>>The transformation of Dell into Dell emc. And now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the enterprise technology industry. The company has gone from a Wall Street darling rocket ship PC company to a Midling enterprise player, forced to go private to a debt laden powerhouse that controlled one of the most valuable assets in enterprise tech i e VMware, and now is a hundred billion dollar giant with a low margin business. A strong balance sheet in the broadest hardware portfolio in the industry and financial magic that Dell went through would make anyone's head spin. The last lever of Dell EMC of the Dell EMC deal was detailed in Michael Dell's book Play Nice But Win in a captivating chapter called Harry You and the Bolt from the Blue Michael Dell described how he and his colleagues came up with the final straw of how to finance the deal. >>If you haven't read it, you should. And of course, after years of successfully integrating EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, all of this culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell and a massive wealth creation milestone pending, of course the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello and welcome to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be hosting the program. Now today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit, we're gonna hear from four of Dell's senior executives, Tom Sweet, who's the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's gonna share his views on the company's position and opportunities going forward. He's gonna answer the question, why is Dell a good long-term investment? Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau, who's the president of Dell's ISG business. >>That unit is the largest profit driver of Dell. He's gonna talk about the product angle and specifically how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Groot, who is the senior vice president of marketing, will come on the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering, and then the new Edge platform called Project Frontier. Now it's also cyber security Awareness month that we're gonna see if Sam has, you know, anything to say about that. Then finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell actually has some pretty forward thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're gonna speak with Jen Vera, who's Dell's chief Human Resource Resource Officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. However, before we get into all this, I wanna share our independent perspectives on the company and some research that we'll introduce to frame the program. >>Now, as you know, we love data here at the cube and one of our partners, ETR has what we believe is the best spending intentions data for enterprise tech. So here's a graphic that shows ET R'S proprietary net score methodology in the vertical access. That's a measure of spending velocity. And on the X axis, his overlap of pervasiveness in the data sample, this is a cut for just the server, the storage, and the client sectors within the ETR taxonomy. So you can see Dell CSG products, laptops in particular are dominant on both the X and the Y dimensions. CSG is the client solutions group and accounts for nearly 60% of Dell's revenue and about half of its operating income. And then the arrow signifies that dot, that represents Dell's ISG business that we're gonna talk to Jeff Boudro about. That's the infrastructure solutions group. Now, ISG accounts for the bulk of of the remainder of Dell's business, and it is, it's, as I said, it's most profitable from a margin standpoint. >>It comprises the EMC storage business as well as the Dell server business and Dell's networking portfolio. And as a note, we didn't include networking in that cut had we done. So Cisco would've dominated the graphic. And frankly, Dell's networking business isn't industry leading in the same way that PCs, servers and storage are. And as you can see, the data confirms the leadership position Dell has in its client side, its server and its storage sectors. But the nuance is look at that red dotted line at 40% on the vertical axis that represents a highly elevated net score, and every company in the sector is below that line. Now we should mention that we also filtered the data for those companies with more than a hundred mentions in the survey, but the point remains the same. This is a mature business that generally is lower margin storage is the exception, but cloud has put pressure on margins even in that business in addition to the server space. >>The last point on this graphic is we put a box around VMware and it's prominently present on both the X and Y dimensions. VMware participates with purely software defined high margin offerings in this, in these spaces, and it gives you a sense of what might have been had Dell chosen to hold onto that asset or spin it into the company. But let's face it, the alternatives from Michael Dell were just too attractive and it's unlikely that a spin in would've unlocked the value in the way a spinout did, at least not in the near future. So let's take a look at the snapshot of Dell's financials. To give you a sense of where the company stands today, Dell is a company with over a hundred billion in revenue. Last quarter, it did more than 26 billion in revenue and grew at a quite amazing 9% rate for a company that size. >>But because it's a hardware company, primarily its margins are low with operating income, 10% of revenue, and at 21% gross margin with VMware on Dell's income statement before the spin, its gross margins. Were in the low thirties. Now, Dell only spends about 2% of revenue on r and d because because it's so big, it's still a lot of money. And you can see it is cash flow positive. Dell's free cash flow over the trailing 12 month period is 3.7 billion, but that's only 3.5% of trailing 12 month revenue. Dell's Apex, and of course it's hardware maintenance business is recurring revenue and that is only about 5 billion in revenue and it's growing at 8% annually. Now having said that, it's the equivalent of service now's total revenue. Of course, service now is 23% operating margin and 16% free cash flow margin and more than 5 billion in cash on the balance sheet and an 85 billion market cap. >>That's what software will do for you. Now Dell, like most companies, is staring at a challenging macro environment with FX headwinds, inflation, et cetera. You've heard the story and hence it's conservative and contracting revenue guidance. But the balance sheet transformation has been quite amazing. Thanks to VMware's cash flow, Michael Dell and his partners from Silver Lake at all, they put up around $4 billion of their own cash to buy EMC for 67 billion, and of course got VMware in the process. Most of that financing was debt that Dell put on its balance sheet to do the transaction to the tune of 46 billion. It added to the, to the balance sheet debt. Now Dell's debt, the core debt net of its financing operation is now down to 16 billion and it has 7 billion in cash in the balance sheet. So dramatic delta from just a few years ago. So pretty good picture. >>But Dell a hundred billion company is still only valued at 28 billion or around 26 cents on the revenue dollar H HP's revenue multiple is around 60 cents on the revenue dollar. HP Inc. Dell's, you know, laptop and PC competitor is around 45 cents. IBM's revenue multiple is almost two times. By the way, IBM has more than 50 billion in debt thanks to the Red Hat acquisition. And Cisco has a revenue multiple, it's over three x, about 3.3 x currently. So is Dell undervalued? Well, based on these comparisons with its peers, I'd say yes and no. Dell's performance relative to its peers in the market is very strong. It's winning and has an extremely adept go to market machine, but it's lack of software content and it's margin profile leads. One to believe that if it can continue to pull some valuation levers while entering new markets, it can get its valuation well above where it is today. >>So what are some of those levers and what might that look like going forward? Despite the fact that Dell doesn't have a huge software revenue component since spinning out VMware and it doesn't own a cloud, it plays in virtually every part of the hardware market and it can provide infrastructure for pr pretty much any application in any use case and pretty much any industry and pretty much any geography in the world and it can serve those customers. So its size is an advantage. However, the history for hardware heavy companies that try to get bigger has some notable failures, namely hp, which had to split into two businesses, HP Inc. And hp E and ibm, which has had in abysmal decade from a performance standpoint and has had to shrink to grow again and obviously do a massive 34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. So why will Dell do any better than these two? >>Well, it has a fantastic supply chain. It's a founder led company, which makes a cultural difference in our view, and it's actually comfortable with a low margin software, light business model. Most certainly, IBM wasn't comfortable with that and didn't have these characteristics, and HP was kind of just incomprehensible at the end. So Dell in my opinion, is a much better chance of doing well at a hundred billion or over, but we'll see how it navigates through the current headwinds as it's guiding down. Apex is essentially Dell's version of the cloud. Now remember, Dell got started late. HPE is further along from a model standpoint with GreenLake, but Dell has a larger portfolio, so they're gonna try to play on that advantage. But at the end of the day, these as a service offerings are simply ways to bring a utility model to existing customers and generate recurring revenue. >>And that's a good thing because customers will be loyal to an incumbent if it can deliver as a service and reduce risk for for customers. But the real opportunity lies ahead, specifically Dell is embracing the cloud model. It took a while, but they're on board as Matt Baker Dell's senior vice president of corporate strategy likes to say it's not a zero sum game. What it means by that is just because Dell doesn't own its own cloud, it doesn't mean Dell can't build value on top of hyperscale clouds, what we call super cloud. And that's Dell's strategy to take advantage of public cloud CapEx and connect on-prem to the cloud, create a unified experience across clouds and out to the edge that's ambitious and technically it's non-trivial. But listen to Dell's vice chairman and Coco, Jeff Clark, explain this vision, please play the clip. >>You said also technology and business models are tied together and enabler. That's if, if you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want, They want to leverage whatever they can, and at the end of the day there's, they have to differentiate what they do. Well that, that's >>Exactly right. If I take that and what, what Dave was saying and and I, and I summarize it the following way, if we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to delivery a distributed platform, game over, >>Eh, pretty interesting, right? John Freer called it a business operating system. Essentially, I think of it sometimes as a cloud operating system or cloud operating environment to drive new business value on top of the hyperscale CapEx. Now, is it really game over? As Jeff Clark said, if Dell can do that, I'd say if it had that today, it might be game over for the competition, but this vision will take years to play out. And of course it's gotta be funded and now it's gonna take time. And in this industry it tends to move. Companies tend to move in lockstep. So as often as the case, it's gonna come down to execution and Dell's ability to enter new markets that are ideally, at least from my perspective, higher margin data management, extending data protection into cyber security as an adjacency and of course edge at telco slash 5G opportunities. >>All there for the taking. I mean, look, even if Dell doesn't go after more higher margin software content, it can thrive with a lower margin model just by penetrating new markets and throwing off cash from those markets. But by keeping close to customers and maybe through Tuck in acquisitions, it might be able to find the next nugget beyond today's cloud and on-prem models. And the last thing I'll call out is ecosystem. I say here ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. Because a defining characteristic of a cloud player is ecosystem, and if Apex is Dell's cloud, it has the opportunity to expand that ecosystem dramatically. This is one of the company's biggest opportunities and challenges. At the same time, in my view, it's just scratching the surface on its partner ecosystem. And it's ecosystem today is is both reseller heavy and tech partner heavy. And that's not a bad thing, but in a, but it's starting to evolve more rapidly. >>The snowflake deal is an example of up to stack evolution, but I'd like to see much more out of that snowflake relationship and more relationships like that. Specifically I'd like to see more momentum with data and database. And if we live at a data heavy world, which we do, where the data and the database and data management offerings, you know, coexist and are super important to customers, like to see that inside of Apex, like to see that data play beyond storage, which is really where it is today and it's early days. The point is with Dell's go to market advantage, which which company wouldn't treat Dell like the on-prem hybrid edge super cloud player that I wanna partner with to drive more business. You'd be crazy not to, but Dell has a lot on its plate and we'd like to see some serious acceleration on the ecosystem front. In other words, Dell as both a selling partner and a business enabler with its platform, its programmable infrastructure as a service. And that is a moving target that will rapidly involve. And of course we'll be here watching and reporting. So thanks for watching this preview of Dell Technology Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vte. We hope you enjoy the rest of the program.

(upbeat music) >> The transformation of Dell into Dell EMC, and now Dell Technologies, has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the enterprise technology industry. The company has gone from a Wall Street darling rocketship PC company, to a middling enterprise player, forced to go private, to a debt-laden powerhouse that controlled one of the most valuable assets in enterprise tech, i.e., VMware. And now is a $100 billion dollar giant with a low-margin business, a strong balance sheet, and the broadest hardware portfolio in the industry. The financial magic that Dell went through would make anyone's head spin. The last lever of the Dell EMC deal was detailed in Michael Dell's book "Play Nice But Win," in a captivating chapter called "Harry You and the Bolt from the Blue." Michael Dell described how he and his colleagues came up with the final straw of how to finance the deal. If you haven't read it, you should. And of course, after years of successfully integrating EMC and becoming VMware's number-one distribution channel, all of this culminated in the spin-out of VMware from Dell, and a massive wealth-creation milestone, pending, of course, the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell, and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Dell Technologies Summit 2022. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be hosting the program. Now, today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit, we're going to hear from four of Dell's senior executives. Tom Sweet, who's the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's going to share his views on the company's position and opportunities going forward. He's going to answer the question, why is Dell a good long-term investment? Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau, who's the President of Dell's ISG business. That unit is the largest profit driver of Dell. He's going to talk about the product angle, and specifically, how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grocott, who's the Senior Vice President of Marketing, will come on the program and give us the update on APEX, which is Dell's as-a-Service offering, and then the new edge platform called Project Frontier. Now, it's also Cybersecurity Awareness Month, that we're going to see if Sam has, you know, anything to say about that. Then finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell actually has some pretty forward-thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're going to speak with Jenn Saavedra, who's Dell's Chief Human Resource Officer, about hybrid work, and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. However, before we get into all this, I want to share our independent perspectives on the company, and some research that we'll introduce to frame the program. Now, as you know, we love data here at theCUBE, and one of our partners, ETR, has what we believe is the best spending intentions data for enterprise tech. So here's a graphic that shows ETR's proprietary Net Score methodology on the vertical axis, that's a measure of spending velocity, and on the x-axis is overlap or pervasiveness in the data sample. This is a cut for just the server, the storage, and the client sectors within the ETR taxonomy. So you can see Dell's CSG products, laptops in particular, are dominant on both the x and the y dimensions. CSG is the Client Solutions Group, and accounts for nearly 60% of Dell's revenue, and about half of its operating income. And then the arrow signifies that dot that represents Dell's ISG business, that we're going to talk to Jeff Boudreau about. That's the Infrastructure Solutions Group. Now, ISG accounts for the bulk of the remainder of Dell's business, and it is its, as I said, its most profitable from a margin standpoint. It comprises the EMC storage business, as well as the Dell server business, and Dell's networking portfolio. And as a note, we didn't include networking in that cut. Had we done so, Cisco would've dominated the graphic. And frankly, Dell's networking business isn't industry leading in the same way that PCs, servers, and storage are. And as you can see, the data confirms the leadership position Dell has in its client side, its server, and its storage sectors. But the nuance is, look at that red dotted line at 40% on the vertical axis. That represents a highly elevated Net Score, and every company in the sector is below that line. Now, we should mention that we also filtered the data for those companies with more than a hundred mentions in the survey, but the point remains the same. This is a mature business that generally is lower margin. Storage is the exception, but cloud has put pressure on margins even in that business, in addition to the server space. The last point on this graphic is, we put a box around VMware, and it's prominently present on both the x and y dimensions. VMware participates with purely software-defined high-margin offerings in these spaces, and it gives you a sense of what might have been, had Dell chosen to hold onto that asset or spin it into the company. But let's face it, the alternatives for Michael Dell were just too attractive, and it's unlikely that a spin-in would've unlocked the value in the way a spin-out did, at least not in the near future. So let's take a look at the snapshot of Dell's financials, to give you a sense of where the company stands today. Dell is a company with over $100 billion dollars in revenue. Last quarter, it did more than 26 billion in revenue, and grew at a quite amazing 9% rate, for a company that size. But because it's a hardware company, primarily, its margins are low, with operating income 10% of revenue, and at 21% gross margin. With VMware on Dell's income statement before the spin, its gross margins were in the low 30s. Now, Dell only spends about 2% of revenue on R&D, but because it's so big, it's still a lot of money. And you can see it is cash-flow positive. Dell's free cash flow over the trailing 12-month period is 3.7 billion, but that's only 3.5% of trailing 12-month revenue. Dell's APEX, and of course its hardware maintenance business, is recurring revenue, and that is only about 5 billion in revenue, and it's growing at 8% annually. Now, having said that, it's the equivalent of ServiceNow's total revenue. Of course, ServiceNow has 23% operating margin and 16% free cash-flow margin, and more than $5 billion in cash on the balance sheet, and an $85 billion market cap. That's what software will do for you. Now Dell, like most companies, is staring at a challenging macro environment, with FX headwinds, inflation, et cetera. You've heard the story. And hence it's conservative, and contracting revenue guidance. But the balance sheet transformation has been quite amazing, thanks to VMware's cash flow. Michael Dell and his partners from Silver Lake et al., they put up around $4 billion of their own cash to buy EMC for 67 billion, and of course got VMware in the process. Most of that financing was debt that Dell put on its balance sheet to do the transaction, to the tune of $46 billion it added to the balance sheet debt. Now, Dell's debt, the core debt, net of its financing operation, is now down to 16 billion, and it has $7 billion in cash on the balance sheet. So a dramatic delta from just a few years ago. So, pretty good picture. But Dell, a $100 billion company, is still only valued at 28 billion, or around 26 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE's revenue multiple is around 60 cents on the revenue dollar. HP Inc., Dell's laptop and PC competitor, is around 45 cents. IBM's revenue multiple is almost two times. By the way, IBM has more than $50 billion in debt thanks to the Red Hat acquisition. And Cisco has a revenue multiple that's over 3x, about 3.3x currently. So is Dell undervalued? Well, based on these comparisons with its peers, I'd say yes, and no. Dell's performance, relative to its peers in the market, is very strong. It's winning, and has an extremely adept go-to-market machine, but its lack of software content and its margin profile leads one to believe that if it can continue to pull some valuation levers while entering new markets, it can get its valuation well above where it is today. So what are some of those levers, and what might that look like, going forward? Despite the fact that Dell doesn't have a huge software revenue component since spinning out VMware, and it doesn't own a cloud, it plays in virtually every part of the hardware market. And it can provide infrastructure for pretty much any application in any use case, in pretty much any industry, in pretty much any geography in the world. And it can serve those customers. So its size is an advantage. However, the history for hardware-heavy companies that try to get bigger has some notable failures, namely HP, which had to split into two businesses, HP Inc. and HPE, and IBM, which has had an abysmal decade from a performance standpoint, and has had to shrink to grow again, and obviously do a massive $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. So why will Dell do any better than these two? Well, it has a fantastic supply chain. It's a founder-led company, which makes a cultural difference, in our view. And it's actually comfortable with a low-margin software-light business model. Most certainly, IBM wasn't comfortable with that, and didn't have these characteristics, and HP was kind of just incomprehensible at the end. So Dell in my opinion, has a much better chance of doing well at 100 billion or over, but we'll see how it navigates through the current headwinds as it's guiding down. APEX is essentially Dell's version of the cloud. Now, remember, Dell got started late. HPE is further along from a model standpoint with GreenLake, but Dell has a larger portfolio, so they're going to try to play on that advantage. But at the end of the day, these as-a-Service offerings are simply ways to bring a utility model to existing customers, and generate recurring revenue. And that's a good thing, because customers will be loyal to an incumbent if it can deliver as-a-Service and reduce risk for customers. But the real opportunity lies ahead. Specifically, Dell is embracing the cloud model. It took a while, but they're on board. As Matt Baker, Dell's Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy, likes to say, it's not a zero-sum game. What he means by that is, just because Dell doesn't own its own cloud, it doesn't mean Dell can't build value on top of hyperscale clouds. What we call supercloud. And that's Dell's strategy, to take advantage of public cloud capex, and connect on-prem to the cloud, create a unified experience across clouds, and out to the edge. That's ambitious, and technically it's nontrivial. But listen to Dell's Vice Chairman and Co-COO, Jeff Clarke, explain this vision. Please play the clip. >> You said also, technology and business models are tied together, and an enabler. >> That's right. >> If you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want. They want to leverage whatever they can, and at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do. >> Well, that's exactly right. If I take that and what Dave was saying, and I summarize it the following way: if we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to deliver a distributed platform, game over. >> Eh, pretty interesting, right? John Furrier called it a "business operating system." Essentially, I think of it sometimes as a cloud operating system, or cloud operating environment, to drive new business value on top of the hyperscale capex. Now, is it really game over, as Jeff Clarke said, if Dell can do that? Uh, (sucks in breath) I'd say if it had that today, it might be game over for the competition, but this vision will take years to play out. And of course, it's got to be funded. And that's going to take time, and in this industry, it tends to move, companies tend to move in lockstep. So, as often is the case, it's going to come down to execution and Dell's ability to enter new markets that are ideally, at least from my perspective, higher margin. Data management, extending data protection into cybersecurity as an adjacency, and of course, edge and telco/5G opportunities. All there for the taking. I mean, look, even if Dell doesn't go after more higher-margin software content, it can thrive with a lower-margin model just by penetrating new markets and throwing off cash from those markets. But by keeping close to customers, and maybe through tuck-in acquisitions, it might be able to find the next nugget beyond today's cloud and on-prem models. And the last thing I'll call out is ecosystem. I say here, "Ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem," because a defining characteristic of a cloud player is ecosystem, and if APEX is Dell's cloud, it has the opportunity to expand that ecosystem dramatically. This is one of the company's biggest opportunities and challenges at the same time, in my view. It's just scratching the surface on its partner ecosystem. And its ecosystem today is both reseller heavy and tech partner heavy. And that's not a bad thing, but it's starting to evolve more rapidly. The Snowflake deal is an example of up-the-stack evolution, but I'd like to see much more out of that Snowflake relationship, and more relationships like that. Specifically, I'd like to see more momentum with data and database. And if we live in a data-heavy world, which we do, where the data and the database and data management offerings, you know, coexist and are super important to customers, I'd like to see that inside of APEX. I'd like to see that data play beyond storage, which is really where it is today, in its early days. The point is, with Dell's go-to-market advantage, which company wouldn't treat Dell like the on-prem, hybrid, edge, supercloud player that I want to partner with to drive more business? You'd be crazy not to. But Dell has a lot on its plate, and we'd like to see some serious acceleration on the ecosystem front. In other words, Dell as both a selling partner and a business enabler with its platform, its programmable Infrastructure-as-a-Service. And that is a moving target that will rapidly evolve. And of course, we'll be here watching and reporting. So thanks for watching this preview of Dell Technologies Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vellante, we hope you enjoy the rest of the program. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> The transformation of Dell into Dell EMC and now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the enterprise technology industry. The company has gone from a Wall Street darling rocket ship PC company, to a middling enterprise player forced to go private, to a debt-laden powerhouse that controlled one of the most valuable assets in enterprise tech i.e VMware. And now is a 100 billion dollar giant with a low margin business, a strong balance sheet, and the broadest hardware portfolio in the industry. Financial magic that Dell went through would make anyone's head spin. The last lever of Dell EMC, of the Dell EMC deal was detailed in Michael Dell's book, "Play Nice But Win." In a captivating chapter called Harry You and the Bolt from the Blue, Michael Dell described how he and his colleagues came up with the final straw of how to finance the deal. If you haven't read it, you should. And, of course, after years of successfully integrating EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, all of this culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell in a massive wealth creation milestone. Pending, of course, the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be hosting the program. Now, today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit, we're going to hear from four of Dell's senior executives Tom Sweet, who's the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's going to share his views on the company's position and opportunities going forward. He's going to answer the question, why is Dell a good long-term investment? Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau who's the president of Dell's ISG business. That unit is the largest profit driver of Dell. He's going to talk about the product angle and specifically, how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grocott who is the senior vice president of marketing will come on the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as-a-service offering, and then the new edge platform called Project Frontier. Now, it's also Cyber Security Awareness month that we're going to see if Sam has anything to say about that. Then finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell actually has some pretty forward-thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're going to speak with Jennifer Saavedra who's Dell's chief human resource officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. However, before we get into all this, I want to share our independent perspectives on the company and some research that will introduce to frame the program. Now, as you know, we love data here at theCUBE and one of our partners, ETR has what we believe is the best spending intentions data for enterprise tech. So here's a graphic that shows ETR's proprietary net score methodology in the vertical axis. That's a measure of spending velocity. And on the x-axis is overlap of pervasiveness in the data sample. This is a cut for just the server, the storage, and the client sectors within the ETR taxonomy. So you can see Dell CSG products, laptops in particular are dominant on both the X and the Y dimensions. CSG is the client solutions group and accounts for nearly 60% of Dell's revenue and about half of its operating income. And then the arrow signifies that dot that represents Dell's ISG business that we're going to talk to Jeff Boudreau about. That's the infrastructure solutions group. Now, ISG accounts for the bulk of the remainder of Dell's business and it is, as I said, it's most profitable from a margin standpoint. It comprises the EMC storage business as well as the Dell server business and Dell's networking portfolio. And as a note, we didn't include networking in that cut. Had we done so, SISCO would've dominated the graphic. And frankly, Dell's networking business is an industry-leading in the same way that PCs, servers, and storage are. And as you can see, the data confirms the leadership position Dell has in its client side, its server and its storage sectors. But the nuance is look at that red dotted line at 40% on the vertical axis. That represents a highly elevated net score and every company in the sector is below that line. Now, we should mention that we also filtered the data for those companies with more than a 100 mentions in the survey, but the point remains the same. This is a mature business that generally is lower margin. Storage is the exception but cloud has put pressure on margins even in that business in addition to the server space. The last point on this graphic is we put a box around VMware and it's prominently present on both the X and Y dimensions. VMware participates with purely software-defined high margin offerings in these spaces, and it gives you a sense of what might have been had Dell chosen to hold onto that asset or spin it into the company. But let's face it, the alternatives from Michael Dell were just too attractive and it's unlikely that a spin in would've unlocked the value in the way a spin-out did, at least not in the near future. So let's take a look at the snapshot of Dell's financials to give you a sense of where the company stands today. Dell is a company with over a 100 billion dollars in revenue. Last quarter, it did more than 26 billion in revenue and grew at a quite amazing 9% rate for a company that size. But because it's a hardware company primarily, its margins are low with operating income 10% of revenue and at 21% gross margin. With VMware on Dell's income statement, before the spin its gross margins were in the low 30s. Now, Dell only spends about 2% of revenue on R&D because because it's so big, it's still a lot of money. And you can see it is cash flow positive, Dell's free cash flow over the trailing 12-month period is 3.7 billion but that's only 3.5% of trailing 12-month revenue. Dell's Apex and of course it's hardware maintenance business is recurring revenue and that is only about 5 billion in revenue and it's growing at 8% annually. Now having said that, it's the equivalent of Service now's total revenue. Of course, Service now has 23% operating margin and 16% free cash flow margin and more than $5 billion in cash on the balance sheet and an 85 billion dollar market cap. That's what software will do for you. Now, Dell, like most companies, is staring at a challenging macro environment with FX headwinds, inflation, et cetera. You've heard the story, and hence it's conservative and contracting revenue guidance. But the balance sheet transformation has been quite amazing thanks to VMware's cash flow. Michael Dell and his partners from Silver Lake et al, they put up around $4 billion of their own cash to buy EMC for $67 billion and of course got VMware in the process. Most of that financing was debt that Dell put on its balance sheet to do the transaction to the tune of $46 billion it added to the balance sheet debt. Now, Dell's debt, the core debt, net of its financing operation is now down to 16 billion and it has 7 billion in cash in the balance sheet. So dramatic delta from just a few years ago. So pretty good picture. But Dell, a 100 billion company, is still only valued at 28 billion or around 26 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE's revenue multiple is around 60 cents on the revenue dollar. HP Inc, Dell's laptop and PC competitor, is around 45 cents. IBM's revenue multiple is almost two times. By the way, IBM has more than $50 billion in debt thanks to the Red Hat acquisition. And Cisco has a revenue multiple, it's over 3X, about 3.3X currently. So is Dell undervalued? Well, based on these comparisons with its peers, I'd say yes and no. Dell's performance relative to its peers in the market is very strong. It's winning and has an extremely adept go to market machine. But it's lack of software content and it's margin profile leads one to believe that if it can continue to pull some valuation levers while entering new markets, it can get its valuation well above where it is today. So what are some of those levers and what might that look like going forward? Despite the fact that Dell doesn't have a huge software revenue component, since spinning out VMware, and it doesn't own a cloud, it plays in virtually every part of the hardware market. And it can provide infrastructure for pretty much any application, in any use case, in pretty much any industry, in pretty much any geography in the world and it can serve those customers. So its size is an advantage. However, the history for hardware-heavy companies that try to get bigger has some notable failures. Namely HP which had to split into two businesses, HP Inc and HPE, and IBM which has had in abysmal decade from a performance standpoint and has had to shrink to grow again and obviously do a massive $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. So why will Dell do any better than these two? Well, it has a fantastic supply chain. It's a founder-led company which makes a cultural difference, in our view, and it's actually comfortable with a low margin software light business model. Most certainly, IBM wasn't comfortable with that and didn't have these characteristics and HP was kind of just incomprehensible at the end. So Dell in my opinion is a much better chance of doing well at a 100 billion or over, but we'll see how it navigates through the current headwinds as it's guiding down. Apex is essentially Dell's version of the cloud. Now remember, Dell got started late. HPE is further along from a model standpoint with GreenLake. But Dell has a larger portfolio so they're going to try to play on that advantage. But at the end of the day, these as-a-service offerings are simply ways to bring a utility model to existing customers and generate recurring revenue. And that's a good thing because customers will be loyal to an incumbent if it can deliver as-a-service and reduce risk for customers. But the real opportunity lies ahead, specifically Dell is embracing the cloud model. It took a while, but they're on board. As Matt Baker, Dell's senior vice president of corporate strategy likes to say, it's not a zero sum game. What he means by that is just because Dell doesn't own its own cloud, it doesn't mean Dell can't build value on top of hyperscale clouds, what we call super cloud. And that's Dell's strategy to take advantage of public cloud CapEx and connect on-prem to the cloud, create a unified experience across clouds and out to the edge. That's ambitious and technically it's non-trivial. But listen to Dell's vice chairman and co-COO Jeff Clarke explain this vision. Please play the clip. >> You said also technology and business models are tied together and enabler. If you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want. They want to leverage whatever they can and at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do. >> No, that's exactly right. If I take that and what Dave was saying and I summarize it the following way. If we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to deliver a distributed platform, game over. >> Yeah, pretty interesting, right? John Freer called it a business operating system. Essentially, I think of it sometimes as a cloud operating system or cloud operating environment to drive new business value on top of the hyperscale CapEx. Now, is it really game over as Jeff Clarke said, if Dell can do that? I'd say if it had that today, it might be game over for the competition but this vision will take years to play out, and of course it's got to be funded. And now it's going to take time and in this industry, it tends to move, companies tend to move in lockstep. So as often as the case, it's going to come down to execution and Dell's ability to enter new markets that are ideally, at least from my perspective, higher margin. Data management, extending data protection into cyber security as an adjacency and, of course, edge at Telco slash 5G opportunities. All there for the taking. I mean, look, even if Dell doesn't go after more higher margin software content, it can thrive with a lower margin model just by penetrating new markets and throwing off cash from those markets. But by keeping close to customers and maybe through tuck in acquisitions, it might be able to find the next nugget beyond today's cloud and on-prem models. And the last thing I'll call out is ecosystem. I say here ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. Because a defining characteristic of a cloud player is ecosystem and if Apex is Dell's cloud, it has the opportunity to expand that ecosystem dramatically. This is one of the company's biggest opportunities and challenges at the same time, in my view. It's just scratching the surface on its partner ecosystem. And it's ecosystem today is is both reseller heavy and tech partner heavy. And that's not a bad thing, but it's starting to evolve more rapidly. The snowflake deal is an example of up to stack evolution. But I'd like to see much more out of that Snowflake relationship and more relationships like that. Specifically, I'd like to see more momentum with data and database. And if we live at a data heavy world, which we do, where the data and the database and data management offerings coexist and are super important to customers, I'd like to see that inside of Apex. I'd like to see that data play beyond storage which is really where it is today and it's early days. The point is, with Dell's go to market advantage, which company wouldn't treat Dell like the on-prem, hybrid, edge, super cloud player, that I want to partner with to drive more business? You'd be crazy not to. But Dell has a lot on its plate and we'd like to see some serious acceleration on the ecosystem front. In other words, Dell as both a selling partner and a business enabler with its platform. Its programmable infrastructure as-a-service. And that is a moving target that will rapidly involve. And, of course, we'll be here watching and reporting. So thanks for watching this preview of Dell Technology Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vellante, we hope you enjoy the rest of the program. (upbeat music)

>> From The Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data driven insights from The Cube at ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> The reverse momentum in tech stocks caused by rising interest rates, less attractive discounted cash flow models, and more tepid forward guidance, can be easily measured by public market valuations. And while there's lots of discussion about the impact on private companies and cash runway and 409A valuations, measuring the performance of non-public companies isn't as easy. IPOs have dried up and public statements by private companies, of course, they accentuate the good and they kind of hide the bad. Real data, unless you're an insider, is hard to find. Hello and welcome to this week's "Wikibon Cube Insights" powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we unlock some of the secrets that non-public, emerging tech companies may or may not be sharing. And we do this by introducing you to a capability from ETR that we've not exposed you to over the past couple of years, it's called the Emerging Technologies Survey, and it is packed with sentiment data and performance data based on surveys of more than a thousand CIOs and IT buyers covering more than 400 companies. And we've invited back our colleague, Erik Bradley of ETR to help explain the survey and the data that we're going to cover today. Erik, this survey is something that I've not personally spent much time on, but I'm blown away at the data. It's really unique and detailed. First of all, welcome. Good to see you again. >> Great to see you too, Dave, and I'm really happy to be talking about the ETS or the Emerging Technology Survey. Even our own clients of constituents probably don't spend as much time in here as they should. >> Yeah, because there's so much in the mainstream, but let's pull up a slide to bring out the survey composition. Tell us about the study. How often do you run it? What's the background and the methodology? >> Yeah, you were just spot on the way you were talking about the private tech companies out there. So what we did is we decided to take all the vendors that we track that are not yet public and move 'em over to the ETS. And there isn't a lot of information out there. If you're not in Silicon (indistinct), you're not going to get this stuff. So PitchBook and Tech Crunch are two out there that gives some data on these guys. But what we really wanted to do was go out to our community. We have 6,000, ITDMs in our community. We wanted to ask them, "Are you aware of these companies? And if so, are you allocating any resources to them? Are you planning to evaluate them," and really just kind of figure out what we can do. So this particular survey, as you can see, 1000 plus responses, over 450 vendors that we track. And essentially what we're trying to do here is talk about your evaluation and awareness of these companies and also your utilization. And also if you're not utilizing 'em, then we can also figure out your sales conversion or churn. So this is interesting, not only for the ITDMs themselves to figure out what their peers are evaluating and what they should put in POCs against the big guys when contracts come up. But it's also really interesting for the tech vendors themselves to see how they're performing. >> And you can see 2/3 of the respondents are director level of above. You got 28% is C-suite. There is of course a North America bias, 70, 75% is North America. But these smaller companies, you know, that's when they start doing business. So, okay. We're going to do a couple of things here today. First, we're going to give you the big picture across the sectors that ETR covers within the ETS survey. And then we're going to look at the high and low sentiment for the larger private companies. And then we're going to do the same for the smaller private companies, the ones that don't have as much mindshare. And then I'm going to put those two groups together and we're going to look at two dimensions, actually three dimensions, which companies are being evaluated the most. Second, companies are getting the most usage and adoption of their offerings. And then third, which companies are seeing the highest churn rates, which of course is a silent killer of companies. And then finally, we're going to look at the sentiment and mindshare for two key areas that we like to cover often here on "Breaking Analysis", security and data. And data comprises database, including data warehousing, and then big data analytics is the second part of data. And then machine learning and AI is the third section within data that we're going to look at. Now, one other thing before we get into it, ETR very often will include open source offerings in the mix, even though they're not companies like TensorFlow or Kubernetes, for example. And we'll call that out during this discussion. The reason this is done is for context, because everyone is using open source. It is the heart of innovation and many business models are super glued to an open source offering, like take MariaDB, for example. There's the foundation and then there's with the open source code and then there, of course, the company that sells services around the offering. Okay, so let's first look at the highest and lowest sentiment among these private firms, the ones that have the highest mindshare. So they're naturally going to be somewhat larger. And we do this on two dimensions, sentiment on the vertical axis and mindshare on the horizontal axis and note the open source tool, see Kubernetes, Postgres, Kafka, TensorFlow, Jenkins, Grafana, et cetera. So Erik, please explain what we're looking at here, how it's derived and what the data tells us. >> Certainly, so there is a lot here, so we're going to break it down first of all by explaining just what mindshare and net sentiment is. You explain the axis. We have so many evaluation metrics, but we need to aggregate them into one so that way we can rank against each other. Net sentiment is really the aggregation of all the positive and subtracting out the negative. So the net sentiment is a very quick way of looking at where these companies stand versus their peers in their sectors and sub sectors. Mindshare is basically the awareness of them, which is good for very early stage companies. And you'll see some names on here that are obviously been around for a very long time. And they're clearly be the bigger on the axis on the outside. Kubernetes, for instance, as you mentioned, is open source. This de facto standard for all container orchestration, and it should be that far up into the right, because that's what everyone's using. In fact, the open source leaders are so prevalent in the emerging technology survey that we break them out later in our analysis, 'cause it's really not fair to include them and compare them to the actual companies that are providing the support and the security around that open source technology. But no survey, no analysis, no research would be complete without including these open source tech. So what we're looking at here, if I can just get away from the open source names, we see other things like Databricks and OneTrust . They're repeating as top net sentiment performers here. And then also the design vendors. People don't spend a lot of time on 'em, but Miro and Figma. This is their third survey in a row where they're just dominating that sentiment overall. And Adobe should probably take note of that because they're really coming after them. But Databricks, we all know probably would've been a public company by now if the market hadn't turned, but you can see just how dominant they are in a survey of nothing but private companies. And we'll see that again when we talk about the database later. >> And I'll just add, so you see automation anywhere on there, the big UiPath competitor company that was not able to get to the public markets. They've been trying. Snyk, Peter McKay's company, they've raised a bunch of money, big security player. They're doing some really interesting things in developer security, helping developers secure the data flow, H2O.ai, Dataiku AI company. We saw them at the Snowflake Summit. Redis Labs, Netskope and security. So a lot of names that we know that ultimately we think are probably going to be hitting the public market. Okay, here's the same view for private companies with less mindshare, Erik. Take us through this one. >> On the previous slide too real quickly, I wanted to pull that security scorecard and we'll get back into it. But this is a newcomer, that I couldn't believe how strong their data was, but we'll bring that up in a second. Now, when we go to the ones of lower mindshare, it's interesting to talk about open source, right? Kubernetes was all the way on the top right. Everyone uses containers. Here we see Istio up there. Not everyone is using service mesh as much. And that's why Istio is in the smaller breakout. But still when you talk about net sentiment, it's about the leader, it's the highest one there is. So really interesting to point out. Then we see other names like Collibra in the data side really performing well. And again, as always security, very well represented here. We have Aqua, Wiz, Armis, which is a standout in this survey this time around. They do IoT security. I hadn't even heard of them until I started digging into the data here. And I couldn't believe how well they were doing. And then of course you have AnyScale, which is doing a second best in this and the best name in the survey Hugging Face, which is a machine learning AI tool. Also doing really well on a net sentiment, but they're not as far along on that access of mindshare just yet. So these are again, emerging companies that might not be as well represented in the enterprise as they will be in a couple of years. >> Hugging Face sounds like something you do with your two year old. Like you said, you see high performers, AnyScale do machine learning and you mentioned them. They came out of Berkeley. Collibra Governance, InfluxData is on there. InfluxDB's a time series database. And yeah, of course, Alex, if you bring that back up, you get a big group of red dots, right? That's the bad zone, I guess, which Sisense does vis, Yellowbrick Data is a NPP database. How should we interpret the red dots, Erik? I mean, is it necessarily a bad thing? Could it be misinterpreted? What's your take on that? >> Sure, well, let me just explain the definition of it first from a data science perspective, right? We're a data company first. So the gray dots that you're seeing that aren't named, that's the mean that's the average. So in order for you to be on this chart, you have to be at least one standard deviation above or below that average. So that gray is where we're saying, "Hey, this is where the lump of average comes in. This is where everyone normally stands." So you either have to be an outperformer or an underperformer to even show up in this analysis. So by definition, yes, the red dots are bad. You're at least one standard deviation below the average of your peers. It's not where you want to be. And if you're on the lower left, not only are you not performing well from a utilization or an actual usage rate, but people don't even know who you are. So that's a problem, obviously. And the VCs and the PEs out there that are backing these companies, they're the ones who mostly are interested in this data. >> Yeah. Oh, that's great explanation. Thank you for that. No, nice benchmarking there and yeah, you don't want to be in the red. All right, let's get into the next segment here. Here going to look at evaluation rates, adoption and the all important churn. First new evaluations. Let's bring up that slide. And Erik, take us through this. >> So essentially I just want to explain what evaluation means is that people will cite that they either plan to evaluate the company or they're currently evaluating. So that means we're aware of 'em and we are choosing to do a POC of them. And then we'll see later how that turns into utilization, which is what a company wants to see, awareness, evaluation, and then actually utilizing them. That's sort of the life cycle for these emerging companies. So what we're seeing here, again, with very high evaluation rates. H2O, we mentioned. SecurityScorecard jumped up again. Chargebee, Snyk, Salt Security, Armis. A lot of security names are up here, Aqua, Netskope, which God has been around forever. I still can't believe it's in an Emerging Technology Survey But so many of these names fall in data and security again, which is why we decided to pick those out Dave. And on the lower side, Vena, Acton, those unfortunately took the dubious award of the lowest evaluations in our survey, but I prefer to focus on the positive. So SecurityScorecard, again, real standout in this one, they're in a security assessment space, basically. They'll come in and assess for you how your security hygiene is. And it's an area of a real interest right now amongst our ITDM community. >> Yeah, I mean, I think those, and then Arctic Wolf is up there too. They're doing managed services. You had mentioned Netskope. Yeah, okay. All right, let's look at now adoption. These are the companies whose offerings are being used the most and are above that standard deviation in the green. Take us through this, Erik. >> Sure, yet again, what we're looking at is, okay, we went from awareness, we went to evaluation. Now it's about utilization, which means a survey respondent's going to state "Yes, we evaluated and we plan to utilize it" or "It's already in our enterprise and we're actually allocating further resources to it." Not surprising, again, a lot of open source, the reason why, it's free. So it's really easy to grow your utilization on something that's free. But as you and I both know, as Red Hat proved, there's a lot of money to be made once the open source is adopted, right? You need the governance, you need the security, you need the support wrapped around it. So here we're seeing Kubernetes, Postgres, Apache Kafka, Jenkins, Grafana. These are all open source based names. But if we're looking at names that are non open source, we're going to see Databricks, Automation Anywhere, Rubrik all have the highest mindshare. So these are the names, not surprisingly, all names that probably should have been public by now. Everyone's expecting an IPO imminently. These are the names that have the highest mindshare. If we talk about the highest utilization rates, again, Miro and Figma pop up, and I know they're not household names, but they are just dominant in this survey. These are applications that are meant for design software and, again, they're going after an Autodesk or a CAD or Adobe type of thing. It is just dominant how high the utilization rates are here, which again is something Adobe should be paying attention to. And then you'll see a little bit lower, but also interesting, we see Collibra again, we see Hugging Face again. And these are names that are obviously in the data governance, ML, AI side. So we're seeing a ton of data, a ton of security and Rubrik was interesting in this one, too, high utilization and high mindshare. We know how pervasive they are in the enterprise already. >> Erik, Alex, keep that up for a second, if you would. So yeah, you mentioned Rubrik. Cohesity's not on there. They're sort of the big one. We're going to talk about them in a moment. Puppet is