>>from around the globe. It's >>the Cube with digital coverage of Dev >>Ops Virtual Forum Brought to You by Broadcom. Welcome to Broadcom, Step Ups, Virtual Forum I and Lisa Martin and I'm joined by another Martin very socially. Distance from me all the way. Coming from Birmingham, England, is Glynn Martin, head of Q. A transformation at BT Glenn. It's great to have you on the program. >>Thank you, Lisa. I'm looking forward, Toa. >>As we said before, we went live to Martin's for the price of one in one segment. So this is gonna be an interesting segment, Guesses. What we're gonna do is Glen's gonna give us a really kind of deep inside out view of Dev ops. From an evolution perspective, Soglo's Let's start transformation is at the heart of what you dio. It's obviously been a very transformative year. How have the events of this year affected the transformation that you are so responsible for driving? >>Yeah. Thank you, Leigh. So I mean, yeah, it has been a difficult year Bond, although working for BT, which is ah, global telecommunications company. Relatively resilient, I suppose, as an industry through covert, it obviously still has been affected and has got its challenges on bond. If anything is actually caused us to accelerate of our transformation journey, you know, we had to do some great things during this time around. You know, in the UK for our emergency and health workers give them unlimited data and for vulnerable people to support them and that spent that we've had to deliver changes quickly. Um, but what? We want to be able to do it, deliver those kind of changes quickly, but sustainably for everything that we do, not just because there's an emergency eso we were already on the kind of journey to by John, but ever so ever more important now that we are what we're able to do, those that kind of work, do it more quickly on. But it works because the implications of it not working is could be terrible in terms of, you know, we've been supporting testing centers, new hospitals to treat covert patients, so we need to get it right and therefore the coverage of what we do, the quality of what we do and how quickly we do. It really has taken on a new scowling what was already a very competitive market within the telco industry within the UK. Um, you know, what I would say is that you know, we are under pressure to deliver more value, but we have small cost challenges. We have to obviously deal with the fact that you know, Cove in 19 has hit most industries kind of revenues and profits. So we've got this kind of paradox between having less cost, but they're having to deliver more value quicker on bond, you know, to higher quality. So, yeah, certainly the finances is on our minds. And that's why we need flexible models, cost models that allow us to kind of do growth. But we get that growth by showing that we're delivering value, especially in, you know, these times when there are financial challenges on companies. >>So one of the things that I want to ask you about again looking at, develops from the inside out on the evolution that you've seen you talked about the speed of things really accelerating in this last nine months or so. When we think Dev ops, we think speed. But one of the things I love to get your perspective on we've talked about in a number of the segments that we've done for this event is cultural change. What are some of the things that scene there as as needing to get, as you said, get things right but done so quickly to support essential businesses, essential workers? How have you seen that cultural shift? >>Yeah, I think you know, before, you know, test test team saw themselves of this part of the software delivery cycle. Andi, actually, now, really, our customers were expecting their quality and to deliver for our customers what they want. Quality has to be ingrained throughout the life cycle. Obviously that you know, there's lots of buzzwords like shift left. How do you do? Shift left testing. But for me, that's really instilling quality and given capabilities shared capabilities throughout the life cycle. That Dr you know, Dr Automation drive improvements. I always say that you know, you're only as good as your lowest common denominator on one thing that we're finding on our Dev Ops Journey Waas that we were you know, we would be trying thio do certain things quicker and had automated build automated tests. But if we were taking weeks to create test scripts or we were taking weeks to manly craft data, and even then when we had taken so long to do it that the coverage was quite poor and that led to lots of defects later in the lifecycle or even in in our production environment, we just couldn't afford to do that. And actually, you know, focusing on continuous testing over the last 9 to 12 months has really given us the ability Thio delivered quickly across the the whole life cycle and therefore actually go from doing a kind of semi agile kind of thing where we did you use the stories we did a few of the kind of, you know, as our ceremonies. But we weren't really deploying any quicker into production because, you know, our stakeholders were scared that we didn't have the same control that we had when we had more water for releases. And, you know, when way didn't think ourselves. So we've done a lot of work on every aspect, especially from a testing point of view, every aspect of every activity, rather than just looking at automated test, you know, whether it is actually creating the test in the first place, Whether it's doing security testing earlier in the light and performance testing. Learn the life cycle, etcetera. So, yeah, it Z It's been a riel key thing that for for C T for us to drive, develops, >>talk to me a little bit about your team. What are some of the shifts in terms of expectations that you're experiencing and how your team interacts with the internal folks from pipeline through life cycle? >>Yeah, we've done a lot of work on this, you know, there's a thing. I think people were pretty quiet. Customer experience. Gap. It reminds me of a cart, a Gilbert cartoon where, you know, we start with the requirements here on Do you know, we almost like a Chinese whisper effects and what we deliver eyes completely, completely different. So we think the testing team or the the delivery team, you know, you know, you think they've done a great job. This is what it said in the acceptance criteria, but then our customers the same Well, actually, that's not working. This isn't working, you know, on there's this kind of gap Way had a great launched this year of actual Requirement Society, one of the board common tools Onda that for the first time in in since I remember actually working within B. T, I had customers saying to may, Wow, you know, we want more of this. We want more projects, um, to have a actual requirements design on it because it allowed us to actually work with the business collaboratively. I mean, we talk about collaboration, but how do you actually, you know, do that have something that both the business on technical people can understand? And we've actually been working with the business using at our requirement. Designer Thio, you know, really look about what the requirements are. Tease out requirements to the hadn't even thought off and making sure that we've got high levels of test coverage. And so what we actually deliver at the end of it, not only have you been able Thio generate test more quickly, but we've got much higher test coverage and also can more smartly, you're using the kind of AI within the tour and with some of the other kind of pipeline tools actually deliver to choose the right tests on the bar, still actually doing a risk based testing approach. So that's been a great launched this year, but just the start of many kind of things that we're >>doing. But what I hear in that Glenn is a lot of positives that have come out of a very challenging situation. Uh, talk to me about it and I like that perspective. This is a very challenging time for everybody in the world, but it sounds like from a collaboration, perspective is you're right. We talk about that a lot critical with Dev Ops. But those challenges there you guys were able to overcome those pretty quickly. What other challenges did you face and figure out quickly enough to be able to pit it so fast? >>I mean, you talked about culture. I mean, you know, Bt is like most come countries companies. So, um, is very siloed. You know, we're still trying to work to become closer as a company. So I think there's a lot of challenges around. How do you integrate with other tools? How do you integrate with you know, the various different technologies and bt we have 58 different whitey stacks? That's not systems that stacks all of those stacks of can have, you know, hundreds of systems on we're trying to. We're gonna drive at the moment a simplified program where we're trying Thio, you know, reduce that number 2 14 stacks. And even then they'll be complexity behind the scenes that that we will be challenged. Maurin Mawr As we go forward, how do you actually hired that to our users on as an I T organization? How do we make ourselves Lena so that even when we you know, we've still got some of that legacy and we'll never fully get rid of it on that's the kind of trade off that we have to make. How do we actually deal with that and and hide that for my users a say and and and drive those programs so we can actually accelerate change. So we take, you know, reduce that kind of waste, and that kind of legacy costs out of our business. You know, the other thing is, well, beating. And I'm sure you know telecoms probably no difference to insurance or finance we've got You know, when you take the number of products that we do and then you combine them, the permutations are tens and hundreds of thousands of products. So we as a business to trying to simplify. We are trying Thio do that in a natural way and haven't trying to do agile in the proper way, you know, and really actually work it paste really deliver value. So I think what we're looking Maura, Maura, at the moment is actually, um is more value focus? Before we used to deliver changes, sometimes into production, someone had a great idea or it was a great idea nine months ago or 12 months ago. But actually, then we end up deploying it. And then we look at the the the users, you know, the usage of that product of that application or whatever it is on. It's not being used for six months, so we're getting much we haven't got, you know, because of the last 12 months, we certainly haven't got room for that kind of waste and you know, the for not really understanding the value of changes that we we are doing. So I think that's the most important thing at the moment is really taken that waste out. You know, there's lots of focus on things like flow management. What bits of the our process are actually taking too long, and we've We've started on that journey, but we've got a hell of a long way to go, you know, But that that involves looking every aspect off the kind of software delivery cycle. >>What are some? Because that that going from, what, 58 i t stocks down to 14 or whatever it's going to be go simplifying is sounds magical. Took everybody. It's a big challenge. What are some of the core technology capabilities that you see really as kind of essential for enabling that with this new way that you're working? >>Yeah. I mean, I think we've started on a continuous testing journey, and I think that's just the start. I mean, that's really, as I say, looking at every aspect off, you know, from a Q, a point of view. It's every aspect of what we dio. But it's also looking at, you know, we're starting to branch into more like a AI ops and, you know, really, the full life cycle on. But, you know, that's just a stepping stone onto, you know, I think oughta Nomics is the way forward, right? You know all of this kind of stuff that happens um, you know, monitoring, you know, monitoring systems, what's happening in production had to be feed that back. How do you get to a point where actually we think about a change on then suddenly it's in production safely. Or if it's not going to safety, it's automatically backing out. So, you know, it's a very, very long journey. But if we want Thio, you know, in a world where the pace is ever increasing the demands of the team and you know, with the pressures on at the moment where with we're being asked to do things, you know more efficiently Ondas leaving as possible. We need to be, you know, thinking about every part of the process. And how do we put the kind of stepping stones in players to lead us to a more automated kind of, you know, their future? >>Do you feel that that plant outcomes are starting to align with what's delivered? Given this massive shift that you're experiencing, >>I think it's starting to, and I think you know, Azzawi. Look at more of a value based approach on. Do you know a Zeiss? A princess was a kind of flight management. I think that's that will become ever evermore important. So I think it's starting to people. Certainly realized that, you know, people teams need to work together. You know, the kind of the cousin between business and ICT, especially as we go Teoh Mawr kind of sad space solutions, low cold solutions. You know there's not such a gap anymore. Actually, some of our business partners expects to be much more tech savvy. Eso I think you know, this is what we have to kind of appreciate. What is I ts role? How do we give the capabilities become more for centers of excellence rather than actually doing Mount amount of work And for May and from a testing point of view, you know, amount, amount of testing, actually, how do we automate that? How do we actually generate that instead of created? I think that's the kind of challenge going forward. >>What are some? As we look forward, what are some of the things that you would like to see implemented or deployed in the next say, 6 to 12 months as we hopefully round a corner with this pandemic? >>Yeah, I think you know, certainly for for where we are as a company from a Q A perspective. We are. Yeah, there's certain bits that we do Well, you know, we've started creating continuous delivery. A day evokes pipelines. Um, there's still manual aspects of that. So, you know, certainly for May I I've challenged my team with saying, How do we do an automated journey? So if I, you know, I put a requirement injera or value whoever it is, that's why. Then click a button on bond, you know, with either zero touch of one touch, then put that into production and have confidence that that has been done safely on that it works. And what happens if it doesn't work? So you know, that's that's the next in the next few months, that's what our concentration is about. But it's also about decision making, you know, how do we actually understand those value judgements? And I think there's lots of the things Dev ops, ai ops, kind of always that aspects of business operations. I think it's about having the information in one place to make those kind of decisions. How does it all tied together, as I say, even still with kind of Dev ops, we've still got elements within my company where we've got lots of different organizations doing some doing similar kind of things but the walking of working in silos Still. So I think, having a eye ops Aziz becomes more and more to the fore as we go to the cloud. And that's what we need to. You know, we're still very early on in our cloud journey, you know. So we need to make sure the technologies work with Cloud as well as you kind of legacy systems. But it's about bringing that all together and having a full visible pipeline. Everybody can see and make decisions against >>you said the word confidence, which jumped out at me right away. Because absolutely, you've gotta have be able to have confidence in what your team is delivering and how it's impacting the business and those customers. Last question for you is how would you advise your peers in a similar situation to leverage technology automation, for example, dev ops to be able to gain the confidence that they're making the right decisions for their business? >>Yeah, I mean, I think the the approach that we've taken actually is not started with technology we've actually taken human centered design a za core principle of what we dio within the i t part of BT. So by using humans tend to design. That means we talked to our customers. We understand their pain points, we map out their current processes on. But when we mapped out, those processes also understand their aspirations as well, you know, Where do they want to be in six months? You know, Do they want to be more agile and you know, or do they want Teoh? Is this apart their business that they want thio run better? We have to Then look at why that's not running well and then see what solutions are out there. We've been lucky that, you know, with our partnership with Broadcom within the P l. A. A lot of the tortures and the P l. A have directly answered some of the businesses problems. But I think by having those conversations and actually engaging with the business, um, you know, especially if the business hold the purse strings, which is you know, in some companies, including as they do there is that kind of, you know, almost by understanding their their pain points and then saying This is how we can solve your problem We've tended to be much more successful than trying Thio impose something and say We're here to technology that they don't quite understand doesn't really understand how it could have resonate with their problems. So I think that's the heart of it is really about, you know, getting looking at the data, looking at the processes, looking at where the kind of waste is on. Then actually then looking at the right solutions. And as I say, continuous testing is a massive for us. We've also got a good relationship with capitals looking at visual ai on. Actually, there's a common theme through that, and I mean, AI is becoming more and more prevalent, and I know yeah, sometimes what is A I and people have kind of the semantics of it. Is it true, ai or not? But yes, certainly, you know, AI and machine learning is becoming more and more prevalent in the way that we work, and it's allowing us to be much more effective, the quicker and what we do on being more accurate. You know, whether it's finding defects, running the right tests or, you know, being able to anticipate problems before they're happening in a production environment. >>Welcome. Thank you so much for giving us this sort of insight. Outlook at Dev Ops, sharing the successes that you're having taking those challenges, converting them toe opportunities and forgiving folks who might be in your shoes or maybe slightly behind advice. I'm sure they appreciate it. We appreciate your time. >>It's been an absolute pleasure, Really. Thank you for inviting me of Extremely enjoyed it. So thank you ever so much. >>Excellent. Me too. I've learned a lot for Glynn Martin and Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube?

(upbeat instrumental music) >> TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (uplifting instrumental music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE Live at MWC '23. I'm Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, our co-founder, our co-CEO of theCUBE, you know him, you love him. He's here as my co-host. Dave, we have a great couple of guests here to break down day one keynote. Lots of meat. I can't wait to be part of this conversation. Chris Lewis joins us, the founder and MD of Lewis Insight. And Sarbjeet Johal, one of you know him as well. He's a Cube contributor, cloud architect. Guys, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me today. >> Lovely to be here. >> Thank you. >> Chris, I want to start with you. You have covered all aspects of global telecoms industries over 30 years working as an analyst. Talk about the evolution of the telecom industry that you've witnessed, and what were some of the things you heard in the keynote that excite you about the direction it's going? >> Well, as ever, MWC, there's no lack of glitz and glamour, but it's the underlying issues of the industry that are really at stake here. There's not a lot of new revenue coming into the telecom providers, but there's a lot of adjustment, readjustment of the underlying operational environment. And also, really importantly, what came out of the keynotes is the willingness and the necessity to really engage with the API community, with the developer community, people who traditionally, telecoms would never have even touched. So they're sorting out their own house, they're cleaning their own stables, getting the cost base down, but they're also now realizing they've got to engage with all the other parties. There's a lot of cloud providers here, there's a lot of other people from outside so they're realizing they cannot do it all themselves. It's quite a tough lesson for a very conservative, inward looking industry, right? So should we be spending all this money and all this glitz and glamour of MWC and all be here, or should would be out there really building for the future and making sure the services are right for yours and my needs in a business and personal lives? So a lot of new changes, a lot of realization of what's going on outside, but underlying it, we've just got to get this right this time. >> And it feels like that monetization is front and center. You mentioned developers, we've got to work with developers, but I'm hearing the latest keynote from the Ericsson CEOs, we're going to monetize through those APIs, we're going to charge the developers. I mean, first of all, Chris, am I getting that right? And Sarbjeet, as somebody who's close to the developer community, is that the right way to build bridges? But Chris, are we getting that right? >> Well, let's take the first steps first. So, Ericsson, of course, acquired Vonage, which is a massive API business so they want to make money. They expect to make money by bringing that into the mainstream telecom community. Now, whether it's the developers who pay for it, or let's face it, we are moving into a situation as the telco moves into a techco model where the techco means they're going to be selling bits of the technology to developer guys and to other application developers. So when he says he needs to charge other people for it, it's the way in which people reach in and will take going through those open APIs like the open gateway announced today, but also the way they'll reach in and take things like network slicing. So we're opening up the telecom community, the treasure chest, if you like, where developers' applications and other third parties can come in and take those chunks of technology and build them into their services. This is a complete change from the old telecom industry where everybody used to come and you say, "all right, this is my product, you've got to buy it and you're going to pay me a lot of money for it." So we are looking at a more flexible environment where the other parties can take those chunks. And we know we want collectivity built into our financial applications, into our government applications, everything, into the future of the metaverse, whatever it may be. But it requires that change in attitude of the telcos. And they do need more money 'cause they've said, the baseline of revenue is pretty static, there's not a lot of growth in there so they're looking for new revenues. It's in a B2B2X time model. And it's probably the middle man's going to pay for it rather than the customer. >> But the techco model, Sarbjeet, it looks like the telcos are getting their money on their way in. The techco company model's to get them on their way out like the app store. Go build something of value, build some kind of app or data product, and then when it takes off, we'll take a piece of the action. What are your thoughts from a developer perspective about how the telcos are approaching it? >> Yeah, I think before we came here, like I said, I did some tweets on this, that we talk about all kind of developers, like there's game developers and front end, back end, and they're all talking about like what they're building on top of cloud, but nowhere you will hear the term "telco developer," there's no API from telcos given to the developers to build IoT solutions on top of it because telco as an IoT, I think is a good sort of hand in hand there. And edge computing as well. The glimmer of hope, if you will, for telcos is the edge computing, I believe. And even in edge, I predicted, I said that many times that cloud players will dominate that market with the private 5G. You know that story, right? >> We're going to talk about that. (laughs) >> The key is this, that if you see in general where the population lives, in metros, right? That's where the world population is like flocking to and we have cloud providers covering the local zones with local like heavy duty presence from the big cloud providers and then these telcos are getting sidetracked by that. Even the V2X in cars moving the autonomous cars and all that, even in that space, telcos are getting sidetracked in many ways. What telcos have to do is to join the forces, build some standards, if not standards, some consortium sort of. They're trying to do that with the open gateway here, they have only eight APIs. And it's 2023, eight APIs is nothing, right? (laughs) So they should have started this 10 years back, I think. So, yeah, I think to entice the developers, developers need the employability, we need to train them, we need to show them some light that hey, you can build a lot on top of it. If you tell developers they can develop two things or five things, nobody will come. >> So, Chris, the cloud will dominate the edge. So A, do you buy it? B, the telcos obviously are acting like that might happen. >> Do you know I love people when they've got their heads in the clouds. (all laugh) And you're right in so many ways, but if you flip it around and think about how the customers think about this, business customers and consumers, they don't care about all this background shenanigans going on, do they? >> Lisa: No. >> So I think one of the problems we have is that this is a new territory and whether you call it the edge or whatever you call it, what we need there is we need connectivity, we need security, we need storage, we need compute, we need analytics, and we need applications. And are any of those more important than the others? It's the collective that actually drives the real value there. So we need all those things together. And of course, the people who represented at this show, whether it's the cloud guys, the telcos, the Nokia, the Ericssons of this world, they all own little bits of that. So that's why they're all talking partnerships because they need the combination, they cannot do it on their own. The cloud guys can't do it on their own. >> Well, the cloud guys own all of those things that you just talked about though. (all laugh) >> Well, they don't own the last bit of connectivity, do they? They don't own the access. >> Right, exactly. That's the one thing they don't own. So, okay, we're back to pipes, right? We're back to charging for connectivity- >> Pipes are very valuable things, right? >> Yeah, for sure. >> Never underestimate pipes. I don't know about where you live, plumbers make a lot of money where I live- >> I don't underestimate them but I'm saying can the telcos charge for more than that or are the cloud guys going to mop up the storage, the analytics, the compute, and the apps? >> They may mop it up, but I think what the telcos are doing and we've seen a lot of it here already, is they are working with all those major cloud guys already. So is it an unequal relationship? The cloud guys are global, massive global scale, the telcos are fundamentally national operators. >> Yep. >> Some have a little bit of regional, nobody has global scale. So who stitches it all together? >> Dave: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. >> Absolutely. >> I know that saying never gets old. It's true. Well, Sarbjeet, one of the things that you tweeted about, I didn't get to see the keynote but I was looking at your tweets. 46% of telcos think they won't make it to the next decade. That's a big number. Did that surprise you? >> No, actually it didn't surprise me because the competition is like closing in on them and the telcos are competing with telcos as well and the telcos are competing with cloud providers on the other side, right? So the smaller ones are getting squeezed. It's the bigger players, they can hook up the newer platforms, I think they will survive. It's like that part is like any other industry, if you will. But the key is here, I think why the pain points were sort of described on the main stage is that they're crying out loud to tell the big tech cloud providers that "hey, you pay your fair share," like we talked, right? You are not paying, you're generating so much content which reverses our networks and you are not paying for it. So they are not able to recoup the cost of laying down their networks. By the way, one thing actually I want to mention is that they said the cloud needs earth. The cloud and earth, it's like there's no physical need to cloud, you know that, right? So like, I think it's the other way around. I think the earth needs the cloud because I'm a cloud guy. (Sarbjeet and Lisa laugh) >> I think you need each other, right? >> I think so too. >> They need each other. When they said cloud needs earth, right? I think they're still in denial that the cloud is a big force. They have to partner. When you can't compete with somebody, what do you do? Partner with them. >> Chris, this is your world. Are they in denial? >> No, I think they're waking up to the pragmatism of the situation. >> Yeah. >> They're building... As we said, most of the telcos, you find have relationships with the cloud guys, I think you're right about the industry. I mean, do you think what's happened since US was '96, the big telecom act when we started breaking up all the big telcos and we had lots of competition came in, we're seeing the signs that we might start to aggregate them back up together again. So it's been an interesting experiment for like 30 years, hasn't it too? >> It made the US less competitive, I would argue, but carry on. >> Yes, I think it's true. And Europe is maybe too competitive and therefore, it's not driven the investment needed. And by the way, it's not just mobile, it's fixed as well. You saw the Orange CEO was talking about the her investment and the massive fiber investments way ahead of many other countries, way ahead of the UK or Germany. We need that fiber in the ground to carry all your cloud traffic to do this. So there is a scale issue, there is a competition issue, but the telcos are very much aware of it. They need the cloud, by the way, to improve their operational environments as well, to change that whole old IT environment to deliver you and I better service. So no, it absolutely is changing. And they're getting scale, but they're fundamentally offering the basic product, you call it pipes, I'll just say they're offering broadband to you and I and the business community. But they're stepping on dangerous ground, I think, when saying they want to charge the over the top guys for all the traffic they use. Those over the top guys now build a lot of the global networks, the backbone submarine network. They're putting a lot of money into it, and by giving us endless data for our individual usage, that cat is out the bag, I think to a large extent. >> Yeah. And Orange CEO basically said that, that they're not paying their fair share. I'm for net neutrality but the governments are going to have to fund this unless you let us charge the OTT. >> Well, I mean, we could of course renationalize. Where would that take us? (Dave laughs) That would make MWC very interesting next year, wouldn't it? To renationalize it. So, no, I think you've got to be careful what we wish for here. Creating the absolute clear product that is required to underpin all of these activities, whether it's IoT or whether it's cloud delivery or whether it's just our own communication stuff, delivering that absolutely ubiquitously high quality for business and for consumer is what we have to do. And telcos have been too conservative in the past. >> I think they need to get together and create standards around... I think they have a big opportunity. We know that the clouds are being built in silos, right? So there's Azure stack, there's AWS and there's Google. And those are three main ones and a few others, right? So that we are fighting... On the cloud side, what we are fighting is the multicloud. How do we consume that multicloud without having standards? So if these people get together and create some standards around IoT and edge computing sort of area, people will flock to them to say, "we will use you guys, your API, we don't care behind the scenes if you use AWS or Google Cloud or Azure, we will come to you." So market, actually is looking for that solution. I think it's an opportunity for these guys, for telcos. But the problem with telcos is they're nationalized, as you said Chris versus the cloud guys are still kind of national in a way, but they're global corporations. And some of the telcos are global corporations as well, BT covers so many countries and TD covers so many... DT is in US as well, so they're all over the place. >> But you know what's interesting is that the TM forum, which is one of the industry associations, they've had an open digital architecture framework for quite some years now. Google had joined that some years ago, Azure in there, AWS just joined it a couple of weeks ago. So when people said this morning, why isn't AWS on the keynote? They don't like sharing the limelight, do they? But they're getting very much in bed with the telco. So I think you'll see the marriage. And in fact, there's a really interesting statement, if you look at the IoT you mentioned, Bosch and Nokia have been working together 'cause they said, the problem we've got, you've got a connectivity network on one hand, you've got the sensor network on the other hand, you're trying to merge them together, it's a nightmare. So we are finally seeing those sort of groups talking to each other. So I think the standards are coming, the cooperation is coming, partnerships are coming, but it means that the telco can't dominate the sector like it used to. It's got to play ball with everybody else. >> I think they have to work with the regulators as well to loosen the regulation. Or you said before we started this segment, you used Chris, the analogy of sports, right? In sports, when you're playing fiercely, you commit the fouls and then ask for ref to blow the whistle. You're now looking at the ref all the time. The telcos are looking at the ref all the time. >> Dave: Yeah, can I do this? Can I do that? Is this a fair move? >> They should be looking for the space in front of the opposition. >> Yeah, they should be just on attack mode and commit these fouls, if you will, and then ask for forgiveness then- >> What do you make of that AWS not you there- >> Well, Chris just made a great point that they don't like to share the limelight 'cause I thought it was very obvious that we had Google Cloud, we had Microsoft there on day one of this 80,000 person event. A lot of people back from COVID and they weren't there. But Chris, you brought up a great point that kind of made me think, maybe you're right. Maybe they're in the afternoon keynote, they want their own time- >> You think GSMA invited them? >> I imagine so. You'd have to ask GSMA. >> I would think so. >> Get Max on here and ask that. >> I'm going to ask them, I will. >> But no, and they don't like it because I think the misconception, by the way, is that everyone says, "oh, it's AWS, it's Google Cloud and it's Azure." They're not all the same business by any stretch of the imagination. AWS has been doing loads of great work, they've been launching private network stuff over the last couple of weeks. Really interesting. Google's been playing catch up. We know that they came in readily late to the market. And Azure, they've all got slightly different angles on it. So perhaps it just wasn't right for AWS and the way they wanted to pitch things so they don't have to be there, do they? >> That's a good point. >> But the industry needs them there, that's the number one cloud. >> Dave, they're there working with the industry. >> Yeah, of course. >> They don't have to be on the keynote stage. And in fact, you think about this show and you mentioned the 80,000 people, the activity going on around in all these massive areas they're in, it's fantastic. That's where the business is done. The business isn't done up on the keynote stage. >> That's why there's the glitz and the glamour, Chris. (all laugh) >> Yeah. It's not glitz, it's espresso. It's not glamour anymore, it's just espresso. >> We need the espresso. >> Yeah. >> I think another thing is that it's interesting how an average European sees the tech market and an average North American, especially you from US, you have to see the market. Here, people are more like process oriented and they want the rules of the road already established before they can take a step- >> Chris: That's because it's your pension in the North American- >> Exactly. So unions are there and the more employee rights and everything, you can't fire people easily here or in Germany or most of the Europe is like that with the exception of UK. >> Well, but it's like I said, that Silicone Valley gets their money on the way out, you know? And that's how they do it, that's how they think it. And they don't... They ask for forgiveness. I think the east coast is more close to Europe, but in the EU, highly regulated, really focused on lifetime employment, things like that. >> But Dave, the issue is the telecom industry is brilliant, right? We keep paying every month whatever we do with it. >> It's a great business, to your point- >> It's a brilliant business model. >> Dave: It's fantastic. >> So it's about then getting the structure right behind it. And you know, we've seen a lot of stratification where people are selling off towers, Orange haven't sold their towers off, they made a big point about that. Others are selling their towers off. Some people are selling off their underlying network, Telecom Italia talking about KKR buying the whole underlying network. It's like what do you want to be in control of? It's a great business. >> But that's why they complain so much is that they're having to sell their assets because of the onerous CapEx requirements, right? >> Yeah, they've had it good, right? And dare I say, perhaps they've not planned well enough for the future. >> They're trying to protect their past from the future. I mean, that's... >> Actually, look at the... Every "n" number of years, there's a new faster network. They have to dig the ground, they have to put the fiber, they have to put this. Now, there are so many booths showing 6G now, we are not even done with 5G yet, now the next 6G you know, like then- >> 10G's coming- >> 10G, that's a different market. (Dave laughs) >> Actually, they're bogged down by the innovation, I think. >> And the generational thing is really important because we're planning for 6G in all sorts of good ways but actually what we use in our daily lives, we've gone through the barrier, we've got enough to do that. So 4G gives us enough, the fiber in the ground or even old copper gives us enough. So the question is, what are we willing to pay for more than that basic connectivity? And the answer to your point, Dave, is not a lot, right? So therefore, that's why the emphasis is on the business market on that B2B and B2B2X. >> But we'll pay for Netflix all day long. >> All day long. (all laugh) >> The one thing Chris, I don't know, I want to know your viewpoints and we have talked in the past as well, there's absence of think tanks in tech, right? So we have think tanks on the foreign policy and economic policy in every country, and we have global think tanks, but tech is becoming a huge part of the economy, global economy as well as national economies, right? But we don't have think tanks on like policy around tech. For example, this 4G is good for a lot of use cases. Then 5G is good for smaller number of use cases. And then 6G will be like, fewer people need 6G for example. Why can't we have sort of those kind of entities dictating those kind of like, okay, is this a wiser way to go about it? >> Lina Khan wants to. She wants to break up big tech- >> You're too young to remember but the IT used to have a show every four years in Geneva, there were standards around there. So I think there are bodies. I think the balance of power obviously has gone from the telecom to the west coast to the IT markets. And it's changing the balance about, it moves more quickly, right? Telecoms has never moved quickly enough. I think there is hope by the way, that telecoms now that we are moving to more softwarized environment, and God forbid, we're moving into CICD in the telecom world, right? Which is a massive change, but I think there's hopes for it to change. The mentality is changing, the culture is changing, but to change those old structured organizations from the British telecom or the France telecom into the modern world, it's a hell of a long journey. It's not an overnight journey at all. >> Well, of course the theme of the event is velocity. >> Yeah, I know that. >> And it's been interesting sitting here with the three of you talking about from a historic perspective, how slow and molasseslike telecom has been. They don't have a choice anymore. As consumers, we have this expectation we're going to get anything we want on our mobile device, 24 by seven. We don't care about how the sausage is made, we just want the end result. So do you really think, and we're only on day one guys... And Chris we'll start with you. Is the theme really velocity? Is it disruption? Are they able to move faster? >> Actually, I think invisibility is the real answer. (Lisa laughs) We want communication to be invisible, right? >> Absolutely. >> We want it to work. When we switch our phones on, we want it to work and we want to... Well, they're not even phones anymore, are they really? I mean that's the... So no, velocity, we've got... There is momentum in the industry, there's no doubt about that. The cloud guys coming in, making telecoms think about the way they run their own business, where they meet, that collision point on the edges you talked about Sarbjeet. We do have velocity, we've got momentum. There's so many interested parties. The way I think of this is that the telecom industry used to be inward looking, just design its own technology and then expect everyone else to dance to our tune. We're now flipping that 180 degrees and we are now having to work with all the different outside forces shaping us. Whether it's devices, whether it's smart cities, governments, the hosting guys, the Equinoxis, all these things. So everyone wants a piece of this telecom world so we've got to make ourselves more open. That's why you get in a more open environment. >> But you did... I just want to bring back a point you made during COVID, which was when everybody switched to work from home, started using their landlines again, telcos had to respond and nothing broke. I mean, it was pretty amazing. >> Chris: It did a good job. >> It was kind of invisible. So, props to the telcos for making that happen. >> They did a great job. >> So it really did. Now, okay, what have you done for me lately? So now they've got to deal with the future and they're talking monetization. But to me, monetization is all about data and not necessarily just the network data. Yeah, they can sell that 'cause they own that but what kind of incremental value are they going to create for the consumers that... >> Yeah, actually that's a problem. I think the problem is that they have been strangled by the regulation for a long time and they cannot look at their data. It's a lot more similar to the FinTech world, right? I used to work at Visa. And then Visa, we did trillion dollars in transactions in '96. Like we moved so much money around, but we couldn't look at these things, right? So yeah, I think regulation is a problem that holds you back, it's the antithesis of velocity, it slows you down. >> But data means everything, doesn't it? I mean, it means everything and nothing. So I think the challenge here is what data do the telcos have that is useful, valuable to me, right? So in the home environment, the fact that my broadband provider says, oh, by the way, you've got 20 gadgets on that network and 20 on that one... That's great, tell me what's on there. I probably don't know what's taking all my valuable bandwidth up. So I think there's security wrapped around that, telling me the way I'm using it if I'm getting the best out of my service. >> You pay for that? >> No, I'm saying they don't do it yet. I think- >> But would you pay for that? >> I think I would, yeah. >> Would you pay a lot for that? I would expect it to be there as part of my dashboard for my monthly fee. They're already charging me enough. >> Well, that's fine, but you pay a lot more in North America than I do in Europe, right? >> Yeah, no, that's true. >> You're really overpaying over there, right? >> Way overpaying. >> So, actually everybody's looking at these devices, right? So this is a radio operated device basically, right? And then why couldn't they benefit from this? This is like we need to like double click on this like 10 times to find out why telcos failed to leverage this device, right? But I think the problem is their reliance on regulations and their being close to the national sort of governments and local bodies and authorities, right? And in some countries, these telcos are totally controlled in very authoritarian ways, right? It's not like open, like in the west, most of the west. Like the world is bigger than five, six countries and we know that, right? But we end up talking about the major economies most of the time. >> Dave: Always. >> Chris: We have a topic we want to hit on. >> We do have a topic. Our last topic, Chris, it's for you. You guys have done an amazing job for the last 25 minutes talking about the industry, where it's going, the evolution. But Chris, you're registered blind throughout your career. You're a leading user of assertive technologies. Talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, some of the things you're doing there. >> Well, we should have had 25 minutes on that and five minutes on- (all laugh) >> Lisa: You'll have to come back. >> Really interesting. So I've been looking at it. You're quite right, I've been using accessible technology on my iPhone and on my laptop for 10, 20 years now. It's amazing. And what I'm trying to get across to the industry is to think about inclusive design from day one. When you're designing an app or you're designing a service, make sure you... And telecom's a great example. In fact, there's quite a lot of sign language around here this week. If you look at all the events written, good to see that coming in. Obviously, no use to me whatsoever, but good for the hearing impaired, which by the way is the biggest category of disability in the world. Biggest chunk is hearing impaired, then vision impaired, and then cognitive and then physical. And therefore, whenever you're designing any service, my call to arms to people is think about how that's going to be used and how a blind person might use it or how a deaf person or someone with physical issues or any cognitive issues might use it. And a great example, the GSMA and I have been talking about the app they use for getting into the venue here. I downloaded it. I got the app downloaded and I'm calling my guys going, where's my badge? And he said, "it's top left." And because I work with a screen reader, they hadn't tagged it properly so I couldn't actually open my badge on my own. Now, they changed it overnight so it worked this morning, which is fantastic work by Trevor and the team. But it's those things that if you don't build it in from scratch, you really frustrate a whole group of users. And if you think about it, people with disabilities are excluded from so many services if they can't see the screen or they can't hear it. But it's also the elderly community who don't find it easy to get access to things. Smart speakers have been a real blessing in that respect 'cause you can now talk to that thing and it starts talking back to you. And then there's the people who can't afford it so we need to come down market. This event is about launching these thousand dollars plus devices. Come on, we need below a hundred dollars devices to get to the real mass market and get the next billion people in and then to educate people how to use it. And I think to go back to your previous point, I think governments are starting to realize how important this is about building the community within the countries. You've got some massive projects like NEOM in Saudi Arabia. If you have a look at that, if you get a chance, a fantastic development in the desert where they're building a new city from scratch and they're building it so anyone and everyone can get access to it. So in the past, it was all done very much by individual disability. So I used to use some very expensive, clunky blind tech stuff. I'm now using mostly mainstream. But my call to answer to say is, make sure when you develop an app, it's accessible, anyone can use it, you can talk to it, you can get whatever access you need and it will make all of our lives better. So as we age and hearing starts to go and sight starts to go and dexterity starts to go, then those things become very useful for everybody. >> That's a great point and what a great champion they have in you. Chris, Sarbjeet, Dave, thank you so much for kicking things off, analyzing day one keynote, the ecosystem day, talking about what velocity actually means, where we really are. We're going to have to have you guys back 'cause as you know, we can keep going, but we are out of time. But thank you. >> Pleasure. >> We had a very spirited, lively conversation. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you very much. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live in Barcelona, Spain at MWC '23. We'll be back after a short break. See you soon. (uplifting instrumental music)

