(soft music) >> Welcome back to Sin City, guys and girls we're glad you're with us. You've been watching theCUBE all week, we know that. This is theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 22, from the Venetian Expo Center where there are tens of thousands of people, and this event if you know it, covers the entire strip. There are over 55,000 people here, hundreds of thousands online. Dave, this has been a fantastic show. It is clear everyone's back. We're hearing phenomenal stories from AWS and it's ecosystem. We got a great customer story coming up next, featured on the main stage. >> Yeah, I mean, you know, post pandemic, you start to think about, okay, how are things changing? And one of the things that we heard from Adam Selipsky, was, we're going beyond digital transformation into business transformation. Okay. That can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. I have a sense of what it means. And I think this next interview really talks to business transformation beyond digital transformation, beyond the IT. >> Excellent. We've got two guests. One of them is an alumni, Scott Mullins joins us, GM, AWS Worldwide Financial Services, and Brad Peterson is here, the EVP, CIO and CTO of NASDAQ. Welcome guys. Great to have you. >> Hey guys. >> Hey guys. Thanks for having us. >> Yeah >> Brad, talk a little bit, there was an announcement with NASDAQ and AWS last year, a year ago, about how they're partnering to transform capital markets. It was a highlight of last year. Remind us what you talked about and what's gone on since then. >> Yeah, so, we are very excited. I work with Adena Friedman, she's my boss, CEO of NASDAQ, and she was on stage with Adam for his first Keynote as CEO of AWS. And we made the commitment that we were going to move our markets to the Cloud. And we've been a long time customer of AWS and everyone said, you know the last piece, the last frontier to be moved was the actual matching where all the messages, the quotes get matched together to become confirmed orders. So that was what we committed to less than a year ago. And we said we were going to move one of our options markets. In the US, we have six of them. And options markets are the most challenging, they're the most high volume and high performance. So we said, let's start with something really challenging and prove we can do it together with AWS. So we committed to that. >> And? Results so far? >> So, I can sit here and say that November 7th so we are live, we're in production and the MRX Exchange is called Mercury, so we shorten it for MRX, we like acronyms in technology. And so, we started with a phased launch of symbols, so you kind of allow yourself to make sure you have all the functionality working then you add some volume on it, and we are going to complete the conversion on Monday. So we are all good so far. And I have some results I can share, but maybe Scott, if you want to talk about why we did that together. >> Yeah. >> And what we've done together over many years. >> Right. You know, Brian, I think it's a natural extension of our relationship, right? You know, you look at the 12 year relationship that AWS and NASDAQ have had together, it's just the next step, in the way that we're going to help the industry transform itself. And so not just NASDAQ's business transformation for itself, but really a blueprint and a template for the entire capital markets industry. And so many times people will ask me, who's using Cloud well? Who's doing well in the Cloud? And NASDAQ is an easy example to point to, of somebody who's truly taking advantage of these capabilities because the Cloud isn't a place, it's a set of capabilities. And so, this is a shining example of how to use these capabilities to actually deliver real business benefit, not just to to your organization, but I think the really exciting part is the market technology piece of how you're serving other exchanges. >> So last year before re:Invent, we said, and it's obvious within the tech ecosystem, that technology companies are building on top of the Cloud. We said, the big trend that we see in the 2020s is that, you know, consumers of IT, historically, your customers are going to start taking their stacks, their software, their data, their services and sassifying, putting it on the Cloud and delivering new services to customers. So when we saw Adena on stage last year, we called it by the way, we called it Super Cloud. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Some people liked the term but I love it. And so yeah, Super Cloud. So when we saw Adena on stage, we said that's a great example. We've seen Capital One doing some similar things, we've had some conversations with US West, it's happening, right? So talk about how you actually do that. I mean, because you've got a lot, you've got a big on-premises stay, are you connecting to that? Is it all in the Cloud? Paint a picture of what the architecture looks like? >> Yeah. And there's, so you started with the business transformation, so I like that. >> Yeah. >> And the Super Cloud designation, what we are is, we own and operate exchanges in the United States and in Europe and in Canada. So we have our own markets that we're looking at modernizing. So we look at this, as a modernization of the capital market infrastructure, but we happen to be the leading technology provider for other markets around the world. So you either build your own or you source from us. And we're by far the leading provider. So a lot of our customers said, how about if you go first? It's kind of like Mikey, you know, give it to Mikey, let him try it. >> See if Mikey likes it. >> Yeah. >> Penguin off the iceberg thing. >> Yeah. And so what we did is we said, to make this easy for our customers, so you want to ask your customers, you want to figure out how you can do it so that you don't disrupt their business. So we took the Edge Compute that was announced a few years ago, Amazon Outposts, and we were one of their early customers. So we started immediately to innovate with, jointly innovate with Amazon. And we said, this looks interesting for us. So we extended the region into our Carteret data center in Northern New Jersey, which gave us all the services that we know and love from Amazon. So our technical operations team has the same tools and services but then, we're able to connect because in the markets what we're doing is we need to connect fairly. So we need to ensure that you still have that fairness element. So by bringing it into our building and extending the Edge Compute platform, the AWS Outpost into Carteret, that allowed us to also talk very succinctly with our regulators. It's a familiar territory, it's all buttoned up. And that simplified the conversion conversation with the regulators. It simplified it with our customers. And then it was up to us to then deliver time and performance >> Because you had alternatives. You could have taken a more mature kind of on-prem legacy stack, figured out how to bolt that in, you know, less cloudy. So why did you choose Outposts? I am curious. >> Well, Outposts looked like when it was announced, that it was really about extending territory, so we had our customers in mind, our global customers, and they don't always have an AWS region in country. So a lot of you think about a regulator, they're going to say, well where is this region located? So finally we saw this ability to grow the Cloud geographically. And of course we're in Sweden, so we we work with the AWS region in Stockholm, but not every country has a region yet. >> And we're working as fast as we can. - Yes, you are. >> Building in every single location around the planet. >> You're doing a good job. >> So, we saw it as an investment that Amazon had to grow the geographic footprint and we have customers in many smaller countries that don't have a region today. So maybe talk a little bit about what you guys had in mind and it's a multi-industry trend that the Edge Compute has four or five industries that you can say, this really makes a lot of sense to extend the Cloud. >> And David, you said it earlier, there's a trend of ecosystems that are coming onto the Cloud. This is our opportunity to bring the Cloud to an ecosystem, to an existing ecosystem. And if you think about NASDAQ's data center in Carteret, there's an ecosystem of NASDAQ's clients there that are there to be with NASDAQ. And so, it was actually much easier for us as we worked together over a really a four year period, thinking about this and how to make this technological transition, to actually bring the capabilities to that ecosystem, rather than trying to bring the ecosystem to AWS in one of our public regions. And so, that's been our philosophy with Outpost all along. It's actually extending our capabilities that our customers know and love into any environment that they need to be able to use that in. And so to Brad's point about servicing other markets in different countries around the world, it actually gives us that ability to do that very quickly, very nimbly and very succinctly and successfully. >> Did you guys write a working backwards document for this initiative? >> We did. >> Yeah, we actually did. So to be, this is one of the fully exercised. We have a couple of... So by the way, Scott used to work at NASDAQ and we have a number of people who have gone from NASDAQ data to AWS, and from AWS to NASDAQ. So we have adopted, that's one of the things that we think is an effective way to really clarify what you're trying to accomplish with a project. So I know you're a little bit kidding on that, but we did. >> No, I was close. Because I want to go to the like, where are we in the milestone? And take us through kind of what we can expect going forward now that we've worked backwards. >> Yep, we did. >> We did. And look, I think from a milestone perspective, as you heard Brad say, we're very excited that we've stood up MRX in production. Having worked at NASDAQ myself, when you make a change and when you stand up a market that's always a moment where you're working with your community, with your clients and you've got a market-wide call that you're working and you're wanting to make sure that everything goes smoothly. And so, when that call went smoothly and that transition went smoothly I know you were very happy, and in AWS, we were also very happy as well that we hit that milestone within the timeframe that Adena set. And that was very important I know to you. >> Yeah. >> And for us as well. >> Yeah. And our commitment, so the time base of this one was by the end of 2022. So November 7th, checked. We got that one done. >> That's awesome. >> The other one is we said, we wanted the performance to be as good or better than our current platform that we have. And we were putting a new version of our derivative or options software onto this platform. We had confidence because we already rolled it to one market in the US then we rolled it earlier this year and that was last year. And we rolled it to our nordic derivatives market. And we saw really good customer feedback. So we had confidence in our software was going to run. Now we had to marry that up with the Outpost platform and we said we really want to achieve as good or better performance and we achieved better performance, so that's noticeable by our customers. And that one was the biggest question. I think our customers understand when we set a date, we test them with them. We have our national test facility that they can test in. But really the big question was how is it going to perform? And that was, I think one of the biggest proof points that we're really proud about, jointly together. And it took both, it took both of us to really innovate and get the platform right, and we did a number of iterations. We're never done. >> Right. >> But we have a final result that says it is better. >> Well, congratulations. - Thank you. >> It sounds like you guys have done a tremendous job. What can we expect in 2023? From NASDAQ and AWS? Any little nuggets you can share? >> Well, we just came from the partner, the partner Keynote with Adam and Ruba and we had another colleague on stage, so Nick Ciubotariu, so he is actually someone who brought digital assets and cryptocurrencies onto the Venmo, PayPal platform. He joined NASDAQ about a year ago and we announced that in our marketplace, the Amazon marketplace, we are going to offer digital custody, digital assets custody solution. So that is certainly going to be something we're excited about in 2023. >> I know we got to go, but I love this story because it fits so great at the Super cloud but we've learned so much from Amazon over the years. Two pieces of teams, we talked about working backwards, customer obsession, but this is a story of NASDAQ pointing its internal capabilities externally. We're already on that journey and then, bringing that to the Cloud. Very powerful story. I wonder what's next in this, because we learn a lot and we, it's like the NFL, we copy it. I think about product market fit. You think about scientific, you know, go to market and seeing that applied to the financial services industry and obviously other industries, it's really exciting to see. So congratulations. >> No, thank you. And look, I think it's an example of Invent and Simplify, that's another Amazon principle. And this is, I think a great example of inventing on behalf of an industry and then continually working to simplify the way that the industry works with all of us. >> Last question and we've got only 30 seconds left. Brad, I'm going to direct it to you. If you had the opportunity to take over the NASDAQ sign in Times Square and say a phrase that summarizes what NASDAQ and AWS are doing together, what would it say? >> Oh, and I think I'm going to put that up on Monday. So we're going to close the market together and it's going to say, "Modernizing the capital market's infrastructure together." >> Very cool. >> Excellent. Drop the mic. Guys, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate you joining us on the show, sharing your insights and what NASDAQ and AWS are doing. We're going to have to keep watching this. You're going to have to come back next year. >> All right. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome back to theCUBE as to continue our coverage here at AWS re:Invent '22. We're in the Venetian. Out in Las Vegas, it is Wednesday. And the PaaS is still happening. I can guarantee you that. We continue our series of discussions as part of the "AWS Startup Showcase". This is the "Global Startup Program", a part of that showcase. And I'm joined by two gentlemen today who are going to talk about what CoreStack is up to. One of them is Ez Natarajan, who is the Founder and CEO. Good to have you- (simultaneous chatter) with us today. We appreciate it. Thanks, EZ. >> Nice to meet you, John. >> And Brad Winney who is the area Sales Leader for startups at AWS. Brad, good to see you. >> Good to see you, John. >> Thanks for joining us here on The Showcase. So Ez, first off, let's just talk about CoreStack a little bit for people at home who might not be familiar with what you do. It's all about obviously data, governance, giving people peace of mind, but much deeper than that. I'll let you take it from there. >> So CoreStack is a governance platform that helps customers maximize their cloud usage and get governance at scale. When we talk about governance, we instill confidence through three layers: solving the problems of the CIO, solving the problems of the CTO, solving the problems of the CFO, together with a single pin of class,- >> John: Mm-hmm. >> which helps them achieve continuous holistic automated outcomes at any given time. >> John: Mm-hmm. So, Brad, follow up on that a little bit- >> Yeah. because Ez touched on it there that he's got a lot of stakeholders- >> Right. >> with a lot of different needs and a lot of different demands- >> Mm-hmm. >> but the same overriding emotion, right? >> Yeah. >> They all want confidence. >> They all want confidence. And one of the trickiest parts of confidence is the governance issue, which is policy. It's how do we determine who has access to what, how we do that scale. And across not only start been a process. This is a huge concern, especially as we talked a lot about cutting costs as the overriding driver for 2023. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> The economic compression being what it is, you still have to do this in a secure way and as a riskless way as possible. And so companies like CoreStack really offer core, no pun intended, (Ez laughs) function there where you abstract out a lot of the complexity of governance and you make governance a much more simple process. And that's why we're big fans of what they do. >> So we think governance from a three dimensional standpoint, right? (speaks faintly) How do we help customers be more compliant, secure, achieve the best performance and operations with increased availability? >> Jaohn: Mm-hmm. >> At the same time do the right spend from a cost standpoint. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. So when all three dimensions are connected, the business velocity increases and the customer's ability to cater to their customers increase. So our governance tenants come from these three pillars of finance operations, security operations and air operations at cloud operations. >> Yeah. And... Yeah. Please, go ahead. >> Can I (indistinct)? >> Oh, I'm sorry. Just- >> No, that's fine. >> So part of what's going on here, which is critical for AWS, is if you notice a lot of (indistinct) language is at the business value with key stakeholders of the CTO, the CSO and so on. And we're doing a much better job of speaking business value on top of AWS services. But the AWS partners, again, like CoreStack have such great expertise- >> John: Mm-hmm. >> in that level of dialogue. That's why it's such a key part for us, why we're really interested partnering with them. >> How do you wrestle with this, wrestle may not be the right word, but because you do have, as we just went through these litany, these business parts of your business or a business that need access- >> Ez: Mm-hmm. >> and that you need to have policies in place, but they change, right? I mean, and somebody maybe from the financial side should have a window into data and other slices of their business. There's a lot of internal auditing. >> Man: Mm-hmm. >> Obviously, it's got to be done, right? And so just talk about that process a little bit. How you identify the appropriate avenues or the appropriate gateways for people to- >> Sure. >> access data so that you can have that confidence as a CTO or CSO, that it's all right. And we're not going to let too much- >> out to the wrong people. >> Sure. >> Yeah. So there are two dimensions that drive the businesses to look for that kind of confidence building exercise, right? One, there are regulatory external requirements that say that I know if I'm in the financial industry, I maybe need to following NIST, PCI, and sort of compliances. Or if I'm in the healthcare industry, maybe HIPAA and related compliance, I need to follow. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> That's an external pressure. Internally, the organizations based on their geographical presence and the kind of partners and customers they cater to, they may have their own standards. And when they start adopting cloud; A, for each service, how do I make sure the service is secure and it operates at the best level so that we don't violate any of the internal or external requirements. At the same time, we get the outcome that is needed. And that is driven into policies, that is driven into standards which are consumable easily, like AWS offers well-architected framework that helps customers make sure that I know I'm architecting my application workloads in a way that meets the business demands. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And what CoreStack has done is taken that and automated it in such a way it helps the customers simplify that process to get that outcome measured easily so they get that confidence to consume more of the higher order services. >> John: Okay. And I'm wondering about your relationship as far with AWS goes, because, to me, it's like going deep sea fishing and all of a sudden you get this big 4, 500 pound fish. Like, now what? >> Mm-hmm. >> Now what do we do because we got what we wanted? So, talk about the "Now what?" with AWS in terms of that relationship, what they're helping you with, and the kind of services that you're seeking from them as well. >> Oh, thanks to Brad and the entire Global Startup Ecosystem team at AWS. And we have been part of AWS Ecosystem at various levels, starting from Marketplace to ISV Accelerate to APN Partners, Cloud Management Tools Competency Partner, Co-Sell programs. The team provides different leverages to connect to the entire ecosystem of how AWS gets consumed by the customers. Customers may come through channels and partners. And these channels and partners maybe from WAs to MSPs to SIs to how they really want to use each. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And the ecosystem that AWS provides helps us feed into all these players and provide this higher order capability which instills confidence to the customers end of the day. >> Man: Absolutely. Right. >> And this can be taken through an MSP. This can be taken through a GSI. This can be taken to the customer through a WA. And that's how our play of expansion into larger AWS customer base. >> Brad: Yeah. >> Brad, from your side of the fence. >> Brad: No, its... This is where the commons of scale come to benefit our partners. And AWS has easily the largest ecosystem. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> Whether or not it's partners, customers, and the like. And so... And then, all the respective teams and programs bring all those resources to bear for startups. Your analogy of of catching a big fish off coast, I actually have a house in Florida. I spend a lot of time there. >> Interviewer: Okay. >> I've yet to catch a big 500 pound fish. But... (interviewer laughs) >> But they're out there. >> But they're definitely out there. >> Yeah. >> And so, in addition to the formalized programs like the Global Partner Network Program, the APN and Marketplace, we really break our activities down with the CoreStacks of the world into two major kind of processes: "Sell to" and "Sell with". And when we say "Sell to", what we're really doing is helping them architect for the future. And so, that plays dividends for their customers. So what do we mean by that? We mean helping them take advantage of all the latest serverless technologies: the latest chip sets like Graviton, thing like that. So that has the added benefit of just lowering the overall cost of deployment and expend. And that's... And we focus on that really extensively. So don't ever want to lose that part of the picture of what we do. >> Mm-hmm. >> And the "Sell with" is what he just mentioned, which is, our teams out in the field compliment these programs like APN and Marketplace with person-to-person in relationship development for core key opportunities in things like FinTech and Retail and so on. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> We have significant industry groups and business units- >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> in the enterprise level that our teams work with day in and day out to help foster those relationships. And to help CoreStack continue to develop and grow that business. >> Yeah. We've talked a lot about cost, right? >> Yeah. >> But there's a difference between reducing costs or optimizing your spend, right? I mean there- >> Brad: Right. >> Right. There's a... They're very different prism. So in terms of optimizing and what you're doing in the data governance world, what kind of conversations discussions are you having with your clients? And how is that relationship with AWS allowing you to go with confidence into those discussions and be able to sell optimization of how they're going to spend maybe more money than they had planned on originally? >> So today, because of the extra external micro-market conditions, every single customer that we talk to wanting to take a foster status of, "Hey, where are we today? How are we using the cloud? Are we in an optimized state?" >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> And when it comes to optimization, again, the larger customers that we talk to are really bothered about the business outcome and how their services and ability to cater to their customers, right? >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> They don't want to compromise on that just because they want to optimize on the spend. That conversation trickled down to taking a poster assessment first, and then are you using the right set of services within AWS? Are the right set of services being optimized for various requirements? >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> And AWS help in terms of catering to the segment of customers who need that kind of a play through the patent ecosystem. >> John: Mm-hmm. Yeah. We've talked a lot about confidence too, cloud with confidence. >> Brad: Yeah. Yeah. >> What does that mean to different people, you think? I mean, (Brad laughing) because don't you have to feel them out and say "Okay. What's kind of your tolerance level for certain, not risks, but certain measures that you might need to change"? >> I actually think it's flipped the other way around now. I think the risk factor- >> Okay. >> is more on your on-prem environment. And all that goes with that. 'Cause you... Because the development of the cloud in the last 15 years has been profound. It's gone from... That's been the risky proposition now. With all of the infrastructure, all the security and compliance guardrails we have built into the cloud, it's really more about transition and risk of transition. And that's what we see a lot of. And that's why, again, where governance comes into play here, which is how do I move my business from on-prem in a fairly insecure environment relatively speaking to the secure cloud? >> Interviewer: Sure. >> How do I do that without disrupting business? How do I do that without putting my business at risk? And that's a key piece. I want to come back, if I may, something on cost-cutting. >> Interviewer: Sure. >> We were talking about this on the way up here. Cost-cutting, it's the bonfire of the vanities in that in that everybody is talking about cost-cutting. And so we're in doing that perpetuating the very problem that we kind of want to avoid, which is our big cost-cutting. (laughs) So... And I say that because in the venture capital community, what's happening is two things: One is, everybody's being asked to extend their runways as much as possible, but they are not letting them off the hook on growth. And so what we're seeing a lot of is a more nuanced conversation of where you trim your costs, it's not essential, spend, but reinvest. Especially if you've got good strong product market fit, reinvest that for growth. And so that's... So if I think about our playbook for 2023, it's to help good strong startups. Either tune their market fit or now that they good have have good market fit, really run and develop their business. So growth is not off the hook for 2023. >> And then let me just hit on something- >> Yeah. >> before we say goodbye here that you just touched on too, Brad, about. How we see startups, right? AWS, I mean, obviously there's a company focus on nurturing this environment of innovation and of growth. And for people looking at maybe through different prisms and coming. >> Brad: Yeah. >> So if you would maybe from your side of the fence, Ez from CoreStack, about working as a startup with AWS, I mean, how would you characterize that relationship about the kind of partnership that you have? And I want to hear from Brad too about how he sees AWS in general in the startup world. But go ahead. >> It's kind of a mutually enriching relationship, right? The support that comes from AWS because our combined goal is help the customers maximize the potential of cloud. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> And we talked about confidence. And we talked about all the enablement that we provide. But the partnership helps us get to the reach, right? >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> Reach at scale. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. We are talking about customers from different industry verticals having different set of problems. And how do we solve it together so that like the reimbursement that happens, in fact healthcare customers that we repeatedly talk to, even in the current market conditions, they don't want to save. They want to optimize and re-spend their savings using more cloud. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> So that's the partnership that is mutually enriching. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. To me, this is easy. I think the reason why a lot of us are here at AWS, especially the startup world, is that our business interests are completely aligned. So I run a pretty significant business unit in a startup neighbor. But a good part of my job and my team's job is to go help cut costs. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> So tell me... Show me a revenue responsibility position where part of your job is to go cut cost. >> Interviewer: Right. >> It's so unique and we're not a non-profit. We just have a very good long-term view, right? Which is, if we help companies reduce costs and conserve capital and really make sure that that capital is being used the right way, then their long-term viability comes into play. And that's where we have a chance to win more of that business over time. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> And so because those business interests are very congruent and we come in, we earn so much trust in the process. But I think that... That's why I think we being AWS, are uniquely successful startups. Our business interests are completely aligned and there's a lot of trust for that. >> It's a great success story. It really is. And thank you for sharing your little slice of that and growing slice of that too- >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> from all appearances. Thank you both. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you very much, John. >> Appreciate your time. >> This is part of the AWS Startup Showcase. And I'm John Walls. You're watching theCUBE here at AWS re:Invent '22. And theCUBE, of course, the leader in high tech coverage.

