream out there and the digital event so guys let's get into it the journey is you guys are pioneering this journey of multi cloud and cloud native networking and is soon gonna be a lot more coming so we want to get into the journey what's it been like is it real you got a lot of scar tissue and what are some of the learnings yeah absolutely so multi cloud is whether or not we we accepted as a network engineers is is a reality like Steve said about two years ago companies really decided to to just to just bite the bullet and and and move there whether or not whether or not we we accept that fact we need to now create a consistent architecture across across multiple clouds and that that is challenging without orchestration layers as you start managing different different tool sets and different languages across different clouds so that's it's really important that to start thinking about that guys on the other panelists here there's different phases of this journey some come at it from a networking perspective some come in from a problem troubleshooting which what's your experiences yeah so from a networking perspective it's been incredibly exciting it's kind of a once-in-a-generation 'el opportunity to look at how you're building out your network you can start to embrace things like infrastructure as code that maybe your peers on the systems teams have been doing for years but it just never really worked on bram so it's really it's really exciting to look at all the opportunities that we have and then all the interesting challenges that come up that you that you get to tackle an effect said you guys are mostly AWS right yep right now though we're we are looking at multiple clouds we have production workloads running in multiple clouds today but a lot of the initial work has been with Amazon and you've seen it from a networking perspective that's where you guys are coming at it from yep we evolved more from a customer requirement perspective started out primarily as AWS but as the customer needed more resources from Azure like HPC you know as your ad things like that even recently Google Google Analytics our journey has evolved into more of a multi cloud environment Steve weigh in on the architecture because this has been the big conversation I want you to lead this second yeah so I mean I think you guys agree the journey you know it seems like the journey started a couple years ago got real serious the need for multi cloud whether you're there today of course it's gonna be there in the future so that's really important I think the next thing is just architecture I'd love to hear what you you know had some comments about architecture matters it all starts I mean every Enterprise I talk to maybe talk about architecture and the importance of architecture maybe Bobby it's a fun architecture perspective we sorted a journey five years ago Wow okay and we're just now starting our fourth evolution of our network marketer and we call it networking security net SEC yeah versus Justice Network yeah and that fourth generation architectures be based primarily upon Palo Alto Networks an aviatrix I have Atrix doing the orchestration piece of it but that journey came because of the need for simplicity ok the need for a multi cloud orchestration without us having to go and do reprogramming efforts across every cloud as it comes along right I guess the other question I also had around architectures also Louis maybe just talk about I know we've talked a little bit about you know scripting right and some of your thoughts on that yeah absolutely so so for us we started we started creating the network constructs with cloud formation and we've we've stuck with that for the most part what's interesting about that is today on premise we have a lot of a lot of automation around around how we provision networks but cloud formation has become a little bit like the new manual for us so we we're now having issues with having the to automate that component and making it consistent with our on premise architecture making it consistent with Azure architecture and Google cloud so it's really interesting to see to see companies now bring that layer of abstraction that SEO and brought to the to the web side now it's going up into into the into the cloud networking architecture so on the fourth generation of you mentioned you're in the fourth gen architecture what do you guys what have you learned is there any lessons scar tissue what to avoid what worked what was some of the that's probably the biggest list and there is that when you think you finally figured it out you have it right Amazon will change something as you or change something you know transit gateways a game changer so in listening to the business requirements is probably the biggest thing we need to do up front but I think from a simplicity perspective we like I said we don't want to do things four times we want to do things one time we won't be able to write to an API which aviatrix has and have them do the orchestration for us so that we don't have to do it four times how important is architecture in the progression is it you guys get thrown in the deep end to solve these problems or you guys zooming out and looking at it it's that I mean how are you guys looking at the architecture I mean you can't get off the ground if you don't have the network there so all of those that we've gone through similar evolutions we're on our fourth or fifth evolution I think about what we started off with Amazon without a direct connect gate without a trans a gateway without a lot of the things that are available today kind of the 80/20 that Steve was talking about just because it wasn't there doesn't mean we didn't need it so we needed to figure out a way to do it we couldn't say oh you need to come back to the network team in a year and maybe Amazon will have a solution for it right you need to do it now and in evolve later and maybe optimize or change the way you're doing things in the future but don't sit around and wait you can't I'd love to have you guys each individually answer this question for the live stream because it comes up a lot a lot of cloud architects out in the community what should they be thinking about the folks that are coming into this proactively and/or realizing the business benefits are there what advice would you guys give them an architecture what should be they be thinking about and what are some guiding principles you could share so I would start with looking at an architecture model that that can that can spread and and give consistency they're different to different cloud vendors that you will absolutely have to support cloud vendors tend to want to pull you into using their native toolset and that's good if only it was realistic to talk about only one cloud but because it doesn't it's it's it's super important to talk about and have a conversation with the business and with your technology teams about a consistent model how do I do my day one work so that I'm not you know spending 80 percent of my time troubleshooting or managing my network because I'm doing that then I'm missing out on ways that I can make improvements or embrace new technologies so it's really important early on to figure out how do I make this as low maintenance as possible so that I can focus on the things that the team really should be focusing on Bobby your advice the architect I don't know what else I can do that simplicity operations is key right all right so the holistic view of j2 operation you mentioned let's can jump in day one is your your your getting stuff set up day two is your life after all right this is kind of what you're getting at David so what does that look like what are you envisioning as you look at that 20 mile stare at post multi-cloud world what are some of the things that you want in a day to operations yeah infrastructure is code is really important to us so how do we how do we design it so that we can fit start making network changes and fitting them into like a release pipeline and start looking at it like that rather than somebody logging into a router seoi and troubleshooting things on in an ad hoc nature so moving more towards the DevOps model yes anything on that day - yeah I would love to add something so in terms of day 2 operations you can you can either sort of ignore the day 2 operations for a little while where you get well you get your feet wet or you can start approaching it from the beginning the fact is that the the cloud native tools don't have a lot of maturity in that space and when you run into an issue you're gonna end up having a bad day going through millions and millions of logs just to try to understand what's going on so that's something that that the industry just now is beginning to realize it's it's such as such a big gap I think that's key because for us we're moving to more of an event-driven operations in the past monitoring got the job done it's impossible to modern monitor something there's nothing there when the event happens all right so the event-driven application and then detection is important yeah I think Gardiner was all about the cloud native wave coming into networking that's going to be here thing I want to get your guys perspectives I know you have different views of how you came on into the journey and how you're executing and I always say the beauties in the eye of the beholder and that kind of applies the network's laid out so Bobby you guys do a lot of high-performance encryption both on AWS and Azure that's kind of a unique thing for you how are you seeing that impact with multi cloud yeah and that's a new requirement for us to where we we have a requirement to encrypt and they never get the question should I encryption or not encrypt the answer is always yes you should encrypt when you can encrypt for our perspective we we need to migrate a bunch of data from our data centers we have some huge data centers and then getting that data to the cloud is the timely expense in some cases so we have been mandated that we have to encrypt everything leave from the data center so we're looking at using the aviatrix insane mode appliances to be able to encrypt you know 10 20 gigabits of data as it moves to the cloud itself David you're using terraform you got fire Ned you've got a lot of complexity in your network what do you guys look at the future for yours environment yeah so something exciting that or yeah now is fire net so for our security team they obviously have a lot of a lot of knowledge base around Palo Alto and with our commitments to our clients you know it's it's it's not very easy to shift your security model to a specific cloud vendor right so there's a lot of stuck to compliance of things like that where being able to take some of what you've you know you've worked on for years on Bram and put it in the cloud and have the same type of assurance that things are gonna work and be secured in the same way that they are on prem helps make that journey into the cloud a lot easier and Louis you guys got scripting and get a lot of things going on what's your what's your unique angle on this yeah no absolutely so full disclosure I'm not a not not an aviatrix customer yet it's okay we want to hear the truth that's good Ellis what are you thinking about what's on your mind no really when you when you talk about implementing the tool like this it's really just really important to talk about automation and focus on on value so when you talk about things like encryption and things like so you're encrypting tunnels and crypting the path and those things are it should it should should be second nature really when you when you look at building those back ends and managing them with your team it becomes really painful so tools like a Beatrix that that add a lot of automation it's out of out of sight out of mind you can focus on the value and you don't have to focus on so I gotta ask you guys I'll see aviatrix is here they're their supplier to this sector but you guys are customers everyone's pitching you stuff people are not going to buy my stuff how do you guys have that conversation with the suppliers like the cloud vendors and other folks what's that what's it like we're API all the way you got to support this what are some of the what are some of your requirements how do you talk to and evaluate people that walk in and want to knock on your door and pitch you something what's the conversation like it's definitely it's definitely API driven we we definitely look at the at the PAP i structure of the vendors provide before we select anything that that is always first in mind and also what a problem are we really trying to solve usually people try to sell or try to give us something that isn't really valuable like implementing a solution on the on the on the cloud isn't really it doesn't really add a lot of value that's where we go David what's your conversation like with suppliers you have a certain new way to do things as as becomes more agile and essentially the networking and more dynamic what are some of the conversation is with the either incumbents or new new vendors that you're having what do what do you require yeah so ease of use is definitely definitely high up there we've had some vendors come in and say you know hey you know when you go to set this up we're gonna want to send somebody on site and they're gonna sit with you for your day to configure it and that's kind of a red flag what wait a minute you know do we really if one of my really talented engineers can't figure it out on his own what's going on there and why is that so I you know having having some ease-of-use and the team being comfortable with it and understanding it is really important Bobby how about you I mean the old days was do a bake-off and you know the winner takes all I mean is it like that anymore but what's the Volvic a bake-off last year for us do you win so but that's different now because now when you when you get the product you can install the product and they double your energy or have it in a matter of minutes and so the key is is they can you be operational you know within hours or days instead of weeks but but do we also have the flexibility to customize it to meet your needs could you want to be you want to be put into a box with the other customers when you have needs that your pastor cut their needs yeah almost see the challenge that you guys are living where you've got the cloud immediate value depending how you can roll up any solutions but then you have might have other needs so you got to be careful not to buy into stuff that's not shipping so you're trying to be proactive at the same time deal with what you got I mean how do you guys see that evolving because multi-cloud to me is definitely relevant but it's not yet clear how to implement across how do you guys look at this baked versus you know future solutions coming how do you balance that so again so right now we we're we're taking the the ad hoc approach and experimenting with the different concepts of cloud and and really leveraging the the native constructs of each cloud but but there's a there's a breaking point for sure you don't you don't get to scale this like Alexa mom said and you have to focus on being able to deliver a developer they're their sandbox or they're their play area for the for the things that they're trying to build quickly and the