(upbeat music) >> Hello, everybody. This is Dave Vellante. Welcome back to Supercloud2, where we're exploring the intersection of data analytics and the future of cloud. In this segment, we're going to look at how the Supercloud will support a new class of applications, not just work that runs on multiple clouds, but rather a new breed of apps that can orchestrate things in the real world. Think Uber for many types of businesses. These applications, they're not about codifying forms or business processes. They're about orchestrating people, places, and things in a business ecosystem. And I'm pleased to welcome my colleague and friend, George Gilbert, former Gartner Analyst, Wiki Bond market analyst, former equities analyst as my co-host. And we're thrilled to have Tristan Handy, who's the founder and CEO of DBT Labs and Bob Muglia, who's the former President of Microsoft's Enterprise business and former CEO of Snowflake. Welcome all, gentlemen. Thank you for coming on the program. >> Good to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Hey, look, I'm going to start actually with the SuperCloud because both Tristan and Bob, you've read the definition. Thank you for doing that. And Bob, you have some really good input, some thoughts on maybe some of the drawbacks and how we can advance this. So what are your thoughts in reading that definition around SuperCloud? >> Well, I thought first of all that you did a very good job of laying out all of the characteristics of it and helping to define it overall. But I do think it can be tightened a bit, and I think it's helpful to do it in as short a way as possible. And so in the last day I've spent a little time thinking about how to take it and write a crisp definition. And here's my go at it. This is one day old, so gimme a break if it's going to change. And of course we have to follow the industry, and so that, and whatever the industry decides, but let's give this a try. So in the way I think you're defining it, what I would say is a SuperCloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. >> Boom. Nice. Okay, great. I'm going to go back and read the script on that one and tighten that up a bit. Thank you for spending the time thinking about that. Tristan, would you add anything to that or what are your thoughts on the whole SuperCloud concept? >> So as I read through this, I fully realize that we need a word for this thing because I have experienced the inability to talk about it as well. But for many of us who have been living in the Confluence, Snowflake, you know, this world of like new infrastructure, this seems fairly uncontroversial. Like I read through this, and I'm just like, yeah, this is like the world I've been living in for years now. And I noticed that you called out Snowflake for being an example of this, but I think that there are like many folks, myself included, for whom this world like fully exists today. >> Yeah, I think that's a fair, I dunno if it's criticism, but people observe, well, what's the big deal here? It's just kind of what we're living in today. It reminds me of, you know, Tim Burns Lee saying, well, this is what the internet was supposed to be. It was supposed to be Web 2.0, so maybe this is what multi-cloud was supposed to be. Let's turn our attention to apps. Bob first and then go to Tristan. Bob, what are data apps to you? When people talk about data products, is that what they mean? Are we talking about something more, different? What are data apps to you? >> Well, to understand data apps, it's useful to contrast them to something, and I just use the simple term people apps. I know that's a little bit awkward, but it's clear. And almost everything we work with, almost every application that we're familiar with, be it email or Salesforce or any consumer app, those are applications that are targeted at responding to people. You know, in contrast, a data application reacts to changes in data and uses some set of analytic services to autonomously take action. So where applications that we're familiar with respond to people, data apps respond to changes in data. And they both do something, but they do it for different reasons. >> Got it. You know, George, you and I were talking about, you know, it comes back to SuperCloud, broad definition, narrow definition. Tristan, how do you see it? Do you see it the same way? Do you have a different take on data apps? >> Oh, geez. This is like a conversation that I don't know has an end. It's like been, I write a substack, and there's like this little community of people who all write substack. We argue with each other about these kinds of things. Like, you know, as many different takes on this question as you can find, but the way that I think about it is that data products are atomic units of functionality that are fundamentally data driven in nature. So a data product can be as simple as an interactive dashboard that is like actually had design thinking put into it and serves a particular user group and has like actually gone through kind of a product development life cycle. And then a data app or data application is a kind of cohesive end-to-end experience that often encompasses like many different data products. So from my perspective there, this is very, very related to the way that these things are produced, the kinds of experiences that they're provided, that like data innovates every product that we've been building in, you know, software engineering for, you know, as long as there have been computers. >> You know, Jamak Dagani oftentimes uses the, you know, she doesn't name Spotify, but I think it's Spotify as that kind of example she uses. But I wonder if we can maybe try to take some examples. If you take, like George, if you take a CRM system today, you're inputting leads, you got opportunities, it's driven by humans, they're really inputting the data, and then you got this system that kind of orchestrates the business process, like runs a forecast. But in this data driven future, are we talking about the app itself pulling data in and automatically looking at data from the transaction systems, the call center, the supply chain and then actually building a plan? George, is that how you see it? >> I go back to the example of Uber, may not be the most sophisticated data app that we build now, but it was like one of the first where you do have users interacting with their devices as riders trying to call a car or driver. But the app then looks at the location of all the drivers in proximity, and it matches a driver to a rider. It calculates an ETA to the rider. It calculates an ETA then to the destination, and it calculates a price. Those are all activities that are done sort of autonomously that don't require a human to type something into a form. The application is using changes in data to calculate an analytic product and then to operationalize that, to assign the driver to, you know, calculate a price. Those are, that's an example of what I would think of as a data app. And my question then I guess for Tristan is if we don't have all the pieces in place for sort of mainstream companies to build those sorts of apps easily yet, like how would we get started? What's the role of a semantic layer in making that easier for mainstream companies to build? And how do we get started, you know, say with metrics? How does that, how does that take us down that path? >> So what we've seen in the past, I dunno, decade or so, is that one of the most successful business models in infrastructure is taking hard things and rolling 'em up behind APIs. You take messaging, you take payments, and you all of a sudden increase the capability of kind of your median application developer. And you say, you know, previously you were spending all your time being focused on how do you accept credit cards, how do you send SMS payments, and now you can focus on your business logic, and just create the thing. One of, interestingly, one of the things that we still don't know how to API-ify is concepts that live inside of your data warehouse, inside of your data lake. These are core concepts that, you know, you would imagine that the business would be able to create applications around very easily, but in fact that's not the case. It's actually quite challenging to, and involves a lot of data engineering pipeline and all this work to make these available. And so if you really want to make it very easy to create some of these data experiences for users, you need to have an ability to describe these metrics and then to turn them into APIs to make them accessible to application developers who have literally no idea how they're calculated behind the scenes, and they don't need to. >> So how rich can that API layer grow if you start with metric definitions that you've defined? And DBT has, you know, the metric, the dimensions, the time grain, things like that, that's a well scoped sort of API that people can work within. How much can you extend that to say non-calculated business rules or governance information like data reliability rules, things like that, or even, you know, features for an AIML feature store. In other words, it starts, you started pragmatically, but how far can you grow? >> Bob is waiting with bated breath to answer this question. I'm, just really quickly, I think that we as a company and DBT as a product tend to be very pragmatic. We try to release the simplest possible version of a thing, get it out there, and see if people use it. But the idea that, the concept of a metric is really just a first landing pad. The really, there is a physical manifestation of the data and then there's a logical manifestation of the data. And what we're trying to do here is make it very easy to access the logical manifestation of the data, and metric is a way to look at that. Maybe an entity, a customer, a user is another way to look at that. And I'm sure that there will be more kind of logical structures as well. >> So, Bob, chime in on this. You know, what's your thoughts on the right architecture behind this, and how do we get there? >> Yeah, well first of all, I think one of the ways we get there is by what companies like DBT Labs and Tristan is doing, which is incrementally taking and building on the modern data stack and extending that to add a semantic layer that describes the data. Now the way I tend to think about this is a fairly major shift in the way we think about writing applications, which is today a code first approach to moving to a world that is model driven. And I think that's what the big change will be is that where today we think about data, we think about writing code, and we use that to produce APIs as Tristan said, which encapsulates those things together in some form of services that are useful for organizations. And that idea of that encapsulation is never going to go away. It's very, that concept of an API is incredibly useful and will exist well into the future. But what I think will happen is that in the next 10 years, we're going to move to a world where organizations are defining models first of their data, but then ultimately of their business process, their entire business process. Now the concept of a model driven world is a very old concept. I mean, I first started thinking about this and playing around with some early model driven tools, probably before Tristan was born in the early 1980s. And those tools didn't work because the semantics associated with executing the model were too complex to be written in anything other than a procedural language. We're now reaching a time where that is changing, and you see it everywhere. You see it first of all in the world of machine learning and machine learning models, which are taking over more and more of what applications are doing. And I think that's an incredibly important step. And learned models are an important part of what people will do. But if you look at the world today, I will claim that we've always been modeling. Modeling has existed in computers since there have been integrated circuits and any form of computers. But what we do is what I would call implicit modeling, which means that it's the model is written on a whiteboard. It's in a bunch of Slack messages. It's on a set of napkins in conversations that happen and during Zoom. That's where the model gets defined today. It's implicit. There is one in the system. It is hard coded inside application logic that exists across many applications with humans being the glue that connects those models together. And really there is no central place you can go to understand the full attributes of the business, all of the business rules, all of the business logic, the business data. That's going to change in the next 10 years. And we'll start to have a world where we can define models about what we're doing. Now in the short run, the most important models to build are data models and to describe all of the attributes of the data and their relationships. And that's work that DBT Labs is doing. A number of other companies are doing that. We're taking steps along that way with catalogs. People are trying to build more complete ontologies associated with that. The underlying infrastructure is still super, super nascent. But what I think we'll see is this infrastructure that exists today that's building learned models in the form of machine learning programs. You know, some of these incredible machine learning programs in foundation models like GPT and DALL-E and all of the things that are happening in these global scale models, but also all of that needs to get applied to the domains that are appropriate for a business. And I think we'll see the infrastructure developing for that, that can take this concept of learned models and put it together with more explicitly defined models. And this is where the concept of knowledge graphs come in and then the technology that underlies that to actually implement and execute that, which I believe are relational knowledge graphs. >> Oh, oh wow. There's a lot to unpack there. So let me ask the Colombo question, Tristan, we've been making fun of your youth. We're just, we're just jealous. Colombo, I'll explain it offline maybe. >> I watch Colombo. >> Okay. All right, good. So but today if you think about the application stack and the data stack, which is largely an analytics pipeline. They're separate. Do they, those worlds, do they have to come together in order to achieve Bob's vision? When I talk to practitioners about that, they're like, well, I don't want to complexify the application stack cause the data stack today is so, you know, hard to manage. But but do those worlds have to come together? And you know, through that model, I guess abstraction or translation that Bob was just describing, how do you guys think about that? Who wants to take that? >> I think it's inevitable that data and AI are going to become closer together? I think that the infrastructure there has been moving in that direction for a long time. Whether you want to use the Lakehouse portmanteau or not. There's also, there's a next generation of data tech that is still in the like early stage of being developed. There's a company that I love that is essentially Cross Cloud Lambda, and it's just a wonderful abstraction for computing. So I think that, you know, people have been predicting that these worlds are going to come together for awhile. A16Z wrote a great post on this back in I think 2020, predicting this, and I've been predicting this since since 2020. But what's not clear is the timeline, but I think that this is still just as inevitable as it's been. >> Who's that that does Cross Cloud? >> Let me follow up on. >> Who's that, Tristan, that does Cross Cloud Lambda? Can you name names? >> Oh, they're called Modal Labs. >> Modal Labs, yeah, of course. All right, go ahead, George. >> Let me ask about this vision of trying to put the semantics or the code that represents the business with the data. It gets us to a world that's sort of more data centric, where data's not locked inside or behind the APIs of different applications so that we don't have silos. But at the same time, Bob, I've heard you talk about building the semantics gradually on top of, into a knowledge graph that maybe grows out of a data catalog. And the vision of getting to that point, essentially the enterprise's metadata and then the semantics you're going to add onto it are really stored in something that's separate from the underlying operational and analytic data. So at the same time then why couldn't we gradually build semantics beyond the metric definitions that DBT has today? In other words, you build more and more of the semantics in some layer that DBT defines and that sits above the data management layer, but any requests for data have to go through the DBT layer. Is that a workable alternative? Or where, what type of limitations would you face? >> Well, I think that it is the way the world will evolve is to start with the modern data stack and, you know, which is operational applications going through a data pipeline into some form of data lake, data warehouse, the Lakehouse, whatever you want to call it. And then, you know, this wide variety of analytics services that are built together. To the point that Tristan made about machine learning and data coming together, you see that in every major data cloud provider. Snowflake certainly now supports Python and Java. Databricks is of course building their data warehouse. Certainly Google, Microsoft and Amazon are doing very, very similar things in terms of building complete solutions that bring together an analytics stack that typically supports languages like Python together with the data stack and the data warehouse. I mean, all of those things are going to evolve, and they're not going to go away because that infrastructure is relatively new. It's just being deployed by companies, and it solves the problem of working with petabytes of data if you need to work with petabytes of data, and nothing will do that for a long time. What's missing is a layer that understands and can model the semantics of all of this. And if you need to, if you want to model all, if you want to talk about all the semantics of even data, you need to think about all of the relationships. You need to think about how these things connect together. And unfortunately, there really is no platform today. None of our existing platforms are ultimately sufficient for this. It was interesting, I was just talking to a customer yesterday, you know, a large financial organization that is building out these semantic layers. They're further along than many companies are. And you know, I asked what they're building it on, and you know, it's not surprising they're using a, they're using combinations of some form of search together with, you know, textual based search together with a document oriented database. In this case it was Cosmos. And that really is kind of the state of the art right now. And yet those products were not built for this. They don't really, they can't manage the complicated relationships that are required. They can't issue the queries that are required. And so a new generation of database needs to be developed. And fortunately, you know, that is happening. The world is developing a new set of relational algorithms that will be able to work with hundreds of different relations. If you look at a SQL database like Snowflake or a big query, you know, you get tens of different joins coming together, and that query is going to take a really long time. Well, fortunately, technology is evolving, and it's possible with new join algorithms, worst case, optimal join algorithms they're called, where you can join hundreds of different relations together and run semantic queries that you simply couldn't run. Now that technology is nascent, but it's really important, and I think that will be a requirement to have this semantically reach its full potential. In the meantime, Tristan can do a lot of great things by building up on what he's got today and solve some problems that are very real. But in the long run I think we'll see a new set of databases to support these models. >> So Tristan, you got to respond to that, right? You got to, so take the example of Snowflake. We know it doesn't deal well with complex joins, but they're, they've got big aspirations. They're building an ecosystem to really solve some of these problems. Tristan, you guys are part of that ecosystem, and others, but please, your thoughts on what Bob just shared. >> Bob, I'm curious if, I would have no idea what you were talking about except that you introduced me to somebody who gave me a demo of a thing and do you not want to go there right now? >> No, I can talk about it. I mean, we can talk about it. Look, the company I've been working with is Relational AI, and they're doing this work to actually first of all work across the industry with academics and research, you know, across many, many different, over 20 different research institutions across the world to develop this new set of algorithms. They're all fully published, just like SQL, the underlying algorithms that are used by SQL databases are. If you look today, every single SQL database uses a similar set of relational algorithms underneath that. And those algorithms actually go back to system R and what IBM developed in the 1970s. We're just, there's an opportunity for us to build something new that allows you to take, for example, instead of taking data and grouping it together in tables, treat all data as individual relations, you know, a key and a set of values and then be able to perform purely relational operations on it. If you go back to what, to Codd, and what he wrote, he defined two things. He defined a relational calculus and relational algebra. And essentially SQL is a query language that is translated by the query processor into relational algebra. But however, the calculus of SQL is not even close to the full semantics of the relational mathematics. And it's possible to have systems that can do everything and that can store all of the attributes of the data model or ultimately the business model in a form that is much more natural to work with. >> So here's like my short answer to this. I think that we're dealing in different time scales. I think that there is actually a tremendous amount of work to do in the semantic layer using the kind of technology that we have on the ground today. And I think that there's, I don't know, let's say five years of like really solid work that there is to do for the entire industry, if not more. But the wonderful thing about DBT is that it's independent of what the compute substrate is beneath it. And so if we develop new platforms, new capabilities to describe semantic models in more fine grain detail, more procedural, then we're going to support that too. And so I'm excited about all of it. >> Yeah, so interpreting that short answer, you're basically saying, cause Bob was just kind of pointing to you as incremental, but you're saying, yeah, okay, we're applying it for incremental use cases today, but we can accommodate a much broader set of examples in the future. Is that correct, Tristan? >> I think you're using the word incremental as if it's not good, but I think that incremental is great. We have always been about applying incremental improvement on top of what exists today, but allowing practitioners to like use different workflows to actually make use of that technology. So yeah, yeah, we are a very incremental company. We're going to continue being that way. >> Well, I think Bob was using incremental as a pejorative. I mean, I, but to your point, a lot. >> No, I don't think so. I want to stop that. No, I don't think it's pejorative at all. I think incremental, incremental is usually the most successful path. >> Yes, of course. >> In my experience. >> We agree, we agree on that. >> Having tried many, many moonshot things in my Microsoft days, I can tell you that being incremental is a good thing. And I'm a very big believer that that's the way the world's going to go. I just think that there is a need for us to build something new and that ultimately that will be the solution. Now you can argue whether it's two years, three years, five years, or 10 years, but I'd be shocked if it didn't happen in 10 years. >> Yeah, so we all agree that incremental is less disruptive. Boom, but Tristan, you're, I think I'm inferring that you believe you have the architecture to accommodate Bob's vision, and then Bob, and I'm inferring from Bob's comments that maybe you don't think that's the case, but please. >> No, no, no. I think that, so Bob, let me put words into your mouth and you tell me if you disagree, DBT is completely useless in a world where a large scale cloud data warehouse doesn't exist. We were not able to bring the power of Python to our users until these platforms started supporting Python. Like DBT is a layer on top of large scale computing platforms. And to the extent that those platforms extend their functionality to bring more capabilities, we will also service those capabilities. >> Let me try and bridge the two. >> Yeah, yeah, so Bob, Bob, Bob, do you concur with what Tristan just said? >> Absolutely, I mean there's nothing to argue with in what Tristan just said. >> I wanted. >> And it's what he's doing. It'll continue to, I believe he'll continue to do it, and I think it's a very good thing for the industry. You know, I'm just simply saying that on top of that, I would like to provide Tristan and all of those who are following similar paths to him with a new type of database that can actually solve these problems in a much more architected way. And when I talk about Cosmos with something like Mongo or Cosmos together with Elastic, you're using Elastic as the join engine, okay. That's the purpose of it. It becomes a poor man's join engine. And I kind of go, I know there's a better answer than that. I know there is, but that's kind of where we are state of the art right now. >> George, we got to wrap it. So give us the last word here. Go ahead, George. >> Okay, I just, I think there's a way to tie together what Tristan and Bob are both talking about, and I want them to validate it, which is for five years we're going to be adding or some number of years more and more semantics to the operational and analytic data that we have, starting with metric definitions. My question is for Bob, as DBT accumulates more and more of those semantics for different enterprises, can that layer not run on top of a relational knowledge graph? And what would we lose by not having, by having the knowledge graph store sort of the joins, all the complex relationships among the data, but having the semantics in the DBT layer? >> Well, I think this, okay, I think first of all that DBT will be an environment where many of these semantics are defined. The question we're asking is how are they stored and how are they processed? And what I predict will happen is that over time, as companies like DBT begin to build more and more richness into their semantic layer, they will begin to experience challenges that customers want to run queries, they want to ask questions, they want to use this for things where the underlying infrastructure becomes an obstacle. I mean, this has happened in always in the history, right? I mean, you see major advances in computer science when the data model changes. And I think we're on the verge of a very significant change in the way data is stored and structured, or at least metadata is stored and structured. Again, I'm not saying that anytime in the next 10 years, SQL is going to go away. In fact, more SQL will be written in the future than has been written in the past. And those platforms will mature to become the engines, the slicer dicers of data. I mean that's what they are today. They're incredibly powerful at working with large amounts of data, and that infrastructure is maturing very rapidly. What is not maturing is the infrastructure to handle all of the metadata and the semantics that that requires. And that's where I say knowledge graphs are what I believe will be the solution to that. >> But Tristan, bring us home here. It sounds like, let me put pause at this, is that whatever happens in the future, we're going to leverage the vast system that has become cloud that we're talking about a supercloud, sort of where data lives irrespective of physical location. We're going to have to tap that data. It's not necessarily going to be in one place, but give us your final thoughts, please. >> 100% agree. I think that the data is going to live everywhere. It is the responsibility for both the metadata systems and the data processing engines themselves to make sure that we can join data across cloud providers, that we can join data across different physical regions and that we as practitioners are going to kind of start forgetting about details like that. And we're going to start thinking more about how we want to arrange our teams, how does the tooling that we use support our team structures? And that's when data mesh I think really starts to get very, very critical as a concept. >> Guys, great conversation. It was really awesome to have you. I can't thank you enough for spending time with us. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks a lot. >> All right. This is Dave Vellante for George Gilbert, John Furrier, and the entire Cube community. Keep it right there for more content. You're watching SuperCloud2. (upbeat music)

>>How do y'all, and welcome back to Supercomputing 2022. We're the Cube, and we are live from Dallas, Texas. I'm joined by my co-host, David Nicholson. David, hello. Hello. We are gonna be talking about data and enterprise AI at scale during this segment. And we have the pleasure of being joined by both Dell and Navidia. Anthony and Bob, welcome to the show. How you both doing? Doing good. >>Great. Great show so far. >>Love that. Enthusiasm, especially in the afternoon on day two. I think we all, what, what's in that cup? Is there something exciting in there that maybe we should all be sharing with you? >>Just say it's just still Yeah, water. >>Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So I wanna make sure that, cause we haven't talked about this at all during the show yet, on the cube, I wanna make sure that everyone's on the same page when we're talking about data unstructured versus structured data. I, it's in your title, Anthony, tell me what, what's the difference? >>Well, look, the world has been based in analytics around rows and columns, spreadsheets, data warehouses, and we've made predictions around the forecast of sales maintenance issues. But when we take computers and we give them eyes, ears, and fingers, cameras, microphones, and temperature and vibration sensors, we now translate that into more human experience. But that kind of data, the sensor data, that video camera is unstructured or semi-structured, that's what that >>Means. We live in a world of unstructured data structure is something we add to later after the fact. But the world that we see and the world that we experience is unstructured data. And one of the promises of AI is to be able to take advantage of everything that's going on around us and augment that, improve that, solve problems based on that. And so if we're gonna do that job effectively, we can't just depend on structured data to get the problem done. We have to be able to incorporate everything that we can see here, taste, smell, touch, and use >>That as, >>As part of the problem >>Solving. We want the chaos, bring it. >>Chaos has been a little bit of a theme of our >>Show. It has been, yeah. And chaos is in the eye of the beholder. You, you think about, you think about the reason for structuring data to a degree. We had limited processing horsepower back when everything was being structured as a way to allow us to be able to, to to reason over it and gain insights. So it made sense to put things into rows and tables. How does, I'm curious, diving right into where Nvidia fits into this, into this puzzle, how does NVIDIA accelerate or enhance our ability to glean insight from or reason over unstructured data in particular? >>Yeah, great question. It's really all about, I would say it's all about ai and Invidia is a leader in the AI space. We've been investing and focusing on AI since at least 2012, if not before, accelerated computing that we do it. Invidia is an important part of it, really. We believe that AI is gonna revolutionize nearly every aspect of computing. Really nearly every aspect of problem solving, even nearly every aspect of programming. And one of the reasons is for what we're talking about now is it's a little impact. Being able to incorporate unstructured data into problem solving is really critical to being able to solve the next generation of problems. AI unlocks, tools and methodologies that we can realistically do that with. It's not realistic to write procedural code that's gonna look at a picture and solve all the problems that we need to solve if we're talking about a complex problem like autonomous driving. But with AI and its ability to naturally absorb unstructured data and make intelligent reason decisions based on it, it's really a breakthrough. And that's what NVIDIA's been focusing on for at least a decade or more. >>And how does NVIDIA fit into Dell's strategy? >>Well, I mean, look, we've been partners for many, many years delivering beautiful experiences on workstations and laptops. But as we see the transition away from taking something that was designed to make something pretty on screen to being useful in solving problems in life sciences, manufacturing in other places, we work together to provide integrated solutions. So take for example, the dgx a 100 platform, brilliant design, revolutionary bus technologies, but the rocket ship can't go to Mars without the fuel. And so you need a tank that can scale in performance at the same rate as you throw GPUs at it. And so that's where the relationship really comes alive. We enable people to curate the data, organize it, and then feed those algorithms that get the answers that Bob's been talking about. >>So, so as a gamer, I must say you're a little shot at making things pretty on a screen. Come on. That was a low blow. That >>Was a low blow >>Sassy. What I, >>I Now what's in your cup? That's what I wanna know, Dave, >>I apparently have the most boring cup of anyone on you today. I don't know what happened. We're gonna have to talk to the production team. I'm looking at all of you. We're gonna have to make that better. One of the themes that's been on this show, and I love that you all embrace the chaos, we're, we're seeing a lot of trend in the experimentation phase or stage rather. And it's, we're in an academic zone of it with ai, companies are excited to adopt, but most companies haven't really rolled out their strategy. What is necessary for us to move from this kind of science experiment, science fiction in our heads to practical application at scale? Well, >>Let me take this, Bob. So I've noticed there's a pattern of three levels of maturity. The first level is just what you described. It's about having an experience, proof of value, getting stakeholders on board, and then just picking out what technology, what algorithm do I need? What's my data source? That's all fun, but it is chaos over time. People start actually making decisions based on it. This moves us into production. And what's important there is normality, predictability, commonality across, but hidden and embedded in that is a center of excellence. The community of data scientists and business intelligence professionals sharing a common platform in the last stage, we get hungry to replicate those results to other use cases, throwing even more information at it to get better accuracy and precision. But to do this in a budget you can afford. And so how do you figure out all the knobs and dials to turn in order to make, take billions of parameters and process that, that's where casual, what's >>That casual decision matrix there with billions of parameters? >>Yeah. Oh, I mean, >>But you're right that >>That's, that's exactly what we're, we're on this continuum, and this is where I think the partnership does really well, is to marry high performant enterprise grade scalability that provides the consistency, the audit trail, all of the things you need to make sure you don't get in trouble, plus all of the horsepower to get to the results. Bob, what would you >>Add there? I think the thing that we've been talking about here is complexity. And there's complexity in the AI problem solving space. There's complexity everywhere you look. And we talked about the idea that NVIDIA can help with some of that complexity from the architecture and the software development side of it. And Dell helps with that in a whole range of ways, not the least of which is the infrastructure and the server design and everything that goes into unlocking the performance of the technology that we have available to us today. So even the center of excellence is an example of how do I take this incredibly complex problem and simplify it down so that the real world can absorb and use this? And that's really what Dell and Vidia are partnering together to do. And that's really what the center of excellence is. It's an idea to help us say, let's take this extremely complex problem and extract some good value out of >>It. So what is Invidia's superpower in this realm? I mean, look, we're we are in, we, we are in the era of Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're, we're in a season of microprocessor manufacturers, one uping, one another with their latest announcements. There's been an ebb and a flow in our industry between doing everything via the CPU versus offloading processes. Invidia comes up and says, Hey, hold on a second, gpu, which again, was focused on graphics processing originally doing something very, very specific. How does that translate today? What's the Nvidia again? What's, what's, what's the superpower? Because people will say, well, hey, I've got a, I've got a cpu, why do I need you? >>I think our superpower is accelerated computing, and that's really a hardware and software thing. I think your question is slanted towards the hardware side, which is, yes, it is very typical and we do make great processors, but the processor, the graphics processor that you talked about from 10 or 20 years ago was designed to solve a very complex task. And it was exquisitely designed to solve that task with the resources that we had available at that time. Time. Now, fast forward 10 or 15 years, we're talking about a new class of problems called ai. And it requires both exquisite, soft, exquisite processor design as well as very complex and exquisite software design sitting on top of it as well. And the systems and infrastructure knowledge, high performance storage and everything that we're talking about in the solution today. So Nvidia superpower is really about that accelerated computing stack at the bottom. You've got hardware above that, you've got systems above that, you have middleware and libraries and above that you have what we call application SDKs that enable the simplification of this really complex problem to this domain or that domain or that domain, while still allowing you to take advantage of that processing horsepower that we put in that exquisitely designed thing called the gpu >>Decreasing complexity and increasing speed to very key themes of the show. Shocking, no one, you all wanna do more faster. Speaking of that, and I'm curious because you both serve a lot of different unique customers, verticals and use cases, is there a specific project that you're allowed to talk about? Or, I mean, you know, you wanna give us the scoop, that's totally cool too. We're here for the scoop on the cube, but is there a specific project or use case that has you personally excited Anthony? We'll start with that. >>Look, I'm, I've always been a big fan of natural language processing. I don't know why, but to derive intent based on the word choices is very interesting to me. I think what compliments that is natural language generation. So now we're having AI programs actually discover and describe what's inside of a package. It wouldn't surprise me that over time we move from doing the typical summary on the economic, the economics of the day or what happened in football. And we start moving that towards more of the creative advertising and marketing arts where you are no longer needed because the AI is gonna spit out the result. I don't think we're gonna get there, but I really love this idea of human language and computational linguistics. >>What a, what a marriage. I agree. Think it's fascinating. What about you, Bob? It's got you >>Pumped. The thing that really excites me is the problem solving, sort of the tip of the spear in problem solving. The stuff that you've never seen before, the stuff that you know, in a geeky way kind of takes your breath away. And I'm gonna jump or pivot off of what Anthony said. Large language models are really one of those areas that are just, I think they're amazing and they're just kind of surprising everyone with what they can do here on the show floor. I was looking at a demonstration from a large language model startup, basically, and they were showing that you could ask a question about some obscure news piece that was reported only in a German newspaper. It was about a little shipwreck that happened in a hardware. And I could type in a query to this system and it would immediately know where to find that information as if it read the article, summarized it for you, and it even could answer questions that you could only only answer by looking pic, looking at pictures in that article. Just amazing stuff that's going on. Just phenomenal >>Stuff. That's a huge accessibility. >>That's right. And I geek out when I see stuff like that. And that's where I feel like all this work that Dell and Invidia and many others are putting into this space is really starting to show potential in ways that we wouldn't have dreamed of really five years ago. Just really amazing. And >>We see this in media and entertainment. So in broadcasting, you have a sudden event, someone leaves this planet where they discover something new where they get a divorce and they're a major quarterback. You wanna go back somewhere in all of your archives to find that footage. That's a very laborist project. But if you can use AI technology to categorize that and provide the metadata tag so you can, it's searchable, then we're off to better productions, more interesting content and a much richer viewer experience >>And a much more dynamic picture of what's really going on. Factoring all of that in, I love that. I mean, David and I are both nerds and I know we've had take our breath away moments, so I appreciate that you just brought that up. Don't worry, you're in good company. In terms of the Geek Squad over >>Here, I think actually maybe this entire show for Yes, exactly. >>I mean, we were talking about how steampunk some of the liquid cooling stuff is, and you know, this is the only place on earth really, or the only show where you would come and see it at this level in scale and, and just, yeah, it's, it's, it's very, it's very exciting. How important for the future of innovation in HPC are partnerships like the one that Navia and Dell have? >>You wanna start? >>Sure, I would, I would just, I mean, I'm gonna be bold and brash and arrogant and say they're essential. Yeah, you don't not, you do not want to try and roll this on your own. This is, even if we just zoomed in to one little beat, little piece of the technology, the software stack that do modern, accelerated deep learning is incredibly complicated. There can be easily 20 or 30 components that all have to be the right version with the right buttons pushed, built the right way, assembled the right way, and we've got lots of technologies to help with that. But you do not want to be trying to pull that off on your own. That's just one little piece of the complexity that we talked about. And we really need, as technology providers in this space, we really need to do as much as we do to try to unlock the potential. We have to do a lot to make it usable and capable as well. >>I got a question for Anthony. All >>Right, >>So in your role, and I, and I'm, I'm sort of, I'm sort of projecting here, but I think, I think, I think your superpower personally is likely in the realm of being able to connect the dots between technology and the value that that technology holds in a variety of contexts. That's right. Whether it's business or, or whatever, say sentences. Okay. Now it's critical to have people like you to connect those dots. Today in the era of pervasive ai, how important will it be to have AI have to explain its answer? In other words, words, should I trust the information the AI is giving me? If I am a decision maker, should I just trust it on face value? Or am I going to want a demand of the AI kind of what you deliver today, which is No, no, no, no, no, no. You need to explain this to me. How did you arrive at that conclusion, right? How important will that be for people to move forward and trust the results? We can all say, oh hey, just trust us. Hey, it's ai, it's great, it's got Invidia, you know, Invidia acceleration and it's Dell. You can trust us, but come on. So many variables in the background. It's >>An interesting one. And explainability is a big function of ai. People want to know how the black box works, right? Because I don't know if you have an AI engine that's looking for potential maladies in an X-ray, but it misses it. Do you sue the hospital, the doctor or the software company, right? And so that accountability element is huge. I think as we progress and we trust it to be part of our everyday decision making, it's as simply as a recommendation engine. It isn't actually doing all of the decisions. It's supporting us. We still have, after decades of advanced technology algorithms that have been proven, we can't predict what the market price of any object is gonna be tomorrow. And you know why? You know why human beings, we are so unpredictable. How we feel in the moment is radically different. And whereas we can extrapolate for a population to an individual choice, we can't do that. So humans and computers will not be separated. It's a, it's a joint partnership. But I wanna get back to your point, and I think this is very fundamental to the philosophy of both companies. Yeah, it's about a community. It's always about the people sharing ideas, getting the best. And anytime you have a center of excellence and algorithm that works for sales forecasting may actually be really interesting for churn analysis to make sure the employees or students don't leave the institution. So it's that community of interest that I think is unparalleled at other conferences. This is the place where a lot of that happens. >>I totally agree with that. We felt that on the show. I think that's a beautiful note to close on. Anthony, Bob, thank you so much for being here. I'm sure everyone feels more educated and perhaps more at peace with the chaos. David, thanks for sitting next to me asking the best questions of any host on the cube. And thank you all for being a part of our community. Speaking of community here on the cube, we're alive from Dallas, Texas. It's super computing all week. My name is Savannah Peterson and I'm grateful you're here. >>So I.