(calming music) >> Hello and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here at AWS re:Invent day three of our scintillating coverage here on theCUBE. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by John Furrier. John Day three energy's high. How you feeling? >> I dunno, it's day two, day three, day four. It feels like day four, but again, we're back. >> Who's counting? >> Three pandemic levels in terms of 50,000 plus people? Hallways are packed. I got pictures. People don't believe it. It's actually happening. Then people are back. So, you know, and then the economy is a big question too and it's still, people are here, they're still building on the cloud and cost is a big thing. This next segment's going to be really important. I'm looking forward to this next segment. >> Yeah, me too. Without further ado let's welcome our guests for this segment. We have Brad from AMD and we have Rahul from you are, well you do a variety of different things. We'll start with CloudFix for this segment, but we could we could talk about your multiple hats all day long. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. How you doing? Brad how does it feel? We love seeing your logo above our stage here. >> Oh look, we love this. And talking about re:Invent last year, the energy this year compared to last year is so much bigger. We love it. We're excited to be here. >> Yeah, that's awesome. Rahul, how are you feeling? >> Excellent, I mean, I think this is my eighth or ninth re:Invent at this point and it's been fabulous. I think the, the crowd, the engagement, it's awesome. >> You wouldn't know there's a looming recession if you look at the activity but yet still the reality is here we had an analyst on yesterday, we were talking about spend more in the cloud, save more. So that you can still use the cloud and there's a lot of right sizing, I call you got to turn the lights off before you go to bed. Kind of be more efficient with your infrastructure as a theme. This re:Invent is a lot more about that now. Before it's about the glory days. Oh yeah, keep building, now with a little bit of pressure. This is the conversation. >> Exactly and I think most companies are looking to figure out how to innovate their way out of this uncertainty that's kind of on everyone's head. And the only way to do it is to be able to be more efficient with whatever your existing spend is, take those savings and then apply them to innovating on new stuff. And that's the way to go about it at this point. >> I think it's such a hot topic, for everyone that we're talking about. I mean, total cost optimization figuring out ways to be more efficient. I know that that's a big part of your mission at CloudFix. So just in case the audience isn't versed, give us the pitch. >> Okay, so a little bit of background on this. So the other hat I wear is CTO of ESW Capital. We have over 150 enterprise software companies within the portfolio. And one of my jobs is also to manage and run about 40 to 45,000 AWS accounts of our own. >> Casual number, just a few, just a couple pocket change, no big deal. >> And like everyone else here in the audience, yeah we had a problem with our costs, just going out of control and as we were looking at a lot of the tools to help us kind of get more efficient one of the biggest issues was that while people give you a lot of recommendations recommendations are way too far from realized savings. And we were running through the challenge of how do you take recommendation and turn them into real savings and multiple different hurdles. The short story being, we had to create CloudFix to actually realize those savings. So we took AWS recommendations around cost, filtered them down to the ones that are completely non-disruptive in nature, implemented those as simple automations that everyone could just run and realize those savings right away. We then took those savings and then started applying them to innovating and doing new interesting things with that money. >> Is there a best practice in your mind that you see merging in this time? People start more focused on it. Is there a method or a purpose kind of best practice of how to approach cost optimization? >> I think one of the things that most people don't realize is that cost optimization is not a one and done thing. It is literally nonstop. Which means that, on one hand AWS is constantly creating new services. There are over a hundred thousand API at this point of time How to use them right, how to use them efficiently You also have a problem of choice. Developers are constantly discovering new services discovering new ways to utilize them. And they are behaving in ways that you had not anticipated before. So you have to stay on top of things all the time. And really the only way to kind of stay on top is to have automation that helps you stay on top of all of these things. So yeah, finding efficiencies, standardizing your practices about how you leverage these AWS services and then automating the governance and hygiene around how you utilize them is really the key >> Brad tell me what this means for AMD and what working with CloudFix and Rahul does for your customers. >> Well, the idea of efficiency and cost optimization is near and dear to our heart. We have the leading. >> It's near and dear to everyone's heart, right now. (group laughs) >> But we are the leaders in x86 price performance and density and power efficiency. So this is something that's actually part of our core culture. We've been doing this a long time and what's interesting is most companies don't understand how much more efficiency they can get out of their applications aside from just the choices they make in cloud. but that's the one thing, the message we're giving to everybody is choice matters very much when it comes to your cloud solutions and just deciding what type of instance types you choose can have a massive impact on your bottom line. And so we are excited to partner with CloudFix, they've got a great model for this and they make it very easier for our customers to help identify those areas. And then AMD can come in as well and then help provide additional insight into those applications what else they can squeeze out of it. So it's a great relationship. >> If I hear you correctly, then there's more choice for the customers, faster selection, so no bad choices means bad performance if they have a workload or an app that needs to run, is that where you you kind of get into the, is that where it is or more? >> Well, I mean from the AMD side right now, one of the things they do very quickly is they identify where the low hanging fruit is. So it's the thing about x86 compatibility, you can shift instance types instantly in most cases without any change to your environment at all. And CloudFix has an automated tool to do that. And that's one thing you can immediately have an impact on your cost without having to do any work at all. And customers love that. >> What's the alternative if this doesn't exist they have to go manually figure it out or it gets them in the face or they see the numbers don't work or what's the, if you don't have the tool to automate what's the customer's experience >> The alternative is that you actually have people look at every single instance of usage of resources and try and figure out how to do this. At cloud scale, that just doesn't make sense. You just can't. >> It's too many different options. >> Correct The reality is that your resources your human resources are literally your most expensive part of your budget. You want to leverage all the amazing people you have to do the amazing work. This is not amazing work. This is mundane. >> So you free up all the people time. >> Correct, you free up wasting their time and resources on doing something that's mundane, simple and should be automated, because that's the only way you scale. >> I think of you is like a little helper in the background helping me save money while I'm not thinking about it. It's like a good financial planner making you money since we're talking about the economy >> Pretty much, the other analogy that I give to all the technologists is this is like garbage collection. Like for most languages when you are coding, you have these new languages that do garbage collection for you. You don't do memory management and stuff where developers back in the day used to do that. Why do that when you can have technology do that in an automated manner for you in an optimal way. So just kind of freeing up your developer's time from doing this stuff that's mundane and it's a standard best practice. One of the things that we leverage AMD for, is they've helped us define the process of seamlessly migrating folks over to AMD based instances without any major disruptions or trying to minimize every aspect of disruption. So all the best practices are kind of borrowed from them, borrowed from AWS in most other cases. And we basically put them in the automation so that you don't ever have to worry about that stuff. >> Well you're getting so much data you have the opportunity to really streamline, I mean I love this, because you can look across industry, across verticals and behavior of what other folks are doing. Learn from that and apply that in the background to all your different customers. >> So how big is the company? How big is the team? >> So we have people in about 130 different countries. So we've completely been remote and global and actually the cloud has been one of the big enablers of that. >> That's awesome, 130 countries. >> And that's the best part of it. I was just telling Brad a short while ago that's allowed us to hire the best talent from across the world and they spend their time building new amazing products and new solutions instead of doing all this other mundane stuff. So we are big believers in automation not only for our world. And once our customers started asking us about or telling us about the same problem that they were having that's when we actually took what we had internally for our own purpose. We packaged it up as CloudFix and launched it last year at re:Invent. >> If the customers aren't thinking about automation then they're going to probably have struggle. They're going to probably struggle. I mean with more data coming in you see the data story here more data's coming in, more automation. And this year Brad price performance, I've heard the word price performance more this year at re:Invent than any other year I've heard it before, but this year, price performance not performance, price performance. So you're starting to hear that dialogue of squeeze, understand the use cases use the right specialized processor instance starting to see that evolve. >> Yeah and and there's so much to it. I mean, AMD right out of the box is any instance is 10% less expensive than the equivalent in the market right now on AWS. They do a great job of maximizing those products. We've got our Zen four core general processor family just released in November and it's going to be a beast. Yeah, we're very excited about it and AWS announced support for it so we're excited to see what they deliver there too. But price performance is so critical and again it's going back to the complexity of these environments. Giving some of these enterprises some help, to help them understand where they can get additional value. It goes well beyond the retail price. There's a lot more money to be shaved off the top just by spending time thinking about those applications. >> Yeah, absolutely. I love that you talked about collaboration we've been talking about community. I want to acknowledge the AWS super fans here, standing behind the stage. Rahul, I know that you are an AWS super fan. Can you tell us about that community and the program? >> Yeah, so I have been involved with AWS and building products with AWS since 2007. So it's kind of 15 years back when literally there were just a handful of API for launching EC2 instances and S3. >> Not the a hundred thousand that you mentioned earlier, my goodness, the scale. >> So I think I feel very privileged and honored that I have been part of that journey and have had to learn or have had the opportunity to learn both from successes and failures. And it's just my way of contributing back to that community. So we are part of the FinOps foundation as well, contributing through that. I run a podcast called AWS Insiders and a livestream called AWS Made Easy. So we are trying to make sure that people out there are able to understand how to leverage AWS in the best possible way. And yeah, we are there to help and hold their hand through it. >> Talk about the community, take a minute to explain to the audience watching the community around this cost optimization area. It's evolving, you mentioned FinOps. There's a whole large community developing, of practitioners and technologists coming together to look at this. What does this all mean? Talk about this community. >> So cost management within organizations is has evolved so drastically that organizations haven't really coped with it. Historically, you've had finance teams basically buy a lot of infrastructure, which is CapEx and the engineering teams had kind of an upper bound on what they would spend and where they would spend. Suddenly with cloud, that's kind of enabled so much innovation all of a sudden, everyone's realized it, five years was spent figuring out whether people should be on the cloud or not. That's no longer a question, right. Everyone needs to be in the cloud and I think that's a no-brainer. The problem there is that suddenly your operating model has moved from CapEx to OpEx. And organizations haven't really figured out how to deal with it. Finance now no longer has the controls to control and manage and forecast costs. Engineering has never had to deal with it in the past and suddenly now they have to figure out how to do all this finance stuff. And procurement finds itself in a very awkward way position because they are no longer doing these negotiations like they were doing in the past where it was okay right up front before you engage, you do these negotiations. Now it's kind of an ongoing thing and it's constantly changing. Like every day is different. >> And you got marketplace >> And you got marketplace. So it's a very complex situation and I think what we are trying to do with the FinOps foundation is try and take a lot of the best practices across organizations that have been doing this at least for the last 10, 15 years. Take all the learnings and failures and turn them into hopefully opinionated approaches that people can take organizations can take to navigate through this faster rather than kind of falter and then decide that oh, this is not for us. >> Yeah. It's a great model, it's a great model. >> I know it's time John, go ahead. >> All right so, we got a little bumper sticker exercise we used to say what's the bumper sticker for the show? We used to say that, now we're modernizing, we're saying if you had to do an Instagram reel right now, short hot take of what's going on at re:Invent this year with AMD or CloudFix or just in general what would be the sizzle reel, that would be on Instagram or TikTok, go. >> Look, I think when you're at re:Invent right now and number one the energy is fantastic. 23 is going to be a building year. We've got a lot of difficult times ahead financially but it's the time, the ones that come out of 23 stronger and more efficient, and cost optimize are going to survive the long run. So now's the time to build. >> Well done, Rahul let's go for it. >> Yeah, so like Brad said, cost and efficiencies at the top of everyone's mind. Stuff that's the low hanging fruit, easy, use automation. Apply your sources to do most of the innovation. Take the easiest part to realizing savings and operate as efficiently as you possibly can. I think that's got to be key. >> I think they nailed it. They both nailed it. Wow, well it was really good. >> I put you on our talent list of >> And alright, so we repeat them. Are you part of our host team? I love this, I absolutely love this Rahul we wish you the best at CloudFix and your 17 other jobs. And I am genuinely impressed. Do you sleep actually? Last question. >> I do, I do. I have an amazing team that really helps me with all of this. So yeah, thanks to them and thank you for having us here. >> It's been fantastic. >> It's our pleasure. And Brad, I'm delighted we get you both now and again on our next segment. Thank you for being here with us. >> Thank you very much. >> And thank you all for tuning in to our live coverage here at AWS re:Invent, in fabulous Sin City with John Furrier, my name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (calm music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to Las Vegas, Nevada. We're live from the show floor here at AWS re:Invent on theCUBE. My name is Savannah Peterson joined by my VIP co-host John Furrier. John, what's your hot take? >> We get wall-to-wall coverage day three of theCUBE (laughing loudly) shows popping, another day tomorrow. >> How many interviews have we done so far? >> I think we're over a hundred I think, (laughing loudly) we might be pushing a hundred. >> We've had a really fantastic line up of guests on theCUBE so far. We are in the meat of the sandwich right now. We've got a full line up of programming all day long and tomorrow. We are lucky to be joined by two fantastic gentlemen on our next segment. Brad, who's a familiar face. We just got to see you in that last one. Thank you for being here, you still doing good? >> Still good. >> Okay, great, glad nothing's changed in the last 14 minutes. >> 'no, we're good. >> Would've been tragic. And welcome, Mark, the CEO of Cloud Saver. Mark, how you doing this morning? >> I'm doing great, thanks so much. >> Savannah: How's the show going for ya'? >> It's going amazing. The turnout's just fantastic. It's record turnouts here. It's been lots of activity, it's great to be part of. >> So I suspect most people know about AMD, but Mark, I'm going to let you give us just a little intro to Cloud Saver so the audience is prepped... >> 'yeah, absolutely. So at Cloud Saver we help companies manage their Cloud spin. And the way that we do it is a little bit unique. Most people try and solve Cloud cost management just through a software only solution but we have a different perspective. There's so many complexities and nuances to managing your Cloud spin, that we don't think that software's enough. So our solution is a full managed service so we can plan our own proprietary technology with a full service delivery team, so that we come in and provide project management, Cloud engineering, FinOps analysts, and we come in and basically do all the cost authorization for the company. And so it's been a fantastic solution for us and something that's really resonated well within our customer base. >> I love your slogan. "Clean up the Cloud with the Cloud Saver Tag Manager'. >> Mark: That's right. >> So yesterday in the Keynote, Adams Lesky said, "Hey if you want to tighten your belt, come to the Cloud." So, big focus right now on right sizing. >> That's right. >> I won't say repatriation 'cause that's not kind of of happening, but like people are looking at it like they're not going to, it's not the glory days where you leave all your lights on in your house and you go to bed, you don't worry about the electricity bill. Now people are like, "Okay, what am I doing? Why am I doing it?" A lot more policy, a lot more focus. What are you guys seeing as the low hanging fruit, best practices, the use cases that people are implementing right now? >> Yeah, if you think about where things are at now from a Cloud cost management perspective, there's a lot of frustration in the marketplace because everybody sees their cost continually going up. And what typically happens is they'll say, okay we need to figure out what's going on with this cost and figure out where we can make some changes. And so they go out and get a cost visibility tool and then they're a little bit disappointed because all that visibility tool is completely dependent upon properly tagging your resources. So what a lot of people don't understand is that a lot of their pain that they're experiencing, the root cause is actually they've got a data problem which is why we built a entire solution to help companies clean up their Cloud, clean up their tags. It really is a foundational piece to help them understand how to manage their costs. >> I just.. >> Data is back in the data problem again >> Shocking, right? Not a theme we've heard on the show. Not a theme we've heard on the show at all. I mean, I think with tags it matters more than people realize and it can get very messy very quick. I know that this partnership is relatively new, six months, you told us before this show. Brad what does this partnership mean for AMD customers? >> Yeah, it's critical, they have a fantastic approach to this kind of a full service approach to cost optimization, compete optimization. AMD we're very, extremely focused on providing most cost efficient, most performance, and most energy efficient products on the market. And as Adam talked about, come to the Cloud to tighten your belt. I'll follow up. When you come to the Cloud, your choice matters, right? Your choice matters on what you use and what the downstream impact and cost is. And it also matters in sustainability and other other factors with our products. >> You know, yesterday Zeyess Karvellos one of our analysts on theCUBE, he used his own independent shop. We were talking about this focus and he actually made a comment I want to get your both reaction to, he said "Spend more in the Cloud, save more." Meaning there are ways to spend more on the Cloud and save more at the same time. >> Right. >> It's not just cut and eliminate, it's right side. I don't know what the right word is. Can you guys.. >> No, I think what you're saying is, is that there are areas where you need to spend more so you can be more efficient and get value that way, but there's also plenty of areas where you're spending money unnecessarily. Either you have resources that nobody's using. Let's find those and pull them to the front and center and turn them off, right? Or if you've over provisioned certain areas let's pull those back. So I think having the right balance of where you spend your money to get the value makes total sense. >> John: Yeah >> I like that holistic approach too. I like that you're not just looking at one thing. I mean, people, you're kind of, I'm thinking of you as like the McKinsey or like the dream team that just comes in tidies everything up. Makes sure that people are being, getting that total cost optimization. It's exciting. So who, I imagine, I mean obviously the entire organization benefits, but who benefits most? What types of roles? Who's using you? >> Right, so, Cloud cost management really benefits the entire organization, especially when times get tougher and everybody's looking to tighten their belt with cost. You know.. >> Wait every time when you say that, I'm like conscious, (laughing loudly) of my abdomen. we're in Vegas, there's great food, (laughing loudly) and we got, (laughing loudly) thanks a lot Adam, thanks a lot. (all laughing loudly). >> No, but it really does benefit everybody across the organization and it also helps people to keep cost management kind of front and center, right? No company allows people to have a complete blank check to go out there for infrastructure and as a way to make sure you've got proper checks and balances in place so that you're responsibly managing your IT organization. >> Yeah, and going back to the spend comment, spend more, you know, to save money. You know, look, we're going to be facing a very difficult situation in 23. I think there's going to be a lot of headwinds for a lot of companies. And the way to look at this is it's if you can provide yourself additional operating capital to work, there's other aspects to working with the business. Time to market, right? You're talking about addressing your top line. There's other ways to use applications and the services from AWS to help enable your business to grow even faster in '23 right? So '23 is a time to build, not necessarily a time to hang back and hope everything turns out okay. >> Yeah we