>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020 the Virtual Experience, really happy to welcome to the program, we have a returning guest. Tarkan Maner is the Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix, in a new role since the last time we had him on the program, and joining him, we have Herman Brown, who's the CIO for the City of San Francisco's District Attorney. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, Tarkan, help set the stage for us. As I mentioned, we know you, our network knows you, but, new to Nutanix in the last year, and talk to us a little bit about this HPE Nutanix partnership. >> Yeah, if you noticed, first of all, thank you for hosting us, great to be here. This is probably, who knows, my fiftieth CUBE I guess, over the past two decades, especially the last twenty years have been crazy for us, obviously in the industry, lots of movement, lots of change. So let me go into the context, that led to Nutanix joining the company, about six months ago in the capacity of Chief Commercial Officer, a hybrid role with some product aspects, business development global market, our cloud infrastructure digitalizes and some of the Corp Dev we're working on. In that context, obviously, HPE is a very, very important strategic partner to us. As you know, the companies, the two companies have been working together for a long time, but especially the last, I would say, six to twelve months, we have this phenomenal relationship around what I call "three focused areas" of our business. Around our digital infrastructure, upward converge infrastructure, a business on top of that, our solutions from data center to DevOps and to this stuff, services, it's three specific segments, we built this really interesting really strong relationship with HPE with some of our philosophies and HPE's platform, now obviously, working through a multicloud channel, who are our own Nutanix cloud, our own hosted cloud, in addition to it, our Telco and SSP partners using their cloud infrastructure as well as some of the hyperscaling work we're doing, with Azure, AWS in addition to our direct SalesForce and private cloud approach, HPE and Nutanix are working hand in hand in this multicloud so to speak operating model. So it's a new relationship in some ways, from a multicloud perspective, but if it has to grow in segments, we had a phenomenal quarter in the last three months, we just released our results, and HPE is growing for us. And we're given definitely a great suite of solutions to our customers with the typical usual, simple to deploy, simple to use mechanics customer delight on the HPE platform. So I'm sure we've got a whole lot more, but glad to be here also with Herman Brown, from the DA's office in San Francisco, my favorite city in the world, so glad to be here. Thank you, Stu, again, for hosting us. >> Great, thanks so much, Tarkan. You know, Herman, we're going to get into a lot of the technology pieces, you with your CIO hat on, you know, want to understand how cloud, how modern infrastructure, your applications are changing, but, give us a little bit about your personal background and really the purview that you cover in the city of San Francisco District Attorney's office. >> Yes, well, you know, I've been with the DA's office for just over 3 years, it'll be 4 years I guess in August of this year, and I come from twenty plus years of private sector experience, some government experience. And, you know, the city and county, the government is really no different than any other organization other than we're known to be a little bit slower to adopt the technologies, which is why I'm here. I want to help government become more efficient, more productive through the use of technology, and so I'm excited to be here and thank you, first and foremost, for having me on the show. I appreciate it. >> I love that you brought that up, because we've been doing theCUBE for just over a decade now, and in the early parts of that, it's like, right, okay, I'm talking to a local government, we understand, your budgets are tight, you're using older technology, you've got duct tape and baling wire to keep things going. The last few years, some of my favorite conversations have been in the public sector, because you talk about some of the tools that are out there, and don't need a huge capital investment to get started, I can modernize, so Herman, digital transformation, is that a term that you've brought from the private sector over to the public sector, or what kind of transformations are you going through and what is it that's I guess driving the need for transformation in your world? >> So yeah, I've been with the city and county of San Francisco for nine years, so I'd love to say that I brought digital transformation or at least the term with me, but I was actually here in the DA's office or in the city and county's employment when that terminology came out. Being the CIO for the San Francisco District Attorney's office, I mean, we're essentially a law firm. And law firms are historically just paper intensive organizations, right, you have court filings and rap sheets, all these physical documents that have to be physically ink signed and transferred from one attorney to another to the courts, and between police departments and sheriffs and so forth and so on. And we just looked at, what are we doing, how can we work more efficient, you know? As a lot of organizations, we're always finding ourselves to be understaffed for the amount of work that we have going on, the city and county of San Francisco, the DA's office, we see roughly 26,000 cases a year, we try about half of those cases per year. And we're a staff of 320 people. That includes everyone, the attorneys, the paralegals, finance folks, IT, investigators. And so it was like, we need to really embrace technology and be able to help transform this paper intensive processes into automated, digital forms and documents that can minimize the physical transferring of data, especially now, during Covid-19. >> Yeah, Herman, that transformation process is often multi-step, there's a lot of people, there's technology, and then there's the applications. It was at a Nutanix show that the comment I made is, well, let's modernize the platform, then you can modernize the applications on top of it. Tarkan, maybe, I'd love to hear just a little commentary from you, you've got a great perspective on this. That modernization effort, where your customers are, some of the levers that Nutanix is helping them along that journey. >> Yeah, so everything Herman said is very interesting, and obviously, a delight to my ears, because as a technologist in the industry for the past three decades, we're dealing with this, what I call, transformational waves, and you know, in the last ten years, the cloud transformation from the server to transition transformation now, increasingly, we're seeing this very fast migrations from the old school legacy data centers with legacy infrastructure and apps, basically are lifting and shifting these applications to a new cloud, so to speak, opened the model. The cloud to us, in a sense, it's not a destination, it's an open model, so if we see the customer's needs at the end of the day, just like Herman outlined, Herman is not trying to do cloud or digitization for the digital cloud's sake, he's trying to lead his team and the DA's office, with the most DAs by the way, in the nation, making sure that they can process data faster. They can achieve their goals, working especially in this post-pandemic world, and the entire change that are happening in our country, in a big way over the past few weeks, the events, and how our country is going to change for the future. So there's going to be a lot of work going to be happening in the government, this transformation or digitization, migration to the cloud, is going to be a big deal, so as a company, it very quickly we've seen this as a huge opportunity for our customers, as we're partnering with them in a multi cloud way. We still believe our server partners are super important in this context with HPE, but the cloud services around HPE Greenlake, the things we are doing with them, at the same time, working with HPE and some of our partners delivering our own Nutanix cloud services as well as some of the things we have been doing with some of Telco's and service providers, to give choice to our customers to consume the services we provide on-prem, through our old cloud services through a third party telephone service provider, or the choice of hyper scale into the U.S. As your Google, unlimited oracle. So in this context this partnership is hugely important, so there's a lot going on with HPE with Antonio, with our CEO, with Tarak, our CFO, with Tom Black, it's Sonali. The entire executive team are working very closely with them, and with Hyko in the fuel organization, our fuel organization, and we really cherish customers like the DA's office who are doing the transformation, who are leading the transformation, during this pandemic and during this massive change in our country and hopefully it's going to make a transformative change to our world in terms of obviously not only technology, but social change, so you see this as a transformative time frame for companies like us and HPE and partners like Herman and DA's office. >> Herman, please! >> Yeah, I was just going to say, and absolutely I agree with Tarkan, and the way that we're able to react so quickly to this pandemic is the fact that we've already have started this digital transformation, that we've already been looking at these cloud services, we've already started down this path, and so it's made the transition with this surging overnight change of the office nine to five, five days a week to you know, everyone is remote every day now, we couldn't do that without having these cloud services such as Nutanix and HPE partnership, to make that possible. >> Yeah, is there something specific you talk, the work from home initiative, did you have to scale something out, did you have to, you know, bring us inside that change that helped enable your workforce that you wouldn't have been able to do without this technology. >> Yeah, we absolutely had to scale out the workforce. I would say that before the beginning of this pandemic, we had roughly 15 people that probably had VPN access from outside the office, now you have to also understand that the DA's office is very unique in the form of the types of data that we handle and deal with, so I have HIPPA data, I have CJIS, which is criminal justice information, that's managed by DOJ, so there are certain systems that we normally would not be able to access from outside the office that we had to be able to access now remotely. And so it's taken some time to get us there to that point, but you know, having this environment that allowed us to scale up easily, start looking at digitizing this process and being able to have the storage