>>Okay. Okay. We're back on the cube here in cloud city. I'm John Farah, David latte. Thanks Adam. And guys in the studio. Awesome stuff. Dave mobile world Congress is happening. It's basically a hybrid show. Mostly virtual. Actually the physical action is a lot of booths. Cloud city is tricked out, big time made for TV. The cubes, obviously here, we've got the main stage with Adam and crew, Chloe and team, and it's pretty, pretty cool. Cloud cities, thematic John, we're going to see the next decade be about the cloudification of telco and major, major portions of telco. We're going to move to the cloud. It's very clear. And especially the front end stuff, a lot of the business support systems, some of the operational systems are going to go. When you're seeing that, you're seeing that with Amazon, you're seeing Microsoft, you're seeing Google. They're all moving in that direction. >>So it's inevitable. And I just love the fact that events are back. That's a game changing statement. Mobile world. Congress is not going to go away. There's no way they're going to let this event slide by. Even though we're coming out of the pandemic, clearly Bon Jovi was here. He said, quote, we met him last night, face to face. He's like, go Patriots. Hope they have a good season. This year. He's a big Patriots fan. He said, it's going to be better. This could be better. But he also said he it's the first time he's performed in a year and a half in front of all excited. He wasn't calm, small little intimate crowd. Again, look behind this. You can see the cloud city. This is really built out extremely well. A lot of executives here, but the content has been awesome here, but also remote. We've been bringing people in live remotes and we also had some prerecorded assets that we have. And we've got one here from Booz Allen, who I had a conversation with earlier in the month and grab some time to talk about the impact of 5g telecom and how it relates to national security for cover mints and society. And so let's take a look at that video right now. >>Hi, welcome to the cube conversation here in the cube studios in Palo Alto, California, I'm John for a, your host had a great conversation with two great guests gonna explore the edge, what it means in terms of commercial, but also national security. And as the world goes digital, we're going to have the deep dive conversation around, um, how it's all transforming. We've got Kate Lee, vice president Booz Allen's digital business. Kate. Great to have you, uh, John Paisano principal at Booz Allen's digital cloud solutions. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. So one of the most hottest topics, obviously besides cloud computing, having the most refactoring impact on business and government and public sector has been the next phase of cloud growth and cloud scale, and that's really modern applications, um, and consumer, and then here, uh, for national security and for governments here in the U S is in the military impact. >>And as digital transformation starts to go to the next level, you starting to see the architectures emerge, where the edge, the IOT edge, the industrial IOT edge, or any kind of edge concept 5g is exploding, making that much more of a dense, more throughput for connectivity with wireless. You've got Amazon with snowballs, snowmobile, all kinds of ways to deploy technology. That's it like and operational technologies it's causing quite a cloud operational opportunity and disruption. So I want to get into it. Let's key. Let's start with you. I mean, we're looking at an architecture, that's changing both commercial and public sector with the edge. What are the key considerations that you guys see as people have to really move fast and this new architecture of digital, >>Which I think is a great question. And, um, if I could just, uh, share our observation on why we even started investing in edge, um, you mentioned cloud, um, but as we've reflected upon kind of the history of it on you to take a look from mainframes to desktops, to servers, to a cloud, to mobile, and now I have a T what we observed was that, um, industry investing in infrastructure led to kind of an evolution of, uh, uh, of it, right? So as you mentioned with industry spending billions on IOT and edge, um, we've just feel that that's going to be the next evolution. Um, if you've take a look at, um, you mentioned 5g, I think 5g will be certainly, um, an accelerator to edge, um, because of the, the resilience, the lower latency and so forth, but, um, taking a look at what's happening in space, you mentioned space earlier as well, right. >>Um, and, uh, what, uh, Starlink is doing by putting satellites to actually provide transport into the space. Um, we're thinking that that actually is going to be the next ubiquitous thing. Once transport becomes ubiquitous, just like cloud allows stores to be ubiquitous. We think that, you know, the next generation internet will be space-based. Um, so when you think about it, um, connected, it won't be connected servers per se. It will be connected devices. Um, so, uh, that's kind of, you know, some of the observations and why we've been really focusing on investing in, in edge. >>Awesome. I'd love to sh to, uh, continue the conversation on space and the edge, um, and super great conversation to have you guys on and really appreciate it. I do want to ask you guys about the innovation and the opportunities, uh, this new shift that's happening is the next big thing is coming quickly and it's here on us and that's cloud. I call it cloud 2.0, the cloud scale, modern software development environment, uh, edge with 5g changing the game. I key, I completely agree with you. And I think this is where people are focusing their attention from startups to companies that are transforming and repivoting, or refactoring their, their, uh, existing assets to be positioned. And you're starting to see clear winners and losers as a pattern emerge, right? You gotta be in the cloud, you gotta be leveraging data. You gotta be, uh, horizontally scalable, but you've gotta have AI machine learning in there with modern software practices that are secure. >>That's the playbook. Some people are it, some people are not getting there. So I got to ask you guys, you know, as telcos become super important and the ability to be a telco. Now, we just mentioned standing up a tactical edge, for instance, uh, launching a satellite couple of hundred K you're going to launch a cube set. Um, that could be good and bad, right? So, so, you know, the telco business is changing radically cloud telco cloud is emerging as an edge phenomenon with 5g, certainly business commercial benefits, more than consumer. How do you guys see the innovation and disruption happening with telco? >>Um, you know, as we think through, um, cloud to edge, um, one thing that we realized, because our definition of edge, John was actually at the point of data collection, right on the sensor themselves, others definition of edge is we're a little bit further back when we call it the edge of the it enterprise. Um, but you know, as we look at this, we realize that you need, you needed this kind of multi echelon environment, right? From your cloud to your tactical clouds, right. Where you can do some processing and then at the edge themselves, really at the end of the day, it's all about, I think, data, right? I mean, everything we're talking about is still all about the data, right? The AI needs to Dane, the telco is transporting the data. Right. And so, um, I think if you think about it from a data perspective, in relationship to telcos, right, one edge will actually enable a very different paradigm in a distributed paradigm for data processing. Right. So instead of bringing the data to some central cloud, right. Um, which takes bandwidth off your telcos, push the products to the data, right. So mitigate, what's actually being sent over to those telco lines to increase the efficiencies of them. Right. Um, so I think, you know, at the end of the day, uh, the telcos are gonna have a pretty big, uh, component to this, um, even from space down to ground station, right. How that works. Um, so, um, the, the network of these telcos, I think, are just going to expand >>John, what's your perspective. I mean, startups are coming out. The scalability speed of innovation is a big factor. The old telco days had like, I mean, you know, months and years, new towers go up and now you've got backbone. You've got, you know, it's kind of a slow glacier pace. Now it's under siege with rapid innovation. >>Yeah. So, um, I definitely echo the sentiments that Q would have, but I would also, if we go back and think about the digital battle space and what we've talked about, um, faster speeds being available, you know, in places it's not been before is great. However, when you think about basing an adversary, that's a near peer threat. The first thing they're going to do is make it contested congested, and you have to be able to survive. I, while yes, the, the pace of innovation is absolutely pushing comms. The places we've not had it before. Um, we have to be mindful to not get complacent and over rely on it, assuming it will always be there because I know in my experience wearing the uniform and even if I'm up against it adversary, that's the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to do whatever I can to disrupt your ability to communicate. So how do you take it down to that lowest level and still make that squad, the platoon, whatever that structure is, you know, continued some survivable and lethal. And so that's something I think, as we look at the innovations, we need to be mindful of that so low. And I talk about how do you architect it? What services do you use? Those are all those things that you have to think about. What if I lose it at this echelon? How could, how do I continue to mission? >>Yeah. It's interesting. Mean if you look at how