interesting to me because you remember the early days of that sort of space, you had Puppet and Chef and then you had Ansible. Red Hat bought Ansible and then Ansible really took off. So it's interesting to see Puppet on there as well. Okay. So now let's look at the churn because this one is where you don't want to be. It's, of course, all red 'cause churn is bad. Take us through this, Erik. >> Yeah, definitely don't want to be here and I don't love to dwell on the negative. So we won't spend as much time. But to your point, there's one thing I want to point out that think it's important. So you see Rubrik in the same spot, but Rubrik has so many citations in our survey that it actually would make sense that they're both being high utilization and churn just because they're so well represented. They have such a high overall representation in our survey. And the reason I call that out is Cohesity. Cohesity has an extremely high churn rate here about 17% and unlike Rubrik, they were not on the utilization side. So Rubrik is seeing both, Cohesity is not. It's not being utilized, but it's seeing a high churn. So that's the way you can look at this data and say, "Hm." Same thing with Puppet. You noticed that it was on the other slide. It's also on this one. So basically what it means is a lot of people are giving Puppet a shot, but it's starting to churn, which means it's not as sticky as we would like. One that was surprising on here for me was Tanium. It's kind of jumbled in there. It's hard to see in the middle, but Tanium, I was very surprised to see as high of a churn because what I do hear from our end user community is that people that use it, like it. It really kind of spreads into not only vulnerability management, but also that endpoint detection and response side. So I was surprised by that one, mostly to see Tanium in here. Mural, again, was another one of those application design softwares that's seeing a very high churn as well. >> So you're saying if you're in both... Alex, bring that back up if you would. So if you're in both like MariaDB is for example, I think, yeah, they're in both. They're both green in the previous one and red here, that's not as bad. You mentioned Rubrik is going to be in both. Cohesity is a bit of a concern. Cohesity just brought on Sanjay Poonen. So this could be a go to market issue, right? I mean, 'cause Cohesity has got a great product and they got really happy customers. So they're just maybe having to figure out, okay, what's the right ideal customer profile and Sanjay Poonen, I guarantee, is going to have that company cranking. I mean they had been doing very well on the surveys and had fallen off of a bit. The other interesting things wondering the previous survey I saw Cvent, which is an event platform. My only reason I pay attention to that is 'cause we actually have an event platform. We don't sell it separately. We bundle it as part of our offerings. And you see Hopin on here. Hopin raised a billion dollars during the pandemic. And we were like, "Wow, that's going to blow up." And so you see Hopin on the churn and you didn't see 'em in the previous chart, but that's sort of interesting. Like you said, let's not kind of dwell on the negative, but you really don't. You know, churn is a real big concern. Okay, now we're going to drill down into two sectors, security and data. Where data comprises three areas, database and data warehousing, machine learning and AI and big data analytics. So first let's take a look at the security sector. Now this is interesting because not only is it a sector drill down, but also gives an indicator of how much money the firm has raised, which is the size of that bubble. And to tell us if a company is punching above its weight and efficiently using its venture capital. Erik, take us through this slide. Explain the dots, the size of the dots. Set this up please. >> Yeah. So again, the axis is still the same, net sentiment and mindshare, but what we've done this time is we've taken publicly available information on how much capital company is raised and that'll be the size of the circle you see around the name. And then whether it's green or red is basically saying relative to the amount of money they've raised, how are they doing in our data? So when you see a Netskope, which has been around forever, raised a lot of money, that's why you're going to see them more leading towards red, 'cause it's just been around forever and kind of would expect it. Versus a name like SecurityScorecard, which is only raised a little bit of money and it's actually performing just as well, if not better than a name, like a Netskope. OneTrust doing absolutely incredible right now. BeyondTrust. We've seen the issues with Okta, right. So those are two names that play in that space that obviously are probably getting some looks about what's going on right now. Wiz, we've all heard about right? So raised a ton of money. It's doing well on net sentiment, but the mindshare isn't as well as you'd want, which is why you're going to see a little bit of that red versus a name like Aqua, which is doing container and application security. And hasn't raised as much money, but is really neck and neck with a name like Wiz. So that is why on a relative basis, you'll see that more green. As we all know, information security is never going away. But as we'll get to later in the program, Dave, I'm not sure in this current market environment, if people are as willing to do POCs and switch away from their security provider, right. There's a little bit of tepidness out there, a little trepidation. So right now we're seeing overall a slight pause, a slight cooling in overall evaluations on the security side versus historical levels a year ago. >> Now let's stay on here for a second. So a couple things I want to point out. So it's interesting. Now Snyk has raised over, I think $800 million but you can see them, they're high on the vertical and the horizontal, but now compare that to Lacework. It's hard to see, but they're kind of buried in the middle there. That's the biggest dot in this whole thing. I think I'm interpreting this correctly. They've raised over a billion dollars. It's a Mike Speiser company. He was the founding investor in Snowflake. So people watch that very closely, but that's an example of where they're not punching above their weight. They recently had a layoff and they got to fine tune things, but I'm still confident they they're going to do well. 'Cause they're approaching security as a data problem, which is probably people having trouble getting their arms around that. And then again, I see Arctic Wolf. They're not red, they're not green, but they've raised fair amount of money, but it's showing up to the right and decent level there. And a couple of the other ones that you mentioned, Netskope. Yeah, they've raised a lot of money, but they're actually performing where you want. What you don't want is where Lacework is, right. They've got some work to do to really take advantage of the money that they raised last November and prior to that. >> Yeah, if you're seeing that more neutral color, like you're calling out with an Arctic Wolf, like that means relative to their peers, this is where they should be. It's when you're seeing that red on a Lacework where we all know, wow, you raised a ton of money and your mindshare isn't where it should be. Your net sentiment is not where it should be comparatively. And then you see these great standouts, like Salt Security and SecurityScorecard and Abnormal. You know they haven't raised that much money yet, but their net sentiment's higher and their mindshare's doing well. So those basically in a nutshell, if you're a PE or a VC and you see a small green circle, then you're doing well, then it means you made a good investment. >> Some of these guys, I don't know, but you see these small green circles. Those are the ones you want to start digging into and maybe help them catch a wave. Okay, let's get into the data discussion. And again, three areas, database slash data warehousing, big data analytics and ML AI. First, we're going to look at the database sector. So Alex, thank you for bringing that up. Alright, take us through this, Erik. Actually, let me just say Postgres SQL. I got to ask you about this. It shows some funding, but that actually could be a mix of EDB, the company that commercializes Postgres and Postgres the open source database, which is a transaction system and kind of an open source Oracle. You see MariaDB is a database, but open source database. But the companies they've raised over $200 million and they filed an S-4. So Erik looks like this might be a little bit of mashup of companies and open source products. Help us understand this. >> Yeah, it's tough when you start dealing with the open source side and I'll be honest with you, there is a little bit of a mashup here. There are certain names here that are a hundred percent for profit companies. And then there are others that are obviously open source based like Redis is open source, but Redis Labs is the one trying to monetize the support around it. So you're a hundred percent accurate on this slide. I think one of the things here that's important to note though, is just how important open source is to data. If you're going to be going to any of these areas, it's going to be open source based to begin with. And Neo4j is one I want to call out here. It's not one everyone's familiar with, but it's basically geographical charting database, which is a name that we're seeing on a net sentiment side actually really, really high. When you think about it's the third overall net sentiment for a niche database play. It's not as big on the mindshare 'cause it's use cases aren't as often, but third biggest play on net sentiment. I found really interesting on this slide. >> And again, so MariaDB, as I said, they filed an S-4 I think $50 million in revenue, that might even be ARR. So they're not huge, but they're getting there. And by the way, MariaDB, if you don't know, was the company that was formed the day that Oracle bought Sun in which they got MySQL and MariaDB has done a really good job of replacing a lot of MySQL instances. Oracle has responded with MySQL HeatWave, which was kind of the Oracle version of MySQL. So there's some interesting battles going on there. If you think about the LAMP stack, the M in the LAMP stack was MySQL. And so now it's all MariaDB replacing that MySQL for a large part. And then you see again, the red, you know, you got to have some concerns about there. Aerospike's been around for a long time. SingleStore changed their name a couple years ago, last year. Yellowbrick Data, Fire Bolt was kind of going after Snowflake for a while, but yeah, you want to get out of that red zone. So they got some work to do. >> And Dave, real quick for the people that aren't aware, I just want to let them know that we can cut this data with the public company data as well. So we can cross over this with that because some of these names are competing with the larger public company names as well. So we can go ahead and cross reference like a MariaDB with a Mongo, for instance, or of something of that nature. So it's not in this slide, but at another point we can certainly explain on a relative basis how these private names are doing compared to the other ones as well. >> All right, let's take a quick look at analytics. Alex, bring that up if you would. Go ahead, Erik. >> Yeah, I mean, essentially here, I can't see it on my screen, my apologies. I just kind of went to blank on that. So gimme one second to catch up. >> So I could set it up while you're doing that. You got Grafana up and to the right. I mean, this is huge right. >> Got it thank you. I lost my screen there for a second. Yep. Again, open source name Grafana, absolutely up and to the right. But as we know, Grafana Labs is actually picking up a lot of speed based on Grafana, of course. And I think we might actually hear some noise from them coming this year. The names that are actually a little bit more disappointing than I want to call out are names like ThoughtSpot. It's been around forever. Their mindshare of course is second best here but based on the amount of time they've been around and the amount of money they've raised, it's not actually outperforming the way it should be. We're seeing Moogsoft obviously make some waves. That's very high net sentiment for that company. It's, you know, what, third, fourth position overall in this entire area, Another name like Fivetran, Matillion is doing well. Fivetran, even though it's got a high net sentiment, again, it's raised so much money that we would've expected a little bit more at this point. I know you know this space extremely well, but basically what we're looking at here and to the bottom left, you're going to see some names with a lot of red, large circles that really just aren't performing that well. InfluxData, however, second highest net sentiment. And it's really pretty early on in this stage and the feedback we're getting on this name is the use cases are great, the efficacy's great. And I think it's one to watch out for. >> InfluxData, time series database. The other interesting things I just noticed here, you got Tamer on here, which is that little small green. Those are the ones we were saying before, look for those guys. They might be some of the interesting companies out there and then observe Jeremy Burton's company. They do observability on top of Snowflake, not green, but kind of in that gray. So that's kind of cool. Monte Carlo is another one, they're sort of slightly green. They are doing some really interesting things in data and data mesh. So yeah, okay. So I can spend all day on this stuff, Erik, phenomenal data. I got to get back and really dig in. Let's end with machine learning and AI. Now this chart it's similar in its dimensions, of course, except for the money raised. We're not showing that size of the bubble, but AI is so hot. We wanted to cover that here, Erik, explain this please. Why TensorFlow is highlighted and walk us through this chart. >> Yeah, it's funny yet again, right? Another open source name, TensorFlow being up there. And I just want to explain, we do break out machine learning, AI is its own sector. A lot of this of course really is intertwined with the data side, but it is on its own area. And one of the things I think that's most important here to break out is Databricks. We started to cover Databricks in machine learning, AI. That company has grown into much, much more than that. So I do want to state to you Dave, and also the audience out there that moving forward, we're going to be moving Databricks out of only the MA/AI into other sectors. So we can kind of value them against their peers a little bit better. But in this instance, you could just see how dominant they are in this area. And one thing that's not here, but I do want to point out is that we have the ability to break this down by industry vertical, organization size. And when I break this down into Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000, both Databricks and Tensorflow are even better than you see here. So it's quite interesting to see that the names that are succeeding are also succeeding with the largest organizations in the world. And as we know, large organizations means large budgets. So this is one area that I just thought was really interesting to point out that as we break it down, the data by vertical, these two names still are the outstanding players. >> I just also want to call it H2O.ai. They're getting a lot of buzz in the marketplace and I'm seeing them a lot more. Anaconda, another one. Dataiku consistently popping up. DataRobot is also interesting because all the kerfuffle that's going on there. The Cube guy, Cube alum, Chris Lynch stepped down as executive chairman. All this stuff came out about how the executives were taking money off the table and didn't allow the employees to participate in that money raising deal. So that's pissed a lot of people off. And so they're now going through some kind of uncomfortable things, which is unfortunate because DataRobot, I noticed, we haven't covered them that much in "Breaking Analysis", but I've noticed them oftentimes, Erik, in the surveys doing really well. So you would think that company has a lot of potential. But yeah, it's an important space that we're going to continue to watch. Let me ask you Erik, can you contextualize this from a time series standpoint? I mean, how is this changed over time? >> Yeah, again, not show here, but in the data. I'm sorry, go ahead. >> No, I'm sorry. What I meant, I should have interjected. In other words, you would think in a downturn that these emerging companies would be less interesting to buyers 'cause they're more risky. What have you seen? >> Yeah, and it was interesting before we went live, you and I were having this conversation about "Is the downturn stopping people from evaluating these private companies or not," right. In a larger sense, that's really what we're doing here. How are these private companies doing when it comes down to the actual practitioners? The people with the budget, the people with the decision making. And so what I did is, we have historical data as you know, I went back to the Emerging Technology Survey we did in November of 21, right at the crest right before the market started to really fall and everything kind of started to fall apart there. And what I noticed is on the security side, very much so, we're seeing less evaluations than we were in November 21. So I broke it down. On cloud security, net sentiment went from 21% to 16% from November '21. That's a pretty big drop. And again, that sentiment is our one aggregate metric for overall positivity, meaning utilization and actual evaluation of the name. Again in database, we saw it drop a little bit from 19% to 13%. However, in analytics we actually saw it stay steady. So it's pretty interesting that yes, cloud security and security in general is always going to be important. But right now we're seeing less overall net sentiment in that space. But within analytics, we're seeing steady with growing mindshare. And also to your point earlier in machine learning, AI, we're seeing steady net sentiment and mindshare has grown a whopping 25% to 30%. So despite the downturn, we're seeing more awareness of these companies in analytics and machine learning and a steady, actual utilization of them. I can't say the same in security and database. They're actually shrinking a little bit since the end of last year. >> You know it's interesting, we were on a round table, Erik does these round tables with CISOs and CIOs, and I remember one time you had asked the question, "How do you think about some of these emerging tech companies?" And one of the executives said, "I always include somebody in the bottom left of the Gartner Magic Quadrant in my RFPs. I think he said, "That's how I found," I don't know, it was Zscaler or something like that years before anybody ever knew of them "Because they're going to help me get to the next level." So it's interesting to see Erik in these sectors, how they're holding up in many cases. >> Yeah. It's a very important part for the actual IT practitioners themselves. There's always contracts coming up and you always have to worry about your next round of negotiations. And that's one of the roles these guys play. You have to do a POC when contracts come up, but it's also their job to stay on top of the new technology. You can't fall behind. Like everyone's a software company. Now everyone's a tech company, no matter what you're doing. So these guys have to stay in on top of it. And that's what this ETS can do. You can go in here and look and say, "All right, I'm going to evaluate their technology," and it could be twofold. It might be that you're ready to upgrade your technology and they're actually pushing the envelope or it simply might be I'm using them as a negotiation ploy. So when I go back to the big guy who I have full intentions of writing that contract to, at least I have some negotiation leverage. >> Erik, we got to leave it there. I could spend all day. I'm going to definitely dig into this on my own time. Thank you for introducing this, really appreciate your time today. >> I always enjoy it, Dave and I hope everyone out there has a great holiday weekend. Enjoy the rest of the summer. And, you know, I love to talk data. So anytime you want, just point the camera on me and I'll start talking data. >> You got it. I also want to thank the team at ETR, not only Erik, but Darren Bramen who's a data scientist, really helped prepare this data, the entire team over at ETR. I cannot tell you how much additional data there is. We are just scratching the surface in this "Breaking Analysis". So great job guys. I want to thank Alex Myerson. Who's on production and he manages the podcast. Ken Shifman as well, who's just coming back from VMware Explore. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE. Does some great editing for us. Thank you. All of you guys. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcast, wherever you listen. All you got to do is just search "Breaking Analysis" podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me to get in touch david.vellante@siliconangle.com. You can DM me at dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Bradley and The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. Be well. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis". (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of CONMEBOL. Future ready 2020. Brought to you by combo. >>Hi and welcome back. I'm Stew Minuteman, and we're at the Cube's coverage of Con Volt Future Ready. You've got the power panel to really dig in on the product announcements that happened at the event today. Joining me? We have three guests. First of all, we have Brenda Rajagopalan. He's the vice president of products. Sitting next to him is Don Foster, vice president of Storage Solutions. And in the far piece of the panel Mersereau, vice president of Global Channels and Alliances. All three of them with Conn Volt. Gentlemen, thanks all three of you for joining us. Exactly. All right, so first of all, great job on the launch. You know, these days with a virtual event doing, you know, the announcements, the engagement with the press and analyst, you know, having demos, customer discussions. It's a challenge to put all those together. And it has been, you know, engaging in interesting watch today. So we're going to start with you. You've been quite busy today explaining all the pieces, so just at a very high level if you put this really looks like the culmination of the update with Conn Volt portfolio new team new products compared to kind of a year, year and 1/2 ago. So just if you could start us off with kind of the high points, >>thank you still, yeah, absolutely exciting day for us today. You did comrade multiple reasons for that excitement and go through that we announced an exciting new portfolio today knows to not the culmination. It's a continuation off our journey, a bunch of new products that we launched today Hyper scaler X as a new integrated data protection appliance. We've also announced new offerings in data protection, backup and recovery, disaster recovery and complete data protection and lots of exciting updates for Hedwig and a couple of weeks like we introduced updates for metallic. So, yes, it's been a really exciting pain. Also, today happens to be the data, and we got to know that we are the leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for the ninth consecutive. I am so a lot of goodness today for us. >>Excellent. Lots of areas that we definitely want to dig deep in to the pieces done. You know, we just heard a little bit about Hedvig was an acquisition a year ago that everybody's kind of looking at and saying Okay, you know, will this make them compete against some of their traditional partners? How we get integrated in So, baby, just give us one level deeper on the Hedvig piece on what that means to the portfolio? Yeah, sure, So I >>guess I mean, one of the key things that the random mentioned was the fact that had hyper scale that's is built off the head Day files. So that's a huge milestone for us. As we teased out maybe 10 months ago. Remember, Tomball, Go on the Cube and talking about, you know, kind of what our vision and strategy was of unifying data and storage management. Those hyper hyper scale X applying is a definite milestone improving out that direction. But beyond just the hyper scale ECs, we've also been driving on some of the more primary or modern workloads such as containers and the really interesting stuff we've come out with your recently is the kubernetes native integration that ties in all of the advanced component of the head to distribute storage architecture on the platform itself across multi cloud and on premise environments, making it really easy and policy driven. Um, for Dev, ops users and infrastructure users, the tie ins applications from a group, Friction >>Great and Mercer. There's some updates to the partner program and help us understand how all of these product updates they're gonna affect the kind of the partnerships and alliances beasts that you want. >>Absolutely. So in the time since our last meeting that go in the fall, which is actually right after I had just doing combo, we spent a good portion of the following six months really talking with partners, understanding the understand the impact of the partner program that we introduced last summer, looking at the data and really looking at barriers to evolve the program, which fell around three difference specific. Once you bet one was simplicity of the simplicity of the program, simplicity of understanding, rewards, levers and so forth. The second was paying for value was really helping, helping our partners to be profitable around things like deal registration on other benefits and then third was around co investment. So making sure that we get the right members in place to support our partners and investing in practices. Another training, another enablement around combo and we launched in over these things last week is a part of an evolution of that program. Today is a great follow on because in addition to all of the program evolutions that we we launched last week now we have an opportunity with our partners to have many more opportunities or kind of a thin into the wedge to open up new discussions with our customers now around all of these different use cases and capabilities. So back to that simplification angle, really driving more and more opportunities for those partners toe specific conversations around use cases. >>Okay, for this next question, I think it makes sense for you to start. Maybe maybe Don, you can get some commentary in two. But when he's firstly the announcements, there are some new products in the piece that you discuss but trying to understand, you know, when you position it, you know, do you call the portfolio? Is it a platform? You know, if I'm an existing Conn Volt customer, you know, how do I approach this? If I use something like metallic, how does that interplay with some of the new pieces that were discussed today. >>Sure, I can take the business. I'm sure Don and mostly will have more data to it. The simplest way to think about it is as a port for you. But contrary to how you would think about portfolio as independent products, what we have is a set off data management services granular. We're very aligned to the use case, which can all inter operate with each other. So maybe launched backup and recovery and disaster recovery. These can be handled separately, purchased separately and deployed standalone or for customers who want a combination of those capabilities. We also have a complete data protection are fine storage optimization, data governance E discovery in complaints are data management services that build on top off any of these capabilities now a very differentiating factor in our platform owners. All the services that you're talking about are delivered off the same software to make it simpler to manage to the same year. So it's very easy to start with one service and then just turn on the license and go to other services so I can understand the confusion is coming from but it's all the same. The customer simplicity and flexibility in mind, and it's all delivered off the same platform. So it is a portfolio built on a single Don. Would you like to add more to it? >>Yeah, I think the interesting thing due to add on top of that is where we're going with Hedvig Infrastructure, the head of distributed storage platform, uh, to to run this point, how everything is integrated and feed and work off of one another. That's the same idea that we have. We talked about unifying data and storage manager. So the intricate storage architecture components the way data might be maneuvered, whether it's for kubernetes for virtual machines, database environments, secondary