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome back to Las Vegas. You're watching the Cube's coverage of UI Path Forward. Five. We reach cruising altitude on day two. Christina Seacrest is here. She's the process Artificial intelligence and automation GPS automation leader at ey. And Bob PCIs, executive director for Intelligent Automation for the state of Tennessee. Folks, welcome to the cube. Thank you for Adam. >>Good >>To have you. Okay, I don't know if I messed up that title, Christina, but it's kind of interesting. You got process, you got ai, you got automation, you got gps. What's your role? >>I have a lot of rules, so thank you for that. Yeah, so my focus is first and foremost automation. So how do you get things like UI path into our clients, but also I focus specifically in our government and public sector clients. So sled specifically. So state local education. So that's why I'm here with the state of Tennessee. And then we also like to take it beyond automation. So how do you bring an artificial intelligence and all the technologies that come with that. So really full end to end spectrum of >>Automation. So Bob, when you think about the sort of the, the factors that are driving your organization of, how did you describe that, Those sort of external factors that inform your strategy. What, what's, what are the catalysts for how you determine to deploy technology? >>Well, it was primarily that we know tendency has a tendency to provide good customer service, but we want to get to a great status best in class, if you will. And we had an external advisory review where it said, Hey, you know, we could make automation to improve our customer experience. And so that was like a directive of the, the state leaders to go across the board and automate all processes statewide, starting with the 23 executive agencies. >>So where's the focus from that standpoint? Is it on just providing better interfaces to your constituents, your customers? Is it cutting costs or you actually have more budget to invest? Kind of a combination of >>Those? Yeah, so it's, it's really both qualitative and quantitative, right? So quantitative is where we're able to reduce hours and therefore we can redirect people to more less mundane work, if you will. And then qualitative is where we're able to reduce the errors, improve data quality, reduce cycle time for our citizens, you know, when they're making requests, et cetera. So it's, I think it's a combination of both of those quantitative and qualitative metrics that we are mandated in, in micromanaged, quite frankly to, to bring, make those >>Numbers. So I'm from Massachusetts, when I go to a a mass.gov website, I say, all this was done in the 1990s and you could just see where the different stovepipes were, were. But then every now and then you'll hit one and you'll say, Wow, okay, this is up to, it's such a great experience. And then the flip side of that is you want your employees to be happy and not have to do all this mundane work so you can retain the best people. You don't have to. So you're living that in, in state and, and local. So where did you start your automation journey? What role did EY play? Let's go. Yeah, >>Sure. So I, I, I think the thought for process automation was probably three or four years ago, but then we started the program about 18 months ago and there was a lot of, let's say behind the scenes work before we could bring EY in, you know, like what resources was I gonna have in, in the state that were gonna help me address all of the agency simultaneously, right? Cuz normally you'll see a project that'll do be more siloed across the state and say, we're gonna do this agency, we're gonna do this division. Well, you have 40 other agencies that are, you know, the momentum is it's just gonna fall, it wayside. So how we looked at it was let's blanket it and go across all 23 agencies at the same time, you know, identify common processes that are used across 40 divisions, for example, right? >>So, so what we basically did is we procured the software, you know, did the contracts, and then it was really about, I designed, I'm gonna say a multistream approach where they were, we could run multiple work streams, independent define all the architectures, required dev tests, production, the disaster recovery at the same time in parallel developed the center of excellence, the operation model, the processes, methodologies. And the third one was, let's go out to a few divisions, business administration, health, you know, health, human resources, and be able to do a process inventory to see what was there. And then based on that, there's all this theory of well let's do a proof of concept. Let's do a proof of technology, let's do apply. Well, the bottom line is rpa technology's been around for a long time. It's proven there's nothing to prove. But really what was important to prove before we decided to go, you know, full tilt was, you know, develop a proof of perceived business value. >>Are we gonna bring in the, the business value, the hours and the qu qualitative metrics that is expected by our ex executive team, The leadership, we were able to do that, you know, with the help of help of ey, we built out the prototypes and we got the green light to go forward, got ey to start, and then we just basically went pedal to the metal. We had our foundation already defined. We built up the architecture in less than one to two months. Now, in, in a public sector or private sector, it's just not heard of, right? But we have a tendency with EYs technical team, myself, we look around the, the road around the rock instead, the rock in the road, right? So we ended up coming up with a very unique, very easy to easy to handle architecture that was very scalable. And then were able to hit the ground running and deploy in production by December where head of >>Was EY involved in the whole, you know, dev test production, dr. Center of excellence, the, the process inventory or did you bring them in? Did you kind of do that internally then bring EY in for the proof of >>Value? EY was actually awarded the contract for soup to nuts, basically the first phase, which was those four work streams I told you about. And they worked with myself and the state of Tennessee infrastructure architecture teams. We needed to get these things defined and signed off the architecture so we could expedite getting them built out. And then they, and they basically ran all four work streams, you know, the process, inventory, the prototype, the, the proof of perceived business value, the building out the center of excellence, working with myself. And, and this wasn't just us in a, a vacuum, we ended up having to, I mean, I could do the strategy, I could do the technology and I could said the roadmap and all the good stuff, but we had to actually meet with a lot of the state or tendency organizations on change management. How do we end up putting this process or an automation in the middle of the, the normal traditional process, right? So there was a lot of interaction there and getting their feedback and then tweaking our operational model based on feedback from the state of Tennessee. So it was all very collective collaborative. I think that would be the keyword is collaborative and then building out everything. So then, and then we ended up going to the next way where they knew so much and we were, we had such a tight timeframe that we continued with ey. >>So Christina, Bob mentioned center of excellence a couple of times in the state of Tennessee, but then beyond state of Tennessee, other organizations you've worked with in this space, what's the relationship between center of excellence and this thing we've been hearing about over the last couple of days, the citizen developer has that been, has, has, has that been leveraged in the state of Tennessee? Bob, have you seen that leveraged in other places? Christina? What's that relationship look like? >>Yeah, so we don't leverage that, that model yet we have centralized model and there's reasons for that. So we don't end up having maverick's, runoff runoffs have one off, have, you know, have a a UI path version or down this division or have another RPA tool in another division, right? So then all of a sudden we're, we have a maintenance nightmare. Manageability nightmare. So we basically, you know, I I I negotiate an ELA with UI path, so therefore if anyone wants to go do another automation on another division, or they would basically follow our model, our design, our coe, our quality gates. We we're the gatekeepers to bring into production. >>Got it. Now, yeah. Now Christina, what's your perspective? Because I can imagine Nashville and Memphis might have very different ideas about a lot of things. Yeah. Little Tennessee reference there, but what, what, what about what, what about other places are you, are you seeing the citizen developer leveraged in, in some kinds of places more than others or >>What? Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of, because of the foundation we're building. Yeah. So we laid, you know, when, when Bob talks about the first phase of eight weeks, that was amazingly fast, even in that's ridiculous. Spoke about it to say you're gonna lay these four foundations. I was excited, like, I was like, wow, this, this is a very serious client. They wanna go fast and they wanna get that momentum, but the AUM was laid out so we could propel ourselves. So we are at 40 automations right now. We're in the works of creating 80 more automations in this next year. We'll be at 120 really quickly. The AUM is critical. And I will say at a client, I've, I've worked with over 50 clients on automation programs. The way state of Tennessee treats the aom and they abide by it, it is the living document of how you go and go fast. Got it. And the one thing I would say is it's also allowed us to have such immense quality. So I always talk about you put in forward, you put in another 80, we're at 98% uptime on all our automations, meaning they don't go down. And that's because of the AOM we set up. And the natural progression is going to be how do you take it to citizen developer? How do you take it to, we call, you know, process automation plus, >>But methodically, methodically, not just throwing it out at the beginning and, and hoping the chaos >>Works. Exactly. Exactly. And >>The ratio of of bots to automations, is that one to one or you have automation? Oh no, the single bot is doing multiple. So how many bots are you talking about? >>We're doing, Bob, you're gonna answer this better than I will, but the efficiency is amazing. We've been pushing that. >>So our ratio now, cause we have a high density architecture we put in is four bots, excuse me, four processes. The one bot and four bots, The one virtual machine EC two server. Right? So it's four to one, four to one. Now what we're going to get by next summer, we'll do more analysis. We'll probably get the six to one, six to one that's made serious shrinkage of our footprint from a machine, you know, management perspective from 60 down to seven right now we're gonna add the next chunk. We add another 80 automations in FIS gear 24. We're only gonna add two more bot, two more servers. Right? So that's only 10 running like close to 200 bucks. >>And, and is doing this on prem in the cloud? >>No, our, the architecture's fully >>Oh, cloud based >>Ct. Yeah. So we use UiPath SAS model. Yeah. Right. So that handles the orchestrator, the attended bots, all the other tooling you need automation hub, process minor et etc. Etc. Cetera. And then on the state side in aws we have, we use unattended bots, cert bots that have to go down into the legacy systems, et cetera. And they're sitting on EC two instances. >>Was there, was there a security not hole that you had to get through internally? What was that like? >>No, actually we, we, we were lock and step with the security team on this. I mean, there are some standards and templates and you know, what we had to follow, you know, but they're doing an assessment every single release, they do assessments on little bots, what systems it's activating or are accessing, et cetera. The data, because you have fedra data of FTI data, you know, in the public sector to make sure we're not touching it. >>Do you guys golf? >>I do, yeah. Not Well, yes, >>If you mean I I like golf but not don't golf well, but so you know what, what a mulligan is. If you had a Mulligan right, for the state of Tennessee, what'd you learn? What would you do differently? You know, what are some of the gotchas you see maybe Christina in, in other customers and then maybe specifically state of Tennessee, >>Right? I would say, you know, it is the intangibles. So when we talk about our clients that go fast and go big, like state of Tennessee, it's because that, that we call it phase zero that gets done that Bob did. It's about making sure you've got the sponsorship. So we've got executive sponsorship all the way up. You've got amazing stakeholder engagement. So you're communicating the value of what we're trying to do. And you're, you're showing them the value. We have been really focused on the return on investment and we'll talk a little bit about that, but it's how do you make sure that when you do, you know, states are different with those agencies, you have such an opportunity to maximize return on investment if you do it right, because you're not talking about automation in one agency, you're talking it across multiple agencies. We call that the multiplier effect. And that's huge. And if you understand that and how to actually apply that, the value you get is amazing. So I, I don't, I can't say there's a mulligan here, Bob, you may think of some, I know on other clients, if you don't line up your stakeholders and you don't set the expectations early on, you meander and you may get five, six automations in over the year. You know, when I go to clients and say, we're doing 40, we're doing 80, they're like, >>Wow, that's the, but that's the bottom line. Gotcha. Is if you, if you want to have an operational impact and have multiple zeros, you gotta go through that process that you said up front. >>Exactly. A >>Anything you do differently, Bob? >>Well, I I what I do differently, I mean, I think, I mean we, we did get executive sponsorship, you know, and in one area, but we still have to go out to all the 23 agencies and get, and bring awareness and kind of like set the hook to bring 'em in, right? Bring 'em to the, to the, to the lake. Right. And, and I think if, if it was more of a blanket top down, getting every agency to agree to, you know, in investigate automation, it would've been a lot easier. So we're, we're, we're getting it done. We've gone through 13 agencies already and less than a year, all of our releases are sprinkling across multiple agencies. So it's not like a silo. I'll look at that. Everyone at every agency is being impacted. So I think that's great. But I, I think our, our Mueller now is just trying to make sure we have enough backlog to do the next sprints. >>Is it, you know, the ROI on these initiatives is, is, is so clear and so fast. Is it self-funding? Is there gain sharing or do you just give business, give money back to the state and have to scramble for more? Do you get to, you know, get a lick off that cone? >>Unfortunately we don't, but I, I, I try to see if we could get some property like, nah, we don't do that. It's all cost, cost based. But, but our ROI is very attractive, I think for, for doing a whole state, you know, transformation. I think our ROI is three and a half to four years. Right. And that's pretty mind blowing. Even if you look at private sector or, I, I think some of the, the key things which people are noticing, even though we're in public sector, we're we are very nimble. This project is extremely nimble. We've had people come in, exactly, we need this, so we're gonna get penalized. Okay, knock it out in four hours, four days. Right? So it's that nimbleness that you just don't hear of even in private sector or public sector. And we're just able to do that for all the collaboration we do across ey, across myself and across all the other organizations that I, that I kind of drag along or what have, >>What do you, what do you, do you see any limits to the opportunities here? I mean, is this a decade long opportunity? Is you have that much runway >>Or that's just not my dna, so we're gonna, we're gonna probably do it like in four years, but Well, when >>You say do it, I mean, will you be done at that point? Or do you see the weight, >>Look at, you know, we could boil the ocean and I think this is one of the reasons why we're successful is we could boil the ocean and and be, it will be 10 attended 20 year program. Yeah. Okay. Or we looked at it, we had some of EY guys look at it and say, I said, what's the 25 80 rule? Meaning, you know, give me, So if we had 500 processes, tell me how many processes will gimme 80% of the hours. And it was 125, it was a 25 80 rule. I said, that's what we're doing it, we're doing, we're gonna do the 80% of the hours quantifiably. Now when we're done with that pass, then we'll have those other ones that are bringing 20% of the hours, that's when we might be bringing citizens in. That's what we're bringing state workers in. But at that same time, we will be going back in the wave and doing advanced ai. Right. Or advance ia, in other words. So right now we do rpa, ocr, icr, but you know, there's NL ml nps, there's virtual agents and stuff. So that's like the wave we're gonna do through the ones we've already gone through. Got it. Right. So it'll probably be a two or three wave or iterations. >>Cool. Guys, thanks so much for coming into the cube. Great story. Really appreciate you taking us through it. Thank you so much for having us. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson. The Dave ante. We back at UI path forward five from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Keep it right there.

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. And welcome to this CUBE conversation where we welcome an ESG senior analyst, Bob Laliberte Bob, good to see you. >> Great to see you too. Thanks for having me >> Love it, I love to have the analyst sessions. Set it up. What's your scope, what's your area of expertise? >> So my coverage area right now is networking in its entirety. So that spans everything from enterprise networking, wired, wireless, campus, data center, et cetera. All the way up through telco and, in cloud networking. >> So how do you look at the landscape? One of the big things I think about a lot is how does the shift to cloud migration? How does that affect the existing, network layers? I mean, you got Cisco as the big whale and it's just, it's amazing to me. They still have whatever percent market share they have 60, 65% of the market. Are things, what's happening in the competitive landscape. How is cloud affecting that? >> That's a great question. I think the interesting piece is so many times organizations think about the network as plumbing. But the reality is the it's really important plumbing because as you talk about cloud and things get more distributed, well, guess what connects those distributed locations? It's the network. And so organizations as they've moved to the cloud you've seen a big shift with things like SD-WAN and so forth. How do I get more efficient connectivity up to that cloud? How do I not only enable able better connectivity between my data centers in the cloud, but now all my remote workers in the cloud. And so there's been a lot of big shifts going on that have driven the importance of having not only network, but secure networks. So like I said, cloud is one thing, and you're moving your applications there. But with the pandemic you saw the remote work. Think about the network administrators who we're managing, hey, I've got to control network connections between my data centers, a couple clouds and maybe dozens maybe a hundred remote branches. And now I'm connecting to 10,000 micro branches that I need to ensure that they can connect up to these applications and so forth. Hell of a lot more complex environment today than it used to be for these network teams. When we look at the, what we're seeing, how the networking providers are responding it's by driving comprehensive end-to-end solutions. So unifying, wired, wireless, and WAN. Driving efficiencies there. You're seeing even ThousandEyes for Cisco and things like that. Because they know the Internet's becoming more integral part of the corporate network. So being able to drive those types of things being able to, I think look at how to drive those operational efficiencies through AI and ML. So one of the big shifts we've seen in networking is the transition to cloud-based network management. And obviously that couple of things that helps with, first of all, the operations teams who are working remotely can more easily access it. But once all that data is up in the cloud, it creates a platform to be able to invest in AI/ML, and be able to drive intelligent alerting and even automation. And that's really what's needed because as the environments get more distributed and complex, you need to have that those operational efficiencies that automation, that intelligence to help them. >> How has remote work and hybrid work affected sort of network, spending priorities. Obviously when the pandemic hit you had to accommodate end points. And I always have this theory okay, when people come back to the office and I know it's going to be a different world but, the HQ probably needs some love as well. So has that been a tailwind for the industry? >> Absolutely, that's what we're seeing now. I think when the pandemic first hit, everyone said I've got to ramp up my VPNs. I've got to scale out my concentrators. I've got to add more firewalls in my data center. And then after a while, when they realized this was here to stay, they said, okay we just created that hub-and-spoke network that we just got rid of with SD-WAN. So what are the better solutions we can implement? So now you're seeing them not only implement better networking solutions for the remote workers. But reimagining what the campus looks like. Because it's not going to be ever 100% full or maybe it will, but how, for how many times a year will it be 100% full? So you've got to go from 80% cubes and 20% conference and collaboration areas, to 80% collaboration areas and 20% cubes. So we're seeing a lot of transition taking place in the campus environment as organizations are deploying newer technologies like Wi-Fi 6E. That have greater bandwidth to allow for those collaboration apps to run in those collaboration areas. Instead of just having the single wired conference room for video. Everyone's got to be able to run their video, voice and video collaboration apps. >> So how do you look at the landscape now? Again, you can't talk about networking without talking about Cisco. I think they, up there, I saw you and Zeus as talking about out, Cisco's quarter and other networking topics. Their long term guidance is for 60% growth for a company that size that's really outstanding. I mean, Cisco's, really has always been an execution machine of course. And it's a new era now under Chuck. There are more than ankle biters. If you look at Arista's doing pretty well there's guys like Extreme, there's others that are out there but nobody seemed to be able to unseat Cisco. What's happening in the landscape? >> I mean, that's a great question. Cisco's just been around for so long and been so big for so long. And you have to also keep in mind that with Cisco it's not just about the technology, but the fact from a if you think about it from a cultural standpoint these are workers who have been trained on Cisco since, some of them since high school. The educational component that Cisco has done has groomed generations of network technologists. So when they come into the market, they're fully familiar and used to Cisco. Plus they make a really good product and they've got products that cover everything. They cover the whole gambit. So they're still able to maintain their share. They're able to grow. They're able to move. They've made a shift last year. They announced in last spring that they were going to focus more on end-to-end. So instead of just having, hey, here's a point product, here's a point product. Here's a point product. Let's think about it in its entirety. Let's deliver a complete end-to-end solution solve bigger problems for customers, which obviously makes it much harder to remove when you're just trying to remove a piece of that single problem. But the other competitors are also having good years. And I think also the rising tide floats all boats. And so because of this distributed nature, the importance of the network, everyone is doing that. Plus obviously this has to be said, the supply chain issues where people are ordering ahead as well. But organizations, you look at Arista, they've gone from just being a data center company to expanding all the way down to the campus edge, wireless, right there creating an end-to-end environment Extreme did the same thing. They went out and made a lot of acquisitions. They pulled them all together, integrated. They're all moving to this cloud based end-to-end network management. Arista has been on a tear, bringing in a lot of, not only innovative technology, but innovative technologists. So if you look at some of the organizations they bought. I keep calling it Route 128, it's 128 Technologies. So sorry folks I live in Massachusetts. It's always been Route 128. >> You Remember when don't we. 128 Technology's Mist was their big. Mist was their, Mist was kind of like their VMware. VMware to EMC was Mist was to Juniper. And so we call it the Mistification of Juniper where every organization, every company they bring in they're rolling under that and this the AI engine. So they're bringing in 128 Technologies into that. They've got their own, their own stuff under that, their wired switches. So they've got this unified wired and wireless and WAN assurance now that they have. They've been gaining a lot of traction with that. And again, for the things we were talking about because it's far more distributed and complex. You need to have, It's not like people are getting replaced. It's not like, hey, we're leveraging this automation so that we can get rid of network teams. It's because it's getting so much more complex just to have the same number of people manage that more complex environment. We need those intelligence solutions. >> So I want to ask you about network and multi-cloud. And so it's kind of tongue in cheek because we coined this term super cloud. And so what we meant by that, so here's the premise. And I wonder you could give us your perspective. Multi-cloud, I've said many times is I think largely a symptom of multi-vendor I run in this, I run in AWS or, Azure, I've done the work to understand their primitives and or Google, whatever it is. But it's not like an abstraction layer that's floating above all those but now you're starting to see that. In fact, it re:Invent in November. The ecosystem it seemed like was everybody was focused on developing what we call these super clouds. And again, it's tongue in cheek, this abstraction layer it hides the underlying complexity of the primitives and the APIs adds incremental value on top of that. So there's a company Prosimo, which Steve Herrod, is invested in and others Praveen Akkiraju, whom I'm sure you know from Viptela. Aviatrix is another company that's sort of, Steve Malaney has come on theCUBE and talked about what they're doing. Like yeah, that's super cloud. It seems like it's something new and different than just multi-cloud which is kind of connecting in to different clouds. It's that value on top. What do you think about that? And what does that mean for networking? >> That's a really good point because we are starting to see the inception of organizations going beyond having multiple cloud providers and looking at starting to deploy applications across multiple clouds. It's still really early. The vast majority of organizations are still, I use this application for this cloud and this application for that cloud. But that's the next frontier. That's what they're trying to solve is how do I create this basically cloud fabric and make it as simple as possible. And again, all the things we've been talking about how do I, instead of you having to learn Amazon, Google, Azure networking technology, learn mine, I'll take care of it, but I'll abstract all that complexity from you and make it so much simpler to be able to connect to these interconnect, and connect to them in a seamless fashion. And so that's what they're really trying to do is they're. And the hard part is it takes really sophisticated solutions to remove that high level of complexity and make it simple for an organization to do that. So yeah, absolutely. >> If I had more time I'd make it shorter as somebody who writes a lot. And I think you're right. I think it is future. It's not definitely not here today, but the other thing is it ties into digital transformation. We used this again, throw that buzzword around but, companies not just tech company, I mean everybody's becoming like a tech company, but organizations, financial services companies, healthcare they're building their own clouds on top of the hyperscalers who spend $100 billion a year on CapEx. And that seems to be a trend that I think is going to take legs over this next decade. Just like in the previous decade everybody was thinking, okay, we're going to SaaSify our business softwares (indistinct) the world. And now it's software and cloud services are the way in which I'm going to create customer experiences. >> Correct, yeah. It's why should I go out and make an investment in technology when the technology's already there? And I can rent it for when I need it scale it as I need it and, and do all of that. I agree with that. I think that's something that we're seeing. The interesting part though is that when we look at our data points, probably let than 40% of the applications and workloads are in the cloud today. So there's still a role that the corporate data center plays. We are seeing over time. They expect that to progress and transition but I think there's still always going to be maybe a quarter of the workloads and applications may never leave. Depending on how they're built, et cetera. So there's always going to be that distributed environment where you've got workloads in the private data centers, workloads in multiple public clouds. And also, the big thing too is don't forget about the edge. We're seeing a lot more edge activity take place as organizations recognize, as they deploy more IOT devices, and want to get realtime business insights they've got to deploy the compute there. >> Well, and that's something that I wanted to ask you about, but going back to what you just said, which is, I agree with you. So that suggests to me, Bob that we're just kind of, with cloud just entering the steep part of the S curve. Amazon's headed toward $100 billion, run rate business. Maybe they probably won't get there this year but they will next year. We're entering that steep growth phase, really could be. It's incredible. But I wanted to ask you about the edge. Because you're right is we got to move compute to the edge, ARM is going to dominate. I would think, the edge. They already are with our smartphones. How do you see the cloud guys participating in the edge? Whether it was Andy Jassy, or now Adam Selipsky or anybody at Amazon. They have the dogma of in the fullness of time all workloads are going to be in the cloud. So they either have to change their definition of cloud. Or they're wrong. So what's your thought on that? >> I think it really starts coming down to what's your definition of edge. And so, much like when the cloud technologies first came about and you had all the shadow IT. Everyone running off, and everyone thought oh this is all great, until you realized you had to operationalize it and you had to pull the brakes. Stop doing that. We're going to make sure IT operations. >> Call the CIO up. Exactly, finding out where stuff was by going through accounting and seeing credit card charges. For the edge what we've seen I think is maybe organizations really saying I've got to deploy my servers in my own site. Right at that edge in order to get the lowest possible latency. And so what I think we're starting to see is organizations looking at that and saying, okay well I'm in a metro and I've got 25 locations in a metro. And I've deployed technology to every single one of those sites. Do I need it there? Or can I put it in an Equinix facility that's less than five milliseconds from all 25 sites? So I think there's starting to be this pragmatic approach of looking at let's look at the edge, let's take a look at what type of latencies. What is our definition of real time. When do we actually need the data and so forth? What kind of connectivity do we have? And then from there figure out how we go about connecting it. And so for companies like AWS and Google and Azure a lot of them there's local zones and things like that. They're deploying them in those colos because they don't have data centers in every metro but they can leverage an Equinix. They can leverage someone else's hardware that's there to deploy their software stack within that location. So I think that's something that we're starting to see more and more of as the edge. And obviously the association with the telcos as well. They've got a great footprint. If you want to get close to the edge with their colos Their home offices and things like that and whatnot. Their ability to move the compute closer to the edge, the base stations of the antennas and things like that, are certainly significant. And that's why you're seeing the wavelengths and things like that, programs like that. >> So I was going to close, but there some really interesting topics you just brought up. Call it whatever you going to call it near edge, far edge or deep edge. And you mentioned real time. Yeah. So for those Equinix data centers, I don't need, true real time. But for Tesla, I need real time. I need real time inference at the edge probably using a bunch of ARM cores and I can't go back to any cloud. How do you look at that? Both, I would think big markets. Do you have a sense as to, is one bigger than the other? Are they both just enormous or we don't even know yet. >> I'm not sure that we know yet. I think certainly, it's riding the tail of the IOTs. So the more sensors, the more things that are deployed the more that, that data businesses realize they can leverage that data to make real time business insights to drive either better experiences. And if you're in retail. So location based services and real time offer management it doesn't do any good to offer a coupon for something that you've, that's 40 yards behind you. That that's past, like you said with the cars there's, I've seen some studies recently. They say, well, based on the latency, if the command is to stop and you're at one millisecond, it stops within four inches. If you are at 50 milliseconds, it stops 10 feet later. That's a big difference. And I don't know if those numbers are right but you get the idea about the impact, what the real time impact is of. >> Margin is not huge. >> Exactly, so that's where organizations, I think first and foremost need to take a pragmatic approach to determine what is real time for us. What's our definition of it. And then that can lead them to where do I need to place this compute technology? And then that goes to how do I then connect to it? So for the Teslas and so forth, obviously you're going to want 5G connections if possible. Ultra low latency and not just any 5G. The good stuff, the millimeter bandwidth stuff that that's the ultra low latency. >> So let's wrap. So, what's going on in your research world obviously the big, big acquisition tech target they seem to be investing in ESG. You guys are really growing and hiring. That's awesome. Any research that you're working on? >> Yeah, there's a couple of couple of projects we have going on right now. We're wrapping up a four part distributed cloud research series. So we did it on distributed cloud infrastructure. Applications, observability. And now this last one is on the edge. Coincidentally. So we're working on that. We've got some new network modernization research that we've published. And we're going to be looking, from a networking perspective looking at end-to-end network modernization which will be coming out soon. >> Awesome, Bob, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really would love to have you back and chat about some of those things. Observability hot space. God, I wish we had more time. >> Absolutely, appreciate it, thanks. >> And thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome back. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS 2021. We're here in the Venetian, formerly the sands convention center in Las Vegas. My name is Dave Volante. Really excited to have Bob bright tell here. He's the director of SAP global alliances at IBM and Manu.. I'm going to try that again. Pro boxcar, is that correct? Rebecca Head of Linux and IBM alliances at AWS Manu. I'm sorry for bashing your name, but at least I got it right, guys. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>And I'm actually now AWS partnership. I had SAP before, so it's great. I first, my first reinvest, >>I have a old DNA title. That's great. That's why I was asking you about Philly before you don't have the accent though. Bob, >>I'm not a Philly native, so cowboy >>Because you have the SAP connection there. IBM, AWS. It's like, whoa, what's going on here? >>Well, maybe I'll start and then have my new, my new, make some comments. And I'll just start by just, uh, we're real excited to be here. IBM's a diamond sponsor at, at re-invent and it's great to be in person and really appreciate AWS being able to put this event on this week and get us back in person. It really makes a difference. And I know there's a lot of people virtually as well, but, um, IBM and AWS have worked together for a number of years. Uh, maybe we could characterize it more opportunistically, um, prior, but in the last 12, 18 months, I think there's been a lot of developments that have really made us come together strategically as partners. I know we'll talk a little bit about red hat during the course of the conversation, but with IBM's >>You say opportunities like you mean in the field and the more strategic >>Relationship or strategic and with IBM's open hybrid cloud strategy. And, uh, with so many of our clients preferring AWS is their cloud. Um, we are working together now to meet clients where they're at to help them get the value of the cloud. And we're talking a little bit about coming out of the pandemic before this. Um, and one of the things that we're seeing with our clients that IBM is a lot of that low hanging fruit. The cloud was achieved, maybe the lift and shift or doing some SAS based applications, but now it's even more important to rapidly adopt hybrid cloud and cloud technologies to provide your business with flexible innovation transformation, all of those things. So that's why it has been important for us to, to partner with AWS strategically. Um, our clients are telling us that when they do move those heavier workloads to the cloud and do it in a hybrid model, they see about two and a half times the value. >>So with that, our partnership is multi-dimensional, we're doing a lot with IBM consulting. My new we'll talk a little bit about IBM software and red hat. Just one example, Dave, with IBM consulting, we now are up to almost 10,000 certifications and 10 plus AWS competencies. So that competency chart that shows we're knocking them all out on the, on the checkerboard there to get them to IBM consulting competencies. And we just had the energy one announced this week. So IBM consulting is in area software's big too. In my news, been helping us with that part of the partner. >>Well, it's, you know, to your point, you can't pick whatever cliche you want. You can't fight fashion. The trend is your friend. You have a lot of, a lot of people want to be on AWS. So rather than fighting, oh, we have our own cloud. No, you've got to meet customers where they are, right >>David, this is where this takes us. You know, the analogy we use between Bob and I, IBM boss spoke about IBM consulting, which we know has been a strategic partnership for the last two, two and a half years. I think I'm going to share the best kept secret in the cloud phase right now. IBM software and AWS now are working together. The analogy we use is IBM software and AWS. I like peanut butter and jelly better together. And over the last 12 months, the two companies have accelerated working together around three key dimensions. Number one, around product, number two around making sure our customers, joint customers successful. And number three, around building a robust ecosystem of partners. One thing that we have realized is just helping customers modernize. Migrate is challenging. And on the product side, now we have about 15 products on AWS marketplace. >>I think about trusty or verify insecurity, cloud Pak for data, uh, uh, Cognos data DataStage over the next 12 months, we plan to land all of the cloud packs. These are containerized version of IBM software on AWS and the marketplace. In addition, many of our customers are now using the managed red hat, OpenShift servers. We launched it earlier in April. This year, we are seeing tremendous customer feedback, tremendous, uh, growth there that is also informing that customers really like the open shirt model managed services one-click deployment. And so our goal is over the next 12 months, launched many more IBM software as a managed service offering. So that's kind of like what we're doing on the product side, on the customer success. A great example is somebody is helping a big oil and gas customers managed with this energy transition that we're working through. Um, Schlumberger software around simulation runs on OpenShift on Amazon in a hybrid environment, especially critical as we have a lot of oil and gas data that needs to have maybe sit on premises, uh, because of data residency requirements. >>I think the third piece is around building an ecosystem of partners for our red hat OpenShift services, which we launched April. We already have 30 partners that are helping customers not only to modernize, but to migrate on AWS. We know modernization is challenging, moving to containers is difficult. So we need this robust ecosystem of partners and Bob and I, and you know, the IBM and AWS team are investing heavily. We have cash credit to do financial incentives plus also technical content so that our customers so that our partners can help customers to be successful. Yeah, >>So the cloud packs are cool. That makes a lot of sense. And now the acquisition of red hat makes it easier. It's a catalyst gets IBM, much more closely aligned to developers and it makes it easier for things like cloud packs to be migrated to the cloud and being running cloud native. How did that acquisition affect from your standpoint menu and Bob I'd love your thoughts and your relationship. >>The red hat acquisition by IBM is a net positive red hat. And AWS have been working together for 14 years now. And we have tens of thousands of customers that are running mission critical workloads, such as SAP, Oracle databases. And there's a lot of trust that is engendered by working in the field for 14 years, uh, supporting mission critical customers, mission critical workloads. And so that relationship has provided a lot of tailwinds to our partnership with IBM software. I think a lot of the stuff we spoke about a lot of the progress you've made in the last six to eight to 12 months, a big function is that the trust that we have engendered working together with red hat. >>Yeah. I'll add Dave that, um, I, I agree with my new comments on the red hat. Red hat really is the epitome of openness right. Of open source software and the history that Manu described with AWS, there has been excellent adoption of red hat on AWS, red hat, enterprise Linux, and then most recently, um, red hat OpenShift on AWS. And just to give another example to the ecosystem point, just this morning, red hat with IBM, with a major ISV named Solonus announced that Solonus will be running one of their key, uh, applications and releasing it on Rossa on AWS. And all this means for our clients is faster adoption and acceleration and being able to innovate, um, in a hybrid way. So that's really the value that red hat is helping, um, to bring to the table in our cloud packs are available on open shift and rose as an option as well. So we're excited about the red hat partnership. It's really essential to our partnership into our, our hybrid cloud strategy. >>You mentioned up front, you know, happy that AWS decided to have this show. Of course, a lot of people watching online and you can get massive scale online, but there's nothing like the live event, you know, and when you make announcements at a live event, there's a little buzz going on and you get feedback. So are you making any hard news here? What, what announcements can you >>Share? Yeah, well, the one we had, um, on, um, uh, Solonus earlier with red hat and to do roasts on top of red hat was one and there's just an advance of, um, of re-invent. Um, we announced something in the data and AI space. So that's another big area of our partnership is data and AI. So we're in, we announced that in the oil industry and in the, um, uh, in that area that we are partnering together with AWS to be able to get insights on data so that we could get clean and reusable energy solutions out there. And there's so much untapped data. We know data is such an important resource, that that's an area that we're going to partner on with our cloud Pak for data on AWS. And of course underlying everything is open shifts. So that's one big announcement. We're also doing a lot in security for IBM and my news has been working closely with this. So my new, I, I know you're close to the integrations we're doing with AWS. So I'll let you comment maybe on some of the things in security. >>I mean, everybody's a security company these days, right? I mean, >>And then we continue to work and making sure that a lot of the IBM security products are integrating with our native services. So the customers have a seamless experience. And as he you'll see a lot of the same investments happening over 2022 as we grow the >>Partnership. So what like a QRadar or something like that >>Are, for example, integrating with security hub. That would be great example. >>I mean, it's the, it's the number one topic for CEO's that has been for a while and still will be okay. So give us a little roadmap, you know, maybe Bob, you could start, where do you want to see this relationship go? Um, what can we expect in the, in the coming 12 months? Yeah, well, >>Again, we're super excited about our partnership with AWS. I think we're just scratching the surface of how we're going to add value to our clients on this, on this hybrid cloud journey that they're all going through. And IBM, and this has been in our financial reports and in our earnings and everything, we're investing over a billion dollars in the ecosystem. And so partners like AWS are critical to provide that platform of growth for our clients and innovation for our clients. So all of the things that I talked about in money talked about today, whether it be our IBM consulting capabilities or our IBM software, our red hat, we're going to continue to invest. We talked about the red hat acquisition. IBM has made a few other acquisitions that help drive this partnership and drive value to our clients for adoption, from Instana to Turbonomic X, to some really innovative cloud consulting companies like Knorr cloud in towels. So we're going to continue to make investments. And I think we're just on the tip of the iceberg and we invite everybody at re-invent, either in person, which is exciting or virtually to learn more about our partnership and how we can help you and my new, any additional comments to that. >>Thanks, Bob V have a golden child hair with red hat OpenShift on Amazon. That'd be launched in April. We are seeing tremendous customer adoption. So we suspect that in next year, we'll continue to see solid adoption around red hat OpenShift. That VocaliD is also informing how customers want a more native experience for IBM software on AWS. And so we, um, we are targeting to, to launch many more IBM software in a native format on edema. So that would be the big team for next year. Uh, in addition, again, I'll call to action to our partner community. There's a huge opportunity to help our joint customers to modernize and migrate on AWS via both IBM, AWS are leaning in, we have cash credit to give financial incentives to partners, to help our customers, to migrate and modernize as well as we are also creating a lot of technical content that is not freely available so that a lot of our partners can start this. IBM focus on AWS practice >>Guys. Thanks so much for coming on the cube. Congratulations, and look at, you know, I often say the next 10 years is not going to be like the last 10 years. The cloud is expanding is a really good example. So thank you for your time. Appreciate your time. All right. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech coverage at AWS reinvent 2021

>>Mhm Yes. Hi and welcome to the Aruba Pensando announcement. I'm lisa martin. Hopefully you've seen the announcement from Antonio and john but if you haven't, we're going to dig into it from an analyst perspective joining me is bob La Liberty, senior analyst at Enterprise strategy Group to unpack the announcement, bob. Welcome to the program. >>Thank you very much. Great to be here. >>So in this case anybody hasn't seen the announcement go ahead and give me an overview, what are these two companies announcing? >>Yeah, absolutely. So essentially what you've seen is is that Pensando, who's been developing this distributed services platform to be deployed as an intelligent card, basically has taken their technology and incorporate it into an Aruba switch. So now you can get distributed services, all the great capabilities that Pensando has been working on combined with an Aruba top of rack switch, all managed under the Aruba fabric controller. Um so you've got a really simplistic way to be able to provision, configure and update and assigned policies to all those great Pensando state full services in the top of rack switch for an existing data center environment >>and what's your overall synopsis? Is this a disruptive technology? What do you think? >>Yeah, I really like this. I mean the whole goal of developing this technology was to be somewhat disruptive. It was to enable data center organizations to basically recreate what hyper scale hours are doing and the whole concept is around how do I improve, how do I distribute the services that are needed to help my application to protect my applications closer to the applications themselves. Um so I really find that this is something that's that's really needed. You know, we've seen the pendulum swinging towards distributed. But the interesting part about this announcement is that the majority of applications still reside in existing data centers. And the other the other kind of interesting pieces that, you know, cloud native, everyone talks about cloud native applications, but cloud native doesn't always mean public cloud only and that organizations are actually gonna run them in a hybrid. So organizations need to figure out how they're going to run these cloud native applications and their existing data center environments. And what the combination of the technologies enable organizations to do is to basically retrofit if you will that top of rack switch and be able to deploy, excuse me deploy those distributed services at a top of rack switch, instead of having to either rely on existing hardware appliances that are pulled off to the side of the network or to have to deploy agents onto the server which could impact the application performance. So they've kind of hit that that goldilocks spot of being able to provide distributed services without impacting the application performance. In fact, when you look at it from that perspective of its not having to go to that appliance pool any longer, it's actually going to increase the performance, right? Your latency is going to be a lot lower because instead of hair pinning through the core of your network. Now you're just going to your top of rack switch so it's going to improve the performance. >>Everybody wants improved performance. Especially in this the fact that things are continuing to stay distributed and we probably will have some part of that be permanent. So bob how do customers upgrade or integrate this into their existing environments? Talk to me a little bit more about that and the simplicity, it sounds like what you're saying with which they can do that. >>Yeah, this should be a fairly minimally minimally disruptive uh type of integration, essentially what you're doing, if you've got a high availability top of rack up environment, you're going to be swapping out one top of rack switch at the time. And organizations do this quite often when they're upgrading for capacity and things of that nature. So in this case it's simply going to be replacing the top of rack switch and organizations can look at different ways of how they want to do this. You know, to start, they might want to look at where they're critical applications are and deploy them. They're so they've got the services, it might be based on looking at where I don't know, you might have some regulated services, right. Pc I things like that that need to make sure that they've got higher levels of security. So essentially it's all about just simply deploying those top of rack switches going on to Aruba's fabric controller being able to spend that up, configure apply the policies and the security policies that you want to employ for those applications and and let it run >>Talk to me about this in certain context that we know some of the industry's every industry obviously has been affected by the events of the last 1819 months. What we think of manufacturing, healthcare, financial services give me uh your perspective into some of the customers in those industries and how they'll be able to take advantage of this technology as their environments continue to distribute. >>Yeah, I mean I think that the interesting piece of this is that, you know what it's really about for any industry, it's about as they modernize their data center as they modernize their applications. Right? So we've seen the transition from um monolithic too. So a based apps to microservices based applications and and that's really what's driving this because what's happening in all those organizations now, there's a lot of of communication within those applications themselves. Right? Because instead of having one monolithic application or two or three pieces of an application, you could now have dozens or hundreds of pieces of an application that need to talk to each other. And so the key for all of these industries, right, Regardless of the industry, when you're deploying this is how do you secure that communication, how do you make sure that East west traffic is being fully protected um because as organizations, you know, the legacy approach was castle and moat protect the perimeter, which was great. But if you got inside that perimeter right then the malware could really put periphery slow, deliberate, sorry, can't talk today. Um, but the idea is now, how can I deploy services that are able to protect that east west traffic as well? And so by deploying those services at the top of rack, you can do that more easily without having any kind of an impact. Right? So I think that you know the zero trust is what it's the mantra is never trust always verify. And so that's what organizations are looking to do. So even if there is a malware attack and they do get inside the data center that it's not able to spread throughout that organization. >>Got it. And that's absolutely critical. We have seen the security landscape change dramatically in the last year and a half, we've seen this massive spike in ransom where it's companies in every industry. I now know that it is not a matter of if we get attacked, it's when we've seen a massive increase in detail. So let's kind of dig into, You mentioned some of the benefits in terms of low latency performance, let's unpack the security level there. What are some of the things that you've seen in the security landscape where zero trust is absolutely critical for every industry? >>Yeah. Well like I said, it's really all about how do you make sure you're protecting there's a lot more communication going on within your application itself and how do you protect it? And so as that landscape has changed, it's critically important for organizations to adapt to that and to be able to, you know, make this change happen. So I mean we've seen this in the hyper scale is right. They've deployed the technology, they have it running at the right and those, those intelligent cards at the server level as close as they can. But for an existing data center, it doesn't make sense, right, unless you're replacing your whole data center, which is obviously incredibly disruptive. It's this is really about how do you insert those services in a minimally minimally disruptive way. And that's what that's what's really key here. The other interesting pieces because of the location, because they can track that east west traffic and apply the security policies to it and they can see all that and they've got visibility into it. They can then take that information and they can export it to existing other security tools. So you're not going to get rid of your perimeter security, you still need that. So this is more about a defense and depth about securing or augmenting your security posture and creating much more, much more, much tighter security around those modern application environments as well. So, so having this capability, like I said, it really starts to democratize that, that capability and the functions that the hyper scholars have and it brings it into existing enterprise data center environments and I think that's really what's important. And then, like I said, as organizations progress, they can take the data that they're collecting and they can leverage that with XDR solutions, right? Feed it into other, you know, sense or things like that. That can really help organizations um, you know, enhance their machine learning algorithms and things like that. The more data you can collect, the better you can, you can nail down the the policies that need to be provided there. >>Well, that's important too. As every company these days either needs to become a data company or if they don't, they're probably not going to be around much longer. Talk to me about the overall security kind of like implication you said this is going to help organizations in any industry augment their overall security posture. That's so critically important these days. >>Yeah. And it's like I said, it's really about having that that full visibility into the east west flows for these. So, and their ability, the distributed services switch is able to stream all of that telemetry of those flows right? And that can be complemented by the existing north south firewall telemetry as well. So you've got all this data for the XDR engines and things like that so that you can really determine whether there's an insider attack where there's any movement of malware, things like that, whether there's an external actor that's gotten into the data center, so it really provides you with a lot more visibility and that visibility provides that data that you talked about. So that's really what's key here and again, it's the ability here is that you're not needing to deploy XDR agents on every workload so there's no impact to the application performance when you're doing it in this this matter. So that's what makes it a really kind of an elegant solution to being able to modernize and deliver these capabilities into an existing data center environment. >>What do you think the timeframe is for an organization to be able to take advantage of this technology? >>Yeah, that's a good question. I mean really it's it's up to the, you know, it's up to the organization themselves. Clearly, once the technology is released by Aruba they've got the ability to start deploying it um you know, obviously one of the easiest ways to deploy it might be if they were adding a new rack adding some new capabilities then certainly that's completely non disruptive and they can get going there, but like I said, it, excuse me, it's also quite easy for organisations to be able to to just simply if they've got a high availability top of rack environment to start augmenting it into their existing their existing infrastructure as well, fairly non destructively >>excellent. That non disruption augmentation is critical. I I do want to ask you a question in terms of the partnership with HP. Aruban Pensando, what does this signify on the HP side in your opinion? >>Mhm Well from from the HP side, like I said, I think this is a HP has been involved with Pensando for a long time now. They've obviously recognized the value of the technology and wanted to partner with them from an early stage and so um what it really helps is you're thinking about moving forward. It creates a unique opportunity for organizations to take advantage of the Pensando technology within the HP server environments as well as those top of rack switches and create some really unique opportunities to drive even greater visibility and protection. >>Let's do one more thing bob. Let's just summarize your key takeaways if somebody has 30-60 seconds to watch this and see what the three things are that Bob says we need to be taking away from this announcement. What are those three things? >>Yeah, I think the key thing is first to recognize that modern application environments are gaining ground and that organizations need to accommodate these new application architecture. Right. But to do that, they need a solution. They need some technology to help them. So the key takeaway is that this now this H P E Aruba and Pensando distributed services switch, enables you to deploy distributed services into your existing environment in a minimally disruptive way and it provides you with the benefits of improving security of improving performance and user experiences um all while making sure that you can scale and do it simply through a single interface through the Aruba fabric controller. >>Got it. And being able to deliver those outstanding customer and user experiences is critical, as we are in this day and age where our business lives blend with our consumer lives that we expect things to be able to work like that bob. Thank you for joining me on the program, breaking down the HP Aruba Pensando announcement, telling us what it is, what the benefits are in it for customers and how they can take advantage of that. We appreciate your analysis. >>Very welcome. It's great to be here. >>Probably Liberty. I'm lisa martin. You're watching this HP Aruba Pensando announcement video. >>Mhm.

>>Thank you. >>Hi and welcome to the Aruba Pensando announcement. I'm lisa martin. Hopefully you've seen the announcement from Antonio and john but if you haven't, we're going to dig into it from an analyst perspective joining me is bob La Liberty, senior analyst at Enterprise strategy Group to unpack the announcement, bob Welcome to the program. >>Thank you very much. Great to be here. >>So in this case anybody hasn't seen the announcement go ahead and give me an overview, what are these two companies announcing? >>Yeah, absolutely. So essentially what you've seen is is that Pensando, who's been developing this distributed services platform to be deployed as an intelligent card, basically has taken their technology and incorporate it into an Aruba switch. So now you can get distributed services, all the great capabilities that Pensando has been working on combined with an Aruba top of rack switch, all managed under the Aruba fabric controller. Um so you've got a really simplistic way to be able to provision, configure and update and assigned policies to all those great Pensando state full services in the top of rack switch for an existing data center environment >>and what's your overall synopsis? Is this a disruptive technology? What do you think? >>Yeah, I really like this. I mean the whole goal of developing this technology was to be somewhat disruptive. It was to enable data center organizations to basically recreate what hyper scale hours are doing and the whole concept is around how do I improve, how do I distribute the services that are needed to help my application to protect my applications closer to the applications themselves. Um so I really find that this is something that's that's really needed. You know, we've seen the pendulum swinging towards distributed. But the interesting part about this announcement is that the majority of applications still reside in existing data centers. And the other the other kind of interesting pieces that, you know, cloud native, everyone talks about cloud native applications, but cloud native doesn't always mean public cloud only and that organizations are actually gonna run them in a hybrid. So organizations need to figure out how they're going to run these cloud native applications and their existing data center environments. And what the combination of the technologies enable organizations to do is to basically retrofit if you will that top of rack switch and be able to deploy, excuse me, deploy those distributed services at a top of rack switch. Instead of having to either rely on existing hardware appliances that are pulled off to the side of the network or to have to deploy agents onto the server which could impact the application performance. So they've kind of hit that goldilocks spot of being able to provide distributed services without impacting the application performance. In fact, when you look at it from that perspective of its not having to go to that appliance pool any longer, it's actually going to increase the performance, right? Your latency is going to be a lot lower because instead of hair pinning through the core of your network. Now you're just going to your top of rack switch. So it's going to improve the performance. >>Everybody wants improved performance. Especially in this the fact that things are continuing to stay distributed and we probably will have some part of that be permanent. So bob how do customers upgrade or integrate this into their existing environments? Talk to me a little bit more about that and the simplicity, it sounds like what you're saying with which they can do that. >>Yeah, this should be a fairly minimally minimally disruptive uh type of integration, essentially what you're doing if you've got a high availability top of rack it environment, you're going to be swapping out one top of rack switch at the time. And organizations do this quite often when they're upgrading for capacity and things of that nature. So in this case it's simply going to be replacing the top of rack switch and organizations can look at different ways of how they want to do this. You know, to start they might want to look at where they're critical applications are and deploy them. They're so they've got the services, it might be based on looking at where, I don't know you might have some regulated services. Right. Pc I things like that that need to make sure that they've got higher levels of security. So essentially it's all about just simply deploying those top of rack switches going on to Aruba's fabric controller being able to spend that up configure, apply the policies and the security policies that you want to employ for those applications and and let it run, >>Talk to me about this in certain context that we know some of the industry's every industry obviously has been affected by the events of the last 1819 months. What we think of manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, give me uh your perspective into some of the customers in those industries and how they'll be able to take advantage of this technology as their environments continue to distribute. >>Yeah, I mean, I think that the interesting piece of this is that, you know what it's really about for any industry, it's about as they modernize their data center, as they modernize their applications. Right? So we've seen the transition from um monolithic too. So a based apps to microservices based applications and and that's really what's driving this. Because what's happening in all those organizations now, there's a lot of of communication within those applications themselves. Right? Because instead of having one monolithic application or two or three pieces of an application, you could now have dozens or hundreds of pieces of an application that need to talk to each other. And so the key for all of these industries, right. Regardless of the industry, when you're deploying this is how do you secure that communication, how do you make sure that East West traffic is being fully protected um because as organizations, you know, the legacy approach was castle and moat protect the perimeter, which was great. But if you got inside that perimeter right then the malware could really put periphery slow, deliberate, sorry, can't talk today. Um, but the idea is now, how can I deploy services that are able to protect that east west traffic as well? And so by deploying those services at the top of rack, you can do that more easily without having any kind of an impact. Right? So I think that you know the zero trust is what it's the mantra is never trust, always verify. And so that's what organizations are looking to do. So even if there is a malware attack and they do get inside the data center that it's not able to spread throughout that organization. >>Got it. And that's absolutely critical. We have seen the security landscape change dramatically in the last year and a half, we've seen this massive spike in ransom where it's companies in every industry. I now know that it is not a matter of if we get attacked, it's when we've seen a massive increase in detail. So let's kind of dig into, You mentioned some of the benefits in terms of low latency performance, let's unpack the security level there. What are some of the things that you've seen in the security landscape where zero trust is absolutely critical for every industry? >>Yeah. Well, like I said, it's really all about how do you make sure you're protecting there's a lot more communication going on within your application itself and how do you protect it? And so as that landscape has changed, it's critically important for organizations to adapt to that and to be able to, you know, make this change happen. So I mean we've seen this in the hyper scale is right. They've deployed the technology, they have it running at the right and those, those intelligent cards at the server level as close as they can. But for an existing data center, it doesn't make sense, right, unless you're replacing your whole data center, which is obviously incredibly disruptive. It's this is really about how do you insert those services in a minimally minimally disruptive way. And that's what that's what's really key here. The other interesting pieces because of the location, because they can track that east west traffic and apply the security policies to it and they can see all that and they've got visibility into it. They can then take that information and they can export it to existing other security tools. So you're not going to get rid of your perimeter security, you still need that. So this is more about a defense and depth about securing or augmenting your security posture and creating much more, much more, much tighter security around those modern application environments as well. So, so having this capability, like I said, it really starts to democratize that, that capability and the functions that the hyper scholars have and it brings it into existing enterprise data center environments and I think that's really what's important. And then, like I said, as organizations progress, they can take the data that they're collecting and they can leverage that with XDR solutions, right? Feed it into other, you know, sense or things like that. That can really help organizations um, you know, enhance their machine learning algorithms and things like that. The more data you can collect, the better you can, you can nail down the the policies that need to be provided there. >>Well, that's important too. As every company these days either needs to become a data company or if they don't, they're probably not going to be around much longer. Talk to me about the overall security kind of like implication. You said this is going to help organizations in any industry augment their overall security posture. That's so critically important these days. >>Yeah. And it's like I said, it's really about having that that full visibility into the east west flows for these so, and their ability, the distributed services switch is able to stream all of that telemetry of those flows right? And that can be complemented by the existing north south firewall telemetry as well. So you've got all this data for the XDR engines and things like that so that you can really determine whether there's an insider attack where there's any movement of malware, things like that, whether there's an external actor that's gotten into the data center, so it really provides you with a lot more visibility and that visibility provides that data that you talked about. So that's really what's key here and again, it's the ability here is that you're not needing to deploy XDR agents on every workload so there's no impact to the application performance when you're doing it in this this matter. So that's what makes it a really kind of an elegant solution to being able to modernize and deliver these capabilities into an existing data center environment. >>What do you think the timeframe is for an organization to be able to take advantage of this technology? >>Yeah, that's a good question. I mean really it's it's up to the, you know, it's up to the organization themselves. Clearly, once the technology is released by Aruba they've got the ability to start deploying it um you know, obviously one of the easiest ways to deploy it might be if they were adding a new rack, adding some new capabilities then certainly that's completely non disruptive and they can get going there, but like I said it, excuse me, it's also quite easy for organisations to be able to to just simply if they've got a high availability top of rack environment to start augmenting it into their existing their existing infrastructure as well, fairly non destructively >>excellent. That non disruption augmentation is critical. I I do want to ask you a question in terms of the partnership with HP Aruban Pensando, what does this signify on the HP side in your opinion? >>Mhm Well from from the HP side, like I said, I think this is a HP has been involved with Pensando for a long time now. They've obviously recognized the value of the technology and wanted to partner with them from an early stage and so um what it really helps is you're thinking about moving forward. It creates a unique opportunity for organizations to take advantage of the Pensando technology within the HP server environments as well as those top of rack switches and create some really unique opportunities to drive even greater visibility and protection. >>Let's do one more thing bob. Let's just summarize your key takeaways if somebody has 30-60 seconds to watch this and see what the three things are that Bob says we need to be taking away from this announcement. What are those three things? >>Yeah, I think the key thing is first to recognize that modern application environments are gaining ground and that organizations need to accommodate these new application architecture. Right? But to do that, they need a solution. They need some technology to help them. So the key takeaway is that this now this H P E. Aruba and Pensando distributed services switch enables you to deploy distributed services into your existing environment in a minimally disruptive way and it provides you with the benefits of improving security of improving performance and user experiences. Um all while making sure that you can scale and do it simply through a single interface through the Aruba fabric controller. >>Got it. And being able to deliver those outstanding customer and user experiences is critical as we are in this day and age where our business lives blend with our consumer lives that we expect things to be able to work like that bob. Thank you for joining me on the program, breaking down the HP Aruba Pensando announcement, telling us what it is, what the benefits are in it for customers and how they can take advantage of that. We appreciate your analysis. >>Very welcome. It's great to be here. >>Probably Liberty. I'm lisa martin. You're watching this HP Aruba Pensando announcement video. Yeah. Mhm.

>>Earlier this week, Oracle announced the new X nine M generation of exit data platforms for its cloud at customer and legacy on prem deployments. And the company made some enhancements to its zero data loss, recovery appliance. CLRA something we've covered quite often since its announcement. We had a video exclusive with one Louisa who was the executive vice president of mission critical database technologies. At Oracle. We did that on the day of the announcement who got his take on it. And I asked Oracle, Hey, can we get some subject matter experts, some technical gurus to dig deeper and get more details on the architecture because we want to better understand some of the performance claims that Oracle is making. And with me today is Susan. Who's the vice president of product management for exit data database machine. Bob tome is the vice president of product management for exit data cloud at customer. And Tim chin is the senior director of product management for DRA folks. Welcome to this power panel and welcome to the cube. >>Thank you, Dave. >>Can we start with you? Um, Juan and I, we talked about the X nine M a that Oracle just launched a couple of days ago. Maybe you could give us a recap, some of the, what do we need to know? The, especially I'm interested in the big numbers once more so we can just understand the claims you're making around this announcement. We can dig into that. >>Absolutely. They've very excited to do that. In a nutshell, we have the world's fastest database machine for both LTP and analytics, and we made that even faster, not just simply faster, but for all LPP we made it 70% faster and we took the oil PPV ops all the way up to 27.6 million read IOPS and mind you, this is being measured at the sequel layer for analytics. We did pretty much the same thing, an 87% increase in analytics. And we broke through that one terabyte per second barrier, absolutely phenomenal stuff. Now, while all those numbers by themselves are fascinating, here's something that's even more fascinating in my mind, 80% of the product development work for extra data, X nine M was done during COVID, which means all of us were remote. And what that meant was extreme levels of teamwork between the development teams, manufacturing teams, procurement teams, software teams, the works. I mean, everybody coming together as one to deliver this product, I think it's kudos to everybody who touched this product in one way or the other extremely proud of it. >>Thank you for making that point. And I'm laughing because it's like you the same bolt of a mission-critical OLT T O LTP performance. You had the world record, and now you're saying, adding on top of that. Um, but, okay. But, so there are customers that still, you know, build the builder and they're trying to build their own exit data. What they do is they buy their own servers and storage and networking components. And I do that when I talk to them, they'll say, look, they want to maintain their independence. They don't want to get locked in Oracle, or maybe they believe it's cheaper. You know, maybe they're sort of focused on the, the, the CapEx the CFO has him in the headlock, or they might, sometimes they talk about, they want a platform that can support, you know, horizontal, uh, apps, maybe not Oracle stuff, or, or maybe they're just trying to preserve their job. I don't know, but why shouldn't these customers roll their own and why can't they get similar results just using standard off the shelf technologies? >>Great question. It's going to require a little involved answer, but let's just look at the statistics to begin with. Oracle's exit data was first productized in Delaware to the market in 2008. And at that point in time itself, we had industry leadership across a number of metrics. Today, we are at the 11th generation of exit data, and we are way far ahead than the competition, like 50 X, faster hundred X faster, right? I mean, we are talking orders of magnitude faster. How did we achieve this? And I think the answer to your question is going to lie in what are we doing at the engineering level to make these magical numbers come to, uh, for right first, it starts with the hardware. Oracle has its own hardware server design team, where we are embedding in capabilities towards increasing performance, reliability, security, and scalability down at the hardware level, the database, which is a user level process talks to the hardware directly. >>The only reason we can do this is because we own the source code for pretty much everything in between, starting with the database, going into the operating system, the hypervisor. And as I, as I just mentioned the hardware, and then we also worked with the former elements on this entire thing, the key to making extra data, the best Oracle database machine lies in that engineering, where we take the operating system, make it fit like tongue and groove into, uh, a bit with the opera, with the hardware, and then do the same with the database. And because we have got this deep insight into what are the workloads that are, that are running at any given point in time on the compute side of extra data, we can then do micromanagement at the software layers of how traffic flows are flowing through the entire system and do things like, you know, prioritize all PP transactions on a very specific, uh, you know, queue on the RDMA. >>We'll converse Ethan at be able to do smart scan, use the compute elements in the storage tier to be able to offload SQL processing. They call them the longer I used formats of data, extend them into flash, just a whole bunch of things that we've been doing over the last 12 years, because we have this deep engineering, you can try to cobble a system together, which sort of looks like an extra data. It's got a network and it's got storage, tiering compute here, but you're not going to be able to achieve anything close to what we are doing. The biggest deal in my mind, apart from the performance and the high availability is the security, because we are testing the stack top to bottom. When you're trying to build your own best of breed kind of stuff. You're not going to be able to do that because it depended on the server that had to do something and HP to do something else or Dell to do something else and a Brocade switch to do something it's not possible. We can do this, we've done it. We've proven it. We've delivered it for over a decade. End of story. For as far as I'm concerned, >>I mean, you know, at this fine, remember when Oracle purchased Sohn and I know a big part of that purchase was to get Java, but I remember saying at the time it was a brilliant acquisition. I was looking at it from a financial standpoint. I think you paid seven and a half billion for it. And it automatically, when you're, when Safra was able to get back to sort of pre acquisition margins, you got the Oracle uplift in terms of revenue multiples. So then that standpoint, it was a no brainer, but the other thing is back in the Unix days, it was like HP. Oracle was the standard. And, and in terms of all the benchmarks and performance, but even then, I'm sure you work closely with HP, but it was like to get the stuff to work together, you know, make