can't go over it, (chuckles) We can't go under it, we got to go through it... >> Got to make it work >> Got to make our way through it. I think it's, yeah, it's so important. So as the partnership grows, what's next for you two companies? Brad will go to you first. >> Yeah sure you know, we're very excited to partner with Cloud Saver. It's fantastic company, have great team. And for us it's AMB is entering into the partnership space of this now. So now we've got a great position with AWS. We love their products, and now we're going to try to enable as many partners as we can in some specific areas. And for us cost optimization is priority number one. So you'll see a lot of programs that come out in '23 around this area. We're going to dedicate a lot of sales resources to help as many enterprise customers as we can, working with our close partners like Cloud Saver. >> Next ecosystem developing for you guys. >> Absolutely, absolutely, and you know AMD's they're still fairly new in the Cloud space, right? And this is a journey that takes a long time, and this is the next leg in our growth in the environment. >> Well, certainly the trend is more horsepower, more under the hood, more capabilities, customized >> Oh that's coming. >> Workloads. You're starting to see the specialized instances, you can see what's happening and soon it's going to be like a, it's own like computer in the Cloud >> Right. >> More horsepower. >> You think about this, I mean more than 400 instance types, more than 400 types of services out there in that range. And you think about all the potential interactions and applications. It's incredibly complex, right? >> Yeah that decision matrix just went like this in my brain when you said that. That is wild. And everyone wants to do more, faster, easier but also with the comfort of that cost savings, in terms of your customers priorities, I mean, you're talking to a lot of different people across a lot of different industries both of you are, I'm sure is cost optimization the number one priority as we're going into 2023? >> Yeah. Matter of fact, I have a chance to obviously speak with AWS leadership on a regular basis. Every single, they keep telling me for the past two months, every single CEO they're speaking to right now, it's the very first things out of the mouth. It's top of mind for every major corporation right now. And I think the message is also the same. It's like, great, let's help you do that but at the same time, is it not a bad time to re:Invest with some of those additional savings, right? And I think that's where the value of else comes into play. >> Yeah, and I think what you guys are demonstrating to also is another tell sign of this what I call NextGen Cloud evolution, which is as the end-to-end messaging and positioning expands and as you see more solutions. You know, let's face it, it's going to be more complex. So the complexity will be abstracted away by new opportunities like what you guys are doing, what you're enabling. So you're starting to see kind of platforms emerging across the board as well as more ISVs. So ISVs, people building software, starting to see now more symbiotic relationship, for developers and entrepreneurship. >> Yeah, so the complexity of the Cloud is certainly something that's not going to get any less as time goes on, right? And I think as companies realize that, they see it, they acknowledge it and I think they're going to lean on partners to help them navigate those waters. So that's where I think the combination of AMD and Cloud Saver, we can really partner very well because I think we're both very passionate about creating customer value, and I think there's a tremendous number of ways that we can collaborate together to bring that to the customers. >> And you know what's interesting too you guys are both hitting on this is that this next partner channel whatever you want to call it is very joint engineering and development. It's not just relationships and selling, there's integration and the new products that can come out is a phenomenal, we're going to watch. I think I predict that the ecosystem's going to explode big time in terms of value, just new things, joint engineering, API... >> 'it's so collaborative too. >> Yeah, it's going to be... >> 'well, the innovation in the marketplace right now is absolutely on fire. I mean, it's so exciting to see all the new technologies have on board. And to be able to see that kind of permeate throughout the marketplace is something that's just really fun and excited to be part of. >> Oh, when you think about the doom and gloom that we hear every day and you look around right now, everybody's building, right? And... >> this and smiling. >> And smiling, right? >> Paul: Today, (laughing loudly) >> Until Thursday when the legs start to get out. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, what recession? I mean, it's so crowded here. And again, this is the point that the Amazon is now a big player in this economy in 2008 that last recession, they weren't a factor. Now you got be tightening new solutions. I think you're going to see, I think more agility. I think Amazon and the ecosystem might propel us out the recession faster if you get the tailwind that might be a big thing we're watching. >> I agree. Cloud computing is inevitable. >> Yeah. >> It's inevitable. >> Yeah, it's no longer a conversation, it's a commitment. And I think we all certainly agree with that. So, Brad is versed in this challenge because we did it in our last segment. But Mark, we have a new tradition I should say, at re:Invent here, where we're looking for your 32nd Instagram reel, your sizzle your thought leadership hot take on the most important story or theme of the show this year. >> For the show as a whole. Wow, well, I think innovation is absolutely front and center today. I think, of the new technologies that we're seeing out there are absolutely phenomenal. I think they're taking the whole Cloud computing to the next level, and I think it's going to have a dramatic impact on how people develop applications and run workloads in the Cloud. >> Well done. What do you think John? I think you nailed it. >> Nailed it. Yeah, want to go for round two? >> Sure. >> Sure, I'll give a shot, (laughing loudly) So... >> 'get it, Brad. >> So, when in public Cloud choice matters? >> It matters. Think about the instance types you use think about the configurations you use and think about the applications you're layering in there and why they're there, right? Optimize those environments. Take advantage of all the tools you have. >> Yeah, you're going to start tuning your Cloud now. I mean, as it gets bigger and better, stronger you're going to start to see just fine tuning more craft, I guess. >> Mark: Yeah. >> In there, great stuff. >> Paul, and in these interesting times, I'm not committed to calling it a recession yet. I still have a chart of hope. I think that the services and the value that you provide to your customers are going to be one of those painkillers that will survive through this. I mean we're seeing a little bit of the trimming of the fat, of extraneous spending in the tech sector as a whole. But I can't imagine folks not wanting to leverage AMD and Cloud Saver, it's exciting, yeah. >> Saving money never goes out of style right? (laughing loudly) >> Saving money is always sexy. I love that, yeah, (laughing loudly) It's actually really... That's a great line goes on. Mark, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story with us. We really appreciate it, Brad. It's been a fabulous thing. You're just going to stay here all day, right? >> I'll just hang out, yeah. >> All right. >> I'm yours. >> I love that. And thank you all for tuning to us live here from the show floor at AWS re:Invent in fabulous sunny Las Vegas Nevada with John Furrier, I'm Savannah Peterson you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

foreign continued coverage of AWS re invent my name is Savannah Peterson and I am very excited to be joined by two brilliant blokes in the space of efficiency and performance whether you're on Prem or in the cloud today's discussion is going to be fascinating please welcome Brad and Simon to the show how are you Simon coming in from the UK how you feeling well thank you excellent and Brad we have you coming in from Seattle how are you this morning doing fine thank you excellent and feeling bookish given your background love that I know that you both really care about efficiency and performance it's a very hot topic both of the show and in the industry right now I'm curious I'm going to open it up with you Simon what challenges and I think you've actually continued to tackle these throughout the course of your career what challenges were you facing and wanting to solve when you started yellow dog um really we're just looking at cloud and coming from an on-premise environment really wanted to be able to make accessing Cloud particularly a volume to be simple and straightforward um if you look at today at the number of instance types available from the major Cloud providers there's more than seven thousand different instance types whereas on-prem you go along you select your processes you select your systems it's already be really easy when you hit the cloud you've just got this amazing amount of choice so really it was all about how can you make Intelligent Decisions for you know are you going to run your workload how to match it with what you've got on premise and that was really the inspiration for Rafael so staying there for just a second what does yellow dog provide customers is a SAS system so um you get to it by accessing through the yellow platform and what it allows people to do is to be able to make Intelligent Decisions about where to run their workload would that be on premise or in the cloud it has a wealth of information it understands the costs the performance the latency and the availability of every different instance type in all different clouds it really allows people to uh to be able to make use of that information provision exactly what they need and to be able to run their workloads yeah it also includes a provisioner and it also includes a scheduler as well which is a cloud native scheduler so it's designed to be able to cope with um with cloud in terms of things like spots and interruptions and be able to uh to reschedule and fail over between clouds if there's ever need to do so yeah that sounds incredible and I know this means a lot for partners like AMD Brad talk to me about the partnership and what this means for AMD for your customers yeah absolutely it you know we're excited to be aligned with the uh with a company like yellow dog it's it's um you know the the importance of compute is becoming more and more prevalent every day and it's it's always been top of mind but especially now when you think about what the uh what the economy and the rest of the world is kind of facing over the next you know probably a year or longer it's so important that um that you're able to maximize your dollars and your spend and doing away with uh with uh with absolute certainty that you've got the right type of people behind you uh ensuring that you're your dollars are being spent very wisely and the great thing about yell dogs that they have tremendous insight into uh into cost optimization computer optimization across the entire Globe their their indexes is quite remarkable and what it does is it allows uh customers to actually see just how performant and cost efficient AMD is so it allows us to really put our best foot forward and and gives customers a chance to understand something that they probably weren't uh more familiar with the fact that uh that AMD uh is a tremendous a tremendous value in the marketplace yeah and and uh Simon can you tell us a little bit more about the yellow dog index I'm glad you brought that up Brad yes the yellow index is uh is essentially it's live it's available for anyone to access you can just go to index.yam.tech and you'll be able to see pretty much every single instance type that's available from all the major Cloud providers and be able to make your selection are you looking for GPU type nodes are you looking for AMD processors are you looking just for performance essentially what you're able to do is create a live view of effectively what's available in different data centers around the world and the price at this moment in time also just uh as Brad mentioned in terms of you know cost efficiency and uh and being taking green values seriously as we should we should do the yellow index also has the ability to be able to see at that point in time where the best place to be at a runner job is based upon the lowest carbon impact of running at this moment in time and that for many organizations gives an amazing Insight in not just about being able to find the the understand fishing processes but being able to ensure the greenest energy possible is powering that process when you want to be able to run your workload it's so powerful what you just said and I think when we exactly it's not just about it's not just about power but it's about place when we are are looking at Global Computing at scale what I know that there's ESG advantages in and ESG being a very hot topic when we're talking about AMW on AWS and and and leveraging tools like yellow dog what other sorts of advantages Beyond being least carbon impactful can your Mutual customers benefit from so it's not like I say there's many other features you know a very important thing when you're running a high performance Computing workload is being able to match the instruction set that you're running on premise and then being able to use that in the cloud as well and also to be able to make Intelligent Decisions of where should something run should would something be more efficient um to build on premise should we always try and maximize our on-premise resources before going into the cloud there's a lot about being able to just be able to make decisions and yellow itself it makes thousands of decisions per second to be in a workout where the the best and most optimized places to to run your workload yeah so Brad you work with a lot of companies at scale what type of scale is possible when leveraging Technologies like AMD and yellow dog combined well you know I love the fact that you mentioned uh you know HPC and it's one of the areas that actually is most exciting for for me personally and for and for AMD with the combination of yellow dog and AWS and AWS launched the very first HPC uh instance type last year and you know we're we're we haven't even begun to answer a question we haven't gotten to see um the full-scale capability in the cloud when it comes to these uh these very coordinated and very refined workloads that are running at massive scale and and uh you know we've got some some products we'll be launched in the near future as well that are incredibly performant and you know to be honest I don't think I don't think we have even come close to seeing the scale relative to somebody's very optimized workloads in HPC uh that that we're capable of so um we're excited we're excited for the next few years to see how how we can wrap in um some of the tremendous success that AMD has had on-prem in these these these massive compute centers and replicating that same success inside AWS with companies like yellow dog it's uh it we're excited to see what uh what's what's going to come forward can you give us a preview of anything on the record that gets you really excited about the future I was going to ask you what what had you looking forward to 2023 and Beyond but nothing well not nothing official of course uh but um I will say this you know AMD has recently successful had the launch for Genoa uh it's our next next-gen release and it is um it is proving to be it absolutely is the dominant compute engine it at this point that exists and you know when you start to couple that with the the prowess of AWS you know you could see that over time becoming something potentially that um you know um can really start to change the compute landscape quite a bit so we're hopeful that you know in the future we'll have something along those lines uh with AWS and others and um we're very uh we're very bullish in that area love it uh Simon what about you you've been passionate about low carbon I.T for a long time is carbon neutral Tech in our future what I realize is a bold and lofty claim for you but feel free to give us any of your future predictions um yeah so well I started here trying to build solutions for you know many years ago so 2006 um I was part of a team that launched the the world's lowest powered Windows PC that was actually based on the AMD technology back then so uh you can tell that AMD have been working on a low power for us for a long time in terms of carbon neutral yes I think um certainly there's a there's a few data centers around the world now that are getting very close to uh to carbon neutral some of which may have already achieved it so that's really interesting but so you know the the second part of that is really the the manufacturer of everything that goes into those Services systems and being able to to get to uh you know a net zero on those over a period of time and when we do that which is yeah not without challenges but but certainly possible then we really will have carbon neutral I.T which will be uh a benefit to everyone you know mankind itself yeah casual statement and I have to say that I wholeheartedly agree I think that it's one of the greater challenges of Our Generation especially as what we're able to do in HPC in particular since we're talking about it is only going to grow and scale and magnitude and the amount of data that we have to organize certain process is is wild even today so I love that I'm curious is there anything that you can share with us that's in the pipeline for Yellow Dog anything coming up in the future that's very exciting um so we're coming up very soon um we're going to release something called um version 4 again log which contains um what we call a resource framework which is all about making sure you've got everything you need before you run a job either on-prem or in the cloud so that might be anything from making sure you've got the right licenses making sure that your data is all in the right location making sure you've got all aspects of your workflow ready before you start launching compute and start really but you know burning through dollars with computer could potentially sat there uh not not doing anything until other tasks keep catch up so we're really excited about this new V4 release which will uh which will come out very soon awesome we can't wait to learn more about that hopefully here again on the cube Brad what do Partnerships with companies like yellowdog meme for you and for the customers that you're able to serve yeah it's it's incredibly important I it's you know there's one of the difficulties in in compute that we have today especially in Cloud compute there's there's so much available at this point I mean there was a point in time it was very simple and straightforward it's not even close to being that anymore green so you know one of the things I love about yellow dog itself is actually it does a great they do a great job of making very complex situations and environments fairly simple to understand especially from a business perspective and so one of the things that we love about it is it actually helps our customers you know the AMD direct customers better understand how to properly use our technology and to get the most out of it and so it's difficult for us to articulate that message because you know we are a Semiconductor Company so sometimes it's a little tough to be able to articulate workloads and applications in the way that our customer base will be able to understand but you know it's it's so critical to have companies like yellow dog in the middle that can actually you know make that translation for us directly to the customer um you know and and especially too when you start thinking about ESG and environmental relationships and I'd like to make a comment and one of the things that is fantastic about AMD AWS and yellow we all share the same Mission and we're very public about those missions about just being better to the to the planet and um you know AMD has taken some very aggressive uh targets through 2025 much beyond anything that the industry has expected and you know because of that we are you know we are the most um we are the most power efficient xa6 product on the marketplace and it's not even close and you know I look forward to the day when uh you know you start looking at instance types inside these public Cloud providers in conjunction with the old dog and you can actually even start to see maybe potentially what that carbon footprint is based on those decisions you make on compute and um you know considering that more than half to spend for everybody is generally compute in these environments it's critical to really know what your true impact in the world is and um it's just one of the best parts about a partnership like this oh what a wonderful note to close on and I love both the Synergy between all the partners on a technology level but most importantly on a mission level because none of it matters if we don't have a planet that we can continue to innovate on so I'm I'm really grateful that you're both here fighting a good fight working together and also making a lot of information available for companies of all different sizes as they're navigating very complex decision trees in and operating their stack so thank you both Simon and Brad I really appreciate your time it's been incredibly insightful and thank you to our audience for tuning in to our continuing coverage of AWS re invent here on thecube my name is Savannah Peterson and I look forward to learning more with you soon foreign [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE Live in Detroit, Michigan. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We are covering KubeCon + CloudNativeCon '22. John, this is day two of our coverage wall-to-wall three days of coverage on theCUBE. We've been talking a lot about the developer and how the world is starting to really revolve around developer and DevOps portfolios. >> Yes, developers, startups, big companies, all transforming. This next segment, we want to hear from how Dell Technologies cloud natives, big time strategy there and looking forward to it. It's good. It's going to be a great segment. >> Yes, please welcome back one of our alumni to theCUBE. Brad Maltz is here, Senior Director of DevOps Portfolio and DevRel for Dell Technologies. Good to see you. >> Thank you guys for having me. >> So, Dell at KubeCon, what's going on? >> Yeah, that's literally the most common question I'm getting. So for us, it's a lot about our customer base is making that transformation into a DevOps world. And they have a ton of Dell and they're like, Hey, from a Dell perspective, how do you help us make that transformation into a DevOps operating model? So we're here to explain that. We're here to talk about infrastructure as code, our container Kubernetes story, our multi-cloud story. We're talking about all of it. >> Tell us about those stories and what the value is in it for companies to work with Dell as they transition. >> So when we look at it from a DevOps perspective for us, it's all about the culture, the operating model shift they're trying to make. And what that means to them is they have to figure out how do they automate all of the stacks they have to deal with. Whether it's going to be server, storage, data protection, network, and all the way up through the hypervisor and Kubernetes. That means they need to work with an ecosystem of tools. Things like Ansible, things like Terraform, all that stuff. Our job is to make our portfolio more consumable in the infrastructure as code space. That's one part of the discussion. The second part of the conversation is Kubernetes won. Kubernetes won the abstraction in this multi-cloud world and we as Dell are helping our customers consume Kubernetes. Whether it's by bringing solutions and more appliance oriented mentality to the market or whether it's actually enabling them with our container storage modules and CSI drivers. >> So it as supercloud as we call or multi-cloud as some people call it, you're starting to see the abstraction for interoperability, but essentially just distributed hybrid cloud. Edge as you guys have a big presence. So Dell's supplying not just the data center anymore. Cloud models are moving to hybrid on-premises, edge is growing. We saw some great use cases where military applications are using Kubernetes and all kinds of new things. So this real examples happening right now. This is going to impact Dell's customers and Dell as a supplier of compute and servers. And the gear that runs everything. Like at a telco, you can have a data center at an edge spot, like a box could be a data center. >> Telco is a great example cause we created the business, the Telco business unit. And in the Telco business unit, our goal was, hey, telco is a little different than enterprise edge. Enterprise edge, retail, manufacturing, healthcare. They have certain needs. Telco, much smaller group of customers that have a much different set of needs. And that's very similar is how do we scale at the edge? How do we control things programmatically? How do we do it in a secure way? And how do we do it so that our people internally don't have to deal with the underpinnings of all that infrastructure. Just make it easier for them. That's our goal through the edge discussions, through telco and all that. >> Yeah. We've been doing a big thing on why hardware matters. Hardware's back. We look at all the hyperscalers, the big competition is faster, faster, faster chips, faster the physics. This is part of the supply chain both hardware and software. Okay. So developers want more power. At the end of the day, this community here wants invisible infrastructure and they want it fast. >> Brad: Yes, that's exactly right. >> There's a lot under the hub. It's still servers. >> You still got firmware, you still got bio, you still got to management operating system, You still got to patch things, kernels, security issues, all of that from a server perspective. We haven't even talked about storage or networking or any of the other stuff. So there's a ton of buttons and dials under the covers. >> And that's totally going to be awesome. And the question comes in, okay, now take me to the cloud native because automation, infrastructures code, these are now the hotspots. Software supply chain, not hardware, software supply chain. So these are all things that are going to be intersecting. What's your view? >> In the multi-cloud view of the world, what we really have are our customers are saying, okay, we started on one cloud, Amazon or Azure or Google. And they're like, you know what? We had to go to a second cloud for whatever reason, many reasons. Now we have to manage two clouds. And by the way, we never got fully off-prem. So now we have all of our on-premises stuff plus multiple clouds. How do we deal with the complexity there? And the complexity there is everything from data problems of data mobility, data protection, replication, all that stuff. How do we deal with the actual application life cycle management across that? And that's where a lot of the tooling we're discussing comes in. That's where Kubernetes comes in and they want to do it in an agnostic way. 