>>Welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage of VM wear Explorer, 2022 formerly VM world. The Cube's 12th year covering the annual conference. I'm Jennifer Daveon. We got Jason Bloomberg here. Who's a Silicon angle contributor guest author, president of inte analyst firm. Great to see you, Jason. Thanks for coming on the queue. >>Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks a lot. >>And thanks for contributing to Silicon angle. We really appreciate your articles and, and so does the audience, so thanks for that. >>Very good. We're happy >>To help. All right. So I gotta ask you, okay. We've been here on the desk. We haven't had a chance to really scour the landscape here at Moscone. What's going, what's your take on what's going on with VMware Explorer, not world. Yeah. Gotta see the name change. You got the overhang of the, the cloud Broadcom, which from us, it seems like it's energized people like, like shocked to the system something's gonna happen. What's your take. >>Yeah, something's definitely going to happen. Well, I've been struggling with VMware's messaging, you know, how they're messaging to the market. They seem to be downplaying cloud native computing in favor of multi-cloud, which is really quite different from the Tansu centric messaging from a year or two ago. So Tansu is still obviously part of the story, but it's really, they're relegating the cloud native story to an architectural pattern, which it is, but I believe it's much more than that. It's really more of a paradigm shift in how organizations implement it. Broadly speaking, where virtualization is part of the cloud native story, but VMware is making cloud native part of the virtualization story. Do so >>Do you think that's the, the mischaracterization of cloud native or a bad strategy or both? >>Well, I think they're missing an opportunity, right? I think they're missing an opportunity to be a cloud native leader. They're well positioned to do that with Tansu and where the technology was going and the technology is still there. Right? It's not that that >>They're just downplaying it. >>They're just downplaying it. Right. So >>As, as they were security too, they didn't really pump up security at >>All. Yeah. And you know, vSphere is still gonna be based on Kubernetes. So it's, they're going to be cloud native in terms of Kubernetes support across their product line. Anyway. So, but they're, they're really focusing on multi-cloud and betting the farm on multi-cloud and that ties to the change of the name of the conference. Although it's hard to see really how they're connecting the dots. Right. >>It's a bridge you can't cross, you can't see that bridge crossing what you're saying. Yeah. I mean, I thought that was a clever way of saying, oh, we're exploring new frontiers, which is kinda like, we don't really know what it is >>Yet. Yeah. Yeah. I think the, the term Explorer was probably concocted by a committee where, you know, they eliminated all the more interesting names and that was the one that was left. But, you know, Raghu explained that that Explorer is supposed to expand the audience for the conference beyond the VMware customer to this broader multi-cloud audience. But it's hard to say whether you >>Think it worked. Was there people that you recognize here or identified as a new audience? >>I don't think so. Not, not at this show, but over time, they're hoping to have this broader audience now where it's a multi-cloud audience where it's more than just VMware. It's more than just individual clouds, you know, we'll see if that works. >>You heard the cl the cloud chaos. Right. Do you, do you think they're, multi-cloud cross cloud services is a solution looking for a problem or is the problem real? Is there a market there? >>Oh, oh, the cloud chaos. That's a real problem. Right? Multi-cloud is, is a reality. Many organizations are leveraging different clouds for different reasons. And as a result, you have management security, other issues, which lead to this chaos challenge. So the, the problem is real aria. If they can get it up and running and, you know, straightened out, it's gonna be a great solution, but there are other products on the market that are more mature and more well integrated than aria. So they're going to, you know, have to compete, but VMware is very good at that. So, you know, I don't, I don't count the outing. Who >>Do you see as the competition lay out the horses on the track from your perspective? >>Well, you know, there's, there's a lot of different companies. I, I don't wanna mention any particular ones cuz, cuz I don't want to, you know, favor certain ones over others cuz then I get into trouble. But there's a, a lot of companies that >>Okay, I will. So you got a red hat with, you got obvious ones, Cisco, Cisco, I guess is Ashi Corp plays a role? Well, >>Cisco's been talking about this, >>Anybody we missed. >>Well, there's a number of smaller players, including some of the exhibitors at the, at the show that are putting together this, you know, I guess cloud native control plane that covers more than just a single cloud or cover on premises of virtualization as well as multiple clouds. And that's sort of the big challenge, right? This control plane. How do we come up with a way of managing all of this, heterogeneous it in a unified way that meets the business need and allows the technology organization, both it and the application development folks to move quickly and to do what they need to do to meet business needs. Right? So difficult for large organizations to get out of their own way and achieve that, you know, level of speed and scalability that, that, that technology promises. But they're organizationally challenged to, >>To accomplish. I think I've always looked at multi-cloud as a reality. I do see that as a situational analysis on the landscape. Yeah, I got Azure because I got Microsoft in my enterprise and they converted everything to the cloud. And so I didn't really change that. I got Amazon cause that's from almost my action is, and I gotta use Google cloud for some AI stuff. Right. All good. Right. I mean that's not really spanning anything. There's no ring. It's not really, it's like point solutions within the ecosystem, but it's interesting to see how people are globbing onto multi-cloud because to me it feels like a broken strategy trying to get straightened out. Right. Like, you know, multi-cloud groping from multi-cloud it feels that way. And, and that makes a lot of sense cuz if you're not on the right side of this historic shift right now, you're gonna be dead. >>So which side of the street do you wanna be on? I think it's becoming clear. I think the good news is this year. It's like, if you're on this side of the street, you're gonna be, be alive. Yeah. And this side of the street, not so much. So, you know, that's cloud native obviously hybrid steady state mul how multi-cloud shakes out. I don't think the market's ready personally in terms of true multi-cloud I think it's, it's an opportunity to have the conversation. That's why we're having the super cloud narrative. Cause it's a lit more attention getting, but it focuses on, it has to do something specific. Right? It can't be vaporware. The market won't tolerate vaporware and the new cloud architecture, at least that's my opinion. What's your reaction? Yeah. >>Well the, well you're quite right that a lot of the multiple cloud scenarios involve, you know, picking and choosing the various capabilities each of the cloud provider pro offers. Right? So you want TensorFlow, you have a little bit of Google and you want Amazon for something, but then Amazon's too expensive for something else. So you go with a Azure for that or you have Microsoft 365 as well as Amazon. Right? So you're, that's sort of a multi-cloud right there. But I think the more strategic question is organizations who are combining clouds for more architectural reasons. So for example, you know, back backup or failover or data sovereignty issues, right, where you, you can go into a single cloud and say, well, I want, you know, different data and different regions, but they may a, a particular cloud might not have all the answers for you. So you may say, okay, well I want, I may one of the big clouds or there's specialty cloud providers that focus on data sovereignty solutions for particular markets. And, and that might be part of the mix, right? Isn't necessarily all the big clouds. >>I think that's an interesting observation. Cause when you look at, you know, hybrid, right. When you really dig into a lot of the hybrid was Dr. Right? Yeah. Well, we got, we're gonna use the cloud for backup. And that, and that, what you're saying is multi-cloud could be sort of a similar dynamic, >>The low-head fruit, >>Which is fine, which is not that interesting. >>It's the low hanging fruit though. It's the easy, it's that risk free? I won't say risk free, but it's the easiest way not to get killed, >>But there's a translate into just sort of more interesting and lucrative and monetizable opportunities. You know, it's kind of a big leap to go from Dr. To actually building new applications that cross clouds and delivering new monetization value on top of data and you know, this nerve. >>Yeah. Whether that would be the best way to build such applications, the jury's still out. Why would you actually want to do well? >>I was gonna ask you, is there an advantage? We talked to Mariana, Tess, who's, you know, she's CTO of into it now of course, into it's a, you know, different kind of application, but she's like, yeah, we kinda looked hard at that multiple cloud thing. We found it too complex. And so we just picked one cloud, you know, in, for kind of the same thing. So, you know, is there an advantage now, the one advantage John, you pointed this out is if I run on Microsoft, I'll make more money. If I run on Amazon and you know, they'll, they'll help me sell. So, so that's a business justification, but is there a technical reason to do it? You know, global presence, there >>Could be technical reason not to do it either too. So >>There's more because of complexity. >>You mean? Well, and or technical debt on some services might not be there at this point. I mean the puzzle pieces gotta be there, assume that all clouds have have the pieces. Right. Then it's a matter of composability. I think E AJ who came on AJ Patel who runs modern applications development would agree with your assessment of cloud native being probably the driving front car on this messaging, because that's the issue like once you have the, everything there, then you're composing, it's the orchestra model, Dave. It's like, okay, we got everything here. How do I stitch it together? Not so much coding, writing code, cuz you got everything in building blocks and patterns and, and recipes. >>Yeah. And that's really what VMware has in mind when they talk about multi-cloud right? From VMware's perspective, you can put their virtual machine technology in any cloud. So if you, if you do that and you put it in multiple clouds, then you have, you know, this common, familiar environment, right. It's VMware everywhere. Doesn't really matter which cloud it's in because you get all the goodness that VMware has and you have the expertise on staff. And so now you have, you know, the workload portability across clouds, which can give you added benefits. But one of the straw men of this argument is that price arbitrage, right. I'm gonna, you know, put workloads in Amazon if it's cheaper. But if then if Amazon, you know, Azure has a different pricing structure for something I'm doing, then maybe I'll, I'll move a workload over there to get better pricing. That's difficult to implement in practice. Right. That's so that's that while people like to talk about that, yeah. I'm gonna optimize my cost by moving workloads across clouds, the practicalities at this point, make it difficult. Yeah. But with, if you have VMware, any your clouds, it may be more straightforward, but you still might not do it in order to save money on a particular cloud bill. >>It still, people don't want data. They really, really don't want to move >>Data. This audience does not want do it. I mean, if you look at the evolution, this customer base, even their, their affinity towards cloud native that's years in the making just to good put it perspective. Yeah. So I like how VMware's reality is on crawl, walk, run their clients, no matter what they want 'em to do, you can't make 'em run. And when they're still in diapers right. Or instill in the crib. Right. So you gotta get the customers in a mode of saying, I can see how VMware could operate that. I know and know how to run in an environment because the people who come through this show, they're like teams, it's like an offsite meeting, meets a conference and it's institutionalized for 15 plus years of main enterprise workload management. So I like, that's just not going away. So okay. Given that, how do you connect to the next thing? >>Well, I think the, the missing piece of the puzzle is, is the edge, right? Because it's not just about connecting one hyperscaler to another hyperscaler or even to on-premises or a private cloud, it's also the edge, the edge computing and the edge computing data center requirements. Right. Because you have, you could have an edge data center in a, a phone tower or a point of presence, a telco point of presence, which are those nondescript buildings, every town has. Right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you know, we have that >>Little colo that no one knows about, >>Right, exactly. That, you know, used to be your DSL end point. And now it's just a mini data center for the cloud, or it could be the, you know, the factory computer room or computer room in a retailer. You know, every retailer has that computer room in the modern retails target home Depot. They will have thousands of these little mini cloud data centers they're handling their, their point of sale systems, their, you know, local wifi and all these other local systems. That's, that's where the interesting part of this cloud story is going because that is inherently heterogeneous inherently mixed in terms of the hardware requirements, the software requirements and how you're going to build applications to support that, including AI based applications, which are sort of the, one of the areas of major innovation today is how are we going to do AI on the edge and why would we do it? And there's huge, huge opportunity to >>Well, real time referencing at the edge. Exactly. Absolutely. With all the data. My, my question is, is, is, is the cloud gonna be part of that? Or is the edge gonna actually bring new architectures and new economics that completely disrupt the, the economics that we've known in the cloud and in the data center? >>Well, this for hardware matters. If form factor matters, you can put a data center, the size of four, you know, four U boxes and then you're done >>Nice. I, >>I think it's a semantic question. It's something for the marketers to come up with the right jargon for is yeah. Is the edge part of the cloud, is the cloud part of the edge? Are we gonna come up with a new term, super cloud HyperCloud? >>Yeah. >>Wonder woman cloud, who knows? Yeah. But what, what >>Covers everything, but what might not be semantic is the, I, I come back to the Silicon that inside the, you know, apple max, the M one M two M two ultras, the, what Tesla's doing with NPUs, what you're seeing, you know, in, in, in arm based innovations could completely change the economics of computing, the security model. >>As we say, with the AJ >>Power consumption, >>Cloud's the hardware middleware. And then you got the application is the business everything's completely technology. The business is the app. I >>Mean we're 15 years into the cloud. You know, it's like every 15 years something gets blown up. >>We have two minutes left Jason. So I want to get into what you're working on for when your firm, you had a great, great traction, great practice over there. But before that, what's the, what's your scorecard on the event? How would you, what, what would be your constructive analysis? Positive, good, bad, ugly for VMwares team around this event. What'd they get right? What'd they need to work on >>Well as a smaller event, right? So about one third, the size of previous worlds. I mean, it's, it's, it's been a reasonably well run event for a smaller event. I, you know, in terms of the logistics and everything everything's handled well, I think their market messaging, they need to sort of revisit, but in terms of the ecosystem, you know, I think the ecosystem is, is, is, is doing well. You know, met with a number of the exhibitors over the last few days. And I think there's a lot of, a lot of positive things going on there. >>They see a wave coming and that's cloud native in your mind. >>Well, some of them are talking about cloud native. Some of them aren't, it's a variety of different >>Potentially you're talking where they are in this dag are on the hardware. Okay, cool. What's going on with your research? Tell us what you're focused on right now. What are you digging into? What's going on? Well, >>Cloud native, obviously a big part of what we do, but cybersecurity as well, mainframe modernization, believe it or not. It's a hot topic. DevOps continues to be a hot topic. So a variety of different things. And I'll be writing an article for Silicon angle on this conference. So highlights from the show. Great. Focusing on not just the VMware story, but some of the hot spots among the exhibitors. >>And what's your take on the whole crypto defi world. That's emerging. >>It's all a scam hundred >>Percent. All right. We're now back to enterprise. >>Wait a minute. Hold on. >>We're out of time. >>Gotta go. >>We'll make that a virtual, there are >>A lot of scams. >>I'll admit that you gotta, it's a lot of cool stuff. You gotta get through the underbelly that grows the old bolt. >>You hear kit earlier. He's like, yeah. Well, forget about crypto. Let's talk blockchain, but I'm like, no, let's talk crypto. >>Yeah. All good stuff, Jason. Thanks for coming on the cube. Thanks for spending time. I know you've been busy in meetings and thanks for coming back. Yeah. Happy to help. All right. We're wrapping up day two. I'm Jeff David ante cube coverage. Two sets three days live coverage, 12th year covering VMware's user conference called explore now was formerly VM world onto the next level. That's what it's all about. Just the cube signing off for day two. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE covering Kubecon and CloudNative Con brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Kubecon CloudNative Con here in San Diego. I'm Stu Miniman and my co-host is Justin Warren. And one of the things we always love to do is really dig in to some of the customer use cases. And joining us to do that, Andrey Rybka, who's the head of Compute Architecture and the CTO Office at Bloomberg. Andrey, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> All right, so just to set the stage, last year we had your colleague Steven Bauer, came, talked about your company's been using Kubernetes for a number of years. You're a member of the CNCF as one of those end users there and you're even an award winner. So, congratulations on all the process. You've been doing if for years, so all the problems, I'm sure are already solved, so now we just have a big party, right? >> Yes, well I'm mean certainly we are at the stage where things are quite mature and there's a lot of workloads that are running Kubernetes. We run Kubernetes on-premises. Steven has an excellent data sense platform that does machine learning with GPUs and bare metal. We also have a really excellent team that runs basically Platform as a Service, generic Platform as a Service, not GPUs but effectively runs any kind of stateless app or service and that's been extremely successful and, you know there's a lot interest in that. And we also run Kubernetes in Public Cloud. So, a lot of workloads for like Bloomberg.com, actually are backed now by Kubernetes. >> Yeah, so we want to spend a bunch of time talking about the applications, the data, the services, that you've built some PaaS's there. Yes, so step us back for a second if you would, and give us the, What led to Kubernetes? And as you said, you've got your on-premises environment, you've got Public Cloud, where was that when you started and what's the role of Kubernetes and that today? >> Sure, we started back in 2015, evaluating all kinds of sort of container orchestration platforms. It's very clear that developers love containers for its portability and just the ability to have the same environments that runs kind of on-premises or on your laptop and runs on the actual deployment environment, the same thing, right? So, we looked at Mesos, Marathon, Cloud Foundry, even OpenShift before it was Kubernetes. And we, in no specific order continuously evaluate all different options and once we make a decision, we recommend to the engineering team and work in partnership with engineers. So all of those awards and everything, actually I want to say, that this is really a kudos to our engineering team. We just a small part of the puzzle. Now as far as like how we made the Kubernetes selection, it was a bit risky. We started with a pre-alpha version and you know I read the Borg paper, how Google actually did Borg. And when I sort of realized, well they're trying to do the same thing with Kubernetes. It was very clear, this is kind of, you know we're going to build on mature experience, right. So, some what it was risky but also a safe bet because you know there was some good computer science and engineering behind the product. So we started alpha version, they're consumer web groups actually were one of the first deployments of there kind of Kubernetes and they present them at the first Kubecon. It was an excellent talk on how we did Kubernetes and you know we came a long way since then. We've got sort of now, probably about 80 to 100 clusters running and you know, they run full high availability, DR -1. I would say it is one of the most reliable environments that we have, you know. We have frequently, you know infrastructure outages, hypervisors, you know, obviously hardware fails, which is normal, and we rarely see any issues and actually you know no like any major issues whatsoever. So, the things we expected out of Kubernetes, the things like reliability, elastic infrastructure, auto-scaling, the multi-tenancy it all worked out. Higher density of sort of packing the nodes, you know that's another great sort of value add that we expected but now we finally realizing that. >> So, one question I've had from a lot of customers, particularly traditional enterprises who are used to doing things and have a lot of virtual machine infrastructure. They're looking at Kubernetes but they're finding it somewhat opaque, a little bit scary. Talk us through, How did you convince the business that this was the choice that we should make and that we need to change the way that we're developing applications and deploying applications and we want to do this with Kubernetes? How did you convince them that this was going to be okay in the end? >> Yes, yes, that's a really good question. A lot of people were scared and you know they were, is this going to break things or you know is this just a shiny new thing. And there was a lot of education that had to occur. We've shown a lot of POCs now. The way we exposed Kubernetes was not just like raw Kubernetes. We actually wanted to keep it safe, so we sort of stayed away from some, like more alpha type of workloads and moved towards kind of like the more stable things. And so, we exposed it Platform as a Service. So, the developers did not actually get to necessarily like kubectl you know, apply a config and just deploy the app. We actually had a really good sort of offering where we had kind of, almost like Git-flow kind of environment where you have, you know your source control, then you have CICD pipeline and then once it goes through all those check and balances, you deploy your containers. So from that perspective, we actually hid quite a bit of things that made things a bit dangerous or potentially a little bit more complicated. And that's proven to be the right strategy because right now as far as the reliability I would say this is probably one of the most reliable environments that we have. And this is by design, you know. We basically tell the developers, by default you're supposed to run at least two replicas at least two Data Centers by default or two, you know, regions or two availability zones, and you can't change that. There's some people who are asking me like can I just deploy just in one Data Center, I'm like, I'm sorry, no. Like by default its like that. And auto-scaling on so if one Data Center goes and you need DR -1, so if you started with two minimum replicas then it auto-scales to four or whatever that will be set. So, you know, I think we've basically put a prototype of a proof of concept relatively fast. And We've got with the initial Platform as a Service, you know from zero to actual delivery in about three months. A lot of building blocks were there and we just put kind of the pieces of the puzzle together. >> All right, that does echo a lot of the discussion that was at had in the keynote today, even was about looking at making Kubernetes easier to consume, essentially by having all of these sensible defaults like you mentioned. You will have two replicas. It will run in these two different zones. And kind of removing some of that responsibility for those decisions from the developers. >> Andrey: Yes. >> How does that line up with the idea of DevOps which seems to be partly about making the developers a bit more responsible for their service and how it runs in production. It sounds like you've actually taken a lot of that effort away from them by, we've done all this work for you so you don't have to think about that anymore. >> I mean a little bit of background, we have about 5,500 engineers. So, expecting everybody to learn DevOps and Kubernetes is not realistic, right? And most developers really want to write applications and services that add business value, right? Nobody wants to really manage networking at the lower level, you know there's a lot of still complexity in this environment, right? So, you know, as far as DevOps, we've built shared kind of teams that have basically like, think of like centralized SRE teams that build the core platform components. We have a world class kind of software infrastructure group which builds those type of components. On top of the sort of, the technology infrastructure team that caters to the hardware and the virtualization infrastructure built on OpenStack. So you know, there is very much kind of a lot of common services/shared services teams that build that as a platform to developers and that is how we can scale. Because, you know, it's very hard to do that if every team is just sort of duplicating each one of those things. >> So Andrey, let's talk a little bit about your application portfolio. >> Andrey: Sure. >> Bloomberg must have thousands of applications out there. >> Andrey: Yes, yes. >> From what you were describing, is this only for kind of net new applications. If I want to use it I have to build something new, replacing something else or, or can you walk us through kind of what percentage is on this platform today and how is that migration or transition? >> And some is not net new, we actually did port quite a bit of the sort of the classic Bloomberg services that developers expect to the platform. And it's seamless to the developers. So, we've been doing quite a bit of sort of Linux migration meaning from like things like Solaris, AIX, and this platform was built purposefully to help developers to migrate their services. Now, they're not sort of lift and shift type of migrations. You can't just expect the, you know classic C++ shared memory app suddenly like jump and start being in containers, right? So there is some architectural changes, differences that had to be done. The type of applications that we see, you know, they're just sort of microservices oriented. Bloomberg has been around since 1981 and they've been doing service-oriented architecture since like early 90s. So, you know, things were already kind of in services kind of framework and mentality. And before, you know we had service matches, Bloomberg had its own kind of paradigm of service matches. So, all we do is kind of retro-fit the same concepts with new frameworks. And what we did is we brought in sort of like a new mentality of open source first. So, most new systems that we built, we look for kind of what about if you know, we look for open source components that can fit in this particular problem set. So there applications that we have right now, we have quite a bit of data services, data transformation pipelines, machine learning, you know, there's quite a bit of the machine learning as far as like the actual learning part of training, and then there is the inference part that runs quite a bit. We have quite a few of accounting services, like, I mentioned Bloomberg.com, and many sort of things that you would normally think of like accounting delivery services that run on Kubernetes. And I mean, at this point, we certainly try to be a little bit conscious about stateful services, so we don't run as much of databases and things like that. Eventually, we will get there once we prove the reliability and resiliency around the stateful set in Kubernetes. >> Yeah, do you have an estimate internal or goals as to what percentage your applications are on this platform now and a roadmap going forward? >> I mean, it's hard to say but going forward, I see majority of all services migrating to Kubernetes because for us, Kubernetes is become an essentially standardized compute fabric. You know, one thing that we've been missing, you know, a lot of open source projects deliver, you know virtualized infrastructure. But, you know, that's not quite enough, right. You need other sort of concepts to be there and Kubernetes did deliver that for us. And more importantly, it also delivered us kind of a, almost like a multi-cloud strategy, you know, kind of accidentally because, you know none of the cloud providers have any standard APIs of any source, right? Like, so even if use Terraform, that's not necessarily multi-cloud, it's just like you got to write HCO for each cloud provider. In Kubernetes, more or less, that becomes kind of a really solved problem. >> So which, what flavor of Kubernetes are you using? Do you leverage any of the services from the Public Cloud on Kubernetes? >> Yeah, I mean, excellent question. So, you know we want to leverage managed offerings as much as possible because things like patch and the security of you know, CVE's, and things like that, I want somebody to take care of that for me and harden things, and out of the box. So, the key to our multi-cloud strategy is use managed offering but based on open source software. So if you want to deploy services, deploy them on Kubernetes as much as possible. If you want to use databases, use manage database but based on the open source software, like Postgres, or MySQL. And that makes it affordable, right, to an extent, I mean, there's going to be some slight differences, but I do believe that managed is better than if I'm going to go and bootstrap VM's and manage my own control plane and the workers and things like that. >> Yeah, and it is a lot of additional work that I think organizations genuinely did try to roll their own and do everything themselves. There's a lot more understanding since the advent of cloud essentially that actually making someone else do this for what is essentially the undifferentiated heavy lifting. If you can get someone else to do that for you, >> Andrey: Absolutely >> it's a much better experience. Which is actually what you've built with the Kubernetes services for your developers. You are becoming that managed service for your app developers. I think a few enterprise organizations have tried to do that a little bit with centralized IT. They haven't quite got that service mentality there where I'm the product owner and I need to create something which my developers find is valuable to use so that they want to use it. >> This is exactly spot on. When I joined Bloomberg six years ago, one of the things we wanted to do is effectively offer a Public Cloud like services on-premises and now we're there. We actually have a lot of managed offerings whether you want Kafka as a service, queuing as a service, or you know, cache as a service, or even Kubernetes but not necessarily we want to expose Kubernetes as a service, we want to expose Platform as a Service. So, you hit the nail on the head because effectively developers want kind of the same things that they see in the Public Cloud. I want you know, function as a service, I want lambda something like this. Well, that's a type of Platform as a Service. So, you're spot on. >> Yeah, Andrey, last question I have for you. You know, you talked about the maturity of the managed offerings there, something we've seen a lot this year is the companies that, How am I going to manage across, you know, various environments? There we saw, you know, Microsoft with Azure, or VMware with Honzu, what do you think of that? Is that something that interests you or anything else in the ecosystem that you still think needs to mature to help your business? >> Sure, sure, I mean, I think that the use cases they're trying to address are definitely near and dear to my heart. Because we are trying to be multi-cloud. And in order to be truly mature multi-cloud sort of company, we need to have sort of mature kind of multi-cloud control plane. That has kind of the deployment address, ACD pipeline address than it need to address security, not just day one but day two, a load and monitoring and all of you know, if I were just to have three different portals to look at, it is very complicated, you're going to miss things. I want one pane of glass, right. So, what this company is addressing is extremely important and I see a lot of value in it. Now from my point of view, in general, what we prefer if it was an open source project that we could contribute and we could collaborate on, we still want to pay money for the support and what not, we don't want to just be free riders, right? But if it's an open source product and we can be part of it, it's not just read-only open source, that is definitely something that I would be very much interested in participating. And majority of the developers that we have are very happy to participate in open source. I think you seen some of our contributors here. We have some people contributing to Kubeflow. There's many other projects, we have quite a bit of cube projects like the case engineering with powerfulseal. If somebody wants to check it out, we've got some really interesting things. >> Andrey, really appreciate you sharing what you and your engineering teams are doing. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for all the contributions back to the community. >> Yep. >> For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman back with more of our three day wall to wall coverage here at KubeCon CloudNative Con. Thank you for watching theCube. (dramatic music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE's live coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019 here in Barcelona, Spain. 7,700 here in attendance, here about all the Cloud Native technologies. I'm Stu Miniman; my cohost to the two days of coverage is Corey Quinn. And to help us break down what's happening in this ecosystem, we've brought in Jason Bloomberg, who's the president at Intellyx. Jason, thanks so much for joining us. >> It's great to be here. >> All right. There's probably some things in the keynote I want to talk about, but I also want to get your general impression of the show and beyond the show, just the ecosystem here. Brian Liles came out this morning. He did not sing or rap for us this morning like he did yesterday. He did remind us that the dinners in Barcelona meant that people were a little late coming in here because, even once you've got through all of your rounds of tapas and everything like that, getting that final check might take a little while. They did eventually filter in, though. Always a fun city here in Barcelona. I found some interesting pieces. Always love some customer studies. Conde Nast talking about what they've done with their digital imprint. CERN, who we're going to have on this program. As a science lover, you want to geek out as to how they're finding the Higgs boson and how things like Kubernetes are helping them there. And digging into things like storage, which I worked at a storage company for 10 years. So, understanding that storage is hard. Well, yeah. When containers came out, I was like, "Oh, god, we just fixed it for virtualization, "and it took us a decade. "How are we going to do it this time?" And they actually quoted a crowd chat that we had in our community. Tim Hawken, of course one of the first Kubernetes guys, was in on that. And we're going to have Tim on this afternoon, too. So, just to set a little context there. Jason, what's your impressions of the show? Anything that has changed in your mind from when you came in here to today? Let's get into it from there. >> Well, this is my second KubeCon. The first one I went to was in Seattle in December. What's interesting from a big picture is really how quickly and broadly KubeCon has been adopted in the enterprise. It's still, in the broader scheme of things, relatively new, but it's really taking its place as the only container orchestrator anybody cares about. It sort of squashed the 20-or-so alternative container orchestrators that had a brief day in the sun. And furthermore, large enterprises are rapidly adopting it. It's remarkable how many of them have adopted it and how broadly, how large the deployment. The Conde Nast example was one. But there are quite a number. So we turned the corner, even though it's relatively immature technology. That's the interesting story as well, that there's still pieces missing. It's sort of like flying an airplane while you're still assembling it, which makes it that much more exciting. >> Yeah, one of the things that has excited me over the last 10 years in tech is how fast it takes me to go from ideation to production, has been shrinking. Big data was: "Let's take the thing that used to take five years "and get it down to 18 months." We all remember ERP deployments and how much money and people you need to throw at that. >> It still takes a lot of money and people. >> Right, because it's ERP. I was talking to one of the booths here, and they were doing an informal poll of, "How many of you are going to have Kubernetes "in production in the next six months?" Not testing it, but in production in the next six months, and it was more than half of the people were going to be ramping it up in that kind of environment. Anything architecturally? What's intriguing you? What's the area that you're digging down to? We know that we are not fully mature, and even though we're in production and huge growth, there's still plenty of work to do. >> An interesting thing about the audience here is it's primarily infrastructure engineers. And the show is aimed at the infrastructure engineers, so it's technical. It's focused on people who code for a living at the infrastructure level, not at the application level. So you have that overall context, and what you end up having, then, is a lot of discussions about the various components. "Here's how we do storage." "Here's how we do this, here's how we do that." And it's all these pieces that people now have to assemble, as opposed to thinking of it overall, from the broader context, which is where I like writing about, in terms of the bigger picture. So the bigger picture is really that Cloud Native, broadly speaking, is a new architectural paradigm. It's more than just an architectural trend. It's set of trends that really change the way we think about architecture. >> One interesting piece about Kubernetes, as well. One of the things we're seeing as we see Kubernetes start to expand out is, unlike serverless, it doesn't necessarily require the same level of, oh, just take everything you've done and spend 18 months rewriting it from scratch, and then it works in this new paradigm in a better way. It's much less of a painful conversion process. We saw in the keynote today that they took WebLogic, of all things, and dropped that into Kubernetes. If you can do it with something as challenging, in some respects, and as monolithic as WebLogic, then almost any other stack you're going to see winds up making some sense. >> Right, you mentioned serverless in contrast with Kubernetes, but actually, serverless is part of this Cloud Native paradigm as well. So it's broader than Kubernetes, although Kubernetes has established itself as the container orchestration platform of choice. But it's really an overall story about how we can leverage the best practices we've learned from cloud computing across the entire enterprise IT landscape, both in the cloud and on premises. And Kubernetes is driving this in large part, but it's bigger picture than the technology itself. That's what's so interesting, because it's so transformative, but people here are thinking about trees, not the forest. >> It's an interesting thing you say there, and I'm curious if you can help our community, Because they look at this, and they're like, "Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes." Well, a bunch of the things sit on Kubernetes. As they've tried to say, it's a platform of platforms. It's not the piece. Many of the things can be with Kubernetes but don't have to be. So, the whole observability piece. We heard the merging of the OpenCensus, OpenTracing with OpenTelemetry. You don't have to have Kubernetes for that to be a piece of it. It can be serverless underneath it. It can be all these other pieces. Cloud Native architecture sits on top of it. So when you say Cloud Native architecture, what defines that? What are the pieces? How do I have to do it? Is it just, I have to have meditated properly and had a certain sense of being? What do we have to do to be Cloud Native? >> Well, an interesting way of looking at it is: What we have subtracted from the equation, so what is intentionally missing. Cloud Native is stateless, it is codeless, and it is trustless. Now, not to say that we don't have ways of dealing with state, and of course there's still plenty of code, and we still need trust. But those are architectural principals that really percolate through everything we do. So containers are inherently stateless; they're ephemeral. Kubernetes deals with ephemeral resources that come and go as needed. This is key part of how we achieve the scale we're looking for. So now we have to deal with state in a stateless environment, and we need to do that in a codeless way. By codeless, I mean declarative. Instead of saying, how are we going to do something? Let's write code for that, we're going to say, how are we going to do that? Let's write a configuration file, a YAML file, or some other declarative representation of what we want to do. And Kubernetes is driven this way. It's driven by configuration, which means that you don't need to fork it. You don't need to go in and monkey with the insides to do something with it. It's essentially configurable and extensible, as opposed to customizable. This is a new way of thinking about how to leverage open-source infrastructure software. In the past, it was open-source. Let's go in an monkey with the code, because that's one of the benefits of open-source. Nobody wants to do that now, because it's declaratively-driven, and it's configurable. >> Okay, I hear what you're saying, and I like what you're saying. But one of the things that people say here is everyone's a little bit different, and it is not one solution. There's lots of different paths, and that's what's causing a little bit of confusion as to which service mesh, or do I have a couple of pieces that overlap. And every deployment that I see of this is slightly different, so how do I have my cake and eat it, too? >> Well, you mentioned that Kubernetes is a platform of platforms, and there's little discussion of what we're actually doing with the Kubernetes here at the show. Occasionally, there's some talk about AI, and there's some talk about a few other things, but it's really up to the users of Kubernetes, who are now the development teams in the enterprises, to figure out what they want to do with it and, as such, figure out what capabilities they require. Depending upon what applications you're running and the business use cases, you may need certain things more than others. Because AI is very different from websites, it's very different from other things you might be running. So that's part of the benefit of a platform of platforms, is it's inherently configurable. You can pick and choose the capabilities you want without having to go into Kubernetes and fork it. We don't want 12 different Kubernetes that are incompatible with each other, but we're perfectly okay with different flavors that are all based on the same, fundamental, identical code base. >> We take a look at this entire conference, and it really comes across as, yes, it's KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. We look at the, I think, 36 projects that are now being managed by this. But if we look at the conversations of what's happening here, it's very clear that the focus of this show is Kubernetes and friends, where it tends to be taking the limelight of a lot of this. One of the challenges you start seeing as soon as you start moving up the stack, out through the rest of the stack, rather, and seeing what all of these Cloud Native technologies are is, increasingly, they're starting to be defined by what they aren't. I mean, you have the old saw of, serverless runs on servers, and other incredibly unhelpful sentiments. And we talk about what things aren't more so than we do what they are. And what about capabilities story? I don't have an answer for this. I think it's one of those areas where language is hard, and defining what these things are is incredibly difficult. But I see what you're saying. We absolutely are seeing a transformative moment. And one of the strangest things about it, to me