only way to do that is with the with with some sort of consistent orchestration layer that allows you to so use a lot more stuff to be coming pretty quickly hides area I do expect things to start to start maturing quite quite quickly this year and you guys see similar trend new stuff coming fast yeah part of the biggest challenge we've got now is being able to segment within the network being able to provide segmentation between production on production workloads even businesses because we support many businesses worldwide and and isolation between those is a key criteria there so the ability to identify and quickly isolate those workloads is key so the CIOs that are watching or that are saying hey take that he'll do multi cloud and then you know the bottoms-up organization Nick pops you're kind of like off a little bit it's not how it works I mean what is the reality in terms of implementing you know in as fast as possible because the business benefits are but it's not always clear in the technology how to move that fast yeah what are some of the barriers one of the blockers what are the enablers I think the reality is is that you may not think you're multi-cloud but your business is right so I think the biggest barriers there is understanding what the requirements are and how best to meet those requirements and then secure manner because you need to make sure that things are working from a latency perspective that things work the way they did and get out of the mind shift that you know it was a cheery application in the data center it doesn't have to be a Tier three application in the cloud so lift and shift is is not the way to go yeah scale is a big part of what I see is the competitive advantage to a lot these clouds and needs to be proprietary network stacks in the old days and then open systems came that was a good thing but as clouds become bigger there's kind of an inherent lock in there with the scale how do you guys keep the choice open how're you guys thinking about interoperability what are some of the conversations and you guys are having around those key concepts well when we look at when we look at the upfront from a networking perspective it it's really key for you to just enable enable all the all the clouds to be to be able to communicate between them developers will will find a way to use the cloud that best suits their their business need and and like like you said it's whether whether you're in denial or not of the multi cloud fact that then your company is in already that's it becomes really important for you to move quickly yeah and I a lot of it also hinges on how well is the provider embracing what that specific cloud is doing so are they are they swimming with Amazon or Azure and just helping facilitate things they're doing the you know the heavy lifting API work for you or are they swimming upstream and they're trying to hack it all together in a messy way and so that helps you you know stay out of the lock-in because they're you know if they're doing if they're using Amazon native tools to help you get where you need to be it's not like Amazon's gonna release something in the future that completely you know makes you have designed yourself into a corner so the closer they're more than cloud native they are the more the easier it is to to deploy but you also need to be aligned in such a way that you can take advantage of those cloud native technologies will it make sense tgw is a game changer in terms of cost and performance right so to completely ignore that would be wrong but you know if you needed to have encryption you know teach Adobe's not encrypted so you need to have some type of a gateway to do the VPN encryption you know so the aviatrix tool give you the beauty of both worlds you can use tgw with a gateway Wow real quick in the last minute we have I want to just get a quick feedback from you guys I hear a lot of people say to me hey the I picked the best cloud for the workload you got and then figure out multi cloud behind the scenes so that seems to be do you guys agree with that I mean is it do I go Mull one cloud across the whole company or this workload works great on AWS that work was great on this from a cloud standpoint do you agree with that premise and then witness multi-cloud stitch them all together yeah from from an application perspective it it can be per workload but it can also be an economical decision certain enterprise contracts will will pull you in one direction that value but the the network problem is still the same doesn't go away yeah yeah yeah I mean you don't want to be trying to fit a square into a round Hall right so if it works better on that cloud provider then it's our job to make sure that that service is there and people can use it agree you just need to stay ahead of the game make sure that the network infrastructure is there secure is available and is multi cloud capable yeah I'm at the end of the day you guys just validating that it's the networking game now cloud storage compute check networking is where the action is awesome thanks for your insights guys appreciate you coming on the panel appreciate it thanks thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay welcome back on the live feed I'm John fritz T Blaney my co-host with aviatrix I'm with the cube for the special digital event our next customer panel got great another set of cloud network architects Justin Smith was aura Justin broadly with Ellie Mae and Amit Oh tree job with Koopa welcome to stage [Applause] all right thank you thank you okay he's got all the the cliff notes from the last session welcome back rinse and repeat yeah yeah we're going to go under the hood a little bit I think I think they nailed the what we've been reporting and we've been having this conversation around networking is where the action is because that's the end of the day you got a move a pack from A to B and you get workloads exchanging data so it's really killer so let's get started Amit what are you seeing as the journey of multi cloud as you go under the hood and say okay I got to implement this I have to engineer the network make it enabling make it programmable make it interoperable across clouds and that's like I mean almost sounds impossible to me what's your take yeah I mean it it seems impossible but if you are running an organization which is running infrastructure as a cordon all right it is easily doable like you can use tools out there that's available today you can use third-party products that can do a better job but but put your architecture first don't wait architecture may not be perfect put the best architecture that's available today and be agile to iterate and make improvements over the time we get to Justin's over here so I have to be careful when I point a question in Justin they both have the answer but okay journeys what's the journey been like I mean is there phases we heard that from Gartner people come in to multi cloud and cloud native networking from different perspectives what's your take on the journey Justin yeah I mean from our perspective we started out very much focused on one cloud and as we started doing errands we started doing new products the market the need for multi cloud comes very apparent very quickly for us and so you know having an architecture that we can plug in play into and be able to add and change things as it changes is super important for what we're doing in the space just in your journey yes for us we were very ad hoc oriented and the idea is that we were reinventing all the time trying to move into these new things and coming up with great new ideas and so rather than it being some iterative approach with our deployments that became a number of different deployments and so we shifted that tore in the network has been a real enabler of this is that it there's one network and it touches whatever cloud we want it to touch and it touches the data centers that we need it to touch and it touches the customers that we need it to touch our job is to make sure that the services that are available and one of those locations are available in all of the locations so the idea is not that we need to come up with this new solution every time it's that we're just iterating on what we've already decided to do before we get the architecture section I want to ask you guys a question I'm a big fan of you know let the app developers have infrastructure as code so check but having the right cloud run that workload I'm a big fan of that if it works great but we just heard from the other panel you can't change the network so I want to get your thoughts what is cloud native networking and is that the engine really that's the enabler for this multi cloud trend but you guys taken we'll start with Amit what do you think about that yeah so you are gonna have workloads running in different clouds and the workloads would have affinity to one cloud over other but how you expose that it matter of how you are going to build your networks how we are gonna run security how we are going to do egress ingress out of it so it's a big problem how do you split says what's the solution what's the end the key pain points and problem statement I mean the key pain point for most companies is how do you take your traditionally on-premise network and then blow that out to the cloud in a way that makes sense you know IP conflicts you have IP space you pub public eye peas and premise as well as in the cloud and how do you kind of make a sense of all of that and I think that's where tools like a v8 ryx make a lot of sense in that space from our site it's it's really simple its latency its bandwidth and availability these don't change whether we're talking about cloud or data center or even corporate IT networking so our job when when these all of these things are simplified into like s3 for instance and our developers want to use those we have to be able to deliver that and for a particular group or another group that wants to use just just GCP resources these aren't we have to support these requirements and these wants as opposed to saying hey that's not a good idea our job is to enable them not to disable them do you think you guys think infrastructure is code which I love that I think it's that's the future it is we saw that with DevOps but I do start getting the networking is it getting down to the network portion where it's network is code because storage and compute working really well is seeing all kubernetes and service master and network as code reality is it there is got work to do it's absolutely there I mean you mentioned net DevOps and it's it's very real I mean in Cooper we build our networks through terraform and on not only just out of fun build an API so that we can consistently build V nets and VPC all across in the same unit yeah and even security groups and then on top an aviatrix comes in we can peer the networks bridge bridge all the different regions through code same with you guys but yeah everything we deploy is done with automation and then we also run things like lambda on top to make changes in real time we don't make manual changes on our network in the data center funny enough it's still manual but the cloud has enabled us to move into this automation mindset and and all my guys that's what they focus on is bringing what now what they're doing in the cloud into the data center which is kind of opposite of what it should be that's full or what it used to be it's full DevOps then yes yeah I mean for us was similar on-premise still somewhat very manual although we're moving more Norton ninja and terraform concepts but everything in the production environment is colored Confirmation terraform code and now coming into the datacenter same I just wanted to jump in on a Justin Smith one of the comment that you made because it's something that we always talk about a lot is that the center of gravity of architecture used to be an on-prem and now it's shifted in the cloud and once you have your strategic architecture what you--what do you do you push that everywhere so what you used to see at the beginning of cloud was pushing the architecture on prem into cloud now I want to pick up on what you said to you others agree that the center of architect of gravity is here I'm now pushing what I do in the cloud back into on pram and and then so first that and then also in the journey where are you at from 0 to 100 of actually in the journey to cloud DUI you 50% there are you 10% yes I mean are you evacuating data centers next year I mean were you guys at yeah so there's there's two types of gravity that you typically are dealing with no migration first is data gravity and your data set and where that data lives and then the second is the network platform that interrupts all that together right in our case the data gravity sold mostly on Prem but our network is now extending out to the app tier that's going to be in cloud right eventually that data gravity will also move to cloud as we start getting more sophisticated but you know in our journey we're about halfway there about halfway through the process we're taking a handle of you know lift and shift and when did that start and we started about three years ago okay okay go by it's a very different story it started from a garage and one hundred percent on the clock it's a business spend management platform as a software-as-a-service one hundred percent on the cloud it was like ten years ago right yes yeah you guys are riding the wave love that architecture Justin I want to ask user you guys mentioned DevOps I mean obviously we saw the huge observability wave which is essentially network management for the cloud in my opinion right yeah it's more dynamic but this isn't about visibility we heard from the last panel you don't know what's being turned on or turned off from a services standpoint at any given time how is all this playing out when you start getting into the DevOps down well this this is the big challenge for all of us as visibility when you talk transport within a cloud you know we very interesting we we have moved from having a backbone that we bought that we own that would be data center connectivity we now I work for as or as a subscription billing company so we want to support the subscription mindset so rather than going and buying circuits and having to wait three months to install and then coming up with some way to get things connected and resiliency and redundancy I my backbone is in the cloud I use the cloud providers interconnections between regions to transport data across and and so if you do that with their native solutions you you do lose visibility there are areas in that that you don't get which is why controlling you know controllers and having some type of management plane is a requirement for us to do what we're supposed to do and provide consistency while doing it a great conversation I loved when you said earlier latency bandwidth I think availability with your sim pop3 things guys SLA I mean you just do ping times between clouds it's like you don't know what you're getting for round-trip times this becomes a huge kind of risk management black hole whatever you want to call blind spot how are you guys looking at the interconnects between clouds because you know I can see that working from you know ground to cloud I'm per cloud but when you start doing with multi clouds