and compute and processing power to be able to support that initiative is really what we're talking about, and that's what we've been doing. We've been quickly scaling, adding in additional storage but popping in drives and making this all possible in a very quickly and seamlessly process. >> Excellent. Maybe we've talked a little bit about the results and how you can move faster, you know, digital information all about leveraging your data and be able to react more quickly, so you know, the pandemic definitely has put services to the test and it sounds like they're doing well. Maybe step us back a little bit as to what led you to HPE and Nutanix, how you made that decision. >> Well, you know, we went through a trial, a period, proof of concept, we looked at Dell, we looked at HPE and Nutanix, we looked at a few different solutions, and it really boiled down to cost, and what we were getting, bang for the dollar. I think there are some other great solutions out there or good solutions out there but none of them came to the value that the partnership with HPE and Nutanix actually have to offer to us. You know, one of the things is that with this partnership is when there's a support issue, I call Nutanix, I'm not calling HPE, I'm not calling this, the other third party vendor, I'm not getting the runaround of "oh, that's not our problem, that's someone else's problem, you need to call the software team, you need to call the hardware team," no. It's one person that you know, we call, as I like to say, "one throat to choke." And fortunately, we haven't had to go that route, Nutanix has been an excellent partner for ours and they have been great to work with, and on the ball, and that's what I always talk about, success is not just the success of the organization, but the success of the individuals and the success of the partnership between organizations. And that's what I looked for is a business partner that wants to help me at my role at my organization be successful. >> Great. Herman, we talked about modernizing the environment, bring us inside the applications, if you would, what applications you're using, you know, are there new initiatives that you're doing from an application standpoint? >> Yeah, so we're running the same standard applications that most organizations are running, with DHCPISS, you know, I have some other systems that we run just because of the CIO, CICA hat that I also wear within the organization, I'm very security conscious about talking about those applications. But we run pretty much the same basic applications as most organizations do. Those specialized applications that we also operate on, we do see an improvement in performance, we do see the speediness of the access, the more stability and reliability of the solutions, and so we're very pleased with the performance that we're getting. >> Excellent. You also, you talked about the efficiency of what you're doing. I mentioned earlier that, public sector, you can get started, you know, for smaller chunks using things like Nutanix, but budget, obviously, still a concern, I'm sure, anything you're doing with the verbalization in the infrastructure that is helping you keep budget under control? >> Absolutely, I mean, the Nutanix environment is scalable, it allows us to be able to look at other solutions such as CDI, which we're talking about and looking at, potentially doing for staff members that don't have laptops that may need laptops or need remote access into the system. We also have that ability to scale up with just another leg, more storage, it makes it very easy to go with where you're looking at cost-saving measures, currently running BMWare on the back end, but looking to convert that over AHV, yes, in the future, that can also help us reduce those costs in the future as well. Especially at this point in time, where city and county is looking for department budget savings. >> Excellent. Tarkan, I guess this would be a good point for you to chime in on, you know, generally, AHV and any other commentary you've got regarding-- >> I was just trying to hold my words back, because the things that Herman is doing are so exciting in a way, you know, techies like myself still get really excited. Like Herman talked about we're not doing infrastructure for infrastructure's sake. At the end of the day, Herman and his office like many government offices both in the fed as in state or local, have to do more with less. Obviously in this post-pandemic world, you get even more efficient, more innovative, and get most output from our input. In that context, bringing storage, compute, networking, all integrated in a converged way, it's smart, it's not just adding them up, one plus one plus one equals three, but one plus one plus one equals less than one, in terms of cost, making it make sure it's infrastructures are simplified, easy to deploy, easy to use, that's why we keep an NPS score of 90, by the way, part of the reason, a little bit of shameless plug there for you. I don't know many companies who have an NPS 90 because we make infrastructure simple. So if you settle this, to Herman's point, all those applications he's managing and building and then obviously digitizing, and in some way, lifting a shifting and creating a new cloud digitized model, he want to make sure Herman and companies and organizations like the DA's office under leadership, with innovative CIOs like Herman, making sure they have choice. They can choose the prem model they want, on-prem, off-prem, hybrid, or multicloud, or in a government cloud fashion, and deliver these services. To give you an example, we talked about home as the extended enterprise. Our home office is now part of the office. I have to secure my home the way I secure my Nutanix headquarters because I'm now running my business from home. So in the past, there was a delineation between home and office. Now home is part of the extended office. The way I manage my trash, the way I manage my peer flows, applications, the network, latency, everything has to be dealt with in a very smart way. But even our paper trash in our office, we manage it carefully because of the IP, you know, people steal IP. Guess what, now at home, I have to have the same vigor. Guess what, you know, DA's office, the things that Herman is dealing with, they have to be so careful, not only in the office, but at home. So in that sense, that's the better service, your two desktops, all these new technologies I'm going to deal with in this simple way. Our new solution, all requires a browser, that's it, and no deliver a browser-based application, integration, to home, in a secure way, the things that we've been praying for for a long, long time. So this post-pandemic world is going to make us more agile, is going to make us more efficient, and hopefully we're going to do much more with less. >> Excellent, well, Herman, I have one more question for you, if you can, give us a little bit of a look forward. We always love to hear from a CIO just, number one, what's on your plate, and as you look at this solution, what you'll be using it for and going, and secondly, if you've got anything, if you could have something more that the ecosystem, maybe HPE and Nutanix, or maybe just in general from the ecosystem out there, that would make your life and your staff's easier. >> Well, you know, that's a great question. We have over 30 projects on our project list right now that are active projects that's going on. I have a staff of 9 IT professionals with three open positions, so I should say, 9, I have six, actual staff members with three open positions, currently, and we're on a hiring freeze. So one of the great things about the Nutanix HP solution has been that I've been able to downsize from the two systems engineer to the one system engineer without necessarily losing any bandwidth or knowledge or experience because the environment is so easy to manage, which has been great. We will continue to move forward with the digitization of our records and utilizing the cloud services that are available, through the various channels, and it's just an unprecedented time. I see that this is going to be the new norm. >> Excellent, so Tarkan, we'll let you put the exclamation point on it, give us the final takeaway for HPE and Nutanix. >> So, look, at the end of the day, we are in this new software defined growth and multicloud fashion having a partnership within two companies which covers data center services, DevOps services, as well as end user services, end to end, both in private clouds, also in a multicloud fashion, through telco as well as hyperscalers and Azure, deliver the service, with the open end model the customer chooses. Again, end to end, from data center, to DevOps, to end user, is the perfect marriage that HPE and Nutanix's relationship delivers. So we are really looking forward to working with customers like Herman, to deliver on that dream, on that journey, making sure that cloud migration and cloud consolidation happens efficiently end to end. Again, from the data center, to DevOps, to end user, all the way in a fashion that we do more with less in this post-pandemic world, and we're looking forward to that partnership as we move forward, and thank you Stu and thank you, Herman, for the time today. >> Excellent, well, Tarkan Maner, always a pleasure to catch up with you, really great to get all the update from you and really appreciate HPE and Nutanix bringing us Herman Brown, CIO, Herman, thank you so much for joining us, really appreciate you sharing your story, hopefully, you'll be able to open up and hire those three people that you're looking to hire in your future. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you very much for having me, Tarkan, it's always a pleasure, thanks Nutanix and HPE for just making a solid, great solution that can help in the success of the DA's office. Really do appreciate it. >> Thank you so much, Herman, again, I really appreciate it. >> We'll be back with more coverage from HPE Discover 2020, the Virtual Experience. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you, as always, for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020 the Virtual Experience, really happy to welcome to the program, we have a returning guest. Tarkan Maner is the Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix, in a new role since the last time we had him on the program, and joining him, we have Herman Brown, who's the CIO for the City of San Francisco's District Attorney. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, Tarkan, help set the stage for us. As I mentioned, we know you, our network knows you, but, new to Nutanix in the last year, and talk to us a little bit about this HPE Nutanix partnership. >> Yeah, if you noticed, first of all, thank you for hosting us, great to be here. This is probably, who knows, my fiftieth CUBE I guess, over the past two decades, especially the last twenty years have been crazy for us, obviously in the industry, lots of movement, lots of change. So let me go into the context, that led to Nutanix joining the company, about six months ago in the capacity of Chief Commercial Officer, a hybrid role with some product aspects, business development global market, our cloud infrastructure digitalizes and some of the Corp Dev we're working on. In that context, obviously, HPE is a very, very important strategic partner to us. As you know, the companies, the two companies have been working together for a long time, but especially the last, I would say, six to twelve months, we have this phenomenal relationship around what I call "three focused areas" of our business. Around our digital infrastructure, upward converge infrastructure, a business on top of that, our solutions from data center to DevOps and to this stuff, services, it's three specific segments, we built this really interesting really strong relationship with HPE with some of our philosophies and HPE's platform, now obviously, working through a multicloud channel, who are our own Nutanix cloud, our own hosted cloud, in addition to it, our Telco and SSP partners using their cloud infrastructure as well as some of the hyperscaling work we're doing, with Azure, in addition to our direct sales floors and private cloud approach, HPE and Nutanix are working hand in hand in this multicloud so to speak operative model. So it's a new relationship in some ways, from a multicloud perspective, but if it has to grow in segments, we had a phenomenal quarter in the last three months, we just released our results, and HPE is growing with us. And we're given definitely a great suite of solutions to our customers with the typical usual, simple to deploy, simple to use mechanics customers like on the HPE platform. So I'm sure we've got a whole lot more, but glad to be here also with Herman Brown, from the DA's office in San Francisco, my favorite city in the world, so glad to be here. Thank you, Stu, again, for hosting us. >> Great, thanks so much, Tarkan. You know, Herman, we're going to get into a lot of the technology pieces, you with your CIO hat on, you know, want to understand how cloud, how modern infrastructure, your applications are changing, but, give us a little bit about your personal background and really the purview that you cover in the city of San Francisco District Attorney's office. >> Yes, well, you know, I've been with the DA's office for just over 3 years, it'll be 4 years I guess in August of this year, and I come from twenty plus years of private sector experience, some government experience. And, you know, the city and county, the government is really no different than any other organization other than we're known to be a little bit slower to adopt the technologies, which is why I'm here. I want to help government become more efficient, more productive through the use of technology, and so I'm excited to be here and thank you, first and foremost, for having me on the show. I appreciate it. >> I love that you brought that up, because we've been doing theCUBE for just over a decade now, and in the early parts of that, it's like, right, okay, I'm talking to a local government, we understand, your budgets are tight, you're using older technology, you've got duct tape and baling wire to keep things going. The last few years, some of my favorite conversations have been in the public sector, because you talk about some of the tools that are out there, and don't need a huge capital investment to get started, I can modernize, so Herman, digital transformation, is that a term that you've brought from the private sector over to the public sector, or what kind of transformations are you going through and what is it that's I guess driving the need for transformation in your world? >> So yeah, I've been with the city and county of San Francisco for nine years, so I'd love to say that I brought digital transformation or at least the term with me, but I was actually here in the DA's office or in the city and county's employment when that terminology came out. Being the CIO for the San Francisco District Attorney's office, I mean, we're essentially a law firm. And law firms are historically just paper intensive organizations, right, you have court filings and rap sheets, all these physical documents that have to be physically ink signed and transferred from one attorney to another to the courts, and between police departments and sheriffs and so forth and so on. And we just looked at, what are we doing, how can we work more efficient, you know? As a lot of organizations, we're always finding ourselves to be understaffed for the amount of work that we have going on, the city and county of San Francisco, the DA's office, we see roughly 26,000 cases a year, we try about half of those cases per year. And we're a staff of 320 people. That includes everyone, the attorneys, the paralegals, finance folks, IT, investigators. And so it was like, we need to really embrace technology and be able to help transform this paper intensive processes into automated, digital forms and documents that can minimize the physical transferring of data, especially now, during Covid-19. >> Yeah, Herman, that transformation process is often multi-step, there's a lot of people, there's technology, and then there's the applications. It was at a Nutanix show that the comment I made is, well, let's modernize the platform, then you can modernize the applications on top of it. Tarkan, maybe, I'd love to hear just a little commentary from you, you've got a great perspective on this. That modernization effort, where your customers are, some of the levers that Nutanix is helping them along that journey. >> Yeah, so everything Herman said is very interesting, and obviously, a delight to my ears, because as a technologist in the industry for the past three decades, we're dealing with this, what I call, transformational waves, and you know, in the last ten years, the cloud transformation from the server to transition transformation now, increasingly, we're seeing this very fast migrations from the old school legacy data centers with legacy infrastructure and apps, basically are lifting and shifting these applications to a new cloud, so to speak, opened the model. The cloud to us, in a sense, it's not a destination, it's an open model, so if we see the customer's needs at the end of the day, just like Herman outlined, Herman is not trying to do cloud or digitization for the digital cloud's sake, he's trying to lead his team and the DA's office, with the most DAs by the way, in the nation, making sure that they can process data faster. They can achieve their goals, working especially in this post-pandemic world, and the entire change that are happening in our country, in a big way over the past few weeks, the events, and how our country is going to change for the future. So there's going to be a lot of work going to be happening in the government, this transformation or digitization, migration to the cloud, is going to be a big deal, so as a company, it very quickly we've seen this as a huge opportunity for our customers, as we're partnering with them in a multi cloud way. We still believe our server partners are super important in this context with HPE, but the cloud services around HPE Greenlake, the things we are doing with them, at the same time, working with HPE and some of our partners delivering our own Nutanix cloud services as well as some of the things we have been doing with some of Telco's and service providers, to give choice to our customers to consume the services we provide on-prem, through our old cloud services through a third party telephone service provider, or the choice of hyper scale into the U.S. As your Google, unlimited oracle. So in this context this partnership is hugely important, so there's a lot going on with HPE with Antonio, with our CEO, with Tarak, our CFO, with Tom Black, it's Sonali. The entire executive team are working very closely with them, and with Hyko in the fuel organization, our fuel organization, and we really cherish customers like the DA's office who are doing the transformation, who are leading the transformation, during this pandemic and during this massive change in our country and hopefully it's going to make a transformative change to our world in terms of obviously not only technology, but social change, so you see this as a transformative time frame for companies like us and HPE and partners like Herman and DA's office. >> Herman, please! >> Yeah, I was just going to say, and absolutely I agree with Tarak, and the way that we're able to react so quickly to this pandemic is the fact that we've already have started this digital transformation, that we've already been looking at these cloud services, we've already started down this path, and so it's made the transition with this surging overnight change of the office nine to five, five days a week to you know, everyone is remote every day now, we couldn't do that without having these cloud services such as Nutanix and HPE partnership, to make that possible. >> Yeah, is there something specific you talk, the work from home initiative, did you have to scale something out, did you have to, you know, bring us inside that change that helped enable your workforce that you wouldn't have been able to do without this technology. >> Yeah, we absolutely had to scale out the workforce. I would say that before the beginning of this pandemic, we had roughly 15 people that probably had VPN access from outside the office, now you have to also understand that the DA's office is very unique in the form of the types of data that we handle and deal with, so I have HIPPA data, I have CJIS, which is criminal justice information, that's managed by DOJ, so there are certain systems that we normally would not be able to access from outside the office that we had to be able to access now remotely. And so it's taken some time to get us there to that point, but you know, having this environment that allowed us to scale up easily, start looking at digitizing this process and being able to have the storage and compute and processing power to be able to support that initiative is really what we're talking about, and that's what we've been doing. We've been quickly scaling, adding in additional storage but popping in drives and making this all possible in a very quickly and seamlessly process. >> Excellent. Maybe we've talked a little bit about the results and how you can move faster, you know, digital information all about leveraging your data and be able to react more quickly, so you know, the pandemic definitely has put services to the test and it sounds like they're doing well. Maybe step us back a little bit as to what led you to HPE and Nutanix, how you made that decision. >> Well, you know, we went through a trial, a period, proof of concept, we looked at Dell, we looked at HPE and Nutanix, we looked at a few different solutions, and