>> 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)

(light music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm really pleased to announce a collaboration with Rob Strechay. He's a guest cube analyst, and we'll be working together to extract the signal from the noise. Rob is a long-time product pro, working at a number of firms including AWS, HP, HPE, NetApp, Snowplow. I did a stint as an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Rob, good to see you. Thanks for coming into our Marlboro Studios. >> Well, thank you for having me. It's always great to be here. >> I'm really excited about working with you. We've known each other for a long time. You've been in the Cube a bunch. You know, you're in between gigs, and I think we can have a lot of fun together. Covering events, covering trends. So. let's get into it. What's happening out there? We're sort of exited the isolation economy. Things were booming. Now, everybody's tapping the brakes. From your standpoint, what are you seeing out there? >> Yeah. I'm seeing that people are really looking how to get more out of their data. How they're bringing things together, how they're looking at the costs of Cloud, and understanding how are they building out their SaaS applications. And understanding that when they go in and actually start to use Cloud, it's not only just using the base services anymore. They're looking at, how do I use these platforms as a service? Some are easier than others, and they're trying to understand, how do I get more value out of that relationship with the Cloud? They're also consolidating the number of Clouds that they have, I would say to try to better optimize their spend, and getting better pricing for that matter. >> Are you seeing people unhook Clouds, or just reduce maybe certain Cloud activities and going maybe instead of 60/40 going 90/10? >> Correct. It's more like the 90/10 type of rule where they're starting to say, Hey I'm not going to get rid of Azure or AWS or Google. I'm going to move a portion of this over that I was using on this one service. Maybe I got a great two-year contract to start with on this platform as a service or a database as a service. I'm going to unhook from that and maybe go with an independent. Maybe with something like a Snowflake or a Databricks on top of another Cloud, so that I can consolidate down. But it also gives them more flexibility as well. >> In our last breaking analysis, Rob, we identified six factors that were reducing Cloud consumption. There were factors and customer tactics. And I want to get your take on this. So, some of the factors really, you got fewer mortgage originations. FinTech, obviously big Cloud user. Crypto, not as much activity there. Lower ad spending means less Cloud. And then one of 'em, which you kind of disagreed with was less, less analytics, you know, fewer... Less frequency of calculations. I'll come back to that. But then optimizing compute using Graviton or AMD instances moving to cheaper storage tiers. That of course makes sense. And then optimize pricing plans. Maybe going from On Demand, you know, to, you know, instead of pay by the drink, buy in volume. Okay. So, first of all, do those make sense to you with the exception? We'll come back and talk about the analytics piece. Is that what you're seeing from customers? >> Yeah, I think so. I think that was pretty much dead on with what I'm seeing from customers and the ones that I go out and talk to. A lot of times they're trying to really monetize their, you know, understand how their business utilizes these Clouds. And, where their spend is going in those Clouds. Can they use, you know, lower tiers of storage? Do they really need the best processors? Do they need to be using Intel or can they get away with AMD or Graviton 2 or 3? Or do they need to move in? And, I think when you look at all of these Clouds, they always have pricing curves that are arcs from the newest to the oldest stuff. And you can play games with that. And understanding how you can actually lower your costs by looking at maybe some of the older generation. Maybe your application was written 10 years ago. You don't necessarily have to be on the best, newest processor for that application per se. >> So last, I want to come back to this whole analytics piece. Last June, I think it was June, Dev Ittycheria, who's the-- I call him Dev. Spelled Dev, pronounced Dave. (chuckles softly) Same pronunciation, different spelling. Dev Ittycheria, CEO of Mongo, on the earnings call. He was getting, you know, hit. Things were starting to get a little less visible in terms of, you know, the outlook. And people were pushing him like... Because you're in the Cloud, is it easier to dial down? And he said, because we're the document database, we support transaction applications. We're less discretionary than say, analytics. Well on the Snowflake earnings call, that same month or the month after, they were all over Slootman and Scarpelli. Oh, the Mongo CEO said that they're less discretionary than analytics. And Snowflake was an interesting comment. They basically said, look, we're the Cloud. You can dial it up, you can dial it down, but the area under the curve over a period of time is going to be the same, because they get their customers to commit. What do you say? You disagreed with the notion that people are running their calculations less frequently. Is that because they're trying to do a better job of targeting customers in near real time? What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, I think they're moving away from using people and more expensive marketing. Or, they're trying to figure out what's my Google ad spend, what's my Meta ad spend? And what they're trying to do is optimize that spend. So, what is the return on advertising, or the ROAS as they would say. And what they're looking to do is understand, okay, I have to collect these analytics that better understand where are these people coming from? How do they get to my site, to my store, to my whatever? And when they're using it, how do they they better move through that? What you're also seeing is that analytics is not only just for kind of the retail or financial services or things like that, but then they're also, you know, using that to make offers in those categories. When you move back to more, you know, take other companies that are building products and SaaS delivered products. They may actually go and use this analytics for making the product better. And one of the big reasons for that is maybe they're dialing back how many product managers they have. And they're looking to be more data driven about how they actually go and build the product out or enhance the product. So maybe they're, you know, an online video service and they want to understand why people are either using or not using the whiteboard inside the product. And they're collecting a lot of that product analytics in a big way so that they can go through that. And they're doing it in a constant manner. This first party type tracking within applications is growing rapidly by customers. >> So, let's talk about who wins in that. So, obviously the Cloud guys, AWS, Google and Azure. I want to come back and unpack that a little bit. Databricks and Snowflake, we reported on our last breaking analysis, it kind of on a collision course. You know, a couple years ago we were thinking, okay, AWS, Snowflake and Databricks, like perfect sandwich. And then of course they started to become more competitive. My sense is they still, you know, compliment each other in the field, right? But, you know, publicly, they've got bigger aspirations, they get big TAMs that they're going after. But it's interesting, the data shows that-- So, Snowflake was off the charts in terms of spending momentum and our EPR surveys. Our partner down in New York, they kind of came into line. They're both growing in terms of market presence. Databricks couldn't get to IPO. So, we don't have as much, you know, visibility on their financials. You know, Snowflake obviously highly transparent cause they're a public company. And then you got AWS, Google and Azure. And it seems like AWS appears to be more partner friendly. Microsoft, you know, depends on what market you're in. And Google wants to sell BigQuery. >> Yeah. >> So, what are you seeing in the public Cloud from a data platform perspective? >> Yeah. I think that was pretty astute in what you were talking about there, because I think of the three, Google is definitely I think a little bit behind in how they go to market with their partners. Azure's done a fantastic job of partnering with these companies to understand and even though they may have Synapse as their go-to and where they want people to go to do AI and ML. What they're looking at is, Hey, we're going to also be friendly with Snowflake. We're also going to be friendly with a Databricks. And I think that, Amazon has always been there because that's where the market has been for these developers. So, many, like Databricks' and the Snowflake's have gone there first because, you know, Databricks' case, they built out on top of S3 first. And going and using somebody's object layer other than AWS, was not as simple as you would think it would be. Moving between those. >> So, one of the financial meetups I said meetup, but the... It was either the CEO or the CFO. It was either Slootman or Scarpelli talking at, I don't know, Merrill Lynch or one of the other financial conferences said, I think it was probably their Q3 call. Snowflake said 80% of our business goes through Amazon. And he said to this audience, the next day we got a call from Microsoft. Hey, we got to do more. And, we know just from reading the financial statements that Snowflake is getting concessions from Amazon, they're buying in volume, they're renegotiating their contracts. Amazon gets it. You know, lower the price, people buy more. Long term, we're all going to make more money. Microsoft obviously wants to get into that game with Snowflake. They understand the momentum. They said Google, not so much. And I've had customers tell me that they wanted to use Google's AI with Snowflake, but they can't, they got to go to to BigQuery. So, honestly, I haven't like vetted that so. But, I think it's true. But nonetheless, it seems like Google's a little less friendly with the data platform providers. What do you think? >> Yeah, I would say so. I think this is a place that Google looks and wants to own. Is that now, are they doing the right things long term? I mean again, you know, you look at Google Analytics being you know, basically outlawed in five countries in the EU because of GDPR concerns, and compliance and governance of data. And I think people are looking at Google and BigQuery in general and saying, is it the best place for me to go? Is it going to be in the right places where I need it? Still, it's still one of the largest used databases out there just because it underpins a number of the Google services. So you almost get, like you were saying, forced into BigQuery sometimes, if you want to use the tech on top. >> You do strategy. >> Yeah. >> Right? You do strategy, you do messaging. Is it the right call by Google? I mean, it's not a-- I criticize Google sometimes. But, I'm not sure it's the wrong call to say, Hey, this is our ace in the hole. >> Yeah. >> We got to get people into BigQuery. Cause, first of all, BigQuery is a solid product. I mean it's Cloud native and it's, you know, by all, it gets high marks. So, why give the competition an advantage? Let's try to force people essentially into what is we think a great product and it is a great product. The flip side of that is, they're giving up some potential partner TAM and not treating the ecosystem as well as one of their major competitors. What do you do if you're in that position? >> Yeah, I think that that's a fantastic question. And the question I pose back to the companies I've worked with and worked for is, are you really looking to have vendor lock-in as your key differentiator to your service? And I think when you start to look at these companies that are moving away from BigQuery, moving to even, Databricks on top of GCS in Google, they're looking to say, okay, I can go there if I have to evacuate from GCP and go to another Cloud, I can stay on Databricks as a platform, for instance. So I think it's, people are looking at what platform as a service, database as a service they go and use. Because from a strategic perspective, they don't want that vendor locking. >> That's where Supercloud becomes interesting, right? Because, if I can run on Snowflake or Databricks, you know, across Clouds. Even Oracle, you know, they're getting into business with Microsoft. Let's talk about some of the Cloud players. So, the big three have reported. >> Right. >> We saw AWSs Cloud growth decelerated down to 20%, which is I think the lowest growth rate since they started to disclose public numbers. And they said they exited, sorry, they said January they grew at 15%. >> Yeah. >> Year on year. Now, they had some pretty tough compares. But nonetheless, 15%, wow. Azure, kind of mid thirties, and then Google, we had kind of low thirties. But, well behind in terms of size. And Google's losing probably almost $3 billion annually. But, that's not necessarily a bad thing by advocating and investing. What's happening with the Cloud? Is AWS just running into the law, large numbers? Do you think we can actually see a re-acceleration like we have in the past with AWS Cloud? Azure, we predicted is going to be 75% of AWS IAS revenues. You know, we try to estimate IAS. >> Yeah. >> Even though they don't share that with us. That's a huge milestone. You'd think-- There's some people who have, I think, Bob Evans predicted a while ago that Microsoft would surpass AWS in terms of size. You know, what do you think? >> Yeah, I think that Azure's going to keep to-- Keep growing at a pretty good clip. I think that for Azure, they still have really great account control, even though people like to hate Microsoft. The Microsoft sellers that are out there making those companies successful day after day have really done a good job of being in those accounts and helping people. I was recently over in the UK. And the UK market between AWS and Azure is pretty amazing, how much Azure there is. And it's growing within Europe in general. In the states, it's, you know, I think it's growing well. I think it's still growing, probably not as fast as it is outside the U.S. But, you go down to someplace like Australia, it's also Azure. You hear about Azure all the time. >> Why? Is that just because of the Microsoft's software state? It's just so convenient. >> I think it has to do with, you know, and you can go with the reasoning they don't break out, you know, Office 365 and all of that out of their numbers is because they have-- They're in all of these accounts because the office suite is so pervasive in there. So, they always have reasons to go back in and, oh by the way, you're on these old SQL licenses. Let us move you up here and we'll be able to-- We'll support you on the old version, you know, with security and all of these things. And be able to move you forward. So, they have a lot of, I guess you could say, levers to stay in those accounts and be interesting. At least as part of the Cloud estate. I think Amazon, you know, is hitting, you know, the large number. Laws of large numbers. But I think that they're also going through, and I think this was seen in the layoffs that they were making, that they're looking to understand and have profitability in more of those services that they have. You know, over 350 odd services that they have. And you know, as somebody who went there and helped to start yet a new one, while I was there. And finally, it went to beta back in September, you start to look at the fact that, that number of services, people, their own sellers don't even know all of their services. It's impossible to comprehend and sell that many things. So, I think what they're going through is really looking to rationalize a lot of what they're doing from a services perspective going forward. They're looking to focus on more profitable services and bringing those in. Because right now it's built like a layer cake where you have, you know, S3 EBS and EC2 on the bottom of the layer cake. And then maybe you have, you're using IAM, the authorization and authentication in there and you have all these different services. And then they call it EMR on top. And so, EMR has to pay for that entire layer cake just to go and compete against somebody like Mongo or something like that. So, you start to unwind the costs of that. Whereas Azure, went and they build basically ground up services for the most part. And Google kind of falls somewhere in between in how they build their-- They're a sort of layer cake type effect, but not as many layers I guess you could say. >> I feel like, you know, Amazon's trying to be a platform for the ecosystem. Yes, they have their own products and they're going to sell. And that's going to drive their profitability cause they don't have to split the pie. But, they're taking a piece of-- They're spinning the meter, as Ziyas Caravalo likes to say on every time Snowflake or Databricks or Mongo or Atlas is, you know, running on their system. They take a piece of the action. Now, Microsoft does that as well. But, you look at Microsoft and security, head-to-head competitors, for example, with a CrowdStrike or an Okta in identity. Whereas, it seems like at least for now, AWS is a more friendly place for the ecosystem. At the same time, you do a lot of business in Microsoft. >> Yeah. And I think that a lot of companies have always feared that Amazon would just throw, you know, bodies at it. And I think that people have come to the realization that a two pizza team, as Amazon would call it, is eight people. I think that's, you know, two slices per person. I'm a little bit fat, so I don't know if that's enough. But, you start to look at it and go, okay, if they're going to start out with eight engineers, if I'm a startup and they're part of my ecosystem, do I really fear them or should I really embrace them and try to partner closer with them? And I think the smart people and the smart companies are partnering with them because they're realizing, Amazon, unless they can see it to, you know, a hundred million, $500 million market, they're not going to throw eight to 16 people at a problem. I think when, you know, you could say, you could look at the elastic with OpenSearch and what they did there. And the licensing terms and the battle they went through. But they knew that Elastic had a huge market. Also, you had a number of ecosystem companies building on top of now OpenSearch, that are now domain on top of Amazon as well. So, I think Amazon's being pretty strategic in how they're doing it. I think some of the-- It'll be interesting. I think this year is a payout year for the cuts that they're making to some of the services internally to kind of, you know, how do we take the fat off some of those services that-- You know, you look at Alexa. I don't know how much revenue Alexa really generates for them. But it's a means to an end for a number of different other services and partners. >> What do you make of this ChatGPT? I mean, Microsoft obviously is playing that card. You want to, you want ChatGPT in the Cloud, come to Azure. Seems like AWS has to respond. And we know Google is, you know, sharpening its knives to come up with its response. >> Yeah, I mean Google just went and talked about Bard for the first time this week and they're in private preview or I guess they call it beta, but. Right at the moment to select, select AI users, which I have no idea what that means. But that's a very interesting way that they're marketing it out there. But, I think that Amazon will have to respond. I think they'll be more measured than say, what Google's doing with Bard and just throwing it out there to, hey, we're going into beta now. I think they'll look at it and see where do we go and how do we actually integrate this in? Because they do have a lot of components of AI and ML underneath the hood that other services use. And I think that, you know, they've learned from that. And I think that they've already done a good job. Especially for media and entertainment when you start to look at some of the ways that they use it for helping do graphics and helping to do drones. I think part of their buy of iRobot was the fact that iRobot was a big user of RoboMaker, which is using different models to train those robots to go around objects and things like that, so. >> Quick touch on Kubernetes, the whole DevOps World we just covered. The Cloud Native Foundation Security, CNCF. The security conference up in Seattle last week. First time they spun that out kind of like reinforced, you know, AWS spins out, reinforced from reinvent. Amsterdam's coming up soon, the CubeCon. What should we expect? What's hot in Cubeland? >> Yeah, I think, you know, Kubes, you're going to be looking at how OpenShift keeps growing and I think to that respect you get to see the momentum with people like Red Hat. You see others coming up and realizing how OpenShift has gone to market as being, like you were saying, partnering with those Clouds and really making it simple. I think the simplicity and the manageability of Kubernetes is going to be at the forefront. I think a lot of the investment is still going into, how do I bring observability and DevOps and AIOps and MLOps all together. And I think that's going to be a big place where people are going to be looking to see what comes out of CubeCon in Amsterdam. I think it's that manageability ease of use. >> Well Rob, I look forward to working with you on behalf of the whole Cube team. We're going to do more of these and go out to some shows extract the signal from the noise. Really appreciate you coming into our studio. >> Well, thank you for having me on. Really appreciate it. >> You're really welcome. All right, keep it right there, or thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. And we'll see you next time. (light music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore 2022. We are at Moscone West. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. Excited, really excited, whereas they were saying in the VMware keynote, pumped and jacked and jazzed to be back in-person with a lot of folks here. Keynote with standing room only. We've just come from that. We've got a couple of guests here from Expedient, going to unpack their relationship with VMware. Please welcome Brian Smith, the Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Expedient. And Brent Meadows, the Vice President of Advanced Solution Architecture at Expedient. Guys it's great to have you on the program. >> Appreciate it bringing us on. >> Yep, welcome. >> Isn't it great to be back in person? >> It is phenomenal to be back. >> So let's talk about obviously three years since the last, what was called VMworld, so many dynamics in the market. Talk to us about what's going on at Expedient, we want to dig into Cloud Different, but kind of give us a lay of the land of what's going on and then we're going to uncrack the VMware partnership as well. >> Sure, so Expedient we're a full stack cloud service provider. So we have physical data centers that we run and then have VMware-based cloud and we've seen a huge shift from the client perspective during the pandemic in how they've really responded from everything pre-pandemic was very focused with Cloud First and trying to go that route only with hyper scaler. And there's been a big evolution with how people have to change how they think about their transformation to get the end result they're looking for. >> Talk about Cloud Different and what it's helping customers to achieve as everyone's in this accelerated transformation. >> Yeah. So, Cloud Different is something that Expedient branded. It's really about how the transformation works. And traditionally, companies thought about doing their transformation, at first they kept everything in house that they were doing and they started building their new applications out into a hyper scale cloud. And what that really is like is, a good analogy would be, it's like living in a house while you're renovating it. And I know what that's like from my relationship versus if you build a new house, or move to a new property that's completed already. And that's really the difference in that experience from a Cloud Different approach from transformation is you think of all the things that you have internally, and there's a lot of technical debt there, and that's a lot of weight that you're carrying when you're trying to do that transformation. So if you kind of flip that around and instead look to make that transformation and move all that technical debt into a cloud that's already built to run those same types of applications, a VMware-based cloud, now you can remove all of that noise, move into a curated stack of technology and everything just works. It has the security in place, your teams know how to run it, and then you can take that time you really reclaim and apply that towards new applications and new things that are strategic to the business. >> That's really critical, Brent, to get folks in the IT organization across the business, really focused on strategic initiatives rather than a lot of the mundane tasks that they just don't have time for. Brent, what are you hearing in the last couple of years with the dynamics we talked about, what are you hearing from the customer? >> Right. So, one of the big things and the challenges in the current dynamic is kind of that staffing part. So as people have built their infrastructure over the years, there's a lot of tribal knowledge that's been created during that process and every day more and more of that knowledge is walking out the door. So taking some of that technical debt that Brian mentioned and kind of removing that so you don't have to have all that tribal knowledge, really standardizing on the foundational infrastructure pieces, allows them to make that transition and not have to carry that technical debt along with them as they make their digital transformations. >> We heard a lot this morning in the keynote guys about customers going, most of them still being in cloud chaos, but VMware wanting them to get to cloud smart. What does that mean, Brian, from Expedient's perspective? What does cloud smart look like to Expedient and its customers? >> Yeah, we completely agree with that message. And it's something