workload I mean SL leis will be all over the map won't they just inherently but how do you guys view that yeah I think we talked about workload and we know that the workloads are going to be different in different clouds but they are going to be calling each other so it's very important to have that visibility that you can see how data is flowing at what latency and what our ability is hour is there and our authority needs to operate on that so it's solely use the software dashboard look at the times and look at the latency in the old days strong so on open so on you try to figure it out and then your day is you have to figure out just and what's your answer to that because you're in the middle of it yeah I mean I think the the key thing there is that we have to plan for that failure we have to plan for that latency and our applications it's starting start tracking in your SLI something you start planning for and you loosely couple these services and a much more micro services approach so you actually can handle that kind of failure or that type of unknown latency and unfortunately the cloud has made us much better at handling exceptions a much better way you guys are all great examples of cloud native from day one and you guys had when did you have the tipping point moment or the Epiphany of saying a multi clouds real I can't ignore it I got to factor it into all my design design principles and and everything you're doing what's it was there a moment or was it was it from day one now there are two divisions one was the business so in business there was some affinity to not be in one cloud or to be in one cloud and that drove from the business side so it has a cloud architect our responsibility was to support that business and other is the technology some things are really running better in like if you are running dot network load or you are going to run machine learning or AI so that you have you would have that preference of one cloud over other so it was the bill that we got from AWS I mean that's that's what drives a lot of these conversations is the financial viability of what you're building on top of it which is so we this failure domain idea which is which is fairly interesting is how do I solve or guarantee against a failure domain you have methodologies with you know back-end direct connects or interconnect with GCP all of these ideas are something that you have to take into account but that transport layer should not matter to whoever we're building this for our job is to deliver the frames in the packets what that flows across how you get there we want to make that seamless and so whether it's a public internet API call or it's a back-end connectivity through Direct Connect it doesn't matter it just has to meet a contract that you signed with your application folks yeah that's the availability piece just on your thoughts on that I think any comment on that so actually multi clouds become something much more recent in the last six to eight months I'd say we always kind of had a very much an attitude of like moving to Amazon from our private cloud is hard enough why complicate it further but the realities of the business and as we start seeing you know improvements in Google and Asia and different technology spaces the need for multi cloud becomes much more important as well as those are acquisition strategies I matured we're seeing that companies that used to be on premise that we typically acquire are now very much already on a cloud and if they're on a cloud I need to plug them into our ecosystem and so that's really change our multi cloud story in a big way I'd love to get your thoughts on the clouds versus the clouds because you know you compare them Amazon's got more features they're rich with features I see the bills are haiku people using them but Google's got a great Network Google's networks pretty damn good and then you got a sure what's the difference between the clouds who where they've evolved something whether they peak in certain areas better than others what what are the characteristics which makes one cloud better do they have a unique feature that makes Azure better than Google and vice versa what do you guys think about the different clouds yeah to my experience I think there is the approach is different in many places Google has a different approach very devops friendly and you can run your workload like your network can spend regions time I mean but our application ready to accept that MS one is evolving I mean I remember ten years back Amazon's network was a flat network we will be launching servers and 10.0.0.0 mode multi-account came out so they are evolving as you are at a late start but because they have a late start they saw the pattern and they they have some mature set up on the I mean I think they're all trying to say they're equal in their own ways I think they all have very specific design philosophies that allow them to be successful in different ways and you have to kind of that in mine is your architectural and solution for example Amazon has a very much a very regional affinity they don't like to go cross region in their architecture whereas Google is very much it's a global network we're gonna think about as a global solution I think Google also has advantages there to market and so it has seen what asier did wrong it's seen what AWS did wrong and it's made those improvements and I think that's one of their big advantage at great scale to Justin thoughts on the cloud so yeah Amazon built from the system up and Google built from the network down so their ideas and approaches are from a global versus or regional I agree with you completely that that is the big number one thing but the if you look at it from the outset interestingly the the inability or the ability for Amazon to limit layer 2 broadcasting and and what that really means from a VPC perspective changed all the routing protocols you can use all the things that we have built inside of a data center to provide resiliency and and and make things seamless to users all of that disappeared and so because we had to accept that at the VPC level now we have to accept it at the LAN level Google's done a better job of being able to overcome those things and provide those traditional Network facilities to us it's just great panel can go all day here's awesome so I heard we could we'll get to the cloud native naive question so kind of think about what's not even what's cloud is that next but I got to ask you had a conversation with a friend he's like when is the new land so if you think about what the land was at a data center when is the new link you get talking about the cloud impact so that means st when the old st was kind of changing into the new land how do you guys look at that because if you think about it what lands were for inside a premises was all about networking high speed but now when you take the win and make essentially a land do you agree with that and how do you view this trend and is it good or bad or is it ugly and what's what you guys take on this yeah I think it's the it's a thing that you have to work with your application architect so if you are managing networks and if you're a sorry engineer you need to work with them to expose the unreliability that would bring in so the application has to hand a lot of this the difference in the Layton sees and and the reliability has to be worked through the application there land when same concept as it be yesterday I think we've been talking about for a long time the erosion of the edge and so is this is just a continuation of that journey we've been on for the last several years as we get more and more cloud native when we start about API is the ability to lock my data in place and not be able to access it really goes away and so I think this is just continuation that thing I think it has challenges we start talking about weighing scale versus land scale the tooling doesn't work the same the scale of that tooling is much larger and the need to automation is much much higher in a way than it was in a land that's what we're seeing so much infrastructure as code yeah yeah so for me I'll go back again to this its bandwidth and its latency right that bet define those two land versus win but the other thing that's comes up more and more with cloud deployments is where is our security boundary and where can I extend this secure aware appliance or set of rules to protect what's inside of it so for us we're able to deliver VRS or route forwarding tables for different segments wherever we're at in the world and so they're they're trusted to talk to each other but if they're gonna go to someplace that's outside of their their network then they have to cross a security boundary and where we enforce policy very heavily so for me there's it's not just land when it's it's how does environment get to environment more importantly that's a great point and security we haven't talked to yet but that's got to be baked in from the beginning that's architecture thoughts on security are you guys are dealing with it yeah start from the base have app to have security built in have TLS have encryption on the data I transit data at rest but as you bring the application to the cloud and they are going to go multi-cloud talking to over the Internet in some places well have apt web security I mean I mean our principals day Security's day zero every day and so we we always build it into our design we load entire architecture into our applications it's encrypt everything it's TLS everywhere it's make sure that that data is secured at all times yeah one of the cool trends at RSA just as a side note was the data in use encryption piece which is a homomorphic stuff was interesting all right guys final question you know we heard on the earlier panel was also trending at reinvent we take the tea out of cloud native it spells cloud naive okay they got shirts now he being sure he's gonna got this trend going what does that mean to be naive so if you're to your peers out there watching a live stream and also the suppliers that are trying to you know supply you guys with technology and services what's naive look like and what's native look like when is someone naive about implementing all this stuff so for me it's because we are in hundred-percent cloud for us its main thing is ready for the change and you will you will find new building blocks coming in and the network design will evolve and change so don't be naive and think that it's static you wall with the change I think the big naivety that people have is that well I've been doing it this way for twenty years and been successful it's going to be successful in cloud the reality is that's not the case you have to think some of the stuff a little bit differently and you need to think about it early enough so that you can become cloud native and really enable your business on cloud yeah for me it's it's being open minded right the the our industry the network industry as a whole has been very much I am smarter than everybody else and we're gonna tell everybody how it's going to be done and we have we fell into a lull when it came to producing infrastructure and and and so embracing this idea that we can deploy a new solution or a new environment in minutes as opposed to hours or weeks or four months in some cases is really important and and so you know it's are you being closed-minded native being open-minded exactly and and it took a for me it was that was a transformative kind of where I was looking to solve problems in a cloud way as opposed to looking to solve problems in this traditional old-school way all right I know we're out of time but I ask one more question so you guys so good it could be a quick answer what's the BS language when you the BS meter goes off when people talk to you about solutions what's the kind of jargon that you hear that's the BS meter going off what are people talking about that in your opinion you here you go that's total B yes what what triggers use it so that I have two lines out of movies that are really I can if the if I say them without actually thinking them it's like 1.21 jigowatts how you're out of your mind from Back to the Future right somebody's gonna be a bank and then and then Martin ball and and Michael Keaton and mr. mom when he goes to 22 21 whatever it takes yeah those two right there if those go off in my mind somebody's talking to me I know they're full of baloney so a lot of speeds would be a lot of speeds and feeds a lot of data did it instead of talking about what you're actually doing and solutioning for you're talking about well I does this this this and okay 220 221 anytime I start seeing the cloud vendor start benchmarking against each other it's your workload is your workload you need to benchmark yourself don't don't listen to the marketing on that that's that's all I'm a what triggers you and the bsp I think if somebody explains you a not simple they cannot explain you in simplicity then that's a good one all right guys thanks for the great insight great panel how about a round of applause practitioners DX easy solutions integrating company than we service customers from all industry verticals and we're helping them to move to the digital world so as a solutions integrator we interface with many many customers that have many different types of needs and they're on their IT journey to modernize their applications into the cloud so we encounter many different scenarios many different reasons for those migrations all of them seeking to optimize their IT solutions to better enable their business we have our CPS organization it's cloud platform services we support AWS does your Google Alibaba corkle will help move those workloads to wherever it's most appropriate no one buys the house for the plumbing equally no one buys the solution for the networking but if the plumbing doesn't work no one likes the house and if this network doesn't work no one likes a solution so network is ubiquitous it is a key component of every solution we do the network connectivity is the lifeblood of any architecture without network connectivity nothing works properly planning and building a scalable robust network that's gonna be able to adapt with the application needs its when encountering some network design and talking about speed the deployment aviatrix came up in discussion and we then further pursued an area DHT products that incorporated aviatrix is part of a new offering that we are in the process of developing that really enhances our ability to provide cloud connectivity for the lance cloud connectivity there's a new line of networking services that we're getting into as our clients move into hybrid cloud networking it is much different than our traditional based services an aviatrix provides a key component in that service before we found aviatrix we were using just native peering connections but there wasn't a way to visualize all those peering connections and with multiple accounts multiple contacts for security with a v8 church we were able to visualize those different peering connections of security groups it helped a lot especially in areas of early deployment scenarios were quickly able to then take those deployment scenarios and turn them into scripts that we can then deploy repeatedly their solutions were designed for work with the cloud native capabilities first and