at least, is the enthusiasm with which we're seeing large enterprises, that you don't generally think of as being particularly agile or fast-moving, are demonstrating otherwise. They're diving into this in fascinating ways. It's really been enlightening to have conversations for the last couple of days with companies that are embracing this new paradigm. >> Right. Well, in our perspective at Intellyx, we're focusing on digital transformation in the enterprise, which really means putting the customer first and having a customer-driven transformation of IT, as well as the organization itself. And it's hard to think in those terms, in customer-facing terms, when you're only talking about IT infrastructure. Be that as it may, it's still all customer-driven. And this is sometimes the missing piece, is how do we connect what we're doing on the infrastructure side with what customers require from these companies that are implementing it? Often, that missing piece centers on the workload. Because, from the infrastructure perspective, we have a notion of a workload, and we want workload portability. And portability is one of the key benefits of Kubernetes. It gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of scalability and deployment options, as well as resilience and other benefits. But the workload also represents the applications we're putting in front of our end users, whether they're employees or end customers. So that's they key piece that is like the keystone that ties the digital story, that is the customer-facing, technology-driven, technology-empowered story, with the IT infrastructure stories. How do we support the flexibility, scalability, resilience of the workloads that the business needs to meet its business goals? >> Yeah, I'm really glad you brought up that digital transformation piece, because I have two questions, and I want to make sure I'm allowing you to cover both of them. One is, the outcome we from people as well: "I need to be faster, and I need to be agile." But at the same point, which pieces should I, as an enterprise, really need to manage? Many of these pieces, shouldn't I just be able to consume it as a managed service? Because I don't need to worry about all of those pieces. The Google presentation this morning about storage was: You have two options. Path one is: we'll take care of all of that for you. Path two is: here's the level of turtles that you're going to go all the way down, and we all know how complicated storage is, and it's got to work. If I lose my state, if I lose my pieces there, I'm probably out of business or at least in really big trouble. The second piece on that, you talked about the application. And digital transformation. Speed's great and everything, but we've said at Wikibon that the thing that will differentiate the traditional companies and the digitally transformed is data will drive your business. You will have data, it will add value of business, and I don't feel that story has come out yet. Do you see that as the end result from this? And apologies for having two big, complex questions here for you. >> Well, data are core to the digital transformation story, and it's also an essential part of the Kubernetes story. Although, from the infrastructure perspective, we're really thinking more about compute than about data. But of course, everything boils down to the data. That is definitely always a key part of the story. And you're talking about the different options. You could run it yourself or run it as a managed service. This is a key part of the story as well, is that it's not about making a single choice. It's about having options, and this is part of the modern cloud storage. It's not just about, "Okay, we'll put everything in one public cloud." It's about having multiple public clouds, private clouds, on-premises virtualization, as well as legacy environments. This is what you call hybrid IT. Having an abstracted collection of environments that supports workload portability in order to meet the business needs for the infrastructure. And that workload portability, in the context of multiple clouds, that is becoming increasingly dependent on Kubernetes as an essential element of the infrastructure. So Kubernetes is not the be-all and end-all, but it's become an essentially necessary part of the infrastructure, to make this whole vision of hybrid IT and digital transformation work. >> For now. I mean, I maintain that, five years from now, no one is going to care about Kubernetes. And there's two ways that goes. Either it dries up, blows away, and something else replaces it, which I don't find likely, or, more likely, it slips beneath the surface of awareness for most people. >> I would agree, yeah. >> The same way that we're not sitting here, having an in-depth conversation about which distribution of Linux, or what Linux kernel or virtual memory manager we're working with. That stuff has all slipped under the surface, to the point where there are people who care tremendously about this, but you don't need to employ them at every company. And most companies don't even have to think about it. I think Kubernetes is heading that direction. >> Yeah, it looks like it. Obviously, things continue to evolve. Yeah, Linux is a good example. TCP/IP as well. I remember the network protocol wars of the early 90s, before the web came along, and it was, "Are we going to use Banyan VINES, "are we going to use NetWare?" Remember NetWare? "Or are we going to use TCP/IP or Token Ring?" Yeah! >> Thank you. >> We could use GDP, but I don't get it. >> Come on, KOBOL's coming back, we're going to bring back Token Ring, too. >> KOBOL never went away. Token Ring, though, it's long gone. >> I am disappointed in Corey, here, for not asking the question about portability. The concern we have, as you say: okay, I put Kubernetes in here because I want portability. Do I end up with least-common-denominator cloud? I'm making a decision that I'm not going to go deep on some of the pieces, because nice as the IPI lets things through, but we understand if I need to work across multiple environments, I'm usually making a trade-off there. What do you hear from customers? Are they aware that they're doing this? Is this a challenge for people, not getting the full benefit out of whichever primary or whichever clouds they are using? >> Well, portability is not just one thing. It's actually a set of capabilities, depending upon what you are trying to accomplish. So for instance, you may want to simply support backing up your workload, so you want to be able to move it from here to there, to back it up. Or you may want to leverage different public clouds, because different public clouds have different strengths. There may be some portability there. Or you may be doing cloud migration, where you're trying to move from on-premises to cloud, so it's kind of a one-time portability. So there could be a number of reasons why portability is important, and that could impact what it means to you, to move something from here to there. And why, how often you're going to do it, how important it is, whether it's a one-to-many kind of thing, or it's a one-to-one kind of thing. It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. >> Jason, last thing real quick. What research do you see coming out of this? What follow-up? What should people be looking for from Intellyx in this space in the near future? >> Well, we continue to focus on hybrid IT, which include Kubernetes, as well as some of the interesting trends. One of the interesting stories is how Kubernetes is increasingly being deployed on the edge. And there's a very interesting story there with edge computing, because the telcos are, in large part, driving that, because of their 5G roll-outs. So we have this interesting confluence of disruptive trends. We have 5G, we have edge computing, we have Kubernetes, and it's also a key use case for OpenStack, as well. So it's like all of these interesting trends are converging to meet a new class of challenges. And AI is part of that story as well, because we want to run AI at the edge, as well. That's the sort of thing we do at Intellyx, is try to take multiple disruptive trends and show the big picture overall. And for my articles for SiliconANGLE, that's what I'm doing as well, so stay tuned for those. >> All right. Jason Bloomberg, thank you for helping us break down what we're doing in this environment. And as you said, actually, some people said OpenStack is dead. Look, it's alive and well in the Telco space and actually merging into a lot of these environments. Nothing ever dies in IT, and theCUBE always keeps rolling throughout all the shows. For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We have a full-packed day of interviews here, so be sure to stay with us. And thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Seattle,Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon andCloudNativeCon North America 2018 brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone,live Cube coverage here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon2018 in Seattle. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman hosting three days of coverage. Wall to wall, 8,000 people,double from last year, North America, expanding intoChina, Europe, everywhere. The CNCF is expanding, so is Kubernetes. The rise of Kubernetes has spawned the Cloud Native movement going mainstream that's ecosystem driven. We got a great guest here. Steven Bower, data andanalytics infrastructure lead at Bloomberg, featuredthem on siliconangle.com in one of our special reportsand user using Kubernetes and the variety of Cloud Native. Steven welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thanks for coming on,award winning end user, given all the end users,everyone's kind of award winning. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Congratulations. Bloomberg's known, we've covered you guys, great development team. You guys have a lot ofengineers at Bloomberg as well as being a media company on cable, Bloomberg terminal, everything else. You've got a lot of datascience, you've got a lot of engineers, you're building stuff. What's the focus on Kubernetes? Where are you using it? How are you contributing? What's the dynamic? Why are you winning with Kubernetes? >> Sure, that's a good question. I think, well we're usingit all over the place in lots of different things. We have a huge engineeringteam that does all kinds of different things. So in the area that I manage,which is data and analytics infrastructure, we have been we basically managedatabases and search engines and all kinds of other tech like that. What we've ended uprealizing is that we built something that looks a lot like Kubernetes but doesn't work nearlyas well for all of those different systems, tomanage them at scale. You know, we're talkingthousands of instances of post cross and solar andall kinds of different things and having a singletool, or single platform which we can kind of levelup all of those things really makes a lot of sense in terms of not necessarily like cuttingcosts and things like that 'cause that's actuallynot as interesting to me as actually allowing theteams that manage those things to actually contribute to those projects, contribute to solar or postcross and stuff like that and free them from havingto spend a lot of time managing infrastructure. >> Tim Hopkins said, itwas just on theCUBE here before you came on,from Google, one of the co-leads on Kubernetesat gkegoogles@cloud. He said something interesting. I want to get your reaction to this. One of the benefits of Kubernetesis to give the confidence that deployments are going to be reliable and that confidence gets a flywheel and then people startshipping more as a matter of course of the business,not like oh my God we got to push a new code,oh my God, fingers crossed, press the button. The old model was fingers cross, go, QA, no, no, confidence, theconfidence and the iteration. Is that where you'reseeing the value, too? Does that relate to you? Does that make sense to you?Does that resonate with you? >> Yeah, it definitely does. A lot of the models thatwe're trying to move towards are really like declarative model of both how we develop software andthen how we deploy software and then how we manage it in production. Kubernetes offers that, thatecosystem across the board. That's been really, trying to think of a great way to put this. Being able to have that tooland being able to do that and the repeatability. In the world that I livein, everything we do we don't do one of it,we do, I think we run something like 2000 solar clusters. So all we're doing all daylong is just stamping out the same thing over and overagain and if I can build one system that doesthat very, really cleanly and simply and then I canuse that same system for running post tests orrunning something else that gives us the confidenceand we can test it, we can run it on our laptops. Our developers can developand do all that kind of stuff and it works the same everywherethey go and we can just rinse, lather, repeat kind of. >> So Steve, step back for a second. Your infrastructure, is thisall Bloomberg Data Center's? How does cloud fit into the discussion? >> Yeah, I mean, we dohave some infrastructure running in the cloud but primarily it's all on prem and data center. In my world it's all onmetal because we have all these data systemsthat need direct access to SSDs and MME andall this kind of stuff. >> Can you give us, withoutsharing state secrets, a little bit of the scaleof what you're doing? I love data's at the centerof what you're doing there. We can all understand howimportant data is to your business but talk aboutwhat the requirements are that why you have some special requirements that thetypical enterprise wouldn't. >> Sure, I think, youcan look at Bloomberg as a media company, wehave news, all that stuff. We obviously have the Bloomberg terminal and really what drives that terminal, it's all kinds of software but in the end it's data, right, andit's all kinds of data. What is that definition,big data and all these whatever stuff that everyonewas pitching five years ago. We have all of those problems. We have data that is movingat millions of ticks a second. We have enormous data sets. We have really complex data sets like people scanning courtfilings from tiny little courts all around thecountry and sending that data in and we have tonormalize that and put it in. So all these crazy differenttypes of information. They are both demanding interms of the complexities of parsing data and puttingthem and structuring them into those systems as wellas the scale so we have some pretty enormous andhigh performance systems that require us and kindof drive us to that need for metal and very focused on performance in all different aspects. >> Great, wonder, give us your engagement with this ecosystem here. One of the big questionscoming in is okay, Kubernetes, the thingwe here from the CNTF is well, it's getting kind of boring. I don't know that I agree with the term. I understand they'resaying it's becoming mature and therefore there's less drama around it which is good but this ecosystemis anything but boring. You ask a user like yourself, you've got complex requirements. There's more than 30different projects a year. What do you use out of here? What do you build yourself? What do you contribute to? How do you consideropen-source contributions? It's a big nut and wedon't have a ton of time but if you could scratch thesurface on some of those. >> I think the number onelesson that I've learned from this ecosystem isthat it's moving so rapidly that when we decide tobuild something on our own we have a talk tomorrow aboutour data science platform which we built about ayear-and-a-half, two-years ago. By the time we were ready to talk about it and everything like that,you have all the other different technologiesthat have moved forward. So it made us realize thatif we're going to start something internally,a new project, either A we should go look and seewhat's out there and contribute to that or we should juststart it in open source to begin with rather thanthat oh, let's build it and then we'll open source it. >> Chasing your tail kind of thing. >> Yeah, it's like we have tobecome part of the ecosystem in our entirety. >> That brings up a good question. I want to ask you this incontext of thinking about your peers that mightnot be as progressive as Bloomberg on the tech side. You guys certainly do a greatjob and it's well documented. Classic IT shop, racking andstacking servers and boxes and now we got the wholedigital transformation thing going on, same old, same old but now, 2019, real impact. The investments they'remaking on how to change their IT, their data isnow in front of them. They have to deal with them. This is right front andcenter 'cause companies are realizing they'regoing to go out of business if they don't actually make the adoption 'cause the data's super valuable. So how do you see the Kubernetesand the CNC of ecosystem changing the investment practices of a classic enterprise IT? You know, if your peerscalled you and said hey Steven, hey help me out,what's the secret playbook? Where do I go? I don't want to get, Igot to make some changes. What do they change? What's the impact of theinvestment with Kubernetes? What's the end game? What's the real impact? >> I think, it's a toughthing, right, 'cause Bloomberg is really notlike your typical IT shop. We are a software company at heart and so that makes us alittle bit different. When I talk to other people,I say that in the sense that not a lot of companiescan afford to decide to make a project open-- >> 'cause they outsource everything. >> Right, outsource it. Well, I mean-- >> They outsource everything. >> That's actually a huge change though. We're not sitting heretalking about hundreds of commercial products that are owned by a small handful of vendorsthat are multi-million dollar investments foreverything we're doing. We're talking about lotsof little tiny companies that have products thatare really, really valuable that are in the open sourceworld that we can get our hands on and startworking with before we even make a decision about talkingabout support or whatever. There's all kinds of technologies that, I walk into this room andthese are like friends all around 'cause we'veworked with all their software and we're like hey, theseguys have a company now. This was just a GitHubrepo a couple years ago and I think that that's abig change and embracing that, that's probablyreally hard for your typical kind of IT shop where theywant to have this clear line of I can call techsupport and get someone on the phone and that's like the main-- >> The classic old software model but it's changed. >> So Steve, one of thethings we're trying to get some insight on here isit's not just running Kubernetes in production,it's what am I doing with it. How does that change my business? I understand ML is a big pieceof what you're doing there. Give us some insight as to how does this transform your business? Does it transform your business? >> Specifically on the MLside and we'll talk about this actually that's kind of thefocus of our talk tomorrow so I don't want to stealtheir thunder too much but a lot of it was really about looking at okay, how did ML, deep ML people work? How did they want to work? If you ask an ML personwhat they really want they want an infinitely scalable cluster that it's just theirs and they want to an assay to manage all theinfrastructure for them and a data engineer to managecleaning up all the data and all these things and they wanted that all to themselves and not haveto share it with anyone else. So a lot of what we try tofigure out is how we can actually deliver that to themand it really has transformed. Once people realize that onour platform they had access to an enormous pool of GPUs,it went from oh, I want to work on my box and can you giveme GPUs on my one little box to wow, I can dohyper-parameter tuning across hundreds of GPUs overnight or during the day or whatever their needs are. It really unlocked people's capabilities and they're actuallylike, they went from being skeptical of a systemthat they had to share and things like that 'causeit actually just works and that's really the-- >> That's really thedopamine effect for them. They can see value withouthaving to go through the slogging of the configurationsand the normal stuff >> Yeah, exactly.>> that they had to do. >> Authentication. >> So we've been hearingthreads of the CICD pipeline is a big benefit,which you're kind of seeing as well but whatwe're also seeing people building below Kubernetes seeing storage and networking getting better. How do you see that holistically? Are you seeing is thenetwork more performant, that notion of programmabilitybecomes now part of it, automation, it's software. Everyone has to build software. In fact, I talked to theVP of Technology Innovation at Proctor and Gamble andhe's saying hey, we outsourced everything, I got to start hiring software so maybe not as big asBloomberg but the trend is let's get more software people on board but they still got networks,they still got storage, they still got the gear. What's the impact, the under-the-hood? >> Yeah, I think it'scomplex because you typically have these structures thatare built inside companies where you have a networkingteam and you have an infrastructure, ahardware team and whatever. One of the SREs on my team the other day, he was like, do you thinkwe can talk to the network team about puttingsoftware on their switches? That's a really interestingquestion to start asking and he actually had areally good use case. That makes a lot of sense, maybewe should think about that. And then dealing with, there'sobviously the technology aspect of that but there's also skillsets. Someone that's been workingwith a bunch of switches for a bunch of years isn'tnecessarily a programmer, used to a typical CICDprocess and things like that. >> On the flip side, I thinkthat's cool to recognize the networking guy butwe heard Tim Hopkins say there's a lot of policyknobs in Kubernetes that the networking guyscould potentially take advantage of so it mightwork the other way. Are the network guys looking at Kubernetes saying hey, or are theynot yet that sophisticated but they would love, they'd love policy. Network guys write policy. Wouldn't you want-- >> Yeah, yeah, oh absolutely. It's actually one of thebiggest draws of using Kubernetes in our ecosystem. We've made heavy use ofapplying network policy down to the workload level which means that from a securityperspective, if I know that I'm transmittingdata between two different places and I've only openedup assets for that one application, for thatone particular use case, rather than saying well,I know that I'm running the same workload on thesame box and I got to open it up for everyoneon that box but maybe someone might use thatthing but maybe they won't and like worrying about stuff like that, it's like no, I can runa workload and I know that these are the only two end points that it can talk to. >> Oh, that's a relief. That's like, hey, we're done. >> So for them this is their panacea. I know exactly whatworkloads are doing exactly what on the network andwhat they're capable of so that's been-- >> That's real progress. That's progress. >> Oh, it's huge progress, yeah. And we've been able todo things that we used to not be able to do for years. >> Talk about the-- >> I just had a quicklittle question there. You mentioned you've gotten SREs. When did you pick that up asa term that you called there and how do you see if you talk a little bit to the skill set and the jobs of peoplethat you have inside. >> Bloomberg's a big companyso the terminology of it and what actuallyindividual teams are doing is probably a little bitvaried across the organization. It's been something that'scome in over probably the last two to three years at Bloomberg. In my organization, it wasactually really interesting 'cause when I started off with, you know, you read the Google book and whatever. What I did is I wentto the guys on my team that were going to becomethe SREs for the organization and I had them write thismanifesto about how we should build and deploy and managesoftware and I didn't tell them necessarily up front thatthis is what was going to happen but when they finishedwriting that and agreed that this is how thingsshould work and they argued for a while, I said, okay,now go build all the tooling to make this easy forpeople to do, all right. And that's what we, and thenthey've just been building off their tooling. Turns out when you're workingwith a lot of the tools and the CNTF and then with Kubernetes, that's actually not that hard. There's lots of thingsthere that are just easy when you get to that place and so that's the kind of journey we'vebeen on to really try to build that infrastructure andthey've done a good job. The engineers downstream of them the speed that they're able to develop and the assurance that there was a CVE forKubernetes two weeks ago and we patched it theafternoon the CVE came out. Being able to do that in anysort of company of scale is I've worked a lot ofbanking and stuff like that in my past and it's unheard of to be able to deploy things in that speed. >> And that's really, Imean this is the goodness of clouds, the goodnessof having that kind of consistency operationally. It's funny you use SRE,that's a Google term. It's a great term andyou've got developers, you got operations kindof working together now. That's the magic. Well Steven, thank you so much for sharing this great insight on theCUBE. Certainly great valuefor the folks watching. Lot of traction, a lot ofpeople, end users contributing and consuming Kubernetes,building around it. Great trend, it's really fun to watch. A lot of composable servicesup and down the stack so congratulations. Steve Bower, Data andAnalytics Infrastructure Lead at Bloomberg. This is theCUBE bringingyou all the action, sharing the data here at KubeCon. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back withmore after this short break. (electronic music)

>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back to Vegas. Guys. We're happy that you're here. Lisa Martin here covering with Dave Valante, Palo Alto Networks Ignite 22. We're at MGM Grand. This is our first day, Dave of two days of cube coverage. We've been having great conversations with the ecosystem with Palo Alto executives, with partners. One of the things that they have is unit 42. We're gonna be talking with them next about cyber intelligence. And the threat data that they get is >>Incredible. Yeah. They have all the data, they know what's going on, and of course things are changing. The state of play changes. Hold on a second. I got a text here. Oh, my Netflix account was frozen. Should I click on this link? Yeah. What do you think? Have you had a, it's, have you had a little bit more of that this holiday season? Yeah, definitely. >>Unbelievable, right? A lot of smishing going on. >>Yeah, they're very clever. >>Yeah, we're very pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the queue. Wendy Whitmore is here, the SVP of Unit 42. Welcome back, Wendy. Great to have >>You. Thanks Lisa. So >>Unit 42 created back in 2014. One of the things that I saw that you said in your keynote this morning or today was everything old is still around and it's co, it's way more prolific than ever. What are some of the things that Unit 42 is seeing these days with, with respect to cyber threats as the landscape has changed so much the last two years alone? >>You know, it, it has. So it's really interesting. I've been responding to these breaches for over two decades now, and I can tell you that there are a lot of new and novel techniques. I love that you already highlighted Smishing, right? In the opening gate. Right. Because that is something that a year ago, no one knew what that word was. I mean, we, it's probably gonna be invented this year, right? But that said, so many of the tactics that we have previously seen, when it comes to just general espionage techniques, right? Data act filtration, intellectual property theft, those are going on now more than ever. And you're not hearing about them as much in the news because there are so many other things, right? We're under the landscape of a major war going on between Russia and Ukraine of ransomware attacks, you know, occurring on a weekly basis. And so we keep hearing about those, but ultimately these nations aid actors are using that top cover, if you will, as a great distraction. It's almost like a perfect storm for them to continue conducting so much cyber espionage work that like we may not be feeling that today, but years down the road, they're, the work that they're doing today is gonna have really significant impact. >>Ransomware has become a household word in the last couple of years. I think even my mom knows what it is, to some degree. Yeah. But the threat actors are far more sophisticated than they've ever written. They're very motivated. They're very well funded. I think I've read a stat recently in the last year that there's a ransomware attack once every 11 seconds. And of course we only hear about the big ones. But that is a concern that goes all the way up to the board. >>Yeah. You know, we have a stat in our ransomware threat report that talks about how often victims are posted on leak sites. And I think it's once every seven minutes at this point that a new victim is posted. Meaning a victim has had their data, a victim organization had their data stolen and posted on some leak site in the attempt to be extorted. So that has become so common. One of the shifts that we've seen this year in particular and in recent months, you know, a year ago when I was at Ignite, which was virtual, we talked about quadruple extortion, meaning four different ways that these ransomware actors would go out and try to make money from these attacks in what they're doing now is often going to just one, which is, I don't even wanna bother with encrypting your data now, because that means that in order to get paid, I probably have to decrypt it. Right? That's a lot of work. It's time consuming. It's kind of painstaking. And so what they've really looked to do now is do the extortion where they simply steal the data and then threaten to post it on these leak sites, you know, release it other parts of the web and, and go from there. And so that's really a blending of these techniques of traditional cyber espionage with intellectual property theft. Wow. >>How trustworthy are those guys in terms of, I mean, these are hackers, right? In terms of it's really the, the hacker honor system, isn't it? I mean, if you get compromised like that, you really beholden to criminals. And so, you >>Know, so that's one of the key reasons why having the threat intelligence is so important, right? Understanding which group that you're dealing with and what their likelihood of paying is, what's their modus operandi. It's become even more important now because these groups switch teams more frequently than NFL trades, you know, free agents during the regular season, right? Or players become free agents. And that's because their infrastructure. So the, you know, infrastructure, the servers, the systems that they're using to conduct these attacks from is actually largely being disrupted more from law enforcement, international intelligence agencies working together with public private partnerships. So what they're doing is saying, okay, great. All that infrastructure that I just had now is, is burned, right? It's no longer effective. So then they'll disband a team and then they'll recruit a new team and it's constant like mixing and matching in players. >>All that said, even though that's highly dynamic, one of the other areas that they pride themselves on is customer service. So, and I think it's interesting because, you know, when I said they're not wanting to like do all the decryption? Yeah. Cuz that's like painful techni technical slow work. But on the customer service side, they will create these customer service portals immediately stand one up, say, you know, hey it's, it's like an Amazon, you know, if you've ever had to return a package on Amazon for example, and you need to click through and like explain, you know, Hey, I didn't receive this package. A portal window pops up, you start talking to either a bot or a live agent on the backend. In this case they're hu what appeared to be very much humans who are explaining to you exactly what happened, what they're asking for, super pleasant, getting back within minutes of a response. And they know that in order for them to get paid, they need to have good customer service because otherwise they're not going to, you know, have a business. How, >>So what's the state of play look like from between nation states, criminals and how, how difficult or not so difficult is it for you to identify? Do you have clear signatures? My understanding in with Solar Winds it was a little harder, but maybe help us understand and help our audience understand what the state of play is right now. >>One of the interesting things that I think is occurring, and I highlighted this this morning, is this idea of convergence. And so I'll break it down for one example relates to the type of malware or tools that these attackers use. So traditionally, if we looked at a nation state actor like China or Russia, they were very, very specific and very strategic about the types of victims that they were going to go after when they had zero day. So, you know, new, new malware out there, new vulnerabilities that could be exploited only by them because the rest of the world didn't know about it. They might have one organization that they would target that at, at most, a handful and all very strategic for their objective. They wanted to keep that a secret as long as possible. Now what we're seeing actually is those same attackers going towards one, a much larger supply chain. >>So, so lorenzen is a great example of that. The Hafnia attacks towards Microsoft Exchange server last year. All great examples of that. But what they're also doing is instead of using zero days as much, or you know, because those are expensive to build, they take a lot of time, a lot of funding, a lot of patience and research. What they're doing is using commercially available tools. And so there's a tool that our team identified earlier this year called Brute Rael, C4 or BRC four for short. And that's a tool that we now know that nation state actors are using. But just two weeks ago we invested a ransomware attack where the ransomware actor was using that same piece of tooling. So to your point, yak can get difficult for defenders when you're looking through and saying, well wait, they're all using some of the same tools right now and some of the same approaches when it comes to nation states, that's great for them because they can blend into the noise and it makes it harder to identify as >>Quickly. And, and is that an example of living off the land or is that B BRC four sort of a homegrown hacker tool? Is it, is it a, is it a commercial >>Off the shelf? So it's a tool that was actually, so you can purchase it, I believe it's about 2,500 US dollars for a license. It was actually created by a former Red teamer from a couple well-known companies in the industry who then decided, well hey, I built this tool for work, I'm gonna sell this. Well great for Red teamers that are, you know, legitimately doing good work, but not great now because they're, they built a, a strong tool that has the ability to hide amongst a, a lot of protocols. It can actually hide within Slack and teams to where you can't even see the data is being exfiltrated. And so there's a lot of concern. And then now the reality that it gets into the wrong hands of nation state actors in ransomware actors, one of the really interesting things about that piece of malware is it has a setting where you can change wallpaper. And I don't know if you know offhand, you know what that means, but you know, if that comes to mind, what you would do with it. Well certainly a nation state actor is never gonna do something like that, right? But who likes to do that are ransomware actors who can go in and change the background wallpaper on a desktop that says you've been hacked by XYZ organization and let you know what's going on. So pretty interesting, obviously the developer doing some work there for different parts of the, you know, nefarious community. >>Tremendous amount of sophistication that's gone on the last couple of years alone. I was just reading that Unit 42 is now a founding member of the Cyber Threat Alliance includes now more than 35 organizations. So you guys are getting a very broad picture of today's threat landscape. How can customers actually achieve cyber resilience? Is it achievable and how do you help? >>So I, I think it is achievable. So let me kind of parse out the question, right. So the Cyber Threat Alliance, the J C D C, the Cyber Safety Review Board, which I'm a member of, right? I think one of the really cool things about Palo Alto Networks is just our partnerships. So those are just a handful. We've got partnerships with over 200 organizations. We work closely with the Ukrainian cert, for example, sharing information, incredible information about like what's going on in the war, sharing technical details. We do that with Interpol on a daily basis where, you know, we're sharing information. Just last week the Africa cyber surge operation was announced where millions of nodes were taken down that were part of these larger, you know, system of C2 channels that attackers are using to conduct exploits and attacks throughout the world. So super exciting in that regard and it's something that we're really passionate about at Palo Alto Networks in terms of resilience, a few things, you know, one is visibility, so really having a, an understanding of in a real, as much of real time as possible, right? What's happening. And then it goes into how you, how can we decrease operational impact. So that's everything from network segmentation to wanna add the terms and phrases I like to use a lot is the win is really increasing the time it takes for the attackers to get their work done and decreasing the amount of time it takes for the defenders to get their work done, right? >>Yeah. I I call it increasing the denominator, right? And the ROI equation benefit over or value, right? Equals equals or benefit equals value over cost if you can increase the cost to go go elsewhere, right? Absolutely. And that's the, that's the game. Yeah. You mentioned Ukraine before, what have we learned from Ukraine? I, I remember I was talking to Robert Gates years ago, 2016 I think, and I was asking him, yeah, but don't we have the best cyber technology? Can't we attack? He said, we got the most to lose too. Yeah. And so what have we learned from, from Ukraine? >>Well, I, I think that's part of the key point there, right? Is you know, a great offense essentially can also be for us, you know, deterrent. So in that aspect we have as an, as a company and or excuse me, as a country, as a company as well, but then as partners throughout all parts of the world have really focused on increasing the intelligence sharing and specifically, you know, I mentioned Ukrainian cert. There are so many different agencies and other sorts throughout the world that are doing everything they can to share information to help protect human life there. And so what we've really been concerned with, with is, you know, what cyber warfare elements are going to be used there, not only how does that impact Ukraine, but how does it potentially spread out to other parts of the world critical infrastructure. So you've seen that, you know, I mentioned CS rrb, but cisa, right? >>CISA has done a tremendous job of continuously getting out information and doing everything they can to make sure that we are collaborating at a commercial level. You know, we are sharing information and intelligence more than ever before. So partners like Mania and CrowdStrike, our Intel teams are working together on a daily basis to make sure that we're able to protect not only our clients, but certainly if we've got any information relevant that we can share that as well. And I think if there's any silver lining to an otherwise very awful situation, I think the fact that is has accelerated intelligence sharing is really positive. >>I was gonna ask you about this cause I think, you know, 10 or so years ago, there was a lot of talk about that, but the industry, you know, kind of kept things to themselves, you know, a a actually tried to monetize some of that private data. So that's changing is what I'm hearing from you >>More so than ever more, you know, I've, I mentioned I've been in the field for 20 years. You know, it, it's tough when you have a commercial business that relies on, you know, information to, in order to pay people's salaries, right? I think that has changed quite a lot. We see the benefit of just that continuous sharing. There are, you know, so many more walls broken down between these commercial competitors, but also the work on the public private partnership side has really increased some of those relationships. Made it easier. And you know, I have to give a whole lot of credit and mention sisa, like the fact that during log four J, like they had GitHub repositories, they were using Slack, they were using Twitter. So the government has really started pushing forward with a lot of the newer leadership that's in place to say, Hey, we're gonna use tools and technology that works to share and disseminate information as quickly as we can. Right? That's fantastic. That's helping everybody. >>We knew that every industry, no, nobody's spared of this. But did you notice in the last couple of years, any industries in particular that are more vulnerable? Like I think of healthcare with personal health information or financial services, any industries kind of jump out as being more susceptible than others? >>So I think those two are always gonna be at the forefront, right? Financial services and healthcare. But what's been really top of mind is critical infrastructure, just making sure right? That our water, our power, our fuel, so many other parts of right, the ecosystem that go into making sure that, you know, we're keeping, you know, houses heated during the winter, for example, that people have fresh water. Those are extremely critical. And so that is really a massive area of focus for the industry right now. >>Can I come back to public-private partnerships? My question is relates to regulations because the public policy tends to be behind tech, the technology industry as an understatement. So when you take something like GDPR is the obvious example, but there are many, many others, data sovereignty, you can't move the data. Are are, are, is there tension between your desire as our desire as an industry to share data and government's desire to keep data private and restrict that data sharing? How is that playing out? How do you resolve that? >>Well I think there have been great strides right in each of those areas. So in terms of regulation when it comes to breaches there, you know, has been a tendency in the past to do victim shaming, right? And for organizations to not want to come forward because they're concerned about the monetary funds, right? I think there's been tremendous acceleration. You're seeing that everywhere from the fbi, from cisa, to really working very closely with organizations to, to have a true impact. So one example would be a ransomware attack that occurred. This was for a client of ours within the United States and we had a very close relationship with the FBI at that local field office and made a phone call. This was 7:00 AM Eastern time. And this was an organization that had this breach gone public, would've made worldwide news. There would've been a very big impact because it would've taken a lot of their systems offline. >>Within the 30 minutes that local FBI office was on site said, we just saw this piece of malware last week, we have a decryptor for it from another organization who shared it with us. Here you go. And within 60 minutes, every system was back up and running. Our teams were able to respond and get that disseminated quickly. So efforts like that, I think the government has made a tremendous amount of headway into improving relationships. Is there always gonna be some tension between, you know, competing, you know, organizations? Sure. But I think that we're doing a whole lot to progress it, >>But governments will make exceptions in that case. Especially for something as critical as the example that you just gave and be able to, you know, do a reach around, if you will, on, on onerous regulations that, that ne aren't helpful in that situation, but certainly do a lot of good in terms of protecting privacy. >>Well, and I think there used to be exceptions made typically only for national security elements, right? And now you're seeing that expanding much more so, which I think is also positive. Right. >>Last question for you as we are wrapping up time here. What can organizations really do to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to, to threat actors? We've got internal external threats. What can they really do to just be ahead of that curve? Is that possible? >>Well, it is now, it's not an easy task so I'm not gonna, you know, trivialize it. But I think that one, having relationships with right organizations in advance always a good thing. That's a, everything from certainly a commercial relationships, but also your peers, right? There's all kinds of fantastic industry spec specific information sharing organizations. I think the biggest thing that impacts is having education across your executive team and testing regularly, right? Having a plan in place, testing it. And it's not just the security pieces of it, right? As security responders, we live these attacks every day, but it's making sure that your general counsel and your head of operations and your CEO knows what to do. Your board of directors, do they know what to do when they receive a phone call from Bloomberg, for example? Are they supposed supposed to answer? Do your employees know that those kind of communications in advance and training can be really critical and make or break a difference in an attack. >>That's a great point about the testing but also the communication that it really needs to be company wide. Everyone at every level needs to know how to react. Wendy, it's been so great having, >>Wait one last question. Sure. Do you have a favorite superhero growing up? >>Ooh, it's gotta be Wonder Woman. Yeah, >>Yeah, okay. Yeah, so cuz I'm always curious, there's not a lot of women in, in security in cyber. How'd you get into it? And many cyber pros like wanna save the world? >>Yeah, no, that's a great question. So I joined the Air Force, you know, I, I was a special agent doing computer crime investigations and that was a great job. And I learned about that from, we had an alumni day and all these alumni came in from the university and they were in flight suits and combat gear. And there was one woman who had long blonde flowing hair and a black suit and high heels and she was carrying a gun. What did she do? Because that's what I wanted do. >>Awesome. Love it. We >>Blonde >>Wonder Woman. >>Exactly. Wonder Woman. Wendy, it's been so great having you on the program. We, we will definitely be following unit 42 and all the great stuff that you guys are doing. Keep up the good >>Work. Thanks so much Lisa. Thank >>You. Day our pleasure. For our guest and Dave Valante, I'm Lisa Martin, live in Las Vegas at MGM Grand for Palo Alto Ignite, 22. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Hey guys. Welcome back to the Cubes coverage of Ansible Fast 2022. This is day two of our wall to wall coverage. Lisa Martin here with John Ferer. John, we're seeing this world where companies are saying if we can't automate it, we need to, The automation market is transforming. There's been a lot of buzz about that. A lot of technical chops here at Ansible Fest. >>Yeah, I mean, we've got a great guest here coming on Cuba alumni, Dean Newman, future room. He travels every event he's got. He's got his nose to the grindstone ear to the ground. Great analysis. I mean, we're gonna get into why it's important. How does Ansible fit into the big picture? It's really gonna be a great segment. The >>Board do it well, John just did my job for me about, I'll introduce him again. Daniel Newman, one of our alumni is Back Principal Analyst at Future and Research. Great to have you back on the cube. >>Yeah, it's good to join you. Excited to be back in Chicago. I don't know if you guys knew this, but for 40 years, this was my hometown. Now I don't necessarily brag about that anymore. I'm, I live in Austin now. I'm a proud Texan, but I did grow up here actually out in the west suburbs. I got off the plane, I felt the cold air, and I almost turned around and said, Does this thing go back? Yeah. Cause I'm, I've, I've grown thin skin. It did not take me long. I, I like the warm, Come on, >>I'm the saying, I'm from California and I got off the plane Monday. I went, Whoa, I need a coat. And I was in Miami a week ago and it was 85. >>Oh goodness. >>Crazy. So you just flew in. Talk about what's going on, your take on, on Ansible. We've talked a lot with the community, with partners, with customers, a lot of momentum. The flywheel of the community is going around and round and round. What are some of your perspectives that you see? >>Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's you know, I'm gonna take a quick step back. We're entering an era where companies are gonna have to figure out how to do more with less. Okay? We've got exponential data growth, we've got more architectural complexity than ever before. Companies are trying to discern how to deal with many different environments. And just at a macro level, Red Hat is one of the companies that is almost certainly gonna be part of this multi-cloud hybrid cloud era. So that should initially give a lot of confidence to the buying group that are looking at how to automate their environments. You're automating workflows, but really with, with Ansible, we're focused on automating it, automating the network. So as companies are kind of dig out, we're entering this recessionary period, Okay, we're gonna call it what it is. The first thing that they're gonna look at is how do we tech our way out of it? >>I had a wonderful one-on-one conversation with ServiceNow ceo, Bill McDermott, and we saw ServiceNow was in focus this morning in the initial opening session. This is the integration, right? Ansible integrating with ServiceNow. What we need to see is infrastructure automation, layers and applications working in concert to basically enable enterprises to be up and running all the time. Let's first fix the problems that are most common. Let's, let's automate 'em, let's script them. And then at some point, let's have them self resolving, which we saw at the end with Project Wisdom. So as I see it, automation is that layer that enterprises, boards, technologists, all can agree upon are basically here's something that can make our business more efficient, more profitable, and it's gonna deal with this short term downturn in a way that tech is actually gonna be the answer. Just like Bill and I said, let's tech our way out of it. >>If you look at the Red Hat being bought by ibm, you see Project Wisdom Project, not a product, it's a project. Project Wisdom is the confluence of research and practitioners kind of coming together with ai. So bringing AI power to the Ansible is interesting. Red Hat, Linux, Rel OpenShift, I mean, Red Hat's kind of position, isn't it? Kind of be in that right spot where a puck might be coming maybe. I mean, what do you think? >>Yeah, as analysts, we're really good at predicting the, the recent past. It's a joke I always like to make, but Red Hat's been building toward the future. I think for some time. Project Wisdom, first of all, I was very encouraged with it. One of the things that many people in the market probably have commented on is how close is IBM in Red Hat? Now, again, it's a $34 billion acquisition that was made, but boy, the cultures of these two companies couldn't be more different. And of course, Red Hat kind of carries this, this sort of middle ground layer where they provide a lot of value in services to companies that maybe don't use IBM at, at, for the public cloud especially. This was a great indication of how you can take the power of IBM's research, which of course has some of the world's most prolific data scientists, engineers, building things for the future. >>You know, you see things like yesterday they launched a, you know, an AI solution. You know, they're building chips, semiconductors, and technologies that are gonna power the future. They're building quantum. Long story short, they have these really brilliant technologists here that could be adding value to Red Hat. And I don't know that the, the world has fully been able to appreciate that. So when, when they got on stage and they kind of say, Here's how IBM is gonna help power the next generation, I was immediately very encouraged by the fact that the two companies are starting to show signs of how they can collaborate to offer value to their customers. Because of course, as John kind of started off with, his question is, they've kind of been where the puck is going. Open source, Linux hybrid cloud, This is the future. In the future. Every company's multi-cloud. And I said in a one-on-one meeting this morning, every company is going to probably have workloads on every cloud, especially large enterprises. >>Yeah. And I think that the secret's gonna be how do you make that evolve? And one of the things that's coming out of the industry over the years, and looking back as historians, we would say, gotta have standards. Well, with cloud, now people standards might slow things down. So you're gonna start to figure out how does the community and the developers are thinking it'll be the canary in the coal mine. And I'd love to get your reaction on that, because we got Cuban next week. You're seeing people kind of align and try to win the developers, which, you know, I always laugh cuz like, you don't wanna win, you want, you want them on your team, but you don't wanna win them. It's like a, it's like, so developers will decide, >>Well, I, I think what's happening is there are multiple forces that are driving product adoption. And John, getting the developers to support the utilization and adoption of any sort of stack goes a long way. We've seen how sticky it can be, how sticky it is with many of the public cloud pro providers, how sticky it is with certain applications. And it's gonna be sticky here in these interim layers like open source automation. And Red Hat does have a very compelling developer ecosystem. I mean, if you sat in the keynote this morning, I said, you know, if you're not a developer, some of this stuff would've been fairly difficult to understand. But as a developer you saw them laughing at jokes because, you know, what was it the whole part about, you know, it didn't actually, the ping wasn't a success, right? And everybody started laughing and you know, I, I was sitting next to someone who wasn't technical and, and you know, she kinda goes, What, what was so funny? >>I'm like, well, he said it worked. Do you see that? It said zero data trans or whatever that was. So, but if I may just really quickly, one, one other thing I did wanna say about Project Wisdom, John, that the low code and no code to the full stack developer is a continuum that every technology company is gonna have to think deeply about as we go to the future. Because the people that tend to know the process that needs to be automated tend to not be able to code it. And so we've seen every automation company on the planet sort of figuring out and how to address this low code, no code environment. I think the power of this partnership between IBM Research and Red Hat is that they have an incredibly deep bench of capabilities to do things like, like self-training. Okay, you've got so much data, such significant size models and accuracy is a problem, but we need systems that can self teach. They need to be able self-teach, self learn, self-heal so that we can actually get to the crux of what automation is supposed to do for us. And that's supposed to take the mundane out and enable those humans that know how to code to work on the really difficult and hard stuff because the automation's not gonna replace any of that stuff anytime soon. >>So where do you think looking at, at the partnership and the evolution of it between IBM research and Red Hat, and you're saying, you know, they're, they're, they're finally getting this synergy together. How is it gonna affect the future of automation and how is it poised to give them a competitive advantage in the market? >>Yeah, I think the future or the, the competitive space is that, that is, is ecosystems and integration. So yesterday you heard, you know, Red Hat Ansible focusing on a partnership with aws. You know, this week I was at Oracle Cloud world and they're talking about running their database in aws. And, and so I'm kind of going around to get to the answer to your question, but I think collaboration is sort of the future of growth and innovation. You need multiple companies working towards the same goal to put gobs of resources, that's the technical term, gobs of resources towards doing really hard things. And so Ansible has been very successful in automating and securing and focusing on very certain specific workloads that need to be automated, but we need more and there's gonna be more data created. The proliferation, especially the edge. So you saw all this stuff about Rockwell, How do you really automate the edge at scale? You need large models that are able to look and consume a ton of data that are gonna be continuously learning, and then eventually they're gonna be able to deliver value to these companies at scale. IBM plus Red Hat have really great resources to drive this kind of automation. Having said that, I see those partnerships with aws, with Microsoft, with ibm, with ServiceNow. It's not one player coming to the table. It's a lot of players. They >>Gotta be Switzerland. I mean they have the Switzerland. I mean, but the thing about the Amazon deal is like that marketplace integration essentially puts Ansible once a client's in on, on marketplace and you get the central on the same bill. I mean, that's gonna be a money maker for Ansible. I >>Couldn't agree more, John. I think being part of these public cloud marketplaces is gonna be so critical and having Ansible land and of course AWS largest public cloud by volume, largest marketplace today. And my opinion is that partnership will be extensible to the other public clouds over time. That just makes sense. And so you start, you know, I think we've learned this, John, you've done enough of these interviews that, you know, you start with the biggest, with the highest distribution and probability rates, which in this case right now is aws, but it'll land on in Azure, it'll land in Google and it'll continue to, to grow. And that kind of adoption, streamlining make it consumption more consumable. That's >>Always, I think, Red Hat and Ansible, you nailed it on that whole point about multicloud, because what happens then is why would I want to alienate a marketplace audience to use my product when it could span multiple environments, right? So you saw, you heard that Stephanie yesterday talk about they, they didn't say multiple clouds, multiple environments. And I think that is where I think I see this layer coming in because some companies just have to work on all clouds. That's the way it has to be. Why wouldn't you? >>Yeah. Well every, every company will probably end up with some workloads in every cloud. I just think that is the fate. Whether it's how we consume our SaaS, which a lot of people don't think about, but it always tends to be running on another hyperscale public cloud. Most companies tend to be consuming some workloads from every cloud. It's not always direct. So they might have a single control plane that they tend to lead the way with, but that is only gonna continue to change. And every public cloud company seems to be working on figuring out what their niche is. What is the one thing that sort of drives whether, you know, it is, you know, traditional, we know the commoditization of traditional storage network compute. So now you're seeing things like ai, things like automation, things like the edge collaboration tools, software being put into the, to the forefront because it's a different consumption model, it's a different margin and economic model. And then of course it gives competitive advantages. And we've seen that, you know, I came back from Google Cloud next and at Google Cloud next, you know, you can see they're leaning into the data AI cloud. I mean, that is their focus, like data ai. This is how we get people to come in and start using Google, who in most cases, they're probably using AWS or Microsoft today. >>It's a great specialty cloud right there. That's a big use case. I can run data on Google and run something on aws. >>And then of course you've got all kinds of, and this is a little off topic, but you got sovereignty, compliance, regulatory that tends to drive different clouds over, you know, global clouds like Tencent and Alibaba. You know, if your workloads are in China, >>Well, this comes back down at least to the whole complexity issue. I mean, it has to get complex before it gets easier. And I think that's what we're seeing companies opportunities like Ansible to be like, Okay, tame, tame the complexity. >>Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean, look, when I was watching the demonstrations today, my take is there's so many kind of simple, repeatable and mundane tasks in everyday life that enterprises need to, to automate. Do that first, you know? Then the second thing is working on how do you create self-healing, self-teaching, self-learning, You know, and, and I realize I'm a little broken of a broken record at this, but these are those first things to fix. You know, I know we want to jump to the future where we automate every task and we have multi-term conversational AI that is booking our calendars and driving our cars for us. But in the first place, we just need to say, Hey, the network's down. Like, let's make sure that we can quickly get access back to that network again. Let's make sure that we're able to reach our different zones and locations. Let's make sure that robotic arm is continually doing the thing it's supposed to be doing on the schedule that it's been committed to. That's first. And then we can get to some of these really intensive deep metaverse state of automation that we talk about. Self-learning, data replication, synthetic data. I'm just gonna throw terms around. So I sound super smart. >>In your customer conversations though, from an looking at the automation journey, are you finding most of them, or some percentage is, is wanting to go directly into those really complex projects rather than starting with the basics? >>I don't know that you're, you're finding that the customers want to do that? I think it's the architecture that often ends up being a problem is we as, as the vendor side, will tend to talk about the most complex problems that they're able to solve before companies have really started solving the, the immediate problems that are before them. You know, it's, we talk about, you know, the metaphor of the cloud is a great one, but we talk about the cloud, like it's ubiquitous. Yeah. But less than 30% of our workloads are in the public cloud. Automation is still in very early days and in many industries it's fairly nascent. And doing things like self-healing networks is still something that hasn't even been able to be deployed on an enterprise-wide basis, let alone at the industrial layer. Maybe at the company's on manufacturing PLAs or in oil fields. Like these are places that have difficult to reach infrastructure that needs to be running all the time. We need to build systems and leverage the power of automation to keep that stuff up and running. That's, that's just business value, which by the way is what makes the world go running. Yeah. Awesome. >>A lot of customers and users are struggling to find what's the value in automating certain process, What's the ROI in it? How do you help them get there so that they understand how to start, but truly to make it a journey that is a success. >>ROI tends to be a little bit nebulous. It's one of those things I think a lot of analysts do. Things like TCO analysis Yeah. Is an ROI analysis. I think the businesses actually tend to know what the ROI is gonna be because they can basically look at something like, you know, when you have an msa, here's the downtime, right? Business can typically tell you, you know, I guarantee you Amazon could say, Look for every second of downtime, this is how much commerce it costs us. Yeah. A company can generally say, if it was, you know, we had the energy, the windmills company, like they could say every minute that windmill isn't running, we're creating, you know, X amount less energy. So there's a, there's a time value proposition that companies can determine. Now the question is, is about the deployment. You know, we, I've seen it more nascent, like cybersecurity can tend to be nascent. >>Like what does a breach cost us? Well there's, you know, specific costs of actually getting the breach cured or paying for the cybersecurity services. And then there's the actual, you know, ephemeral costs of brand damage and of risks and customer, you know, negative customer sentiment that potentially comes out of it. With automation, I think it's actually pretty well understood. They can look at, hey, if we can do this many more cycles, if we can keep our uptime at this rate, if we can reduce specific workforce, and I'm always very careful about this because I don't believe automation is about replacement or displacement, but I do think it is about up-leveling and it is about helping people work on things that are complex problems that machines can't solve. I mean, said that if you don't need to put as many bodies on something that can be immediately returned to the organization's bottom line, or those resources can be used for something more innovative. So all those things are pretty well understood. Getting the automation to full deployment at scale, though, I think what often, it's not that roi, it's the timeline that gets misunderstood. Like all it projects, they tend to take longer. And even when things are made really easy, like with what Project Wisdom is trying to do, semantically enable through low code, no code and the ability to get more accuracy, it just never tends to happen quite as fast. So, but that's not an automation problem, That's just the crux of it. >>Okay. What are some of the, the next things on your plate? You're quite a, a busy guy. We, you, you were at Google, you were at Oracle, you're here today. What are some of the next things that we can expect from Daniel Newman? >>Oh boy, I moved Really, I do move really quickly and thank you for that. Well, I'm very excited. I'm taking a couple of work personal days. I don't know if you're a fan, but F1 is this weekend. I'm the US Grand Prix. Oh, you're gonna Austin. So I will be, I live in Austin. Oh. So I will be in Austin. I will be at the Grand Prix. It is work because it, you know, I'm going with a number of our clients that have, have sponsorships there. So I'll be spending time figuring out how the data that comes off of these really fun cars is meaningfully gonna change the world. I'll actually be talking to Splunk CEO at the, at the race on Saturday morning. But yeah, I got a lot of great things. I got a, a conversation coming up with the CEO of Twilio next week. We got a huge week of earnings ahead and so I do a lot of work on that. So I'll be on Bloomberg next week with Emily Chang talking about Microsoft and Google. Love talking to Emily, but just as much love being here on, on the queue with you >>Guys. Well we like to hear that. Who you're rooting for F one's your favorite driver. I, >>I, I like Lando. Do you? I'm Norris. I know it's not necessarily a fan favorite, but I'm a bit of a McLaren guy. I mean obviously I have clients with Oracle and Red Bull with Ball Common Ferrari. I've got Cly Splunk and so I have clients in all. So I'm cheering for all of 'em. And on Sunday I'm actually gonna be in the Williams Paddock. So I don't, I don't know if that's gonna gimme me a chance to really root for anything, but I'm always, always a big fan of the underdog. So maybe Latifi. >>There you go. And the data that comes off the how many central unbeliev, the car, it's crazy's. Such a scientific sport. Believable. >>We could have Christian, I was with Christian Horner yesterday, the team principal from Reside. Oh yeah, yeah. He was at the Oracle event and we did a q and a with him and with the CMO of, it's so much fun. F1 has been unbelievable to watch the momentum and what a great, you know, transitional conversation to to, to CX and automation of experiences for fans as the fan has grown by hundreds of percent. But just to circle back full way, I was very encouraged with what I saw today. Red Hat, Ansible, IBM Strong partnership. I like what they're doing in their expanded ecosystem. And automation, by the way, is gonna be one of the most robust investment areas over the next few years, even as other parts of tech continue to struggle that in cyber security. >>You heard it here. First guys, investment in automation and cyber security straight from two analysts. I got to sit between. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, Ansible Fest 22. John and I will be back after a short break. SO'S stick around.

>> From the theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis", with Dave Vellante. >> The recent security breach of an Okta third party supplier has been widely reported. The criticisms of Okta's response have been harsh, and the impact on Okta's value has been obvious, investors shaved about $6 billion off the company's market cap during the week the hack was made public. We believe Okta's claim that the customer technical impact was, "Near zero," may be semantically correct. However, based on customer data, we feel Okta has a blind spot. There are customer ripple effects that require clear action which are missed in Okta's public statements, in our view. Okta's product portfolio remains solid, it's a clear leader in the identity space. But in our view, one part of the long journey back to credibility requires Okta to fully understand and recognize the true scope of this breach on its customers. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon "CUBE Insights", powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we welcome our ETR colleague, Erik Bradley, to share new data from the community. Erik, welcome. >> Thank you, Dave, always enjoy being on the show, particularly when we get to talk about a topic that's not being well covered in the mainstream media in my opinion. >> Yeah, I agree, you've got some new data, and we're going to share some of that today. Let's first review the timeline of this hack. On January 20th this year, Okta got an alert that something was amiss at one of its partners, a company called Sitel, that provides low-level contact center support for Okta. The next day, Sitel retained a forensic firm to investigate, which was completed, that investigation was completed on February 28th. A report dated March 10th was created, and Okta received a summary of that from Sitel on March 17th. Five days later, Lapsus$ posted the infamous screenshots on Twitter. And later that day, sheesh, Okta got the full report from Sitel, and then responded publicly. Then the media frenzy in the back and forth ensued. So Erik, you know, there's so much wrong with this timeline, it's been picked apart by the media. But I will say this, what appeared to be a benign incident and generally has turned into a PR disaster for Okta, and I imagine Sitel as well. Who I reached out to by the way, but they did not provide a comment, whereas Okta did. We'll share that later. I mean, where do we start on this, Erik? >> It's a great question, "Where do we start?" As you know, our motto here is opinions only exist due to a lack of data, so I'm going to start with the data. What we were able to do is because we had a survey that was in the field when the news broke, is that we were able to observe the data in realtime. So we sequestered the data up until that moment when it was announced, so before March 23rd and then after March 23rd. And although most of the responses came in prior, so it wasn't as much of an end as we would've liked. It really was telling to see the difference of how the survey responses changed from before the breach was announced to after, and we can get into a little bit more- >> So let's... Sorry, sorry to interrupt, let's bring that up, let's look at some of that data. And as followers of this program know... Let me just set it up, Erik. Every quarter, ETR, they have a proprietary net score methodology to determine customer spending momentum, and that's what we're talking about here. Essentially measuring the net number of customers spending more on a particular product or platform. So apologize for interrupting, but you're on this data right here. >> Not at all. >> So take us through this. >> Yeah, so again, let's caveat. Okta is still a premier company in our work. Top five in overall security, not just in their niche, and they still remained extremely strong at the end of the survey. However, when you kind of look at that at a more of a micro analysis, what you noticed was a true difference between before March 23rd and after. Overall, their cumulative net score or proprietary spending intention score that we use, was 56% prior. That dropped to 44% during the time period after, that is a significant drop. Even a little bit more telling, and again, small sample size, I want to be very fair about that. Before March 23rd, only three of our community members indicated any indication of replacing Okta. That number went to eight afterwards. So again, small number, but a big difference when you're talking about a percentage change. >> Yeah, so that's that sort of green line that was shown there. You know, not too damaging, but definitely a noticeable downturn with the caveat that it's a small end. But here's the thing that I love working with you, we didn't stop there. You went out, you talked to customers, I talked to a number of customers. You actually organized a panel. This week, Erik hosted a deep dive on the topic with CISOs. And we have, if we could bring up that next slide, Alex. These are some of the top CISOs in the community, and I'm going to just summarize the comments and then turn it over to you, Erik. The first one was really concerning, "We heard about this in the media," ooh, ooh, ouch. Next one, "Not a huge hit, but loss of trust." "We can't just shut Okta off like SolarWinds." So there's definitely a lock in effect there. "We may need to hire new people," i.e, "There's a business impact to us beyond the technical impact." "We're rethinking contract negotiations with Okta." And bottom line, "It's still a strong solution." "We're not really worried about our Okta environment, but this is a trust and communications issue." Erik, these are painful to read, and in the end of the day, Okta has to own this. Todd McKinnon did acknowledge this. As I said at the top, there are domino business impacts that Okta may not be seeing. What are your thoughts? >> There's a lot we're going to need to get into in a little bit, and I think you were spot on earlier, when McKinnon said there was no impact. And that's not actually true, there's a lot of peripheral, derivative impact that was brought up in our panel. Before we even did the panel though, I do want to say we went out quickly to about 20 customers and asked them if they were willing to give an opinion. And it was sort of split down the middle where about, you know, half of them were saying, "You know, this is okay. We're going to stand by 'em, Okta's the best in the industry." A few were cautious, "Opinion's unchanged, but we're going to take a look deeper." And then another 40% were just flat out negative. And again, small sample size, but you don't want to see that. It's indicative of reputational damage right away. That was what led us to say, "You know what, let's go do this panel." And as you know, from reading it and looking at the panel, well, a lot of topics were brought up about the derivative impact of it. And whether that's your own, you know, having to hire people to go look into your backend to deal with and manage Okta. Whether it's cyber insurance ramifications down the road, there's a lot of aspects that need to be discussed about this. >> Yeah now, so before I go on... And by the way, I've spent a fair amount of time just parsing, listening very carefully to Todd McKinnon's commentary. He did an interview with Emily Chang, it was quite useful. But before I go on, I reached out to Okta, and they were super responsive and I appreciate that. And I do believe they're taking this seriously, here's a statement they provided to theCUBE. Quote, "As a global leader in identity, we recognize the critical role Okta plays for our customers and our customers' end users. Okta has a culture of learning and improving, and we are taking the steps to prevent this from happening again. We know trust is earned, and building back our customers' trust in Okta through our actions and our ongoing support as their secure identity partner is our top priority." Okay, so look, you know, what are you going to say, right? I mean, I think they do own it. Again, the concern is the blind spots. So we put together this visual to try to explain how Okta is describing the impact, and maybe another way to look at it. So let me walk you through this. Here's a simple way in which organizations think about the impact of a breach. What's the probability of a breach, that's the vertical axis, and what's the impact on the horizontal. Now I feel as though business impact really is the financial, you know, condition. But we've narrowed this to map to Todd McKinnon's statements of the technical impact. And they've said the technical impact in terms of things customers need to do or change, is near zero, and that's the red dot that you see there. Look, the fact is, that Okta has more than 15,000 customers, and at most, 366 were directly impacted by this. That's less than 3% of the base, and it's probably less than that, they're just being conservative. And the technical impact which Todd McKinnon described in an interview, again, with Emily Chang, was near zero in terms of actions the customers had to take on things like reporting and changes and remediation. Basically negligible. But based on the customer feedback outside of that 366, that's what we're calling that blind spot and that bracket. And then we list the items that we are hearing from customers on things that they have to do now, despite that minimal exposure. Erik, this is new information that we've uncovered through the ETR process, and there's a long list of collateral impacts that you just referred to before, actions that customers have to take, right? >> Yeah, there's a lot, and the panel really brought that to life even more than I expected to be quite honest. First of all, you're right, most of them believe that this was a minimal impact. The true damage here was reputational, and the derivatives that come from it. We had one panelist say that they now have to go hire people, because, and I hate to say this, but Okta isn't known for their best professional support. So they have to go get people now in to kind of do that themselves and manage that. That's obviously not the easiest thing to do in this environment. We had other ones express concern about, "Hey I'm an Okta customer. When I have to do my cyber insurance renewal, is my policy going to go up? Is my premium going to go up?" And it's not something that they even want to have to handle, but they do. There were a lot of concerns. One particular person didn't think the impact was minimal, and I just think it's worth bringing up. There was no demand for ransom here. So there were only two and a half percent of Okta customers that were hit, but we don't know what the second play is, right, this could just be stage one. And I think that there was one particular person on the panel who truly believes that, that could be the case, that this was just the first step. And in his opinion, there wasn't anything specific about those 366 customers that made him feel like the bad actor was targeting them. So he does believe that this might be a step one of a step two situation. Now that's a, you know, bit of an alarmist opinion and the rest of the panel didn't really echo it, but it is something that's kind of worth bringing up out there. >> Well, you know, it just pays to be paranoid. I mean, you know, it was reported that supposedly, this hack was done by a 16-year-old in England, out of his, you know, mother's house, but who knows? You know, other actors might have paid that individual to see what they could do. It could have been a little bit of reconnaissance, throw the pawn in there and see how, you know, what the response is like. So I want to parse some of Todd McKinnon's statements from that Bloomberg interview. Look, we've always, you and I both have been impressed with Okta, and Todd McKinnon's management. His decisions, execution, leadership, super impressive individual. You know, big fans of the company. And in the interview, it looked like (chuckles) the guy hadn't slept in three weeks, so really you have to feel for him. But I think there are some statements that have to be unpacked. The first one, McKinnon took responsibility and talked about how they'll be transparent about steps they're taking in the future to avoid you know, similar problems. We talked about the near-zero technical impact, we don't need to go there anymore. But Erik, the two things that struck me as communication misfires were the last two. Especially the penultimate statement there, quote, "The competitor product was at fault for this breach." You know, by the way, I believe this to be true. Evidently, Sitel was not using Okta as its identity access platform. You know, we're all trying to figure out who that is. I can tell you it definitely was not CyberArk, we're still digging to find out who. But you know, you can't say in my view, "We are taking responsibility," and then later say it was the competitor's fault. And I know that's not what he meant, but that's kind of how it came across. And even if it's true, you just don't say that later in a conversation after saying that, "We own it." Now on the last point, love your thoughts on this, Erik? My first reaction was Okta's throwing Sitel under the bus. You know, Okta's asking for forgiveness from its customers, but it just shot its partner, and I kind of get it. This shows that they're taking action but I would've preferred something like, "Look, we've suspended our use of Sitel for the time being pending a more detailed review. We've shut down that relationship to block any exposures. Our focus right now is on customers, and we'll take a look at that down the road." But I have to say in looking at the timeline, it looks like Sitel did hide the ball a little bit, and so you can't blame 'em. And you know, what are your thoughts on that? >> Well, I'll go back to my panelists again, who unanimously agreed this was a masterclass on how not to handle crisis management. And I do feel for 'em, they're a fantastic management team. The acquisition of Auth0 alone, was just such a brilliant move that you have to kind of wonder what went wrong here, they clearly were blindsided. I agree with you that Sitel was not forthcoming quickly enough, and I have a feeling that, that's what got them in this position, in a bad PR. However, you can't go ahead and fire your partner and then turn around and ask other people not to fire you. Particularly until a very thorough investigation and a root cause analysis has been released to everyone. And the customers that I have spoken to don't believe that, that is done yet. Now, when I ask them directly, "Would you consider leaving Okta?" Their answers were, "No, it is not easy to rip and replace, and we're not done doing our due diligence." So it's interesting that Okta's customers are giving them that benefit of the doubt, but we haven't seen it, you know, flow the other way with Okta's partner. >> Yeah, and that's why I would've preferred a different public posture, because who knows? I mean, is Sitel the only partner that's not using Okta as its identity management, who knows? I'd like to learn more about that. And to your point, you know, maybe Okta's got to vertically integrate here and start, you know, supporting the lower level stuff directly itself, you know, and/or tightening up those partnerships. Now of course, the impact on Okta obviously has been really serious, big hit on the stock. You know, they're piling on inflation and quantitative tightening and rate hikes. But the real damage, as we've said, is trust and reputation, which Okta has earned, and now it has to work hard to earn back. And it's unfortunate. Look, Okta was founded in 2009 and in over a decade, you know, by my count, there have been no major incidents that are obvious. And we've seen the damage that hackers can do by going after the digital supply chain and third and fourth party providers. You know, rules on disclosure is still not tight and that maybe is part of the problem here. Perhaps the new law The House just sent over to President Biden, is going to help. But the point, Erik, is Okta is not alone here. It feels like they got what looked like a benign alert. Sitel wasn't fully transparent, and Okta is kind of fumbling on the comms, which creates this spiraling effect. Look, we're going to have to wait for the real near-term and midterm impacts, but longterm, I personally believe Okta is going to be fine. But they're going to have to sacrifice some margin possibly in the near to midterm, and go through more pain to regain the loyalty of its customers. And I really would like to hear from Okta that they understand that customers, the impact of this breach to customers, actually does go beyond the 366 that were possibly compromised. Erik, I'll give you the final word. >> Yeah, there's a couple of things there if I can have a moment, and yes, Okta... Well, there was a great quote, one of the guys said, "Okta's built like a tank, but they just gave the keys to a 16 year old valet." So he said, "There is some concern here." But yes, they are best of breed, they are the leader, but there is some concern. And every one of the guys I spoke to, all CISOs, said, "This is going to come up at renewal time. At a minimum, this is leverage. I have to ask them to audit their third parties and their partners. I have to bring this up when it comes time." And then the other one that's a little bit of a concern is data-wise. We saw Ping Identity jump big, from 9% net score to 24% net score. Don't know if it's causative or correlated, but it did happen. Another thing to be concerned about out there, is Microsoft is making absolutely massive strides in security. And all four of the panelists said, "Hey, I've got an E5 license, why don't I get the most out of it? I'm at least going to look." So for Okta to say, you know, "Hey, there's no impact here," it's just not true, there is an impact, they're saying what they need to say. But there's more to this, you know, their market cap definitely got hit. But you know, I think over time if the market stabilized, we could see that recover. It's a great management team, but they did just open the door for a big, big player like Microsoft. And you and I also both know that there's a lot of emerging names out there too, that would like to, you know, take a little bit of that share. >> And you know, but here's the thing, I want to keep going here for a minute. Microsoft got hit by lapses, Nvidia got hit by lapses. But I think, Erik, I feel like people, "Oh yeah, Microsoft, they get hit all the time." They're kind of used to it with Microsoft, right? So that's why I'm saying, it's really interesting here. Customers want to consolidate their security portfolio and the number of tools that they have, you know. But then you look at something like this and you say, "Okay, we're narrowing the blast radius. You know, maybe we have to rethink that and that creates more complexity," and so it's a very complicated situation. But you know, your point about Microsoft is ironic, right. Because you know, when you see Microsoft, Amazon, you know, customers get hit all the time and it's oftentimes the fault of the customer, or the partner. And so it seems like, again, coming back to the comms of this, is that really is the one thing that they just didn't get right. >> Yeah, the biggest takeaway from this without a doubt is it's not the impact of the breach, it was the impact of their delay and how they handled it and how they managed it. That's through the course of 25 CISOs I've spoken to now, that's unanimous. It's not about that this was a huge damaging hit, but the damage really came from their reaction or lack thereof. >> Yeah, and it's unfortunate, 'cause it feels like a lot of it was sort of, I want to say out of their control because obviously they could have audited the partners. But still, I feel like they got thrown a curve ball that they really had a, you know, difficult time, you know, parsing through that. All right, hey, we got to leave it there for now. Thank you, Erik Bradley, appreciate you coming on, It's always a pleasure to have you >> Always good talking to you too, Dave, thanks a lot. >> ETR team, you guys are amazing, do some great work. I want to thank Stephanie Chan, who helps me with background research for "Breaking Analysis". Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, help get the word out, as do some others. Alex Myerson on production, Alex, thank you. And Rob Hof, is our EIC at SiliconANGLE. Remember, all these episodes, they are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search, "Breaking Analysis podcast." I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Check out etr.ai, it's the best in the business for real customer data real-time, near real-time, awesome platform. You can reach out to me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com, or @DVellante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. This is Dave Vellante, for Erik Bradley, and "theCUBE Insights", powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, be well, and we'll see you next time. (bright music)