we've been preaching for a couple years in part of that Cloud Different story. And it's really about having a consistent wrapper across all of your environments. It doesn't matter if it's things that you're running on-premises that's legacy to things that are in a VMware-based cloud, like an Expedient cloud or things that are in a hyper scale, but having one consistent security, one consistent automation, one consistent cost management, really gives you the governance so that you can get the value out of cloud that you are hoping for and remove a lot of the noise and think less about the technology and more about what the business is getting out of the technology. >> So what does that look like as a practical matter? I imagine you have customers whose on-premises VMware environments look different than what you've created within Expedient data centers. I'm thinking of things like the level of adoption of NSX, how well a customer may embrace VSAN on-prem as an example. Is part of this transmogrification into your data center, kind of nudging people to adopt frameworks that are really necessary for success in the future? >> It's less of a nudge because a lot of times as a service provider, we don't talk about the technology, we talk more about the outcome. So the nice thing with VMware is we can move that same virtual machine or that container into the platform and the client doesn't always know exactly what's underneath because we have that standardized VMware stack and it just works. And that's part of the beauty of the process. I dunno if you want to talk about a specific client or... >> Yeah, so one of the ones we worked with is Bob Evans Foods. So they were in that transformation stage of refreshing, not only their office space and their data center, but also their VMware environment. So we helped them go through and first thing is looking at their existing environment, figuring out what they currently have, because you can't really make a good decision of what you need to change until you know where you're starting from. So we worked with them through that process, completely evacuated their data center. And from a business perspective, what that allowed them to do as well is have more flexibility in the choice of their next corporate office, because they didn't have to have a data center attached to it. So just from that data center perspective, we gave them some flexibility there. But then from an operations perspective, really standardize that process, offloaded some of those menial tasks that you mentioned earlier, and allow them to really look more towards business-driving projects, instead of just trying to keep those lights on, keeping the backups running, et cetera. >> Brian, question for you, here we are, the theme of the event is "The Center of the Multi-cloud Universe" which seems like a Marvel movie, I haven't seen any new superheroes yet, but I suspect there might be some here. But as customers end up and land in multi-cloud by default not by strategy, how does Expedient and VMware help them actually take the environment that they have and make it strategic so that the business can achieve the outcomes, improving revenue, finding new revenue streams, new products, new routes to market to delight those customers. How do you turn that kind of cloud chaos into a strategy? >> Yeah. I'd say there's a couple different components. One is really time. How can you give them time back for things that are creating noise and aren't really strategic to the business? And so if you can give that time back, that's the first way that you can really impact the business. And the second is through that standardization, but also a lot of times when people think of that new standard, they're only thinking if you're building from scratch. And what VMware has really helped is by taking those existing workloads and giving a standard that works for those applications and what you're building new and brings those together under a common platform and so had a really significant impact to the speed that somebody can get to that cloud operating model, that used to be a multi-year process and most of our clients can go from really everything or almost everything on-prem and a little bit in a cloud to a complete cloud operating model, on average, in four to six months. >> Wow! >> So if I have an on-premises environment and some of my workloads are running in a VMware context, VMware would make the pitch in an agnostic way that, "Well, you can go and deploy that "on top of a stack of infrastructure "and anybody and anywhere now." Why do customers come to you instead of saying, "Oh, we'll go to "pick your flavor of hyper scale cloud provider." What's kind of your superpower? You've mentioned a couple of things, but really hone it in on, why would someone want to go to Expedient? >> Yeah. In a single word, service. I mean, we have a 99% client retention rate and have for well over a decade. So it's really that expertise that wraps around all the different technology so that you're not worried about what's happening and you're not worried about trying to keep the lights on and doing the firefighting. You're really focused on the business. And the other way to, I guess another analogy is, if you think about a lot of the technology and the way people go to cloud, it's like if you got a set of Legos without the box or the instructions. So you can build stuff, it could be cool, but you're not going to get to that end state-- >> Hold on. That's how Legos used to work. Just maybe you're too young to remember a time-- >> You see their sales go up because now you buy a different set for this-- >> I build those sets with my son, but I do it grudgingly. >> Do you ever step on one? >> Of course I do. >> Yeah, there's some pain involved. Same thing happens in the transformation. So when they're buying services from an Expedient, you're buying that box set where you have a picture of what your outcome's going to be, the instructions are there. So you also have confidence that you're going to get to the end outcome much faster than you would if you're trying to assemble everything yourself. (David laughing) >> In my mind, I'm imagining the things that I built with Lego, before there were instructions. >> No death star? >> No. Nothing close with the death star. Definitely something that you would not want your information technology to depend upon. >> Got it. >> Brent, we've seen obviously, it seems like every customer these days, regardless of industry has a cloud first initiative. They have competitors in the rear view mirror who are, if they're able to be more agile and faster to market, are potential huge competitive threat. As we see the rise of multi-cloud in the last 12 months, there's also been a lot of increased analyst coverage for alternate specialty hybrid cloud. Talk to us about, Expedient was in the recent Gartner market guide for specialty cloud. How are these related? What's driving this constant change out in the customer marketplace? >> Sure. So a lot of that agility that clients are getting and trying to do that digital transformation or refactor their applications requires a lot of effort from the developers and the internal IT practitioners. So by moving to a model with an enterprise kind of like Expedient, that allows them to get a consistent foundational level for those technical debt, the 'traditional workloads' where they can start focusing their efforts more on that refactoring of their applications, to get that agility, to get the flexibility, to get the market advantage of time to market with their new refactored applications. That takes them much faster to market, allows them to get ahead of those competitors, if they're not already ahead of them, get further ahead of them or catch up the ones that may have already made that transition. >> And I would add that the analyst coverage you've seen in the last 9 to 12 months, really accelerate for our type of cloud because before everything was hyper scale, everything's going to be hyper scale and they realized that companies have been trying to go to the cloud really for over a decade, really 15 years, that digital transformation, but most companies, when you look at the analysts say they're about 30% there, they've hit a plateau. So they need to look at a different way to approach that. And they're realizing that a VMware-based cloud or the specialty cloud providers give a different mode of cloud. Because you had of a pendulum that everything was on-premises, everything swung to cloud first and then it swung to multi-cloud, which meant multiple hyper scale providers and now it's really landing at that equilibrium where you have different modes of cloud. So it's similar like if you want to travel the world, you don't use one mode of transportation to get from one continent to the other. You have to use different modes. Same thing to get all the way to that cloud transformation, you need to use different modes of cloud, an enterprise cloud, a hyper scale cloud, working them together with that common management plan. >> And with that said Brian, where have customer conversations gone in the last couple of years? Obviously this has got to be an executive level, maybe even a board level conversation. Talk to us about how your customer conversations have changed. Have the stakeholders changed? Has things gone up to stack? >> Yeah. The business is much more involved than what it's been in the past and some of the drivers, even through the pandemic, as people reevaluate office space, a lot of times data centers were part of the same building. Or they were added into a review that nobody ever asked, "Well, why are you only using 20% of your data center?" So now that conversation is very active and they're reevaluating that and then the conversation shifts to "Where's the best place?" And that's a lot of, the conference also talks about the best place for your application for the workload in the right location. >> My role here is to dive down into the weeds constantly to stay away from business outcomes and things like that. But somewhere in the middle there's this question of how what you provide is consumed. So fair to assume that often people are moving from CapEx model to an OPEX model where they're consuming by the glass, by the drink. What does that mean organizationally for your customers? And do you help them work through that journey, reorganizing their internal organization to take advantage of cloud? Is that something that Expedient is a part of, or do you have partners that help them through that? How does that work? >> Yeah. There's some unique things that an enterprise doesn't understand when they think about what they've done on-prem versus a service provider is. There's whole models that they can purchase with us in consumption, not just the physical hardware, but licensing as well. Do you want to talk about how clients actually step in and start to do that evaluation? >> Sure. So it really kind of starts on the front end of evaluating what they have. So going through an assessment process, because traditionally, if you have a big data center full of hardware, you've already paid for it. So as you're deploying new workloads, it's "free to deploy." But when you go to that cloud operating model, you're paying for each drink that you're taking. So we want to make sure that as they're going into that cloud operating model, that they are right sized on the front end. They're not over-provisioned on anything that they're going to just waste money and resources on after they make that transition. So it's really about giving them great data on the front end, doing all that collection from a foundational level, from a infrastructure level, but also from a business and IT operations perspective and figuring out where they're spending, not just their money, but also their time and effort and helping them streamline and simplify those IT operations. >> Let's talk about one of the other elephants in the room and that is the remote hybrid workforce. Obviously it's been two and a half years, which is hard to believe. I think I'm one of the only people that hates working from home. Most people, do you too? Okay, good. Thank you, we're normal. >> Absolutely. (Lisa laughing) But VMware was talking about desktop as a service, there was so much change and quick temporary platform set up to accommodate offsite workers during the pandemic. What are some of the experiences that your clients are having and how is Expedient plus VMware helping businesses adapt and really create them the right hybrid model for them going forward? >> Sure. So as part of being that full sack cloud service provider, desktop in that remote user has to be part of that consideration. And one of the biggest things we saw with the pandemic was people stood up what we call pandemic VDI, very temporary solutions. And you saw the news articles that they said, "We did it in 10 days." And how many big transformational events do people plan and execute in 10 days that transform their workforce? So now they're having to come back and say, "Okay, what's the right way to deploy it?" And do you want to talk about some of the specifics of what we're seeing in the adjustments that they're doing? >> Sure. So it is, when you look at it from the end user perspective, it's how they're operating, how they're getting their tools through their day to day job, but it's also the IT administrators that are having to provide that service to the end users. So it's really kind of across the board, it's affecting everyone. So it's really kind of going through and helping them figure out how they're going to support their users going forward. So we've spun up things like VMware desktop as a service providing that multi-tenant ability to consume on a per desktop basis, but then we've also wrapped around with a lot of security features. So one of the big things is as people are going and distributing where they're working from, that data and access to data is also opened up to those locations. So putting those protections in place to be able to protect the environment and then be able, if something does get in, to be able to detect what's going on. And then of course, with a lot of the other components, being able to recover those environments. So building the desktops, the end user access into the disaster recovery plans. >> And talk more, a little bit Brent, about the security aspect. We've seen the threat landscape change dramatically in the last couple of years, ransomware is a household word. I'm pretty sure even my mom knows what that means, to some degree. Where is that in customer conversations? I can imagine in certain industries like financial services and healthcare with PII, it's absolutely critical to ensure that that data is, they know where it is. It's protected and it's recoverable, 'cause everyone's talking about cyber resilience these days. >> Right. And if it's not conversation 1, it's conversation 1A. So it's really kind of core to everything that we do when we're talking to clients. It's whether it's production DR or the desktops, is building that security in place to help them build their security practice up. So when you think about it, it's doing it at layers. So starting with things like more advanced antivirus to see what's actually going on the desktop and then kind of layering above there. So even up to micro-segmentation, where you can envelop each individual desktop in their own quasi network, so that they're only allowed kind of that zero trust model where, Hey, if you can get to a file share, that's the only place you should be going or do I need web apps to get my day to day job done, but really restricting that access and making sure that everything is more good traffic versus unknown traffic. >> Yeah. >> And also on the, you asked about the clouds smarter earlier. And you can really weave the desktop into that because when you're thinking of your production compute environment and your remote desktop environment, and now you can actually share storage together, you can share security together and you start to get economies of scale across those different environments as well. >> So as we are in August, I think still yeah, 2022, barely for a couple more days, lot of change going on at VMware. Expedient has been VMware America's partner of the year before. Talk to us about some of the things that you think from a strategic perspective are next for the partnership. >> That it's definitely the multi-cloud world is here. And it's how we can go deeper, how we're going to see that really mature. You know, one of the things that we've actually done together this year was we worked on a project and evaluated over 30 different companies of what they spend on IT. Everything from the physical data center to the entire stack, to people and actually build a cloud transformation calculator that allows you to compare strategies, so that if you look at Strategy A over a five year period, doing your current transformation, versus that Cloud Different approach, it can actually help quantify the number of hours difference that you can get, the total cost of ownership and the speed that you can get there. So it's things like that that help people make easier decisions and simplify information are going to be part of it. But without a doubt, it's going to be how you can have that wrapper across all of your different environments that really delivers that cloud-like environment that panacea people have been looking for. >> Yeah. That panacea, that seems like it's critical for every organization to achieve. Last question for you. When customers come to you, when they've hit that plateau. They come to Expedient saying, "Guys, with VMware, help us accelerate past this. "We don't have the time, we need to get this done quickly." How do you advise them to move forward? >> Sure. So it goes back to that, what's causing them to hit that plateau? Is it more on the development side of things? Is it the infrastructure teams, not being able to respond fast enough to the developers? And really putting a plan in place to really get rid of those plateaus. It could be getting rid of the technical debt. It could be changing the IT operations and kind of that, the way that they're looking at a cloud transformation model, to help them kind of get accelerated and get them back on the right path. >> Back on the right path. I think we all want to get back on the right path. Guys, thank you so much for joining David and me on theCUBE today, talking about Expedient Cloud Different, what you're seeing in the marketplace, and how Expedient and VMware are helping customers to succeed. We appreciate your time. >> Yep. >> Thanks for having us. >> For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer '22, stick around, Dave and I will be back shortly with our next guest. (gentle upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Once a staid and boring business dominated by IBM, Oracle, and at the time newcomer Microsoft, along with a handful of wannabes, the database business has exploded in the past decade and has become a staple of financial excellence, customer experience, analytic advantage, competitive strategy, growth initiatives, visualizations, not to mention compliance, security, privacy and dozens of other important use cases and initiatives. And on the vendor's side of the house, we've seen the rapid ascendancy of cloud databases. Most notably from Snowflake, whose massive raises leading up to its IPO in late 2020 sparked a spate of interest and VC investment in the separation of compute and storage and all that elastic resource stuff in the cloud. The company joined AWS, Azure and Google to popularize cloud databases, which have become a linchpin of competitive strategies for technology suppliers. And if I get you to put your data in my database and in my cloud, and I keep innovating, I'm going to build a moat and achieve a hugely attractive lifetime customer value in a really amazing marginal economics dynamic that is going to fund my future. And I'll be able to sell other adjacent services, not just compute and storage, but machine learning and inference and training and all kinds of stuff, dozens of lucrative cloud offerings. Meanwhile, the database leader, Oracle has invested massive amounts of money to maintain its lead. It's building on its position as the king of mission critical workloads and making typical Oracle like claims against the competition. Most were recently just yesterday with another announcement around MySQL HeatWave. An extension of MySQL that is compatible with on-premises MySQLs and is setting new standards in price performance. We're seeing a dramatic divergence in strategies across the database spectrum. On the far left, we see Amazon with more than a dozen database offerings each with its own API and primitives. AWS is taking a right tool for the right job approach, often building on open source platforms and creating services that it offers to customers to solve very specific problems for developers. And on the other side of the line, we see Oracle, which is taking the Swiss Army Knife approach, converging database functionality, enabling analytic and transactional workloads to run in the same data store, eliminating the need to ETL, at the same time adding capabilities into its platform like automation and machine learning. Welcome to this database Power Panel. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm so excited to bring together some of the most respected industry analyst in the community. Today we're going to assess what's happening in the market. We're going to dig into the competitive landscape and explore the future of database and database platforms and decode what it means to customers. Let me take a moment to welcome our guest analyst today. Matt Kimball is a vice president and principal analysts at Moor Insights and Strategy, Matt. He knows products, he knows industry, he's got real world IT expertise, and he's got all the angles 25 plus years of experience in all kinds of great background. Matt, welcome. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Holgar Mueller, friend of theCUBE, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research in depth knowledge on applications, application development, knows developers. He's worked at SAP and Oracle. And then Bob Evans is Chief Content Officer and co-founder of the Acceleration Economy, founder and principle of Cloud Wars. Covers all kinds of industry topics and great insights. He's got awesome videos, these three minute hits. If you haven't seen 'em, checking them out, knows cloud companies, his Cloud Wars minutes are fantastic. And then of course, Marc Staimer is the founder of Dragon Slayer Research. A frequent contributor and guest analyst at Wikibon. He's got a wide ranging knowledge across IT products, knows technology really well, can go deep. And then of course, Ron Westfall, Senior Analyst and Director Research Director at Futurum Research, great all around product trends knowledge. Can take, you know, technical dives and really understands competitive angles, knows Redshift, Snowflake, and many others. Gents, thanks so much for taking the time to join us in theCube today. It's great to have you on, good to see you. >> Good to be here, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, let's start with an around the horn and briefly, if each of you would describe, you know, anything I missed in your areas of expertise and then you answer the following question, how would you describe the state of the database, state of platform market today? Matt Kimball, please start. >> Oh, I hate going first, but that it's okay. How would I describe the world today? I would just in one sentence, I would say, I'm glad I'm not in IT anymore, right? So, you know, it is a complex and dangerous world out there. And I don't envy IT folks I'd have to support, you know, these modernization and transformation efforts that are going on within the enterprise. It used to be, you mentioned it, Dave, you would argue about IBM versus Oracle versus this newcomer in the database space called Microsoft. And don't forget Sybase back in the day, but you know, now it's not just, which SQL vendor am I going to go with? It's all of these different, divergent data types that have to be taken, they have to be merged together, synthesized. And somehow I have to do that cleanly and use this to drive strategic decisions for my business. That is not easy. So, you know, you have to look at it from the perspective of the business user. It's great for them because as a DevOps person, or as an analyst, I have so much flexibility and I have this thing called the cloud now where I can go get services immediately. As an IT person or a DBA, I am calling up prevention hotlines 24 hours a day, because I don't know how I'm going to be able to support the business. And as an Oracle or as an Oracle or a Microsoft or some of the cloud providers and cloud databases out there, I'm licking my chops because, you know, my market is expanding and expanding every day. >> Great, thank you for that, Matt. Holgar, how do you see the world these days? You always have a good perspective on things, share with us. >> Well, I think it's the best time to be in IT, I'm not sure what Matt is talking about. (laughing) It's easier than ever, right? The direction is going to cloud. Kubernetes has won, Google has the best AI for now, right? So things are easier than ever before. You made commitments for five plus years on hardware, networking and so on premise, and I got gray hair about worrying it was the wrong decision. No, just kidding. But you kind of both sides, just to be controversial, make it interesting, right. So yeah, no, I think the interesting thing specifically with databases, right? We have this big suite versus best of breed, right? Obviously innovation, like you mentioned with Snowflake and others happening in the cloud, the cloud vendors server, where to save of their databases. And then we have one of the few survivors of the old guard as Evans likes to call them is Oracle who's doing well, both their traditional database. And now, which is really interesting, remarkable from that because Oracle it was always the power of one, have one database, add more to it, make it what I call the universal database. And now this new HeatWave offering is coming and MySQL open source side. So they're getting the second (indistinct) right? So it's interesting that older players, traditional players who still are in the market are diversifying their offerings. Something we don't see so much from