it really boiled down to cost, and what we were getting, bang for the dollar. I think there are some other great solutions out there or good solutions out there but none of them came to the value that the partnership with HPE and Nutanix actually have to offer to us. You know, one of the things is that with this partnership is when there's a support issue, I call Nutanix, I'm not calling HPE, I'm not calling this, the other third party vendor, I'm not getting the runaround of "oh, that's not our problem, that's someone else's problem, you need to call the software team, you need to call the hardware team," no. It's one person that you know, we call, as I like to say, "one throat to choke." And fortunately, we haven't had to go that route, Nutanix has been an excellent partner for ours and they have been great to work with, and on the ball, and that's what I always talk about, success is not just the success of the organization, but the success of the individuals and the success of the partnership between organizations. And that's what I looked for is a business partner that wants to help me at my role at my organization be successful. >> Great. Herman, we talked about modernizing the environment, bring us inside the applications, if you would, what applications you're using, you know, are there new initiatives that you're doing from an application standpoint? >> Yeah, so we're running the same standard applications that most organizations are running, with DHCPISS, you know, I have some other systems that we run just because of the CIO, CICA hat that I also wear within the organization, I'm very security conscious about talking about those applications. But we run pretty much the same basic applications as most organizations do. Those specialized applications that we also operate on, we do see an improvement in performance, we do see the speediness of the access, the more stability and reliability of the solutions, and so we're very pleased with the performance that we're getting. >> Excellent. You also, you talked about the efficiency of what you're doing. I mentioned earlier that, public sector, you can get started, you know, for smaller chunks using things like Nutanix, but budget, obviously, still a concern, I'm sure, anything you're doing with the verbalization in the infrastructure that is helping you keep budget under control? >> Absolutely, I mean, the Nutanix environment is scalable, it allows us to be able to look at other solutions such as CDI, which we're talking about and looking at, potentially doing for staff members that don't have laptops that may need laptops or need remote access into the system. We also have that ability to scale up with just another leg, more storage, it makes it very easy to go with where you're looking at cost-saving measures, currently running BMWare on the back end, but looking to convert that over AHV, yes, in the future, that can also help us reduce those costs in the future as well. Especially at this point in time, where city and county is looking for department budget savings. >> Excellent. Tarkan, I guess this would be a good point for you to chime in on, you know, generally, AHV and any other commentary you've got regarding-- >> I was just trying to hold my words back, because the things that Herman is doing are so exciting in a way, you know, techies like myself still get really excited. Like Herman talked about we're not doing infrastructure for infrastructure's sake. At the end of the day, Herman and his office like many government offices both in the fed as in state or local, have to do more with less. Obviously in this post-pandemic world, you get even more efficient, more innovative, and get most output from our input. In that context, bringing storage, compute, networking, all integrated in a converged way, it's smart, it's not just adding them up, one plus one plus one equals three, but one plus one plus one equals less than one, in terms of cost, making it make sure it's infrastructures are simplified, easy to deploy, easy to use, that's why we keep an NPS score of 90, by the way, part of the reason, a little bit of shameless plug there for you. I don't know many companies who have an NPS 90 because we make infrastructure simple. So if you settle this, to Herman's point, all those applications he's managing and building and then obviously digitizing, and in some way, lifting a shifting and creating a new cloud digitized model, he want to make sure Herman and companies and organizations like the DA's office under leadership, with innovative CIOs like Herman, making sure they have choice. They can choose the prem model they want, on-prem, off-prem, hybrid, or multicloud, or in a government cloud fashion, and deliver these services. To give you an example, we talked about home as the extended enterprise. Our home office is now part of the office. I have to secure my home the way I secure my Nutanix headquarters because I'm now running my business from home. So in the past, there was a delineation between home and office. Now home is part of the extended office. The way I manage my trash, the way I manage my peer flows, applications, the network, latency, everything has to be dealt with in a very smart way. But even our paper trash in our office, we manage it carefully because of the IP, you know, people steal IP. Guess what, now at home, I have to have the same vigor. Guess what, you know, DA's office, the things that Herman is dealing with, they have to be so careful, not only in the office, but at home. So in that sense, that's the better service, your two desktops, all these new technologies I'm going to deal with in this simple way. Our new solution, all requires a browser, that's it, and no deliver a browser-based application, integration, to home, in a secure way, the things that we've been praying for for a long, long time. So this post-pandemic world is going to make us more agile, is going to make us more efficient, and hopefully we're going to do much more with less. >> Excellent, well, Herman, I have one more question for you, if you can, give us a little bit of a look forward. We always love to hear from a CIO just, number one, what's on your plate, and as you look at this solution, what you'll be using it for and going, and secondly, if you've got anything, if you could have something more that the ecosystem, maybe HPE and Nutanix, or maybe just in general from the ecosystem out there, that would make your life and your staff's easier. >> Well, you know, that's a great question. We have over 30 projects on our project list right now that are active projects that's going on. I have a staff of 9 IT professionals with three open positions, so I should say, 9, I have six, actual staff members with three open positions, currently, and we're on a hiring freeze. So one of the great things about the Nutanix HP solution has been that I've been able to downsize from the two systems engineer to the one system engineer without necessarily losing any bandwidth or knowledge or experience because the environment is so easy to manage, which has been great. We will continue to move forward with the digitization of our records and utilizing the cloud services that are available, through the various channels, and it's just an unprecedented time. I see that this is going to be the new norm. >> Excellent, so Tarkan, we'll let you put the exclamation point on it, give us the final takeaway for HPE and Nutanix. >> So, look, at the end of the day, we are in this new software defined growth and multicloud fashion having a partnership within two companies which covers data center services, DevOps services, as well as end user services, end to end, both in private clouds, also in a multicloud fashion, through telco as well as hyperscalers and Azure, deliver the service, with the open end model the customer chooses. Again, end to end, from data center, to DevOps, to end user, is the perfect marriage that HPE and Nutanix's relationship delivers. So we are really looking forward to working with customers like Herman, to deliver on that dream, on that journey, making sure that cloud migration and cloud consolidation happens efficiently end to end. Again, from the data center, to DevOps, to end user, all the way in a fashion that we do more with less in this post-pandemic world, and we're looking forward to that partnership as we move forward, and thank you Stu and thank you, Herman, for the time today. >> Excellent, well, Tarkan Maner, always a pleasure to catch up with you, really great to get all the update from you and really appreciate HPE and Nutanix bringing us Herman Brown, CIO, Herman, thank you so much for joining us, really appreciate you sharing your story, hopefully, you'll be able to open up and hire those three people that you're looking to hire in your future. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you very much for having me, Tarkan, it's always a pleasure, thanks Nutanix and HPE for just making a solid, great solution that can help in the success of the DA's office. Really do appreciate it. >> Thank you so much, Herman, again, I really appreciate it. >> We'll be back with more coverage from HPE Discover 2020, the Virtual Experience. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you, as always, for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 18. Brought to you by Docker and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of DockerCon 2018 in beautiful San Francisco. It's a stunning day here. We're at Moscone West, I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer. Very honored to welcome to theCUBE, for the first time, the CEO of Docker Inc., Steve Singh. Welcome, Steve. >> Hi Lisa, very nice to meet you. John, how are you? >> So the general session this morning, standing room only between five and six thousand people. I gotta say a couple things that jumped out at me. One, coolest stage entrance I've ever seen with this great, if you haven't seen it from the livestream, this, like, 3D Golden Gate Bridge and I loved that and I loved the demo of Docker Desktop that your kids did, fueled by Mountain Dew, which actually single handedly got me through college here in San Francisco. So, the momentum that you guys, it was kicking off with a bang. >> Yeah, I, look, I've got a great team and one of the things we wanted to communicate this morning is that you're seeing a massive transformation in the world of software. And this transformation is enabling every company in the world to think about their business in a new light. To think about how their business meets customer needs in a way that's much more personal, in a way that delivers more value. And this is the beauty of where Docker is, right, we have a chance to help literally every company in the world. And that's the part, honestly, that gets me excited, is, like, how do you help other people go create amazing businesses? And so this is, I couldn't be more happy to be at Docker. >> Steve, keying