companies have been procuring and consuming technology key, it's been like siloed. Okay. We've got a workplace workforce project, uh, and we have the tactical edge and we have the, you know, siloed it solution when really work in play, whether it's work here. And John's example is the war fighter. And so his concern is safety is his life. Right. And, and protection, the department has to manage the coms. And so they have to have countermeasures and contingencies ready to go. Right. So all this is integrate integrated. Now it's not like one department it's like, it's it's together. >>Yeah. Do you, I mean, you're, you're, uh, I love what you just said. I mean, we have to get away from this siloed siloed banking. Um, not only within a single organization, but across the enterprise. Right. Um, you know, from a digital battlefield perspective, you know, I, you know, it's a joint fight, right. So even across these enterprise of enterprises, right. So I think you're spot on. We have to look horizontally, uh, we have to integrate, we have to inter-operate. Um, and, and by doing that, that's where the innovation is also going to be accelerated too. Right. Not reinventing the wheel. >>Yeah. You know, I think the infrastructure edge is so key. It's going to be very interesting to see how the existing incumbents can handle themselves. Obviously the towers are important. Five GLC has much more, more deployments, not as centralized in terms of the, of the spectrum. Uh, it's more dense. It's gonna create more connectivity options. Um, how do you guys see that impacting? Because certainly more gear, like, obviously not, not the centralized tower from a backhaul standpoint, but now the edge, the radios themselves, the wireless, uh, uh, uh, transit is key. Um, that's the real edge here. How does, how do you guys see that evolving? >>So, um, you know, we're seeing, uh, we're seeing a lot of, um, innovations actually through small companies. We're really focused on very specific niche problems. I think it's a great starting point, um, because what they're doing is showing the art of the possible, right. Um, because again, we're in a different environment now there's different rules, there's different capabilities now, but then we're also seeing, you mentioned earlier on, um, uh, some of the larger companies, Amazon and Microsoft also investing, um, as well. Right. So, um, I think the merge of the, you know, are the unconstrained are the possible right by these small companies that are, you know, just kind of driving, you know, uh, innovations, uh, supported by the, the, the maturity and the, the, the heft of these large companies who are building out kind of these, um, pardoned kind of, uh, capabilities. Um, they're going to converge at some point, right. Um, and, and that's where I think they want to get further innovation. >>Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time. Final question for you guys, as people are watching this, a lot of smart executives and teams are coming together to kind of put the battle plans together for their companies, as they transition from old to this new way, which is clearly cloud-scale role of data. We've got them, we hit out all the key points. I think here, as they start to think about architecture and how they deploy their resources, this becomes now the new boardroom conversation that trickles down and includes everyone, including the developers. You know, the developers are now going to be on the front lines. Um, mid-level managers are going to be integrated in as well. It's a group conversation. What are some of the advice that you would give to folks who are in this mode of planning, architecture, trying to be positioned to come out of this pandemic with a massive growth opportunity and, and to be on the right side of history? What's your advice? >>Um, this is a quick question. Um, so I think, um, you, you touched upon it. Um, one is take the holistic approach. Uh, you mentioned orchestras a couple of times, and I think that's, that's critical understanding, um, how your edge architectures will let you connect with your cloud architecture. So they're, they're not disjointed, right? They're not siloed, right. They're interoperable, they integrate. So you're taking that enterprise approach. Um, I think the second thing is be patient. Uh, it took us some time to really kind of, and we've been looking at this for, uh, about three years now. Um, and we were very intentional in assessing the landscape, how people were, you know, um, discussing around edge, um, and kind of pulling that all together, but it took us some time to even figure it out, kind of, Hey, what are the use cases? How can we actually apply this and get some ROI and value, um, out for our clients? Right. So being a little bit patient, um, in thinking through kind of how you can leverage this and potentially be a disruptor, >>John, your thoughts on advice to people watching as they try to put the right plans together to be positioned and not foreclose any future value. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, in addition to the points, the key res I would, number one, amplified the fact of recognize that you're going to have a hybrid environment of legacy and modern capabilities. And in addition to thinking, you know, open architectures and whatnot, think about your culture, the people, your processes, your techniques, and whatnot, and your governance. How do you make decisions when it needs to be closed versus open? Where do you invest in the workforce? What decisions are you going to make in your architecture that drive that, that hybrid world that you're going to live in? All those recipes, you know, patients open all that, that I think we often overlook the cultural people aspect of, you know, upskilling it, this is a very different way of thinking on modern software delivery. Like, how do you go through this lifecycle? How's security embedded. So making sure that's part of that boardroom conversation >>Back day, this is a great interview. We just had with Kaley for Booz Allen reason, why I wanted to bring that into the cube programming this week was because you heard him saying ivory cloud. You heard him say public cloud innovation, edge, all elements of the architecture. And he says, we are learning and it takes patience. And the other thing that he was hyper focused on was the horizontal scalability, not silos. And this is an architectural shift. Who's Alan again, premier firm, and they're doing like killer work. Those guys are amazing. So this brings up the whole theme here, which is you got to nail the architecture. If you don't know what checkmate looks like, don't play chess. That's what I always say. Well, you don't know what the game is, don't play it. And I think the telco story that we hear from Dr is that these guys don't know the game. >>Now I would question that Amazon and others think they do because as they're all partnering with them, yeah, Amazon's got great partnerships. Google just announced a partnership with Ericsson goes on and on. I think anything that can move into the hybrid cloud, Ken should and will that'll happen, but there's some stuff that's going to take some time. Maybe we'll never move. You see that with mainframes. But what they'll do is they'll put an abstraction layer around it and it's got to communicate. And I think the big question is, okay, is it going to be the cloud stack coming on prem, which I think is going to happen, or is it going to be the reverse? And I would bet on the former, well, you know, we've been covering the cloud from day one. We've been part of that wave. We've had all the top conversations with Andy Jassy when, and he was just breaking through the growth. All the cloud players we've been there. We talked to all their customers. We have our finger on the pulse of cloud and we are in cloud city. Main street of cloud city is where all the action is. And the main stage is up there. Adam and team take it from here.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Well, welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, your host. Got a great conversation with two great guests, going to explore the edge, what it means in terms of commercial, but also national security. And as the world goes digital, we're going to have that deep dive conversation around how it's all transforming. We've got Ki Lee, Vice President of Booz Allen's Digital Business. Ki, great to have you. John Pisano, Principal at Booz Allen's Digital Cloud Solutions. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. >> And thanks for having us, John. >> So one of the most hottest topics, obviously besides cloud computing having the most refactoring impact on business and government and public sector has been the next phase of cloud growth and cloud scale, and that's really modern applications and consumer, and then here for national security and for governments here in the U.S. is military impact. And as digital transformation starts to go to the next level, you're starting to see the architectures emerge where the edge, the IoT edge, the industrial IoT edge, or any kind of edge concept, 5G is exploding, making that much more of a dense, more throughput for connectivity with wireless. You got Amazon with Snowball, Snowmobile, all kinds of ways to deploy technology, that's IT like and operational technologies. It's causing quite a cloud operational opportunity and disruption, so I want to get into it. Ki, let's start with you. I mean, we're looking at an architecture that's changing both commercial and public sector with the edge. What are the key considerations that you guys see as people have to really move fast in this new architecture of digital? >> Yeah, John, I think it's a great question. And if I could just share our observation on why we even started investing in edge. You mentioned the cloud, but as we've reflected upon kind of the history of IT, then you take a look from mainframes to desktops to servers to cloud to mobile and now IoT, what we observed was that industry investing in infrastructure led to kind of an evolution of IT, right? So as you mentioned, with industry spending billions on IoT and edge, we just feel that that's going to be the next evolution. If you take a look at, you mentioned 5G, I think 5G will be certainly an accelerator to edge because of the resilience, the lower latency and so forth. But taking a look at what's happening in space, you mentioned space earlier as well, right, and what Starlink is doing by putting satellites to actually provide transport into the space, we're thinking that that actually is going to be the next ubiquitous thing. Once transport becomes ubiquitous, just like cloud allows storage to be ubiquitous. We think that the next generation internet will be space-based. So when you think about it, connected, it won't be connected servers per se, it will be connected devices. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> That's kind of some of the observations and why we've been really focusing on investing in edge. >> I want to come back to that piece around space and edge and bring it from a commercial and then also tactical architecture in a minute 'cause there's a lot to unpack there, role of open source, modern application development, software and hardware supply chains, all are core issues that are going to emerge. But I want to get with John real quick on cloud impact, because you think about 5G and the future of work or future of play, you've got people, right? So whether you're at a large concert like Coachella or a 49ers or Patriots game or Redskins game if you're in the D.C. area, you got people there, of congestion, and now you got devices now serving those people. And that's their play, people at work, whether it's a military operation, and you've got work, play, tactical edge things. How is cloud connecting? 'Cause this is like the edge has never been kind of an IT thing. It's been more of a bandwidth or either telco or something else operationally. What's the cloud at scale, cloud operations impact? >> Yeah, so if you think about how these systems are architected and you think about those considerations that Ki kind of touched on, a lot of what you have to think about now is what aspects of the application reside in the cloud, where you tend to be less constrained. And then how do you architect that application to move out towards the edge, right? So how do I tier my application? Ultimately, how do I move data and applications around the ecosystem? How do I need to evolve where my application stages things and how that data and those apps are moved to each of those different tiers? So when we build a lot of applications, especially if they're in the cloud, they're built with some of those common considerations of elasticity, scalability, all those things; whereas when you talk about congestion and disconnected operations, you lose a lot of those characteristics, and you have to kind of rethink that. >> Ki, let's get into the aspect you brought up, which is space. And then I was mentioning the tactical edge from a military standpoint. These are use cases of deployments, and in fact, this is how people have to work now. So you've got the future of work or play, and now you've got the situational deployments, whether it's a new tower of next to a stadium. We've all been at a game or somewhere or a concert where we only got five bars and no connectivity. So we know what that means. So now you have people congregating in work or play, and now you have a tactical deployment. What's the key things that you're seeing that it's going to help make that better? Are there any breakthroughs that you see that are possible? What's going on in your view? >> Yeah, I mean, I think what's enabling all of this, again, one is transport, right? So whether it's 5G to increase the speed and decrease the latency, whether it's things like Starlink with making transport and comms ubiquitous, that tied with the fact that ships continue to get smaller and faster, right? And when you're thinking about tactical edge, those devices have limited size, weight, power conditions and constraints. And so the software that goes on them has to be just as lightweight. And that's why we've actually partnered with SUSE and what they've done with K3s to do that. So I think those are some of the enabling technologies out there. John, as you've kind of alluded to it, there are additional challenges as we think about it. We're not, it's not a simple transition and monetization here, but again, we think that this will be the next major disruption. >> What do you guys think, John, if you don't mind weighing in too on this as modern application development happens, we just were covering CloudNativeCon and KubeCon, DockerCon, containers are very popular. Kubernetes is becoming super great. As you look at the telco landscape where we're kind of converging this edge, it has to be commercially enterprise grade. It has to have that transit and transport that's intelligent and all these new things. How does open source fit into all this? Because we're seeing open source becoming very reliable, more people are contributing to open source. How does that impact the edge in your opinion? >> So from my perspective, I think it's helping accelerate things that traditionally maybe may have been stuck in the traditional proprietary software confines. So within our mindset at Booz Allen, we were very focused on open architecture, open based systems, which open source obviously is an aspect of that. So how do you create systems that can easily interface with each other to exchange data, and how do you leverage tools that are available in the open source community to do that? So containerization is a big drive that is really going throughout the open source community. And there's just a number of other tools, whether it's tools that are used to provide basic services like how do I move code through a pipeline all the way through? How do I do just basic hardening and security checking of my capabilities? Historically, those have tend to be closed source type apps, whereas today you've got a very broad community that's able to very quickly provide and develop capabilities and push it out to a community that then continues to adapt and add to it or grow that library of stuff. >> Yeah, and then we've got trends like Open RAN. I saw some Ground Station for the AWS. You're starting to see Starlink, you mentioned. You're bringing connectivity to the masses. What is that going to do for operators? Because remember, security is a huge issue. We talk about security all the time. Where does that kind of come in? Because now you're really OT, which has been very purpose-built kind devices in the old IoT world. As the new IoT and the edge develop, you're going to need to have intelligence. You're going to be data-driven. There is an open source impact key. So, how, if I'm a senior executive, how do I get my arms around this? I really need to think this through because the security risks alone could be more penetration areas, more surface area. >> Right. That's a great question. And let me just address kind of the value to the clients and the end users in the digital battlefield as our warriors to increase survivability and lethality. At the end of the day from a mission perspective, we know we believe that time's a weapon. So reducing any latency in that kind of observe, orient, decide, act OODA loop is value to the war fighter. In terms of your question on how to think about this, John, you're spot on. I mean, as I've mentioned before, there are various different challenges, one, being the cyber aspect of it. We are absolutely going to be increasing our attack surface when you think about putting processing on edge devices. There are other factors too, non-technical that we've been thinking about s we've tried to kind of engender and kind of move to this kind of edge open ecosystem where we can kind of plug and play, reuse, all kind of taking the same concepts of the open-source community and open architectures. But other things that we've considered, one, workforce. As you mentioned before, when you think about these embedded systems and so forth, there aren't that many embedded engineers out there. But there is a workforce that are digital and software engineers that are trained. So how do we actually create an abstraction layer that we can leverage that workforce and not be limited by some of the constraints of the embedded engineers out there? The other thing is what we've, in talking with several colleagues, clients, partners, what people aren't thinking about is actually when you start putting software on these edge devices in the billions, the total cost of ownership. How do you maintain an enterprise that potentially consists of billions of devices? So extending the standard kind of DevSecOps that we move to automate CI/CD to a cloud, how do we move it from cloud to jet? That's kind of what we say. How do we move DevSecOps to automate secure containers all the way to the edge devices to mitigate some of those total cost of ownership challenges. >> It's interesting, as you have software defined, this embedded system discussion is hugely relevant and important because when you have software defined, you've got to be faster in the deployment of these devices. You need security, 'cause remember, supply chain on the hardware side and software in that too. >> Absolutely. >> So if you're going to have a serviceability model where you have to shift left, as they say, you got to be at the point of CI/CD flows, you need to be having security at the time of coding. So all these paradigms are new in Day-2 operations. I call it Day-0 operations 'cause it should be in everyday too. >> Yep. Absolutely. >> But you've got to service these things. So software supply chain becomes a very interesting