the traditional tools from Oracle on the Microsoft side or the IBM side these days. >> Great, thank you Holgar. Bob Evans, you've covered this business for a while. You've worked at, you know, a number of different outlets and companies and you cover the competition, how do you see things? >> Dave, you know, the other angle to look at this from is from the customer side, right? You got now CEOs who are any sort of business across all sorts of industries, and they understand that their future success is going to be dependent on their ability to become a digital company, to understand data, to use it the right way. So as you outline Dave, I think in your intro there, it is a fantastic time to be in the database business. And I think we've got a lot of new buyers and influencers coming in. They don't know all this history about IBM and Microsoft and Oracle and you know, whoever else. So I think they're going to take a long, hard look, Dave, at some of these results and who is able to help these companies not serve up the best technology, but who's going to be able to help their business move into the digital future. So it's a fascinating time now from every perspective. >> Great points, Bob. I mean, digital transformation has gone from buzzword to imperative. Mr. Staimer, how do you see things? >> I see things a little bit differently than my peers here in that I see the database market being segmented. There's all the different kinds of databases that people are looking at for different kinds of data, and then there is databases in the cloud. And so database as cloud service, I view very differently than databases because the traditional way of implementing a database is changing and it's changing rapidly. So one of the premises that you stated earlier on was that you viewed Oracle as a database company. I don't view Oracle as a database company anymore. I view Oracle as a cloud company that happens to have a significant expertise and specialty in databases, and they still sell database software in the traditional way, but ultimately they're a cloud company. So database cloud services from my point of view is a very distinct market from databases. >> Okay, well, you gave us some good meat on the bone to talk about that. Last but not least-- >> Dave did Marc, just say Oracle's a cloud company? >> Yeah. (laughing) Take away the database, it would be interesting to have that discussion, but let's let Ron jump in here. Ron, give us your take. >> That's a great segue. I think it's truly the era of the cloud database, that's something that's rising. And the key trends that come with it include for example, elastic scaling. That is the ability to scale on demand, to right size workloads according to customer requirements. And also I think it's going to increase the prioritization for high availability. That is the player who can provide the highest availability is going to have, I think, a great deal of success in this emerging market. And also I anticipate that there will be more consolidation across platforms in order to enable cost savings for customers, and that's something that's always going to be important. And I think we'll see more of that over the horizon. And then finally security, security will be more important than ever. We've seen a spike (indistinct), we certainly have seen geopolitical originated cybersecurity concerns. And as a result, I see database security becoming all the more important. >> Great, thank you. Okay, let me share some data with you guys. I'm going to throw this at you and see what you think. We have this awesome data partner called Enterprise Technology Research, ETR. They do these quarterly surveys and each period with dozens of industry segments, they track clients spending, customer spending. And this is the database, data warehouse sector okay so it's taxonomy, so it's not perfect, but it's a big kind of chunk. They essentially ask customers within a category and buy a specific vendor, you're spending more or less on the platform? And then they subtract the lesses from the mores and they derive a metric called net score. It's like NPS, it's a measure of spending velocity. It's more complicated and granular than that, but that's the basis and that's the vertical axis. The horizontal axis is what they call market share, it's not like IDC market share, it's just pervasiveness in the data set. And so there are a couple of things that stand out here and that we can use as reference point. The first is the momentum of Snowflake. They've been off the charts for many, many, for over two years now, anything above that dotted red line, that 40%, is considered by ETR to be highly elevated and Snowflake's even way above that. And I think it's probably not sustainable. We're going to see in the next April survey, next month from those guys, when it comes out. And then you see AWS and Microsoft, they're really pervasive on the horizontal axis and highly elevated, Google falls behind them. And then you got a number of well funded players. You got Cockroach Labs, Mongo, Redis, MariaDB, which of course is a fork on MySQL started almost as protest at Oracle when they acquired Sun and they got MySQL and you can see the number of others. Now Oracle who's the leading database player, despite what Marc Staimer says, we know, (laughs) and they're a cloud player (laughing) who happens to be a leading database player. They dominate in the mission critical space, we know that they're the king of that sector, but you can see here that they're kind of legacy, right? They've been around a long time, they get a big install base. So they don't have the spending momentum on the vertical axis. Now remember this is, just really this doesn't capture spending levels, so that understates Oracle but nonetheless. So it's not a complete picture like SAP for instance is not in here, no Hana. I think people are actually buying it, but it doesn't show up here, (laughs) but it does give an indication of momentum and presence. So Bob Evans, I'm going to start with you. You've commented on many of these companies, you know, what does this data tell you? >> Yeah, you know, Dave, I think all these compilations of things like that are interesting, and that folks at ETR do some good work, but I think as you said, it's a snapshot sort of a two-dimensional thing of a rapidly changing, three dimensional world. You know, the incidents at which some of these companies are mentioned versus the volume that happens. I think it's, you know, with Oracle and I'm not going to declare my religious affiliation, either as cloud company or database company, you know, they're all of those things and more, and I think some of our old language of how we classify companies is just not relevant anymore. But I want to ask too something in here, the autonomous database from Oracle, nobody else has done that. So either Oracle is crazy, they've tried out a technology that nobody other than them is interested in, or they're onto something that nobody else can match. So to me, Dave, within Oracle, trying to identify how they're doing there, I would watch autonomous database growth too, because right, it's either going to be a big plan and it breaks through, or it's going to be caught behind. And the Snowflake phenomenon as you mentioned, that is a rare, rare bird who comes up and can grow 100% at a billion dollar revenue level like that. So now they've had a chance to come in, scare the crap out of everybody, rock the market with something totally new, the data cloud. Will the bigger companies be able to catch up and offer a compelling alternative, or is Snowflake going to continue to be this outlier. It's a fascinating time. >> Really, interesting points there. Holgar, I want to ask you, I mean, I've talked to certainly I'm sure you guys have too, the founders of Snowflake that came out of Oracle and they actually, they don't apologize. They say, "Hey, we not going to do all that complicated stuff that Oracle does, we were trying to keep it real simple." But at the same time, you know, they don't do sophisticated workload management. They don't do complex joints. They're kind of relying on the ecosystems. So when you look at the data like this and the various momentums, and we talked about the diverging strategies, what does this say to you? >> Well, it is a great point. And I think Snowflake is an example how the cloud can turbo charge a well understood concept in this case, the data warehouse, right? You move that and you find steroids and you see like for some players who've been big in data warehouse, like Sentara Data, as an example, here in San Diego, what could have been for them right in that part. The interesting thing, the problem though is the cloud hides a lot of complexity too, which you can scale really well as you attract lots of customers to go there. And you don't have to build things like what Bob said, right? One of the fascinating things, right, nobody's answering Oracle on the autonomous database. I don't think is that they cannot, they just have different priorities or the database is not such a priority. I would dare to say that it's for IBM and Microsoft right now at the moment. And the cloud vendors, you just hide that right through scripts and through scale because you support thousands of customers and you can deal with a little more complexity, right? It's not against them. Whereas if you have to run it yourself, very different story, right? You want to have the autonomous parts, you want to have the powerful tools to do things. >> Thank you. And so Matt, I want to go to you, you've set up front, you know, it's just complicated if you're in IT, it's a complicated situation and you've been on the customer side. And if you're a buyer, it's obviously, it's like Holgar said, "Cloud's supposed to make this stuff easier, but the simpler it gets the more complicated gets." So where do you place your bets? Or I guess more importantly, how do you decide where to place your bets? >> Yeah, it's a good question. And to what Bob and Holgar said, you know, the around autonomous database, I think, you know, part of, as I, you know, play kind of armchair psychologist, if you will, corporate psychologists, I look at what Oracle is doing and, you know, databases where they've made their mark and it's kind of, that's their strong position, right? So it makes sense if you're making an entry into this cloud and you really want to kind of build momentum, you go with what you're good at, right? So that's kind of the strength of Oracle. Let's put a lot of focus on that. They do a lot more than database, don't get me wrong, but you know, I'm going to short my strength and then kind of pivot from there. With regards to, you know, what IT looks at and what I would look at you know as an IT director or somebody who is, you know, trying to consume services from these different cloud providers. First and foremost, I go with what I know, right? Let's not forget IT is a conservative group. And when we look at, you know, all the different permutations of database types out there, SQL, NoSQL, all the different types of NoSQL, those are largely being deployed by business users that are looking for agility or businesses that are looking for agility. You know, the reason why MongoDB is so popular is because of DevOps, right? It's a great platform to develop on and that's where it kind of gained its traction. But as an IT person, I want to go with what I know, where my muscle memory is, and that's my first position. And so as I evaluate different cloud service providers and cloud databases, I look for, you know, what I know and what I've invested in and where my muscle memory is. Is there enough there and do I have enough belief that that company or that service is going to be able to take me to, you know, where I see my organization in five years from a data management perspective, from a business perspective, are they going to be there? And if they are, then I'm a little bit more willing to make that investment, but it is, you know, if I'm kind of going in this blind or if I'm cloud native, you know, that's where the Snowflakes of the world become very attractive to me. >> Thank you. So Marc, I asked Andy Jackson in theCube one time, you have all these, you know, data stores and different APIs and primitives and you know, very granular, what's the strategy there? And he said, "Hey, that allows us as the market changes, it allows us to be more flexible. If we start building abstractions layers, it's harder for us." I think also it was not a good time to market advantage, but let me ask you, I described earlier on that spectrum from AWS to Oracle. We just saw yesterday, Oracle announced, I think the third major enhancement in like 15 months to MySQL HeatWave, what do you make of that announcement? How do you think it impacts the competitive landscape, particularly as it relates to, you know, converging transaction and analytics, eliminating ELT, I know you have some thoughts on this. >> So let me back up for a second and defend my cloud statement about Oracle for a moment. (laughing) AWS did a great job in developing the cloud market in general and everything in the cloud market. I mean, I give them lots of kudos on that. And a lot of what they did is they took open source software and they rent it to people who use their cloud. So I give 'em lots of credit, they dominate the market. Oracle was late to the cloud market. In fact, they actually poo-pooed it initially, if you look at some of Larry Ellison's statements, they said, "Oh, it's never going to take off." And then they did 180 turn, and they said, "Oh, we're going to embrace the cloud." And they really have, but when you're late to a market, you've got to be compelling. And this ties into the announcement yesterday, but let's deal with this compelling. To be compelling from a user point of view, you got to be twice as fast, offer twice as much functionality, at half the cost. That's generally what compelling is that you're going to capture market share from the leaders who established the market. It's very difficult to capture market share in a new market for yourself. And you're right. I mean, Bob was correct on this and Holgar and Matt in which you look at Oracle, and they did a great job of leveraging their database to move into this market, give 'em lots of kudos for that too. But yesterday they announced, as you said, the third innovation release and the pace is just amazing of what they're doing on these releases on HeatWave that ties together initially MySQL with an integrated builtin analytics engine, so a data warehouse built in. And then they added automation with autopilot, and now they've added machine learning to it, and it's all in the same service. It's not something you can buy and put on your premise unless you buy their cloud customers stuff. But generally it's a cloud offering, so it's compellingly better as far as the integration. You don't buy multiple services, you buy one and it's lower cost than any of the other services, but more importantly, it's faster, which again, give 'em credit for, they have more integration of a product. They can tie things together in a way that nobody else does. There's no additional services, ETL services like Glue and AWS. So from that perspective, they're getting better performance, fewer services, lower cost. Hmm, they're aiming at the compelling side again. So from a customer point of view it's compelling. Matt, you wanted to say something there. >> Yeah, I want to kind of, on what you just said there Marc, and this is something I've found really interesting, you know. The traditional way that you look at software and, you know, purchasing software and IT is, you look at either best of breed solutions and you have to work on the backend to integrate them all and make them all work well. And generally, you know, the big hit against the, you know, we have one integrated offering is that, you lose capability or you lose depth of features, right. And to what you were saying, you know, that's the thing I found interesting about what Oracle is doing is they're building in depth as they kind of, you know, build that service. It's not like you're losing a lot of capabilities, because you're going to one integrated service versus having to use A versus B versus C, and I love that idea. >> You're right. Yeah, not only you're not losing, but you're gaining functionality that you can't get by integrating a lot of these. I mean, I can take Snowflake and integrate it in with machine learning, but I also have to integrate in with a transactional database. So I've got to have connectors between all of this, which means I'm adding time. And what it comes down to at the end of the day is expertise, effort, time, and cost. And so what I see the difference from the Oracle announcements is they're aiming at reducing all of that by increasing performance as well. Correct me if I'm wrong on that but that's what I saw at the announcement yesterday. >> You know, Marc, one thing though Marc, it's funny you say that because I started out saying, you know, I'm glad I'm not 19 anymore. And the reason is because of exactly what you said, it's almost like there's a pseudo level of witchcraft that's required to support the modern data environment right in the enterprise. And I need simpler faster, better. That's what I need, you know, I am no longer wearing pocket protectors. I have turned from, you know, break, fix kind of person, to you know, business consultant. And I need that point and click simplicity, but I can't sacrifice, you know, a depth of features of functionality on the backend as I play that consultancy role. >> So, Ron, I want to bring in Ron, you know, it's funny. So Matt, you mentioned Mongo, I often and say, if Oracle mentions you, you're on the map. We saw them yesterday Ron, (laughing) they hammered RedShifts auto ML, they took swipes at Snowflake, a little bit of BigQuery. What were your thoughts on that? Do you agree with what these guys are saying in terms of HeatWaves capabilities? >> Yes, Dave, I think that's an excellent question. And fundamentally I do agree. And the question is why, and I think it's important to know that all of the Oracle data is backed by the fact that they're using benchmarks. For example, all of the ML and all of the TPC benchmarks, including all the scripts, all the configs and all the detail are posted on GitHub. So anybody can look at these results and they're fully transparent and replicate themselves. If you don't agree with this data, then by all means challenge it. And we have not really seen that in all of the new updates in HeatWave over the last 15 months. And as a result, when it comes to these, you know, fundamentals in looking at the competitive landscape, which I think gives validity to outcomes such as Oracle being able to deliver 4.8 times better price performance than Redshift. As well as for example, 14.4 better price performance than Snowflake, and also 12.9 better price performance than BigQuery. And so that is, you know, looking at the quantitative side of things. But again, I think, you know, to Marc's point and to Matt's point, there are also qualitative aspects that clearly differentiate the Oracle proposition, from my perspective. For example now the MySQL HeatWave ML capabilities are native, they're built in, and they also support things such as completion criteria. And as a result, that enables them to show that hey, when you're using Redshift ML for example, you're having to also use their SageMaker tool and it's running on a meter. And so, you know, nobody really wants to be running on a meter when, you know, executing these incredibly complex tasks. And likewise, when it comes to Snowflake, they have to use a third party capability. They don't have the built in, it's not native. So the user, to the point that he's having to spend more time and it increases complexity to use auto ML capabilities across the Snowflake platform. And also, I think it also applies to other important features such as data sampling, for example, with the HeatWave ML, it's intelligent sampling that's being implemented. Whereas in contrast, we're seeing Redshift using random sampling. And again, Snowflake, you're having to use a third party library in order to achieve the same capabilities. So I think the differentiation is crystal clear. I think it definitely is refreshing. It's showing that this is where true value can be assigned. And if you don't agree with it, by all means challenge the data. >> Yeah, I want to come to the benchmarks in a minute. By the way, you know, the gentleman who's the Oracle's architect, he did a great job on the call yesterday explaining what you have to do. I thought that was quite impressive. But Bob, I know you follow the financials pretty closely and on the earnings call earlier this month, Ellison said that, "We're going to see HeatWave on AWS." And the skeptic in me said, oh, they must not be getting people to come to OCI. And then they, you remember this chart they showed yesterday that showed the growth of HeatWave on OCI. But of course there was no data on there, it was just sort of, you know, lines up and to the right. So what do you guys think of that? (Marc laughs) Does it signal Bob, desperation by Oracle that they can't get traction on OCI, or is it just really a smart tame expansion move? What do you think? >> Yeah, Dave, that's a great question. You know, along the way there, and you know, just inside of that was something that said Ellison said on earnings call that spoke to a different sort of philosophy or mindset, almost Marc, where he said, "We're going to make this multicloud," right? With a lot of their other cloud stuff, if you wanted to use any of Oracle's cloud software, you had to use Oracle's infrastructure, OCI, there was no other way out of it. But this one, but I thought it was a classic Ellison line. He said, "Well, we're making this available on AWS. We're making this available, you know, on Snowflake because we're going after those users. And once they see what can be done here." So he's looking at it, I guess you could say, it's a concession to customers because they want multi-cloud. The other way to look at it, it's a hunting expedition and it's one of those uniquely I think Oracle ways. He said up front, right, he doesn't say, "Well, there's a big market, there's a lot for everybody, we just want on our slice." Said, "No, we are going after Amazon, we're going after Redshift, we're going after Aurora. We're going after these users of Snowflake and so on." And I think it's really fairly refreshing these days to hear somebody say that, because now if I'm a buyer, I can look at that and say, you know, to Marc's point, "Do they measure up, do they crack that threshold ceiling? Or is this just going to be more pain than a few dollars savings is worth?" But you look at those numbers that Ron pointed out and that we all saw in that chart. I've never seen Dave, anything like that. In a substantive market, a new player coming in here, and being able to establish differences that are four, seven, eight, 10, 12 times better than competition. And as new buyers look at that, they're going to say, "What the hell are we doing paying, you know, five times more to get a poor result? What's going on here?" So I think this is going to rattle people and force a harder, closer look at what these alternatives are. >> I wonder if the guy, thank you. Let's just skip ahead of the benchmarks guys, bring up the next slide, let's skip ahead a little bit here, which talks to the benchmarks and the benchmarking if we can. You know, David Floyer, the sort of semiretired, you know, Wikibon analyst said, "Dave, this is going to force Amazon and others, Snowflake," he said, "To rethink actually how they architect databases." And this is kind of a compilation of some of the data that they shared. They went after Redshift mostly, (laughs) but also, you know, as I say, Snowflake, BigQuery. And, like I said, you can always tell which companies are doing well, 'cause Oracle will come after you, but they're on the radar here. (laughing) Holgar should we take this stuff seriously? I mean, or is it, you know, a grain salt? What are your thoughts here? >> I think you have to take it seriously. I mean, that's a great question, great point on that. Because like Ron said, "If there's a flaw in a benchmark, we know this database traditionally, right?" If anybody came up that, everybody will be, "Oh, you put the wrong benchmark, it wasn't audited right, let us do it again," and so on. We don't see this happening, right? So kudos to Oracle to be aggressive, differentiated, and seem to having impeccable benchmarks. But what we really see, I think in my view is that the classic and we can talk about this in 100 years, right? Is the suite versus best of breed, right? And the key question of the suite, because the suite's always slower, right? No matter at which level of the stack, you have the suite, then the best of breed that will come up with something new, use a cloud, put the data warehouse on steroids and so on. The important thing is that you have to assess as a buyer what is the speed of my suite vendor. And that's what you guys mentioned before as well, right? Marc said that and so on, "Like, this is a third release in one year of the HeatWave team, right?" So everybody in the database open source Marc, and there's so many MySQL spinoffs to certain point is put on shine on the speed of (indistinct) team, putting out fundamental changes. And the beauty of that is right, is so inherent to the Oracle value proposition. Larry's vision of building the IBM of the 21st century, right from the Silicon, from the chip all the way across the seven stacks to the click of the user. And that what makes the database what Rob was saying, "Tied to the OCI infrastructure," because designed for that, it runs uniquely better for that, that's why we see the cross connect to Microsoft. HeatWave so it's different, right? Because HeatWave runs on cheap hardware, right? Which is the breadth and butter 886 scale of any cloud provider, right? So Oracle probably needs it to scale OCI in a different category, not the expensive side, but also allow us to do what we said before, the multicloud capability, which ultimately CIOs really want, because data gravity is real, you want to operate where that is. If you have a fast, innovative offering, which gives you more functionality and the R and D speed is really impressive for the space, puts away bad results, then it's a good bet to look at. >> Yeah, so you're saying, that we versus best of breed. I