foreign greetings from San Francisco thecube is live this is our second day of wall-to-wall coverage of VMware Explorer 2022. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here we're going to be talking with some ladies from Rackspace next please welcome Adriana Bustamante VP of strategic alliances and Hannah Deuce director of strategic alliances from Rackspace it's great to have you on the program thank you so much for having us good afternoon good morning is it lunchtime already almost almost yes and it's great to be back in person we were just talking about the keynote yesterday that we were in and it was standing room only people are ready to be back they're ready to be hearing from VMware it's ecosystem its Partners it's Community yes talk to us Adriana about what Rackspace is doing with Dell and VMware particularly in the healthcare space sure no so for us Partnerships are a big foundation to how we operate as a company and um and I have the privilege of doing it for over over 16 years so we've been looking after the dell and VMware part partnership ourselves personally for the last three years but they've been long-standing partners for for us and and how do we go and drive more meaningful joint Solutions together so Rackspace you know been around since since 98 we've seen such an evolution of coming becoming more of this multi-cloud transformation agile Global partner and we have a lot of customers that fall in lots of different verticals from retail to public sector into Healthcare but we started noticing and what we're trying trying to drive as a company is how do we drive more specialized Solutions and because of the pandemic and because of post-pandemic and everyone really trying to to figure out what the new normal is addressing different clients we saw that need increasing and we wanted to Rally together with our most strategic alliances to do more Hannah talk about obviously the the pandemic created such problems for every industry but but Healthcare being front and center it still is talk about some of the challenges that Healthcare organizations are coming to Rackspace going help yeah common theme that we've heard from some of our large providers Healthcare Providers has been helped me do more with less which we're all trying to do as we navigate The New Normal but in that space we found the opportunity to really leverage some of our expertise long-term expertise and that the talent and the resource pool that we had to really help in a some of the challenges that are being faced at a resource shortage Talent shortage and so Rackspace is able to Leverage What what we've done for many many years and really tailor it to the outcomes that Health Care Providers are needing nowadays that more with less Mantra runs across the gamut but a lot of it's been helped me modernize helped me get to that next phase I can't I can't I don't have the resources to DIY it myself anymore I need to figure out a more robust business continuity program and so helping with business continuity Dr you know third copies of just all all this data that's growing so it's not just covered pandemic driven but it's that's definitely driving the the need and the requirement to modernize so much quicker it's interesting that you mentioned rackspace's history and expertise in doing things and moving that forward and leveraging that pivoting focusing on specific environments to create something net new we've seen a lot of that here if you go back 10 years I don't know if that's the perfect date to go back to but if you go back 10 years ago you think about VMware where would we have expected VMware to be in this era of cloud we may have thought of things very very differently differently Rackspace a Pioneer in creating off-premises hey we will do this for you didn't even really call it Cloud at the time right but it was Cloud yeah and so the ability for entities like Rackspace like VMware we had a NetApp talking to us about stuff they're doing in the cloud 10 years ago if you I would say no they'd be they'll be gone they'll be gone so it's really really cool to see Rackspace making this transition and uh you know being aware of everything that's going on and focusing on the best value proposition moving forward I mean am I am I you know do I sound like somebody who would who would fit into the Rackspace culture right now or do I not get it yes you sound like a rocker we'll make you an honorary record that's what we call a Rackspace employees yes you know what we've noticed too and is budgets are moving those decision makers are moving so again 10 years ago just like you said you would be talking to sometimes a completely different Persona than we do than we do today and we've seen a shift more towards that business value we have a really unique ability to bring business and Technical conversations together I did a lot of work in the past of working with a lot of CMO and and digital transformation companies and so helping bring it and business seeing the same and how healthcare because budgets are living in different places and even across the board with Rackspace people are trying to drive more business outcomes business driven Solutions so the technical becomes the back end and really the ingredients to make all of that all of that happen and that's what we're helping to solve and it's a lot it's very fast paced everyone wants to be agile now and so they're leaning on us more and more to drive more services so if you've seen Rackspace evolve we're driving more of that advisement and those transformation service type discussions where where our original history was DNA was very much always embedded in driving a great experience now they're just wanting more from us more services help us how help us figure out the how Adriana comment on the outcomes that you're helping Healthcare organizations achieve as as we as we it's such a relatable tangible topic Healthcare is Right everybody's everybody's got somebody who's sick or you've been sick or whatnot what are some of those outcomes that we can ex that customers can expect to achieve with Rackspace and VMware oh great great question so very much I can't mentioned earlier it's how do I modernize how do I optimize how do I take the biggest advantage of the budgets and the landscape that I have I want to get to the Cloud we need to help our patients and get access to that data is this ready to go into the cloud is this not ready to go into the cloud you know how do we how do we help make sure we're taking care of our patients we're keeping things secure and accessible you know what else do you think is coming up yeah and one specific one uh sequencing genetic sequencing and so we've had this come up from a few different types of providers whether it's medical devices that they may provide to their end clients and an outcome that they're looking for is how do we get how do we leverage um here's rip here's what we do but now we have so many more people we need to give this access to we need them to be able to have access to the sequencing that all of this is doing all of these different entities are doing and the outcome that they're trying to get to to is more collaboration so so that way we can speed up in the face of a pandemic we can speed up those resolutions we could speed up to you know whether it's a vaccine needed or something that's going to address the next thing that might be coming you know um so that's a specific one I've heard that from a handful of different different um clients that that we work with and so trying to give them a Consolidated not trying to we are able to deliver them a Consolidated place that their application and tooling can run in and then all of these other entities can safely and securely access this data to do what they're going to do in their own spaces and then hopefully it helps the betterment of of of us globally like as humans in the healthcare space we all benefit from this so leveraging the technology to really drive a valuable outcome helps us all so so and by the way I like trying to because it conveys the proper level of humility that we all need to bring to this because it's complicated and anybody who looks you in the eye it pretends like they know exactly how to do it you need to run from those people no it is and and look that's where our partners become so significant we we know we're Best in Class for specific things but we rely on our Partnerships with Dell and VMware to bring their expertise to bring their tried and true technology to help us all together collectively deliver something good technology for good technology for good it is inherently good and it's nice when it's used for goodness it's nice when it's yeah yeah talk about security for a second you know we've seen the threat landscape change dramatically obviously nobody wants to be the next breach ransomware becoming a household term it's now a matter of when we get a head not F where has security gone in terms of conversations with customers going help us ensure that what we're doing is delivering data access to the right folks that need it at the right time in real time in a secure fashion no uh that's another good question in hot and burning so you know I think if we think about past conversations it was that nice Insurance offering that seemed like it came at a high cost if you really need it I've never been breached before um I'll get it when I when I need it but exactly to your point it's the win and not the if so what we're finding and also working with a nice ecosystem of Partners as well from anywhere from Akamai to cloudflare to BT it's how do we help ensure that there is the security as Hannah mentioned that we're delivering the right data access to the right people and permissions you know we're able to help meet multitude of compliance and regulations obviously health care and other regulated space as well we look to make sure that from our side of the house from the infrastructure that we have the right building blocks to help them Reach those compliance needs obviously it's a mutual partnership in maintaining that compliance and that we're able to provide guidance and best practices on to make sure that the data is living in a secure place that the people that need access to it get it when they when they need it and monitor those permissions and back to your complexity comment so more and more complex as we are a global global provider so when you start to talk to our teams in the UK and our our you know clients there specializing um kind of that Sovereign Cloud mentality of hey we need to have um we need to have a cloud that is built for the specific needs that reside within Healthcare by region so it's not just even I mean you know we're we're homegrown out of San Antonio Texas so like we know the U.S and have spent time here but we've been Global for many years so we just get down into the into the nitty-gritty to customize what's needed within each region well Hannah is that part of the Rackspace value proposition at large moving forward because frankly look if I if I want if I want something generic I can I can swipe credit card and and fire up some Services sure um moving forward this is something that is going to more characterize the Rackspace experience and I and I understand that the hesitancy to say hey it's complicated it's like I don't want to hear that I want to hear that it's easy it's like well okay we'll make it easy for you yes but it's still complicated is that okay that's the honest that's that's the honest yeah that's why you need help right that's why we need to talk about that because people people have a legitimate question why Rackspace yep and we don't I don't want to put you on the spot but no yeah but why why Rackspace you've talked a little bit about it already but kind of encapsulate it oh gosh so good good question why Rackspace it's because you can stand up [Laughter] well you can you do it there's many different options out there um and if I had a PowerPoint slide I'd show you this like lovely web of options of directions that you could go and what is Rackspace value it's that we come in and simplify it because we've had experience with this this same use case whatever somebody is bringing forward to us is typically something we've dealt with at numerous times and so we're repeating and speeding up the ability to simplify the complex and to deliver something more simplified well it may be complex within us and we're like working to get it done the outcome that we're delivering is is faster it's less expensive than dedicating all the resources yourself to do it and go invest in all of that that we've already built up and then we're able to deliver it in a more simplified manner it's like the duck analogy the feet below the water yes exactly and a lot of expertise as well yes a lot talk a little bit about the solution that that Dell VMware Rackspace are delivering to customers sure so when we think about um Healthcare clouds or Cloud specific to the healthcare industry you know there's some major players within that space that you think epic we'll just use them as an example this can play out with others but we are building out a custom or we have a custom clouds able to host epic and then provide services up through the Epic help application through partnership so that is broadening the the market for us in the sense that we can tailor what the what that end and with that healthcare provider needs uh do they do they have the expertise to manage the application okay you do that and then we will build out a custom fit Cloud for that application oh and you need all the adjacent things that come with it too so then we have reference architecture you know built out already to to tailor to whatever all those other 40 80 90 hundreds of applications that need to come with that and then and then you start to think about Imaging platforms so we have Imaging platforms available for those specific needs whether it's MRIs and things like that and then the long-term retention that's needed with that so all of these pieces that build out a healthcare ecosystem and those needs we've built those we've built those out and provide those two to our clients yesterday VMware was talking about Cloud chaos yes and and it's true you talk about the complexity and Dave talks about it too like acknowledging yes this is a very complex thing to do yeah there's just so many moving parts so many Dynamics so many people involved or lack thereof people they they then talked about kind of this this the goal of getting customers from cloud chaos to Cloud smart how does that message resonate with Rackspace and how are you helping customers get from simplifying the chaos to eventually get to that cloud smart goal so a lot of it I I believe is with the power of our alliances and I was talking about this earlier we really believe in creating those powerful ecosystems and Jay McBain former for Forester analyst talks about you know the people are going to come ahead really are serve as that orchestration layer of bringing everybody together so if you look at all of that cloud chaos and all of the different logos and the webs and which decisions to make you know the ones that can help simplify that bring it all together like we're going to need a little bit of this like baking a cake in some ways we're going to need a little bit of sugar we'll need this technology this technology and whoever is able to put it together in a clean and seamless way and as Hannah said you know we have specific use cases in different verticals Healthcare specifically and talking from the Imaging and the Epic helping them get hospitals and different you know smaller clinics get to the edge so we have all of the building blocks to get them what they need and we can't do that without Partners but we help simplify those outcomes for those customers yep so there's where they're Cloud smart so then they're like I want I want to be agile I want to work on my cost I want to be able to leverage a multi-cloud fashion because some things may may inherently need to be on Azure some things we inherently need to be on VMware how do we make them feel like they still have that modernized platform and Technology but still give the secure and access that they need right yeah we like to think of it as are you multi-cloud by accident or multi-cloud by Design and help you get to that multi-cloud by Design and leveraging the right yeah the right tools the right places and Dell was talking about that just that at Dell Technologies world just a couple months ago that most most organizations are multi-cloud by default not designed are you seeing any customers that are are able or how are you able to help customers go from that we're here by default for whatever reason acquisition growth.oit line of business and go from that default to a more strategic multi-cloud approach yes it takes planning and commitment you know you really need the business leaders and the technical leaders bought in and saying this is what I'm gonna do because it is a journey because exactly right M A is like inherited four different tools you have databases that kind of look similar but they're a little bit different but they serve four different things so at Rackspace we're able to help assess and we sit down with their teams we have very amazing rock star expertise that will come in and sit with the customers and say what are we trying to drive for it let's get a good assessment of the landscape and let's figure out what are you trying to get towards in your journey and looking at what's the best fit for that application from where it is now to where it is where it wants to be because we saw a lot of customers move to the cloud very quickly you know they went Cloud native very fast some of it made sense retailers who had the spikiness that completely made sense we had some customers though that we've seen move certain workloads they've been in the public Cloud now for a couple years but it was a static website it doesn't make as much sense anymore for certain things so we're able to help navigate all of those choices for them so it's interesting you just you just said something sort of offhand about having experts having them come in so if I am a customer and I have some outcome I want to achieve yes the people that I'm going to be talking to from Rackspace or from Rackspace and the people from Rackspace who are going to be working with the actual people who are deploying infrastructure are also Rackspace people so the interesting contrast there between other circumstances oftentimes is you may have a Global Systems integrator with smart people representing what a cloud provider is doing the perception if they try to make people perceive that okay everybody is working in lockstep but often there are disconnects between what the real capabilities are and what's being advertised so is that I mean I I know it's like a leading question it's like softball get your bats out but I mean isn't that an advantage you've got a single you know the saying used to be uh one throat to show now it's one back to pack because it's kind of Contour friendly yeah yeah but talk about that is that a real Advantage it does it really helps us because again this is our our this is our expertise this is where we where we live we're really close to the infrastructure we're great at the advisement on it we can help with those ongoing and day two management and Opera in operations and what it feels like to grow and scale so we lay this out cleanly and and clearly as possible if this is where we're really good we can we can help you in these areas but we do work with system integrators as well and part of our partner Community because they're working on sometimes the bigger overall Transformations and then we're staying look we understand this multi-cloud but it helps us because in the end we're doing that end to end for for them customer knows this is Rackspace and on hand and we we really strive to be very transparent in what it is that we want to drive and outcomes so sometimes at the time where it's like we're gonna talk about a certain new technology Dell might bring some of their Architects to the table we will say here is Dell with us we're doing that actively in the healthcare space today and it's all coming together but you know at the end of the day this is what Rackspace is going to drive and deliver from an end to end and we tap those people when needed so you don't have to worry about picking up the phone to call Dell or VMware so if I had worded the hard-hitting journalist question the right way it would have elicited the same responses that yeah yeah it drives accountability at the end of the day because what we advised on what we said now we got to go deliver yeah and it's it's all the same the same organization driving accountability so from a customer perspective they're engaging Rackspace who will then bring in dell and VMware as needed as we find the solution exactly we have all of the certification I mean the team the team is great on getting all of the certs because we're getting to handling all of the level one level two level three business they know who to call they have their dedicated account teams they have engagement managers that help them Drive what those bigger conversations are and they don't have to worry about the experts because we either have it on hand or we'll pull them in as needed if it's the bat phone we need to call awesome ladies thank you so much for joining Dave and me today talking about what Rackspace is up to in the partner ecosystem space and specifically what you're doing to help Healthcare organizations transform and modernize we appreciate your insights and your thoughts yeah thank you for having us thank you pleasure for our guests and Dave Nicholson I'm Lisa Martin you're watching thecube live from VMware Explorer 2022 we'll be back after a short break foreign [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: TheCUBE presents KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe, 2022. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Valencia, Spain, a KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe, 2022. I'm your host, Keith Townsend alongside Paul Gillon, Senior Editor, Enterprise Architecture for SiliconANGLE. We are, I think at the half point way point this to be fair we've talked to a lot of folks in open source in general. What's the difference between open source communities and these closed source communities that we attend so so much? >> Well open source is just it's that it's open it's anybody can contribute. There are a set of rules that manage how your contributions are reflected in the code base. What has to be shared, what you can keep to yourself but the it's an entirely different vibe. You know, you go to a conventional conference where there's a lot of proprietary being sold and it's all about cash. It's all about money changing hands. It's all about doing the deal. And open source conferences I think are more, they're more transparent and yeah money changes hands, but it seems like the objective of the interaction is not to consummate a deal to the degree that it is at a more conventional computer conference. >> And I think that can create an uneven side effect. And we're going to talk about that a little bit with, honestly a friend of mine Alex Ellis, founder of OpenFaaS. Alex welcome back to the program. >> Thank you, good to see Keith. >> So how long you've been doing OpenFaaS? >> Well, I first had this idea that serverless and function should be run on your own hardware back in 2016. >> Wow and I remember seeing you at DockerCon EU, was that in 2017? >> Yeah, I think that's when we first met and Simon Foskett took us out to dinner and we got chatting. And I just remember you went back to your hotel room after the presentation. You just had your iPhone out and your headphones you were talking about how you tried to OpenWhisk and really struggled with it and OpenFaaS sort of got you where you needed to be to sort of get some value out of the solution. >> And I think that's the magic of these open source communities in open source conferences that you can try stuff, you can struggle with it, come to a conference either get some advice or go in another direction and try something like a OpenFaaS. But we're going to talk about the business perspective. >> Yeah. >> Give us some, like give us some hero numbers from the project. What types of organizations are using OpenFaaS and what are like the download and stars all those, the ways you guys measure project success. >> So there's a few ways that you hear this talked about at KubeCon specifically. And one of the metrics that you hear the most often is GitHub stars. Now a GitHub star means that somebody with their laptop like yourself has heard of a project or seen it on their phone and clicked a button that's it. There's not really an indication of adoption but of interest. And that might be fleeting and a blog post you might publish you might bump that up by 2000. And so OpenFaaS quite quickly got a lot of stars which encouraged me to go on and do more with it. And it's now just crossed 30,000 across the whole organization of about 40 different open source repositories. >> Wow that is a number. >> Now you are in ecosystem where Knative is also taken off. And can you distinguish your approach to serverless or FaaS to Knatives? >> Yes so, Knative isn't an approach to FaaS. That's simply put and if you listen to Aikas Ville from the Knative project, he was working inside Google and wished that Kubernetes would do a little bit more than what it did. And so he started an initiative with some others to start bringing more abstractions like Auto Scaling, revision management so he can have two versions of code and and shift traffic around. And that's really what they're trying to do is add onto Kubernetes and make it do some of the things that a platform might do. Now OpenFaaS started from a different angle and frankly, two years earlier. >> There was no Kubernetes when you started it. >> It kind of led in the space and and built out that ecosystem. So the idea was, I was working with Lambda and AWS Alexa skills. I wanted to run them on my own hardware and I couldn't. And so OpenFaaS from the beginning started from that developer experience of here's my code, run it for me. Knative is a set of extensions that may be a building block but you're still pretty much working with Kubernetes. We get calls come through. And actually recently I can't tell you who they are but there's a very large telecommunications provider in the US that was using OpenFaaS, like yourself heard of Knative and in the hype they switched. And then they switched back again recently to OpenFaaS and they've come to us for quite a large commercial deal. >> So did they find Knative to be more restrictive? >> No, it's the opposite. It's a lot less opinionated. It's more like building blocks and you are dealing with a lot more detail. It's a much bigger system to manage, but don't get me wrong. I mean the guys are very friendly. They have their sort of use cases that they pursue. Google's now donated the project to CNCF. And so they're running it that way. Now it doesn't mean that there aren't FaaS on top of it. Red Hat have a serverless product VMware have one. But OpenFaaS because it owns the whole stack can get you something that's always been very lean, simple to use to the point that Keith in his hotel room installed it and was product with it in an evening without having to be a Kubernetes expert. >> And that is and if you remember back that was very anti-Kubernetes. >> Yes. >> It was not a platform I thought that was. And for some of the very same reasons, I didn't think it was very user friendly. You know, I tried open with I'm thinking what enterprise is going to try this thing, especially without the handholding and the support needed to do that. And you know, something pretty interesting that happened as I shared this with you on Twitter, I was having a briefing by a big microprocessor company, one of the big two. And they were showing me some of the work they were doing in Cloud-native and the way that they stretch test the system to show me Auto Scaling. Is that they bought up a OpenFaaS what is it? The well text that just does a bunch of, >> The cows maybe. >> Yeah the cows. That does just a bunch of texts. And it just all, and I'm like one I was amazed at is super simple app. And the second one was the reason why they discovered it was because of that simplicity is just a thing that's in your store that you can just download and test. And it was open fast. And it was this big company that you had no idea that was using >> No >> OpenFaaS. >> No. >> How prevalent is that? That you're always running into like these surprises of who's using the solution. >> There are a lot of top tier companies, billion dollar companies that use software that I've worked on. And it's quite common. The main issue you have with open source is you don't have like the commercial software you talked about, the relationships. They don't tell you they're using it until it breaks. And then they may come in incognito with a personal email address asking for things. What they don't want to do often is lend their brands or support you. And so it is a big challenge. However, early on, when I met you, BT, live person the University of Washington, and a bunch of other companies had told us they were using it. We were having discussions with them took them to Kubecon and did talks with them. You can go and look at them in the video player. However, when I left my job in 2019 to work on this full time I went to them and I said, you know, use it in production it's useful for you. We've done a talk, we really understand the business value of how it saves you time. I haven't got a way to fund it and it won't exist unless you help they were like sucks to be you. >> Wow that's brutal. So, okay let me get this right. I remember the story 2019, you leave your job. You say I'm going to do OpenFaaS and support this project 100% of your time. If there's no one contributing to the project from a financial perspective how do you make money? I've always pitched open source because you're the first person that I've met that ran an open source project. And I always pitched them people like you who work on it on their side time. But they're not the Knatives of the world, the SDOs, they have full time developers. Sponsored by Google and Microsoft, etc. If you're not sponsored how do you make money off of open source? >> If this is the million dollar question, really? How do you make money from something that is completely free? Where all of the value has already been captured by a company and they have no incentive to support you build a relationship or send you money in any way. >> And no one has really figured it out. Arguably Red Hat is the only one that's pulled it off. >> Well, people do refer to Red Hat and they say the Red Hat model but I think that was a one off. And we quite, we can kind of agree about that in a business. However, I eventually accepted the fact that companies don't pay for something they can get for free. It took me a very long time to get around that because you know, with open source enthusiast built a huge community around this project, almost 400 people have contributed code to it over the years. And we have had full-time people working on it on and off. And there's some people who really support it in their working hours or at home on the weekends. But no, I had to really think, right, what am I going to offer? And to begin with it would support existing customers weren't interested. They're not really customers because they're consuming it as a project. So I needed to create a product because we understand we buy products. Initially I just couldn't find the right customers. And so many times I thought about giving up, leaving it behind, my family would've supported me with that as well. And they would've known exactly why even you would've done. And so what I started to do was offer my insights as a community leader, as a maintainer to companies like we've got here. So Casting one of my customers, CSIG one of my customers, Rancher R, DigitalOcean, a lot of the vendors you see here. And I was able to get a significant amount of money by lending my expertise and writing content that gave me enough buffer to give the doctors time to realize that maybe they do need support and go a bit further into production. And over the last 12 months, we've been signing six figure deals with existing users and new users alike in enterprise. >> For support >> For support, for licensing of new features that are close source and for consulting. >> So you have proprietary extensions. Also that are sort of enterprise class. Right and then also the consulting business, the support business which is a proven business model that has worked >> Is a proven business model. What it's not a proven business model is if you work hard enough, you deserve to be rewarded. >> Mmh. >> You have to go with the system. Winter comes after autumn. Summer comes after spring and you, it's no point saying why is it like that? That's the way it is. And if you go with it, you can benefit from it. And that's what the realization I had as much as I didn't want to do it. >> So you know this community, well you know there's other project founders out here thinking about making the leap. If you're giving advice to a project founder and they're thinking about making this leap, you know quitting their job and becoming the next Alex. And I think this is the perception that the misperception out there. >> Yes. >> You're, you're well known. There's a difference between being well known and well compensated. >> Yeah. >> What advice would you give those founders >> To be. >> Before they make the leap to say you know what I'm going to do my project full time. I'm going to lean on the generosity of the community. So there are some generous people in the community. You've done some really interesting things for individual like contributions etc but that's not enough. >> So look, I mean really you have to go back to the MBA mindset. What problem are you trying to solve? Who is your target customer? What do they care about? What do they eat and drink? When do they go to sleep? You really need to know who this is for. And then customize a journey for them so that they can come to you. And you need some way initially of funneling those people in qualifying them because not everybody that comes to a student or somebody doing a PhD is not your customer. >> Right, right. >> You need to understand sales. You need to understand a lot about business but you can work it out on your way. You know, I'm testament to that. And once you have people you then need something to sell them that might meet their needs and be prepared to tell them that what you've got isn't right for them. 'cause sometimes that's the one thing that will build integrity. >> That's very hard for community leaders. It's very hard for community leaders to say, no >> Absolutely so how do you help them over that hump? I think of what you've done. >> So you have to set some boundaries because as an open source developer and maintainer you want to help everybody that's there regardless. And I think for me it was taking some of the open source features that companies used not releasing them anymore in the open source edition, putting them into the paid developing new features based on what feedback we'd had, offering support as well but also understanding what is support. What do you need to offer? You may think you need a one hour SLA for a fix probably turns out that you could sell a three day response time or one day response time. And some people would want that and see value in it. But you're not going to know until you talk to your customers. >> I want to ask you, because this has been a particular interest of mine. It seems like managed services have been kind of the lifeline for pure open source companies. Enabling these companies to maintain their open source roots, but still have a revenue stream of delivering as a service. Is that a business model option you've looked at? >> There's three business models perhaps that are prevalent. One is OpenCore, which is roughly what I'm following. >> Right. >> Then there is SaaS, which is what you understand and then there's support on pure open source. So that's more like what Rancher does. Now if you think of a company like Buoyant that produces Linkerd they do a bit of both. So they don't have any close source pieces yet but they can host it for you or you can host it and they'll support you. And so I think if there's a way that you can put your product into a SaaS that makes it easier for them to run then you know go for it. However, we've OpenFaaS, remember what is the core problem we are solving, portability So why lock into my cloud? >> Take that option off the table, go ahead. >> It's been a long journey and I've been a fan since your start. I've seen the bumps and bruises and the scars get made. If you're open source leader and you're thinking about becoming as famous as Alex, hey you can do that, you can put in all the work become famous but if you want to make a living, solve a problem, understand what people are willing to pay for that problem and go out and sell it. Valuable lessons here on theCUBE. From Valencia, Spain I'm Keith Townsend along with Paul Gillon and you're watching theCUBE the leader in high-tech coverage. (Upbeat music)

>>Welcome to the cubes, continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year. This year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two life studios, two remote studios, and over 100 guests. So stick around as we talk about the next 10 years of cloud innovation, I'm very excited to be joined by another Lisa from Zscaler. Lisa Lorenzen is here with me, the field CTO for the Americas. She's here to talk about ZScaler's mission to make doing business and navigating change a simpler, faster, and more productive experience. Lisa, welcome to the program. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >>So let's talk about Zscaler in AWS. Talk to me about the partnership, what you guys are doing together. >>Yeah, definitely. Z scaler is a strategic security ISV partner with AWS. So we provide AWS customers with zero trust, secure remote access to AWS, and this can improve their security posture as well as their user experience with AWS. These scaler recently announced that we are the first and only cloud security service to achieve the FedRAMP PI authorization to operate. And that FedRAMP ZPA service is built on AWS gov cloud. ZScaler's also an AWS marketplace seller where our customers can purchase our zero trust exchange services as well as request or high value security assessments. We're excited about that as we're seeing a rapid increase in customer adoption as these scaler via the AWS marketplace, we vetted our software on AWS edge services that support emerging use cases, including 5g, IOT, and OT. So for example, Zscaler runs on wavelength, outposts, snowball and snowcones, and Zscaler has strategic partnerships with leading AWS service providers and system integration partners, including Verizon NTT, BT, Accenture, Deloitte, and many of the leading national and regional AWS consulting partners. >>Great summary there. So you mentioned something I want to get more understanding on this. It sounds like it's a differentiator for CSO scale. You said that you guys recently announced to the first and only cloud security service to achieve FedRAMP high. Uh, ATO built on AWS gov cloud. Talk to me about and what the significance of that is. >>I L five authorization to operate means that we are able to protect federal assets for the department of defense, as well as for the civilian agencies. It just extends the certification of our cloud by the government to ensure that we meet all of the requirements to protect that military side of the house, as well as the civilian side of the house. >>Got it super important there, let's talk about zero trust. It's a super hot topic. We've seen so many changes to the threat landscape during the pandemic. How are some of the ways that Z scaler and AWS are helping customers tackle this together? >>Well, I'd actually like to answer that by telling a little bit of a story. Um, Growmark is one of our Z scaler and AWS success stories when they had to send everyone home to work from home overnight, the quote that we had from is the users just went home and nothing changed. ZPA made work from anywhere, just work, and they were able to maintain complete business continuity. So even though their employers might have had poor internet service at home, or, you know, 80 challenging infrastructure, if you've got kids on your wifi bunch of kids in the neighborhood doing remote school, everyone's working from home, you don't have the reliability or the, maybe the bandwidth capacity that you would when you're sitting in an office. And Zscaler private access is a cloud delivered zero trust solution that leverages dynamic resilient, TLS encrypted tunnels to connect the user to an application rather than putting an end point on a network. >>And the reason that's important is it makes for a much more reliable and resilient service, even in environments that may not have the best connectivity I live out in the county. I really, some days think that there's a hamster on a wheel somewhere in my cable modem network, and I am a consumer of this, right. I connect to Z scaler over Zscaler private access, I'm protected by Zscaler internet access. And so I access our internal applications that are running in AWS as well this way. And it makes a huge difference. Growmark really started with an SAP migration to AWS, and this was long before the pandemic. So they started out looking for that better user experience and the zero trust capability. They were able to ensure that their SAP environment was dark to the internet, even though it was running in the cloud. And that put them in this position to leverage that zero trust service when the pandemic was upon us, >>That ability or that quote that you mentioned, it just worked was absolutely critical for all of us in every industry. And I'm sure a lot of folks who were trying to manage working from home, the spouses from home kids doing, you know, school online also felt like you with the hamster on the wheel, I'm sure their internet access, but being able to have that business continuity was table-stakes especially early on for most organizations. We saw a lot of digital transformation, a lot of acceleration of it in the last 20 months during the pandemic. Talk to me about how Z scaler helps customers from a digital transformation perspective and maybe what some of the things were that you saw in the last 20 months that have accelerated >>Absolutely. Um, another example, there would be Jefferson health, and really, as we saw during the pandemic, as you say, it accelerated a lot of the existing trends of mobility, but also migration to the cloud. And when you move applications to the cloud, honestly, it's a complex environment and maybe the controls and the risk landscape is not as well. Understood. So Z scaler also has another solution, which is our cloud security posture management. And this is really ensuring that your configuration on your environment, that those workloads run in is controlled, understood correctly, coordinated and configured. So as deference and health migrated to the cloud first model, they were able to leverage the scalers workload posture to measure and control that risk. Again, it's environment where the combination of AWS and Z scaler together gives them a flexible, resilient solution that they can be confident is correctly configured and thoroughly locked down. >>And that's critical for businesses in any organization, especially as quickly as how quickly things changed in the last 20 months or so I do wonder how your customer conversations have has changed as I introduced you as the field CTO of the America's proceeds killer. I'm sure you talk with a lot of customers. How has the security posture, um, zero trust? How has that risen up within the organizational chain? Is that something that the board is concerned about? >>My gosh, yes. And zero trust really has gone through the Gartner hype cycle. You've got the introduction, the peak of interest, the trough of despair, and then really rising back into what's actually feasible. Only zero trust has done that on a timeline of over a decade. When the term was first introduced, I was working with firewall VPN enact technology, and frankly, we didn't necessarily have the flexibility, the scalability, or the resilience to offer true zero trust. You can try to do that with network security controls, but when you're really protecting a user connecting to an application, you've got an abstraction layer mismatch. What we're seeing now is the reemergence of zero trust as a priority. And this was greatly accelerated honestly by the cybersecurity executive order that came out a few months ago from the Biden administration, which made zero trust a priority for the federal government and the public sector, but also raised visibility on zero trust for the private sector as well. >>When we're looking at zero trust as a way to perhaps ward off some of these high profile breaches and outages like the colonial pipeline, whole situation that was based on some legacy technology for remote access that was exploited and led to a breach that they had to take their entire infrastructure offline to mitigate. If we can look at more modern delivery mechanisms and more sophisticated controls for zero trust, that helps the board address a number of challenges ranging from obviously risk management, but also agility and cost reduction in an environment where more than ever belts are being tightened. New ways of delivering applications are being considered. But the ability to innovate is more important than ever. >>It is more important than ever the ability to innovate, but it really changing security landscape. I'm glad to hear that you're seeing, uh, this change as a result of the executive order that president Biden put down in the summer. That's good news. It sounds like there's some progress being made there, but we saw, you mentioned colonial pipeline. We saw a lot in the last 20, 22 months or so with ransomware becoming a household word, also becoming something that is a matter of when companies in any industry get hit and versus if it's no longer kind of that choice anymore. So talk to me about some of the threats and some of the stats that Z scaler has seen particularly in the last 20, 22 months. >>Oh gosh. Well, let's see. I'm just going to focus on the last 12 months, cause that's really where we've got some of the best data. We've seen a 500% increase in ransomware delivered over encrypted channels. And what that means is it's really critical to have scalable SSL inspection that can operate at wire speed without impeding the user experience or delay in critical projects, server communications, activities that need to happen without any introduced in any additional latency. So if you think about what that takes the Z scaler internet access solution is protecting users, outbound access in the same way that Zscaler private access protects access to private resources. So we're really seeing more and more organizations seeing that both of these services are necessary to deliver a comprehensive zero trust. You have to protect and control the outbound traffic to make sure that nothing good leaks out, nothing bad sneaks in. >>And at the same time, you have to protect and control the inbound traffic and inbound is, you know, a much broader definition with apps in the data center in the cloud these days. We're also seeing that 30% of malware is delivered through trusted applications like file shares or collaboration tools. So it's no longer enough to only inspect web traffic. Now you have to be able to really inspect all flavors of traffic when you're doing that outbound protection. So another good example where Z scaler and AWS work together here is in Amazon workspaces. And there's a huge trend towards desktop as a service, for example, and organizations are starting to recognize that they need to protect both the user experience and also the connectivity onward in Amazon workspaces, the same way that they would for a traditional end user device. So we see Z scaler running in the Amazon workspaces instances to protect that outbound traffic and control that inbound traffic as well. >>Another big area is the ransomware infections are not the problem. It's the result. So over half of the ransomware infections include data theft or leakage. And that is a double whammy because you get what's called double extortion where not only do you have to pay to unlock your machines, but you have to pay not to have that stolen data exposed to the rest of the world. So it's more important than ever to be able to break that kill chain as early as possible to ensure that the or the server traffic itself isn't exposed to the initial infection vector. If you do happen to get an infection vector that sneaks through, you need to be able to control the lateral movement so that it doesn't spread in your environment. And then if both of those controls fail, you also need the outbound protection such as CASBY and DLP to ensure that even if they get into the environment, they can't exfiltrate any of the data that they find as a result. We're seeing that the largest security risk today is lateral movement inside the corporate network. And that's one of the things that makes these ransomware double extortion situations, such a problem. >>Last question for you. And we've got about a minute left. I'm curious, you said over 50% of ransomware attacks are now double extortion. How do you guys help customers combat that? So >>We really deliver a solution that eliminates a lot of the attack surface and a lot of the risks. We have no inbound listener, unlike a traditional VPN. So the outbound only connections mean you don't have the external attack surface. You can write these granular policy controls to eliminate lateral movement. And because we integrate with customer's existing identity and access management, we can eliminate the credential exposure that can lead to a larger spread in a compromised environment. We also can eliminate the problem of unpatched gateways, which led to things like colonial pipeline or some of the other major breaches we've seen recently. And we can remove that single point of failure. So you can rely on dynamic optimized traffic distribution for all of these secure services. Basically, what we're trying to do is make it simpler and more secure at the same time, >>Simpler and more secure at the same time is what everyone needs regardless of industry. Lisa, thank you for joining me today, talking about Zscaler in AWS, zero trust the threat landscape that you're seeing, and also how's the scaler and AWS together can help customers mitigate those growing risks. We appreciate your insights and your thoughtfulness. >>Thank you >>For Lisa Lorenzen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent stick around more great content coming up next.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Mobile World Congress is alive, theCUBE will be there and we'll certainly let you know if it's alive and well when we get on the ground. Now, as we approach a delayed mobile world congress, it's really appropriate to reflect in the state of the telecoms industry. Let's face it. Telcos have done of really good job of keeping us all connected during the pandemic, supporting work from home and that whole pivot, accommodating the rapid shift to landline traffic, securing the network and keeping it up and running but it doesn't change the underlying fundamental dilemma that Telco has faced. Telco is a slow growth, no growth industry, with revenue expectations in the low single digits. And at the same time network traffic continues to grow at 20% annually. And last year it grew at 40% to 50%. Despite these challenges, Telcos are still investing in the future. For example, the Telco industry collectively is selling out more than a trillion dollars in the first half of this decade on 5G and fiber infrastructure. And it's estimated that there are now more than 200 5G networks worldwide. But a lot of questions remain, not the least of which is, can and should Telcos go beyond connectivity and fiber. Can the Telcos actually monetize 5G or whatever's next beyond 5G? Or is that going to be left to the ecosystem? Now what about the ecosystem? How is that evolving? And very importantly, what role will the Cloud Hyperscalers play in Telco? Are they infrastructure on which the Telcos can build or are they going to suck the value out of the market as they have done in the enterprise? Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, it's my pleasure to welcome a long time telecoms industry analyst and colleague, and the founding director of Lewis Insight, Mr. Chris Lewis. Chris, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on >> Dave, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. >> It is really our pleasure. So, we're going to cover a lot of ground today. And first thing, we're going to talk about Mobile World Congress. I've never been, you're an expert at that and what we can expect. And then we're going to review the current state of telecoms infrastructure, where it should go. We're going to dig into transformation. Is it a mandate? Is it aspirational? Can Telcos enter adjacent markets in ways they haven't been able to in the past? And then how about the ecosystem? We're going to talk about that, and then obviously we're going to talk about Cloud as I said, and we'll riff a little bit on the tech landscape. So Chris, let's get into it, Mobile World Congress, it's back on, what's Mobile World Congress typically like? What's your expectation this year for the vibe compared to previous events? >> Well Dave, the issue of Mobile World Congress is always that we go down there for a week into Barcelona. We stress ourselves building a matrix of meetings in 30 minutes slots and we return at the end of it trying to remember what we'd been told all the way through. The great thing is that with the last time we had a live, with around 110,000 people there, you could see anyone and everyone you needed to within the mobile, and increasingly the adjacent industry and ecosystem. So, he gave you that once a year, big download of everything new, obviously because it's the Mobile World Congress, a lot of it around devices, but increasingly over the last few years, we saw many, many stands with cars on them because the connected car became an issue, a lot more software oriented players there, but always the Telcos, always the people providing the network infrastructure. Increasingly in the last few years people provided the software and IT infrastructure, but all of these people contributing to what the network should be in the future, what needs to be connected. But of course the reach of the network has been growing. You mentioned during lockdown about connecting people in their homes, well, of course we've also been extending that connection to connect things whether it's in the home or the different devices, monitoring of doorbells and lights and all that sort of stuff. And in the industry environment, connecting all of the robots and sensors. So, actually the perimeter, the remit of the industry to connect has been expanding, and so is the sort of remit of Mobile World Congress. So, we set an awful lot of different suppliers coming in, trying to attach to this enormous market of roughly $1.5 trillion globally. >> Chris, what's the buzz in the industry in terms of who's going to show up. I know a lot of people have pulled out, I've got the Mobile World Congress app and I can see who's attending. And it looks like quite a few people are going to go but what's your expectation? >> Well, from an analyst point of view, obviously I'm mainly keeping up with my clients and trying to get new clients. I'm looking at it and going most of my clients are not attending in person. Now, of course, we need the DSMA, we need Mobile World Congress for future for the industry interaction. But of course, like many people having adopted and adapted to be online, then they're putting a lot of the keynotes online, a lot of the activities will be online. But of course many of the vendors have also produced their independent content and content to actually deliver to us as analysts. So, I'm not sure who will be there. I like you, but you'll be on the ground. You'll be able to report back and let us know exactly who turned up. But from my point of view, I've had so many pre-briefs already, the difference between this year and previous years, I used to get loads of pre-briefs and then have to go do the briefs as well. So this year I've got the pre-brief so I can sit back, put my feet up and wait for your report to come back as to what's happening on the ground. >> You got it. Okay, let's get into a little bit and talk about Telco infrastructure and the state, where it is today, where it's going, Chris, how would you describe the current state of Telco infrastructure? Where does it need to go? Like, what is the ideal future state look like for Telcos in your view? >> So there's always a bit of an identity crisis when it comes to Telco. I think going forward, the connectivity piece was seen as being table stakes, and then people thought where can we go beyond connectivity? And we'll come back to that later. But actually to the connectivity under the scenario I just described of people, buildings, things, and society, we've got to do a lot more work to make that connectivity extend, to be more reliable, to be more secure. So, the state of the network is that we have been building out infrastructure, which includes fiber to connect households and businesses. It includes that next move to cellular from 4G to 5G. It obviously includes Wi-Fi, wherever we've got that as well. And actually it's been a pretty good state, as you said in your opening comments they've done a pretty good job keeping us all connected during the pandemic, whether we're a fixed centric market like the UK with a lot of mobile on top and like the US, or in many markets in Africa and Asia, where we're very mobile centric. So, the fact is that every country market is different, so we should never make too many assumptions at a very top level, but building out that network, building out the services, focusing on that connectivity and making sure we get that cost of delivery right, because competition is pushing us towards having and not ever increasing prices, because we don't want to pay a lot extra every time. But the big issue for me is how do we bring together the IT and the network parts of this story to make sure that we build that efficiency in, and that brings in many questions that we going to touch upon now around Cloud and Hyperscalers around who plays in the ecosystem. >> Well, as you know, Telco is not my wheelhouse, but hanging around with you, I've learned, you've talked a lot about the infrastructure being fit for purpose. It's easy from an IT perspective. Oh yeah, it's fossilized, it's hardened, and it's not really flexible, but the flip side of that coin is as you're pointing out, it's super reliable. So, the big talk today is, "Okay, we're going to open up the network, open systems, and Open RAN, and open everything and microservices and containers. And so, the question is this, can you mimic that historical reliability in that open platform? >> Well, for me, this is the big trade-off and in my great Telco debate every year, I always try and put people against each other to try and to literally debate the future. And one of the things we looked at was is a more open network against this desire of the Telcos to actually have a smaller supplier roster. And of course, as a major corporation, these are on a national basis, very large companies, not large compared to the Hyperscalers for example, but they're large organizations, and they're trying to slim down their organization, slim down the supplier ecosystem. So actually in some ways, the more open it becomes, the more someone's got to manage and integrate all those pieces together. And that isn't something we want to do necessarily. So, I see a real tension there between giving more and more to the traditional suppliers. The Nokia's, Ericsson's, Huawei's, Amdocs and so on, the Ciscos. And then the people coming in breaking new ground like Mavenir and come in, and the sort of approach that Rakuten and Curve taken in bringing in more open and more malleable pieces of smaller software. So yeah, it's a real challenge. And I think as an industry which is notorious for being slow moving, actually we've begun to move relatively quickly, but not necessarily all the way through the organization. We've got plenty of stuff sitting on major or mainframes still in the back of the organization. But of course, as mobile has come in, we've started to deal much more closely, uninteractively in real time, God forbid, with the customers. So actually, at that front end, we've had to do things a lot more quickly. And that's where we're seeing the quickest adaptation to what you might see in your IT environment as being much more, continuous development, continuous improvement, and that sort of on demand delivery. >> Yeah, and we're going to get to that sort of in the Cloud space, but I want to now touch on Telco transformation which is sort of the main theme of this episode. And there's a lot of discussion on this topic, can Telcos move beyond connectivity and managing fiber? Is this a mandate? Is it a pipe dream that's just aspirational? Can they attack adjacencies to grow beyond the 1% a year? I mean, they haven't been successful historically. What are those adjacencies that might be, an opportunity and how will that ecosystem develop? >> Sure. >> So Chris, can and should Telcos try to move beyond core connectivity? Let's start there. >> I like what you did there by saying pipe dreams. Normally, pipe is a is a negative comment in the telecom world. But pipe dream gives it a real positive feel. So can they move beyond connectivity? Well, first of all, connectivity is growing in terms of the number of things being connected. So, in that sense, the