sure that it was going to be able to recover according to your standards, but you couldn't actually do that deep engineering that you just described now earlier, Subin you, you, you, you stated that the X sign now in M you get, oh, LTP IO, IOP reads at 27 million IOPS. Uh, you got 19 microseconds latency, so pretty impressive stuff, impressive numbers. And you kind of just went there. Um, but how are you measuring these numbers versus other performance claims from your competitors? What what's, you know, are you, are you stacking the deck? Can you give you share with us there? >>Sure. So Shada incidents, we are mentioning it at the sequel layer. This is not some kind of an ion meter or a micro benchmark. That's looking at just a flash subsystem or just a persistent memory subsystem. This is measured at the compute, not doing an entire set of transactions. And how many times can you finish that? Right? So that's how it's being measured. Now. Most people cannot measure it like that because of the disparity and the number of vendors that are involved in that particular solution, right? You've got servers from vendor a and storage from vendor B, the storage network from vendor C, the operating system from vendor D. How do you tune all of these things on your own? You cannot write. I mean, there's only certain bells and whistles and knobs that are available for you to tune, but so that's how we are measuring the 19 microseconds is at the sequel layer. >>What that means is this a real world customer running a real world. Workload is guaranteed to get that kind of a latency. None of the other suppliers can make that claim. This is the real world capability. Now let's take a look at that 19 microseconds we boast and we say, Hey, we had an order of magnitude two orders of magnitude faster than everybody else. When it comes down to latency. And one things that this is we'll do our magic while it is magical. The magic is really grounded in deep engineering and deep physics and science. The way we implement this is we, first of all, put the persistent memory tier in the storage. And that way it's shared across all of the database instances that are running on the compute tier. Then we have this ultra fast hundred gigabit ethernet RDMA over converged ethernet fabric. >>With this, what we have been able to do is at the hardware level between two network interface guides that are resident on that fabric, we create paths that enable high priority low-latency communication between any two end points on that fabric. And then given the fact that we implemented persistent memory in the storage tier, what that means is with that persistent memory, sitting on the memory bus of the processor in the storage tier, we can perform it remote direct memory access operation from the compute tier to memory address spaces in the persistent memory of the storage tier, without the involvement of the operating system on either end, no context, switches, knowing processing latencies and all of that. So it's hardware to hardware, communication with security built in, which is immutable, right? So all of this is built into the hardware itself. So there's no software involved. You perform a read, the data comes back 19 microseconds, boom. End of story. >>Yeah. So that's key to my next topic, which is security because if you're not getting the OSTP involved and that's, you know, very oftentimes if I can get access to the OSTP, I get privileged. Like I can really take advantage of that as a hacker. But so, but, but before I go there, like Oracle talks about, it's got a huge percentage of the Gayety 7% of the fortune 100 companies run their mission, critical workloads on exit data. But so that's not only important to the companies, but they're serving consumer me, right. I'm going to my ATM or I'm swiping my credit card. And Juan mentioned that you use a layered security model. I just sort of inferred anyway, that, that having this stuff in hardware and not have to involve access to the OS actually contributes to better security. But can you describe this in a bit more detail? >>So yeah, what Brian was talking about was this layered security set differently. It is defense in depth, and that's been our mantra and philosophy for several years now. So what does that entail? As I mentioned earlier, we designed our own servers. We do this for performance. We also do it for security. We've got a number of features that are built into the hardware that make sure that we've got immutable areas of form where we, for instance, let me give you this example. If you take an article x86 server, just a standard x86 server, not even express in the form of an extra data system, even if you had super user privileges sitting on top of an operating system, you cannot modify the bias as a user, as a super user that has to be done through the system management network. So we put gates and protection modes, et cetera, right in the hardware itself. >>Now, of course the security of that hardware goes all the way back to the fact that we own the design. We've got a global supply chain, but we are making sure that our supply chain is protected monitored. And, uh, we also protect the last mile of the supply chain, which is we can detect if there's been any tampering of form where that's been, uh, that's occurred in the hardware while the hardware shipped from our factory to the customers, uh, docks. Right? So we, we know that something's been tampered with the moment it comes back up on the customer. So that's on the hardware. Let's take a look at the operating system, Oracle Linux, we own article the next, the entire source code. And what shipping on exit data is the unbreakable enterprise Connell, the carnal and the operating system itself have been reduced in terms of eliminating all unnecessary packages from that operating system bundle. >>When we deliver it in the form of the data, let's put some real numbers on that. A standard Oracle Linux or a standard Linux distribution has got about 5,000 plus packages. These things include like print servers, web servers, a whole bunch of stuff that you're not absolutely going to use at all on exit data. Why ship those? Because the moment you ship more stuff than you need, you are increasing the, uh, the target, uh, that attackers can get to. So on AXA data, there are only 701 packages. So compare this 5,413 packages on a standard Linux, 701 and exit data. So we reduced the attack surface another aspect on this, when we, we do our own STIG, uh, ASCAP benchmarking. If you take a standard Linux and you run that ASCAP benchmark, you'll get about a 30% pass score on exit data. It's 90 plus percent. >>So which means we are doing the heavy lifting of doing the security checks on the operating system before it even goes out to the factory. And then you layer on Oracle database, transparent data encryption. We've got all kinds of protection capabilities, data reduction, being able to do an authentication on a user ID basis, being able to log it, being able to track it, being able to determine who access the system when and log back. So it's basically defend at every single layer. And then of course the customer's responsibility. It doesn't just stop by getting this high secure, uh, environment. They have to do their own job of them securing their network perimeters, securing who has physical access to the system and everything else. So it's a giant responsibility. And as you mentioned, you know, you as a consumer going to an ATM machine and withdrawing money, you would do 200. You don't want to see 5,000 deducted from your account. And so all of this is made possible with exited and the amount of security focus that we have on the system >>And the bank doesn't want to see it the other way. So I'm geeking out here in the cube, but I got one more question for you. Juan talked about X nine M best system for database consolidation. So I, I kinda, you know, it was built to handle all LTP analytics, et cetera. So I want to push you a little bit on this because I can make an argument that, that this is kind of a Swiss army knife versus the best screwdriver or the best knife. How do you respond to that concern and how, how do you respond to the concern that you're putting too many eggs in one basket? Like, what do you tell people to fear you're consolidating workloads to save money, but you're also narrowing the blast radius. Isn't that a problem? >>Very good question there. So, yes. So this is an interesting problem, and it is a balancing act. As you correctly pointed out, you want to have the economies of scale that you get when you consolidate more and more databases, but at the same time, when something happens when hardware fails or there's an attack, you want to make sure that you have business continuity. So what we are doing on exit data, first of all, as I mentioned, we are designing our own hardware and a building in reliability into the system and at the hardware layer, that means having redundancy, redundancy for fans, power supplies. We even have the ability to isolate faulty cores on the processor. And we've got this a tremendous amount of sweeping that's going on by the system management stack, looking for problem areas and trying to contain them as much as possible within the hardware itself. >>Then you take it up to the software layer. We used our reliability to then build high availability. What that implies is, and that's fundamental to the exited architecture is this entire scale out model, our based system, you cannot go smaller than having two database nodes and three storage cells. Why is that? That's because you want to have high availability of your database instances. So if something happens to one server hardware, software, whatever you got another server that's ready to take on that load. And then with real application clusters, you can then switch over between these two, why three storage cells. We want to make sure that when you have got duplicate copies of data, because you at least want to have one additional copy of your data in case something happens to the disc that has got that only that one copy, right? So the reason we have got three is because then you can Stripe data across these three different servers and deliver high availability. >>Now you take that up to the rack level. A lot of things happen. Now, when you're really talking about the blast radius, you want to make sure that if something physically happens to this data center, that you have infrastructure that's available for it to function for business continuity, we maintain, which is why we have the maximum availability architecture. So with components like golden gate and active data guard, and other ways by which we can keep to this distant systems in sync is extremely critical for us to deliver these high availability paths that make, uh, the whole equation about how many eggs in one basket versus containing the containment of the blast radius. A lot easier to grapple with because business continuity is something which is paramount to us. I mean, Oracle, the enterprise is running on Xcel data. Our high value cloud customers are running on extra data. And I'm sure Bob's going to talk a lot more about the cloud piece of it. So I think we have all the tools in place to, to go after that optimization on how many eggs in one basket was his blast radius. It's a question of working through the solution and the criticalities of that particular instance. >>Okay, great. Thank you for that detailed soup. We're going to give you a break. You go take a breath, get a, get a drink of water. Maybe we'll come back to you. If we have time, let's go to Bob, Bob, Bob tome, X data cloud at customer X nine M earlier this week, Juan said kinda, kinda cocky. What we're bothering, comparing exit data against your cloud, a customer against outpost or Azure stack. Can you elaborate on, on why that is? >>Sure. Or you, you know, first of all, I want to say, I love, I love baby. We go south posts. You know why it affirms everything that we've been doing for the past four and a half years with clouded customer. It affirms that cloud is running that running cloud services in customers' data center is a large and important market, large and important enough that AWS felt that the need provide these, um, you know, these customers with an AWS option, even if it only supports a sliver of the functionality that they provide in the public cloud. And that's what they're doing. They're giving it a sliver and they're not exactly leading with the best they could offer. So for that reason, you know, that reason alone, there's really nothing to compare. And so we, we give them the benefit of the doubt and we actually are using their public cloud solutions. >>Another point most customers are looking to deploy to Oracle cloud, a customer they're looking for a per performance, scalable, secure, and highly available platform to deploy. What's offered their most critical databases. Most often they are Oracle databases does outposts for an Oracle database. No. Does outpost run a comparable database? Not really does outposts run Amazon's top OTP and analytics database services, the ones that are top in their cloud public cloud. No, that we couldn't find anything that runs outposts that's worth comparing against X data clouded customer, which is why the comparisons are against their public cloud products. And even with that still we're looking at numbers like 50 times a hundred times slower, right? So then there's the Azure stack. One of the key benefits to, um, you know, that customers love about the cloud that I think is really under, appreciated it under appreciated is really that it's a single vendor solution, right? You have a problem with cloud service could be I as pass SAS doesn't matter. And there's a single vendor responsible for fixing your issue as your stack is missing big here, because they're a multi-vendor cloud solution like AWS outposts. Also, they don't exactly offer the same services in the cloud that they offer on prem. And from what I hear, it can be a management nightmare requiring specialized administrators to keep that beast running. >>Okay. So, well, thanks for that. I'll I'll grant you that, first of all, granted that Oracle was the first with that same, same vision. I always tell people that, you know, if they say, well, we were first I'm like, well, actually, no, Oracle's first having said that, Bob and I hear you that, that right now, outpost is a one Datto version. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but neither did your cloud when you first launched your cloud. So let's, let's let it bake for a while and we'll come back in a couple of years and see how things compare. So if you're up for it. Yeah. >>Just remember that we're still in the oven too. Right. >>Okay. All right. Good. I love it. I love the, the chutzpah. One also talked about Deutsche bank. Um, and that, I, I mean, I saw that Deutsche bank announcement, how they're working with Oracle, they're modernizing their infrastructure around database. They're building other services around that and kind of building their own sort of version of a cloud for their customers. How does exit data cloud a customer fit in to that whole Deutsche bank deal? Is, is this solution unique to Deutsche bank? Do you see other organizations adopting clouded customer for similar reasons and use cases? >>Yeah, I'll start with that. First. I want to say that I don't think Georgia bank is unique. They want what all customers want. They want to be able to run their most important workloads. The ones today running their data center on exit eight as a non other high-end systems in a cloud environment where they can benefit from things like cloud economics, cloud operations, cloud automations, but they can't move to public cloud. They need to maintain the service levels, the performance, the scalability of the security and the availability that their business has. It has come to depend on most clouds can't provide that. Although actually Oracle's cloud can our public cloud Ken, because our public cloud does run exit data, but still even with that, they can't do it because as a bank, they're subject to lots of rules and regulations, they cannot move their 40 petabytes of data to a point outside the control of their data center. >>They have thousands of interconnected databases, right? And applications. It's like a rat's nest, right? And this is similar many large customers have this problem. How do you move that to the cloud? You can move it piecemeal. Uh, I'm going to move these apps and, you know, not move those apps. Um, but suddenly ended up with these things where some pieces are up here. Some pieces are down here. The thing just dies because of the long latency over a land connection, it just doesn't work. Right. So you can also shut it down. Let's shut it down on, on Friday and move everything all at once. Unfortunately, when you're looking at it, a state decides that most customers have, you're not going to be able to, you're going to be down for a month, right? Who can, who can tolerate that? So it's a big challenge and exited cloud a customer let's then move to the cloud without losing control of their data. >>And without unhappy having to untangle that thousands of interconnected databases. So, you know, that's why these customers are choosing X data, clouded customer. More importantly, it sets them up for the future with exited cloud at customer, they can run not just in their data center, but they could also run in public cloud, adjacent sites, giving them a path to moving some work out of the data center and ultimately into the public cloud. You know, as I said, they're not unique. Other banks are watching and some are acting and it's not just banks. Just last week. Telefonica telco in Spain announced their intent to migrate the bulk of their Oracle databases to excavate a cloud at customer. This will be the key cloud platform running. They're running in their data center to support both new services, as well as mission critical and operational systems. And one last important point exited cloud a customer can also run autonomous database. Even if customers aren't today ready to adopt this. A lot of them are interested in it. They see it as a key piece of the puzzle moving forward in the future and customers know that they can easily start to migrate to autonomous in the future as they're ready. And this of course is going to drive additional efficiencies and additional cost savings. >>So, Bob, I got a question for you because you know, Oracle's playing both sides, right? You've got a cloud, you know, you've got a true public cloud now. And, and obviously you have a huge on-premise state. When I talk to companies that don't own a cloud, uh, whether it's Dell or HPE, Cisco, et cetera, they have made, they make the point. And I agree with them by the way that the world is hybrid, not everything's going into the, to the cloud. However, I had a lot of respect for folks at Amazon as well. And they believed long-term, they'll say this, they've got them on record of saying this, that they believe long-term ultimately all workloads are going to be running in the cloud. Now, I guess it depends on how you define the cloud. The cloud is expanding and all that other stuff. But my question to you, because again, you kind of on both sides, here are our hybrid solutions like cloud at customer. Do you see them as a stepping stone to the cloud, or is cloud in your data center, sort of a continuous sort of permanent, you know, essential play >>That. That's a great question. As I recall, people debated this a few years back when we first introduced clouded customer. And at that point, some people I'm talking about even internal Oracle, right? Some people saw this as a stop gap measure to let people leverage cloud benefits until they're really ready for the public cloud. But I think over the past four and a half years, the changing the thinking has changed a little bit on this. And everyone kind of agrees that clouded customer may be a stepping stone for some customers, but others see that as the end game, right? Not every workload can run in the public cloud, not at least not given the, um, you know, today's regulations and the issues that are faced by many of these regulated industries. These industries move very, very slowly and customers are content to, and in many cases required to retain complete control of their data and they will be running under their control. They'll be running with that data under their control and the data center for the foreseeable future. >>Oh, I got another question for kind of just, if I could take a little tangent, cause the other thing I hear from the, on the, the, the on-prem don't own, the cloud folks is it's actually cheaper to run in on-prem, uh, because they're getting better at automation, et cetera. When you get the exact opposite from the cloud guys, they roll their eyes. Are you kidding me? It's way cheaper to run it in the cloud, which is more cost-effective is it one of those? It depends, Bob. >>Um, you know, the great thing about numbers is you can make, you can, you can kind of twist them to show anything that you want, right? That's a have spreadsheet. Can I, can, I can sell you on anything? Um, I think that there's, there's customers who look at it and they say, oh, on-premise sheet is cheaper. And there's customers who look at it and say, the cloud is cheaper. If you, um, you know, there's a lot of ways that you may incur savings in the cloud. A lot of it has to do with the cloud economics, the ability to pay for what you're using and only what you're using. If you were to kind of, you know, if you, if you size something for your peak workload and then, you know, on prem, you probably put a little bit of a buffer in it, right? >>If you size everything for that, you're gonna find that you're paying, you know, this much, right? All the time you're paying for peak workload all the time with the cloud, of course, we support scaling up, scaling down. We supply, we support you're paying for what you use and you can scale up and scale down. That's where the big savings is now. There's also additional savings associated with you. Don't have the cloud vendors like work. Well, we manage that infrastructure for you. You no longer have to worry about it. Um, we have a lot of automation, things that you use to either, you know, probably what used to happen is you used to have to spend hours and hours or years or whatever, scripting these things yourselves. We now have this automation to do it. We have, um, you eyes that make things ad hoc things, as simple as point and click and, uh, you know, that eliminates errors. And, and it's often difficult to put a cost on those things. And I think the more enlightened customers can put a cost on all of those. So the people that were saying it's cheaper to run on prem, uh, they, they either, you know, have a very stable workload that never changes and their environment never changes, um, or more likely. They just really haven't thought through the, all the hidden costs out there. >>All right, you got some new features. Thank you for that. By the way, you got some new features in, in cloud, a customer, a what are those? Do I have to upgrade to X nine M to, to get >>All right. So, you know, we're always introducing new features for clouded customer, but two significant things that we've rolled out recently are operator access control and elastic storage expansion. As we discussed, many organizations are using Axeda cloud a customer they're attracting the cloud economics, the operational benefits, but they're required by regulations to retain control and visibility of their data, as well as any infrastructure that sits inside their data center with operator access control, enabled cloud operations, staff members must request access to a customer system, a customer, it team grants, a designated person, specific access to a specific component for a specific period of time with specific privileges, they can then kind of view audit controls in real time. And if they see something they don't like, you know, Hey, what's this guy doing? It looks like he's, he's stealing my data or doing something I don't like, boom. >>They can kill that operators, access the session, the connections, everything right away. And this gives everyone, especially customers that need to, you know, regulate remote access to their infrastructure. It gives them the confidence that they need to use exit data cloud, uh, conduct, customer service. And, and the other thing that's new is, um, elastic storage expansion. Customers could out add additional service to their system either at initial deployment or after the fact. And this really provides two important benefits. The first is that they can right size their configuration if they need only the minimum compute capacity, but they don't need the maximum number of storage servers to get that capacity. They don't need to subscribe to kind of a fixed shape. We used to have fixed shapes, I guess, with hundreds of unnecessary database cores, just to get the storage capacity, they can select a smaller system. >>And then incrementally add on that storage. The second benefit is the, is kind of key for many customers. You are at a storage, guess what you can add more. And that way, when you're out of storage, that's really important. Now they'll get to your last part of that question. Do you need a deck, a new, uh, exit aquatic customer XIM system to get these features? No they're available for all gen two exited clouded customer systems. That's really one of the best things about cloud. The service you subscribed to today just keeps getting better and better. And unless there's some technical limitation that, you know, we, and it, which is rare, most new features are available even for the oldest cloud customer systems. >>Cool. And you can bring that in on from my, my last question for you, Bob is a, another one on security. Obviously, again, we talked to Susan about this. It's a big deal. How can customer data be secure if it's in the cloud, if somebody, other than the, their own vetted employees are managing the underlying infrastructure, is is that a concern you hear a lot and how do you handle that? >>You know, it's, it's only something because a lot of these customers, they have big, you know, security people and it's their job to be concerned about that kind of stuff. And security. However, is one of the biggest, but least appreciate appreciated benefits of cloud cloud vendors, such as Oracle hire the best and brightest security experts to ensure that their clouds are secure. Something that only the largest customers can afford to do. You're a small, small shop. You're not going to be able to, you know, hire some of this expertise. So you're better off being in the cloud. Customers who are running in the Oracle cloud can also use articles, data, safe tool, which we provide, which basically lets you inspect your databases, insurance. Sure that everything is locked down and secure and your data is secure. But your question is actually a little bit different. >>It was about potential internal threats to company's data. Given the cloud vendor, not the customer's employees have access to the infrastructure that sits beneath the databases and really the first and most important thing we do to protect customers' data is we encrypt that database by default. Actually Subin listed a whole laundry list of things, but that's the one thing I want to point out. We encrypt your database. It's, you know, it's, it's encrypted. Yes. It sits on our infrastructure. Yes. Our operations persons can actually see those data files sitting on the infrastructure, but guess what? They can't see the data. The data is encrypted. All they see as kind of a big encrypted blob. Um, so they can't access the data themselves. And you know, as you'd expect, we have very tight controls over operations access to the infrastructure. They need to securely log in using mechanisms by stuff to present, prevent unauthorized access. >>And then all access is logged and suspicious. Activities are investigated, but that still may not be enough for some customers, especially the ones I mentioned earlier, the regulated industries. And that's why we offer app operator access control. As I mentioned, that gives customers complete control over the access to the infrastructure. The, when the, what ops can do, how long can they do it? Customers can monitor in real time. And if they see something they don't like they stop it immediately. Lastly, I just want to mention Oracle's data ball feature. This prevents administrators from accessing data, protecting data from road operators, robot, world operations, whether they be from Oracle or from the customer's own it staff, this database option. A lot of ball is sorry. Database ball data vault is included when running a license included service on exited clouded customer. So basically to get it with the service. Got it. >>Hi Tom. Thank you so much. It's unbelievable, Bob. I mean, we've got a lot to unpack there, but uh, we're going to give you a break now and go to Tim, Tim chin, zero data loss, recovery appliance. We always love that name. The big guy we think named it, but nobody will tell us, but we've been talking about security. There's been a lot of news around ransomware attacks. Every industry around the globe, any knucklehead with, uh, with a high school diploma could become a ransomware attack or go in the dark web, get, get ransomware as a service stick, a, put a stick in and take a piece of the VIG and hopefully get arrested. Um, with, when you think about database, how do you deal with the ransomware challenge? >>Yeah, Dave, um, that's an extremely important and timely question. Um, we are hearing this from our customers. We just talk about ha and backup strategies and ransomware, um, has been coming up more and more. Um, and the unfortunate thing that these ransoms are actually paid, um, uh, in the hope of the re you know, the, uh, the ability to access the data again. So what that means it tells me is that today's recovery solutions and processes are not sufficient to get these systems back in a reliable and timely manner. Um, and so you have to pay the ransom, right, to get, uh, to get the, even a hope of getting the data back now for databases. This can have a huge impact because we're talking about transactional workloads. And so even a compromise of just a few minutes, a blip, um, can affect hundreds or even thousands of transactions. This can literally represent hundreds of lost orders, right? If you're a big manufacturing company or even like millions of dollars worth of, uh, financial transactions in a bank. Right. Um, and that's why protecting databases at a transaction level is especially critical, um, for ransomware. And that's a huge contrast to traditional backup approaches. Okay. >>So how do you approach that? What do you, what do you do specifically for ransomware protection for the database? >>Yeah, so we have the zero data loss recovery appliance, which we announced the X nine M generation. Um, it is really the only solution in the market, which offers that transaction level of protection, which allows all transactions to be recovered with zero RPO, zero again, and this is only possible because Oracle has very innovative and unique technology called real-time redo, which captures all the transactional changes from the databases by the appliance, and then stored as well by the appliance, moreover, the appliance validates all these backups and reading. So you want to make sure that you can recover them after you've sent them, right? So it's not just a file level integrity check on a file system. That's actual database level of validation that the Oracle blocks and the redo that I mentioned can be restored and recovered as a usable database, any kind of, um, malicious attack or modification of that backup data and transmit that, or if it's even stored on the appliance and it was compromised would be immediately detected and reported by that validation. >>So this allows administrators to take action. This is removing that system from the network. And so it's a huge leap in terms of what customers can get today. The last thing I just want to point out is we call our cyber vault deployment, right? Um, a lot of customers in the industry are creating what we call air gapped environments, where they have a separate location where their backup copies are stored physically network separated from the production systems. And so this prevents ransomware for possibly infiltrating that last good copy of backups. So you can deploy recovery appliance in a cyber vault and have it synchronized at random times when the network's available, uh, to, to keep it in sync. Right. Um, so that combined with our transaction level zero data loss validation, it's a nice package and really a game changer in protecting and recovering your databases from modern day cyber threats. >>Okay, great. Thank you for clarifying that air gap piece. Cause I, there was some confusion about that. Every data protection and backup company that I know as a ransomware solution, it's like the hottest topic going, you got newer players in, in, in recovery and backup like rubric Cohesity. They raised a ton of dough. Dell has got solutions, HPE just acquired Zerto to deal with this problem. And other things IBM has got stuff. Veem seems to be doing pretty well. Veritas got a range of, of recovery solutions. They're sort of all out there. What's your take on these and their strategy and how do you differentiate? >>Yeah, it's a pretty crowded market, like you said. Um, I think the first thing you really have to keep in mind and understand that these vendors, these new and up and coming, um, uh, uh, vendors start in the copy data management, we call CDN space and they're not traditional backup recovery designed are purpose built for the purpose of CDM products is to provide these fast point in time copies for test dev non-production use, and that's a viable problem and it needs a solution. So you create these one time copy and then you create snapshots. Um, after you apply these incremental changes to that copy, and then the snapshot can be quickly restored and presented as like it's a fully populated, uh, file. And this is all done through the underlying storage of block pointers. So all of this kind of sounds really cool and modern, right? It's like new and upcoming and lots of people in the market doing this. Well, it's really not that modern because we've, we know storage, snapshot technologies has been around for years. Right. Um, what these new vendors have been doing is essentially repackaging the old technology for backup and recovery use cases and having sort of an easier to use automation interface wrapped around it. >>Yeah. So you mentioned a copy data management, uh, last year, active FIO. Uh, they started that whole space from what I recall at one point there, they value more than a billion dollars. They were acquired by Google. Uh, and as I say, they kind of created that, that category. So fast forward a little bit, nine months a year, whatever it's been, do you see that Google active FIO offer in, in, in customer engagements? Is that something that you run into? >>We really don't. Um, yeah, it was really popular and known some years ago, but we really don't hear about it anymore. Um, after the acquisition, you look at all the collateral and the marketing, they are really a CDM and backup solution exclusively for Google cloud use cases. And they're not being positioned as for on premises or any other use cases outside of Google cloud. That's what, 90, 90 plus percent of your market there that isn't addressable now by Activia. So really we don't see them in any of our engagements at this time. >>I want to come back and push it a little bit, uh, on some of the tech that you said, it's kind of really not that modern. Uh, I mean it's, if they certainly position it as modern, a lot of the engineers who are building there's new sort of backup and recovery capabilities came from the hyperscalers, whether it's copy data management, you know, the bot mock quote, unquote modern backup recovery, it's kind of a data management, sort of this nice all in one solution seems pretty compelling. How does recovery clients specifically stack up? You know, a lot of people think it's a niche product for, for really high end use cases. Is that fair? How do you see a town? >>Yeah. Yeah. So it's, I think it's so important to just, you know, understand, again, the fundamental use of this technology is to create data copies for test W's right. Um, and that's really different than operational backup recovery in which you must have this ability to do full and point in time recoverability in any production outage or Dr. Situation. Um, and then more importantly, after you recover and your applications are back in business, that performance must continue to meet servers levels as before. And when you look at a CDM product, um, and you restore a snapshot and you say with that product and the application is brought up on that restored snapshot, what happens or your production application is now running on actual read rideable snapshots on backup storage. Remember they don't restore all the data back to the production, uh, level stores. They're restoring it as a snapshot okay. >>Onto their storage. And so you have a huge difference in performance. Now running these applications where they instantly recovered, if you will database. So to meet these true operational requirements, you have to fully restore the files to production storage period. And so recovery appliance was first and foremost designed to accomplish this. It's an operational recovery solution, right? We accomplish that. Like I mentioned, with this real-time transaction protection, we have incremental forever backup strategies. So that you're just taking just the changes every day. And you, you can create these virtual full backups that are quickly restored, fully restored, if you will, at 24 terabytes an hour. And we validate and document that performance very clearly in our website. And of course we provide that continuous recovery validation for all the backups that are stored on the system. So it's, um, it's a very nice, complete solution. >>It scales to meet your demands, hundreds of thousands of databases, you know, it's, um, you know, these CDM products might seem great and they work well for a few databases, but then you put a real enterprise load and these hundreds of databases, and we've seen a lot of times where it just buckles, you know, it can't handle that kind of load in that, uh, in that scale. Uh, and, and this is important because customers read their marketing and read the collateral like, Hey, instant recovery. Why wouldn't I want that? Well, it's, you know, nicer than it looks, you know, it always sounds better. Right. Um, and so we have to educate them and about exactly what that means for the database, especially backup recovery use cases. And they're not really handled well, um, with their products. >>I know I'm like way over. I had a lot of questions on this announcement and I was gonna, I was gonna let you go, Tim, but you just mentioned something that, that gave me one more question if I may. So you talked about, uh, supporting hundreds of thousands of databases. You petabytes, you have real world use cases that, that actually leverage the, the appliance in these types of environments. Where does it really shine? >>Yeah. Let me just give you just two real quick ones. You know, we have a company energy transfer, the major natural gas and pipeline operator in the U S so they are a big part of our country's critical infrastructure services. We know ransomware, and these kinds of threats are, you know, are very much viable. We saw the colonial pipeline incident that happened, right? And so the attack, right, critical services while energy transfer was running, lots of databases and their legacy backup environments just couldn't keep up with their enterprise needs. They had backups taking like, well, over a day, they had restores taking several hours. Um, and so they had problems and they couldn't meet their SLS. They moved to the recovery appliance and now they're seeing backwards complete with that incremental forever in just 15 minutes. So that's like a 48 times improvement in backup time. >>And they're also seeing restores completing in about 30 minutes, right. Versus several hours. So it's a, it's a huge difference for them. And they also get that nice recovery validation and monitoring by the system. They know the health of their enterprise at their fingertips. The second quick one is just a global financial services customer. Um, and they have like over 10,000 databases globally and they, they really couldn't find a solution other than throw more hardware kind of approach to, uh, to fix their backups. Well, this, uh, not that the failures and not as the issues. So they moved to recovery appliance and they saw their failed backup rates go down for Matta plea. They saw four times better backup and restore performance. Um, and they have also a very nice centralized way to monitor and manage the system. Uh, real-time view if you will, that data protection health for their entire environment. Uh, and they can show this to the executive management and auditing teams. This is great for compliance reporting. Um, and so they finally done that. They have north of 50 plus, um, recovery appliances a day across that on global enterprise. >>Love it. Thank you for that. Um, uh, guys, great power panel. We have a lot of Oracle customers in our community and the best way to, to help them is to, I get to ask you a bunch of questions and get the experts to answer. So I wonder if you could bring us home, maybe you could just sort of give us the, the top takeaways that you want to your customers to remember in our audience to remember from this announcement. >>Sure, sorry. Uh, I want to actually pick up from where Tim left off and talk about a real customer use case. This is hot off the press. One of the largest banks in the United States, they decided to, that they needed to update. So performance software update on 3000 of their database instances, which are spanning 68, exited a clusters, massive undertaking, correct. They finished the entire task in three hours, three hours to update 3000 databases and 68 exited a clusters. Talk about availability, try doing this on any other infrastructure, no way anyone's going to be able to achieve this. So that's on terms of the availability, right? We are engineering in all of the aspects of database management, performance, security availability, being able to provide redundancy at every single level is all part of the design philosophy and how we are engineering this product. And as far as we are concerned, the, the goal is for forever. >>We are just going to continue to go down this path of increasing performance, increasing the security aspect of the, uh, of the infrastructure, as well as our Oracle database and keep going on this. You know, this, while these have been great results that we've delivered with extra data X nine M the, the journey is on and to our customers. The biggest advantage that you're going to get from the kind of performance metrics that we are driving with extra data is consolidation consolidate more, move, more database instances onto the extended platform, gain the benefits from that consolidation, reduce your operational expenses, reduce your capital expenses. They use your management expenses, all of those, bring it down to accelerator. Your total cost of ownership is guaranteed to go down. Those are my key takeaways, Dave >>Guys, you've been really generous with your time. Uh Subin uh, uh, uh, Bob, Tim, I appreciate you taking my questions and we'll willingness to go toe to toe, really? Thanks for your time. >>You're welcome, David. Thank you. Thank you. >>And thank you for watching this video exclusive from the cube. This is Dave Volante, and we'll see you next time. Be well.