just want to sort of play back then Marc a comment. That suite versus best of breed, there's always been that trade off. If I understand you Holgar you're saying that somehow Oracle has magically cut through that trade off and they're giving you the best of both. >> It's the developing velocity, right? The provision of important features, which matter to buyers of the suite vendor, eclipses the best of breed vendor, then the best of breed vendor is in the hell of a potential job. >> Yeah, go ahead Marc. >> Yeah and I want to add on what Holgar just said there. I mean the worst job in the data center is data movement, moving the data sucks. I don't care who you are, nobody likes it. You never get any kudos for doing it well, and you always get the ah craps, when things go wrong. So it's in- >> In the data center Marc all the time across data centers, across cloud. That's where the bleeding comes. >> It's right, you get beat up all the time. So nobody likes to move data, ever. So what you're looking at with what they announce with HeatWave and what I love about HeatWave is it doesn't matter when you started with it, you get all the additional features they announce it's part of the service, all the time. But they don't have to move any of the data. You want to analyze the data that's in your transactional, MySQL database, it's there. You want to do machine learning models, it's there, there's no data movement. The data movement is the key thing, and they just eliminate that, in so many ways. And the other thing I wanted to talk about is on the benchmarks. As great as those benchmarks are, they're really conservative 'cause they're underestimating the cost of that data movement. The ETLs, the other services, everything's left out. It's just comparing HeatWave, MySQL cloud service with HeatWave versus Redshift, not Redshift and Aurora and Glue, Redshift and Redshift ML and SageMaker, it's just Redshift. >> Yeah, so what you're saying is what Oracle's doing is saying, "Okay, we're going to run MySQL HeatWave benchmarks on analytics against Redshift, and then we're going to run 'em in transaction against Aurora." >> Right. >> But if you really had to look at what you would have to do with the ETL, you'd have to buy two different data stores and all the infrastructure around that, and that goes away so. >> Due to the nature of the competition, they're running narrow best of breed benchmarks. There is no suite level benchmark (Dave laughs) because they created something new. >> Well that's you're the earlier point they're beating best of breed with a suite. So that's, I guess to Floyer's earlier point, "That's going to shake things up." But I want to come back to Bob Evans, 'cause I want to tap your Cloud Wars mojo before we wrap. And line up the horses, you got AWS, you got Microsoft, Google and Oracle. Now they all own their own cloud. Snowflake, Mongo, Couchbase, Redis, Cockroach by the way they're all doing very well. They run in the cloud as do many others. I think you guys all saw the Andreessen, you know, commentary from Sarah Wang and company, to talk about the cost of goods sold impact of cloud. So owning your own cloud has to be an advantage because other guys like Snowflake have to pay cloud vendors and negotiate down versus having the whole enchilada, Safra Catz's dream. Bob, how do you think this is going to impact the market long term? >> Well, Dave, that's a great question about, you know, how this is all going to play out. If I could mention three things, one, Frank Slootman has done a fantastic job with Snowflake. Really good company before he got there, but since he's been there, the growth mindset, the discipline, the rigor and the phenomenon of what Snowflake has done has forced all these bigger companies to really accelerate what they're doing. And again, it's an example of how this intense competition makes all the different cloud vendors better and it provides enormous value to customers. Second thing I wanted to mention here was look at the Adam Selipsky effect at AWS, took over in the middle of May, and in Q2, Q3, Q4, AWS's growth rate accelerated. And in each of those three quotas, they grew faster than Microsoft's cloud, which has not happened in two or three years, so they're closing the gap on Microsoft. The third thing, Dave, in this, you know, incredibly intense competitive nature here, look at Larry Ellison, right? He's got his, you know, the product that for the last two or three years, he said, "It's going to help determine the future of the company, autonomous database." You would think he's the last person in the world who's going to bring in, you know, in some ways another database to think about there, but he has put, you know, his whole effort and energy behind this. The investments Oracle's made, he's riding this horse really hard. So it's not just a technology achievement, but it's also an investment priority for Oracle going forward. And I think it's going to form a lot of how they position themselves to this new breed of buyer with a new type of need and expectations from IT. So I just think the next two or three years are going to be fantastic for people who are lucky enough to get to do the sorts of things that we do. >> You know, it's a great point you made about AWS. Back in 2018 Q3, they were doing about 7.4 billion a quarter and they were growing in the mid forties. They dropped down to like 29% Q4, 2020, I'm looking at the data now. They popped back up last quarter, last reported quarter to 40%, that is 17.8 billion, so they more doubled and they accelerated their growth rate. (laughs) So maybe that pretends, people are concerned about Snowflake right now decelerating growth. You know, maybe that's going to be different. By the way, I think Snowflake has a different strategy, the whole data cloud thing, data sharing. They're not trying to necessarily take Oracle head on, which is going to make this next 10 years, really interesting. All right, we got to go, last question. 30 seconds or less, what can we expect from the future of data platforms? Matt, please start. >> I have to go first again? You're killing me, Dave. (laughing) In the next few years, I think you're going to see the major players continue to meet customers where they are, right. Every organization, every environment is, you know, kind of, we use these words bespoke in Snowflake, pardon the pun, but Snowflakes, right. But you know, they're all opinionated and unique and what's great as an IT person is, you know, there is a service for me regardless of where I am on my journey, in my data management journey. I think you're going to continue to see with regards specifically to Oracle, I think you're going to see the company continue along this path of being all things to all people, if you will, or all organizations without sacrificing, you know, kind of richness of features and sacrificing who they are, right. Look, they are the data kings, right? I mean, they've been a database leader for an awful long time. I don't see that going away any time soon and I love the innovative spirit they've brought in with HeatWave. >> All right, great thank you. Okay, 30 seconds, Holgar go. >> Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing that we see is really that trend to autonomous as Oracle calls or self-driving software, right? So the database will have to do more things than just store the data and support the DVA. It will have to show it can wide insights, the whole upside, it will be able to show to one machine learning. We haven't really talked about that. How in just exciting what kind of use case we can get of machine learning running real time on data as it changes, right? So, which is part of the E5 announcement, right? So we'll see more of that self-driving nature in the database space. And because you said we can promote it, right. Check out my report about HeatWave latest release where I post in oracle.com. >> Great, thank you for that. And Bob Evans, please. You're great at quick hits, hit us. >> Dave, thanks. I really enjoyed getting to hear everybody's opinion here today and I think what's going to happen too. I think there's a new generation of buyers, a new set of CXO influencers in here. And I think what Oracle's done with this, MySQL HeatWave, those benchmarks that Ron talked about so eloquently here that is going to become something that forces other companies, not just try to get incrementally better. I think we're going to see a massive new wave of innovation to try to play catch up. So I really take my hat off to Oracle's achievement from going to, push everybody to be better. >> Excellent. Marc Staimer, what do you say? >> Sure, I'm going to leverage off of something Matt said earlier, "Those companies that are going to develop faster, cheaper, simpler products that are going to solve customer problems, IT problems are the ones that are going to succeed, or the ones who are going to grow. The one who are just focused on the technology are going to fall by the wayside." So those who can solve more problems, do it more elegantly and do it for less money are going to do great. So Oracle's going down that path today, Snowflake's going down that path. They're trying to do more integration with third party, but as a result, aiming at that simpler, faster, cheaper mentality is where you're going to continue to see this market go. >> Amen brother Marc. >> Thank you, Ron Westfall, we'll give you the last word, bring us home. >> Well, thank you. And I'm loving it. I see a wave of innovation across the entire cloud database ecosystem and Oracle is fueling it. We are seeing it, with the native integration of auto ML capabilities, elastic scaling, lower entry price points, et cetera. And this is just going to be great news for buyers, but also developers and increased use of open APIs. And so I think that is really the key takeaways. Just we're going to see a lot of great innovation on the horizon here. >> Guys, fantastic insights, one of the best power panel as I've ever done. Love to have you back. Thanks so much for coming on today. >> Great job, Dave, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCube and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>>the >>globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS >>reinvent 2020 >>sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Everyone welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 Virtual I'm John for your host. Got a great segment here with two analyst day Volonte and Zia's Carvell who's head principles of zk research dot com. Guys. Great to see you A W s Kino. Thanks for >>coming on. Let's be back in the cube. >>Welcome back. Great to see you guys. Wanna get your thoughts? Um, it's mainly you because we talked with the enterprise a lot. You are leading analyst. You cover a broad range from networking all the way up to the C suite for enterprise buyers and and technology trends. Um, Andy Jassy laid down, in my opinion, what was directionally his next 20 mile stare. The next conquest for Amazon. And that is global. I t spend they locked in the infrastructures of service pass kicking ass. There. Check check. Hello, Enterprise. Different ballgame. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, they have so much in different areas, obviously. You know, they have dominated cloud instances right there. Mawr compute storage memory. You know insists that anybody but you can see him, um, spreading their wings now, right? I think one of the more interesting announcements was actually what they're doing with Amazon connect. That's their contact center platform. And this is something that I think, Even last year, a lot of people weren't really even sure if they'd be in a long primary in the pocket. People about this market, they were asking, If you really think Amazon's in this, there's something they're experimenting. But we're here to stay. And I think one of the interesting things that they bring to market is, you know, almost unprecedented scale with their cloud platform as well as all the machine learning algorithms. And I think if if you believe that machine learning artificial intelligence is changing, I t. Forever and that's everything from the infrastructure to the network through the applications, then they have an inherent advantage because they have all those machine learning albums built into this stuff that they dio and so they can constantly look at these different markets and disruptive, disruptive, disrupt and take more and more sharing that and that's what they've done. E think that's you know, the context and announcements were great example that they're not doing the telephony things, and, you know, they're kind of bare table stakes. They do that pretty well, but they've just unloaded a whole bunch of ai based features that >>Dave, what's your take on this context center? Because it's not just call centers. I mean, there was a whole industry around call center, unified communications. That whole world. This is about the contact. It's about the person. This is not just a nuanced thing like telephony or, you know, PBX is in the old days. Remember those days? Things is not about the call. It's about the contact. This is what Jazzy saying. >>I think that way had Diana or on early. And I said, I like the fact that their AWS specifically is going after these solutions because several years ago it was just sort of. Here's a bunch of tools. Go figure it out. I think the contact center is I mean, everybody can relate Thio the pains of going through getting rerouted, having to restate all your credentials, not knowing who you are. And so between machine learning, Alexa, Natural language processing, better work flows. I mean there's this huge opportunity toe reinvent the whole call center contact center. So, uh, yeah, I think you called it John. It's a no brainer for a W s toe Really disrupt that >>business. Well, it also puts him in a position. You know, news is breaking on the day of and yet his keynote here at reinvent that, uh, you got Salesforce spying slack for 27 close toe, $28 billion. That's a 55% premium over when they announced it. And that's like a 30 x or 50 x on on revenue. Massive number to confess the message board software. I mean, so So. So. If Amazon can come in and get the context center model, which is not just voice, it's chat, it's machine learning. It's bots. And the innovation to create a step function kind of brings it back into the that integration of user network compute. You know, I just think that it feels very edgy in the sense of edge computing, because if I'm a person, I'm mobile. If I'm a person at work or at home, so there's a whole redefinition Zs, what's your take on this edge? Play from Amazon in context toe the enterprise software landscape. That seems to be, you know, focus on buying companies like Salesforce. >>Well, I think edges really the next big foray for computing. If one of the things and you ask we talked about this, you know, was that the compute, the unit of Compute, has gotten smaller and smaller, Right? We went from data centers to servers to virtual machines, the virtual machines and clouds. Now we're talking about containers and containers on edges, and this requires, um if you if you believe in the world of distributed computing where we're gonna have mawr containers running in MAWR, places on MAWR edges, right. The value proposition where companies is now they can move their data closer to the customer. They could move data closer to the user. And so, if I'm a retailer and I'm trying to understand what a customer is doing, I could do that in store. If I'm Tesla and I'm trying to understand what the drivers doing, I could do that in car, right? If I'm a cellular provider, I could do it by cellular edge. So the edge, I think, is where a lot of the innovation is going to be at Amazon has the luxury of this massive global network. You know, they just announced the number another a number of other local nodes, including Boston and a few other places. So they've got the footprint in place. And this this is what makes Amazon's are difficult to compete with, right? They built this massive network and this all these, no doubt for their e commerce business. And now they're leveraging that deliver I t services. You can't just go build this from the ground up the variety, right? You have to be able to monetize it another way. And they've been doing that with the commerce for a long time. And so it makes them. It makes it very, very difficult for them to capture Google could with Daniel forget about the item. Oh, yeah, so good. Microsoft. Possibly. But they I think that the more distributed compute becomes the more favors Amazon, >>I would add to that if I could, John, I mean, look good. Look at the prevailing way in which many of the infrastructure the old guard is Andy. Jesse calls them. Companies have pursued the edge they've essentially taking, taking x 86 boxes and, you know, maybe made him rugged and throwing them over the fence to the edge. And that really is not gonna play the edges. Now there's not one edge. I mean, there's a very highly specific use cases and factories and windmills. And maybe maybe it's small retail organizations, and whatever it is that those are gonna be really unique situations. And I think the idea of putting a programmable infrastructure at the edge is gonna win. I also think that the edge architecture is gonna be different. It's going to require much more efficient processing to do a I Influencing a lot of the data is gonna be, uh, stay at the edge. A lot of it's not gonna be persisted. Some of it's gonna come back to the cloud. But I think most of it is actually gonna gonna either not be persisted or stay at the edge and be affected in real time. When you think of autonomous vehicles so totally different programming model, >>well, I think that's the point of what I was saying earlier Zeus was talking about Is that it's It's the edges is just different. I mean, you got purpose built stuff. I mean, they were talking by the way they have snowball. So they have, ah, hard edge device. And they got out outpost now in multiple flavors and sizes. But they also were talking about computer vision and machine learning. We're going together for that. The panoramic appliance. I think it was where there's all these different cases to your point, Dave, where it's just different. At the edge, you have the zones for five G. I mean, if you go to a five g tower, that's essentially an edge. Just there's equipment up to this. Radios is transceivers and other back haul equipment. So when you look at the totality of what it is, the diversity, I think that's why this whole idea of Lambda and Containers is interesting. Toe Zia's. When you were saying about the compute sizes being small, because if you could put compute at the edge on small pieces to match the form factor that becomes interesting. I think that's what this Lambda container announcement I found interesting because I see that playing directly into that your reaction to >>that. It actually, um, makes it. If not done correctly, it could make I t much more complex because, um, containers air interesting because they're not like virtual machines. First live in perpetuity. Containers you They're very ephemeral, right? You spin them up to 30 seconds, you spin them up for a couple of minutes that you deprecate them. So at any given point in time, you could have thousands of containers, a handful of containers, millions of containers, Right? But it necessitates a common management. Uh huh. Underlay that could be used to visualize where these containers are, what's running on them. And that's what AWS provides. You know, all the stuff they're doing Lambda and Eks and things like that that lends itself to that. So a customer can then go and almost create a container architecture that spans all their cloud's edges, even on Prem. Now, uh, when Amazon has but still be able to manage it and simplify it, I think somebody's trying to do it themselves. They're gonna find that the complexity almost becomes untenable. Unless you have a Nike organization the size of Amazon companies don't. So we're >>gonna here, we're gonna hear from Deepak singing in a few sessions. He did the eks anywhere. That's essentially kubernetes service on the data center. But look at what they did with eks anywhere and then CCS, which has a common control plane to your point, that's compelling. And so, you know, if you're a developer or you're an enterprise, you might not have If you want to go with this. I t world. We talked about earlier zeros before you came on on our last segment. Most I t is not that built out in terms of capabilities. So learning new stuff is hard, so operating Amazon might be foreign to most I t shops. This is a challenge. Did you agree with that? Or or how do you see that? >>Um, well, a lot of Amazon used, obviously just the interviews and numbers of fucked that right. Um, but I think the concept of in a world where you have that common operating layer that spans it's no longer geographically limited to a data center or to a server. You know, it's it's now distributed across your entire multi cloud or distributed cloud environment. And so one of the important things right people remember is the world is becoming more dynamic and or distributed, and your I t strategy has to follow that. If you're doing things that are counted that you're not only standing still, you're actually going backwards. And so what Amazon is doing is they're allowing companies to be is dynamic distributors. They need to be to be able to maintain that that common operating layer that actually makes it management, because without it, you just you wind up in a situation. Like I said, that's incredible. A lot of people facing that today. And that's why that's why there's this big divergence, right? This five native cos they're going fast and legacy companies that can. >>Guys, I want to spend the next 10 minutes we have getting into more of the business side from this keynote because because I know your research on digital transmission first. I know you know the networking side up and down the stack and all that good stuff, but you've been doing a lot of research around the digital transformation with the cloud. Dave, you just put out a great great breaking and else think your 55th, um, episode on digital transformation with the cloud. It's very clear that Jackie is basically preaching, saying, Hey, Clay Christensen is former professor who passed away. He brought up this whole innovator's dilemma kind of theme and saying, Hey, if you don't get the reality that you're in, you better wake up and smell the coffee. It's a wake up call. That's what he's basically saying That's my take away. This is really this business management lesson. Leadership thinking is super important, and I know we've We've talked about people process, technology. Uh, let's Covad eyes this real quick. Bottom line. What is the playbook? Do you agree with jazz? His point of view here? Um, he's pretty being hardcore. He's like, literally saying adapter die in his own way. What, you guys thoughts on this? This is a true forcing function. This cove, In reality, >>I mean I mean, if you talk about the business transformation, digital transformation, business transformation, you know, what does that mean? I, like, said earlier that the last 10 years about I t transformation, I think the next 10 is gonna be about business transformation, organizational industry transformation, and I think what that means is the entire operational stack is gonna get digitized. So your sales you're marketing your your customer support your logistics. You know you're gonna have one interface to the customer as opposed toe, you know, fragmented stovepipe siloed. You know, data sets all over the place, and that is a major change. And I think that's ultimately what a W. S is trying to affect with its model and has obviously big challenges in doing so. But But that, to me, is what digital transformation is ultimately all about. And I think you're going to see it unfold very rapidly over the next several >>years. What's your reaction? What's your view on on the on Jackie? >>And he talked about his eight steps toe reinvention. Um and e think what digital transformation to me is the willingness to re invent disruptive own business even in the face that it might look horrible for your business, right? But understanding he is there something that I think is true. And a lot of, um, business leaders don't fully by this that if something is good for your customer, they're going to do it, and you can either make it happen, or you gonna watch it happen and then have the market taken away from me because there's a lot of cases you look at how slow you know, A lot of the banks, you know, operated until you know, the a lot of these, uh, cloud native, uh, money exchange systems came around the cape. Alan Ben more and things like that, right? Even retailers Amazon completely disrupted that model. You could say that Amazon killed, you know, Toys R us, but 20 rescue Toys R Us E. And I think there's got to be this hard willingness to look at your business model and be willing to disrupt yourself. And what Kobe did, John, I think, is a taught us a lesson that you have to be prepared for anything because nobody saw this coming. And sure you can. And a lot of companies thrived out of this, and a lot of one's gone away, but that the ability to be agile has never been more important. But you're only is Angela's. Ike lets you be, and that's what that's what. The W. Is going to sell us the ability to do anything you want with your business. But the staff, you have to have the business because they're willing to do that. >>You know, that's a great point. That's so smart. It's crime that's worth calling out. And we were talking before we came on live about our business with the Cube. There's no virtual, there's no floor anymore. So we had to go virtual if we weren't in the cloud. If we weren't doing R and D and tinkering with some software and having our studio, we'd be out of business. Dave. Everyone knows it. Now Get the Cube virtual. We have some software were position, and this kind of speaks directly to what Andy Jassy said. He said. Quote. If you're not in the process of figuring out as a company, how you're going to reinvent your customer experience in your product and reinvent who you are, you are starting to unwind. You may not realize it, but you are. What he's saying is you better wake up and smell the coffee and I want to get your guys reacted. You, particularly you around your experience and research. I've noticed that