market is growing. What we pay for that connectivity is not necessarily growing. So, therefore the mandate is absolutely to transform the inner workings and reduce the cost of delivery. So, that's the internal perspective. The external perspective is that we've tried in many Telcos around the world to break into those adjacent markets, being around media, being enterprise, being around IOT, and actually for the most part they've failed. And we've seen some very significant recent announcements from AT&T, Verizon, BT, beginning to move away from, owning content and not delivering content, but owning content. And the same as they've struggled often in the enterprise market to really get into that, because it's a well-established channel of delivery bringing all those ecosystem players in. So, actually rather than the old Telco view of we going to move into adjacent markets and control those markets, actually moving into them and enabling fellow ecosystem players to deliver the service is what I think we're beginning to see a lot more of now. And that's the big change, it's actually learning to play with the other people in the ecosystem. I always use a phrase that there's no room for egos in the ecosystem. And I think Telcos went in initially with an ego thinking we're really important, we are on connectivity. But actually now they're beginning to approach the ecosystem things saying, "How can we support partners? How can we support everyone in this ecosystem to deliver the services to consumers, businesses and whomever in this evolving ecosystem?" So, there are opportunities out there, plenty of them, but of course, like any opportunity, you've got to approach it in the right way. You've got to get the right investment in place. You've got to approach it with the right open API so everyone can integrate with your approach, and approach it, do I say with a little bit of humility to say, "Hey, we can bring this to the table, how do we work together? >> Well, it's an enormous market. I think you've shared with me, it's like 1.4 trillion. And I want to stay on these adjacencies for a minute, because one of the obvious things that Telcos will talk about is managed services. And I know we have to be careful of that term in an IT context, that it's different in a, you're talking about managing connectivity, but there's professional services. That's a logical sort of extension of their business and probably a safe adjacency, maybe not even adjacency, but they're not going to get into devices. I mean, they'll resell devices, but they're not going to be, I would presume not go back to trying to make devices, but there's certainly the edge and that's so, it'll define in opaque, but it's huge. If there's 5G, there's the IT component and that's probably a partnership opportunity. And as you pointed out, there's the ecosystem, but I wonder, how do you think about 5G as an adjacency or indoor opportunity? Is it a revenue opportunity for Telcos or is that just something that is really aspirational? >> Oh, absolutely it's a revenue opportunity, but I prefer to think of 5G as being a sort of a metaphor for the whole future of telecom. So, we usually talk, and MWC would normally talk about 5G just as a mobile solution. Of course, what you can get with, you can use this fixed wireless access approach, where the roots that sits in your house or your building. So, it's a potential replacement for some fixed lines. And of course, it's also, gives you the ability to build out, let's say in a manufacturing or a campus environment, a private 5G network. So, many of the early opportunities we're seeing with 5G are actually in that more private network environment addressing those very low latency, and high bandwidth requirements. So yeah, there are plenty of opportunities. Of course, the question here is, is connectivity enough, or especially with your comment around the edge, at the edge we need to manage connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, and of course the applications. So, that's a blend of players. It's not going to be in the hands of one player. So yes, plenty of opportunities but understanding what comes the other way from the customer base, where that's, you and I in our homes or outward as an about, or from a business point of view, an office or a campus environment, that's what should be driving, and not the technology itself. And I think this is the trap that the industry has fallen into many times, is we've got a great new wave of technology coming, how can we possibly deliver it to everybody rather than listening to what the customers really require and delivering it in a way consumable by all those different markets. >> Yeah now, of course all of these topics blend together. We try to keep them separately, but we're going to talk about Cloud, we're going to talk about competition, But one of the areas that we don't have a specific agenda item on is, is data and AI. And of course there's all this data flowing through the network, so presumably it's an opportunity for the Telcos. At the same time, they're not considered AI experts. They do when you talk about Edge, they would appear to have the latency advantage because of the last mile and their proximity, to various end points. But the Cloud is sort of building out as well. How do you think about data and AI as an opportunity for Telco? >> I think the whole data and AI piece for me sits on top of the cake or pie, whatever you want to call it. What we're doing with all this connectivity, what we're doing with all these moving parts and gathering information around it, and building automation into the delivery of the service, and using the analytics, whether you call it ML or AI, it doesn't really matter. But actually using that information to deliver a better service, a better outcome. Now, of course, Telcos have had much of this data for years and years, for decades, but they've never used it. So, I think what's happening is, the Cloud players are beginning to educate many of the Telcos around how valuable this stuff is. And that then brings in that question of how do we partner with people using open APIs to leverage that data. Now, do the Telcos keep hold of all that data? Do they let the Cloud players do all of it? No, it's going to be a combination depending on particular environments, and of course the people owning their devices also have a vested interest in this as well. So, you've always got to look at it end to end and where the data flows are, and where we can analyze it. But I agree that analysis on the device at the Edge, and perhaps less and less going back to the core, which is of course the original sort of mandate of the Cloud. >> Well, we certainly think that most of the Edge is going to be about AI inferencing, and then most of the data is going to stay at the edge. Some will come back for sure. And that is big opportunity for whether you're selling compute or conductivity, or maybe storage as well, but certainly insights at the Edge. >> Everything. >> Yeah. >> Everything, yeah. >> Let's get into the Cloud discussion and talk about the Hyperscalers, the big Hyperscaler elephant in the room. We're going to try to dig into what role the Cloud will play in the transformation of telecoms on Telecom TV at the great Telco debate. You likened the Hyperscalers, Chris, to Dementors from Harry Potter hovering over the industry. So, the question is, are the Cloud players going to suck the value out of the Telcos? Or are they more like Dobby the elf? They're powerful, there's sometimes friendly but they're unpredictable. >> Thank you for extending that analogy. Yes, it got a lot of reaction when I use that, but I think it indicates some of the direction of power shift where, we've got to remember here that Telcos are fundamentally national, and they're restricted by regulation, and the Cloud players are global, perhaps not as global as they'd like be, but some regional restrictions, but the global players, the Hyperscalers, they will use that power and they they will extend their reach, and they are extending their reach. If you think they now command some fantastic global networks, in some ways they've replaced some of the Telco international networks, all the submarine investments that tend to be done primarily for the Hyperscalers. So, they're building that out. So, as soon as you get onto their network, then you suddenly become part of that environment. And that is reducing some of the spend on the longer distances we might have got in the past approaches from the Telcos. Now, does that mean they're going to go all the way down and take over the Telcos? I don't believe so, because it's a fundamentally different business digging fiber in people's streets and delivering to the buildings, and putting antennas up. So, they will be a coexistence. And in fact, what we've already seen with Cloud and the Hyperscalers is that they're working much more close together than people might imagine. Now, you mentioned about data in the previous question, Google probably the best known of the of the AI and ML delivers from the Cloud side, working with many of the Telcos, even in some cases to actually have all the data outsourced into the Google Cloud for analytics purposes. They've got the power, the heavy lifting to do that. And so, we begin to see that, and obviously with shifting of workloads as appropriate within the Telco networking environment, we're seeing that with AWS, and of course with Azure as well. And Azure of course acquired a couple of companies in affirmed and Metro switch, which actually do some of the formal 5G core and the likes there within the connectivity environment. So, it's not clean cuts. And to go back to the analogy, those Dementors are swooping around and looking for opportunities, and we know that they will pick up opportunities, and they will extend their reach as far as they can down to that edge. But of course, the edge is where, as you rightly say, the Telcos have the control, they don't necessarily own the customer. I don't believe anyone owns the customer in this digital environment, because digital allows you to move your allegiance and your custom elsewhere anyway. So, but they do own that access piece, and that's what's important from a national point of view, from an economic point of view. And that's why we've seen some of the geopolitical activity banning Huawei from certain markets, encouraging more innovation through open ecosystem plays. And so, there is a tension there between the local Telco, the local market and the Hyperscaler market, but fundamentally they've got an absolute brilliant way of working together using the best of both worlds to deliver the services that we need as an economy. >> Well, and we've talked about this you and I in the past where the Telcos, portions of the Telco network could move into the Cloud. And there of course the Telcos all run the big data centers, and portions of that IT infrastructure could move into the Cloud. But it's very clear, they're not going to give up the entire family jewels to the Cloud players. Why would they? But there are portions of their IT that they could move into. Particularly, in the front end, they want to build like everybody. They want to build an abstraction layer. They're not going to move their core systems and their backend Oracle databases, they're going to put a brick wall around those, but they wanted abstraction layer, and they want to take advantage of microservices and use that data from those transaction systems. But the web front end stuff makes sense to put into Cloud. So, how do you think about that? >> I think you've hit the nail on the head. So you can't move those big backend systems straight away, gradually over time, you will, but you've got to go for those easy wins. And certainly in the research I've been doing with many of my clients, they're suggested that front end piece, making sure that you can onboard customers more easily, you can get the right mix of services. You can provide the omnichannel interaction from that customer experience that everybody talks about, for which the industry is not very well known at all by the way. So, any improvement on that is going to be good from an MPS point of view. So yeah, leveraging what we might, what we call BSS OSS in the telecom world, and actually putting that into the Cloud, leveraging both the Hyperscalers, but also by the way, many of the traditional players who people think haven't moved Cloud wards, but they are moving Cloud wards and they're embracing microservices and Cloud native. So, what you would have seen if we'd been in person down in Barcelona next week, would be a lot of the vendors who perhaps traditionally seems a bit slow moving, actually have done a lot of work to move their portfolio into the Cloud and into Cloud native environments. And yes, as you say, we can use that front end, we can use the API openness that's developed by people at the TM forum, to actually make sure we don't have to do the backend straight away, do it over time. Because of course the thing that we're not touching upon here, is the revenue stream is a consistent revenue stream. So, just because you don't need to change the backend to keep your revenue stream going, this is on a new, it keeps delivering every month, we keep paying our 50, 40, whatever bucks a month into the Telco pot. That's why it's such a big market, and people aren't going to stop doing that. So, I think the dynamics of the industry, we often spend a lot of time thinking about the inner workings of it and the potential of adjacent markets, whereas actually, we keep paying for this stuff, we keep pushing revenue into the pockets of all the Telcos. So, it's not a bad industry to be in, even if they were just pushed back to be in the access market, it's a great business. We need it more and more. The elasticity of demand is very inelastic, we need it. >> Yeah, it's the mother of old golden geese. We don't have a separate topic on security, and I want to touch on security here, is such an important topic. And it's top of mind obviously for everybody, Telcos, Hyperscalers, the Hyperscalers have this shared responsibility model, you know it well. A lot of times it's really confusing for customers. They don't realize it until there has been a problem. The Telcos are going to be very much tuned into this. How will all this openness, and we're going to talk about technology in a moment, but how will this transformation in your view, in the Cloud, with the shared responsibility model, how will that affect the whole security posture? >> Security is a great subject, and I do not specialize in it. I don't claim to be an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I would say security for me is a bit like AI and analytics. It's everywhere. It's part of everything. And therefore you cannot think of it as a separate add on issue. So, every aspect, every element, every service you build into your micro services environment has to think about how do you secure that connection, that transaction, how do you secure the customer's data? Obviously, sovereignty plays a role in that as well in terms of where it sits, but at every level of every connection, every hop that we look through, every route to jump, we've got to see that security is built in. And in some ways, it's seen as being a separate part of the industry, but actually, as we collapse parts of the network down, we're talking about bringing optical and rooting together in many environments, security should be talked about in the same breath. So when I talked about Edge, when I talked about connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, I should've said security as well, because I absolutely believe that is fundamental to every chain in the link and let's face it, we've got a lot of links in the chain. >> Yeah, 100%. Okay, let's hit on technologies and competition, we kind of blend those together. What technology should we be paying attention to that are going to accelerate this transformation. We hear a lot about 5G, Open RAN. There's a lot of new tech coming in. What are you watching? Who are the players that we maybe should be paying attention to, some that you really like, that are well positioned? >> We've touched upon it in various of the questions that have proceeded this. So, the sort of Cloudification of the networking environment is obviously really important. The automation of the process we've got to move away from bureaucratic manual processes within these large organizations, because we've got to be more efficient, we've got to be more reliable. So, anything which is related to automation. And then the Open RAN question is really interesting. Once again, you raised this topic of when you go down an Open RAN routes or any open route, it ultimately requires more integration. You've got more moving parts from more suppliers. So, therefore there are potential security issues there, depending on how it's defined, but everybody is entering the Open RAN market. There are some names that you will see regularly next week, being pushed, I'm not going to push them anymore, because some of them just attract the oxygen of attention. But there are plenty out there. The good news is, the key vendors who come from the more traditional side are also absolutely embracing that and accept the openness. But I think the piece which probably excites me more, apart from the whole shift towards Cloud and microservices, is the coming together, the openness between the IT environment and the networking environment. And you see it, for example, in the Open RAN, this thing called the RIC, the RAN Interconnection Controller. We're actually, we're beginning to find people come from the IT side able to control elements within the wireless controller piece. Now that that starts to say to me, we're getting a real handle on it, anybody can manage it. So, more specialization is required, but understanding how the end to end flow works. What we will see of course is announcements about new devices, the big guys like Apple and Samsung do their own thing during the year, and don't interrupt their beat with it with MWC, but you'll see a lot of devices being pushed by many other providers, and you'll see many players trying to break into the different elements of the market. But I think mostly, you'll see the people approaching it from more and more Cloudified angle where things are much more leveraging, that Cloud capability and not relying on the sort of rigid and stodgy infrastructure that we've seen in the past >> Which is kind of interesting because Cloud, a lot of the Clouds are Walled Gardens, at the same time they host a lot of open technologies, and I think as these two worlds collide, IT and the Telco industry, it's going to be interesting to see how the Telco developer ecosystem evolves. And so, that's something that we definitely want to watch. You've got a comment there? >> Yeah, I think the Telco developer they've not traditionally been very big in that area at all, have they? They've had their traditional, if you go back to when you and I were kids, the plain old telephone service was a, they were a one trick pony, and they've moved onto that. In some ways, I'd like them to move on and to have the one trick of plain old broadband that we just get broadband delivered everywhere. So, there are some issues about delivering service to all parts of every country, and obviously the globe, whether we do that through satellite, we might see some interesting satellite stuff coming out during NWC. There's an awful lot of birds flying up there trying to deliver signal back to the ground. Traditionally, that's not been very well received, with the change in generation of satellite might help do that. But we've known traditionally that a lot of developer activity in there, what it does bring to the four though, Dave, is this issue of players like the Ciscos and Junipers, and all these guys of the world who bring a developer community to the table as well. This is where the ecosystem play comes in, because that's where you get the innovation in the application world, working with channels, working with individual applications. And so it's opening up, it's basically building a massive fabric that anybody can tap into, and that's what becomes so exciting. So, the barriers to entry come down, but I think it will see us settling down, a stabilization of relationship between the Telcos and the Hyperscalers, because they need each other as we talked about previously, then the major providers, the Ciscos, Nokias, Ericssons, Huawei's, the way they interact with the Telcos. And then allowing that level of innovation coming in from the smaller players, whether it's on a national or a global basis. So, it's actually a really exciting environment. >> So I want to continue that theme and just talk about Telco in the enterprise. And Chris, on this topic, I want to just touch on some things and bring in some survey data from ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, our partner. And of course the Telcos, they've got lots of data centers. And as we talked about, they're going to be moving certain portions into the Cloud, lots of the front end pieces in particular, but let's look at the momentum of some of the IT players within the ETR dataset, and look at how they compare to some of the Telcos that ETR captures specifically within the Telco industry. So, we filtered this data on the Telco industry. So, this is our X, Y graph that we show you oftentimes on the vertical axis, is net score which measures spending momentum, and in the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the dataset. Now, this data is for shared accounts just in the Telco sector. So we filtered on certain sectors, like within the technology sectors, Cloud, networking, and so it's narrow, it's a narrow slice of the 1500. It respondents, it represents about 133 shared accounts. And a couple of things to jump right out. Within the Telco industry, it's no surprise, but Azure and AWS have massive presence on the horizontal axis, but what's notable as they score very highly in the vertical axis, with elevated spending velocity on their platforms within Telco. Google Cloud doesn't have as much of a presence, but it's elevated as well. Chris was talking about their data posture before, Arista and Verizon, along with VMware are also elevated, as is Aruba, which is HPEs networking division, but they don't have the presence on the horizontal axis. And you got Red Hat OpenStack is actually quite prominent in Telco as we've reported in previous segments. Is no surprise You see Akamai there. Now remember, this survey is weighted toward enterprise IT, so you have to take that into consideration, but look at Cisco, very strong presence, nicely elevated as is Equinox, both higher than many of the others including Dell, but you could see Dell actually has pretty respectable spending in Telco. It's an area that they're starting to focus on more. And then you got that cluster below, your Juniper, AT&T, Oracle, the rest of HPE TELUM and Lumen which is formerly, century link via IBM. Now again, I'm going to caution you. This is an enterprise IT heavy survey, but the big takeaway is the Cloud players have a major presence inside of firms that say they're in the telecommunications industry. And certain IT players like Cisco, VMware and Red Hat appear to be well positioned inside these accounts. So Chris, I'm not sure if any of this commentary resonates with you, but it seems that the Telcos would love to partner up with traditional IT vendors and Cloud players, and maybe find ways to grow their respective businesses. >> I think some of the data points you brought out there are very important. So yes, we've seen a Microsoft Azure and AWS very strong working with Telcos. We've seen Google Cloud platform actually really aggressively pushed into the market certainly the last 12, 24 months. So yeah, they're well positioned, and they all come from a slightly different background. As I said, the Google with this, perhaps more data centric approach in its analytics, tools very useful, AWS with this outpost reaching out, connecting out, and as you'll, with its knowledge of the the Microsoft business market certainly pushing into private networks as well, by the way. So yeah, and Cisco, of course in there does have, and it's a mass scale division, a lot of activity there, some of the people collapsing, some of that rooting an obstacle together, their big push on Silicon. So, what you've got here is a sort of cross representation of many of the different sorts of suppliers who are active in this market. Now Telcos is a big spenders, the telecom market, as we said, a $1.4 trillion market, they spend a lot, they probably have to double bubble spend at the moment to get over the hump of 5G investment, to build out fiber where they need to build out. So, any anything that relates to that is of course a major spending opportunity, a major market opportunity for players. And we know when you need the infrastructure behind it, whether it's in data centers or in their own data centers or in the Cloud to deliver against it. So, what I do like about this as an analyst, a lot of people would focus on one particular piece of the market. So you specialize on handsets, people specialize on home markets and home gateways. So, I tend to sit back and try and look at the big picture, the whole picture. And I think we're beginning to see some very good momentum where people are, where companies are building upon, of course their core business within the telecom industry, extending it out. But the lines of demarcation are blurring between enterprise, Telco, and indeed moving down into small business. And you think about the SD-WAN Market, which came from nowhere to build a much more flexible solution for connecting people over the wide area network, which has been brilliant during the pandemic, because it's allowed us to extend that to home, but be of course, build a campus ready for the future as well. So there are plenty of opportunities out there. I think the big question in my mind is always about from going into the Telco, as I said, whether they wannna reduce the number of suppliers on the roster. So that puts a question mark against some of the open approaches, and then from the Telco to the end customer, because it goes to the Telcos, 30% of their revenue comes from the enterprise market, 60% from the consumer market. How do they leverage the channel? Which includes all the channels, we talked about security, all of the IT stuff that you've already touched upon and the Cloud. It's going to be a very interesting mix and balancing act between different channels to get the services that the customers want. And I think increasingly, customers are more aware of the opportunities open to them to reach back into this ecosystem and say, "Yeah, I want a piece of humans to Telco, but I want it to come to me through my local integrated channel, because I need a bit of their expertise on security." So, fascinating market, and I think not telecom's no longer considered in isolation, but very much as part of that broader digital ecosystem. >> Chris, it's very hard to compress an analysis of a $1.4 trillion business into 30 or 35 minutes, but you're just the guy to help me do it. So, I got to really thank you for participating today and bringing your knowledge. Awesome. >> Do you know, it's my pleasure. I love looking at this market. Obviously I love analogies like Harry Potter, which makes it bring things to life. But at the end of the day, we as people, we want to be connected, we as business, we want to be connected, in society we want to be connected. So, the fundamental of this industry are unbelievably strong. Let's hope that governments don't mess with it too much. And let's hope that we get the right technology comes through, and help support that world of connectivity going forward. >> All right, Chris, well, I'll be texting you from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and many thanks to my colleague, Chris Lewis, he brought some serious knowledge today and thank you. And remember, I publish each week on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. And these episodes are all available as podcasts. You just got to search for Breaking Analysis podcasts. You can always connect with me on twitter @dvellante or email me at dave.vellante@siliconangle.com. And you can comment on my LinkedIn post, and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome to data, citizens, to anyone I'm thrilled that so many of you joining us this year for what I think will be our best conference yet. This is always my favorite moment of the year. And what makes it especially meaningful for me at this time is that we've all faced so much uncertainty over the last year. Being able to bring together or community of data, citizens, data professionals, customers, and partners gives me so much energy. We all share the same passion to use data, to create positive change in our work. And in our lives 2021 has been called a year of transitions and rightfully so the pandemic has changed our lives, our businesses and our society. It has changed or world. There's been a number of notable shifts over the last 18 months. And I like to bring up three shifts that I personally connect to. >>And these will likely resonate with many of you too. First as a shift though, it's remote work at the start of the pandemic, tens of millions of people across many industries, transition to working from home. This transition happened and presented really fast. And in many cases have happened overnight. For me not being able to meet our customers and our federal court. He begins in Berson, especially during such turbulent times. I've always actually welcomed over 200 new colleagues. New Colombians was especially hard. The second is of course, a shift towards online retail in the U S e-commerce was forecasted to reach 24% of total retail sales by 2024, but by July, 2020. So four years earlier, it had already reached 33% that has translated into an enormous boost for delivery companies. And finally, the supply chain reinvention, the pandemic reveal the complexity and vulnerabilities in the supply chains of many different companies from raw materials to freight disruptions, to labor shortages. >>The damage from the pandemic was felt everywhere. For example, my wife and I have been waiting for us for over six months for a four year old daughter's first bike. Now, many companies are oriented towards data and analytics to reduce costs and better understand, manage and optimize their entire value chain. Now, the one thing that all of these shifts have in common is that they accelerated the massive growth of digitization. This transition to digital isn't new, but how much it has accelerated. Hasn't been easy for organizations in many cases as has happened under enormous pressure. And that digitization has resulted in two related trends. First, an explosion of digital channels, which has created unprecedented amounts of new data, this more volume and more variety of data than ever before. It's been distributed broadly across organizations. Again, this is not a nutrient, but one that has also accelerated imagine just the amount of data that is now on tick-tock. >>It's also a great example of the responsibilities and risks that come with all of that data. This brings me to the second trend and risk that we had started seeing even before the pandemic, the creation of ever more data silos, these silos result in disjointed and often ineffective data teams. And what is more concerning is that it's often a lack of confidence in the outcome. This leads to an overall lack of trust in the information we need to solve this every day, maybe every hour, every minute we rely on data to make both transactional and transformative business decisions. Every organization today depends on mission, critical insights and data critical processes. What happens if suddenly there's a data problem, this could impact our resourcing or customers or back-office or entire ecosystem, the integrity and the reliability of data has real immediate, uh, long-term implications for our businesses and our reputations. >>And this will determine the trajectory of our success. We all feel the weight of data, the immense opportunities and potential implications associated with it. And this is a lot of pressure to bear, but I believe that we have the ability to take control of our data to become more effective and how we work to be more productive and to ultimately generate faster and better outcomes. I believe this is a pivotal moment as organizations transition from reacting to the pandemic, to building a healthy new, normal, we have an extraordinary opportunity to make good use of our data and by doing so, I believe we can achieve extraordinary things by making trusted data more accessible and more usable. We can do even more. We can get more out of our work. Uh, we can put more work into it. We can help our organizations serve more customers and enrich more communities with trusted data. We have the power to change things for good and with it, there's no limit to what people, businesses or society can achieve. When we are United by data, >>The world doesn't just run on information. It runs on people living their passion, dreaming big ideas, but without information without the data, those ideas won't become innovations. That's why at Colibra we're changing how organizations use data. So our customers can change the world. We make data easier to access by making it usable, manageable, and practical. We make it make sense. So people have a common language to share and shape their ideas. And no matter how far and wide that data is scattered, we make sure it's all within reach, connecting the disconnected, joining the disjointed so people can collaborate and trust that their data won't slow them down so they can prove that data has the power to change things for good, doing more enriching, more, helping more together with Collibra. You can be United by data >>United by data. All of us here are United by our passion for data. We are all data citizens, and there's so much power in this community. Uniting is also what the Colibra data intelligence cloud or product does it unites your entire organization to deliver accurate, trusted data for every use for every user and across every source managed, trusted, and accessible. These are the crucial elements that will give your teams the ability to easily collaborate and make every data workflow more productive. There's also some of the experience and the impacts of our customers take Freddie Mac. For example, it's driving their data ecosystem transformation with 5.5 billion data points and over true trillion dollars in assets. Under management, Freddie Mac leveraged Columbia to support the digital transformation and management of its data ecosystem. They eliminate duplicate data, spending improve data lake productivity and drive enhance data quality while delivering increased value for their customers. >>It's also at the heart of what Yelp is doing to connect its engineers, to trusted data unleashed product innovation and instill a data-driven culture. And why companies like audio and BT are promoting the importance of data, culture, and making data easily accessible to the data citizens throughout their organization. Over the next couple of days, the knowledge shared by our partners, our customers, guest speakers. And could you begins, will inspire and energize you to keep moving forward as change agents United by data. Again, I'm so glad to kick off data citizens and thank you for being here with us.

>>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of dev ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Hi guys. Welcome back. So we have discussed the current state and the near future state of DevOps and how it's going to evolve from three unique perspectives. In this last segment, we're going to open up the floor and see if we can come to a shared understanding of where dev ops needs to go in order to be successful next year. So our guests today are, you've seen them all before Jeffrey Hammond is here. The VP and principal analyst serving CIO is at Forester. We've also got Serge Lucio, the GM of Broadcom's enterprise software division and Glenn Martin, the head of QA transformation at BT guys. Welcome back. Great to have you all three together >>To be here. >>All right. So we're very, we're all very socially distanced as we've talked about before. Great to have this conversation. So let's, let's start with one of the topics that we kicked off the forum with Jeff. We're going to start with you spiritual co-location that's a really interesting topic that we've we've uncovered, but how much of the challenge is truly cultural and what can we solve through technology? Jeff, we'll start with you then search then Glen Jeff, take it away. >>Yeah, I think fundamentally you can have all the technology in the world and if you don't make the right investments in the cultural practices in your development organization, you still won't be effective. Um, almost 10 years ago, I wrote a piece, um, where I did a bunch of research around what made high performance teams, software delivery teams, high performance. And one of the things that came out as part of that was that these teams have a high level of autonomy. And that's one of the things that you see coming out of the agile manifesto. Let's take that to today where developers are on their own in their own offices. If you've got teams where the team itself had a high level of autonomy, um, and they know how to work, they can make decisions. They can move forward. They're not waiting for management to tell them what to do. >>And so what we have seen is that organizations that embraced autonomy, uh, and got their teams in the right place and their teams had the information that they needed to make the right decisions have actually been able to operate pretty well, even as they've been remote. And it's turned out to be things like, well, how do we actually push the software that we've created into production that would become the challenge is not, are we writing the right software? And that's why I think the term spiritual co-location is so important because even though we may be physically distant, we're on the same plane, we're connected from a, from, from a, a, a shared purpose. Um, you know, surgeon, I worked together a long, long time ago, surgery it's been what almost 15, 16 years since we were at the same place. And yet I would say there's probably still a certain level of spiritual co-location between us, uh, because of the shared purposes that we've had in the past and what we've seen, uh, in the industry. And that's a really powerful tool, uh, to build on. So what do tools play as part of that, to the extent that tools make information available, to build shared purpose on to the extent that they enable communication so that we can build that spiritual co-location to the extent that they reinforce the culture that we want to put in place, they can be incredibly valuable, especially when, when we don't have the luxury of physical locate, physical colocation. Hope. That makes sense. >>It does. I should have introduced us. This last segment is we're all spiritually co-located or it's a surge, clearly you're still spiritually co located with junk. Talk to me about what your thoughts are about spiritual of co-location the cultural impact and how technology can move it forward. >>Yeah. So I think, well, I'm going to sound very similar to Jeff in that respect. I think, you know, it starts with kind of a shared purpose and the other, I, Oh, individuals teams, uh, contributed to kind of a business outcome. What is our shared goal or shared vision? What's what is it we're trying to achieve collectively and, uh, keeping it aligned to that. Um, and so, so it's really starts with that now, now the big challenge, always these over the last 20 years, especially in large organizations, there's the specialization of roles and functions. And so we, we all that started to basically measure which we do, uh, on a daily basis using metrics, which oftentimes are completely disconnected from kind of a business outcome or purpose. We, we kind of revert back to, okay, what is my database all the time? What is my cycle time like? >>And, and I think, you know, which we can do or where we really should be focused as an industry is to start to basically provide a lens for these different stakeholders to look at what they're doing in the context of kind of these business outcomes. So, um, you know, probably one of my, um, theories of experience was to actually weakness at one of a large financial institution, um, you know, to stakeholders and quote development and operations staring at the same data, right. Which was related to, you know, in calming changes, um, testing, execution results, you know, covert coverage, um, official liabilities and all the all ran. It could have a direction leveling. So that's when you start to put these things in context and represent that in a way that these different stakeholders can, can look at from their different lens. And, uh, and it can start to basically communicate and understand of they jointly are competing to, uh, to, to that kind of common view or objective. >>And Glen, we talked a lot about transformation with you last time. What are your on spiritual co-location and the cultural part, the technology impact? >>Yeah, I mean, I agree with Jeffrey that, you know, um, the people and culture, the most important thing, actually, that's why it's really important when you're transforming to have partners who have the same vision as you, um, who, who you can work with, have the same end goal in mind. And I've certainly found that with our, um, you know, continuing relationship with Broadcom, what it also does though, is although, you know, tools can accelerate what you're doing and can join consistency. You know, we've seen within simplify, which is BTS flagship transformation program, where we're trying to, as it says, simplify the number of systems stacks that we have, the number of products that we have actually at the moment, we've got different value streams within that program who have got organizational silos who were trying to rewrite, rewrite the wheel, um, who are still doing things manually. >>So in order to try and bring that consistency, we need the right tools that actually are at an enterprise grade, which can be flexible to work with in BT, which is such a complex and very different environments. But in all areas, BT you're in whether it's a consumer, whether it's a mobile area, whether it's large global or government organizations, you know, we found that we need tools that can drive that consistency, but also flex to Greenfield brownfield kind of technologies as well. So it's really important that as I say, for a number of different aspects, that you have the right partner, um, to drive the right culture, I've got the same vision, but also who have the tool sets to help you accelerate. They can't do that on their own, but they can help accelerate what it is you're trying to do in it. And a really good example of that is we're trying to shift left, which is probably a, quite a bit of a buzz phrase in there kind of testing world at the moment. >>But, you know, I could talk about things like continuous delivery director, one of Broadcom's tools, and it has many different features to it, but very simply on its own, it allows us to give the visibility of what the teams are doing. And once we have that visibility, then we can talk to the teams, um, around, you know, could they be doing better component testing? Could they be using some virtualized services here or there? And that's not even the main purpose of continuous delivery director, but it's just a reason that tools themselves can just give greater visibility of have much more intuitive and insightful conversations with other teams and reduce those organizational silos. >>Thanks, Ben. So we'd kind of sum that up. Autonomy collaboration tools that facilitate that. So let's talk now about metrics from your perspectives. What are the metrics that matter, Jeff? >>Well, I'm going to go right back to what Glenn said about data that provides visibility that enables us to, to make decisions, um, with shared purpose. And so business value has to be one of the first things that we at. Um, how do we assess whether we have built something that is valuable, you know, that could be sales revenue, it could be net promoter score. Uh, if you're not selling what you've built, it could even be what the level of reuse is within your organization or other teams picking up the services, uh, that you've created. Um, one of the things that I've begun to see organizations do is to align value streams with customer journeys and then to align teams with those value streams. So that's one of the ways that you get to a shared purpose, cause we're all trying to deliver around that customer journey, the value associated with it. >>And we're all measured on that. Um, there are flow metrics which are really important. How long does it take us to get a new feature out from the time that we conceive it to the time that we can run our first experiments with it? There are quality metrics, um, you know, some of the classics or maybe things like defect, density, or meantime to response. Um, one of my favorites came from a, um, a company called ultimate software where they looked at the ratio of defects found in production to defects found in pre production and their developers were in fact measured on that ratio. It told them that guess what quality is your job to not just the test? Uh, department's a group. The fourth level that I think is really important, uh, in, in the current, uh, uh, situation that we're in is the level of engagement in your development organization. >>We used to joke that we measured this with the parking lot metric. How full was the parking lot at nine? And how full was it at five o'clock? I can't do that anymore since we're not physically co-located, but what you can do is you can look at how folks are delivering. You can look at your metrics in your SCM environment. You can look at, uh, the relative rates of churn. Uh, you can look at things like, well, are our developers delivering, uh, during longer periods earlier in the morning, later in the evening, are they delivering, uh, you know, on the weekends as well? Are those signs that we might be heading toward a burnout because folks are still running at sprint levels instead of marathon levels. Uh, so all of those in combination, uh, business value, uh, flow engagement in quality, I think form the backbone of any sort of, of metrics, uh, uh, a program. >>The second thing that I think you need to look at is what are we going to do with the data and the philosophy behind the data is critical. Um, unfortunately I see organizations where they weaponize the data and that's completely the wrong way to look at it. What you need to do is you need to say, you need to say, how is this data helping us to identify the blockers? The things that aren't allowing us to provide the right context for people to do the right thing. And then what do we do to remove those blockers, uh, to make sure that we're giving these autonomous teams the context that they need to do their job, uh, in a way that creates the most value for the customer. >>Great advice stuff, Glenn, over to your metrics that matter to you that really make a big, and also, >>How do you measure quality kind of following onto the advice that Jeff provided? I mean, Jeff provided some great advice. Actually, he talks about value. He talks about flow. Both of those things are very much on my mind at the moment. Um, but there was this, I listened to a speaker called me Kirsten a couple of months ago. It talked very much about how important flight management is and removing, you know, and using that to remove waste, to understand in terms of, you know, making software changes, um, what is it that's causing us to do it longer than we need to. So where are those areas where it takes too long? So I think that's a very important thing for us. It's, um, even more basic than that at the moment, we're on a journey from moving from kind of a waterfall to agile. Um, and the problem with moving from waterfall to agile is with waterfall, the, the business had a kind of comfort that, you know, everything was tested together and therefore it's safer. >>Um, and with agile, there's that kind of, how do we make sure that, you know, if we're doing things quick and we're getting stuff out the door that we give that confidence, um, that that's ready to go, or if there's a risk that we're able to truly articulate what that risk is. So there's a bit about release confidence, um, and some of the metrics around that and how healthy those releases are, and actually saying, you know, we spend a lot of money, um, um, an investment setting up, Pat, our teams training our teams, are we actually seeing them deliver more quickly and are we actually seeing them deliver more value quickly? So yeah, those are the two main things for me at the moment, but I think it's also about, you know, generally bringing it all together, the dev ops, you know, we've got the kind of value ops AI ops, how do we actually bring that together to so we can make quick decisions and making sure that we are delivering the biggest bang for our buck, absolutely biggest bang for the buck, surge, your thoughts. >>Yeah. So I think we all agree, right? It starts with business metrics, flow metrics. Um, these are kind of the most important metrics. And ultimately, I mean, one of the things that's very common across a highly functional teams is engagements, right? When, when you see a team that's highly functioning, that's agile, that practices DevOps every day, they are highly engaged. Um, that that's, that's definitely true. Now the, you know, back to, I think, uh, GemCis point on weaponization of metrics. One of the key challenges we see is that, um, organizations traditionally have been kind of, uh, you know, setting up benchmarks, right? So what is a good cycle time? What is a good lead time? What is a good meantime to repair? The, the problem is that this is very contextual, right? It varies. It's going to vary quite a bit, depending on the nature of application and system. And so one of the things that we really need to evolve, um, as an industry is to understand that it's not so much about those flow metrics is about, are these four metrics ultimately contribute to the business metric to the business outcome. So that's one thing, the second aspect, I think that's oftentimes misunderstood. >>Yeah. >>So that cycle time, or, or, or what you perceive as being a buy cycle time or better quality, the problem is oftentimes like all, do you go and explore why, right. What is the root cause of this? And I think one of the key challenges is that we tend to focus a lot of time on metrics and not on the eye type patterns, which are pretty common across the industry. Um, you know, you look at, for instance, things like, you know, lead time, for instance, it's very common that, uh, organizational boundaries are going to be a key contributor to badly time. And so I think that there is, you know, the metrics there is, I think a lot of, uh, work that we need to do in terms of classifying this antibiograms, um, you know, back to you, Jeff, I think you're one of the cool offers of waterscrumfall as a, as a, as a key patterning industry or anti-fat. Um, but what our scrum fall right, is a key one, right. And you will detect that through defect, arrival rates. That's where that looks like an escort. And so I think it's beyond kind of the metrics is what do you do with those metrics? >>Right? I'll tell you a search. One of the things that is really interesting to me in that space is I think those of us had been in industry for a long time. We know the anti-patterns cause we've seen them in our career maybe in multiple times. And one of the things that I think you could see tooling do is perhaps provide some notification of anti-patterns based on the telemetry that comes in. I think it would be a really interesting place to apply, uh, machine learning and reinforcement learning techniques. Um, so hopefully something that we'd see in the future with dev ops tools, because, you know, as a manager that, that, you know, may be only a 10 year veteran or 15 year veteran, you may be seeing these anti-patterns for the first time. And it would sure be nice to know what to do, uh, when they start to pop up, >>That would right. Insight, always helpful. All right, guys, I would like to get your final thoughts on the fit. The one thing that you believe our audience really needs to be on the lookout for and to put on our agendas for the next 12 months, Jeff, we'll go back to you. >>I would say, look for the opportunities that this disruption presents. And there are a couple that I see, first of all, as we shift to remote central working, uh, we're unlocking new pools of talent, uh, we're, it's possible to implement, uh, more geographic diversity. So, so look to that as part of your strategy. Number two, look for new types of tools. We've seen a lot of interest in usage of low-code tools to very quickly develop applications. That's potentially part of a mainstream strategy as we go into 2021. Finally, make sure that you embrace this idea that you are supporting creative workers that agile and dev ops are the peanut butter and chocolate to support creative, uh, workers with algorithmic capabilities, >>Peanut butter and chocolate Glen, where do we go from there? What are, what's the one silver bullet that you think folks should be on the lookout for? >>I certainly agree that, um, low, low code is, uh, next year. We'll see much more low code we'd already started going, moving towards a more of a SAS based world, but Loco also, um, I think as well for me, um, we've still got one foot in the kind of cow camp. Um, you know, we'll be fully trying to explore what that means going into the next year and, and exploiting the capabilities of cloud. But I think the last, um, the last thing for me is how do you really instill quality throughout the kind of, um, the life cycle, um, where, when I heard the word scrum for it kind of made me shut it because I know that's a problem. That's where we're at with some of our things at the moment. So we need to get beyond that. We need to be releasing, um, changes more frequently into production and actually being a bit more brave and having the confidence to actually do more testing in production in going straight to production itself. So expect to see much more of that next year. Um, yeah. Thank you. I haven't got any food analogies. Unfortunately >>We all need some peanut butter and chocolate. All right. It starts to take us on that's what's that nugget you think everyone needs to have on their agendas. >>That's interesting. Right. So a couple of days ago we had kind of a latest state of the DevOps report, right? And if you read through the report, it's, it's all about the lost city, right? It's all about, we still are receiving DevOps as being all about speed. And so to me, the key advice is in order to create kind of that spiritual collocation in order to foster engagement, we have to go back to what is it we're trying to do collectively. We have to go back to tie everything to the business outcome. And so for me, it's absolutely imperative for organizations to start to plot their value streams, to understand how they're delivering value and to align everything they do from a metrics to deliver it, to flow to those metrics. And only with that, I think, are we going to be able to actually start to really start to align kind of all these roles across the organizations and drive, not just speed, but business outcomes, >>All about business outcomes. I think you guys, the three of you could write a book together. So I'll give you that as food for thought. Thank you all so much for joining me today and our guests. I think this was an incredibly valuable fruitful conversation, and we appreciate all of you taking the time to spiritually co-located with us today, guys. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you for Jeff Hammond serves Lucio and Glen Martin. I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching the broad cops Broadcom dev ops virtual forum.