conversation. It's a new one that we're having on theCUBE and in the industry Software supply chain is a superly relevant important topic because now you've got to interface it, not just with other software, but hardware. How do you service devices in space? You can't send a break/fix person in space. (chuckles) Maybe you will soon, but again, this brings up a whole set of issues. >> No, so I think it's certainly, I don't think anyone has the answers. We sure don't have all the answers but we're very optimistic. If you take a look at what's going on within the U.S. Air Force and what the Chief Software Officer Nic Chaillan and his team, and we're a supporter of this and a plankowner of Platform One. They were ahead of the curve in kind of commoditizing some of these DevSecOps principles in partnership with the DoD CIO and that shift left concept. They've got a certified and accredited platform that provides that DevSecOps. They have an entire repository in the Iron Bank that allows for hardened containers and reciprocity. All those things are value to the mission and around the edge because those are all accelerators. I think there's an opportunity to leverage industry kind of best practices as well and patterns there. You kind of touched upon this, John, but these devices honestly just become firmware. The software is just, if the devices themselves just become firmware , you can just put over the wire updates onto them. So I'm optimistic. I think all the piece parts are taking place across industry and in the government. And I think we're primed to kind of move into this next evolution. >> Yeah. And it's also some collaboration. What I like about, why I'm bringing up the open source angle and I think this is where I think the major focus will shift to, and I want to get your reaction to it is because open source is seeing a lot more collaboration. You mentioned some of the embedded devices. Some people are saying, this is the weakest link in the supply chain, and it can be shored up pretty quickly. But there's other data, other collective intelligence that you can get from sharing data, for instance, which hasn't really been a best practice in the cybersecurity industry. So now open source, it's all been about sharing, right? So you got the confluence of these worlds colliding, all aspects of culture and Dev and Sec and Ops and engineering all coming together. John, what's your reaction to that? Because this is a big topic. >> Yeah, so it's providing a level of transparency that historically we've not seen, right? So in that community, having those pipelines, the results of what's coming out of it, it's allowing anyone in that life cycle or that supply chain to look at it, see the state of it, and make a decision on, is this a risk I'm willing to take or not? Or am I willing to invest and personally contribute back to the community to address that because it's important to me and it's likely going to be important to some of the others that are using it? So I think it's critical, and it's enabling that acceleration and shift that I talked about, that now that everybody can see it, look inside of it, understand the state of it, contribute to it, it's allowing us to break down some of the barriers that Ki talked about. And it reinforces that excitement that we're seeing now. That community is enabling us to move faster and do things that maybe historically we've not been able to do. >> Ki, I'd love to get your thoughts. You mentioned battlefield, and I've been covering a lot of the tactical edge around the DOD's work. You mentioned about the military on the Air Force side, Platform One, I believe, was from the Air Force work that they've done, all cloud native kind of directions. But when you talk about a war field, you talk about connectivity. I mean, who controls the DNS in Taiwan, or who controls the DNS in Korea? I mean, we have to deploy, you've got to stand up infrastructure. How about agility? I mean, tactical command and control operations, this has got to be really well done. So this is not a trivial thing. >> No. >> How are you seeing this translate into the edge innovation area? (laughs) >> It's certainly not a trivial thing, but I think, again, I'm encouraged by how government and industry are partnering up. There's a vision set around this joint all domain command control, JADC2. And then all the services are getting behind that, are looking into that, and this vision of this military, internet of military things. And I think the key thing there, John, as you mentioned, it's not just the connected of the sensors, which requires the transport again, but also they have to be interoperable. So you can have a bunch of sensors and platforms out there, they may be connected, but if they can't speak to one another in a common language, that kind of defeats the purpose and the mission value of that sensor or shooter kind of paradigm that we've been striving for for ages. So you're right on. I mean, this is not a trivial thing, but I think over history we've learned quite a bit. Technology and innovation is happening at just an amazing rate where things are coming out in months as opposed to decades as before. I agree, not trivial, but again, I think there are all the piece parts in place and being put into place. >> I think you mentioned earlier that the personnel, the people, the engineers that are out there, not enough, more of them coming in. I think now the appetite and the provocative nature of this shift in tech is going to attract a lot of people because the old adage is these are hard problems attracts great people. You got in new engineering, SRE like scale engineering. You have software development, that's changing, becoming much more robust and more science-driven. You don't have to be just a coder as a software engineer. You could be coming at it from any angle. So there's a lot more opportunities from a personnel standpoint now to attract great people, and there's real hard problems to solve, not just security. >> Absolutely. Definitely. I agree with that 100%. I would also contest that it's an opportunity for innovators. We've been thinking about this for some time, and we think there's absolute value from various different use cases that we've identified, digital battlefield, force protection, disaster recovery, and so forth. But there are use cases that we probably haven't even thought about, even from a commercial perspective. So I think there's going to be an opportunity just like the internet back in the mid '90s for us to kind of innovate based on this new kind of edge environment. >> It's a revolution. New leadership, new brands are going to emerge, new paradigms, new workflows, new operations, clearly great stuff. I want to thank you guys for coming on. I also want to thank Rancher Labs for sponsoring this conversation. Without their support, we wouldn't be here. And now they were acquired by SUSE. We've covered their event with theCUBE virtual last year. What's the connection with those guys? Can you guys take a minute to explain the relationship with SUSE and Rancher? >> Yeah. So it's actually it's fortuitous. And I think we just, we got lucky. There's two overall aspects of it. First of all, we are both, we partner on the Platform One basic ordering agreement. So just there we had a common mentality of DevSecOps. And so there was a good partnership there, but then when we thought about we're engaging it from an edge perspective, the K3s, right? I mean, they're a leader from a container perspective obviously, but the fact that they are innovators around K3s to reduce that software footprint, which is required on these edge devices, we kind of got a twofer there in that partnership. >> John, any comment on your end? >> Yeah, I would just amplify, the K3s aspects in leveraging the containers, a lot of what we've seen success in when you look at what's going on, especially on that tactical edge around enabling capabilities, containers, and the portability it provides makes it very easy for us to interface and integrate a lot of different sensors to close the OODA loop to whoever is wearing or operating that a piece of equipment that the software is running on. >> Awesome, I'd love to continue the conversation on space and the edge and super great conversation to have you guys on. Really appreciate it. I do want to ask you guys about the innovation and the opportunities of this new shift that's happening as the next big thing is coming quickly. And it's here on us and that's cloud, I call it cloud 2.0, the cloud scale, modern software development environment, edge with 5G changing the game. Ki, I completely agree with you. And I think this is where people are focusing their attention from startups to companies that are transforming and re-pivoting or refactoring their existing assets to be positioned. And you're starting to see clear winners and losers. There's a pattern emerging. You got to be in the cloud, you got to be leveraging data, you got to be horizontally scalable, but you got to have AI machine learning in there with modern software practices that are secure. That's the playbook. Some people are making it. Some people are not getting there. So I'd ask you guys, as telcos become super important and the ability to be a telco now, we just mentioned standing up a tactical edge, for instance. Launching a satellite, a couple of hundred K, you can launch a CubeSat. That could be good and bad. So the telco business is changing radically. Cloud, telco cloud is emerging as an edge phenomenon with 5G, certainly business commercial benefits more than consumer. How do you guys see the innovation and disruption happening with telco? >> As we think through cloud to edge, one thing that we realize, because our definition of edge, John, was actually at the point of data collection on the sensor themselves. Others' definition of edge is we're a little bit further back, what we call it the edge of the IT