storage, you name it, um, we are. We're quickly working to continue driving that level of of unification and integration between the portfolio and heads storage, distribute storage platforms and also deliver. So what you're seeing today going back to, I think wrong his first point. It's definitely not the culmination. It's just another step in the direction as we continue to innovate and integrate this >>product, and I think for our partners what this really does, it allows them to sell around customer use cases because it'll ask now if I have a d. Our use case. I can go after just PR. If I have a backup use case, I can just go after backup, and I don't have to try to sell more than that. Could be on what the customer is looking for in parallel that we can steal these things in line with the customer use case. So the customer has a lot of remote offices. They want to scale Hedvig across those they want to use the art of the cloud. They can scale these things independently, and it really gives us a lot of optionality that we didn't have before when we had a few monolithic products. >>Excellent. Really reminds me more of how I look at products if I was gonna go buy it from some of the public cloud providers living in a hybrid cloud. World, of course, is what your customers are doing. Help us understand a little bit, you know, Mercer talked about metallic and the azure partnership, but for the rest of the products, the portfolio that we're talking about, you know, does this >>kind >>of work seamlessly across my own data center hosting providers Public Cloud, you know, how does this fit into the cloud environment for your customer? >>Yes, it does. And I can start with this one goes to, um it's our strategy is cloud first, right? And you see it in every aspect of our product portfolio. In fact, I don't know if you got to see a keynote today, but Ron from Johns Hopkins University was remarking that comment has the best cloud native architectures. And that's primarily because of the innovation that we drive into the multi cloud reality. We have very deep partnerships with pretty much all the cloud vendors, and we use that for delivering joint innovation, a few things that when you think of it from a hybrid customers perspective, the most important need for them is to continue working on pram while still leveraging the cloud. And we have a lot of optimization is built into that, and then the next step of the journey is of course, making sure that you can recover to the cloud would be it work load. Typically your data quality and there's a lot of automation that we provide to our solutions and finally, Of course, if you're already in the cloud, whether you're running a science parents or cloud native, our software protects across all those use cases, either true sass with metallic auto downloadable software, backup and recovery so we can cover the interest victims of actual presence. You. We do definitely help customers in every stage of their hybrid cloud acceleration journey. >>And if you take a look at the Hedvig protect if you take a look at the head back to, um, the ability to work in a cloud native fast, it is essentially a part of the DNA of that storage of the storage, right? So whether you're running on Prem, whether you're running it about adjacent, set up inside the cloud head, that can work with any compute environment and any storage environment that you went to essentially then feed, we build this distributed storage, and the reason that becomes important. It's pretty much highlighted with our announcement around the kubernetes and container support is that it makes it really easy to start maneuvering data from on Prem to the cloud, um, from cloud to cloud region to region, sort of that high availability that you know as customers make cloud first a reality and their organizations starts to become a critical requirement or ensuring the application of and some of the things that we've done now with kubernetes in making all of our integration for how we deliver storage for the kubernetes and container environments and being that they're completely kubernetes native and that they can support a Google in AWS and Azure. And of course, any on premises community set up just showcases the value that we can provide in giving them that level of data portability. And it basically provides a common foundation layer, or how any sort of the Dev ops teams will be operating in the way that those state full container state workloads. Donna Oh, sorry. Go >>ahead, mark area >>because you mentioned the metallic and azure partnership announcement and I just want to get on that. And one thing that run dimension, which is we are really excited about the announcement of partnership with Microsoft and all the different news cases that opens up that are SAS platform with Azure with office 3 65 and all of the great application stack it's on. If you're at the same time, to run this point. We are a multi cloud company. And whether that is other of the hyper scale clouds Mess GC, P. Ali at Oracle and IBM, etcetera, or Oliver, Great service writer burners. We continue to believe in customer choice, and we'll continue to drive unique event innovations across all of those platforms. >>All right, Don, I was wondering if we could just dig in a little bit more on some other kubernetes pieces you were talking about. Let me look at just the maturation of storage in general. You know, how do we had state back into containers in kubernetes environments? Help us see, You know what you're hearing from your customers. And you know how you how you're ready to meet their needs toe not only deliver storage, but as you say, Really? You know, full data protection in that environment? >>Certainly it So I mean, there's been a number of enhancements that happened in the kubernetes environment General over the last two years. One of the big ones was the creation of what the visit environment calls a persistent volume. And what that allows you to do is to really present storage to a a communities application. Do it be typically through what's called a CSR container storage interface that allows for state full data to be written, storage and be handled and reattached applications as you leverage them about that kubernetes. Um, as you can probably imagine that with the addition of the additional state full applications, some of the overall management now of stateless and state collapse become very talent. And that's primarily because many customers have been using some of the more traditional storage solutions to try to map that into these new state. Full scenario. And as you start to think about Dev ops organization, most Dev ops organizations want to work in the environment of their choice. Whether that's Google, whether that's AWS, Microsoft, uh, something that might be on Prem or a mix of different on Prem environments. What you typically find, at least in the kubernetes world, is there's seldom ever one single, very large kubernetes infrastructure cluster that's set to run, Dev asked. The way and production all at once. You usually have this spread out across a fairly global configuration, and so that's where some of these traditional mechanisms from traditional storage vendors really start to fall down because you can apply the same level of automation and controls in every single one of those environments. When you don't control the storage, let's say and that's really where interfacing Hedvig and allowing that sort of extension distribute storage platform brings about all of this automation policy control and really storage execution definition for the state. Full statehood workloads so that now managing the stateless and the state full becomes pretty easy and pretty easy to maintain when it comes to developing another Dev branch or simply trying to do disaster recovery or a J for production, >>any family actively do. That's a very interesting response, and the reality is customers are beginning to experiment with business. Very often they only have a virtual environment, and now they're also trying to expand into continuous. So Hedwig's ability to service primary storage for virtualization as well as containers actually gives their degree of flexibility and freedom for customers to try out containers and to start their contingent. Thank you familiar constructs. Everything is mellow where you just need to great with continuous >>Alright, bring a flexibility is something that I heard when you talk about the portfolio and the pricing as to how you put these pieces together. You actually talked about in the presentation this morning? Aggressive pricing. If you talk about, you know, kind of backup and recovery, help us understand, You know, convo 2020 how you're looking at your customers and you know how you put together your products, that to meet what they need at that. As you said, aggressive pricing? >>Absolutely. And you use this phrase a little bit earlier is to blow like flexibility. That's exactly what we're trying to get to the reason why we are reconstructing our portfolio so that we have these very granular use case aligned data management services to provide the cloud like flexibility. Customers don't have the same data management needs all the time. Great. So they can pick and choose the exact solution that need because there are delivered on the same platform that can enable out the solution investment, you know, And that's the reality. We know that many of our customers are going to start with one and keep adding more and more services, because that's what we see as ongoing conversations that gives us the ability to really praise the entry products very aggressively when compared to competition, especially when we go against single product windows. This uses a lot of slammed where we can start with a really aggressively priced product and enable more capabilities as we move forward to give you an idea, we launched disaster recovery today. I would say that compared to the so the established vendors India, we would probably come in at about 25 to 40% of the Priceline because it depends on the environment and what not. But you're going to see that that's the power of bringing to the table. You start small and then depending on what your needs are, you have the flexibility to run on either. More data management capabilities are more workloads, depending on what your needs will be. I think it's been a drag from a partner perspective, less with muscle. If you want a little bit more than that, >>yes, I mean, that goes back to the idea of being ableto simply scale across government use functionality. For example, things like the fact that our disaster recovery offering the Newman doesn't require backup really allows us to have those Taylor conversations around use cases, applications >>a >>zealous platforms. You think about one of the the big demands that we've had coming in from customers and partners, which is help me have a D R scenario or a VR set up in my environment that doesn't require people to go put their hands on boxes and cables, which was one of those things that a year ago we were having. This conversation would not necessarily have been as important as it is now, but that ability to target those specific, urgent use cases without having to go across on sort of sell things that aren't necessarily associated with the immediate pain points really makes those just makes us ineffective. Offer. >>Yeah, you bring up some changing priorities. I think almost everybody will agree that the number one priority we're hearing from customers is around security. So whether I'm adopting more cloud, I'm looking at different solutions out there. Security has to be front and center. Could we just kind of go down the line and give us the update as to how security fits and all the pieces we've been discussing? >>I guess I'm talking about change, right, so I'll start. The security for us is built into everything that we do the same view you're probably going to get from each of us because security is burden. It's not a board on, and you would see it across a lot of different images. If you take our backup and recovery and disaster recovery, for instance, a lot of ransomware protection capabilities built into the solution. For instance, we have anomaly detection that is built into the platform. If we see any kind of spurious activity happening all of a sudden, we know that that might be a potential and be reported so that the customer can take a quick look at air Gap isolation, encryption by default. So many features building. And when you come to disaster recovery, encryption on the wire, a lot of security aspects we've been to every part of the portfolio don't. >>Consequently, with Hedvig, it's probably no surprise that when that this platform was developed and as we've continued development, security has always been at the core of what we're doing is stored. So what? It's for something as simple as encryption on different volume, ensuring the communication between applications and the storage platform itself, and the way the distributors towards platform indicates those are all incredibly secured. Lock down almost such for our own our own protocols for ensuring that, um, you know, only we're able to talk within our own, our own system. Beyond that, though, I mean it comes down to ensure that data in rest data in transit. It's always it's always secure. It's also encrypted based upon the level of control that using any is there one. And then beyond just the fact of keeping the data secure. You have things like immutable snapshots. You have declared of data sovereignty to ensure that you can put essentially virtual fence barriers for where data can be transported in this highly distributed platform. Ah, and then, from a user perspective, there's always level security for providing all seeking roll on what groups organization and consume storage or leverage. Different resource is the storage platform and then, of course, from a service provider's perspective as well, providing that multi tenanted access s so that users can have access to what they want when they want it. It's all about self service, >>and the idea there is that obviously, we're all familiar with the reports of increased bad actors in the current environment to increased ransomware attacks and so forth. And be a part of that is addressed by what wrong and done said in terms of our core technology. Part of that also, though, is addressed by being able to work across platforms and environments because, you know, as we see the acceleration of state tier one applications or entire data center, evacuations into service provider or cloud environments has happened. You know, this could have taken 5 10 years in a in a normal cycle. But we've seen this happen overnight has cut this. Companies have needed to move those I T environments off science into managed environments and our ability to protect the applications, whether they're on premises, whether they're in the cloud or in the most difficult near where they live. In both cases, in both places at once, is something that it's really important to our customers to be able to ensure that in the end, security posture >>great Well, final thing I have for all three of you is you correctly noted that this is not the end, but along the journey that you're going along with your customers. So you know, with all three of you would like to get a little bit. Give us directionally. What should we be looking at? A convo. Take what was announced today and a little bit of look forward towards future. >>Directionally we should be looking at a place where we're delivering even greater simplicity to our customers. And that's gonna be achieved through multiple aspects. 1st 1 it's more technologies coming together. Integrating. We announced three important integration story. We announced the Microsoft partnership a couple of weeks back. You're gonna see us more longer direction. The second piece is technology innovation. We believe in it. That's what Differentiators has a very different company and we'll continue building it along the dimensions off data awareness, data, automation and agility. And the last one continued obsession with data. What more can we do with it? How can we drive more insights for our customers We're going to see is introducing more capabilities along those dimensions? No. >>And I think Rhonda tying directly into what you're highlighting there. I'm gonna go back to what we teased out 10 months ago at calm Bolt. Go there in Colorado in this very on this very program and talk about how, in the unification of ah ah, data and storage management, that vision, we're going to make more and more reality. I think the, uh, the announcements we've made here today let some of the things that we've done in between the lead up to this point is just proof of our execution. And ah, I can happily and excitedly tell you, we're just getting warmed up. It's going to be, ah, gonna be some fun future ahead. >>And I think studio in the running that out with the partner angle. Obviously, we're going to continue to produce great products and solutions that we're going to make our partners relevant. In those conversations with customers, I think we're also going to continue to invest in alternative business models, services, things like migration services, audit services, other things that build on top of this core technology to provide value for customers and additional opportunities for our partners >>to >>build out their their offerings around combo technologies. >>All right, well, thank you. All three of you for joining us. It was great to be able to dig in, understand those pieces. I know you've got lots of resources online for people to learn more. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you too. Thank you. Alright, and stay with us. So we've got one more interview left for the Cube's coverage of con vault. Future Ready, students. Mannan. Thanks. As always for watching the Cube. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Narrator: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix dot next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix dot next. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight co-hosting along with Stu Miniman. We're joined by Christo du Raan, he is the COO IT Hardware and Infrastructure at Trustco Holdings. Thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> All right, thanks. And thanks for having me. >> Direct from Namibia. So we keep hearing there are customers from 50 countries. And you represent Namibia here. >> Yeah I come from far down in Africa. (laughs) >> So tell our viewers a little bit about Trustco, what you do down there? >> Trustco's a financial services company firstly, we look after all our Namibian customers in the insurance industry, as well as in the banking industry. We've been busy building our banking industry now for the last five years. And we're almost to that point where we can start serving people. Then we've got also educational services that we give to our customers and we've got roughly about 15,000 students, all doing distance learning, and of that 15,000 we've got about 80 to 90 percent of them that we also do finance, not just for the course material but also the technology, that we finance for them, so to give them the capabilities to do their studies through us. Then we've got also natural resources, it's quite a new business unit for us, where we dabble a little in diamond mining, we've got two mines currently, one in Namibia itself, where we produce probably one of the best diamonds in the world, clear cut diamonds, and then also in Sierra Leone we've recently acquired a mining license there as well. Then in Namibia, the other stuff that we do is in Shared Services, where we have our own radio station that we broadcast in Namibia, and then we do a little bit of in-house marketing and media and those type of things. >> Just a few things! >> Well luckily Christo, your IT staff, they have it easy, they don't have, you know, I walk through the Expo floor, it's like oh well how many verticals do you need to go to all of them, to be able to learn what you're doing. So give us if you can just, a little bit of a snapshot of your IT environment, what your team's responsible for, and if you can, kind of bring us even back before you began the journey onto Nutanix. >> So we're very centralized in Namibia, all our stuff gets run out of one data center, or one common area in our area offices, and then we expand to the six branches out in Namibia and in South Africa and now of late we'll be in Sierra Leone. IT team pretty much look after everything, we've got a saying at the office, "If it's got a plug on, it's IT's problem". (laughing) So yeah, so we do everything from the infrastructure, the networking, the servers, the storage, well, now it's Nutanix, everything is already built into one solution, so that the spurred systems have now fallen away, and we only look after it. >> Bring us back to that move to Nutanix, was there an upgrade that you were looking to do? Was there a pain point? What was the impetus to look at Nutanix? >> So our business has expanded quite quickly and the old way of doing things, with the separate SANs, separate switches, separate servers, those type of things became a little bit slumbersome, and difficult to manage because you had to have all these different kind of vendors that's got specific software solutions and specific training that you have to do and it just became a little bit too much for us and we decided that, let's step back a little bit, and see if there's any solutions out there that makes it firstly easier, that we can manage with less people and do more and at that stage hyperconvergence was just on the peak of becoming a thing, if you want to call it that, and we had done our research and found that Nutanix at that stage was the best fit for us and also the most mature in the hyperconverged space. So, that's basically where we got to the Nutanix solution, obviously like everyone else, we started with a Community Edition, dabbled our hand a little bit in there, and saw that's actually doable, it's easy and something that we can build on. >> So, you've been with them for about two years now, so still a relatively new relationship but talk about the beginning in particular and relationships are hard. Every relationship is hard. There are inevitable stumbling blocks. What were some of the challenges you faced and how did you work with Nutanix to overcome them? >> Challenges, I can say, luckily we haven't had a lot of them. Our business is not nearly as big as the Europeans and the Americans, so it is not that complex a system. We had our challenges in the beginning, hypervisor specifically, 'cause we made a huge move, we went totally 180 degrees from our Hyper-V environment, we said we going to go right over to AHV, don't want to do deal licensing, let's just jump in on AHV and go Nutanix fully. So, obviously we had a few challenges with a couple of our services and servers. But other than that, I must say, it was actually a pretty easy move for us. >> It's interesting that you say going from Hyper-V 'cause I've talked to the customers, oh there's a saving from moving from VMware, oh Microsoft, Hyper-V's all included, if you're doing Windows and you've got Hyper-V, I'm sure you've got a Windows application, so was there an application change or what was the driver to move? >> There were some of our applications that were very specific, especially on the network drivers side of things, moving from the normal Windows drivers, to the IO drivers in Linux. We had a couple of challenges with our in-house apps as well, but again, it was a reasonably painless move over to Nutanix. >> One of things we keep hearing about at this conference is how Nutanix is evolving as customer needs and demands are changing. You gave us the overview of your company, you are getting into new businesses and still continuing in established businesses, what are some of the needs that your IT is experiencing and how is Nutanix meeting those needs? >> Like I say, in the old infrastructure days, provisioning was probably the biggest hurdle, if the Dev guys wanted stuff, you first had to go and buy some more hardware, because you need to adapt to them. When we reversed over to Hyper-V eventually, it became easier, but it was still not the right fit. You still had to tweak it and play with it etc etc. So, the biggest challenge was to get our DevOp guys quicker access to what they need. And then also our customers as well. We've moved from where there's a person that needed to provision storage, needed to provision networking, needed to provision server and VMs, that's now all basically done by one person and most of those things we've already automized, so it is five, ten minutes, and then they've got what they need. I think it made us a little bit more agile because we pride ourselves on being quick thinkers, deploying stuff fast and that was always Trustco's main advantage in the Namibian market, we didn't go through all the other rigamarole that other companies have of tendering and doing things in a certain way and by the time that you get there it's not relevant anymore, now we need to do something else again. That brought us quick to market and made it so that we can deliver quicker solutions to our customers. >> So, Christo, was there any impact organizationally for rolling out Nutanix, you mentioned DevOps there, the goal of course is that they shouldn't have to worry about the infrastructure and hopefully Nutanix is delivering that, but there's some retraining or moving inside the organization, what's the impact been on your organization? >> On the customer side, none. They don't even know we've moved over. >> But from the IT side? >> From our customer side, they've not seen anything. From the IT side of things, we had a phased approach, so we started off with the Community Edition, where we basically just dabbled in it, saw what we could do on it and then also, let's call it training for the IT guys, so that they're comfortable in how the product works. So by the time that we got to deploying it in production, it was actually a very smooth transaction. We had all the kinks sorted out beforehand and made sure that everything will work, again, being in the finance industry, in the banking industry, downtime is an absolute no no, and we wanted to get to a point where we say we're not going to move over production sites, production environments, in the evenings from twelve to four in the morning because we've all got families so we'll either plan it properly ahead of time and yes we did it and actually, dare I say, in production time, we moved across almost seamlessly. We've got a lot of redundancies built in obviously so it gave us the opportunity to actually move in place if you want to call it that. >> So what does the future hold for this relationship? Where do you see your partnership with Nutanix evolving and where do you think you'll be, say, five years from now? >> So, we've got a roadmap set out with Nutanix and where we're now only in the baby phase, where we've done the infrastructure, we're happy everything is working, so now we're in the POC stage of exploring the software suite in its entirety. We've started now with Leap and Bolt ADR scenario and tested it extensively and we're now in that process, probably when I get back in Namibia, we'll have the licenses hopefully to start deploying it in our production environment. More closer to the future, in the next I would say, six to nine months, we're going to take on Frame, 'cause part of our business scenario, because we were Microsoft, was the Remote Desktop Service, and that was what kept us so lean. There are some challenges now with Remote Desktop Services where our Dev guys are moving into some Linux and there's different things coming up now where we move away from the traditional monolithic applications to more agile applications and then we'll start dabbling our hands in Frame. For us the holdback was when Frame came out, that it was only in the cloud and for us in Namibia, Africa, the internet is not as stable as we would like, so that was totally off the cards for us. Now that it moved back into on-prem and we can run Frame on-prem, that will probably be our biggest project going forward for the next year and year and a half. >> Excellent. Well thank you so much for coming on theCube Christo. It was a pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, stay tuned for more of theCube's live coverage of dot next. [Urgent Music]