'Cause if they can't begin to transition to do it in a standardized layer, then the end of the day they're still going to be managing three totally different environments with three separate engineering teams. >> So is your target audience primarily existing Dell customers, legacy customers, or is it really wide open? >> It's actually been opening up. So we have kind of, the way I view it is we have three different segments that we're going to be going after. We have what I would say is the top 10% of the industry that's really able to skill up into this DevOps world very quickly. They're going to go after the GitOps, they're going to go after all those things. That's a combination of existing customers, but also the really, really large customers that can build their own clouds on-premises. We then have the other end of the spectrum. People that aren't making the shift. People that are like, you know what this DevOps transformation it's not going to help us there, but we still need server and storage and whatnot. And then I like to call it the squishy middle. 60, 70% of the market that's like, we can't scale up in time, we can't hire the people, they're not available 'cause that 10% just got them all, but we still have the same problems. And how do we operate in a world where we have that multi-cloud type of a problem, but we can't find the people. Now you got to figure out more of the no-code, low-code packaged solutions, packaged automation coming from companies like Dell and others. >> So there's customers that are either at the beginning of their journey are not convinced yet. What are some of the barriers that they're seeing that Dell can help them overcome? >> Number one thing, education. >> Lisa: Really? >> We're hearing that consistently here at KubeCon and just customer meetings all over the place. There is a segment of the industry that they're empowered to move into a DevOps model. They don't have the ability or resources. They're not able to say, I've been doing this forever in this way in storage. How do I do that in another thing? And they're scared. They want somebody to come in and kind of handhold them a little bit, but somebody they trust. Somebody they've been working with for a very long time. That's Dell's role. Hands-on labs, training materials, how-to videos, but do it in the comfortable way that they feel like, okay we got this. >> And the success with the customers has been that well-documented. The success with the company, again, continues to survive and thrive in all conditions. So Michael Dell knows what he's doing. Love following his strategy. Michael, if you're watching, I know he watches theCUBE video, congratulations. But now the hard question for Dell is this, the applications used to run on PCs, now they're running PCs under the covers and servers. The application space here at this community is enabled by Kubernetes, is creating a new application runtime like environment. I like, compared to the old app server days when things were like just application specific, development got easier. We're in that renaissance now where the app runtime is being enabled by Kubernetes. You guys been there, done that in the old school, now the new school. What's your view on this Kubernetes? What's Dell's view on? >> Yeah, so back to Kubernetes won in my head. It's just flat out won and part of the reason, and it beat out a lot of things. You remember Cloud Foundry, which there's still a thing, but Cloud Foundry went a little too far up into the application stack and constrained the application developers a bit too much. Kubernetes success is two things. It's because they're not constraining the developer, but they're also figuring out how to enable that IT operations mindset. And they become that happy medium that's out there. So now all of a sudden, application modernization conversations and cloud-native app development, there is a standard package. There's standard load balancing and security paradigm, standard registration mechanisms, all built into the Kubernetes layer, by the way, enabled by an ecosystem. And because they're actually going through that, what's happening now is we can finally move forward. We can take that next step and we can build around that ecosystem of Kubernetes. >> That is thematically something that we've been hearing, John, for the last day and a half is the maturation of Kubernetes People, what's next? We are ready for the next step. Talk about Dell as an enabler of that. >> Yeah, so a funny, another part of that paradigm is Kubernetes does not equal virtualization. And this is a hard one in this industry right now. A lot of people say, well, yeah, we did the VMware pivot and then the KVM and everything else and they're like, this is just another one of those pivots. I'm like, no it's not. Virtualization was the pivot of physical hardware became virtual hardware, but you still thought of it in CPU memory disc and you managed it in the same way. Kubernetes, it's a such a different way of thinking about operationalization and all that abstraction that what we're realizing is people need to take baby steps into Kubernetes right now. The maturity of it is great because there is an ecosystem around it, but the majority of the industry isn't even aware of the basics of Kubernetes right now. So our job, we look at it as the education part, but also can we deliver the solutions together with the OpenShift's of the world and the Tanzu's of the world and the Rancher's of the world. Can we deliver more of that full stack experience going into the next few years? That's where we believe we can help accelerate them. Education and that delivery mechanism. >> And the community support is going to be there too. You got to have the. >> 100%. >> The community, not just education, which you guys done before, but doing it with open source vibe. >> That's where DevRel comes in. So the DevRel half of my world now is all about Dell in the community. And to be part of community isn't just to say, Hey, I'm going to go sponsor something. That's not community to me. >> It doesn't hurt. >> It doesn't hurt, but we're going to do that. We're definitely going to help with that. What our notion is you got to participate, you got to contribute, you got to be there, you got to be part of the community. That's part of my developer relations team is to become part of it. >> You got to be part of it and belong. Belonging is earning. >> Brad: Yes. >> And that's the key. And the other thing we were talking about standards and Dell has won a lot of business 'cause the PC and the servers all had standards, standard components. Standards now in the community are being driven by developer consensus. >> Brad: Yes. >> So that is an interesting new paradigm. So if you make cloud native work where all the hardware and software that's powering the builders is invisible. The developers will tell you what they want. >> 100%. >> And that's why your Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry example is so on point. It's a little bit nuanced, but what happened there is, let's explain Kubernetes was loosely de facto enabling. They didn't try to take too much territory. They didn't over push. >> Brad: Exactly. >> They were very flexible, lightweight at first, but it was enabling. >> It was organic. >> And we called it on theCUBE, I'm not going to lie, we called that early on. So props to us. >> Brad: Good job. >> Pat on the back. >> Lisa: Pat your own back. >> We get it right a lot. But now there's impact though. But the Dell I think speaks to the theme here, which just we talked is that you got startups here. We had from Envoy, we saw the donator there. He started his own company. You got Dell, which has large enterprises running massive workloads with a lot of legacy and modernization. So you got a combination of both coming together. This is going to be a collision of innovation. >> Oh I look, that's exactly right. Part of what I've been getting is not just the end users, the infrastructure developers, and whatnot around here. Startups look, come to Dell, and they're like, why are you here? Like we build this and we don't talk to you. And we're like, why not? If we come to market and start delivering more of those Kubernetes oriented solutions and the Kubernetes stack experience, that's where you guys should be working with us. You're part of the ecosystem. >> Well, your job is to say to them, look it when you want to write your software for the edge and we have market share of the most hardware at the edge, 'cause we perform better on the edge. No one wants to write software on the slower platform. >> No. >> Name me one I want to write software that's just, this is something, but people don't understand that's why you're here. >> Brad: That's exactly right. >> The game is about performance. >> Brad: Yeah. >> Cloud can do it, you can do it with a machine. So it depends where in the distributed computing chain you're at. >> You bring up one topic that actually isn't a core discussion topic around DevOps, but I am seeing more HPC and a AI/ML conversations popping up in this DevOps cloud native space. 'Cause even the market of HPC, which is a very traditional market, commodity server driven in the past, they're starting to say, how do I take advantage of Kubernetes and all of the benefits that we've been talking about. >> What are some of the things that you've heard like in your sense is the key theme or the talk track of Kubernetes, its evolution? What's on the developer's minds the last day and a half at this conference? >> Oh, okay. That's a hard question, but a good one. So the way I look at it is probably it's the robustness of the features within Kubernetes, not the native features, but even partner included features. They just want to be able to handle security in a much more, I hate to say zero trust, but secure cloud native way. There's tools in the Kubernetes ecosystem that are so integrated into Kubernetes. They don't have to think sometimes as much about how do they do it themselves. They can go find through open source or off-the-shelf startup and say, I need that and I can spin it up in about five minutes and now I'm doing that without having to spend weeks or months and having to build that. And that's security is one example. You can go through the networking discussion, you can go through so many different areas. The fact is because of community and the ecosystem, that is the winning formula for Kubernetes to enable the development. That's all I'm hearing here is they're like, give me more, give me more startups, give me more of these technologies. >> And ease of use has been a big topic here. We've been talking before we came on camera about VMware has done great since it used the virtual machine example versus Kubernetes. That is millions of developers and operators on VMware. They have about 200,000 plus just in VMUG alone. So they are going to transform their careers. They're looking for a home. They're looking for a community for the next 10 years. I mean, VMware will still be around with Broadcom, but I'm speculating that it will be much more in maintenance mode. But to get someone's career in fourth gear, fifth gear, you got to go and get that next skill set, and that's the question. Where do all these operators, IT operators go to become enterprise operators? >> Brad: That's exactly right. >> That is a big topic. What's your reaction? >> Sp I'm actually a living proof of that. I grew up in the VMware ecosystem. And for me making that pivot, it took me many years. One of the ways I did that was I actually have run in Dell, our advanced development pivotal Dojos, if you remember Pivotal. >> Yes. >> And doing the Pair Programming in Agile. It took me that mental shift to say, okay, we were doing it that way and now there's a new way to do it through code with developers and using all the new buzzwords. And that pivot is different for somebody that's just starting now, and they don't have access to a Dojo that they can go handle like a whole bunch of pair programmers. How do they make that pivot? That's 100% what we have to do. >> Okay, so my question is this, this is a hard question for you, maybe you can answer or not or maybe you can. What's different now than the attempt in the past from Dell EMC to do work or align with the developers? I think, was it five, six years ago, it was an effort. Was it timing? What's different now from then? >> So that attempt was awesome. That team was great. I was very close to that team and that was from the EMC side originally is where they have built that out. And the notion of that was that we just have to go start contributing knowledge and technology into the community and start really taking the brand and trying to expand the brand to be relevant in that community. Nothing wrong. That was actually an amazing way they did it. I think through the merger there was definitely a little bit of, okay, well, maybe this isn't one of our top priorities right now and that's probably what happened through the actual merger. >> John: It's a little bit distraction. >> It was distraction. >> Timings wasn't as good now. >> You try merging a 67 billion merger. I mean it's just really hard to do. What happened here is I think we finally got past a lot of that with the merger and now we're in steady stage/growth mode, which is a notion that now we can go and do this again in the new world, taking our lessons learned from what we did before, and try to actually go and update that in these new power apps. >> And you could point to some specific timing issues. Like at that time this community wasn't as advanced along. Kubernetes wasn't as clear. Visibility to that value proposition. Although a lot of people were speculating what happened that way. >> Exactly. >> But now with multi-cloud, I think developers starting to see the reality that it ain't going to be one cloud. >> Well, multi-cloud is not one cloud, so 100%. >> Well, I mean there's multi-cloud today, but it's really not multi-cloud by the way it could be. The people have multiple clouds. I think that gives developers comfort that existing enterprise players. Remember Microsoft wasn't really in the cloud game six, seven years ago. Look where they are now. Significant progress, nipping at the heels of AWS. So all the enterprise players are back at the table. >> Brad: Yeah, definitely. We're here. >> And that's timing issue. >> We're here. >> Talk about, you're here, you are helping customers get to the basics of Kubernetes. You talked a lot about the importance of the education. >> Brad: Yes. >> That screams to me that Dell can be a facilitator of cultural change within organizations, whether it's a bank or a hospital or a retailer or whatnot. Another thing that I'm curious about, what you guys are doing, how you've evolved, Dell is a massive partner ecosystem. How is the partner ecosystem involved in helping customers build their DevOps portfolios and really start embracing, understanding, and learning about Kubernetes? >> So that's an ever changing world right now. And that's part of why we're here at KubeCon is to help expand that. We have a very, very strong partner community. Not even just channel, but like technology partner community. And our goal is to understand with our DevOps portfolio what needs to be the next step of that partner community. Do we have to go partner up with like the, I'll use examples, the Solo.io. Do we have to partner up with all the mesh companies, the HashiCorp, which we are, We have to understand where the layers that make sense and where don't. There are some that don't make sense because they're so often to an app developer land or they're so far above even Kubernetes sometimes that maybe they don't make sense in our partner community. >> How influential are, I know we got to go soon, but how influential are your customers in helping to make some of those decisions? It's all about the customer at the end of the day. >> They're the only one that's deciding for us. They have to come to us. We have to see the need. We have to understand the discussions through our sales mechanisms, our other mechanisms. We're using that data every single day, every hour to make those decisions. >> Awesome. Brad, it's been great to have you. Sorry we took more of your time than we planned, but it was so interesting. >> No, this is awesome. >> Dell at KubeCon, you've done a great job of explaining why that absolutely resonates, the relevance, and why customers should be looking at Dell as their partner for this. Thank you so much for your time and your insights. >> Thank you guys. >> All right. For John Furrier and our guest, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon '22 from Detroit, Michigan. Stick around, our next guest will be here in just a minute. (gentle music)

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to HPE. Discover 2022. My name is Dave Lanta. I'm here with my co-host John fur. John we've been watching the evolution of H HP to HPE. We've seen GreenLake when Antonio Neri, I called it. I called it burn the boats. He goes, no, no, no, it wasn't burn the boats. I said, well, okay, burn the bridges. But it was all in on as a service on, on GreenLake. And we're gonna talk about that. Brad Shapiro is here. He's the vice president and managing director of the enterprise business at HPE financial services. Brad. Good to see him. Good to see >>You as well. >>Yeah, you guys got it all started. When, when Antonio kinda laid down, the gauntlet said, this is where we're going. Let's make it happen now. Cause the first place he turned I would imagine is the financial services said, okay, how do we start this today? Can you help us? And they take us back to that >>And yeah, sure. So, you know, uh, yeah, HP financial services, um, it's kind of a foundational element cuz when you think about it, asset management is really what we're doing here. And I know asset management's a, a big word, right? And it can mean lots of things to, to different people. Um, in this context, uh, we started looking at how do customers manage assets over the life cycle and a lot of customers while they were interested in a consumption model and looking at GreenLake for their private cloud, they were certainly looking at public cloud for certain workloads and then maybe even traditional data center for other activities that, that they're running. So it's really that hybrid environment. Uh, but they were stuck going well, Hey, I'm in a CapEx model today. How do I get out of CapEx and really get into this hybrid model? >>And that's where asset management comes in. So one of the, the biggest initial focus is, and we continue to have that focus. We call it our accelerated migration offer and it's really us going in and acquiring the customer assets, moving it on the HPE balance sheet and then figuring out what are we gonna do with those assets, which are gonna stay in use under a consumption model, which are excess. And we can put through our, uh, asset up cycling process, we monetize the majority of that, put that back into reuse and then maybe a small amount gets recycled. So, so really focused on the assets and accelerating customers transition to GreenLake. Did you >>See, or are you seeing a difference between like Le traditional leasing customers who already have kind of on that model versus like what you just described as sort of the, the CapEx was more complicated, you gotta get, I presume procurement involved the legal issues and was there a lot less, was it less friction with the, the leasing customers? Well, >>You know, I, I look at leasing and financing, very similar to CapEx. It's, it's a much more traditional model versus this new as a service experience. Um, so if, if they were in a leasing model, we could convert those leases into GreenLake. I wouldn't say one was any more difficult than the other. Yeah. Um, they were both really traditional mindset, um, and not really looking at a consumption model. So I think we had our fair share of both. And I think we, we have and are able to address both customers moving in into a consumption >>Mode. Right. How does this tie into sustainability? Because you know, we have on one end of the spectrum, the, the high end sustainability, you know, the, the science and sure. And the behind it, tactically speaking companies still now want to operate in this kind of, there's a sustainable angle here. Yeah. Talk about that piece of it. How does that tie in obviously consumption versus CapEx you're building, you're not building, what, what does that thread through the sustainability angle? >>Yeah. So, so first let me just say sustainability is really important to our customers. Um, and, and we're seeing it all over and it is real. Um, the good thing is that you can get business value out of the solutions and have a more sustainable model. So when I think about, and I talk to customers about sustainability, uh, there's a number of fronts they're focused on one, their customers believe it's important, right? So, so they're focused on making sure they're driving sustainable models. Uh, I've seen an increasing number of customers, both commercial and public sector have sustainability requirements in their tenders, in their RFPs. And you have to be able to, to comply with those. Um, second, uh, they, they look at it and go, how do I attract talent? It's increasingly important for them to attract talent. And then really if you, because >>They wanna work for a mission driven company that's >>Sustainable. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and the third area is investors. You know, the investment community is now looking at ESG and whole and you know, certainly environmental impacts, um, in where they're making an investment. So quick personal story, I was talking, uh, to a friend of mine who works for a hedge fund and he was telling me over the last year, they've hired a whole team. That's focused on just doing analysis of companies, ESG initiatives, determining where they're gonna invest their money. So it's, it's a wall street thing now. So this is real from a number of angles where, where sustainability has an impact. Now, how we play in that. Um, clearly when you go to a GreenLake consumption model, the idea is improving utilization of the asset. So driving higher utilization means you need less assets. You know, over time, the, the secret is we're gonna sell you less, right? >>You're gonna have less assets, but you're gonna have higher utilization. That's good for the environment where HPE Fs comes in is when those assets are done. We put those assets back into reuse. So we have a remark, we have remarketing facilities, one in, in Andover, mass, one in kin Scotland. And then we have 80 different facilities. We have partnerships around the world and our focus is how do we drive more reuse, 85% of the assets we get back, go into reuse. And when you look at servers and PCs and things like that, it's over 95% go into reuse. So a real focus on reuse is good for the environment as well. And then needless to say, the new technology that goes into a GreenLake deal, we're seeing like 30% energy savings coming, coming out of those environments. So all really good stuff related to it's >>Interesting. I mean, a couple points there is one is, you know, Benoff kind of got it all started pre pandemic. He was out talking about, you know, sustainability and ESG. And a lot of people were like, no way. It's all about bottom line profits. And so he was ahead of that. And I guess, you know, back to at least you were, oh, you were always in the residual value game, but now it's a little different, isn't it? Absolutely. It's, it's it's yes. You gotta figure out what the value of that asset's gonna be, but also there's a sustainability aspect of it as >>Well. Yeah, absolutely. And the, the pretty cool thing here is while you drive sustainability, we're also seeing customers that, that go into GreenLake. Um, we had a good example with Kern county, a 42% savings over their CapEx environment when they moved to GreenLake. So it was better for the environment and significant savings. So you can have kind of like have your cake and eat it too. You, you get better environmental, uh, impacts and you're getting better bottom line, uh, performance. >>It's a business case there too do. Now we kind of, I was talking upfront about the, the early days of GreenLake where, you know, they were, it was a financial model. Yeah. And now it's evolving to actually a technology model. We heard Alma with the platform. How has that, or has that changed the way that financial services your >>Group >>Yeah. Approaches the, the, the market. >>Yeah. So, um, yeah, that's a great point. You know, when people talk about GreenLake, they think about the old days. And, and look, I've been around a while. I remember the flex capacity, right? Yeah, of course this isn't flex capacity. I mean, the platform's amazing and it really starts to bring to life the whole thought, when we talk about hybrid, right, there are workloads sure. They might belong best in the public cloud. Right. There, there are workloads that belong best in the private cloud, under the HPE GreenLake model. And there are still workloads that customers may say, Hey, look, I've got legacy applications. I'm gonna continue to run them in a traditional data center. And so from an H P E Fs perspective, you know, we look at this, not as a leasing and financing company, we're looking at this on how do we leverage the customer's existing assets? >>How do we create incremental budget using those existing assets? And then what kind of model best serves that workload? And then how do you optimize the capacity and the spend on that? So, you know, an interesting note in the past year, we put 500 million back into customer budgets by just leveraging their existing it estate. And, and it does, it's not all HPE product, you know, we're, we're, we're monetizing third party products in the data center, in the network, in the workplace. So we can really look at, we call it any tech any time, anywhere we look at all the technology and really assess what's the best way to leverage that investment. Yeah. And, and get the most out of >>It. Yeah. I mean, it's really evolved from just recycling assets for profit, but integrating the business model into the value proposition, the core value proposition in GreenLake. That's great innovation. Um, and, and congratulations on that. Sure. My, my question for you is more kind of zooming out at the market. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, from your perspective in financial services at HPE, what has the pandemic proven to you guys? How has it changed? How you guys work and how has it changed the customer environment? Cuz you mentioned assets. I think real estate. Oh no. One's going back to work. Yeah, no one's been in the office. How has the market changed with hybrids as a steady state now coming outta the pandemic? What are customers doing with the assets? What are some of the trends that you're seeing in the customer base? >>Yeah. So, so look, I'll give you my personal perspective of what I think about as a business leader. And when I talk to customers, I think we're all thinking about the same thing. So I start with experience, what experience do I wanna create for my customers and very closely linked to that, my colleagues, right? So it, the, the people working in our organization, what experience am I creating for them? So they can in turn, create that experience for partners and customers externally. So experience is one thing. The second is innovation, right? We spend a lot of time thinking about what's next? Where do we want to go? What's the innovation and more and more that innovation is all digital, right? So digital transformation is huge within my organization. And it's huge within all of our customers. Dave, I think the last time we talked, I was in my living room on a little laptop screen and zoom and, and I think I use the analogy E every business is now a digital business, even my pizza shop in jerseys. >>Yeah. Right. I mean, everything was online curbside pickup. So what I'm finding is the, the trends in terms of how to leverage technology is how do you create that customer experience? And then how does digital now blend as we're coming out of the pandemic? And, and you're, you know, now able to go into restaurants and stores, how do you blend digital with that in person experience and maybe leverage the best of both. Right. And, and how do you do that in a seamless way to really give customers choice and give them that smooth, seamless experience. So that, that's what I see happening. And you know, what we are trying to do with our asset management plays with the financial modeling we do is how do we get more of that spend going to innovation versus maintenance. And, and that's a big key because, you know, you have to be fast. So I talk about innovation. I talk about customer experience, speed to market. I mean, you know, and the bar keeps getting higher, right? It's like, as soon as you think you're fast, you're slow. We, because you have to keep, it all keeps rolling. >>We heard yesterday on the cube from, uh, one of the HP point, next executives said, you gotta perform and transform >>At the >>Same time at the same time. And you gotta know where the people are gonna land. Absolutely. And how the assets are gonna be distributed. >>And to your point, Brad, you know, from our virtual interview, you're so right. I mean, every business has to be a digital business. And you know, my, my personal story, John, you know, my brother Richie was the executive chef at legal seafood. Right. Pandemic. So then that was a, a place you wanted to go to that restaurant, famous restaurant in Boston when they reopened, they weren't ready. Right. They didn't have the digital story together. They ended up having to, we were just at Smith and Linsky, they ended up selling to Smith and Wilensky's oh, and you, you drive around, you see a lot of these retail businesses is shut down. Yeah. Right. And so, okay. So we're, they weren't able to get through that, you know, cross that chasm in digital transformation. Yeah. A lot of businesses were able to and make it a tailwind. >>Yeah. And, and look, the other thing I think all businesses are focused on right now, uh, with the labor market is talent. And, and so when you think about all of these things tying together, you want to drive, uh, you know, innovation. You want to drive your digital transformation. You wanna make that environmentally sustainable. And, and I think all of that, if you start putting all that together, those are the companies that are gonna attract the talent in the marketplace. And, and really there there's a battle for talent and >>You wanna make it profitable. Uh, Brad bureau. Thanks so much for you. Great to see you face to face. >>Yeah. Likewise. Thanks. Thanks. >>All right. Keep it right there, John. And I will be back. We're wrapping up day three of HPE, discover 2022. You're watching the cube.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of HPE. Discover 2022 from the Venetian convention center, formerly the sand convention center in Las Vegas, Dave ante, with John furrier. We're here with Brad parks. Who's the chief product officer at morphia data and Brian Thompson. Who's the vice president of GreenLake cloud product management at Hewlett Packard enterprise gentlemen. Great to see you first time on the queue first time. Wow. I just assumed we've known each other for, so >>We've been around a long time now. I'm happy to be here and thanks for, thanks for making the >>Time. Yeah, you've put a lot of people on the queue, but Morpheus data, when we, you know, we first met, I mean, with your new role here several years ago, tell, give us the update what's Morpheus do, why are you, so why does people, why do people need Morpheus? Think >>People need Morpheus, cuz it is messy, right? Technology promise, you know, simple, better, faster, but it's only gotten more complex, more heterogeneous over the last decade. We are a unified orchestration and automation platform that makes kind of the, the messy labyrinth that is enterprise. It kind of simpler to navigate primary use case. Self-service for developers who wanna push a button, get a database and an abstract deployed into their on-prem or their public cloud without having to wait on it. >>So you've, you've, you've been through the hyper-converged world. You've seen all that hardware come together. The VMware Nutanix of the world's kind of hardware. Now you got this software abstraction where you got operations, you've got AI, you got all kinds of ops AI ops dev ops data ops ops machine, >>You >>Know, they're all there. And so you got developer environments, you got operating environments. It's just getting more complicated at scale. Yep. This is a huge challenge. You guys are tackling this and then by the way, throw in automation in there too. Right? So, so all that's kind of coming together. How does self-service work put all that complication? >>Well, so I was just talking about Robert Christiansen. I know he's probably think he's been on the Q he's on S team and the ven diagram that we see in hundreds of enterprises we talk to is there's a need for central platform engineering at an enterprise to enable developers, to hit a button, get their database, run an I API line, you know, get their app stack deployed. They also wanna do the same thing with Kubernetes, right? Micro clusters deployed, you know, at a service, same thing with Terraform and Ansible. And they're just there aren't enough skilled operators who have moved up that stack. So you have to automate and canonize that knowledge and, and make it easy. >>Brian, one of the sort of pillars of GreenLake is, and as a service is data and we see a change in the way data is data platforms are being architected, data organizations. And one of the things that is a critical principle of sort of what we see as the new data era is self-service infrastructure where the operation of the technical details are an operational detail, not the be all end, all, you have to go beg and get data out. Okay. So you guys are building out, I think, consistent with that principle self-service infrastructure. That's right. So where does Morpheus fit in, in terms of that objective, what's your relationship like and, and help us understand >>That. Yeah. Within GreenLake, specifically think of this as a broad portfolio of different as a service offerings. Part of that key is meeting customers where they are and where they want to be. So we have that array of things which are fully self-service if you will, but serving an it admin type of persona. So it's where as a enterprise, I still have those resources. I want that granular of control all the way through, how do we deliver some of our more advanced cloud services, really trying to serve the end user to your point, how do I empower application owners, developers to, to bring in and, and work with those services? This is key in, in some of those cloud services, we're delivering more of VSC is a key component that we work as we bring to again, provide those interfaces. How do I provide everything from API CLI through a gooey experience that can span across multiple form factors, bring together that more of a homogenous experience? >>What, what options are out there to solve this problem today? I mean, what are the best practices? Is it do it yourself? Is it, you know, a little bit of VMware here, a little bit of, you know, other tooling there, what, what do you see out there in the marketplace? >>I'll give kinda my perspective kind of yeah. Outside the, the tools that we see when we walk into an enterprise, you've got a company that's got a lot of VMware, maybe a little Nutanix, we've got some AWS, they wanna use OpenShift for their clusters. They got Terraform Ansible, and they got service now. And there's a, there's a poor it ops team in the middle, trying to wire all that together. And each of those domains have tried to go up this hill, right. VMware's done with vRealize automation, you know? Yeah. OpenShift will say no where the way, and you use cube vert to >>Do your virtual service now will say the same thing. Right? >>So our goal is, you know, we started in the middle right. Middle out, right. We started unifying that for self-service for developers and finance teams. And we're we're agnostic. We don't have a dog in the fight, right. We don't have a hypervisor business, a hardware business, an ITSM business. We're all about bringing the pieces together. But that said, we work with partners like HP, you have a footprint of thousands of customers who are solving that same problem and need to need to move up stack. So it's been a good win-win. So >>You're not trying to be the cloud operating system per se. I mean, right. The way, the way a VMware wants to be, or you could even argue, well, I guess open, you >>Got, you got the hyperscalers coming down, you got VMware moving up. But again, they all at the end of the day are trying to control their cash cow, right. Their hardcore business. We wanna make them all transparent. So >>Your bet is it's gonna be all of the above. Yeah. That's not gonna change. Right. That's the complexity is, is that right? Or do you think they're gonna consolidate? >>No, I think there's definitely something to that. I also think there's enough. Disparate. Technology's not gonna be one size fits all or one to rule them all. In fact, I think that's part of the examples in the past, like private cloud is we announced yesterday private cloud for enterprise. It's not a new term. People are doing that for quite a while now, but they are typically fairly brittle hand rolled disparate technologies, some poor it team trying to hold it together. So where we can provide that kind of life cycle management in a cloud operating model, remove that complexity and provide that stability. And in that experience across what will be interchangeable parts at times, I think that's really that direction in, >>Yeah. You guys talk about this whole starting in the middle. I like that because there's a skills gap as well. Right. Not only is there for a challenge on it that transforms, there's not enough. People actually know how to manage a Kubernetes cluster spin one up. Yeah. So there's been a rise of managed services. We're seeing come outta the woodwork almost in all areas where it's complex. Yeah. How does that fit into the makeup of as customers, engineer or rearchitect or, or just evolve to edge on premises and public cloud? Yeah. In a cloud operating way, because if I got managed service, do they just plug in, I mean, new orchestrating services, managed services all the above, take us through this dynamic because we're seeing more and more customers saying, just gimme the service. Yeah. >>I, I know manage perspective. This, this kinda goes back to that portfolio of meeting customers where they are. There are some that, that have that expertise in house they're opinionated. They just want a different consumption model. But on the other side of that, it's difficult to attract and retain that type of talent. And if I have limited resources, am I gonna focus on the care and feeding of that underlying infrastructure? Or am I gonna try to up level and focus on things more strategic to the business? So that's where we've certainly been focusing. And I think this type of management capability is what feeds into that. Right? >>Talk about the trust aspect, because if I'm gonna go manage service, it better work. I need to trust it. It's not a zero trust environment. It's actually a trust and verified, but you're seeing the software supply chain is a big discussion point. Developers don't wanna have to get back off their CDC pipeline to go in and manage stuff. So a managed service has to be verified. Yeah. There's a huge trust factor in there. How does what's the status of this now? Is it real? >>I think one of the, one of the pieces we see in terms of trust organizationally, I mean, people in process is always harder than the tech usually. And, and a lot of the trust is just internal. You get, you know, developers don't trust the ops team, right? Security doesn't trust anybody, you know, finance doesn't trust, you know, who's billing them. Part of what we do as a stack is we give each of those stakeholder groups, the ability to get their core needs met without getting each other's way. And from a delivery perspective where we partner with HPE is we are, you know, we're a platform framework, we're a technology provider we're inside, you know, products like the private cloud. We work their GMs team, the manage services team. If they wanna take on more of that operational concern, right. They use us or if the customer wants to manage it themselves. So we we're all about enabling them at the end of the day. And, and HP brings >>And how hard bread is it to unify? UN unification is a great word. I love let's unify everybody. Right. So how, how hard is that? Can you scope that problem statement for us? What does that mean? >>I'll separate it from a technology perspective and then the people process. So a lot of the traditional people that have played in that space that do it yourself, you mention right. Scripting it all together is hard, right? And if you change from cloud a to cloud B, you're set back six months, like why we exist is we wanna very quickly pull the pieces together. We can usually get a POC up and running in about two hours, right? That's a, self-service VMware private cloud, right? That doesn't mean you've solved the organizational inertia. You know, that's, that takes time, weeks, months. And that's where people are like Accenture GreenLake, other SI other channel partners bring that together to, to help make that change happen. >>How mature is the platform? Where are you in terms of determining product market fit? Are you, are you scaling at this point? >>Well, the, the great part about our origin story, right? We got our start as an internal tool set inside a two and a half billion dollar private equity firm that was transforming it at dozens of companies. So we were built for the use case product market fit happened, cuz a bunch of guys needed to get their jobs done. So we've been an outbound since 2015, right? We were top of the stack ranking, you know, all the MQs, all the quadrants, all the analysis. So we think we're their product market fit. The nice thing is customers have actually moved to where we are. Right? Five years ago, cloud management meant cleaning up the lift and shift mess. Now it's automation platform engineering. So it it's a fun time. >>It's it's operational. Yeah. It's they're operationalizing it. >>What's your go to market model. Maybe you could double click on those through >>Partners. So honestly through HP is a big one. We're small, right? We want to be the best unified platform we can be. Our go to market is via technology partners like HPE, right? The other systems integrators, other channel partners globally. So, so yeah. It's >>So then you've got kind of a tiger team overly. Yep. Salesforce is that, that >>Yeah, we've got teams globally. So we've got about 700,000 workloads under management around the world. About 70% of those are OnPrem VMware Nutanix. The rest are up in the public cloud. So we work with partners, solution providers, services, engines to, to help deliver that to >>Customers. What do you make of the 61 billion acquisition of VMware from Broadcom? >>We're, you know, I think your analysis was spot on. It is gonna be a, a war of, you know, what is the, the most profitable to that new Broadcom business and things like vRealize automation, some of these fringe products that are core at a customer use cases, but may not be driving a lot of bottom revenue for VMware, I think are gonna be gonna be on the bubble. And we've seen more interest in the last few weeks from people who just want to hedge their bets. Right. They want to be able to switch from hypervisor a to hypervisor B or cloud a to cloud B without being locked into anyone's stack. And that is, that is why we exist. Mm. >>You wanna comment on that? >>I mean, it's, you know, for HP and from a GreenLake and even just historically, right. It's about customer choice. Mm. We have a strong relationship with VMware. Sure. We have, I don't know how many bajillions of servers out there running VMware that we, we support with. So, you know, it's, it's, it's all just looking at that ecosystem and helping deliver those customer solutions and outcomes is our focus. Yeah. >>Thank >>You. Brian. Talk about the GreenLake success with partners. We're seeing ecosystem is a big part of that and we know the formula for ecosystems create value. What is the pitch that green lakes making to the marketplace right now to attract more folks to build and or integrate into the >>Platform? Yeah. I mean, GreenLake started with a, a vehicle of how do I start to deliver an OPEX model, a consumption model for traditional infrastructure that we've been providing more and more as the services and solutions really have emerged and evolved. It's gone from, how do I just give you kit and a consumption model for it to now looking at embedded solutions with third party ISV software building or wrapping those services around it, really delivering outcomes and solutions you're seeing. And hopefully you'll solve just from announcement more and more of that, where we have kind of turnkey solutions with key partners, how do we bring a marketplace ecosystem together? How do we help enable those kind of full solutions? Because we're not gonna build it all ourselves, right. We wanna make sure that we can deliver those outcomes. >>So marketing is often and should be ahead of the actual product, early days of GreenLake. It was really a, you know, financial model. Sure. Right. Where do, where do you see GreenLake today? How far is it matured? We saw some of the, the announcements yesterday. We saw some demos. Where are we at? >>Yeah. So this actually, I think really the exciting part is you might have heard Antonio refer to as that journey to one each of our different businesses within green or within HPE, they've all been building these cloud services in GreenLake enabled services. But as you saw Alma share the path to the HPE GreenLake cloud platform that really is bringing these services together into a functional platform, right? Common identity, common telemetry services, bringing these together as now, integrable interoperable services. Like you're starting to see that come together and you can really see the Chrome trail of, of where we're going with a very powerful hybrid cloud experience, right? Spanning private public on-prem colo and a, and a full solution set within there. So it that's, that's the exciting part >>For me and Brad Morpheus will be a capability inside of GreenLake that a customer can consume. Do you have to write to GreenLake APIs to enable that? Or is it, is it more just certify that you work inside a GreenLake? What has to get done? I'll say a lot >>Of what they've done is actually written into, into our APIs. Like we've normalized hybrid it. We have a, a database model of every load balance or a cloud endpoint automation tool. So we are, we're all about making it easier to consume it. And the vision that Alma and HP has around GreenLake fits very well with why we exist. So they're able to extract metering data from our, you know, from our API, we know who provisioned what, where how much they spent. So we're a good repository and platform partner for them to, to build on. It's >>Great for that console that you guys have. Yeah. >>You got the, you got the open APIs, you publish those, you guys take advantage of 'em and then sure. Boom. Then you can consume. Got it. All right, guys. Hey, great to see you again, red. Thanks for, for >>Coming on. Thanks. Thanks for having us on >>Our pleasure. Great stuff. Congratulations. Okay. Keep it right there. This is Dave Valante for John furrier. Are you watching the cubes coverage of HPE discover 2022 from Las Vegas? We'll be right back.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to the Cube's day one coverage of HPE discover 2022 live from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, here with Dave ante. We've got a couple of guests here with us next, gonna be talking about industry transformation, please. Welcome, brought off director of global industry and sustainability marketing and Andy Hulk, halter senior director at worldwide industry sales programs, guys from HPE. Thanks for joining us. You bet. >>Thank you for having to >>Be here, >>Industry transformation. That's a big term. It's not a new concept, but we see so much going on. Andy, talk to you about industry transformation, from your perspective, where are customers, how are they capitalizing to really make data a true currency? >>Right? Well, underlying all this is, is the data that is becoming so complex, but at the same time, there's specialization required in each industry with the different applications that the industries are running and our ability to bring that forward and connect all those things is a big trend going on. And as we see that developing over time, um, we're getting more, um, connecting those different applications that are running is becoming more, uh, every day we're doing more of that. >>One more. >>So where do you wanna start? What's your favorite industry to, to transform? Uh, I mean, financial services is, you know, got the right, the whole blockchain thing going on, uh, industry 4.0 and manufacturing, you know, retail, everybody has, uh, you know, an Amazon war room, you know, energy now with EVs and, and solar and everything else and the price of oil. And, and now you throw in inflation and supply chain and you, I mean, it's just, every industry is getting disrupted. I, I wanna make an observation. You guys tell me what you think. Yeah. You know, think about the, the incumbent industries. They, they generally have data at the outskirts. It's all siloed and they're trying to put it at the core and that's a big challenge for them. What are you guys seeing in terms of who is having success with that? Do you have examples? What role do you play? Yeah, we have so much to talk about, right? Yeah. >>Yeah. Let me I'll jump in here. Um, I mean, I think one of the unique ideas is all this interest industries you mentioned, there are all trying to learn from each other, right? If you're a financial institution, you wanna understand what retail is doing because you wanna serve your customers better. Right. You wanna look at, you know, some of these technologies, how they're being applied. Um, you look about like sustainability industries are trying to learn how to do that better from each other. So there's this notion of industry and transformation is it's kind of twofold. It's one. How are these industries almost like entering new markets? I mean, you look at, at all the tech, tech companies out there, they're all getting in into payments, for example. Right. You know, Google pay app. Yeah. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so that's just like one example of where you're seeing the kind of, that, that blurring of lines between industries happening >>Content, uh, Amazon getting into grocery. And so in, in the premises, that data is the enabler. I mean, right. For decades, we've seen a, a, a stack, a vertical stack within an industry where, yeah. Where, whether it's, you know, research and development, manufacturing, sales, and distribute marketing, you were in that industry stuck for life. Right. And now all of a sudden data allows you to traverse industries. Yeah. This dual disruption agenda that you mentioned, right? >>Yeah. It's, it's, it's really, as it's core is because these companies have the ability to take advantage of that data even more. And they're trying to serve their customers even better that that's kind of opening up these new doors for them to, to do that because that's, you know, and again, there's so many good examples out there. Uh, automobile manufacturing are looking towards the gaming industry, you know, to how do they design controls, you know, that kind of stuff is, you know, as example. So you see, you know, all kinds of that. You mentioned also that, you know, everybody's trying to bring the data to the core. I don't, I don't think that's necessarily true. I think you heard earlier today in the keynote, you know, that that companies want to be able to, to take advantage of the data, data, wherever it is. Um, if it's the edge and a factory floor, if it's in a, you know, it's patient data sitting somewhere, you want to, you know, handle it where it is, and there's a cost to doing that, to bring it all >>Together. Yeah. So by the way, I wanna clarify you're absolutely right. The data by its very nature is distributed. Sure. When I say core, I mean, put it at the core of their business. Sure. That's >>What, I mean, >>Fair enough by data first, but your point is really, we're gonna talk about that. Yeah. Because it brings, brings so many other challenges with how you deal with that. But please jump in Lisa. Yeah. >>I was just gonna ask you, Brad, you talk about the blurred lines between industries. Yeah. And talk to us about how is HPE a facilitator of those industries learning from each other. You have such breadth in so many different industries as Dave mentioned, but how are you that enabler, if you will, of allowing them to, to be able to have data be that key. >>Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think it just comes through the experience of working with these customers, um, you know, in these various industries. And then, um, there's so many times where customers come to us and they want us brief and again, they wanna learn for these other industries. So we're an aggregator of that technology. We obviously UN understand the technology with the cloud or, you know, edge or, you know, anything we're doing in with data. So we're using those, you know, those lessons and just applying those out there, um, you know, to those industries. So it's, I think it's just us as an aggregator. >>You, you, how how's the customer experience changing any we heard from home Depot this morning, they were focused on the customer experience and, and their associate experience. Right? Yeah. Bringing those together maybe. >>Well, you know, what we also heard this morning is the different personas, right. That are out there and being that are looking to transform their business. Yeah. And each of those personas is still linked together by the data, but they want to use it in different ways with different applications and the ability to connect all those things. Again, they're learning from each industry. So what home Depot learns about their mobile apps, maybe something that we can deploy in, uh, manufacturing, um, as far as locating things on the floor and connecting the edge data in, bring it in to, and then use that to analyze, use AI models, to do predictive behavior, uh, preventative maintenance, all these things are similar uses of connecting the data, but then applying to the specific industry use case. Yeah. And that pivot of that horizontal use of the data into those specific demands by, uh, at the personas within the, the, the different industries is what we're, we're >>Focused on. Yeah. And the technology is like an accelerate, you know, here. So you're think about like something like 5g, right. 