enterprise. But as we look at this, we realize that you needed this kind of multi echelon environment from your cloud to your tactical clouds where you can do some processing and then at the edge of themselves. Really at the end of the day, it's all about, I think, data, right? I mean, everything we're talking about, it's still all about the data, right? The AI needs the data, the telco is transporting the data. And so I think if you think about it from a data perspective in relationship to the telcos, one, edge will actually enable a very different paradigm and a distributed paradigm for data processing. So, hey, instead of bringing the data to some central cloud which takes bandwidth off your telcos, push the products to the data. So mitigate what's actually being sent over those telco lines to increase the efficiencies of them. So I think at the end of the day, the telcos are going to have a pretty big component to this, even from space down to ground station, how that works. So the network of these telcos, I think, are just going to expand. >> John, what's your perspective? I mean, startups are coming out. The scalability, speed of innovation is a big factor. The old telco days had, I mean, months and years, new towers go up and now you got a backbone. It's kind of a slow glacier pace. Now it's under siege with rapid innovation. >> Yeah, so I definitely echo the sentiments that Ki would have, but I would also, if we go back and think about the digital battle space and what we've talked about, faster speeds being available in places it's not been before is great. However, when you think about facing an adversary that's a near-peer threat, the first thing they're going to do is make it contested, congested, and you have to be able to survive. While yes, the pace of innovation is absolutely pushing comms to places we've not had it before, we have to be mindful to not get complacent and over-rely on it, assuming it'll always be there. 'Cause I know in my experience wearing the uniform, and even if I'm up against an adversary, that's the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do whatever I can to disrupt your ability to communicate. So how do you take it down to that lowest level and still make that squad, the platoon, whatever that structure is, continue survivable and lethal. So that's something I think, as we look at the innovations, we need to be mindful of that. So when I talk about how do you architect it? What services do you use? Those are all those things that you have to think about. What if I lose it at this echelon? How do I continue the mission? >> Yeah, it's interesting. And if you look at how companies have been procuring and consuming technology, Ki, it's been like siloed. "Okay, we've got a workplace workforce project, and we have the tactical edge, and we have the siloed IT solution," when really work and play, whether it's work here in John's example, is the war fighter. And so his concern is safety, his life and protection. >> Yeah. >> The other department has to manage the comms, (laughs) and so they have to have countermeasures and contingencies ready to go. So all this is, they all integrate it now. It's not like one department. It's like it's together. >> Yeah. John, I love what you just said. I mean, we have to get away from this siloed thinking not only within a single organization, but across the enterprise. From a digital battlefield perspective, it's a joint fight, so even across these enterprise of enterprises, So I think you're spot on. We have to look horizontally. We have to integrate, we have to inter-operate, and by doing that, that's where the innovation is also going to be accelerated too, not reinventing the wheel. >> Yeah, and I think the infrastructure edge is so key. It's going to be very interesting to see how the existing incumbents can handle themselves. Obviously the towers are important. 5G obviously, that's more deployments, not as centralized in terms of the spectrum. It's more dense. It's going to create more connectivity options. How do you guys see that impacting? Because certainly more gear, like obviously not the centralized tower, from a backhaul standpoint but now the edge, the radios themselves, the wireless transit is key. That's the real edge here. How do you guys see that evolving? >> We're seeing a lot of innovations actually through small companies who are really focused on very specific niche problems. I think it's a great starting point because what they're doing is showing the art of the possible. Because again, we're in a different environment now. There's different rules. There's different capabilities. But then we're also seeing, you mentioned earlier on, some of the larger companies, the Amazons, the Microsofts, also investing as well. So I think the merge of the, you know, or the unconstrained or the possible by these small companies that are just kind of driving innovations supported by the maturity and the heft of these large companies who are building out these hardened kind of capabilities, they're going to converge at some point. And that's where I think we're going to get further innovation. >> Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time. Final question for you guys, as people are watching this, a lot of smart executives and teams are coming together to kind of put the battle plans together for their companies as they transition from old to this new way, which is clearly cloud-scale, role of data. We hit out all the key points I think here. As they start to think about architecture and how they deploy their resources, this becomes now the new boardroom conversation that trickles down and includes everyone, including the developers. The developers are now going to be on the front lines. Mid-level managers are going to be integrated in as well. It's a group conversation. What are some of the advice that you would give to folks who are in this mode of planning architecture, trying to be positioned to come out of this pandemic with a massive growth opportunity and to be on the right side of history? What's your advice? >> It's such a great question. So I think you touched upon it. One is take the holistic approach. You mentioned architectures a couple of times, and I think that's critical. Understanding how your edge architectures will let you connect with your cloud architecture so that they're not disjointed, they're not siloed. They're interoperable, they integrate. So you're taking that enterprise approach. I think the second thing is be patient. It took us some time to really kind of, and we've been looking at this for about three years now. And we were very intentional in assessing the landscape, how people were discussing around edge and kind of pulling that all together. But it took us some time to even figure it out, hey, what are the use cases? How can we actually apply this and get some ROI and value out for our clients? So being a little bit patient in thinking through kind of how we can leverage this and potentially be a disruptor. >> John, your thoughts on advice to people watching as they try to put the right plans together to be positioned and not foreclose any future value. >> Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to the points that Ki raised, I would, number one, amplify the fact of recognize that you're going to have a hybrid environment of legacy and modern capabilities. And in addition to thinking open architectures and whatnot, think about your culture, the people, your processes, your techniques and whatnot, and your governance. How do you make decisions when it needs to be closed versus open? Where do you invest in the workforce? What decisions are you going to make in your architecture that drive that hybrid world that you're going to live in? All those recipes, patience, open, all that, that I think we often overlook the cultural people aspect of upskilling. This is a very different way of thinking on modern software delivery. How do you go through this lifecycle? How's security embedded? So making sure that's part of that boardroom conversation I think is key. >> John Pisano, Principal at Booz Allen Digital Cloud Solutions, thanks for sharing that great insight. Ki Lee, Vice President at Booz Allen Digital Business. Gentlemen, great conversation. Thanks for that insight. And I think people watching are going to probably learn a lot on how to evaluate startups to how they put their architecture together. So I really appreciate the insight and commentary. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier. This is theCUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching. 