>>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of dev ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Hi, Lisa Martin here covering the Broadcom dev ops virtual forum. I'm very pleased to be joined today by a cube alumni, Jeffrey Hammond, the vice president and principal analyst serving CIO is at Forester. Jeffrey. Nice to talk with you today. >>Good morning. It's good to be here. Yeah. >>So a virtual forum, great opportunity to engage with our audiences so much has changed in the last it's an understatement, right? Or it's an overstated thing, but it's an obvious, so much has changed when we think of dev ops. One of the things that we think of is speed, you know, enabling organizations to be able to better serve customers or adapt to changing markets like we're in now, speaking of the need to adapt, talk to us about what you're seeing with respect to dev ops and agile in the age of COVID, what are things looking like? >>Yeah, I think that, um, for most organizations, we're in a, uh, a period of adjustment, uh, when we initially started, it was essentially a sprint, you know, you run as hard as you can for as fast as you can for as long as you can and you just kind of power through it. And, and that's actually what, um, the folks that get hub saw in may when they ran an analysis of how developers, uh, commit times and a level of work that they were committing and how they were working, uh, in the first couple of months of COVID was, was progressing. They found that developers, at least in the Pacific time zone were actually increasing their work volume, maybe because they didn't have two hour commutes or maybe because they were stuck away in their homes, but for whatever reason, they were doing more work. >>And it's almost like, you know, if you've ever run a marathon the first mile or two in the marathon, you feel great and you just want to run and you want to power through it and you want to go hard. And if you do that by the time you get to mile 18 or 19, you're going to be gassed. It's sucking for wind. Uh, and, and that's, I think where we're starting to hit. So as we start to, um, gear our development chops out for the reality that most of us won't be returning into an office until 2021 at the earliest and many organizations will, will be fundamentally changing, uh, their remote workforce, uh, policies. We have to make sure that the agile processes that we use and the dev ops processes and tools that we use to support these teams are essentially aligned to help developers run that marathon instead of just kind of power through. >>So, um, let me give you a couple of specifics for many organizations, they have been in an environment where they will, um, tolerate Rover remote work and what I would call remote work around the edges like developers can be remote, but product managers and, um, you know, essentially scrum masters and all the administrators that are running the, uh, uh, the SCM repositories and, and the dev ops pipelines are all in the office. And it's essentially centralized work. That's not, we are anymore. We're moving from remote workers at the edge to remote workers at the center of what we do. And so one of the implications of that is that, um, we have to think about all the activities that you need to do from a dev ops perspective or from an agile perspective, they have to be remote people. One of the things I found with some of the organizations I talked to early on was there were things that administrators had to do that required them to go into the office to reboot the SCM server as an example, or to make sure that the final approvals for production, uh, were made. >>And so the code could be moved into the production environment. And so it actually was a little bit difficult because they had to get specific approval from the HR organizations to actually be allowed to go into the office in some States. And so one of the, the results of that is that while we've traditionally said, you know, tools are important, but they're not as important as culture as structure as organization as process. I think we have to rethink that a little bit because to the extent that tools enable us to be more digitally organized and to hiring, you know, achieve higher levels of digitization in our processes and be able to support the idea of remote workers in the center. They're now on an equal footing with so many of the other levers, uh, that, that, um, uh, that organizations have at their disposal. Um, I'll give you another example for years. >>We've said that the key to success with agile at the team level is cross-functional co located teams that are working together physically co located. It's the easiest way to show agile success. We can't do that anymore. We can't be physically located at least for the foreseeable future. So, you know, how do you take the low hanging fruits of an agile transformation and apply it in, in, in, in the time of COVID? Well, I think what you have to do is that you have to look at what physical co-location has enabled in the past and understand that it's not so much the fact that we're together looking at each other across the table. It's the fact that we're able to get into a shared mindspace, uh, from, um, uh, from a measurement perspective, we can have shared purpose. We can engage in high bandwidth communications. It's the spiritual aspect of that physical co-location that is actually important. So one of the biggest things that organizations need to start to ask themselves is how do we achieve spiritual colocation with our agile teams? Because we don't have the, the ease of physical co-location available to us anymore? >>Well, the spiritual co-location is such an interesting kind of provocative phrase there, but something that probably was a challenge here, we are seven, eight months in for many organizations, as you say, going from, you know, physical workspaces, co-location being able to collaborate face to face to a, a light switch flip overnight. And this undefined period of time where all we were living with with was uncertainty, how does spiritual, what do you, when you talk about spiritual co-location in terms of collaboration and processes and technology help us unpack that, and how are you seeing organizations adopted? >>Yeah, it's, it's, um, it's a great question. And, and I think it goes to the very root of how organizations are trying to transform themselves to be more agile and to embrace dev ops. Um, if you go all the way back to the, to the original, uh, agile manifesto, you know, there were four principles that were espoused individuals and interactions over processes and tools. That's still important. Individuals and interactions are at the core of software development, processes and tools that support those individual and interact. Uh, those individuals in those interactions are more important than ever working software over comprehensive documentation. Working software is still more important, but when you are trying to onboard employees and they can't come into the office and they can't do the two day training session and kind of understand how things work and they can't just holler over the cube, uh, to ask a question, you may need to invest a little bit more in documentation to help that onboarding process be successful in a remote context, uh, customer collaboration over contract negotiation. >>Absolutely still important, but employee collaboration is equally as important if you want to be spiritually, spiritually co-located. And if you want to have a shared purpose and then, um, responding to change over following a plan. I think one of the things that's happened in a lot of organizations is we have focused so much of our dev ops effort around velocity getting faster. We need to run as fast as we can like that sprinter. Okay. You know, trying to just power through it as quickly as possible. But as we shift to, to the, to the marathon way of thinking, um, velocity is still important, but agility becomes even more important. So when you have to create an application in three weeks to do track and trace for your employees, agility is more important. Um, and then just flat out velocity. Um, and so changing some of the ways that we think about dev ops practices, um, is, is important to make sure that that agility is there for one thing, you have to defer decisions as far down the chain to the team level as possible. >>So those teams have to be empowered to make decisions because you can't have a program level meeting of six or seven teams and one large hall and say, here's the lay of the land. Here's what we're going to do here are our processes. And here are our guardrails. Those teams have to make decisions much more quickly that developers are actually developing code in smaller chunks of flow. They have to be able to take two hours here or 50 minutes there and do something useful. And so the tools that support us have to become tolerant of the reality of, of, of, of how we're working. So if they work in a way that it allows the team together to take as much autonomy as they can handle, um, to, uh, allow them to communicate in a way that, that, that delivers shared purpose and allows them to adapt and master new technologies, then they're in the zone in their spiritual, they'll get spiritually connected. I hope that makes sense. >>It does. I think we all could use some of that, but, you know, you talked about in the beginning and I've, I've talked to numerous companies during the pandemic on the cube about the productivity, or rather the number of hours of work has gone way up for many roles, you know, and, and, and times that they normally late at night on the weekends. So, but it's a cultural, it's a mind shift to your point about dev ops focused on velocity, sprints, sprints, sprints, and now we have to, so that cultural shift is not an easy one for developers. And even at this folks to flip so quickly, what have you seen in terms of the velocity at which businesses are able to get more of that balance between the velocity, the sprint and the agility? >>I think, I think at the core, this really comes down to management sensitivity. Um, when everybody was in the office, you could kind of see the mental health of development teams by, by watching how they work. You know, you call it management by walking around, right. We can't do that. Managers have to, um, to, to be more aware of what their teams are doing, because they're not going to see that, that developer doing a check-in at 9:00 PM on a Friday, uh, because that's what they had to do, uh, to meet the objectives. And, um, and, and they're going to have to, to, um, to find new ways to measure engagement and also potential burnout. Um, friend of mine once had, uh, had a great metric that he called the parking lot metric. It was helpful as the parking lot at nine. And how full was it at five? >>And that gives you an indication of how engaged your developers are. Um, what's the digital equivalent equivalent to the parking lot metric in the time of COVID it's commit stats, it's commit rates. It's, um, you know, the, uh, the turn rate, uh, that we have in our code. So we have this information, we may not be collecting it, but then the next question becomes, how do we use that information? Do we use that information to say, well, this team isn't delivering as at the same level of productivity as another team, do we weaponize that data or do we use that data to identify impedances in the process? Um, why isn't a team working effectively? Is it because they have higher levels of family obligations and they've got kids that, that are at home? Um, is it because they're working with, um, you know, hardware technology, and guess what, they, it's not easy to get the hardware technology into their home office because it's in the lab at the, uh, at the corporate office, uh, or they're trying to communicate, uh, you know, halfway around the world. >>And, uh, they're communicating with a, with an office lab that is also shut down and, and, and the bandwidth just doesn't enable the, the level of high bandwidth communications. So from a dev ops perspective, managers have to get much more sensitive to the, the exhaust that the dev ops tools are throwing off, but also how they're going to use that in a constructive way to, to prevent burnout. And then they also need to, if they're not already managing or monitoring or measuring the level of developer engagement, they have, they really need to start whether that's surveys around developer satisfaction, um, whether it's, you know, more regular social events, uh, where developers can kind of just get together and drink a beer and talk about what's going on in the project, uh, and monitoring who checks in and who doesn't, uh, they have to, to, um, work harder, I think, than they ever have before. >>Well, and you mentioned burnout, and that's something that I think we've all faced in this time at varying levels and it changes. And it's a real, there's a tension in the air, regardless of where you are. There's a challenge, as you mentioned, people having, you know, coworker, their kids as coworkers and fighting for bandwidth, because everyone is forced in this situation. I'd love to get your perspective on some businesses that are, that have done this well, this adaptation, what can you share in terms of some real-world examples that might inspire the audience? >>Yeah. Uh, I'll start with, uh, stack overflow. Uh, they recently published a piece in the journal of the ACM around some of the things that they had discovered. Um, you know, first of all, just a cultural philosophy. If one person is remote, everybody is remote. And you just think that way from an executive level, um, social spaces. One of the things that they talk about doing is leaving a video conference room open at a team level all day long, and the team members, you know, we'll go on mute, you know, so that they don't have to, that they don't necessarily have to be there with somebody else listening to them. But if they have a question, they can just pop off mute really quickly and ask the question. And if anybody else knows the answer, it's kind of like being in that virtual pod. Uh, if you, uh, if you will, um, even here at Forrester, one of the things that we've done is we've invested in social ceremonies. >>We've actually moved our to our team meetings on, on my analyst team from, from once every two weeks to weekly. And we have built more time in for social Ajay socialization, just so we can see, uh, how, how, how we're doing. Um, I think Microsoft has really made some good, uh, information available in how they've managed things like the onboarding process. I think I'm Amanda silver over there mentioned that a couple of weeks ago when, uh, uh, a presentation they did that, uh, uh, Microsoft onboarded over 150,000 people since the start of COVID, if you don't have good remote onboarding processes, that's going to be a disaster. Now they're not all developers, but if you think about it, um, everything from how you do the interviewing process, uh, to how you get people, their badges, to how they get their equipment. Um, security is a, is another issue that they called out typically, uh, it security, um, the security of, of developers machines ends at, at, at the corporate desktop. >>But, you know, since we're increasingly using our own machines, our own hardware, um, security organizations kind of have to extend their security policies to cover, uh, employee devices, and that's caused them to scramble a little bit. Uh, so, so the examples are out there. It's not a lot of, like, we have to do everything completely differently, but it's a lot of subtle changes that, that have to be made. Um, I'll give you another example. Um, one of the things that, that we are seeing is that, um, more and more organizations to deal with the challenges around agility, with respect to delivering software, embracing low-code tools. In fact, uh, we see about 50% of firms are using low-code tools right now. We predict it's going to be 75% by the end of next year. So figuring out how your dev ops processes support an organization that might be using Mendix or OutSystems, or, you know, the power platform building the front end of an application, like a track and trace application really, really quickly, but then hooking it up to your backend infrastructure. Does that happen completely outside the dev ops investments that you're making and the agile processes that you're making, or do you adapt your organization? Um, our hybrid teams now teams that not just have professional developers, but also have business users that are doing some development with a low-code tool. Those are the kinds of things that we have to be, um, willing to, um, to entertain in order to shift the focus a little bit more toward the agility side, I think >>Lot of obstacles, but also a lot of opportunities for businesses to really learn, pay attention here, pivot and grow, and hopefully some good opportunities for the developers and the business folks to just get better at what they're doing and learning to embrace spiritual co-location Jeffrey, thank you so much for joining us on the program today. Very insightful conversation. >>My pleasure. It's it's, it's an important thing. Just remember if you're going to run that marathon, break it into 26, 10 minute runs, take a walk break in between each and you'll find that you'll get there. >>Digestible components, wise advice. Jeffery Hammond. Thank you so much for joining for Jeffrey I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching Broadcom's dev ops virtual forum >>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of dev ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom, >>Continuing our conversations here at Broadcom's dev ops virtual forum. Lisa Martin here, please. To welcome back to the program, Serge Lucio, the general manager of the enterprise software division at Broadcom. Hey, Serge. Welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. So I know you were just, uh, participating with the biz ops manifesto that just happened recently. I just had the chance to talk with Jeffrey Hammond and he unlocked this really interesting concept, but I wanted to get your thoughts on spiritual co-location as really a necessity for biz ops to succeed in this unusual time in which we're living. What are your thoughts on spiritual colocation in terms of cultural change versus adoption of technologies? >>Yeah, it's a, it's, it's quite interesting, right? When we, when we think about the major impediments for, uh, for dev ops implementation, it's all about culture, right? And swore over the last 20 years, we've been talking about silos. We'd be talking about the paradox for these teams to when it went to align in many ways, it's not so much about these teams aligning, but about being in the same car in the same books, right? It's really about fusing those teams around kind of the common purpose, a common objective. So to me, the, this, this is really about kind of changing this culture where people start to look at a kind of OKR is instead of the key objective, um, that, that drives the entire team. Now, what it means in practice is really that's, uh, we need to change a lot of behaviors, right? It's not about the Yarki, it's not about roles. It's about, you know, who can do what and when, and, uh, you know, driving a bias towards action. It also means that we need, I mean, especially in this school times, it becomes very difficult, right? To drive kind of a kind of collaboration between these teams. And so I think there there's a significant role that especially tools can play in terms of providing this complex feedback from teams to, uh, to be in that preface spiritual qualification. >>Well, and it talked about culture being, it's something that, you know, we're so used to talking about dev ops with respect to velocity, all about speed here. But of course this time everything changed so quickly, but going from the physical spaces to everybody being remote really does take it. It's very different than you can't replicate it digitally, but there are collaboration tools that can kind of really be essential to help that cultural shift. Right? >>Yeah. So 2020, we, we touch to talk about collaboration in a very mundane way. Like, of course we can use zoom. We can all get into, into the same room. But the point when I think when Jeff says spiritual, co-location, it's really about, we all share the same objective. Do we, do we have a niece who, for instance, our pipeline, right? When you talk about dev ops, probably we all started thinking about this continuous delivery pipeline that basically drives the automation, the orchestration across the team, but just thinking about a pipeline, right, at the end of the day, it's all about what is the meantime to beat back to these teams. If I'm a developer and a commit code, I don't, does it take where, you know, that code to be processed through pipeline pushy? Can I get feedback if I am a finance person who is funding a product or a project, what is my meantime to beat back? >>And so a lot of, kind of a, when we think about the pipeline, I think what's been really inspiring to me in the last year or so is that there is much more of an adoption of the Dora metrics. There is way more of a focus around value stream management. And to me, this is really when we talk about collaboration, it's really a balance. How do you provide the feedback to the different stakeholders across the life cycle in a very timely matter? And that's what we would need to get to in terms of kind of this, this notion of collaboration. It's not so much about people being in the same physical space. It's about, you know, when I checked in code, you know, to do I guess the system to automatically identify what I'm going to break. If I'm about to release some allegation, how can the system help me reduce my change pillar rates? Because it's, it's able to predict that some issue was introduced in the outpatient or work product. Um, so I think there's, there's a great role of technology and AI candidate Lynch to, to actually provide that new level of collaboration. >>So we'll get to AI in a second, but I'm curious, what are some of the, of the metrics you think that really matter right now is organizations are still in some form of transformation to this new almost 100% remote workforce. >>So I'll just say first, I'm not a big fan of metrics. Um, and the reason being that, you know, you can look at a change killer rate, right, or a lead time or cycle time. And those are, those are interesting metrics, right? The trend on metric is absolutely critical, but what's more important is you get to the root cause what is taught to you lean to that metric to degrade or improve or time. And so I'm much more interested and we, you know, fruit for Broadcom. Are we more interested in understanding what are the patterns that contribute to this? So I'll give you a very mundane example. You know, we know that cycle time is heavily influenced by, um, organizational boundaries. So, you know, we talk a lot about silos, but, uh, we we've worked with many of our customers doing value stream mapping. And oftentimes what you see is that really the boundaries of your organization creates a lot of idle time, right? So to me, it's less about the metrics. I think the door metrics are a pretty, you know, valid set metrics, but what's way more important is to understand what are the antiperspirants, what are the things that we can detect through the data that actually are affecting those metrics. And, uh, I mean, over the last 10, 20 years, we've learned a lot about kind of what are, what are the antiperspirants within our large enterprise customers. And there are plenty of them. >>What are some of the things that you're seeing now with respect to patterns that have developed over the last seven to eight months? >>So I think the two areas which clearly are evolving very quickly are on kind of the front end of the life cycle, where DevOps is more and more embracing value stream management value stream mapping. Um, and I think what's interesting is that in many ways the product is becoming the new silo. Uh, the notion of a product is very difficult by itself to actually define people are starting to recognize that a value stream is not its own little kind of Island. That in reality, when I define a product, this product, oftentimes as dependencies on our products and that in fact, you're looking at kind of a network of value streams, if you will. So, so even on that, and there is clearly kind of a new sets, if you will, of anti-patterns where products are being defined as a set of OTRs, they have interdependencies and you have have a new set of silos on the operands, uh, the Abra key movement to Israel and the SRE space where, um, I think there is a cultural clash while the dev ops side is very much embracing this notion of OTRs and value stream mapping and Belgium management. >>On the other end, you have the it operations teams. We still think business services, right? For them, they think about configure items, think about infrastructure. And so, you know, it's not uncommon to see, you know, teams where, you know, the operations team is still thinking about hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of business services. And so the, the, there is there's this boundary where, um, I think, well, SRE is being put in place. And there's lots of thinking about what kind of metrics can be fined. I think, you know, going back to culture, I think there's a lot of cultural evolution that's still required for true operations team. >>And that's a hard thing. Cultural transformation in any industry pandemic or not is a challenging thing. You talked about, uh, AI and automation of minutes ago. How do you think those technologies can be leveraged by DevOps leaders to influence their successes and their ability to collaborate, maybe see eye to eye with the SRS? >>Yeah. Um, so th you're kind of too. So even for myself, as a leader of a, you know, 1500 people organization, there's a number of things I don't see right. On a daily basis. And, um, I think the, the, the, the technologies that we have at our disposal today from the AI are able to mind a lot of data and expose a lot of, uh, issues that's as leaders we may not be aware of. And some of the, some of these are pretty kind of easy to understand, right? We all think we're agile. And yet when you, when you start to understand, for instance, uh, what is the, what is the working progress right to during the sprint? Um, when you start to analyze the data you can detect, for instance, that maybe the teams are over committed, that there is too much work in progress. >>You can start to identify kind of, interdepencies either from a technology, from a people point of view, which were hidden, uh, you can start to understand maybe the change filler rates he's he is dragging. So I believe that there is a, there's a fundamental role to be played by the tools to, to expose again, these anti parents, to, to make these things visible to the teams, to be able to even compare teams. Right. One of the things that's, that's, uh, that's amazing is now we have access to tons of data, not just from a given customer, but across a large number of customers. And so we start to compare all of these teams kind of operate, and what's working, what's not working >>Thoughts on AI and automation as, as a facilitator of spiritual co-location. >>Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's um, you know, th there's, uh, the problem we all face is the unknown, right? The, the law city, but volume variety of the data, uh, everyday we don't really necessarily completely appreciate what is the impact of our actions, right? And so, um, AI can really act as a safety net that enables us to, to understand what is the impact of our actions. Um, and so, yeah, in many ways, the ability to be informed in a timely matter to be able to interact with people on the basis of data, um, and collaborate on the data. And the actual matter, I think is, is a, is a very powerful enabler, uh, on, in that respect. I mean, I, I've seen, um, I've seen countless of times that, uh, for instance, at the SRE boundary, um, to basically show that we'll turn the quality attributes, so an incoming release, right. And exposing that to, uh, an operations person and a sorry person, and enabling that collaboration dialogue through data is a very, very powerful tool. >>Do you have any recommendations for how teams can use, you know, the SRE folks, the dev ops says can use AI and automation in the right ways to be successful rather than some ways that aren't going to be nonproductive. >>Yeah. So to me, the th there, there's a part of the question really is when, when we talk about data, there are there different ways you can use data, right? Um, so you can, you can do a lot of an analytics, predictive analytics. So I think there is a, there's a tendency, uh, to look at, let's say a, um, a specific KPI, like a, an availability KPI, or change filler rate, and to basically do a regression analysis and projecting all these things, going to happen in the future. To me, that that's, that's a, that's a bad approach. The reason why I fundamentally think it's a better approach is because we are systems. The way we develop software is, is a, is a non-leader kind of system, right? Software development is not linear nature. And so I think there's a D this is probably the worst approach is to actually focus on metrics on the other end. >>Um, if you, if you start to actually understand at a more granular level, what har, uh, which are the things which are contributing to this, right? So if you start to understand, for instance, that whenever maybe, you know, you affect a specific part of the application that translates into production issues. So we, we have, I've actually, uh, a customer who, uh, identified that, uh, over 50% of their unplanned outages were related to specific components in your architecture. And whenever these components were changed, this resulted in these plant outages. So if you start to be able to basically establish causality, right, cause an effect between kind of data across the last cycle. I think, I think this is the right way to, uh, to, to use AI. And so pharma to be, I think it's way more God could have a classification problem. What are the classes of problems that do exist and affect things as opposed to analytics, predictive, which I don't think is as powerful. >>So I mentioned in the beginning of our conversation, that just came off the biz ops manifesto. You're one of the authors of that. I want to get your thoughts on dev ops and biz ops overlapping, complimenting each other, what, from a, the biz ops perspective, what does it mean to the future of dev ops? >>Yeah, so, so it's interesting, right? If you think about DevOps, um, there's no felony document, right? Can we, we can refer to the Phoenix project. I mean, there are a set of documents which have been written, but in many ways, there's no clear definition of what dev ops is. Uh, if you go to the dev ops Institute today, you'll see that they are specific, um, trainings for instance, on value management on SRE. And so in many ways, the problem we have as an industry is that, um, there are set practices between agile dev ops, SRE Valley should management. I told, right. And we all basically talk about the same things, right. We all talk about essentially, um, accelerating in the meantime fee to feedback, but yet we don't have the common framework to talk about that. The other key thing is that we add to wait, uh, for, uh, for jeans, Jean Kim's Lascaux, um, to, uh, to really start to get into the business aspect, right? >>And for value stream mapping to start to emerge for us to start as an industry, right. It, to start to think about what is our connection with the business aspect, what's our purpose, right? And ultimately it's all about driving these business outcomes. And so to me, these ops is really about kind of, uh, putting a lens on this critical element that it's not business and it, that we in fact need to fuse business 19 that I need needs to transform itself to recognize that it's, it's this value generator, right. It's not a cost center. And so the relationship to me, it's more than BizOps provides kind of this Oliver or kind of framework, if you will. That set the context for what is the reason, uh, for it to exist. What's part of the core values and principles that it needs to embrace to, again, change from a cost center to a value center. And then we need to start to use this as a way to start to unify some of the, again, the core practices, whether it's agile, DevOps value, stream mapping SRE. Um, so, so I think over time, my hope is that we start to optimize a lot of our practices, language, um, and, uh, and cultural elements. >>Last question surgeon, the last few seconds we have here talking about this, the relation between biz ops and dev ops, um, what do you think as DevOps evolves? And as you talked to circle some of your insights, what should our audience keep their eyes on in the next six to 12 months? >>So to me, the key, the key, um, challenge for, for the industry is really around. So we were seeing a very rapid shift towards kind of, uh, product to product, right. Which we don't want to do is to recreate kind of these new silos, these hard silos. Um, so that, that's one of the big changes, uh, that I think we need to be, uh, to be really careful about, um, because it is ultimately, it is about culture. It's not about, uh, it's not about, um, kind of how we segment the work, right. And, uh, any true culture that we can overcome kind of silos. So back to, I guess, with Jeffrey's concept of, um, kind of the spiritual co-location, I think it's, it's really about that too. It's really about kind of, uh, uh, focusing on the business outcomes on kind of aligning on driving engagement across the teams, but, but not for create a, kind of a new set of silos, which instead of being vertical are going to be these horizontal products >>Crazy by surge that looking at culture as kind of a way of really, uh, uh, addressing and helping to, uh, re re reduce, replace challenges. We thank you so much for sharing your insights and your time at today's DevOps virtual forum. >>Thank you. Thanks for your time. >>I'll be right back >>From around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of devops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome to Broadcom's DevOps virtual forum, I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm joined by another Martin, very socially distanced from me all the way coming from Birmingham, England is Glynn Martin, the head of QA transformation at BT. Glynn, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you, Lisa. I'm looking forward to it. As we said before, we went live to Martins for the person one in one segment. So this is going to be an interesting segment guys, what we're going to do is Glynn's going to give us a really kind of deep inside out view of devops from an evolution perspective. So Glynn, let's start. Transformation is at the heart of what you do. It's obviously been a very transformative year. How have the events of this year affected the >> transformation that you are still responsible for driving? Yeah. Thank you, Lisa. I mean, yeah, it has been a difficult year. >>Um, and although working for BT, which is a global telecommunications company, um, I'm relatively resilient, I suppose, as a, an industry, um, through COVID obviously still has been affected and has got its challenges. And if anything, it's actually caused us to accelerate our transformation journey. Um, you know, we had to do some great things during this time around, um, you know, in the UK for our emergency and, um, health workers give them unlimited data and for vulnerable people to support them. And that's spent that we've had to deliver changes quickly. Um, but what we want to be able to do is deliver those kinds of changes quickly, but sustainably for everything that we do, not just because there's an emergency. Um, so we were already on the kind of journey to agile, but ever more important now that we are, we are able to do those, that kind of work, do it more quickly. >>Um, and that it works because the, the implications of it not working is, can be terrible in terms of you know, we've been supporting testing centers,  new hospitals to treat COVID patients. So we need to get it right. And then therefore the coverage of what we do, the quality of what we do and how quickly we do it really has taken on a new scale and what was already a very competitive market within the telco industry within the UK. Um, you know, what I would say is that, you know, we are under pressure to deliver more value, but we have small cost challenges. We have to obviously, um, deal with the fact that, you know, COVID 19 has hit most industries kind of revenues and profits. So we've got this kind of paradox between having less costs, but having to deliver more value quicker and  to higher quality. So yeah, certainly the finances is, um, on our minds and that's why we need flexible models, cost models that allow us to kind of do growth, but we get that growth by showing that we're delivering value. Um, especially in these times when there are financial challenges on companies. So one of the things that I want to ask you about, I'm again, looking at DevOps from the inside >>Out and the evolution that you've seen, you talked about the speed of things really accelerating in this last nine months or so. When we think dev ops, we think speed. But one of the things I'd love to get your perspective on is we've talked about in a number of the segments that we've done for this event is cultural change. What are some of the things that you've seen there as, as needing to get, as you said, get things right, but done so quickly to support essential businesses, essential workers. How have you seen that cultural shift? >>Yeah, I think, you know, before test teams for themselves at this part of the software delivery cycle, um, and actually now really our customers are expecting that quality and to deliver for our customers what they want, quality has to be ingrained throughout the life cycle. Obviously, you know, there's lots of buzzwords like shift left. Um, how do we do shift left testing? Um, but for me, that's really instilling quality and given capabilities shared capabilities throughout the life cycle that drive automation, drive improvements. I always say that, you know, you're only as good as your lowest common denominator. And one thing that we were finding on our dev ops journey was that we  would be trying to do certain things quick, we had automated build, automated tests. But if we were taking a weeks to create test scripts, or we were taking weeks to manually craft data, and even then when we had taken so long to do it, that the coverage was quite poor and that led to lots of defects later on in the life cycle, or even in our production environment, we just couldn't afford to do that. >>And actually, focusing on continuous testing over the last nine to 12 months has really given us the ability to deliver quickly across the whole life cycle. And therefore actually go from doing a kind of semi agile kind of thing, where we did the user stories, we did a few of the kind of agile ceremonies, but we weren't really deploying any quicker into production because our stakeholders were scared that we didn't have the same control that we had when we had more waterfall releases. And, you know, when we didn't think of ourselves. So we've done a lot of work on every aspect, um, especially from a testing point of view, every aspect of every activity, rather than just looking at automated tests, you know, whether it is actually creating the test in the first place, whether it's doing security testing earlier in the lot and performance testing in the life cycle, et cetera. So, yeah,  it's been a real key thing that for CT, for us to drive DevOps, >>Talk to me a little bit about your team. What are some of the shifts in terms of expectations that you're experiencing and how your team interacts with the internal folks from pipeline through life cycle? >>Yeah, we've done a lot of work on this. Um, you know, there's a thing that I think people will probably call it a customer experience gap, and it reminds me of a Gilbert cartoon, where we start with the requirements here and you're almost like a Chinese whisper effects and what we deliver is completely different. So we think the testing team or the delivery teams, um, know in our teeth has done a great job. This is what it said in the acceptance criteria, but then our customers are saying, well, actually that's not working this isn't working and there's this kind of gap. Um, we had a great launch this year of agile requirements, it's one of the Broadcom tools. And that was the first time in, ever since I remember actually working within BT, I had customers saying to me, wow, you know, we want more of this. >>We want more projects to have extra requirements design on it because it allowed us to actually work with the business collaboratively. I mean, we talk about collaboration, but how do we actually, you know, do that and have something that both the business and technical people can understand. And we've actually been working with the business , using agile requirements designer to really look at what the requirements are, tease out requirements we hadn't even thought of and making sure that we've got high levels of test coverage. And what we actually deliver at the end of it, not only have we been able to generate tests more quickly, but we've got much higher test coverage and also can more smartly, using the kind of AI within the tool and then some of the other kinds of pipeline tools, actually deliver to choose the right tasks, and actually doing a risk based testing approach. So that's been a great launch this year, but just the start of many kinds of things that we're doing >>Well, what I hear in that, Glynn is a lot of positives that have come out of a very challenging situation. Talk to me about it. And I liked that perspective. This is a very challenging time for everybody in the world, but it sounds like from a collaboration perspective you're right, we talk about that a lot critical with devops. But those challenges there, you guys were able to overcome those pretty quickly. What other challenges did you face and figure out quickly enough to be able to pivot so fast? >>I mean, you talked about culture. You know, BT is like most companies  So it's very siloed. You know we're still trying to work to become closer as a company. So I think there's a lot of challenges around how would you integrate with other tools? How would you integrate with the various different technologies. And BT, we have 58 different IT stacks. That's not systems, that's stacks, all of those stacks can have hundreds of systems. And we're trying to, we've got a drive at the moment, a simplified program where we're trying to you know, reduce that number to 14 stacks. And even then there'll be complexity behind the scenes that we will be challenged more and more as we go forward. How do we actually highlight that to our users? And as an it organization, how do we make ourselves leaner, so that even when we've still got some of that legacy, and we'll never fully get rid of it and that's the kind of trade off that we have to make, how do we actually deal with that and hide that from our users and drive those programs, so we can, as I say, accelerate change,  reduce that kind of waste and that kind of legacy costs out of our business. You know, the other thing as well, I'm sure telecoms is probably no different to insurance or finance. When you take the number of products that we do, and then you combine them, the permutations are tens and hundreds of thousands of products. So we, as a business are trying to simplify, we are trying to do that in an agile way. >>And haven't tried to do agile in the proper way and really actually work at pace, really deliver value. So I think what we're looking more and more at the moment is actually  more value focused. Before we used to deliver changes sometimes into production. Someone had a great idea, or it was a great idea nine months ago or 12 months ago, but actually then we ended up deploying it and then we'd look at the users, the usage of that product or that application or whatever it is, and it's not being used for six months. So we haven't got, you know, the cost of the last 12 months. We certainly haven't gotten room for that kind of waste and, you know, for not really understanding the value of changes that we are doing. So I think that's the most important thing of the moment, it's really taking that waste out. You know, there's lots of focus on things like flow management, what bits of our process are actually taking too long. And we've started on that journey, but we've got a hell of a long way to go. But that involves looking at every aspect of the software delivery cycle. >> Going from, what 58 IT stacks down to 14 or whatever it's going to be, simplifying sounds magical to everybody. It's a big challenge. What are some of the core technology capabilities that you see really as kind of essential for enabling that with this new way that you're working? >>Yeah. I mean, I think we were started on a continuous testing journey, and I think that's just the start. I mean as I say, looking at every aspect of, you know, from a QA point of view is every aspect of what we do. And it's also looking at, you know, we've started to branch into more like AI, uh, AI ops and, you know, really the full life cycle. Um, and you know, that's just a stepping stone to, you know, I think autonomics is the way forward, right. You know, all of this kind of stuff that happens, um, you know, monitoring, uh, you know, watching the systems what's happening in production, how do we feed that back? How'd you get to a point where actually we think about change and then suddenly it's in production safely, or if it's not going to safety, it's automatically backing out. So, you know, it's a very, very long journey, but if we want to, you know, in a world where the pace is in ever-increasing and the demands for the team, and, you know, with the pressures on, at the moment where we're being asked to do things, uh, you know, more efficiently and as lean as possible, we need to be thinking about every part of the process and how we put the kind of stepping stones in place to lead us to a more automated kind of, um, you know, um, the future. >>Do you feel that that planned outcomes are starting to align with what's delivered, given this massive shift that you're experiencing? >>I think it's starting to, and I think, you know, as I say, as we look at more of a value based approach, um, and, um, you know, as I say, print, this was a kind of flow management. I think that that will become ever, uh, ever more important. So, um, I think it starting to people certainly realize that, you know, teams need to work together, you know, the kind of the cousin between business and it, especially as we go to more kind of SAS based solutions, low code solutions, you know, there's not such a gap anymore, actually, some of our business partners that expense to be much more tech savvy. Um, so I think, you know, this is what we have to kind of appreciate what is its role, how do we give the capabilities, um, become more of a centers of excellence rather than actually doing mounds amounts of work. And for me, and from a testing point of view, you know, mounds and mounds of testing, actually, how do we automate that? How do we actually generate that instead of, um, create it? I think that's the kind of challenge going forward. >>What are some, as we look forward, what are some of the things that you would like to see implemented or deployed in the next, say six to 12 months as we hopefully round a corner with this pandemic? >>Yeah, I think, um, you know, certainly for, for where we are as a company from a QA perspective, we are, um, you let's start in bits that we do well, you know, we've started creating, um, continuous delivery and DevOps pipelines. Um, there's still manual aspects of that. So, you know, certainly for me, I I've challenged my team with saying how do we do an automated journey? So if I put a requirement in JIRA or rally or wherever it is and why then click a button and, you know, with either zero touch for one such, then put that into production and have confidence that, that has been done safely and that it works and what happens if it doesn't work. So, you know, that's, that's the next, um, the next few months, that's what our concentration, um, is, is about. But it's also about decision-making, you know, how do you actually understand those value judgments? >>And I think there's lots of the things dev ops, AI ops, kind of that always ask aspects of business operations. I think it's about having the information in one place to make those kinds of decisions. How does it all try and tie it together? As I say, even still with kind of dev ops, we've still got elements within my company where we've got lots of different organizations doing some, doing similar kinds of things, but they're all kind of working in silos. So I think having AI ops as it comes more and more to the fore as we go to cloud, and that's what we need to, you know, we're still very early on in our cloud journey, you know, so we need to make sure the technologies work with cloud as well as you can have, um, legacy systems, but it's about bringing that all together and having a full, visible pipeline, um, that everybody can see and make decisions. >>You said the word confidence, which jumped out at me right away, because absolutely you've got to have be able to have confidence in what your team is delivering and how it's impacting the business and those customers. Last question then for you is how would you advise your peers in a similar situation to leverage technology automation, for example, dev ops, to be able to gain the confidence that they're making the right decisions for their business? >>I think the, the, the, the, the approach that we've taken actually is not started with technology. Um, we've actually taken a human centered design, uh, as a core principle of what we do, um, within the it part of BT. So by using human centered design, that means we talk to our customers, we understand their pain points, we map out their current processes. Um, and then when we mapped out what this process does, it also understand their aspirations as well, you know? Um, and where do they want to be in six months? You know, do they want it to be, um, more agile and, you know, or do they want to, you know, is, is this a part of their business that they want to do one better? We actually then looked at why that's not running well, and then see what, what solutions are out there. >>We've been lucky that, you know, with our partnership, with Broadcom within the payer line, lots of the tools and the PLA have directly answered some of the business's problems. But I think by having those conversations and actually engaging with the business, um, you know, especially if the business hold the purse strings, which in, in, uh, you know, in some companies include not as they do there is that kind of, you know, almost by understanding their, their pain points and then starting, this is how we can solve your problem. Um, is we've, we've tended to be much more successful than trying to impose something and say, well, here's the technology that they don't quite understand. It doesn't really understand how it kind of resonates with their problems. So I think that's the heart of it. It's really about, you know, getting, looking at the data, looking at the processes, looking at where the kind of waste is. >>And then actually then looking at the right solutions. Then, as I say, continuous testing is massive for us. We've also got a good relationship with Apple towards looking at visual AI. And actually there's a common theme through that. And I mean, AI is becoming more and more prevalent. And I know, you know, sometimes what is AI and people have kind of this semantics of, is it true AI or not, but it's certainly, you know, AI machine learning is becoming more and more prevalent in the way that we work. And it's allowing us to be much more effective, be quicker in what we do and be more accurate. And, you know, whether it's finding defects running the right tests or, um, you know, being able to anticipate problems before they're happening in a production environment. >>Well, thank you so much for giving us this sort of insight outlook at dev ops sharing the successes that you're having, taking those challenges, converting them to opportunities and forgiving folks who might be in your shoes, or maybe slightly behind advice enter. They appreciate it. We appreciate your time. >>Well, it's been an absolute pleasure, really. Thank you for inviting me. I have a extremely enjoyed it. So thank you ever so much. >>Excellent. Me too. I've learned a lot for Glenn Martin. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube >>Driving revenue today means getting better, more valuable software features into the hands of your customers. If you don't do it quickly, your competitors as well, but going faster without quality creates risks that can damage your brand destroy customer loyalty and cost millions to fix dev ops from Broadcom is a complete solution for balancing speed and risk, allowing you to accelerate the flow of value while minimizing the risk and severity of critical issues with Broadcom quality becomes integrated across the entire DevOps pipeline from planning to production, actionable insights, including our unique readiness score, provide a three 60 degree view of software quality giving you visibility into potential issues before they become disasters. Dev ops leaders can manage these risks with tools like Canary deployments tested on a small subset of users, or immediately roll back to limit the impact of defects for subsequent cycles. Dev ops from Broadcom makes innovation improvement easier with integrated planning and continuous testing tools that accelerate the flow of value product requirements are used to automatically generate tests to ensure complete quality coverage and tests are easily updated. >>As requirements change developers can perform unit testing without ever leaving their preferred environment, improving efficiency and productivity for the ultimate in shift left testing the platform also integrates virtual services and test data on demand. Eliminating two common roadblocks to fast and complete continuous testing. When software is ready for the CIC CD pipeline, only DevOps from Broadcom uses AI to prioritize the most critical and relevant tests dramatically improving feedback speed with no decrease in quality. This release is ready to go wherever you are in your DevOps journey. Broadcom helps maximize innovation velocity while managing risk. So you can deploy ideas into production faster and release with more confidence from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of dev ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Hi guys. Welcome back. So we have discussed the current state and the near future state of dev ops and how it's going to evolve from three unique perspectives. In this last segment, we're going to open up the floor and see if we can come to a shared understanding of where dev ops needs to go in order to be successful next year. So our guests today are, you've seen them all before Jeffrey Hammond is here. The VP and principal analyst serving CIO is at Forester. We've also Serge Lucio, the GM of Broadcom's enterprise software division and Glenn Martin, the head of QA transformation at BT guys. Welcome back. Great to have you all three together >>To be here. >>All right. So we're very, we're all very socially distanced as we've talked about before. Great to have this conversation. So let's, let's start with one of the topics that we kicked off the forum with Jeff. We're going to start with you spiritual co-location that's a really interesting topic that we've we've uncovered, but how much of the challenge is truly cultural and what can we solve through technology? Jeff, we'll start with you then search then Glen Jeff, take it away. >>Yeah, I think fundamentally you can have all the technology in the world and if you don't make the right investments in the cultural practices in your development organization, you still won't be effective. Um, almost 10 years ago, I wrote a piece, um, where I did a bunch of research around what made high-performance teams, software delivery teams, high performance. And one of the things that came out as part of that was that these teams have a high level of autonomy. And that's one of the things that you see coming out of the agile manifesto. Let's take that to today where developers are on their own in their own offices. If you've got teams where the team itself had a high level of autonomy, um, and they know how to work, they can make decisions. They can move forward. They're not waiting for management to tell them what to do. >>And so what we have seen is that organizations that embraced autonomy, uh, and got their teams in the right place and their teams had the information that they needed to make the right decisions have actually been able to operate pretty well, even as they've been remote. And it's turned out to be things like, well, how do we actually push the software that we've created into production that would become the challenge is not, are we writing the right software? And that's why I think the term spiritual co-location is so important because even though we may be physically distant, we're on the same plane, we're connected from a, from, from a, a shared purpose. Um, you know, surgeon, I worked together a long, long time ago. So it's been what almost 15, 16 years since we were at the same place. And yet I would say there's probably still a certain level of spiritual co-location between us, uh, because of the shared purposes that we've had in the past and what we've seen in the industry. And that's a really powerful tool, uh, to build on. So what do tools play as part of that, to the extent that tools make information available, to build shared purpose on to the extent that they enable communication so that we can build that spiritual co-location to the extent that they reinforce the culture that we want to put in place, they can be incredibly valuable, especially when, when we don't have the luxury of physical locate physical co-location. Okay. That makes sense. >>It does. I shouldn't have introduced us. This last segment is we're all spiritually co-located or it's a surge, clearly you're still spiritually co located with jump. Talk to me about what your thoughts are about spiritual of co-location the cultural impact and how technology can move it forward. >>Yeah. So I think, well, I'm going to sound very similar to Jeff in that respect. I think, you know, it starts with kind of a shared purpose and the other understanding, Oh, individuals teams, uh, contributed to kind of a business outcome, what is our shared goal or shared vision? What's what is it we're trying to achieve collectively and keeping it kind of aligned to that? Um, and so, so it's really starts with that now, now the big challenge, always these over the last 20 years, especially in large organization, there's been specialization of roles and functions. And so we, we all that started to basically measure which we do, uh, on a daily basis using metrics, which oftentimes are completely disconnected from kind of a business outcome or purpose. We, we kind of reverted back to, okay, what is my database all the time? What is my cycle time? >>Right. And, and I think, you know, which we can do or where we really should be focused as an industry is to start to basically provide a lens or these different stakeholders to look at what they're doing in the context of kind of these business outcomes. So, um, you know, probably one of my, um, favorites experience was to actually weakness at one of a large financial institution. Um, you know, Tuesday Golder's unquote development and operations staring at the same data, right. Which was related to, you know, in calming changes, um, test execution results, you know, Coverity coverage, um, official liabilities and all the all ran. It could have a direction level links. And that's when you start to put these things in context and represent that to you in a way that these different stakeholders can, can look at from their different lens. And, uh, and it can start to basically communicate and, and understand have they joined our company to, uh, to, to that kind of common view or objective. >>And Glen, we talked a lot about transformation with you last time. What are your thoughts on spiritual colocation and the cultural part, the technology impact? >>Yeah, I mean, I agree with Jeffrey that, you know, um, the people and culture, the most important thing, actually, that's why it's really important when you're transforming to have partners who have the same vision as you, um, who, who you can work with, have the same end goal in mind. And w I've certainly found that with our, um, you know, continuing relationship with Broadcom, what it also does though, is although, you know, tools can accelerate what you're doing and can join consistency. You know, we've seen within simplify, which is BTS flagship transformation program, where we're trying to, as it can, it says simplify the number of systems stacks that we have, the number of products that we have actually at the moment, we've got different value streams within that program who have got organizational silos. We were trying to rewrite, rewrite the wheel, um, who are still doing things manually. >>So in order to try and bring that consistency, we need the right tools that actually are at an enterprise grade, which can be flexible to work with in BT, which is such a complex and very dev, uh, different environments, depending on what area of BT you're in, whether it's a consumer, whether it's a mobile area, whether it's large global or government organizations, you know, we found that we need tools that can, um, drive that consistency, but also flex to Greenfield brownfield kind of technologies as well. So it's really important that as I say, for a number of different aspects, that you have the right partner, um, to drive the right culture, I've got the same vision, but also who have the tool sets to help you accelerate. They can't do that on their own, but they can help accelerate what it is you're trying to do in it. >>And a really good example of that is we're trying to shift left, which is probably a, quite a bit of a buzz phrase in their kind of testing world at the moment. But, you know, I could talk about things like continuous delivery direct to when a ball comes tools and it has many different features to it, but very simply on its own, it allows us to give the visibility of what the teams are doing. And once we have that visibility, then we can talk to the teams, um, around, you know, could they be doing better component testing? Could they be using some virtualized services here or there? And that's not even the main purpose of continuous delivery director, but it's just a reason that tools themselves can just give greater visibility of have much more intuitive and insightful conversations with other teams and reduce those organizational silos. >>Thanks, Ben. So we'd kind of sum it up, autonomy collaboration tools that facilitate that. So let's talk now about metrics from your perspectives. What are the metrics that matter? Jeff, >>I'm going to go right back to what Glenn said about data that provides visibility that enables us to, to make decisions, um, with shared purpose. And so business value has to be one of the first things that we look at. Um, how do we assess whether we have built something that is valuable, you know, that could be sales revenue, it could be net promoter score. Uh, if you're not selling what you've built, it could even be what the level of reuse is within your organization or other teams picking up the services, uh, that you've created. Um, one of the things that I've begun to see organizations do is to align value streams with customer journeys and then to align teams with those value streams. So that's one of the ways that you get to a shared purpose, cause we're all trying to deliver around that customer journey, the value with it. >>And we're all measured on that. Um, there are flow metrics which are really important. How long does it take us to get a new feature out from the time that we conceive it to the time that we can run our first experiments with it? There are quality metrics, um, you know, some of the classics or maybe things like defect, density, or meantime to response. Um, one of my favorites came from a, um, a company called ultimate software where they looked at the ratio of defects found in production to defects found in pre production and their developers were in fact measured on that ratio. It told them that guess what quality is your job to not just the test, uh, departments, a group, the fourth level that I think is really important, uh, in, in the current, uh, situation that we're in is the level of engagement in your development organization. >>We used to joke that we measured this with the parking lot metric helpful was the parking lot at nine. And how full was it at five o'clock. I can't do that anymore since we're not physically co-located, but what you can do is you can look at how folks are delivering. You can look at your metrics in your SCM environment. You can look at, uh, the relative rates of churn. Uh, you can look at things like, well, are our developers delivering, uh, during longer periods earlier in the morning, later in the evening, are they delivering, uh, you know, on the weekends as well? Are those signs that we might be heading toward a burnout because folks are still running at sprint levels instead of marathon levels. Uh, so all of those in combination, uh, business value, uh, flow engagement in quality, I think form the backbone of any sort of, of metrics, uh, a program. >>The second thing that I think you need to look at is what are we going to do with the data and the philosophy behind the data is critical. Um, unfortunately I see organizations where they weaponize the data and that's completely the wrong way to look at it. What you need to do is you need to say, you need to say, how is this data helping us to identify the blockers? The things that aren't allowing us to provide the right context for people to do the right thing. And then what do we do to remove those blockers, uh, to make sure that we're giving these autonomous teams the context that they need to do their job, uh, in a way that creates the most value for the customers. >>Great advice stuff, Glenn, over to your metrics that matter to you that really make a big impact. And, and, and also how do you measure quality kind of following onto the advice that Jeff provided? >>That's some great advice. Actually, he talks about value. He talks about flow. Both of those things are very much on my mind at the moment. Um, but there was this, I listened to a speaker, uh, called me Kirsten a couple of months ago. It taught very much around how important flow management is and removing, you know, and using that to remove waste, to understand in terms of, you know, making software changes, um, what is it that's causing us to do it longer than we need to. So where are those areas where it takes long? So I think that's a very important thing for us. It's even more basic than that at the moment, we're on a journey from moving from kind of a waterfall to agile. Um, and the problem with moving from waterfall to agile is with waterfall, the, the business had a kind of comfort that, you know, everything was tested together and therefore it's safer. >>Um, and with agile, there's that kind of, you know, how do we make sure that, you know, if we're doing things quick and we're getting stuff out the door that we give that confidence, um, that that's ready to go, or if there's a risk that we're able to truly articulate what that risk is. So there's a bit about release confidence, um, and some of the metrics around that and how, how healthy those releases are, and actually saying, you know, we spend a lot of money, um, um, an investment setting up our teams, training our teams, are we actually seeing them deliver more quickly and are we actually seeing them deliver more value quickly? So yeah, those are the two main things for me at the moment, but I think it's also about, you know, generally bringing it all together, the dev ops, you know, we've got the kind of value ops AI ops, how do we actually bring that together to so we can make quick decisions and making sure that we are, um, delivering the biggest bang for our buck, absolutely biggest bang for the buck, surge, your thoughts. >>Yeah. So I think we all agree, right? It starts with business metrics, flow metrics. Um, these are kind of the most important metrics. And ultimately, I mean, one of the things that's very common across a highly functional teams is engagements, right? When, when you see a team that's highly functioning, that's agile, that practices DevOps every day, they are highly engaged. Um, that that's, that's definitely true. Now the, you know, back to, I think, uh, Jeff's point on weaponization of metrics. One of the key challenges we see is that, um, organizations traditionally have been kind of, uh, you know, setting up benchmarks, right? So what is a good cycle time? What is a good lead time? What is a good meantime to repair? The, the problem is that this is very contextual, right? It varies. It's going to vary quite a bit, depending on the nature of application and system. >>And so one of the things that we really need to evolve, um, as an industry is to understand that it's not so much about those flow metrics is about our, these four metrics ultimately contribute to the business metric to the business outcome. So that's one thing. The second aspect, I think that's oftentimes misunderstood is that, you know, when you have a bad cycle time or, or, or what you perceive as being a buy cycle time or better quality, the problem is oftentimes like all, do you go and explore why, right. What is the root cause of this? And I think one of the key challenges is that we tend to focus a lot of time on metrics and not on the eye type patterns, which are pretty common across the industry. Um, you know, if you look at, for instance, things like lead time, for instance, it's very common that, uh, organizational boundaries are going to be a key contributor to badly time. >>And so I think that there is, you know, the only the metrics there is, I think a lot of work that we need to do in terms of classifying, descend type patterns, um, you know, back to you, Jeff, I think you're one of the cool offers of waterscrumfall as a, as, as a key pattern, the industry or anti-spatter. Um, but waterscrumfall right is a key one, right? And you will detect that through kind of a defect arrival rates. That's where that looks like an S-curve. And so I think it's beyond kind of the, the metrics is what do you do with those metrics? >>Right? I'll tell you a search. One of the things that is really interesting to me in that space is I think those of us had been in industry for a long time. We know the anti-patterns cause we've seen them in our career maybe in multiple times. And one of the things that I think you could see tooling do is perhaps provide some notification of anti-patterns based on the telemetry that comes in. I think it would be a really interesting place to apply, uh, machine learning and reinforcement learning techniques. Um, so hopefully something that we'd see in the future with dev ops tools, because, you know, as a manager that, that, you know, may be only a 10 year veteran or 15 year veteran, you may be seeing these anti-patterns for the first time. And it would sure be nice to know what to do, uh, when they start to pop up, >>That would right. Insight, always helpful. All right, guys, I would like to get your final thoughts on this. The one thing that you believe our audience really needs to be on the lookout for and to put on our agendas for the next 12 months, Jeff will go back to you. Okay. >>I would say look for the opportunities that this disruption presents. And there are a couple that I see, first of all, uh, as we shift to remote central working, uh, we're unlocking new pools of talent, uh, we're, it's possible to implement, uh, more geographic diversity. So, so look to that as part of your strategy. Number two, look for new types of tools. We've seen a lot of interest in usage of low-code tools to very quickly develop applications. That's potentially part of a mainstream strategy as we go into 2021. Finally, make sure that you embrace this idea that you are supporting creative workers that agile and dev ops are the peanut butter and chocolate to support creative, uh, workers with algorithmic capabilities, >>Peanut butter and chocolate Glen, where do we go from there? What are, what's the one silver bullet that you think folks to be on the lookout for now? I, I certainly agree that, um, low, low code is, uh, next year. We'll see much more low code we'd already started going, moving towards a more of a SAS based world, but low code also. Um, I think as well for me, um, we've still got one foot in the kind of cow camp. Um, you know, we'll be fully trying to explore what that means going into the next year and exploiting the capabilities of cloud. But I think the last, um, the last thing for me is how do you really instill quality throughout the kind of, um, the, the life cycle, um, where, when I heard the word scrum fall, it kind of made me shut it because I know that's a problem. That's where we're at with some of our things at the moment we need to get beyond that. We need >>To be releasing, um, changes more frequently into production and actually being a bit more brave and having the confidence to actually do more testing in production and go straight to production itself. So expect to see much more of that next year. Um, yeah. Thank you. I haven't got any food analogies. Unfortunately we all need some peanut butter and chocolate. All right. It starts to take us home. That's what's that nugget you think everyone needs to have on their agendas? >>That's interesting. Right. So a couple of days ago we had kind of a latest state of the DevOps report, right? And if you read through the report, it's all about the lost city, but it's all about sweet. We still are receiving DevOps as being all about speed. And so to me, the key advice is in order to create kind of a spiritual collocation in order to foster engagement, we have to go back to what is it we're trying to do collectively. We have to go back to tie everything to the business outcome. And so for me, it's absolutely imperative for organizations to start to plot their value streams, to understand how they're delivering value into aligning everything they do from a metrics to deliver it, to flow to those metrics. And only with that, I think, are we going to be able to actually start to really start to align kind of all these roles across the organizations and drive, not just speed, but business outcomes, >>All about business outcomes. I think you guys, the three of you could write a book together. So I'll give you that as food for thought. Thank you all so much for joining me today and our guests. I think this was an incredibly valuable fruitful conversation, and we appreciate all of you taking the time to spiritually co-located with us today, guys. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. Thank you for Jeff Hammond serves Lucio and Glen Martin. I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching the broad cops Broadcom dev ops virtual forum.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of DevOps virtual forum. Brought to you by Broadcom. >> Hi guys, welcome back. So we have discussed the current state and the near future state of DevOps and how it's going to evolve from three unique perspectives. In this last segment, we're going to open up the floor and see if we can come to a shared understanding of where DevOps needs to go. In order to be successful next year. So our guests today are you've seen them all before. Jeffrey Hammond is here the VP and Principal Analyst serving CIO at Forrester. We've also got Serge Lucio, the GM of Broadcom Enterprise Software Division. And Glyn Martin, the head of QA Transformation at BT. Guys welcome back. Great to have you all three together. >> Hi Lisa. (Serge speaks faintly) >> Good to be here. >> All right. So we're all very socially distanced as we talked about before. Great to have this conversation. So let's start with one of the topics that we kicked off the forum with. Jeff, we're going to start with you spiritual colocation. That's a really interesting topic that we've uncovered. But how much of the challenge is truly cultural? And what can we solve through technology? Jeff, we'll start with you, then Serge, then Glyn, Jeff take it away. >> Yeah I think fundamentally, you can have all the technology in the world. And if you don't make the right investments in the cultural practices in your development organization. You still won't be effective. Almost 10 years ago, I wrote a piece. Where I did a bunch of research around what made high performance teams software delivery teams high performance. And one of the things that came out as part of that was that these teams have a high level of autonomy. And that's one of the things that you see coming out of the Agile Manifesto. Let's take that today. Where developers are on their own in their own offices. if you've got teams where the team itself had a high level of autonomy. And they know how to work, they can make decisions. They can move forward. They're not waiting for management to tell them what to do. And so what we have seen is that organizations that embraced autonomy, and got their teams in the right place. And their teams had the information that they needed to make the right decisions. Have actually been able to operate pretty well, even as they've been remote. And it's turned out to be things like well, how do we actually push the software that we've created into production that have become the challenge is not. Are we writing the right software? And that's why I think the term spiritual colocation is so important. Because even though we may be physically distant, we're on the same plane, we're connected from a shared purpose. There's a Surgeon I worked together a long, long time ago, so just it's been what, almost 15-16 years, since we worked at the same place. And yet I would say there's probably still a certain level of spiritual colocation, between us. because of this shared purposes that we've had in the past and what we've seen in the industry, and that's a really powerful tool to build on. So what do tools play as part of that, to the extent that tools make information available to build shared purpose on. To the extent that they enable communication so that we can build that spiritual colocation. To the extent that they reinforce the culture that we want to put in place. They can be incredibly valuable, especially when we don't have the luxury of physical colocation. Hope that makes sense.(chuckles) >> It does. I should have introduced this last segment as we're all spiritually colocated. All right. So Serge, clearly you're still spiritually colocated with Jeff. Talk to me about what your thoughts are about spiritual of colocation. The cultural impact and how technology can move it forward? >> Yes, so I think, while I'm going to sound very similar to Jeff in that respect. I think it starts with kind of shared purpose, and understanding how individuals teams contribute to kind of a business outcome. What is our shared goals our shared vision with what is it we're trying to achieve collectively. And keeping kind of the line to that. And so it really starts with it Now, the big challenge always is over the last 20 years, especially in large organization has been specialization of roles and functions. And so we all have started to basically measure which we do on a daily basis using metrics, which oftentimes are completely disconnected from kind of a business outcome. Or is it on purpose. We kind of revert that to Okay, what is my database uptime? What is my cycle time? Right. And I think which we can do or where we really should be focused as an industry is to start to basically provide a lens for these different stakeholders to look at what they're doing. In the context of benefiting this business outcomes. So, probably one of my theories experience was to actually witness at one of our large financial institution. Two stakeholders across development and operations staring at the same data. Like which was related to economy changes, test execution results, coverage, official liabilities, and all the overran direction of incidents. And when you start to put these things in context, and represent that in a way that these different stakeholders can look at from their different lens. And they can start to basically communicate, and understand how they jointly or complement to do that kind of common vision or objective. >> And Glyn, we talked a lot about transformation with you last time. What are your thoughts on spiritual colocation and the cultural part of technology impact? >> Yeah, I mean I agree with Jeffrey that, you know, the people and culture are the most important thing. Actually, that's why it's really important when you're transforming to have partners who have the same vision as you. Who you can work with have the same end goal in mind. And we would constantly found that with our continuing relationship with Broadcom. What it also does, are those tools can accelerate what you're doing and can drive consistency. You know, we've seen within simplify, which is BT's Flagship Transformation Program, where we're trying to as it says, simplify the number of system stacks that we have. The number of products that we have, actually at the moment we've got different value streams within that program. Who have got organizational silos who are trying to rewrite the wheel. Who are still doing things manually. So in order to try and bring that consistency, we need the right tools that actually are at an enterprise grade, which can be flexible to work with in BT. Which is such a complex and very different environment, depending on what area BT you're in. Whether it's consumer, whether it's a mobile area, whether it's large global or government organizations. We found that we need tools that can drive that consistency. But also flex to Greenfield Brownfield kind of technologies as well. So it's really important that as it's a from a number of different aspects. That you have the right partner, and to drive the right culture here, and the same vision, but also who have the tool sets to help you accelerate, They can't do that on their own. But they can help accelerate what it is you're trying to do. And a really good example of that is we're trying to shift left, which is probably a quite a bit of a buzz phrase. And they're kind of testing well at the moment. But I could talk about things like Continuous Delivery Director to Broadcom tools. And it has many different features to it, but very simply on its own. It allows us to give the visibility of what the teams are doing. And once we have that visibility, then we can talk to the teams around could they be doing better component testing? Could they be using some virtualized services here or there? And that's not even the main purpose of Continuous Delivery Director. But it's just a reason that tools themselves can just give greater visibility of have much more intuitive and insightful conversations with other teams and reduce those organizational silos. >> Thanks, Glyn So we kind of sum that up autonomy, collaboration tools that facilitate that. So let's talk now about metrics. From your perspective, what are the metrics that matter Jeff? >> Well, I'm going to go right back to what Glyn said about data that provides visibility that enables us to to make decisions with shared purpose. And so business value has to be one of the first things that we looking at. How do we assess whether we have built something that is valuable? That could be sales revenue, it could be Net Promoter Score, if you're not selling what you've built, it could even be what the level of reuse is within your organization. Or other teams picking up the services that you've created. One of the things that I've begun to see organizations do is to align value streams with customer journeys. And then to align teams with those value streams. So that's one of the ways that you get to a shared purpose. 'Cause we're all trying to deliver around that customer journey. The value associated with it. And we're all measured on that. There are flow metrics, which are really important. How long does it take us to get a new feature out. From the time that we conceive it to the time that we can run our first experiments with it. There are quality metrics, some of the classics or maybe things like defect density or meantime to response. One of my favorites came from a company called Ultimate Software. Where they looked at the ratio of defects found in Production defects found in pre production. And their developers were in fact measured on that ratio and told them that guess what quality is your job too. Not just the test departments group. The fourth level that I think is really important in the current situation that we're in, is the level of engagement in your development organization. We used to joke that we measured this with the parking lot metric. How how full was the parking lot at 9, and how full was it at 5 o'clock. I can't do that anymore, since we're not physically colocated. But what you can do is you can look at how folks are delivering. You can look at your metrics in your SCCM environment, you can look at the relative rates of churn, you can look at things like well are our developers delivering during longer periods. Earlier in the morning, later in the evening? Are they delivering on the weekends as well. Are those signs that we might be heading toward burnout, because folks are still running at sprint levels instead of marathon levels. So all of those in combination, business value, flow, engagement and quality. I think form the backbone of any sort of metrics program. The second thing that I think you need to look at is what are we going to do with the data and the philosophy behind the data is critical. Unfortunately I see organizations where they weaponize the data. And that's completely the wrong way to look at it. What you need to do is you need to say. "How is this data helping us to identify the blockers? The things that aren't allowing us to provide the right context for people to do the right thing? And then what do we do to remove those blockers to make sure that we're giving these autonomous teams, the context that they need to do their job in a way that creates the most value for the customers?" >> Great advice, Jeff. Glyn over to you metrics that matter to you that really make a big impact. And also how do you measure quality kind of following on to the advice that Jeff provided? >> I mean, Jeff provided some great advice. Actually, he talks about value, he talks about flow, both of those things are very much on my mind at the moment. But there was a time, listen to a speaker called Mia Kirsten, a couple of months ago, he talked very much around how important flow management is. And remove and using that to remove waste, to understand in terms of, making software changes. What is it that's causing us to do it longer than we need to? So where are those areas where it takes too long. So I think that's a very important thing. For us, it's even more basic than that at the moment. We're on a journey from moving from waterfall to agile. And the problem with moving from waterfall to agile is, with waterfall, the the business had a kind of comfort that everything was tested together, and therefore it's safer. And with agile, there's that kind of how do we make sure that you know, if we're doing things quick, and we're getting stuff out the door that we give that confidence, that that's ready to go? Or if there's a risk that we're able to truly articulate what that risk is. So there's a bit about release confidence. And some of the metrics around that and how healthy those releases are and actually saying we spend a lot of money, in an investment setting up agile teams training agile teams. Are we actually seeing them deliver more quickly? And are we actually seeing them deliver more value quickly? So yeah, those are the two main things for me at the moment. But I think it's also about, generally bringing it all together DevOps. We've got the kind of value ops, AI Ops. How do we actually bring that together to so we can make quick decisions, and making sure that we are delivering the biggest bang for our partners. >> Absolutely biggest bang for the partners. Serge your thoughts. >> Yes I think we all agree, right? It starts with business metrics, flow metrics. These are one of the most important metrics and ultimately, I mean, one of the things that's very common across I highly functional teams is engagements, right? When you see a team that's highly functional, and that's agile, that practices DevOps everyday. They are highly engaged. That definitely true. Now back to you, I think, Jeff's points on weaponization of metrics. One of the key challenges we see is that organizations traditionally have been kind of, setting up benchmarks. Right. So what is a good cycle time? What is a good mean time? What is a good mean time to repair? The problem is that this is very contextual, right? It's going to vary quite a bit, depending on the nature of application and system. And so one of the things that we really need to evolve as an industry. Is to understand that it's not so much about those flow metrics is about are these flow metrics ultimately contribute to the business metric. To the business outcome. So that's one thing. The second aspect, I think that's oftentimes misunderstood, is that when you have a bad cycle time or what you perceive as being a bad cycle time or bad quality. The problem is oftentimes like, how do you go and explore why, right? What is the root cause of this? And I think one of the key challenges is that we tend to focus a lot of time on metrics. And not on the I type patterns, which are pretty common across the industry. If you look at for instance things like, lead time for instance. It's very common that organizational boundaries are going to be a key contributor to bad lead time. And so I think that there is reviewing the metrics, there is I think a lot of work that we need to do in terms of classifying this untied PaaS. Back to you, Jeff, I think you're one of the cool offers of Water-Scrum Fall as a key pattern in the industry or anti-patterns. >> Yeah >> But Water Scrum Fall, right. Is the key one right? And you will detect that through kind of a defect rival rates. That's right, that looks like an S curve. And so I think it's the output of the metrics is what do you do with those metrics. >> Right. I'll tell you Serge, one of the things that is really interesting to me in that space is. I think those of us had been in industry for a long time, we know the anti patterns, 'cause we've seen them in our career,(laughs) maybe in multiple times. And one of the things that I think you could see tooling do is perhaps provide some notification of anti patterns based on the telemetry that comes in. I think it would be a really interesting place to apply machine learning and reinforcement learning techniques. So hopefully something that we'd see in the future with DevOps tools. 'Cause as a manager that maybe only a 10 year veteran or a 15 year veteran. You may be seeing these anti patterns for the first time, and it would sure be nice to know what to do when they start to pop up.(chuckles) >> That would right? Insight, always helpful. All right guys, I would like to get your final thoughts on the fit one thing that you believe our audience really needs to be on the lookout for. and to put on our agendas. For the next 12 months. Jeff will be back to you. >> I would say, look for the opportunities that this disruption presents. And there are a couple that I see. First of all, as we shift to remote central working, we're unlocking new pools of talent. Where it's possible to implement more geographic diversity. So look to that as part of your strategy. Number two, look for new types of tools. We've seen a lot of interest in usage of low code tools. To very quickly develop applications. That's potentially part of a mainstream strategy as we go into 2021. Finally, make sure that you embrace this idea that you are supporting creative workers. That agile and DevOps are the peanut butter and chocolate to support creative workers with algorithmic capabilities. >> Peanut butter and chocolate. Glyn where do we go from there? What's the one silver bullet that you think that needs to be on the look out for? >> (indistinct) out I certainly agree that low code is next year, we'll see much more low code. We've already started going moving towards more of a SaaS based world but low code also. I think as well for me, we've still got one foot in the kind of cloud camp. We'll be fully trying to explore what that means going into the next year and exploiting the capabilities of cloud. But I think the last thing for me is, how do you really instill quality throughout the kind of the life cycle When I heard the word scrum for it kind of made me shut it. 'Cause I know that's a problem. That's where we're at with some of our things at the moment. So we need to get beyond that we need to be releasing changes more frequently into production. And actually being a bit more brave and having the confidence to actually do more testing in production and going straight to production itself. So expect to see much more of that next year. Yeah, thank you. I haven't got any food analogies unfortunately. (laughs) >> We all need some peanut butter and chocolate. All right Serge, Just take us on that sir. What's that nugget you think everyone needs to have on their agendas? >> That's interesting, right? So a couple of days ago, we had kind of a latest state of the DevOps report, right? And if you read through the report, it's all about velocity, right? It's all about we still are perceiving DevOps as being all about speed. And so to me the key advice is, in order to create kind of this spiritual colocation in order to foster engagement. We have to go back to what is it we're trying to do collectively. We have to go back to tie everything to the business outcome. And so for me, it's absolutely imperative for organizations to start to plot their value streams. To understand how they're delivering value into allowing everything they do from a metrics to delivery to flow to those metrics. And only with data, I think, are we going to be able to actually start to to restart to align kind of all these roles across the organizations and drive not just speed, but business outcomes. >> All about business outcomes. I think you guys, the three of you could write a book together. So I'll give you that as food for thought. Thank you all so much for joining me. Today and our guests, I think this was an incredibly valuable, fruitful conversation. And we appreciate all of you taking the time to spiritually colocate with us today. Guys, thank you. >> Thank you Lisa. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> For Jeff Hammond, Serge Lucio and Glyn Martin. I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching the Broadcom DevOps virtual forum. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. I'm Stu Miniman and we're digging into VMware's Vsphere 7 announcement. We've had conversations with some of the executives, some of the technical people. But we know that there's no better way to really understand a technology than to talk to some of the practitioners that are using it. So really happy to have join me for the program, I have Phil Buckley-Mellor. Who is an Infrastructure Designer with British Telecom. Joining me digitally from across the pond, Phil, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi Stu. >> All right so, Phil, let's start of course British Telecom, I think most people know you know what BT is and you know it's a really sprawling company. Tell us a little bit about your group, your role, and what's your mandate? >> Okay so my group is called Service Platforms. It's the bit of BT that services all the multimillions of our customers. So we have broadband, we have TV, we have mobile. We have DNS and email systems. It's all about our customers. It's not a B2B part of BT, you with me? We specifically focus on those kind of multimillion customers that we've got in those various services. And in particular my group is for, we do infrastructure. So we do data center all the way up to really about boot time or so or just past boot time. And the application developers look after that stage and above. >> Okay great we are definitely going to want to dig in and talk about that. That boundary between the infrastructure teams and the application teams. But let's talk a little bit first, you know we're talking about VMware. So you know, how long has your organization been doing VMware? And tell us what you see with the announcement that VMware is making for vSphere 7? >> Sure well I mean we've had a really great relationship with VMware for about 12, 13 years. Something like that. And it's an absolutely key part of our infrastructure it's written throughout BT really. In every part of our operations design, development, and the whole ethos of the company is based around a lot of VMware products. And so one of the challenges that we've got right now, is application architecture's are changing quite significantly at the moment and as you know. In particular with Serverless and with containers and a whole bunch of other things like that. We're very comfortable with our ability to manage VMs and have been for a while. We currently use, extensively we use vSphere, NSX T, Vrops, login site, networking site, and a whole bunch of other VMware constellation applications. And our operations team they know how to use that. They know how to optimize. They know how to PaaS on-prem and troubleshoot. So that's great and that's been like that for a half a decade a least. We've been really, really confident with our ability to work with VMware environments. And along came containers and like I said multicloud as well. And what we were struggling with was the inability to have a single pane of glass. really on all that. And to use the same people and the same processes to manage a different kind of technology. So we've been working pretty closely with VMware on number of different containerization products for several years now. I've worked really closely with the vSphere Integrated Containers guys in particular and now with the pacific guys. With really the idea that when we bring in version 7, and the containerization aspect of version 7 we'll be in a position to have that single pane of glass. To allow our operations team to really barely differentiate between what's a VM and what's a container. That's really the holy grail, right? >> Yeah >> So we'll be able to allow our developers to develop, our operations team to deploy and to operate, and our designers to see the same infrastructure, whether that's on-premises, cloud, or off premises. And be able to manage the whole piece in that respect. >> Okay so, Phil, really interesting things you've walked through here. You've been using containers in a virtualized environment for a number of years. Want to understand in the organizational piece just a little bit because it sounds great. I managed all the environment but you know containers are a little bit different than VMs, you know? If I think back you know, from an applications standpoint, it was you know let's stick in in a VM. I don't need to change it. And once I spin up a VM, often that's going to sit there for months, if not years. As opposed to you know, I think about a containerization environment. I really want to pull the resources. I'm going to create and destroy things all the time. So you know, bring us inside that organizational piece. You know how much will there need to be interaction, and more interaction or change in policies, between your infrastructure team and your App Dev team? >> Well yes I mean you're absolutely right. The nature and the time scales that we're talking about between VMs and containers is wildly different. As you say we probably almost certainly have VMs in place now that were in place in 2018 certainly I imagine. Haven't really been touched. Where as you say VMs, a lot of people talk about spinning them all up all the time. There are parts of our architecture that require that. In particular the very client facing bursty stuff. You know it does require spinning up and spinning down pretty quickly. But some of our other containers do sit around for weeks if not months. It would really just depend on the development cycle aspects of that. But the hard bit that we've really had was just the visualizing it. There are a number of different products out there that will allow you see the behavior of your containers and understand the resource requirements that they are having at any given moment, allow you to troubleshoot on some of them. But they are not... They're new products. They are new things that we would have to get used to. And also it seems like there's an awful lot of competing products. Quite a Venn diagram in terms of functionality and user abilities to do that. So again coming back to being able to manage through vSphere To be able to have a list of VMs and along side it is a list of containers. And to be able to use policies to define how they behave. In terms of the networking, to be able to essentially put our deployments on rails, by using in particular TAC based policies. Means that we can take the owners of security we can take the owners of performance management and capacity management away from the developers. Who don't really care about that a lot of the time. And they can just get on with their job. Which is to develop new functionality and help our customers. So that then means that then we have to be really responsible about defining those policies and making sure that they're adhered to. But again we know how to do that with VMs through vSphere. So the fact that we can actually apply that straight away just with slightly different compute unit, which is really all we're talking about here, is ideal. And then to be able to extend that into multiple clouds as well. Because we do use multiple clouds where Asia, the US, and Azure customers. And we're between them is an opportunity that we can't do anything other than be excited about to take up. >> Phil, I really like how you described really the changing roles that are happening there in your organization need to understand right there's things that developers care about you know they want to move fast they want to be able to build new things. and there's things that they shouldn't have to worry about and you know we talk about some of the new world and you know can the platform underneath this take care of it. Well there's somethings platforms take care of, there's somethings that the software or you know your team is going to need to understand So maybe if you could dig in a little bit to some of those what are the drivers from your application portfolio? What is the business asking of your organization that's driving this change and being one of those you know tailwinds pushing you towards you know Kubernetes and the vSphere 7 technologies. >> Well it all comes down to the customers, right. Our customers want new functionality. They want new integrations. They want new content. They want better stability and better performance. And our ability to extend or contract in capacity as needed as well. So they are the real, ultimate challenges that we want to give our customers the best possible experience of our products and services. So we have to address that, really from a development perspective. It's our developers that have the responsibility to design and deploy those. So we have to, in infrastructure we have to act as a firm foundation really underneath all of that that. That allows them to know that what they spend their time to develop and want to push out to our customers is something that can be trusted is performance. We understand where their capacity requirements are coming from in the short term and in the long term for that. And is secure as well, obviously as well is a big aspect to it. So really we're just providing our developers with the best possible chance of giving our customers what will hopefully make them delighted. >> Great Phil, you've mentioned a couple of times that you're using public clouds as well as your VMware farm I want to make sure if you can explain a little bit a couple of things. Number one is when it comes to your team, especially your infrastructure team. How much are they involved with setting up some of the basic pieces or managing things like performance in the public cloud? And secondly when you look at your applications are some of your clouds, some of your applications hybrid going between the data center and the public cloud and I haven't talked to too many customers that are doing applications that just live in any cloud and move things around but maybe if you could clarify those pieces as to what cloud really means to your organization and your applications? >> Sure well I mean to us clouds allows us to accelerate development. Which is nice because it means we don't have to do on premises capacity uplifts for new pieces of functionality or so. We can initially build in cloud and test in the cloud. But very often applications really make better sense especially in the TV environment, where people watch TV all the time I mean yes there are peak hours and lighter hours of TV watching. The same goes for broadband really. But we generally we're more than an a tower application profile so what that allows us to do then is to have applications that when it makes sense we run them inside, our organization when we have to run them in our organization for you know data protection reasons or whatever. Then we can do that as well but then where say for instance we have a boxing match up. And we're going to see an enormous spike in the amount of customers that want to sign up into our order journey to allow them to view that to gain access to that. Well why would you spend a lot of money on service just for that level of additional capacity? So we do absolutely have hybrid applications. Not necessarily hybrid blocks. We have blocks of sub-applications. You know dozens of them really to support our whole platform. And what you would see is that if you were to look at our full application structure. For one of the platforms I mentioned that some of the some of those application blocks have to run inside some can run outside. And what we want to be able to do is let our operations team to define that again by policy As to where they run. And to have a system that allows us to transparently see where they're running, how they're running, and the implications of those decisions. So that we can trim those maybe in the future as well. And that way we best serve our customers. We get to, get our customers yeah what they need. >> All right great, Phil. Final question I have for you, You've been through a few iterations of looking at Vms, containers, public cloud. What advice would you give your peers with the announcement of vSphere 7 and how they can look at things today in 2020 versus what they might have looked at say a year or two ago? >> Well I'll be honest, I was a little bit surprised by vSphere 7. We knew that VMware were working on trying to make containers on the same level both from a management deployment perspective as VMs. I mean they're called VMware after all, right. And we knew that they were looking at that. But I was surprised by just quite how quickly they have managed to almost completely reinvent their application really. It's you know if you look at the whole Tanzu stuff and the mission control stuff. I think a lot of people were blown away by just quite how happy VMware were to reinvent themselves, from an application perspective you know. And to really leap forward. And this is between version 6 and 7. I've been following these since version 3 at least. And it's an absolutely revolutionary change in terms of the overall architecture. The aims to what they want to achieve with the application. And luckily the nice thing is that if you're used to version 6 it's not that big a deal. It's really not that big a deal to move forward at all. It's not such a big change to process and the training and things like that. But my word there's an awful lot of work underneath that. Underneath the covers. And I'm really excited and I think other people in my position should just take it as an opportunity to revisit what they can achieve in particular with vSphere and with in combination with AdeXT. It's quite hard to put into place unless you've seen the slides about it and unless you've seen the products. Just how revolutionary version 7 is compared to previous versions. Which have kind of evolved for a couple of years. So yeah I think I'm really excited about it. I know a lot of my peers at other companies that I speak with quite often are very excited about 7 as well. So yeah I'm really excited about the whole piece. >> Well, Phil thank you so much. Absolutely no doubt this is a huge move for VMware. The entire company and their ecosystem rallying around help move to the next phase of where application developers and infrastructure need to go. Phil Buckley, joining us from British Telecom. I'm Stu Miniman thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (Instrumental music)