on that, one of the customers on stage today, McKesson. >> Yeah. >> And I loved Rashmi Kumar came out and talked about future-proofing for applications, their infrastructure, their applications in partnership with Docker. >> Yeah. And that implies a certain amount of trust that they have in Docker and Docker's technology platform and in partnering with you. You come from a, so you've been at Docker for about a year now, right? Came in as CEO. Docker is still a small company, a couple hundred folks but punching way above its weight with a huge community impact. How do you, and, you know, you've worked with the biggest companies in the world, how do you come in and establish that trust and help reassure them that you're gonna be a good partner for them and, kinda, what are you seeing with your customers? >> It's a great question, John, and look, there's maybe two or three pieces of how we think about that. The first thing, trust is very human, right? You've gotta know that you're walking into a situation as a vendor and as a customer but really as partners. And you're trying to solve a problem together. Because the reality is, this transformation that companies are going through is the first time in 40 years that this kind of transformation has happened. Second is, the technology stack is still in the early stages. Now, it's incredible and it enables amazing things, but it's still in the early stages. So both of us have to walk into the relationship knowing that, you know what, sometimes it won't go perfect, but guess what? We're gonna be, you know, if it doesn't go perfect we're gonna honor everything we ever committed to you and the same thing on the customer's side. They look at it and say, "I may have actually described my needs differently than what they actually are." And that's what a real partnership is. That's number one. Number two is, trust is driven by culture. And one of the things that I love about Docker is that we see our place in the world but we wanna make sure the customer always has choice. We wanna make sure that if we do a great job the customer will choose to work with us. If we don't, they should have the choice to go somewhere else. And that's what our platform enables, is the choice to be able to work with anybody you'd like to work with, whether you're the developer or you're an operator or you're an IT, I'm sorry, an architect, or the executive. The other piece around this is that part of the value of Docker is it's not just the 400 people of our company, right? There's 5,000 members of our community that are adding value to our community. One of the things that I wanna make sure we do for our community is help them not just innovate on this incredible platform but how do we help them take their innovations to market? And so that's part of the ethos of our company. >> One of the things that you talked about this morning that I thought was really compelling was, you said software innovation used to be, for the last 40 years, it's been driven by tech companies. That's changing. You talked about distributed innovation and distributed consumption. How is Docker helping to, culturally, I don't wanna say instill, but helping to influence, maybe, organizations to be able to distribute innovation and be able to share bi-directionally? >> Yeah, so, a great question, Lisa. So, first of all, is there's a cultural change within companies. When you think about the next generation or the next 40 years being, software being driven from non-technology companies. First of all, we're seeing that. Second is that it requires a cultural change within the business but that change is critical 'cause in the absence of becoming more of a software company your business is gonna be under threat, right? From the competing business. Look at what Netflix has done in media compared to every other media company. That same example applies in every single industry. Now, the way that we help enable that software transformation is to provide a platform that is so easy to use that it doesn't require a lot of training. Now this is complicated platforms, so, yes you have to be a fantastic developer or an IT professional but our job is to take complicated technology like container management software, orchestration layers like Swarm or Kubernetes, service mesh, storage networking, all of those, and make it so simple and easy to use that your IT department can say, "I can use this platform to effectively future-proof your company," right? So, how do you have a platform that you can build every application on, take all of you legacy applications on, run it, and then run it anywhere you like. >> I think that's been one of the through lines for Docker since the very beginning, that developer experience, right? >> Yes. >> And what's been interesting in Docker's development was, I think for both inside and outside, is kind of, what is Docker Inc, and the project versus the company, what is it selling, what's the commercial aspect here? I think, I kind of think back to my experience at BMWare, where there was an enterprise side and then a huge install base of workstation folks. And it's even stronger with Docker because actually now with Docker Desktop as an application development environment or a, you know, I don't wanna, not quite development environment but, you know, the one you announced today with Docker Desktop. That's an even more valuable through line into the Enterprise Edition. >> Yeah. >> But I don't, so, I guess where I'm heading, Steve, is, can you talk a little bit about the commercial situation? Docker EE as the flagship platform. >> Yeah, of course. >> And, kind of, where we are in the maturity journey with customers right now, it's real and important. >> Absolutely John, but you're bringing up a great point within this. Look, we're both, we're a enterprise software company and we're this incredible community where innovation is being brought in by every member of the community. And there's nothing in the world that says you can't do both. This idea that you're one company versus another, this is nonsense, alright? It's a very narrow view of the world. In fact, I would argue that, more and more, companies have to think about that they have multiple people that they serve. Multiple constituents that they serve. In our case we serve the Enterprise IT organization and we also serve developers. And developers are a critical part, not just of our community, that is the life of every company going forward. Which is why we're so excited about this. That's the life of every company. So, Docker Desktop, the reason we're so excited about it is, first of all, it is the easiest way to engage with Docker, to build applications. And then we feel like there's a lot more innovation that we can actually deliver within Docker Desktop. Alright, so a million new developers joined on Docker Desktop this year. In fact, we're growing about seven or eight percent month over month on that. And so you should expect over the next year another million will be on Docker Desktop. But it's incumbent upon us to say, the only way that we continue to earn the trust of that portion of our constituents, that of the developer community, is to make sure we're innovative, to make sure we're open to allow others to innovate on top of us. >> I'd love to, kind of, explore on audience a little bit. So, in terms of innovation, you know, we know that the companies that have the ability to aggressively innovate, and to do that they have to have the budget, are the ones that stay relevant and that are the most competitive. But I think I saw some stats and I think Scott Johnson said that close to 90 percent of IT budgets are spent keeping the lights on. So you have very little dollars to actually drive innovation. So when you're talking with customers, and you said you just met with 25 of Docker Inc's biggest customers just this morning, are you talking to both the developer guys and girls as well as the C suite? >> Yeah. >> What is, how are you connecting and then, maybe, is it a conversation to enable the developers to be able to sell the value up the stack or is it vice versa? >> A couple of things here, so, first of all, John, I didn't answer part of your question which is the growth in our Enterprise customer base. We've literally doubled it year over year, right? So, more than 500 Global 10,000 companies that are using Docker to run their applications and to manage their applications. The way that we engage with our customers is literally across the entire constituents of that organization, right? A developer by themselves, as genius as that group of people are, you can't deliver the application. And delivering the application is just as important as building it. And so the IT organization, the ops organization is critical. And then there's gotta be an overriding objective. What is it we're trying to do? How do we transform ourselves into a software company? You think about, think about just for example, Tesla, right? When you have a company, and I realize Tesla's stock goes up and down, they're always in the news, but when you have a company that's worth more than some of the biggest automotive companies in the world, you have to ask yourself why. Well, part of the reason why isn't just the fact that we've got an electric vehicle that's better for the environment. Part of it is, it's really as much a software company as it is a automotive company. They have incredible amounts of data about how we use our cars, where we go, and in fact the Tesla cars are actually interconnected. And so, that brings a perspective in how you build cars and how they're gonna be used and how they're gonna be consumed that's radically different than if you're just an auto manufacturer. Now, look, Ford and GM and Volvo are all really smart, great companies and they're quickly moving through to themselves being software companies. >> Steve, can you talk a little bit about ecosystems? Microsoft, on stage this morning, a long partnership with them but also here at the show, right, enterprise folks, Dell and Accenture and I'm just looking down the list as well as Google and Amazon, right? So, you need to be partnering with a lot of folks to make all this work. How are you approaching that? >> John, part of the reason for that is, let's start with a simple premise, is something this large, alright, you can't possibly innovate fast enough on your own, alright? There's seven billion amazing people on this planet. The only way you can really drive mass scale global innovation, is you have to be open, right? I'm literally a guy that was born in a mud house in India, so I certainly appreciate the opportunity to participate in the rest of the world's economy. So we have to be open to say, anybody that wants to contribute, can. Now, obviously we think that contribution has to be within an ethos, right? If your definition of contribution is how do you help your own business, that's not good enough. You have to look