>>Everyone wants a cloud operating model. Since the introduction of the modern cloud. Last decade, the entire technology landscape has changed. We've learned a lot from the hyperscalers, especially from AWS. Now, one thing is certain in the technology business. It's so competitive. Then if a faster, better, cheaper idea comes along, the industry will move quickly to adopt it. They'll add their unique value and then they'll bring solutions to the market. And that's precisely what's happening throughout the technology industry because of cloud. And one of the best examples is Amazon's nitro. That's AWS has custom built hypervisor that delivers on the promise of more efficiently using resources and expanding things like processor, optionality for customers. It's a secret weapon for Amazon. As, as we, as we wrote last year, every infrastructure company needs something like nitro to compete. Why do we say this? Well, Wiki Bon our research arm estimates that nearly 30% of CPU cores in the data center are wasted. >>They're doing work that they weren't designed to do well, specifically offloading networking, storage, and security tasks. So if you can eliminate that waste, you can recapture dollars that drop right to the bottom line. That's why every company needs a nitro like solution. As a result of these developments, customers are rethinking networks and how they utilize precious compute resources. They can't, or won't put everything into the public cloud for many reasons. That's one of the tailwinds for tier two cloud service providers and why they're growing so fast. They give options to customers that don't want to keep investing in building out their own data centers, and they don't want to migrate all their workloads to the public cloud. So these providers and on-prem customers, they want to be more like hyperscalers, right? They want to be more agile and they do that. They're distributing, networking and security functions and pushing them closer to the applications. >>Now, at the same time, they're unifying their view of the network. So it can be less fragmented, manage more efficiently with more automation and better visibility. How are they doing this? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today. Welcome to changing the game for cloud networking made possible by pluribus networks. My name is Dave Vellante and today on this special cube presentation, John furrier, and I are going to explore these issues in detail. We'll dig into new solutions being created by pluribus and Nvidia to specifically address offloading, wasted resources, accelerating performance, isolating data, and making networks more secure all while unifying the network experience. We're going to start on the west coast and our Palo Alto studios, where John will talk to Mike of pluribus and AMI, but Donnie of Nvidia, then we'll bring on Alessandra Bobby airy of pluribus and Pete Lummus from Nvidia to take a deeper dive into the technology. And then we're gonna bring it back here to our east coast studio and get the independent analyst perspective from Bob Liberte of the enterprise strategy group. We hope you enjoy the program. Okay, let's do this over to John >>Okay. Let's kick things off. We're here at my cafe. One of the TMO and pluribus networks and NAMI by Dani VP of networking, marketing, and developer ecosystem at Nvidia. Great to have you welcome folks. >>Thank you. Thanks. >>So let's get into the, the problem situation with cloud unified network. What problems are out there? What challenges do cloud operators have Mike let's get into it. >>Yeah, it really, you know, the challenges we're looking at are for non hyperscalers that's enterprises, governments, um, tier two service providers, cloud service providers, and the first mandate for them is to become as agile as a hyperscaler. So they need to be able to deploy services and security policies. And second, they need to be able to abstract the complexity of the network and define things in software while it's accelerated in hardware. Um, really ultimately they need a single operating model everywhere. And then the second thing is they need to distribute networking and security services out to the edge of the host. Um, we're seeing a growth in cyber attacks. Um, it's, it's not slowing down. It's only getting worse and, you know, solving for this security problem across clouds is absolutely critical. And the way to do it is to move security out to the host. >>Okay. With that goal in mind, what's the pluribus vision. How does this tie together? >>Yeah. So, um, basically what we see is, uh, that this demands a new architecture and that new architecture has four tenants. The first tenant is unified and simplified cloud networks. If you look at cloud networks today, there's, there's sort of like discreet bespoke cloud networks, you know, per hypervisor, per private cloud edge cloud public cloud. Each of the public clouds have different networks that needs to be unified. You know, if we want these folks to be able to be agile, they need to be able to issue a single command or instantiate a security policy across all those locations with one command and not have to go to each one. The second is like I mentioned, distributed security, um, distributed security without compromise, extended out to the host is absolutely critical. So micro-segmentation and distributed firewalls, but it doesn't stop there. They also need pervasive visibility. >>You know, it's, it's, it's sort of like with security, you really can't see you can't protect what you can't see. So you need visibility everywhere. The problem is visibility to date has been very expensive. Folks have had to basically build a separate overlay network of taps, packet brokers, tap aggregation infrastructure that really needs to be built into this unified network I'm talking about. And the last thing is automation. All of this needs to be SDN enabled. So this is related to my comment about abstraction abstract, the complexity of all of these discreet networks, physic whatever's down there in the physical layer. Yeah. I don't want to see it. I want to abstract it. I wanted to find things in software, but I do want to leverage the power of hardware to accelerate that. So that's the fourth tenant is SDN automation. >>Mike, we've been talking on the cube a lot about this architectural shift and customers are looking at this. This is a big part of everyone who's looking at cloud operations next gen, how do we get there? How do customers get this vision realized? >>That's a great question. And I appreciate the tee up. I mean, we're, we're here today for that reason. We're introducing two things today. Um, the first is a unified cloud networking vision, and that is a vision of where pluribus is headed with our partners like Nvidia longterm. Um, and that is about, uh, deploying a common operating model, SDN enabled SDN, automated hardware, accelerated across all clouds. Um, and whether that's underlying overlay switch or server, um, hype, any hypervisor infrastructure containers, any workload doesn't matter. So that's ultimately where we want to get. And that's what we talked about earlier. Um, the first step in that vision is what we call the unified cloud fabric. And this is the next generation of our adaptive cloud fabric. Um, and what's nice about this is we're not starting from scratch. We have a, a, an award-winning adaptive cloud fabric product that is deployed globally. Um, and in particular, uh, we're very proud of the fact that it's deployed in over a hundred tier one mobile operators as the network fabric for their 4g and 5g virtualized cores. We know how to build carrier grade, uh, networking infrastructure, what we're doing now, um, to realize this next generation unified cloud fabric is we're extending from the switch to this Nvidia Bluefield to DPU. We know there's a, >>Hold that up real quick. That's a good, that's a good prop. That's the blue field and video. >>It's the Nvidia Bluefield two DPU data processing unit. And, um, uh, you know, what we're doing, uh, fundamentally is extending our SDN automated fabric, the unified cloud fabric out to the host, but it does take processing power. So we knew that we didn't want to do, we didn't want to implement that running on the CPU, which is what some other companies do because it consumes revenue generating CPU's from the application. So a DPU is a perfect way to implement this. And we knew that Nvidia was the leader with this blue field too. And so that is the first that's, that's the first step in the getting into realizing this vision. >>I mean, Nvidia has always been powering some great workloads of GPU. Now you've got DPU networking and then video is here. What is the relationship with clothes? How did that come together? Tell us the story. >>Yeah. So, you know, we've been working with pluribus for quite some time. I think the last several months was really when it came to fruition and, uh, what pluribus is trying to build and what Nvidia has. So we have, you know, this concept of a Bluefield data processing unit, which if you think about it, conceptually does really three things, offload, accelerate an isolate. So offload your workloads from your CPU to your data processing unit infrastructure workloads that is, uh, accelerate. So there's a bunch of acceleration engines. So you can run infrastructure workloads much faster than you would otherwise, and then isolation. So you have this nice security isolation between the data processing unit and your other CPU environment. And so you can run completely isolated workloads directly on the data processing unit. So we introduced this, you know, a couple of years ago, and with pluribus, you know, we've been talking to the pluribus team for quite some months now. >>And I think really the combination of what pluribus is trying to build and what they've developed around this unified cloud fabric, uh, is fits really nicely with the DPU and running that on the DPU and extending it really from your physical switch, all the way to your host environment, specifically on the data processing unit. So if you think about what's happening as you add data processing units to your environment. So every server we believe over time is going to have data processing units. So now you'll have to manage that complexity from the physical network layer to the host layer. And so what pluribus is really trying to do is extending the network fabric from the host, from the switch to the host, and really have that single pane of glass for network operators to be able to configure provision, manage all of the complexity of the network environment. >>So that's really how the partnership truly started. And so it started really with extending the network fabric, and now we're also working with them on security. So, you know, if you sort of take that concept of isolation and security isolation, what pluribus has within their fabric is the concept of micro-segmentation. And so now you can take that extended to the data processing unit and really have, um, isolated micro-segmentation workloads, whether it's bare metal cloud native environments, whether it's virtualized environments, whether it's public cloud, private cloud hybrid cloud. So it really is a magical partnership between the two companies with their unified cloud fabric running on, on the DPU. >>You know, what I love about this conversation is it reminds me of when you have these changing markets, the product gets pulled out of the market and, and you guys step up and create these new solutions. And I think this is a great example. So I have to ask you, how do you guys differentiate what sets this apart for customers with what's in it for the customer? >>Yeah. So I mentioned, you know, three things in terms of the value of what the Bluefield brings, right? There's offloading, accelerating, isolating, that's sort of the key core tenants of Bluefield. Um, so that, you know, if you sort of think about what, um, what Bluefields, what we've done, you know, in terms of the differentiation, we're really a robust platform for innovation. So we introduced Bluefield to, uh, last year, we're introducing Bluefield three, which is our next generation of Bluefields, you know, we'll have five X, the arm compute capacity. It will have 400 gig line rate acceleration, four X better crypto acceleration. So it will be remarkably better than the previous generation. And we'll continue to innovate and add, uh, chips to our portfolio every, every 18 months to two years. Um, so that's sort of one of the key areas of differentiation. The other is the, if you look at Nvidia and, and you know, what we're sort of known for is really known for our AI artificial intelligence and our artificial intelligence software, as well as our GPU. >>So you look at artificial intelligence and the combination of artificial intelligence plus data processing. This really creates the, you know, faster, more efficient, secure AI systems from the core of your data center, all the way out to the edge. And so with Nvidia, we really have these converged accelerators where we've combined the GPU, which does all your AI processing with your data processing with the DPU. So we have this convergence really nice convergence of that area. And I would say the third area is really around our developer environment. So, you know, one of the key, one of our key motivations at Nvidia is really to have our partner ecosystem, embrace our technology and build solutions around our technology. So if you look at what we've done with the DPU, with credit and an SDK, which is an open SDK called Doka, and it's an open SDK for our partners to really build and develop solutions using Bluefield and using all these accelerated libraries that we expose through Doka. And so part of our differentiation is really building this open ecosystem for our partners to take advantage and build solutions around our technology. >>You know, what's exciting is when I hear you talk, it's like you realize that there's no one general purpose network anymore. Everyone has their own super environment Supercloud or these new capabilities. They can really craft their own, I'd say, custom environment at scale with easy tools. Right. And it's all kind of, again, this is the new architecture Mike, you were talking about, how does customers run this effectively? Cost-effectively and how do people migrate? >>Yeah, I, I think that is the key question, right? So we've got this beautiful architecture. You, you know, Amazon nitro is a, is a good example of, of a smart NIC architecture that has been successfully deployed, but enterprises and serve tier two service providers and tier one service providers and governments are not Amazon, right? So they need to migrate there and they need this architecture to be cost-effective. And, and that's, that's super key. I mean, the reality is deep user moving fast, but they're not going to be, um, deployed everywhere on day one. Some servers will have DPS right away, some servers will have use and a year or two. And then there are devices that may never have DPS, right. IOT gateways, or legacy servers, even mainframes. Um, so that's the beauty of a solution that creates a fabric across both the switch and the DPU, right. >>Um, and by leveraging the Nvidia Bluefield DPU, what we really like about it is it's open. Um, and that drives, uh, cost efficiencies. And then, um, uh, you know, with this, with this, our architectural approach effectively, you get a unified solution across switch and DPU workload independent doesn't matter what hypervisor it is, integrated visibility, integrated security, and that can, uh, create tremendous cost efficiencies and, and really extract a lot of the expense from, from a capital perspective out of the network, as well as from an operational perspective, because now I have an SDN automated solution where I'm literally issuing a command to deploy a network service or to create or deploy our security policy and is deployed everywhere, automatically saving the oppor, the network operations team and the security operations team time. >>All right. So let me rewind that because that's super important. Get the unified cloud architecture, I'm the customer guy, but it's implemented, what's the value again, take, take me through the value to me. I have a unified environment. What's the value. >>Yeah. So I mean, the value is effectively, um, that, so there's a few pieces of value. The first piece of value is, um, I'm creating this clean D mark. I'm taking networking to the host. And like I mentioned, we're not running it on the CPU. So in implementations that run networking on the CPU, there's some conflict between the dev ops team who owned the server and the NetApps team who own the network because they're installing software on the, on the CPU stealing cycles from what should be revenue generating. Uh CPU's. So now by, by terminating the networking on the DPU, we click create this real clean DMARC. So the dev ops folks are happy because they don't necessarily have the skills to manage network and they don't necessarily want to spend the time managing networking. They've got their network counterparts who are also happy the NetApps team, because they want to control the networking. >>And now we've got this clean DMARC where the DevOps folks get the services they need and the NetApp folks get the control and agility they need. So that's a huge value. Um, the next piece of value is distributed security. This is essential. I mentioned earlier, you know, put pushing out micro-segmentation and distributed firewall, basically at the application level, right, where I create these small, small segments on an by application basis. So if a bad actor does penetrate the perimeter firewall, they're contained once they get inside. Cause the worst thing is a bad actor, penetrates a perimeter firewall and can go wherever they want and wreak havoc. Right? And so that's why this, this is so essential. Um, and the next benefit obviously is this unified networking operating model, right? Having, uh, uh, uh, an operating model across switch and server underlay and overlay, workload agnostic, making the life of the NetApps teams much easier so they can focus their time on really strategy instead of spending an afternoon, deploying a single villain, for example. >>Awesome. And I think also from my standpoint, I mean, perimeter security is pretty much, I mean, they're out there, it gets the firewall still out there exists, but pretty much they're being breached all the time, the perimeter. So you have to have this new security model. And I think the other thing that you mentioned, the separation between dev ops is cool because the infrastructure is code is about making the developers be agile and build security in from day one. So this policy aspect is, is huge. Um, new control points. I think you guys have a new architecture that enables the security to be handled more flexible. >>Right. >>That seems to be the killer feature here, >>Right? Yeah. If you look at the data processing unit, I think one of the great things about sort of this new architecture, it's really the foundation for zero trust it's. So like you talked about the perimeter is getting breached. And so now each and every compute node has to be protected. And I think that's sort of what you see with the partnership between pluribus and Nvidia is the DPU is really the foundation of zero trust. And pluribus is really building on that vision with, uh, allowing sort of micro-segmentation and being able to protect each and every compute node as well as the underlying network. >>This is super exciting. This is an illustration of how the market's evolving architectures are being reshaped and refactored for cloud scale and all this new goodness with data. So I gotta ask how you guys go into market together. Michael, start with you. What's the relationship look like in the go to market with an Nvidia? >>Sure. Um, I mean, we're, you know, we're super excited about the partnership, obviously we're here together. Um, we think we've got a really good solution for the market, so we're jointly marketing it. Um, uh, you know, obviously we appreciate that Nvidia is open. Um, that's, that's sort of in our DNA, we're about open networking. They've got other ISV who are gonna run on Bluefield too. We're probably going to run on other DPS in the, in the future, but right now, um, we're, we feel like we're partnered with the number one, uh, provider of DPS in the world and, uh, super excited about, uh, making a splash with it. >>I'm in get the hot product. >>Yeah. So Bluefield too, as I mentioned was GA last year, we're introducing, uh, well, we now also have the converged accelerator. So I talked about artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence with the Bluefield DPU, all of that put together on a converged accelerator. The nice thing there is you can either run those workloads. So if you have an artificial intelligence workload and an infrastructure workload, you can warn them separately on the same platform or you can actually use, uh, you can actually run artificial intelligence applications on the Bluefield itself. So that's what the converged accelerator really brings to the table. Uh, so that's available now. Then we have Bluefield three, which will be available late this year. And I talked about sort of, you know, uh, how much better that next generation of Bluefield is in comparison to Bluefield two. So we will see Bluefield three shipping later on this year, and then our software stack, which I talked about, which is called Doka we're on our second version are Doka one dot two. >>We're releasing Doka one dot three, uh, in about two months from now. And so that's really our open ecosystem framework. So allow you to program the Bluefields. So we have all of our acceleration libraries, um, security libraries, that's all packed into this STK called Doka. And it really gives that simplicity to our partners to be able to develop on top of Bluefield. So as we add new generations of Bluefield, you know, next, next year, we'll have, you know, another version and so on and so forth Doka is really that unified unified layer that allows, um, Bluefield to be both forwards compatible and backwards compatible. So partners only really have to think about writing to that SDK once, and then it automatically works with future generations of Bluefields. So that's sort of the nice thing around, um, around Doka. And then in terms of our go to market model, we're working with every, every major OEM. So, uh, later on this year, you'll see, you know, major server manufacturers, uh, releasing Bluefield enabled servers. So, um, more to come >>Awesome, save money, make it easier, more capabilities, more workload power. This is the future of, of cloud operations. >>Yeah. And, and, and, uh, one thing I'll add is, um, we are, um, we have a number of customers as you'll hear in the next segment, um, that are already signed up and we'll be working with us for our, uh, early field trial starting late April early may. Um, we are accepting registrations. You can go to www.pluribusnetworks.com/e F T a. If you're interested in signing up for, um, uh, being part of our field trial and providing feedback on the product, >>Awesome innovation and network. Thanks so much for sharing the news. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Okay. In a moment, we'll be back to look deeper in the product, the integration security zero trust use cases. You're watching the cube, the leader in enterprise tech coverage, >>Cloud networking is complex and fragmented slowing down your business. How can you simplify and unify your cloud networks to increase agility and business velocity? >>Pluribus unified cloud networking provides a unified simplify and agile network fabric across all clouds. It brings the simplicity of a public cloud operation model to private clouds, dramatically reducing complexity and improving agility, availability, and security. Now enterprises and service providers can increase their business philosophy and delight customers in the distributed multi-cloud era. We achieve this with a new approach to cloud networking, pluribus unified cloud fabric. This open vendor, independent network fabric, unifies, networking, and security across distributed clouds. The first step is extending the fabric to servers equipped with data processing units, unifying the fabric across switches and servers, and it doesn't stop there. The fabric is unified across underlay and overlay networks and across all workloads and virtualization environments. The unified cloud fabric is optimized for seamless migration to this new distributed architecture, leveraging the power of the DPU for application level micro-segmentation distributed fireball and encryption while still supporting those servers and devices that are not equipped with a DPU. Ultimately the unified cloud fabric extends seamlessly across distributed clouds, including central regional at edge private clouds and public clouds. The unified cloud fabric is a comprehensive network solution. That includes everything you need for clouds, networking built in SDN automation, distributed security without compromises, pervasive wire speed, visibility and application insight available on your choice of open networking switches and DP use all at the lowest total cost of ownership. The end result is a dramatically simplified unified cloud networking architecture that unifies your distributed clouds and frees your business to move at cloud speed, >>To learn more, visit www.pluribusnetworks.com. >>Okay. We're back I'm John ferry with the cube, and we're going to go deeper into a deep dive into unified cloud networking solution from Clovis and Nvidia. And we'll examine some of the use cases with Alessandra Burberry, VP of product management and pullovers networks and Pete Bloomberg who's director of technical marketing and video remotely guys. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Yeah. >>So deep dive, let's get into the what and how Alexandra we heard earlier about the pluribus Nvidia partnership and the solution you're working together on what is it? >>Yeah. First let's talk about the water. What are we really integrating with the Nvidia Bluefield, the DPO technology, uh, plugable says, um, uh, there's been shipping, uh, in, uh, in volume, uh, in multiple mission critical networks. So this advisor one network operating systems, it runs today on a merchant silicone switches and effectively it's a standard open network operating system for data center. Um, and the novelty about this system that integrates a distributed control plane for, at water made effective in SDN overlay. This automation is a completely open and interoperable and extensible to other type of clouds is not enclosed them. And this is actually what we're now porting to the Nvidia DPO. >>Awesome. So how does it integrate into Nvidia hardware and specifically how has pluribus integrating its software with the Nvidia hardware? >>Yeah, I think, uh, we leverage some of the interesting properties of the Bluefield, the DPO hardware, which allows actually to integrate, uh, um, uh, our software, our network operating system in a manner which is completely isolated and independent from the guest operating system. So the first byproduct of this approach is that whatever we do at the network level on the DPU card that is completely agnostic to the hypervisor layer or OSTP layer running on, uh, on the host even more, um, uh, we can also independently manage this network, know that the switch on a Neek effectively, um, uh, managed completely independently from the host. You don't have to go through the network operating system, running on x86 to control this network node. So you throw yet the experience effectively of a top of rack for virtual machine or a top of rack for, uh, Kubernetes bots, where instead of, uh, um, if you allow me with the analogy instead of connecting a server knee directly to a switchboard, now you're connecting a VM virtual interface to a virtual interface on the switch on an ache. >>And, uh, also as part of this integration, we, uh, put a lot of effort, a lot of emphasis in, uh, accelerating the entire, uh, data plane for networking and security. So we are taking advantage of the DACA, uh, Nvidia DACA API to program the accelerators. And these accomplished two things with that. Number one, uh, you, uh, have much greater performance, much better performance. They're running the same network services on an x86 CPU. And second, this gives you the ability to free up, I would say around 20, 25% of the server capacity to be devoted either to, uh, additional workloads to run your cloud applications, or perhaps you can actually shrink the power footprint and compute footprint of your data center by 20%, if you want to run the same number of compute workloads. So great efficiencies in the overall approach, >>And this is completely independent of the server CPU, right? >>Absolutely. There is zero code from running on the x86, and this is what we think this enables a very clean demarcation between computer and network. >>So Pete, I gotta get, I gotta get you in here. We heard that, uh, the DPU is enabled cleaner separation of dev ops and net ops. Can you explain why that's important because everyone's talking DevSecOps right now, you've got net ops, net, net sec ops, this separation. Why is this clean separation important? >>Yeah, I think it's a, you know, it's a pragmatic solution in my opinion. Um, you know, we wish the world was all kind of rainbows and unicorns, but it's a little, a little messier than that. And I think a lot of the dev ops stuff and that, uh, mentality and philosophy, there's a natural fit there. Right? You have applications running on servers. So you're talking about developers with those applications integrating with the operators of those servers. Well, the network has always been this other thing and the network operators have always had a very different approach to things than compute operators. And, you know, I think that we, we in the networking industry have gotten closer together, but there's still a gap there's still some distance. And I think in that distance, isn't going to be closed. And so, you know, again, it comes down to pragmatism and I think, you know, one of my favorite phrases is look good fences, make good neighbors. And that's what this is. >>Yeah. That's a great point because dev ops has become kind of the calling card for cloud, right. But dev ops is as simply infrastructure as code and infrastructure is networking, right? So if infrastructure is code, you know, you're talking about, you know, that part of the stack under the covers under the hood, if you will, this is super important distinction. And this is where the innovation is. Can you elaborate on how you see that? Because this is really where the action is right now. >>Yeah, exactly. And I think that's where, um, one from, from the policy, the security that the zero trust aspect of this, right? If you get it wrong on that network side, all of a sudden you, you can totally open up that those capabilities. And so security is part of that. But the other part is thinking about this at scale, right? So we're taking one top of rack switch and adding, you know, up to 48 servers per rack. And so that ability to automate, orchestrate and manage at scale becomes absolutely critical. >>I'll Sandra, this is really the why we're talking about here, and this is scale. And again, getting it right. If you don't get it right, you're going to be really kind of up, you know what you know, so this is a huge deal. Networking matters, security matters, automation matters, dev ops, net ops, all coming together, clean separation, um, help us understand how this joint solution with Nvidia fits into the pluribus unified cloud networking vision, because this is what people are talking about and working on right now. >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think here with this solution, we're attacking two major problems in cloud networking. One is, uh, operation of, uh, cloud networking. And the second is a distributing security services in the cloud infrastructure. First, let me talk about the first water. We really unifying. If we're unifying something, something must be at least fragmented or this jointed and the, what is this joint that is actually the network in the cloud. If you look holistically, how networking is deployed in the cloud, you have your physical fabric infrastructure, right? Your switches and routers, you'll build your IP clause fabric leaf in spine typologies. This is actually a well understood the problem. I, I would say, um, there are multiple vendors, uh, uh, with, uh, um, uh, let's say similar technologies, um, very well standardized, whether you will understood, um, and almost a commodity, I would say building an IP fabric these days, but this is not the place where you deploy most of your services in the cloud, particularly from a security standpoint, two services are actually now moved into the compute layer where you actually were called builders, have to instrument the, a separate, uh, network virtualization layer, where they deploy segmentation and security closer to the workloads. >>And this is where the complication arise. These high value part of the cloud network is where you have a plethora of options that they don't talk to each other. And they are very dependent on the kind of hypervisor or compute solution you choose. Um, for example, the networking API to be between an GSXI environment or an hyper V or a Zen are completely disjointed. You have multiple orchestration layers. And when, and then when you throw in also Kubernetes in this, in this, in this type of architecture, uh, you're introducing yet another level of networking. And when Kubernetes runs on top of VMs, which is a prevalent approach, you actually just stacking up multiple networks on the compute layer that they eventually run on the physical fabric infrastructure. Those are all ships in the nights effectively, right? They operate as completely disjointed. And we're trying to attack this problem first with the notion of a unified fabric, which is independent from any workloads, whether it's this fabric spans on a switch, which can be con connected to a bare metal workload, or can span all the way inside the DPU, uh, where, um, you have, uh, your multi hypervisor compute environment. >>It's one API, one common network control plane, and one common set of segmentation services for the network. That's probably the number one, >>You know, it's interesting you, man, I hear you talking, I hear one network month, different operating models reminds me of the old serverless days. You know, there's still servers, but they call it serverless. Is there going to be a term network list? Because at the end of the day, it should be one network, not multiple operating models. This, this is a problem that you guys are working on. Is that right? I mean, I'm not, I'm just joking server listen network list, but the idea is it should be one thing. >>Yeah, it's effectively. What we're trying to do is we are trying to recompose this fragmentation in terms of network operation, across physical networking and server networking server networking is where the majority of the problems are because of the, uh, as much as you have standardized the ways of building, uh, physical networks and cloud fabrics with IP protocols and internet, you don't have that kind of, uh, uh, sort of, uh, um, um, uh, operational efficiency, uh, at the server layer. And, uh, this is what we're trying to attack first. The, with this technology, the second aspect we're trying to attack is are we distribute the security services throughout the infrastructure, more efficiently, whether it's micro-segmentation is a stateful firewall services, or even encryption. Those are all capabilities enabled by the blue field, uh, uh, the Butte technology and, uh, uh, we can actually integrate those capabilities directly into the nettle Fabrica, uh, limiting dramatically, at least for east-west traffic, the sprawl of, uh, security appliances, whether virtual or physical, that is typically the way the people today, uh, segment and secure the traffic in the cloud. >>Awesome. Pete, all kidding aside about network lists and serverless kind of fun, fun play on words there, the network is one thing it's basically distributed computing, right? So I love to get your thoughts about this distributed security with zero trust as the driver for this architecture you guys are doing. Can you share in more detail the depth of why DPU based approach is better than alternatives? >>Yeah, I think what's, what's beautiful and kind of what the DPU brings. That's new to this model is a completely isolated compute environment inside. So, you know, it's the, uh, yo dog, I heard you like a server, so I put a server inside your server. Uh, and so we provide, uh, you know, armed CPU's memory and network accelerators inside, and that is completely isolated from the host. So the server, the, the actual x86 host just thinks it has a regular Nick in there, but you actually have this full control plane thing. It's just like taking your top of rack switch and shoving it inside of your compute node. And so you have not only the separation, um, within the data plane, but you have this complete control plane separation. So you have this element that the network team can now control and manage, but we're taking all of the functions we used to do at the top of rack switch, and we're just shooting them now. >>And, you know, as time has gone on we've, we've struggled to put more and more and more into that network edge. And the reality is the network edge is the compute layer, not the top of rack switch layer. And so that provides this phenomenal enforcement point for security and policy. And I think outside of today's solutions around virtual firewalls, um, the other option is centralized appliances. And even if you can get one that can scale large enough, the question is, can you afford it? And so what we end up doing is we kind of hope that of aliens good enough, or we hope that if the excellent tunnel is good enough and we can actually apply more advanced techniques there because we can't physically, you know, financially afford that appliance to see all of the traffic. And now that we have a distributed model with this accelerator, we could do it. >>So what's the what's in it for the customer. I real quick, cause I think this is interesting point. You mentioned policy, everyone in networking knows policy is just a great thing and it adds, you hear it being talked about up the stack as well. When you start getting to orchestrating microservices and whatnot, all that good stuff going on there, containers and whatnot and modern applications. What's the benefit to the customers with this approach? Because what I heard was more scale, more edge deployment, flexibility, relative to security policies and application enablement. I mean, is that what what's the customer get out of this architecture? What's the enablement. >>It comes down to, uh, taking again the capabilities that were in that top of rack switch and asserting them down. So that makes simplicity smaller blast radiuses for failure, smaller failure domains, maintenance on the networks, and the systems become easier. Your ability to integrate across workloads becomes infinitely easier. Um, and again, you know, we always want to kind of separate each one of those layers. So just as in say, a VX land network, my leaf and spine don't have to be tightly coupled together. I can now do this at a different layer. And so you can run a DPU with any networking in the core there. And so you get this extreme flexibility. You can start small, you can scale large. Um, you know, to me, the, the possibilities are endless. Yes, >>It's a great security control plan. Really flexibility is key. And, and also being situationally aware of any kind of threats or new vectors or whatever's happening in the network. Alessandra, this is huge upside, right? You've already identified some successes with some customers on your early field trials. What are they doing and why are they attracted to the solution? >>Yeah, I think the response from customers has been, uh, the most, uh, encouraging and, uh, exciting, uh, for, uh, for us to, uh, to sort of continue and work and develop this product. And we have actually learned a lot in the process. Um, we talked to tier two tier three cloud providers. Uh, we talked to, uh, SP um, software Tyco type of networks, uh, as well as a large enterprise customers, um, in, uh, one particular case. Um, uh, one, uh, I think, um, let me, let me call out a couple of examples here, just to give you a flavor. Uh, there is a service provider, a cloud provider, uh, in Asia who is actually managing a cloud, uh, where they are offering services based on multiple hypervisors. They are native services based on Zen, but they also are on ramp into the cloud, uh, workloads based on, uh, ESI and, uh, uh, and KVM, depending on what the customer picks from the piece on the menu. >>And they have the problem of now orchestrating through their orchestrate or integrating with the Zen center with vSphere, uh, with, uh, open stack to coordinate these multiple environments and in the process to provide security, they actually deploy virtual appliances everywhere, which has a lot of costs, complication, and eats up into the server CPU. The problem is that they saw in this technology, they call it actually game changing is actually to remove all this complexity of in a single network and distribute the micro-segmentation service directly into the fabric. And overall, they're hoping to get out of it, uh, uh, tremendous, uh, um, opics, uh, benefit and overall, um, uh, operational simplification for the cloud infrastructure. That's one potent a use case. Uh, another, uh, large enterprise customer global enterprise customer, uh, is running, uh, both ESI and hyper V in that environment. And they don't have a solution to do micro-segmentation consistently across hypervisors. >>So again, micro-segmentation is a huge driver security looks like it's a recurring theme, uh, talking to most of these customers and in the Tyco space, um, uh, we're working with a few types of customers on the CFT program, uh, where the main goal is actually to our Monet's network operation. They typically handle all the VNF search with their own homegrown DPDK stack. This is overly complex. It is frankly also as low and inefficient, and then they have a physical network to manage the, the idea of having again, one network, uh, to coordinate the provision in our cloud services between the, the take of VNF, uh, and, uh, the rest of the infrastructure, uh, is extremely powerful on top of the offloading capability of the, by the bluefin DPOs. Those are just some examples. >>That was a great use case, a lot more potential. I see that with the unified cloud networking, great stuff, feed, shout out to you guys at Nvidia had been following your success for a long time and continuing to innovate as cloud scales and pluribus here with the unified networking, kind of bring it to the next level. Great stuff. Great to have you guys on. And again, software keeps driving the innovation again, networking is just a part of it, and it's the key solution. So I got to ask both of you to wrap this up. How can cloud operators who are interested in, in this, uh, new architecture and solution, uh, learn more because this is an architectural shift. People are working on this problem. They're trying to think about multiple clouds of trying to think about unification around the network and giving more security, more flexibility, uh, to their teams. How can people learn more? >>Yeah, so, uh, all Sandra and I have a talk at the upcoming Nvidia GTC conference. Um, so that's the week of March 21st through 24th. Um, you can go and register for free and video.com/at GTC. Um, you can also watch recorded sessions if you ended up watching us on YouTube a little bit after the fact. Um, and we're going to dive a little bit more into the specifics and the details and what we're providing in the solution. >>Alexandra, how can people learn more? >>Yeah, absolutely. People can go to the pluribus, a website, www boost networks.com/eft, and they can fill up the form and, uh, they will contact durables to either know more or to know more and actually to sign up for the actual early field trial program, which starts at the end of April. >>Okay. Well, we'll leave it there. Thanks. You both for joining. Appreciate it up next. You're going to hear an independent analyst perspective and review some of the research from the enterprise strategy group ESG. I'm John ferry with the >>Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Okay. We've heard from the folks at networks and Nvidia about their effort to transform cloud networking and unify bespoke infrastructure. Now let's get the perspective from an independent analyst and to do so. We welcome in ESG, senior analysts, Bob LA Liberte, Bob. Good to see you. Thanks for coming into our east coast studios. >>Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to be >>Here. Yeah. So this, this idea of unified cloud networking approach, how serious is it? What's what's driving it. >>Yeah, there's certainly a lot of drivers behind it, but probably the first and foremost is the fact that application environments are becoming a lot more distributed, right? So the, it pendulum tends to swing back and forth. And we're definitely on one that's swinging from consolidated to distributed. And so applications are being deployed in multiple private data centers, multiple public cloud locations, edge locations. And as a result of that, what you're seeing is a lot of complexity. So organizations are having to deal with this highly disparate environment. They have to secure it. They have to ensure connectivity to it and all that's driving up complexity. In fact, when we asked in one of our last surveys and last year about network complexity, more than half 54% came out and said, Hey, our network environment is now either more or significantly more complex than it used to be. >>And as a result of that, what you're seeing is it's really impacting agility. So everyone's moving to these modern application environments, distributing them across areas so they can improve agility yet it's creating more complexity. So a little bit counter to the fact and, you know, really counter to their overarching digital transformation initiatives. From what we've seen, you know, nine out of 10 organizations today are either beginning in process or have a mature digital transformation process or initiative, but their top goals, when you look at them, it probably shouldn't be a surprise. The number one goal is driving operational efficiency. So it makes sense. I've distributed my environment to create agility, but I've created a lot of complexity. So now I need these tools that are going to help me drive operational efficiency, drive better experience. >>I mean, I love how you bring in the data yesterday. Does a great job with that. Uh, questions is, is it about just unifying existing networks or is there sort of a need to rethink kind of a do-over network, how networks are built? >>Yeah, that's a, that's a really good point because certainly unifying networks helps right. Driving any kind of operational efficiency helps. But in this particular case, because we've made the transition to new application architectures and the impact that's having as well, it's really about changing and bringing in new frameworks and new network architectures to accommodate those new application architectures. And by that, what I'm talking about is the fact that these new modern application architectures, microservices, containers are driving a lot more east west traffic. So in the old days, it used to be easier in north south coming out of the server, one application per server, things like that. Right now you've got hundreds, if not thousands of microservices communicating with each other users communicating to them. So there's a lot more traffic and a lot of it's taking place within the servers themselves. The other issue that you starting to see as well from that security perspective, when we were all consolidated, we had those perimeter based legacy, you know, castle and moat security architectures, but that doesn't work anymore when the applications aren't in the castle, right. >>When everything's spread out that that no longer happens. So we're absolutely seeing, um, organizations trying to, trying to make a shift. And, and I think much, like if you think about the shift that we're seeing with all the remote workers and the sassy framework to enable a secure framework there, this it's almost the same thing. We're seeing this distributed services framework come up to support the applications better within the data centers, within the cloud data centers, so that you can drive that security closer to those applications and make sure they're, they're fully protected. Uh, and that's really driving a lot of the, you know, the zero trust stuff you hear, right? So never trust, always verify, making sure that everything is, is, is really secure micro-segmentation is another big area. So ensuring that these applications, when they're connected to each other, they're, they're fully segmented out. And that's again, because if someone does get a breach, if they are in your data center, you want to limit the blast radius, you want to limit the amount of damage that's done. So that by doing that, it really makes it a lot harder for them to see everything that's in there. >>You know, you mentioned zero trust. It used to be a buzzword, and now it's like become a mandate. And I love the mode analogy. You know, you build a moat to protect the queen and the castle, the Queens left the castles, it's just distributed. So how should we think about this, this pluribus and Nvidia solution. There's a spectrum, help us understand that you've got appliances, you've got pure software solutions. You've got what pluribus is doing with Nvidia, help us understand that. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think as organizations recognize the need to distribute their services to closer to the applications, they're trying different models. So from a legacy approach, you know, from a security perspective, they've got these centralized firewalls that they're deploying within their data centers. The hard part for that is if you want all this traffic to be secured, you're actually sending it out of the server up through the rack, usually to in different location in the data center and back. So with the need for agility, with the need for performance, right, that adds a lot of latency. Plus when you start needing to scale, that means adding more and more network connections, more and more appliances. So it can get very costly as well as impacting the performance. The other way that organizations are seeking to solve this problem is by taking the software itself and deploying it on the servers. Okay. So that's a, it's a great approach, right? It brings it really close to the applications, but the things you start running into there, there's a couple of things. One is that you start seeing that the DevOps team start taking on that networking and security responsibility, which they >>Don't want to >>Do, they don't want to do right. And the operations teams loses a little bit of visibility into that. Um, plus when you load the software onto the server, you're taking up precious CPU cycles. So if you're really wanting your applications to perform at an optimized state, having additional software on there, isn't going to, isn't going to do it. So, you know, when we think about all those types of things, right, and certainly the other side effects of that is the impact of the performance, but there's also a cost. So if you have to buy more servers because your CPU's are being utilized, right, and you have hundreds or thousands of servers, right, those costs are going to add up. So what, what Nvidia and pluribus have done by working together is to be able to take some of those services and be able to deploy them onto a smart Nick, right? >>To be able to deploy the DPU based smart SMARTNICK into the servers themselves. And then pluribus has come in and said, we're going to unify create that unified fabric across the networking space, into those networking services all the way down to the server. So the benefits of having that are pretty clear in that you're offloading that capability from the server. So your CPU's are optimized. You're saving a lot of money. You're not having to go outside of the server and go to a different rack somewhere else in the data center. So your performance is going to be optimized as well. You're not going to incur any latency hit for every trip round trip to the, to the firewall and back. So I think all those things are really important. Plus the fact that you're going to see from a, an organizational aspect, we talked about the dev ops and net ops teams. The network operations teams now can work with the security teams to establish the security policies and the networking policies. So that they've dev ops teams. Don't have to worry about that. So essentially they just create the guardrails and let the dev op team run. Cause that's what they want. They want that agility and speed. >>Yeah. Your point about CPU cycles is key. I mean, it's estimated that 25 to 30% of CPU cycles in the data center are wasted. The cores are wasted doing storage offload or, or networking or security offload. And, you know, I've said many times everybody needs a nitro like Amazon nugget, but you can't go, you can only buy Amazon nitro if you go into AWS. Right. Everybody needs a nitro. So is that how we should think about this? >>Yeah. That's a great analogy to think about this. Um, and I think I would take it a step further because it's, it's almost the opposite end of the spectrum because pluribus and video are doing this in a very open way. And so pluribus has always been a proponent of open networking. And so what they're trying to do is extend that now to these distributed services. So leverage working with Nvidia, who's also open as well, being able to bring that to bear so that organizations can not only take advantage of these distributed services, but also that unified networking fabric, that unified cloud fabric across that environment from the server across the switches, the other key piece of what pluribus is doing, because they've been doing this for a while now, and they've been doing it with the older application environments and the older server environments, they're able to provide that unified networking experience across a host of different types of servers and platforms. So you can have not only the modern application supported, but also the legacy environments, um, you know, bare metal. You could go any type of virtualization, you can run containers, et cetera. So a wide gambit of different technologies hosting those applications supported by a unified cloud fabric from pluribus. >>So what does that mean for the customer? I don't have to rip and replace my whole infrastructure, right? >>Yeah. Well, think what it does for, again, from that operational efficiency, when you're going from a legacy environment to that modern environment, it helps with the migration helps you accelerate that migration because you're not switching different management systems to accomplish that. You've got the same unified networking fabric that you've been working with to enable you to run your legacy as well as transfer over to those modern applications. Okay. >>So your people are comfortable with the skillsets, et cetera. All right. I'll give you the last word. Give us the bottom line here. >>So yeah, I think obviously with all the modern applications that are coming out, the distributed application environments, it's really posing a lot of risk on these organizations to be able to get not only security, but also visibility into those environments. And so organizations have to find solutions. As I said, at the beginning, they're looking to drive operational efficiency. So getting operational efficiency from a unified cloud networking solution, that it goes from the server across the servers to multiple different environments, right in different cloud environments is certainly going to help organizations drive that operational efficiency. It's going to help them save money for visibility, for security and even open networking. So a great opportunity for organizations, especially large enterprises, cloud providers who are trying to build that hyperscaler like environment. You mentioned the nitro card, right? This is a great way to do it with an open solution. >>Bob, thanks so much for, for coming in and sharing your insights. Appreciate it. >>You're welcome. Thanks. >>Thanks for watching the program today. Remember all these videos are available on demand@thekey.net. You can check out all the news from today@siliconangle.com and of course, pluribus networks.com many thanks diplomas for making this program possible and sponsoring the cube. This is Dave Volante. Thanks for watching. Be well, we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. Robert Christiansen joins me, one of our alumni the VP of Strategy in the Office of the CTO at HPE. Robert, it's great to see you, welcome back to the program. >> It's nice being here, Lisa. Thank you so much for having me. >> So here we are still in this virtual world. Things are opening up a little bit, which is nice but one of the things I'm excited to talk to you about today is Edge to Cloud from the customer's perspective. Obviously, that's why HPE does what it does for its customers. So let's talk about some of the things that you see from your perspective, with respect to data. We can't have a Cube conversation without talking about data, there's more and more of it, value but getting access to it quickly, getting access to it in real-time and often cases to make data-driven decisions is a challenging thing to do. Talk to me about what you see from the customer's lens. >> Well, the customer at a very highest level from the board level on down they're saying, "Hey, what is our data strategy? How are we going to put the value of data in place? Are we going to have it manifest its value in an internal fashion where it makes us run better as an organization? Can we get cost improvements? Can we move quicker with that? And then can we monetize that data if it's like very specific to an industry like healthcare or pharma or something like that? Can we expose that data to the rest of the world and give them access into what we call like data sets?" And there's a lot of that going on right now too. So we're seeing these two different angles about how they're going to manage and control that data. And you were talking about, and you mentioned it, you know the Edge related focus around that. You know, the Edges where business is done is where people actually do the transaction whether it's in a healthcare like in a hospital or a manufacturing facility et cetera. And then, but that data that they're using at that location is really important to make a decision at that location. They can't send it back to a Cloud. They can't send it back to someplace, wait for a decision to happen and then shoot it back again and say, "Hey, stop the production line because we found a defect." You need to act at that moment which the clients are saying, "Hey, can you improve my reliability? Can you give me better SLS? Can you improve the quality of my products? Can you improve healthcare in a hospital by immediate decisions?" And that is a data problem. And that requires the movement of compute and networking and storage and fundamentally the core piece of HPE's world. But in addition to that, the software necessary to take the action on that data when they detect that there's some action that needs to be taken. >> And I mentioned a minute ago, you know real-time and we've learned in the last 15 months plus. One of the things we learned is for a lot of cases, access to real-time data is no longer a nice to have. It's really going to be something, an element that separates those that succeed versus those that aren't as competitive. But I want to talk about data from a consumption perspective consumers, producers, obviously, meeting to ensure that the data consumers have what they need, what is it? What is your thought when you talk with customers, the consumers versus the producers? >> Yeah, that's a great question, Lisa. One of the key fundamental areas that HPE and the Office of the CTO has really been focused on over the last six months is something that we call data spaces and that is putting in place a platform, a set of services that connect data consumers with data producers. And when you think about that, that really isn't nothing new. I mean, you could go all the way back, if you've been around for a while remember the company called TRW and they used to have credit reporting, and they used to sell that stuff. And then it moved into Experian and those things. But you've got Bloomberg and next LexisNexis and all these companies that sell data. And they've been doing it, but it's very siloed. And so the explosion of data, the valuableness the value of the data for the consumers of it has put the producers in a position where they can't readily be discovered. And whether it be a private source of data like an IoT device and an industrial control, or a set of data that might say, "Hey, here's credit card for our data on a certain geography." Those sets need to be discovered, curated, and be made available to those who would want that. You know, for example, the folks that want to know how IoT device is working inside an industrial control or a company who's trying to lower their fraud rates on credit card transactions, like in stadiums or something like that. And so this discoverability in this space, or what you just talked about is such a core piece of what we're working on right now. And we haven't, our strategy is not only to just work on what HPE has to bring that and manifest that to the marketplace. But more importantly, how are we working with our partners to really bridge that gap and bring that next generation of services to those clients that can make those connections. >> So connecting and facilitating collaboration, absolutely key, as well as that seamless flow of data sharing without constraints. How are customers working with HPE and some of your partners to be able to create a data strategy, launch it, and start gleaning value from data faster than they can before? (Robert chuckles) >> This is the big question because it's a maturity curve. Organizations are in various states of what we call data maturity or data management maturity. They can be in very early stages. You know what we consider, you know, they just more worried about just maintaining the lights on DR strategies and make sure that data doesn't go away versus all the way through a whole cycle where they're actually governing it and putting it into what I call those discoverable buckets that are made available. And there's a whole life cycle about that. And so we see a big opportunity here for our A&PS and other professional services organizations to help people get up that maturity curve. But they also have to have the foundational tools necessary to make that happen. This is really where the Ezmeral product line or software applications really shines being able to give that undercarriage that's necessary to help that data maturity and the growth of that client to meet those data needs. And we see the data fabric being a key element to that, for that distributed model, allowing people to get access and availability to have a highly redundant, highly durable data fabric and then to build applications specifically as data-intensive applications on top of that with the Ezmeral platform all the way into our GreenLake solutions. So it's quite a journey here, Lisa. I want to just, point to the fact that HPE has done a really, really good job of positioning itself for the explosion of all of these data-intensive AI/ML workloads that are making their way into every single conversation every single enterprise to this day that wants to take advantage of the value of the data they have and to augment that data through other sources. >> One, when you think about data-intensive applications the first one that pops into my mind is Uber. And it's one of those applications that we just expect. We kind of think of as a taxi service when really it's logistics and transportation, but all of the data on the backend that it is organizing to find the ride for me at my location to take me where I'm going. The explosion of data-intensive applications is great but there's also so much more demand from consumers whether we're in business or we're consuming in our personal lives. >> It's so true and that's a very popular example. And you know, you think about the real-time necessity of what's the traffic patterns at the time I order my thing. Is it going to route me the right way? That's a very real consumer facing one, but if we click into our clients and where HPE very much is like the backbone of the global economy. We provide probably one third of the compute for the global economy and it's a staggering stat if you really think about it. Our clients, I was just talking with a client here earlier, very, very large financial services company. And they have 1200 data sets that have been selling to their clients globally. And a lot of these clients want to augment that data with their existing real-time data to come up with a solution. And so they merge it and they can determine some value through a model, an AI model. And so we're working hand-in-hand with them right now to give them that backbone so that they can deliver data sets into these other systems and then make sure they get controlled and secured. So that the company we're working with, our client has a deep sense of security that that data set is not going to find itself out into the wild somewhere. And uncontrolled for a number of reasons, from security and governance mind. But the number of use cases, Lisa are as infinite as the number of opportunities for people see value in business today. >> When you're talking about 1200 data sets that a company is selling, and of course there are many, many data sets that many types of companies consume. How do you work with them to ensure that they don't just proliferate silos, but that they get more of a unified data repository that they can act on? >> Yeah, that's a great question. A key tenant of the strategy at HPE is Open-source. So we believe in a hybrid, multi-Cloud environment meaning that as long as we all agree that we are going to standardize on Open-source technologies and APIs, we will be able to write and build applications that can natively run on any abstract platform. So for example, it's very important that we containerize, for example, and we use storage and data tools that adhere to Open standards. So if you think about that, if you write a Spark application you want that Spark application potentially to run on any of the hyperscalers, the Amazon's or the Microsoft to GCPS, or you want it to run on-premises and specifically like on HPE equipment. But the idea here is I consider one of our clients right now. I mean, think about that. One of our clients specifically ask that question that you just said. They said, "Hey, we are building out this platform, this next generation platform. And we don't want the lock-in. We want to be, we want to create that environment where that data and the data framework." So they use very specific Open -source data frameworks and they open, they use very specific application frameworks the software from the Open-source community. We were able to meet that through the Ezmeral platform. Give them a very high availability, five nines high availability, redundant, redundant geographically to geographic data centers to give them that security that they're looking for. And because of that, it's opened so many other doors for us to walk in with a Cloud strategy that is an alternative, not just the one bet to public Cloud but you haven't other opportunity to bring a Cloud strategy on-premises that is compatible with Cloud-native activities that are going on in the public Cloud. And this is at the heart of HPE strategy. I think it's just, it's been paying off. It continues to pay off. We just keep investing and keep moving down that path. I think we're going to be doing really well. >> It sounds to me that the strategy that HP is developing is highly collaborative and synergistic with your customers. Talk to me a little bit about that, especially in the last year, as we've seen a massive acceleration in digital transformation about the rapid pivot to work from home, the necessity to collaborate electronically. Talk to me a little bit about that yin and yang with HPE and its customers in terms of your strategy. >> Yeah, well, I think when COVID hit one of the very first things that just took off with VDI. Rohit Dixon and I were talking on a podcast we had earlier around the work from home strategy that was implemented almost immediately. Well, we had it already in the can, we already were doing it for many clients already but it went from like a three priority to a 12, 10 being the max. Super, super charged up on how do we get work from home secured, work from home applications and stuff in the hands of people doing, you know, when data sensitivity is super important, VDI kicks in that's on that side. But then if you start looking at the digital transformation that has to happen in the supply chain that's going on right now. The opening up of our economies it's been various starts and stops if you look around the globe. The supply chains have absolutely gone under a huge amount of pressure, because, unlike in the United States, everybody just wants everything now because things are starting to open up. I was talking to a meat packing company and a restaurant business a little while ago. And they said, "Everybody wants to order the barbecue. Now we can't get the meat for the barbecues 'cause everybody's going to the barbecues." And so the supply, this is a multi-billion dollar industry supplying meat to all of the rest of the countries and stuff like that. And so they don't have optics into that supply chain today. So they're immediately having to go through a digitization process, the transformation in something as what you would call as low tech as delivering meat. So no industry is immune, none anywhere in this whole process. And it will continue to evolve as we exit and change how we live our life going into these next couple of years. I think it's going to be phenomenal just to watch. >> Yeah, it's one of the things I call a COVID catalyst some of the silver linings that have come out of this 'cause I wouldn't have thought of the meatpacking industry as a technology field as well, but now thanks to you, I will. Last question for you. When customers in this dynamic world in which we're still living talk about Edge to Cloud are they working with you to develop a Cloud initiatives, Cloud mandates, Cloud everywhere? And if so, how do you help them start? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So again, it's like back into the data model, everybody has a different degree or a starting point that they will engage us with a strategy but specifically with what you're talking about. Almost everybody already has a Cloud strategy. So they may be at different maturity levels with that Cloud strategy. And there's almost always a Cloud group. Now, historically HPE has not had much of a foot in the Cloud group because they never really historically looked at us says that HPE is a Cloud company. But what's happened over the last couple of years with the acceleration of the acceptance of Cloud on-premises and GreenLake, specifically, and the introduction of Ezmeral and the Cloud-native infrastructure services and past layer stuff that's coming up through the Ezmeral product into our clients. It's immediately opened the door for conversations around Cloud that is available for what is staying on-premises which is in excess of 70% of the applications today. Now, if you were to take that now and extend that into the Edge conversation, what if you were able to take a smaller form factor of a GreenLake Cloud and push it more closer to an Edge location while still giving the similar capabilities, Cloud-native functions that you had before? When we're provocative with clients in that sense they suddenly open up and see the art of the possible. And so this is where we are really, really breaking down a set of paradigms of what's possible by introducing, you know, not just from the Silicon all the way up but the set of services all the way to the top of stack to the actual application that they're going to be running. And we say, "Hey, we can offer it to you in as a pay as you go model, we can get you the consumption models that are necessary, that lets you buy at the same way as the Cloud offers it. But more importantly, we'll be able to run it for you and provide you an abstraction out of that model. So you don't have to send your people out into the field to do these things. We have the software, the tools, and the systems necessary to manage it for you." But the last part is I want to be really really focused on when clients are writing that application for the Edge that matters. They are putting it into new Cloud-native architectures containers, microservices, they're using solid pipelines development pipelines, they've implemented what they call their DevOps or their DataOps practices in field, in country, if you would say. That's where we shine. And so we had a really, really good conversation start there. And so how we start that is we arrive with a set of blueprints to help them establish what that roadmap looks like. And then our professional services staff, or A&PS groups around the globe are really really set up well to help them take that trip. >> Wow, that's outstanding, Robert. We could have a whole conversation on HPE's transformation. Internet itself that was my first job in tech was at Hewlett Packard back in the day. But this has been really interesting, really getting it your vision of the customer's experience and the customer's perspective from the Office of the CTO. Great to talk to you, Robert. Thank you for sharing all that you did. This could have been a Part 2 conversation. >> Well, I'm hopeful then that we'll do Part 3 and 4 here as the months go by. So I look forward to seeing you again, Lisa. >> Deal, that's a deal. All right. >> All right. >> For Robert Christiansen, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2021. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. Robert Christiansen joins me, one of our alumni the VP of Strategy in the Office of the CTO at HPE. Robert, it's great to see you, welcome back to the program. >> It's nice being here, Lisa. Thank you so much for having me. >> So here we are still in this virtual world. Things are opening up a little bit, which is nice but one of the things I'm excited to talk to you about today is Edge to Cloud from the customer's perspective. Obviously, that's why HPE does what it does for its customers. So let's talk about some of the things that you see from your perspective, with respect to data. We can't have a Cube conversation without talking about data, there's more and more of it, value but getting access to it quickly, getting access to it in real-time and often cases to make data-driven decisions is a challenging thing to do. Talk to me about what you see from the customer's lens. >> Well, the customer at a very highest level from the board level on down they're saying, "Hey, what is our data strategy? How are we going to put the value of data in place? Are we going to have it manifest its value in an internal fashion where it makes us run better as an organization? Can we get cost improvements? Can we move quicker with that? And then can we monetize that data if it's like very specific to an industry like healthcare or pharma or something like that? Can we expose that data to the rest of the world and give them access into what we call like data sets?" And there's a lot of that going on right now too. So we're seeing these two different angles about how they're going to manage and control that data. And you were talking about, and you mentioned it, you know the Edge related focus around that. You know, the Edges where business is done is where people actually do the transaction whether it's in a healthcare like in a hospital or a manufacturing facility et cetera. And then, but that data that they're using at that location is really important to make a decision at that location. They can't send it back to a Cloud. They can't send it back to someplace, wait for a decision to happen and then shoot it back again and say, "Hey, stop the production line because we found a defect." You need to act at that moment which the clients are saying, "Hey, can you improve my reliability? Can you give me better SLS? Can you improve the quality of my products? Can you improve healthcare in a hospital by immediate decisions?" And that is a data problem. And that requires the movement of compute and networking and storage and fundamentally the core piece of HPE's world. But in addition to that, the software necessary to take the action on that data when they detect that there's some action that needs to be taken. >> And I mentioned a minute ago, you know real-time and we've learned in the last 15 months plus. One of the things we learned is for a lot of cases, access to real-time data is no longer a nice to have. It's really going to be something, an element that separates those that succeed versus those that aren't as competitive. But I want to talk about data from a consumption perspective consumers, producers, obviously, meeting to ensure that the data consumers have what they need, what is it? What is your thought when you talk with customers, the consumers versus the producers? >> Yeah, that's a great question, Lisa. One of the key fundamental areas that HPE and the Office of the CTO has really been focused on over the last six months is something that we call data spaces and that is putting in place a platform, a set of services that connect data consumers with data producers. And when you think about that, that really isn't nothing new. I mean, you could go all the way back, if you've been around for a while remember the company called TRW and they used to have credit reporting, and they used to sell that stuff. And then it moved into Experian and those things. But you've got Bloomberg and next LexisNexis and all these companies that sell data. And they've been doing it, but it's very siloed. And so the explosion of data, the valuableness the value of the data for the consumers of it has put the producers in a position where they can't readily be discovered. And whether it be a private source of data like an IoT device and an industrial control, or a set of data that might say, "Hey, here's credit card for our data on a certain geography." Those sets need to be discovered, curated, and be made available to those who would want that. You know, for example, the folks that want to know how IoT device is working inside an industrial control or a company who's trying to lower their fraud rates on credit card transactions, like in stadiums or something like that. And so this discoverability in this space, or what you just talked about is such a core piece of what we're working on right now. And we haven't, our strategy is not only to just work on what HPE has to bring that and manifest that to the marketplace. But more importantly, how are we working with our partners to really bridge that gap and bring that next generation of services to those clients that can make those connections. >> So connecting and facilitating collaboration, absolutely key, as well as that seamless flow of data sharing without constraints. How are customers working with HPE and some of your partners to be able to create a data strategy, launch it, and start gleaning value from data faster than they can before? (Robert chuckles) >> This is the big question because it's a maturity curve. Organizations are in various states of what we call data maturity or data management maturity. They can be in very early stages. You know what we consider, you know, they just more worried about just maintaining the lights on DR strategies and make sure that data doesn't go away versus all the way through a whole cycle where they're actually governing it and putting it into what I call those discoverable buckets that are made available. And there's a whole life cycle about that. And so we see a big opportunity here for our A&PS and other professional services organizations to help people get up that maturity curve. But they also have to have the foundational tools necessary to make that happen. This is really where the Ezmeral product line or software applications really shines being able to give that undercarriage that's necessary to help that data maturity and the growth of that client to meet those data needs. And we see the data fabric being a key element to that, for that distributed model, allowing people to get access and availability to have a highly redundant, highly durable data fabric and then to build applications specifically as data-intensive applications on top of that with the Ezmeral platform all the way into our GreenLake solutions. So it's quite a journey here, Lisa. I want to just, point to the fact that HPE has done a really, really good job of positioning itself for the explosion of all of these data-intensive AI/ML workloads that are making their way into every single conversation every single enterprise to this day that wants to take advantage of the value of the data they have and to augment that data through other sources. >> One, when you think about data-intensive applications the first one that pops into my mind is Uber. And it's one of those applications that we just expect. We kind of think of as a taxi service when really it's logistics and transportation, but all of the data on the backend that it is organizing to find the ride for me at my location to take me where I'm going. The explosion of data-intensive applications is great but there's also so much more demand from consumers whether we're in business or we're consuming in our personal lives. >> It's so true and that's a very popular example. And you know, you think about the real-time necessity of what's the traffic patterns at the time I order my thing. Is it going to route me the right way? That's a very real consumer facing one, but if we click into our clients and where HPE very much is like the backbone of the global economy. We provide probably one third of the compute for the global economy and it's a staggering stat if you really think about it. Our clients, I was just talking with a client here earlier, very, very large financial services company. And they have 1200 data sets that have been selling to their clients globally. And a lot of these clients want to augment that data with their existing real-time data to come up with a solution. And so they merge it and they can determine some value through a model, an AI model. And so we're working hand-in-hand with them right now to give them that backbone so that they can deliver data sets into these other systems and then make sure they get controlled and secured. So that the company we're working with, our client has a deep sense of security that that data set is not going to find itself out into the wild somewhere. And uncontrolled for a number of reasons, from security and governance mind. But the number of use cases, Lisa are as infinite as the number of opportunities for people see value in business today. >> When you're talking about 1200 data sets that a company is selling, and of course there are many, many data sets that many types of companies consume. How do you work with them to ensure that they don't just proliferate silos, but that they get more of a unified data repository that they can act on? >> Yeah, that's a great question. A key tenant of the strategy at HPE is Open-source. So we believe in a hybrid, multi-Cloud environment meaning that as long as we all agree that we are going to standardize on Open-source technologies and APIs, we will be able to write and build applications that can natively run on any abstract platform. So for example, it's very important that we containerize, for example, and we use storage and data tools that adhere to Open standards. So if you think about that, if you write a Spark application you want that Spark application potentially to run on any of the hyperscalers, the Amazon's or the Microsoft to GCPS, or you want it to run on-premises and specifically like on HPE equipment. But the idea here is I consider one of our clients right now. I mean, think about that. One of our clients specifically ask that question that you just said. They said, "Hey, we are building out this platform, this next generation platform. And we don't want the lock-in. We want to be, we want to create that environment where that data and the data framework." So they use very specific Open -source data frameworks and they open, they use very specific application frameworks the software from the Open-source community. We were able to meet that through the Ezmeral platform. Give them a very high availability, five nines high availability, redundant, redundant geographically to geographic data centers to give them that security that they're looking for. And because of that, it's opened so many other doors for us to walk in with a Cloud strategy that is an alternative, not just the one bet to public Cloud but you haven't other opportunity to bring a Cloud strategy on-premises that is compatible with Cloud-native activities that are going on in the public Cloud. And this is at the heart of HPE strategy. I think it's just, it's been paying off. It continues to pay off. We just keep investing and keep moving down that path. I think we're going to be doing really well. >> It sounds to me that the strategy that HP is developing is highly collaborative and synergistic with your customers. Talk to me a little bit about that, especially in the last year, as we've seen a massive acceleration in digital transformation about the rapid pivot to work from home, the necessity to collaborate electronically. Talk to me a little bit about that yin and yang with HPE and its customers in terms of your strategy. >> Yeah, well, I think when COVID hit one of the very first things that just took off with VDI. Rohit Dixon and I were talking on a podcast we had earlier around the work from home strategy that was implemented almost immediately. Well, we had it already in the can, we already were doing it for many clients already but it went from like a three priority to a 12, 10 being the max. Super, super charged up on how do we get work from home secured, work from home applications and stuff in the hands of people doing, you know, when data sensitivity is super important, VDI kicks in that's on that side. But then if you start looking at the digital transformation that has to happen in the supply chain that's going on right now. The opening up of our economies it's been various starts and stops if you look around the globe. The supply chains have absolutely gone under a huge amount of pressure, because, unlike in the United States, everybody just wants everything now because things are starting to open up. I was talking to a meat packing company and a restaurant business a little while ago. And they said, "Everybody wants to order the barbecue. Now we can't get the meat for the barbecues 'cause everybody's going to the barbecues." And so the supply, this is a multi-billion dollar industry supplying meat to all of the rest of the countries and stuff like that. And so they don't have optics into that supply chain today. So they're immediately having to go through a digitization process, the transformation in something as what you would call as low tech as delivering meat. So no industry is immune, none anywhere in this whole process. And it will continue to evolve as we exit and change how we live our life going into these next couple of years. I think it's going to be phenomenal just to watch. >> Yeah, it's one of the things I call a COVID catalyst some of the silver linings that have come out of this 'cause I wouldn't have thought of the meatpacking industry as a technology field as well, but now thanks to you, I will. Last question for you. When customers in this dynamic world in which we're still living talk about Edge to Cloud are they working with you to develop a Cloud initiatives, Cloud mandates, Cloud everywhere? And if so, how do you help them start? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So again, it's like back into the data model, everybody has a different degree or a starting point that they will engage us with a strategy but specifically with what you're talking about. Almost everybody already has a Cloud strategy. So they may be at different maturity levels with that Cloud strategy. And there's almost always a Cloud group. Now, historically HPE has not had much of a foot in the Cloud group because they never really historically looked at us says that HPE is a Cloud company. But what's happened over the last couple of years with the acceleration of the acceptance of Cloud on-premises and GreenLake, specifically, and the introduction of Ezmeral and the Cloud-native infrastructure services and past layer stuff that's coming up through the Ezmeral product into our clients. It's immediately opened the door for conversations around Cloud that is available for what is staying on-premises which is in excess of 70% of the applications today. Now, if you were to take that now and extend that into the Edge conversation, what if you were able to take a smaller form factor of a GreenLake Cloud and push it more closer to an Edge location while still giving the similar capabilities, Cloud-native functions that you had before? When we're provocative with clients in that sense they suddenly open up and see the art of the possible. And so this is where we are really, really breaking down a set of paradigms of what's possible by introducing, you know, not just from the Silicon all the way up but the set of services all the way to the top of stack to the actual application that they're going to be running. And we say, "Hey, we can offer it to you in as a pay as you go model, we can get you the consumption models that are necessary, that lets you buy at the same way as the Cloud offers it. But more importantly, we'll be able to run it for you and provide you an abstraction out of that model. So you don't have to send your people out into the field to do these things. We have the software, the tools, and the systems necessary to manage it for you." But the last part is I want to be really really focused on when clients are writing that application for the Edge that matters. They are putting it into new Cloud-native architectures containers, microservices, they're using solid pipelines development pipelines, they've implemented what they call their DevOps or their DataOps practices in field, in country, if you would say. That's where we shine. And so we had a really, really good conversation start there. And so how we start that is we arrive with a set of blueprints to help them establish what that roadmap looks like. And then our professional services staff, or A&PS groups around the globe are really really set up well to help them take that trip. >> Wow, that's outstanding, Robert. We could have a whole conversation on HPE's transformation. Internet itself that was my first job in tech was at Hewlett Packard back in the day. But this has been really interesting, really getting it your vision of the customer's experience and the customer's perspective from the Office of the CTO. Great to talk to you, Robert. Thank you for sharing all that you did. This could have been a Part 2 conversation. >> Well, I'm hopeful then that we'll do Part 3 and 4 here as the months go by. So I look forward to seeing you again, Lisa. >> Deal, that's a deal. All right. >> All right. >> For Robert Christiansen, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2021. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBEconversation. >> Hi brother, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this CUBEconversation. We're going to talk about a topic that is obviously top of mind in a lot of people situations right now, which is ensuring business continuity, business resiliency. Given this work from home pivot is something that a lot of people are focused on. Many CIOs have told us that business resiliency was way too focused on disaster recovery. And we're going to talk about this in the context of VPNs. Now I've got a love-hate with VPNs. I mean, on the one hand they provide safeguards. They give us privacy, they give us protection, everything's encrypted, but they can bring forth performance problems. There could be service quality issues, video or audio. And so the problem with VPNs is a lot of times they're a black box. You don't know what's going on inside. There are different types of VPNs, and it's actually a pretty complicated situation and with me to talk about that is Paul Barrett, the CTO of Enterprise at Netscout, Paul, good to see you. >> Great to be here. >> Yeah, so what did you see with regard to the trends that hit with COVID? Obviously there was this very rapid work from home pivot, VPNs had to be deployed for remote workers who typically would come into the office, what did you see? >> So with Netscout, we service the largest, most complex organizations, both in the US and globally. But for many of these organizations, the VPN services they provided really was for quite a small subset of their workforce. People working on the road, maybe they had a small subset of their employees working from home. And as you say, obviously, as we all understand, almost overnight, everyone's found themselves struggling to work from home. And quite frankly, most organizations VPN configurations were just never architected to deal with this kind of situation. One of the perhaps most important distinctions between the different types of VPN is whether you have a so called full VPN service or a split VPN service, because that really impacted the ability of organizations to deliver VPN. >> So what does that mean full versus split? I know there's sometimes free VPNs. You kind of get what you pay for, what does that mean, split versus full? >> So with a full VPN connection, every thing that you connect to on the internet or any business service has to go over your VPN connection. You can't make any direct connections from your PC to the internet, has to go through your enterprise network. So if you think about it, if you suddenly moved tens of thousands of employees to working from home, every single communication activity performed by those employees goes through your VPN concentrators. With a split VPN, and for example, I use a split VPN, only when I need to connect to business services that are provided over my enterprise network do I actually go directly to my enterprise network over the VPN. If I'm just going to Google or any other regular internet resource, then I get a direct connection to that internet resource. And that really takes the pressure off the VPN concentrators. >> The split VPN gives you more flexibility. I can't tell you how many times I've sent a link to somebody and say, oh, I can't open it, it's got to be my VPN blocking it. You're saying it gives you this sort of you have your cake and eat it too, the split VPN. >> Well, right, yes. It just means that to say it's only the traffic that has to go into the corporate network, goes through the corporate VPNs. What we observe is, as I say, 'cause we deal with very large organizations, particularly regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare. There was a as just a requirement that hey, everything's got to come over the VPN. We don't want any traffic kind of leaking directly onto the internet. We want to have full control, so everything goes through our security stack. So one of the things we're sort of seeing now with three months into the COVID situation, I would say most of our customers have got through the worst of it. But a lot of them would say they're still running very hot. And those of who were previously offering full VPN, are saying, "Well, can I transition "to offering a split VPN service." But it's not a trivial thing to do because especially if you're highly regulated, you've got the compliance requirements, you've got to make sure that the traffic that has to go through your security stack does so, and that you're comfortable with any traffic that's going direct, SaaS services like Office 365, you have to make sure that you're comfortable with that traffic is going direct over the internet. So let's say it's the transition from full VPN to split it's quite a challenge and it's not trivial. >> Well, and I would imagine, I mean, if I'm the compliance officer I'm saying, "Go full VPN and I don't care if there's a restriction "and some handcuffs placed on the users." If you're a line of business head, you're saying, "Hey, I want more flexibility." So the brute force approach, it's a two edged sword. So how do you help solve that problem? I know you're focused on providing visibility, but explain where Netscout fits in the value chain. >> So yeah, everything Netscout does is about analyzing the traffic flag on networks. And we do it for helping customers ensure that the applications and services are healthy, that they're available, we have products that allow people to protect their applications against DDoS attacks, but in the case of VPN, it's really about understanding how the service is being used. If you actually look at the traffic coming on the enterprise side of your VPN concentrator, so often it's been decrypted, I can see who's accessing which business services, I can see, if for example, it's a full VPN connection, how I got users going to unimportant services like YouTube, which really isn't helping the situation. I can see whether, I might actually, 'cause typically large organizations have multiple VPN concentrators around the country and even around the globe. And you get situations where one set of the VPN concentrators are sitting there under utilized, whereas I've got another set of VPN concentrators that are sort of overwhelmed. And by getting this visibility of that kind of usage, I can actually think about getting some of my user groups to maybe use a different VPN concentrator. And as I was talking about the migration to a split VPN, having visibility of what applications are being used. Hey, I have this particular sensitive application and I need all that traffic to come through my security stack, but actually it turns out I didn't configure my split VPN correctly and it's all leaking directly over the public internet. Then I have the visibility I need to detect that kind of situation and to remedy it. >> So is the primary reason why people use Netscout in this use case really to, obviously to provide that visibility, but to make them more secure, is there a performance aspect as well in terms of what you guys are doing? >> Yeah, one of the, I would say the facets of the move to working from home is increased emphasis on services, such as unified communications, voice and video, the use of collaboration services, has greatly increased. Those types of service, particularly voice and video, they're real time services, they're very susceptible to poor network transmission. Things like latency and packets being dropped. And as I say, people working from home are becoming much more reliant on these types of service than they are when they're in an office. And so it's critical to understand whether problems with, for example, voice and video quality are arising in your own network, because for example, you've saturated your VPN concentrator or whether they're coming from your SaaS provider. So, to give an example, I find using, one of the well known collaboration services, if I've got problems in my own network and I'm introducing packet loss into my voice feeds, if I send all of this, because of already corrupted traffic to the collaboration service, and then that gets reflected to all of my other users, everyone will go, "Oh, hey, there's a problem "with the collaboration service." And you're going to waste time pointing your thing at the collaboration service provider, who let's be honest at the moment has got much better things to do than to go chasing phantom problems. When if you have visibility inside your own network, you can actually understand that, oh, hey, no, this is a problem of my own making. So I'm not going to waste cycles, pointing the finger at the other guy, I can actually get on with isolating the problem in my own network, figure out what I need to do and then remediate it. >> So Netscout, you guys are doing some dirty work. You like Navy Seals going in, and going deep into the network. So talk a little bit about the intellectual property behind this. How does it work? What's the secret sauce that Netscout brings to the table? >> So, our CEO and co-founder Anil Singhal, over 30 years ago, the company is 35 years old, he recognized the growing importance of the computer network and he recognized the need to understand what's happening on these networks. And of course now it's almost impossible to do anything without it involving a network of some kind. So, he persevered and continue to refine and refine the technology of analyzing what happens on a network, but converting that raw traffic into actionable data, we call that the data we produce, the metadata, Adaptive Service Intelligence, and we sometimes refer to it as smart data. And of course there's an emerging trend in the industry, of AIOps saying, what can I do if I start to apply machine learning algorithms to all the data that's coming out of my environment. It's like the old garbage in, garbage out, you could only perform high quality analytics if you have a high quality data source to work with. So that's really, that's always been our focus. How can we take all of that complex traffic on a network and map it to a very simple but actionable set of high quality data? >> So it always comes back to the data, doesn't it? In these types of things, but I wonder what is the diversity and variety of the data set? Is it a fairly narrow and well understood data set or are there sort of conflicting data that you also have to rationalize? >> Well, data model has multiple levels. Everything from reduce all the raw packets, and we're intelligent how we do that. We have all the parts that you really need, and we store rich data relating to individual transactions. That's very useful for troubleshooting, but what we were also able to do, is to actually for most network protocols, we actually can map it to a common data model. And that's extremely powerful because it means that in a single pane of glass, I can get insight into all of the different applications and protocols running on my network. >> So you've sort of addressed the data quality problem in that way, I wonder, I mean, as a CTO, I would imagine you spend a fair amount of time with customers, are there any sort of examples that you can give? Either, name names or anonymous, just in terms of the 100 days, how you've helped customers, some of your favorite examples, perhaps? >> Well, as I say, I mean, a lot of energy has been put into providing that visibility around VPN services because quite honestly it was never seen as a particularly critical component of the overall enterprise. It was that, as I said earlier, it was that kind of, oh, that's just something to help the guys on the road. And all of a sudden it became the most important piece. And as I said, it's also not just been about, okay, let's give sufficient visibility for you to kind of keep the wheels on the truck, it's also helping the customers about thinking forward, about planning. We talked about planning a migration, split VPN, but also thinking about their future needs. I think a lot of customers are looking to over-provision and the ones that have already transitioned to virtualized infrastructure are actually in a stronger position because they've got a lot more flexibility and ability, for example, to split up more VPN resources, or more virtual desktop resources, for example. >> And of course you mentioned that you guys deal with many types of industries, but specifically a lot of regulated industries, financial services, healthcare, government, et cetera. And so I would imagine that, that those guys really had to tap your services over the past 100 days. >> Exactly, and as we mentioned earlier, those are the organizations that are much more likely to be using full VPN and have a lot more constraints on their ability. So even if they do move to split VPN, then there's going to be limits on how much of the traffic that they can truly allow direct over the internet. >> I wonder if we could end just sort of riffing on the whole notion of digital transformation and automation. I mean, prior to COVID, we talk a lot about automation, talk about digital transformation, but the reality is a lot of it was lip service. A lot of customers or companies would really kind of prioritize other initiatives, but overnight, if you weren't digital, you couldn't transact business and automation has really become imperative. People don't seem to be afraid of it anymore, they seem to be sort of glomming onto it. And really as a productivity driver, how do you see the nation in this post-isolation economy and what are the impacts to some of your customers? >> Well, as we all understand, digital transformation is all about trying to be agile, to be able to move as fast as possible, to be able to deploy new services quickly, to respond to disruption in the marketplace and new opportunities. The only way you can really achieve that as you mentioned, is through large scale automation. But I like to make two observations about automation. Automation is very good at taking a small building block and then replicating it and deploying it, many hundreds or thousands of times over. But if you've got a bug or a defect in that building block, when you go and replicate it, you go and replicate whatever that failure moment was or that bug. So if you don't have visibility, very quickly, you can find that a very small little area that was overlooked by the quality guys has got the huge implications. The other thing about wholesale automation, and as we build these increasingly complex systems where we have machines talking to machines, largely unobserved, I'm always reminded of the stock market crash of 1987, so called Black Monday on October the 19th. And this was one of the biggest crashes ever, something like a trillion dollars was wiped off the US markets alone. And although, a lot of people said a correction was due, when we look back, we see that the thing that was different about that crash is that it was the first time we really had automated trading algorithms in play. Now, I don't believe anybody who wrote one of those algorithms was deliberately trying to crash the markets, they were trying to make money. But what no one had thought about is how all of these different algorithms by different people would interact with each other when they were pushed sort of out of their comfort zone, if you like. And I think we have a very strong analogy with digital transformation. As I say, we continue to build increasingly complex systems with machines talking to machines. So for me to operate these kinds of environments without maximum visibility, it's almost terrifying. It's like driving a racing car without a safety harness. So, visibility is absolutely key as we move towards further automation. >> That's interesting, I mean, I wasn't around in the 1920s, but my understanding was that when stock market crash hit then, depression then it took hours and hours and hours to determine, what the market actually closed at. You actually saw that in the 60s as well. And then I remember, well, 1987, there were no, for you younger people in United States, there were no real time quotes then, unless you had like a Bloomberg Terminal, which we had one, actually, I was at IDC at the time. And it took like many, many minutes to actually get a quote back. I mean, the volume was so high and the infrastructure just really wasn't there. But now to your point, you see things happening today in the stock market, Paul and they chalk it up to a computer glitch, which essentially means they have no idea what happened. And to your point about the complexity and machines to machines, if you think about AI, a lot of AI is again, back to this black box. So are you suggesting that you guys can actually provide visibility? It's solves some of that black box problem? >> Well, absolutely, what we can do is we can provide a visibility into the interactions between all of these different systems. It's amazing how often in these large complex environments, there may be dependencies that people didn't even know existed. That can be that complex. So by looking at all of the traffic flowing between all of these different systems, we can help people understand what the dependencies are. Is a particular sub-component starting to fail? Is it becoming slow? Is it generating errors? And if things do go wrong, it's about troubleshooting as fast as possible. We need to get these systems back up and running. So the ability to rapidly isolate problems and to get away from the situation where different organizations in IT are pointing the finger at each other, 'cause nobody really knows where to start. And that's kind of human nature. It's like, well, it could be my responsibility, but it could be the other guy, so I'm pointing the finger at the other guy. What we do is we provide that information that first of all, isolates the location of the problem. So we can put the correct team working on it and the other guys can get back to their day jobs. And by providing evidence of a problem, you can actually allow someone to get to the bottom of a problem much faster. >> You got to have tooling, with all this public internet, the public cloud, now with IOT, it's just going to get more and more complicated. We'll probably look back on the 2010s and say that was nothing compared to what we're entering here. But Paul, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE it was a great conversation. Really appreciate your insights. >> Thank you, I enjoyed it's my pleasure. >> All right and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is The Cube Conversation. >> Everyone welcome to this special live stream here in The Cube Studios. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great panel discussion here for one hour, sponsored by Lumina PR, not sponsored but organized by Lumina PR. An authentic conversation around professionals in the news media, and communication professionals, how they can work together. As we know, pitching stories to national media takes place in the backdrop in today's market, which is on full display. The Coronavirus, racial unrest in our country and a lot of new tech challenges from companies, their role in society with their technology and of course, an election all make for important stories to be developed and reported. And we got a great panel here and the purpose is to bridge the two worlds. People trying to get news out for their companies in a way that's relevant and important for audiences. I've got a great panelists here, Gerard Baker Editor at Large with the Wall Street Journal, Eric Savitz, Associate Editor with Barron's and Brenna Goth who's a Southwest Staff Correspondent with Bloomberg Publications. Thanks for joining me today, guys, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> So we're going to break this down, we got about an hour, we're going to probably do about 40 minutes. I'd love to get your thoughts in this power panel. And you guys are on the front lines decades of experience, seeing these waves of media evolve. And now more than ever, you can't believe what's happening. You're seeing the funding of journalism really challenging at an all time high. You have stories that are super important to audiences and society really changing and we need this more than ever to have more important stories to be told. So this is really a challenge. And so I want to get your thoughts on this first segment. The challenge is around collecting the data, doing the analysis, getting the stories out, prioritizing stories in this time. So I'd love to get your thoughts. We'll start with you, Brenna, what's your thoughts on this as you're out there in Arizona. Coronavirus on the worst is one of the states there. What are your challenges? >> I would say for me, one of the challenges of the past couple months is just the the sheer influx of different types of stories we've had and the amount of news coming out. So I think one of the challenging things is a lot of times we'll get into a bit of a routine covering one story. So early on maybe the Coronavirus, and then something else will come up. So I personally have been covering some of the Coronavirus news here in Arizona and in the Southwest, as well as some of the protests we've seen with the Black Lives Matter movement. And prioritizing that is pretty difficult. And so one thing that I I've been doing is I've noticed that a lot of my routine projects or things I've been working on earlier in the year are off the table, and I'll get back to them when I have time. But for now, I feel like I'm a little bit more on breaking news almost every day in a way that I wasn't before. >> Gerard, I want to get your thoughts on this. Wall Street Journal has been since I could remember when the web hit the scene early on very digital savvy. Reporting, it's obviously, awesome as well. As you have people in sheltering in place, both journalists and the people themselves and the companies, there's an important part of the digital component. How do you see that as an opportunity and a challenge at the same time because you want to get data out there, you want to be collecting and reporting those stories? How do you see that opportunity, given the challenge that people can't meet face to face? >> First of all, thank you very much for having me. I think as we've all discovered in all fields of endeavor in the last three months, it's been quite a revelation, how much we can do without using without access to the traditional office environment. I think one of the things that Coronavirus, this crisis will have done we all agree I think is that it will have fundamentally changed the way people work. There'll be a lot more people quite a bit more working from home. They'll be a lot more remote working. Generally, there'll be a lot less travel. So on the one hand, it's been eye opening. actually how relatively easy, I use that word carefully. But how we've managed, and I think it's true of all news organizations, how we've managed surprisingly well, I think, without actually being at work. At the Wall Street Journal, we have a big office, obviously in midtown Manhattan, as well as dozens of bureaus around the world. Nobody has really been in that office since the middle of March. And yet we've put out a complete Wall Street Journal product, everything from the print edition, obviously, through every aspect of digital media, the website, all of the apps, video, everything, audio, podcasts. We've been able to do pretty well everything that we could do when we were all working in the office. So I think that will be an important lesson and that will clearly induce some change, some long term changes, I think about the way we work. That said, I'd point to two particular challenges that I think we have not properly overcome. Or if you like that we have, the two impediments, that the crisis has produced for us. One is, as you said, the absence of face to face activity, the hive process, which I think is really important. I think that a lot of the best ideas, a lot of the best, the best stories are developed through conversations between people in an office which don't necessarily we can't necessarily replicate through the online experience through this kind of event or through the Zoom meetings that we've all been doing. I think that has inhibited to some extent, some of the more creative activity that we could have done. I think the second larger problem which we all must face with this is that being essentially locked up in our homes for more than three months, which most of us has been I think accentuates a problem that is already that has been a problem in journalism for a long time, which is that journalists tend to cluster in the major metropolitan areas. I think, a couple of years ago, I read a study which said, I think that more than three quarters of journalists work for major news organizations, print, digital TV, radio, whatever, live and work in one of four major metropolises in the US. That's the New York area, the Washington DC area, the San Francisco area and the LA area. And that tends to create a very narrow worldview, unfortunately, because not enough people either come from those areas, but from outside those areas or spend enough time talking to people from outside those areas. And I think the Coronavirus has accentuated that. And I think in terms of coverage, I'm here in New York. I've been in New York continuously for three and a half months now which is quite unusual, I usually travel a lot. And so my reporting, I write columns now, mainly, but obviously I talk to people too. But the reporting, the editing that we're doing here is inevitably influenced by the experience that we've had in New York, which has obviously been, frankly, devastating. New York has been devastated by Coronavirus in a way that no where else in the country has. And I think to some extent, that does, perhaps have undue influence on the coverage. We're all locked up. We're all mindful of our own health. We're all mindful of people that we know who've gone to hospital or have been very, very sick or where we are, we are heavily influenced by our own immediate environment. And I think that has been a problem if we had been, imagine if the journalists in the country, instead of being clustered in New York and LA and San Francisco had been sort of spread over Texas and Missouri and Florida, things like that. I think you'd have a very different overall accounting of this story over the last three months. So I think it's just, it's accentuated that phenomenon in journalism, which I think we're mindful of, and which we all need to do a better job of addressing. >> It's really interesting. And I want to come back to that point around, who you're collaborating with to get this, now we have virtual ground truth, I guess, how you collaborate. But decision making around stories is, you need an open mind. And if you have this, I guess, I'll call it groupthink or clustering is interesting, now we have digital and we have virtual, it opens up the aperture but we still have the groupthink. But I want to get Eric's take first on his work environment, 'cause I know you've lived on both sides of New York and San Francisco area, as well as you've worked out in the field for agencies, as well on the other side, on the storytelling side. How has this current news environment, journalism environment impacted your view and challenges and your opportunities that you're going after the news? >> Well, so there's there's a few elements here. So one, Barron's Of course, covers the world, looks at the world through a financial lens. We cover the stock market every day. The stock market is not the center of story, but it is an important element of what's been unfolding over the last few months and the markets have been incredibly volatile, we change the way that we approach the markets. Because everything, the big stories are macro stories, huge swings in stock prices, huge swings in the price of oil, dramatic moves in almost every financial security that you can imagine. And so there's a little bit of a struggle for us as we try and shift our daily coverage to be a little more focused on the macro stories as we're still trying to tell what's happening with individual stocks and companies, but these bigger stories have changed our approach. So even if you look at say the covers of our magazine over the last few months, typically, we would do a cover on a company or an investor, that sort of thing. And now they're all big, thematic stories, because the world has changed. And world is changing how it looks at the financial markets. I think one thing that that Gerard touched on is the inability to really leave your house. I'm sitting in my little home office here, where I've been working since March, and my inability to get out and talk to people in person to have some, some interface with the companies and people that I cover, makes it tougher. You get story ideas from those interactions. I think Gerard said some of it comes from your interactions with your colleagues. But some of that also just comes from your ability to interact with sources and that is really tougher to do. It's more formalistic if you do it online. It's just not the same to be on a Zoom call as to be sitting in a Starbucks with somebody and talking about what's going on. I think the other elements of this is that there's, we have a lot of attempts, trying new things trying to reach our readers. We'll do video sessions, we'll do all sorts of other things. And it's one more layer on top of everything else is that there's a lot of demands on the time for the people who are working in journalism right now. I would say one other thing I'll touch on, John, which is, you mentioned, I did use, I worked for public communications for a while, and I do feel their pain because the ability to do any normal PR pitching for new products, new services, the kinds of things that PR people do every day is really tough. It's just really hard to get anybody's attention for those things right now. And the world is focused on these very large problems. >> Well, we'll unpack the PR comms opportunities in the next section. But I want to to just come back to this topic teased out from Gerard and Brenna when you guys were getting out as well. This virtual ground truth, ultimately, at the end of the day, you got to get the stories, you got to report them, they got to be distributed. Obviously, the Wall Street Journal is operating well, by the way, I love the Q&A video chats and what they got going on over there. So the format's are evolving and doing a good job, people are running their business. But as journalists and reporters out there, you got to get the truth and the ground truth comes from interaction. So as you have an aperture with digital, there's also groupthink on, say, Twitter and these channels. So getting in touch with the audience to have those stories. How are you collecting the data? How are you reporting? Has anything changed or shifted that you can point to because ultimately, it's virtual. You still got to get the ground truth, you still got to get the stories. Any thoughts on this point? >> I think in a way what we're seeing is in writ large actually is a problem again, another problem that I think digital journalism or the digital product digital content, if you like, actually presents for us today, which is that it's often said, I think rightly, that one of the, as successful as a lot of digital journalism has been and thank you for what you said about the Wall Street Journal. And we have done a tremendous job and by the way, one of the things that's been a striking feature of this crisis has been the rapid growth in subscriptions that we've had at the Journal. I know other news organizations have too. But we've benefited particularly from a hunger for the quality news. And we've put on an enormous number subscriptions in the last three months. So we've been very fortunate in that respect. But one of the challenges that people always say, one of the one of the drawbacks that people always draw attention to about digital content is that there's a lack of, for want of a better words, serendipity about the experience. When you used to read a newspaper, print newspapers, when may be some of us are old enough to remember, we'd get a newspaper, we'd open it up, we'd look at the front page, we look inside, we'd look at what other sections they were. And we would find things, very large number of things that we weren't particularly, we weren't looking for, we weren't expecting to, we're looking for a story about such. With the digital experience, as we know, that's a much it's a much less serendipitous experience. So you tend to a lot of search, you're looking, you find things that you tend to be looking for, and you find fewer things that, you follow particular people on social media that you have a particular interest in, you follow particular topics and have RSS feeds or whatever else you're doing. And you follow things that, you tend to find things that you were looking for. You don't find many things you weren't. What I think that the virus, the being locked up at home, again, has had a similar effect. That we, again, some of the best stories that I think anybody comes across in life, but news organizations are able to do are those stories that you know that you come across when you might have been looking for something else. You might have been working on a story about a particular company with a particular view to doing one thing and you came across somebody else. And he or she may have told you something actually really quite different and quite interesting and it took you in a different direction. That is easier to do when you're talking to people face to face, when you're actually there, when you're calling, when you're tasked with looking at a topic in the realm. When you are again, sitting at home with your phone on your computer, you tend to be more narrowly so you tend to sort of operate in lanes. And I think that we haven't had the breadth probably of journalism that I think you would get. So that's a very important you talk about data. The data that we have is obviously, we've got access broadly to the same data that we would have, the same electronically delivered data that we would have if we'd been sitting in our office. The data that I think in some ways is more interesting is the non electronically delivered data that is again, the casual conversation, the observation that you might get from being in a particular place or being with someone. The stimuli that arise from being physically in a place that you just aren't getting. And I think that is an important driver of a lot of stories. And we're missing that. >> Well, Gerard, I just want to ask real quick before I go to Brenna on her her take on this. You mentioned the serendipity and taking the stories in certain directions from the interactions. But also there's trust involved. As you build that relationship, there's trust between the parties, and that takes you down that road. How do you develop trust as you are online now? Is there a methodology or technique? Because you want to get the stories out fast, it's a speed game. But there's also the development side of it where a trust equation needs to build. What's your thoughts on that piece? Because that's where the real deeper stories come from. >> So I wasn't sure if you're asking me or Gerard. >> Gerard if he wants can answer that is the trust piece. >> I'll let the others speak to that too. Yeah, it is probably harder to... Again, most probably most people, most stories, most investigative stories, most scoops, most exclusives tend to come from people you already trust, right? So you've developed a trust with them, and they've developed a trust with you. Perhaps more importantly, they know you're going to treat the story fairly and properly. And that tends to develop over time. And I don't think that's been particularly impaired by this process. You don't need to have a physical proximity with someone in order to be able to develop that trust. My sources, I generally speak to them on the phone 99% of the time anyway, and you can still do that from home. So I don't think that's quite... Obviously, again, there are many more benefits from being able to actually physically interact with someone. But I think the level of, trust takes a long time to develop, let's be honest, too, as well. And I think you develop that trust both by developing good sources. and again, as I said, with the sources understanding that you're going to do the story well. >> Brenna, speed game is out there, you got to get stories fast. How do you balance speed and getting the stories and doing some digging into it? What's your thoughts on all this? >> I would say, every week is looking different for me these days. A lot of times there are government announcements coming out, or there are numbers coming out or something that really does require a really quick story. And so what I've been trying to do is get those stories out as quick as possible with maybe sources I already have, or really just the facts on the ground I can get quickly. And then I think in these days, too, there is a ton of room for following up on things. And some news event will come out but it sparks another idea. And that's the time to that when I'm hearing from PR people or I'm hearing from people who care about the issue, right after that first event is really useful for me to hear who else is thinking about these things and maybe ways I can go beyond the first story for something that more in depth and adds more context and provides more value to our readers. >> Awesome. Well, guys, great commentary and insight there on the current situation. The next section is with the role of PR, because it's changing. I've heard the term earned media is a term that's been kicked around. Now we're all virtual, and we're all connected. The media is all virtual. It's all earned at this point. And that's not just a journalistic thing, there's storytelling. There's new voices emerging. You got these newsletter services, audiences are moving very quickly around trying to figure out what's real. So comms folks are trying to get out there and do their job and tell a story. And sometimes that story doesn't meet the cadence of say, news and/or reporting. So let's talk about that. Eric, you brought this up. You have been on both sides. You said you feel for the folks out there who are trying to do their job. How is the job changing? And what can they do now? >> The news cycle is so ferocious at the moment that it's very difficult to insert your weigh in on something that doesn't touch on the virus or the economy or social unrest or the volatility of the financial markets. So I think there's certain kinds of things that are probably best saved for another moment in time, If you're trying to launch new products or trying to announce new services, or those things are just tougher to do right now. I think that the most interesting questions right now are, If I'm a comms person, how can I make myself and my clients a resource to media who are trying to tell stories about these things, do it in a timely way, not overreach, not try insert myself into a story that really isn't a good fit? Now, every time one of these things happen, we got inboxes full of pitches for things that are only tangentially relevant and are probably not really that helpful, either to the reporter generally or to the client of the firm that is trying to pitch an idea. But I will say on the on this at the same time that I rely on my connections to people in corporate comms every single day to make connections with companies that I cover and need to talk to. And it's a moment when almost more than ever, I need immediacy of response, accurate information access to the right people at the companies who I'm trying to cover. But it does mean you need to be I think sharper or a little more pointed a little more your thinking about why am I pitching this person this story? Because the there's no time to waste. We are working 24 hours a day is what it feels like. You don't want to be wasting people's time. >> Well, you guys you guys represent big brands in media which is phenomenal. And anyone would love to have their company mentioned obviously, in a good way, that's their goal. But the word media relations means you relate to the media. If there's no media to relate to, the roles change, and there's not enough seats at the table, so to speak. So getting a clip on in the clip book that gets sent to management, look, "We're on Bloomberg." "Great, check." But is at it? So people, this is a department that needs to do more. Is there things that they can do, that isn't just chasing, getting on your franchises stories? Because it obviously would be great if we were all on Barron's Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg, but they can't always get that. They still got to do more. They got to develop the relationships. >> John, one thing I would be conscious of here is that many of our publications, it's certainly true for journalists, true for us at Barron's and it's certainly true for Bloomberg. We're all multimedia publishers. We're doing lots of things. Barron's has television show on Fox. We have a video series. We have podcasts and newsletters, and daily live audio chats and all sorts of other stuff in addition to the magazine and the website. And so part of that is trying to figure out not just the right publication, but maybe there's an opportunity to do a very particular, maybe you'd be great fit for this thing, but not that thing. And having a real understanding of what are the moving parts. And then the other part, which is always the hardest part, in a way, is truly understanding not just I want to pitch to Bloomberg, but who do I want to pitch at Bloomberg. So I might have a great story for the Wall Street Journal and maybe Gerard would care but maybe it's really somebody you heard on the street who cares or somebody who's covering a particular company. So you have to navigate that, I think effectively. And even, more so now, because we're not sitting in a newsroom. I can't go yell over to somebody who's a few desks away and suggest they take a look at something. >> Do you think that the comm-- (talk over each other) Do you think the comms teams are savvy and literate in multimedia? Are they still stuck in the print ways or the group swing is they're used to what they're doing and haven't evolved? Is that something that you're seeing here? >> I think it varies. Some people will really get it. I think one of the things that that this comes back to in a sense is it's relationship driven. To Gerard's point, it's not so much about trusting people that I don't know, it's about I've been at this a long time, I know what people I know, who I trust, and they know the things I'm interested in and so that relationship is really important. It's a lot harder to try that with somebody new. And the other thing is, I think relevant here is something that we touched on earlier, which is the idiosyncratic element. The ability for me to go out and see new things is tougher. In the technology business, you could spend half your time just going to events, You could go to the conferences and trade shows and dinners and lunches and coffees all day long. And you would get a lot of good story ideas that way. And now you can't do any of that. >> There's no digital hallway. There are out there. It's called Twitter, I guess or-- >> Well, you're doing it from sitting in this very I'm still doing it from sitting in the same chair, having conversations, in some ways like that. But it's not nearly the same. >> Gerard, Brenna, what do you guys think about the comms opportunity, challenges, either whether it's directly or indirectly, things that they could do differently? Share your thoughts. Gerard, we'll start with you? >> Well, I would echo Eric's point as far as knowing who you're pitching to. And I would say that in, at least for the people I'm working with, some of our beats have changed because there are new issues to cover. Someone's taking more of a role covering virus coverage, someone's taking more of a role covering protests. And so I think knowing instead of casting a really wide net, I'm normally happy to try to direct pitches in the right direction. But I do have less time to do that now. So I think if someone can come to me and say, "I know you've been covering this, "this is how my content fits in with that." It'd grab my attention more and makes it easier for me. So I would say that that is one thing that as beats are shifting and people are taking on a little bit of new roles in our coverage, that that's something PR and marketing teams could definitely keep an eye on. >> I agree with all of that. And all everything everybody said. I'd say two very quick things. One, exactly as everybody said, really know who you are pitching to. It's partly just, it's going to be much more effective if you're pitching to the right person, the right story. But when I say that also make the extra effort to familiarize yourself with the work that that reporter or that editor has done. You cannot, I'm sorry to say, overestimate the vanity of reporters or editors or anybody. And so if you're pitching a story to a particular reporter, in a field, make sure you're familiar with what that person may have done and say to her, "I really thought you did a great job "on the reporting that you did on this." Or, "I read your really interesting piece about that," or "I listened to your podcast." It's a relatively easy thing to do that yields extraordinarily well. A, because it appeals to anybody's fantasy and we all have a little bit of that. But, B, it also suggests to the reporter or the editor or the person involved the PR person communications person pitching them, really knows this, has really done their work and has really actually takes this seriously. And instead of just calling, the number of emails I get, and I'm sure it's the same for the others too, or occasional calls out of the blue or LinkedIn messages. >> I love your work. I love your work. >> (voice cuts out) was technology. Well, I have a technology story for you. It's absolutely valueless. So that's the first thing, I would really emphasize that. The second thing I'd say is, especially on the specific relation to this crisis, this Coronavirus issue is it's a tricky balance to get right. On the one hand, make sure that what you're doing what you're pitching is not completely irrelevant right now. The last three months has not been a very good time to pitch a story about going out with a bunch of people to a crowded restaurant or whatever or something like that to do something. Clearly, we know that. At the same time, don't go to the other extreme and try and make every little thing you have seen every story you may have every product or service or idea that you're pitching don't make it the thing that suddenly is really important because of Coronavirus. I've seen too many of those too. People trying too hard to say, "In this time of crisis, "in this challenging time, what people really want to hear "about is "I don't know, "some new diaper "baby's diaper product that I'm developing or whatever." That's trying too hard. So there is something in the middle, which is, don't pitch the obviously irrelevant story that is just not going to get any attention through this process. >> So you're saying don't-- >> And at the same time, don't go too far in the other direction. And essentially, underestimate the reporter's intelligence 'cause that reporter can tell you, "I can see that you're trying too hard." >> So no shotgun approach, obviously, "Hey, I love your work." Okay, yeah. And then be sensitive to what you're working on not try to force an angle on you, if you're doing a story. Eric, I want to get your thoughts on the evolution of some of the prominent journalists that I've known and/or communication professionals that are taking roles in the big companies to be storytellers, or editors of large companies. I interviewed Andy Cunningham last year, who used to be With Cunningham Communications, and formerly of Apple, better in the tech space and NPR. She said, "Companies have to own their own story "and tell it and put it out there." I've seen journalists say on Facebook, "I'm working on a story of x." And then crowdsource a little inbound. Thoughts on this new role of corporations telling their own story, going direct to the consumers. >> I think to a certain extent, that's valuable. And in some ways, it's a little overrated. There are a lot of companies creating content on their websites, or they're creating their own podcasts or they're creating their own newsletter and those kinds of things. I'm not quite sure how much of that, what the consumption level is for some of those things. I think, to me, the more valuable element of telling your story is less about the form and function and it's more about being able to really tell people, explain to them why what they do matters and to whom it matters, understanding the audience that's going to want to hear your story. There are, to your point, there are quite a few journalists who have migrated to either corporate communications or being in house storytellers of one kind or another for large businesses. And there's certainly a need to figure out the right way to tell your story. I think in a funny way, this is a tougher moment for those things. Because the world is being driven by external events, by these huge global forces are what we're all focused on right now. And it makes it a lot tougher to try and steer your own story at this particular moment in time. And I think you do see it Gerard was talking about don't try and... You want to know what other people are doing. You do want to be aware of what others are writing about. But there's this tendency to want to say, "I saw you wrote a story about Peloton "and we too have a exercise story that you can, "something that's similar." >> (chuckles) A story similar to it. We have a dance video or something. People are trying to glam on to things and taking a few steps too far. But in terms of your original question, it's just tougher at the moment to control your story in that particular fashion, I think. >> Well, this brings up a good point. I want to get to Gerard's take on this because the Wall Street Journal obviously has been around for many, many decades. and it's institution in journalism. In the old days, if you weren't relevant enough to make the news, if you weren't the most important story that people cared about, the editors make that choice and you're on the front page or in a story editorially. And companies would say, "No, but I should be in there." And you'd say, "That's what advertising is for." And that's the way it seemed to work in the past. If you weren't relevant in the spirit of the decision making of important story or it needs to be communicated to the audience, there's ads for that. You can get a full page ad in the old days. Now with the new world, what's an ad, what's a story? You now have multiple omni-channels out there. So traditionally, you want to get the best, most important story that's about relevance. So companies might not have a relevant story and they're telling a boring story. There's no there, there, or they miss the story. How do you see this? 