some customers that had cloud going on did well with co vid and said ones that didn't are still struggling not to catch up. So you're kind of intense. You got some companies that were that were on the wave, Maybe kind of figuring it out, that we're in good position and some that were flat footed and are desperate. Um, seems to be a trend. Do you agree with that? And what's your view on this idea of being ready? What does that even mean to be? Have readiness or >>take, you don't get the data points that Andy threw up there, right? That 50% of the companies that were the global fortune $500.2000 or are no longer here, Right? That Zatz Pretty shocking statistic. And that does come, uh, you know, from the willingness to disrupt your business. And if you got you're right. The companies that had a good, solid class raging in place, we're able to adapt their business very quickly. You could you look at retailers. Some had a very strong online presence. They had online customer service set up those companies didn't find other ones, were really forced to try and figure out how to let people in the store had a mimic. You know, the in store experience, you know, through from, uh, you know, support interface or whatever. Those are the ones that really struggling. So you're right. I think companies that were on the offensive plug to Dover companies that were fully in the cloud really accelerated their business and ones that didn't buy into it. I think they're struggling to survive in a lot of They're gone. >>Yeah, and all that. John, When Jesus was talking about his view of digital transformation, I was just writing down some of the examples to your point. The folks that were sort of had were cloud ready, covert ready, if you will. And those that weren't But think about think about automobiles. You know, there's testily even a manufacturer of automobiles or they software company. Personal health has completely changed over the last nine months with remote. You know, uh, telehealth automated manufacturing. You think about digital cash, e commerce and retail is completely, you know, accelerated. Obviously toe online. Think about kids in college and kids in high school and remote learning farming. You know, we've done a great job in terms of mono crops and actually creating a lot of food. But now I think the next 10 years is gonna be how do we get more nutritious food to people and so virtually every industry is ripe for disruption, and the cloud is the underpinning of that disruption. >>Alright, guys, got a few more minutes left. I want to get your thoughts quickly on the keynote. What it means for the customers that we're watching again. This is not a sales and marketing conference as they talk about. But if you're sitting in the audience, you guys, we're watching and we're virtual um Did it hit home with you? If you're a customer, what did he what? Give us Give the grades. Where do you Where do you hit a home run? Where he missed. Did he leave anything out? What's your take Zia's? We'll start with you. >>Um, I thought it was actually really good Keynote. I thought you did a good job of making the case for AWS. They talked about the open. They have more instances than anybody. So you could do almost any kind of compute in their cloud. I think one of the important lessons variety to is the importance. You can't just do everything. The software right? Hardware Still important silicon still important that, and to meet the needs of very special he needs from things like machine learning and AI. Amazon's actually spending their own silicon very much like Athens doing with their computers. And so if you are going to be a customer service focused company, you need to think of the I T. Stack and everything from the silicon, the hardware through the software, and build that integrated experience to Amazon's giving a tools to do that Now E. Do I would like to see Amazon be a little more, um, a supposed the cloud competitive friendly. The one thing I hear from customers all the time is they love the Amazon tools. They love the optimization capabilities, but you know, if they are adopting some kind of multi cloud strategy, the Amazon tools don't work in Azure and the capital don't work in Amazon. The same with Google, and it would be well within the best interests of those three companies. They find a way to get together and allow their common framework to work across clouds. Amazon's already got a lead that they could do that, and I don't think it's gonna be, but that that is something I think that's still missing from this world is they make it very difficult for customers to move the multi cloud. >>Well, some would say some people are saying, saying that the number one in the cloud I mean, got cloud wars Bob Evans over there saying Microsoft is dominating number one position over everybody else, multiple quarters in a row Now he's looking at revenue and granted. You got a lot of propping up there you got. You know, Windows server and sequel. You got a bunch of professional services, But clearly the I as in past side of the market, Microsoft is, like, way behind um So, yeah, they've got the numbers little legacy in their Microsoft should, and they got a little base. If I'm Amazon, I'm not. I'm worried about Microsoft more than anybody. I think you know, I looking at the Civil War between the Seattle forces. I mean, this is really Microsoft's gotta greatest all base, and they could flip that license deals and >>the cloud is good enough. I mean, it's myself doing very, very well with its classic Microsoft. You know >>they your point. Microsoft is the king of good enough, right? They put out features. They market heavily to the I t pro on. They put out licensing packages, so you're almost foolish to not at least fry their products. And then they do roll it out. So it's good enough and then you live with it for a while. But ultimately, whenever people use Microsoft, they do have an alternative under in there for a very special case. But e don't wanna >>the king of good enough. That's a great line. I love that. I'm gonna use that. But this Babel fish thing for Aurora that is a huge dagger. Potentially, it's an escape valve for customers. They wanna leave Microsoft. But clearly, if Microsoft you're gonna get penalized by running your license on Amazon. >>If our CEO our i t c t, I'd say, Okay, I definitely want to do business with with Amazon. That's what I heard today from Jassy, and I would want to hedge my bets either with Microsoft, especially if I'm a Microsoft shop or with Google's from analytics heavy unquestionably. I'd want to hedge my bets and have some kind of 70 30 80 20 mix. >>Look, if you're Andy Jassy and he's told me my interview, do it directly. I asked this question. He was very forthright. He doesn't hide from the fact that, uh, customers have multiple clouds, but they have a primary and secondary, but they're not gonna have, like, five or six major clouds. Yeah, it's hard to get these teams trained at to begin with. So there's a hedge. There's a supplier leverage. I get that. He's totally gets that. But if you're Amazon, you're gonna have your annual conference. You really don't wanna be in the business of talking about the other guys cloud, you say hybrid, right? It's on my show. You know, like you're competing. This is there's definitely competition between Microsoft and A W s. So you gotta respect that. But yeah, of course. There's multiple clouds called hybrid eks everywhere. Uh, container service. I mean, >>especially global, right? Different cloud providers of different strengths in different regions. You know, Microsoft, very strong in the Gulf. AWS isn't you know. So if you're a global company, um, you know, then you almost by default, have to go multi cloud multiple cloud vendors because of geographic differences. Obviously, China, with its own set of cloud providers. So, you know, smaller midsize businesses could get away with one, but As soon as you become global, you have to use more. >>Well, I'm a big fan of distributed computing. I loved the large scale concept of distribute computing. You got regions. Now you've got local zones. You got I O t edge. You got cloud going on Prem Edge. It's really an edge game at this point. Greater now distributed hyper Put hyper next to anything hyper cloud on your sounds better Piper >>Cube. And the opportunities the cloud providers and Amazon, you know, certainly is leading. This is the ability to take this complex, hyper distributed world and use their management tools toe create a normalized operating simplify What would be an overly complex world about it? >>Okay, we got a break. Just quick plug. There's a big salesforce event coming up on December 10th. Check it out on the Amazon site that that plug in you watching the cube stay tuned for more coverage after this break

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Everyone welcome to the cubes Live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 virtual were virtual this year We are the Cube Virtual I'm your host John for a joint day Volonte for keynote analysis Andy Jassy just delivered his live keynote. This is our live keynote analysis. Dave. Great to see you, Andy Jassy again. You know their eight year covering reinvent their ninth year. We're virtual. We're not in person. We're doing it. >>Great to see you, John. Even though we're 3000 miles apart, we both have the covert here. Do going Happy birthday, my friend. >>Thank you. Congratulations. Five years ago I was 50 and they had the cake on stage and on the floor. There's no floor, this year's virtual and I think one of the things that came out of Andy Jessie's keynote, obviously, you know, I met with him earlier. Telegraph some of these these moves was one thing that surprised me. He came right out of the gate. He acknowledged that social change, the cultural shift. Um, that was interesting but he went in and did his normal end to end. Slew of announcements, big themes around pivoting. And he brought kind of this business school kind of leadership vibe to the table early talking about what people are experiencing companies like ourselves and others around the change and cultural change around companies and leadership. It takes for the cloud. And this was a big theme of reinvent, literally like, Hey, don't hold on to the old And I kept thinking to myself, David, you and I both are Historians of the tech industry remind me of when I was young, breaking into the business, the mainframe guys and gals, they were hugging onto those mainframes as long as they could, and I looked at it like That's not gonna be around much longer. And they kept No, it's gonna be around. This is this is the state of the art, and then the extinction. Instantly this feels like cloud moment, where it's like it's the wake up call. Hey, everyone doing it the old way. You're done. This is it. But you know, this is a big theme. >>Yes. So, I mean, how do you curate 2.5 3 hours of Andy Jassy. So I tried to break it down at the three things in addition to what you just mentioned about him acknowledging the social unrest and and the inequalities, particularly with black people. Uh, but so I had market leadership. And there's some nuance there that if we have time, I'd love to talk about, uh, the feature innovation. I mean, that was the bulk of his presentation, and I was very pleased. I wrote a piece this weekend. As you know, talk about Cloud 2030 and my main focus was the last 10 years about I t transformation the next 10 years. They're gonna be about organizational and business and industry transformation. I saw a lot of that in jazz ces keynote. So you know, where do you wanna go? We've only got a few minutes here, John, >>but let's break. Let's break down the high level theme before we get into the announcement. The thematic part was, it's about reinventing 2020. The digital transformation is being forced upon us. Either you're in the cloud or you're not in the cloud. Either way, you got to get to the cloud for to survive in this post covert error. Um, you heard a lot about redefining compute new chips, custom chips. They announced the deal with Intel, but then he's like we're better and faster on our custom side. That was kind of a key thing, this high idea of computing, I think that comes into play with edge and hybrid. The other thing that was notable was Jessie's almost announcement of redefining hybrid. There's no product announcement, but he was essentially announcing. Hybrid is changed, and he was leaning forward with his definition of redefining what hybrid cloud is. And I think that to me was the biggest, um, signal. And then finally, what got my attention was the absolute overt call out of Microsoft and Oracle, and, you know, suddenly, behind the scenes on the database shift we've been saying for multiple times. Multiple databases in the cloud he laid that out, said there will be no one thing to rule anything. No databases. And he called out Microsoft would look at Microsoft. Some people like cloud wars. Bob Evans, our good friend, claims that Microsoft been number one in the cloud for like like year, and it's just not true right. That's just not number one. He used his revenue a za benchmark. And if you look at Microsoft's revenue, bulk of it is from propped up from Windows Server and Sequel Server. They have Get up in there that's new. And then a bunch of professional services and some eyes and passed. If you look at true cloud revenue, there's not much there, Dave. They're definitely not number one. I think Jassy kind of throws a dagger in there with saying, Hey, if you're paying for licenses mawr on Amazon versus Azure that's old school shenanigans or sales tactics. And he called that out. That, to me, was pretty aggressive. And then So I finally just cove in management stuff. Democratizing machine learning. >>Let me pick up on a couple things. There actually were a number of hybrid announcements. Um, E C s anywhere E k s anywhere. So kubernetes anywhere containers anywhere smaller outposts, new local zones, announced 12 new cities, including Boston, and then Jesse rattle them off and made a sort of a joke to himself that you made that I remembered all 12 because the guy uses no notes. He's just amazing. He's up there for three hours, no notes and then new wavelength zones for for the five g edge. So actually a lot of hybrid announcements, basically, to your point redefining hybrid. Basically, bringing the cloud to the edge of which he kind of redefined the data center is just sort of another edge location. >>Well, I mean, my point was Is that my point is that he Actually, Reid said it needs to be redefined. Any kind of paused there and then went into the announcements. And, you know, I think you know, it's funny how you called out Microsoft. I was just saying which I think was really pivotal. We're gonna dig into that Babel Babel Fish Open source thing, which could be complete competitive strategy, move against Microsoft. But in a way, Dave Jassy is pulling and Amazon's pulling the same move Microsoft did decades ago. Remember, embrace and extend right Bill Gates's philosophy. This is kind of what they're doing. They have embraced hybrid. They have embraced the data center. They're extending it out. You're seeing outpost, You see, five g, You're seeing these I o t edge points. They're putting Amazon everywhere. That was my take away. They call it Amazon anywhere. I think it's everywhere. They want cloud operations everywhere. That's the theme that I see kind of bubbling out there saying, Hey, we're just gonna keep keep doing this. >>Well, what I like about it is and I've said this for a long time now that the edge is gonna be one by developers. And so they essentially taking AWS and the data center is an AP, and they're bringing that data center is an A P I virtually everywhere. As you're saying, I wanna go back to something you said about leadership and Microsoft and the numbers because I've done a lot of homework on this Aziz, you know, And so Jassy made the point. He makes this point a lot that it's not about the the actual growth rate. Yeah, the other guys, they're growing faster. But there were growing from a much larger base and I want to share with you a nuance because he said he talked about how AWS grew incrementally 10 billion and only took him 12 months. I have quarterly forecast and I've published these on Wiki Bond, a silicon angle. And if you look at the quarterly numbers and now this is an estimate, John. But for Q four, I've got Amazon growing at 25%. That's a year on year as you're growing to 46% and Google growing at 50% 58%. So Google and and Azure much, much higher growth rates that than than Amazon. But what happens when you look at the absolute numbers? From Q three to Q four, Amazon goes from 11.6 billion to 12.4 billion. Microsoft actually stays flat at around 6.76 point eight billion. Google actually drops sequentially. Now I'm talking about sequentially, even though they have 58% growth. So the point of the Jazz is making is right on. He is the only company growing at half the growth rate year on year, but it's sequential. Revenues are the only of the Big Three that are growing, so that's the law of large numbers. You grow more slowly, but you throw off more revenue. Who would you rather be? >>I think I mean, it's clearly that Microsoft's not number one. Amazon's number one cloud certainly infrastructure as a service and pass major themes in the now so we won't go through. We're digging into the analyst Sessions would come at two o'clock in three o'clock later, but they're innovating on those two. They want they one that I would call this member. Jasio says, Oh, we're in the early innings Inning one is I as and pass. Amazon wins it all. They ran the table, No doubt. Now inning to in the game is global. I t. That was a really big part of the announcement. People might have missed that. If you if you're blown away by all the technical and complexity of GP three volumes for EBS and Aurora Surveillance V two or sage maker Feature store and Data Wrangler Elastic. All that all that complex stuff the one take away is they're going to continue to innovate. And I, as in past and the new mountain that they're gonna Klima's global I t spin. That's on premises. Cloud is eating the world and a W s is hungry for on premises and the edge. You're going to see massive surge for those territories. That's where the big spend is gonna be. And that's why you're seeing a big focus on containers and kubernetes and this kind of connective tissue between the data machine layer, modern app layer and full custom. I as on the on the bottom stack. So they're kind of just marching along to the cadence of, uh, Andy Jassy view here, Dave, that, you know, they're gonna listen to customers and keep sucking it in Obama's well and pushing it out to the edge. And and we've set it on the Cube many years. The data center is just a big edge. And that's what Jassy is basically saying here in the keynote. >>Well, and when when Andy Jassy gets pushed on Well, yes, you listen to customers. What about your partners? You know, he'll give examples of partners that are doing very well. And of course we have many. But as we've often said in the Cube, John, if you're a partner in the ecosystem, you gotta move fast. There were three interesting feature announcements that I thought were very closely related to other things that we've seen before. The high performance elastic block storage. I forget the exact name of it, but SAN in a cloud the first ever SAN in the cloud it reminds me of something that pure storage did last year and accelerate so very, very kind of similar. And then the aws glue elastic views. It was sort of like snowflake's data cloud. Now, of course, AWS has many, many more databases that they're connecting, You know, it, uh, stuff like as one. But the way AWS does it is they're copying and moving data and doing change data management. So what snowflake has is what I would consider a true global mesh. And then the third one was quicksight que That reminded me of what thought spots doing with search and analytics and AI. So again, if you're an ecosystem partner, you gotta move fast and you've got to keep innovating. Amazon's gonna do what it has to for customers. >>I think Amazon's gonna have their playbooks when it's all said and done, you know, Do they eat the competition up? I think what they do is they have to have the match on the Amazon side. They're gonna have ah, game and play and let the partners innovate. They clearly need that ecosystem message. That's a key thing. Um, love the message from them. I think it's a positive story, but as you know it's Amazons. This is their Kool Aid injection moment, David. Educational or a k A. Their view of the world. My question for you is what's your take on what wasn't said If you were, you know, as were in the virtual audience, what should have been talk about? What's the reality? What's different? What didn't they hit home? What could they have done? What, your critical analysis? >>Well, I mean, I'm not sure it should have been said, but certainly what wasn't said is the recognition that multi cloud is an opportunity. And I think Amazon's philosophy or belief at the current time is that people aren't spreading workloads, same workload across multiple clouds and splitting them up. What they're doing is they're hedging bets. Maybe they're going 70 30 90 10, 60 40. But so multi cloud, from Amazon standpoint is clearly not the opportunity that everybody who doesn't have a cloud or also Google, whose no distant third in cloud says is a huge opportunity. So it doesn't appear that it's there yet, so that was I wouldn't call it a miss, but it's something that, to me, was a take away that Amazon does not currently see that there's something that customers are clamoring for. >>There's so many threads in here Were unpacked mean Andy does leave a lot of, you know, signature stories that lines in there. Tons of storylines. You know, I thought one thing that that mass Amazon's gonna talk about this is not something that promotes product, but trend allies. I think one thing that I would have loved to Seymour conversation around is what I call the snowflake factor. It snowflake built their business on Amazon. I think you're gonna see a tsunami of kind of new cloud service providers. Come on the scene building on top of AWS in a major way of like, that kind of value means snowflake went public, uh, to the level of no one's ever seen ever in the history of N Y s e. They're on Amazon. So I call that the the next tier cloud scale value. That was one thing I'd like to see. I didn't hear much about the global i t number penetration love to hear more about that and the thing that I would like to have heard more. But Jassy kind of touched a little bit on it was that, he said at one point, and when he talked about the verticals that this horizontal disruption now you and I both know we've been seeing on the queue for years. It's horizontally scalable, vertically specialized with the data, and that's kind of what Amazon's been doing for the past couple of years. And it's on full display here, horizontal integration value with the data and then use machine learning with the modern applications, you get the best of both worlds. He actually called that out on this keynote. So to me, that is a message to all entrepreneurs, all innovators out there that if you wanna change the position in the industry of your company, do those things. There's an opportunity right now to integrate with the cloud to disrupt horizontally, but then on the vertical. So that will be very interesting to see how that plays out. >>And eventually you mentioned Snowflake and I was talking about multi cloud snowflake talks about multi cloud a lot, but I don't even think what they're doing is multi cloud. I think what they're doing is building a data cloud across clouds and their abstracting that infrastructure and so to me, That's not multi Cloud is in. Hey, I run on Google or I run on the AWS or I run on Azure ITT's. I'm abstracting that making that complexity disappeared, I'm creating an entirely new cloud at scale. Quite different. >>Okay, we gotta break it there. Come back into our program. It's our live portion of Cube Live and e. K s Everywhere day. That's multi cloud. If they won't say, that's what I'll say it for them, but the way we go, more live coverage from here at reinvent virtual. We are virtual Cuban John for Dave a lot. They'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to Palo Altos Cube Studios for CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE. We're with Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision, CUBE Alumni. He's been on before. Building one of the most compelling companies that's disrupting and changing the game in Comms, advertising, PR, with Cloud technologies. Kevin, great to see you again, thanks for coming in. >> Likewise John, It's really good to be back. >> So, we haven't chatted in two years. You've been busy. Our last conversation was the beginning of 2017. Cision's done a lot of interesting things. You've got a lot of M and A under your belt. You're putting this portfolio together with Cloud technologies. Really been interesting. I really got to say I think you cracked the code on I think a new reality, a new economic reality. Also new capabilities for comms folks. Congratulations. >> Thank you, it's been a fun ride. >> So give us the update. So two years since we talked, how many deals, companies have you bought? What's the headcount, what's the revenue? Give us an update. >> In the four years, 12 acquisitions, seven of which have happened since I've been here. Up to 4,500 employees in over 40 countries. Customer count has grown to over 50,000 customers globally. Revenue's kind of gone from 500s to just shy of 800 million. A lot of leadership changes, and as you just mentioned, pretty seismic change, finally. We've certainly been the catalyst and the cattle prod for that seismic change around tech, data, measurement and analytics finally becoming mature and adopted inside this line of business like the Chief Communication Officer, the earn media folks. To say that they were not tech savvy a few years ago would be an understatement. So, a lot's been going on. >> Yeah, and certainly the trend is your friend, in my opinion, for you. But I think the reality is not yet upon people's general mindset. It's coming quickly, so if you look at some of the big trends out there. Look at fake news, look at Facebook, look at the Google effect. Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Big Tech, Amazon. Cloud computing, in that time period that you were, prior to just going to Cision, you had Oracle Cloud, done a lot of great things on the Marketing Cloud side. But the timing of Cloud computing, the timing of how media has changed. There's not many journalists anymore. We had Andy Cunningham, a legendary industry veteran, formerly of Cunningham Communications. He did the PR for Steve Jobs. You said, there's no more journalists, a few left, but you got to tell your story direct to the consumer. >> You do. >> This is now a new marketing phenomenon. This is a tailwind for you at Cision because you guys, although put these cubbies together, have a unique vision around bringing brand value advertising at PR economics. >> Yeah, that's a good way to put it. >> Tell us the vision of Cision and specifically the shift that's happening. Why are you guys important? What wave are you riding? >> So, there's a couple shifts, John. You and I have talked about this in previous programs There's this shift of the line of business, having to work in a whole bunch of non-integrated point solutions. The CFO used to live in 17 different applications from 17 vendors. That's all squished together. Now I buy from one Cloud platform, right, from Oracle or SAP. Same thing happened in Human Capital Management. 22 things squished into the Cloud, one from Workday, right. Same thing happened, you had 25 different things for sales and service. That all squished together, into one CRM in the Cloud, I buy from Salesforce, right. And our last rodeo, the early part of this stack, it was me and Adobe battling it out for the right to go squish the entire the LUMAscape into a marketing cloud, right, so there could be one ring to rule them all for the CMO. So, it happens in every single category. It just hasn't had over here, happened on the earned media side and the Chief Communications Officer. So, bringing the tech stack so that now we are for the CCO what Adobe is for the CMO what Salesforce is for the CRO, Workday is for the CHRO. That has to happen. You can't do, you can't manage it this way without sophisticated tech, without automation, without integration, you can't do it. The second thing that had to happen, especially in marketing and advertising, they all figured out how to get revenue credit. Advertising was a slow single-digit CAGR industry for 50 years. And then something happened. After 5% CAGR for 50 years, and then something happened over the next 10 years. Digital paid went from like 15 billion to 150 billion. And what happened is that old, I know half my advertising is wasted on this one half. That went bye-bye. Now I know immediately, down to the page, down the ad unit, down to this, exactly what worked, right. When I was able to put Pixels on ads, John, you'd go to that page, Pixel would go on you, It would follow you around If you ended up putting something in the e-commerce shop that ad got credit. I'm not saying that's right, I'm just saying that's how the entire-- >> But that's how the infrastructure would let you, allowed you, it enabled you to do that. Then again, paid advertising, paid search, paid advertising, that thing has created massive value in here. >> Massive value. But my buyer, right, so the person that does the little ad on the most regional tech page got credit. My buyer that got Bob Evans, the Cloud King, to write an article about why Microsoft is going to beat AWS, he's a credible third party influencer, writing objectively. That article's worth triple platinum and has more credibility than 20,000 Microsoft sales reps. We've never, until Cision, well let's Pixel that, let's go figure out how many of those are the target audience. Let's ride that all the way down to the lead form that's right. Basically it's super simple. Nobody's ever tracked the press releases, the articles or any of the earned media content, the way people have tracked banner ads or e-commerce emails. Therefore this line of business never get revenue credit. It stayed over here in the OpEx pile where things like commerce and advertising got dumped onto the revenue pile. Well, you saw the crazy investment shift. So, that's really the more important one, is Comms is finally getting quantified ROI and business's attribution like their commerce and advertising peers for the first time ever in 2018 via what Cision's rolled out. That's the exciting piece. >> I think, I mean, I guess what I hear you saying is that for the first time, the PR actually can be measured, similar to how advertising >> You got it. >> Couldn't be measured then be measured. Now PR or communications can be measured. >> They get measured the same way. And then one other thing. That ad, that press release, down to the business event. This one had $2 million dollars of ad spend, this one had no ad spend. When it goes to convert, in CRM or it goes to convert on a website, this one came from banner ad, this one came from credible third party content. Guess which one, not only had zero ad spend instead of $2 million in ad spend. Guess which one from which source actually converts better. It's the guy that chose to read credible third-party article. He's going to convert in the marketing system way better that somebody who just clicked on the ad. >> Well certainly, I'm biased-- >> So all the way down the funnel, we're talking about real financial impact based on capturing earned media ID, which is pretty exciting. >> Well, I think the more exciting thing is that you're basically taking a value that is unfunded quote by the advertising firm, has no budget basically, or thin budgets, trying to hit an organic, credible outlet which is converting in progression to a buyer, an outcome. That progression is now tracked. But let's just talk about the economics because you're talking about $2 million in spend, it could be $20 million. The ratio between ad spend and conversion to this new element you mentioned is different. You're essentially talking about the big mega trend, which is organic content. Meaning connecting to sources. >> That's right. >> That flow. Of course, we believe and we, at the Cube, everyone's been seeing that with our business. Let's talk about that dynamic because this is not a funded operationalized piece yet, so we've been seeing, in the industry, PR and comms becoming more powerful. So, the Chief Communication Officer isn't just rolling out press releases, although they have to do that to communicate. You've got medium posts now, you've got multiple channels. A lot of places to put the story. So the Chief Communication Officer really is the Chief Storyteller Officer, Not necessarily the CMO. >> Emphatically. >> The Martech Stack kind of tracking. So talk about that dynamic. How is the Chief Communication Officer role change or changing? Why is that important and what should people be thinking about, if they are a Chief Communication Officer? >> You know, it's interesting. There's a, I'm just going to call it an actual contradiction on this front. When you and I were getting out of our undergrad, 7 out of 10 times that CCO, the Chief Communication Officer, worked for the CEO and 30% of time other. Yet the role was materially narrow. The role has exploded. You just said it pretty eloquently. This role has really exploded and widened its aperture. Right now though 7 out of 10 of them actually do work for the CMO, which is a pretty interesting contradiction. And only 30% of them work for the CEO. Despite the fact that from an organizational stand point, that kind of counter intuitive org move has been made. It doesn't really matter because, so much of what you just said too, you was in marketing's purview or around brand or around reputation or around telling the story or around even owning the key assets. Key assets isn't that beautiful Budweiser frog commercial they played on Super Bowl anymore. The key assets are what's getting done over in the communications, in part. So, from a storytelling standpoint, from an ownership of the narrative, from a, not just a product or a service or promotion, but the whole company, the whole brand reputation, the goodwill, all of that is comms. Therefore you're seeing comms take the widest amount of real estate around the boardroom table than they've ever had. Despite the fact that they don't sit in the chair as much. I mentioned that just because I find it very interesting. Comms has never been more empowered, never had a wider aperture. >> But budget wise, they're not really that loaded up with funding. >> And to my earlier point, it's because they couldn't show. Super strategic. Showing ROI. >> So, showing ROI is critical. >> Not the quality of clippings. >> It was the Maslow of Hierarchy of Needs if you can just show me that I put a quarter in and I got a dollar out. Like the ads and the e-commerce folks do. It simply drives the drives me. >> So take us through some of those analytics because people who know about comms, the old school comms people who are doing this, they should really be thinking about what their operation is because, can I get an article in the Wall Street Journal? Can Silicon Angle write about us? I've got to get more clippings. That tend to be the thing. Did we get the press release out on time? They're not really tied into some of the key marketing mix pieces. They tend to be kind of a narrow scope. Those metrics were pretty clear. What are the new metrics? What's the new operational playbook.? >> Yeah, we call those Vanity Metrics. I cared about theoretical reach. Hey, Yahoo tells me I reached 222 billion people, so I plug in 222 billion people. I reached more people than there are on the planet with this PR campaign. I needed to get to the basic stuff like how many people did I actually reach, number one. But they don't, they do theoretical reach. They work in things like sentiment. Well, I'm going to come up with, 100 reporters wrote about me. I'm going to come up with, how many of them I thought were positive, negative, neutral. Sentiment analysis, they measure number of reporters or hits versus their competitors and say, Proctor and Gamble rolled out this diaper product, how did I do this five days? How much did Proctor and Gamble diapers get written about versus Craft diapers versus Unilever's. Share a voice. Not irrelevant metrics. But not metrics the CEO and the CFO are going to invest in. >> Conversion to brand or sales, those kind of things? >> They never just never existed. Those never existed. Now when we can introduce the same exact metrics that the commerce and the ad folks do and say, I can tell you exactly how many people. I can tell you exactly who they were, demographic, firmographic, lifestyle, you name it. I can tell you who the audience is you're reaching. I can tell you exactly what they do. When those kind of people read those kind of articles or those kind of people read those kind of press releases, they go to these destinations, they take these behaviors. And because I can track that all the way down to whatever that success metric is, which could be a lead form if I'm B2B for pipe. It could be a e-commerce store from B2C. It could be a rating or review or a user generation content gourd. It could be a sign up and register, if I'm trying to get database names. Whatever the business metric is. That's what the commerce and the ad people do all day every day. That's why they are more funded than ever. The fact that press releases, articles, tweets, blogs, the fact that the earned media stuff has never been able to do those things is why they just continue to suffer and have had a real lack of investment prices going on for the last 20 year. >> Talk about the trend around-- >> It's simple stuff. >> I know, if you improve the ROI, you get more budget. >> It really is that simple. >> That's been the challenge. I think PR is certainly becoming, comms is becoming more powerful. People know I talk about it all the time. I think comms is the new CMO I think command and control and organic content work together in the organic. We've seen it first hand in our business. But, it's an issue of tech savviness and also vision. A lot of people just are uncomfortable shifting to the new realities. >> That's for sure. >> What are some of the people tech savvy look at when they look at say revamping comms platform or strategy versus say old school? >> I'll give you two answers on that, John. Here is one thing that is good for us, that 7 out of 10 to the CCOs work for the CMO. Because when I was in this seat starting to light that fire under the CMO for the first time, which was not that long ago, and they were not tech savvy, and they were not sophisticated. They didn't know how to do this stuff either. That was a good 10 year journey to get the CMO from not sophisticated to very sophisticated. Now they're one of the more sophisticated lines of business in the world. But that was a slog. >> So are we going to see a Comms Stack? Like Martech, ComTech. >> ComTech is the decision communication Cloud, is ComTech. So we did it. We've built the Cloud stack. Again like I said, just like Adobe has the tech stack for marketing, Cision has the tech stack for comms, and we've replicated that. But because the CCO works for the CMO and the CMO's already been through this. Been through this with Ad Techs, been through this with MarTech, been through this with eCommerce, been through this with Web. You know, I've got a three or four year sophistication path this time just because >> The learnings are there >> The company's already done it everywhere else. The boss has already done it everywhere else. >> So the learnings are there from the MarTech so it's a pretty easy leap to take? >> That's exactly right. >> It's just-- >> How CommTech works is shocking. Incredibly similar to how MarTech and AdTech work. A lot of it is the same technology, just being applied different. >> That's good news >> So, the adoption curve for us is a fantastic thing. It's a really good thing for us that 70% of them work for CMOs because the CMO is the most impatient person on the planet, to get this over because the CMO is sick of doing customer journeys or omni channel across just paid and owned. They recognize that the most influential thing to influence you, it's not their emails, it's not their push notifications, It's not their ads. It's recognizing which credible third-party content you read, getting them into that, so that they're influencing you. >> It's kind of like Google PageRank in the old days. This source is more relevant than that one, give it more weight. >> And now all of a sudden if I have my Cision ID, I can plug in the more weight stuff under your profile. I want to let him go across paid and owned too, I materially improve the performance of the paid and owned because I'm putting in the really important signal versus what's sitting over there in the DMP or the CDP, which is kind of garbage. That's really important. >> I really think. >> I thinks you've got a home run here. I think you've really cracked the code on this. I think you are absolutely right on the money with comms and CommsTech. I see it all the time. In my years of experiences, it's so obvious. Then again, the tailwind is that they've been through the MarTech. The question I have for you is cultural shift. That's a big one. So, I'm out evangelizing all the time about the CUBE Cloud and some of the things we're doing. I run into the deer in the headlights on one side, what do you mean? And then people like, I believe, I totally understand. The believers and the non believers. What's the cultural shift? Because some chief comms op, they're very savvy, progressive, we've got to make the shift. How do they get the ship to turn? What are some of the cultural challenges? >> And boy is that right. I felt the same thing, getting more doing it with the CMO. A lot of people kept their head in the sand until they got obsoleted. They didn't know. Could they not see the train coming? They didn't want to see the train coming. Now you go look at the top 100 CMOs in the world today. Pretty different bunch than who those top 100 CMOs were 10 years ago. Really different bunch. History's repeating itself over here too. You've got the extremely innovative CCOs that are driving that change and transformation. You've got the deer in the headlight, okay, I know I need to do this, but I'm not sure how, and you do have your typical, you know, nope, I've got my do not disturb sign and police tape over my office. I won't even let you in my door. I don't want to hear about it. You've got all flavors. The good news is we are well past the half point where the innovators are starting actually to deploy and show results, the deer in the headlights are starting to innovate, and these folks are at least opening up the door and taking down some tape. >> Is there pressure on the agency side now? A lot of agencies charge a lot of monthly billings for these clients, the old school thing. Some are trying to be progressive and do more services. Have you seen, with the Cision Cloud and things that you're doing, that you're enabling, those agencies seem to be more productive? >> Yes. >> Are the client's putting pressure on those agencies so they see more value? Talk about the agency dynamic. >> That's also a virtuous cycle too, right? That cycle goes from, it's a Bell Curve. At the beginning of the bell curve, customers have no clue about the communications. They go to their agencies for advice. So, you have to educate the agencies on how to say nice things about you. By the time you're at the Bell Curve, the client's know about the tech or they've adopted the tech, and the agencies realize, oh, I can monetize the hell out of this. They need strategy and services and content and creative and campaign. This is yet another good old fashioned >> High gross profit. >> A buck for the tech means six bucks for me as the service agency. At the bottom, over here, I'll never forget this when we did our modern marketing experiences, Erik, the CMO of Clorox said, hey, to all you agencies out there, now that we're mature, you know, we choose our our agency based on their fluency around our tech stack. So it goes that violently and therefore, the agencies really do need to try to get fluent. The ones that do, really reap rewards because there is a blatant amount of need as the line of business customer tries to get from here to here. And the agency is the is the very first place that that customer is going to go to. >> So, basically the agency-- >> The customer has first right of refusal to go provide these services and monetize them. >> So, the agency has to keep up. >> They certainly do. >> Because, if the game gets changed by speed, it's accelerated >> If they keep up, yup. >> Value is created. If they don't have their running shoes on, they're out. >> If they keep up and they stay fluent, then they're going to be great. The last thing back in the things. We've kind of hit this. This is one of those magic points I've been talking about for 20 years. When the CFO or the CEO or the CMO walk down to the CCOs office and say, where are we on this, 'cause it's out in the wild now, there are over 1200 big brands doing this measurement, Cision ID, CommsTech stuff. It's getting written about by good old fashioned media. Customer says, wow, I couldn't do this for 50 years, now I am, and look what I just did to my Comms program. That gets read. The world's the same place as it always has been. You and I read that. We go down to our comms department and say, wow, I didn't know that was possible, where are we on this? So the Where Are We On This wave is coming to communications, which is an accelerant. >> It's an accountability-- >> Now it's accountability, and therefore, the urgency to get fluent and changed. So now they're hiring up quantums and operations and statisticians and database people just like the marketers did. The anatomy of a communications department is starting to like half science half art, just like happened in marketing. Whereas before that, it was 95% art and 5% science. But it's getting to be 50/50. >> Do you have any competition? >> We have, just like always. >> You guys pretty much have PR Newswire, a lot of big elements there. >> We do. >> You've got a good foothold. >> This is just an example. Even though Marketo is part of Adobe, giant. And Eloqua is part of Oracle, giant and Pardot is part of Salesforce. You've got three goliaths in marketing automation. Hubspot's still sticking around. PeerPlay, marketing Automation. You can just picture it. CRM giants, Microsoft and Salesforce have eaten the world Zendesk's still kicking around. It's a little PeerPlay. That equivalent exists. I have nobody that's even one fifth as big as I am, or as global or complete. But I do have some small, point specific solution providers. They're still hanging out there. >> The thing is, one, first you're a great leader. You've seen the moving on the marking tech side. You've got waves of experience under your belt. But I think what's interesting is that like the Web 1.0, having websites and webpages, Web 2.0 and social networks. That was about the first generation. Serve information, create Affiliate programs, all kind of coded tracking. You mentioned all that. I over-simplified it, but you get the idea. Now, every company needs a new capability. They need to stand up media infra structure. What does that mean? They're going to throw a podcast, they're going to take their content, put them into multiple channels. That's a comms function. Now comms is becoming the new CMO-like capability in this earned channel. So, your Cloud becomes that provisioning entity for companies to stand up capabilities without waiting. Is that the vision? >> You've nailed it. And that is one of the key reasons why you have to have a tech stack. That's a spot on one, another one. Early in my career, the 20 influences that mattered, they were all newspaper reporters or TV folks. There was only 20 of them. I had a Rolodex. so I could take each one of them out for a three Martini lunch, they'd write something good about me. >> Wish is was that easy now. >> Now, you have thousands of influencers across 52 channels, and they change in real time, and they're global in nature. It's another example of where, well, if you don't automate that with tech and by the way. >> You're left behind. >> If you send out digital content they talk back to you in real time. You have to actually not only do influencer identification, outreach and curation, you've got to do real time engagement. >> There's no agility. >> There's none. >> Zero agility. >> None, exactly. >> There's no like Dev Ops mindset in there at all. >> Then the speed with which, it's no longer okay for comms to call the agency and say, give me a ClipBook, I've got to get it to my CEO by Friday. That whole start the ClipBook on Tuesday, I've got to have the ClipBook, the physical ClipBook on the CEO as an example. Nope, if I'm not basically streaming my senior executives in real time, curated and analyzed as to what's important and what it means, I can't do that without a tech stack. >> Well, Andy Cunningham was on the Cube. >> This whole thing has been forced to get modernized by cloud technology and transformation >> Andy Cunningham, a legend in the comms business who did all Steve Jobs comms, legend. She basically said on The Cube, it's not about waiting for the clips to create the ClipBook, create your own ClipBook and get it out there. Then evaluate and engage. This is the new command and control with digital assets. >> Now, it's become the real-time, curated feed that never stops. It sure as hell better not. Because comms is in trouble if it does. >> Well this is a great topic. But let's have you in this, I can go deep on this. I think this is a really important shift, and you guys are the only ones that are on it at this level. I don't think the Salesforce and the Adobe yet, I don't think they're nimble enough to go after this wave. I think they're stuck on their wave and they're making a lot of money. >> You know John, paid media and owned media. The Google Marketing Cloud, that SAP Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce Marketing Clouds. They don't do anything in earned. Nothing. This is one of the reasons I jumped because I knew this needed to happen. But, you know, they're also chasing much bigger pots of money. Marketing and Advertising is still a lot more money. We're working on it to grow the pie for comms. But, bottom line is, they're chasing the big markets as I was at Oracle. And they're still pretty much in a violent arms race against each other. Salesforce is still way more focused on what Adobe's doing. >> You're just on a different wave. >> So, we're just over here doing this, building a billion dollar cloud leader, that is mission critical to everyone of their customers. They're going to end up being some pretty import partners to us, because they've been too focused on the big arms race against each other, in paid and owned and have not had the luxury to even go here. >> Well I think this wave that you're on is going to be really big. I think they don't see it, in my opinion, or can't get there. With the right surfboard, to use a surfing analogy, there's going to be a big wave. Thanks for sharing your insights. >> Absolutely. >> While you're here, get the plug in for Cision. What's going on, what's next? What's the big momentum? Get the plug in for the company. What are you guys still going to do? >> Plugin for the company. The company has acquired a couple of companies in January. You might see, one of which is Falcon. Basically Falcon is one of the big four in the land of Hootsuite, Sprinklr, Spredfast. Cloud companies do this. Adobe has Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Parking Cloud. Salesforce has Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud. Cision has just become a multi cloud company. We now have the Cision Social Cloud and the Cision Communications Cloud. And we're going to go grab a couple hundred million dollars of stuff away from Sprinklr, Hootsuite and collapse social into this. Most of social is earned as well. So, look for a wing spread, into another adjacent market. I think that's number one. Then look for publishing of the data. That's probably going to be the most exciting thing because we just talked about, again our metrics and capabilities you can buy But, little teaser. If we can say, in two months here's the average click through on a Google ad, YouTube ad, a banner ad, I'll show it to you on a Blog, a press release, an article. Apples to apples. Here is the conversion rate. If I can start becoming almost like an eMarketer or publisher on what happens when people read earned, there's going to be some unbelievable stats and they're going to be incredibly telling, and it's going to drive where are we on that. So this is going to be the year. >> It's a new digital advertising format. It's a new format. >> That's exactly right. >> It's a new digital advertising format. >> And its one when the CEO understands that he or she can have it for earned now, the way he's had it for marketing and advertising, that little conversation walking down the hall. In thousands of companies where the CCO or the VP of PR looks up and the CEO is going where are we on that? That's the year that that can flip switches, which I'm excited about. >> Every silo function is now horizontally connected with data, now measured, fully instrumented. The value will be there and whoever can bring the value gets the budget. That's the new model. Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision, changing the game in the shift around the Chief Communications Officer and how that is becoming more tech savvy. Really disrupting the business by measuring earned media. A big wave that's coming. Of course, it's early, but it's going to be a big one. Kevin, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure, John, thank you. >> So, CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto Thanks for watching. >> Thanks John. (upbeat music)