at this and say, there has to be choice, in our view, choice, security and agility. So, how do we deliver those values or that ethos to our customers? And if you're willing to do that, man we want to partner with everybody in this space. >> Yeah, I, sometimes I despair of the tech press, although I consume a lot of it and if I never have to read another Swarm versus Kubernetes article again I would be happy. But Kubernetes' all over the keynote and it seems like Docker you all have embraced it and in fact are supporting it in very innovative ways with the cloud providers. In terms of ecosystem can you talk a little bit about-- >> Yeah, well, part of the value of Docker is we simplify very complex things and make it available to our customers to consume with little training, little understanding of the underlying deep technology. And the other part is that it comes back to this idea that innovation will happen everywhere. Why should we view the world as it's our solution or, you know, nobody's? That's nonsense, right? Kubernetes is a fantastic orchestrational entity. Why shouldn't it be integrated into the Docker container platform? And so, as we did that, guess what happened? Our customers, all they saw was, instead of conflict they saw the opportunity to work together. In fact it's been amazing for the growth in our business, that's why ewe doubled year over year. >> Now, collaboration is essential and we were talking with Scott Johnson a little bit earlier today about the internal collaboration but also the external collaboration with customers. You talked about partnerships, I think that the MTA program, the Modernization of Traditional Apps launched about a year ago with Avanade, Cisco, HPE and Microsoft. Tell us a little bit about that, probably around the same time that you came to the helm. You're seeing, you know, customers like Visa, PayPal as part of this program, be able to transform and go to the container journey. >> Yeah, and Lisa, this speaks to an observation you made a few minutes ago about the fact that, you know, 85, 90% of IT budgets are fixed before you even walk into the year. So, look, the Docker platform can be used for any kind of application. Legacy apps, next generation apps that run in the data center, next generation apps that run on Edge devices. But if you accept that 90% of the apps that sit within a company are all legacy apps, well, guess what, that's where their cost is. And then if you marry that to the fact that every CIO has this problem that I don't have a lot of money that's free in my budget. Well, how do we help solve that? And the way we chose to solve it is this Docker MTA solution. Modernizing Traditional Apps. Take your traditional apps, run 'em on the Docker platform, run 'em on any infrastructure you like, cut your app and infrastructure management costs in half. Now, then take that savings and then apply it towards innovation. This is why it resonates with CIO's. I mean, as much as they may love Docker and they may love us, they have a business to serve and they're very, very practical in how they think about, you know, going about their business. >> So with that approach, thanks John, how receptive were those enterprise CIO's to going, "You're right, we've gotta start with our enterprise apps." They don't have the luxury of time, of ripping out old infrastructure and building them on containers or microservices architectures. And these are often mission-critical applications. Was that an easy sell, was that, tell me about that. >> (laughs) Well, nothing's easy but the reality is, is that it, they got it quickly, right? Because it speaks directly to their paying point. And what I'm very proud of with my team is not only were we able to deliver a great product for MTA but we're also helping our customers actually make sure they can migrate these apps over. But what's been really a positive, you know, kind of a signal we've seen, that's still the early stages, is that as our customers are moving their legacy apps to Docker and running 'em on new infrastructure, sometimes public cloud, and cutting costs, they're starting to take that cost savings and actually applying it to their next generation apps. So they're not using Docker for new apps. And so that is, that's the benefit of when you really try to solve the problem the way the customer wants to consume it. >> So, Steve, the user conference, very energizing, right. >> Yeah. >> Already the energy's been good here, you've been doing trainings and certifications, there's people behind us, everyone's talking, so that kind of in some ways sets the tone for the year, so as you and your team go back to the office after this week, you know, what are you looking to do and what can we expect out of Docker? >> I'll just speak to two things. First of all, there's so much innovation we still have to deliver. If anything, you know, I would say my team will tell me I might be pushing a little hard. But you know what, this is the fun, you only have x number of years in life and you should make the most of it. So we're really excited about new apps, we're excited about SecurEdge apps. We're excited about, I don't know if you saw the demo this morning, of Armada, which allows you to run any app on any operating system, on any infrastructure, all from a single pane of glass. Our customers love that and they're very excited about that. That said, you know, this is a, it's a big test. We have a huge opportunity to welcome a lot of other companies, so when you walk around and see 5,000 people that see amazing opportunity, not just for Docker, for themselves, right? That's the secret part of Docker that I love. We're creating jobs that didn't exist before, right? I mean, you see kids coming out of college now getting Docker skills and they're using that to grow their IT profession. In fact, I was just at i.c.stars, this is an amazing organization in Chicago that helps individuals who've been displaced in the workforce learn the IT skills required to come back to the workforce and really help run internal IT organizations. Guess what they're learning? They're learning Docker. So that's, these are the kind of things that get us excited. >> And that's essential for enterprise organizations who, that's one of the challenges they face, was, you know, modernizing the data center, which they have to do, but then it requires new skill sets, maybe upskilling, so it's exciting to hear that you're seeing this investment in people that have an opportunity, the proclivity to actually learn this technology. >> Yeah, this is, we are happy because we help customers but we also create amazing new jobs that, you know, are, certainly our community can still benefit from. >> So, last question, the three themes that came out of your session and really the general session this morning was, you talked about someone's choice, agility and security. Are those the three pillars that you believe Docker, upon which Docker sits as really competitive differentiators? >> Amen, amen, number one, but it's also our values, right? This is rooted in our values and when a company performs best is when their values show up in their products. Because then you're never lost, you'll always know what you're focused on. And you know, when I ran Concur, we had this vision, north star, called The Perfect Trip. And our objective was to always go create a delightful business trip experience. And for Docker I wanna make sure that we have a north star. And our north star is our values and they have to translate directly to what actually helps the customer. >> Love that, the north star. Well, hopefully theCUBE is the north star of modern tech media. Steve, thanks so much for stopping by. >> Thank you, it's wonderful to meet you. It was great to meet you as well and congratulations on the big success. >> Thank you. >> We look forward to hearing-- >> Thank you Lisa, thank you John. >> What's coming out in the next year. >> Thank you. >> And we wanna thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer today live from San Francisco DockerCon 2018. Stick around, we'll be back after a short break. (upbeat music)

(mellow electronic music) >> Welcome back, we're here live in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. We are live in Las Vegas at Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference, about developers, large-scale cloud, big data, the future. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by co-host, Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org, and our guest is James Hamilton, VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Well thank you very much. >> You're a tech athlete, certainly in our book, is a term we coined, because we love to use sports analogies You're kind of the cutting edge. You've been the business and technology innovating for many years going back to the database days at IBM, Microsoft, and now Amazon. You gave a great presentation at the analyst briefing. Very impressive. So I got to ask you the first question, when did you first get addicted to the notion of what Amazon could be? When did you first taste the Cool-Aide? >> Super good question. Couple different instances. One is I was general manager of exchange hosts and services and we were doing a decent job, but what I noticed was customers were loving it, we're expanding like mad, and I saw opportunity to improve by at least a factor of two I'm sorry, 10, it's just amazing. So that was a first hint that this is really important for customers. The second one was S3 was announced, and the storage price pretty much froze the whole industry. I've worked in storage all my life, I think I know what's possible in storage, and S3 was not possible. It was just like, what is this? And so, I started writing apps against it, I was just blown away. Super reliable. Unbelievably priced. I wrote a fairly substantial app, I got a bill for $7. Wow. So that's really the beginnings of where I knew this was going to change the world, and I've been, as you said, addicted to it since. >> So you also mentioned some stats there. We'll break it down, 'cause we love to talk about the software defined data center, which is basically not even at the hype stage yet. It's just like, it's still undefined, but software virtualization, network virtualization really is pushing that movement of the software focus, and that's essentially you guys are doing. You're talking about notifications and basically it's a large-scale systems problem. That you guys are building a global operating system as Andy Jassy would say. Well, he didn't say that directly, he said internet operating system, but if you believe that APIs are critical services. So I got to ask you that question around this notion of a data center, I mean come on, nobody's really going to give up their data center. It might change significantly, but you pointed out the data center costs are in the top three order, servers, power circulation systems, or cooling