'Cause this is the blend, this is the gray area that I see. It's certainly a good story, depending on who you're talking to, the 10 people who like it. >> I think there's no question. We're in the news business, topicality matters. You're going to have a much better chance of getting your story, getting your product or service, whatever covered by the Wall Street Journal, Barron's or anywhere else for that matter, if it seems somehow news related, whether it's the virus or the unrest that we've been seeing, or it's to do with the economy. Clearly, you can have an effect. Newspapers, news organizations of all the three news organizations we represent don't just, are not just obviously completely obsessed with what happened this morning and what's going on right now. We are all digging into deeper stories, especially in the business field. Part of what we all do is actually try to get beyond the daily headlines. And so what's happening with the fortunes of a particular company. Obviously, they may be impacted by they're going to be impacted by the lockdown and Coronavirus. But they actually were doing some interesting things that they were developing over the long term, and we would like to look into that too. So again, there is a balance there. And I'm not going to pretend that if you have a really topical story about some new medical device or some new technology for dealing with this new world that we're all operating in, you're probably going to get more attention than you would if you don't have that. But I wouldn't also underestimate, the other thing is, as well as topicality, everybody's looking at the same time to be different, and every journalist wants to do something original and exclusive. And so they are looking for a good story that may be completely unrelated. In fact, I would also underestimate, I wouldn't underestimate either the desire of readers and viewers and listeners to actually have some deeper reported stories on subjects that are not directly in the news right now. So again, it's about striking the balance right. But I wouldn't say that, that there is not at all, I wouldn't say there is not a strong role for interesting stories that may not have anything to do what's going on with the news right now. >> Brenna, you want to add on your thoughts, you're in the front lines as well, Bloomberg, everyone wants to be on Bloomberg. There's Bloomberg radio. You guys got tons of media too, there's tons of stuff to do. How do they navigate? And how do you view the interactions with comms folks? >> It looks we're having a little bit of challenge with... Eric, your thoughts on comm professionals. The questions in the chats are everything's so fast paced, do you think it's less likely for reporters to respond to PR comms people who don't have interacted with you before? Or with people you haven't met before? >> It's an internal problem. I've seen data that talks about the ratio of comms people to reporters, and it's, I don't know, six or seven to one or something like that, and there are days when it feels like it's 70 to one. And so it is challenging to break through. And I think it's particularly challenging now because some of the tools you might have had, you might have said, "Can we grab coffee one day or something like that," trying to find ways to get in front of that person when you don't need them. It's a relationship business. I know this is a frustrating answer, but I think it's the right answer which is those relationships between media and comms people are most successful when they've been established over time. And so you're not getting... The spray and pray strategy doesn't really work. It's about, "Eric, I have a story that's perfect for you. "And here's why I think you you should talk to this guy." And if they really know me, there's a reasonable chance that I'll not only listen to them, but I'll at least take the call. You need to have that high degree of targeting. It is really hard to break through and people try everything. They try, the insincere version of the, "I read your story, it was great. "but here's another great story." Which maybe they read your story, maybe they didn't at least it was an attempt. Or, "if you like this company, you'll love that one." People try all these tricks to try and get get to you. I think the highest level of highest probability of success comes from the more information you have about not just what I covered yesterday, but what do I cover over time? What kinds of stories am I writing? What kinds of stories does the publication write? And also to keep the pitching tight, I was big believer when I was doing comms, you should be able to pitch stories in two sentences. And you'll know from that whether there's going to be connection or not, don't send me five or more pitches. Time is of the essence, keep it short and as targeted as possible. >> That's a good answer to Paul Bernardo's question in the chat, which is how do you do the pitch. Brenna, you're back. Can you hear us? No. Okay. We'll get back to her when she gets logged back in. Gerard, your thoughts on how to reach you. I've never met you before, if I'm a CEO or I'm a comms person, a company never heard of, how do I get your attention? If I can't have a coffee with you with COVID, how do I connect with you virtually? (talk over each other) >> Exactly as Eric said, it is about targeting, it's really about making sure you are. And again, it's, I hate to say this, but it's not that hard. If you are the comms person for a large or medium sized company or even a small company, and you've got a particular pitch you want to make, you're probably dealing in a particular field, a particular sector, business sector or whatever. Let's say it says not technology for change, let's say it's fast moving consumer goods or something like that. Bloomberg, Brenna is in an enormous organization with a huge number of journalist you deal and a great deal of specialism and quality with all kinds of sectors. The Wall Street Journal is a very large organization, we have 13, 1400 reporters, 13 to 1400 hundred journalist and staff, I should say. Barron's is a very large organization with especially a particularly strong field coverage, especially in certain sectors of business and finance. It's not that hard to find out A, who is the right person, actually the right person in those organizations who's been dealing with the story that you're trying to sell. Secondly, it's absolutely not hard to find out what they have written or broadcast or produced on in that general field in the course of the last, and again, as Eric says, going back not just over the last week or two, but over the last year or two, you can get a sense of their specialism and understand them. It's really not that hard. It's the work of an hour to go back and see who the right person is and to find out what they've done. And then to tailor the pitch that you're making to that person. And again, I say that partly, it's not purely about the vanity of the reporter, it's that the reporter will just be much more favorably inclined to deal with someone who clearly knows, frankly, not just what they're pitching, but what the journalist is doing and what he or she, in his or her daily activity is actually doing. Target it as narrowly as you can. And again, I would just echo what Eric and I think what Brenna was also saying earlier too that I'm really genuinely surprised at how many very broad pitches, again, I'm not directly in a relative role now. But I was the editor in chief of the Journal for almost six years. And even in that position, the number of extraordinarily broad pitches I get from people who clearly didn't really know who I was, who didn't know what I did, and in some cases, didn't even really know what Wall Street Journal was. If you can find that, if you actually believe that. It's not hard. It's not that hard to do that. And you will have so much more success, if you are identifying the organization, the people, the types of stories that they're interested in, it really is not that difficult to do. >> Okay, I really appreciate, first of all, great insight there. I want to get some questions from the crowd so if you're going to chat, there was a little bit of a chat hiccup in there. So it should be fixed. We're going to go to the chat for some questions for this distinguished panel. Talk about the new coffee. There's a good question here. Have you noticed news fatigue, or reader seeking out news other than COVID? If so, what news stories have you been seeing trending? In other words, are people sick and tired of COVID? Or is it still on the front pages? Is that relevant? And if not COVID, what stories are important, do you think? >> Well, I could take a brief stab at that. I think it's not just COVID per se, for us, the volatility of the stock market, the uncertainties in the current economic environment, the impact on on joblessness, these massive shifts of perceptions on urban lifestyles. There's a million elements of this that go beyond the core, what's happening with the virus story. I do think as a whole, all those things, and then you combine that with the social unrest and Black Lives Matter. And then on top of that, the pending election in the fall. There's just not a lot of room left for other stuff. And I think I would look at it a little bit differently. It's not finding stories that don't talk on those things, it's finding ways for coverage of other things whether it's entertainment. Obviously, there's a huge impact on the entertainment business. There's a huge impact on sports. There's obviously a huge impact on travel and retail and restaurants and even things like religious life and schooling. I have the done parents of a college, was about to be a college sophomore, prays every day that she can go back to school in the fall. There are lots of elements to this. And it's pretty hard to imagine I would say to Gerard's point earlier, people are looking for good stories, they're always looking for good stories on any, but trying to find topics that don't touch on any of these big trends, there's not a lot of reasons to look for those. >> I agree. Let me just give you an example. I think Eric's exactly right. It's hard to break through. I'll just give you an example, when you asked that question, I just went straight to my Wall Street Journal app on my phone. And of course, like every organization, you can look at stories by sections and by interest and by topic and by popularity. And what are the three most popular stories right now on the Wall Street Journal app? I can tell you the first one is how exactly do you catch COVID-19? I think that's been around since for about a month. The second story is cases accelerate across the United States. And the third story is New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, tell travelers from areas with virus rates to self isolate. So look, I think anecdotally, there is a sense of COVID fatigue. Well, we're all slightly tired of it. And certainly, we were probably all getting tired, or rather distressed by those terrible cases and when we've seen them really accelerate back in March and April and these awful stories of people getting sick and dying. I was COVID fatigued. But I just have to say all of the evidence we have from our data, in terms of as I said earlier, the interest in the story, the demand for what we're doing, the growth in subscriptions that we've had, and just as I said, little things like that, that I can point you at any one time, I can guarantee you that our among our top 10 most read stories, at least half of them will be COVID-19. >> I think it's safe to say general interest in that outcome of progression of that is super critical. And I think this brings up the tech angle, which we can get into a minute. But just stick with some of these questions I just want to just keep these questions flowing while we have a couple more minutes left here. In these very challenging times for journalism, do byline articles have more power to grab the editors attention in the pitching process? >> Well, I think I assume what the questioner is asking when he said byline articles is contributed. >> Yes. >> Contributed content. Barron's doesn't run a lot of contributing content that way in a very limited way. When I worked at Forbes, we used to run tons of it. I'm not a big believer that that's necessarily a great way to generate a lot of attention. You might get published in some publication, if you can get yourself onto the op ed page of The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, more power to you. But I think in most cases-- >> It's the exception not the rule Exception not the rule so to speak, on the big one. >> Yeah. >> Well, this brings up the whole point about certainly on SiliconANGLE, our property, where I'm co founder and chief, we basically debate over and get so many pitches, "hey, I want to write for you, here's a contributed article." And it's essentially an advertisement. Come on, really, it's not really relevant. In some case we (talk over each other) analysts come in and and done that. But this brings up the question, we're seeing these newsletters like sub stack and these services really are funding direct journalism. So it's an interesting. if you're good enough to write Gerard, what's your take on this, you've seen this, you have a bit of experience in this. >> I think, fundamental problem here is that is people like the idea of doing by lines or contributed content, but often don't have enough to say. You can't just do, turn your marketing brochure into a piece of an 800 word with the content that that's going to be compelling or really attract any attention. I think there's a place for it, if you truly have something important to say, and if you really have something new to say, and it's not thinly disguised marketing material. Yeah, you can find a way to do that. I'm not sure I would over-rotate on that as an approach. >> No, I just briefly, again, I completely agree. At the Journal we just don't ever publish those pieces. As Eric says, you're always, everyone is always welcome to try and pitch to the op ed pages of the Journal. They're not generally going to I don't answer for them, I don't make those decisions. But I've never seen a marketing pitch run as an op ed effectively. I just think you have to know again, who you're aiming at. I'm sure it's true for Bloomberg, Barron's and the Journal, most other major news organizations are not really going to consider that. There might be organizations, there might be magazines, digital and print magazines. There might be certain trade publications that would consider that. Again, at the Journal and I'm sure most of the large news organizations, we have very strict rules about what we can publish. And how and who can get published. And it's essentially journal editorials, that journal news staff who can publish stories we don't really take byline, outside contribution. >> Given that your time is so valuable, guys, what's the biggest, best practice to get your attention? Eric, you mentioned keeping things tight and crisp. Are there certain techniques to get your attention? >> Well I'll mention just a couple of quick things. Email is better than most other channels, despite the volume. Patience is required as a result because of the volume. People do try and crawl over the transom, hit you up on LinkedIn, DM you on Twitter, there's a lot of things that people try and do. I think a very tightly crafted, highly personalized email with the right subject line is probably still the most effective way, unless it's somebody you actually, there are people who know me who know they have the right to pick up the phone and call me if they really think they have... That's a relationship that's built over time. The one thing on this I would add which I think came up a little bit before thinking about it is, you have to engage in retail PR, not not wholesale PR. The idea that you're going to spam a list of 100 people and think that that's really going to be a successful approach, it's not unless you're just making an announcement, and if you're issuing your earnings release, or you've announced a large acquisition or those things, fine, then I need to get the information. But simply sending around a very wide list is not a good strategy, in most cases, I would say probably for anyone. >> We got Brenna back, can you hear me? She's back, okay. >> I can hear you, I'm back. >> Well, let's go back to you, we missed you. Thanks for coming back in. We had a glitch on our end but appreciate it, bandwidth internet is for... Virtual is always a challenge to do live, but thank you. The trend we're just going through is how do I pitch to you? What's the best practice? How do I get your attention? Do bylines lines work? Actually, Bloomberg doesn't do that very often either as well as like the Journal. but your thoughts on folks out there who are really trying to figure out how to do a good job, how to get your attention, how to augment your role and responsibilities. What's your thoughts? >> I would say, going back to what we said a little bit before about really knowing who you're pitching to. If you know something that I've written recently that you can reference, that gets my attention. But I would also encourage people to try to think about different ways that they can be part of a story if they are looking to be mentioned in one of our articles. And what I mean by that is, maybe you are launching new products or you have a new initiative, but think about other ways that your companies relate to what's going on right now. So for instance, one thing that I'm really interested in is just the the changing nature of work in the office place itself. So maybe you know of something that's going on at a company, unlimited vacation for the first time or sabbaticals are being offered to working parents who have nowhere to send their children, or something that's unique about the current moment that we're living in. And I think that those make really good interviews. So it might not be us featuring your product or featuring exactly what your company does, but it still makes you part of the conversation. And I think it's still, it's probably valuable to the company as well to get that mention, and people may be looking into what you guys do. So I would say that something else we are really interested in right now is really looking at who we're quoting and the diversity of our sources. So that's something else I would put a plug in for PR people to be keeping an eye on, is if you're always putting up your same CEO who is maybe of a certain demographic, but you have other people in your company who you can give the opportunity to talk with the media. I'm really interested in making sure I'm using a diverse list of sources and I'm not just always calling the same person. So if you can identify people who maybe even aren't experienced with it, but they're willing to give it a try, I think that now's a really good moment to be able to get new voices in there. >> Rather than the speed dial person you go to for that vertical or that story, building out those sources. >> Exactly. >> Great, that's great insight, Everyone, great insights. And thank you for your time on this awesome panel. Love to do it again. This has been super informative. I love some of the engagement out there. And again, I think we can do more of these and get the word out. I'd like to end the panel on an uplifting note for young aspiring journalists coming out of school. Honestly, journalism programs are evolving. The landscape is changing. We're seeing a sea change. As younger generation comes out of college and master's programs in journalism, we need to tell the most important stories. Could you each take a minute to give your advice to folks either going in and coming out of school, what to be prepared for, how they can make an impact? Brenna, we'll start with you, Gerard and Eric. >> That's a big question. I would say one thing that has been been encouraging about everything going on right now as I have seen an increased hunger for information and an increased hunger for accurate information. So I do think it can obviously be disheartening to look at the furloughs and the layoffs and everything that is going on around the country. But at the same time, I think we have been able to see really big impacts from the people that are doing reporting on protests and police brutality and on responses to the virus. And so I think for young journalists, definitely take a look at the people who are doing work that you think is making a difference. And be inspired by that to keep pushing even though the market might be a little bit difficult for a while. >> I'd say two things. One, again, echoing what Brenna said, identify people that you follow or you admire or you think are making a real contribution in the field and maybe directly interact with them. I think all of us, whoever we are, always like to hear from young journalists and budding journalists. And again, similar advice to giving to the advice that we were giving about PR pitches. If you know what that person has been doing, and then contact them and follow them. And I know I've been contacted by a number of young journalists like that. The other thing I'd say is and this is more of a plea than a piece of advice. But I do think it will work in the long run, be prepared to go against the grain. I fear that too much journalism today is of the same piece. There is not a lot of intellectual diversity in what we're seeing There's a tendency to follow the herd. Goes back a little bit to what I was saying right at the opening about the fact that too many journalists, quite frankly, are clustered in the major metropolitan areas in this country and around the world. Have something distinctive and a bit different to say. I'm not suggesting you offer some crazy theory or a set of observations about the world but be prepared to... To me, the reason I went into journalism was because I was always a bit skeptical about whenever I saw something in any media, which especially one which seemed to have a huge amount of support and was repeated in all places, I always asked myself, "Is that really true? "Is that actually right? "Maybe there's an alternative to that." And that's going to make you stand out as a journalist, that's going to give you a distinctiveness. It's quite hard to do in some respects right now, because standing out from the crowd can get you into trouble. And I'm not suggesting that people should do that. Have a record of original storytelling, of reporting, of doing things perhaps that not, because look, candidly, there are probably right now in this country, 100,00 budding putative journalists who would like to go out and write about, report on Black Lives Matter and the reports on the problems of racial inequality in this country and the protests and all of that kind of stuff. The problem there is there are already 100,000 of those people who want to do that in addition to probably the 100,000 journalists who are already doing it. Find something else, find something different. have something distinctive to offer so that when attention moves on from these big stories, whether it's COVID or race or politics or the election or Donald Trump or whatever. Have something else to offer that is quite distinctive and where you have actually managed to carve out for yourself a real record as having an independent voice. >> Brenna and Gerard, great insight. Eric, take us home close us out. >> Sure. I'd say a couple things. So one is as a new, as a young journalist, I think first of all, having a variety of tools in your toolkit is super valuable. So be able to write long and write short, be able to do audio, blogs, podcast, video. If you can shoot photos and the more skills that you have, a following on social media. You want to have all of the tools in your toolkit because it is challenging to get a job and so you want to be able to be flexible enough to fill all those roles. And the truth is that a modern journalist is finding the need to do all of that. When I first started at Barron's many, many years ago, we did one thing, we did a weekly magazine. You'd have two weeks to write a story. It was very comfortable. And that's just not the way the world works anymore. So that's one element. And the other thing, I think Gerard is right. You really want to have a certain expertise if possible that makes you stand out. And the contradiction is, but you also want to have the flexibility to do lots of different stories. You want to get (voice cuts out) hold. But if you have some expertise, that is hard to find, that's really valuable. When Barron's hires we're always looking for people who have, can write well but also really understand the financial markets. And it can be challenging for us sometimes to find those people. And so I think there's, you need to go short and long. It's a barbell strategy. Have expertise, but also be flexible in both your approach and the things you're willing to cover. >> Great insight. Folks, thanks for the great commentary, great chats for the folks watching, really appreciate your valuable time. Be original, go against the grain, be skeptical, and just do a good job. I think there's a lot of opportunity. And I think the world's changing. Thanks for your time. And I hope the comms folks enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for joining us, everyone. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> I'm John Furrier here in the Cube for this Cube Talk was one hour power panel. Awesome conversation. Stay in chat if you want to ask more questions. We'll come back and look at those chats later. But thank you for watching. Have a nice day. (instrumental music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> As you may recall, coming into the second part of 2019 we reported, based on ETR Survey data, that there was a narrowing of spending on emerging tech and an unplugging of a lot of legacy systems. This was really because people were going from experimentation into operationalizing their digital initiatives. When COVID hit, conventional wisdom suggested that there would be a flight to safety. Now, interestingly, we reported with Eric Bradley, based on one of the Venns, that a lot of CIOs were still experimenting with emerging vendors. But this was very anecdotal. Today, we have more data, fresh data, from the ETR Emerging Technology Study on private companies, which really does suggest that there's a notable decline in experimentation, and that's affecting emerging technology vendors. Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. Once again, Sagar Kadakia is joining us. Sagar is the Director of Research at ETR. Sagar, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Good to see you again. Thanks for having me, Dave. >> So, it's really important to point out, this Emerging Tech Study that you guys do, it's different from your quarterly Technology Spending Intention Survey. Take us through the methodology. Guys, maybe you could bring up the first chart. And, Sagar, walk us through how you guys approach this. >> No problem. So, a lot of the viewers are used to seeing a lot of the results from the Technology Spending Intention Survey, or the TSIS, as we call it. That study, as the title says, it really tracks spending intentions on more pervasive vendors, right, Microsoft, AWS, as an example. What we're going to look at today is our Emerging Technology Study, which we conduct biannually, in May and November. This study is a little bit different. We ask CIOs around evaluations, awareness, planned evaluations, so think of this as pre-spend, right. So that's a major differentiator from the TSIS. That, and this study, really focuses on private emerging providers. We're really only focused on those really emerging private companies, say, like your Series B to Series G or H, whatever it may be, so, two big differences within those studies. And then today what we're really going to look at is the results from the Emerging Technology Study. Just a couple of quick things here. We had 811 CIOs participate, which represents about 380 billion in annual IT spend, so the results from this study matter. We had almost 75 Fortune 100s take it. So, again, we're really measuring how private emerging providers are doing in the largest organizations. And so today we're going to be reviewing notable sectors, but largely this survey tracks roughly 356 private technologies and frameworks. >> All right, guys, bring up the pie chart, the next slide. Now, Sagar, this is sort of a snapshot here, and it basically says that 44% of CIOs agree that COVID has decreased the organization's evaluation and utilization of emerging tech, despite what I mentioned, Eric Bradley's Venn, which suggested one CIO in particular said, "Hey, I always pick somebody in the lower left "of the magic quadrant." But, again, this is a static view. I know we have some other data, but take us through this, and how this compares to other surveys that you've done. >> No problem. So let's start with the high level takeaways. And I'll actually kind of get into to the point that Eric was debating, 'cause that point is true. It's just really how you kind of slice and dice the data to get to that. So, what you're looking at here, and what the overall takeaway from the Emerging Technology Study was, is, you know, you are going to see notable declines in POCs, of proof-of-concepts, any valuations because of COVID-19. Even though we had been communicating for quite some time, you know, the last few months, that there's increasing pressure for companies to further digitize with COVID-19, there are IT budget constraints. There is a huge pivot in IT resources towards supporting remote employees, a decrease in risk tolerance, and so that's why what you're seeing here is a rather notable number of CIOs, 44%, that said that they are decreasing their organization's evaluation and utilization of private emerging providers. So that is notable. >> Now, as you pointed out, you guys run this survey a couple of times a year. So now let's look at the time series. Guys, if you bring up the next chart. We can see how the sentiment has changed since last year. And, of course, we're isolating here on some of larger companies. So, take us through what this data means. >> No problem. So, how do we quantify what we just saw in the prior slide? We saw 44% of CIOs indicating that they are going to be decreasing their evaluations. But what exactly does that mean? We can pretty much determine that by looking at a lot of the data that we captured through our Emerging Technology Study. There's a lot going on in this slide, but I'll walk you through it. What you're looking at here is Fortune 1000 organizations, so we've really isolated the data to those organizations that matter. So, let's start with the teal, kind of green line first, because I think it's a little bit easier to understand. What you're looking at, Fortune 1000 evaluations, both planned and current, okay? And you're looking at a time series, one year ago and six months ago. So, two of the answer options that we provide CIOs in this survey, right, think about the survey as a grid, where you have seven answer options going horizontally, and then 300-plus vendors and technologies going vertically. For any given vendor, they can essentially indicate one of these options, two of them being on currently evaluating them or I plan to evaluate them in six months. So what you're looking at here is effectively the aggregate number, or the average number of Fortune 1000 evaluations. So if you look into May 2019, all the way on the left of that chart, that 24% roughly means that a quarter of selections made by Fortune 1000 of the survey, they selected plan to evaluate or currently evaluating. If you fast-forward six months, to the middle of the chart, November '19, it's roughly the same, one in four technologies that are Fortune 1000 selected, they indicated that I plan or am currently evaluating them. But now look at that big drop off going into May 2020, the 17%, right? So now one out of every six technologies, or one out of every selections that they made was an evaluation. So a very notable drop. And then if you look at the blue line, this is another answer option that we provided CIOs: I'm aware of the technology but I have no plans to evaluate. So this answer option essentially tracks awareness levels. If you look at the last six months, look at that big uptick from 44% to over 50%, right? So now, essentially one out of every two technologies, or private technologies that a CIO is aware of, they have no plans to evaluate. So this is going to have an impact on the general landscape, when we think about those private emerging providers. But there is one caveat, and, Dave, this is what you mentioned earlier, this is what Eric was talking about. The providers that are doing well are the ones that are work-from-home aligned. And so, just like a few years ago, we were really analyzing results based on are you cloud-native or are you Cloud-aligned, because those technologies are going to do the best, what we're seeing in the emerging space is now the same thing. Those emerging providers that enable organizations to maintain productivity for their employees, essentially allowing their employees to work remotely, those emerging providers are still doing well. And that is probably the second biggest takeaway from this study. >> So now what we're seeing here is this flight to perceive safety, which, to your point, Sagar, doesn't necessarily mean good news for all enterprise tech vendors, but certainly for those that are positioned for the work-from-home pivot. So now let's take a look at a couple of sectors. We'll start with information security. We've reported for years about how the perimeter's been broken down, and that more spend was going to shift from inside the moat to a distributed network, and that's clearly what's happened as a result of COVID. Guys, if you bring up the next chart. Sagar, you take us through this. >> No problem. And as you imagine, I think that the big theme here is zero trust. So, a couple of things here. And let me just explain this chart a little bit, because we're going to be going through a couple of these. What you're seeing on the X-axis here, is this is effectively what we're classifying as near term growth opportunity from all customers. The way we measure that effectively is we look at all the evaluations, current evaluations, planned evaluations, we look at people who are evaluated and plan to utilize these vendors. The more indications you get on that the more to the top right you're going to be. The more indications you get around I'm aware of but I don't plan to evaluate, or I'm replacing this early-stage vendor, the further down and on the left you're going to be. So, on the X-axis you have near term growth opportunity from all customers, and on the Y-axis you have near term growth opportunity from, really, the biggest shops in the world, your Global 2000, your Forbes Private 225, like Cargill, as an example, and then, of course, your federal agencies. So you really want to be positioned up and to the right here. So, the big takeaway here is zero trust. So, just a couple of things on this slide when we think about zero trust. As organizations accelerate their Cloud and Saas spend because of COVID-19, and, you know, what we were talking about earlier, Dave, remote work becomes the new normal, that perimeter security approach is losing appeal, because the perimeter's less defined, right? Apps and data are increasingly being stored in the Cloud. That, and employees are working remotely from everywhere, and they're accessing all of these items. And so what we're seeing now is a big move into zero trust. So, if we look at that chart again, what you're going to see in that upper right quadrant are a lot of identity and access management players. And look at the bifurcation in general. This is what we were talking about earlier in terms of the landscape not doing well. Most security vendors are in that red area, you know, in the middle to the bottom. But if you look at the top right, what are you seeing here? Unify ID, Auth0, WSO2, right, all identity and access management players. These are critical in your zero trust approach, and this is one of the few area where we are seeing upticks. You also see here BitSight, Lucideus. So that's going to be security assessment. You're seeing VECTRA and Netskope and Darktrace, and a few others here. And Cloud Security and IDPS, Intrusion Detection and Prevention System. So, very few sectors are seeing an uptick, very few security sectors actually look pretty good, based on opportunities that are coming. But, essentially, all of them are in that work-from-home aligned security stack, so to speak. >> Right, and of course, as we know, as we've been reporting, buyers have options, from both established companies and these emerging companies that are public, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler. We've seen the work-from-home pivot benefit those guys, but even Palo Alto Networks, even CISCO, I asked (other speaker drowns out speech) last week, I said, "Hey, what about this pivot to work from home? "What about this zero trust?" And he said, "Look, the reality is, yes, "a big part of our portfolio is exposed "to that traditional infrastructure, "but we have options for zero trust as well." So, from a buyer's standpoint, that perceived flight to safety, you have a lot of established vendors, and that clearly is showing up in your data. Now, the other sector that we want to talk about is database. We've been reporting a lot on database, data warehouse. So, why don't you take us through the next graphic here, if you would. >> Sagar: No problem. So, our theme here is that Snowflake is really separating itself from the pack, and, again, you can see that here. Private database and data warehousing vendors really continue to impact a lot of their public peers, and Snowflake is leading the way. We expect Snowflake to gain momentum in the next few years. And, look, there's some rumors that IPOing soon. And so when we think about that set-up, we like it, because as organizations transition away from hybrid Cloud architectures to 100% or near-100% public Cloud, Snowflake is really going to benefit. So they look good, their data stacks look pretty good, right, that's resiliency, redundancy across data centers. So we kind of like them as well. Redis Labs bring a DB and they look pretty good here on the opportunity side, but we are seeing a little bit of churn, so I think probably Snowflake and DataStax are probably our two favorites here. And again, when you think about Snowflake, we continue to think more pervasive vendors, like Paradata and Cloudera, and some of the other larger database firms, they're going to continue seeing wallet and market share losses due to some of these emerging providers. >> Yeah. If you could just keep that slide up for a second, I would point out, in many ways Snowflake is kind of a safer bet, you know, we talk about flight to safety, because they're well-funded, they're established. You can go from zero to Snowflake very quickly, that's sort of their mantra, if you will. But I want to point out and recognize that it is somewhat oranges and tangerines here, Snowflake being an analytical database. You take MariaDB, for instance, I look at that, anyway, as relational and operational. And then you mentioned DataStax. I would say Couchbase, Redis Labs, Aerospike. Cockroach is really a... EValue Store. You've got some non-relational databases in there. But we're looking at the entire sector of databases, which has become a really interesting market. But again, some of those established players are going to do very well, and I would put Snowflake on that cusp. As you pointed out, Bloomberg broke the story, I think last week, that they were contemplating an IPO, which we've known for a while. >> Yeah. And just one last thing on that. We do like some of the more pervasive players, right. Obviously, AWS, all their products, Redshift and DynamoDB. Microsoft looks really good. It's just really some of the other legacy ones, like the Teradatas, the Oracles, the Hadoops, right, that we are going to be impacted. And so the claw providers look really good. >> So, the last decade has really brought forth this whole notion of DevOps, infrastructure as code, the whole API economy. And that's the piece we want to jump into now. And there are some real stand-outs here, you know, despite the early data that we showed you, where CIOs are less prone to look at emerging vendors. There are some, for instance, if you bring up the next chart, guys, like Hashi, that really are standing out, aren't they? >> That's right, Dave. So, again, what you're seeing here is you're seeing that bifurcation that we were talking about earlier. There are a lot of infrastructure software vendors that are not positioned well, but if you look at the ones at the top right that are positioned well... We have two kind of things on here, starting with infrastructure automation. We think a winner here is emerging with Terraform. Look all the way up to the right, how well-positioned they are, how many opportunities they're getting. And for the second straight survey now, Terraform is leading along their peers, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack. And they're leading their peers in so many different categories, notably on allocating more spend, which is obviously very important. For Chef, Puppet and SaltStack, which you can see a little bit below, probably a little bit higher than the middle, we are seeing some elevator churn levels. And so, really, Terraform looks like they're kind of separating themselves. And we've got this great quote from the CIO just a few months ago, on why Terraform is likely pulling away, and I'll read it out here quickly. "The Terraform tool creates "an entire infrastructure in a box. "Unlike vendors that use procedural languages, "like Ants, Bull and Chef, "it will show you the infrastructure "in the way you want it to be. "You don't have to worry about "the things that happen underneath." I know some companies where you can put your entire Amazon infrastructure through Terraform. If Amazon disappears, if your availability drops, load balancers, RDS, everything, you just run Terraform and everything will be created in 10 to 15 minutes. So that shows you the power of Terraform and why we think it's ranked better than some of the other vendors. >> Yeah, I think that really does sum it up. And, actually, guys, if you don't mind bringing that chart back up again. So, a point out, so, Mitchell Hashimoto, Hashi, really, I believe I'm correct, talking to Stu about this a little bit, he sort of led the Terraform project, which is an Open Source project, and, to your point, very easy to deploy. Chef, Puppet, Salt, they were largely disrupted by Cloud, because they're designed to automate deployment largely on-prem and DevOps, and now Terraform sort of packages everything up into a platform. So, Hashi actually makes money, and you'll see it on this slide, and things, Vault, which is kind of their security play. You see GitLab on here. That's really application tooling to deploy code. You see Docker containers, you know, Docker, really all about open source, and they've had great adoption, Docker's challenge has always been monetization. You see Turbonomic on here, which is application resource management. You can't go too deep on these things, but it's pretty deep within this sector. But we are comparing different types of companies, but just to give you a sense as to where the momentum is. All right, let's wrap here. So maybe some final thoughts, Sagar, on the Emerging Technology Study, and then what we can expect in the coming month here, on the update in the Technology Spending Intention Study, please. >> Yeah, no problem. One last thing on the zero trust side that has been a big issue that we didn't get to cover, is VPN spend. Our data is pointing that, yes, even though VPN spend did increase the last few months because of remote work, we actually think that people are going to move away from that as they move onto zero trust. So just one last point on that, just in terms of overall thoughts, you know, again, as we cover it, you can see how bifurcated all these spaces are. Really, if we were to go sector by sector by sector, right, storage and block chain and MLAI and all that stuff, you would see there's a few or maybe one or two vendors doing well, and the majority of vendors are not seeing as many opportunities. And so, again, are you work-from-home aligned? Are you the best vendor of all the other emerging providers? And if you fit those two criteria then you will continue seeing POCs and evaluations. And if you don't fit that criteria, unfortunately, you're going to see less opportunities. So think that's really the big takeaway on that. And then, just in terms of next steps, we're already transitioning now to our next Technology Spending Intention Survey. That launched last week. And so, again, we're going to start getting a feel for how CIOs are spending in 2H-20, right, so, for the back half of the year. And our question changes a little bit. We ask them, "How do you plan on spending in the back half year "versus how you actually spent "in the first half of the year, or 1H-20?" So, we're kind of, tighten the screw, so to speak, and really getting an idea of what's spend going to look like in the back half, and we're also going to get some updates as it relates to budget impacts from COVID-19, as well as how vendor-relationships have changed, as well as business impacts, like layoffs and furloughs, and all that stuff. So we have a tremendous amount of data that's going to be coming in the next few weeks, and it should really prepare us for what to see over the summer and into the fall. >> Yeah, very excited, Sagar, to see that. I just wanted to double down on what you said about changes in networking. We've reported with you guys on NPLS networks, shifting to SD-WAN. But even VPN and SD-WAN are being called into question as the internet becomes the new private network. And so lots of changes there. And again, very excited to see updated data, return of post-COVID, as we exit this isolation economy. Really want to point out to folks that this is not a snapshot survey, right? This is an ongoing exercise that ETR runs, and grateful for our partnership with you guys. Check out ETR.plus, that's the ETR website. I publish weekly on Wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com. Sagar, thanks so much for coming on. Once again, great to have you. >> Thank you so much, for having me, Dave. I really appreciate it, as always. >> And thank you for watching this episode of theCube Insights, powered by ETR. This Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of you. I path live the release show brought to you by you. >>I path Hi. Welcome back to this special R p A drill down with support from you. I path You're watching The Cube. My name is Dave Volante and Bobby CMO. You know I passed Bobby. Good to see you again. Hope you're doing well. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi, Dave. It's great to see you as well. It's always a pleasure to be on the Cube and even in the virtual format, this is really exciting. >>So, you know, last year at forward, we talked about the possibility of a downturn. Now nobody expected this kind of downturn. But we talked about that. Automation was likely something that was going to stay strong even in the downturn. We were thinking about potential recession or an economic downturn. Stock market dropped, but nothing like this. How are you guys holding up in this posted 19 pandemic? What are you seeing in the marketplace? >>Yeah, we certainly we're not thinking of a black swan or rhino or whatever we call this, but, you know, it's been a pretty crazy couple of months for everybody. You know, when When this first started, we were like everybody else. Not sure how it impact our business. The interesting thing has been that you're in code. It actually brought a reality check through. A lot of companies and organizations realize that it's very few tools to respond quickly, right? Bond with, you know, cost pressures that we're urgent or preserving revenue, perhaps, or responding to Ah, strange resource is, you know, in all centers, or or built to support. You know, the surge in in, um, in the healthcare community. And so r p a became one of those tools that quickly waas knowledge and adopted. And so we went out two months ago to go find those 1st 1st use cases. Talk about him, then. You know, 1st 30 days we had 50 in production, right? Companies, you know, great organizations like Cleveland Clinic, right? You know where they use their parking lot? Give the first tests the swab tests, right of, uh, well, who have proven right? You know, they had a line of 88 hours by, you know, putting a robot in place in two days. They got that line down by 80 or 90% right? It is a huge hit as we see that kind of a kind of benefit all across right now in the world. Right now we have. We were featured in The Wall Street Journal recently with nurses and a large hospital system in Ireland called Matter. The nurses said in the interview that, you know they have. They were able to free up time to be a patient's right, which is what they're there for, anyway, thanks to robots during this during this emergency. So I think you know, it's it's definitely raise The awareness that that this technology is provides an amazing time to value, and that's it's pretty unprecedented in the world of B two B software. >>I want to share some data with you in our community is the first time we've we've shown this. Guys would bring up the data slide, and so this is ah, chart that e. T are produced. There's enterprise technology research. They go out of reporter. They survey CIOs and I T practitioners and a survey in different segments and the use of methodology Net score. And this is sort of how method how Net scores derived. And so what this chart shows is the percent of customers that responded there were about 125 You I path customers that responded. Are you adopting new U I path? Are you increasing spending in 2020? Are you planning on flat spending or decreasing spending? Are you replacing the platform of beacons? And so basically, we take the green, uh, subtract the read from the green, and that gives us net score. But the point is that Bobby abouts about 80% of your customers are planning to spend Maurin 2020 than they spent in 2019 and only about 6% of planning on spending less, which is fairly astounding. I mean, we've been reporting on this for a while in the heat nous in the in the automation market generally and specifically. But are you seeing this in the marketplace? And maybe you could talk about why? >>Well, we just finished our first fiscal quarter into the end of April, and we're still privately held, so we can be, uh, find some insights of our company, but yeah, the the pace of our business picked up actually in in the mark. April timeframe. Um, customer adoption, large customer adoption. Um, the number of new new companies and new logos were at a record high. And, you know, we're entering into this quarter now, and we have some 20 plus $1,000,000 deals that are like that. It closed, right? I mean, that's probably a 30% increase Versus what? How many we have today alone. Right? So our business, you know, is is now well over 400 million and air are we ended last year, 3 60 and the growth rate continues fast. I think you know what's interesting is that the pace of the recode world was already fast, right? The the luxury of time has kind of disappeared. And so people are thinking about, you know, they don't have they can't wait now, months and years for digital transformation. They have to do things in days and days and days and weeks. And and that's where our technology really comes into play. Right? And and and it actually is also coming to play well in the world of the remote workforce. Reality two of the ability for remote workers to get trained while they're home on automation to build automation pipelines to to build automation. Now, with our latest release, you can download our podcast, capture and report what you're doing, and it basically generates the process definition document and the sample files, which allow for faster implementation by our center of excellence. So what's really happening here? We see it is a sense of urgency coming out of this. Prices are coming down the curve. Hopefully, now this is of urgency that our customers are facing in terms of how they respond, you know, and respond digitally to helping their business out. And it varies a lot by industry, our state and local business was really thinking was not going to be the biggest laggard of any industry picked up in a significant way in the last couple of months, New York State, with Governor Cuomo, became a big customer of ours. There's a quote from L. A County, see Iot that I've got here. They just employed us. It's public, this quote, he said. Deputy CIO said Price is always the mother of invention. We can always carry forward the good things they're coming out of this crisis situation. He's referring to our P A is being a lesson. They learned hearing this, that they're going to carry forward. And so we see this state of Oklahoma became a customer and others. So I think that's that's what we're seeing kind of a broad based. It's worldwide. >>You're really organizations can't put it off anymore. I think you're right. It sort of brought forward the future into the present. Now you mentioned 360 million last year. We had forecast 350 million was pretty good for you guys released, so it's happy about that. But so obviously still a strong trajectory. You know, it might have been higher without without covert. We'll never know, but sort of underscores the strength of the space. Um, and February you guys, there was an article that so you're essentially Theo Dan, Daniel Hernandez was quoted. Is that on hold now? Are you guys still sort of thinking about pressing forward or too early to say right? >>Yeah. I mean, I think I think the reality is we have a very, very strong business. We've raised, you know, significant money from great investors, some of which are the leading VCs in the world. and also that the public company investors and, you know, we have, ah, aggressive plan. We have an aggressive plan to build out our platform for hyper automation to continue. The growth path is now becoming the center of companies of I, T and Digital Strategies, not on the side. Right. And so to do that, you know, we're gonna want capital to help fuel our our our ambitions and fuel Our ability to serve our customers and public markets is probably a very, very logical one. As Daniel mentioned in a in a A recent, uh, he's on Bloomberg that he definitely sees. That is ah, maybe accelerating that, You know, we're late Last year, we started focusing on sustainable growth as a company and operational regular. These are important things in addition to having strong growth that, you know, a long term company has to have in place. And I can tell you, um, I'm really excited about the fact that we, you know, we operate very much like a public company. Now, internally, we you know, we do draft earnings releases that aren't public yet, and we do mock earnings, earnings calls, and we have hired Thomas Hansen is runs our chief revenue officer with storage backgrounds. And so you're gonna interview as well. These are these are these are the best of the best, right? That joint, they're joined this company, they're joining alongside the arm Kalonzo the world that are part of this company. And so I think, Yeah, I think it's an AR It's likely. And and it's gonna We're here to be a long term leader in this decade of automation. >>Well, and one of the other things that we forecast on our breaking analysis we took a look at the total available market kind of like into it. Early days of service Now is you know, people were really not fully understanding the market and chillin C it is is quite large, so video. So when we look at the competition, you know, you guys, if I showed you the same wheel with automation anywhere, it would also look strong. You know, some of the others, maybe not a strong but still stronger than many of the segments. I mean, for instance, you know, on Prem hardware. You know, compared with that and you know the automation space in general across the board is very, very strong. So I wonder if maybe you could talk a little bit about how you guys differentiate from the competition. How you see that? >>Yeah, I think you know, we've We've come a long way in the last three years, right? In terms of becoming the market leader, having the highest market share, we're very open and transparent about our numbers with We've long had the vision of a robot. Every person, uh, and and we've been delivering on that on on that vision and ah, building out a platform that helps companies, you know, transform digitally enterprise wide. Right. So, you know, I don't see any of our competitors with a platform for hyper automation like this. We have an incredible focus on the ability to help people actually find the ideas, build the pipeline, score the pipelines and integrate those with the automation center of excellence. Right? We have the ability now with our latest release to help test automation testers now not only in the world of art A but actually take robotic robots and and architecture into doing test automation. The traditional test automation market in a much better and faster way So you know, we're innovating at a pace that that it is, I think, much faster than I don't. I don't know automation anywhere. I won't share any their numbers. You know, who knows what the numbers are. We have guesses, but I'm fairly certain that we continue to gain share on them. But you know, what's most important is customer adoption, and we've also seen a number of customers switch from some of our competitors to us. Our competitors are undercapitalized and middle. Invest in R and D. This is an investment area, really build a platform out from our competitors have architectures that are hard to upgrade, right? This has been a big source of pain for companies that have been on our competitors. Where upgrades are difficult requires them to retest every time where our upgrades are very rolling, you know, are very smooth. We have an insider program which you know, I don't think any of our competitors have. If you go inside that you had pat that your customer every single bit every single review betting, private preview, public preview and general availability, you can provide feedback on and the customers can score up new ideas. They drive our our roadmap. Right. And this is I think we operate differently. I think our growth is a is a good indication of that. And, you know, and there are new competitors like Microsoft. But I think you know, you know, medium or long term, you know, they're gonna make effort around our, um and you know, they're behind the, um, automation is really hard. The buried entry here is not it's not. Not easy. And we're going to keep me on that platform, play out, and I think that's ah, that's what makes us so different. Um and ah, you know, we have the renewal numbers, retention numbers, expansion numbers and and the revenue numbers to improve that, uh, you know, we're number one. >>Well, so I mean, there's a lot of ways to skin the cat, and you're right. You guys are really focused, you know, you automation anywhere really focused on this space, and you shared with us how you differentiate there. But as you point out Microsoft, they sort of added on I had talked to Allan, preferably the day from paga. You know, those guys don't position themselves as our PC, but they have r p A. I talked to, you know, our mutual friend Robert Young John the other day, right? They're piling onto this this trend, right? So why not? Right, It's it's ah, it's hot. But so, you know, clearly you guys are innovating there. I want to talk about your vision before we get into the latest product release two things that I would call out the term hyper automation with, I think is the Gartner term. And then it will probably stick. And then this this idea of a robot for every person How would you describe your vision? >>Yeah, I mean, we think that robots can and improve, you know, the the lives of of or pers everywhere, right? We think in every every function, every role. And we see that already, the job satisfaction and the people don't want to do the mundane, repetitive work, right? The new hires coming out of college, you know, they're gonna be excel and sequel server. We're no longer the tools of productivity. For them, it's it's your path. We have business. Schools that have committed top tier business schools have committed to deploying your path or to putting you're passing every force in the school these students are graduating with the right path is their most important skill going into companies. And they're gonna expect to be able to use robots within their companies in their daily lives. A swell. So, you know, we have customers today that are rolling out a robot for every person you know. We had Ah, Conoco Phillips on just earlier in our launch, talking about citizen developers, enabling says, developer armies of developers and growing enterprise wide. See, Intel was on as well from Singapore, the large telco. They're doing the exact same thing. So I think you know, I think this is this is this is this is about broad based digital transformation. Everybody participating And what happens is the leading companies to do this, you know, they're going to get the benefit of benefits out of it. It can reinvest that productivity, benefits and data science and analytics and serving customers and in, you know, and and, ah, new product ideas. And so, you know, this is this. You know, automation is going to fuel now the ability for companies to really differentiate and serve their customers better. And it's only needed enterprise wide view on it that you really maximizing. Take Amazon, for example, a great customer during during this prices. You know, they're trying to hire hundreds of thousands of people, right? Help in the fact that in their in their distribution centers elsewhere, this all served demand to help people who like you and I home or ordering things that we need, right? Well, they're use your path robots all throughout their HR hr on boarding HR recruiting HR administration And so helping them has been a big during this prices surge of robots is helping them actually hire workers. You know another example of Schneider Electric and amazing customer of ours. They're bringing their plants, their manufacturing facilities, implants back online faster by using robots to help manage the PPE personal protective equipment in the plant allow people workers to get back to work faster. Right? So what's happening is is, you know in that in those cases is your different examples of robots and different functions, right? In all cases, it's about helping grow a company faster. It's about helping protect workers. It's about helping getting revenue machines back up and running after Kobe is going to be critical to get back to work faster. So I'm I'm really excited about the fact that as people think about automation across the organization, the number of ideas and Aaron opportunities for improvement are are we're just starting to tap that potential. >>Well, this is why I think the vision is so important because you're talking about things that are transformative. Now, as you well know, one of the criticisms of RPS. So you have people, the suppliers and just yeah, we, you know, looking at mundane tasks, just automating mundane tasks like sometimes paving the cow path and say, you're very much aware of that criticism. But if I look at the recent announcements, you're really starting to build out that vision that you just talked about. They're really four takeaways. You sort of extending the core PAP platform, injecting AI end some or and more automation end to end automation really taken that full lifestyles lifecycle systems view and the last one is sort of putting it talks to the robot. For every person that sort of citizen automation, if you will, that sort of encompasses your product announcements. So it wasn't just sort of a point Announcement really is a underscores the platform. I wonder if you could just What do we need to know about you guys? Just that out. >>So we think about how we think about the rolls back to a division of robots person how automation can help different roles. And so this product launch $20 for this large scale launch that you just articulated, um, impacts in a fax and helps many different kinds of new roles Certainly process analysts now who examined processes, passes performance improvements. You know, they're a user of our process mining solution in our past. Find a solution that helps speed on our way. Arpaio engine, no testers and quality engineers. Now they can actually use studio pro and actually used test robots are brand new, and our new test manager is sort of the orchestration and management of test executions. Now they can participate in in leveraged power of robots and what they do as well. And we kind of think about that, you know, kind of across the board in our organization across the platform. They can use tools like you have path insights in Europe. If you're an analyst or your, uh ah. B I, this intelligence person really know what's going on with robots in terms of our wife for my organization and provide that up to the, you know, sea levels in the board of directors in real time. So I think that's that's the big part. Here is we're bringing, and we're helping bring in many, many different kinds of roles different kinds of people. Data scientist. You mentioned AI. Now data scientists can build a model. The models applied to ai fabric an orchestrator. It's drag and drop by our developer in studio, and now you can turn, you know, a a mundane, rules based task right into an experience based ones where a robot can help make a decision right. Based on experience and data, they can tweak and tune that model and data scientists can interact, you know, with the automation is flowing through your path. So I think that's how we think about it, right? You know, one of the great new capabilities, as well as the ability to engage line workers, dispatch out workers If you're a telco or or retail story retail store workers you know the robots can work with humans out in the field. We've got one real large manufacturer with 18,000 drivers in a DST direct store delivery scenario. And you know the ability for them to interact with robots and help them do their job in the field. Our customers better after the list data entry and data manipulation, multiple systems. So I this is this makes us very unique in our vision and in our execution. And again, I don't I have not heard of a single ah example by competitors that has any kind of a vision or articulation to be able to help a company enterprise wide and, you know, with the speed and the and the full, full vision that we have. >>Okay, so you're not worried about downturns. You can't control black swans Anyway, you're not worried about the competition. It feels like you know, you're worried about what you're worried about. You want about growing too fast. Additionally, deploying the the capital that you've raised. What worries you? >>Yeah. You know, we're paranoid or paranoid company, right? And when it comes to the market and and trying to drive, I think we've done a lot to help actually push the rock up the hill in terms of really, really driving our market, building the market, and we want to continue that right and not let up. So there's this kind of desire to never let up, right? Well, we always remind ourselves we must work harder, must work harder. We must work harder. And that's that's That's sort of this this mentality around ourselves, by the smartest people. Hire the smartest people you work with our customers, our customers are priority. Do that with really high excellence and really high sincerity that it comes through and everything that we do, you know, to build a world class operation to be, you know, Daniel DNS. When I first met him, he said, You know, I really want to be the enemy of the great news ecology company that serve customers really well. And it was amazing things for society, and and, you know, we're on that track, but we've got, you know, we're in the in the in the early innings. So, you know, making sure that we also run our business in a way that, um, you know, uh, is ready to be Ah, you know, publicly successful company on being able to raise new sources of capital to fund our ambitions and our ideas. I mean, you saw the number of announcements from our 24 release. It reminded me of an AWS re invent conference, where it's just innovation, innovation, innovation, innovation. And these are very real. They're not made up mythical announcements that some of our competitors do about launching some kind of discovery box doesn't exist, right? These are very real with real customers behind them, and and so you know, just doing that with the same level of tenacity. But being, you know, old, fast, immersed and humble, which are four core culture values along the way and not losing that Azeri grow. That's that's something we talk about maintaining that culture that's super critical to us. >>Everybody's talking about Okay, What What's gonna be permanent? Postpone it. I was just listening to Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture, and she was saying that, you know, prior to Covic, they had data that showed that the top 25% of companies that have leaned into digital transformation were outperforming. You know, the balance of their peers, and I know question now that the the rest of that base really is going to be focused on automation. Automation is is really going to be one of those things that is high, high priority now and really for the next decade and beyond. So, Bobby, thanks so much for coming on the Cube and supporting us in this in this r p. A drill down. Really appreciate it, >>Dave. It's always a pleasure as always. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Alright. And thank you for watching everybody. Dave Volante. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching the cube. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>Bye from San Francisco. It's the cube covering RSA conference, 2020 San Francisco brought to you by Silicon angle media. >>Hey, welcome back. Everyone's keeps coverage here in San Francisco at the Moscone center for RSA conference 2020 I'm John, your host, as cybersecurity goes to the next generation as the new cloud scale, cyber threats are out there, the real impact a company's business and society will be determined by the industry. This technology and the people that a cube alumni here, caramel Jaffer, SVP, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development for iron net. Welcome back. Thanks to Shawn. Good to be here. Thanks for having so iron net FC general Keith Alexander and you got to know new CEO of there. Phil Welsh scaler and duo knows how to scale up a company. He's right. Iron is doing really well. The iron dome, the vision of collaboration and signaling. Congratulations on your success. What's a quick update? >> Well look, I mean, you know, we have now built the capability to share information across multiple companies, multiple industries with the government in real time at machine speed. >>Really bringing people together, not just creating collected security or clip to defense, but also collaborating real time to defend one another. So you're able to divide and conquer Goliath, the enemy the same way they come after you and beat them at their own game. >> So this is the classic case of offense defense. Most corporations are playing defense, whack-a-mole, redundant, not a lot of efficiencies, a lot of burnout. Exactly. Not a lot of collaboration, but everyone's talking about the who the attackers are and collaborating like a team. Right? And you guys talk about this mission. Exactly. This is really the new way to do it. It has, the only way it works, >> it is. And you know, you see kids doing it out there when they're playing Fortnite, right? They're collaborating in real time across networks, uh, to, you know, to play a game, right? You can imagine that same construct when it comes to cyber defense, right? >>There's no reason why one big company, a second big company in a small company can't work together to identify all the threats, see that common threat landscape, and then take action on it. Trusting one another to take down the pieces they have folk to focus on and ultimately winning the battle. There's no other way a single company is gonna be able defend itself against a huge decency that has virtually unlimited resources and virtually unlimited human capital. And you've got to come together, defend across multiple industries, uh, collectively and collaboratively. >> Do you mean, we talked about this last time and I want to revisit this and I think it's super important. I think it's the most important story that's not really being talked about in the industry. And that is that we were talking last time about the government protects businesses. If someone dropped troops on the ground in your neighborhood, the government would protect you digitally. >>That's not happening. So there's really no protection for businesses. Do they build their own militia? Do they build their own army? Who was going to, who's going to be their heat shield? So this is a big conversation and a big, it brings a question. The role of the government. We're going to need a digital air force. We're going to need a digital army, Navy, Navy seals. We need to have that force, and this has to be a policy issue, but in the short term, businesses and individuals are sitting out there being attacked by sophisticated mission-based teams of hackers and nation States, right? Either camouflaging or hiding, but attacking still. This is a huge issue. What's going on? Are people talking about this in D C well, >> John, look not enough. People are talking about it, right? And forget DC. We need to be talking about here, out here in the Silicon Valley with all these companies here at the RSA floor and bring up the things you're bringing up because this is a real problem we're facing as a nation. >>The Russians aren't coming after one company, one state. They're coming after our entire election infrastructure. They're coming after us as a nation. The Chinese maybe come after one company at a time, but their goal is to take our electoral properties, a nation, repurpose it back home. And when the economic game, right, the Iranians, the North Koreans, they're not focused on individual actors, but they are coming after individual actors. We can't defend against those things. One man, one woman, one company on an Island, one, one agency, one state. We've got to come together collectively, right? Work state with other States, right? If we can defend against the Russians, California might be really good at it. Rhode Island, small States can be real hard, defends against the Russians, but if California, Rhode Island come together, here's the threats. I see. Here's what it's. You see share information, that's great. Then we collaborate on the defense and work together. >>You take these threats, I'll take those threats and now we're working as a team, like you said earlier, like those kids do when they're playing fortnight and now we're changing the game. Now we're really fighting the real fight. >> You know, when I hear general Keith Alexander talking about his vision with iron net and what you guys are doing, I'm inspired because it's simply put, we have a mission to protect our nation, our people, and a good businesses, and he puts it into kind of military, military terms, but in reality, it's a simple concept. Yeah, we're being attacked, defend and attack back. Just basic stuff. But to make it work as the sharing. So I got to ask you, I'm first of all, I love the, I love what he has, his vision. I love what you guys are doing. How real are we? What's the progression? >>Where are we on the progress bar of that vision? Well, you know, a lot's changed to the last year and a half alone, right? The threats gotten a lot, a lot more real to everybody, right? Used to be the industry would say to us, yeah, we want to share with the government, but we want something back for, right. We want them to show us some signal to today. Industry is like, look, the Chinese are crushing us out there, right? We can beat them at a, at some level, but we really need the governor to go do its job too. So we'll give you the information we have on, on an anonymized basis. You do your thing. We're going to keep defending ourselves and if you can give us something back, that's great. So we've now stood up in real time of DHS. We're sharing with them huge amounts of data about what we're seeing across six of the top 10 energy companies, some of the biggest banks, some of the biggest healthcare companies in the country. >>Right? In real time with DHS and more to come on that more to come with other government agencies and more to come with some our partners across the globe, right? Partners like those in Japan, Singapore, Eastern Europe, right? Our allies in the middle East, they're all the four lenses threat. We can bring their better capability. They can help us see what's coming at us in the future because as those enemies out there testing the weapons in those local areas. I want to get your thoughts on the capital markets because obviously financing is critical and you're seeing successful venture capital formulas like forge point really specialized funds on cyber but not classic industry formation sectors. Like it's not just security industry are taking a much more broader view because there's a policy implication is that organizational behavior, this technology up and down the stack. So it's a much broad investment thesis. >>What's your view of that? Because as you do, you see that as a formula and if so, what is this new aperture or this new lens of investing to be successful in funding? Companies will look, it's really important what companies like forge point are doing. Venture capital funds, right? Don Dixon, Alberta Pez will land. They're really innovating here. They've created a largest cybersecurity focused fund. They just closed the recently in the world, right? And so they really focus on this industry. Partners like, Kleiner Perkins, Ted Schlein, Andrea are doing really great work in this area. Also really important capital formation, right? And let's not forget other funds. Ron Gula, right? The founder of tenable started his own fund out there in DC, in the DMV area. There's a lot of innovation happening this country and the funding on it's critical. Now look, the reality is the easy money's not going to be here forever, right? >>It's the question is what comes when that inevitable step back. We don't. Nobody likes to talk about it. I said the guy who who bets on the other side of the craps game in Vegas, right? You don't wanna be that guy, but let's be real. I mean that day will eventually come. And the question is how do you bring some of these things together, right? Bring these various pieces together to really create long term strategies, right? And that's I think what's really innovative about what Don and Alberto are doing is they're building portfolio companies across a range of areas to create sort of an end to end capability, right? Andrea is doing things like that. Ted's doing stuff like that. It's a, that's really innovation. The VC market, right? And we're seeing increased collaboration VC to PE. It's looking a lot more similar, right? And now we're seeing innovative vehicles like stacks that are taking some of these public sort of the reverse manner, right? >>There's a lot of interests. I've had to be there with Hank Thomas, the guys chief cyber wrenches. So a lot of really cool stuff going on in the financing world. Opportunities for young, smart entrepreneurs to really move out in this field and to do it now. And money's still silver. All that hasn't come as innovation on the capital market side, which is awesome. Let's talk about the ecosystem in every single market sector that I've been over, my 30 year career has been about a successful entrepreneurship check, capital two formation of partnerships. Okay. You're on the iron net, front lines here. As part of that ecosystem, how do you see the ecosystem formula developing? Is it the same kind of model? Is it a little bit different? What's your vision of the ecosystem? Look, I mean partnerships channel, it's critical to every cyber security company. You can't scale on your own. >>You've got to do it through others, right? I was at a CrowdStrike event the other day. 91% of the revenue comes from the channel. That's an amazing number. You think about that, right? It's you look at who we're trying to talk about partnering with. We're talking about some of the big cloud players. Amazon, Microsoft, right? Google, right on the, on the vendor side. Pardon me? Splunk crashes, so these big players, right? We want to build with them, right? We want to work with them because there's a story to tell here, right? When we were together, the AECOS through self is defendant stronger. There's no, there's no anonymity here, right? It's all we bring a specialty, you bring specialty, you work together, you run out and go get the go get the business and make companies safer. At the end of the day, it's all about protecting the ecosystem. What about the big cloud player? >>Cause he goes two big mega trends. Obviously cloud computing and scale, right? Multi-cloud on the horizon, hybrids, kind of the bridge between single public cloud and multi-cloud and then AI you've got the biggies are generally will be multiple generations of innovation and value creation. What's your vision on the impact of the big waves that are coming? Well, look, I mean cloud computing is a rate change the world right? Today you can deploy capability and have a supercomputer in your fingertips in in minutes, right? You can also secure that in minutes because you can update it in real time. As the machine is functioning, you have a problem, take it down, throw up a new virtual machine. These are amazing innovations that are creating more and more capability out there in industry. It's game changing. We're happy, we're glad to be part of that and we ought to be helping defend that new amazing ecosystem. >>Partnering with companies like Microsoft. They didn't AWS did, you know, you know, I'm really impressed with your technical acumen. You've got a good grasp of the industry, but also, uh, you have really strong on the societal impact policy formulation side of government and business. So I want to get your thoughts for the young kids out there that are going to school, trying to make sense of the chaos that's going on in the world, whether it's DC political theater or the tech theater, big tech and in general, all of the things with coronavirus, all this stuff going on. It's a, it's a pretty crazy time, but a lot of work has to start getting done that are new problems. Yeah. What is your advice as someone who's been through the multiple waves to the young kids who have to figure out what half fatigue, what problems are out there, what things can people get their arms around to work on, to specialize in? >>What's your, what's your thoughts and expertise on that? Well, John, thanks for the question. What I really like about that question is is we're talking about what the future looks like and here's what I think the future looks like. It's all about taking risks. Tell a lot of these young kids out there today, they're worried about how the world looks right? Will America still be strong? Can we, can we get through this hard time we're going through in DC with the world challenges and what I can say is this country has never been stronger. We may have our own troubles internally, but we are risk takers and we always win. No matter how hard it gets them out of how bad it gets, right? Risk taking a study that's building the American blood. It's our founders came here taking a risk, leaving Eagle to come here and we've succeeded the last 200 years. >>There is no question in my mind that trend will continue. So the young people out there, I don't know what the future has to hold. I don't know if the new tape I was going to be, but you're going to invent it. And if you don't take the risks, we're not succeed as a nation. And that's what I think is key. You know, most people worry that if they take too many risks, they might not succeed. Right? But the reality is most people you see around at this convention, they all took risks to be here. And even when they had trouble, they got up, they dust themselves off and they won. And I believe that everybody in this country, that's what's amazing about the station is we have this opportunity to, to try, if we fail to get up again and succeed. So fail fast, fail often, and crush it. >>You know, some of the best innovations have come from times where you had the cold war, you had, um, you had times where, you know, the hippie revolution spawn the computer. So you, so you have the culture of America, which is not about regulation and stunting growth. You had risk-taking, you had entrepreneurship, but yet enough freedom for business to operate, to solve new challenges, accurate. And to me the biggest imperative in my mind is this next generation has to solve a lot of those new questions. What side of the street is the self driving cars go on? I see bike lanes in San Francisco, more congestion, more more cry. All this stuff's going on. AI could be a great enabler for that. Cyber security, a direct threat to our country and global geopolitical landscape. These are big problems. State and local governments, they're not really tech savvy. They don't really have a lot ID. >>So what do they do? How do they serve their, their constituents? You know, look John, these are really important and hard questions, but we know what has made technology so successful in America? What's made it large, successful is the governor state out of the way, right? Industry and innovators have had a chance to work together and do stuff and change the world, right? You look at California, you know, one of the reasons California is so successful and Silicon Valley is so dynamic. You can move between jobs and we don't enforce non-compete agreements, right? Because you can switch jobs and you can go to that next higher value target, right? That shows the value of, you know, innovation, creating innovation. Now there's a real tendency to say, when we're faced with challenges, well, the government has to step in and solve that problem, right? The Silicon Valley and what California's done, what technology's done is a story about the government stayed out and let innovators innovate, and that's a real opportunity for this nation. >>We've got to keep on down that path, even when it seemed like the easier answer is, come on in DC, come on in Sacramento, fix this problem for us. We have demonstrated as a country that Americans and individual are good at solve these problems. We should allow them to do that and innovate. Yeah. One of my passions is to kind of use technology and media to end communities to get to the truth faster. A lot of, um, access to smart minds out there, but young minds, young minds, uh, old minds, young minds though. It's all there. You gotta get the data out and that's going to be a big thing. That's the, one of the things that's changing is the dark arts of smear campaigns. The story of Bloomberg today, Oracle reveals funding for dark money, group biting, big tech internet accountability projects. Um, and so the classic astroturfing get the Jedi contract, Google WASU with Java. >>So articles in the middle of all this, but using them as an illustrative point. The lawyers seem to be running the kingdom right now. I know you're an attorney, so I'm recovering, recovering. I don't want to be offensive, but entrepreneurship cannot be stifled by regulation. Sarbanes Oxley slowed down a lot of the IPO shifts to the latest stage capital. So regulation, nest and every good thing. But also there's some of these little tactics out in the shadows are going to be revealed. What's the new way to get this straightened out in your mind? We'll look, in my view, the best solution for problematic speech or pragmatic people is more speech, right? Let's shine a light on it, right? If there are people doing shady stuff, let's talk about it's an outfit. Let's have it out in the open. Let's fight it out. At the end of the day, what America's really about is smart ideas. >>Winning. It's a, let's get the ideas out there. You know, we spent a lot of time, right now we're under attack by the Russians when it comes to our elections, right? We spent a lot of time harping at one another, one party versus another party. The president versus that person. This person who tells committee for zap person who tells committee. It's crazy when the real threat is from the outside. We need to get past all that noise, right? And really get to the next thing which is we're fighting a foreign entity on this front. We need to face that enemy down and stop killing each other with this nonsense and turn the lights on. I'm a big believer of if something can be exposed, you can talk about it. Why is it happening exactly right. This consequences with that reputation, et cetera. You got it. >>Thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate your insight. Um, I want to just ask you one final question cause you look at, look at the industry right now. What is the most important story that people are talking about and what is the most important story that people should be talking about? Yeah. Well look, I think the one story that's out there a lot, right, is what's going on in our politics, what's going on in our elections. Um, you know, Chris Krebs at DHS has been out here this week talking a lot about the threat that our elections face and the importance about States working with one another and States working with the federal government to defend the nation when it comes to these elections in November. Right? We need to get ahead of that. Right? The reality is it's been four years since 2016 we need to do more. That's a key issue going forward. What are the Iranians North Koreans think about next? They haven't hit us recently. We know what's coming. We got to get ahead of that. I'm going to come again at a nation, depending on staff threat to your meal. Great to have you on the QSO is great insight. Thanks for coming on sharing your perspective. I'm John furrier here at RSA in San Francisco for the cube coverage. Thanks for watching.