>>from San Francisco. It's the Q covering pager duty Summit 2019. Brought to you by pager Duty. >>Hey, welcome back there. Ready, Geoffrey? Here with the cue, we're pager duty Summit in the historic Western St Francis Hotel, downtown San Francisco. I think they've outgrown the venue. The place is packed to the gills. Standing, rolling, the keynote Really excited of our next guest. Someone who's been to this industry for awhile really done some super cool creative things. He's given the closing keynote. We're happy to have him here right now. That's Mitchell Hashimoto from Hachiko. It's great to see you. >>Good to see you too. Thanks for having >>absolutely so just a quick overview before we get into it on hot chic or for the people in our familiar >>Sure, so hospitals a company that what we try to do is help people adopt cloud, but more, more realistically, Adolfo multi cloud and hybrid cloud the real world complexities. That cloud isn't just a technical landing point, but it's really way You deliver software. You want to deliver more applications, you want to connect them faster. You want to do this in an automated away infrastructure is code of all these modern practices way. Build a suite of tools Thio provisions secure, connect and run those applications for separate products that we sell that you could adopt separately. Good mix and match. That's That's what we've been doing for a long time. Based on open source Software, Way started purely as an open source community and have grown into an enterprise cos that's that's That's the elevator pitch. >>No, it's great, but it's a great story, >>right? Europe, Europe in Seattle got some access to some cloud infrastructure and really solve your own problem. Figured out other people of that problem and then really built a really cool, open source kind of based software company. >>Yeah, I mean, I think the amount of people that had the problem I was facing personally was orders of magnitude more than I expected. I've told other people we never expected to start even a business around this. It was just scratching and building technical solutions. But a CZ, as we sort of worked at startups, started talking a bigger and bigger companies. It just kept everyone kept saying, Yes, I have that problem and it's only grown since then, right surprising, >>and the complexity has only grown exponentially before. The you know, years ago, there was this bright, shiny new object called a W s. I mean, I love Bezos is great line that nobody even paid attention. You have six or seven years. They've got a head start and kind of this Russian. Now there's been a little bit of a fallback as people trying to figure out what to go where now it's hybrid cloud and horses for courses. So a lot of great complexity, which is nothing but good news for you. >>Absolutely. I told this story before, but our first year incorporated company I actually got hung up on by an analyst because I said way we're trying to solve a multi cloud problem and they said that's not a real problem when it will never be a real problem. They hung up on me on it was a bet, then, and and I think they're the expectation that was it was gonna be Eight of us is gonna be physical infrastructure and the physical infrastructure days were numbered. It was gonna get acts out. It was just gonna all go to eight of us and our conviction was that you would have both forever and or for a very long time. And then people like Azure, Google and others would pick up and and that's been true. But I think what we didn't expect, the complexity that got introduced with things like containers in Kubernetes because it's not like Clouded option finished in the next started It all came at once. So now Riel Cos they're dealing with the complexity of their still trying to move the clouds. They're trying to get more out of their physical infrastructure, trying to adopt kubernetes. Now people are starting to peck at them about server list. So there the complexity is is a bit crazy and review our job trying to simplify that adoption make you get the most out of >>right. And that was before you could get a piece of Ian where inside of AWS, get a get a piece of the Google Data Center inside your own data center. So it just continues to get crazier. >>Yes, yeah, So you're giving a closing keynote on a >>new project. You're working on fault, and it's an existing project. Justin cry. They're old, but but I think you talked about before we turn the cameras on. It's really more of a kind of an attitude in a and a point of view and a way to go after the problem. So I wonder if you could kind of dig into a little bit of What did you see? How did you decide to kind of turn the lens a little bit and reframe this challenge? Yeah, >>I think the big picture of story I'm trying to tell him the keynote is that everybody? Anything You look around the technical nontechnical, this table, that glass. Like everything you look at, it trickles back to the idea of one or a small group of people, and it takes an army to make it show up on this table. But it starts by somebody's vision, and everything was created by somebody. So I'm talking about vault, something we made and, you know, why don't we create it? And why do we make it the way we did? And you know, another thing I say is people ask, Why did you start hot record for having this vision? Something I constantly told myself was wine on me. I get someone's gonna do it. Why not make it? Could be anybody, like I'll give it a shot. Why not? And Bolt was that way. We Armand. I'm a co founder. Way took security classes in college, but we don't have a formal security background. We didn't work in security in industry. So the odds of us launching a security product that is so prevalent today whether you know it or not, it's behind the scenes very prevalent were stacked against us. How did that happen? And that's that's sort of what I've been going to talk about. >>Let's go. But do >>dive into a little bit on the security challenge because it's funny, right? Everyone always says, Right. Security's got to be baked in and you've got these complex infrastructure and everything's connected with AP eyes, the other people's applications and, oh yes, delivered through this little thing that you carry around. And maybe the network's not working well or the CPS running low are You're running iPhone five. And of course, it's not gonna work on most modern app. Yeah, bacon security always do, but that's easy to say. It's much harder to do, you know. Still, people want to build moats and castles and drawbridges, and that's just not gonna work anymore. >>Exactly. So you exactly hit upon the two major issues that we recognize there felt we recognize. One was that a lot of people were saying it. Very few people were doing it on. The reality was it was hard to do. Everyone knew theoretically what they should do. No one, no one thought. Oh yeah, saving somebody's personal information in plain text in the daytime. It's a good idea. Nobody thought that Everyone said it should be encrypted, but encryption is hard. So maybe one day, so no one was doing it. And then the other side of it was the people that were doing it where the world's largest companies, because the solutions were catered towards his mindset of of castle and moats, which works totally fine in a physical tradition environment but completely breaks down in a cloud world where there is no four perimeters anymore. It's >>still there, There. >>You're one AP I call away from opening everything to the Internet. So how do you protect this? And we've seen a lot of trends change towards zero Trust and ServiceMaster Mutual feel like there's a lot of stuff that happened way sort of jumped on that. >>Yeah, so So you're using, like, multi level encryption, and I've read a little bit on the website. It's way over my head, I think. But, you >>know, the basics are just making kryptonite. Christian makes security, cloud infrastructure, security approachable by anybody and a core philosophy. Our company, Hashi Hashi Hashi. My name means bridge, and that is a core part of our culture. Which is you can't just have, ah, theoretical thing or a shiny object and leave people hanging. You gotta give them a bridge, a path to get there, right? And so we say, with all our technology, one of the crawl, walk and run adoption periods and with security it's the same is that to say you're secure means something totally different everybody for a bank to be secure, it's a lot more than for a five person started to be secure. So how do you give somebody a solutions they could adopt? Check the security box for themselves at every path of the lake, and bald is one of the tools that way have individuals using it, and we have the world's largest companies, almost 10% of the global 2000 paying customers evolved many more open source users on its scales the entire spectrum. >>Wow. So you keep coming up >>with lots of new, uh, new projects as we get ready to flip the counter to 2020. What are some of the things you're thinking about? >>I think the big one, you know, that our focus is right now is service. Miss Vault is we're big enough company now where we always have teams working on every every one of our projects we have release is going out. The thing we've been talking about the most is the service mess thing. I think Cloud as a mainstream thing, Let's say, has has existed for seven or eight years. It's since it's been released. It's been over in almost 15 but as a thing that people have, that is a good idea. Seven or eight years and you know we've touched security. Now we've touched how infrastructures managed touch developers. I think a place that's been relatively untouched and has gotten by without anyone noticing has been networking and network security. They're they're really doing things the way they've always done things, and I think that's been okay because there's bigger fish to fry. But I think the time has come and networking as a bull's eye on it. And people are looking at What is networking mean in a cloud world and service mash appears to be the way that is gonna happen. Way have our own service mess solution called Council on Our Approaches Standard Hasta Corp. It's nothing new. It's We're gonna work with everything containers, kubernetes, viens physical infrastructure. We're gonna make it all work across multiple data centers. That is our approach service fashion, solving that challenge. >>What's the secret sauce? >>I mean, it's not that secret, right? >>It's just building. Just execute. Better understand that this header >>JD is the problem, right? Right, I said, This is our keynote a couple weeks ago that there are a lot of service messes out there, and nine out of 10 of them are solving a solution for a single environment, whether it's kubernetes or physical environment. And I think that's a problem. But it's not the problem. The problem to me is how do I get my kubernetes instances pods to communicate to my NSX service is on my physical infrastructure. That is the problem as people, whether that's temporary, not and they intend to move the communities or whatever. It's that's the reality. And how do you make that work? And that is what we're focused on solving that problem >>just every time I hear service mess. I think there was a company a while ago that sold the CSC. Probably like 2013. Didn't really get into That is a as a good, happy story. But they were early on the name. Yeah. Yeah. So last thing pager duty were Pedrie. What? You guys doing a page of duty? >>Sure. So we've been I've actually been a paying customer pager duty since before we even made this company in my previous job was a customer wear now, still customers. So we still use it internally. But in addition to that way, do integration across the board. So with terra form our infrastructure provisioning tool way have a way to manage all pager duty as code and as your complexion pager duty rises instead of clicking through a u. I being able to version and code everything and have that realize itself and how he works very valuable from like a service MASH consul standpoint. Hooking in the monitoring to the alerting of Pedro duty is a big thing that we do so tying those together. So it's very symbiotic. I love pager duty as a user and a partner. There's a lot here. >>Yeah, is pretty interesting slide when Jennifer put up in the keynote where it listed so many integration points with so many applications with on the outside looking in and you're like how you're integrating with spunk, that making how you're innovating with service. Now that doesn't make any sense. How Integrated was in Desperate. These were all kind of systems of record, but really, there's some really elegant integration points to make. This one plus one equals three opportunity between these applications. >>Yeah, I think it's very similar to the stuff we do with Walton Security. It's like the core permanence. Everybody needs him like with security. Everyone is an auto. Everyone needs traceability. Everyone needs access control. But rebuilding that functionality and every application is unrealistic. And paging and alerting an on call and events are the same thing. So it's you'd rather integrate and leverage those systems that make that your nexus for that specific functionality. And that's where Page duties. Awesome way. Step in, >>which was always great to catch up. Good luck on your keynote tomorrow. And really, it's a really amazing story to watch that you got You guys have built >>Well, thank you very much. >>All right. He's Mitchell. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cue. Were paid your duty, Simon in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Okay, this presentation includes forward looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially as a result of various risk factors including those described in the 10 k's 10 q's and eight ks. Vm ware files with the SEC, ladies and gentlemen, Sunjay Buddha for the jazz mafia from Oakland, California. Good to be with you. Welcome to late night with Jimmy Fallon. I'm an early early morning with Sanjay Poonen and two are set. It's the first time we're doing a live band and jazz and blues is my favorite. You know, I prefer a career in music, playing with Eric Clapton and that abandoned software, but you know, life as a different way. I'll things. I'm delighted to have you all here. Wasn't yesterday's keynote. Just awesome. Off the charts. I mean pat and Ray, you just guys, I thought it was the best ever keynote and I'm not kissing up to the two of you. If you know pat, you can't kiss up to them because if you do, you'll get an action item list at 4:30 in the morning that sten long and you'll be having nails for breakfast with him but bad it was delightful and I was so inspired by your tattoo that I decided to Kinda fell asleep in batter ass tattoo parlor and I thought one wasn't enough so I was gonna one up with. I love Vm ware. Twenty years. Can you see that? What do you guys think? But thank you all of you for being here. It's a delight to have you folks at our conference. Twenty 5,000 of you here, 100,000 watching. Thank you to all of the vm ware employees who helped put this together. Robin Matlock, Linda, Brit, Clara. Can I have you guys stand up and just acknowledge those of you who are involved? Thank you for being involved. Linda. These ladies worked so hard to make this a great show. Everybody on their teams. It's the life to have you all here. I know that we're gonna have a fantastic time. The title of my talk is pioneers of the possible and we're going to go through over the course of the next 90 minutes or so, a conversation with customers, give you a little bit of perspective of why some of these folks are pioneers and then we're going to talk about somebody who's been a pioneer in the world but thought to start off with a story. I love stories and I was born in a family with four boys and my parents I grew up in India were immensely creative and naming that for boys. The eldest was named Sanjay. That's me. The next was named Santosh Sunday, so if you can get the drift here, it's s a n, s a n s a n and the final one. My parents got even more creative and colon suneel sun, so you could imagine my mother going south or Sunday do. I meant Sanjay you and it was always that confusion and then I come to the United States as an immigrant at age 18 and people see my name and most Americans hadn't seen many Sundays before, so they call me Sanjay. I mean, of course it of sounds like v San, so sanjay, so for all of your V, San Lovers. Then I come to California for years later work at apple and my Latino friends see my name and it sorta sounds like San Jose, so I get called sand. Hey, okay. Then I meet some Norwegian friends later on in my life, nordics. The J is a y, so I get called San Year. Your my Italian friend calls me son Joe. So the point of the matter is, whatever you call me, I respond, but there's certain things that are core to my DNA. Those that people know me know that whatever you call me, there's something that's core to me. Maybe I like music more than software. Maybe I want my tombstone to not be with. I was smart or stupid that I had a big heart. It's the same with vm ware. When you think about the engines that fuel us, you can call us the VM company. The virtualization company. Server virtualization. We seek to be now called the digital foundation company. Sometimes our competitors are not so kind to us. They call us the other things. That's okay. There's something that's core to this company that really, really stands out. They're sort of the engines that fuel vm ware, so like a plane with two engines, innovation and customer obsession. Innovation is what allows the engine to go faster, farther and constantly look at ways in which you can actually make the better and better customer obsession allows you to do it in concert with customers and my message to all of you here is that we want to both of those together with you. Imagine if 500,000 customers could see the benefit of vsphere San Nsx all above cloud foundation being your products. We've been very fortunate and blessed to innovate in everything starting with Sova virtualization, starting with software defined storage in 2009. We were a little later to kind of really on the hyperconverged infrastructure, but the first things that we innovate in storage, we're way back in 2009 when we acquired nicer and began the early works in software defined networking in 2012 when we put together desktop virtualization, mobile and identity the first time to form the digital workspace and as you heard in the last few days, the vision of a multi cloud or hybrid cloud in a virtual cloud networking. This is an amazing vision couple that innovation with an obsession and customer obsession and an NPS. Every engineer and sales rep and everybody in between is compensated on NPS. If something is not going well, you can send me an email. I know you can send pat an email. You can send the good emails to me and the bad emails to Scott Dot Beto said Bmr.com. No, I'm kidding. We want all of you to feel like you're plugged into us and we're very fortunate. This is your vote on nps. We've been very blessed to have the highest nps and that is our focus, but innovation done with customers. I shared this chart last year and it's sort of our sesame street simple chart. I tell our sales rep, this is probably the one shot that gets used the most by our sales organization. If you can't describe our story in one shot, you have 100 powerpoints, you probably have no power and very The fact of the matter is that the data center is sort of like a human body. little point. You've got your heart that's Compute, you've got the storage, maybe your lungs, you've got the nervous system that's networking and you've got the brains of management and what we're trying to do is help you make that journey to the cloud. That's the bottom part of the story. We call it the cloud foundation, the top part, and it's all serving apps. The top part of that story is the digital workspace, so very simply put that that's the desktop, moving edge and mobile. The digital workspace meets the cloud foundation. The combination is a digital foundation Where does, and we've begun this revolution with a company. That's what we end. focus on impact, not just make an impression making an impact, and there's three c's that all of us collectively have had an impact on cost very clearly. I'm going to walk you through some of that complexity and carbon and the carbon data was just fascinating to see some of that yesterday, uh, from Pat, these fierce guarded off this revolution when we started this off 20 years ago. These were stories I just picked up some of the period people would send us electricity bills of what it looked like before and after vsphere with a dramatic reduction in cost, uh, off the tune of 80 plus percent people would show us 10, sometimes 20 times a value creation from server consolidation ratios. I think of the story goes right. Intel initially sort of fought vm ware. I didn't want to have it happen. Dell was one of the first investors. Pat Michael, do I have that story? Right? Good. It's always a job fulfilling through agree with my boss and my chairman as opposed to disagree with them. Um, so that's how it got started. And true with over the, this has been an incredible story. This is kind of the revenue that you've helped us with over the 20 years of existence. Last year was about a billion but I pulled up one of the Roi Charts that somebody wrote in 2006. collectively over a year, $50 million, It might've been my esteemed colleague, Greg rug around that showed that every dollar spent on vm ware resulted in nine to $26 worth of economic value. This was in 2006. So I just said, let's say it's about 10 x of economic value, um, to you. And I think over the years it may have been bigger, but let's say conservative. It's then that $50 million has resulted in half a trillion worth of value to you if you were willing to be more generous and 20. It's 1 trillion worth of value over the that was the heart. years. Our second core product, This is one of my favorite products. How can you not like a product that has part of your name and it. We sent incredible. But the Roi here is incredible too. It's mostly coming from cap ex and op ex reduction, but mostly cap x. initially there was a little bit of tension between us and the hardware storage players. Now I think every hardware storage layer begins their presentation on hyperconverged infrastructure as the pathway to the private cloud. Dramatic reduction. We would like this 15,000 customers have we send. We want every one of the 500,000 customers. If you're going to invest in a private cloud to begin your journey with, with a a hyperconverged infrastructure v sound and sometimes we don't always get this right. This store products actually sort of the story of the of the movie seabiscuit where we sort of came from behind and vm ware sometimes does well. We've come from behind and now we're number one in this category. Incredible Roi. NSX, little not so obvious because there's a fair amount spent on hardware and the trucks would. It looks like this mostly, and this is on the lefthand side, a opex mostly driven by a little bit of server virtualization and a network driven architecture. What we're doing is not coming here saying you need to rip out your existing hardware, whether it's Cisco, juniper, Arista, you get more value out of that or more value potentially out of your Palo Alto or load balancing capabilities, but what we're saying is you can extend the life, optimize your underlay and invest more in your overlay and we're going to start doing more and software all the way from the l for the elephant seven stack firewalling application controllers and make that in networking stack, application aware, and we can dramatically help you reduce that. At the core of that is an investment hyperconverged infrastructure. We find often investments like v San could trigger the investments. In nsx we have roi tools that will help you make that even more dramatic, so once you've got compute storage and networking, you put it together. Then with a lot of other components, we're just getting started in this journey with Nsx, one of our top priorities, but you put that now with the brain. Okay, you got the heart, the lungs, the nervous system, and the brain where you do three a's, sort of like those three c's. You've got automation, you've got analytics and monitoring and of course the part that you saw yesterday, ai and all of the incredible capabilities that you have here. When you put that now in a place where you've got the full SDDC stack, you have a variety of deployment options. Number one is deploying it. A traditional hardware driven type of on premise environment. Okay, and here's the cost we we we accumulate over 2,500 pms. All you could deploy this in a private cloud with a software defined data center with the components I've talked about and the additional cost also for cloud bursting Dr because you're usually investing that sometimes your own data centers or you have the choice of now building an redoing some of those apps for public cloud this, but in many cases you're going to have to add on a cost for migration and refactoring those apps. So it is technically a little more expensive when you factor in that cost on any of the hyperscalers. We think the most economically attractive is this hybrid cloud option, like Vm ware cloud and where you have, for example, all of that Dr Capabilities built into it so that in essence folks is the core of that story. And what I've tried to show you over the last few minutes is the economic value can be extremely compelling. We think at least 10 to 20 x in terms of how we can generate value with them. So rather than me speak more than words, I'd like to welcome my first panel. Please join me in welcoming on stage. Are Our guests from brinks from sky and from National Commercial Bank of Jamaica. Gentlemen, join me on stage. Well, gentlemen, we've got a Indian American. We've got a kiwi who now lives in the UK and we've got a Jamaican. Maybe we should talk about cricket, which by the way is a very exciting sport. It lasts only five days, but nonetheless, I want to start with you Rohan. You, um, brings is an incredible story. Everyone knows the armored trucks and security. Have you driven in one of those? Have a great story and the stock price has doubled. You're a cio that brings business and it together. Maybe we can start there. How have you effectively being able to do that in bridging business and it. Thank you Sanjay. So let me start by describing who is the business, right? Who is brinks? Brinks is the number one secure logistics and cash management services company in the world. Our job is to protect our customers, most precious assets, their cash, precious metals, diamonds, jewelry, commodities and so on. You've seen our trucks in your neighborhoods, in your cities, even in countries across the world, right? But the world is going digital and so we have to ratchet up our use of digital technologies and tools in order to continue to serve our customers in a digital world. So we're building a digital network that extends all the way out to the edges and our edges. Our branches are our messengers and their handheld devices, our trucks and even our computer control safes that we place on our customer's premises all the way back to our monitoring centers are processing centers in our data centers so that we can receive events that are taking place in that cash ecosystem around our customers and react and be proactive in our service of them and at the heart of this digital business transformation is the vm ware product suite. We have been able to use the products to successfully architect of hybrid cloud data center in North America. Awesome. I'd like to get to your next, but before I do that, you made a tremendous sacrifice to be here because you just had a two month old baby. How is your sleep getting there? I've been there with twins and we have a nice little gift for you for you here. Why don't you open it and show everybody some side that something. I think your two month old will like once you get to the bottom of all that day. I've. I'm sure something's in there. Oh Geez. That's the better one. Open it up. There's a Vm, wear a little outfit for your two month. Alright guys, this is great. Thank you all. We appreciate your being here and making the sacrifice in the midst of that. But I was amazed listening to you. I mean, we think of Jamaica, it's a vacation spot. It's also an incredible place with athletes and Usain bolt, but when you, the not just the biggest bank in Jamaica, but also one of the innovators and picking areas like containers and so on. How did you build an innovation culture in the bank? Well, I think, uh, to what rughead said the world is going to dissolve and NCB. We have an aspiration to become the Caribbean's first digital bank. And what that meant for us is two things. One is to reinvent or core business processes and to, to ensure that our customers, when they interact with the bank across all channels have a, what we call the Amazon experience and to drive that, what we actually had to do was to work in two moons. Uh, the first movement we call mode one is And no two, which is stunning up a whole set of to keep the lights on, keep the bank running. agile labs to ensure that we could innovate and transform and grow