5g is gonna accelerate, you know, a lot of transformation in various industries. Um, throughout that, I mean, tech, you know, the technology alone is not really what the, the, the customer cares about it. They, they care about what do I do with that? What kind of outcome can I get? Right. >>I wanna ask you, Andy, about the customer conversations, you talked about the personas, we've been talking about data democratization for a very long time. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> obviously is a challenging thing to do, but how were you seeing customer conversations, change and evolve, especially over the last couple of years where every L B has to have access to data and be a driver of its value. >>Right. Well, the customer, you know, historically H HP's, uh, background is in infrastructure and we've served industries in the data center for a legacy, right. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, but now they're saying it's more, you know, I've gotta talk to, uh, more people in my business as a data center owner, I've gotta serve these folks, understand their business. And as a supplier, to me, you need to understand them as well. And sometimes help me with that conversation and help me see the things to make those connections that I may not know as a data, you know, as a, as an it professional. Um, and how do we challenge the business to think about different ways of doing things in the industry? So how do we, we think about, um, you know, bringing those connections from other industries in, and, and, uh, uncovering, uh, opportunities or problems anticipating problems in those deployments that they may not have seen by their staying in their swim lane. >>Yeah. You know, I'm, I'm touring on this topic because on the one hand, I think about the, the big data era and, and, and I know a, of, a lot of failures to, to return, you know, the expectations and it wasn't a fail fast. It took a decade, you know, to get there. And part of the failure domain was to your earlier point, Brett, everything was sort of shoved into this centralized location. Yeah. You have this hyper specialized data team, and everybody has to go through them, but organizations I think are now realizing it, like, like your thoughts on this, that data has to go out to the lines of business. It has to be contextualized. People are now talking about building data products and monetizing data. And yeah, that's really, to me what digital transformation is about. So, but generally speaking, most companies are not great at data. They have a lot of data. Yeah. A lot of, lot of data line around insights. I think we heard in the morning keynote are scarce. Right. So what's your vision for how this evolves? >>Yeah. I think, I think, you know, from the data perspective that again, the, at the core is how do I serve my customer better? Right. So, you know, whether that is actual, you know, customer data that you want to sort of up personalized offers for, or, you know, make decisions of, you know, medical decisions for their, you know, for their, you know, better patient outcomes. So if they keep that in mind, then, you know, as far as how it's used by the different lines of business there, you know, that's where we can help facilitate, you know, in many ways. And that's where, you know, cloud becomes a, you know, a really key technology, um, you know, having that flexibility to, to move it around as needed, create the, you know, um, deliver the workload where the customer needs it, that, you know, that sort of idea is, is where we're, we're going with this. >>I think, yeah. I'd, I'd like to give you an example, um, please, in the FSI industry, uh, out here on the floor, we've got a demo on payment systems, right. And we've been doing that, uh, with our nonstop, uh, product and supporting that, uh, in the, in the banking industry for 10 years or more. And it's evolved over time to be one of the, you know, it's a ubiquitous across the, in the support. Yeah. Um, but now we're talking about new regulations with all the global events that are going on, you know, crazy stuff that more pressure on the banks to, to comply with that, um, worries about money laundering and fraud prevention. Well, connecting those, the data from those payment systems into the AI modeling that is now being deployed to do more sophisticated fraud detection and Mon money laundering detection and all of those kinds of things, how you connect those together as an example, what we're seeing, how we get more insights by, uh, by the combination that we can bring together. >>And the insights is critical. Yes. Right. I mean, without it, the data isn't very useful. >>Right, right. Right. And I think even, you know, these, these concepts like swarm learning right. Where you're actually trying to aggregate a lot of those, you know, a lot of that data and, and provide, you know, even a broader data set to, to learn from is even, you know, more beneficial. >>I think the, when you think about the, the principles of this, this decentralized world, that's that it starts with an organization saying, look, we recognize that we can't shove it all into a data warehouse or a data hub or a single data lake. Yeah. We're gonna have all of those. And those are just kind of nodes in the mesh, like it's steel as Youma the GHI term <laugh> and, and, and, and increasingly data as product that can be monetized. We're hearing a lot more about this, and those are organizational yeah. Considerations. I mean, HPE can maybe facilitate that through whiteboard sessions, but, but the, that leads to, in order to, to democratize data, I need self-service infrastructure and I need data that can be shared and governed. I, I don't know about the last one, but you definitely are. Number three self-service infrastructure simplification. Yeah. Your version of cloud. How do you see that, uh, your, your role in that little vision that I just laid out? Do you buy that? >>You wanna take that or, >>Well, I, I think that we have, um, we definitely, because we, we see the data in all these different places and we're, we're trying to be agnostic to, um, you know, where it comes from, who owns it. It's how do you get it together and make it useful? And you don't have to capture it. You don't have to own it, but you may own some of it. You may borrow some of it. You may rent some of it. You may buy it and you may bring it together and they'll use it for the purpose. And then move on to expand into new things that you learn from that you may then monetize, um, in all those different ways. So we have a role of making that platform in a way that you can see it in different ways and use it consistently and repetitively and GRA gain more value of it, and then apply your applications and, you know, all those other things that you do. But that, that bringing together agnostically is a big part of our offering. >>And, and am I, am I not correct? I'm in my thinking on H HP's value is providing that infrastructure, uh, to be able to do just, just that that's your swim lane, if you will. And >>It is, but we're being asked to move up the stack and provide not only the infrastructure now, the platform, the ability to offer that platform, uh, in our HPE GreenLake offering where we're, we now can, you know, have cloud-like services on prem. It doesn't really matter where the data sits, um, and then plug in the applications and even manage those applications for the >>Customers. Okay. So, I mean, I see you as I, as, and Paz, which that up to stack yeah. The ability to, okay. I want whatever Python or open shift, I wanna build applications now on that. Interesting. The management piece is something I, I excluded, um, be because an organization may say, Hey, we need help managing this stuff. Right. But I see that, that I, as in pass, as infrastructure, you're not getting into applications where you're getting, you're not >>No other than letting, letting customers, you actually build on top of that. Right. Right. There's a >>Lot of customer, you're an enabler. >>Absolutely. Yeah. You look at some of the things we're doing with, you know, with our escrow platform and things like that. Right. You know, we're providing that development platform in a, in a really streamlined way of, of, you know, pushing, you know, applications out. I mean, little known fact, right. Is that most banks right now are hiring more developers right now than, than finance people. So all these, all these industries are becoming tech companies and that's, you know, that's the whole launch of the FinTech industry many years ago, and it's, you know, continued to evolve >>And they want to bring AI, they wanna bring data into their applications. And you, HPE I see is an enabler of >>That. Absolutely. Absolutely. >>Give us last question. As we wrap up here, give us the vision, like the next five years, what are some of the industry transformation elements you are forecasting if you have a crystal >>Ball. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think number one, just an increased focus on personalization and customization. Uh, you know, you look at, you know, personalized offers when you add location based services, things like that, combined 5g, you know, like all this technologies, you're seeing a lot of that custom manufacturing, so those kind of trends are gonna continue. And we know that's, you know, those are the workloads that we gotta, you know, know know is coming, you know, down the pike and, and, and address those. Um, secondly I think AI, right, AI is gonna, is gonna be, you know, it's gonna impact every industry in a big, big way. You know, when like Andy talked right about, you know, fraud detection, uh, you know, manufacturing, robotics, those kind of things. Uh, and then I think, um, you know, lastly, just, just this more convergence, you know, of these industries, right. You know, tech is just, you know, impacting everything in such a big way. And so you're gonna see more of that, that blurring of lines between, between industries. So they jump into jump outta their normal swim lanes. Right, right. >>Be between machine learning and AI, we're gonna see efficiencies by doing things better, with less, uh, deviations and driving, uh, lower cost. And we're gonna see new capabilities come to the forefront and that's gonna be consistent across all industries. And it's gonna be based on the data. Both of those require the models, you know, the data go in and drive their models. Do >>You think any industry is more ripe for disruption? I mean, timeframe wise, you got healthcare, you know, like I always wonder, you know, how is AI gonna help doctors make better diagnoses already is yeah. Will, will AI make the diagnoses? Yeah. You know, retail, I mentioned before, you know, energy, you know, government is changing entertainment, media entertainment is, do you see any industry patterns where one is being disrupted more than the other? >>When we talk to customers, every industry thinks their industry is not going fast enough. And so it's like, you know, I think everybody is just so hyper focused on, you know, what they are involved in and then their domain that, uh, you, you, depending on who you talk to. Yeah. I, you don't, everybody needs to do it faster, you know, more economically, um, and more efficiently. Right. And so >>I think, and they're all being disrupted now, too. Absolutely. It's not only have to do faster, but they've got to, um, transform to keep up with the demands of their >>Customer. Nobody's safe. >>Yeah. And the technology's just gonna continue to accelerate that. And that's the thing. And, and, and the market's becoming, you know, less forgiving as, as we go. So people have to react really, really fast in these markets, you know, and especially with all the other changes going on around us, uh, to, to actually, you know, make that impact. >>Interesting. I'm liking what's in this crystal ball. I'm gonna have to ask you guys for some cons after we wrap here. Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining David, me talking about industry transformation, tremendous amount of, of transformation so far and so much to go. It's exciting to watch. >>Yeah. Appreciate it. >>Have an, we appreciate it for our guests and Dave ante. I, Lisa Martin, you're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. You AP back after a short break.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to this CUBE Unstoppable Domain Showcase. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've been showcasing all the great content about Web3 and what's going around the corner for Web4. Of course, Unstoppable Domains is one of the big growth stories in the business. Brad Kam, the Co-founder is here with me, of Unstoppable Domains, Brad, great to see you, thanks for coming on this showcase. >> Thanks, pleasure for having me. >> So you have a lot of history in the Web3. They're calling it now, but it's basically crypto and blockchain. You know, the white paper came out and then, you know how it developed was organically. We saw how that happened. Now you're the co-founder of Unstoppable Domains. You're seeing the mainstream, I would say mainstream scene, Superbowl commercials, okay? You're seeing it everywhere. So it is here. Stadiums are named after cryptos, companies. It's here. Hey, it's no longer a fringe, it is reality. You guys are in the middle of it. What's going on with the trend, and where does Unstoppable fit in and where do you guys tie in here? >> I mean, I think that what's been happening in general, this whole revolution around cryptocurrencies and then NFTs and what Unstoppable Domain is doing. It's all around creating this idea that people can own something that's digital. And this hasn't really been possible before Bitcoin. Bitcoin was the first case. You could own money. You don't need a bank, no one else. You know, you can completely control it. No one else can turn you off. Then there was this next phase of the revolution, which is, assets beyond just currencies. So NFTs, digital art. What we're working on is like a decentralized identity, like a username for Web3 and each individual domain name is an NFT. But yeah, it's been a crazy ride over the past 10 years. >> It's fun because, you know, on siliconangle.com, which we founded, we were covering early days of crypto. In fact, our first website, the developer want to be paid in crypto. It's interesting. Price of Bitcoin, I won't say that how low it was. But then you saw the ICO Wave, the token started coming in. You started seeing much more engineering focus, a lot of white papers coming out, a lot of cool ideas. And then now you got this mainstream of this. So I got to ask you, what are the coolest things you guys are working on, because Unstoppable has a solution that solves a problem today, and that people are facing at the same time, it is part of this new architecture. What problem do you guys solve right now that's in market that you're seeing the most traction on? >> Yeah, so it's really about, so whenever you interact with a blockchain, you wind up having to deal with one of these really, really crazy public keys, public addresses. And they're like anywhere from 20 to 40 characters long, they're random, they're impossible to memorize. And going back to even early days in crypto, I think people knew that this tech was not going to go mainstream if you have to copy and paste these things around. If I'm getting ready to send you like a million dollars, I'm going to copy and paste some random string of numbers and letters. I'm going to have no confirmations about who I'm sending it to, and I'm going to hope that it works out. It's just not practical. People have kind of always known there was going to be a solution. And one of the more popular ideas was, doing kind of like what DNS did, which is, instead of having to deal with these crazy IP addresses, this long random string of numbers to find a website, you have a name like a keyword, something that's easy to remember. You know, like a hotels.com or something like that. And so what NFT domains are, is basically the same thing, but for blockchain addresses. And yeah, it's just better and easier. There's this joke that everybody, you know, if you want to send me money, you're going to send me a test transaction of, you know, like a dollar first, just to make sure that I get it. Call me up and make sure that I get it before you go and send the big amount. Just not the way of moving billions of dollars of value is going to work in the future. >> Yeah, and I think one of the things you just point out, make it easier. When you have these new waves, these shifts, we saw it with the web pages. More and more web pages were coming on, more online users. They called it the online populations growing. Here, the same thing's happening. And if the focus is on ease of use, making things simpler to understand, and reducing the step it takes to do things, right? This is kind of what's going on and with the developer community, and what Ethereum has done really well is, brought in the developers. So that's the convergence of all the action. And so, when you (John chuckles) so that's where you're at right now. How do you go forward from here? Obviously, there's business development deals to do, you guys are partnering a lot. What's the strategy? What are some of the things that you can share about some of your business activity that points to how mainstream it is and where it's going? >> So I think the way to think about an NFT domain name is that it's meant to be like your identity on Web3. So, it's going to have a lot of different context. So it's kind of like your Venmo account, where you could send me money to brad.crypto, can be your decentralized website, where you can check out my content at brad.crypto. It can also be my like login kind of like a decentralized Facebook O oth, where I can log into DApps and share information about myself and bring my data along with me. So it's got all of these different things that it can do, but where it's starting is inside of crypto wallets and crypto apps, and they are adopting it for this identity idea. And it's the same form of identity across all your apps. That's the thing that's new here. So, yeah, that's the really big and profound shift that's happening. And the reason why this is going to be maybe even more important than a lot of, you know, your listeners think is that, everyone's going to have a crypto wallet. Every person in the world is going to have a crypto wallet. Every app, every consumer app that you use is going to build one in. Twitter just launched, just built one. Reddit is building one. You're seeing it across all the consumer finance apps. So it's not just the crypto companies that you're thinking of, every app's going to have a wallet. And it's going to really change the way that we use the internet. >> I think there's a couple things you pointed. I want to get your reaction to and thoughts more on this concept of DApps or decentralized applications, DApps or depending on what you call it. This is applications. And that take advantage of the architecture, and then this idea of users owning their own data. And this absolutely reverses the script today. Today, you see Facebook, you see LinkedIn, all these silos, they own the data that you are the product. Here, the users are in control. They have their data, but the apps are being built for it for the paradigm shift here, right? That's what's happening. Is that right? >> Totally, totally. And so, it all starts. I mean, DApp is just this crazy term. It feels like it's this, like really foreign, weird thing. All it means is that you sign in with your wallet instead of signing in with a username and password, where the data is stored inside of that app. Like inside of Facebook. So that's the only real, like, core underneath difference to keep in mind, signing in with the wallet. But that is like a complete sea change in the way the internet works. Because I have this key, this private key, it's on my phone or my device or whatever. And I'm the only one that has it. So, if somebody wanted to hack me, they need to go get access to my device. Two years ago, when Twitter got hacked, Barack Obama and Elon Musk were tweeting the same stuff. That's because Twitter had all the data. And so, you needed to hack Twitter instead of each individual person. It's a completely different security model. It's way better for users to have that. But, if you're thinking from the user perspective, what's going to happen is, is that instead of Facebook storing all of my data, and then me being trapped inside of Facebook, I'm going to store it, and I'm going to move around on the internet, logging in with my Web3 username, my NFT domain name, and I'm going to have all my data with me. And then I could use 100 different Facebooks all in one day. And it would be effortless for me to go and move from one to the other. So, the monopoly situation that we exist in as a society is because of the way data storage works and- >> So that's a huge point. So let's double down on that for one more second. This is a huge point. I want to get your thoughts. So I think people don't understand that in the mainstream having that horizontal traversal or ability to move around with your identity in this case, your Unstoppable Domain and your data allows the user to take it from place to place. It's like going to other apps that could be like Facebook, where the user's in charge. And they're either deciding whether to share their data or not, or they're certainly continuate their data. And this allows for more of a horizontal scalability for the user, not for a company. >> Yeah, and what's going to happen is, as users are building up their reputation. They're building up their identity in Web3. So you have your username and you have your profile and you have certain badges of activities that you've done. And you're building up this reputation. And now apps are looking at that, and they're starting to create social networks and other things to provide me services because it started with the user. And so, the user is starting to collect all this valuable data, and then apps are saying, well, hey, let me give you a special experience based on that. But the real thing, and this is like the core, I mean, this is just like a core capitalist idea, in general. If you have more competition, you get a better experience for users. We have not had competition in Web2 for decades because these companies have become monopolies. And what Web3 is really allowing is, this wide open competition. And that's the core thing. Like, it's not like, you know, it's going to take time for Web3 to get better than Web2. You know, it's very, very early days. But the reason why it's going to work is because of the competitive aspect here. Like it's just so much better for consumers when this happens. >> I would also add to that, first of all, great point, great insight. I would also add that the web presence technology based upon DNS specifically is, first of all, it's asking, so it's not foreign characters, it's not Unicode for the geeks out there. But that's limiting too, it limits you to be on a site. And so, I think the combination of kind of inadequate or antiquated DNS has limitations. So if... And that doesn't help communities, right? So when you're in the communities, you have potentially marketplaces that could be anywhere. So if you have ID, I'm just kind of thinking it forward here. But if you have your own data and your own ID, you can jump into a marketplace, two-sided marketplace anywhere. An app can provide that, if the community's robust, this is kind of where I see the use case going. How do you guys, do you guys agree with that statement and how do you see that ability for the user to take advantage of other competitive or new emerging communities or marketplaces? >> So I think it all comes down. So identity is just this huge problem in Web2. And part of the reason why it's very, very hard for new marketplaces and new communities to emerge is 'cause you need all kinds of trust and reputation. And it's very hard to get real information about the users that you're interacting with. If you're in the Web3 paradigm, then what happens is, is you can go and check certain things on the blockchain to see if they're true. And you can know that they're true 100%. You can know that I have used Uniswap in the past 30 days, and OpenSea in the past 30 days. You can know for sure that this wallet is mine. The same owner of this wallet also owns this other wallet, owns this asset. So having the ability to know certain things about a stranger is really what's going to change behavior. And one of the things that we're really excited about is being able to prove information about yourself without sharing it. So I can tell you, hey, I'm a unique person. I'm an American, I'm not an American, but I don't have to tell you who I am. And you can still know that it's true. And that concept is going to be what enables what you're talking about. I'm going to be able to show up in some new community that was created two hours ago, and we can all trust each other that a certain set of facts are true. And that's possible because- >> And exchange value with smart contracts and other with no middle men involved activities, which is the promise of the new decentralized web. All right, so let me ask you a question on that. Because I think this is key. The anonymous point is huge. If you look at any kind of abstraction layers or any evolution in technology over the years, it's always been about cleaning up the mess or extending capabilities of something that was inadequate. We mentioned DNS, now you got this. There's a lot of problems with Web2, 2.0, social bots. You mentioned bots. Bots are anonymous and they don't have a lot of time in market. So it's easy to start bots, and everyone who does either scraping bots, everyone knows this. What you just pointed out was, in an ops environment that was user choice, but has all the data that could be verified. So it's almost like a blue check mark on Twitter without having your name, kind of- >> It's going to be 100s of check marks, but exactly. 