(smart gentle music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, got two great guests here from AWS, Bob Wise, General Manager of Kubernetes for Amazon Web Services and Peder Ulander, Head of product marketing for the enterprise developer and open-source at AWS. Gentlemen, you guys are the core leaders in the AWS open-source initiatives. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE here for Red Hat Summit. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Good to be here. >> So the innovation that's come from people building on top of the cloud has just been amazing. You guys, props to Amazon Web Services for constantly adding more and raising the bar on more services every year. You guys do that, and now public cloud has become so popular, and so important that now Hybrid has pushed the Edge. You got outpost with Amazon you see everyone following suit. It's pretty much clear vote of confidence from the customers that, Hybrid is the operating model of the future. And that really is about the Edge. So I want to chat with you about the open-source intersection there, so let's get into it. So we're here at Red Hat Summit. So Red Hat's an open-source company and timing is great for them. Now, part of IBM you guys have had a relationship with Red Hat for some time. Can you tell us about the partnership and how it's working together? >> Yeah, absolutely. Why don't I take that one? AWS and Red Hat have been strategic partners since, shoot, I think it's 2008 or so in the early days of AWS, when engaging with customers, we wanted to ensure that AWS was the best place for enterprises to run their Red Hat workloads. And this is super important when you think about, what Red Hat has accomplished with RHEL in the enterprise, it's running SAP, it's running Oracle's, it's running all different types of core business applications, as well as a lot of the new things that customers are innovating. And so having that relationship to ensure that not only did it work on AWS, but it actually scaled we had integration of services, we had the performance, the price all of the things that were so critical to customers was critical from day one. And we continue to evolve this relationship over time. As you see us coming into Red Hat Summit this year. >> Well, again, to the hard news here also the new service Red Hat OpenShift servers on AWS known as ROSA, the A for Amazon Red Hat OpenShift, A for Amazon Web Services, a clever acronym but really it's on AWS. What exactly is this service? What does it do? And who is it designed for? >> Well, I'll let me jump in on this one. Maybe let's start with the why? Why ROSA? Customers love using OpenShift, but they also want to use AWS. They want the best of both. So they want their peanut butter and their chocolate together in a single confection. A lot of those customers have deployed AWS, have deployed OpenShift on AWS. They want managed service simplified supply chain. We want to be able to streamline moving on premises, OpenShift workloads to AWS, naturally want good integration with AWS services. So as to the, what? Our new service jointly operated is supported by Red Hat and AWS to provide a fully managed to OpenShifts on AWS. So again, like lot of customers have been running OpenShift on AWS before this time, but of course they were managing it themselves typically. And so now they get a fully managed option with also simplified supply chain. Single support channels, single billing. >> You know, were talking before we came on camera about the acronym on AWS and people build on the clouds kind of like it's no big deal to say that, but I know it means something. I want to explain, you guys to explain this on because I know I've been scolded saying things on theCUBE that were kind of misspoken because it's easy to say, Oh yeah, I built that app. We built all this stuff on theCUBE was on AWS, but it's not on AWS. It means something from a designation standpoint what does on AWS mean? 'Cause this is OpenShift servers on AWS, we see this other companies have their products on AWS. This is specific designation. Can you share, please. >> John, when you see the branding of something like Red Hat on AWS, what that basically signals to our customers is that this is joint engineering work. This is the top of the strategic partners where we actually do a lot of joint engineering and work to make sure that we're driving the right integrations and the right experience, make sure that these things are accessible and discoverable in our console. They're treated effectively as a first-class service inside of the AWS ecosystem. So it's, there's not many of the on's, if you will. You think about SAP on VMware cloud, on AWS, and now Red Hat OpenShift on AWS, it really is that signal that helps give customers the confidence of tested, tried, trued, supported and validated service on top of AWS. And we think that's significantly better than anything else. It's easy to run an image on a VM and stuffed it into a cloud service to make it available, but customers want better, customer want tighter experiences. They want to be able to take advantage of all the great things that we have from a scale availability and performance perspective. And that's really what we're pushing towards. >> Yeah. I've seen examples specifically where when partners work with Amazon at that level of joint engineering, deeper partnerships. The results were pretty significant on the business side. So congratulations to you guys working with OpenShift and Red Hat, that's real testament to their product. But I got to ask you guys, pull the Amazon playbook out and challenge you guys, or just, create a new some commentary around the process of working backwards. Every time I talked to Andy Jassy, he always says, we work backwards from the customer and we get the requirements, and we're listening to customers. Okay, great. He loves that, he loves to say that it's true. I know that I've seen that. What is the customer work backwards document look like here? What is the, what was the need and what made this become such an important part of AWS? What was the, and then what are they saying now, now that the products out there? >> Well, OpenShift has a very wide footprint as does AWS. Some working backwards documents kind of write themselves, because now the customer demand is so strong that there's just no avoiding it. Now, it really just becomes about making sure you have a good plan so it becomes much more operational at that point. ROSA's definitely one of those services. We had so much demand and as a result, no surprise that we're getting a lot of enthusiasm for customers because so many of them asked us for it. (crosstalk) >> What's been the reaction in asking demand. That's kind of got the sense of that, but okay. So there's demand now, what's the what's the use cases? What are customers saying? What's the reaction been? >> Lot of the use cases are these Hybrid kind of use cases where a customer has a big OpenShift footprint. What we see from a lot of these customers is a strong demand for consistency in order to reduce IT sprawl. What they really want to do is have the smallest number of simplest environments they can. And so when customers that standardized on OpenShift really wants to be able to standardize OpenShifts, both in their on premises environment and on AWS and get managed service options just to remove the undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> Hey, what's your take on the product marketing side of this, where you got open-source becoming very enterprise specific, Red Hat's been there for a very long time. I've been user of Red Hat since the beginning and following them, and Linux, obviously is Linux where that's come from. But what features specifically jump out in this offering that customers are resonating around? What's the vibe here? >> John, you kind of alluded to it early on, which is I don't know that I'd necessarily call it Hybrid but the reality is our customers have environments that are on premises in the cloud and all the way out to the Edge. Today, when you think of a lot of solutions and services, it's a fractured experience that they have between those three locations. And one of our biggest commitments to our customers, just to make things super simple, remove the complexity do all of the hard work, which means, customers are looking for a consistent experience environment and tooling that spans data center to cloud, to Edge. And that's probably the biggest kind of core asset here for customers who might have standardized on OpenShift in the data centers. They come to the cloud, they want to continue to leverage those skills. I think probably one of the, an interesting one is we headed down in this path, we all know Delta Airlines. Delta is a great example of a customer who, joint customer, who have been doing stuff inside of AWS for a long time. They've been standardizing on Red Hat for a long time and bringing this together just gave them that simple extension to take their investment in Red Hat OpenShift and leverage their experience. And again, the scale and performance of what AWS brings them. >> Next question, what's next for a Red Hat OpenShift on AWS in your work with Red Hat. Where does this go next? What's the big to-do item, what do you guys see as the vision? >> I'm glad you mentioned open-source collaboration at the start there. We're taking to point out is that AWS works on the Kubernetes project upstream as does the Red Hat teams. So one of the ways that we collaborate with the Red Hat team is in open-source. One of those projects is on a new project called ACK. It was on controllers for Kubernetes and this is a kind of Kubernetes friendly way for my customers to use an API to manage AWS services. So that's one of the things that we're looking forward to as that goes GA wobbling out into both ROSA and onto our other services. >> Awesome. I got to ask you guys this while you're here, because it's very rare to get two luminaries within AWS on the open-source side. This has been a huge build-out over the many, many years for AWS, and some people really kind of don't understand kind of the position. So take a minute to clarify the position of AWS on open-source. You guys are very active in a lot of projects. You mentioned upstream with Kubernetes in other areas. I've had many countries with Adrian Cockcroft on this, as well as others within AWS. Huge proponents web services, I mean, you go back to the original Amazon. I mean, Jeff Barr was saying 15 years ago some of those API's are still in play here. API's back in 15 years ago, that was kind of not main stream at that time. So you had open standards, really made Amazon web services successful and you guys are continuing it but as the modern era is very enterprise, like and you see a lot of legacy, you seeing a lot more operations that they're going to be driven by open technologies that you guys are investing in. I'll take a minute to explain what AWS is doing and what you guys care about and your mission? >> Yeah. Well, why don't I start? And then we'll kick it over to Bob 'cause I think Bob can also talk about some of the key contribution sides, but the best way to think about it is kind of in three different pillars. So let's start with the first one, which is, around the fact of ensuring that our customer's favorite open-source projects run best on AWS. Since 2006, we've been helping our customers operationalize their open-source investments and really kind of achieve that scale and focus more on how they use and innovate on the products versus how they set up and run. And for myself being an open-source since the late 90s, the biggest opportunity, yet challenge was the access to the technology, but it still required you as a customer to learn how to set up, configure, operationalized support and sustain. AWS removes that heavy lifting and, again, back to that earlier point from the beginning of AWS, we helped customers scale and implement their Apache services, their database services, all of these different types of open-source projects to make them really work exceptionally well on AWS. And back to that point, make sure that AWS was the best place for their open-source projects. I think the second thing that we do, and you're seeing that today with what we're doing with ROSA and Red Hat is we partner with open-source leaders from Red Hat to Redis and Confluent to a number of different players out there, Grafana, and Prometheus, to even foundations like the LF and the CNCF. We partner with these leaders to ensure that we're working together to grow grow the overall experience and the overall the overall pie, if you will. And this kind of gets into that point you were making John in that, the old world legacy proprietary stuff, there's a huge chance for refresh and new opportunity and rethinking or modernization if you will, as you come into the cloud having the expertise and the partnerships with these key players is as enterprises move in, is so crucial. And then the third piece I'd like to talk about that's important to our open-source strategies is really around contribution. We have a number of projects that we've delivered ourselves. I think the two most recent ones that really come top of mind for me is, what we did with Babel Fish, as well as with OpenSearch. So contributing and driving a true open-source project that helps our customers, take advantage of things like an SQL, a proprietary to open-source SQL conversion tool, or what we're doing to make Elasticsearch, the opportune or the primary open platform for our customers. But it's not just about those services, it's also collaborating with key industry initiatives. Bob's at the forefront of that with what we're doing with the CNCF around things, like Kubernetes and Prometheus et cetera, Bob you want to jump in on some of that? >> Sure, I think the one thing I would add here is that customers love using those open-source projects. The one of the challenges with them frequently is security. And this is job zero to AWS. So a lot of the collaboration work we do, a lot of the work that we do on upstream projects is go specifically around kind of security oriented things because that is what customers expect when they come to get a managed service at AWS. Some of those efforts are somewhat unsung because you generally do more work and less talk, in security oriented things. But projects across AWS, that's always a key contribution focus for us. >> Good way to call out security too. I think that's being built-in to the everything now, that's an operating model. People call it shift-left day two operations. Whatever you want to look at it. You got this nice formation going between under the hood kind of programmability of the infrastructure at scale. And then you have the modern application development which is just beginning, programmable DevSecOps. It's funny, Bob, I'd love to get your take on this because I remember in the 80s and during the Unix generation I used to peddle software under the table. Like, here's a copy of, you just don't tell anyone, people in the younger generation don't get the fact that it wasn't always open. And so now you have open and you have this idea of an enterprise that's going to be a system management system view. So you got engineering and you got computer science kind of coming together, this SRE middle layer. You're hearing that as a, kind of a new discipline. So DevOps kind of has won. I mean, we kind of knew this for many, many years. I said this in 2013 on theCUBE actually at re-inventing. I just recently shared that clip. But okay, now you've got SecOps, DevSecOps. So now you have an era where it's a system thinking and open-source is driving all of that. So can you share your perspective because this is kind of where the puck is going. It's an open to open world. That's going to have to be open and scalable. How does open-source and you guys take it to the next level to give that same scale and reliability? What's your vision? >> The key here is really around automation and what we're seeing you could look at Kubernetes. Kubernetes, is essentially a robot. It was like the early design of it was built around robotics principles. So it's a giant software robot and the world has changed. If you just look at the influx of all kinds of automation to not just the DevOps world but to all industries, you see a similar kind of trend. And so the world of IT operations person is changing from doing the work that the robot did and replacing it with the robot to managing large numbers of robots. And in this case, the robots are like a little early and a little hard to talk to. And so, you end up using languages like YAML and other things, but it turns out robots still just do what you tell them to do. And so one of the things you have to do is be really, really careful because robots will go and do whatever it is you ask them to do. On the other hand, they're really, really good at doing that. So in the security area, they take the research points to the largest single source of security issues, being people making manual mistakes. And a lot of people are still a little bit terrified if human beings aren't touching things on the way to production. In AWS, we're terrified if humans aren't touching it. And that is a super hard chasm to cross and open-source projects have really, are really playing a big role in what's really a IT wide migration to a whole new set of, not just tools, but organizational approaches. >> What's your reaction to that? Because we're talking that essentially software concepts, because if you write bad code, the code will execute what you did. So assuming it compiles left in the old days. Now, if you're going to scale a large scale operations that has dynamic capabilities, services being initiated in terminating tear down up started, you need the automation, but if you really don't design it right, you could be screwed. This is a huge deal. >> This is one reason why we've put so much effort into getops that you can think of it as a more narrowly defined subset of the DevOps world with a specific set of principles around using kind of simplified declarative approaches, along with robots that converge the desired state, converge the system to the desired state. And when you get into large distributed systems, you end up needing to take those kinds of approaches to get it to work at scale. Otherwise you have problems. >> Yeah, just adding to that. And it's funny, you said DevOps has won. I actually think DevOps has won, but DevOps hasn't changed (indistinct) Bob, you were right, the reality is it was founded back what quite a while ago, it was more around CICD in the enterprise and the closed data center. And it was one of those where automation and runbooks took addressed the fact that, every pair of hands between service requests and service delivery recreated or created an issue. So that growth and that mental model of moving from a waterfall, agile to DevOps, you built it, you run it, type of a model, I think is really, really important. But as it comes out into the cloud, you no longer have those controls of the data center and you actually have infinite scale. So back to your point of you got to get this right. You have to architect correctly you have to make sure that your code is good, you have to make sure that you have full visibility. This is where it gets really interesting at AWS. And some of the things that we're tying in. So whether we're talking about getops like what Bob just went through, or what you brought up with DevSecOps, you also have things like, AIOps. And so looking at how we take our machine learning tools to really implement the appropriate types of code reviews to assessing your infrastructure or your choices against well-architected principles and providing automated remediation is key, adding to that is observability, developers, especially in a highly distributed environment need to have better understanding, fidelity and touchpoints of what's going on with our application as it runs in production. And so what we do with regards to the work we have in observability around Grafana and Prometheus projects only accelerate that co-whole concept of continuous monitoring and continuous observability, and then kind of really, adding to that, I think it was last month, we introduce our fault injection simulator, a chaos engineering tool that, again takes advantage of all of this automation and machine learning to really help our developers, our customers operate at scale. And make sure that when they are releasing code, they're releasing code that is not just great in a small sense, it works on my laptop, but it works great in a highly distributed massively scaled environment around the globe. >> You know, this is one of the things that impresses me about Red Hat this year. And I've said this before all the covers events I've covered with them is that they get the cloud scale piece and I think their relationship with you guys shows that I think, DevOps has won, but it's the gift that keeps giving in open-source because what you have here is no longer a conversation about the cloud moving to the cloud. It's the cloud has become the operating model. So the conversation shifts to much more complicated enterprise or, and or intelligent Edge, and whether it's industrial or human or whatever, you got a data problem. So that's about a programmability issue at scale. So what's interesting is that Red Hat is on those bandwagon. It's an operating system. I mean, basically it's a distributed computing paradigm, essentially ala AWS concept as a cloud. Now it goes to the Edge, it's just distributed services via an open-source. So what's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, it's back to the original point, John where I said, any CIO is thinking about their IT environment from data center to cloud, to Edge and the more consistency automation and, kind of tools that they're at their disposal to enable them to create that kind of, I think you started to talk about an infrastructure the whole as code infrastructure's code, it's now, almost everything is code. And that starts with the operating system, obviously. And that's why this is so critical that we're partnering with companies like Red Hat on our vision and their vision, because they aligned to where our customers were ultimately going. Bob, you want to, you want to add to that? >> Bob: No, I think you said it. >> John: You guys are crushing it. Bob, one quick question for you, while I got you here. You mentioned getops, I've heard this before, I kind of understand it. Can you just quickly define from your perspective. What is getops? >> Sure, well, getops is really taking the, I said before it's a kind of narrowed version of DevOps. Sure, it's infrastructure is code. Sure, you're doing things incrementally but the getops principle, it's back to like, what are the good, what are the best practices we are managing large numbers, large numbers of robots. And in this case, it's around this idea of declarative intent. So instead of having systems that reach into production and change things, what you do is you set up the defined declared state of the system that you want and then leave the robots to constantly work to converge the state there. That seems kind of nebulous. Let me give you like a really concrete example from Kubernetes, by the way the entire Kubernetes system design is based on this. You say, I want five pods running in production and that's running my application. So what Kubernetes does is it sits there and it constantly checks, Oh, I'm supposed to have five pods. Do I have five? Well, what happens if the machine running one of those pods goes away. Now, suddenly it goes and checks and says, Oh, I'm supposed to have five pods, but there's four pods. What action do I take to now try to get the system back to the state. So you don't have a system running, reaching out and checking externally to Kubernetes, you let Kubernetes do the heavy lifting there. And so it goes through, goes through a loop of, Oh, I need to start a new pod and then it converges the system state back to running five pods. So it's really taking that kind of declarative intent combined with constant convergence loops to fully production at scale. >> That's awesome. Well, we do a whole segment on state and stateless future, but we don't have time. I do want to summarize real quick. We're here at the Red Hat Summit 2021. You got Red Hat OpenShift on AWS. The big news, Bob and Peder tell us quickly in summary, why AWS? Why Red Hat? Why better together? Give the quick overview, Bob, we'll start with you. >> Bob, you want to kick us off? >> I'm going to repeat peanut butter and chocolate. Customers love OpenShift, they love managed services. They want a simplified operations, simplified supply chain. So you get the best of both worlds. You get the OpenShift that you want fully managed on AWS, where you get all of the security and scale. Yeah, I can't add much to that. Other than saying, Red Hat is powerhouse obviously on data centers it is the operating system of the data center. Bringing together the best in the cloud, with the best in the data center is such a huge benefit to our customers. Because back to your point, John, our customers are thinking about what are they doing from data center to cloud, to Edge and bringing the best of those pieces together in a seamless solution is so, so critical. And that that's why AW. (indistinct) >> Thanks for coming on, I really appreciate it. I just want to give you guys a plug for you and being humble, but you've worked in the CNCF and standards bodies has been well, well known and I'm getting the word out. Congratulations for the commitment to open-source. Really appreciate the community. Thanks you, thank you for your time. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay, Cube coverage here, covering Red Hat Summit 2021. I'm John Ferry, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (smart gentle music)

>> Narrator: From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, everybody. Welcome to the special Cube Conversation. With COVID-19 hitting, organizations really had to focus on business resiliency, and we've got two great guests here to talk about that topic. Bob Bender's the chief technology officer at Founders Federal Credit Union. And he's joined by Jim Shook, who is the director of cybersecurity and compliance practice at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on the CUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks, Dave, great to see you, thank you. So, Bob, let's start with you, give us a little bit of background on Founders and your role. >> Founders Federal Credit Union is a financial institution that has about 225,000 members, serving them in 30 different locations, located in the Carolinas. I serve as chief technology officer bringing in the latest technology and cyber resilient direction for the company. >> Great. And Jim, talk about your role. Is this a new role that was precipitated by COVID or was this something that Dell has had for a while? Certainly relevant. >> It's actually been around for a while, Dave. The organization invested in this space going back about five years, I founded the cyber security and compliance practice. So really, my role is most of the time in the field with our customers, helping them to understand and solve their issues around the cyber resilience and cyber recovery field that we're talking about. But I also, to do that properly, spend a lot of time with organizations that are interested in that space. So it could be with an advisory partner, could be the FBI, might be a regulator, a particular group like Sheltered Harbor that we've worked with frequently. So it's just really, as you point out, taken off first with ransomware a couple of years ago, and then with the recent challenges from work from home in COVID. So we're really helping out a lot of our customers right now. >> Bob, I've talked privately to a number of CIOs and CSOs and many have said to me that when COVID hit that their business continuance was really much too (voice cuts out) Now, you guys actually started your journey way back in 2017. I wonder if you could take us back a few years and what were the trends that you were seeing that precipitated you to go on this journey? >> Well, I think we actually saw the malware, the horizon there. And I'll take you back a little further 'cause I just love that story is, when we looked at the relationship of Dell EMC, we talked to the 1% of the 1%, who is protecting their environment, their data capital, the new critical asset in our environment. And Dell EMC was the top of the line every time. When we looked at the environment and what it required, to put our assets under protection, again, we turned to Dell EMC and said, where do we need to go here? You look at this Mecklenburg County, you look at the city of Atlanta, you look at Boeing and I hate to use the examples, but some very large companies, some really experienced companies were susceptible to this malware attacks that we just knew ourself it was going to change us. So the horizon was moving fast and we had to as well. >> Well, you were in a highly regulated industry as well. How did that factor into the move? Well, you're exactly right. We had on our budget, our capital budget horizon, to do an air gap solution. We were looking at that. So the regulatory requirements were requiring that, the auditors were in every day talking about that. And we just kept framing that in what we were going to do in that environment. We wanted to make sure as we did this purpose built data bunker, that we looked at everything, talk to the experts, whether that was federal state regulation. You mentioned Sheltered Harbor, there's GDPR. All these things are changing how are we going to be able to sustain a forward look as we stand this environment up. And we also stood up a cyber security operations center. So we felt very confident in our Runbooks, in our incident response, that you would think that we would be ready to execute. I'll share with you that we reached out every which way and a friend called me and was actually in a live ransomware event and asked if I wanted to come on to their site to help them through that incident. We had some expertise on our staff that they did not possess at that time. So going into that environment, spending 30 hours of the last 72 hours of an attack we came back changed. We came back changed and went to our board and our executives and said, "We thought we knew what we were doing." But when you see the need to change from one to 10 servers recovery to 300 in 72 hours, we just realized that we had to change our plan. We turned to the investment we had already made and what we had looked at for some time, and said, "Dell EMC, we're ready to look at that "PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution. "How can you stand this up very quickly?" >> So, Jim, Bob was saying that he looked at the 1% of the 1%, so these guys are early adopters, but anything you can add to that discussion in terms of what you saw precipitate the activity, let's go pre-COVID, certainly ransomware was part of that. Was that the big catalyst that you saw? >> It really was. So when we started the practice, it was following up on the Sony Pictures attack, which only hit Sony in that. But it was unique in that it was trying to destroy an organization as opposed to just steal their data. So we had financial industry really leading the way, the regulators in the financial industry saying, "Gosh, these attacks could happen here "and they would be devastating." So they led the way. And as our practice continued, 2016 became the year of ransomware and became more prevalent, with the attackers getting more sophisticated and being able to monetize their efforts more completely with things like cryptocurrencies. And so as we come around and start talking to Bob, he still was well ahead of the game. People were talking about these issues, starting to grow concerned, but didn't really understand what to do. And Dave, I know we'll get to this a little bit later, but even today, there's quite a bit of disconnect, many times between the business, understanding the risks of the business and then the technology, which really is the business now, but making those pieces fit together and understanding where you need to improve to secure against these risks is a difficult process. >> Well, I think I'd love to come back to Bob and try to understand how you pitch this to the board, if you will, how you made the business case. To Jim's point, the adversaries are highly capable. It's a lucrative business. I always talk to my kids about ROI numerator and denominator. If you can raise the denominator, that's going to lower the value. And that's the business that you're in is making it less attractive for the bad guys. But how did you present this to the board? Was it a board level discussion? >> It was, exactly. We brought Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution to them and said, not only you're experiencing and seeing in the news daily, these attacks in our regions, but we have actually gone out into an environment and watch that attack play out. Not only that is when we stepped away, and we ran through some tabletops with them and we stepped away. And we said, "Are you okay? "Do you know how it got in? "Are you prepared to protect now and detect that again?" Within 30 days, they were hit again by the same ransomware attacks and hackers. So I hate to say this, but I probably fast forwarded on the business case and in the environment, the horizon around me, players, they made my case for me. So I really appreciated that top down approach. The board invested, the executive invested, they understood what was at risk. They understood that you don't have weeks to recover in the financial institution. You're dealing with hundreds of thousand transactions per second so it made my case. We had studied, we had talked to the experts. We knew what we wanted. We went to Dell EMC and said, "I have six months and here's my spend." And that's from equipment hitting our CoLOS and our data centers, standing it up, standing up the Runbooks and it's fully executed. And I wanted an environment that was not only holistic. We built it out to cover all of our data and that I could stand up the data center within that environment. I didn't need another backup solution. I needed a cyber recovery environment, a lifestyle change, if you would say. It's got to be different than your BCP/DR. While it inherits some of those relationships, we fund it with employees separately. We treated the incident response separately, and it is really benefited. And I think we've really grown. And we continue to stress that to educate ourselves not only at the board level, but a bottom up approach as well with the employees. 'cause they're a part of that human firewall as well. >> I think you've seen this where a lot of organizations, they do a checkbox on backup or as I was saying before, DR. But then in this world of digital, when a problem hits, it's like, "Oh-oh, we're not ready." So I wonder Jim, if we can get into this solution that Bob has been talking about the Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution, there's a mouthful there. You got the power branding going on. What is that all about? Talk to us about the tech that's behind this. >> It's something that we've developed over time and really added to in our capability. So at its core, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery is going to protect your most critical data and applications so that if there is a cyber attack, a ransomware or destructive attack, they're safe from that attack. And you can take that data and recover the most important components of the business. And to do that, we do a number of things, Dave. The solution itself takes care of all these things. But number one is we isolate the data so that you can't get there from here. If you're a bad actor, even an insider, you can't get to the data because of how we've architected. And so we'll use that to update the critical applications and data. Then we'll lock that data down. People will use terms like immutability or retention lock. So we'll lock it down in that isolated environment, and then we'll analyze it. So it's one thing to be able to protect the data with the solution, it's another, to be able to say that what I have here in my data vault, in my air gapped isolated environment is clean. It's good data. And if there was an attack, I can use that to recover. And then of course over time, we've built out all the capabilities. We've made it easier to deploy, easier to manage. We have very sophisticated services for organizations that need them. And then we can do a much lighter touch for organizations that have a lot of their built in capabilities. At its core, it's a recover capability so that if there was an attack that was unfortunately successful, you don't lose your business. You're not at the mercy of the criminals to pay the ransom. You have this data and you can recover it. >> So Bob, talk to us about your objectives going into this. It's more than a project. It really is a transformation of your resiliency infrastructure, I'll call it. What were your objectives going in? A lot of companies are reacting, and it's like, you don't have time to really think. So what are the objectives? How long did it take? Paint a picture of the project and what it looked like, some of the high level milestones that you were able to achieve. >> Well, I think several times Dell EMC was able to talk us off the edge, where it really got complicated. The Foundation Services is just one of your more difficult conversations, one of the top three, definitely, patch management, notification, and how you're going to rehydrate that data, keeping that window very small to reduce that risk almost completely as you move. I think other area this apply is that we really wanted to understand our data. And I think we're on a road to achieving that. It was important that if we were going to put it into the vault, it had a purpose. And if we weren't going to put it in a vault, let's see why would we choose to do that? Why would we have this data? Why would we have this laying around? Because that's a story of our members, 225 stories. So their ability to move into financial security, that story is now ours to protect. Not only do we want to serve you in the services and the industry and make sure you achieve what you're trying to, but now we have that story about you that we have to protect just as passionately. And we had that. I think that was two of the biggest things. I think the third is that we wanted to make sure we could be successful moving forward. And I'll share with you that in the history of the credit union, we achieved one of the biggest projects here, in the last two years. That umbrella of the Cyber Recovery solution protection was immediate. We plugged in a significant project of our data capital and it's automatically covered. So I take that out of the vendor of responsibility, which is very difficult to validate, to hold accountable sometimes. And it comes back under our control into this purpose built data security and cyber resilient, business strategy. That's a business strategy for us is to maintain that presence. So everything new, we feel that we're sized, there's not going to be a rip and replace, a huge architectural change because we did have this as an objective at the very beginning. >> Tim, when you go into a project like this, what do you tell customers in terms of things that they really should be focused on to have a successful outcome? >> I'm going to say first that not everybody has a Bob Bender. So we have a lot of these conversations where we have to really start from the beginning and work through it with our customers. If you approach this the right way, it's really about the business. So what are the key processes for your business? It can be different from a bank than from a hospital than from a school point. So what are the key things that you do? And then what's the tech that supports that and underlies those processes? That's what we want to get into the vault. So we'll have those conversations early on. I think we have to help a lot of organizations through the risks too. So understand the risk landscape, why doing one or two little things aren't really going to protect you from the full spectrum of attackers. And then the third piece really is, where do we start? How do we get moving on this process? How do we get victory so that the board can understand and the business can understand, and we can continue to progress along the way? So it's always a bit of a journey, but getting that first step and getting some understanding there on the threat landscape, along with why we're doing this is very important. >> So, Bob, what about any speed bumps that you encountered? What were some of those? No project is ever perfect. What'd you run into? How'd you deal with it? >> Well, I would say the Foundation Services were major part of our time. So it really helped for Dell EMC to come and explain to us and look at that perimeter and how our data is brought into that and size that for us and make sure it's sustainable. So that is definitely, could be a speed bump that we had to overcome. But today, because of those lifts, those efforts invested the Runbooks, the increase in new products, new data as our business organically grows is a non-event. It's very plug and play and that's what we wanted from the start. Again, you go back to that conversation at 1% of the 1%, it's saying, who protects you? We followed that. We stayed with the partner we trusted, the horizon holistically has come back and paid for itself again and again. So speed bumps, we're just enjoying that we were early adapters. I don't want to throw anybody out there, but you look about two weeks ago, there was a major announcement about an attack that was successful. They got them with ransomware and the company paid the ransom. But it wasn't for the ransomware, it was for the data they stole so that they would delete it. That's again, why we wanted this environment is we needed time to react in the case that these malwares are growing much faster than we're capable of understanding how they're attacking. Now it's one, two punch, where's it going to be? Where is it going to end? We're not going to likely be patient zero, but we're also not going to have to be up at night worrying that there's a new strain out there. We have a little time now that we have this secure environment that we know has that air gap solution that was built with the regulatory consideration, with the legal considerations, with the data capital, with the review of malware and such. You can go back in time and say, "Scan to see if I have a problem. So again, the partnership is while we focus on our business, they're focusing on the strategy for the future. And that's what we need. We can't be in both places at once. >> How long did the project take from the point of which you agreed, signed the contract to where you felt like you were getting value out of the solution? >> Six months. >> Really? >> We were adamant. I'd put it off for a year and a half, that's two budget cycles basically is what it felt. And then I had to come back and ask for that money back because we felt so passionate that our data, our critical data didn't need to be at that risk any longer. So it was a very tight timeline. And again, product on prem within six months. And it was a lot of things going on there. So I just wasn't idle during that time. I was having a conversation with Dell EMC about our relationship and our contracts. Let's build that cyber resilience into the contract. Now we've got this, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery environment, let's build it here where you also agree to bring on extra hardware or product if I need that. Let's talk about me being on a technology advisory panel So I can tell you where the pricing of the regulations are going, so you can start to build that in. Let's talk about the executive board reporting of your products and how that can enable us. We're not just talking about cyber and protecting your data. We're talking about back then 60% of your keep the lights on IT person will spend with auditors, talking about how we were failing. This product helped us get ahead of that to now where we're data analytic. We're just analysts that can come back to the business table and say, "We can stand that up very quickly." Not only because of the hardware and the platform solution we have, but it is now covered with a cyber resilience of the the cyber security recovery platform. >> I want to ask you about analytics. Do you feel as though you've been able to go from what is generally viewed as a reactive mode into something that is more anticipatory or proactive using analytics? >> Well, I definitely do. We pull analytics daily and sometimes hourly to make sure we're achieving our KPIs. And looking at the KRIs, we do risk assessments from the industry to make sure if our controls layer of defenses are there, that they will still work what we stood up three years ago. So I definitely think we've gone from an ad hoc rip and replace approach to transformation into a more of a threat hunting type of approach. So our cyber security operation center, for us, is very advanced and is always looking for opportunities not only to improve, to do self-assessments, but we're very active. We're monetizing that with a CUSO arm of the credit union to go out and help others where we're successful, others that may not have that staff. It's very rewarding for us. And I hate to say it sometimes it's at their expense of being in-evolved in the event of a ransomware attack or a malware event. We learned so much the gaps we have, that we could take this back, create Runbooks and make the industry stronger against these types of attacks. >> Well, so Jim, you said earlier, not every company has a Bob Bender. How common is it that you're able to see customers go from that reactive mode into one that is proactive? Is that rare or is it increasingly common? It can't be a 100%, but what are you seeing as trends? >> It's more common now. You think of, again, back to Bob, that's three plus years ago, and he's been a tireless supporter and tireless worker in his industry and in his community, in the cyber area. And efforts like those of Bob's have helped so many other organizations I think, understand the risks and take further action. I think too, Bob talks about some of the challenges with getting started in that three year timeframe, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery has become more productized, our practice is more mature. We have more people, more help. We're still doing things out there that nobody else is touching. And so we've made it easier for organizations that have an interest in this area, to deploy and deploy quickly and to get quick value from their projects. So I think between that some of the ease of use, and then also there's more understanding, I think, of what the bad actors can do and those threats. This isn't about somebody maybe having an outage for a couple of hours. This is about the very existence of a business being threatened. That if you're attacked, you might not come back from it. And there've been some significant example that you might lose hundreds of millions of dollars. So as that awareness has grown, more and more people have come on board and been able to leverage learnings from people like Bob who started much earlier. >> Well, I can see the CFO saying, "Okay, I get it. "I have no choice where we're going to be attacked. "We know that, I got to buy the insurance. You got me." But I can see the CFO saying, "Is there any way we can "get additional value out of this? "Can we use it to improve our processes and cut our costs? "Can we monetize this in some way?" Bob, what's the reality there? Are you able to find other sources of value beyond just an insurance policy? >> Definitely, Dave you're exactly right. We're able to go out there and take these Runbooks and really start to educate what cyber resilience means and what air gap means, what are you required to do, and then what is your responsibility to do it. When you take these exercises that are offered and you go through them, and then you change that perspective and go through a live event with other folks that see that after 60 hours of folks being up straight, it really changes your view to understand that there's no finish line here. We're always going to be trying to improve the product and why not pick somebody that you're comfortable with and you trust. And I think that's the biggest win we have from this is that was a Dell EMC partnership with us. It is very comfortable fit. We moved from backup and recovery into cyber resilience and cybersecurity as a business strategy with that partner, with our partner Dell, and it hasn't failed us. It's a very comforting. We're talking about quality of life for the employee. You hear that, keep the lights on. And they've really turned into professionals to really understand what security means differently today and what that quality of data is. Reports, aren't just reports, they're data capital. The new currency today of the value we bring. So how are we going to use that? How are we going to monetize that? It's changing. And then I hate to jump ahead, but we had our perimeters at 1% of our workforce remote and all of a sudden COVID-19 takes on a different challenge. We thought we were doing really good and next, we had to move 50% of our employees out in five days. And because of that Dell EMC, holistic approach, we were protected every step of the way. We didn't lose any time saying, we bought the wrong control, the wrong hardware, the wrong software. It was a very comfortable approach. The Runbooks held us, our security posture stayed solid. It's been a very rewarding. >> Well, Bob, that was my next question, actually is because