circulation, and then actual power itself. Is that right, did I get that right? >> Pretty close, pretty close. Servers dominate, and then after servers if you look at data centers together, that's power, cooling, and the building and facility itself. That is the number two cost, and the actual power itself is number three. >> So that's a huge issue. When we talk like CIOs, it's like can you please take the facility's budget off my back? For many reasons, one, it's going to be written off soon maybe. All kinds of financial issues around-- >> A lot of them don't see it, though, which is a problem. >> That is a problem, that is a problem. Real estate season, and then, yes. >> And then they go, "Ah, it's not my problem" so money just flies out the window. >> So it's obviously a cost improvement for you. So what are you guys doing in that area and what's your big ah-ha for the customers that you walk in the door and say, look, we have this cloud, we have this system and all those headaches can be, not shifted, or relieved if you will, some big asprin for them. What's the communication like? What do you talk to them about? >> Really it depends an awful lot on who it is. I mean, different people care about different things. What gets me excited is I know that this is the dominate cost of offering a service is all of this muck. It's all of this complexity, it's all of this high, high capital cost up front. Facility will run 200 million before there's servers in it. This is big money, and so from my perspective, taking that way from most companies is one contribution. Second contribution is, if you build a lot of data centers you get good at it, and so as a consequence of that I think we're building very good facilities. They're very reliable, and the costs are plummeting fast. That's a second contribution. Third contribution is because... because we're making capacity available to customers it means they don't have to predict two years in advance what they're going to need, and that means there's less wastage, and that's just good for the industry as a whole. >> So we're getting some questions on our crowd chat application. If you want to ask a question, ask him anything. It's kind of like Reddit. Go to crowdchat.net/reinvent. The first question came in was, "James, when do you think ARM will be in the data center?" >> Ah ha, that's a great question. Well, many people know that I'm super excited about ARM. It's early days, the reason why I'm excited is partly because I love seeing lots of players. I love seeing lots of innovation. I think that's what's making our industry so exciting right now. So that's one contribution that ARM brings. Another is if you look at the history of server-side computing, most of the innovation comes from the volume-driven, usually on clients first. The reason why X86 ended up in such a strong position is so many desktops we running X86 processors and as a consequence it became a great server processor. High R&D flow into it. ARM is in just about every device that everyone's carrying around. It's almost every disk drive, it's just super broadly deployed. And whenever you see a broadly deployed processor it means there's an opportunity to do something special for customers. I think it's good for the industry. But in a precise answer to your question, I really don't have one right now. It's something that we're deeply interested in and investigating deeply, but at this point it hasn't happened yet, but I'm excited by it. >> Do you think that... Two lines of questioning here. One is things that are applicable to AWS, other's just your knowledge of the industry and what you think. We talked about that yesterday with OCP, right? >> Yep. >> Not a right fit for us, but you applaud the effort. We should talk about that, too, but does splitting workloads up into little itty, bitty processors change the utilization factor and change the need for things like virtualization, you know? What do you think? >> Yeah, it's a good question. I first got excited about the price performance of micro-servers back in 2007. And at that time it was pretty easy to produce a win by going to a lower-powered processor. At that point memory bandwidth wasn't as good as it could be. It was actually hard on some workloads to fully use a processor. Intel's a very smart company, they've done great work on improving the memory bandwidth, and so today it's actually harder to produce a win, and so you kind of have workloads in classes. At the very, very high end we've got database workloads. They really love single-threaded performance, and performance really is king, but there are lots of highly parallel workloads where there's an opportunity for a big gain. I still think virtualization is probably something where the industry's going to want to be there, just because it brings so many operational advantages. >> So I got to ask the question. Yesterday we had Jason Stowe on, CEO of Cycle Computing, and he had an amazing thing that he did, sorry, trumping it out kids say, but it's not new to you, but it's new to us. He basically created a supercomputer and spun up hundreds of thousands of cores in 30 minutes, which is like insane, but he did it for like 30 grand. Which would've cost, if you try to provision it to the TUCO calculator or whatever your model, it'd be months and years, maybe, and years. But the thing that he said I want to get your point on and I'm going to ask you questions specifically on is, Spot instances were critical for him to do that, and the creativity of his solutions, so I got to ask you, did you see Spot pricing instances being a big deal, and what impact has that done to AWS' vision of large scale? >> I'm super excited by Spot. In fact, it's one of the reasons I joined Amazon. I went through a day of interviews, I met a bunch of really smart people doing interesting work. Someone probably shouldn't have talked to me about Spot because it hadn't been announced yet, and I just went, "This is brilliant! "This is absolutely brilliant!" It's taking the ideas from financial markets, where you've got high-value assets, and saying why don't we actually sell it off, make a market on the basis of that and sell it off? So two things happen that make Spot interesting. The first is an observation up front that poor utilization is basically the elephant in the room. Most folks can't use more than 12% to 15% of their overall server capacity, and so all the rest ends up being wasted. >> You said yesterday 30% is outstanding. It's like have a party. >> 30% probably means you're not measuring it well. >> Yeah, you're lying. >> It's real good, yeah, basically. So that means 70% or more is wasted, it's a crime. And so the first thing that says is, that one of the most powerful advertisements for cloud computing is if you bring a large number of non-correlated workloads together, what happens is when you're supporting a workload you've got to have enough capacity to support the peak, but you only get to monetize the average. And so as the peak to average gets further apart, you're wasting more. So when you bring a large number of non-correlated workloads together what happens is it flattens out just by itself. Without doing anything it flattens out, but there's still some ups and downs. And the Spot market is a way of filling in those ups and downs so we get as close to 100%. >> Is there certain workloads that fit the spot, obviously certain workloads might fit it, but what workloads don't fit the Spot price, because, I mean, it makes total sense and it's an arbitrage opportunity for excess capacity laying around, and it's price based on usage. So is there a workload, 'cause it'll be torrent up, torrent down, I mean, what's the use cases there? >> Workloads that don't operate well in an interrupted environment, that are very time-critical, those workloads shouldn't be run in Spot. It's just not what the resource is designed for. But workloads like the one that we were talking to with Cycle Computing are awesome, where you need large numbers of resources. If the workload needs to restart, that's absolutely fine, and price is really the focus. >> Okay, and question from crowd chat. "Ask James what are his thoughts "on commodity networking and merchant silicon." >> I think an awful lot about that. >> This guy knows you. (both laughing) >> Who's that from? >> It's your family. >> Yeah, exactly! >> They're watching. >> No, network commoditization is a phenomenal thing that the whole industry's needed that for 15 years. We've got a vertical ecosystem that's kind of frozen in time. Vertically-integrated ecosystem kind of frozen in time. Costs everywhere are falling except in networking. We just got to do something, and so it's happening. I'm real excited by that. It's really changing the Amazon business and what we can do for customers. >> Let's talk a little bit about server design, because I was fascinated yesterday listening to you talk how you've come full circle. Over the last decade, right, you started with what's got to be stripped down, basic commodity and now you're of a different mindset. So describe that, and then I have some follow-up questions for you. >> Yeah, I know what you're alluding to. Is years ago I used to argue you don't want hardware specialization, it's crazy. It's the magic's in software. You want to specialize software running on general-purpose processors, and that's because there was a very small number of servers out there, and I felt like it was the most nimble way to run. However today, in AWS when we're running ten of thousands of copies of a single type of server, hardware optimizations are absolutely vital. You end up getting a power-performance advantage at 10X. You can get a price-performance advantage that's substantial and so I've kind of gone full circle where now we're pulling more and more down into the hardware, and starting to do hardware optimizations for our customers. >> So heat density is a huge problem in data centers and server design. You showed a picture of a Quanta package yesterday. You didn't show us your server, said "I can't you ours," but you said, "but we blow this away, "and this is really good." But you describe that you're able to get around a lot of those problems because of the way you design data centers. >> Yep. >> Could you talk about that a little bit? >> Sure, sure, sure. One of the problems when you're building a server it could end up anywhere. It could end up in a beautiful data center that's super well engineered. It could end up on the end of a row on a very badly run data center. >> Or in a closet. >> Or in a closet. The air is recirculating, and so the servers have to be designed with huge headroom on cooling requirements, and they have to be able to operate in any of those environments without driving warranty costs for the vendors. We take a different approach. We say we're not going to build terrible data centers. We're going to build really good data centers and we're going to