where those cloud native capabilities fall short they then have solution sets that augment those capabilities I was pleasantly surprised number one with the aviatrix team as a whole in their level of engagement with us you know we weren't only buying the product we were buying a team that came on board to help us implement and solution that was really good to work together to learn both what aviatrix had to offer as well as enhancements that we had to bring that aviatrix was able to put into their product and meet our needs even better aviatrix was a joy to find because they really provided us the technology that we needed in order to provide multi cloud connectivity that really added to the functionality that you can't get from the basic law providing services we're taking our customers on a journey to simplify and optimize their IT infrastructure aviatrix certainly has made my job much easier okay welcome back to altitude 2020 for the digital event for the live feed welcome back I'm John Ford with the cube with Steve Mulaney CEO aviatrix for the next panel from global system integrators the folks who are building and working with folks on their journey to multi cloud and cloud native networking we've got a great panel George Buckman with dxc and Derek Monahan with wwt welcome to the stage [Applause] [Music] okay you guys are the ones out there advising building and getting down and dirty with multi cloud and cloud native networking we heard from the customer panel you can see the diversity of where people come into the journey of cloud it kind of depends upon where you are but the trends are all clear cloud native networking DevOps up and down the stack this has been the main engine what's your guys take of the disk journey to multi cloud what do you guys seeing yeah it's it's critical I mean we're seeing all of our enterprise customers enter into this they've been through the migrations of the easy stuff you know now they're trying to optimize and get more improvement so now the tough stuffs coming on right and you know they need their data processing near where their data is so that's driving them to a multi cloud environment okay we heard some of the edge stuff I mean you guys are exactly you've seen this movie before but now it's a whole new ballgame what's your take yeah so I'll give you a hint so our practice it's not called the cloud practice it's the multi cloud practice and so if that gives you a hint of how we approach things it's very consultative and so when we look at what the trends are let's look a little year ago about a year ago we were having conversations with customers let's build a data center in the cloud let's put some VP C's let's throw some firewalls with some DNS and other infrastructure out there and let's hope it works this isn't a science project so what we're trying we're starting to see is customers are starting to have more of a vision and we're helping with that consultative nature but it's totally based on the business and you got to start understanding how the lines of business are using the apps and then we evolved into that next journey which is a foundational approach to what are some of the problem statement customers are solving when they come to you what are the top things that are on their my house or the ease of use of jelly all that stuff but what specifically they did digging into yeah some complexity I think when you look at multi cloud approach in my view is network requirements are complex you know I think they are but I think the approach can be let's simplify that so one thing that we try to do and this is how we talk to customers is let's just like you simplify an aviatrix simplifies the automation orchestration of cloud networking we're trying to simplify the design the planning implementation of infrastructure across multiple workloads across multiple platforms and so the way we do it is we sit down we look at not just use cases and not just the questions in common we anticipate we actually build out based on the business and function requirements we build out a strategy and then create a set of documents and guess what we actually build in the lab and that lab that we platform we built proves out this reference architecture actually works absolutely we implement similar concepts I mean we they're proven practices they work great so well George you mentioned that the hard part is now upon us are you referring to networking what is specifically were you getting at Tara so the easy parts done now so for the enterprises themselves migrating their more critical apps or more difficult apps into the environments you know they've just we've just scratched the surface I believe on what enterprises that are doing to move into the cloud to optimize their environments to take advantage of the scale and speed to deployment and to be able to better enable their businesses so they're just now really starting the >> so do you get you guys see what I talked about them in terms of their Cambrian explosion I mean you're both monster system integrators with you know top fortune enterprise customers you know really rely on you for for guidance and consulting and so forth and boy they're networks is that something that you you've seen I mean does that resonate did you notice a year and a half ago and all of a sudden the importance of cloud for enterprise shoot up yeah I mean we're seeing it okay in our internal environment as yeah you know we're a huge company or right customer zero or an IT so we're experiencing that internal okay and every one of our other customers so I have another question oh I don't know the answer to this and the lawyer never asks a question that you don't know the answer to but I'm gonna ask it anyway d XE @ wwt massive system integrators why aviatrix yep so great question Steve so I think the way we approach things I think we have a similar vision a similar strategy how you approach things how we approach things that it worldwide technology number one we want to simplify the complexity and so that's your number one priorities let's take the networking but simplify it and I think part of the other point I'm making is we have we see this automation piece as not just an afterthought anymore if you look at what customers care about visibility and automation is probably the at the top three maybe the third on the list and I think that's where we see the value and I think the partnership that we're building and what I what I get excited about is not just putting yours in our lab and showing customers how it works it's Co developing a solution with you figuring out hey how can we make this better right mr. piller is a huge thing Jenna insecurity alone Network everything's around visibility what automation do you see happening in terms of progression order of operations if you will it's the low-hanging fruit what are people working on now and what are what are some of the aspirational goals around when you start thinking about multi cloud and automation yep so I wanted to get back to answer that question I want to answer your question you know what led us there and why aviatrix you know in working some large internal IT projects and and looking at how we were going to integrate those solutions you know we like to build everything with recipes where Network is probably playing catch-up in the DevOps world but with a DevOps mindset looking to speed to deploy support all those things so when you start building your recipes you take a little of this a little of that and you mix it all together well when you look around you say wow look there's this big bag of a VHS let me plop that in that solves a big part of my problems that I have to speed to integrate speed to deploy and the operational views that I need to run this so that was 11 years about reference architectures yeah absolutely so you know they came with a full slate of reference architectures already the out there and ready to go that fit our needs so it's very very easy for us to integrate those into our recipes what do you guys think about all the multi vendor interoperability conversations that have been going on choice has been a big part of multi cloud in terms of you know customers want choice didn't you know they'll put a workload in the cloud that works but this notion of choice and interoperability is become a big conversation it is and I think our approach and that's why we talk to customers is let's let's speed and be risk of that decision making process and how do we do that because the interoperability is key you're not just putting it's not just a single vendor we're talking you know many many vendors I mean think about the average number of cloud applications a customer uses a business and enterprise business today you know it's it's above 30 it's it's skyrocketing and so what we do and we look at it from an Billy approaches how do things interoperate we test it out we validate it we build a reference architecture it says these are the critical design elements now let's build one with aviatrix and show how this works with aviatrix and I think the the important part there though is the automation piece that we add to it invisibility so I think the visibility is what's what I see lacking across the industry today and the cloud needed that's been a big topic yep okay in terms of aviatrix that you guys see them coming in there one of the ones that are emerging and the new brands emerging with multi cloud you still got the old guard incumbents with huge footprints how our customers dealing with that that kind of component in dealing with both of them yeah I mean where we have customers that are ingrained with a particular vendor and you know we have partnerships with many vendors so our objective is to provide the solution that meets that client and you they all want multi vendor they all want interoperability correct all right so I got to ask you guys a question while we were defining de to operations what does that mean I mean you guys are looking at the big business and technical components of architecture what does de two operations mean what's the definition of that yeah so I think from our perspective my experience we you know de to operations whether it's it's not just the you know the orchestration piece and setting up and let it a lot of automate and have some you know change control you're looking at this from a data perspective how do I support this ongoing and make it easy to make changes as we evolve that the the cloud is very dynamic the the nature of how that fast is expanding the number of features is astonishing trying to keep up to date with a number of just networking capabilities and services that are added so I think day to operation starts with a fundable understanding of you know building out supporting a customer's environments and making it the automation piece easy from from you know a distance I think yeah and you know taking that to the next level of being able to enable customers to have catalog items that they can pick and choose hey I need this network connectivity from this cloud location back to this on pram and being able to have that automated and provisioned just simply by ordering it for the folks watching out there guys take a minute to explain as you guys are in the trenches doing a lot of good work what are some of the engagement that you guys get into how does that progress what is that what's what happens there they call you up and say hey I need multi-cloud or you're already in there I mean take us through why how someone can engage to use a global si to come in and make this thing happen what's looks like typical engagement look like yeah so from our perspective we typically have a series of workshops in a methodology that we kind of go along the journey number one we have a foundational approach and I don't mean foundation meaning the network foundation that's a very critical element we got a factor in security we got a factor in automation so we think about foundation we do a workshop that starts with education a lot of times we'll go in and we'll just educate the customer what does VPC sharing you know what is a private link and Azure how does that impact your business you know customers I want to share services out in an ecosystem with other customers and partners well there's many ways to accomplish that so our goal is to you know understand those requirements and then build that strategy with them thoughts George oh yeah I mean I'm one of the guys that's down in the weeds making things happen so I'm not the guy on the front line interfacing with the customers every day but we have a similar approach you know we have a consulting practice that will go out and and apply their practices to see what those and when do you parachute in yeah when I then is I'm on the back end working with our offering development leads for the networking so we understand or seeing what customers are asking for and we're on the back end developing the solutions that integrate with our own offerings as well as enable other customers to just deploy quickly to meet their connectivity needs it so the patterns are similar great final question for you guys I want to ask you to paint a picture of what success looks like and you know for name customers you don't forget in reveal of kind of who they are but what does success look like in multi-cloud as you as you paint a picture for the folks here and watching on the live stream it's if someone says hey I want to be multi-cloud I got to have my operations agile I want full DevOps I want programmability security built in from day zero what does success look like yeah I think success looks like this so when you're building out a network the network is a harder thing to change than some other aspects of cloud so what we think is even if you're thinking about that second cloud which we have most of our customers are on to public clouds today they might be dabbling in that is you build that network foundation an architecture that takes in consideration where you're going and so once we start building that reference architecture out that shows this is how to sit from a multi-cloud perspective not a single cloud and let's not forget our branches let's not forget our data centers let's not forget how all this connects together because that's how we define multi-cloud it's not just in the cloud it's on Prem and it's off Prem and so collectively I think the key is also is that we provide them an hld you got to start with in a high-level design that can be tweaked as you go through the journey but you got to give a solid structural foundation and that networking which we think most customers think as not not the network engineers but as an afterthought we want to make that the most critical element before you start the journey Jorge from your seed had a success look for you so you know it starts out on these journeys often start out people not even thinking about what is gonna happen what what their network needs are when they start their migration journey to the cloud so I want this success to me looks like them being able to end up not worrying about what's happening in the network when they move to the cloud good guys great insight thanks for coming on share and pen I've got a round of applause the global system integrators [Applause] [Music] okay welcome back from the live feed I'm shuffle with the cube Steve Eleni