you've started the journey. >> Sorry. >> No, no, it's okay. Because you started the journey early, were you able to respond to COVID in a more fast sell manner? it sounds like you just went right in. But there's nuance there, because you've got now 50% or more of the workforce working at home, you got endpoint security to worry about. You got identity access management, and it sounds like you were, "No problem. "We've got this covered." Am I getting that right? >> You're exactly right, Dave. We test our endpoints daily. We make sure that we understand what residue of data is where. And when we saw that employee shift to a safe environment, our most consideration at that time, we felt very comfortable that the controls we had in place, again, Dell and their business partners who we are going to hold true and be solid. And we test those metrics daily. I get reports back telling me, what's missing in patch management, what's missing in a backup. I'll go back to keeping BCP and cyber security separate. In the vault, we take approach of recovery and systems daily. And now that goes from maybe a 2% testing rate almost to 100% annually. So again, to your point, COVID was a real setback. We just executed the same Runbooks we had been maturing all along. So it was very comfortable for employees and it was very comfortable for our IT structure. We did not feel any service delays or outages because of that. In a day, when you have to produce that data, secure that data, every minute of every day of every year, it's very comforting to know it's going to happen. You don't push that button and nothing happens. It's executed as planned. >> Jim, did you see a huge spike in demand for your services as a result of COVID and how did you handle it? You guys got a zillion customers, how did you respond and make sure that you were taking care of everybody? >> We really did see a big spike, Dave. I think there were a couple of things going on. As Bob points out, the security posture changes very quickly when you're sending people to work from home or people remotely, you've expanded or obliterated your parameter, you're not ready for it. And so security becomes even more important and more top of mind. So with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, we can go in and we can protect those most critical applications. So organizations are really looking at their full security posture. What can we do better to detect and protect against these threats? And that's really important. For us, we're focusing on what happens when those fail? And with that extension and people going home, and then the threat actors getting even more active, the possibilities of those failures become more possible and the risks are just in front of everybody. So I think it was a combination of all of those things. Many, many customers came to us very quickly and said, "Tell us more about what you're doing here. "How does it fit into our infrastructure? "What does it protect us against? "How quickly can we deploy?" And so there has been a huge uptake in interest. And we're fortunate in that, as you pointed out early on, Dave, we invested early here. I'm five years into the practice. We've got a lot of people, very mature, very sophisticated in this area, a lot of passion among our team. And we can go take care of all those customers. >> Bob, if you had a mulligan, thinking about this project, what would you do differently if you had a chance to do it over? >> I think I would start earlier. I think that was probably the biggest thing I regret in that realizing you need to understand that you may not have the time you think you do. And luckily, we came to our senses, we executed and I got to say it was with common sense, comfortable products that we already understood. We didn't have to learn a whole new game plan. I don't worry about that. I don't worry about the sizing of the product 'cause we did it, I feel correctly going in and it fits us as we move forward. And we're growing at an increased rate that we may not expect. It's plug and play. Again, I would just say, stay involved, get involved, know that what we know today about malware and these attacks are only going to get more complicated. And that's where I need to spend my time, my group become experts there. Why I really cherish the Dell EMC relationship is from the very beginning, they've always been very passionate on delivering products that recover and protect and now are cyber resilient. I don't have to challenge that, you pay for what you get for. And I just got to say, I don't think there's much other than I would have started earlier. So start today, don't put it off. >> So you said earlier though, you're never done, you never are, in this industry. So what's your roadmap look like? Where do you want to go from here with this capability? >> I definitely want to keep educating my staff, keep training them, keep working with Dell. Again, I tell you they're such forward thinking as a company. They saved me that investment. So if you're looking at part of the investment, it's got to be, are you with a partner that's forward thinking? So we definitely want to mature this, challenge it, keep challenging, keep working with Dell and their products to deliver more. Again, we go to the federal and state regulatory requirements. You go to the Sheltered Harbor, the ACET testing from the NCUA regulators, just software asset management. You can keep on going down the line. This product, I hate to say it, it's like the iPhone. You think about how many products the iPhone has now made not relevant. I don't even own a flashlight, I don't think. This is what the Dell product line brings to me is that I can trust they're going to keep me relevant so I can stay at the business table and design products that help our members today. >> Jim, how about from Dell's perspective, the roadmap, without giving away any confidential information, where do you want to take this? We talk about air gaps. I remember watching that documentary Zero Days and hearing them say, "We got through an air gap. "No problem." So analytics obviously plays a role in this machine intelligence, machine learning, AI. Where does Dell want to take this capability? Where do you see that going? >> We've got some things in mind and then we're always going to listen to our customers and see where the regulations are going to. And thus far, we've been ahead of those with the help of people like Bob. I think where we have a huge advantage, Dave is with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery. It's a product. So we've got people who are dedicated to this full time. We have a maturity in the organization, in the field to deliver it and to service it. And having something as a product like that really enables us to have roadmaps and support and things that customers need to really make this effective for them. So as we look out on the product, and thanks for your reminder, I don't want to risk saying anything here I'm going to get in trouble for. We look at things in three paths. One is we want to increase the ability for our customers to consume the product. So they want it in different forms. They might want it in appliances, in the Cloud, virtual, all of those things are things that we've developed and continue to develop. They want more capabilities. So they want the product to do more things. They want it to be more secure, and keeping up. As you mentioned, machine learning with the analytics is a big key for us. Even more mundane things like operational information makes it easier to keep the vault secure and understand what's going on there without having to get into it all the time. So those are really valuable. And then our third point, really, we can't do everything. And so we have great partners, whether they're doing delivery, offering cyber recovery as a service or providing secure capabilities, like our relationship with Unisys. They have a stealth product that is a zero knowledge, zero trust product that helps us to secure some of the connections to the vault. We'll keep iterating on all of those things and being innovative in this space, working with the regulators, doing things. Bob's mentioned a couple of times, Sheltered Harbor. We've been working with them for two years to have our product endorsed to their specification. Something that nobody else is even touching. So we'll continue along all those paths, but really following our customer's lead in addition to maybe going some places that they haven't thought about before. >> It's great guys. I have to fear that when you talk to SecOps pros, you ask them what their biggest challenge is, and they'll say lack of talent, lack of skills. And so this is a great example, Jim, you're mentioning it, you've productized this. This is a great example of a technology company translating, IT labor costs into R&D. And removing those so customers can spend time running their business. Bob and Jim, thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. Great story. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thanks, Bob. >> All right. And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE. We'll see you next time. (instrumental music)

>> Woman: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios to have a Cube conversation with a real leader in the industry he's been publishing for a long, long time. I've been following him in social media. First time I've ever get the met in person and kind of a virtual COVID 20, 20 way. And we're excited to welcome into the studio. Bob Evans. He's a founder and principal analyst, the Cloud Wars Media coming to us. Bob where are you coming to us from today? >> In Pittsburgh today. Jeff. Good to see you. >> Awesome. Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. There's a lot of Fricks in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania cause Henry Clay was there many moons ago so that's a good town. So welcome. >> Thank you, Jeff. Thanks. Great to be here. And I look forward to our conversation. >> Absolutely. So let's, let's jump into it. So I know you attended today, the Citrix Cloud Summit you know, we've covered Citrix energy in the past this year, they decided to go we'll obviously virtual like everybody did but they, you know, they did something a little creative I think as, and they broke it into pieces, which, which I think is the way of the future. There's no reason to necessarily aggregate all of your news, all of your customer stuff, all your customer appreciation, the party the partners, all for three days in Vegas. Cause that's the only time you could get the Science Convention Center. So today was the Cloud Summit all day long. First off, just, you know, your general impressions of the event, >> Jeff, you know, I just thought that the guys had hit a really good note about what's going on in the outside world. You know, sometimes I think it's a little awkward when tech companies come in and the first thing they want to talk about is themselves, which I guess in some ways fine but I think the Citrix guys did a really good job at coming outside in here's what's going on in the outside world. Here's how we as a technology player trying to adapt to that and deliver the maximum value to our customers in this time of unprecedented change. So I thought they really nailed that with cloud and some of the other big topics that they laid out >> Great. And you've been covering cloud for a long time and, and you know, COVID is, we're still in it. There's a lot of really bad things that are happening. There's hundreds of thousands of people that are dying and a lot of businesses are getting crushed especially hospitality, travel you know, anything that relies on an aggregation of people. Conversely though we're, we're fortunate to be in the IT industry and in the information industry. And for a lot of industries, it's actually been kind of an accelerant. And one of the main accelerants is this, you know kind of digital transformation and new way to work. And some of these things that were initiatives in play but on March 15th, approximately it was go, right? It was Light switch no more planning, no more talking, it's here now. Ready, set, go. And it's in, you know, Citrix is in a pretty good position in terms of the products that they offer, the services that they offer, the customer base that they have to take advantage of that opportunity and, and you know, go to this, we've all seen the social media memes right? Who's driving your digital transformation the CEO, the CIO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer to the question is. They're pretty well positioned and it seems like, you know, they're doing a good job kind of doubling down on the opportunity. >> Jeff. Yeah. And I'd sure echo your, your initial point there about the nightmare that everybody's experienced over the last six or seven months. There's, there's no way around that yet. It has forced in these categories like, you know, that we've all heard hundreds of thousand time digital transformation to the point where the term almost becomes a cliche but in fact right? You know, it has become something that's really you know, one of the driving forces, touching everybody in the planet, right? There's, and I think digital transformation. Isn't so much about the technology, of course but it's because, you know, there's a couple billion people around the world who want to live digitally enhanced digitally driven lifestyles. And the pandemic only accelerated that as you said. So it triggered things you know, in our personal lives and our new set of requirements and expectations sort of rippled up to the B2C companies and from them back up to the B2B companies So every company on earth, every industry has had to do this. And like you said, if they were, deluding themselves maybe telling themselves these different companies that yeah, we're going fast, we're aggressive. Well, when this thing hit earlier this year as you said, they just had to really slam their foot down. I think that David Henshall from Citrix said that they had some companies that had, they were compressing three years into five months or he said in some cases even weeks. So it's really been extraordinary. And cloud has been the vehicle for these companies to get over into their digital future. >> Right. And let's talk about that for a minute because you know, Moore's law is my favorite law that nobody knows which was, you know, we tend to underestimate, excuse me we tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short term of specific technology and underestimate the longterm impact. You know, Gardener kind of uses a similar thing with the hype cycle. And then you know, the thing goes at the end, you know, had COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago you know, the ease in which the information workers were able to basically just not show up and turn on their computer at home and have access to most of their tools and most of the security and most of their applications that wasn't even possible. So it's a really interesting, you know, just validation on the enabler that we are actually able to not go to work on Tuesday the 16th or whatever the day was. And for the most part, you know, get most of our work done. >> Yeah. Yeah. Jeff, you know, I've thought about it a lot over the last several months. Remember the big consultant companies used to try to do these measures of technology and they'd always come out and say, well, we've done all these studies. And despite the billions of dollars of investment we can't show that IT has actually boosted productivity or, you know, delivered an ROI that customers should be happy with. I was always puzzled by some of the things that went into those. But I would say that today over these last six or seven months to your point, we have seen extraordinary validation of these investments in technology broadly. But specifically I think some of these things that are happening with the cloud, you know, as you've said how fast some companies have been able to do this and then not remarkable thing, Jeff right. About human nature. And we hear a lot about in, in when companies change that relative to changing human behavior changing technology is somewhat easy but you try to change human behavior and it's wicked. Well, we had this highly motivating force behind it, of the pandemic. So you had a desire on the part of people to change. And as you pointed out, there's also this corresponding thing of, you know, the technology was here. It was right. You've got a fast number of companies delivering some extraordinary solutions. And, you know, I thought it was interesting. I think it was a Kirsten Kliphouse from Google cloud. One of Citrix's partners who said that we're two best of breed companies, Citrix and Google cloud. So I thought that, that coming from Google you know, that is very high praise. So again, I think the guys at Citrix are sort of coming into this at the right time with the right set of outside in-approaches and having that flexibility to say that we're moving into territory nobody's ever been both been in before. So we better be able to move as fast as possible. >> Right. Right. And, and just to keep going down the quote line, you know once everyone is taken care of and you, you deal with the health and safety of your people which is a number one, right? The other thing is the great Winston Churchill quote which has never let a good crisis go to waste. And I think you know, David talked about in that, in his keynote that this is an opportunity, He said to challenge assumptions, challenge the models of the past. So, you know get beyond the technology discussion and use this really as a catalyst to rethink the way that you do things. And, you know, I think it's a really interesting moment because there is no model right? There is no, there is no formula for how do you reopen, there was no playbook for how do you shut down? You know, it was, everybody's figuring it out. And you've got kind of all these concurrent processes happening at the same time as everyone tries to figure it out and come to solutions. But clearly, you know, the path to, to leverage as much as you can, is the cloud and the flexibility of the cloud and, you know the ability to, to expand, add more applications. And so, you know, Citrix again, right place, right time right. Solution, but also you know, taking an aggressive tact to take advantage of this opportunity, both in taking care of their customers, but really it's a real great opportunity for them to change a little bit. >> It is. And Jeff, you know, I think if I could just piggyback on you know, your, your guy there Winston Churchill, one of his other quotes, I love it too. And he said, if find yourself crawling through hell, keep going. And I think so many companies have really had to do that now. It's, it's not ideal. It's not maybe the way they plan it but this is the reality we're facing here in 2020 and a couple of things right? I think it requires a new type of leadership within the customer companies right? What, how the CEO gets engaged in saying, I, I'm not going to relegate this to the CIO for this to happen and something else to the CMO. They've got to be front and center on this because people are pretty smart. And then the heightened sensitivity that everybody in every business has around the world today if you think your CEO is just paying lip service to this stuff about digital transformation and all these changes that everybody's going to make, the people aren't going to buy into it. So you've got the leadership thing happening on the one side and into that it's not a vacuum, but into that void or that opportunity of this unprecedented space that you mentioned come the smart, capable forward-looking technology companies that are less concerned with the stuff that they've dragged along with them for years or decade or more. But instead of trying to say, what is the new stuff that people are going to be desperately in need of and how can I help these customers do things that they never did before? It's going to require me as a tech company to do stuff that I've never done before. So I, I've just been really inspired by seeing a lot of the tech companies doing what they are helping their customers to do which is take a product development cycle, look at all the new stuff that came out around COVID and back to work, workspaces. And so on what Citrix, you know others are doing like this, the product development cycles Jeff, you study this stuff closely. It's, it's almost unimaginable. If you had said that somebody within three months within two months, we're going to have a new suite of product available we would have said it just, it's not possible the nice idea but it can't work, but that's happening now, right? >> Yeah. Isn't it interesting that had you asked them on March 10th, they would have told you it's not possible. And by March 20th, they were doing it. >> Yeah. >> At scale, huge companies. And to your point, I think that the good news is they had kind of their own companies to eat their own dog food and get their own employees you know, working from home and then, you know, bake that into the way that they had their go to market. But let's talk a little bit more specifically about work from home or work from anywhere or the new way to work. And it's funny cause that's been bantered about for, for way too long, but now, now it's here. And most indications are that for many people, many companies are saying you're not going to go back for a while. And even when you do go back it's going to be a lot different. So, you know, the new way to work is really important. And there's so much that goes into that. And one of the big pieces that I'm encouraged to hear is how do you measure work? And, you know, there's a great line I heard where, you know work is an output. It's not a place to go. And, you know, I had Martin Michaelson early on in this thing, and he had the great line, you know it's so easy to fake it at work, you know, just look busy and walk around and go to all the meetings where with a work from home or work from anywhere. What the leadership needs to do is, is a couple of things. One, is measure output right? Not activity. And you know, it's great. People can have dinner with their family or go see the kid's baseball game. Or I guess they don't have a baseball games right now but, you know, measure output, not activity which is, doesn't seem to be that revolutionary. But I think it kind of is. And, and then the other thing is really be an enabler and be a, an unblocker for people in terms of a leadership role right? Get out, help get stuff out of the way. And, but unfortunately, the counter is, you know how many apps does a normal person have to interact with every day? And how many notifications do those apps fire off every day between Slack and Asana and Salesforce and, and texts and tweets and everything else. You know, I think there's a real opportunity to take a whole nother level of productivity improvement by removing these, these silly distractions automating, you know, as much of the crap away as we can to enable people to use their brains and have some quiet time and think about things and deliver much better value than this constant reaction to nonstop notifications. >> Yeah. Yeah. Jeff, you know, I loved your point there about the difference between people's outlook on March 10th versus on March 20th. And I believe that, you know, all limitations are self-imposed, right? We tend to form constructs around how we think and allow those then to shape and often restrict or confine our behavior. And here's an example of the CEO of Novartis Pharmaceutical Company. He said, we have been brought up in the pharmaceutical industry to believe that it is immutable law of physics that it's going to take 12 and a half years and two and a half billion dollars to get a new drug approved. And he said in the past with the technology and the processes and the capabilities that that was true it is not true today yet too often, the pharmaceutical industries behave like those external limitations are put in there. So flip that over to one of the customers that, that was at the Citrix Cloud Summit today Jim Noga, who's the CIO at Mass General Brigham. I thought it was remarkable what he said when you asked about how are things going with this work from home? Well, Jim Noga the CIO there said that we had been averaging before COVID 9,000 virtual visits a month. And he said since then that number has gone up to a quarter of a million virtual visits a month or it's 8,000 a day. So they're doing an a day what they used to do in a month. Like, you said it, you tell them that on March 10th, they're not going to believe it but March 20th, it started to become reality. So I think for the customers, they're going to be more drawn to companies that are willing to say, I see your need. I see how fast you want to move. I see where you need to go and do things you never did before. I'm willing to lock elbows with you, and go in on that. And the tech number is that sort of sit back and say, ah well, I'd like to help you there, but that's not what I do. They're going to get destroyed. They're going to get blown out. And I think over the next year or two, we're going to see this massive forcing function in the tech industry. That's going to separate the companies that are able to move at the pace of market and keep up with their customers versus those that are trapped by their past or by their legacy. And it is, going to be a fascinating talk. >> So I throw on a follow up to make sure I understand that number. Those are patient visits per unit time. >> Yeah. At Mass Brigham. So he said 9,000 virtual visits a month is what they're averaging before COVID. He said, now we're up to 250,000 virtual visits per month. >> Wow. >> So it's 8,000 a day. >> Wow. I mean the thing that highlights to me, Bob, and the fact that we're doing this right now, and none of us had to get on an airplane is, you know, I think when people think back or sit back and look at what does this enable? right? What does digital enable? Instead of saying instead of focusing what we can't do, like we can't go out and get a cup of coffee after this is over and we can't and that would be great and we'd have a good time but conversely, there's so many new things that you can do right? And you can reach so many more people than you could physically. And, and for like, you know, events like the one today. And, you know, we cover events all the time. So many more people can attend if they don't have the expense, of flying to Vegas and they don't have to leave the shop or, you know, whatever the limitations are. And we're seeing massive increases in registrants for virtual events, massive increase in new registrants. Who've never attended the, the events before. So I think he really brings up a good point, which is, you know, focus on what you can do and which is a whole new opportunity a whole new space, if you will, as opposed to continuing to whine about the things that we can't do because we can't do anything about those anyway >> No, and you know, that old line of a wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first (laughs) you know, one of the other guests that that was on the Cloud Summit today Jeff, I don't know if you got to see 'em, but Steve Shute from SAP who heads up their entire 40,000 person customer success organization he said this about Citrix. "Citrix workspace is the foundation to provide secure cloud based access for this new generation of remote workers." So you get companies like SAP, and, you know, you want to talk about somebody that has earned its way into the, you know the biggest companies in the world and how they go along. You know, it's pretty powerful. They end up, your point Jeff, about how things have changed, focus on what we can do. The former CEO of SAP, Bill McDermott. He recently said, we think of phones as, you know, devices that help us be more productive. We think of computers as devices that help us be more productive. He said, now the world's going to start thinking of the office or the headquarters. It's a productivity tool. That's all it is. It's not the place that measures Hey, he was only at work, four days today. So, you know, he didn't really contribute. It's going to be a productivity tool. So we're going to look at a lot of concepts and just flip them upside down what they meant in February. Isn't going to to mean that much after this incredible change that we've all been through. >> Right. Right. Another big theme I wanted to touch base with you on it was very evident at the at the show today was multicloud right and hybrid cloud. And, you know, I used to work for Oracle in, in the day. And you know Amazon really changed the game in, in public cloud. The greatest line, one of Jeff's best lines is you know, we had seven year headstart. Nobody even was paying attention to the small book seller in Seattle and they completely changed enterprise technology. But what came across today pretty clearly right? As horses for courses, and really focusing at the application first right? The workload first and where that thing runs and how that thing runs, can be any place in that in a large organization you know, this is pick an airline or, or a big bank right? They're going to have stuff running at Oracle. They're going to have stuff running at AWS. They're going to have stuff running on Google. They're going to to have stuff running in Azure. They're going to have stuff running in their data center. IBM cloud, Ali Baba. I mean there's restrictions for location and, and data sovereigncy and all these things that are driving it. And really, you know, kind of drives this concept where the concept of cloud is kind of simple but the actual execution day to day at the enterprise level and managing and keeping track of this stuff, it is definitely a multicloud hybrid cloud. Pick your, pick your, your adjective but it's definitely not a single cloud world. That's for sure. >> Yeah. Yeah. And Jeff, you know, the Citrix customer that I mentioned earlier, Jim Noga is that the CIO at mass General Brigham, one of the other points he made about this was he said he's been very pleased about some of the contributions that cloud has made in, in, in his hospital organizations, you know transformation, what they've been able today and all the new things that they're capable of doing now that they were not people poor. But he said, you know, cloud is a tool. He said, it's not Nirvana. It's not a place for everything. He said, we have some on-premises systems. He said, they're more valuable now than they were a couple of years ago. And then we've got edge devices and we have something else over here. He said, so I think his point was it's important to put the proper value on cloud for all the things it can do for a specific organization, but not the thing that it's a panacea for everything though, big fan, but also a realist about it. >> Great. >> And so from that to the hybrid stuff and multicloud and I know all the big tech vendors would love it and say Oh no, it's not a multicloud, but just be my cloud. Just, just use my stuff. Everything will be easy, but that's not true. So I think Citrix position itself really well big emphasis on security, big emphasis on the experience that employees need to have. It isn't just sort of like a road war you loose five or seven years ago, as long as he, or she can connect through email and, you know, sending a sales data back and forth, they're all set. Now. It's very different. You've got people sitting in a wildly different environments for, you know, six, eight, 10 hours a day and chunk of an hour or two or three here or there. But that, that seamless experience always dependable, always reliable is just, you know, it can't be compromised. And I just thought you have one you know, high level thought about what happened. It was impressive for me to see that Citrix certainly a fine company put it. It's not one of the biggest tech companies in the world but look at the companies we have, the Microsoft, SAP talking about Google Cloud, AWS, you know, up and down the line. So I just thought it was really impressive how they showed their might as sort of a part of a network effect that is undeniable right now. >> Right. Right. And I think it's driven, you know, we hear over and over right? I mean, co-opertition is a very Silicon Valley thing. And ultimately it's about customer choice and the customer's going to choose you know, kind of by workload, even if you will or by budget as to what they're going to do where so you have to be able to operate in that world or you're going to be you're going to get, you're going to get left out unless you're just super dominant and it's a single application and they built it on you and that's it. But that's not realistic. I want to shift gears a little bit Bob, since I'm so happy to be talking to you on another topic, that's, that's a big mega trend and we're slowly seeing more and more applications. That's machine learning and artificial intelligence and you know, and, and the generic conversations about these remind me of the old big data conversations. It's like okay. So what you know, who cares? It doesn't really matter until you apply it. And with all these new applications and even just around the work from home that we discussed earlier, you know, there's so many opportunities to apply machine learning and AI, to very specific functions and tasks to, again, help people prioritize what they're going to do help people not have to deal with the crap that they shouldn't have to do. And really, you know at a whole another level of, of productivity really, based on a smarter way to help them figure out what am I going to do in my next, my next marginal minute? You know, cause ultimately that's the decision that people make when they're sitting down getting work, done it, how do they do the best work? And I think the AI and machine learning opportunities are gargantuan. >> Jeff. The point you made a few minutes ago about, you know, we tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short term and underestimate it, what it'll be overtime well, we've been doing that with AI for the last 40 years but this is going to be sort of the golden age of it. And one of the reasons why I have been so bullish on cloud is it presents like the perfect delivery system for it. This is we see in medicine, there's sometimes breakthroughs at the laboratory level where they've got the new breakthrough medication but they don't have the bullet. They don't have the delivery system to get it in there, cloud's going to be an accelerator for that. And it gives the tech companies, which and this is going to be very good for customers, every big tech company. Now as a data company, every company says, it's an analytics. Everybody says I'm into AI. Every company says I'm into ML. And in a way that's real good for customers cause the competitive level is going to soar. It's going to bring more choice. As you said, the more customers more types of solutions, more sorts of innovation. And it's also going to be incumbent on those tech vendors. You've got to make it as easy as possible, as fast as possible for these customers to get the benefit of it. I think it was Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google cloud said, Hey, you know, if, if a shoe company or a retailer or a bank had fantastic expertise in data science, they could go out and hire 200 data scientists do this all themselves. He said, but that's not what they do. And they don't want to do that. >> Right. >> So he said, come to the companies who can do it. And I think that we will see changes in how business works driven by ML and AI, unlike anything that we've ever seen. >> Yeah. >> And that's going to happen over the next 12, 18 months. >> Yeah. Baked into everything. Well, Bob, I really am excited that we finally got to catch up in, in person COVID style. Like I said, I've been following you for a long time. So I just gave you the last word before we sign off. You know, you've been in this business for a long time. You've seen lots and lots of waves. You know, this is just another wave with this, with this, you know, gasoline thrown on the fire with, with COVID in terms of the rate of change. And the, you know there's no more talking, the time to move is now, share kind of your perspective as to kind of where we are. And, you know, we're, we're not that far from flipping the calendar to 2021, which is a good thing you know, as you, as you look forward a little bit you know, what's in your mind, what's getting you excited. What's getting you up in the morning. >> Yeah. Jeff, I guess it comes down to this thing of, we, I think here late in 2020, everybody's got a reason to be pretty proud of what we have done, not only in the last six months but over the last several years, if you look at the improvements that have been made in health care and making it available to more people, in education the things that teenagers or young teenagers or even pre-teenagers can do now to learn and explore the world and communicate with people from all over the globe, there's a lot of great things going on, but I think we're going to look back on this point and say, this was, this was a pivot point here in mid and late 2020, when we stopped letting in some ways, as you described it earlier worrying so much about the things we can't do. And instead put more time into what we can do, what breakthroughs can we make. And I think these things we've talked about with AI and ML are going to be a big part of that, the computer industry or the tech industry, maturing and understanding they're not in charge. It's the customers who are in charge here. And the tech companies have to reorient themselves and reimagine themselves to meet the demands of this new fast changing world. And so I think those are some of the mega trends and more and more Jeff, I think these tech companies are going to say that the customers are demanding that the tech companies give them the gift of speed, give them the gift of engaging with customers in new ways, give them the gift of seeing the world as other people see it rather than just through the narrow lens of, you know sometimes the tech bubble that can percolate somewhere out sometimes out in the Palo Alto area. So I, I'm incredibly optimistic about what the future is going to bring. >> Well, Thank you. Thanks for Bob for sharing your insight. You can follow Bob on Twitter. He's got podcasts, he's very prolific writer and again, really, really a great to meet you in person. And thanks for sharing your thoughts >> Jeff, thanks so much. You guys do a fantastic job and it's been a pleasure to be with you. >> Thank you. Allright. He's Bob Evans. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCube from our Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Narrator: 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 the special CUBE Conversation here. In the CUBES Palo Alto studios, I'm John Furrier, your host with a great story here to tell and a great story with Bob Russell, the CEO of the CTA group, also known as the Community Technology Alliance. Great story, very relevant in this time and has to involve data and technologies for good. So, Bob, thanks for spending the time to join me today. Thanks for remote dialing in or internetting in thank you. >> My pleasure, great to be with you. >> You guys have a really great mission with the Community Technology Alliance. Also known as the CTA group, which is you guys go by, take a minute to explain the firm and what you guys do coz I think this is a high impact story for this community just in general, but now more than ever, it's great story. Can you take a minute to explain? >> Thank you. We're a San Jose based nonprofit and we were founded in 1991 to provide the technology needed to support the work to end homelessness in a number of California communities and counties, primarily by providing data collection and reporting tools for agencies that were receiving federal funding to house the homeless. Several years ago, as we were looking at the data, we realized that we needed to expand our focus to not only include the homeless, but to include what's called homeless prevention. And homeless prevention is providing services to those who are not homeless, but who are at risk of becoming homeless, or those that are living in poverty and do not have enough money to pay the mortgage or pay their rent and so they too are at risk of becoming homeless. Because what the data is showing is that once you become homeless, it can be difficult, it can be time consuming, and it can take a long time for you to secure new housing. So if you can help people who are on the cusp of becoming homeless, that is, that's a wonderful thing. Keeping people from becoming homeless in the first place is one of the most effective tools in fighting homelessness in the Bay Area and throughout the United States. That expanded focus meant we really, we needed to rethink how best to leverage technology in order to help agencies communities, both in homelessness and homeless prevention. And so we focused on three different components or three tools. The first one was creating data integration tool, so that agencies that are using multiple systems, can integrate their data into a single source of truth, they can quickly communicate and exchange data with one another in order to identify how best to help people in need in their communities. The second thing that we did was we created a mobile app so that you could collect data out of your closed or your proprietary system, upload that data later to your system, or to this, to a central data warehouse. And then also, you could use this data that once we pulled your data in from multiple data systems and created a single source of truth, you could actually view that unified data. And the third tool we developed was a reporting and analytics tool, so that you could quickly visualize your data, look at overall trends and determine what measures are most effective in helping people to remain housed or to help people who are homeless to secure housing as quickly as possible. So that's our story in a nutshell, John. >> Yeah, one of the famous CUBE alumni Jeff Hammerbacher, founder of Cloudera, one said in the CUBE. This is 10 years ago, and he came from Facebook and then he said, our bright minds in the industry are working on data science so that people click on and add. And that really kind of became a rallying point in the computer science industry, because this is really a data driven strategy, you guys are taking this proactive, it's not reactive, which is still got it's own challenges. So, you know, using data for good, there's some reality there. It's like collective intelligence or predictive analytics or a recommendation engine for services to be delivered. So Love it. Love this story, I think is super important. It's not going to go away it's only going to get stronger and better. But I got to ask you with that, what are some of the challenges with the current environment for social services? Because, you mentioned legacy, legacy systems. Well, this legacy a process too. I can only imagine the challenges, what are some of those challenges in the current environment? >> Yes, yeah, there are many challenges, but I'd like to focus in on two. The first is agencies aren't network, their systems are not network. And so agency A cannot exchange and communicate with agency B. And so what happens in most communities is that if someone's in need, whether it's an individual or a family, odds are they're going to multiple agencies to secure all the different services that they need. And because agencies are not networked, it can be very difficult to secure services. If you're a need, you can end up spending a lot of time going from agency to agency, asking what's available, and seeing that if you're eligible for services. So one of the challenges that we were asked to overcome by, you know, talking to various agencies and communities is can you allow us to continue to use our current systems, but can you figure out a way for our systems to communicate and exchange critical data with one another, and the second reason or challenge is tied to first, most agencies have multiple funding sources in order to provide the services that they provide. And many of those funding sources will say to an agency in exchange for us giving you funding, you must use this system to collect data and to report out. And so what happens is a single agency can have multiple data systems that either, that just simply cannot communicate with one another. And so this creates inefficiencies. And this means that resources that would be going to a client, a family and an individual has to be redirected to doing multiple data entry and administering multiple systems. And so before we built any of our tools, we spent a good chunk of time talking to these various stakeholders in the homeless and poverty arena going, what are your primary pain points? These were the two that stood out for us. In how we could use technology to help these agencies get a more unified view of what's going on in their community and what works. >> How has any of the systematic changes affected you coz the networking piece is huge. When we see this play out in data driven businesses, obvious ones are cybersecurity, the more data the better, coz you got a machine learning is a lot of things there. The other problem I want to get your thoughts on is just the idea of not just not being networked, but the data silos. So the data silos are out there, and sometimes they're not talking to each other, even if they are connected. >> So if you're homeless or at risk of becoming homeless, odds are you're going to need multiple services to help you. It's very rare that an agency has all the services that you need so that you end up being helped by multiple services. Each one of those service, each one of those agencies, ends up being a data silo. And so you do not get a complete picture of in your community of how what are the various services that you are providing this client, and which services are most rapidly helping that client move either into housing or into self sufficiency. So agencies are very much aware that they have data silos out there, but they simply do not have the expertise or the time or the resources to manually take all of that data and try to come up with a single spreadsheet that tells 'em everything. >> On the role of data, I've seen you mentioned the users, you mentioned an app, can you just share some anecdotal examples of kind of where it's working and challenges and opportunities you guys are doubling down on because, I mean, this is a really important point, because if you look at our society at large today, the ability to deliver services, whether it's education, homelessness, poverty, it's all kind of interconnected, all has the same almost systematic kind of functional role, right you got to, identify services, needs, match them to funding and or people and move in real time or as contextually relevant as possible. If you do that, right, you're on the front end, not the back end of reacting to it. Can you give some examples? >> Yeah, I'm thinking of a young woman. I mean, this is, for me, this has been a powerful story for our organization in helping us to understand the human impact that data silos can have. So this is, in one of our communities there was a young woman with, who was recently divorced with a young son who became sick. And so she went to the hospital to secure treatment for her child, the hospital, the clinic was able to help her. But when she asked about are there agencies out there are there services out there that can help me with financial assistance can help me with getting food and finding a stable housing? They told her no, we can't help you we're clinic, but we can point you to a shelter. Well, by the time she got to that shelter, they were full for the night. So she had no place for her and her son to stay. And so what happens is she ended up spending the night out on the street. And then she spent the next week looking for, you know food bank, so she'd get food. Going to various agencies to find out, you know do you have any available housing, do you have any financial assistance and she was coming up against, you know obstacle, one obstacle over another. So if you're homeless and you don't have a car, and you know, think about anyone in the Bay Area, how difficult it is to get around if you don't have a vehicle or someone who can provide you with it, with a transportation. Her life changed and I yeah, her life changed when she ended up at a homeless encampment. And a what's called an outreach worker, went to that outreach, that encampment with our tools, with our mobile app. And this outreach worker met up with this young woman and said, how can I help you? And she, this woman explained, look, I need a place to stay for the night. I need food for my child, can you helped me? But what she did was she took her tablet open, opened up our mobile app and found yes, there is a nearby shelter that has space available. Let me get you into that shelter as soon as possible. She also alerted the case managers at that shelter that this is what the woman needs. Can you provide that assistance to her as soon as we get her to the shelter? And so what happened was instead of wandering around the community, trying to find help, because of this timely encounter between this young woman and his outreach worker, this outreach worker was able to get this woman and her child into a temporary shelter an emergency shelter for the night. And then over time, helped her secure her own apartment with financial assistance, and also the other services that she needed. And for me, that is the essence of what we're trying to do here is simply remove the barriers for you to.. The essence, what happened here was this woman was able to quickly determine through the help of an agency, what's currently available, and then connect her to those appropriate agencies to get the services that she needed. And so I have told this story many times it still gets me that it's, this is the beauty of technology. This is how you can leverage technology and help someone in need. For me it's just amazing what you can do with the right. Yes, with the right technology. >> It's such a powerful story coz it also not only illustrates the personal needs that they were met. But it also illustrates the scale of how data and the contextually relevant need at that time having the right thing happen at the right time, when it needs to happen, can scale. So it's not, it's not a one off. This is how technology can work. So I think this is a great indicator of things to come. And I think this is going to be playing out more and that is the role of data and people. This has been a fundamental dynamics, not just about machines anymore. It's the human and the data interaction. This is becoming a huge thing. Can you share your thoughts on the role of people because audiences want to get involved you seeing a much more mission driven, culture evolving quickly. People want to have an impact. >> Right. Oh, yeah, data plays a fundamental role. Best way, what helps me to understand just how fundamental that role is that what data does is it creates a narrative on the past and current experiences of people in need. In other words, data tells a story. And whether that person is homeless or at risk of becoming homeless or living in poverty, that narrative becomes a powerful tool for agencies. And it, when you take that narrative because you've been able to harness technology, create that narrative. What you can do with that narrative, is you can coordinate available services to those in need. And as, you know the story of this young woman, you can also rightly reduce the wait times and the time that someone says I have this need until you connect them with that available service. That narrative also helps you to improve your programs and services. You can look at what's working, what's not working, and make the necessary changes so that you can end up helping more people. It improves access to programs and services, instead of someone going by bus, or however I'm trying to go from one end of town to the other. Imagine if you could go to a public library, for example. And as a person in need, you could log in and go, you could tell your story, interesting data and say, help me to find the services that I need. >> Yeah. >> The other thing is that it reduces inefficiencies. Many agencies are spending considerable amount of time in duplicate data entry in order to make sure that they're collecting the data and all the different systems that they need. And then I think another key thing that data plays a fundamental role is that you can take your data as an agency, as a community and you can tell your story to policy leaders and to funders and say look, if there is how you can support us in order to provide effective homeless and poverty alleviation solutions, so again the idea that-- >> Yeah that's a key point right there, that's I mean, the key point is, you look at people process technology, which is like the, overused cliche of digital transformation very relevant by the way, the process piece is kind of taking that same track as you saw the internet technologies, change marketing and advertising, performance based, show me the clicks. If you think about what you just said, that's really what's going on here is you can actually have performance based programs with specific deliverables, if I can do this, would you do more? And the answer is you can measure it with data. This is really the magic of this. It's a new way of doing things. And again, this is not going to go away. And I think stakeholders can hold people's feet to the fire for performance based results, because the data is there if you strive to do a good mission. If the systems are in place, you can measure it. >> Thanks for that question John. Three (background noise drowns out other sounds) come to mind. First, many organizations now financially match the donations made by their employees that they make to nonprofit. So I would say that check with your HR department and see if they have a matching program. And if they do, what happens then is that for every dollar that you give to that agency, your organization, the company that you work for, will match that, and so your money will go further. These same pro... These same Corporate Social Responsibility programs, not only will match your donations, but the other thing that they will do is they will sometime arrange, sometimes workout opportunities to volunteer at very various nonprofits. And so you can also check with your organization to see if they do that. A second possibility is that you connect with groups such as the Full Circle Fund. There are other groups out there, but I'm most familiar with the Full Circle Fund. And it is a San Francisco based nonprofit that leverages your time and your resources and intellectual capital to help out with nonprofits throughout the Bay Area. So whether it is that you're looking to volunteer coding or development skills, or you're looking for some way to find out what's going on in the Bay Community, and how can I help. Full Circle Fund would be a great resource. And again, there are other nonprofits like them out there as well. The third thing is, if you know of an agency in your area, a goodwill, united way, a habitat for humanity, give them a call or check on their website to see what volunteer, positions they have available or what they're looking for. And if it looks like a good match, give them a call and have that conversation. Those are three things that immediately came to mind for me John about if he wanted to help out, how could you? >> Well, certainly it's important mission. I really appreciate, Bob, what you're doing and your team, Bob Russell, the CEO of CTA group, also known as the Community Technology Alliance. Really putting technology into practice, to help the services get to the folks that matter, the homelessness and the folks in poverty, on the edge of poverty. It really is an example of how you can solve some of these systematic problems with performance base. If you follow the data, follow the money, follow the services, it all can work in real time. And that's a good example. So thank you so much for what you do. And great mission. Thank you for your time. >> Thank you, and thank you for having me. >> Okay I'm the CUBE. I'm John Furrier, covering all the stories here while we're still programming here in the CUBE studios with our quarantine crew. Bob Russell, the CEO of CTA group, out with a great story. Check it out and get involved. I'm John Furrier, The CUBE. Thanks for watching (bright upbeat music)