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to the Palo Alto students leaky bomb John free we're here for a special cube conversation and special report big news from VMware to discuss the launch of the availability of vSphere seven I'm here with Chris Prasad SVP and general manager of the vSphere business and cloud platform business unit and Paul Turner VP a VP of Product Management guys thanks for coming in and talking about the big news thank you for having us you guys announced some interesting things back in march around containers kubernetes and the vSphere there's just about the hard news what's being announced today we are announcing the general availability of vSphere 7 John it's by far the biggest release that we have done in the last 10 years we previewed it this project Pacific a few months ago with this release we are putting kubernetes native support into the vSphere platform what that allows us to do is give customers the ability to run both modern applications based on kubernetes and containers as well as traditional VM based applications on the same platform and it also allows the IT departments to provide their developers cloud operating model using the VMware cloud foundation that is powered by this release this is a key part of our tansu portfolio of solutions and products that we announced this year and it is targeted fully at the developers of modern applications and the specific news is vSphere 7 is general available you know really vSphere 7 yes ok that so let's on the trend line here the relevance is what what's the big trend line that this is riding obviously we saw the announcements at VMworld last year and throughout the year there's a lot of buzz Pat Keller says there's a big wave here with kubernetes what does this announcement mean for you guys with the marketplace trend yeah so what kubernetes is really about is people trying to have an agile operation they're trying to modernize their IT applications and they the best way to do that is build off your current platform expanded and and make it a an innovative a agile platform for you to run kubernetes applications and VM applications together I'm not just that customers are also looking at being able to manage a hybrid cloud environment both on Prem and public cloud together so they want to be able to evolve and modernize their application stack but modernize their infrastructure stack which means hybrid cloud operations with innovative applications kubernetes or container based applications and VMs what's excited about this trend Chris we were talking with us at VMworld last year and we've had many conversations around cloud native but you're seeing cloud native becoming the operating model for modern business I mean this is really the move to the cloud if you look at the successful enterprises even the suppliers the on-premises piece if not move to the cloud native marketplace technologies the on premise isn't effective so it's not so much on premises going away we know it's not but it's turning into cloud native this is the move to the cloud generally this is a big wave yeah absolutely I mean if Jon if you think about it on-premise we have significant market share by far the leader in the market and so what we are trying to do with this is to allow customers to use the current platform they are using but bring their application modern application development on top of the same platform today customers tend to set up stacks which are different right so you have a kubernetes stack you have a stack for the traditional applications you have operators and administrators who are specialized in kubernetes on one side and you have the traditional VM operators on the other side with this move what we are saying is that you can be on the same common platform you can have the same administrators who are used to administering the environment that you already had and at the same time offer the developers what they like which is kubernetes dial-tone that they can come and deploy their applications on the same platform that you use for traditional applications yep all Pat said Cuba is gonna be the dial tone on the internet most Millennials might even know what dial tone is but a buddy mince is is that's the key fabric there's gonna work a straight and you know we've heard over the years skill gap skill gap not a lot of skills out there but when you look at the reality of skills gap it's really about skills gaps and shortages not enough people most CIOs and chief and major security are so that we talk to you say I don't want to fork my development teams I don't want to have three separate teams so I don't have to I want to have automation I want an operating model that's not gonna be fragmented this kind of speaks to this whole idea of you know interoperability and multi-cloud this seems to be the next big way behind ibrid I think it I think it is the next big wake the the thing that customers are looking for is a cloud operating model they like the ability for developers to be able to invoke new services on demand in a very agile way and we want to bring that cloud operating model to on-prem to Google cloud to Amazon Cloud to Microsoft cloud to any of our VC peepee partners you get the same cloud operating experience and it's all driven by a kubernetes based dial-tone it's effective and available within this platform so by bringing a single infrastructure platform that can one run in this hybrid manner and give you the cloud operating agility that developers are looking for that's what's key in version seven says Pat Kelsey near me when he says dial tone of the internet kubernetes does he mean always on or what does he mean specifically just that it's always available what's what says what's the meaning behind that that phrase the the first thing he means is that developers can come to the infrastructure which is the VMware cloud foundation and be able to work with a set of api's that are kubernetes api s-- so developers understand that they're looking for that they understand that dial tone right and you come to our VMware cloud foundation that runs across all these clouds you get the same API said that you can use to deploy their application okay so let's get into the value here of vSphere seven how does VMware vSphere 7 specifically help customers isn't just bolting on kubernetes to vSphere some will say is it that's simple or are you running product management no it's not that easy it's yeah some people say hey just Bolton kubernetes on vSphere it's it's not that easy so so one of the things if if anybody's actually tried deploying kubernetes first it's it's highly complicated um so so definitely one of the things that we're bringing is you call it a bolt on but it's certainly not like that we are making it incredibly simple you talked about IT operational shortages customers want to be able to deploy kubernetes environments in a very simple way the easiest way that we can you can do that is take your existing environment that are out ninety percent of IT and just turn on turn on the kubernetes dial tone and it is as simple as that now it's much more than that in version 7 as well we're bringing in a couple things that are very important you also have to be able to manage at scale just like you would in the cloud you want to be able to have infrastructure almost self-managed and upgrade and lifecycle manage itself and so we're bringing in a new way of managing infrastructure so that you can manage just large scale environments both on-premise and public cloud environments and scale and then associated with that as well is you must make it secure so there's a lot of enhancements we're building into the platform around what we call intrinsic security which is how can we actually build in truly a trusted platform for your developers and IIT yeah I mean I I was just going to touch on your point about the shortage of IT staff and how we are addressing that here the the way we are addressing that is that the IT administrators that are used to administering vSphere can continue to administer this enhanced platform with kubernetes the same way administered the older laces so they don't have to learn anything new they're just working the same way we are not changing any tools process technologies so same as it was before same as it was before more capable dealer and developers can come in and they see new capabilities around kubernetes so it's best of both worlds and what was the pain point that you guys are so obviously the ease-of-use is critical Asti operationally I get that as you look at the cloud native developer Saiga's infrastructure as code means as app developers on the other side taking advantage of it what's the real pain point that you guys are solving with vSphere 7 so I think it's it's it's multiple factors so so first is we've we've talked about agility a few times right there is DevOps as a real trend inside an IT organizations they need to be able to build and deliver applications much quicker they need to be able to respond to the business and to do that what they are doing is is they need infrastructure that is on demand so what what we're really doing in the core kubernetes kind of enablement is allowing that on-demand fulfillment of infrastructure so you get that agility that you need but it's it's not just tied to modern applications it's also your all of your existing business applications and your monitoring applications on one platform which means that you know you've got a very simple and and low-cost way of managing large-scale IT infrastructure so that's a that's a huge piece as well and and then I I do want to emphasize a couple of other things it's we're also bringing in new capabilities for AI and m/l applications for sa P Hana databases where we can actually scale to some of the largest business applications out there and you have all of the capabilities like like the GPU awareness and FPGA were FPGA awareness that we built into the platform so that you can truly run this as the fastest accelerated platform for your most extreme applications so you've got the ability to run those applications as well as your kubernetes and container based applications that's the accelerated application innovation piece of the announcement right that's right yeah it's it's it's quite powerful that we've actually brought in you know basically new hardware awareness into the product and expose that to your developers whether that's through containers or through VMs Chris I want to get your thoughts on the ecosystem and then the community but I want to just dig into one feature you mentioned I get the lifestyle improvement a life cycle improvement I get the application acceleration innovation but the intrinsic security is interesting could you take a minute explain what that is yeah so there's there's a few different aspects one is looking at how can we actually provide a trusted environment and that means that you need to have a way that the the key management that even your administrator is not able to get keys to the kingdom as we would call it you you want to have a controlled environment that you know some of the worst security challenges inside and some of the companies has been your Intel or internal IT staff so you've got to have a way that you can run a trusted environment in independent we've got these fair trust Authority that we released in version 7 that actually gives you a a secure environment for actually managing your keys to the kingdom effectively your certificates so you've got this you know continuous runtime now not only that we've actually gone and taken our carbon black features and we're actually building in full support for carbon black into the platform so that you've got negative security of even your application ecosystem yeah that's been coming up a lot conversations the carbon black in the security piece Chris obviously have vsphere everywhere having that operating model makes a lot of sense but you have a lot of touch points you got cloud hyper scale is got the edge you got partners so the other dominant market share and private cloud we are on Amazon as you well know as your Google IBM cloud Oracle cloud so all the major clouds there is a vSphere stack running so it allows customers if you think about it right it allows customers to have the same operating model irrespective where their workload is residing they can set policies compliance security they said it once it applies to all their environments across this hybrid cloud and it's all for a supported by our VMware cloud foundation which is powered by vSphere 7 yeah I think having that the cloud is API based having connection points and having that reliable easy to use is critical operating model all right guys so let's summarize the announcement what do you guys take Derek take away from this vSphere 7 what is the bottom line what's what's it really mean I think what we're if we look at it for developers we are democratizing kubernetes we already are in 90% of IT environments out there are running vSphere we are bringing to every one of those be sphere environments and all of the virtual infrastructure administrators they can now manage kubernetes environments you can you can manage it by simply upgrading your environment that's a really nice position rather than having independent kind of environments you need to manage so so I think that's that is one of the key things that's in here the other thing though is there is I don't think any other platform out there that other than vSphere that can run in your data center in Google's in Amazon's in Microsoft's in you know thousands of VC PP partners you have one hybrid platform that you can run with and that's got operational benefits that's got efficiency benefits that's got agility benefits yeah I just add to that and say that look we want to meet customers where they are in their journey and we want to enable them to make business decisions without technology getting in the way and I think the announcement that we made today with vSphere 7 is going to help them accelerate their digital transformation journey without making trade-offs on people process and technology and there's more to come that we're laser focused on making our platform the best in the industry for running all kinds of applications and the best platform for a hybrid and multi cloud and so you'll see more capabilities coming in the future stay tuned oh one final question on this news announcement which is this awesome vSphere core product for you guys if I'm the customer tell me why it's gonna be important five years from now because of what I just said it is the only platform that is going to be running across all the public clouds right which will allow you to have an operational model that is consistent across the clouds so think about it if you go to Amazon native and then you have orc Lord and as your you're going to have different tools different processes different people trained to work with those clouds but when you come to VMware and you use our cloud foundation you have one operating model across all these environments and that's going to be game-changing great stuff great stuff thanks for unpacking that for us graduates on the insulin Thank You Vera bees fear 7 News special report here inside the cube conversation I'm John Farrar your thanks for watch [Music] and welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with the cube we are having a very special Q conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil if you will of the new VMware vSphere 7 dot gonna get a little bit more of a technical deep dive here today we're excited to have a longtime cube alumni kit Kolbert here is the vp and CTO cloud platform at being work it great to see you yeah and and new to the cube jared rose off he's a senior director of product management at VMware and I'm guessin had a whole lot to do with this build so Jared first off congratulations for birthing this new release and great to have you on board alright so let's just jump into it from kind of a technical aspect what is so different about vSphere seven yeah great so vSphere seven baek's kubernetes right into the virtualization platform and so this means that as a developer I can now use kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment and it means as an IT admin I'm actually able to deliver kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run so I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that that might be coming when the with the acquisition of the hefty Oh team so really exciting news and I think it you tease it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments regardless of whether that's on Prem public cloud this public cloud that public cloud so this really is the the realization of that vision yes yeah so we talked at VMworld about project Pacific right this technology preview and as Jared mentioned of what that was was how do we take kubernetes and really build it into vSphere as you know we had a hybrid cloud vision for quite a while now how do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible now part of the broader VMware cloud foundation portfolio and you know as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud on-premises at the edge with service providers there's a secondary question how do we actually evolve that platform so it can support not just the existing workloads but also modern work clothes as well right all right so I think you brought some pictures for us a little demo so why don't ya well into there and let's see what it looks like you guys can cube the demo yes we're gonna start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation for an vSphere 7 so what you're seeing here is the developers actually using kubernetes to deploy kubernetes the self eating watermelon right so the developer uses this kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole kubernetes cluster and the whole developer experience now is driven by kubernetes they can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of kubernetes api is and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere and so you know that's not just provisioning workloads though this is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed so go look at hey what's the IP address that got allocated to that or what's the CPU load on this you know workload I just deployed on top of kubernetes we've integrated a container registry into vSphere so here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images and you know one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as code standpoint now the developers infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control I can check in not just my code but also the description of the kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app so now we're looking at a sort of a side-by-side view where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application and on the left-hand side we see V Center and what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through kubernetes those are showing up right inside of the V center console and so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names and so this means what a developer calls their IT department says hey I got a problem with my database we don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about they got the same name they say they see the same information so what we're gonna do is that you know we're gonna push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience and you know what you'll see here is that V Center is the V Center you've already known and loved but what's different is that now it's much more application focused so here we see a new screen inside of V Center vSphere namespaces and so these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications like a whole distributed system now as a single object inside a V Center and when I click into one of these apps this is a managed object inside of e spear I can click on permissions and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces I can hook this into my Active Directory infrastructure so I can use the same you know corporate credentials to access the system I tap into all my existing storage so you know this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers can use storage policy based management to provide storage for kubernetes and it's hooked in with things like DRS right so I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory and all that's going to be enforced by Drs inside the cluster and again as an as an admin I'm just using vSphere but to the developer they're getting a whole kubernetes experience out of this platform now vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the kubernetes environment so besides you know seeing the VMS and and things that developers have deployed I can see all of the desired state specifications all the different kubernetes objects that the developers have created the compute network and storage objects they're all integrated right inside the the vCenter console and so once again from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective this data is invaluable it often saves hours just in trying to figure out what what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue so the you know as you can see this is all baked right into V Center the V Center experience isn't transformed a lot we get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say where's the kubernetes and they're surprised that like they've been managing kubernetes all this time it just looks it looks like the vSphere experience they've already got but all those kubernetes objects the pods and containers kubernetes clusters load balancer stores they're all represented right there natively in the V Center UI and so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins well that's a it's pretty it's pretty wild you know it really builds off the vision that again I think you kind of outlined kid teased out it at VMworld which was you know the IT still sees vSphere which is what they want to see when they're used to seeing but devs siku Nettie's and really bringing those together in a unified environment so that depending on what your job is and what you're working on that's what you're gonna see in this kind of unified environment yeah yeah as the demo showed it is still vSphere at the center but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere the kubernetes base one which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks as well as the traditional vSphere interface API is which is great for VI admins and IT operations right and then and really it was interesting to you tease that a lot that was a good little preview of people knew they're watching but you talked about really cloud journey and and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are that are running in their classic memes and then kind of the modern you know county cloud native applications built on kubernetes and youyou outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum and getting from one to the other but not really about kind of the messy middle if you will and this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum they can move their workloads or move their apps ya know I think we think a lot about it like that that we look at we talk to customers and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go their future state architecture and that involves embracing cloud it involves modernizing applications and you know as you mentioned that it's it's challenging for them because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of these two extremes either you're here where you are kind of the old current world and you got the bright Nirvana future on the far end there and they believe it's the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other that you have to kind of change everything out from underneath you and that's obviously very expensive very time-consuming and very error-prone as well there's a lot of things that can go wrong there and so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really to your point as you call it the the messy middle I would say it's more like how do we offer stepping stones along that journey rather than making this one giant leap we had to invest all this time and resources how come you able people to make smaller incremental steps each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost right and its really enabling kind of this next gen application where there's a lot of things that are different about about one of the fundamental things is we're now the application defines a reach sources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities of what the what the application can't do and that's where everybody is moving as quickly as as makes sense you said not all applications need to make that move but most of them should and most of them are and most of them are at least making that journey you see that yeah definitely I mean I think that you know certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from you know looking historically at how we managed infrastructure one of things we enable in VCR 7 is how we manage applications right so a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know your your resource allocation you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure you talk about it in terms of this VM is going to be encrypted or this VM is gonna have this firewall rule and what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management so you actually look at an application and say I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU or I want this application to be have these security rules on it and so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level right yeah and like I kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say you know if you look back one thing we did was something like V San before that people had to put policies on a LUN you know an actual storage LUN and a storage array and then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array it inherited certain policies right and so these have turned that around allows you to put the policy on the VM but what jerez talking about now is that for a modern workload a modern were close not a single VM it's it's a collection of different things you've got some containers in there some VMs probably distributed maybe even some on-prem some in the cloud and so how do you start managing that more holistically and this notion of really having an application as a first-class entity that you can now manage inside of vSphere it's really powerful and very simplifying one right and why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time that's it's a nice big word but the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications and more importantly how do you continue to evolve them and change them you know based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace yeah well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance right so today if I want to check of this app is compliant I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down and hardened and secured the right way but now instead what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of each Center set the right security settings on that and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are gonna inherit that stuff so it really simplifies that it also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications you know if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory when you log in with vSphere seven what you see is a few dozen applications so a single admin can manage a much larger pool of infrastructure many more applications and they could before because we automate so much of that operation and it's not just the scale part which is obviously really important but it's also the rate of change and this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done done ie building applications well at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security performance concerns these sorts of elements and so being by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level and then have the developer be able to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction it actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better they're not stepping over each other but in fact now they can both get what they need to get done done and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe and in compliance is ready fourth so there's a lot more to this is a very significant release right again a lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves that's a pretty significant you know kind of RER context or many many parts of ease of beer so beyond the kubernetes you know kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out and there's a very significant release yeah it's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about kubernetes what was project Pacific but is now just part of vSphere and certainly that is a very large aspect of it but to your point you know vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features and so instead of a demo here let's pull up with some slides right look at what's there so outside of kubernetes there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere seven so the first first one is simplified lifecycle management and then really focus on security it's a second one and then applications as well out both including you know the cloud native apps that don't fit in the kubernetes bucket as well as others and so we go on the first one the first column there there's a ton of stuff that we're doing around simplifying life cycle so let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics so we have this new technology vSphere lifecycle management VL cm and the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades lifecycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts how do we make them more declarative with a single image you can now specify for an entire cluster we find that a lot of our vSphere admins especially at larger scales have a really tough time doing this there's a lot of in and out today it's somewhat tricky to do and so we want to make it really really simple and really easy to automate as well so if you're doing kubernetes on kubernetes I suppose you're gonna have automation on automation right because they're upgrading to the sevens is probably not any consequent inconsequential tasks mm-hm and yeah and going forward and allowing you know as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great VCR functionality at a more rapid clip how do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well right next big thing you talk about is security yep we just got back from RSA thank goodness we got that that show in before all the badness started yeah but everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top yeah talk about kind of the the changes in the security so done a lot of things around security things around identity Federation things around simplifying certificate management you know dramatic simplifications there across the board one I want to focus on here on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere trust Authority and so with that one what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces and really ensure there's a trusted computing base when we talk to customers what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats including even internal ones right how do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted and obviously if you're hiring someone you somewhat trust them but you know what what's how do you implement that the concept of least privilege right or zero trust right yeah topic exactly so the idea with trust authorities that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and sure fully secure those can be managed by a special vCenter server which is in turn very lockdown only a few people have access to it and then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that okay these untrusted hosts haven't been modified we know they're okay so they're okay to actually run workloads on they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing so is this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment right and then the third kind of leg of the stool is you know just better leveraging you know kind of a more complex asset ecosystem if you know what things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application could draw the appropriate resources as needed so you've done a lot of work here as well yeah there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space as you mentioned all sort of accelerators coming out we all know about GPUs and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases not to mention 3d rendering but you know FPGAs and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there and so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out they have a lot of the same problems that we saw in the very early days of virtualization ie silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using and you know what you find is all things we found before you found we find very low utilization rates inability to automate that inability to manage that well putting security and compliance and so forth and so this is really the reality that we see at most customers and it's funny because and some ones you think well well shouldn't we be past this as an industry shouldn't we have solved this already you know we did this with virtualization but as it turns out the virtualization we did was for compute and then storage and network but now we really needed to virtualize all these accelerators and so that's where this bit fusion technology that we're including now with vSphere it really comes to the forefront so if you see in the current slide we're showing here the challenge is that just these separate pools of infrastructure how do you manage all that and so if you go to the we go to the next slide what we see is that with bit fusion you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization you can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together so they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use we can you know have multiple people sharing a GPU we can do it very dynamically and the great part of it is is that it's really easy for these folks to use they don't even need to think about it in fact integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows so it's pretty it's pretty trick is because the classifications of the assets now are much much larger much varied and much more workload specific right that's really the opportunities flash they are they're good guys are diverse yeah and so like you know a couple other things just I don't have a slide on it but just things we're doing to our base capabilities things around DRS and vmotion really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads right so you look at some of the massive sa P Hana or Oracle databases and how do we ensure that the emotion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else they're making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth right now a lot of this stuff not just kind of brand new cool new accelerator stuff but it's also how do we ensure the core ass people have already been running for many years we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well right all right so do I give you the last word you've been working on this for a while there's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys what do you what do you tell them what should they be excited about what are you excited for them in this new release I think what I'm excited about is how you know IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps right I think today you look at a lot of these organizations and what ends up happening is the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT infrastructure right and so now I think we can shift that story around I think that there's you know there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and appdev teams are gonna be having over the next couple years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team make you more productive give you better performance availability disaster recovery and these kinds of capabilities awesome well Jared congratulations that get both of you for forgetting to release out I'm sure it was a heavy lift and it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it and thanks for for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep dive I'm sure there's ton more resources from people I even want to go down into the weeds so thanks for stopping by thank you thank you all right ease Jared he's kid I'm Jeff you're watching the cube we're in the Palo Alto studios thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music] hi and welcome to a special cube conversation I'm Stu min a minute and we're digging into VMware vSphere seven announcement we've had conversations with some of the executives some of the technical people but we know that there's no better way to really understand a technology than to talk to some of the practitioners that are using it so really happy to have joined me for the program I have Bill Buckley Miller who is in infrastructure designer with British Telecom joining me digitally from across the pond bill thanks so much for joining us nice - all right so Phil let's start of course British Telecom I think most people know you know what BT is and it's a you know a really sprawling company tell us a little bit about you know your group your role and what's your mandate okay so my group it's called service platforms it's the bit of BT that services all of our multi millions of our customers so they we have broadband we have TV we have mobile we have DNS and email systems and one and it's all about our customers it's not a B to be part of BT you with me we we specifically focus on those kind of multi million customers that we've got in those various services I'm in particular my group is for we do infrastructure so we really do from data center all the way up to really about boot time or so we'll just past boot time and the application developers look after that stage and above okay great we definitely gonna want to dig in and talk about that that boundary between the infrastructure teams and the application teams but let's talk a little bit first you know we're talking about VMware so you know how long's your organization been doing VMware and tell us you know what you see with the announcement that VMware's making work BC or seven sure well I mean we've had a really great relationship with VMware for about twelve thirteen years something like that and it's a absolutely key part of our of our infrastructure it's written throughout BT really in every part of our operations design development and the whole ethos of the company is based around a lot of VMware products and so one of the challenges that we've got right now is application architectures are changing quite significantly at the moment and as you know in particular with serving us and with containers and a whole bunch of other things like that we're very comfortable with our ability to manage VMs and have been for a while we currently use extensively we use vSphere NSX t.v raps log insight network insight and a whole bunch of other VMware constellation applications and our operations teams know how to use that they know how to optimize they know how to capacity plan and troubleshoot so that's that's great and that's been like that for a half a decade at least we've been really really confident with our ability to still with Yemen where environments and Along Came containers and like I say multi cloud as well and what we were struggling with was the inability to have a cell pane a glass really on all of that and to use the same people and the same same processes to manage a different kind of technology so we we'd be working pretty closely with VMware on a number of different containerization products for several years now I would really closely with the b-string integrated containers guys in particular and now with the Pacific guys with really the idea that when we we bring in version 7 and the containerization aspects of version 7 we'll be in a position to have that single pane of glass to allow our operations team to really barely differentiate between what's a VM and what's a container that's really the holy grail right so we'll be able to allow our developers to develop our operations team to deploy and to operate and our designers to see the same infrastructure whether that's on premises cloud or off premises and be able to manage the whole piece in that was bad ok so Phil really interesting things you walked through here you've been using containers in a virtualized environment for a number of years want to understand in the organizational piece just a little bit because it sounds I manage all the environment but you know containers are a little bit different than VMs you know if I think back you know from an application standpoint it was you know let's stick it in a vm I don't need to change it and once I spin up a VM often that's gonna sit there for you know months if not years as opposed to you know I think about a containerization environment it's you know I really want a pool of resources I'm gonna create and destroy things all the time so you know bring us inside that organizational piece you know how much will there need to be interaction and more interaction or change in policies between your infrastructure team and your app dev team well yes making absolutely right that's the nature and that the time scales that were talking about between VMs and containers oh he's wildly different as you say we we probably oughta certainly have VMs in place now that were in place in 2000 and 2018 certainly but I imagine I haven't haven't really been touched whereas as you say VMs and a lot of people talk about spinning them all up all the time there are parts of our architecture that require that in particular the very client facing bursty stuff it you know does require spinning up spinning down pretty quickly but some of our smaller the containers do sit around for weeks if not if not months I really just depend on the development cycle aspects of that but the heartbeat that we've we've really had was just the visualizing it and there are a number different products out there that allow you to see the behavior of your containers and understand the resource requirements that they are having at any given moment allows troubleshoot and so on but they are not they need their new products their new things that we we would have to get used to and also it seems that there's an awful lot of competing products quite a Venn diagram if in terms of functionality and user abilities to do that so through again again coming back to being able to manage through vSphere to be able to have a list of VMs and alongside it is a list of containers and to be able to use policies to define how the behave in terms of their networking to be able to essentially put our deployments on Rails by using in particular tag based policies means that we can take the onus of security we can take the onus of performance management and capacity management away from the developers you don't really care about a lot of time and they can just get on with their job which is to develop new functionality and help our customers so that then means that then we have to be really responsible about defining those policies and making sure that they're adhered to but again we know how to do that with VMs new visa so the fact that we can actually apply that straightaway just to add slightly different completely unit which is really what we're talking about here is ideal and then to be able to extend that into multiple clouds as well because we do use multiple cards where AWS and as your customers and were between them is an opportunity that we can't do anything of them be you know excited about take oh yeah still I really like how you described it really the changing roles that are happening there in your organization need to understand right there's things that developers care about you know they want to move fast they want to be able to build new things and there's things that they shouldn't have to worry about and you know we talked about some of the new world and it's like oh can the platform underneath this take care of it well there there's some things platforms take care of there's some things that the software or you know your theme is going to need to understand so maybe if you could dig in a little bit some of those what are the drivers from your application portfolio what is the business asking of your organization that that's driving this change and you know being one of those you know tailwind pushing you towards you know kubernetes and the the vSphere 7 technologies well it all comes down with the customers right our customers want new functionality they want new integrations they want new content and they want better stability and better performance and our ability to extend or contracting capacity as needed as well so they're the real ultimate we want to give our customers the best possible experience of our products and services so we have to address that really from a development perspective it's our developers that have the responsibility to design them to deploy those so we have to in infrastructure we have to act as a firm foundation really underneath all of that that allows them to know that what they spend their time and develop and want to push out to our customers is something that can be trusted as performant we understand where their capacity requirements are coming from in in the short term and in the long term for that and it's secure as well obviously is a big aspect to it so really we're just providing our developers with the best possible chance of giving our customers what will hopefully make them delighted great Phil you've mentioned a couple of times that you're using public clouds as well as you know your your your your VMware farm one of make sure I if you can explain a little bit a couple of things number one is when it comes to your team especially your infrastructure team how much are they involved with setting up some of the the basic pieces or managing things like performance in the public cloud and secondly when you look at your applications are some of your clouds some of your applications hybrid going between the data center and the public cloud and I haven't talked to too many customers that are doing applications that just live in any cloud and move things around but you know maybe if you could clarify those pieces as to you know what cloud really means to your organization and your applications sure well I mean to us climate allows us to accelerate development she's nice because it means we don't have to do on-premises capacity lifts for new pieces of functionality or so we can initially build in the cloud and test in the cloud but very often applications really make better sense especially in the TV environment where people watch TV all the time I mean yes there are peak hours and lighter hours of TV watching same goes for broadband really but we generally we're well more than an eight-hour application profile so what that allows us to do then is to have well it makes sense we run them inside our organization where we have to run them in our organization for you know data protection reasons or whatever then we can do that as well but where we say for instance we have a boxing match on and we're going to be seen enormous spike in the amount of customers that want to sign up into our order journey for to allow them to view that and to gain access to that well why would you spend a lot of money on servers just for that level of additional capacity so we do absolutely have hybrid applications not sorry hybrid blocks we have blocks of suburb locations you know dozens of them really to support oil platform and what you would see is that if you were to look at our full application structure for one of the platform as I mentioned that some of the smoothers application blocks I have to run inside some can run outside and what we want to be able to do is to allow our operations team to define that again by policy as to where they run and to you know have a system that allows us to transparently see where they're running how they're running and the implications of those decisions so that we can tune those maybe in the future as well and that way we best serve our customers we you know we get to get our customers yeah what they need all right great Phil final question I have for you you've been through a few iterations of looking at VMS containers public cloud what what advice would you give your peers with the announcement of vSphere 7 and how they can look at things today in 2020 versus what they might have looked at say a year or two ago well I'll be honest I was a little bit surprised by vSphere so we knew that VMware we're working on trying to make containers on the same level both from a management deployment perspective as we MS I mean they're called VMware after all we knew that they were looking it's no surprise by just quite how quickly they've managed to almost completely reinvent their application really it's you know if you look at the whole tansy stuff from the Mission Control stuff I think a lot of people were blown away by just quite how happy VMware were to reinvent themselves and from an application perspective you know and to really leap forward and this is the very between version six and seven I've been following these since version three at least and it's an absolutely revolutionary change in terms of the overall architecture the aims to - what they want to achieve with the application and you know luckily the nice thing is is that if you're used to version six is not that big a deal it's really not that big a deal to move forward at all it's not such a big change to process and training and things like that but my word there's no awful lot of work underneath that underneath the covers and I'm really excited and I think other people in my position should really just take it as an opportunity to really revisit what they can achieve with them in particular with vSphere and with in combination with and SXT it's it's but you know it's quite hard to put into place unless you've seen the slide or slides about it and useless you've seen the products just how revolutionary the the version 7 is compared to previous revisions which have kind of evolved for a couple of years so yeah I think I'm really excited to run it and know a lot of my peers other companies that I speak with quite often are very excited about seven as well so yeah I'm really excited about the whole ball base well Phil thank you so much absolutely no doubt this is a huge move for VMware the entire company and their ecosystem rallying around helped move to the next phase of where application developers and infrastructure need to go Phil Buckley joining us from British Telecom I'm Stu minimun thank you so much for watching the queue

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to the Palo Alto Studios, theCube. I'm John Furrier, we here for a special Cube Conversation and special report, big news from VMware to discuss the launch of the availability of vSphere 7. I'm here with Krish Prasad SVP and General Manager of the vSphere Business and Cloud Platform Business Unit. And Paul Turner, VP of vSphere Product Management. Guys, thanks for coming in and talking about the big news. >> Thank you for having us. >> You guys announced some interesting things back in March around containers, Kubernetes and vSphere. Krish, tell us about the hard news what's being announced? >> Today we are announcing the general availability of vSphere 7. John, it's by far the biggest release that we have done in the last 10 years. We premiered it as project Pacific few months ago. With this release, we are putting Kubernetes native support into the vSphere platform. What that allows us to do is give customers the ability to run both modern applications based on Kubernetes and containers, as well as traditional VM based applications on the same platform. And it also allows the IT departments to provide their developers, cloud operating model using the VMware cloud foundation that is powered by this release. This is a key part of our (murmurs) portfolio solutions and products that we announced this year. And it is targeted fully at the developers of modern applications. >> And the specific news is vSphere.. >> Seven is generally available. >> Generally a vSphere 7? >> Yes. >> So let's on the trend line here, the relevance is what? What's the big trend line, that this is riding obviously we saw the announcements at VMware last year, and throughout the year, there's a lot of buzz. Pat Gelsinger says, "There's a big wave here with Kubernetes." What does this announcement mean for you guys with the marketplace trend? >> Yes what Kubernetes is really about is people trying to have an agile operation, they're trying to modernize the IT applications. And the best way to do that, is build off your current platform, expand it and make it a an innovative, an Agile Platform for you to run Kubernetes applications and VM applications together. And not just that customers are also looking at being able to manage a hybrid cloud environment, both on-prem and public cloud together. So they want to be able to evolve and modernize their application stack, but modernize their infrastructure stack, which means hybrid cloud operations with innovative applications Kubernetes or container based applications and VMs. >> What's exciting about this trend, Krish, we were talking about this at VMworld last year, we had many conversations around cloud native, but you're seeing cloud native becoming the operating model for modern business. I mean, this is really the move to the cloud. If you look at the successful enterprises, leaving the suppliers, the on premises piece, if not moved to the cloud native marketplace technologies, the on-premise isn't effective. So it's not so much on-premises going away, we know it's not, but it's turning into cloud native. This is the move to the cloud generally, this is a big wave. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, John, if you think about it on-premise, we have, significant market share, we are by far the leader in the market. And so what we are trying to do with this, is to allow customers to use the current platform they are using, but bring their modern application development on top of the same platform. Today, customers tend to set up stacks, which are different, so you have a Kubernetes stack, you have stack for the traditional applications, you have operators and administrators who are specialized in Kubernetes on one side, and you have the traditional VM operators on the other side. With this move, what we are saying is that you can be on the same common platform, you can have the same administrators who are used to administering the environment that you already had, and at the same time, offer the developers what they like, which is Kubernetes dial-tone, that they can come and deploy their applications on the same platform that you use for traditional applications. >> Yeah, Paul, Pat said Kubernetes can be the dial-tone of the internet. Most millennials might even know what dial-tone is. But what he meant is that's the key fabric, that's going to orchestrate. And we've heard over the years skill gap, skill gap, not a lot of skills out there. But when you look at the reality of skills gap, it's really about skills gaps and shortages, not enough people, most CIOs and chief information security officers, that we talk to, say, I don't want to fork my development teams, I don't want to have three separate teams, I don't have to, I want to have automation, I want an operating model that's not going to be fragmented. This kind of speaks to this whole idea of, interoperability and multi cloud. This seems to be the next big way behind hybrid. >> I think it is the next big wave, the thing that customers are looking for is a cloud operating model. They like the ability for developers to be able to invoke new services on demand in a very agile way. And we want to bring that cloud operating model to on-prem, to Google Cloud, to Amazon cloud to Microsoft Cloud to any of our VCPP partners. You get the same cloud operating experience. And it's all driven by a Kubernetes based dial-tone that's effective and available within this platform. So by bringing a single infrastructure platform that can run in this hybrid manner, and give you the cloud operating agility the developers are looking for, that's what's key in version seven. >> Does Pat Gelsinger mean when he says dial-tone of the internet Kubernetes. Does he mean always on? or what does he mean specifically? Just that it's always available? what's the meaning behind that phrase? >> The first thing he means is that developers can come to the infrastructure, which is, The VMware Cloud Foundation, and be able to work with a set of API's that are Kubernetes API's. So developers understand that, they are looking for that. They understand that dial-tone, right? And you come to our VMware cloud foundation that runs across all these clouds, you get the same API set that you can use to deploy that application. >> Okay, so let's get into the value here of vSphere 7, how does VMware and vSphere 7 specifically help customers? Isn't just bolting on Kubernetes to vSphere, some will say is that's simple or (murmurs) you're running product management no, it's not that easy. Some people say, "He is bolting Kubernetes on vSphere." >> it's not that easy. So one of the things, if anybody has actually tried deploying Kubernetes, first, it's highly complicated. And so definitely one of the things that we're bringing is you call it a bolt on, but it's certainly not like that we are making it incredibly simple. You talked about IT operational shortages, customers want to be able to deploy Kubernetes environments in a very simple way. The easiest way that you can do that is take your existing environment that route 90% of IT, and just turn on the Kubernetes dial-tone, and it is as simple as that. Now, it's much more than that, in version seven, as well, we're bringing in a couple things that are very important. You also have to be able to manage at scale, just like you would in the cloud, you want to be able to have infrastructure, almost self manage and upgrade and lifecycle manage itself. And so we're bringing in a new way of managing infrastructure so that you can manage just large scale environments, both on-premise and public cloud environments at scale. And then associated with that as well is you must make it secure. So there's a lot of enhancements we're building into the platform around what we call intrinsic security, which is how can we actually build in a truly a trusted platform for your developers and IT. >> I was just going to touch on your point about this, the shortage of IT staff, and how we are addressing that here. The way we are addressing that, is that the IT administrators that are used to administering vSphere can continue to administer this enhanced platform with Kubernetes, the same way they administered the older releases, so they don't have to learn anything new. They are just working the same way. We are not changing any tools, process, technologies. >> So same as it was before? >> Same as before. >> More capability. >> More capability. And developers can come in and they see new capabilities around Kubernetes. So it's a best of both worlds. >> And what was the pain point that you guys are solving? Obviously, the ease of use is critical, obviously, operationally, I get that. As you look at the cloud native developer cycles, infrastructure as code means, as app developers, on the other side, taking advantage of it. What's the real pain point that you guys are solving with vSphere 7. >> So I think it's multiple factors. So first is we've talked about agility a few times, there is DevOps is a real trend inside an IT organizations. They need to be able to build and deliver applications much quicker, they need to be able to respond to the business. And to do that, what they are doing is they need infrastructure that is on demand. So what we're really doing in the core Kubernetes kind of enablement, is allowing that on demand fulfillment of infrastructure, so you get that agility that you need. But it's not just tied to modern applications. It's also all of your existing business applications and your monitoring applications on one platform, which means that you've got a very simple and low cost way of managing large scale IT infrastructure. So that's a huge piece as well. And then I do want to emphasize a couple of other things. We're also bringing in new capabilities for AI and ML applications for SAP HANA databases, where we can actually scale to some of the largest business applications out there. And you have all of the capabilities like the GPU awareness and FPGA awareness that we built into the platform, so that you can truly run this as the fastest accelerated platform for your most extreme applications. So you've got the ability to run those applications, as well as your Kubernetes and Container based application. >> That's the accelerated application innovation piece of the announcement right? >> That's right, yeah. It's quite powerful that we've actually brought in, basically new hardware awareness into the product and expose that to your developers, whether that's through containers or through VMs. >> Krish, I want to get your thoughts on the ecosystem and then the community but I want to just dig into one feature you mentioned. I get the lifestyle improvement, life lifecycle improvement, I get the application acceleration innovation, but the intrinsic security is interesting. Could you take a minute, explain what that is? >> Yeah, so there's a few different aspects. One is looking at how can we actually provide a trusted environment. And that means that you need to have a way that the key management that even your administrator is not able to get keys to the kingdom, as we would call it. You want to have a controlled environment that, some of the worst security challenges inside in some of the companies has been your internal IT staff. So you've got to have a way that you can run a trusted environment independent. We've got vSphere Trust Authority that we released in version seven, that actually gives you a secure environment for actually managing your keys to the kingdom effectively your certificates. So you've got this, continuous runtime. Now, not only that, we've actually gone and taken our carbon black features, and we're actually building in full support for carbon black into the platform. So that you've got native security of even your application ecosystem. >> Yeah, that's been coming up a lot conversations, the carbon black and the security piece. Krish obviously vSphere everywhere having that operating model makes a lot of sense, but you have a lot of touch points, you got cloud, hyper scalars got the edge, you got partners. >> We have that dominant market share on private cloud. We are on Amazon, as you will know, Azure, Google, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud. So all the major clouds, there is a vSphere stack running. So it allows customers if you think about it, it allows customers to have the same operating model, irrespective of where their workload is residing. They can set policies, components, security, they set it once, it applies to all their environments across this hybrid cloud, and it's all supported by our VMware Cloud Foundation, which is powered by vSphere 7. >> Yeah, I think having that, the cloud as API based having connection points and having that reliable easy to use is critical operating model. Alright guys, so let's summarize the announcement. What do you guys their takeaway from this vSphere 7, what is the bottom line? What's it really mean? (Paul laughs) >> I think what we're, if we look at it for developers, we are democratizing Kubernetes. We already are in 90% of IT environments out there are running vSphere. We are bringing to every one of those vSphere environments and all of the virtual infrastructure administrators, they can now manage Kubernetes environments, you can you can manage it by simply upgrading your environment. That's a really nice position rather than having independent kind of environments you need to manage. So I think that is one of the key things that's in here. The other thing though, I don't think any other platform out there, other than vSphere that can run in your data center in Google's, in Amazon's, in Microsoft's, in thousands of VCPP partners. You have one hybrid platform that you can run with. And that's got operational benefits, that's got efficiency benefits, that's got agility benefits. >> Great. >> Yeah, I would just add to that and say that, look, we want to meet customers, where they are in their journey. And we want to enable them to make business decisions without technology getting in the way. And I think the announcement that we made today, with vSphere 7, is going to help them accelerate their digital transformation journey, without making trade offs on people, process and technology. And there is more to come. Look, we are laser focused on making our platform the best in the industry, for running all kinds of applications and the best platform for a hybrid and multi cloud. And so you will see more capabilities coming in the future. Stay tuned. >> Well, one final question on this news announcement, which is awesome, vSphere, core product for you guys, if I'm the customer, tell me why it's going to be important five years from now? >> Because of what I just said, it is the only platform that is going to be running across all the public clouds, which will allow you to have an operational model that is consistent across the cloud. So think about it. If you go to Amazon native, and then you have a workload in Azure, you're going to have different tools, different processes, different people trained to work with those clouds. But when you come to VMware and you use our Cloud Foundation, you have one operating model across all these environments, and that's going to be game changing. >> Great stuff, great stuff. Thanks for unpacking that for us. Congratulations on the announcement. >> Thank you. >> vSphere 7, news special report here, inside theCube cCnversation, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We are having a very special Cube Conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil, if you will of the new VMware vSphere 7.0 we're going to get a little bit more of a technical deep dive here today we're excited to have longtime Cube alumni, Kit Colbert here, is the VP and CTO of Cloud Platform at VMware. Kit, great to see you. And, and new to theCube, Jared Rosoff. He's a Senior Director of Product Management VMware, and I'm guessing had a whole lot to do with this build. So Jared, first off, congratulations for birthing this new release. And great to have you on board. >> Feels pretty good, great to be here. >> All right, so let's just jump into it. From kind of a technical aspect, what is so different about vSphere 