CEO of aviatrix my co-host our next panel is the aviatrix certified engineers also known as aces this is the folks that are certified their engineering they're building these new solutions please welcome Toby Foster min from Attica Stacy linear from Terra data and Jennifer Reid with Victor Davis to the stage I was just gonna I was just gonna rip you guys and say where's your jackets and Jen's got the jacket on okay good love the aviatrix aces pile of gear there above the clouds soaring to new heights that's right so guys aviatrix aces love the name I think it's great certified this is all about getting things engineered so there's a level of certification I want to get into that but first take us through the day in the life of an ace and just to point out Stacey's a squad leader so he's like a squadron leader Roger and leader yeah squadron leader so he's got a bunch of aces underneath him but share your perspective day-in-the-life Jeff we'll start with you sure so I have actually a whole team that works for me both in the in the North America both in the US and in Mexico and so I'm eagerly working to get them certified as well so I can become a squad leader myself but it's important because one of the the critical gaps that we've found is people having the networking background because they're you graduate from college and you have a lot of computer science background you can program you've got Python but networking in packets they just don't get and so just taking them through all the processes that it's really necessary to understand when you're troubleshooting is really critical mm-hmm and because you're gonna get an issue where you need to figure out where exactly is that happening on the network you know is my my issue just in the V PCs and on the instant side is a security group or is it going on print and this is something actually embedded within Amazon itself I mean I should troubleshot an issue for about six months going back and forth with Amazon and it was the vgw VPN because they were auto-scaling on two sides and we ended up having to pull out the Cisco's and put in aviatrix so I could just say okay it's fixed and actually actually helped the application teams get to that and get it solved yeah but I'm taking a lot of junior people and getting them through that certification process so they can understand and see the network the way I see the network I mean look I've been doing this such for 25 years but I got out when I went in the Marine Corps that's what I did and coming out the network is still the network but people don't get the same training they get they got in the 90s it's just so easy just write some software and they work takes care of itself yes I'll be will get I'll come back to that I want to come back to that that problem solved with Amazon but Toby I think the only thing I have to add to that is that it's always the network fault as long as I've been in network have always been the network's fault and I'm even to this day you know it's still the network's fault and part of being a network guy is that you need to prove when it is and when it's not your fault and that means you need to know a little bit about a hundred different things to make that and now you got a full stack DevOps you gotta know a lot more times another hundred and these times are changing yeah they say you're a squadron leader I get that right what is what does a squadron leader first can you describe what it is I think probably just leading all the network components of it but not they from my perspective when to think about what you asked them was it's about no issues and no escalation soft my day is a good that's a good day yes it's a good day Jennifer you mentioned the Amazon thing this brings up a good point you know when you have these new waves come in you have a lot of new things newly use cases a lot of the finger-pointing it's that guy's problem that girl's problem so what is how do you solve that and how do you get the young guns up to speed is there training is that this is where the certification comes in well is where the certification is really going to come in I know when we we got together at reinvent one of the the questions that that we had with Stephen the team was what what should our certification look like you know she would just be teaching about what aviatrix troubleshooting brings to bear but what should that be like and I think Toby and I were like no no no that's going a little too high we need to get really low because the the better someone can get at actually understanding what actually happening in the network and and where to actually troubleshoot the problem how to step back each of those processes because without that it's just a big black box and they don't know you know because everything is abstracted in Amazon Internet and Azure and Google is substracted and they have these virtual gateways they have VPNs that you just don't have the logs on it's you just don't know and so then what tools can you put in front of them of where they can look because there are full logs well as long as we turned on the flow logs when they built it you know and there's like each one of those little things that well if they had decided to do that when they built it it's there but if you can come in later to really supplement that with training to actual troubleshoot and do a packet capture here as it's going through then teaching them how to read that even yeah Toby we were talking before we came on up on stage about your career you've been networking all your time and then you know you're now entering a lot of younger people how is that going because the people who come in fresh they don't have all the old war stories they don't know you talk about you know that's dimmer fault I walk in bare feet in the snow when I was your age I mean it's so easy now right they say what's your take on how you train the young P so I've noticed two things one is that they are up to speed a lot faster in generalities of networking they can tell you what a network is in high school level now where I didn't learn that too midway through my career and they're learning it faster but they don't necessarily understand why it's that way or you know everybody thinks that it's always slash 24 for a subnet and they don't understand why you can break it down smaller why it's really necessary so the the ramp up speed is much faster for these guys that are coming in but they don't understand why and they need some of that background knowledge to see where it's coming from and why is it important and old guys that's where we thrive Jennifer you mentioned you you got in from the Marines health spa when you got into networking how what was it like then and compared it now almost like we heard earlier static versus dynamic don't be static cuz then you just set the network you got a perimeter yeah no there was no such thing ya know so back in the day I mean I mean we had banyan vines for email and you know we had token ring and I had to set up token ring networks and figure out why that didn't work because how many of things were actually sharing it but then actually just cutting fiber and running fiber cables and dropping them over you know shelters to plug them in and oh crap they swung it too hard and shattered it now I gotta be great polished this thing and actually shoot like to see if it works I mean that was the network crimped five cat5 cables to run an Ethernet you know and then from that just said network switches dumb switches like those were the most common ones you had then actually configuring routers and you know logging into a Cisco router and actually knowing how to configure that and it was funny because I had gone all the way up and was a software product manager for a while so I've gone all the way up the stack and then two and a half three years ago I came across to to work with entity group that it became Victor Davis but we went to help one of our customers Davis and it was like okay so we need to fix the network okay I haven't done this in 20 years but all right let's get to it you know because it really fundamentally does not change it's still the network I mean I've had people tell me well you know when we go to containers we will not have to worry about the network and I'm like yeah you don't I do and then with this were the program abilities it really interesting so I think this brings up the certification what are some of the new things that people should be aware of that come in with the aviatrix ace certification what are some of the highlights can you guys share some of the some of the highlights around the certifications I think some of the importance is that it's it doesn't need to be vendor specific for network generality or basic networking knowledge and instead of learning how Cisco does something or how Palo Alto does something we need to understand how and why it works as a basic model and then understand how each vendor has gone about that problem and solved it in a general that's true in multi cloud as well you can't learn how cloud networking works without understanding how a double u.s. senator and GCP are all slightly the same but slightly different and some things work and some things don't I think that's probably the number one take I think having a certification across clouds is really valuable cuz we heard the global si help the business issues what does it mean to do that is it code is that networking is it configuration is that aviatrix what is the I mean op C aviatrix is the ASA certification but what is it about the multi cloud that makes it multi networking and multi vendor easy answer is yes so you got to be a generalist getting your hands and all you have to be right it takes experience because it's every every cloud vendor has their own certification whether that's hops and advanced networking and advanced security or whatever it might be yeah they can take the test but they have no idea how to figure out what's wrong with that system and the same thing with any certification but it's really getting your hands in there and actually having to troubleshoot the problems you know actually work the problem you know and calm down it's going to be okay I mean because I don't know how many calls I've been on or even had aviatrix join me on it's like okay so everyone calm down let's figure out what's happening it's like we've looked at that screen three times looking at it again it's not gonna solve that problem right but at the same time you know remaining calm but knowing that it really is I'm getting a packet from here to go over here it's not working so what could be the problem you know and actually stepping them through with those scenarios but that's like you only get that by having to do it you know and seeing it and going through it and then I have a question so we you know I just see it we started this program maybe months ago we're seeing a huge amount of interest I mean we're oversubscribed on all the training sessions we've got people flying from around the country even with coronavirus flying to go to Seattle to go to these events were oversubscribed good is that watching leader would put there yeah is that something that you see in your organization's are you recommending that to people do you see I mean I'm just I guess I'm surprised I'm not surprised but I'm really surprised by the demand if you would of this multi cloud network certification because it really isn't anything like that is that something you guys can comment on or do you see the same things in your organization's I say from my side because we operate in the multi cloud environment so it really helps and it's beneficial for us yeah I think I would add that uh networking guys have always needed to use certifications to prove that they know what they know right it's not good enough to say yeah I know IP addresses or I know how a network works and a couple little check marks or a little letters buying helps give you validity um so even in our team we can say hey you know we're using these certifications to know that you know enough of the basics and enough of the understandings that you have the tools necessary right so I guess my final question for you guys is why an eighth certification is relevant and then second part is share what the livestream folks who aren't yet a certified or might want to jump in to be AVH or certified engineers why is it important so why is it relevant and why shouldn't someone want to be an ace-certified I'm uses the right engineer I think my views a little different I think certification comes from proving that you have the knowledge not proving that you get a certification to get no I mean they're backwards so when you've got the training and the understanding and the you use that to prove and you can like grow your certification list with it versus studying for a test to get a certification and have no understanding of ok so that who is the right person that look at this is saying I'm qualified is it a network engineer is it a DevOps person what's your view you know is it a certain you know I think cloud is really the answer it's the as we talked like the edge is getting eroded so is the network definitions eating eroded we're getting more and more of some network some DevOps some security lots and lots of security because network is so involved in so many of them that's just the next progression there I would say I expand that to more automation engineers because we have those now probably extended as well well I think that the training classes themselves are helpful especially the entry-level ones for people who may be quote-unquote cloud architects but I've never done anything and networking for them to understand why we need those things to really work whether or not they go through to eventually get a certification is something different but I really think fundamentally understanding how these things work it makes them a better architect makes them better application developer but even more so as you deploy more of your applications into the cloud really getting an understanding even from our people who have tradition down on Prem networking they can understand how that's going to work in the cloud - well I know we've got just under 30 seconds left I want to get one more question than just one more for the folks watching that are maybe younger that don't have that networking training from your experiences each of you can answer why is it should they know about networking what's the benefit what's in it for them motivate them share some insights and why they should go a little bit deeper in networking Stacey we'll start with you we'll go down I'd say it's probably fundamental right if you don't deliver solutions networking use the very top I would say if you fundamental of an operating system running on a machine how those machines talk together as a fundamental change is something that starts from the base and work your way up right well I think it's a challenge because you you've come from top down now you're gonna start looking from bottom up and you want those different systems to cross communicate and say you built something and you're overlapping IP space not that that doesn't happen but how can I actually make that still operate without having to reappear e-platform it's like those challenges like those younger developers or sis engineers can