'Cause there's so many different things that you're going to want to communicate to strangers, but that's exactly the right mental model. It's going to be these check marks for all kinds of different contexts. And that's what's going to enable people to trust that they're, you know, you're talking to a real person or you're talking to the type of person you thought you were talking to, et cetera. But yeah, it's, you know, I think that the issues that we have with bots today are because Web2 has failed at solving identity. I think Facebook at one point was deleting half a billion fake accounts per quarter. Something like the entire number of user profiles they were deleting per year. So it's just a total- >> And they spring up like mushrooms. They just pop up, to think that's the problem. I mean, the data that you acquire in these siloed platforms is used by them, the company. So you don't own the data, so you become the product as the cliche goes. But what you guys are saying is, if you have an identity and you pop around to multiple sites, you also have your digital footprints and your exhaust that you own. Okay, that's time, that's reputation data. I mean, you can cut it any way you want, but the point is, it's your stuff over time, that's yours. And that's immutables on the blockchain, you can store it and then make that permanent and add to it. >> Exactly. >> That's a time based thing versus today, bots that are spreading misinformation can get popped up when they get killed. They just start another one. So time actually is a metric for quality here. >> Absolutely. And people already use it in the crypto world to say like, hey, this wallet was created greater than two years ago. This wallet has had transactions for at least three or four years. Like this is probably a real, you know, this is probably a legitimate user. And anybody can look that up. I mean, we can we go look it up together right now on Etherscan, it would take a minute. >> Yeah, (indistinct). Yeah, I'm a big fan, I can tell, I love this product. I think you guys are going to do really well. Congratulations, I'm a big fan. I think this is needed. What are some of the deals you've done? blockchain.com is one and Opera. Can you take us through those deals and why they're working with you? Let's start with blockchain.com. >> Yeah, so the whole thing here is that, this identity standard for Web3 apps need to choose to support it. So, you know, we spent several years as a company working to get as many crypto wallets and browsers and crypto exchanges to support this identity standard. Some of the largest and probably most popular companies to have done this are, blockchain.com, for example, blockchain.com, one of the largest crypto wallets in the world. And you can use your domain names instead of crypto addresses. And this is super cool because blockchain.com in particular focuses on onboarding new users. So they're very focused on how we're going to get the next 4 billion internet users to use this tech. And they said, usernames are going to be essential. Like, how can we onboard this next several billion people if we have to explain to them about all these crazy addresses. And it's not just one, like we want to give you 10, 40 character addresses for all these different contexts. Like, it's just no way people are going to be able to do that without having a user name. So, that's why we're really excited about what blockchain.com's doing. They want to train users that this is the way you should use the tech. >> Yeah, and certainly no one wants to remember. I remember how writing down all my... You know, I was never a big wallet fan 'cause of all the hacks I used to write it down and store it in my safe. But if the house burns down or I kick the can who's going to find it, right? So again, these are all important things. Your key storing it, securing it, super important. Talk about Opera. That's an interesting partnership because it's got a browser that people know what it is. What are they doing different? Almost imagine they're innovating around the identity and what people's experiences with what they touch. >> Yeah, so this is one of those things that's a little bit easier and I strongly encourage everybody to go and try DApps after this. 'Cause this is going to be one of those concepts, it can be a little easier if you try it than if you hear about it. But the concept of a wallet and a browser are kind of merging. So it makes sense to have a wallet inside of your browser. Because when you go to a website, the website's going to want you to sign in with your wallet. So having that be in one app is quite convenient for users. And so Opera was one of the trailblazers, a traditional browser that added a crypto wallet so that you can store money in there. And then also added support for domain names for payments and for websites. So, you can type in brad.crypto and you can send me money, or you can type in brad.crypto into the browser and you can check out my website. I've got a little NFT gallery. You can see my collection up there right now. So that's the idea is that, browsers have this kind of superpower in Web3. And what I think is going to happen, Opera and Brave have been kind of the trailblazers here. What I think is going to happen is that, these traditional browsers are going to wake up and they're going to see that integrating a wallet is critical for them to be able to provide services to consumers. >> I mean, it is an app. I mean, why not make it a DApps as well? Because why wouldn't I want to just send you crypto, like Venmo, you mentioned earlier, which people can understand that concept. Venmo, let me make my cash. Same concept here. But built in to the browser, which is not a browser anymore it's a reader, a DApp reader, basically with a wallet. All right, so what does this mean for you guys and the marketplace? You got Opera pushing the envelope on browsing, changing the experience, enabling the applications to be discovered and navigated and consumed. You got blockchain.com with the wallets and being embedded there. Good distribution. Who are you looking for for partners? How do people partner? Let's just say theCUBE wants to do NFTs, and we want to have a login for our communities, which are all open. How do we partner with you? Or do we? We have to wait or is there a... I mean, take us through the partnership strategy. How do people engage with Unstoppable Domains? >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think that if you're a wallet or a crypto exchange, it's super easy, we would love to have you support being able to send money using domains. We also have all sorts of different kind of marketing activities we can do together. We can give out free stuff to your communities. We have a bunch of education that we do. We're really trying to be this onboarding point to Web3. So there's, I think a lot of cool stuff we can do together on the commercial side and on the marketing side. And then the other category that we didn't talk about was DApps. And we now have this login with ensemble domains, which you kind of alluded to there. And so you can log in with your domain name and then you can give the app permission to get certain information about you or proof of information about you, not the actual information, if you don't want to share it, because it's your choice and you're in control. And so, that would be another thing. Like, if you all launch a DApps, we should absolutely have login with Unstoppable there. >> Yeah, there's so much headroom here. You got a short term solution with exchange. Get that distribution, I get that, that's early days of the foundation, push the distribution, get you guys everywhere. But the real success comes in for the login. I mean, the sign in single sign in concept. I think that's going to be powerful, great stuff. Okay, future, tell us something we don't know about Unstoppable Domains that people might be interested in. >> I think the thing that you're going to hear about a lot from us in the future is going to be around this idea of identity, of being able to prove that you're a human and be able to tell apps that. And apps are going to give you all kinds of special access and rewards and all kinds of other things, because you gave 'em that information. So that's probably, that's the hint I'm going to drop. >> You know, it's interesting, Brad. You bring trust, you bring quality verified data, choose intelligence software and machine learning, AI and access to distributed communities and distributed applications. Interesting to see what the software does with that. Cause it traditionally didn't have that before. I mean, just in mind blowing. I mean, it's pretty crazy. Great stuff. Brad, thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing the insight. The Co-founder of Unstoppable Domains, Brad Kam. Thanks for stopping by theCUBE's Showcase with Unstoppable Domains. >> Thanks for having me. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE. As the saying goes, follow the money. And with me to talk about HPE Financial Services and the value that it can bring to customers are two great guests, Brad, Shapiro's VP and managing director of the Enterprise Business at HPE Financial Services. And Paul Sheeran is Managing Director of Worldwide Channel and SMB for HPE Financial Services. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Come on in. >> Thanks Dave, we really appreciate you having us. >> Hi, Dave. >> So Brad, why don't you start us off? Give us the rundown on HPE Financial Services. What's the scope of your services? Should we think of you as a bank? And maybe you could talk about some of the things that you do beyond financing. >> Yeah, that sounds great. So look, we are so much more than banking. Our mission is to create investment capacity to help customers accelerate their transformation. And maybe you could think of us as kind of like a two-in-one partner. We're part-CIO, part-CFO. We kind of refer to ourselves as the CIFO, if you will. And we've got an expertise in a number of different areas. Of course, we'll start with financial. And yes, we offer financial services, and we do an awful lot of financial solutioning. In our portfolio, it's over 13 billion of assets that have been financed. So that is a core competency for us. But we're more than that. We focus also on the technology side of things. And we have expertise in asset management. And we deal with multiple generations of technologies and all major manufacturers as well, not just HPE, but we understand technology and all different types, all different ages of technology. And lastly, we play a pretty big role around sustainability. HPE takes a leadership position when it comes to sustainability. And a lot of our capabilities around the circular economy and putting assets back into reuse play an important role in not only helping customers financially, but helping them meet their sustainability goals. >> I want to come back and ask you more about that, but Paul, I wonder... First of all, I like the CIFO. That's a great, little nomenclature. But Paul, if you're a small business, the CEO is also sometimes the CIO, is sometimes the CFO, a lot of hats. So maybe you could talk about the role that you guys play for SMBs and also channel partners. Channel's a whole different ball game. They want to make margin, they want to grow their business. So maybe you could discuss some of the differences in that channel. >> Yeah. Sure, Dave. Well, starting with the SMB customer is really critical part of our portfolio. As you said, they cover all the roles, so the CIO, CFO. And their budgets can be tight. And especially given the last 18 months, if you read some of the data out there, the budgets are really constrained, especially for the SMB customer. So we try and do, and what our mission is, is what we call creating investment capacity, giving budgets a boost, bringing that vitality to the SMB customer base, to all our customers, but especially SMB customers to help them be able to invest in their digital transformations going forward. So crucial now that all our customers are able to continue to invest in technology. And the pandemic clearly brought it home how important having a digital capability it is. So SMB budgets are tight, and what we try and do is give them that boost, give them that vitality to actually continue to advance ahead and make the right investments for the future. And then from the partners, we actually do a four and a half thousand partners around the world. As you said, partners, they're also not only looking for financial solutions, but how do we differentiate ourselves is to try and help that partner move to a digital platform. We have invested heavily in our digital tools over the last couple of years. So in terms of offering solutions, it can be literally zero touch, low touch so the partner community can plug into our platforms. We also help them on that journey as a service. So technology is moving to as a service. People want to consume technology as a service like they do in the rest of their lives. It's all about subscription. And partners need help to be able to move to another service way. Hopefully GreenLake is the answer. So we support HPE GreenLake's offering. But there's different parts along the way for partners that we look to help them. And last but not least is helping them about asset management. As Brad said, it's all about the assets and understanding how those assets are managed. And helping the partners, having a relevant conversation with their customers as to how best to put in an asset management strategy for their customers. So three areas that we look to differentiate ourselves, Dave. >> We got a lot to talk about. So I want to come back and talk about as a service as well. But Brad, I want to go back to sustainability. So is it just the right thing to do? What's the financial case? Is it good business as well, and where do you fit? >> Yeah, so we believe that sustainability is good for the environment, obviously, but it's also good for business. And when you think about what we bring to the table and those assets back into reuse. So we handle between three and four million assets a year, and over 90% of those, we put back into reuse, with about 10% going into recycling. Putting those back into reuse, the customer that has those assets, we can monetize those assets and help accelerate transformation. So we monetize the asset, and we fund that transition in that transformation so we can really help customers get more budget than they were expecting by leveraging what they would deem to be end-of-life assets, but we find another home for those assets. So it definitely helps customers accelerate the transformation, while being good for the world, good for the environment. >> And that's true, Paul, for SMBs, just maybe on a smaller scale, and definitely makes sense for the channel, right? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. Sustainability now is key. Certainly key for our channel partners is moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have. So absolutely, totally agree. >> Yeah. And it's almost like gain sharing. I mean, sometimes we sell used equipment on eBay. It helps fund future business or future transformation. So let's get into the transformations. Everybody talks about digital transformation. Coming into the pandemic, everybody talked about it, but there was a lot of complacency. We've all seen the wrecking ball and the acceleration we talk about all the time, but what role does HPE Financial Services, and do you have any specific solutions that support digital transformations? Any examples there? Maybe Brad, you could start it off. >> Yeah. Yeah. So I'll start off, and then Paul, feel free to jump in. Look Dave, what I would say is the pandemic taught us that every company is a technology company. And where HPFS comes in is we're looking to provide the investment capacity, which is the lifeblood of a company's digital roadmap. So if you don't have the investment capacity, there is no transformation. So when something like the pandemic comes up, and you can't budget for a pandemic, and revenues are down and budgets are getting squeezed, you really need a partner to help you with that. How do you uncover that investment capacity? So we we've talked to lots of customers. We've also done some research, and the ESG group and analysts basically found that 73% of organizations, not surprisingly, either delayed or canceled projects around IT transformation because of all the uncertainty. So what we're looking to do is leverage all of our capabilities in a timely fashion. Last year, we announced the idea of payment holidays and deferred payments so you could keep your transformation going and not have to pay for it for a full year. And now we look at it as we're coming out of the pandemic. And what we're looking to help customers with is one, help them transition their existing infrastructure into a modernized consumption model like GreenLake. Also looking to accelerate the velocity of the transformation programs by leveraging our capabilities around asset upcycling, as well as our accelerated migration program. And last, looking at our existing customers really doing some financial engineering with them, so they can stretch their budgets more and expand the budget to be able to handle new projects. >> Yeah, I mean, Paul, I think Brad nailed it. You're right, their transformations are strategic. They had to fund VDI initiatives or endpoint security or find some cash to buy laptops to support people at home. People were pulling out their servers and sticking them in their trunk and driving to their home because they couldn't get laptops for awhile. And so what are you seeing now, Paul, particularly in the channel. And of course, again, SMBs were squeezed. Maybe they don't have the liquidity that some of these large public companies have. A lot of people just shored up their balance sheets during the pandemic. Maybe the SMB doesn't have as much advantage to do that. But what are you seeing in regard to the sort of bounce back of spend in more strategic areas like transformation? >> Well, I think what we're seeing right now and what we're hearing, especially for SMB customer, is cash is king. It's all about cash preservation. It's about making sure that... You'll hear some studies where some SMB customers only have three or four months left of cash in their kitty to keep their businesses running. So that is really top of mind now. Would they have to invest? If they don't want invest, they're going to be dead in the water to stay ahead of the competition. So what we're looking to do is really help those customers preserve that cash and reach and look for different ways about how to boost their budget. There's actually nothing better than an example. Brad laid out very nicely in terms of what we can do. Bringing it to life, not so much an SMB customer, but there is UNAD. And UNAD is a university in Columbia based in Bogota. And their mission is very simple, it's all about excellence and learning. But as they went into the pandemic, they needed to invest in their distance learning platforms to really help their students. And like most businesses, cash and budget was being squeezed. Revenues were tight. So it would've been very easy to postpone that investment. Well, what we did with UNAD and working with UNAD under IT team was firstly to understand their existing IT estate and really see what assets are being utilized, what are not being utilized, what assets have reached or ended their useful life. And you'd be amazed. And it's not just the data center, we can work right across their whole estate. So as well as the data center, we look at the PCs. To your point, David, we look at even their print estate. And we identified many, many assets that were being underutilized and other assets that were end of life. So we were able to take those assets back and actually release value and boosts UNAD's budget. And some of those assets could not. They had no value. And sustainability was top of their agenda as well. As you'd imagine, the university wanted to lead and show their students that sustainability is key. So we were able to take those assets back and actually recycle them in a very environmentally sound way. So that was the first step to actually inject some cash into their budgets. The next step then was to look at their existing financial contracts that they had in place where maybe some of their banks and actually restructured those contracts to actually give them additional capacity to invest right now in technology. And I'm delighted to say they partnered with the HPE team, I mean, Aruba, to actually continue their five-year roadmap and actually improved their distance learning platforms. So I just thought that was a really good example right now and in the current climate as to show when we work together with our customers, what's actually possible. >> So let's talk a little bit more about GreenLake. I mean, for decades, I mean, even if I go back to the '80s, I saw financial instruments to sort of rent essentially, but it's different. GreenLake, HPE, has pivoted its entire company to as a service. And I want to understand better what role HPE Financial Services plays in making that transition. It's obviously a crucial part of the financing piece, but Brad, maybe you could tell us a little bit more there. >> Yeah, sure. And I think the great thing about GreenLake is it's more than just a consumption model, it's really providing that cloud experience, on-prem, and being able for customers to really manage a hybrid cloud experience. But where HPEFS plays a role, again, it's around our knowledge and ability around assets. So we are underneath GreenLake, doing financial engineering, managing the assets. But the biggest thing, when you think about how does a customer transition? If they're in a traditional cash purchase paradigm, the cost of change and figuring out how to move into a new type of paradigm and new consumption model can be daunting. So HPFS works closely with our GreenLake team and the customer, and we can take those existing assets and look to accelerate the migration into a GreenLake. A great example of that, a public sector customer, Kern County, they were in that cash paradigm, they had lots of assets. Like most entities, they were under pressure from a budget perspective. Tax revenues were down for a couple years in a row. So not only did moving to a GreenLake model provide some cost savings, and cost savings are important, but it also allowed them to deliver the services they needed to their constituents because they had that pay for use type of flexibility. They didn't have a long delay in procuring and provisioning equipment when they needed to roll something out. And again, once again, HPFS was able to monetize their existing assets, roll those into a GreenLake solution and help self-fund that transformation and really accelerate it to get from that cash paradigm model to a new GreenLake consumption model. >> Paul, what about the channel? I mean, on the one hand, I could see the channels loving GreenLake because there's a lot of services involved, and it's sort of an ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the sort of big hit. But on the other hand, it's the ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the big hit. What's the conversations like with the channel? How is that going? I mean, clearly it's the future, but how do they see it? >> I wouldn't say a drip of cash. We would call it an in-use revenue where it's very predictable, which is actually also a good thing, rather than a sort of a one-and-done solution. So clearly, GreenLake is very important to our channel partners, and we're seeing some really good adoption across the world. Again, we underpin that. The other thing to say is a lot of channel partners, as you likely say, want as sell services and become service providers. And what we also do is support not just the data center, but also workplace and print. And what you'll see on the printing side for many, many years, the print partners have been selling a contractual type of model. But a lot of partners now are moving all of their core portfolio into as a service. And there's different parts. It's nearly a cash to as a service journey, and there's different parts of that ladder on the way. And we will look to help our partners get along that ladder and hopefully position GreenLake. But there's also more simpler solutions like subscription that we can position on that journey. So it's really helping that partner get the confidence and the financial wherewithal and the infrastructure to get on the as a service journey. >> How about solutions? I mean, you guys have had some recent announcements. Maybe Brad, you can take us through sort of what the highlights of those were. >> Sure. So yeah, the first announcement was really the example I just provided, which was how do we transition customers to GreenLake? So again, that's a really important step for many customers, and something that we can help them with is moving from that existing paradigm to GreenLake. The second is really helping customers create velocity to move their transformation programs faster. And we do that in a number of ways, but again, all around the asset in our asset management expertise, whether we look to put those assets back into reuse in their facility, or if we look to monetize those assets and put them into reuse with a different customer. Really, it's all around how do we accelerate the customers transformation as we come out of a pandemic. And then lastly, the offering is really focused on how can we help the customer look at existing budget and really financially engineer where they're spending their money to create new pools of budget and cash so they can fund new projects. So it's interesting because when I look at the customers that we're doing these things with, it really spans every industry. So we're dealing with financial services and insurance companies, communications and broadcasting, travel and hospitality, you name it, manufacturing. So the interesting thing is, while sometimes you come out with solutions that are very industry-specific, I think our circumstances today really span lots of industries, both in the commercial and the public sector. And we're finding that these offers are really relevant right now for customers. >> Let's zoom out for a bit. And Brad, let's start with you, and then Paul, I want to get your unique perspectives from the standpoint of SMB in the channel. Summarize your overall strategy in that context. And then I'm interested in, how important do you feel the HPE Financial Services is with regards... And of course, you guys are biased, but that's okay, I want to hear your bias view. How important is it in the grand scheme of actually doing business with HPE. And I'm interested in in why HPE and how much of a competitive advantage you bring relative to some of your major competitors. >> Yeah, sure. So look, the strategy, in my mind, I'll start with HPFS, it's really making sure that we're working closely with our customers, understanding their needs from a business perspective and what business outcomes they're trying to achieve and then marrying both the financial planning and the technology planning to help those customers deliver and achieve those business outcomes. Doing that, also in a way that is sustainable and is good for the environment and helps customers achieve their sustainability initiatives. So kind of marrying that financial technology and sustainability portion of it. From my perspective, I think HPE is a fantastic partner. One, we've been at GreenLake for quite a while, and it continues to evolve. The experiences that we can provide customers now are significantly advanced from when flex capacity came out years and years and years ago. So I really think if a customer took a look at GreenLake a few years ago, you need to keep looking at it because it really has evolved, really creates a unique experience. But I think it's the combination of our technology. We have great technology in our portfolio. We have a fantastic model in GreenLake, and