>>Fly from San Francisco. It's the cube covering RSA conference 2020 San Francisco brought to you by Silicon angled medias >>live in. Welcome to the cube coverage here in San Francisco at Moscone hall for RSA 2020 I'm John furrier, host of the cube. We're here breaking down all the actions in cyber security. I'll say three days of wall-to-wall cube coverage. You got two great guests here, experts in the cybersecurity enterprise security space. Over 25 years. We've got two gurus and experts. We've got Bob Mindell, executive vice president of North America cyber practice for cap Gemini and Joe McMahon, head of North America cyber strategy, even a practitioner in the intelligence community. Langley, you've been in the business for 25 years. You've seen the waves guys, welcome to the cube. Thank you John. Thanks for having us. So first let's just take a step back. A cyber certainly on the number one agenda kind of already kind of broken out of it in terms of status, board level conversation, every CSO, risk management and a lot of moving parts. >>Now, cyber is not just a segment in the industry. It is the industry. Bob, this is a big part of business challenge today. What's your view? What was going on? So John has a great point. It's actually a business challenge and that's one of the reasons why it's now the top challenge. It's been a tech challenge for a long time. It wasn't always a business challenge for you as was still considered an it challenge and once it started impacting business and got into a board level discussion, it's now top of mind as a business challenge and how it can really impact the business continuity. Joe is talking before we came on camera about you know CEOs can have good days here and there and bad days then but sees us all have bad days all the time because there's so much, it's so hard. You're on the operations side. >>You see a day to day in the trenches as well as the strategy. This is really an operations operationalizing model. As new technology comes out, the challenge is operationalizing them for not only a business benefit but business risk management. It's like changing an airplane engine out at 35,000 feet. It's really hard. What are you seeing as the core challenge? This is not easy. It's a really complex industry. I mean, you take the word cybersecurity, right? Ready? Cybersecurity conference. I see technology, I see a multitude of different challenges that are trying to be solved. It means something different to everybody, and that's part of the problem is it's a really broad ecosystem that we're in. If you meet one person that says, I know all of cyber, they're lying, right? It's just like saying, I know active directory and GRC and I know DNS and I know how to, how to code, right? >>Those people don't exist and cyber is a little bit the same way. So for me, it's just recognizing the intricacies. It's figuring out the complexities, how people processing technology really fit together and it's an operation. It is an ongoing, and during operation, this isn't a program that you can run. You run it for a year, you install and you're done. There's ebbs and flows. You talked about the CISOs and the bad days. There's wins and there's losses. Yeah. And I think part of that is just having the conversation with businesses. Just like in it, you have bad days and good days wins and losses. It's the same thing in cybersecurity and we've got to set that expectation. Yeah, you didn't bring up a good point. I've been saying this on the cube and we've been having conversations around this. It used to be security as part of it, right? >>But now that it's part of the business, the things that you're mentioning around people, process, technology, the class, that kind of transformational formula, it is business issues, organizational behavior. Not everyone's an expert specialism versus generalists. So this is like not just a secure thing, it's the business model of a company is changing. So that's clear. There's no doubt. And then you've got the completion of the cloud coming, public cloud, hybrid multi-cloud. Bob, this is a number one architectural challenge. So outside of the blocking and tackling basics, right, there's now the future business is at risk. What does cap Gemini do? And because you guys are well known, great brand, helping companies be successful, how do you guys go to customers and say, Hey, here's what you do. What's the, what's the cap Gemini story? >>So the cat termini stories is really about increasing your cybersecurity maturity, right? As Joe said, starting out at the basics. If you look at a lot of the breaches that have occurred today have occurred because we got away from the basics and the fundamentals, right? Shiny new ball syndrome. Really. Exactly exasperates that getting away from the basics. So the technology is an enabler, but it's not the be all and end all right, go into the cloud is absolutely a major issue. That's increasing the perimeter, right? We've gone through multiple ways as we talked about, right? So now cloud is is another way, cloud, mobile, social. How do you deal with those from on prem, off prem. But ultimately it's about increasing your cyber cyber security maturity and using the cloud as just increasing the perimeter, right? So you need to, you really need to understand, you have your first line defense and then your maturity is in place. Whether the data resides in your organization, in the cloud, on a mobile device, in a social media, you're responsible for it all. And if you don't have the basics, then you're, you're really, and you guys bring a playbook, is that what you guys come in and do? Correct. Correct. Right. So our goal is to coordinate people, process technology and leverage playbooks, leverage the run books that we had been using for many years. >>I want to get down to you on this one because of what happens when you take that to the, into the practitioner mode or at implementation. Customers want the best technology possible. They go for the shiny new choice. Bob just laid out. There's also risks too because it may or may not be big. So you've got to balance out. I got to get an edge technically because the perimeters becoming huge surface area now or some say has gone. Now you've got edge, just all one big exposed environment, surface area for vulnerabilities is massive. So I need better tech. How do you balance and obtain the best tech and making sure it works and it's in production and secure. So there's a couple of things, right, and this is not, it's not just our, and you'll hear it from other people that have been around a long time, but a lot of organizations that we see have built themselves so that their cybersecurity organization is supporting all these tools that we see. >>That's the wrong way to do it. The tools should support the mission of the organization, right? If my mission is to defend my enterprise, there are certain things that I need to do, right? There's questions I need to be able to ask and get answers to. There's data I need visibility into. There's protections and controls I need to be able to implement. If I can lay those out in some coordinated strategic fashion and say, here's all the things I'm trying to accomplish, here's who's going to do it. Here's my really good team, here's my skilled resources, here's my workflows, my processes, all that type of stuff. Then I can go find the right technology to put into that. And I can actually measure if that technology is effective in supporting my mission. But too often we start with the technology and then we hammer against it and we run into CISOs and they say, I bought all this stuff and it's not working and come hell yeah. >>And that's backing into it the wrong. So I've heard from CSOs, I'd like they buying all these tools. It's like a tool shed. Don't be the fool with the wrong tool as they I say. But that brings up the question of, okay, as you guys go to customers, what are some of the main pain points or issues that they're trying to overcome that that are opportunities that you guys are helping with? Uh, on the business side and on the technical side, what are some of the things? So on the business side, you know, one is depending on their level of maturity and the maturity of the organization and the board of directors and their belief in, in how they need to help fund this. We can start there. We can start by helping draw out the threat landscape within that organization where they are maturity-wise and where they need to go and help them craft that message to the board of directors and get executive sponsorship from the board down in order to take them from baby, a very immature organization or you know, a reactive organization to an adaptive organization, right. >>And really become defenders. So from a business perspective, we can help them there. From the technology perspective, Joe, uh, you know, or an implementation perspective. I think, you know, it's been a really interesting road like being in this a long time, you know, late two thousands when nation States were first really starting to become a thing. All the industries we were talking to, every customer is like, I want to be the best in my industry. I want to be the shining example. And boards in leadership were throwing money at it and everybody was on this really aggressive path to get there. The conversation is shifted a little bit with a lot of the leadership we talked to. It's, I just want to be good enough, maybe a little bit better than good enough, but my, my objective anymore is it to leave the industry. Cause that's really expensive and there's only one of those. >>My objective is to complete my mission maybe a little bit above and beyond, but I need the right size and right. So we spent a lot of time helping organizations, I would say optimize, right? It's what is the right level of people, what is the right amount of resources, what's the right spend, what's the right investment, the right allocation of technology and mix of everything, right? And sometimes it's finding the right partner. Sometimes it's doing certain things in house. It's, there's no one way to solve this problem, but you've got to go look at the business challenges. Look at the operational realities of the customer, their budgets, all those, their geographies mattered, right? Some places it's easy to hire talent. Some places it's not so easy to hire talent. And that's a good point, right? Some organizations, >>they just need to understand what does good look like and we can, we have so many years of experience. We have so many customers use skates is we've been there and we've done that. We can bring the band and show them this is what good looks like and this is sustainable >>of what good looks like. I want to get your reactions to, I was talking to Keith Alexander, general Keith Alexander, a former cyber command had last night and we were talking about officers, his defense and that kind of reaction. How the Sony hack was was just was just, they just went after him as an example. Everyone knows about that hack, but he really was getting at the idea of human efficiency, the human equation, which is if you have someone working on something that here, but their counterpart might be working on it maybe from a different company or in the same company, they're redundant. So there's a lot of burnout, a lot of people putting out fires. So reactive is clearly, I see as a big trend that the conversation's shifting towards let's be proactive, let's get more efficient in the collaboration as well as the technology. What you, how do you guys react to that? What's your view on that statement? So >>people is the number one issue, in my opinion. In this space, there's a shortage of people. The people that are in it are working very long hours. They're burnt out. So we constantly need to be training and bringing more people into the industry. Then there's the scenario around information sharing, right? Threat information sharing, and then what levels are you comfortable with as an organization to share that information? How can you share best practices? So that's where the ice sacks come into play. That's also where us as a practitioner and we have communities, we have customers, we bring them together to really information, share, share, best practice. It's in all of our best interests. We all have the same goal and the goal is to protect our assets, especially in the United States. We have to protect our assets. So we need, the good thing is that it's a pretty open community in that regards and sharing the information, training people, getting people more mature in their people, process technology, how they can go execute it. >>Yeah. What's your take on the whole human equation piece? Right? So sharing day, you probably heard a word and the word goes back to where I came from, from my heritage as well, but I'm sure general Alexander used the word mission at some point, right? So to me, that's the single biggest rallying point for all of the people in this. If you're in this for the right reasons, it's because you care about the mission. The mission is to defend us. Stop the bad guys from doing days, right? Whether you're defending the government, whether you're defending a commercial enterprise, whether you're defending the general public, right? Whatever the case is, if you're concerned, you know, if you believe in the mission, if you're committed to the mission, that's where the energy comes from. You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of talk about the skill gap and the talent gap and all of those types of things. >>To me, it's more of a mindset issue than anything. Right? The skill sets can be taught. They can be picked up over time. I was a philosophy major. All right? Somehow I ended up here. I have no idea how, um, but it's because I cared about the mission and everybody has a part to play. If you build that peer network, uh, both at an individual level and at an organizational and a company level, that's really important in this. Nobody's, nobody's an expert at everything. Like we said, you brought a philosophy. I think one of the things I have observed in interviewing and talking to people is that the world's changed so much that you almost need those fresh perspectives because the problems are new problems, statements, technology is just a part of the problem set back to the culture. The customer problem, Bob, is that they got to get all this work done. >>And so what are some of the use cases that you guys are working on that that is a low hanging fruit in the industry or our customer base? How do you guys engage with customers? So our target market is fortune 500 global 1000 so the biggest of the big enterprises in the world, right? And because of that, we've seen a lot of a complex environments, multinational companies as our customers. Right? We don't go at it from a pure vertical base scenario or a vertical base solution. We believe that horizontal cybersecurity can it be applied to most verticals. Right. And there's some tweaking along the way. Like in financial services, there's regulars and FFIC that you need to be sure you adapt to. But for the most part the fundamentals are applicable. All right. With that said, you know, large multinational manufacturing organization, right? They have a major challenge in that they have manufacturing sites all over the world. >>They building something that is, you know, unique. It has significant IP to it, but it's not secure. Historically they would have said, well, nobody's really gonna just deal steal what we do because it's really not differentiated in the world, but it is differentiated and it's a large corporation making a lot of money. Unfortunately ransomware, that'd be a photographer. Ransomware immediately, right? Like exact down their operations and their network, right? So their network goes down. They can have, they can, they can not have zero downtown and their manufacturing plants around the world. So for us, we're implementing solutions and it's an SLA for them is less than six seconds downtime by two that help secure these global manufacturing environment. That's classic naive when they are it. Oh wow. We've got to think about security on a much broader level. I guess the question I have for you guys, Joe, you talk about when do you guys get called in? >>I mean what's your main value proposition that you guys, cause you guys got a broad view of the industry, that expertise. Why do, why are customers calling you guys and what do you guys deliver? They need something that actually works, right? It's, it's you mentioned earlier, I think when we were talking how important experiences, right? And it's, Bob said it too, having been there, done that I think is really important. The fact that we're not chasing hype, we're not selling widgets. That we have an idea of what good looks like and we can help an organization kind of, you know, navigate that path to get there is really important. So, uh, you know, one of our other customers, large logistics company, been operating for a very long time. You know, very, very mature in terms of their, it operations, those types of things. But they've also grown through merger and acquisition. >>That's a challenge, uh, cause you're taking on somebody else's problem set and they just realize, simply put that their existing security operations wasn't meeting their needs. So we didn't come in and do anything fancy necessarily. It's put a strategic plan in place, figure out where they are today, what are the gaps, what do they need to do to overcome those gaps? Let's go look at their daily operations, their concept of operations, their mission, their vision, all of that stuff down to the individual analysts. Like we talked about the mindset and skillset. But then frankly it's putting in the hard work, right? And nobody wants to put in the heart. I don't want to say nobody wants to put in the hard work. That's fun. There's a lot of words that's gets done I guess by the questions that you guys getting called in on from CSOs chief and Mason security officers. >>Guess who calls you? So usually we're in talking to the Cisco, right? We're having the strategic level conversation with the Cisco because the Cisco either has come in new or has been there. They may have had a breach. Then whatever that compelling event may be, they've come to the realization that they're not where they need to be from a maturity perspective and their cyber defense needs revamping. So that's our opportunity for us to help them really increase the maturity and help them become defenders. Guys, great for the insight. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate you sharing the insights. Guys. Give a quick plug for what you guys are doing. Cap Gemini, you guys are growing. What do you guys look to do? What are some of the things that's going on? Give the company plug. Thanks Sean show. It's been a very interesting journey. >>You know this business started out from Lockheed Martin to Leidos cyber. We were acquired by cap Gemini a year ago last week. It's a very exciting time. We're growing the business significantly. We have huge growth targets for 2020 and beyond, right? We're now over 800 practitioners in North America, over 2,500 practitioners globally, and we believe that we have some very unique differentiated skill sets that can help large enterprises increase their maturity and capabilities plug there. Yeah, I mean, look, nothing makes us happier than getting wins when we're working with an organization and we get to watch a mid level analyst brief the so that they just found this particular attack and Oh by the way, because we're mature and we're effective, that we were able to stop it and prevent any impact to the company. That's what makes me proud. That's what makes it so it makes it fun. >>Final question. We got a lot of CSOs in our community. They're watching. What's the pitch to the CSO? Why, why you guys, we'd love to come in to understand what are their goals, how can we help them, but ultimately where do they believe they think they are and where do they need to go and we can help them walk that journey. Whether it's six months, a year, three years, five years. We can take them along that journey and increase the cyber defense maturity. Joe, speak to the CSO. What are they getting? They're getting confidence. They're getting execution. They're getting commitment to delivery. They're getting basically a, a partner in this whole engagement. We're not a vendor. We're not a service provider. We are a partner. A trusted partner. Yeah, partnerships is key. Building out in real time. A lot new threats. Got to be on offense and defense going on. A lot of new tech to deal with. I mean, it's a board level for a long time. Guys, thanks for coming on. Cap Gemini here inside the cube, bringing their practices, cybersecurity, years of experience with big growth targets. Check them out. I'm John with the cube. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. >> Good morning, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 19 from Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, Stu, this is day three of two sets of coverage for theCUBE, and this expo hall has not gotten any less busy, tons of people still here. >> Lisa, 65,000, I'm sure the throats are a little bit raw, the feet are tired, but there's so much good information, and yeah, excited to dig in with some more of our guests. >> Yep, so much good information, in fact we have Dell EMC back, yes, we had them yesterday, there's more to talk about today, please welcome a couple of guests, we've got Nick Brackney, senior consultant, cloud product marketing, welcome to theCUBE, your first time. >> Yeah, thank you, thanks for having me. >> Lisa: And Bob Ganley, I feel like it's been about 18 hours, maybe 20. Senior consultant cloud product marketing, welcome back. >> Thank you. >> So guys, lots of news. AWS news shot out of a cannon, one of the things, though, that you can't help but talk about at any event is multicloud. Organizations, CIOs tell us on theCUBE all the time, we have inherited a multicloud, sometimes Dave Vellante calls it a crime scene, right, for various reasons, it's not necessarily strategic, but it is becoming a reality. Talk to us about what Dell EMC is seeing with your customer base, with respect, sorry, that's for Nick, to multicloud, what are you seeing, how are you helping customers navigate this? >> Yeah, I think that there's a lot of diversity in needs with our customer base, and it's really challenging for any one vendor to provide all the solutions that they need, and so that's where it's really about being able to offer them choices and giving them support to be in the right cloud for their workload, and so as we talk about this idea of cloud in the state you said, if they're in one or more clouds, it's really important that they have consistency across those clouds, because otherwise, the crime scene turns into something that's a management headache for everyone. >> Nick, wonder if we could tease that out a little bit, because consistency's important, when I think about multi-vendor in the data center for years, VMWare did a pretty good job of extracting the certain layer. I'm a little worried that we're trying to recreate some of the silos of the past in giant cloud environment, so how do we make sure we learn from the past, and because skillsets are very different, the products underneath are very different, so while there might be certain point applications that I might need, the message here at Amazon is, they've got the broadest and deepest environments, they are, if you're doing multicloud, they're going to be doing one of them, so bring us inside your customers and how we make sure that we don't end up with that crime scene that they've talked about, and all the pieces. >> I think first off, you can't look at technology in a vacuum, you really have to be thinking about people and processes. What can a business actually consume? We run into a lot of talk about containers, and containers is a great path forward to go cloud-native, and that's really easy if you're starting from scratch. If you have 1000 apps, though, that currently sit on-premises, it's really challenging to make that move, and which ones do I replatform, which ones do I lift and shift, and so I think that's one of the things we're doing with our work with VMWare Cloud Foundation, is we have one platform that can handle both virtualization and containers, so you can have a orderly progression towards cloud-native. >> Talk about the people part of it, I think we talked about this a little bit yesterday, Bob, and that's actually something that has come up in a lot of our conversations, is it's not just about the technology, for many reasons. How do you help the people, 'cause part of that's cultural, and that's really a challenging change to undergo. >> You know, I think you have to meet them where they are, right, and that's, I read an article and someone said for analytics that most CEOs still are using Excel, there are all these other really advanced analytics things, but that's what they're most comfortable with. So when we're looking at the fact that all these organizations have really standardized on VMWare, that's a really easy move for them to make, because you can take your existing skillsets, the investments you've made in the software-defined data center, and now you can extend them to the cloud, and you can take the existing best practices that you have in your data center, and you can move those to the cloud, so you're not surprised when you get there with all of the configurations and all the management, all the security challenges. >> And I want to add to that, actually, because I think one of the underlooked aspects of this whole thing, is the idea that, like you said, if you have silos of operation, then you've got challenges, and so I like to say security, for example, begins with who are you, what do you have access to? So if you have different ways of doing that on-prem, than in cloud, you're by definition at a riskier state. Same thing for compliance, same thing for automation, if you've got multiple different tools to use, it's just harder to do. So I think the consistency thing is very, very important. >> Excellent, Bob, you're the straight man for my next question here, because if you listen to our hosts here of AWS, they don't use that multicloud word. Yet the biggest conversation of discussion that I've had across with AWS, with customers, and with the ecosystem here has been Outposts, and absolutely, Amazon might not even use the hybrid term, but absolutely, it is that extension between consistency, between the public cloud and in my data center, so I'd like to hear Dell's perspective, Outposts of course, hugely important. >> Sure, I think it'd be really easy or almost trite to say that "Oh, Amazon is justifying "the fact that there's on-prem infrastructure," right, I mean Andy comes out and says "97% of IT revenue is still on-prem." I think everybody understands that. I think it comes down to the following. Investment protection, trust, and choice. And investment protection is about, organizations today have a huge investment in the way they're doing business now, and clearly VMWare is the lion's share of on-prem virtualization today, so it makes sense to extend that investment toward hybrid cloud, and there's a very natural path to do that. From the perspective of trust, when you look at on-prem infrastructure, who better to work with than Dell EMC, I mean we're number one at HTI, number one in servers, number one in storage, we know how to do on-prem, and now with Dell Technologies Cloud, we're extending that to a very consistent hybrid cloud model with AWS. And the third thing is choice, which is, Outposts is interesting because it's a completely managed service. Some organizations want that managed service. What we bring to the table with Dell Technologies Cloud is either Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, which is you manage it the way you normally manage it, or, VMWare Cloud on Dell EMC, which is a completely managed service, so we have the data centers as a service offering, we have the you manage it, mister customer, which aligns with the way they're doing business, and I think last but not least is this whole idea of cloud economics, and this concept of allowing people to pay for things by the drink, which is something that we're helping organizations do with their on-prem. >> Bob, actually, just want to make sure I understand, when we talk about that managed service, the Outposts solutions with VMWare is expected in 2020, does that then roll under the Dell Technology Cloud offering on VMWare, I just want to make sure how that is expected to go. >> Yeah, so no it doesn't, because that's essentially the Amazon hardware with the VMWare stack on it, on-premises, and what we're offering for a data center as a service solution is VMWare Cloud on Dell EMC, formerly known as Project Dimension, which is the trusted Dell EMC hardware with the verified VMWare stack, very tightly integrated, so it's cloud-like operations on-prem. >> So similar consumption models, similar design points, but different hardware stacks. >> Well, multiple consumption models, which is, I think... >> Yeah, and I was going to say, one of the other things you have to look at, too, when you're thinking about, why now, why is this happening, and I think it's because people are starting to realize, something that we've been saying for a long time, which is that cloud isn't a place, it's an operating model, and so by being able to bring that into the data center, what you're doing is you're extending it to more workloads, and I think that's great for customers, that's what they want, and that's what we're trying to build, ourselves. >> What are some of the, Bob, a question for you, aligning with Stu's question, this week, since the announcement of Outposts, what Amazon is doing there, announced last year, coming to fruition now, what are some of the things that you're hearing around the event from Dell EMC customers, are they understanding what that opportunity is for them? >> Yeah, and we've been doing this for a while, right, so VMWare Cloud on Dell EMC has been general availability since VMworld of 2019, we announced it in 2018, we've got tons of customers that are very interested, thousands of customers running within VMWare Cloud on AWS, and now looking at this data center as a service solution, as an extension to that on-prem. The thing that's cool about it is, they don't have to touch the hardware, they don't have to touch the software, it all gets managed remotely, but it's used just like on-prem infrastructure, right? So it's a great solution. >> Nick, one of the things that always gets talked about here is, there's a big shift from CAPEX to OPEX at the show, one of the things that surprises me is customers get all excited, Amazon comes out with a new feature and they say, "Hey, we're going to give you Insights, "and we're going to save you 30% "over what you were paying last year, "just because you probably weren't configuring it great." In your world, if you came to a customer and said "Oh, hey, we oversold you stuff," and this there, they'd probably be walking you out the door, but Dell's been doing some interesting things, going more cloud-native with the economic model, maybe speak a little bit to that. >> I mean, I think it's something that's great, cloud economics makes it easy to get going with a small investment and scale out, and move more quickly, be more agile, and so what we wanted to do was bring that same agility and ability to kind of innovate and not have the cost be a barrier, by then extending that across our portfolio at Dell Technologies On Demand. So that's really about whether you want to do metered usage, whether you want a subscription or whether I want to purchase hardware up front, wait till I'm going to hit the switch and turn it on and then I'll start getting billed, but then I have the idea, the same thing as cloud, where it's this idea of unlimited capacity at your fingertips, right, it's not actually unlimited, we sometimes see that even some clouds run out of space, but you're able to move quicker, you don't have to wait those three, four, six weeks for the hardware to come in, because it's already sitting there. >> Legacy businesses don't have that much time, because there are invariably in every industry, there is a born in the cloud company that is moving faster, has a different mindset, and it's probably chomping at the bit right behind them, take over that business if that legacy enterprise isn't able to work fast enough. >> Absolutely, but what really makes this really interesting is that we're still offering you more choices, right, so the thing is, there are certain workloads that break cloud economics, whether it's massive storage that, I always tell people "You spin up and spin down VMs, "you never delete data because that is super valuable "to your business," or, we find certain workloads that are steady state, right, cloud is really great when you're scaling up, scaling down, when you're flipping off the switch of the lights when you leave the room. If you leave it on all the time, it can add up, and so what's really nice, not just about bringing the cloud economics into the data center, but by bringing that consistent experience across both the data center and your cloud, is now you can let the business requirements and the application requirements determine what the best place to put the workload is. >> Sorry, so Bob, one of the big themes at this show is transformation, you've got it on your hat. When we talk about the cloud-native space, we always said, "They were the cloud-native companies, "they were born in the cloud." We said, "There are many companies now "that are becoming born again in the cloud." Bring us inside a little bit, what you're seeing, the discussion point is you just can't incrementally get there, it requires executive management, involvement, and it is a radical change in the way you build your applications, and that has a ripple effect through everything that you do. >> It absolutely does. When you think about it, there is an evolution happening in application architectures, and that evolution is from physical to virtual, to now infrastructure's a service to add additional efficiency and automation, orchestration, now container as a service, as we see organizations moving toward cloud-native and containers, to platform as a service and function as a service. And when you think about that, organizations need to bring their existing investments and virtualized applications forward as they're adding on containers, as they're looking at this next generation cloud-native. So we believe the right solution is to preserve that investment and bring that forward so we've been adding cloud-native standard upstream Kubernetes distribution to our Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, and that allows organization to extend our investment, so that's one thing is that architectural evolution. The second thing is what I call the operational evolution that's happening as well. And the operational evolution is, cloud has revolutionized the way people look at IT because it's so easy to use. So what we're doing is bringing that operational evolution to the data center as well, where we're completely integrating the on-prem infrastructure so that you can life cycle manage it in a automated fashion, and we're doing that both for infrastructure as a service and now for container as a service for Kubernetes. So we're excited about both the architectural and operational evolution. >> And Nick, I'd be curious, your viewpoint of this show, it's really a interesting mix of, you've got enterprise, you've got developers, you've got everything in between and personas, so bring us inside some of the conversations you're having, how you have worked with some of those different personas. >> Well I think it's really interesting, 'cause the shift towards containers means a shift towards DevOps, and when you're looking at that, I think what's lost on the way is, when I talk to my friends who've spent a lot of time as ITOps folks, they think very differently than developers. When something goes wrong, their immediate reaction is, "Please roll it back." Whereas a developer thinks "Hold on, let me add some more "code to this, and we'll fix it that way." And so I think the challenge right now is, the burden is shifting, and it's shifting towards developers and one of the things, I think, with our solution and hopefully project-specific with VMWare, what's coming down the path, where they're injecting containers into vSphere, all of that, hopefully what's going to come out of that is, you're going to make the job a little bit easier for developers, 'cause when you start doing DevOps, or god forbid DevSecOps, and you're burdening these people with all these responsibilities, how are they still going to innovate? That's really a big challenge, and I think, when I'm at a show like this, I hear it from both sides, so it's really fascinating to hear the different perspectives, they're not necessarily aligned. >> Yeah, it just, the quick note on that, in Warner's keynote, he puts out the giant thing on the board, "Everything fails all the time." That's not what the enterprise was used to in the old world, and that's what that transformation is, a little bit uncomfortable for many of 'em. >> And speaking of being uncomfortable, Bob, you talked about cloud, especially next-gen cloud, brings up opportunity, a lot of opportunity, but with it comes architectural change, as you mentioned, operational change, but cultural change. Final questions and thoughts, Nick, from you, what are in the respect of the opportunity but those changes, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you're seeing enterprises make, and how can they avoid those? >> Yeah, so I mean the first thing is, I think that people having sweeping mandates. When people say cloud first as a mandate, I think what they're missing in that is, there's so much exuberance, they're not thinking through, what does the workload need, what does the business need, and cloud should absolutely be a big part of anyone's strategy moving forward, but you need to be thoughtful about what you do, and Pat Gelsinger talks about, there's three laws, the laws of physics, the laws of economics, and the laws of the land. I always joke around, we still haven't managed to find a way to travel faster than the speed of light, so latency is always an issue. And then the second thing is, around the shared responsibility model. When you move to infrastructure as a service, people think, "Wow, they're taking care of everything, "this is super easy." And what they haven't always figured out is that they're still on the hook for a lot of things from a security perspective, from a manageability perspective, from a data protection perspective, and if you fail to actually address those, then you might run into some problems down the line. >> Guys, good stuff, always so much to talk about, thank you both for joining Stu and me on the program today, Bob, I'll probably see you again at the airport tonight. >> No doubt. >> We appreciate you joining Stu and me. And, stick around on theCUBE, 'cause later today, Andy Jassy, AWS CEO is going to be on. But for now, I'm Lisa Martin for Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>>LA from Las Vegas. It's the cube hovering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Good morning. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 19 from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. Stu, this is day three of two sets of coverage for the cube and this expo hall has not gotten any less busy. Tons of people still here. >>Lisa, 65,000 I'm sure the throats are a little bit raw. The feet are tired, but there's so much good information and yeah, excited to dig in with some more of our guests. >>Yeah, so much good information that we have. Dell EMC back. Yes, we had them yesterday. There's more to talk about today. Please welcome a couple of guests. We've got Nick Brackney, senior consultant cloud at product marketing. Welcome to the queue of your first time. Happy to have you and Bob Ganley. I feel like it's been about 18 hours, maybe 20 senior consultant cloud product marketing. Welcome back. Thank you. So guys, lots of news like AWS news shot out of the cannon. One of the things though that you can't help but talk about at any event is multi-cloud organizations. The CIO is tell us on the cube all the time. We've inherited the multi-cloud. Sometimes Dave Valentic calls it a crime scene, right? For various reasons. It's not necessarily strategic, but it is becoming a reality. Talk to us about what Dell EMC is seeing. What your customer base with respect. Sorry, that's for Nick multi-cloud. Why, what are you seeing? How are you helping customers navigate it? >>Yeah, I think that, uh, there's a lot of diversity in needs for their customer base and it's really challenging for any one vendor to provide all of the solutions that they need. And so that's, that's where it's really about being able to offer them choices and giving them support to be in the right cloud for their workload. And so as we talk about this idea of cloud in the state, you said, you know, if, if they're in one or more clouds, it's really important that they have consistency across those clouds because otherwise the crime scene turns into something that's a, a management headache for everyone. >>Yeah. Nick, I wonder if we could tease that out a little bit because consistency's important. You know, when I think about, you know, multi-vendor in the data center for years, you know, VMware did a pretty good job of abstracting a certain layer. I'm a little worried that we're trying to recreate some of the silos of the past, you know, in giant cloud environment. So how do we make sure we learn from the past? And because skill sets are very different, the products underneath are very different. So while there might be certain point applications that I might need, the message here at Amazon is, you know, they've got the broadest and deepest environments they are. If you're doing multi-cloud, they're gum. Do one of them. So, you know, bring us inside your customers and how we make sure that we don't end up with that crime scene that Dave talked about and uh, all the pieces. >>I think first off, you can't look at technology in a vacuum. You really have to be thinking about people and processes. What can a business actually consume? You know, we run into a lot of talking about containers and containers is a great path forward to go cloud native. And that's really easy if you're starting from scratch. If you have a thousand apps though that currently sit in on premises, it's really challenging to make that move. And you know, which ones do I replatform, which ones do I lift and shift. And so I think that's one of the things we're doing with, you know, I work with VMR cloud foundation is we have one platform that can handle both virtualization and containers so you can have a orderly progression towards cloud native. >>What about the people part of it? I think we talked about this a little bit yesterday, Bob, and that's actually something that has come up in a lot of our conversations is it's not just about the technology for many reasons. How do you help the people? Because part of that's cultural and that's a really a challenging change to undergo. >>You know, I think you have to meet them where they are. Right? And that's, I read an article and someone said that the, uh, for, for analytics that most CEOs still are using Excel. There are all these other really advanced analytics things, but that's what they're most comfortable with. So when we look at the, the fact that all these organizations have really standardized on VMware, that's a really easy move for them to make because you can take your existing skill sets, you know, the, the investments you've made in the software defined data center and now you can extend them to the cloud and you can take the existing best practices that you have in your data center and you can move those to the cloud. So you're not surprised when you get there with all of the configurations and all the management, all the security challenges. >>And I want to add to that actually because I think one of the underlooked aspects of this whole thing is the idea that, like you said, if you have silos of operation, then you've got challenges. And so I like to say security for example, begins with who are you, what do you have access to? So if you have different ways of doing that on prem than in cloud, you're by definition at a riskier state. Same thing for compliance. Same thing for automation. If you've got multiple different tools to use, you know, it's just harder to do. So I think, you know, the consistency thing is very, very important. >>Excellent. Bob, you, you're the straight man for my next question here because, uh, if you listen to our hosts here of AWS, they don't use that multi-cloud word yet. The biggest conversation of discussion that I've had across with AWS with customers and uh, you know, with the ecosystem here has been outposts and absolutely Amazon might not even use the hybrid term, but absolutely is that extension between inconsistency between the public cloud and in my data center. So I'd like to hear, you know, Dell Dell's perspective outposts of course, hugely important. Sure. >>You know, I think it'd be really easy or almost trite to say that, Oh, you know, Amazon is justifying the fact that there's on prime infrastructure, right? I mean, Andy comes out and says 97% of it revenue still on prem. I think, you know, everybody understands that. I think it comes down to the following investment protection, trust and choice and investment protection is about organizations today have a huge investment in the way they're doing business now and clearly VM where's the lion's share of on-prem virtualization today? So it makes sense to extend that investment toward hybrid cloud and there's a very natural path to do that from the perspective of trust. When you look at on prem infrastructure, who better to work with in Dell EMC? I mean we're number one in HCI, number one in servers, number one in storage, we know how to do on prem and now with Dell technologies cloud we're extending that to a very consistent hybrid cloud model with AWS. >>Uh, and the third thing is, you know, choice, which is outposts is interesting because it's a completely managed service. Some organizations want that managed service. What we bring to the table with Dell technologies cloud is either Delta technologies, cloud platform, which is you manage it the way you normally manage it or the VMware cloud on Dell EMC, which is a completely managed service. So we have the data center as a service offering. We have the you manage it mr customer, which aligns with the way they're doing business. And I think last but not least is this whole idea of cloud economics and this concept of allowing people to pay for things by the drink, which is something that, you know, we're helping organizations do with their on premise. >>Bob actually just want to make sure I understand what you're talk about that managed service, the outpost solutions with VMware's expected in 2020. Does that then roll under the Dell technology cloud offering on E on VMware? I just want to make sure how I ended, how that is expected to. >>Yeah. So no it doesn't because that's essentially um, the Amazon hardware with the VMware stack on it on premises. And what we're offering for a data center as a service solution is a VMware cloud on Dell EMC, formerly known as project dimension, which is, you know, the trusted Dell EMC hardware with the verified VMware stack very tightly integrated. So it's cloud like operations on premise. >>Yeah. Yeah. So similar consumption models, similar design points, but different hardware stacks, >>consumption models, which is I think, yeah, I was going to say one of the other things you have to look at too when you're thinking about why now, why is this happening? And I think it's because people are starting to realize something that we've been saying for a long time, which is that cloud isn't a place, it's an operating model. And so by being able to bring that into the data center, what you're doing is you're extending it to more workloads. And I think that's great for customers. That's what they want and that's what we're trying to build ourselves. >>Bob, a question for you, some of the aligning with Stewart's question this week since the announcement of outpost, what Amazon is doing announced last year coming to fruition now, what are some of the things that you're hearing around the event from Dell EMC customers? Are they, are they understanding what that opportunity is for them? Yeah, >>we've been doing this for a while, right? So, um, VMware cloud on Dell EMC has been general availability since VM world of 2019 we announced it in 2018 we've got tons of customers that are very interested, thousands of customers running, um, within VMware cloud on AWS and now looking at this data center as a service solution, as an extension to that on prem. The thing that's cool about it is that they don't have to touch the hardware, they don't have to touch the software. It all gets managed remotely, but it's used just like on prem infrastructure. Right. So it's a great solution. >>Yup. Nica what one of the things that always gets talked about here is there's a big shift from apex to AFEX, uh, at this show. Uh, one of the things that surprises me as customers get all excited, Amazon comes out with new feature and they said, Hey, we're going to give you insight and we're going to save you 30% over what you were paying last year. Just because you probably weren't configuring it crate in your world. If you came to a customer and said, Oh, Hey, we oversold you stuff in this there, they'd probably be walking you out the door. But Dell has been doing some interesting things, going more cloud native with the economic model. Maybe speak a little bit to that. >>I have, I mean, I think it's something that's great. You know, cloud economics makes it easy to get going with a, with a small investment and scale out and, and, uh, move more quickly when be more agile. And so what we wanted to do was bring that same agility and ability to kind of innovate, uh, and, and not have the cost be a barrier by then extending that across our portfolio at Dell technologies on demand. So that's really about, you know, whether you want to do metered usage, whether you want a subscription or whether, you know, I want to, uh, you know, purchase hardware upfront, wait till I'm going to hit the switch and turn it on, and then I'll start getting built. But then I have the idea, the same thing as cloud, where it's, it's this idea of unlimited capacity at your fingertips, right? It's, it's not actually unlimited. We sometimes see that some, even some clouds run out of space, but it's, it's, you're able to move quicker. You don't have to wait those three, four, six weeks for the hardware to come in because it's already sitting there. >>Well, in legacy businesses don't have that much time because there are invariably in every industry, there is a born in the cloud company that is moving faster, has a different mindset and it's probably chomping at the bit right behind them. Take over that business. If that legacy enterprise isn't able to work fast enough. >>Absolutely. But what really makes us really interesting is that we're still offering you more choices, right? So the thing is, is there are certain workloads that break cloud economics, whether it's massive storage that, you know, I always tell people, you spin up and spin down VMs, you never delete data because that is super valuable to your business or you know, uh, we find certain workloads that are steady state, right? You know, cloud is really great when you're scaling up. Scaling down, when you're, you know, flipping off the switch of the lights. When you leave the room, if you leave it on all the time it can add up. And so it's really nice not just about bringing the cloud economics into the data center, but by bringing that consistent experience across both the data center and your cloud is now you can let the business requirements and the application requirements determine what the best place to put the workload is. Yeah. >>So, sorry. So Bob won, one of the big themes at this show is transformation. You've got it on your hat. When we talk about the cloud native space, uh, we were said there were the cloud native companies, they were born in the cloud. We said there are many companies that are becoming born again in the cloud. You know, bring us inside a little bit. What you're seeing, just the discussion point is you just can't incrementally get there. It requires, you know, executive management, uh, involvement and you know, it is a radical change in the way you build your application. And that has a ripple effect through everything that you do. >>Yeah, absolutely does. When you think about it, there is an evolution happening in application architectures and that evolution is from physical to virtual to now infrastructure is a service to add the additional efficiency and automation orchestration. Now container as a service, as we see organizations moving toward cloud native and containers to platform as a service and function as a service. And when you think about that, organizations need to bring their existing investments in virtualized applications forward as they're adding on containers as they're looking at this next generation cloud native. So we believe the right solution is to preserve that investment and bring that forward. So we've been adding cloud native, um, you know, standard upstream Kubernetes distribution to, uh, our Dell technologies cloud platform and that allows organizations to extend our investments. So that's one thing is that architectural evolution. The second thing is what I call the operational evolution that's happening as well. And the operational evolution is, you know, cloud has revolutionized the way people look at it because it's so easy to use. So what we're doing is bringing that operational evolution to the data center as well, where we're completely integrating the on prem infrastructure so that you can life cycle management in an automated fashion. And we're doing that both for infrastructure as a service and now for container as a service for Cooper daddy's. So we're excited about both the architectural and operational evolution. >>Well, and Nick, I'd be curious your viewpoint of this show, it's really a interesting mix of you've got enterprise, you've got developers, you've got everything in between and personas. So brick is inside something for the conversations you're having, how you worked with some of those different personas. >>I think it's really interesting because the shift towards containers means a shift dev ops. And when you're looking at that, uh, I think what's lost in the way is when I went and talked to my friends who spent a lot of time as it ops folks, they think very differently than developers. When something goes wrong, their immediate reaction is, please roll it back. Whereas a developer, thanks, hold on, let me add some more code to this and we'll fix it that way. And so I think the challenge right now is, is the burden is shifting and it's shifting towards developers. And one of the things I think with our solution and you know, hopefully, you know, project Pacific with VMware, what's coming down the path where they're, they're injecting, you know, containers into vSphere, all of that. Hopefully what's going to come out of that is, is you're going to make the job a little bit easier for developers because when you start doing dev ops or God forbid dev sec ops, and you're burdening these people with all these responsibilities, how are they still gonna innovate? That's really a big challenge. And I think when I'm at a show like this, I hear it from both sides. So it's really fascinating to hear the different perspectives and they're not necessarily aligned. >>Yeah, it's just that the, the quick note on that, in order's keynote, he puts out the giant thing on the board. You know, everything fails all the time. That's not what the enterprise was used to in the old world. And that's what that transformation is a little bit uncomfortable for many of them. >>And speaking of being uncomfortable, you know, Bobby talked about cloud, especially next gen cloud brings up opportunities, a lot of opportunity, but with it comes architectural change as you mentioned, uh, operational change but cultural change. Final questions and thoughts, Nick, from you, what are in the respect of the opportunity, but those changes, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you're seeing enterprises make and how can they avoid those? >>Yeah, so I mean, the first thing is I think that people have been sweeping mandates. When people say cloud first as a mandate, I think what they're, what they're missing in that is there's so much exuberance. They're not thinking through what is the workload need, what does the business need? And cloud should absolutely be a big part of anyone's strategy moving forward. But you need to be thoughtful about what you do. And, and uh, Pat Pat Gelsinger talks about there's three laws, the laws of physics, the laws of economics and then the laws of the land. You know, I always joke around, we still haven't managed to find a way to travel faster than the speed of light. So latency is always an issue. And then the second thing is, uh, around the shared responsibility model. You know, when you move to infrastructure as a service, people think, wow, I, I, they're taking care of everything. This is super easy. And what they haven't always figured out is that they're still on the hook for a lot of things from a security perspective, from a manageability perspective, from a data protection perspective. And if you fail to actually address those, then you might run into some problems down the line. >>Guys, good stuff. Always so much to talk about. Thank you both for joining Stu and me on the program today. Bob, I probably see again at the airport tonight. We appreciate you joining soon and stick around on the QTC is later today. Andy Jassy AWS CEO is going to be on, but for now, I'm Lisa Martin for. Thanks for watching the cube.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2019, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with it's Ecosystem partners. >> Good morning, welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin live at AWS re:Invent. Day two of theCUBEs coverage. I am with Stu Miniman, and Stu and I are pleased to welcome a couple of guests of our own from Dell EMC. To my left is Joe CaraDonna, the VP of engineering technology. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Good to be here. >> And then one of our alumni, we've got Bob Ganley, senior consultant Cloud product marketing. Welcome back. >> Thank you. Glad to be here. >> So guys, here we are at AWS re:Invent, with 60 plus thousand people all over the strip here. We know Dell technologies, Dell EMC well, big friends of theCUBE. Joe, Dell, AWS, what's going on? You guys are here. >> Apparently Cloud is a thing. >> Lisa: I heard that. I think I've seen the sticker. >> Yeah, you've seen the sticker. Over the last year, we've been busy rolling out new Cloud services. I mean, look around right. It's important to our customers that we can deliver hybrid Cloud solutions to them, that are meaningful to them and to help them get their workloads to the Cloud. and to be able to migrate, move between Clouds and data center. >> Yeah, Joe, maybe expand a little on this. So we watched when VMware made the partnership announcement with AWS a couple of years ago, which sent ripples through the industry. And VMware has had a large presence at this show, we've seen a lot of announcements and movements with Dell, Dell technologies, Dell EMC over the last year or more, but this is the first year that Dell's actually exhibiting here so help explain for our audience a little bit that dynamic with leveraging VMware and also what Dell is bringing to this ecosystem. >> Yeah, sure. I mean, the way we think about it is, it's really a multi-level stack, you have the application layer and you've got the data layer. So applications with VMware, we're focusing on enabling applications, whether they're VMs or containerized now, being able to move those to the Cloud, move them on-prem. Same is true for data. And data is actually the harder part of the problem, in my opinion, all right, because data has gravity. It's just big, it's hard to move, the principles of data in the Cloud are the same as they are on-prem where you still have to provide the high availability and the accessibility and the security and the capacity and scale in the Cloud as you would in the data center. And what we've been doing here, with our Cloud storage services is bringing essentially our range as a service, to the Cloud. >> You talked about some of those changes and absolutely, data's at the center of everything. We've been saying for a long time, you talk about digital transformation, the outcome of that is if you're not letting data drive your decisions, you really haven't been successful there. One of the biggest challenges beyond data, is the applications. Customers have hundreds, if not thousands of applications, they're building new ones, they're migrating, they're breaking them apart in to micro services, Bob, help us understand where that intersects with what you're talking with customers about. >> Yeah, absolutely. So one of the reasons we're here is most organizations today are leveraging some public Cloud services and at the same time, most organizations have investment on-prem infrastructure. I think we heard Andy say in the keynote yesterday, 97% of all enterprise IT spend is on-prem right now. So organizations are trying to figure out how to make those work together. And that's really what we're here to do, is help organizations figure out how to make their big on-prem investment work well with their public Cloud investment and AWS is clearly the leader there in that space and so we're here to work with our customers in order to help them really bridge that gap between public Cloud and private Cloud and make them work together well. >> And Bob, where does that conversation start? Because one of the other things that Andy talked about is that, his four essentials for transformation is it's got to start at the senior executive level, strategic vision that's aggressively pushed down throughout the organization. Are you now having conversations at that CEO level for them to really include this value of data and apps as part of an overall business transformation? >> Yeah, definitely. If you think about it, it's all about people, process and technology. And technology is only a small part of it. And I think that's the important thing about what Andy was saying in the keynote yesterday, is that it's about making sure that Cloud as an operating model, not as a place, but as an operating model, gets adopted across your organization. And that has to have senior leadership investment. Yeah, they have to be invested in this move, but both from an applications and a data perspective. >> Yeah and on the technology side of things, you want to be able to give the developers the tools they need so they can develop those Cloud native applications. So in the on-prem sphere, we have ECS or objects stored kind of technology for bringing an object to data center. We're plugging into kubernetes every which way. With VMware, we're developing CSI drivers across our storage portfolio to be able to plug in to these kubernetes environments. And we're enabling for data and application migration across environments, as well. >> In many ways, Joe, we've seen, there's a really disaggregation of how people build things. When I talk to the developer community, hybrid is the model that many of them are using, but it used to be nice in the old days as, I bought a box and it had all the feature checklist that I wanted. Now, I need to put together all these micro services. So help us understand some of those services that you provide everywhere. >> It's a horror, right? What did Andy Jassy say yesterday, these are your father's data requirements, right? And he's right about that because what's happening with data is it's sprawling. You have them in data centers, you have them in Cloud, you have them in multiple Clouds, you have them in SaaS portals, you have it on file services and blog services, and how do you wrap your arms around that? And especially when you start looking at use cases like data analytics and you start thinking about data sets, how do you manage data sets? Maybe I had my data born on-prem and I want to do my analytics in the Cloud, how do I even wrap my hands around data sets? So we have a product called ClarityNow, that in fact does that. It indexes billions of files and objects across our storage, across our Cloud services, across Amazon S3, across third party NAS systems as well, and you can get a single pane of glass to see where your files and your objects reside. You can tag it, you can search upon it, you can create data sets based on search, on your tags and your meta data, to then operate on those data sets. So the rules, data's being used in new and different ways, they need new ways to manage it and these are some of the solutions that we're bringing to market. >> You mentioned Multicloud, I wanted to chat about that. We know it's not a word that AWS likes. >> Joe: Can we say that here? >> Yeah. >> On theCUBE, absolutely. >> This is theCUBE, exactly. But the reality is, as we talked to, and Stu knows as well, most CIO's say, we've inherited this mess, of Multicloud, often symptomatically, not as a strategic direction, give us an overview of what Dell EMC, I'll ask you both the same question, and Joe we'll start with you, how are you helping customers address, whether they've inherited Multicloud through M&A acquisition, or developer choice, how do they really extract value from that data, that they know, there's business insights in here that can allow us to differentiate our business, but we have all of this sprawl. What's the answer for that? >> Well some of that is ClarityNow, that I was talking about, the ability to see your data, because half the battle is seeing your data, being able to see it. Also, with Multicloud, whether you inherit it, or whether it was intentional or not, we're setting out our solutions are Multicloud, you can run them anywhere. But not only that, the twist to Multicloud is, well what if you made your data available to multiple clouds simultaneously. And why would you want to do that? One reason we want to go that path is maybe you want to use the best services from each Cloud. But you don't want to move your data around because again it has gravity and it takes time and money and resources to do that. Through our Cloud Storage Services, it's centralized, and you can attach to whatever Cloud you want. So some of that is around taking advantage of that, some of that's around data brokering, we heard Andy talk a little bit about that this morning, where you may have data sets that you want to sell to your customers and they may be running in other Clouds. And some of that is, you may want to switch Clouds due to the services they have, the economics or perhaps even the requirements of your applications. >> Yeah, from an application perspective, for us it's really about consistency, right. So we say it's consistency in two ways, consistent infrastructure and consistent operations. And so we talk about consistent infrastructure, we want to help organizations be able to take that virtual machine and move it. Where is the best place for it, right? So it's about right workload, right Cloud. And we talk about application portfolio analysis and helping organizations figure out, what is that set of applications that they have? What should they do with those applications? Which ones are right to move to Cloud? Which ones should they not invest in and kind of let retire? And so that's another aspect of that people and process thing that we talked about earlier. Helping organizations look at that application portfolio and then take that consistent infrastructure, use that multiple Clouds with that, and then consistent operations which is a single management control plane that can help you have consistency between the way you run your on-prem and the way you run your public Cloud. >> Yeah and give them the freedom to choose the Cloud they want for the workload they want. >> And is that the data level where the differences between, we'll say the public Cloud files, is most exposed? Is it at the data layer where the differences in, we'll say AWS versus it's competitors, is that where the differences between the features and the functionalities is most exposed? >> I think so. I think that one place that we think public Cloud is weak, is file. File workloads. And one of the things we're trying to do is bring consistent file, whether it's on-prem or across the Clouds, through with our Cloud Storage Services at Isilon and the scale and the throughput that those systems can provide, bringing consistent file services, whether it's NFS, SNB or even HDFS or the snapshotting capabilities. And as equally as important, that native replication capabilities across these environments. >> I wonder if we could talk a little bit about some of the organizational changes, the transformation was one of the key takeaways that Andy Jassy was talking about in his three hour keynote yesterday. We've watched for more than a decade now, the role of IT compared to the business, and we know that it's not only does IT need to respond to the business but that data discussion we have better be driving the business, because if you're not leveraging your data, your competition definitely will. I want to get your opinion as to just the positions of power and who you're talking to and what are some of the successful companies doing to help lead this type of change. >> I'll go. I think IT and business are coming together more, the lines are blurring there. And IT's being stretched in to new directions now, they have to serve customers with new demands. So whether it's managing storage or AIs or servers, or VMware environments now being pushed in to things like now managing analytics, kind of environment, right? And all the tools associated with that. Whether it's Cassandra or TetraFlow, being able to stretch, and being able to provide the kind of services that the business requires. >> And up the stack too. >> Yeah. When you talk about the fact that business and IT need to work together, it's kind of like an obvious statement, right? What that really means is, that there needs to be a way to help organizations get to responding more quickly to what the needs of the business are. It's about agility. It's about the ability to respond quickly. So you see organizations moving from waterfall process for development to Agile and you see that being supported by Cloud native architectures, and organizations need to take and be able to do that in a way that preserves the investments that they have today. So most organizations are on this journey from physical to virtual to infrastructure as a service, to container as a service and beyond and they don't want to throw away those investments that they have in existing virtualization, in existing skill sets, and so what we're really doing is helping organizations move to that place where they can adopt Cloud Native while bringing forward those investments they have in traditional infrastructure. So we think that's helping organizations work better together, both from a technology and a business perspective. >> And as far as the kind of people we talk to, I mean data science is growing and growing, data science is becoming more part of the conversation. CIO's as well, right? I mean behind all this, again, is that data that we keep coming back to. You have to ensure the governance of that data, right? That it's being controlled and it's within compliance. >> So we started off the conversation talking about that this was Dell's first year. So 60, 65,000 here. There's a sprawling ecosystem. One of the largest ones here. What do you want to really emphasize? Give us the final takeaway as to how people should think about Dell Technologies in the Cloud ecosystem. >> Yeah, I think, we know our customers want to be able to leverage the Cloud, the kind of conversation we're having with customers is more around, how can I use the Cloud to optimize my business? And that's going to vary on a workload by workload basis. We feel it's our job to arm the customer with the tools they need, right? To be able to have hybrid Cloud architectures, to be able to have the freedom to run the applications wherever they want, consume infrastructure in a way they want it to be consumed, and we're there for them. >> Yeah, I think it's really about a couple of things. One is trust, and the other one is choice. So if you think about it, organizations need to move in to this Cloud world in a way that brings forward those investments that they've made. Dell EMC is the number one provider of hyper-converged infrastructure, of servers, and we can help organizations understand that Cloud operating model, and how to bring the private Cloud investments that they have today forward to work well with the public Cloud investments that they're making, clearly. So it's really about trust and choice of how they implement. >> Trust is a big deal. >> Absolutely. >> I mean, we're the number one storage vendor for a reason. Our customers trust us with their data. >> Well Joe, Bob, thank you so much for joining me and Stu on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And sharing with us what you guys are doing at Dell, AWS. The trust and the choice that you're delivering to your customers, we'll see you at Dell Technologies World. >> We'll see you here next year. >> All right. You got it. All right. For our guests and for Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE, day two of our coverage of AWS re:Invent '19. Thanks for watching. (upbeat, title music)

>>Bly from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cube covering ifs world conference 2019 brought to you by ifs. >>Okay. We're back in Boston, Massachusetts ifs world day one. You walked into cube Dave Vellante with Paul Gillen boss Devoss is here. He's the director of ISF I F S labs and Bob Dico who's the vice president of AI and RPA at ifs jets. Welcome. Good to see you again. Good morning bossy. We're on last year. I'm talking about innovation ifs labs. First of all, tell us about ifs labs and what you've been up to in the last 12 months. Well, I have has Lapsis a functioning as the new technology incubator. Fire Fest writes over continuously looking at opportunities to bring innovation into, into product and help our customers take advantage of all the new things out there to yeah. To, to create better businesses. And one of the things I talked about last year is how we want to be close to our customers. And I think, uh, that's what we have been doing over the pasta pasta year. Really be close to our customers. So Bob, you got, you got the cool title, AI, RPA, all the hot cool topics. So help us understand what role you guys play as ifs. As a software developer, are you building AI? Are you building RPA? Are you integrating it? Yes, yes. Get your paint. >>I mean, our value to our customers comes from wrapping up the technology, the AI, the RPA, the IOT into product in a way that it's going to help their business. So it's going to be easy to use. They're not going to need to be a technical specialist to take advantage of it. It's going to be embedded in the product in a way they can take advantage of very easily that that's the key for us as a software developer. We don't want to offer them a platform that they can just go and do their own thing. We want to sort of control it, make it easier for them. >>So I presume it's not a coincidence that you guys are on together. So this stuff starts in the labs and then your job is to commercialize it. Right? So, so take machine intelligence for example. I mean it can be so many things to so many different people. Take us back to sort of, you know, the starting point, you know, within reason of your work on machine intelligence, what you were thinking at the time, maybe some of the experiments that you did and how it ends up in the product. Oh, very good question. Right? So I think we start at a, Oh, well first of all, I think ifs has been using a machine learning at, at various points in our products for many, many years of Trumbull in our dynamic scheduling engine. We have been using neural networks to optimize fuel serve scheduling for quite some many years. >>But I think, um, if we go back like two years, what we sold is that, uh, there, there's a real potential, um, in our products that if you will take machine learning algorithms inside of the product to actually, um, help ultimately certain decisions in there, um, that could potentially help our business quite a bit. And the role of ifs lapse back in the day as that we just started experimenting, right? So we went out to different customers. Uh, we started engaging with them to see, okay, what kind of data do we have, what kind of use cases are there? And basically based on that, we sort of developed a vision around AI and a division back in the day was based on on three important aspects, human machine interaction optimization and automation. And that kind of really lended well with our customer use case. We talked quite a bit about that or the previous world conference. >>So at that point we basically decided, okay, you know what, we need to make serious work of this, uh, experimenting as boots. But at a certain point you have to conclude that the experiments were successful, which we did. And at that point we decided to look at, okay, how can we make this into a product and how to normally go system. We started engaging with them more intensively and starting to hand over in this guys, we decided the most also a good moment to bring somebody on board that actually has even more experience and knowledge in AI and what we already had as hive as labs. But that could basically take over the Baton. And say, okay, now I am going to run with it and actually start commercializing and productizing that still in collaboration with IVIS laps. But yeah, taking that next step in the road and then then Bob came onboard. >>Christian Pedersen made the point during the keynote this morning that you have to avoid the, the appeal of technology for technology's sake. You have to have it. I start with the business use case. You are both very technology, very deep into the technology. How do you keep disciplined to avoid letting the technology lead your, your activities? >>Well, both. Yeah. So, so I think a good example is what we see this world's going fronts as well. It is staying closer to customer and, and, and accepting and realizing that there is no, um, there's no use in just creating technology for sake of technology as you say yourself. So what we did here for example, is that we showcase collaboration projects with, with customers. So, for example, we show showcase a woman chair pack, which um, as a, as a manufacturing of spouting pouches down here in Massachusetts actually, uh, and they wanted to invest in robotics to get our widows. So what we basically did is actually wind into their factory literally on the factory floor and start innovating there. So instead of just thinking about, okay, how do robotics and AI for subrogations or one of our older products work together, we set, let's experiment on the shop floor off a customer instead of inside of the ivory towers. Sometimes our competitors to them, they'll start to answer your question. >>Sure. I can pick up a little, a little feasible. Yeah. Well, so in, I think the really important thing, and again, Christian touched on it this morning is not the individual technologies themselves. It's how they work together. Um, we see a lot of the underlying technologies becoming more commoditized. That's not where companies are really starting to differentiate algorithms after a while become algorithms. There's a good way of doing things. They might evolve slightly over time, but effectively you can open source a lot of these things. You can take advantage, the value comes from that next layer up. How you take those technologies together, how you can create end to end processes. So if we take something like predictive, we would have an asset. We would have sensors on that asset that would be providing real time data, uh, to an IOT system. We can combine that with historical maintenance data stored within a classic ERP system. >>We can pull that together, use machine learning on it to make a prediction for when that machine is gonna break down. And based on that prediction, we can raise a work order and if we do that over enough assets, we can then optimize our technicians. So instead of having to wait for it to break down, we can know in advance, we can plan for people to be in the right the right place. It's that end to end process where the value is. We have to bring that together in a way that we can offer it to our customers. There's certainly, you know, a lot of talk in the press about machines replacing humans. Machine of all machines have always replaced humans. But for the first time in history, it's with cognitive functions. Now it's, people get freaked out. A little bit about that. I'm hearing a theme of, of augmentation, you know, at this event. >>But I wonder if you could share your thoughts with regard to things like AI automation, robotic process automation. How are customers, you know, adopting them? Is there sort of concern up front? I mean we've talked to a number of RPA customers that, you know, initially maybe are hesitant but then say, wow, I'm automating all those tasks that I hate and sort of lean in. But at the same time, you know, it's clear that this could have an effect on people's jobs and lives. What are your thoughts? Sure. Do you want to kick off on them? Yeah, I'll know. Yeah, absolutely. That's fine. So I think in terms of the, the automation, the low level tasks, as you say, that can free up people to focus on higher value activities. Something like RPA, those bots, they can work 24, seven, they can do it error free. >>Um, it's often doing work that people don't enjoy anyway. So that tends to actually raise morale, raise productivity, and allow you to do tasks faster. And the augmentation, I think is where it gets very interesting because you need to, you often don't want to automate all your decisions. You want people to have the final say, but you want to provide them more information, better, more pertinent ways of making that decision. And so it's very important. If you can do that, then you've got to build the trust with them. If you're going to give them an AI decision that's just out of a black box and just say, there's a 70% chance of this happening. And what I founded in my career is that people don't tend to believe that or they start questioning it and that's where you have difficulty. So this is where explainable AI comes in. >>I do to be able to state clearly why that prediction is being made, what are the key drivers going into it? Or if that's not possible, at least giving them the confidence to see, well, you're not sure about this prediction. You can play around with it. You can see I'm right, but I'm going to make you more comfortable and then hopefully you're going to understand and, and sort of move with it. And then it starts sort of finding its way more naturally into the workplace. So that's, I think the key to building up successful open sexually. What it is is it's sort of giving a human the, the, the parameters the and saying, okay, now you can make the call as to whether or not you want to place that bet or make a different decision or hold off and get more data. Is that right? >>Uh, yeah. I think a lot of it is about setting the threshold and the parameters with within which you want to operate. Often if a model is very confident, either you know, a yes or a no, you probably be quite happy to let it automate. Take that three, it's the borderline decision where it gets interesting. You probably would still want someone to look over it, but you want them to do it consistently. You want them to do it using all the information to hand and say that's what you do. You're presented to them. And to add to that, um, I think we also should not forget they said a lot of our customers, a lot of companies are, are actually struggling finding quality stuff, right? I mean aging of the workforce riots, we're, we're old. I'm retiring eventually. Right? So aging of the workforce is a potential issue. >>Funding, lack of quality. Stop. So if I go back to the chair pack example I was just talking about, um, and, and, and some of the benefits they get out of that robotics projects, um, um, is of course they're saving money right there. They're saving about one point $5 million a year on money on that project, but their most important benefits for them, it's actually the fact that I have been able to move the people from the work floor doing that into higher scope positions, effectively countering the labor shortage today. They were limited in their operations, but in fact, I had two few quality stuff. And by putting the robots in, they were able to reposition those people and that's for them the most important benefits. So I think there's always a little bit of a balance. Um, but I also think we eventually need robots. >>We need ultimation to also keep up with the work that needs to be done. Maybe you can speak to Bobby, you can speak to software robots. We've, Pete with people think of robots, they tend to think of machines, but in fact software robots are, where are the a, the real growth is right now, the greatest growth is right now. How pervasive will software robots be in the workplace do you think in the three to five years? >> I think the software robots as they are now within the RPA space, um, they fulfill a sort of part of the Avril automation picture, but they're never going to be the whole thing. I see them very much as bringing different systems together, moving data between systems, allowing them to interact more effectively. But, um, within systems themselves, uh, you know, the bots can only really scratched the surface. >>They're interacting with software in the same way a human would on the whole by clicking buttons going through, et cetera, beneath the surface. Uh, you know, for example, within the ifs products we have got data understanding how people interact with our products. We can use machine learning on that data to learn, to make recommendations to do things that our software but wouldn't be able to see. So I think it's a combination. There's software bots, they're kind of on the outside looking in, but they're very good at bringing things together. And then insight you've got that sort of deeper automation to take real advantage of the individual pieces of software. >> This may be a little out there, but you guys >>are, you guys are deep into, into the next generation lot to talk right now about quantum and how we could see workable quantum computers within the next two to two to three years. How, what do you think the, the outlook is there? How is that going to shake things up? So >>let me answer this. We were actually a having an active project and I for slabs currently could looking at quantum computing, right? Um, there's a lot of promise in it. Uh, there's also a lot of unfilled, unfulfilled problems in that, right? But if you look at the, the potential, I think where it really starts playing, um, into, uh, into benefits is if the larger the, the, the optimization problems, the larger the algorithms are that we have to run, the more benefits it actually starts bringing us. So if you're asking me for an for an outlook, I say there is potential definitely, especially in optimization problems. Right. Um, but I also think that the realistic outlook is quite far out. Uh, yes, we're all experimenting it and I think it's our responsibility as ifs or ciphers laps to also look on what it could potentially mean for applications as we FSI Fs. >>But my personal opinion is the odd Lucas. Yeah. So what comes five to 10 years out? What comes first? Quantum computing or fully autonomous driverless vehicles? Oh, that's a tricky question. I mean, I would say in terms of the practical commercial application, it's going to be the latter in that much so that's quite a ways off. Yeah, I think so. Of course. Question back on on RPA, what are you guys exactly doing on RPA? Are you developing your own robotic process automation software or are you integrating, doing both say within the products? We, you know, if we think of RPA as, as this means of interacting with the graphical user interface in a way that a human would within the product. Um, we, we're thinking more in terms of automating processes using the machine learning as I mentioned, to learn from experience, et cetera. Uh, in a way that will take advantage of things like our API eighth, an API APIs that are discussed on main stage today. >>RPA is very much our way of interacting with other systems, allowing other systems when trapped with ifs, allowing us to, to send messages out. So we need to make it as easy as possible for those bots to call us. Uh, you know, that can be by making our screens nice and accessible and easy to use. But I think the way that RPA is going, a lot of the major vendors are becoming orchestrators really. They're creating these, these studios where you can drag and drop different components into to do ACR, provide cognitive services and you know, elements that you could drag and drop in would be to say, ah, take data from a file and load it into ifs and put it in a purchase order. And you can just drag that in and then it doesn't really matter how it connects to YFS. It can do that via the API. And I think it probably will say it's creating the ability to talk to ifs. That's the most important thing for us. So you're making your products a RPA ready, friendly >>you, it sounds like you're using it for your own purposes, but you're not an RPA vendor per se. You know what I'm saying? Okay. Here's how you do an automation. You're gonna integrate that with other RPA leadership product. I think we would really take a more firm partner approach to it. Right? So if a customer, I mean, there's different ways of integrating systems to get our RPA as a Google on there. There's other ways as well, right? That if a customer actually, um, wants to integrate the systems together using RPA, very good choice, we make sure that our products are as ready as much for that as possible. Of course we will look at the partner ecosystem to make sure that we have sufficient and the right partners in there that a customer has as a choice in what we recommends. But basically we say where we want to be agnostic to what kind of RPA feminists sits in there that was standing there was obviously a lot of geopolitical stuff going on with tariffs and the like. >>So not withstanding that, do you feel as though things like automation, RPA, AI will swing the pendulum back to onshore manufacturing, whether it's Europe or, or U S or is the costs still so dramatically advantageous to, you know, manufacture in China? Well, that pendulum swing in your opinion as a result of automation? Um, I have a good, good question. Um, I'm not sure it's will completely swing, but it will definitely be influenced. Right. One of the examples I've seen in the RPA space ride wire a company before we would actually have an outsourcing project in India where people would just type over D uh, DDD, the purchase orders right now. Now in RPA bolts scans. I didn't, so they don't need the Indian North shore anymore. But it's always a balance between, you know, what's the benefit of what's the cost of developing technology and that's, and it's, and, and it's almost like a macro economical sort of discussion. >>One of the discussions I had with my colleagues in Sri Lanka, um, and, and maybe completely off topic example, we were talking about carwash, right? So us in the, in the Western world we have car wash where you drive your car through, right? They don't have them in Sri Lankan. All the car washes are by hands. But the difference is because labor is cheaper there that it's actually cheaper to have people washing your car while we'd also in the us for example, that's more expensive than actually having a machine doing it. Right. So it is a, it's a macro economical sort of question that is quite interesting to see how that develops over the next couple of years. All right, Jess. Well thanks very much for coming on the cube. Great discussion. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. You're welcome. All right. I'll keep it right there, but he gave a latte. Paul Gillen moved back. Ifs world from Boston. You watch in the queue.