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>> Live from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering artists. A conference twenty nineteen brought to you by for scout. >> Hey, Welcome back, everybody. Jefe Rick here with the Cube were in the force caboose that Arcee and Mosconi center forty thousand people walking around talking about security is by far the biggest security of it in the world. We're excited to be here. And welcome back a Cube. Alumni has been playing in the security space for a very long time. He's Bradman bury the GDP from Booz Allen >> Hamilton. Brad, great to see you. >> Hey, thanks for having me here today. Absolutely. Yeah. I've, uh I've already walked about seven miles today, and, uh, just glad to be here to have >> a conversation. Yeah, the fit bitten. The walking trackers love this place, right? You feel your circles in a very short period of time. >> I feel very fit fit after today. So thank >> you. But it's pretty interesting rights, >> and you're in it. You're in a position where you're >> advising companies, both government and and commercial companies, you know, to come into an environment like this and just be overwhelmed by so many options. Right? And you can't buy everything here, and you shouldn't buy everything here. So how do you help? How do you hope your client's kind of navigate this crazy landscape. >> It's interesting, so you mentioned forty thousand people. Aziz, you see on the show, should share room floor behind us, Thousands of product companies, and, frankly, our clients are confused. Um, you know, there's a lot of tools, lot technologies. There's no silver bullet, and our clients are asking a couple of fundamental problem. A couple of fundamental questions. One. How effective in mine and then once them effective, you know, how can I be more efficient with my cyber pretty spent? >> So it's funny, effective. So how are they measuring effective, Right? Because that's a that's a kind of a changing, amorphous thing to target as well. >> That's I mean, that's that's That's the that's the key question in cybersecurity is how effective my, you know, there's lots of tools and technologies. We do a lot of instant response, but commercially and federally and in general, when looking at past reaches, its not a problem. In most cases, everyone has the best of the best and tools and technologies. But either they're drowning in data on DH or the tools aren't configured properly, so you know we're spending a lot of time helping our client's baseline their current environment. Help them look at their tool configurations, help them look at their screw. The operation center helping them figure out Can they detect the most recent threats? And how quickly can we respond? >> Right? And then how did they prioritize? That's the thing that always amazes me, because then you can't do everything right. And and it's fascinating with, you know, the recent elections and, you know, kind of a state funded threats. Is that what the bad guys are going on going after? Excuse me? Isn't necessarily your personal identifying information or your bank account, but all kinds of things that you may not have thought were that valuable yesterday, >> right? I mean, you know, it's funny. We talk a lot about these black swan events, and so you look at not Petra and you know what? Not Pecchia. There was some companies that were really hit in a very significant way, and, you know, everyone, everyone is surprised, right and way. See it time after time, folks caught off guard by, you know, these unanticipated attack vectors. It's a big problem. But, you know, I think you know, our clients are getting better. They're starting to be more proactive. There start. They're starting to become more integrated communities where they're taking intelligence and using that to better tune and Taylor there screw the operation programs. And, you know, they're starting to also used take the tools and technologies in their environment, better tie them and integrate them with their operational processes and getting better. >> Right. So another big change in the landscape. You said you've been coming here for years. Society, right? And yeah. And it's just called Industrial. I owe to your Jean. Call it. Yeah. And other things. A lot more devices should or should not be connected. Well, are going to be connected. They were necessarily designed to be connected. And you also work on the military side as well. Right? And these have significant implications. These things do things, whether it's a turbine, whether it's something in the hospital, this monitoring that hard or whether it's, you know, something in a military scenarios. So >> how are you seeing >> the adoption of that? Obviously the benefits far out way you know, the potential downfalls. But you gotta protect for the downfall, >> you know? Yo, Tio, we've u o T is one of the most pressing cyber security challenges that our client's case today. And it's funny. When we first started engaging in the OT space, there was a big vocabulary mismatch. You had thesis, Oh, organizations that we're talking threat actors and attack vectors, and then you had head of manufacturing that we're talking up time, availability and reliability and they were talking past each other. I think now we're at an attorney point where both communities air coming together to recognize that this is a really an imminent threat to the survival of their organization and that they've got to protect they're ot environment. They're starting by making sure that they have segmentation in place. But that's not enough. And you know, it's interesting when we look into a lot of the OT environments, you know, I call it the Smithsonian of it. And so, you know, I was looking at one of our client environments and, you know, they had, Ah, lot of Windows and T devices like that's great. I'm a Windows NT expert. I was using that between nineteen ninety four in nineteen ninety six, and you know, I mean, it's everybody's favorite vulnerability. Right on Rodeo. I'm your guy. So, you know, one of the challenges that we're facing is how do you go into these legacy environments that have very mission critical operations and, you know, integrates cyber security to protect and ensure their mission. And so we're working with companies like for Scott, you know, that provide Asian agent lis capabilities, that that allow us to better no one understand what's in the environment and then be able to apply policies to be able to better protect and defend them. But certainly it's a major issue that everyone's facing. We spent a lot of time talking about issues in manufacturing, but but think about the utilities. Think about the power grid. Think about building control systems. H back. You know, I was talking to a client that has a very critical mission, and I asked them all like, what's your biggest challenge? You face today? And I was thinking for something. I was thinking they were going to be talking about their mission control system. Or, you know, some of some of the rial, you know, critical critical assets they have. But what he said, My biggest challenge is my, my age back, and I'm like, really, He's like my age back goes down, My operation's gonna be disrupted. I'm going out to Coop halfway across the country, and that could result in loss of life. It's a big issue. >> Yeah, it's wild. Triggered all kinds. I think Mike earlier today said that a lot of a lot of the devices you don't even know you're running in tea. Yeah, it's like a little tiny version of Inti that's running underneath this operating system that's running this device. You don't even know it. And it's funny. You talked about the HBC. There was a keynote earlier today where they talk about, you know, if a data center HBC goes down first. I think she said, sixty seconds stuff starts turning off, right? So, you know, depending on what that thing is powering, that's a pretty significant data point. >> Yeah, you know, I think where we are in the journey and the OT is, you know, we started by creating the burning platform, making sure that there was awareness around hate. There is a problem. There is a threat. I think we've moved beyond that. WeII then moved into, you know, segmenting the BOT environment, A lot of the major nation state attacks that we've seen started in the enterprise and move laterally into the OT environment. So we're starting to get better segmentation in place. Now we're getting to a point where we're moving into, you know, the shop floors, the manufacturing facilities, the utilities, and we're starting Teo understand what's on the network right in the world This has probably been struggling with for years and have started to overcome. But in the OT environment, it's still a problem. So understanding what's connected to the network and then building strategy for how we can really protecting defendant. And the difference is it's not just about protecting and defending, but it's insuring continuity of mission. It's about being resilient, >> right and being able to find if there's a problem down the problem. I mean, we're almost numb. Tow the data breach is right there in the paper every day. I mean, I think Michael is really the last big when everyone had a connection fit down. Okay, it's another another data breach. So it's a big It's a big issue. That's right. So >> one of the things you talked about last time we had >> John was continuous diagnostic and mitigation. I think it's a really interesting take that pretty clear in the wording that it's not. It's not by something, put it in and go on vacation. It was a constant, an ongoing process, and I have to really be committed to >> Yeah, you know, I think that, you know, our clients, the federally and commercially are moving beyond compliance. And if you rewind the clock many years ago, everyone was looking at these compliance scores and saying Good to go. And in reality, if you're if you're compliant, you're really looking in the rear view mirror. And it's really about, you know, putting in programs that's continually assessing risk, continuing to take a continues to look at your your environment so that you can better understand what are the risks, one of the threats and that you can prioritize activity in action. And I think the federal government is leading the way with some major programs. I got a VHS continuous diagnostic in mitigation where they're really looking Teo up armor dot gov and, you know, really take a more proactive approach. Teo, you know, securing critical infrastructure, right? Just >> curious because you you kind >> of split the fence between the federal clients and the commercial clients. Everybody's, you know, kind of points of view in packs away they see the world. >> What if you could share? >> Kind of, maybe what's more of a federal kind of centric view that wasn't necessarily shared on the commercial side of they prioritize. And what's kind of the one of the commercial side that the feds are missing? I assume you want to get him both kind of thinking about the same thing, but there's got to be a different set of priorities. >> Yeah, you know, I think after some of the major commercial breaches, Way saw the commercial entities go through a real focused effort. Teo, take the tools