our business. And the heart of that was on the [inaudible] platform. So pks rocks. You guys should try it. We're going to talk about. I'm sure that won't be the last hear from chatting, but uh, that's great. Hey, now I'd like to get a little deeper into the product with all of you folks and just understand how you've engineered that, that transformation. Maybe in sort of the order we covered in my earlier comments in speech. Rohan, you basically began the journey with the private cloud optimization going with, of course vsphere v San and the VX rail environment to optimize your private cloud. And then of course we'll get to the public cloud later. But how did that work out for you and why did you pick v San and how's it gone? So Sunday we started down this journey, the fourth quarter of 2016. And if you remember back then the BMC product was not yet a product, but we still had the vision even back then of bridging from a private data center into a public cloud. So we started with v San because it helped us tackle an important component of our data center stack. Right. And we could get on a common platform, common set of processes and tools so that when we were ready for the full stack, vmc would be there and it was, and then we could extend past that. So. Awesome. And, and I say Dave with a name like Dave Matthews, you must have like all these musicians, like think you're the real date, my out back. What's your favorite Dave Matthew's song or it has to be crashed into me. Right. Good choice rash. But we'll get to music another time. What? NSX was obviously a big transformational capability, February when everyone knows what sky and media and wireless and all of that stuff. Networking is at the core of what you do. Why did you pick Nsx and what have you been able to achieve with it? So I mean, um, yeah, I mean there's, like I say, sky's yeah, maybe your organization. It's incredibly fast moving industry. It's very innovative. We've got a really clever people in, in, in, in house and we need to make sure our product guys and our developers can move at pace and yeah, we've got some great. We've got really good quality metric guys. They're great guys. But the problem is that traditional networking is just fundamentally slow is there's, there's not much you can do about it, you know, and you know to these agile teams here to punch a ticket, get a file, James. Yeah. That's just not reality. We're able to turn that round so that the, the, the devops ops and developers, they can just use terraform and do everything. Yeah, it's, yeah, we rigs for days to seconds and that's in the Aes to seconds with an agile software driven approach and giving them much longer because it would have been hardware driven. Absolutely. And giving the tool set to the do within boundaries. You have scenes with boundaries, developers so they can basically just do, they can do it all themselves. So you empower the developers in a very, very important way. Within a second you had, did you use our insight tools too on top of that? So yes, we're considered slightly different use case. I mean, we're, yeah, we're in the year. You've got general data protection regulations come through and that's, that's, that's a big deal. And uh, and the reality is from what an organization's compliance isn't getting right? So what we've done been able to do is any convenience isn't getting any any less, using vr and ai and Nsx, we're able to essentially micro segment off a lot of Erica our environments which have a lot, much higher compliance rate and you've got in your case, you know, plenty of stores that you're managing with visa and tens of thousands of Vms to annex. This is something at scale that both of you have been able to achieve about NSX and vsn. Pretty incredible. And what I also like with the sky story is it's very centered around Dev ops and the Dev ops use case. Okay, let's come to your Ramon. And obviously I was, when I was talking to the Coobernetti's, uh, you know, our Kubernetes Platform, team pks, and they told me one of the pioneer and customers was National Commercial Bank of Jamaica. I was like, wow, that's awesome. Let's bring you in. And when we heard your story, it's incredible. Why did you pick Coobernetti's as the container platform? You have many choices of what you could have done in terms of companies that are other choices. Why did you pick pks? So I think, well, what happened to, in our interviews cases, we first looked at pcf, which we thought was a very good platform as well. Then we looked at the integration you can get with pqrs, the security, the overland of Nsx, and it made sense for us to go in that direction because you offered 11 team or flexibility on our automation that we could drive through to drive the business. So that was the essence of the argument that we had to make. So the key part with the NSX integration and security and, and the PKS. Uh, and while we've got a few more chairs from the heckler there, I want you to know, Chad, I've got my pks socks on. That's how much I had so much fear. And if he creates too much trouble with security, we can be emotional. I'm out of the arena, you know. Anyway. Um, I wanted to put this chart up because it's very important for all of you, um, and the audience to know that vm ware is making a significant commitment to Coobernetti's. Uh, we feel that this is, as pat talked about it before, something that's going to be integrated into everything we do. It's going to become like a dial tone. Um, and this is just the first of many things you're going to see a vm or really take this now as a consistent thing. And I think we have an opportunity collectively because a lot of people think, oh, you know, containers are a threat to vm ware. We actually think it's a headwind that's going to become a tailwind for us. Just the same way public cloud has been. So thank you for being one of our pioneer and early customers. And Are you using the kubernetes platform in the context of running in a vsphere environment? Yes, we are. We're onto Venice right now. Uh, we have. Our first application will be a mobile banking APP which will be launched in September and all our agile labs are going to be on pbs moving forward medic. So it's really a good move for us. Dave, I know that you've, not yet, I mean you're looking in the context potentially about is your, one of the use cases of Nsx for you containers and how do you view Nsx in that? Absolutely. For us that was the big thing about t when it refresh rocked up is that the um, you know, not just, you know, Sda and on a, on vsphere, but sdn on openstack sdn into their container platform and we've got some early visibility of the, uh, of the career communities integration on there and yeah, it was, it was done right from the start and that's why when we talked to the pks Yeah, it's, guys again, the same sort of thing. it's, it's done right from the start. And so yeah, certainly for us, the, the NSX, everywhere as they come and control plane as a very attractive proposition. Good. Ron, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about how you viewed the public, because you mentioned when we started off this journey, we didn't have Mr. Cloud and aws, we approached to when we were very early on in that journey and you took a bet with us, but it was part of your data center reduction. You're kind of trying to almost to obliterate one data center as you went from three to one. Tell us that story and how the collaboration worked out on we amber cloud. What's the use case? So as I said, our vision was always to bridge to a So we wanted to be able to use public cloud environments to incubate new public cloud, right? applications until they stabilize to flex to the cloud. And ultimately disaster recovery in the cloud. That was the big use case for us. We ran a traditional data center environment where, you know, we run across four regions in the world. Each region had two to three data centers. One was the primary and then usually you had a disaster recovery center where you had all your data hosted, you had certain amount of compute, but it was essentially a cold center, right? It, it sat idle, you did your test once a year. That's the environment we were really looking to get out of. Once vmc was available, we were able to create the same vm ware environment that we currently have on prem in the cloud, right? The same network and security stack in both places and we were actually able to then decommission our disaster recovery data center, took it off, it's took it off and we move. We've got our, our, all of our mission critical data now in the, uh, in the, uh, aws instance using BMC. We have a small amount of compute to keep it warm, but thanks to the vm ware products, we have the ability now to ratchet that up very quickly in a Dr situation, run production in the cloud until we stabilized and then bring that workload back. Would it be fair to tell everybody here, if you are looking at a Dr or that type of bursting scenario, there's no reason to invest in a on premise private cloud. That's really a perfect use case of We, I know certainly we had breaks. this, right? Sorry. Exactly. Yeah. We will no longer have a, uh, a physical Dr a center available anywhere. So you've optimized your one data center with the private cloud stack will be in cloud foundation effectively starting off a decent and you've optimized your hybrid cloud journey, uh, with we cloud. I know we're early on in the journey with Nsx and branch, so we'll come back to that conversation may next year we discover new things about this guy I just found out last night that he grew up in the same town as me in Bangalore and went to the same school. So we will keep a diary of the schools at rival schools, but the last few years with the same school, uh, Dave, as you think about the future of where you want to this use case of network security, what are some of the things that are on your radar over the course of the next couple of months and quarters? So I think what we're really trying to do is, um, you know, computers, this is a critical thing decided technology conference, computers and networks are a bit boring, but rather we want to make them boring. We want to basically sweep them away from so that our people, our customers, our internal customers don't have to think about it were the end that we can make him, that, that compliance, that security, that whole, that whole framework around it. Um, regardless of where that work, right live as living on premise, off premise, everywhere you know. And, and even Aisha potentially out out to the edge. How big were your teams? Very quickly, as we wrap up this, how big are the teams that you have working on network is what was amazing. I talked to you was how nimble and agile you're with lean teams. How big was your team? The, the team during the, uh, the SDDC stack is six people. Six, six. Eight. Wow. There's obviously more that more. And we're working on that core data center and your boat to sleep between five and seven people. For it to brad to both for the infrastructure and containers. Yes. Rolling on your side. It's about the same. Amazing. Well, very quickly maybe 30 seconds. Where do you see the world going? Rolling. So, you know, it brings, I pay attention to two things. One is Iot and we've talked a little bit about that, but what I'm looking for there as digital signals continue to grow is injecting things like machine learning and artificial intelligence in line into that flow back so we can make more decisions closer to the source. Right. And the second thing is about cash. So even though cash volume is increasing, I mean here we are in Vegas, the number one cash city in the US. I can't ignore the digital payments and crypto currency and that relies on blockchain. So focusing on what role does blockchain play in the global world as we go forward and how can brings, continue to bring those services, blockchain and Iot. Very rare book. Well gentlemen, thank you for being with us. It's a pleasure and an honor. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for three guests. Well, um, thank you very much. So as you saw there, it's great to be able to see and learn from some of these pioneering customers and the hopefully the lesson you took away was wherever your journey is, you could start potentially with the private cloud, embark on the journey to the public cloud and then now comes the next part which is pretty exciting, which is the journey off the desktop and removal what digital workspace. And that's the second part of this that I want to explore with a couple of customers, but before I do that, I wanted to set the context of why. What we're trying to do here also has economic value. Hopefully you saw in the first set of charts the economic value of starting with the heart, the lungs, any of that software defined data center and moving to the ultimate hybrid cloud had economic value. We feel the same thing here and it's because of fundamental shift that started off in the last seven, 10 years since iphone. The fact of the matter is when you look at your fleet of your devices across tablets, phones and laptops today is a heterogeneous world. Twenty years ago when the company started, it was probably all Microsoft devices, laptops now phones, tablets. It's a mixture and it was going to be a mixture for the rest of them. I think for the foreseeable time, with very strong, almost trillion market cap companies and in this world, our job is to ensure that heterogeneous digital workspace can be very easily managed and secured. I have a little soft corner for this business because the first three years of my five years here, I ran this business, so I know a thing about these products, but the fact of the matter is that I think the opportunity here is if you think about the 7 billion people in the world, a billion of them are working for some company or the other. The others are children or may not be employed or retired and every one of them have a phone today. Many of them phones and laptops and they're mixed and our job is to ensure that we bring simplicity to this place. You saw a little bit that cacophony yesterday and Pat's chart, and unfortunately a lot of today's world of managing and securing that disparate is a mountain of morass. Okay? No offense to any of the vendors named in there, but it shouldn't be your job to be that light piece of labor at the top of the mountain to put it all together, which costs you potentially at least $50 per user per month. We can make the significantly cheaper with a unified platform, workspace one that has all of those elements, so how have we done that? We've taken those fundamental principles at 70 percent, at least reduction of simplicity and security. A lot of the enterprise companies get security, right, but we don't get simplicity all always right. Many of the consumer companies like right? But maybe it needs some help and facebook, it's simplicity, security and we've taken both of those and said it is possible for you to actually like your user experience as opposed to having to really dread your user experience in being able to get access to applications and how we did this at vm ware, was he. We actually teamed with the Stanford Design School. We put many of our product managers through this concept of design thinking. It's a really, really useful concept. I'd encourage every one of you. I'm not making a plug for the Stanford design school at all, but some very basic principles of viability, desirability, feasibility that allow your product folks to think like a consumer, and that's the key goal in undoing that. We were able to design of these products with the type of simplicity but not compromise at all. Insecurity, tremendous opportunity ahead of us and it gives me great pleasure to bring onstage now to guests that are doing some pioneering work, one from a partner and run from a customer. Please join me in welcoming Maria par day from dxc and John Market from adobe. Thank you, Maria. Thank you Maria and John for being with us. Maria, I want to start with you. A DXC is the coming together of two companies and CSC and HP services and on the surface on the surface of it, I think it was $50,000, 100,000. If it was exact numbers, most skeptics may have said such a big acquisition is probably going to fail, but you're looking now at the end of that sort of post merger and most people would say it's been a success. What's made the dxc coming together of those two very different cultures of success? Well, first of all, you have to credit a lot of very creative people in the space. One of the two companies came together, but mostly it is our customers who are making us successful. We are choosing to take our customers the next generation digital platform. The message is resonating, the cultures have come together, the individuals have come together, the offers have come together and it's resonating in the marketplace, in the market and with our customers and with our partners. So you shouldn't have doubted it. I, I wasn't one of the skeptics, maybe others were. And my understanding is the d and the C Yes. If, and dxc is the digital and customer. if you look at the logo, it's, it's more of an infinity, so digital transformation for customers. But truthfully it's um, we wanted to have a new start to some very powerful companies in the industry and it really was a instead of CSC and HP, a new logo and a new start. And I think, you know, if this resonates very well with what I started off my keynote, which is talking about innovation and customers focused on digital and Adobe, obviously not just a household name, customers, John, many of folks who use your products, but also you folks have written the playbook on a transformation of on premise going cloud, right? A SAS products and now we've got an incredible valuations relative. How has that affected the way you think in it in terms of a cloud first type of philosophy? Uh, too much of how you implement, right? From an IT perspective, we're really focused on the employee experience. And so as we transitioned our products to the cloud, that's where we're working towards as well from an it, it's all about innovation and fostering that ability for employees to create and do some amazing products. So many of those things I talked about like design thinking, uh, right down the playbook, what adobe does every day and does it affect the way in which you build, sorry, deploy products 92. Yeah, I mean fundamentally it comes down to those basics viability and the employee experience. And we've believe that by giving employees choice, we're enabling them to do amazing work. Rhonda, Maria, you obviously you were in the process of rolling out some our technology inside dxc. So I want to focus less on the internal implementation as much as what you see from other clients I shared sort of that mountain of harassed so much different disparate tools. Is that what you hear from clients and how are you messaging to them, what you think the future of the digital workspaces. And I joined partnership. Well Sanjay, your picture was perfect because if you look at the way end user compute infrastructure had worked for years, decades in the past, exactly what we're doing with vm ware in terms of automation and driving that infrastructure to the cloud in many ways. Um, companies like yours and mine having the courage to say the old way of on prem is the way we made our license fees, the way move made our professional services in the past. And now we have to quickly take our customers to a new way of working, a fast paced digital cloud transformation. We see it in every customer that we're dealing with everyday of the week What are some of the keyboard? Every vertical. I mean we're, we're seeing a lot in the healthcare and in a variety of verticals. industry. I'm one of the compelling things that we're seeing in the marketplace right now is the next gen worker in terms of the GIG economy. I'm employees might work for one company at 10:00 in the morning and another company at We have to be able to stand those employees are 10 99 employees up very 2:00 in the afternoon. quickly, contract workers from around the world and do it securely with governance, risk and compliance quickly. Uh, and we see that driving a lot of the next generation infrastructure needs. So the users are going from a company like dxc with 160,000 employees to what we think in the future will be another 200, 300,000 of 'em, uh, partners and contract workers that we still have to treat with the same security sensitivity and governance of our w two employees. Awesome. John, you were one of the pioneer and customers that we worked with on this notion of unified endpoint management because you were sort of a similar employee base to Vm ware, 20,000 odd employees, 1000 plus a and you've got a mixture of devices in your fleet. Maybe you can give us a little bit of a sense. What percentage do you have a windows and Mac? So depending on the geography is we're approximately 50 percent windows 50 slash 50 windows and somewhat similar to how vm ware operates. What is your fleet of mobile phones look like in terms of primarily ios? We have maybe 80 slash 20 or 70 slash 20 a apple and Ios? Yes. Tablets override kinds. It's primarily ios tablets. So you probably have something in the order of, I'm guessing adding that up. Forty or 50,000 devices, some total of laptops, tablets, phones. Absolutely split 60 slash 60,000. Sixty thousand plus. Okay. And a mixture of those. So heterogeneities that gear. Um, and you had point tools for many of those in terms of managing secure in that. Why did you decide to go with workspace one to simplify that, that management security experience? Well, you nailed it. It's all about simplification and so we wanted to take our tools and provide a consistent experience from an it perspective, how we manage those endpoints, but also for our employee population for them to be able to have a consistent experience across all of their devices. In the past it was very disconnected. It was if you had an ios device, the experience might look like this if you had a window is it would look like go down about a year ago is to bring that together again, this. And so our journey that we've started to simplicity. We want to get to a place where an employee can self provision their desktop just like they do their mobile device today. And what would, what's your expectations that you go down that journey of how quickly the onboarding time should, should be for an employee? It should be within 15, 20 minutes. We need to, we need to get it very rapid. The new hire orientation process needs to really be modified. It's no longer acceptable from everything from the it side ever to just the other recruiting aspects. An employee wants to come and start immediately. They want to be productive, they want to make contributions, and so what we want to do from an it perspective is get it out of the way and enable employees to be productive as And the onboarding then could be one way you latch him on and they get workspace quickly as possible. one. Absolutely. Great. Um, let's talk a little bit as we wrap up in the next few minutes, or where do you see the world going in terms of other areas that are synergistic, that workspace one collaboration. Um, you know, what are some of the things that you hear from clients? What's the future of collaboration? We're actually looking towards a future where we're less dependent on email. So say yes to that real real time collaboration. DXC is doing a lot with skype for business, a yammer. I'll still a lot with citrix, um, our tech teams and our development teams use slack and our clients are using everything, so as an integrator to this space, we see less dependent on the asynchronous world and a lot more dependence on the synchronous world and whatever tools that you can have to create real time. Um, collaboration. Now you and I spoke a little last night talking about what does that mean to life work balance when there's always a demanding realtime collaboration, but we're seeing an uptick in that and hopefully over the next few years a slight downtick in, in emails because that is not necessarily the most direct way to communicate all the time. And, and in that process, some of that sort of legacy environment starts to get replaced with newer tools, whether it's slack or zoom or we're in a similar experience. All of the above. All of the above. Are you finding the same thing, John Environment? Yeah, we're moving away. There's, I think what you're going to see transition is email becomes more of the reporting aspect, the notification, but the day to day collaboration is me to products like slack are teams at Adobe. We're very video focused and so even though we may be a very global team around the world, we will typically communicate over some form of video, whether it be blue jeans or Jabber or Blue Jeans for your collaboration. Yeah. whatnot. We've internally, we use Webex and, and um, um, and, and zoom in and also a lot of slack and we're happy to announce, I think at the work breakouts, we'll hear about the integration of workspace one with slack. We're doing a lot with them where I want to end with a final question with you. Obviously you're very passionate about a cause that we also love and I'm passionate about and we're gonna hear more about from Malala, which is more women in technology, diversity and inclusion and you know, especially there's a step and you are obviously a role model in doing that. What would you say to some of the women here and others who might be mentors to women in technology of how they can shape that career? Um, I think probably the women here are already rocking it and doing what you need to do. So mentoring has been a huge part of my career in terms of people mentoring me and if not for the support and I'm real acceptance of the differences that I brought to the workplace. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be sitting here today. So I think I might have more advice for the men than the women in the room. You're all, you have daughters, you have sisters, you have mothers and you have women that you work every day. Um, whether you know it or not, there is an unconscious bias out there. So when you hear things from your sons or from your daughters, she's loud. She's a little odd. She's unique. How about saying how wonderful is that? Let's celebrate that and it's from the little go to the top. So that would be, that would be my advice. I fully endorse that. I fully endorse that all of us men need to hear that we have put everyone at Vm ware through unconscious bias that it's not enough. We've got to keep doing it because it's something that we've got to see. I want my daughter to be in a place where the tech world looks like society, which is not 25, 30 percent. Well no more like 50 percent. Thank you for being a role model and thank you for both of you for being here at our conference. It's my pleasure. Thank you Thank you very much. Maria. Maria and John. So you heard you heard some of that and so that remember some of these things that I shared with you. I've got a couple of shirts here with these wonderful little chart in here and I'm not gonna. Throw it to the vm ware crowd. Raise your hand if you're a customer. Okay, good. Let's see how good my arm is. There we go. There's a couple more here and hopefully this will give you a sense of what we are trying to get done in the hybrid cloud. Let's see. That goes there and make sure it doesn't hit anybody. Anybody here in the middle? Right? There we go. Boom. I got two more. Anybody here? I decided not to bring an air gun in. That one felt flat. Sorry. All. There we go. One more. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, but this is what we're trying to get that diagram once again is the cloud foundation. Folks. The bottom part, done. Very simply. Okay. I'd love a world one day where the only The top part of the diagram is the digital workspace. thing you heard from Ben, where's the cloud foundation? The digital workspace makes them cloud foundation equals a digital foundation company. That's what we're trying to get done. This ties absolutely a synchronously what you heard from pat because everything starts with that. Any APP, a kind of perspective of things and then below it are these four types of clouds, the hybrid cloud, the Telco Cloud, the cloud and the public cloud, and of course on top of it is device. I hope that this not just inspired you in terms of picking up a few, the nuggets from our pioneers. The possible, but every one of the 25,000 view possible, the 100,000 of you who are watching this will take people will meet at all the vm world and before forums. the show on the road and there'll be probably 100,000 We want every one of you to be a pioneer. It is absolutely possible for that to happen because that pioneering a capability starts with every one of you. Can we give a hand once again for the five customers that were onstage with us? That's great.