(intense orchestral music) >> Hello and welcome to this special VMworld preview, I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, here in the Silicon Valley, Palo Alto offices for theCUBE. I'm here with Peter Burris, head of research at SiliconANGLE media and Wikibon team. We're hear kickin' off, what we're going to talk about at VMworld, what we expect to see at the event in Las Vegas; and what are some of the highlights from the news, what's going to be discussed. Peter, great to see you. >> Great to be here John. >> I know you've been workin' hard, we're going to talk about this new true private cloud report that you put out, very comprehensive, a lot to go through, so, we're going to digest that, we're going to unpack that. But first, we're going to have theCUBE there for you know three days. >> Two sets right? >> Two sets. So, second year in a row we have two sets at VMworld. 72 thought leaders and interviews in the middle of the hang space, if you're going to to to VMworld, go to the hang space and look for us, come say hello there's some little cough areas to hang out. Come visit us, say hello, check in if you're an influencer, we're going to come preview some new technology we're going to show there, so, don't forget to ask about that, take a look at the video or the variety of tools we have with theCUBE Digital Tooling and Video Services. But, most notably, there's going to be a lot of headline news, Andy Jassy's going to be giving a keynote, we've got that confirmed on Twitter; and a lot of discussion around the future of the data center, future of IT, certainly of how cloud and on-premises are going to intersect. This is has been a groundbreaking report from Wikibon for the third year of the true private cloud report. So let's unpack that, because I think this is a notable backdrop to VMworld is that as everyone's been saying hybrid cloud, now multi cloud, essentially the same thing. The cloud is a great resource, on-premises (laughs) is not going away. It used to be aspirational to have this notion of having cloud operations. Your report is now definitively saying it's no longer aspirational, it's actually happening. So take a minute to explain the report in it's third year some of the key findings. >> Well the, we might want to, we want to step back a little bit and say what's goin' on with VMware? Because VMware's progress and both what it's enabling, and what constraints it still faces, are going to have a lot to do with what happens in the report. But speaking about the report specifically, True private cloud was a concept that David Floyer, Stu Miniman, kind of devised a number of years ago, and the simple observation is that ultimately a lot of hardware vendors, a lot of system vendors, were just taking the word cloud and slapping it on their hardware and saying oh here's our replacement strategy, does it have anything to do with cloud? Well, kind of, yeah, but not really. And their observation was increasingly, customers are going to want that cloud experience and the basic notion of true private cloud, and what all of our research shows, is that inevitably what's going to happen is the customer's not going to move their data to the public cloud en mass; there's going to be certainly some important elements that are going to there, it's no question about that, but then increasingly they're going to try to bring cloud, the cloud operating model, the cloud experience, down to where the data resides; and that's going to be at the edge, and that's going to be at what others call the core, on-premises. And near premises, so, you know side-by-side with public cloud players in in a number of different hosting companies. So the very concept is the requirements or the attributes of the data are going to dictate where the workloads operate, and increasingly those, that's going to demand an on-premises capability that still satisfies the basic notions of cloud. >> Great, that's a great backdrop. Now let's talk about VMware, and let's, I have something that I want to talk about the direct cloud report, we'll get into that. VMware had two or three years ago, Pat Gelsinger was under the gun, you know with the pressure of the Dell merger looming, what the future is going to be in there. Since then the performance of VMware has been spectacular financially, he's really proud of that. Some new products pivoting, I want to get what you're hearing first, but what I'm hearing is and I want to give you something, give you a chance to respond, I want to get your reaction. VMware has seen some acceleration over the years around vSphere, around kind of good, stable, that haven't lost anything with vSphere, so, one of their core products, virtualization storage; but their large accounts are stable in the Fortune 500, losing some business maybe in the lower accounts, but as the AWS, Azures, and Google Cloud, cloud native players are growing, the emerging products are front and center for VMware. vSAN, NSX, obviously the driver which we'll want to double click on, and the vCHS, the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service. These are, specifically the vSAN getting momentum, and these emerging products, how important is that for VMware? Obviously their stability is IT footprint. But why is the cloud driving some of these new emerging behaviors? >> Look, every company wish they had the install base that VMware has, and that install base is predicated on VDI, or Video Desktop Integration, Virtual Desktop Integration. It's vSAN, which is the use of VMware as a basis for virtualizing storage, and obviously all the stuff that's associated with virtualizing hardware. You know, John, it's interesting, if you think about what made the cloud possible, certainly AWS took on the heavy duty the heavy lifting associated with actually creating a business, and it's obviously you know very successful, but it all started with the idea of virtualization, and the notion that you could in fact bring virtualization in on top of hardware sources and generate a lot of not only cost avoidance, but also increasing flexibilities; you can get better utilization but also increase your flexibility, and that's one of the things that made the cloud possible. And so if we think about the VMware install base, that's where it all starts. It's the ability to get greater utilization and greater flexibility on-premise, and now it's moving into the cloud. So we got three basic questions for for VMware that we're looking at. One, there's been a lot of chatter about the relationship between Dell EMC and VMware, and what does that mean? You know Dell EMC is carrying a pretty significant debt load these days, and, there is visibility in where it's going to go, but VMware, as a brand is worth an enormous amount of money. So how does Dell EMC better you know increasingly attach itself to VMware is an interesting question, and what does that mean for the ecosystem? >> Having perverse incentives possibly versus-- >> Possibly, possibly, but we want to get that, there has to be a constant promise from VMware that they're going to take care of the ecosystem first with Dell EMC as a big participant in that. So that's the first thing, especially these days with all the financial chatter. Second thing is, this AWS agreement is really really important, and a lot of people are questioning is it a one way street? Do you just, you know, sure we have virtualization in cloud, we got virtualization here, does it make it easy to bring stuff up to VMware? What happens once it, or up to AWS, what happens once workloads get up there? Is AWS going to try to you know facilitate a migration? That's still a very very challenging technical problem, but we'll see a lot more, Andy Jassy has the keynote as you said, about how that partnership is working and where it's actually going. Because there will be a requirement also to be able to take workloads out of AWS, and out of public clouds, and bring 'em down on-premise. >> Hence the two-way street that you're looking for. >> Got to be a two-way street. A simple example, we're going to see increasing, in the AI world, we're going to see more modeling occurring in cloud, more training occurring in cloud, and more inferencing learning out on the edge and the core. Well, we want to see, you know VMware certainly wants to see more of those workloads being virtualized. And that leads to the third question what's the VMware story with IOT, with the edge? That is very very unclear at this point in time, and there's a lot of work that's going to have to be required to put into. And so I think that those are the three things that we're really focusing on, and how does VMware answer those questions can have a lot to do with future architectures, future business models, and future partnerships. >> And it's important, I think the edge one is clearly obvious that the don't have much announced, but that have to put a stake in the ground at some point. >> Absolutely. And you know, the reality is, the edge has real-time, often is associated with real-time, high performance, every throughput, very lightweight execution. >> Uses the cloud, uses the data center. >> Uses the cloud, uses the cloud, uses you know servos computing is an example, containers, those things all don't require a virtualized machine. >> I want to get your reactions on something, I sent an email out to a bunch of buyers, of friends in the network of theCUBE alumni and our networks and I asked them a question, I said: what do you think about VMware's prospects going forward as a buyer of technology, as you're transforming your organization from the obvious on-premise operating model to hybrid? Which they're all doing pretty much, and are agreeing to it. So the aspirational aspect was confirmed, to your point. So they responded, (laughs) and they said look it, VMware remains largely flat across server, infrastructure, storage, and virtualization buying. >> In terms of growth? >> No, what they're buying and growth, growth, no they're not really paying much attention to that, they're saying it's pretty flat, we're not going anywhere it's not going down, it's not going up per se, in the core segments. They said the main thing is going to be the emerging technology so vSAN, NSX, and vCHS. Then I asked 'em I said: What do you like about VMware, what do you think they're strong in? They said: well, we like the fact that they got, that they have technology, okay, and if they can keep the technology lead we're interested, so that's a question also, I'll get that in a second, the relationships that they've had with VMware, the supplier relationships, rinse reset a feature of products, and then compatibility with their existing IT footprint. I then asked 'em what're you worried about? (laughs) And they said: well, if there's a discussion about replacing VMware, it's around price cost and technology lag. Your reaction to those two points? >> First point is, again, there's no question that VMware has a great install base of customers that are thinking about what it's going to mean, and I think the most important observation is that, and we'll learn more about how many enterprises really are starting to move their virtual machines up to AWS, for example, more than VMware next week. But I also think that it provides cover for you know a CIO or VP of infrastructure to say yeah I'm going to continue to invest here, and I'm going to, you know, have the option of moving to something else. And there will be a lot more options for what you do with a VMware virtual machine in the future. Regarding the question of whether it's flat or not, I think one of the reasons why that perception is there, is because the hardware business overall has been flat, and VMware is a derivative of play in the hardware business, so, at least until recently. In many respects now it's dragging some of it forward because VMware allows you to put off additional hardware purchases. So we'll see where that cycle ends up, we might be at the nadir of that cycle, but I certainly think that we're seeing-- >> It's mature for sure, I mean. >> It's mature. But it used to be that you'd buy new hardware and then you'd put VMware on top of it to virtualize it, so you could get more productivity out of it. But as hardware's slowed down, why would you buy more VMware? But I think what's happening now is people are thinking first in terms of buying VMware, and what workloads you need to put on there, how they want to set those workloads up, and then looking for hardware to do that, and increasingly looking through the cloud. The third thing I'd say is that look, the VMware cloud foundation, and NSX, are two incredibly important technologies. For example-- >> Well hold on before you go there, 'cause I want to drill down on this because, one of the things that I mentioned in there which is a key word is existing IT footprint; this is a reality, some call it legacy. Having an IT footprint with VMware is not going to get you in trouble because of the path of the cloud, 'cause you've got cloud native, things like Kubernetes down the road, but that footprint's the base foundation. So as NSX comes in, (laughs) and the cloud foundation, interesting new lever. How does those enabling components fit for the enterprise who's sittin' there sayin' I got an existing IT footprint, I got all these clouds on the horizon, why NSX, why is the vCloud foundation important? >> Yeah, so let's start with VCF, VCF provides, or is a, takes you maybe 75, 80% of the way there to that cloud experience on-premises; a VMware based cloud experience on-premises. So, it's a really nice bundling of technology, that provides a relatively simple way of deploying, configuring, maintaining, and ultimately retiring workloads. So, it's a nice package for a lot of enterprises that have that VMware experience. That's a different story from NSX, so, on the cloud foundation standpoint, if you need to demonstrate to your board and to your CXO, and to your line of business people, that you are not just have an option to go to the cloud, but you're actually bringing that experience more to the business, a lot of customers are kickin' the tires on VCF, and it's a good thing to do. NSX is a little bit different. NSX, if we think about the long term, there has always been a need to flatten networks in the enterprise. Having that network, and that network, and that network, and trying to inter-network them together through bridging and gateways, is extremely problematic, even at the network level. It requires-- >> In terms of sprawl and complexity, or both? >> In terms of complexity, in terms of the amount of processing, I mean the cost of doing address translation and takin' packets and re-formatting them for different workloads in the network; very, very difficult to do. Now, you add programmability atop of that, 'cause at the end of the day, cloud is effectively a network program model. Very, you know, hey, you got a big problem on your hands. Somebody at some point in time is going to make, is going to build a $50 billion company around the idea of inter-networking clouds. I don't know who it is. >> Cisco wants to do it. >> Cisco would like to do it, but Cisco, quite frankly, probablyyyy, you know they could have started this process five or six years ago, and they didn't get out there. VMware took some steps to do that. NSX is a pretty good candidate right now, if we're thinking about how we build inter-networked multi cloud environments. >> So, you used the example before you came on camera, that you have this segment that in the old world of network stacks SNA, DECnet, variety whether stacks had proprietary things and bridges happened, to your point, to your explanation. And then TCP/IP came up and flattened it, TCP/IP. >> Yeah, just flattened it all out, made 'em all go away. >> So clouds aren't networks, but they're cloud environments, same concept, but flattening 'em out. >> Well, they are networks, at the end of the day they really are networks. >> They're a network of machines. >> Yeah, they're a network of services, they're a network of machines. >> So, explain the flattening piece, is it, are we still in the early stages of that, are you seeing visibility? >> Very much so. >> What are some data points around this? >> So the, and you said earlier, that the multi cloud, hybrid cloud are really the same, well today they are. We might envision a day when they're not, here's why. Hybrid cloud is I got this cloud, I got that cloud, it's more of a where is the data located, how am I going to run those environments together. Multi cloud is I got multiple clouds that I have to inter-network, and I have to bring together. I want to run a job in one of the Oracle application clouds, that also touches some of the machine learning that you get out of Google Cloud, and increase and include some of the retail capabilities you get out of AWS. That is a very very realistic scenario, it's going to happen, people are doing that kind of stuff right now. >> And that's the preferred outcome people are looking for? >> That's the preferred outcome that people are lookin' for. Well, each of those different environments are going to have an economic incentive to say yeah, that's great do that, but bring more of the workload into my cloud, 'cause I'm going to create interfaces that are a little bit better at working together than you know you can get from the inter-networking side. Well, they'll still have to stay open, but you know some of those environments are going to be better at that than others; but at the end of the day you want no penalty whatsoever, other than latency and where the data's located from amongst these different services. And so eventually what we're going to want to do is we're going to see the inter-networking itself flatten, where're the jobs, how the jobs are set up: flattened. Make it easier to move data, and jobs or workloads out of one cloud and be able to put it in another, because of any number of different reasons. And so, that's-- >> Yeah, competitive advantage, different economics, different product features >> Regulatory regimes change, you know what happens if if in Germany they decide to do something else from other than GDPR, what's it going to mean? >> So is NSX going to be that connector, you kind of think? >> NSX-- >> Has the opportunity. >> Has the potential to be that kind of connector. So an enterprise that's looking at how they can increase their set of options, their flexibility, their ability to bring networking closer to workload. NSX is as good of, that I know about, that we know about, as good an option out there as any. >> I want to ask you before we move onto the true private cloud versus private cloud and that whole report you did to private cloud in the third year. We're seeing a trend around the operating side, the personas are developing Google Cloud Next conference, the notion of an SRE, you know sight reliability engineer. Public cloud has always been known as developer friendly, very developer oriented, cloud native, all the developers love containers, Kubernetes, Istio, and a lot of cool services are coming out. But now with VMware, they kind of own the IT footprint from an operating model, operating the networks. The bridging of those two worlds are kind of coming together, right now we don't see a lot of cross over yet between pure cloud native developers in VMware ecosystem. Your thought on that connection to those personas, how it relates to how the ecosystem's rolling out, your thoughts? >> Yeah, you know John, I think that's going to be the big challenge for the next couple of years, literally, in the next couple of years. That ultimately, developers love the public cloud because they can avoid operations of people. Increasingly the public cloud players are going to have to provide platforms. And you know everybody talks about I, you know infrastructure as a service versus pass as a service, or platform as a service. But when, in Amazon, Google, Azure, Oracle, IBM Software, all of these guys are going to have to add capabilities that are that much more intriguing and interesting to developers. Bringing the enterprise developer into this ecosystem is the next big round of competition, 'cause those people aren't going to go away, they're too important to the future of business. And, to the degree that VMware can provide, and I think this is the best that they can do, a neutral platform for those guys as opposed to starting to introduce you know machine learning services on VMware or or, you know, anything beyond some of the platform stuff that Dell EMC has Pivotal, and what not, on VMware. Yeah, we can expect to see greater integration for that, but I think ultimately what VMware needs to be is a phenomenal target for stuff that's written over here, that needs to run over there, and have it run on VMware, I think that's ultimately what's going to happen. >> Alright Peter, great stuff, now let's talk about the true private cloud report, 'cause I think VMworld is always a beacon, always a bellwether for what's going on in IT, with respect to on-premises private cloud, or true private cloud, or hybrid cloud, IBM as well, and some others, they're always a leader in engineering. Before we get into the report, first describe the difference between what true private cloud is and what people have called private cloud. Because the term private cloud's been kicked around, going back I think 2012 I first heard-- >> Oh, private cloud, I first heard the term private cloud in probably 2005, 2006. >> But you guys have nailed this definition called true private cloud. What does it mean, what's the difference? >> So, the idea is, the cloud experience wherever the data requires it, and increasingly data is going to require it at the edge, in the core, in the data center, you know, local to the business; because of latency issues, because of cost of bandwidth issues, because of regulatory issues, because of IP control issues, any number of other issues, there's going to be an increasing distribution of data; workloads are going to follow that distribution of data, and the systems have to be there to run it. But we want to have a common vision of how those workloads are operated, and a common model for how we pay to run those workloads. So when you think about true private cloud, it's basically, we want the cloud experience, which includes, you know simplicity, the one throat to choke, the regular and non-invasive upgrades and enhancements to software; we want to add to it, kind of the management interfaces that we're associating with the cloud, but also the pay as you go, and the flexibility to scale up and the greater plasticity to be able to add services. We want all of that, but in a footprint on premise. >> And that's for true private cloud? >> And that's what we mean by true private cloud. Now if you go back a few years, companies would you know, you'd get a hardware company that'd say oh look, cloud is Linux plus some manned control interfaces, no problem, we can put that directly into our operating system or have a management interface on our platform, now we can go on cloud. >> And put it in your data center. >> And put it in your data center. But you still paid for everything up front, you have to deal with software patches and upgrades, because it's software that's installed. >> So it's an operating model, how you're consuming technology, how you're buying it. >> Operating model, how you consume the technology, and the flexibility, and the future of the modern application approach, which is services oriented, and networks and data. >> And so one of the findings obviously, you're pretty strong on this sayin' this is no long aspirational, it's realistic. What does the report show, what're the numbers, how did you break down the report? >> Sure. >> What are the categories, and what are some of the data? >> So the aspirational notion was that we kept talking about true private cloud, but, the hardware vendors were slow to actually deliver on it, especially on that service oriented approach as opposed to a product oriented approach. By that I mean product approach is, you buy it all upfront, and it's caviat after I'm a consumer, service oriented approach is you know we have enough belief in what we're selling that you're only paying for the services you consume, which is what AWS and Azure and others do. So we're seeing that actually happen. That's number one. You take a loot at what HPE's with a technology called GreenLake. IBM is advancing it's cause with software. Dell EMC is doing some interesting things with both VMware but also some related types of technologies. All of that is happening right now, so the server companies, or traditional server companies, are introducing true and honest to goodness capabilities that mimic the cloud, so that's happening. The second thing that's happening is you know the AWSs the Google Clouds, and the big hyper scalers, are also starting to introduce technology that allows at least elements of their platform to run on-premise. The big holdover was AWS, but now, through snowballs, through their their kind of ranked box, data box, you can now put a fair amount of processing on there, and a fair amount of AWS stuff, and you can actually run workloads