that they have in the infrastructure to make sure that they're better integrated. Because, you know, in this mass product landscape, there's lots of seems that the adversaries livin and then better tie the tooling in the infrastructure with security operations and on the security operation side, take more of an intelligence driven approach, meaning that you're looking at what's going on out in the wild, taking that information be able to enrich it and using that to be more proactive instead of waiting for an event to pop up on the screen hunt for adversaries in your network. Right now, we're seeing the commercial market really refining that approach. And now we're seeing our government clients start to adopt an embrace commercial. Best practices. >> Write some curious. I love that line. Adversaries live in the scene. Right? We're going to an all hybrid world, right? Public cloud is kicking tail. People have stuff in public, cloud their stuff in their own cloud. They have, you know, it's very kind of hybrid ecosystems that sounds like it's making a whole lot of scenes. >> Yeah, you know, it. You know, just went Just when we think we're getting getting there, you know, we're getting the enterprise under control. We've got asset management in place, You know. We're modernizing security operations. We're being Mohr Hunt driven. More proactive now the attacks services expanding. You know, earlier we talked about the OT environment that's introducing a much broader and new attack service. But now we're talking about cloud and it's not just a single cloud. There's multiple cloud providers, right? And now we're not. Now we're talking about software is a service and multiple software's of service providers. So you know, it's not just what's in your environment now. It's your extended enterprise that includes clouds. So far is the service. Excuse me, ot Io ti and the problem's getting much more complex. And so it's going to keep us busy for the next couple of years. I think job security's okay, I think where I think we're gonna be busy, all >> right, before I let you go, just kind of top trends that you're thinking about what you guys are looking at a za company as we had in twenty >> nineteen, you know, a couple of things. You know, Who's Alan being being deeply rooted in defense and intelligence were working, Teo, unlocking our tradecraft that we've gained through years of dealing with the adversary and working to figure out howto better apply that to cyber defense. Things like advanced threat hunting things like adversary red teaming things like being able to do base lining to assess the effectiveness of an organisation. And then last but not least, a i a. I is a big trend in the industry. It's probably become one of the most overused but buzzwords. But we're looking at specific use cases around artificial intelligence. How do you, you know better Accelerate. Tier one tier, two events triaging in a sock. How do you better detect, you know, adversary movement to enhance detection in your enterprise and, you know, eyes, you know, very, you know, a major major term that's being thrown out at this conference. But we're really looking at how to operationalize that over the next three to five years, >> right? Right. And the bad guys have it too, right? And never forget tomorrow's Law. One of my favorite, not quoted enough laws, right, tend to overestimate in the short term and underestimate in the long term, maybe today's buzzword. But three to five years A I's gonna be everywhere. Absolutely. Alright. Well, Brad, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day is done by. Good >> to see you again. All right, >> all right. He's Brad. I'm Jeff. You're watching. The Cube were in Arcee conference in downtown San Francisco. Thanks >> for watching. We'LL see you next time.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D. C., it's the CUBE. Covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to the nation's capitol everybody. This is the CUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here at day two covering Splunk's .conf user conference #splunkconf17, and my name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with with co-host, George Gilbert. As I say, this is day two. We just came off the keynotes. I'm over product orientation today. George, what I'd like to do is summarize the day and the quarter that we've had so far, and then bring you into the conversation and get your opinion on what you heard. You were at the analyst event yesterday. I've been sitting in keynotes. We've been interviewing folks all day long. So let me start, Splunk is all about machine data. They ingest machine data, they analyze machine data for a number of purposes. The two primary use cases that we've heard this week are really IT, what I would call operations management. Understanding the behavior of your systems. What's potentially going wrong, what needs to be remediated. to avoid an outage or remediate an outage. And of course the second major use case that we've heard here is security. Some of the Wall Street guys, I've read some of the work this morning. Particularly Barclays came out with a research note. They had concerns about that, and I really don't know what the concerns are. We're going to talk about it. I presume it's that they're looking for a TAM expansion strategy to support a ten billion dollar valuation, and potentially a much higher valuation. It's worth noting the conference this year is 7,000 attendees, up from 5,000 last year. That's a 40% increase, growing at, or above actually, the pace of revenue growth at Splunk. Pricing remains a concern for some of the users that I've talked to. And I want to talk to you about that. And then of course, there's a lot of product updates that I want to get into. Splunk Enterprise 7.0 which is really Splunk's core analytics platform ITSI which is what I would, their 3.0, which I would call their ITOM platform. UBA which is user behavior analytics 4.0. Updates to Splunk Cloud, which is a service for machine data in the cloud. We've heard about machine learning across the portfolio, really to address alert fatigue. And a new metrics engine called Mstats. And of course we heard today, enterprise content security updates and many several security-oriented solutions throughout the week on fraud detection, ransomware, they've got a deal with Booz Allen Hamilton on Cyber4Sight which is security as a service that involves human intelligence. And a lot of ecosystem partnerships. AWS, DellEMC was on yesterday, Atlassian, Gigamon, et cetera, growing out the ecosystem. That's a quick rundown, George. I want to start with the pricing. I was talking to some users last night before the party. You know, "What do you like about Splunk? "What don't you like about Splunk? "Are you a customer?" I talked to one prospective customer said, "Wow, I've been trying to do "this stuff on my own for years. "I can't wait to get my hands on this." Existing customers, though, only one complaint that I heard was your price is to high, essentially is what they were telling Splunk. Now my feeling on that, and Raymo from Barclays mentioned that in his research note this morning. Raymo Lencho, top securities analyst following software industry. And my feeling George is that historically, "Your price is too high," has never been a headwind for software companies. You look at Oracle, you look at ServiceNow, sometimes customers complain about pricing too high. Splunk, and those companies tend to do very well. What's your take on pricing as a headwind or tailwind indicator? >> Well the way, you always set up these questions in a way that makes answering them easy. Because it's a tailwind in the sense that the deal sizes feed an enterprise sales force. And you need an enterprise sales force ultimately to be pervasive in an organization. 'Cause you can't just throw up like an Amazon-style console and say, "Pick your poison and put it all together." There has to be an advisory, consultative approach to working with a customer to tell them how best to fit their portfolio. >> Right. >> And their architecture. So yes, the price helps you feed that what some people in the last era of enterprise software used to call the most expensive migratory workforce in the world., which is the sales, enterprise sales organization. >> Sure, right. >> But what's happened in the different, in the change from the last major enterprise applications, ERPCRM, and what we're getting into now, is that then the data was all generated and captured by humans. It was keyboard entry. And so there was no, the volumes of data just weren't that great. It was human, essentially business transactions. Now we're capturing data streaming off everything. And you could say Splunk was sort of like the first one out of the gate doing that. And so if you take the new types of data, customer interactions, there are about ten to a hundred customer interactions for every business transaction. Then the information coming out of the IT applications and infrastructure. It's about ten to a hundred times what the customer interactions were. >> Yeah. >> So you can't price the, Your pricing model, if it stays the same will choke you. >> So you're talking about multiple orders of magnitude >> Yes. >> Of more data. >> Yeah. >> And if you're pricing by the terabyte, >> Right. >> Then that's going to cross your customers. >> Right. But here's what I would argue though George. I mean, and you mentioned AWS. AWS is another one where complaints of high pricing. But if, to me, if the company is adding value, the clients will pay for it. And when you get to the point where it becomes a potential headwind, the company, Oracle is a classic at this, will always adjust its pricing to accommodate both its needs as a public organization and a company that has to make money and fund R & D, and the customers needs, and find that balance where the competition can't get in. And so