really start to get their hands around and understand those complexities and bring that forward in their career they got to know the how the pipes are working and because know what's going some plumbing that's right and the works a how to code it that's right awesome thank you guys for great insights ace certified engineers also known as aces give a round of applause thank you okay all right that concludes my portion thank you Steve thanks for have Don thank you very much that was fantastic everybody round of applause for John Currier yeah so great event great event I'm not going to take long we've got we've got lunch outside for that for the people here just a couple of things just call to action right so we saw the Aces you know for those of you out on the stream here become a certified right it's great for your career it's great for knowledge is is fantastic it's not just an aviatrix thing it's gonna teach you about cloud networking multi-cloud networking with a little bit of aviatrix exactly what the Cisco CCIE program was for IP network that type of the thing that's number one second thing is is is is learn right so so there's a there's a link up there for the four to join the community again like I started this this is a community this is the kickoff to this community and it's a movement so go to what a v8 community bh6 comm starting a community at multi cloud so you know get get trained learn I'd say the next thing is we're doing over a hundred seminars in across the United States and also starting into Europe soon will come out and will actually spend a couple hours and talk about architecture and talk about those beginning things for those of you on the you know on the livestream in here as well you know we're coming to a city near you go to one of those events it's a great way to network with other people that are in the industry as well as to start to learn and get on that multi-cloud journey and then I'd say the last thing is you know we haven't talked a lot about what aviatrix does here and that's intentional we want you you know leaving with wanting to know more and schedule get with us in schedule a multi our architecture workshop session so we we sit out with customers and we talk about where they're at in that journey and more importantly where they're going in that in-state architecture from networking compute storage everything and everything you heard today every panel kept talking about architecture talking about operations those are the types of things that we saw we help you cook define that canonical architecture that system architecture that's yours so for so many of our customers they have three by five plotted lucid charts architecture drawings and it's the customer name slash aviatrix arc network architecture and they put it on their whiteboard that's what what we and that's the most valuable thing they get from us so this becomes their twenty-year network architecture drawing that they don't do anything without talking to us and look at that architecture that's what we do in these multi hour workshop sessions with customers and that's super super powerful so if you're interested definitely call us and let's schedule that with our team so anyway I just want to thank everybody on the livestream thank everybody here hopefully it was it was very useful I think it was and joined the movement and for those of you here join us for lunch and thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS reInvent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel along with it's Ecosystem partners. >> Well, welcome back, everyone theCUBE's live coverage in Las Vegas for AWS reInvent. It's theCUBE's 10th year of operations, it's our seventh AWS reInvent and every year, it gets better and better and every year, we've had theCUBE at reInvent, Jerry Chen has been on as a guest. He's a VIP, Jerry Chen, now a general partner at Greylock Tier One, one of the leading global Venture capitals at Silicon Valley. Jerry, you've been on the journey with us the whole time. >> I guess I'm your good luck charm. >> (laughs) Well, keep it going. Keep on changing the game. So, thanks for coming on. >> Jerry: Thanks for having me. >> So, now that you're a seasoned partner now at Greylock. You got a lot of investments under your belt. How's it going? >> It's great, I mean look, every single year, I look around the landscape thinking, "What else could be coming? "What if we surprise this year?" What's the new trends? What both macro-trends, also company trends, like, who's going to buy who, who's going to go public? Every year, it just gets busier and busier and bigger and bigger. >> All these new categories are emerging with this new architecture. I call it Cloud 2.0, maybe next gen Cloud, whatever you want to call it, it's clear visibility now into the fact that DevOps is working, Cloud operations, large scale operations with Cloud is certainly a great value proposition. You're seeing now multiple databases, pick the tool, I think Jassy got that right in his keynote, I believe that, but now the data equation comes over the top. So, you got DevOps infrastructure as code, you got data now looking like it's going to go down that same path of data as code where developers don't have to deal with all the different nuances of how data's stored, how it's handled, where is it, warm or cold or at glacier. So, developers still don't have that yet today. Seems to be an area of Amazon. What's your take on all this? >> I think you saw, so what drove DevOps? Speed, right? It's basically how developers shows you operations, merging of two groups. So, we're seeing the same trend DataOps, right? How data engineers and data scientists can now have the same speeds developers had for the past 10 years, DataOps. So, A, what does that mean? Give me the menu of what I want like, Goldilocks, too big, too small, just right. Too hot, too cold, just right. Like, give me the storage tier, the data tier, the size I want, the temperature I want and the speed I want. So, you're seeing DataOps give the same kind of Goldilocks treatment as developers. >> And on terms of like Cloud evolution again, you've seen the movie from the beginning at VM where now through Amazon, seventh year. What jumps out at you, what do you look at as squinting through the trend lines and the fashion of the features, it still seems to be the same old game, compute memory storage and software. >> Well I mean, compute memory storage, there's an atomic building blocks of a compute, right? So, regardless of services these high level frameworks, deep down, you still have compute networking and storage. So, that's the building blocks but I think we're seeing 10th year of reInvent this kind of, it's not one size fits all but this really big fat long tail, small instances, micro-instances, server lists, big instances for like jumbo VMs, bare metal, right? So, you're seeing not one architecture but folks can kind of pick and choose buy compute by the drip, the drop or buy compute by the whole VM or whole server full. >> And a lot of people are like, the builders love that. Amazon owns the builder market. I mean, if anyone who's doing a startup, they pretty much start on Amazon. It's the most robust, you pick your tools, you build, but Steve Malaney was just on before us says, "Enterprise don't want power tools, "they're going to cut their hand off." (laughs) Right so, Microsoft's been winning with this approach of consumable Cloud and it's a nice card to play because they're not yet there with capabilities with Amazon, so it's a good call, they got an Enterprise sales force. Microsoft playing a different game than AWS because they have to. >> Sure I mean, what's football now, you have a running game, you need a passing game, right? So, if you can't beat them with the running game, you go with a passing game and so, Amazon has kind of like the fundamental building blocks or power tools for the builders. There's a large segment of population out there that don't want that level of building blocks but they want us a little bit more prescriptive. Microsoft's been around Enterprise for many many years, they understand prescriptive tools and architectures. So, you're going to become a little bit more prefab, if you will. Here's how you can actually construct the right application, ML apps, AI apps, et cetera. Let me give you the building blocks at a higher level abstraction. >> So, I want to get your take on value creations. >> Jerry: Sure. >> So, if it's still early (mumbles), it's took a lot more growth, you start to see Jassy even admit that in his keynotes that he said quote, "There are two types "of developers and customers. "People want the building blocks "or people who want solutions." Or prefab or some sort of more consumable. >> More prescriptive, yeah. >> So, I think Amazon's going to start going that way but that being said, there's still opportunities for startups. You're an investor, you invest in startups. Where do you see opportunities? If you're looking at the startup landscape, what is the playbook? How should you advise startups? Because ya know, have the best team or whatever but you look at Amazon, it's like, okay, they got large scale. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> I'm going to be a little nervous. Are they going to eat my lunch? Do I take advantage of them? Do I draft off them? There are wide spaces as vertical market's exploding that are available. What's your view on how startups should attack the wealth creation opportunity value creation? >> There, I mean, Amazon's creating a new market, right? So, you look at their list of many services. There's just like 175 services out there, which is basically too many for any one company to win every single service. So, but you look at that menu of services, each one of those services themselves can be a startup or a collection of services can be a startup. So, I look at that as a roadmap for opportunity of companies can actually go in and create value around AI, around data, around security, around observability because Amazon's not going to naturally win all of those markets. What they do have is distribution, right? They have a lot of developer mind share. So, if you're a startup, you play one or three themes. So like, one is how do I pick one area and go deep for IP, right? Like, cheaper, better, faster, own some IP and though, they're going to execute better and that's doable over and over again in different markets. Number two is, we talked about this before, there's not going to be a one Cloud wins all, Amazon's clearly in the lead, they have won most of the Cloud, so far, but it'll be a multi-Cloud world, it'll be On Premise world. So, how do I play a multi-Cloud world, is another angle, so, go deep in IP, go multi-Cloud. Number three is this end to end solution, kind of prescriptive. Amazon can get you 80% of the way there, 70% of the way there but if you're like, an AI developer, you're a CMO, you're a marketing developer, you kind of want this end to end solution. So, how can I put together a full suite of tools from beginning to end that can give me a product that's a better experience. So, either I have something that's a deeper IP play a seam between multiple Clouds or give it end to end solutions around a problem and solve that one problem for our customer. >> And in most cases, the underlay is Amazon or Azure. >> Or Google or Alley Cloud or On Premises. Not going to wait any time soon, right? And so, how do I create a single fabric, if you will that looks similar? >> I want to riff with you in real time here on theCUBE around data. So, data scale is obviously a big discussion that's starting to happen now, data tsunami, we've heard that for years. So, there's two scale benefits, horizontal scale with data and then vertical specialism, vertical scale or ya know, using AI machine learning in apps, having data, so, how do you view that? What's your reaction to the notion of creating the horizontal scale value and vertical specialism value? >> Both are a great place for startups, right? They're not mutually exclusive but I think if you go horizontal, the amount of data being created by your applications, your infrastructure, your sensors, time stories data, ridiculously large amount, right? And that's not going away any time soon. I recently did investment in ChronoSphere, 'cause you guys covered over at CUBEcon a few weeks ago, that's talking about metrics and observability data, time stories data. So, they're going to handle that horizontal amount of data, petabytes and petabytes, how can we quarry this quickly, deeply with a lot of insight? That's one play, right? Cheaper, better, faster at scale. The next play, like you said, is vertical. It's how do I own data or slice the data with more contacts than I know I was going to have? We talked about the virtual cycle of data, right? Just the system of intelligence, as well. If I own a set of data, be it healthcare, government or self-driving car data, that no one else has, I can build a solution end to end and go deep and so either pick a lane or pick a geography, you can go either way. It's hard to do both, though. >> It's hard for startup. >> For a startup. >> Any big company. >> Very few companies can do two things well, startups especially, succeed by doing one thing very well. >> I think my observation is that I think looking at Amazon, is that they want the horizontal and they're leaving offers on the table for our startups, the vertical. >> Yeah, if you look at their strategy, the lower level Amazon gets, the more open-sourced, the more ubiquitous you try to be for containers, server lists, networking, S3, basic sub straits, so, horizontal horizontal, low price. As you get higher up from like, deep mind like, AI technologies, perception, prediction, they're getting a little bit more specialized, right? As you see these solutions around retail, healthcare, voice, so, the higher up in the stack, they can build more narrow solutions because like any startup of any product, you need the right wedge. What's the right wedge in the customers? At the base level of developers, building blocks, ubiquitous. For solutions marketing, healthcare, financial services, retail, how do I find a fine point wedge? >> So, the old Venture business was all enamored with consumers over the years and then, maybe four years ago, Enterprise got hot. We were lowly Enterprise guys where no one-- >> Enterprise has been hot forever in my mind, John but maybe-- >> Well, first of all, we've been hot on Enterprise, we love Enterprise but then all of a sudden, it just seemed like, oh my God, people had an awakening like, and there's real value to be had. The IT spend has been trillions and the stats are roughly 20 or so percent, yet to move to the Cloud or this new next gen architecture that you're investing companies in. So, a big market... that's an investment thesis. So, a huge enterprise market, Steve Malaney of Aviation called it a thousand foot wave. So, there's going to be a massive enterprise money... big bag of money on the table. (laughs) A lot of re-transformations, lot of reborn on the Cloud, lot of action. What's your take on that? Do you see it the same way because look how they're getting in big time, Goldman Sachs on stage here. It's a lot of cash. How do you think it's going to be deployed and who's going to be fighting for