down on this box. So it extends the AWS platform out to locations in a very novel way. So we're seeing on the one hand the server companies truly will introduce technology and services that actually do a better job of mimicking the cloud. We're seeing the cloud players come up with technologies that allow them to extend their footprint, their cloud presence, down to where data needs to reside, and that's where everybody's goin' right now, everybody's goin for that spot in the marketplace. >> So, you have categories here, on-premise-- >> We have on-premise, which is kind of the traditional true private cloud, and the leaders from a hardware packaging standpoint are Dell EMC, HPE are two of the big leaders. Then we have-- >> Cisco's right behind them. >> Cisco's right behind 'em. We've got what we call the near-premise, or the host of true private cloud, and this is where you have AWS right next to your private cloud box so that they can communicate really fast, or it's hosted. IBM is very big here, but there is a number of other players-- >> IBM's got a sizable lead, it's 12% by your numbers, and Rackspace coming second and four-- >> Rackspace is good. And then you've got some very interesting and very important smaller players, like Expedient for example. And then-- >> So there's two main categories, there's hosted, >> Correct. >> And then on-premise. >> On-premise. >> And then there's another category >> So near premise, and on-premise. >> Near premise and on-premise or hosted. >> And there's the ecosystem side, there's a software that's actually utilized to do this, this is where VMware excels in. >> Explain what the ecosystem, so you called true private cloud ecosystem pull through shares, what is that? >> So, we have, so, VMware as we've been talking about, is one of those technologies that allows one to devise a true private cloud platform. Increasingly that's what they're doing, with some of the technologies that we're talking about. And so ultimately they are putting the software out to customers and customers are defaulting to that software, as their approach to building that true private cloud, and then pulling hardware through as a second decision. So the first decision is I'm going to build my cloud, my private cloud, my true private cloud with VMware, and I'll find hardware that doesn't get in the way. >> So it's leaders who are pulling hardware sales. >> It's the software leaders that are putting the software for building true private clouds out there, and then through partnerships dragging hardware in. >> And so there, they're there and everyone wants to talk to them. So that's VMware (laughs) 24% >> That's VMware, Nutanix is moving along. >> HPE, Microsoft, IBM. >> HPE's in there. >> Interesting, that's awesome. And any other findings that you've found, in terms of growth? Number sizes I think this year you had 21 billion roughly 2017. >> Yeah, it's just over 20, it's 20.3 billion, it's going to go to, you know over 260 billion in 10 years, it's going to be bigger than the infrastructure as a service marketplace, it is the true private cloud segment, the on-premise segment for the first time exceeded the size of the near premise segment as the software matures, as you figure out how to make these business models go. But this is going to be, you know Diane Greene said something very very interesting at Google Next. And she said look, nobody really understands how this business is going to work in 10 years, and she's right. Some companies clearly have a better understanding than others. >> So do you think your numbers are short or over? >> I think-- >> But that implies you know. (laughs) >> Well no, I don't know if it's short or over, but let me give you an example. That our numbers presume a relatively constant approach in thinking about how we price and how we generate exchange for this stuff. But how fast the cloud operating model, that pay as you go moves into the true private space, is going to have an enormous implication on what those revenues look like. The degree to which companies demand a three year commitment like Salesforce is starting to do with SaaS. It's going to have an enormous implication on how those revenues actually get realized. >> Well, we've debated this, you and I have debated this before with Dave as well, Dave this it's a trillion, Dave Vellante, so, you know I think you're sure, I think you took a conservative approach, and you know just my personal observation. >> Well we think the overall cloud market's going to be, if we add SaaS in there, it's going to be 260 to 300, probably a total of 700 billion, something like that, and so it's pretty sizable. So we're just talking about that on-premise true private cloud. >> Yeah, the true private cloud you know, $250 billion by 2027. Okay, so I got to ask you a question, since, I like that Diane Greene quote by the way, just kidding you about the forecast numbers, but, I think she's right. So I got to ask you, what is your observation around what this report says vis-a-vis the buyer market out there who are squinting through the fud, and, all these rankings around who's got the most market share. We hear, you know there was a post on Forbes from my friend Bob Evans that said: oh, Microsoft's number one in cloud! So, how you define cloud is a function of how you define cloud. Someone defines it by bundling an office and apps and, eventually, the level of granularity is going to have to be at least segmented a bit. How do you view how customers should keep a score card for market share, leadership, and besides customers, and number of services, I mean is there an approach that anything coming out of this data you would see and saying maybe the market might want to be sized this way, maybe we should be thinking about not so much market share numbers on some graph on some analyst firm. Is there any thoughts on that? Because it's a big thing, and true private cloud's just one sector. >> Yeah, yeah. >> You've got SaaS, and you've got PaaS, and you've got-- >> So I think John, there've been at least, you know we could probably say there're more, but just making it up off the top of my head, there have been at least three eras that users focused on. Era number one is the hardware as the asset, how do we get the most out of our hardware. That dominated probably until the late '80s or so. And then it became the application as the asset, and then we bought into the application, and we bought hardware and all the other stuff underneath that application, and that was pretty much the 2000's, up until maybe 2010. And now we're thinking of data as the asset, and what does that mean? What it means is that ultimately, I think that the way that, we think that the way that architecture is going to be thought of, is not on application architecture, but around data architecture; I don't mean data architecture like a DBA, I mean what is your brand promise, what, what activities do you have to deliver that brand promise, what data and services do you need to perform those activities. Get that data in as close as you possibly can to those activities, wherever they have to be performed, so that you can perform them predictably, reliably, at the lowest cost, and in the greatest, shortest period of time. So I would start with the idea, you know what I'm going to focus on where my data's going to be located to run my business, that's where I would focus. The second thing, as I think when we think about market shares, and we think about a lot of these other questions, it's okay which, this is a transformative period of time, which of these companies is going to be most likely to deliver a product now, but also create better options for how I do stuff in the future; and we like to talk to our clients about the idea of buy the stuff that provides the best portfolio of options on future data value. And so, data today, and helping think about architecture, work with companies that are demonstrating that they're going to be able to create the options that you need in the future, 'cause this is going to change a lot over the next five, six, eight years. And so, you want to work with companies that are demonstrating that they're able to create new technology, through IP, through things like opensource, >> Okay so the question is-- >> Are sharing it appropriately too. >> So, who's number one? Again, I don't think this is going to be one score, I think it's going to be level of services, how many services you're using. There was one angle I wanted to do, but I can't, I'm still having a hard time. But I guess I'll ask ya, to put ya on the spot. If I'm a customer, Peter, who's the number one in cloud, gimme the top three players. >> AWS, Azure, Google. >> Okay, (claps once) there ya go. (laughs) The top three clouds. Well we're going to keep an eye on it-- >> Let's go to four though, so AWS, Azure, Google, and then again, from that true private cloud-- >> IBM. >> Because that's a, no, no, it's got to be Vmware; because that's, that's where the pull through is right now, right. But when you think about it, the big question is is AWS and Google Cloud going to come down to the edge, and down to the true private cloud as fast as some of these other cloud players are going to go up to the bigger cloud? If I were to pick the one that's most likely to win, it's located somewhere near ribbon. So Microsoft or... In Seattle area AWS. Again, again, it's so early, I think if people, going to have to figure out what to do, that's going to determine the winners and losers. Certainly a true private cloud report, great report. Check out the true private cloud report from Wikibon.com, go to wikibon.com and check it out, preview for VMworld. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, a lot of exciting news, two large sets, 72 interviews, three days, come visit theCUBE team, we got to full team down there, we're going to have a lot of our team down there lookin' to talk to you. Join our community, join our network, we're going to have a lot of fun, and also learn a lot at VMworld, talk to some really smart people. Thanks for watching. (intense orchestral music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder and co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media. I'm often asked a lot about our business and what our business model is. In the wake of media these days, media businesses are not doing well. Some of them are doing better than others. And today a whole new model of media is changing. I get the question all the time from people, what is theCUBE, what is SiliconANGLE? What is Wikibon? You guys have all the software. I want to take some time to explain what the SiliconANGLE Media business is about. And I'm often asked many times, how does it all work together? So I want to take some time to review that. And I've prepared some slides to take us through this, but I also wanted to show you how it works. Some of the technology that we've built, and also some of the things that we offer to our clients and advertisers or marketers, although we don't have any advertising per say. We do have an interesting business model. I want to share that with you. So let's take a look at some of the slides. SiliconANGLE Media is a new model for media, digital TV, journalism, and research. We provide a unique formula that all works together, but yet individually. We have three major parts to our business. We have theCUBE, which is our digital TV interview show where we go out to events and extract the signal from the noise. We have SiliconAngle.com. News and event coverage. This is our technology journalism. This is the site that really focuses on you know editorial, high quality news and analysis, kind of what's happening, instructing the signal of what's going on in the industry. It really is a short cut to the truth of what's happening. And then Wikibon is or consulting and research team that focuses on the key areas that we program into. And all three of them work together. Think of SiliconANGLE Media as three legs of the stool. SiliconANGLE.com is the journalism, which engages in with the industry. Getting all the top stories, telling the most important stories in Enterprise technology, working with public relations professionals and people in the industry to source the best interviews and get the best content, objective and truthful and again, pure editorial. This site has no advertising on it, and it's completely supported by the sponsorship and business model from theCUBE and our Wikibon research team. TheCUBE is a interesting dynamic because we've been for nine years going to events and going to the front lines where the communities are. And theCUBE has become a community brand, a community content source. But we co-create content in the front lines during an event with the community to tell the best stories. Not only news and editorial, but really what's going on in the people's lives and what's happening in technology. And finally Wikibon is where all the action happens. That's our big brains in our organization that dig in and do the analysis from (the data) that. And then this really kind of gets rendered itself into a couple different sites. SiliconANGLE.com and theCUBE.net. And our coverage areas are really focused in and around  key areas and digital. Our content revolves around the core content markets and communities we cover. Infrastructure, Cloud, AI, big data software, blockchain and crypto. And the intersection of these markets is security data and IOT, but this is really the digital landscape. There is no circulation in digital. There is not real boundaries to content, but for us we focus and use our technology to understand where these lines are in the industry, and we program to them. And we program in a deep targeted way that creates network effects in each community. So if you look at this, we interview the most important people we can and the smartest people we can. And that creates a beautiful network effect. And we create community by streaming live event coverage for major events. That's what we're most well known for is theCUBE. 110 events last year. Our ninth year covering all the top enterprise, all the top Cloud events, all the top big data events, and soon all the top block chain events. Our formula drives activation, but because the content is so targeted around communities, it really creates a targeted network effect because everyone we interview becomes a Cube alumni, and everyone that consumes the content becomes part of our community. So content and community drives engagement. Let's take a look at what this means for our customers. Our audiences go to siliconANGLE.com, where on this site all these stories are led by Rob Hof, editor in chief. And this content here is the best of the best. Everything is editorially vetted. Nothing is paid for in this site. It's completely editorial. We have multiple sections. We have research. A section dedicated to our research analysis. This is where we do deep dives and provide special reporting around all the top important areas. Cube coverage is the section of SiliconANGLE that puts all theCUBE event coverage in one spot. If you want to see the stories that our writers cover from theCUBE, which is separate from theCUBE event itself, but our live writers look at the activity on SiliconANGLE, CUBE and cover it as best they can. And if an important story is happening at a CUBE event, it'll be on the front page of SiliconANGLE, and the editors will pick the best, most important stories here at SiliconANGLE. TheCUBE.net is our site where we have all theCUBE content, a featured section here. There's a live event going on. The content will be played right here in the screen. If there's multiple events going on, then the right hand side they'll be there. Upcoming events are here. You can view more, and of course if you missed an event, you can always look for more here and browse the site for all the events that have happened. And of course if you want to search, we have an alumni database to search all the most important people in tech. If you want to search all the people from say, you know Google, you can browse here and find people to connect with. And this is the beginning of some of our technology that we've built, that you're only see more of. Connecting people around content, people around community, and people around topics and interests. And of course if you want to meet our hosts, they're all listed on there too. TheCUBE.net site is software written by our software engineering teams that's built for fully Cloud horizontally scalable systems, asynchronous technologies, APIs, and a lot more will be coming. You'll see social network, you'll see video clips and other variety of things. Some of the most important technology that we have at SiliconANGLE that no one knows about with theCUBE is we have a variety of technologies. You look at this site here, we have a full dashboard of things that we've built for ourselves using Amazon web services. We built our own content Cloud for our business. We can do search, analyze, visualization. We can detect humans from bots, text analytics, entity extractions, machine learning, leader boards, CUBE leader boards, LinkedIn profiles, who, what, and where, trend analysis, influence or overlaps, really in-depth analysis where I can say give me all the AWS reinvent community with VM World, as an example. I'll type it in here, VM World. Type my email address. And our influence overlap engine will go out and determine who are the influences that overlap between those two communities. I can do that for many more communities. This helps us figure out what's going on. And of course we built our own custom listening engine that listens to every tweet of every single person in the Twitter fire hose by community. And we have hundreds of hundreds of communities. And to give you a taste of how much this is, you look at the stats, 62 million total people over 700 million signals, and we're pulling in 292 signals per minute into our ingestion, into or community. That's driving a lot of our engagement, and again, going back to here we can see we can do full search, all kinds of cool things, trending hashtags. This gives our writers and our community more insight into what's happening so we can bring the most important content to people and connect people to the content. Some of our digital services include video clip, a service that we built with our team, that allows us to search and clip videos. So let's take an example. Here's an interview I did at Google Cloud, and here's our Video Clipper service. Here's the YouTube video and a full transcript. I can put it into different languages. Looks like we have a Korean interest here. I can turn this into Korean or English or Chinese. Or I can say, highlight the summary for me. Every CUBE video gets a full transcript. It says, takes advantage of it here. I can come down here. Every piece of the transcript is linked to the video. So if I want to highlight something, like this, I can highlight this. And here's an example of a clip. Thank you very much. I can share this on Twitter instantly. Or Facebook or LinkedIn. So we can, we index every single video from, like it's uploaded to YouTube, into a full transcript. And that transcript is available for that. We can run machine learning and AI techniques, do any of the extractions, transcripts, and we're starting to do that so we can drive more community around the video. Let's go look at my Twitter feed and show where that clip came up. So the ability to clip videos is super important. There's the video, Google spanner in production. So this video was clipped from a YouTube video that has a unique URL, cube365.net that now we can measure that metadata and offer that nugget of that video and share that to the world. This is unique in that you can take pieces of the video and share them throughout the social web, allows for videos to be merchandised. So a CUBE interview that could be 15 or 20 minutes can now be cut down into multiple nuggets. This is great value, and you can roll these clips up from different videos into a highlight reel by the click of the button. We've automated the hard part of using video so that we can bring video onto the marketing mix for our clients and bring video in the center of the user experience for content consumption. Okay, so here's a real life example of how the Clipper tool can work, as these clips can be merchandised down into gold nuggets or pieced down by part of a bigger video. Certainly it changes the nature of video, whether it's in the marketing mix for a marketer or brand or for us as content developers serving audiences. If you have a piece of content that's in video form, it's a data asset. That data asset then can be used. Here's an example. On Twitter we were having an argument, as usual on Twitter, about who's number one in Cloud. My friend, Bob Evans, said Microsoft is number one in Cloud. And that's his position, like him, but I'm not, you know that's him. We disagree, I said Amazon. An ongoing Twitter battle ensued. He called me out, I called him out. We're all friends, but it's all good fun. And you can see here, what's happening. Hey John, if you're going to go down that type of path, you know how about taking some koolaid injection from the Silicon Valley world. Right, and so I come back. And he goes back again. So finally what's interesting is that Dave Vellante, co-host of theCUBE and my business partner, realized and remembered that he was with me during theCUBE in Washington DC and had a clip, and he sent it here. Furrier, the pressure to catch up with the Amazon experience. And here is an example of why these clips are so powerful. During this conversation that could have gone anywhere, the content needed information. And Dave Vellante then injected content from a video clip of a long interview, and that was a 15 minute interview. And a short sound byte, here it is. >> You say you're doing Cloud, but as they teach you in business school, there's dis-economies of scale trying to match a trajectory of an experienced Cloud vendor. You just mentioned that. Let's explore that. If I want to match Amazon's years of experience, I can say I'm up there with all these services, but you can't just match that over night. It's just dis-economy of scale. Reverse proxies, technical debt, all kinds of stuff. So Microsoft, although looking good on paper, is under serious pressure, and those dis-economy scales creates more risk. That more risk is more down time. We just saw 11 hours of down time on Microsoft Azure than Europe, 11 hours. 11 hours, it's massive, it's not like oh, something just happened. >> Hey, there it is, a clip that was short, part of a longer video. You can always watch it here, that we cut up and created. It instantly changed the nature of the conversation. That's a great example of other things. Let me show you some other tools here, with Video Clipper. That's one example. Certainly we have the notion of creating clip lists. So here's a highlight reel that I put together of Pat Gelsinger's best highlights. I took three, five, four clips and I made it into one beautiful asset. That's Andy Jassy's keynote from VM World. >> Today I'm excited to announce the availability of our, let's talk about that one. We've received hundreds of priorities. >> This is an example. I took a keynote and broke it down into a highlight reel there. There's other clip lists, other CUBE videos, got great stuff, here's the highlights from VM World 2017 that was put together. Look at all those clips. These are different clips. You check a box and you said clip list, creates a highlight reel. You can do this for things like sales enablement. A sales rep could put some clips together and send it to a prospect via email and say here's a minute and a half of our smartest person talking about x. See ya in later for a meeting. It could be used for content to support an article. It could be used to support an argument. It could be used to support a positive thing. This is content for good. This is what we do, and of course, this is all available to our team and also our customers. The best part of all, if I want to find out what's going on with block chain, I can just type into the search engine. We solved the video search problem. I can click on a link and find all I want to do about block chain. Like I say, well, just give me all the clips that have block chain in it. Or give me when there's a block chain mentioned in all the transcripts. So anytime the word block chain is mentioned in any of our videos, we can surface that quickly. 220 clips, I can type in backup. If you're interested in backup and recovery, you can do that. Multi Cloud. Making videos more productive, integral part of the marketing mix is what the purpose of this is. And this is all part of comprehensive back end technology that we're using for our system. So SiliconANGLE Media is not just three properties. It's a coverage area that has technology behind it that you can look at and say, we cover Cloud, we go to the top events in Cloud, we go to the top events in Infrastructure, the top events in AI and big data, and the top events in each of these markets. And we share as much content as possible with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE, and Wikibon. The fastest, most relevant content and engage the community, and we collaborate with them. It's a co-creation business model that has monetization and money making around sponsorships and co-creation. And we make money by monetizing our digital services via our content Cloud, Video Clipper, and data services that help marketers with the co-creation and help them find community, grow community, and create a content market with community. Content plus community equals engagement. Those are the things that are mattering right now. And all of this is happening off someone's website, in the wild, organic discovery. This is the new marketing model that we're taking advantage of, creating a network effect with great content. That's how it works. And of course, we're excited to continue to push the envelope and grow. If you have any questions, I'm happy to talk at any time. You can reach out to me, Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, Greg Ontario, and any of our team. Kent Libbey, Jeff Rick, and our entire sales organization. Of course, Rob Hof, editor in chief. Peter Burris at Wikibon, and Jeff Rick at theCUBE. Thanks for watching. If you have any more questions, happy to do this next time. We'll give you an update on what's going on with or crypto currency community that we're doing. Thanks for watching. (techno music)