it seems to me, and we heard this from Doug Merritt yesterday, that his challenge is staying ahead of the game. Staying, moving faster than the cloud guys. >> Yeah. >> In what they do well. And to the extent that they do that, I feel like their customers will reward them with their loyalty. And so I feel as though they can adjust their pricing mechanisms. Yeah, everybody's worried about 606, and of course the conversions to subscriptions. I feel as though a high growth, and adjustments to your pricing strategy, I think can address that. What do you think about that? >> It's... It sounds like one of those sayings where, the friends say, "Well it works in practice, "but does it work in theory?" >> No, no. But it has worked in practice in the industry hasn't it? So what's different now? >> Okay. So take Oracle, at list price for Oracle 12C, flagship database. The price per processor core, with all the features thrown in, is something like three hundred thousand, three hundred fifty thousand per core. So you take an average Intel high end server chip, that might have 24 cores, and then you have two sockets, so essentially one node server is 48 times 350. And then of course, Oracle will say, "But for a large customer, we'll knock 90% off that," or something like that. >> Yeah, well exactly. >> Which is exactly what the Splunk guys told me yesterday. But it's-- >> But that's what I'm saying. They'll do what they have to do to maintain the footprint in the customer, do right by the customer, and keep the competition out. >> But if it's multiple orders of magnitude different. If you take the open source guys where essentially the software's free and you're just paying for maintenance. >> (laughs) Yeah and humans. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Okay, that's the other advantage of Splunk, as you pointed out yesterday, they've got a much more integrated set of offerings and services that dramatically lower. I mean, we all know the biggest cost of IT is people. It's not the hardware and software but, all right, I don't want to rat hole on pricing, but that was a good discussion. What did you learn yesterday? You've sat through the analyst meeting. Give us the rundown on George Gilbert's analysis of .conf generally and Splunk as a company specifically. >> Okay, so for me it was a bit of an eye opener because I got to understand sort of, I've always had this feeling about where Splunk fits relative to the open source big data ecosystem. But now I got a sense for what their ambitions are, and what their tactical plan is. I've said for awhile, Splunk's the anti-Hadoop. You know, Hadoop is multiple, sort of dozens of animals with three zookeepers. And I mean literally. >> Yeah. >> And the upside of that is, those individual projects are advancing with a pace of innovation that's just unheard of. The problem is the customer bears the burden of putting it all together. Splunk takes a very different approach which is, they aspire apparently to be just like Hadoop in terms of platform for modern operational analytic applications, but they start much narrower. And it gets to what Ramie's point was in that Wall Street review, where if you take at face value what they're saying, or you've listened just to the keynote, it's like, "Geez, they're in this IT operations ghetto, "in security and that's a La Brea tar pit, "and how are they ever going to climb out of that, "to something really broad?" But what they're doing is, they're not claiming loudly that they're trying to topple the giants and take on the world. They're trying to grow in their corner where they have a defensible moat. And basically the-- >> Let me interrupt you. >> Yeah. >> But to get to five billion >> Yeah. >> Or beyond, they have to have an aggressive TAM expansion strategy, kind of beyond ITOM and security, don't they? >> Right. And so that's where they start generalizing their platform. The data store they had on the platform, the original one, is kind of like a data lake in the sense that it really was sort of the same searchable type index that you would put under a sort of a primitive search engine. They added a new data store this time that handles numbers really well and really fast. That's to support the metrics so they can have richer analytics on the dashboard. Then they'll have other data stores that they add over time. And for each one, you're able to now build with their integrated tool set, more and more advanced apps. >> So you can't use a general purpose data store. You've got to use the Splunk within data. It's kind of like Work Day. >> Yeah, well except that they're adding more over time, and then they're putting their development tools over these to shield them. Now how seamlessly they can shield them remains to be seen. >> Well, but so this is where it gets interesting. >> Yeah. >> Splunk as a platform, as an application development platform on which you can build big data apps, >> Yeah. >> It's certainly, conceptually, you can see how you could use Splunk to do that right? >> And so their approaches out of the box will help you with enterprise security, user, they call it user behavior analytics, because it's a term another research firm put on it, but it's really any abnormal behavior of an entity on the network. So they can go in and not sell this fuzzy concept of a big data platform. They said, they go in and sell, to security operations center, "We make your life much, much easier. "And we make your organization safer." And they call these curated experiences. And the reason this is important is, when Hadoop sells, typically they go in, and they say, "Well, we have this data lake. "which is so much cheaper and a better way "to collect all your data than a data warehouse." These guys go in and then they'll add what more and more of these curated experiences, which is what everyone else would call applications. And then the research Wikibon's done, depth first, or rather breadth first versus depth first. Breadth first gives you the end to end visibility across on prem, across multiple clouds, down to the edge. But then, when they put security apps on it, when they put dev ops or, some future big data analytics apps as their machine learning gets richer and richer, then all of a sudden, they're not selling the platform, because that's a much more time-intensive sale, and lots more of objectives, I'm sorry, objections. >> It's not only the solutions, those depth solutions. >> Yes, and then all of a sudden, the customer wakes up and he's got a dozen of these things, and all of a sudden this is a platform. >> Well, ServiceNow is similar in that it's a platform. And when Fred Luddy first came out with it, it's like, "Here." And everybody said, "Well, what do I do with it?" So he went back and wrote a IT service management app. And they said, "Oh okay, we get it." Splunk in a similar way has these depth apps, and as you say, they're not selling the platform, because they say, "Hey, you want to buy a platform?" people don't want to buy a platform, they want to buy a solution. >> Right. >> Having said that, that platform is intrinsic to their solutions when they deliver it. It's there for them to leverage. So the question is, do they have an application developer kit strategy, if you will. >> Yeah. >> Whether it's low code or even high code. >> Yeah. >> Where, and where they're cultivating a developer community. Is there anything like that going on here at .conf? >> Yeah, they're not making a big deal about the development tools, 'cause that makes it sound more like a platform. >> (laughs) But they could! >> But they could. And the tools, you know, so that you can build a user interface, you can build dashboards, you can build machine learning models. The reason those tools are simpler and more accessible to developers, is because they were designed to fit the pieces underneath, the foundation. Whereas if you look at some of the open source big data ecosystem, they've got these notebooks and other tools where you address one back end this way, another back end that way. It's sort of, you know, you can see how Frankenstein was stitched together, you know? >> Yeah so, I mean to your point, we saw fraud detection, we saw ransomware, we see this partnership with Booz Allen Hamilton on Cyber4Sight. We heard today about project Waytono, which is unified monitoring and troubleshooting. And so they have very specific solutions that they're delivering, that presumably many of them are for pay. And so, and bringing ML across the platform, which now open up a whole ton of opportunities. So the question is, are these incremental, defend the base and then grow the core solutions, or are they radical innovations in your view? >> I think they're trying to stay away from the notion of radical innovation, 'cause then that will create more pushback from organizations. So they started out with a google-search-like product for log analytics. And you can see that as their aspirations grow for a broader set of applications, they add in a richer foundation. There's more machine learning algorithms now. They added that new data store. And when we talked about this with the CEO, Doug Merritt yesterday at the analyst day, he's like, "Yes, you look out three to five years, "and the platform gets more and more broad. "and at some point customers wake up "and they realize they have a new strategic platform." >> Yeah, and platforms do beat products, and even though it's hard sell, if you have a platform like Splunk does, you're in a much better strategic position. All right, we got to wrap. George thanks for joining me for the intro. I know you're headed to New York City for Big Data NYC down there, which is the other coverage that we have this week. So thank you again for coming on. >> Okay. >> All right, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest, we're live. This is the CUBE from Splunk .conf2017 in the nation's capitol, be right back. (electronic music)