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are in Orlando in the NetApp booth at SAP Sapphire 2018. We are joined by a new person to theCube, Amit Sinha, the Founder and Chief Customer Officer at WorkSpan. Amit, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, excited to be here. >> So I'm really excited to understand more about WorkSpan, what you guys do. Tell us a little about that, what opportunity you saw in the market with respect to alliances that you went, "Ah why is it no one's doing that." You have this great idea. >> Yeah, absolutely, we had this ah-ha moment, in this day and age of connectedness around the world, there is not a single company that goes to market alone. Right, when the reality's that we all serve the same demanding end-customers. We got to align our marketing. We got to align our messages, We need to align our innovation. I mean just altogether in order to be more. Easier said then done, right. So that's we saw the opportunity, that what if there was a network of alliances that are connected with one another, and if they can truly define a joint innovation, a joint solution, take it to market, co-market it. When they co-market they can get twice the audience at half the cost, and then co-sell. That way they can improve their vendors, and we are truly seeing that, so that's the opportunity that we saw, to really make the life of the alliance manager, the alliance leader, simpler, and easier to do in this connected day and age. >> Well, essential because also on your website, 60 to 75 percent of announced alliances fail. That's enormous, so talk to us about some of the successes that you have had, talking with companies, as you say, that, you know, nobody goes to market alone these days, did they have those ah-ha moments as well when you came knocking on there and say, hey look what we're developing. >> Absolutely, so look at this large event here. Sapphire is one of the biggest enterprise events out here. Over 100 strategic alliances are here from SAP, and they will all make key announcements here about joint products, big golden markets, but can you imagine, three months down the line, 70 percent of them will be actually catching dust on the road. They won't even watch the people, the business cases will be the winner. And that's such a wasted opportunity. The amount of due diligence that goes into kind of creating an alliance, thinking about the business case, people putting together solutions. But then once they announce the keynote, that's where the decline really happens. There's no operational support behind, how do you take this to market. That's where WorkSpan comes in. People wanting to join sales plan, the joint marketing plan, the joint solution plan, to really operationalize that people coming together across the platform. In India we say that a marriage is between families, and that's very true. So really, an alliance is between companies, deep in the companies, not just the alliance manager working with another alliance manager. It's really marketeers, sales folks, alliance people. So, it's a family of two companies coming together. And that's where WorkSpan, why it's the foundation, the consistent process logic, and a data driven argument around it. So you can dig decisions on the base of data, to say, okay where is my alliance working, and where does it need help? You don't do post mortems after that, you can fix as you're going along. >> So let's talk about that process and data driven nature of alliances. Alliances are complex setups, just starting at the very beginning of saying, you know what, I'm, we're two companies, we overlap in areas of competition, but there's these outliers where we really can partner together to make that happy. You look on a show floor, you see brands that are obvious, you know, we're in the NetApp booth and we've talked SAP Hanna a lot, and right across the way is the Oracle booth, and they're talking heavily SAP on Oracle, so there's this opportunity to cooperate, and there's this area of competition. A lot of that is data driven, how do you capture that data and help create the process logic to help companies identify alliances and then execute upon, and manage those alliances going forward. >> Well I think that's an excellent question, so when you are living in a network in this interdependent work, you will partner in some areas and you will compete in some places. So for this network world, we need a new security model, so that only people who are allowed to see something are able to see that thing. We call this Attribute Base Access Control. Compare that to traditional applications which do role based access control, just because you're higher up in the organization, you get to see everything. But this new module of security, Attribute Based Access Control model, allows the right people to get into the right plans, so that they, and they alone, can see it. So you might be working for SAP on, let's say the Google relationship, or the Apple relationships, or the Oracle relationship, or the NetApp relationship, only those right people have those accesses. And the owners of those programs can control and secure that data. So what it allows a company to then do is, it's even more secure in this day and age. We can argue that in this day and age with GDPR and all those compliance efforts, that WorkSpan is far more secure, than sending spreadsheets out, which is the current mode of collaboration. So you can enforce a corporate policy around, what is your shared data, what's your private data. So in the same opportunity you can have private data for your own company, employees to see that as them as sort of partners. So that translucency, not transparency, but translucency is really really important when you do alliances, and that we understand is model of WorkSpan. >> So how do you help, like, for alliances marketing for example, and say there's a joint campaign, NetApp with one of their partners for example, and they wanted to do some lead generation activities, events, webinars, lunch and learns, digital campaigns, and they're gonna get leads that come in from that, and they might say, ah, okay, well I don't want to give you all of that. How do you help with some of that, I mean it kind of goes to the "coopertition" theme a little bit, but from a marketing standpoint, I'm just curious, how do you help either reduce or mitigate concerns that companies, alliance partners would have in that space, or do you come in and sort of help them from a strategic area to normalize some of these concerns? >> Yeah, so what we do is we partner with the company's marketing automation systems, so let's say NetApp is working with AP Cloud for customer. So at this event we announce the integration between WorkSpan and this AP Cloud for customer. Similarly other customers may have other marketing optimations, and you should see in a low quarter market, or a salesfirst.com, so we integrate with those systems. So what happens is marketeers can continue their contact database and their lead machine in those systems, and we get aggregate results in WorkSpan to really see which alliances are doing well. So we don't get into what marketing automation systems do, we partner and we integrate with them. So that, what happens in that, we are extending an investment the company already has made in their marketing automations tech, and we come across as a partner or alliance automations tech, so that really the alliances knew one another. And why is this important. This is important because if you're like an Intel or a NetApp, you may be working with a whole ecosystem of providers, and they themselves have their own marketing automation systems. So you imagine if you are at an intel or you're a NetApp or you're an SAP, you can get all this data back, because there's WorkSpan in the middle. So as a network, you may have just one percent of the data, but your overall network is far more intelligent than all the data you've been collecting. >> So again, whenever we get a topic like this, we have to invoke John Forrier's name and get some block chain conversation going on, from an ideal of, you know, basically there's just, you guys have become an authority of authentication, there's reputation, there's all these fundamental infrastructure things that you have to determine. And you think through, you scale this out beyond just, you know, alliances, and honestly technology is one area. There's all the attributes in manufacturing, in other companies, how does this align with, or a more aggressive question, how does this sort plant like, the ideas of smart contracts with the lies of block chain? >> Yeah, absolutely. So BlockShare is a really good implementation of what we really have done in WorkSpan. So, in WorkSpan, if you think about it, it's a network. There are transactions, they're like, flowing across different parties. And these transactions are trusted, right, across different parties. Let's say an Intel or a NetApp stays approved on our platform, the process extends to the partner and they get a contract, that simple. So in some ways, in living in a connected world, we need to have these kinds of smart contracts and trust in data source that is not just your own. We're living in a shared data world, right? So one of the key partners at Bolt, well NetApp works with this Bolt Intel as well as SAP, right. So, because SAP program funds the SAP marketing campaigns here, and they're both Intels, and they both come from trusted parties, NetApp is able to trust that data, trust that transaction that makes it too. So we provide that trans-foundation based on the qualities that.. >> Sorry, Amit, but that's kind of the trust foundation, as sort of aligns to what Bill Madridment said in his keynote this morning, about, you know, trust being this new currency. You guys have been attaining a lot of momentum in the Fortune 500 space. Tell us a little bit about how you're doing that, and then if there's a customer example that you, that's one of your favorites that you think really articulates your brand values, share that too. >> Absolutely, so we've been very fortunate that we've been trusted by a lot of Fortune 500 companies to come on the platform. Really want to orchestrate their platform and their ecosystem. And we are seeing this need that the head of alliances seen, they're going to be very strategic at the board, where they want to be data driven and numbers driven. They're no longer saying, I'm okay by saying that my alliance with such and such partner is going well. They want to be quantified, they wanna say it's going well by this much. So this is where the main value prop is, we have had companies on our platform that have generated 58 percent more leads, that have reduced their marketing cost by 50 percent. Intel and SAP specifically, this is their third year on our platform, and year on year they have collaborated more number of campaigns, deeper in the regions, where their marketeers are working with intel marketeers, for example. So they got a 24X internal marketing investment, [Lisa] Wow. where as they were expecting an eight to 10x marketing investment, so dramatically increased. For SAP, that meant 100 million dollars more than double at lower marketing cost, just because the two companies can unleash their shared potential with the shared customers across the world. Now this happened, this was not an overnight success, this is a three year success in the making, where there's deep partnership and collaboration at the regional level, at the marketeer level, and all rolling it up at the head of alliances. So Intel is one company, we have SAP of course as a marketing account. We not only work with hardware alliances like NetApp and Intel, but also their SI alliances are on WorkSpan, so large, as many as size you see here, those programs are coming at WorkSpan as well. People at Novel were invited on WorkSpan, HPE is on WorkSpan, so that's a great example as well of a Fortune 500 company. >> Wow, lot of momentum. You know, it's for companies like SAP, like WorkSpan, where you've got software and you've got something under the hood that a lot of people won't know what's happening, or further jobs don't have to know or care, it's always challenging for a brand to go, how do we show the value of our product and service is when it's not something we can touch, or see, or feel. And it's really through the validation, the best you can get, is through the voice of your customer. And the stats that you shared, you must be sort of salivating, with we can actually help you increase Legion by 58 percent, or increase revenue opportunities by 40 percent. I mean, you've got some really substantial data driven facts to show how you're transforming a business. That's got to be, that's gotta make doing business a little bit easier, that you know you've got such salitity. >> Actually when you think of the world, it's really diverse, right, but you can see patterns from this all. So when you work with a lot of partners and you're orchestrating them on your ecosystem, you're running different kinds of marketing campaigns or different sales opportunities. They have different traction depending on how you actually executed them, right. But when you step back and you say, hey, webinars don't really work well in Japan, late evening events work better in Japan. But in the US, one of the best course, it seems like webinars work better. Or such and such partner does a really good job of hiring clients in events, but this other partner I spent a lot of money with, it all seems to go in search or non advertising that I don't see a lot of benefit of, right. So you can make these data driven arguments by partner, by channel, by investment, by, you know by any metric that you want now. So now the head of alliance, this is exactly where the value profit for spenders. Now you can be totally data driven and say, this works, that doesn't work, so I should do more of this and spend less there. >> Fantastic, well Amit I wish we had more time to keep chatting, but thanks so much for stopping by and sharing not only who WorkSpan is and what you do, but some of the significant impact that you can deliver to your customers. >> Thank you so much for the opportunity, loved talking to you both. >> Likewise. We want to thank you for watching theCube, I am Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, from SAP Sapphire 2018, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. (electronic music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to live coverage. This is theCUBE at VMworld 2017, our eighth year covering VMworld, going back to 2010. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, and my co-host this segment, Justin Warren, industry analyst, and our guest, Alan Cohen, Chief Commercial Officer, COO for Illumio. Great to see you, CUBE alumni. Special guest appearance, guest analyst appearance, but also Chief Commercial Officer, Illumio is a security start-up, growing. Thanks for coming on. >> It's not even a startup anymore. >> Justin: It's technically a startup. >> John: After five years, it's not a startup. >> It's not a startup right, you raise $270 million, it's not exactly a startup. >> (laughs) That's true. Well, welcome back. >> Alan: Thank you. >> Welcome back from vacation. Justin and I were talking before you came on, look at, let's go get you on and get some commentary going. >> Alan: Okay. >> You're an industry vet, again, in security, some perspective, but industry perspective, you've seen this VMware cycle many times. What's your analysis right now, obviously stock's 107, they don't to a cloud, no big catback, so it's good. You've made a decision. What's your take on this? >> I've been coming to VMworld for a long time, as you guys have as well, and from my perspective, this was probably the biggest or most significant transition in the history of the company. If you think about the level of dialogue, obviously there's a lot about NSX, which came from the Nicira, I'm always happy about. But, if you hear about, talking about cloud, and kind of talking about a post-infrastructure world, about capabilities, about control, about security, about being able to manage your compute in multiple environments, this is, I think, the beginning of a fundamentally different era. I always think about VMware, this is the company that defined virtualization. No one will argue with that point, so when they come out and they start talking about how are your computes going to operate in multiple environments? And how you're going to put that together, this is not cloud-washing, this is a fairly, all right they have fully acknowledged that the cloud is not a fad, the cloud is not for third tier workloads, this is mainstream computing. I think this is the third wave of computing and VMware is starting to put its markers down for the type of role that it intends to play in this transition. >> Yeah, I agree. >> We have to argue if you don't agree (laughs). >> I'll mostly agree with you, how about that? >> All right that's good. >> At this show, VMware has stopped apologizing for existing. I think, previously, they've been trying to say, "No, no we're a cloud too, "in fact, we're better than cloud "and you shouldn't be using it." It forced customers to choose between two of their children, really, like which one do you love more? And customers don't like that. Whereas at this show, I think it's finally being recognized that customers want to be able to use cloud, as well as use VMware, so that they're taking a more partnership approach to that and it's more about the ecosystem. And, agree, they're not about the infrastructure so much, they're not about the Hypervisor, they're about what you run on top of that. But, I still think there's a lot of infrastructure in that because VMware is fundamentally an infrastructure. >> Alan: Well, you got to get paid, right? >> That's right, (Alan laughs) and there's a lot of stuff out there that's already on VMware. What do you think about the approach? Like with cloud, they have a lot of people doing things in new ways and you mentioned this is the third wave of computing that we're doing it a new way. A lot of VMware stuff is really the whole reason it was popular is that we have people doing things a particular way on physical hardware and then they kept doing more or less the same thing, only on virtual hardware. What do you say about people who are still essentially going to be doing virtual hardware, they're just running it on cloud now? That's not really changing much. >> The way I think about it is: Are you going to be the Chevy Volt or are you going to be a Tesla? What I mean by that, and by the way now GM has the Bolt, which is their move toward Tesla, which is that if you look at the auto industry, they talk about hybrid and you talk about it, and you talk to Elon Musk and he goes, "Hybrids are bullshit." Either you're burning gas, or you're using electricity. To me, this cloud movement is about electricity, which is: I'm going to use cloud-native controls, I'm going to use cloud-native services, I'm going to be using Python and Ruby, and I'm going to have scripting, and I'm going to act like DevOps. And so, cloud is not just a physical place where I rent cycles from Amazon or Azure, it is a way of computing that's got a distributed, dynamic, heterogeneous, and hybrid. When you're in your virtualization on top of cloud, you're still in your Chevy Volt moment, but when you say, "I'm going to actually be native "across all of these environments," then you're really moving into the Tesla movement. >> Hold on. Let me smoke a little bit, I'll pass it over to you because that's complete fantasy. Right now the reality is, is that-- >> It's legal here in LA, in Las Vegas. >> (laughs) I don't think so yet, is it? >> Only outside. >> You can go to Walgreens across the street. >> Whatever you're smoking is good stuff. No, I agree, cloud obviously as a future scenario, there's no debate, but the reality is, like the Volt, Tesla is a one-trick pony. So, greenfield-- >> But, once again, I'm not disagreeing with you, John, but my point is that VMware and most of the IT industry is not there. Most companies don't have DevOps people, you run up and down, you go to all of these shows, ask these guys how many of these guys does Ruby, Python, real scripting, they don't do that. They still have Lu-Wise and management consults and they have the old IT, but this is the beginning movement-- >> They've got legacy bag, I mean we call it legacy baggage in the business, we know what that is. >> Heritage systems. (all laugh) >> Well, Gelsinger was here, I had him in at one o'clock and I kind of, sometimes VMware, they make the technical mistake in PR, they don't really get sometimes where to position things, but the Google announcement was very strategic intent, but they kind of made it a land grab and they tried to overplay their hand, in my opinion, on that one thing, it's strategic intent. This audience, they're not DevOps ready, they're Ops trying to do Dev, so they're not truly ready. So, it's okay to say, "Here's Amazon. "Great, that's today, if you want to do that, "let's get going, checking the boxes, "we're hitting the milestones." And then to dump a headroom deal announcement, that's more headroom, which is cool, but not push it on the Ops guys. >> Here's the opportunity and here's the risk: If Amazon is a $16 billion a year business, it's a rounding error in IT spend. When you take the hype away, nothing against it, and I love that prices are cheaper at Amazon and you can buy a Dot in the fruit aisle, that would totally-- >> John: I think the margins are like 60% (laughs). >> On your cloud. >> My wife took a picture of a rib steak and it said $18, now $13.99, I said, "Fantastic, thank you, Jeff Bezos. "We're eating well, "and we're going to have a little extra money." What I think this transition is not about infrastructure, it's about how IT people do their job. >> John: That's a main point. >> Justin: That's a big, big change. >> Yeah. >> Okay, in this show today doing your job, Justin I want you to comment on this because you were talking with Stu about it. I'm a VMware customer, what do I care about right now in my world? Just today. >> Well, in my world I've got conflicting things, I need to get my job done now. There's nothing different about the IT job, really, which is a shame because some of it needs to change, but there is a gradual realization that it's not about IT, it's not about building infrastructure for the sake of, "Because I like shiny infrastructure." It's, "I'm being paid by my business "to do IT things in service of the business." I have customers who are buying Apples, or using Apple docs, you're laundering. >> In IT you're paid for an outcome. You don't create the outcome. The way IT works is business creates the outcome, IT helps fulfill the outcome, unless you work-- >> John: Is IT a department today? >> Yeah, it's still a department. >> It's still a department? >> Yeah, it is, but it's a department in the same way that, well finance is important, but it's actually the business. Sales is part, they're all integrated. In a really well-run business, they're all integrated. >> How do you know what a real business is? You go to a building, you go to the main offices, you visit the marketing floor, you visit the IT floor. Tell me what the decor is like. They'll tell you what they care about in a business. (John laughs) I've been in a lot of IT shops, not the beautiful shiny glass windows because it's perceived as a back office cost center. >> Digital transformation is always about taking costs, that's table stakes, but now some of the tech vendors need to understand that as you get more business focused, you got to start thinking about driving top line. >> You're also thinking about being in the product. For example, my company, we have three of the four top SAS vendors, as Illumio customers, we do the micro-segmentation for them. We're not their micro-segmentation, we're a component in the software they sell you guys. >> Justin: You're an input. >> Yeah, you are a commodity in the mix of what somebody's building and I think that's going to be one of the changes. The move to cloud, it's not rent or buy, it's not per hour per server, or call Michael Dell and send me a bunch of Q-series, or whatever the heck it's called, it's increasingly saying, "We have these outcomes, we have these dates, "we have these deliverables, "what am I doing to support that and be part of that?" >> Justin: That's it, it's a support function. It's a very important support function, but there's very few businesses, like digital transformation, I don't like that as a term-- >> What the heck does that mean? >> It means something to do with fingers. >> Alan: You use it a lot, what does it really mean, digital transformation? >> To me, first of all, I'm not a big hype person, I like the buzz word in the sense that it does have a relevance now in terms of doing business digitally means you're completely 100% technology-enabled in your business. That means IT is a power function, not a cost center, it's completely native, like electricity in the company-- >> Unless, let's say I have two customers, I have the Yellow Cab company of Las Vegas and I have Uber or Lyft as a customer. My role, as a technologist, or technology provider, is dramatically different in either one of those-- >> Digital transformation to me is a mindset of things like, "I'm going to do a blockchain, "I'm going to start changing the game, "I'm going to