build servers that exploit the fact those data centers are good, and what happens is more value. We don't have to waste as much because we know that we don't have to operate in the closet. >> We got some more questions coming here by the way. This is awesome. This ask me anything crowd chat thing is going great. We got someone, he's from Nutanix, so he's a geek. He's been following your career for many years. I got to ask you about kind of the future of large-scale. So Spot, in his comment, David's comment, Spot instances prove that solutions like WMare's distributed power management are not valuable. Don't power off the most expensive asset. So, okay, that brings up an interesting point. I don't want to slam on BMWare right now, but I just wanted to bring to the next logical question which is this is a paradigm shift. That's a buzz word, but really a lot's happening that's new and innovative. And you guys are doing it and leading. What's next in the large-scale paradigm of computing and computer science? On the science-side you mentioned merchant silicon. Obviously that's, the genie's out of the bottle there, but what's around the corner? Is it the notifications at the scheduling? Was it virtualization, is it compiler design? What are some of the things that you see out on the horizon that you got your eyes on? >> That's interesting, I mean. I've got, if you name your area, and I'll you some interesting things happening in the area, and it's one of the cool things of being in the industry right now. Is that 10 years ago we had a relatively static, kind of slow-pace. You really didn't have to look that far ahead, because of anything was coming you'd see it coming for five years. Now if you ask me about power distribution, we've got tons of work going on in power distribution. We're researching different power distribution topologies. We're researching higher voltage distribution, direct current distribution. Haven't taken any of those steps yet, but we're were working in that. We've got a ton going on in networking. You'll see an announcement tomorrow of a new instance type that is got some interesting characteristics from a networking perspective. There's a lot going on. >> Let's pre-announce, no. >> Gary's over there like-- >> How 'about database, how 'about database? I mean, 10 years ago, John always says database was kind of boring. You go to a party say, oh welcome to database business, oh yeah, see ya. 25 years ago it was really interesting. >> Now you go to a party is like, hey ah! Have a drink! >> It a whole new ballgame, you guys are participating. Google Spanner is this crazy thing, right? So what are your thoughts on the state of the database business today, in memory, I mean. >> No, it's beautiful. I did a keynote at SIGMOD a few years ago and what I said is that 10 years ago Bruce Linsey, I used to work with him in the database world, Bruce Linsey called it polishing the round ball. It's just we're making everything a little, tiny bit better, and now it's fundamentally different. I mean what's happening right now is the database world, every year, if you stepped out for a year, you wouldn't recognize it. It's just, yeah, it's amazing. >> And DynamoDB has had rapid success. You know, we're big users of that. We actually built this app, crowd chat app that people are using on Hadoop and Hbase, and we immediately moved that to DynamoDB and your stack was just so much faster and scalable. So I got to ask you the-- >> And less labor. >> Yeah, yeah. So it's just been very reliable and all the other goodness of the elastic B socket and SQS, all that other good stuff we're working with node, et cetera So I got to ask you, the area that I want your opinion around the corner is versioning control. So at large-scale one of the challenges that we have is as we're pushin' new code, making sure that the integrated stack is completely updated and synchronized with open-source projects. So where does that fit into the scaling up? 'Cause at large scale, versioning control used to be easy to manage, but downloading software and putting in patches, but now you guys handle all that at scale. So that, I'm assuming there's some automation involved, some real tech involved, but how are you guys handling the future of making sure the code is all updated in the stack? >> It's a great question. It's super important from a security perspective that the code be up to date and current. It's super important from a customer perspective and you need to make sure that these upgrades are just non-disruptive. One customer, best answer I heard was yesterday from a customer was on a panel, they were asked how did they deal with Amazon's upgrades, and what she said is, "I didn't even know when they were happening. "I can't tell when they're happening." Exactly the right answer. That's exactly our goal. We monitor the heck out of all of our systems, and our goal, and boy we take it seriously, is we need to know any issue before a customer knows it. And if you fail on that promise, you'll meet Andy really quick. >> So some other paradigm questions coming in. Floyd asks, "Ask James what his opinion of cloud brokerage "companies such as Jamcracker or Graviton. "Do they have a place, or is it wrong thinking?" (James laughs) >> From my perspective, the bigger and richer the ecosystem, the happier our customers all are. It's all goodness. >> It's Darwinism, that's the answer. You know, the fit shall survive. No, but I think that brings up this new marketplace that Spot pricing came out of the woodwork. It's a paradigm that exists in other industries, apply it to cloud. So brokering of cloud might be something, especially with regional and geographical focuses. You can imagine a world of brokering. I mean, I don't know, I'm not qualified to answer that. >> Our goal, honestly, is to provide enough diversity of services that we completely satisfy customer's requirements, and that's what we intend to do. >> How do you guys think about the make versus buy? Are you at a point now where you say, you know what, we can make this stuff for our specific requirements better than we can get it off the shelf, or is that not the case? >> It changes every few minutes. It really does. >> So what are the parameters? >> Years ago when I joined the company we were buying servers from OEM suppliers, and they were doing some tailoring for our uses. It's gotten to the point now where that's not the right model and we have our own custom designs that are being built. We've now gotten to the point where some of the components in servers are being customized for us, partly because we're driving sufficient volume that it's justified, and partly because the partners that the component suppliers are happy to work with us directly and they want input from us. And so it's every year it's a little bit more specialized and that line's moving, so it's shifting towards specialization pretty quickly. >> So now I'm going to be replaced by the crowd, gettin' great questions, I'm going to be obsolete! No earbud, I got it right here. So the question's more of a fun one probably for you to answer, or just kind of lean back and kind of pull your hair out, but how the heck does AWS add so much infrastructure per day? How do you do it? >> It's a really interesting question. I kind of know how much infrastructure, I know abstractly how much infrastructure we put out every day, but when you actually think about this number in context, it's mind boggling. So here's the number. Here's the number. Every day, we deploy enough servers to support Amazon when it was a seven billion dollar company. You think of how many servers a seven billion dollar e-commerce company would actually require? Every day we deploy that many servers, and it's just shocking to me to think that the servers are in the logistics chain, they're being built, they're delivered to the appropriate data centers, there's back positions there, there's networking there, there's power there. I'm actually, every day I'm amazed to be quite honest with you. >> It's mind-boggling. And then for a while I was there, okay, wait a minute. Would that be Moors' Law? Uh no, not even in particular. 'Cause you said every day. Not every year, every day. >> Yeah, it really is. It's a shocking number and one, my definition of scale changes almost every day, where if you look at the number of customers that are trusting with their workloads today, that's what's driving that growth, it's phenomenal! >> We got to get wrapped up, but I got to ask the Hadoob World SQL over Hadoob question solutions. Obviously Hadoob is great, great for storing stuff, but now you're seeing hybrids come out. Again this comes back down to the, you can recognize the database world anymore if you were asleep for a year. So what's your take on that ecosystem? You guys have a lasting map or a decent a bunch of other things. There's some big data stuff going on. How do you, from a database perspective, how do you look at Hadoob and SQL over Hadoob? >> I personally love 'em both, and I love the diversity that's happening in the database world. There's some people that kind of have a religion and think it's crazy to do anything else. I think it's a good thing. Map reduce is particularly, I think, is a good thing, because it takes... First time I saw map reduce being used was actually a Google advertising engineer. And what I loved about his, I was actually talking to him about it, and what I loved is he had no idea how many servers he was using. If you ask me or anyone in the technology how many servers they're using, they know. And the beautiful thing is he's running multi-thousand node applications and he doesn't know. He doesn't care, he's solving advertising problems. And so I think it's good. I think there's a place for everything. >> Well my final question is asking guests this show. Put the bumper sticker on the car leaving re:Invent this year. What's it say? What does the bumper sticker say on the car? Summarize for the folks, what is the tagline this year? The vibe, and the focus? >> Yeah, for me this was the year. I mean, the business has been growing but this is the year where suddenly I'm seeing huge companies 100% dependent upon AWS or on track to be 100% dependent upon AWS. This is no longer an experiment, something people want to learn about. This is real, and this is happening. This is running real businesses. So it's real, baby! >> It's real baby, I like, that's the best bumper... James, distinguished guest now CUBE alum for us, thanks for coming on, you're a tech athlete. Great to have you, great success. Sounds like you got a lot of exciting things you're working on and that's always fun. And obviously Amazon is killing it, as we say in Silicon Valley. You guys are doing great, we love the product. We've been using it for crowd chats. Great stuff, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. This is live, exclusive coverage with siliconANGLE theCUBE. We'll be right back.