it? >> Well, I think, we talked about this in the past. When you look to make an investment, as a startup founder or as a VC, you want to pick a wave bigger than you, bigger than your competitors. Right so, on the consumer side, ya know, the classic example, your Instagram fighting Facebook and photo sharing, you pick the mobile first wave, iPhone wave, right, the first mobile native photo sharing. If you're fighting Enterprise infrastructure, you pick the Cloud data wave, right? You pick the big data wave, you pick the AI waves. So, first as a founder startup, I'm looking for these macro-waves that I see not going away any time soon. So, moving from BaaS data to streaming real time data. That's a wave that's happening, that's inevitable. Dollars are floating from slower BaaS data bases to streaming real time analytics. So, Rocksett, one of the investors we talked about, they're riding that wave from going BaaS to real time, how to do analytics and sequel on real time data. Likewise, time servers, you're going from like, ya know, BaaS data, slow data to massive amounts of time storage data, Chronosphere, playing that wave. So, I think you have to look for these macro-waves of Cloud, which anyone knows but then, you pick these small wavelettes, if that's a word, like a wavelettes or a smaller wave within a wave that says, "Okay, I'm going to "pick this one trend." Ride it as a startup, ride it as an investor and because that's going to be more powerful than my competitors. >> And then, get inside the wave or inside the tornado, whatever metaphor. >> We're going to torch the metaphors but yeah, ride that wave. >> All right, Jerry, great to have you on. Seven years of CUBE action. Great to have you on, congratulations, you're VIP, you've been with us the whole time. >> Congratulations to you, theCUBE, the entire staff here. It's amazing to watch your business grow in the past seven years, as well. >> And we soft launch our CUBE 365, search it, it's on Amazon's marketplace. >> Jerry: Amazing. >> SaaS, our first SaaS offering. >> I love it, I mean-- >> John: No Venture funding. (laughs) Ya know, we're going to be out there. Ya know, maybe let you in on the deal. >> But now, like you broadcast the deal to the rest of the market. >> (laughs) Jerry, great to have you on. Again, great to watch your career at Greylock. Always happy to have ya on, great commentary, awesome time, Jerry Chen, Venture partner, general partner of Greylock. So keep coverage, breaking down the commentary, extracting the signal from the noise here at reInvent 2019, I'm John Furrier, back with more after this short break. (energetic electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're at San Francisco International Gate 54B, at the Alaska Elevated Experience Event. It's pretty exciting, they're really used the opportunity on the Virgin integration, to kind of rebrand everything. Redo the planes, add a lot of new technology, and we're really happy to have our next guest , she's Annabel Chang, she's the vice president of the Bay area for Alaska. Annabelle great seeing you. >> Thank you for having me. >> So congratulations on the event,-- >> Yes. >> I'm sure there's a lot of work that went into this thing. >> Just to say the least, yes. >> So in your remarks during the pressor you spent a lot of time talking about the community involvement >> Yes >> I think you said that you guys invested over a million dollars in kind of local community >> Yes >> Types of activity. So highlight a couple of those organizations and why is it important for Alaska to play in the community that has nothing to do with me getting on an airplane and flying to Seatag. >> Ah, well it actually has everything to do with that. For example, last year we partnered up with the San Jose Mayor's office and the San Jose Public Library Foundation to offer the first ever free coding camp for girls. It was a week long coding camp. Parents didn't have to worry about providing breakfast or lunch. We had it all taken care of. Why does it matter to Alaska Airlines? We also need engineers to help create the apps, to help run the planes and it is super important that we have a diverse workforce that represents our community. Whether we fly and all of the focus that are onboard, as well. >> Right, so that's pretty interesting. Cause I don't think most people would think of you doing that, right? That's a little bit outside the seat mile, kind of calculation and really investing in the community. >> Yes >> A lot of conversation too about the investment in this terminal. You guys are at all 3 Bay Area airports thank you very much. I like to be able to hop on a plane if I'm delayed. >> Yeah >> But you guys are making a big investment here at SFO. >> Yes, so actually I will add a couple of things. We actually are at 6 Northern California airports. So in addition to our big Bay Area airports, we have flights out of Santa Rosa, right into wine country, Monterey and Sacramento. >> Flights out of Santa Rosa? >> Yes. You can bring that wine right onboard. Not, not a problem. Which is really exciting. But last week we just announced that we are going to be opening up a San Francisco lounge. 8500 sq ft. in 2020 on the third floor. You'll have stunning views of the runway. It'll be like nothing else. It'll be the highest domestic lounge at SFO. >> Right. I was wondering if you could just talk about, a little bit about, thinking about the entire customer experience. I had really interesting interview at GE Aviation. >> Yes >> Years ago, where even GE was thinking about kind from the time you leave your door at your house to the arrive at your destination, and all kind of that whole experience between. When you guys talk about lounges, and terminals, and gates, you really are trying to take a much more wholistic view then simply the travel of actual miles in the air. >> 100 percent. It is all about the guest experience. We are trying to be your favorite airline. And we have to earn that loyalty. So from the moment that you are thinking about booking the flight, we already want that to be as easy of a process as possible. From the moment that you deplane and get your bags. And hopefully, we are always looking for ways to be innovative. So, you know many years ago, Alaska Airlines was the first ever to have the kiosks and mobile check-in. And we continue to look for ways to be top in the field. And actually in flight, I'm proud to share that we have the most free movies in the sky, of any airlines. All I tend to watch a few of the same movies over and over again But literally you could scroll, scroll, scroll. It goes from A to Z. Most people kind of get stuck in like the Gs. >> They don't make it past the Gs. >> Yeah, but I promise there's some goodies in the back of the alphabet. >> Right, to just kind of close. You know you talk about WiFi, and you talked about movies, about kind of the role of technology and how Alaska continues to be innovative, leveraging technology with that, with the lounge, with the new C configurations. >> Yeah >> How important to you guys to be able to execute your vision. >> So we want to be your top west coast airline. And the west coast is obviously the tech hub of the entire world. So we know that our travelers care very much about technology. So we're looking ways creative, to make sure that everyone has power. As I always say ABC, always be charging. >> Right, right. >> So we want to make sure your tablets, your phone, your laptop is always available to charge. And we are looking for ways to be creative. So, for example, we know that everyone has personal mobile phones or laptops now. And we're looking for ways to make sure we can take advantage of that technology and offer it to you. >> Right. >> I know, number 1, fast WiFi is going to be key to our success. >> Well Annabel, thanks for taking a few minutes. We look forward to getting on the plane here >> Yeah. >> In a few minutes and >> We're going to have some ice cream aren't we. >> Oh we're going to have ice cream? Yes >> Salt and straw, you don't have to wait in line hopefully. >> Yeah, thank you. >> She's Annabel, I'm Jeff >> Thank you. >> You're watching theCube, we're here at SFO, Gate 54B. Soon we'll be at 35,000 feet. Thanks for watching. >> Awesome >> Catch you next time >> (upbeat music)

(upbeat orchestral music) >> Welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studios having a CUBE conversation about digital transformation, industrial internet, AI, ML, all things great, and we're really excited to have a representative of GE, one of our favorite companies to work with because they're at the cutting edge of old industrial stuff and new digital transformation and building a big software organization out in San Ramon. So we're so happy to have here first time Jeff Erhardt. He is the VP Intelligent Systems from GE Digital. Jeff, great to see you. >> Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so how did you get into GE? You actually, a creature of the valley, you've been here a little while. How did you end up at GE? >> I have. I'm a new guy, so I've been here about a year and a half, I came in via the acquisition of a company called Wise IO where I was the CEO, so I've spent the last 10 years or so of my life building two different analytic startups. One was based around a very popular and powerful open source language called R and spent a lot of time working with much of the Fortune 500. Think the really data driven companies now that you would think of, the Facebooks, the Goldman Sachs, the Mercks, the Pfeizers helping them go through this data driven journey. Anyway, that company was acquired by Microsoft and is embedded into their products now. But the biggest thing I learned out about that was that even if you have really good data science teams, it's incredibly hard to go from white board into production. How do you take concepts and make them work reliably repeatably, scalably over time? And so, Wise IO was a machine learning company that was a spin out from Berkeley, and we spent time building what I now refer to as intelligent systems for the purposes of customer support automation within things like the sales force and Zendesk ecosystem, and it was really that capability that drew us to GE or drew GE to approach us, to think about how do we build that gap not just from algorithms, but into building true intelligent applications? >> Right, so GE is such a great company. They've been around for a hundred years, original DOW component, Jeff Immelt's not there now, but he was the CEO I think for 16 years. A long period of time. Beth Comstock, fantastic leader. Bill Ruth building this great organization. But it's all built around these industrial assets. But they've started, they did the industrial internet launch. We helped cover it in 2013. They have the Pridix Cloud, their own kind of industrial internet cloud, had a big developer conference. But I'm curious coming from kind of a small Silicon Valley startup situation. When you went into GE, what's kind of the state of their adoption, you know, kind of how had Bill's group penetrated the rest of GE and were they making process? We're people kinda getting it, or were you still doing some evangelical work out in the field? Absolutely both, meaning people understand it are implementing yet I think there was maybe misunderstandings about how to think about software data in particular analytics and AI machine learning. And so a big part of my first year at the company was to spend the time coming in really from the top down, from sort of the CEO and CDO levels across the different business understanding what was the state of data and data driven processes within their businesses. And what I learned really quickly was that the core of this business, and this is all public information been well publicized, is in things like GE Aviation. It's not necessarily the sale of the engine that is incredible profitable, but rather it's maintaining and servicing that over time. >> Right. >> And what organizations like them, like our oil and gas divisions, with things like their inspection capabilities like our power division had really done is they had created as a service businesses where they we're taking data across the customer base, running it through a data driven process, and then driving outcomes for our customers. And all of a sudden the aha moment was wow, wait a minute. This is the business model that every startup in the valley is getting funded to take down the traditional software players for. It's just not yet modern, scalable, repeatable, with AI machine learning built in, but that's the purpose and the value of building these common platforms with these applications on top that you can then make intelligent. >> Right. >> So, once we figure that out it was very easy to know where to focus and start building from that. >> So it's just, it's kinda weird I'm sure for people on the outside looking in to say data driven company. We all want to drive data driven companies. But then you say, well wait a minute, now GE builds jet engines. There's no greater example that's used at conferences as to the number of terabytes of data an engine throws off on a transcontinental flight. Or you think of a power plant or locomotion and you think of the control room with all this information so it probably seems counterintuitive to most that, didn't they have data, weren't they a data driven organization? How has the onset of machine learning and some of the modern architectures actually turned them into a data driven company, where before I think they were but really not to the level that we're specifying here. >> Yah, I-- >> What would be your objective, what are you trying to take on this? >> Absolutely, machine learning, AI, whatever buzz words you want to use is a fascinating topic. It's certainly come into vogue. like many things that are hyped, gets confused, gets misused, and gets overplayed. But, it has the potential to be both an incredibly simple technology as well as an incredibly powerful technology. So, one of the things I've most often seen cause people to go awry in this space is to try to think about what is the new things that I can do with machine learning? What is the green field opportunity? And whenever I'm talking to somebody at whatever level, but particularly at the higher levels of the company is I like to take a step back and I like to say, "What are the value producing, data driven workflows within your business?" And I say define for me the data that you have, how decisions are made upon it, and what outcome that you are driving for. And if you can do that, then what we can do is we can overlay machine learning as a technology to intelligently automate or augment those processes. And in turn what that's gonna do is it's gonna force you to standardize your infrastructure, standardize those workflows, quantify what you're trying to optimize for your customers. And if you do that in a standardized and incremental way, you can look backward having accomplished some very big things. >> Right, and those are such big foundational pieces that most people I think discount again, just the simple question of where is your data. >> That's right. >> What form is it in? So another interesting concept that we cover all the time with all the shows we go to is democratization, right? So it seems to me pretty simple, actually. How