7? >> Yeah, great. So vSphere 7, bakes Kubernetes right into the virtualization platform. And so this means that as a developer, I can now use Kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment. And it means as an IT admin, I'm actually able to deliver Kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run. >> So I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that might be coming with the acquisition of the FTO team. So really exciting news. And I think Kit you tease it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments, regardless of whether that's on-prem, public cloud, this public cloud, that public cloud. So this really is the realization of that vision. >> It is, yeah. So, we talked at VMworld about project Pacific, this technology preview, and as Jared mentioned, what that was, is how do we take Kubernetes and really build it into vSphere. As you know, we had Hybrid Cloud Vision for quite a while now. How do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible. Now part of the broader VMware Cloud Foundation portfolio. And as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud on-premises, at the edge, with service providers, there's a secondary question, how do we actually evolve that platform? So it can support not just the existing workloads, but also modern workloads as well. >> All right. So I think you brought some pictures for us a little demo. So why (murmurs) and let's see what it looks like. You guys can keep the demo? >> Narrator: So we're going to start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware Cloud Foundation for and vSphere 7. So what you're seeing here is a developer is actually using Kubernetes to deploy Kubernetes. The selfie in watermelon, (all laughing) So the developer uses this Kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole Kubernetes cluster. And the whole developer experience now is driven by Kubernetes. They can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of Kubernetes API's and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere. And so, that's not just provisioning workloads, though. This is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed, so go look at, hey, what's the IP address that got allocated to that? Or what's the CPU load on this workload I just deployed. On top of Kubernetes, we've integrated a Container Registry into vSphere. So here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images. And one of the amazing things about this is, from an infrastructure is code standpoint. Now, the developers infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control. I can check in, not just my code, but also the description of the Kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app. So now we're looking at sort of a side by side view, where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application and on the left hand side, we see vCenter. And what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through Kubernetes, those are showing up right inside of the vCenter console. And so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things, the same names, and so this means what a developer calls their IT department and says, "Hey, I got a problem with my database," we don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about. They got the same name, they see the same information. So what we're going to do is that, we're going to push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience. And what you'll see here is that vCenter is the vCenter you've already known and love, but what's different is that now it's much more application focused. So here we see a new screen inside of vCenter vSphere namespaces. And so these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications, like the whole distributed system now as a single object inside of vCenter. And when I click into one of these apps, this is a managed object inside of vSphere. I can click on permissions, and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces. I can hook this into my active directory infrastructure, so I can use the same, corporate credentials to access the system, I tap into all my existing storage. So, this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers. I can use storage policy based management to provide storage for Kubernetes. And it's hooked in with things like DRS, right? So I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory, and all that's going to be enforced by DRS inside the cluster. And again, as an admin, I'm just using vSphere, but to the developer, they're getting a whole Kubernetes experience out of this platform. Now, vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the Kubernetes environment. So besides, seeing the VMs and things that developers have deployed, I can see all of the desired state specifications, all the different Kubernetes objects that the developers have created, the compute network and storage objects, they're all integrated right inside the vCenter console. And so once again, from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective, this data is invaluable, often saves hours, just to try to figure out what we're even talking about more trying to resolve an issue. So, as you can see, this is all baked right into vCenter. The vCenter experience isn't transformed a lot, we get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say, "Where's the Kubernetes?" And they're surprised. They're like, they've been managing Kubernetes all this time, it just looks, it looks like the vSphere experience they've already got. But all those Kubernetes objects, the pods and containers, Kubernetes clusters, load balancer stores, they're all represented right there natively in the vCenter UI. And so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins. >> Well, it's pretty wild. It really builds off the vision that again, I think you kind of outlined Kit teased out at VMworld, which was, the IT still sees vSphere, which is what they want to see, what they're used to seeing, but (murmurs) see Kubernetes and really bringing those together in a unified environment. So that, depending on what your job is and what you're working on, that's what you're going to see in this kind of unified environment. >> Yeah, as the demo showed, (clears throat) it is still vSphere at the center, but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere, Kubernetes base one, which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks, as well as the traditional vSphere interface API's, which is great for VI admins and IT operations. >> And then it really is interesting too, you tease that a lot. That was a good little preview, people knew they're watching. But you talked about really cloud journey and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are that are running in their classic VMs, and then kind of the modern, kind of cloud native applications built on Kubernetes. And you outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum, and getting from one to the other, but not really about kind of the messy middle, if you will, and this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum, they can move their workloads or move their apps. >> Yeah, I think we think a lot about it like that, we talk to customers, and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go, their future state architecture. And that involves embracing cloud and involves modernizing applications. And you know, as you mentioned, it's challenging for them. Because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of these two extremes either you're here where you are, kind of the old current world, and you got the bright Nirvana future on the far end there. And they believe that the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other, they have to kind of change everything out from underneath you. And that's obviously very expensive, very time consuming, and very error prone as well. There's a lot of things that can go wrong there. And so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really to your point as you call it, the messy middle, I would say it's more like, how do we offer stepping stones along that journey? Rather than making this one giant leap we had to invest all this time and resources? How can we enable people to make smaller incremental steps, each of which have a lot of business value, but don't have a huge amount of cost? >> And it's really enabling kind of this next gen application, where there's a lot of things that are different about it. But one of the fundamental things is where now the application defines the resources that it needs to operate, versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities what the application can do. And that's where everybody is moving as quickly as makes sense. As you said, not all applications need to make that move, but most of them should, and most of them are, and most of them are at least making that journey. Do you see that? >> Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that, certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from, looking historically at how we managed infrastructure, one of the things we enable in vSphere 7, is how we manage applications. So a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings, or, your resource allocation, you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure, you talk about it in terms of, this VM is going to be encrypted, or this VM is going to have this firewall rule. And what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management. So you actually look at an application and say, I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU. Or I want this application to have these security rules on it. And so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level. >> And like, I can even zoom back a little bit there and say, if you look back, one thing we did was something like vSAN before that people had to put policies on a LAN an actual storage LAN, and a storage array. And then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array, inherited certain policies. And so, vSAN will turn that around allows you to put the policy on the VM. But what Jared is talking about now is that for a modern workload, a modern workloads is not a single VM, it's a collection of different things. You got some containers in there, some VMs, probably distributed, maybe even some on-prem, some on the cloud. And so how do you start managing that more holistically? And this notion of really having an application as a first class entity that you can now manage inside of vSphere is really powerful and very simplified one. >> And why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view, which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time. That's a nice big word, but when the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications. And more importantly, how do you continue to evolve them and change them, based on on either customer demands or competitive demands, or just changes in the marketplace. >> Yeah when you look at something like a modern app that maybe has 100 VMs that are part of it, and you take something like compliance. So today, if I want to check if this app is compliant, I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down hardened and secured the right way. But now instead, what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of vCenter, set the right security settings on that and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are going to inherit that stuff. So it really simplifies that. It also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications. If you think about vCenter today, you might log in and see 1000 VMs in your inventory. When you log in with vSphere 7, what you see is few dozen applications. So a single admin can manage much larger pool of infrastructure, many more applications than they could before. Because we automate so much of that operation. >> And it's not just the scale part, which is obviously really important, but it's also the rate of change. And this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done, done, i.e. building applications, while at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security performance concerns, these sorts of elements. And so being by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level, and then have the developer be able to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction. It actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better. They're not stepping over each other. But in fact, now they can both get what they need to get done, done, and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe, and in compliance, and so forth. >> So there's a lot more to this, this is a very significant release, right? Again, a lot of foreshadowing, if you go out and read the tea leaves, it's a pretty significant kind of re-architecture of many, many parts of vSphere. So beyond the Kubernetes, kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out in this very significant release? >> Yeah, that's a great question, because we tend to talk a lot about Kubernetes, what was Project Pacific, but it's now just part of vSphere. And certainly, that is a very large aspect of it. But to your point, vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features. And so there is a demo here, let's pull up some slides. And we're ready to take a look at what's there. So, outside of Kubernetes, there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere 7. So the first first one is simplified Lifecycle Management. And then really focused on security as a second one, and then applications as well, but both including, the cloud native apps that could fit in the Kubernetes bucket as well as others. And so we go on the first one, the first column there, there's a ton of stuff that we're doing, around simplifying life cycles. So let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics. So we have this new technology vSphere Lifecycle Management, vLCM. And the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades, lifecycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts? How do we make them more declarative, with a single image, you can now specify for an entire cluster. We find that a lot of our vSphere admins, especially at larger scales, have a really tough time doing this. There's a lot of ins and outs today, it's somewhat tricky to do. And so we want to make it really, really simple and really easy to automate as well. >> So if you're doing Kubernetes on Kubernetes, I suppose you're going to have automation on automation, because upgrading to the sevens is probably not an inconsequential task. >> And yeah, and going forward and allowing you as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great VCR functionality at a more rapid clip. How do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well. >> Next big thing you talk about is security. >> Yep >> We just got back from RSA. Thank goodness, we got that show in before all the badness started. But everyone always talks about security is got to be baked in from the bottom to the top. Talk about kind of the the changes in the security. >> So I've done a lot of things around security, things around identity federation, things around simplifying certificate management, dramatic simplifications they're across the board. What I want to focus on here, on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere Trust Authority. And so with that one, what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces, and really ensure there's a trusted computing base? When we talk to customers, what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats, including even internal ones, right? How do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted. And obviously, if you're hiring someone, you somewhat trust them. How do you implement the concept of least privilege. >> Jeff: Or zero trust (murmurs) >> Exactly. So they idea with trust authority that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down ensure a fully secure, those can be managed by a special vCenter Server, which is in turn very locked down, only a few people have access to it. And then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that, okay, this untrusted host haven't been modified, we know they're okay, so they're okay to actually run workloads or they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing. So it's this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment. >> And then the third kind of leg of the stool is, just better leveraging, kind of a more complex asset ecosystem, if you will, with things like FPGAs and GPUs, and kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application can draw the appropriate resources as needed. So you've done a lot of work there as well. >> Yeah, there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space, as you mentioned, all sorts of accelerators coming out. We all know about GPUs, and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases, not to mention 3D rendering. But FPGAs, and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there. And so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out, they have a lot of the same problems that we saw in the very early days of virtualization, i.e. silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using. And what you find is, all the things we found before you find very low utilization rates, inability to automate that, inability to manage that well, putting security and compliance and so forth. And so this is really the reality that we see in most customers and it's funny because, and sometimes you think, "Wow, shouldn't we be past this?" As an industry should we have solved this already, we did this with virtualization. But as it turns out, the virtualization we did was for compute and then storage network. But now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators. And so that's where this bit fusion technology that we're including now with vSphere, really comes to the forefront. So if you see in the current slide, we're showing here, the challenges that just these separate pools of infrastructure, how do you manage all that? And so if the we go to the next slide, what we see is that, with that fusion, you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization, you can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together. So they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use. We can, have multiple people sharing a GPU, we can do it very dynamically. And the great part of it is that it's really easy for these folks to use. They don't even need to think about it, in fact, integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows. >> So it's free, it's pretty cheap, because the classifications of the assets now are much, much larger, much varied and much more workload specific right. That's really the opportunity slash challenge there. >> They are a lot more diverse And so like, a couple other things just, I don't have a slide on it, but just things we're doing to our base capabilities, things around DRS and vMotion. Really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads, right. So you look at some of the massive SAP HANA or Oracle databases, and how do we ensure that vMotion can scale to handle those, without impacting their performance or anything else there? Making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing, and so forth. So a lot of the stuff not just kind of brand new, cool new accelerator stuff, but it's also how do we ensure the core as people have already been running for many years, we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well. >> All right. So Jared I give you the last word. You've been working on this for a while. There's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys. What do you tell them? What should they be excited about? What are you excited for them in this new release? >> I think what I'm excited about is how IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps. I think today, you look at all of these organizations, and what ends up happening is, the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT infrastructure. And so, now, I think we can shift that story around. I think that there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and app dev teams are going to be having over the next couple of years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team? Make you more productive, give you better performance, availability, disaster recovery and these kinds of capabilities. >> Awesome. Well, Jared, congratulation and Kit both of you for getting the release out. I'm sure it was a heavy lift. And it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it. And thanks for for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep dive into this ton more resources for people that didn't want to go down into the weeds. So thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, he's Jared, he's Kit, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube. We're in the Palo Alto Studios. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music) >> Hi, and welcome to a special Cube Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're digging into VMware vSphere 7 announcement. We've had conversations with some of the executives some of the technical people, but we know that there's no better way to really understand the technology than to talk to some of the practitioners that are using it. So really happy to have joined me on the program. I have Philip Buckley-Mellor, who is an infrastructure designer with British Telecom joining me digitally from across the pond. Phil, thanks so much for joining us. >> Nice too. >> Alright, so Phil, let's start of course, British Telecom, I think most people know, you know what BT is and it's, really sprawling company. Tell us a little bit about, your group, your role and what's your mandate. >> Okay, so, my group is called service platforms. It's the bit of BT that services all of our multi millions of our customers. So we have broadband, we have TV, we have mobile, we have DNS and email systems. And it's all about our customers. It's not a B2B part of BT, you're with me? We specifically focus on those kind of multi million customers that we've got in those various services. And in particular, my group we do infrastructure. we really do from data center all the way up to really about boot time or so we'll just pass boot time, and the application developers look after that stage and above. >> Okay, great, we definitely going to want to dig in and talk about that, that boundary between the infrastructure teams and the application teams. But let's talk a little bit first, we're talking about VMware. So, how long has your organization been doing VMware and tell us, what you see with the announcement that VMware is making for vSphere 7? >> Sure, well, I mean, we've had really great relationship with VMware for about 12, 13 years, something like that. And it's a absolutely key part of our infrastructure. It's written throughout BT, really, in every part of our operations, design, development, and the whole ethos of the company is based around a lot of VMware products. And so one of the challenges that we've got right now is application architectures are changing quite significantly at the moment, And as you know, in particular with serverless, and with containers and a whole bunch of other things like that. We're very comfortable with our ability to manage VMs and have been for a while. We currently use extensively we use vSphere NSXT, VROPs, login site, network insight and a whole bunch of other VMware constellation applications. And our operations teams know how to use that they know how to optimize, they know how to pass the plan, and (murmurs). So that's great. And that's been like that for half a decade at least, we've been really, really confident with our ability to deal with VMware environments. And along came containers and like, say, multi cloud as well. And what we were struggling with was the inability to have a single pane of glass, really on all of that, and to use the same people and the same processes to manage a different kind of technology. So we, we've been working pretty closely with VMware on a number of different containerization products. For several years now, I've worked really closely with the vSphere integrated containers, guys in particular, and now with the Pacific guys, with really the ideal that when we bring in version seven and the containerization aspects of version seven, we'll be in a position to have that single pane of glass to allow our operations team to really barely differentiate between what's a VM and what's a container. That's really the Holy Grail. So we'll be able to allow our developers to develop, our operations team to deploy and to operate, and our designers to see the same infrastructure, whether that's on-premises, cloud or off-premises, and be able to manage the whole piece in that respect. >> Okay, so Phil, really interesting things you walk through here, you've been using containers in a virtualized environment for a number of years, want to understand and the organizational piece just a little bit, because it sounds great, I manage all the environment, but, containers are a little bit different than VMs. if I think back, from an application standpoint, it was, let's stick it in a VM, I don't need to change it. And once I spin up a VM, often that's going to sit there for, months, if not years, as opposed to, I think about a containerization environment. It's, I really want to pool of resources, I'm going to create and destroy things all the time. So, bring us inside that organizational piece. How much will there needs to be interaction and more interaction or change in policies between your infrastructure team and your app dev team? >> Well, yes, me absolutely right, that's the nature and the timescales that we're talking about between VMs and containers is wildly different. As you say, we probably almost certainly have Vms in place now that were in place in 2018 certainly I imagine, and haven't really been touched. Whereas as you say, VMs and a lot of people talk about spinning them all up all the time. There are parts of architecture that require that, in particular, the very client facing bursty stuff, does require spinning up and spinning down pretty quickly. But some of our some of our other containers do sit around for weeks, if not months, really does depend on the development cycle aspects of that, but the heartbeat that we've really had was just visualizing it. And there are a number of different products out there that allow you to see the behavior of your containers and understand the resource requirements that they are having at any given moment. Allies troubleshoot and seven. But they need any problems, the new things that we we will have to get used to. And also it seems that there's an awful lot of competing products, quite a Venn diagram of in terms of functionality and user abilities to do that. So again coming back to being able to manage through vSphere. And to be able to have a list of VMs on alongside is a list of containers and to be able to use policies to define how they behave in terms of their networking, to be able to essentially put our deployments on rails by using in particular tag based policies, means that we can take the onus of security, we can take the onus of performance management and capacity management away from the developers who don't really have a lot of time, and they can just get on with their job, which is to develop new functionality, and help our customers. So that means then we have to be really responsible about defining those policies, and making sure that they're adhered to. But again, we know how to do that with the VMs through vSphere. So the fact that we can actually apply that straight away, just with slightly different compute unit, is really what we're talking about here is ideal, and then to be able to extend that into multiple clouds as well, because we do use multiple clouds where (murmurs) and as your customers, and we're between them is an opportunity that we can't do anything other than be excited about (murmurs) >> Yeah, Phil, I really like how you described really the changing roles that are happening there in your organization need to understand, right? There's things that developers care about the they want to move fast, they want to be able to build new things and there's things that they shouldn't have to worry about. And, you know, we talked about some of the new world and it's like, oh, can the platform underneath this take care of it? Well, there's some things platforms take care of, there's some things that the software or your team is going to need to understand. So maybe if you could dig in a little bit, some of those, what are the drivers from your application portfolio? What is the business asking of your organization that's driving this change? And being one of those tail winds pushing you towards, Kubernetes and the vSphere 7 technologies? >> Well, it all comes down to the customers, right? Our customers want new functionality. They want new integrations, they want new content, they want better stability and better performance and our ability to extend or contracting capacity as needed as well. So there will be ultimate challenges that we want to give our customers the best possible experience of our products and services. So we have to have address that really from a development perspective, it's our developers have the responsibility to, design and deploy those. So, in infrastructure, we have to act as a firm, foundation, really underneath all of that. That allows them to know that what they spend their time and develop and want to push out to our customers is something that can be trusted is performant. We understand where the capacity requirements are coming from in the short term, and in the long term for that, and he's secure as well, obviously, is a big aspect to it. And so really, we're just providing our developers with the best possible chance of giving our customers what will hopefully make them delighted. >> Great, Phil, you've mentioned a couple of times that you're using public clouds as well as, your VMware firm. Want to make sure I if you can explain a little bit a couple of things. Number one is, when it comes to your team, especially your infrastructure team, how much are they in involved with setting up some of the basic pieces or managing things like performance in the public cloud. And secondly, when you look at your applications, or some of your clouds, some of your applications hybrid going between the data center and the public cloud. And I haven't talked to too many customers that are doing applications that just live in any cloud and move things around. But you know, maybe if you could clarify those pieces as to, what cloud really means to your organization and your applications? >> Sure, well, I mean, tools. Cloud allows us to accelerate development, which is nice because it means we don't have to do on-premises capacity lifts for new pieces of functionality are so we can initially build in the cloud and test in the cloud. But very often, applications really make better sense, especially in the TV environment where people watch TV all the time. I mean, yes, there are peak hours and lighter hours of TV watching. Same goes for broadband really. But we generally were well more than an eight hour application profile. So what that allows us to do then is to have applications that are, well, it makes sense. We run them inside our organization where we have to run them in our organization for, data protection reasons or whatever, then we can do that as well. But where we say, for instance, we have a boxing match on. And we're going to be seeing an enormous spike in the amount of customers that want to sign up into our auto journey to allow them to view that and to gain access to that, well, why would you spend a lot of money on servers just for that level of additional capacity? So we do absolutely have hybrid applications, not sorry, hybrid blocks, we have blocks of sub applications, dozens of them really to support our platform. And what you would see is that if you were to look at our full application structure for one of the platforms, I mentioned, that some of the some of those application blocks have to run inside some can run outside and what we want to be able to do is to allow our operations team to define that, again, by policies to where they run, and to, have a system that allows us to transparently see where they're running, how they're running, and the implications of those decisions so that we can tune those maybe in the future as well. And that way, we best serve our customers. We got to get our customers yeah, what they need. >> All right, great, Phil, final question I have for you, you've been through a few iterations of looking at VMs containers, public cloud, what what advice would you give your peers with the announcement of vSphere 7 and how they can look at things today in 2020 versus what they might have looked at, say a year or two ago? >> Well, I'll be honest, I was a little bit surprised by vSphere 7. We knew that VMware will working on trying to make containers on the same level, both from a management deployment perspective as VMs. I mean, they're called VMware after all right? And we knew that they were looking at that. But I was surprised by just quite how quickly they've managed to almost completely reinvent the application, really. It's, you know, if you look at the whole Tansy stuff and the Mission Control stuff, I think a lot of people were blown away by just quite how happy VMware were to reinvent themselves from an application perspective, and to really leap forward. And this is, between version six and seven. I've been following these since version three, at least. And it's an absolutely revolutionary change in terms of the overall architecture. The aims to, to what they want to achieve with the application. And luckily, the nice thing is, is that if you're used to version six is not that big a deal, it's really not that big a deal to move forward at all, it's not such a big change to process and training and things like that. But my word, there's an awful lot of work underneath that, underneath the covers. And I'm really excited. And I think all the people in my position should really use take it as an opportunity to revisit what they can achieve with, in particular with vSphere, and with in combination with NSXT, it's quite hard to put into place unless you've seen the slides about it and unless you've seen the product, just how revolutionary the version seven is compared to previous versions, which have kind of evolved through a couple of years. So yeah, I think I'm really excited about it. And I know a lot of my peers or the companies that I speak with quite often are very excited about seven as well. So yeah, I'm really excited about though the whole base >> Well, Phil, thank you so much. Absolutely no doubt this is a huge move for VMware, the entire company and their ecosystem rallying around, help move to the next phase of where application developers and infrastructure need to go. Phil Buckley joining us from British Telecom. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCube. (upbeat music)

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to the Palo Alto students of the cube um John free we're here for a special cube conversation and special report big news from VMware discuss the launch of the availability of vSphere 7 I'm here with Chris Prasad SVP and general manager of the vSphere business and cloud platform business unit and Paul Turner VP a VP of Product Management guys thanks for coming in and talking about the big news thank you for having us you guys announced some interesting things back in march around containers kubernetes and vSphere Chris just about the hard news what's being announced today we are announcing the general availability of vSphere 7 John it's by far the biggest release that we have done in the last 10 years we previewed it this project Pacific a few months ago with this release we are putting kubernetes native support into the vSphere platform what that allows us to do is give customers the ability to run both modern applications based on kubernetes and containers as well as traditional VM based applications on the same platform and it also allows the IT departments to provide their developers cloud operating model using the VMware cloud foundation that is powered by this release this is a key part of our tansu portfolio of solutions and products that we announced this year and it is star gated fully at the developers of modern applications and the specific news is vSphere 7 is general available generally vSphere 7 yes ok that so let's on the trend line here the relevance is what what's the big trend line that this is riding obviously we saw the announcements at VMworld last year and throughout the year there's a lot of buzz pascal Cerner says there's a big wave here with kubernetes what does this announcement mean for you guys with the marketplace trend yeah so what kubernetes is really about is people trying to have an agile operation they're trying to modernize their IT applications and they the best way to do that is build off your current platform expanded and and make it a an innovative a agile platform for you to run kubernetes applications and VM applications together I'm not just that customers are also looking at being able to manage a hybrid cloud environment both on Prem and public cloud together so they want to be able to evolve and modernize their application stack but modernize their infrastructure stack which means hybrid cloud operations with innovative applications kubernetes or container based applications and VMs was excited about this trend Chris we were talking with us at vmworld last year and we've had many conversations around cloud native but you're seeing cloud native becoming the operating model for modern business I mean this is really the move to the cloud if you look at the successful enterprises and even the suppliers the on-premises piece if not move to the cloud native marketplace technologies the on premise isn't effective so it's not so much on premises going away we know it's not but it's turning into cloud native this is the move to the cloud generally this is a big wave yeah absolutely I mean if John if you think about it on-premise we have significant market share by far the leader in the market and so what we are trying to do with this is to allow customers to use the current platform they are using but bring their application modern application development on top of the same platform today customers tend to set up stacks which are different right so you have a kubernetes stack you have a stack for the traditional applications you have operators and administrators who are specialized in kubernetes on one side and you have the traditional VM operators on the other side with this move what we are saying is that you can be on the same common platform you can have the same administrators who are used to administering the environment that you already had and at the same time offer the developers what they like which is kubernetes dial tone that they can come and deploy their applications on the same platform that you use for traditional applications yeah Paul Paul Pat said Cuba is gonna be the dial tone on the internet most Millennials might even know what dial tone is but what he meant is is that's the key fabric there's gonna work a straight and you know we've heard over the years skill gap skill gap not a lot of skills out there but when you look at the reality of skills gap it's really about skills gaps and shortages not enough people most CIOs and chief and major securitizers as we talk to you say I don't want to fork my development teams I don't want to have three separate teams so I don't have to I I want to have automation I want an operating model that's not gonna be fragmented this kind of speaks to this whole idea of you know interoperability and multi clout this seems to be the next big way behind ibrid I think it I think it is the next big wake the the thing that customers are looking for is a cloud operating model they like the ability for developers to be able to invoke new services on demand in a very agile way and we want to bring that cloud operating model to on-prem to Google cloud to Amazon Cloud to Microsoft cloud to any of our VC PP partners you get the same cloud operating experience and it's all driven by kubernetes based dial tone it's effective and available within this platform so by bringing a single infrastructure platform that can one run in this hybrid manner and give you the cloud operating agility that developers are looking for that's what's key in version seven says Pat Kelsey near me when he says dial tone of the Internet kubernetes does he mean always on or what does he mean specifically just that it's always available what's what says what's the meaning behind that that phrase no I the the first thing he means is that developers can come to the infrastructure which is the VMware cloud foundation and be able to work with a set of api's that are kubernetes api s-- so developers understand that they are looking for that they understand that dial tone right and you come to our VMware cloud foundation that one across all these clouds you get the same API said that you can use to deploy that application okay so let's get into the value here of vSphere seven how does vmware vsphere 7 specifically help customers isn't just bolting on kubernetes to vSphere some will say is it that's simple or user you running product management no it's not that easy it's yeah some people say hey use bolton kubernetes on vSphere it's it's not that easy so so one of the things if if anybody has actually tried deploying kubernetes first its highly complicated and so so definitely one of the things that we're bringing is you call it a bolt-on but it's certainly not like that we are making it incredibly simple and you talked about IT operational shortages customers want to be able to deploy kubernetes environments in a very simple way the easiest way that we can you can do that is take your existing environment that are out 90% of IT and just turn on turn on the kubernetes dial tone and it is as simple as that now it's much more than that in version 7 as well we're bringing in a couple things that are very important you also have to be able to manage at scale just like you would in the cloud you want to be able to have infrastructure almost self manage and upgrade and lifecycle manage itself and so we're bringing in a new way of managing infrastructure so that you can manage just large-scale environments both on-premise and public cloud environments and scale and then associated with that as well is you must make it secure so there's a lot of enhancements we're building into the platform around what we call intrinsic security which is how can we actually build in truly a trusted platform for your developers and IT yeah I mean I I was just going to touch on your point about the shortage of IT staff and how we are addressing that here the the way we are addressing that is that the IT administrators that are used to administering vSphere can continue to administer this enhanced platform with kubernetes the same way they administered the older releases so they don't have to learn anything new they are just working the same way we are not changing any tools process technologies so same as it was before same as Italy before more capable they are and developers can come in and they see new capabilities around kubernetes so it's best of both worlds and what was the pain point that you guys are so obviously the ease-of-use is critical Asti operationally I get that as you look at the cloud native developer Saiga's infrastructure as code means as app developers on the other side taking advantage of it what's the real pain point that you guys are solving with vSphere 7 so I think it's it's it's multiple factors so so first is we've we've talked about agility a few times right there is DevOps is a real trend inside an IT organizations they need to be able to build and deliver applications much quicker they need to be able to respond to the business and to do that what they are doing is is they need infrastructure that is on demand so what what we're really doing in the core kubernetes kind of enablement is allowing that on-demand fulfillment of infrastructure so you get that agility that you need but it's it's not just tied to modern applications it's also your all of your existing business applications and your modern applications on one platform which means that you know you've got a very simple and and low-cost way of managing large-scale IT infrastructure so that's a that's a huge piece as well and and then I I do want to emphasize a couple of other things it's we're also bringing in new capabilities for AI and ML applications for sa P Hana databases where we can actually scale to some of the largest business applications out there and you have all of the capabilities like like the GPU awareness and FPGA our FPGA awareness that we built into the platform so that you can truly run this as the fastest accelerated platform for your most extreme applications so you've got the ability to run those applications as well as your kubernetes and container based applications that's the accelerated application innovation piece of the announcement right that's right yeah it's it's it's quite powerful that we've actually brought in you know basically new hardware awareness into the product and expose that to your developers whether that's through containers or through VMs Chris I want to get your thoughts on the ecosystem and then in the community but I want to just dig into one feature you mentioned I get the lifestyle improvement a life cycle improvement I get the application acceleration innovation but the intrinsic security is interesting could you take a minute explain what that is yeah so there's there's a few different aspects one is looking at how can we actually provide a trusted environment and that means that you need to have a way that the the key management that even your administrator is not able to get keys to the kingdom as we would call it you you want to have a controlled environment that you know some of the worst security challenges inside and some of the companies has been your in choler internal IT staff so you've got to have a way that you can run a trusted environment and independent we've got these fair trust authority that we released in version 7 that actually gives you a a secure environment for actually managing your keys to the kingdom effectively your certificates so you've got this you know continuous runtime now not only that we've actually gone and taken our carbon black features and we're actually building in full support for carbon black into the platform so that you've got negative security of even your application ecosystem yeah that's been coming up a lot in conversations the carbon black on the security piece chrishelle see these fear everywhere having that operating model makes a lot of sense but you have a lot of touch points you got cloud hyper scale is that the edge you got partners so the other dominant market share and private cloud we are on Amazon as you well know as your Google IBM cloud Oracle cloud so all the major clouds there is a vSphere stack running so it allows customers if you think about it right it allows customers to have the same operating model irrespective of where their workload is residing they can set policies compliance security they said it wants it applies to all their environments across this hybrid cloud and it's all fun a supported by our VMware cloud foundation which is powered by vSphere 7 yeah I think having that the cloud is API based having connection points and having that reliable easy to use is critical operating model all right guys so let's summarize the announcement what do you guys take dare take away from this vSphere 7 what is the bottom line what's what's it really mean I I think what we're if we look at it for developers we are democratizing kubernetes we already are in 90% of IT environments out there are running vSphere we are bringing to every one of those vSphere environments and all of the virtual infrastructure administrators they can now manage kubernetes environments you can you can manage it by simply upgrading your environment that's a really nice position rather than having independent kind of environments you need to manage so so I think that's that is one of the key things that's in here the other thing though is there is I don't think any other platform out there that other than vSphere that can run in your data center in Google's in Amazon's in Microsoft's in you know thousands of VC PP partners you have one hybrid platform that you can run with and that's got operational benefits that's got efficiency benefits that's got agility benefits yeah I just add to that and say that look we want to meet customers where they are in their journey and we want to enable them to make business decisions without technology getting in the way and I think the announcement that we made today with vSphere 7 is going to help them accelerate their digital transformation journey without making trade-offs on people process and technology and there's more to come that we're laser focused on making our platform the best in the industry for running all kinds of applications and the best platform for a hybrid and multi cloud and so you'll see more capabilities coming in the future stay tuned oh one final question on this news announcement which is this awesome we spear core product for you guys if I'm the customer tell me why it's gonna be important five years from now because of what I just said it is the only platform that is going to be running across all the public clouds right which will allow you to have an operational model that is consistent across the clouds so think about it if you go the Amazon native and then yeah warlord and agile you're going to have different tools different processes different people trained to work with those clouds but when you come to VMware and you use our cloud foundation you have one operating model across all these environments and that's going to be game-changing great stuff great stuff thanks for unpacking that for us graduates on the announcement thank you at vSphere 7 News special report here inside the cube conversation I'm John Fergus thanks for watching [Music] and welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with the cube we are having a very special cube conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil if you will of the new a VMware vSphere seven dot gonna get a little bit more of a technical deep dive here today we're excited to have a longtime cube alumni kit Kolbert here is the vp and CTO cloud platform at being work it great to see you yeah and and new to the cube jared rose off he's a senior director of product management at VMware and I'm guessin had a whole lot to do with this build so Jared first off congratulations for birthing this new release and great to have you on board alright so let's just jump into it from kind of a technical aspect what is so different about vSphere seven yeah great so vSphere seven baek's kubernetes right into the virtualization platform and so this means that as a developer I can now use kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment and it means as an IT admin I'm actually able to deliver kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run so I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that that might be coming when the with the acquisition of the hefty Oh team so really exciting news and I think it you tease it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments regardless of whether that's on Prem public cloud this public cloud that public cloud so this really is the realization of that vision yes yeah so we talked at VMworld about project Pacific all right this technology preview and as Jared mentioned of what that was was how do we take kubernetes and really build it into vSphere as you know we had a hybrid cloud vision for quite a while now how do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible now part of the broader VMware cloud foundation portfolio and you know as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud on-premises at the edge with service providers there's a secondary question how do we actually evolve that platform so it can support not just the existing workloads but also modern workflows as well right all right so I think you brought some pictures for us a little demo so I don't know yeah why was dive into there and let's see what it looks like you guys can cube the demo yes we're gonna start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation for an vSphere 7 so what you're seeing here is the developers actually using kubernetes to deploy kubernetes the self eating watermelon right so the developer uses this kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole kubernetes cluster and the whole developer experience now is driven by kubernetes they can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of kubernetes api is and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere and so you know that's not just provisioning workloads though this is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed so go look at hey what's the IP address that got allocated to that or what's the CPU load on this you know workload I just deployed on top of kubernetes we've integrated a container registry into vSphere so here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images and you know one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as code standpoint now the developers infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control I can check in not just my code but also the description of the kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app so now we're looking at a sort of a side-by-side view where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application and on the left-hand side we see V Center and what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through kubernetes those are showing up right inside of the V center console and so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names and so this means what a developer calls their IT department says hey I got a problem with my database we don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about they got the same name they say they see the same information so what we're gonna do is that you know we're gonna push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience and you know what you'll see here is that V Center is the V Center you've already known and loved but what's different is that now it's much more application focused so here we see a new screen inside of V Center vSphere namespaces and so these vSphere namespaces represent logical applications like a whole distributed system now as a single object inside a V Center and when I click into one of these apps this is a managed object inside of East fear I can click on permissions and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces I can hook this into my active directory infrastructure so I can use the same you know corporate credentials to access the system I tap into all my existing storage so you know this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers I can use storage policy based management to provide storage for kubernetes and it's hooked in with things like DRS right so I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory and all that's going to be enforced by DRS inside the cluster and again as an as an admin I'm just using vSphere but to the developer they're getting a whole kubernetes experience out of this platform now vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the kubernetes environment so besides you know seeing the VMS and and things that developers have deployed i can see all of the desired state specifications all the different kubernetes objects that the developers have created the compute network and storage objects they're all integrated right inside the the vCenter console and so once again from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective this data is invaluable it often saves hours just in trying to figure out what what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue so the you know as you can see this is all baked right into V Center the V Center experience isn't transformed a lot we get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say where's the kubernetes and they're surprised that like they've been managing kubernetes all this time it just looks it looks like the vSphere experience they've already got but all those kubernetes objects the pods and containers kubernetes clusters load balancer stores they're all represented right there natively in the V Center UI and so we're able to take all that and make it work for your existing VI admins well that's a it's pretty it's pretty wild you know it really builds off the vision that again I think you kind of outlined kit teased out it at VMworld which was you know the IT still sees vSphere which is what they want to see when they're used to seeing but devs siku Nettie's and really bringing those together in a unified environment so that depending on what your job is and what you're working on that's what you're gonna see in this kind of unified environment yeah yeah as the demo showed it is still vSphere at the center but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere the kubernetes base one which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks as well as a traditional vSphere interface API is which is great for VI admins and IT operations right and then and really it was interesting to you tease that a lot that was a good little preview of people knew they're watching but you talked about really cloud journey and and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classic old-school apps that are that are running in their classic themes and then kind of the modern you know counting cloud native applications built on kubernetes and youyou outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum and getting from one to the other but not really about kind of the messy middle if you will and this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum they can move their workloads or move their apps ya know I think we think a lot about it like that that we look at we talk to customers and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go their future state architecture and that involves embracing cloud it involves modernizing applications and you know as you mentioned that it's it's challenging for them because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of these two extremes either you're here where you are kind of the old current world and you got the bright Nirvana future on the far end there and they believe it's the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other that you have to kind of change everything out from underneath you and that's