use technology "to change the value equation for my customer." It's not IT conversation in the sense of, let's buy more servers to make something happen for the guy who had a request in that saying, "Let's use technology digitally to change the outcomes." >> But, given that, if we assume that that's true, then there's two ways of doing that. Either we have the IT people need to learn more about business, or the business people need to learn more about IT. >> That's right. >> Which one do you think should happen? Traditionally-- >> I think they're on a collision course. >> I don't think you can survive as a senior executive in most businesses anymore by saying, "Oh, I'll get my CIO in here." >> I would like to believe that that's true, but when people say that it should be a strategic resource and so on, and yet we spend decades outsourcing IT to someone else. If it's really truly important to your business, why aren't you doing it yourself? >> Justin, it's a great question and here's my observations, just thinking out loud here. One, just from a Silicon Valley perspective, looking at entrepreneurial as a canary in the coalmine, you've seen over the past 10-15 years, recently past 10, entrepreneurs have become developer entrepreneurs, product entrepreneurs, have become very savvy on the business side. That's the programmer. When we see Travis with Uber, no VC, they got smart because they could educate themselves. AngelList, Venture Hacks, there's a lot of data out there, so I see some signs of developers specifically building apps because user design is really important, they are leading into, what I call, the street MBA. They're not actually getting an MBA, they don't read the Wall Street Journal, but they're learning about some business concepts that they have to understand to program. IT I think is still getting there, but not as much as the developers. >> Here's a great question that I've learned over the years, and look, I'm coming out of the IT side, as we all are. When I visit a customer and I try to sell them my product, my first question is, "If I didn't exist, what would you do? "And if you don't buy my product, what happens in your business?" And if they're saying, "I have this other alternative." Or it's like, "Ah, we'll do it next year." I mean, maybe I can sell them some product, but what they're really telling me is, "I don't matter." >> All right, let's change the conversation a little bit, just move to another direction I want to get your thoughts on. And I should have, on the intro, given you more prompts, Alan. You were also involved in Nicira, the startup that VMware had bought-- >> Alan: Before all this NSX stuff, I was early. >> Hold on, let me finish the intro. We've interviewed Martin Casado. Stu talks to us all the time, I'm sure Chess has been hearing on the other set, "Oh, hey Martin Casado." It was a great interview, of course they're on theCUBE directory. But, you were there when it was just developing and then boom, software-defined networking, it's going to save the world. NSX has become very important to VMware, what's your thoughts on that? What does the alumni from Nicira and that folks that are still here and outside of VMware think about what's it's turned into? Is it relevant? And where is it going? >> Look, I could have not predicted five years ago when Nicira was acquired by VMware, it would be the heart of everything that their CEO and their team is talking about, if you want to know if that's important, go to the directory of sessions and one out of every three are about NSX. But, I think what it really means is there's a recognition that the network component, which is what really NSX represents, is the part that's going to allow them to transcend the traditional software-defined data center. I have two connections, so Steve Herrod is my investor, Steve is the inventor of the software-defined data center. That was the old Kool-Aid, not the new Kool-Aid. We've left the software-defined data center, we've moved into this cloud era and for them NSX is their driving force on being able to extend the VMware control plane into environments they used to never play in before. That's imminently clear. >> John: Justin, what's your take on NSX? >> NSX is the compatibility mechanism for being able do VMware in multiple places, so I think it's very, very important for VMware as a company. I don't think it's the only solution to that particular problem of being able to have networks that move around, it's possible to do it in other ways. For example, cloud-native type things, will do the networking thing in a different way. But, the network hasn't really undergone the same kind of change that happened in server or it did in storage, it's been pretty much the same for a long, long time. >> You've had an industry structurally dominated by one company, things don't change when-- >> Justin: And it still is, yeah. >> John: Security, security, because we've got a little bit of time I want to get to security. You guys are in the security space. >> Thanks for noticing. >> (laughs) I still don't know what you did, I'm only kidding. Steve Harrod is your investor, former CEO of VMware, very relevant for folks watching. Guys, security Pat Gelsinger said years ago it should be a duo, we've got to fix this. Nothing has really happened. What is the state of the union, if you will, of security? Where the frig is it going? What the hell's going on with security? >> There's two issues with that. If we put our industry analyst hat on, security is the largest segment of IT where nobody owns 5% market share, so there's not gorilla force that can drive that. VMware was the gorilla force driving virtualization, Cisco drove networking, EMC, in the early days, drove storage, but when you get to security you have this kind of-- >> John: Diluted. >> It's like the Balkans, it's like feudal states. >> Justin: It's a ghastly nightmare. >> What I think what Pat was talking about, which we also subscribe to, there are some movements in security, which micro-segmentation is one of them, which are kind of reinstalling a form of forensic hygiene into saying, "Your practices, if they occur, "they will reduce the risk profile." But, I think 50% of the security solutions and categories-- >> So, if I've lost my teeth, I don't get cavities. That kind of thing going on. >> If you're a doctor and you're making rounds in the hospital, you wash your hands or you put on gloves. >> And that's where we are. That is the stage we are at with security is we're at the stage where surgeons didn't believe they should wash their hands because they knew better and they'd say, "No, this couldn't possibly be making patients sick." People have finally realized that people get sick and the germ theory is real and we should wash our hands. >> Your network makes you sick. Your network is the carrier. Everything that's happening in network is effectively the Typhoid Mary of security. (John laughs) We're building flat, fast, unsegmented Layer 3 networks, which allow viruses to move at the speed of light across your environment. So, movements like, what's that called App Defense? >> Justin: App Defense, yep. >> App Defense or micro-segmentation from Illumio and Vmware, are the kind of new hygiene and new practices that are going to reduce the wide-spread disease growing. >> From an evolution theory, then the genetics of networks are effed up. This is what you're saying, we need to fix-- >> No, the networks are getting back to what they were supposed to do. Networks move packets from point A to point D. >> The dumb network? >> Alan: Yes, the dumber the better. >> Okay. You agree? >> Alan: Dumb them down. >> Dumb networks, smart end points. Smart networks doesn't scale as well as smart end points, and we're seeing that with edge computing, for example. Distributed networking is a hard problem and there is so much compute going out there, everything has a computer in it, they're just getting tinier and tinier. If we rely on the network to secure all of that, we're doomed. >> Better off at the end point. And this fuels the whole IoT edge thing, straight up one of the key wave slides out there. >> What you're going to have is a lot of telemetry points and you're going to have a lot of enforcement points. Our architecture is compatible with this, VMware is moving in this direction, other people are, but the people that are clinging to the gum up my network with all kinds of crap, because actually people want it to go the other way. If you think about it, the Internet was built to move packets from point A to point B in case of a nuclear war and, other than routing, there wasn't a whole lot-- >> We still might have that problem (laughs) >> Yeah, well there's always that (laughs). >> Fingers crossed. >> Guys, we got to break, next segment. Al, I'll give you the last word, just give a quick plug for Illumio. Thanks for coming on and being a special guest analyst, as usual, great stuff. Little slow from vacation, you're usually a little snappier. >> Alan: Little slow off the vacation mark. >> Yeah, come on. Back in Italy-- >> Too much Brunello di Motalcino, yeah. >> John: (laughs) Quick plug for Illumio, do a quick plug. >> We're really great to be here. John, you and I talked recently, Illumio is growing very rapidly, clearly we are probably emerging as one of the leaders in this micro-segmentation movement. >> John: A wannabe gorilla. >> What's that? >> You're a wannabe gorilla, go big or go home. >> We are, well, gorillas have to start as little gorillas first, we're not a wannabe gorilla, we're just gorillas growing really rapidly. It takes a lot more food at the zoo to keep us going. About 200 people growing rapidly, just moved into Asia, Pat, we got a guy in your part of the world we work with. >> First of all, it's not a zoo, it's still a jungle. The zoo is not yet established. >> That's true. We're going to establish the zoo. Things are great at Illumio. We have amazing things on the floor here today of, basically the system will actually write its own security policy for you. It's a lot of movement into machine learning, a lot of good stuff. >> All right. Guys, thanks so much. Alan Cohen with Illumio, >> Alan: Thank you. >> Chief Commercial Officer. And Justin Warren, analyst, I'm John Furrier. More live coverage from VMworld after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube. Covering QuickBooks Connect 2016, sponsored by Intuit QuickBooks. Now, here are your hosts, Jeff Frick and John Walls. >> Welcome back here on the Cube as we continue our coverage here at Quickbooks Connect 2016 live from San Jose at the Convention Center. 5,000 attendees, the third year of this event, more than ever, and certainly that explosive growth is personified in what's happening here. On this floor and the key note station, and of course at home, if you're a small business owner you know exactly what we're talking about. Along with Jeff Frick, I'm John Walls and we're joined now by probably one of the most popular authors, most widely read authors in America today. Malcolm Gladwell, five times New York Times Bestseller Author. Congratulations on that. And the Revisionist History Podcast, which we love. I love the Wilt Chamberlain podcast, Big Man Can't Shoot. Thanks for joining us. Great to have you. >> Delighted to be here. >> So, first off, tell us about, and the whole spirit of this show is about the entrepreneurial capabilities of so many people in the workplace today. What's your thought about entrepreneurism if you will, and what does it take to be a good outside the box thinker? Like so many of these folks are. >> Well there ... The explosion ... Here we are in the middle of Silicon Valley and what this part of the country has done to change the culture of the entire world's economy in the last 20 years, 25 years is nothing short of incredible. Entrepreneurship has gone from something that people thought of as the province of wackos and weirdos and strange people to a kind of thing that kids aspire to do and be. That's an amazing transformation. And I think when we ... What's happened over the course of that transformation is we've discovered that the definition of what it takes to be good is a lot broader than we thought. That many different kinds of people using many different kinds of strategies can be effective at starting businesses and achieving. I think that's been the great take home lesson of this entrepreneurial explosion of the last generation. >> I think probably in all of your works, there are pieces of it that you could extract and apply to this world, but what really struck me I think about David and Goliath, about advantages, disadvantages and making the most of your strengths basically, how do you see that translating or how would you want to communicate that to somebody, a small business owner, who thinks "Man, I'm up against the wall"? "How am I going to cut through the clutter?" "How am I going to get there?" All this sweat equity. But yet, there are advantages that they have. >> Yeah. Yeah, because this goes to this issue of learning strategies that there's a kind of learning called compensation learning, where you are learning out of weakness, not out of strength. You're learning from your failures and that kind of learning is a lot harder to do, but it's a lot more powerful. So the task of the small business owner, who is facing a whole series of disadvantages and weaknesses relative to much larger competitors, there's no question, it's a harder way to go. But, if you can pull it off, you'll end up in a much stronger position. If you can be one of those people who can do compensation learning, and in that book I talk, for example, about how many entrepreneurs are dyslexic, and that's a beautiful example of that. Some portion of people who suffer from quite a serious learning disorder, not all of them, some portion of them manage to turn that around into an advantage. To take something, to take a basic inability to read, and turn that into developing skills or delegation and leadership and problem solving and developing an incredible resilience, the ability to cope with failure. They turn a weakness into a strength and they end up being far more powerful than they would be as a result. And when I interviewed all these successful, dyslexic entrepreneurs for that book, what was amazing was that all of them said, "I did not succeed despite my disability, I succeeded because of it." And that's the crux of it. And so I think there is a silver lining to many of the clouds that small business owners face. >> It's a really powerful statement because so often, people are using drugs and medication and other things to kind of normalize people that are maybe not in the mean, that are on the fringe. But in fact, it's their ability to put a different lens, and see things differently that opens up an opportunity that the regular person just trucking down the road didn't see right in front of them. >> That's what I meant when I said earlier, talking about how our kind of definition of what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur is expanding. I think we're beginning to understand that lots of traits that we once thought of as just problematic have unexpected benefits. Like I remember once reading someone who was putting out that basically, most of the great research scientists in the world have OCD. And you kind of have to have OCD if you want to be ... 'Cause what are you doing? You're spending hours and hours in the lab doing the same incredibly precise experiment over and over and over again, and measuring your results to the slightest. That's OCD behavior that has found a beautiful home. Right? Has found a world where you need to be that way, right? And I read that as like, "That's lovely." These are people who we drugged up and pushed off to the fringes two generations ago, and now we've found a home for them in labs where they're doing incredibly productive and satisfying work. >> Yeah, I think you profiled in one of the podcasts, a cancer researcher who you said nobody really likes the guy, he's kind of an ordinary guy, but he was just so laser focused on the very specific problem that he was trying to solve. He didn't really care. That's what he was all about. >> Yeah, no, this has been a lovely development in our understanding of human capacity. >> So where do the ideas come from? I'm one of the many fans and I've read, and every time I read one of your books, it never ceases to amaze me how much you make me think. Which is, I think, why we're all so attracted to it. Because it seems so obvious, right? After you present this beautiful, elegant case, like "I never thought of that." Where do those ideas come from? What motivates you to say "I'm going to write blank. I'm going to do tipping point." >> I wish I had a system, 'cause right now I'm planning the next season of my podcast, so I need 10 more ideas for that, and I'm starting to write a new book so I need 80,000 words for that. And I'm wondering, I wish I had a big bucket full of ideas. (laughter) So I'm running around with my head cut off talking to people, but I spent the summer ... I probably read 40 books this summer to do with ... Apart from, I'm not talking about novels and fillers, and serious books that I'm trying to get. And I've been going around talking to people, just talking to interesting people trying to work out what I'm interested in. And trying to just uncover interesting things that will prompt me to go in cool new directions. There is a kind of, you have to let your mind ... It's like, the farmer lets his field go fallow for a while. You've got to have a fallow period where you just let everything regenerate and then you plant the crop again. >> But somehow reading 40 books doesn't sound like, to me, you're letting your mind go fallow. >> Well I didn't have a ... I was literally just lying around reading books. It seemed pretty fallow to me. >> What was your favorite one out of that read? Or the most enlightening one out of that read? >> I got on these weird side tracks this summer. I became obsessed with Churchill's Best Friend. Churchill had a best friend who betrays him. And it's this incredibly moving story. And I don't know how it fits in what I want to do, but I want to try and make it fit, 'cause it's such a weird and troubling story about this, I mean a truly transcendent figure in history who has a best friend who stabs him in the back with consequences for the world. Anyway, so I read like seven bizarre, weird, obscure books about this guy. And I was like "There's something there I think." >> He's out there, yeah. >> Alright, so we'll pick something that was a little more topical. Last night, they had a drink making robot machine over in the corner making drinks. And it just brings up, as we get into more automation, more connected systems. We had the huge knockout of the web last week from the East coast. As you look at the future, there's the happy future, where the machines do all the hard work and we get to sit around and read books like you did, which is fantastic. And then there's the darker potential future, where the machines take everyone's jobs. What are people going to do? And if it can make drinks and it can diagnose disease and read every manual that came out. How do people fit? And then there's the middle ground, right? The best chess player is the best chess player and a machine, not either or. So I'm just curious to get your thoughts as we look to the next big wave of AI and machine learning and automation, how you see that shaking out. >> I think it's important not to overstate how much of our lives we will be willing to let machines take over. So it's been very interesting for me as a writer, to observe, for example, what happened with eBooks over the last 10 years. So eBooks come along and everyone says, "The printed book is over. It's going to all going to be on ... Why would you go and lug around a big, heavy book when you can get for a fraction of the cost something that'll be ..." And so there were all these gloom and doom, and expectations, and what happens? Well, it turns out that eBooks are still a fairly sizeable portion of the market place. But it turns out that most people actually want to read a book, a physical object, that that's more pleasurable somehow, that the interaction with this thing, this pages and paper, is pleasing. It's part of the experience. And I think that's a useful ... No, that's not a robot and that's not AI, but it's an important reminder that the interactions and the activities that make up our lives are not just functional activities. They are opportunities for enjoyment and engagement, and part of the reason you go to a restaurant is not just to eat the food, but to engage with the people in the restaurant. Part of the pleasure is the person who brings you the wine bottle and gives you a little spiel. Now, I can replace that person with a robot, but the question is do you want to? Now, you can do it. And I can imagine a future where the robot brings you the best wine in the world and does some algorithm and gives you the finest wine. But I don't know, if I'm having a nice night out and I'm paying 60 dollars a plate for my dinner, I kind of want the human interaction. I mean, it's part of the pleasure. Same thing with self-driving cars. It baffles me as a kind of car guy how everyone assumes that "Oh, well, by 2020, it'll all be self-driving cars." Wait a minute, what if I enjoy driving a car? We've forgotten this. It's actually quite a pleasant thing to go and to make decisions unconsciously and consciously and drive down the road. And I like a manual transmission, I like the feel of driving a car. I don't want to give that up. Why should I have to give that up? So it's like, we can't get ahead of ourselves. You mentioned the chess thing, which is a great example of this. Can you make a machine that will beat a person at chess? Yes, you can. But it's not chess. Chess is a gameplay between two people. That's why it's interesting. If it's played between two machines no one will watch it! So it's this absurd thing. I can also make a machine that can run faster than Usain Bolt. It's called a car. Do I want to watch a race between a car and Usain Bolt? No. Why? Because what's pleasurable is watching human beings race. >> But Jeff hit on something, and then you touched on it with the car, and I think about GPS. And how it wasn't that long ago, and I kind of sound like my grandfather now or my father, that we just drove around, right? And if you came to the traffic, "Oh God, I've hit traffic." But now we use applications that take us, and they're using their intelligence. Is it possible, can you see with this generation of kids coming up now, that artificial intelligence kind of makes our personal thinking obsolete? And we don't process like we do, we don't evaluate, we don't analyze, and so we're raising a whole different kind of human, because of the interaction with technology or what we can sign to technology, because we give up on it. >> Well it'd be different. I think that, so let's stick with cars for a moment. I think now we have a world where a whole class of people drive their car to work in the morning. And when they're driving their car, the number of things they can do with their imagination and mind is limited. They can listen to music or the news or a podcast, or they can just sit there, but they can't ... They can maybe talk on a phone even though they shouldn't, but they can't do work and they can't lie in the back and take a nap, and they can't daydream, and they can't have a meaningful interaction with more than one person. What we're going to move to is a world where some people will give up whatever kind of pleasure or interaction that came from driving a car, and replace it with another kind of interaction. So driving a car becomes ... The time that you're in a car becomes a place where an infinite number of things can happen, as opposed to five things can happen. And I sort of think that's what the world looks like, is we get this incredibly complicated mix. Medicine becomes some mixture of the computer is going to do all the easy stuff, but half of medicine is about being reassured. It's about your personal fears. It's not about the diagnosis, or which drug you take. And for that stuff, I imagine that we're going to have much longer, deeper, more meaningful conversations with our doctors 15 years from now, when the computer has taken all the easy stuff off the table, or the AI, the robot. So in many ways, that world allows for much richer, personal interactions than the one we're in now. The doctor really will have ... My doctor has no time for me now. He's like "I got to move around." >> "Got to go." >> In ten years, it's possible my doctor will be able to sit down with me for half an hour or 45 minutes twice a year and really talk about what's going on with me and that's the promise of the future. I don't think we're going to have a situation where everything's done by the robot. >> Well this is one of those occasions where I truly wish we had tons of more time, but you have a busy schedule and so we're going to allow you to go on, but thank you so much ... >> Thank you. It was super fun. >> John: For sharing this time with us. We've thoroughly enjoyed it. >> Jeff: Look forward to the KeyNote later this afternoon as well. >> And we look forward to the next 80,000 words, so good luck with that too! >> Thank you. >> Malcolm Gladwell, joining us here on the Cube. Back with more from San Jose right after this. (upbeat music)