do you drive innovation, democratize the data, democratize the tool to manipulate the data, and democratize the ability to actually do something about it. That said, it's not that easy. And this kind of concept that we see evolving from citizen developer to citizen integrator to citizen data scientist is kinda where we all want to go to, but as you've experienced first hand it's not quite as easy as maybe it appears. >> Yah, I think that's a very fair statement and you know, one of the things, again I spend a lot of time talking about, is I like to think about getting the right people in the right roles, using the right tools. And the term data scientist has evolved over the past five plus years going from to give Drew Conway some credit of his Venn diagram of a program or a math kinda domain expert, into meaning anybody that's looking at data. And there's nothing wrong with that, but the concept of taking anybody that has ability to look at data within something like a BI or a Tableau tool, that is something that should absolutely be democratized and you can think about creating citizens for those people. On the flip side, though, how do you structure a true intelligent system that is running reliably, robustly, and particular in our field in mission critical, high risk, high stakes applications? There are bigger challenges than simply are the tools easy enough to use. It's very much more a software engineering problem than it is a data access or algorithmic problem. >> Right. >> And, so we need to build those bridges and think about where do we apply the citizens to for that understanding, and how do we build robust, reliable software over time? >> Right, so many places we can go, and we're gonna go a lot of them. But one of the things you touched on which also is now coming in vogue is kind of ML that you can, somebody else's ML, right? >> Mhmm. >> As you would buy an application at an app store, now there's all kinds of algorithmic equations out there that you can purchase and participate in. And that really begs an interesting question of kinda the classic buy versus build, or as you said before we turned on the cameras buy versus consume because with API economy with all these connected applications, it really opens up an opportunity that you can use a lot more than was produced inside your own four walls. >> Absolutely. >> For those applications. >> Yep. >> And are you seeing that? How's that kinda playing out? >> So we can parse that in a couple of different ways. So the first thing that I would say is there's a Google paper from a few years back that we love and it's required reading for every new employee that we bring on board. And the title of it was machine Learning is the High Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt. And one of the key points within that paper is that the algorithm piece is something like five percent of an overall production machine learning implementation. And so it gets back to the citizen piece. About it's not just making algorithms easier to use, but it's also about where do you consume things from an API economy? So that's the first thing I would think about. The second thing I would think about is there's different ways to use algorithms or APIs or pieces of information within an overall intelligent system. So you might think of speech to text or translation as capabilities. That's something where it probably absolutely makes sense to call an API from an Amazon or a Microsoft or a Google to do that, but then knowing how to integrate that reliably, robustly into the particular application or business problem that you have, is an important next step. >> Right. >> The third thing that I would think about is, it very much matters what your space is. And there's a difference between doing things like image classification on things like Imagenet which is publicly available images which are well documented. Is it a dog versus a cat? Is it a hot dog versus not? Versus some of the things that we face with an industrial context, which aren't really publicly available. So we deal with things like within our oil and gas business we have a very large pipeline inspection integrity business where the purpose of that is to send the equivalent of an MRI machine through the pipes and collect spectral images that collect across 14 different sensors. The ability to think that you're gonna take a pre trained algorithm based on deep learning and publicly available images to something that is noisy, dirty, has 14 different types of sensors on it and get a good answer-- >> Right. >> Is ridiculous. >> And there's not that many, right? >> And there's not that many. >> That's the other thing I think people underestimate the advantage that Google has we're all taking pictures of dogs and blueberries-- >> Correct. >> So that it's got so much more data to work with. >> That's right. >> As opposed to these industrial applications which are much smaller. >> That's right. >> Lets shift gears again, in terms of digital transformation one of the other often often said examples is when will the day come that GE doesn't sell just engines but actually sells propulsion miles? >> Yep. >> To really convert to a service. >> Yah. >> And that's ultimately where it needs to go cause it's kinda the next step beyond maintenance. >> Yep. >> How are you seeing that digital transformation play out? Do people kinda get it? Do the old line guys that run the jet engine see that this is really a better opportunity? >> Mhmm. >> Cause you guys have, and this is the broader theme, very uniques data and very unique expertise that you've aggregated across in the jet engines base all of your customers in all of the flying conditions and all of the types of airplanes where one individual mechanic or one individual airline just doesn't have an expertise. >> Yep. >> Huge opportunity. >> That's exactly right, and you can say the ame thing in our power space, in our power generation space. You can say the same thing in the one we we're just talking about, you know things like our inspection technology spaces. That's what makes the opportunity so powerful at GE and it's exactly the reason why I'm there because we can't get that any place else. It's both that history, it's that knowledge tied to the data, and very importantly it's what you hinted at that bares repeating is the customer relationships and the customer base upon which you can work together to aggregate all that data together. And if you look at what things are being done, they're already doing it. They are selling effectively, efficiency within a power plant. They are selling safety within certain systems, and again, coming back to why create a platform. Why create standardized applications? Why put these on top? Is if you standardize that, it gives you the ability to create derivative and adjacent products very easily, very efficiently, in ways that nobody else can match. >> Right, right. And I love the whole, for people who aren't familiar with the digital twin concept, but really leveraging this concept of a digital twin not to mimic kinda the macro level, but to mimic the micro level of a particular part unit engine in a particular ecosystem where you can now run simulations, you can run tests, you can do all kinds of stuff without actually having that second big piece of capital gear out there. >> That's right, and it's really hard to mimic those if you didn't start from the first phase of how did you design, build, and put it in to the field? >> Right, right. So, I want to shift gears a little bit just on to philosophical things that you've talked about and doing some research. One of them is that tech is the means to an end, and I know people talk about that all the time, but we're in the tech business. We're here in Silicon Valley. People get so enamored with the technology that they forget that it is a means to an end. It is now the end and to stay focused. >> That's right. >> How are you seeing that kind of play out in GE Digital? Obviously Bill built this humongous organization. I'm super impressed he was able to hire that many people within the last like four years in San Ramon. >> Yah. >> Originally I think just to build the internal software workings within the GE business units, but now really to go much further in terms of industrial internet connectivity, etc. So how do you see that really kinda playing out? >> Yah, I think one of my favorite quotes that I forget who it came from but I'll borrow it is, "Customers don't want to buy a one inch drill bit, they want to buy a one inch hole." >> Right. >> And I think there is both an art and a science and a degree of understanding that needs to go into what is the real customer problem that they are trying to solve for, and how do you peel the onion to understanding that versus just giving what they ask for? >> Right. >> And I think there's an organizational design to how do you get that right. So we had a visitor from Europe, the chairman of one of our large customers, who is going through this data driven journey, and they were at the stage of simply just collecting data off of their equipment. In this case it was elevators and escalators. And then understanding how was it being used? What does it mean for field maintenance, etcetera? But his guys wanted to move right to the end stage and they wanted to come in and say, "Hey, we want to build AI machine learning systems." And we spent some time talking through them about how this is a journey, how you step through it. And you could see the light bulb go off. That yes, I shouldn't try to jump right to that end state. There's a process of going through it, number one, and then the second thing we spent some time talking about was how he can think about structuring his company to create that bridge between the new technology people who are building and doing things in a certain way, and the people who have the legacy knowledge of how things are built, run, and operated? >> Right. >> And it's many times those organizational aspects that are as challenging or as big of barriers to getting it right as a specific technology. >> Oh, for sure, I mean people process and tech it's always the people that are the hard part. It's funny you bring up the elevator or escalator story, We did a show at Spunk many moons ago and we had a person on from an elevator company and the amazing insight they connected Spunk to it. They could actually tell the health of a building by the elevator traffic. >> Yah. >> Not the health of it's industrial systems and it's HVAC, but whether some of the tenants were in trouble. >> Yep. >> By watching the patterns that were coming off the elevator. While different kinda data driven value proposition than they had before. >> Yep. So again, if you could share some best practices really from your experiences with R and now kinda what you're doing at GE about how people should start those first couple of steps in being data driven beyond kinda the simple terms of getting your house in order, getting your data in order, where is it. >> Yah. >> Can you connect to it? Is it clean? >> Yah. >> How should they kinda think about prioritizing? Ho do they look for those easy wins cause at the end of the day it's always about the easiest wins to get the support to move to the next level. >> Yah, so I've sorta got a very simple Hilo play book and you know the first step is you have to know your business. And you have to really understand and prioritize. Again, sometimes I think about not the build, buy decision per say, but maybe the build consume decision. And again, where does it take the effort to go through hiring the people, understanding building those solutions, versus where is it just best to say, "I'm best to consume this product or service from somebody else." So that's number one, and you have to understand your business to do that, really well. The second one is, and we touched on this before, which is getting the right people in the right seats of the bus. Understanding who those citizen data scientists are versus who your developers are, who your analytics people are, who your machine learning people are, and making sure you've got the right people doing the right thing. >> Right. >> And then the last thing is to make sure, to understand that it is a journey. And we like to think about the journey that we go through in sort of three phases, right? Or sort of three swim lanes that could happen, both in parallel, but also as a journey. And we think about those as sort of basic BI and exploratory analytics. How do I learn is there any there there? And fundamentally you're saying, I want to ask and answer a question one time. Think about traditional business reporting. But once you've done that, your goal is always to put something into production. You say, "I've asked and answered once, now I want to ask and answer hundreds, millions, billions of times-- >> Right, right. >> In a row." And the goal is to codify that knowledge into a statistic, an analytic, a business role. And then, how do you start running those within a consistent system? And it's gonna do and force exactly what you just said. Do I have my data in one place? Is it scalable? Is it robust? Is it queryable? Where is it being consumed? How do I capture what's good or bad? And once I start to then define those, I can then start to standardize that within an application workflow and then move into, again, these complex, adaptive, intelligent systems powered by AI machine learning. And so, that's the way we think about it. Know your business, get the people right, understand that it's a systematic journey. >> Right, and then really bake it into the application. >> That's right. >> That's the thing, we don't want to make the same mistake that we do with big data, right? >> Yep. >> Just put it into the application. It's not this stand alone-- >> Correct. >> You know, kinda funny thing. >> Exactly. >> Alright, Jeff, I'll give you the last work before we wrap for the day. So you've been with GE now for about a year and a half, about halfway through 2018. What are your priorities for the next 12 months? If we sit down here, you know June one next year, what are you working on, what's kinda top of mind for you going forward? >> Yah, so top of the line for me, so as I mentioned sort of our first year here was really surveying the landscape, understanding how this company does business, where the opportunities are. Again, where those data driven work flows are. And we have an idea of of that with the core industrial. And so what we've been doing is getting that infrastructure right, getting those people right, getting the V ones of some very powerful systems set up. And so, what I'm gonna be doing over the next year or so is really working with them to scale those out within those core parts of the business, understand how we can create derivative and adjacent products over those, and then how we can take them to market more broadly based upon that, exactly as you said earlier, large scale data that we have available, that customer insight, and that knowledge of how we've been building the stuff, so. >> Alright, I look forward to it. >> I look forward to being back in a year. >> All right, Jeff Erhardt. Thanks for watching. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching the CUBE from our Palo Alto studios. See you next time. (upbeat orchestra music)