obviously very expensive very time-consuming and very error-prone as well there's a lot of things that can go wrong there and so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really to your point as you call it the messy middle I would say it's more like how do we offer stepping stones along that journey rather than making this one giant leap we had to invest all this time and resources how come you able people to make smaller incremental steps each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost right and its really enabling kind of this next gen application where there's a lot of things that are different about it but one of the fundamental things is we're now the application defines a sources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities of what the what the application can do and that's where everybody is moving as quickly as as makes sense you said not all applications need to make that move but most of them should and most of them are and most of them are at least making that journey did you see that yeah definitely I mean I think that you know certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from you know looking historically at how we managed infrastructure one of things we enable in VCR 7 is how we manage applications right so a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know your resource allocation you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure you talked about it in terms of this VM is going to be encrypted or this VM is gonna have this firewall rule and what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management so you actually look at an application and say I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU or I want this application to be have these security rules on it and so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level right yeah and like kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say you know if you look back one thing we did was something like V San before that people had to put policies on a LUN you know an actual storage LUN and a storage array and then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array it inherited certain policies right and so these hammer turned that around allows you to put the policy on the VM but what jerez talking about now is that for a modern workload amount and we're closed not a single VM it's it's a collection of different things you've got some containers in there some VMs probably distributed maybe even some on-premise I'm in the cloud and so how do you start managing that more holistically and this notion of really having an application as a first-class entity that you can now manage inside a vSphere it's really powerful and very simplifying one right and why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time that's it's a nice big word but the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications and more importantly how do you continue to evolve them and change them you know based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace yeah well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance right so today if I want to check of this app is compliant I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down and hardened and secured the right way but now instead what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of each Center set the right security settings on that and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are going to inherit that stuff so it really simplifies that it also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications you know if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory when you log in with vSphere seven what you see is a few dozen applications so a single admin can manage a much larger pool of infrastructure many more applications than they could before because we automate so much of that operation and it's not just the scale part which is obviously really important but it's also the rate of change and this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done done ie building applications well at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security performance concerns these sorts of elements and so being by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level and then have the developer they'll to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction it actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better they're not stepping over each other but in fact now they can both get what they need to get done done and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe and in compliance is a fourth so there's a lot more just this is a very significant release right again a lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves that's a pretty significant you know kind of RER contexture of many many parts of ease of beer so beyond the kubernetes you know kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out and there's a very significant release yeah it's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about kubernetes what was project Pacific but is now just part of vSphere and certainly that is a very large aspect of it but to your point you know VCR 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features and so instead of a demo here let's pull up with some slides I'm ready look at what's there so outside of kubernetes there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere seven so the first first one is simplified lifecycle management and then really focus on security it's a second one and then applications as well out both including you know the cloud native apps that don't fit in the kubernetes bucket as well as others and so we go on that first one the first column there there's a ton of stuff that we're doing around simplifying life cycle so let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics so we have this new technology vSphere lifecycle management VL cm and the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades lifecycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts how do we make them more declarative with a single image you can now specify for an entire cluster we find that a lot of our vSphere admins especially at larger scales have a really tough time doing this there's a lot of in and out today it's somewhat tricky to do and so we want to make it really really simple and really easy to automate as well so if you're doing kubernetes on kubernetes I suppose you're gonna have automation on automation right because upgrading to the sevens is probably not any consequence in consequential tasks mm-hmm and yeah and going forward and allowing you as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great VCR functionality at a more rapid clip how do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well right next big thing you talk about is security yep we just got back from RSA thank goodness yeah we got that that show in before all the badness started yeah but everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top yeah talk about kind of the the changes and the security so done a lot of things around security things around identity Federation things around simplifying certificate management you know dramatic simplification is there across the board a one I want to focus on here on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere trust Authority and so with that one what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces and really ensure there's a trusted computing base when we talk to customers what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats including even internal ones right how do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted and obviously if you're hiring someone you somewhat trust them but you know what's how do you implement that the concept of least privilege right or zero trust me yeah topic exactly so they deal with trust authorities that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and sure fully secure those can be managed by a special vCenter server which is in turn very lockdown only a few people have access to it and then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that okay these untrusted hosts haven't been modified we know they're okay so they're okay to actually run workloads on they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing so is this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment right and then the third kind of leg of the stool is you know just better leveraging you know kind of a more complex asset ecosystem if you know with things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application could draw the appropriate resources as needed so you've done a lot of work there as well yeah there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space as you mention all sort of accelerators coming out we all know about GPUs and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases not to mention 3d rendering but you know FPGA is and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there and so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out they have a lot of the same problems that we saw in the very early days of virtualization ie silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using and you know what you find is all things we found before you found we find very low utilization rates inability to automate that inability to manage that well putting security and compliance and so forth and so this is really the reality that we see at most customers and it's funny because and some ones you think well well shouldn't we be past this as an industry should we have solved this already you know we did this with virtualization but as it turns out the virtualization we did was for compute and then storage and network now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators and so that's where this bit fusion technology that we're including now with vSphere it really comes to the forefront so if you see and the current slide we're showing here the challenge is that just these separate pools of infrastructure how do you manage all that and so if you go to the we go to the next slide what we see is that with bit fusion you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization you can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together so they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use we can you know have multiple people sharing a GPU we can do it very dynamically and the great part of it is is that it's really easy for these folks to use they don't even need to think about it in fact integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows so it's pretty it's pretty trick is because the classifications of the assets now are much much larger much varied and much more workload specific right that's really the the the opportunities flash challenge they are they're good guys are diverse yeah and so like you know a couple other things just I don't have a slide on it but just things we're doing to our base capabilities things around DRS and V motion really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads right so you look at some of the massive sa P HANA or Oracle databases and how do we ensure that V motion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else they're making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth right now a lot of this stuff is not just kind of brand-new cool new accelerated stuff but it's also how do we ensure the core ass people have already been running for many years we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well right alright so Joe I give you the last word you've been working on this for a while there's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys what do you what do you tell them what should they be excited about what are you excited for them in this new release I think what I'm excited about is how you know IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps right I think today you look at a lot of these organizations and what ends up happening is the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT infrastructure right and so now I think we can shift that story around I think that there's you know there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and appdev teams are gonna be having over the next couple years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team making more productive give you better performance availability disaster recovery and these kinds of capabilities awesome well Jared congratulations that get both of you for for getting a release out I'm sure it was a heavy lift and it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it and thanks for for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep dive I'm sure there's ton more resources from people I even want to go down into the wheat so thanks for stopping by thank you thank you all right he's Jared he's kid I'm Jeff you're watching the cube we're in the Palo Alto studios thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music] hi and welcome to a special cube conversation I'm Stu min a minute and we're digging into VMware vSphere seven announcement we've had conversations with some of the executives some of the technical people but we know that there's no better way to really understand a technology than to talk to some of the practitioners that are using it so really happy to have joined me for the program I have Bill Buckley Miller who is an infrastructure designer with British Telecom joining me digitally from across the pond bill thanks so much for joining us hi Stu all right so Phil let's start of course British Telecom I think most people know you know what BT is and it's a you know a really sprawling company tell us a little bit about you know your group your role and what's your mandate okay so my group is called service platforms it's the bit of BT that services all of our multi-millions of our customers so they we have broadband we have TV we have mobile we have DNS and email systems and one and it's all about our customers it's not a beat to be part of beating you with me we we specifically focus on those kind of multi million customers that we've got in those various services I mean in particular my group is four we were um structure so we really do from data center all the way up to really about boot time or so we'll just past the boot time and the application developers look after that stage and above okay great we definitely gonna want to dig in and talk about that that boundary between the infrastructure teams and the application teams on but let's talk a little bit first you know we're talking about VMware so you know how long's your organization been doing VMware and tell us you know you what you see with the announcement that VMware's making work be cr7 sure well I mean we've had a really great relationship with VMware for about 1213 years some weather and it's a absolutely key part of our of our infrastructure it's written throughout BT really in every part of our of our operations design development and the whole ethos of the company is based around a lot of VMware products and so one of the challenges that we've got right now is application architectures are changing quite significantly at the moment and as you know in particular with the server less bandwidth containers and a whole bunch of other things like that we're very comfortable with our ability to manage VMs and have been for a while we currently use extensively we use vSphere NSX T V ROPS login site network insight and a whole bunch of other VMware constellation applications and our operations teams know how to use that they know how to optimize they know how to capacity plan and troubleshoot so that's that's great and that's been like that for a half a decade at least we've been really really confident with our ability to till we p.m. where environments and Along Came containers and like say multi cloud as well and what we were struggling with was the inability to have a cell pane a glass really on all of that and to use the same people and the same same processes to manage a different kind of technology so we we'd be working pretty closely with VMware on a number of different containerization products for several years now I would really closely with the b-string integrated containers guys in particular and now with the Pacific guys with really the idea that when we we bring in version 7 and the containerization aspects of version 7 we'll be in a position to have that single pane of glass to allow our operations team to really barely differentiate between what's a VM and what's a container that's really the Holy Grail right so we'll be able to allow our developers to develop our operations team to deploy and to operate and our designers to see the same infrastructure whether that's on premises cloud or off premises I'm be able to manage the whole piece in that was bad ok so Phil really interesting things you walk through here you've been using containers in a virtualized environment for a number of years want to understand in the organizational piece just a little bit because it sounds great I manage all the environment but you know containers are a little bit different than VMs you know if I think back you know from an application standpoint it was you know let's stick it in a vm I don't need to change it and once I spin up a VM often that's gonna sit there for you know months if not years as opposed to you know I think about a containerization environment it's you know I really want a pool of resources I'm gonna create and destroy things all the time so you know bring us inside that organizational piece you know how much will there need to be interaction and more in a rack or change in policies between your infrastructure team and your app dev team well yes make absolutely right that's the nature and that the time scales that we're talking about between VMs and containers oh he's wildly different as you say we probably all certainly have VMs in place now that were in place in 2000 and 2018 certainly I imagine I haven't haven't really been touched whereas as you say VMs and a lot of people talk about spinning them all up all the time and there are parts of our architecture that require that in particular the very client facing bursty stuff you know just require spinning up spinning down pretty quickly but some of our smaller the containers do sit around for weeks if not if not months I mean they just depend on the development cycle aspects of that but the Harpeth that we've we've really had was just the visualizing it and there are a number different products out there that allow you to see the behavior of your containers and understand the resource requirements that they are having at any given moment allows Troubleshooters and so on but they are not they need their new products their new things that we we would have to get used to and also it seems that there's an awful lot of competing products quite a Venn diagram if in terms of functionality and user abilities to do that so through again again coming back to to being able to manage through vSphere to be able to have a list of VMs and alongside it is a list of containers and to be able to use policies to define how they behave in terms of their networking to be able to essentially put our deployments on Rails by using in particular tag based policies means that we can take the onus of security we can take the onus of performance management capacity management away from the developers you don't really care about a lot of time and they can just get on with their job which is to develop new functionality and help our customers so that then means that then we have to be really responsible about defining those policies making sure that they're adhered to but again we know how to do that with VMs new vSphere so the fact that we can actually apply that straightaway just towards slightly different completely unit which is really all are talking about here is ideal and then to be able to extend that into multiple clouds as well because we do use multiple cards where AWS and those your customers and were between them is an opportunity that we can't do anything of them be you know excited about take home yeah bill I really like how you described it really the changing roles that are happening there in your organization need to understand right there's things that developers care about you know they want to move fast they want to be able to build new things and there's things that they shouldn't have to worry about and you know we talked about some of the new world and it's like oh can the platform underneath this take care of it well there's some things platforms take care of there's some things that the software or you know your team is going to need to understand so maybe if you could dig in a little bit some of those what are the drivers from your application portfolio what is the business asking of your organization that that's driving this change and you know being one of those you know tailwinds pushing you towards you know urban Eddie's and the the vSphere 7 technologies well it all comes down to the customers right our customers want new functionality they want new integrations they want new content and they want better stability and better performance and our ability to extend or contracting capacity as needed as well so they're the real ultimate challenges that we want to give our customers the best possible experience of our products and services so we have to address that really from a development perspective it's our developers that have the responsibility to design and deploy those so we have to in infrastructure we have to act as a a firm foundation really underneath all of that that them to know that what they spend their time and develop and want to push out to our customers is something that can be trusted is performant we understand where their capacity requirements are coming from in the in the short term and in the long term for that and it's secure as well obviously is a big aspect to it and so really we're just providing our developers with the best possible chance of giving our customers what will hopefully make them delighted great Phil you've mentioned a couple of times that you're using public clouds as well as you know your your your your VMware farm what a minute make sure I if you can explain a little bit a couple of things number one is when it comes to your team especially your infrastructure team how much are they involved with setting up some of the the basic pieces or managing things like performance in the public cloud and secondly when you look at your applications are some of your clouds some of your applications hybrid going between the data center and the public cloud and I haven't talked to too many customers that are doing applications that just live in any cloud and move things around but you know maybe if you could clarify those pieces as to you know what cloud really means to your organization and your applications sure well I mean to us cloud allows us to accelerate development she's nice because it means we don't have to do on-premises capacity lifts for new pieces of functionality or so we can initially build in the cloud and test in the cloud but very often applications really make better sense especially in the TV environment where people watch TV all the time and I mean yes there are peak hours and lighter hours of TV watching same goes for broadband really but we generally we're well more than an eight-hour application profile so what that allows us to do then is to have applications that will it make sense we run them inside our organization where we have to run them in our organization for you know data protection reasons or whatever then we can do that as well but where we say for instance we have a boxing match on and we're going to be seen enormous spike in the amount of customers that want to sign up into an order journey for to allow them to view that and to gain access to that well why would you spend a lot of money on servers just for that level of additional capacity so we do absolutely have hybrid applications not sorry hybrid blocks we have blocks of suburb locations you know dozens of them really to support oil platform and what you would see is that if you were to look at our full application structure for one of the platforms I mentioned that some of the smothers application blocks I have to run inside some can run outside and what we want to be able to do is to allow our operations team to define that again by policy as to where they run and to you know have a system that allows us to transparently see where they're running how they're running and the implications of those decisions so that we can tune those maybe in the future as well and that way we best serve our customers we you know we get to get our customers yeah what they need all right great Phil final question I have for you you've been through a few iterations of looking at VMs containers public cloud what what advice would you give your peers with the announcement of vSphere 7 and how they can look at things today in 2020 versus what they might have looked at say a year or two ago well I'll be honest I was a little bit surprised by base rate so we knew that VMware we're working on trying to make containers on the same level both from a management deployment perspective as we Eames I mean they're called VMware after all right we knew that they were looking at at that no surprise by just quite how quickly they've managed to almost completely reinvent their application really it's you know if you look at the whole town zoo stuff in the Mission Control stuff and I think a lot of people were blown away by just quite how happy VMware were to reinvent themselves and from Asian perspective you know and to really leap forward and this is the vote between version six and seven I've been following these since version three at least and it's an absolutely revolutionary change in terms of the overall architecture the aims to - what they would want to achieve with the application and you know luckily the nice thing is is that if you're used to version six is not that big a deal it's really not that big a deal to move forward at all it's not such a big change to process and training and things like that but my word there's an awful lot of work underneath that underneath the covers and I'm really excited and I think all the people in my position should really just take it as opportunity to greevey will revisit what they can achieve with them in particular with vSphere and with in combination with and SXT it's it's but you know it's quite hard to put into place unless you've seen the slide or slides about it and he's lost you've seen the products just have a revolutionary the the version seven is compared to previous revisions which have kind of evolved for a couple of years so yeah I think I'm really excited to run it and I know a lot of my peers or the companies that I speak with quite often are very excited about seven as well so yeah I I'm really excited about the whole whole base well Phil thank you so much absolutely no doubt this is a huge move for VMware the entire company and their ecosystem rallying around help move to the next phase of where application developers and infrastructure need to go Phil Buckley joining us from British Telecom I'm Stu minimun thank you so much for watching the queue [Music]

>>Bach from Las Vegas. It's the Q covered AWS executive summit brought to you by extension. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of the Excenture executive summit here at AWS. Reinvent from Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by two guests for this segment. We have Greg sly, he is the SVP platform and infrastructure at Verizon. Thank you so much for coming on Greg. Thank you. Happy to be here and almost sad. K he is the managing director, Accenture global network services. Thank you so much. I'm all so Greg, I want to start with you wanting, everyone knows Verizon, it's a household brand. Tell our viewers a little bit just about how big you are, what countries you're in your reach. >>Okay. Well we're a global company. There's about 135 ish thousand employees in the company. The brands and they're, you know, they include Yahoo and AOL and HuffPost and riot and others. So we have a much more global reach with some of those brands overseas for is obviously very well known in the U S and overseas as well. And that's really where our big plays are. Now. We're big in Asia as well with our eCommerce sites and stuff. So it's, it's, it's global and it's everywhere. So, >>so give our viewers an overview of this current state of where you are in your journey to the cloud, the cloud effication of Verizon. >>Sure. So the last probably two years we've really put a lot of focus into moving out of our data centers and into the cloud. We focused primarily on workloads that are right for the cloud because we as during this journey we went, there's obviously huge data lakes and huge amounts of data equipped over two exabytes of data. And trying to move that to the cloud is obviously takes some time. But a lot of our front end apps from anything from, you know, where your order, your phone or where you order services to, whether you're on Yahoo fantasy sports or on finance page, those, those things tend to work well in the cloud and they're built for the cloud for very bursty type workflows. So we spend a lot of time moving a lot of our applications plus all the new Greenfield applications up into the cloud. So we're, we're considerable way down the path now on that. We're now getting to the tail end with these kind of massive data sets on what's our next step for those. And that's what we're working on now. >>Um, well I want to bring you into this conversation a little. What, what are you seeing right now across cross industry, the current state of deployments? >>Yeah, so I mean, just building on what Greg said it's almost a third wave of cloudification that we see now. So you know that we had the desegregation of hardware and software and most operators started to go globally towards cloud and then they sort of had the second way, which was really the own private cloud infrastructures. And now because we are here, you can see clearly the amount of public cloud infrastructure that's starting to come in and become relevant to this deployment. So it's almost a third wave where I see a lot of our clients globally looking at hybrid cloud type models for. And >>that really accelerates that cloudification journey because now you see a lot of workloads moving to a hybrid cloud environment. Just by the size of the ecosystem of suppliers and partners that are involved. We give you a sense of how accelerated this has become. I mean, the last three years I've seen in this event doubling of the number of partners who are just moving their workloads, whether it's compute, storage network to a hybrid cloud in one. So that acceleration has started and we expect in the next two to three years this will become mainstream. That I'm always right. We're been down that exact same journey where we've, we've done a lot of things up into the cloud like in AWS now, but we've also done a private cloud which enabled us as more like a development or a on-prem tool that allowed us to build, learn, and take applications that were not really ready for the cloud, are native for the cloud, build them on prem, wherever, a little bit more freedom to do some things and then learn and then move them up to the public cloud. So we've been down that exact same journey. >>So I also want to ask about a buzzword here, five G five G the arrival of five G. what it means to your industry and whether or not being in the cloud is ness is a necessary prerequisite to really capture all the benefits. >>I'm going to start on me. Sure, go ahead. No, I was just saying if you look at 5g, the reason it's so fundamentally different from previous generations is because 5g opens up a bunch of use cases that traditional TG for genetics did not and the size and skin of those use cases including like billions of devices and having really cool use cases like gaming and health and automotive and robotics in 10 places a huge burden on an infrastructure, which means cloudification does become a massive requisite. The level of skill size devices, latency profiles is something you only get when you are on a cloud infrastructure. So Greg, I agree 100% and this is going to drive new innovation that we've never seen before as we obviously being Verizon. 5g is one of our big, big bats. Obviously. That's one of the things that Andy and Hans talked about yesterday at the announcement here at reinvent and where we're seeing now with clarification, it's, it's literally I think one of the cornerstones of how it's going to work because we're going to have to put so much out to the far edge and out into as close to the customers as we can. >>The only way you're going to do that is through the cloud and using the cloud services like outpost and other services to push that out close to the, to our customers. So 5g and cloud are synonymous. They're going to go hand in hand. It's the only way it's going to work. And when, if I just save one last thing on what Greg said, cloudification was happening anyways and it was a great efficiency driver for all organizations. Five G's almost come in and lit a match and said, here's a lot of revenue opportunities that you can get on top and that has just accelerated >>the whole thing with distribution of five G and cloud. So that that's going to happen. >>Yeah, I think we're really only seeing the beginning. It's so early on in 5g and the journey to the cloud that I think next year's reinvent and the year after that I think we're going to look back and say this was really just the very beginning of what we're learning, what this technology can do for the world. >>I want to ask about innovation and this is something that Andy Jassy talked about in his fireside chat this morning is how AWS maintains its startup mentality even though it is of course a enormous company. How does, how do you think about innovation and approach innovation at Verizon? How do you make sure you are continuing to experiment and push boundaries even though you are a large and complex organization yourself? >>It's a good question. That's something we are always pushing. I think it starts from the top with Hans, he's, he's made one of his key pillars of innovation, of what we have to drive, listening to our customers and building on what they need, but we've spent a lot of time on redefining how we work to adapt to the cloud. So the days of in the past of, you know, we'll do one release every quarter, it's now how many releases a day can you do? And the only way you can do that innovation through bucket testing, through AB testing is literally embracing the cloud and doing small tests here and there on stuff. So it's really now learning from the internet startups, trying to keep that startup mentality in a company the size that's 137,000 employees. But it's building that culture and I think Hans has been a great leader to really drive that, that different way of working. So, >>um, well we've seen a dizzying number of announcements from AWS, new products and new services that are coming out. What are, what is most caught your attention and how are you thinking about how to help clients capture the benefits of what AWS is offering? >>You know, the thing that struck me yesterday when I was looking at the keynote was this is probably the first time there is a recognition in the industry that it's an ecosystem play. And what I mean by that is a lot of the challenges that were seen in the last couple of years around getting 5g mainstream, getting all these things in the market was who does it, who supports them and this whole ecosystem and yesterday's announcement where you know Andy enhance and other carriers like water, phone and so on are coming in and saying, you know what? Let's do this together. Let's collaborate. To me that really hit the Mark because as you start building specific use cases to make this real for a consumer like us, you will see that an ecosystem plays the only way to make this a reality. And that's what really struck me. If you look at Waveland, if you look at local zones, all the announcements that were done yesterday, all of them require app development communities, escalates session partnerships. It requires hardware partnerships, services firms. It requires of omic Accenture to come in and do this secret sauce. So there's lot of things that have to >>be done there. And I believe that's what really caught my eye, that it's an ecosystem. Now you have the amount of collaboration going forward. Is going to be unprecedented because no one company is going to be able to do all of it. >>So how do we, you're both technology veterans. I mean you're just babes. You're, you're just teenagers of course. But thinking about how different it is today versus when you were just beginning your careers in terms of, I mean we have this idea of this cutthroat competitive world of technology, but as you said, there is, these companies need each other. I mean they're there, they're competing of course, but they also desperately need each other to make sure their business models are successful. So can you just describe this landscape for, for our viewers in terms of what you've seen as changes and whether or not these changes are for the good? >>Well, starting in the mainframe days, which is where I started and then kind of went wound, don't, you know, windows NT and the distributed compute, you're right, it was very do it ourselves. We're the only ones that could do it. You have to hide everything from all your competitors because we're providing a solution and nobody sees anybody else a secret sauce. And obviously protecting IP was key. Now we've seen open source take a much broader stroke across the canvas and we've also now everyone's got what are we best at and how do we use that rather than trying to be all things to everybody and building partnerships. So you're right, we have partnerships with company that we compete with, but we also have relationships. We need to work together to make this happen. So it is completely different from what it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago on how you're collaborating on one part of a company who should come. >>Competing is one area, but you're actually collaborating to build a product to go to market together at another one. So it's really interesting. I mean the market forces have changed dramatically. I mean, I remember when I was in my telecom operator days with BT, we used to as great selling or love technology, we used to start in the labs and in the labs we use engineering was a sort of bread and butter. And then this focus on customer centricity in the last couple of years around so much choice, so much availability of solutions in the market. And as Greg said, the collaboration is a must do now. And that's why that focus changed for us. And I see now this customer centricity becoming so important that what does the end user really want? And then that comes with it and realization that says, okay, I am not able to provide this by myself, but I do know how to solve for it. >>And that's when you have to bring in others who can create a solution. You're absolutely right because you know, 10 years ago, 1520 years ago, technology was still so new. Most people weren't comfortable yet and really knew what it could do or what they wanted. And it was a room full of architects designing what it was going to be. Now it's a room full of customers telling you what they want and going out. So it's completely changed now where we'll build what the customer, what we think the customer needs. Now we're building what the customer tells us they want. So it's been a one 80 >>so Greg, I know before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about how you'd been to this conference years ago and now just the growth that it has experienced has really shocked your, your sphere system. Um, what kinds of conversations are you having? What are the messages that you're hearing, a particular letter that are particularly resonant to you right now? This idea of the fourth industrial revolution. Do you buy it? >>I absolutely buy it and it's not just drinking the Koolaid because I work at Verizon. It's actually seeing what's possible in health. What's possible in gaming, automotive industry. Like you were saying at the beginning, it's one thing that struck me in Pedder was through the conversation we were having of how many people I've met here and when I was walking through the expo downstairs I was like, Oh, we have a relationship with them now. We have relationship with them. There's like half the floor down there that we have some sort of relationship with that were other customer or a partner or providing services to that. It's, it's, it's changed where before you'd have a booth and you're like, how many people can we get over there? Now it's like how do we get a booth with our partners that we can talk about a common solution that we're providing back? >>So it's, it's been amazing from like it reinvent four or five years ago it was like one hotel was still pretty full up to like four or five hotels now with with 65,000 people or something. It's, it's amazing. But, but the conversations before too used to be, we can only talk if we go into a private room over here. It's now that there's so many people and so many conversations and they're like, Oh let me pull them all in. Let me pull Rebecca cause we're all talking about the same thing now. So it's become more open. There's still sure there's IP and things we have to protect and we all have our company strategies, but there's now there's so much collaboration, there's a lot more conversations going on now. I mean the focus will now move to how do we operationalize this industrial revolution because that's where a lot of engineering horsepower, a lot of scaling would have to happen in terms of, it would be great to launch health as a service or gaming as a service and all of these things. >>But you know when things go wrong, which Deville in the early years of adoption, somebody is going to have to take the call, somebody is going to have to manage the customers. Somebody who's going to have to, because that's where the test would happen in terms of okay this is going to stick and this is going to work. So to me the next two to three years of this event will be around how do I operationalize and scale what we've now started? Cause I think that's where the rubber is going to hit the road. And I think even at Accenture we see this with all our work. It's moving more and more towards how do I monetize the use cases, how do I now build on it? How do I implement at scale? So that's, that's really what I see happening >>coming up. We were, we're on, we're on the cusp of 2020 there's so many new emerging technologies and of course the old technologies which are still pretty new machine learning, AI, IOT. What are some of the exciting trends that you're looking at coming in next year and the next three to five years in terms of your business and an industry wide? Two ML? >>Well for me there's obviously the stuff that we're talking about with five G and waving, but one that really struck me at this conference was how we're going to be treating data differently or I should say storage of data differently. Where before it was like buy huge storage devices and you'd have petabytes and petabytes or exabytes of data in a data somewhere, data centers somewhere. It's now distributed out to the far edge. It's, it's going to be much more in the cloud, much more dispersed. Obviously that's going to bring challenges around, you know, with, with GDPR, with, with, you know, the, the California protection act, all of those that are coming as well of how we're going to deal with that. So absolutely the 5g and the announcements went on yesterday. But in my slice of the world, looking at how are we going to manage, transform, handle, distribute data and how we're going to protect user's privacy through all of that is really interesting. And I think a new field that we're, it's just changing so rapidly day to day >>and one that's really part of our national conversation too in terms of privacy and security. >>Well I think to me the key trend would be adjacencies. And what I mean by that is we've always been a little bit siloed traditionally in terms of, you know, there is a telco industry solution and then there is a mining solution and then there is a automotive solution, right? And the technology is blurring these lines. Now, you know, like as Greg said, I can have a intelligent 5g conversation with a gentleman, car manufacturing company that I wouldn't have dreamed of having a couple of years ago. So that trend is set to accelerate because 5g edge compute, all of these things are going to be more and more applicable to adjacent industries. And this is why I always believe the telecom sector has a pivotal role, almost a orchestrator role that says as these industries look for solutions we have those, we just haven't adapted and customized are social. That I think would be a big trend. I see other industries are going to cash in on what we've done. >>I'm all, Greg, thank you so much for coming on the cube. A really fascinating conversation. Oh, pleasure. I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of the Accenture executive summit. Coming up in just a little bit.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019. Brought to you by, Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to the cube's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT here at the Bella Center in Copenhagen. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, alongside of my co-host Stu Miniman, Analyst. We have two guests for this segment. We have Angie Cusworth, she is the COO of Hardy Fisher Services. >> Hi. >> Thank you so much for coming on Angie. >> Hi. >> And we have David Cusworth SVP sales at Hardy Fisher Services. Thank you so much! >> Thank you. >> And husband and wife. >> And a husband and wife team! >> I believe we have done it before, I know we've had twins on the program. >> Right, yes. >> Uh, but uh, yeah. >> Couples who work, I like it! We'll get into how you make it all work. But David, I want to start with you. Describe Hardy Fisher Services for our viewers who may be unfamiliar with your company. >> Yeah, so we own and operate a large data center based in Leeds, so it's a 400 watt capacity data center previously built for BT house NHS patient records in the UK. And we operate that as a reseller base data center, so we are a very clear go-to market. We have our co-location, we have money services and then obviously cloud which is based on Nutanix. >> So, wait Angie what are the biggest business challenges that you face in your world. >> So I think it's trying to convince customers to move to the cloud. Obviously, you know, we've been doing cloud for some time now. I don't know how to-- >> Yeah, so David, we're talking about that move to cloud. It help it put where, you know, your services built both now Nutanix fit in the customers overall picture. Cause you know, you've SAS, you've got public cloud people are building private clouds off Nutanix or other type of hardware, so you know how do you play with some of those other components and position yourself? >> I think a lot of the challenges that we've seen is people are comfortable with Azure so a lot of resellers that we deal with. Azure is a safe bet. Nutanix is still quite a new name in the marketplace. There's people who don't want to move to the cloud because they don't understand it. So, a lot of the time, we show them the cloud platform in our data centers, and can touch and feel it they can actually see it. Which gives them a bit more confidence. And then, from our side it's the service wrap, so it's holding them the hands on the journey to the cloud. So it's given our technical ability to say, you know, we'll do it for you, we'll hold your hands, we'll get you working. And at the end of the day, the cloud is people's businesses. So if the cloud doesn't work, it affects their business and we're trying to put our hats on as a customer. >> Yeah, it's funny. It reminds me, we used to have the joke, there is no cloud, there is just you know, your computer somewhere else. Angie, bring us inside, a little bit? Your customers, it sounds like they're still a little bit of trepidation about them making changes there? >> Yeah, I think one of the reasons that we've been so successful, is that we follow IT Service Management very well. So we help our customers through the whole journey. So people that are new to cloud, we have excellent technical people, that can help them. We have a fantastic data center, as well. So, they know their kits are safe with us. >> Yeah, bring us inside a little bit. You talked about how many racks there. What differentiates your data center? There's you know, most companies, you know, we tell the average enterprise out there, you know. Friends don't let friends build data centers. There's other people that know what they're doing. So, give us a little bit of a virtual tour, if you would. >> Yeah, so our data center. Like I said, It was originally built for BT and for the NHS. And as they moved to cloud, the need for their data center shrunk. Leeds as a city is growing city and there's not many data centers in Leeds, so we took the opportunity to really re-launch the data center. We knew it was a very high spec data center, cause it cost a lot of money to build. And it gives the customers confidence that when they are going in there, it's very secure. It's very high resilience. And from a cloud platform, we've gone completely Nutanix. So it is literally, you can come in, you can touch Nutanix, you can play with it. And it's just the whole journey really, that to make sure they're in a safe pair of hands. >> Talk a little bit more about how Nutanix comes into play with your organization. >> We went with Nutanix because we're looking for something to be different. There's a lot of people who've got this UA to be WES in that V seller market. So we wanted something that was focused on SME. So we've got very, very much SME focus. And cost comes into it. Having that support, so being able to ring somebody up and not being in a big call center in Asia or in Europe. Somebody who can actually talk them through, what the issues are, also be very responsive, and put the customer first. >> Yeah, it's interesting, and when I think about kind of the traditional service provider. It's like they've build out their management stack, they build something at a scale, so that, you know, they can do something that their customer couldn't. It sounds like Nutanix is a different type of offering. We've been talking about it all week. It's not thriving in that complexity, but you know you just have a simple offering. And then, of course, you know price and easy to manage. Is something that service providers need, so, It sounds as if you built this ten years ago, you might have had to do something very different then how you do it today. >> Yeah, no, absolutely. It's given us a market that really hasn't been there in the past. You know, we can help resellers on the journey, we can give them a bit of a lift up, so. If their too small or they've just got going in cloud and they can't afford to get their own Nutanix platform, then we can get them going and then they can start going into Nutanix. But it's a real differentiate. It's like I say, to a lot of people, it's the safe bet it's your AWS. It's you know a Microsoft name. No one ever gets sacked for by Microsoft kind of conversation. >> I think one of the other compelling things is the cost of it as well. A lot of people think it's cheaper to go as your AWS. Actually it's mechanics are very cost effective for our customers and that's why it appeals for, you know the kind of smaller resellers that we deal with. >> You know, are you starting to do any connection now that you think about as your AWS have their direct connect. When you have people's environment, sometimes they might want to access those services or are you starting to look that, in that environment? Where some of the Nutanix hybrid solutions? >> Yeah, so what we do at the moment is we backup mainly to Azure. So we've, we've a central core platform with Nutanix and then, we're back up as a failover to Azure. But, again, customers don't like the complexity of even doing that as a back up. So it's been great coming to the event and seeing the Nutanix backup and the options there because our customers love Nutanix. >> So are you interested in the mine solution, that has been rolling out? >> Yes, absolutely. >> Yeah, yeah absolutely. That's one of the things that we're really looking forward to going back to explore. And that will be next on our road map. >> Are you starting to look out as to which solution with mine you're going to use or are you still under discussion? >> Yeah, we'll leave that to our technical director. I'm sure he'll point us in the right direction. >> One of the things we hear a lot about at this conference is Nutanix's culture. It's people first culture. It's humble, honest, hungry. How does that come into play in terms of your interactions with the company? >> I think for us, that's a culture that we have as well in our own business. And that really does shine through for every person that we've ever dealt with at Nutanix. There it's always customer first. I can't fault them, they're amazing. >> I think for us, it doesn't feel like you're a big company because it's such of a personal relationship. So it doesn't feel like you're talking to a big corporate company where you're not heard, you know, if you're not a a big customer. The relationships we've got with people work and just pick up the phone it might be a really senior position and they'll help us, and that's something that's really good in Nutanix. >> I'm wondering if you've had any experience with Nutanix support, so we know uptime is, is super critical. So what is your experience? >> Yeah, fantastic. I mean, from an operational perspective, I love the self healing, that's built into the platform. Anyway, I love the fact that my technical guys don't have to be uber technical to be able to operate. That's one of the other benefits in Nutanix for us. It ticks all the boxes from an operational perspective. >> I think from our side as well, the technical guys, so, our first and second line guys can understand Nutanix. They can get their head around it, so it's very easy to train and more with Nutanix as opposed to other platforms where it can take up to a year to really understand how the platform works. It is very, very simple for our support desk. Which means, it is less demand on the support that's got Angie then. >> Training in the skills gap is a hugely important issue in the technology world. It's in the United States and also in Europe. How are you finding it, what is it like to be a Leeds based company, are you finding the people you need to fill the roles you have open? >> We're really lucky actually, because our technical director is an ex-trainer, so we can do a lot of the training on site. But Nutanix training is something that we're definitely going to be tapping into. I've been speaking to the guys here, and that's another useful thing for us to take back to the UK. >> Give our audience a little bit of insight, so you know, what you get out of coming out to the Nutanix conference, you came last year to London, you came out here to Copenhagen. What were you hoping to accomplish? What are the conversations been, give us a little bit of a flavor. >> I think it's been good to network with other Nutanix customers to understand their journey. Definitely to learn about what Nutanix is doing now and in the future. When you're running a business it's kind of head down sometimes. Allowance, you know, you don't get time to really sit and look up what the market is doing. So for us, it's also to be part of our journey, you know, we went to event four or five years ago when it was much smaller, much newer name. And to see how fast Nutanix has gone is amazing. It really is. >> Absolutely, I think it's given us clarity on what we need to do next year. Like I say, you've helped us by coming here today and yesterday, seeing the presentations on how we can implement that into our own business. And how we can really take Nutanix forward. >> In terms of the future, you said you are going to, you're looking into Mine. You're thinking about using some of the Nutanix training, capabilities. >> Frames, Beam. >> So, there's a lot there. >> So yeah, we've really honestly taken so much back and I can't wait now. I think for me personally, it's re-energized me. I'm excited about going back and just working out where we can really take Nutanix forward. >> And what's next for Hardy Fisher? >> It's just growth, we're at an early journey now. So we're kind of at the start of our journey, over the next five years, it's all about growth. We see Leeds as a bit a city that's growing itself. We've had a lot of changes in Leeds as a city. It's still quite small. It's a digital city, but it's got massive focus on growing. We're having a big part of that because we're one of three data centers in Leeds. So, it's not a heavily populated area for data centers. And we're all about helping local resellers, you know, get on that ladder for Nutanix. >> So that will be a big driver for us, you know help the small MSPs. You know, let them touch and feel Nutanix in our data center. And then hopefully give them the leg up for them to buy their own boxes, and then co-locate that in the data centers as well. >> So, as as as devoted Nutanix customers, any advice for Dirige Pandey? He's got, he's under a lot pressure. It's a competitive landscape. You love Nutanix. >> Angie: He's nailed it. >> David: I think, just keep doing what they're doing. >> Rebecca: Stick to your knitting. >> Don't get sold to one of the bigger boys and keep the-- >> Yeah, absolutely, keep the culture. And the, everything that you're doing technically wise it's just unreal. We're blown away. >> I think the culture as well, keep it to grow as big as you are now, keep that culture which has been very hard. I mean, we try doing it in our businesses. You know we have a very hardworking ethic. But we want people to enjoy where they work. We want to have a good work flow, life balance. And it's very difficult to do in a big company. >> Is it, do you like working with each other, in your husband and wife team? >> Yeah, it has it's challenges. (laughing) It has it's challenges but we've worked together for 12 years now, so. >> It's gotten better at work. >> All right. >> It's very hard because, I sell it and I support it, so unless I sell it properly I get in trouble. (laughing) >> Dog house. >> I have to reign him in. >> Exactly, well David an Angie, thank you so much. It has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you very much for having us. Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We'll have more for Nutanix.NEXT in Copenhagen coming up in just a little bit.