then we have all of the financial engineering expertise around assets and lifecycles and how to get the most out of your IT investment. And we are a partner. If you have sustainability initiatives, I mean, HPE talks the talk, we walk the walk. We do all of this for ourselves, and then we bring those practices out and share best practices with customers. So I really think it's a great time to partner with HP if you're a customer. >> Right, thank you for that, Brad. Paul, what would you add for your constituents? >> Brad, said it beautifully. So just a couple of points I'd add in. From a partner perspective, we are actually in every corner of the world. So we have that global footprint. And then as you see, consolidation in the market, that's very important, not only for our customers, but also for our partners, more and more solutions are going cross border and involve different regions. And we look to make sure that we're globally consistent in how we work with our partners and work with our customers. And the final thing I'd say is we get very excited about supporting our HPE colleagues. But from a channel perspective, we actually also support HPI, HP Inc. You will recall, before separation, that the companies did. So we also support the workplace and print environments, plus third party vendors, which again, is important for the channel community. Why do you need a one-stop shell? And where you'll often have a mixed technology and the solution. So we're there for that as well and always have been. And I think the partner community love our consistency there >> It's a nice arrow when you quiver. And of course we've seen laptop demand explode. And it looks like it's going to sustain for a while here. It's hard to predict, but Paul, still with you, tell us, thinking about the future, what's getting you jazzed up? >> Well, I said we have a global footprint, and every country is in a different place right now. As we sort of come out of the pandemic, some countries are still in the midst of it. But what gets me jazzed up and what gets me excited is the sense of optimism. I think we're sort of figured out how to navigate our way out of this pandemic and the current environment. And customers all recognize the need to invest in technology. Technology is the way forward. So that means having the capacity, investment capacity, the investment vitality, to make that investment. So what gets me excited is what we do is important and we're there to help. >> Great. Thank you. And then Brad, two-part question for you to bring us home. So what are you excited about, and what do you got going at Discover? >> So in terms of my excitement, I think Paul said it well, every company is a technology company. And when we see that everybody is going through a digital transformation, quite frankly, we at HPEFS are going through our own digital transformation. Paul mentioned earlier about Technomics. We have omni-channel ways of engaging with us that are consistent. We're looking at our customer and partner experience and continuing to improve those. So we're not resting on our laurels in what we've done in the past, we continue to change, to modernize, to create new and better ways of doing business with our customer base. So the exciting part, for me, is that change that comes with innovation and technology. And I just think HPE is a great place to be right now with all of that innovation going on. So you asked about Discover. So we're really excited. We've got a spotlight with Irv Rothman focused on investment agility and key to growth and regeneration. So that's really exciting. We have a few breakouts, making technology a force for good, getting back on track that create the investment vitality to take on the world and investment strategies to accelerate innovation in a disruptive world. So really excited about that. And then last, we've got some demos. We have a live interactive demo on our technology renewal center, as well as some on-demand demos of those renewal centers as well. So we've got a lot going on at Discover, and we're really excited about it. >> Great. Gentlemen, thank you for that. So I mean, look, cost of capital is low, but to have a technology partner with you that's also has financial expertise, that, to me, is a killer combination. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate your time. >> Dave, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of HPE Discover 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE. As the saying goes, follow the money. And with me to talk about HPE Financial Services and the value that it can bring to customers are two great guests, Brad, Shapiro's VP and managing director of the Enterprise Business at HPE Financial Services. And Paul Sheeran is Managing Director of Worldwide Channel and SMB for HPE Financial Services. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Come on in. >> Thanks Dave, we really appreciate you having us. >> Hi, Dave. >> So Brad, why don't you start us off? Give us the rundown on HPE Financial Services. What's the scope of your services? Should we think of you as a bank? And maybe you could talk about some of the things that you do beyond financing. >> Yeah, that sounds great. So look, we are so much more than banking. Our mission is to create investment capacity to help customers accelerate their transformation. And maybe you could think of us as kind of like a two-in-one partner. We're part-CIO, part-CFO. We kind of refer to ourselves as the CIFO, if you will. And we've got an expertise in a number of different areas. Of course, we'll start with financial. And yes, we offer financial services, and we do an awful lot of financial solutioning. In our portfolio, it's over 13 billion of assets that have been financed. So that is a core competency for us. But we're more than that. We focus also on the technology side of things. And we have expertise in asset management. And we deal with multiple generations of technologies and all major manufacturers as well, not just HPE, but we understand technology and all different types, all different ages of technology. And lastly, we play a pretty big role around sustainability. HPE takes a leadership position when it comes to sustainability. And a lot of our capabilities around the circular economy and putting assets back into reuse play an important role in not only helping customers financially, but helping them meet their sustainability goals. >> I want to come back and ask you more about that, but Paul, I wonder... First of all, I like the CIFO. That's a great, little nomenclature. But Paul, if you're a small business, the CEO is also sometimes the CIO, is sometimes the CFO, a lot of hats. So maybe you could talk about the role that you guys play for SMBs and also channel partners. Channel's a whole different ball game. They want to make margin, they want to grow their business. So maybe you could discuss some of the differences in that channel. >> Yeah. Sure, Dave. Well, starting with the SMB customer is really critical part of our portfolio. As you said, they cover all the roles, so the CIO, CFO. And their budgets can be tight. And especially given the last 18 months, if you read some of the data out there, the budgets are really constrained, especially for the SMBs customer. So we try and do, and what our mission is, is what we call creating investment capacity, giving budgets a boost, bringing that vitality to the SMB customer base, to all our customers, but especially SMB customers to help them be able to invest in their digital transformations going forward. So crucial now that all our customers are able to continue to invest in technology. And the pandemic clearly brought at home how important having a digital capability it is. So SMB budgets are tight, and what we try and do is give them that boost, give them that vitality to actually continue to advance ahead and make the right investments for the future. And then from the partners, we actually do a four and a half thousand partners around the world. As you said, partners, they're also not only looking for financial solutions, but how do we differentiate ourselves is to try and help that partner move to a digital platform. We have invested heavily in our digital tools over the last couple of years. So in terms of offering solutions, it can be literally zero touch, low touch so the partner community can plug into our platforms. We also help them on that journey as a service. So technology is moving to as a service. People want to consume technology as a service like they do in the rest of their lives. It's all about subscription. And partners need help to be able to move to another service way. Hopefully GreenLake is the answer. So we support HPE GreenLake's offering. But there's different parts along the way for partners that we look to help them. And last but not least is helping them about asset management. As Brad said, it's all about the assets and understanding how those assets are managed. And helping the partners, having a relevant conversation with their customers as to how best to put in an asset management strategy for their customers. So three areas that we look to differentiate ourselves, Dave. >> We got a lot to talk about. So I want to come back and talk about as a service as well. But Brad, I want to go back to sustainability. So is it just the right thing to do? What's the financial case? Is it good business as well, and where do you fit? >> Yeah, so we believe that sustainability is good for the environment, obviously, but it's also good for business. And when you think about what we bring to the table and those assets back into reuse. So we handle between three and four million assets a year, and over 90% of those, we put back into reuse, with about 10% going into recycling. Putting those back into reuse, the customer that has those assets, we can monetize those assets and help accelerate transformation. So we monetize the asset, and we fund that transition in that transformation so we can really help customers get more budget than they were expecting by leveraging what they would deem to be end-of-life assets, but we find another home for those assets. So it definitely helps customers accelerate the transformation, while being good for the world, good for the environment. >> And that's true, Paul, for SMBs, just maybe on a smaller scale, and definitely makes sense for the channel, right? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. Sustainability now is key. Certainly key for our channel partners is moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have. So absolutely, totally agree. >> Yeah. And it's almost like gain sharing. I mean, sometimes we sell used equipment on eBay. It helps fund future business or future transformation. So let's get into the transformations. Everybody talks about digital transformation. Coming into the pandemic, everybody talked about it, but there was a lot of complacency. We've all seen the wrecking ball and the acceleration we talk about all the time, but what role does HPE Financial Services, and do you have any specific solutions that support digital transformations? Any examples there? Maybe Brad, you could start it off. >> Yeah. Yeah. So I'll start off, and then Paul, feel free to jump in. Look Dave, what I would say is the pandemic taught us that every company is a technology company. And where HPFS comes in is we're looking to provide the investment capacity, which is the lifeblood of a company's digital roadmap. So if you don't have the investment capacity, there is no transformation. So when something like the pandemic comes up, and you can't budget for a pandemic, and revenues are down and budgets are getting squeezed, you really need a partner to help you with that. How do you uncover that investment capacity? So we we've talked to lots of customers. We've also done some research, and the ESG group and analysts basically found that 73% of organizations, not surprisingly, either delayed or canceled projects around IT transformation because of all the uncertainty. So what we're looking to do is leverage all of our capabilities in a timely fashion. Last year, we announced the idea of payment holidays and deferred payments so you could keep your transformation going and not have to pay for it for a full year. And now we look at it as we're coming out of the pandemic. And what we're looking to help customers with is one, help them transition their existing infrastructure into a modernized consumption model like GreenLake. Also looking to accelerate the velocity of the transformation programs by leveraging our capabilities around asset upcycling, as well as our accelerated migration program. And last, looking at our existing customers really doing some financial engineering with them, so they can stretch their budgets more and expand the budget to be able to handle new projects. >> Yeah, I mean, Paul, I think Brad nailed it. You're right, their transformations are strategic. They had to fund VDI initiatives or endpoint security or find some cash to buy laptops to support people at home. People were pulling out their servers and sticking them in their trunk and driving to their home because they couldn't get laptops for awhile. And so what are you seeing now, Paul, particularly in the channel. And of course, again, SMBs were squeezed. Maybe they don't have the liquidity that some of these large public companies have. A lot of people just shored up their balance sheets during the pandemic. Maybe the SMB doesn't have as much advantage to do that. But what are you seeing in regard to the sort of bounce back of spend in more strategic areas like transformation? >> Well, I think what we're seeing right now and what we're hearing, especially for SMB customer, is cash is king. It's all about cash preservation. It's about making sure that... You'll hear some studies where some SMB customers only have three or four months left of cash in their kitty to keep their businesses running. So that is really top of mind now. Would they have to invest? If they don't want invest, they're going to be dead in the water to stay ahead of the competition. So what we're looking to do is really help those customers preserve that cash and reach and look for different ways about how to boost their budget. There's actually nothing better than an example. Brad laid out very nicely in terms of what we can do. Bringing it to life, not so much an SMB customer, but there is UNAD. And UNAD is a university in Columbia based in Bogota. And their mission is very simple, it's all about excellence and learning. But as they went into the pandemic, they needed to invest in their distance learning platforms to really help their students. And like most businesses, cash and budget was being squeezed. Revenues were tight. So it would've been very easy to postpone that investment. Well, what we did with UNAD and working with UNAD under IT team was firstly to understand their existing IT estate and really see what assets are being utilized, what are not being utilized, what assets have reached or ended their useful life. And you'd be amazed. And it's not just the data center, we can work right across their whole estate. So as well as the data center, we look at the PCs. To your point, David, we look at even their print estate. And we identified many, many assets that were being underutilized and other assets that were end of life. So we were able to take those assets back and actually release value and boosts UNAD's budget. And some of those assets could not. They had no value. And sustainability was top of their agenda as well. As you'd imagine, the university wanted to lead and show their students that sustainability is key. So we were able to take those assets back and actually recycle them in a very environmentally sound way. So that was the first step to actually inject some cash into their budgets. The next step then was to look at their existing financial contracts that they had in place where maybe some of their banks and actually restructured those contracts to actually give them additional capacity to invest right now in technology. And I'm delighted to say they partnered with the HPE team, I mean, Aruba, to actually continue their five-year roadmap and actually improved their distance learning platforms. So I just thought that was a really good example right now and in the current climate as to show when we work together with our customers, what's actually possible. >> So let's talk a little bit more about GreenLake. I mean, for decades, I mean, even if I go back to the '80s, I saw financial instruments to sort of rent essentially, but it's different. GreenLake, HPE, has pivoted its entire company to as a service. And I want to understand better what role HPE Financial Services plays in making that transition. It's obviously a crucial part of the financing piece, but Brad, maybe you could tell us a little bit more there. >> Yeah, sure. And I think the great thing about GreenLake is it's more than just a consumption model, it's really providing that cloud experience, on-prem, and being able for customers to really manage a hybrid cloud experience. But where HPEFS plays a role, again, it's around our knowledge and ability around assets. So we are underneath GreenLake, doing financial engineering, managing the assets. But the biggest thing, when you think about how does a customer transition? If they're in a traditional cash purchase paradigm, the cost of change and figuring out how to move into a new type of paradigm and new consumption model can be daunting. So HPFS works closely with our GreenLake team and the customer, and we can take those existing assets and look to accelerate the migration into a GreenLake. A great example of that, a public sector customer, Kern County, they were in that cash paradigm, they had lots of assets. Like most entities, they were under pressure from a budget perspective. Tax revenues were down for a couple years in a row. So not only did moving to a GreenLake model provide some cost savings, and cost savings are important, but it also allowed them to deliver the services they needed to their constituents because they had that pay for use type of flexibility. They didn't have a long delay in procuring and provisioning equipment when they needed to roll something out. And again, once again, HPFS was able to monetize their existing assets, roll those into a GreenLake solution and help self-fund that transformation and really accelerate it to get from that cash paradigm model to a new GreenLake consumption model. >> Paul, what about the channel? I mean, on the one hand, I could see the channels loving GreenLake because there's a lot of services involved, and it's sort of an ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the sort of big hit. But on the other hand, it's the ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the big hit. What's the conversations like with the channel? How is that going? I mean, clearly it's the future, but how do they see it? >> I wouldn't say a drip of cash. We would call it an in-use revenue where it's very predictable, which is actually also a good thing, rather than a sort of a one-and-done solution. So clearly, GreenLake is very important to our channel partners, and we're seeing some really good adoption across the world. Again, we underpin that. The other thing to say is a lot of channel partners, as you likely say, want as sell services and become service providers. And what we also do is support not just the data center, but also workplace and print. And what you'll see on the printing side for many, many years, the print partners have been selling a contractual type of model. But a lot of partners now are moving all of their core portfolio into as a service. And there's different parts. It's nearly a cash to as a service journey, and there's different parts of that ladder on the way. And we will look to help our partners get along that ladder and hopefully position GreenLake. But there's also more simpler solutions like subscription that we can position on that journey. So it's really helping that partner get the confidence and the financial wherewithal and the infrastructure to get on the as a service journey. >> How about solutions? I mean, you guys have had some recent announcements. Maybe Brad, you can take us through sort of what the highlights of those were. >> Sure. So yeah, the first announcement was really the example I just provided, which was how do we transition customers to GreenLake? So again, that's a really important step for many customers, and something that we can help them with is moving from that existing paradigm to GreenLake. The second is really helping customers create velocity to move their transformation programs faster. And we do that in a number of ways, but again, all around the asset in our asset management expertise, whether we look to put those assets back into reuse in their facility, or if we look to monetize those assets and put them into reuse with a different customer. Really, it's all around how do we accelerate the customers transformation as we come out of a pandemic. And then lastly, the offering is really focused on how can we help the customer look at existing budget and really financially engineer where they're spending their money to create new pools of budget and cash so they can fund new projects. So it's interesting because when I look at the customers that we're doing these things with, it really spans every industry. So we're dealing with financial services and insurance companies, communications and broadcasting, travel and hospitality, you name it, manufacturing. So the interesting thing is, while sometimes you come out with solutions that are very industry-specific, I think our circumstances today really span lots of industries, both in the commercial and the public sector. And we're finding that these offers are really relevant right now for customers. >> Let's zoom out for a bit. And Brad, let's start with you, and then Paul, I want to get your unique perspectives from the standpoint of SMB in the channel. Summarize your overall strategy in that context. And then I'm interested in, how important do you feel the HPE Financial Services is with regards... And of course, you guys are biased, but that's okay, I want to hear your bias view. How important is it in the grand scheme of actually doing business with HPE. And I'm interested in in why HPE and how much of a competitive advantage you bring relative to some of your major competitors. >> Yeah, sure. So look, the strategy, in my mind, I'll start with HPFS, it's really making sure that we're working closely with our customers, understanding their needs from a business perspective and what business outcomes they're trying to achieve and then marrying both the financial planning and the technology planning to help those customers deliver and achieve those business outcomes. Doing that, also in a way that is sustainable and is good for the environment and helps customers achieve their sustainability initiatives. So kind of marrying that financial technology and sustainability portion of it. From my perspective, I think HPE is a fantastic partner. One, we've been at GreenLake for quite a while, and it continues to evolve. The experiences that we can provide customers now are significantly advanced from when flex capacity came out years and years and years ago. So I really think if a customer took a look at GreenLake a few years ago, you need to keep looking at it because it really has evolved, really creates a unique experience. But I think it's the combination of our technology. We have great technology in our portfolio. We have a fantastic model in GreenLake, and then we have all of the financial engineering expertise around assets and lifecycles and how to get the most out of your IT investment. And we are a partner. If you have sustainability initiatives, I mean, HPE talks the talk, we walk the walk. We do all of this for ourselves, and then we bring those practices out and share best practices with customers. So I really think it's a great time to partner with HP if you're a customer. >> Right, thank you for that, Brad. Paul, what would you add for your constituents? >> Brad, said it beautifully. So just a couple of points I'd add in. From a partner perspective, we are actually in every corner of the world. So we have that global footprint. And then as you see, consolidation in the market, that's very important, not only for our customers, but also for our partners, more and more solutions are going cross border and involve different regions. And we look to make sure that we're globally consistent in how we work with our partners and work with our customers. And the final thing I'd say is we get very excited about supporting our HPE colleagues. But from a channel perspective, we actually also support HPI, HP Inc. You will recall, before separation, that the companies did. So we also support the workplace and print environments, plus third party vendors, which again, is important for the channel community. Why do you need a one-stop shell? And where you'll often have a mixed technology and the solution. So we're there for that as well and always have been. And I think the partner community love our consistency there >> It's a nice arrow when you quiver. And of course we've seen laptop demand explode. And it looks like it's going to sustain for a while here. It's hard to predict, but Paul, still with you, tell us, thinking about the future, what's getting you jazzed up? >> Well, I said we have a global footprint, and every country is in a different place right now. As we sort of come out of the pandemic, some countries are still in the midst of it. But what gets me jazzed up and what gets me excited is the sense of optimism. I think we're sort of figured out how to navigate our way out of this pandemic and the current environment. And customers all recognize the need to invest in technology. Technology is the way forward. So that means having the capacity, investment capacity, the investment vitality, to make that investment. So what gets me excited is what we do is important and we're there to help. >> Great. Thank you. And then Brad, two-part question for you to bring us home. So what are you excited about, and what do you got going at Discover? >> So in terms of my excitement, I think Paul said it well, every company is a technology company. And when we see that everybody is going through a digital transformation, quite frankly, we at HPEFS are going through our own digital transformation. Paul mentioned earlier about Technomics. We have omni-channel ways of engaging with us that are consistent. We're looking at our customer and partner experience and continuing to improve those. So we're not resting on our laurels in what we've done in the past, we continue to change, to modernize, to create new and better ways of doing business with our customer base. So the exciting part, for me, is that change that comes with innovation and technology. And I just think HPE is a great place to be right now with all of that innovation going on. So you asked about Discover. So we're really excited. We've got a spotlight with Irv Rothman focused on investment agility and key to growth and regeneration. So that's really exciting. We have a few breakouts, making technology a force for good, getting back on track that create the investment vitality to take on the world and investment strategies to accelerate innovation in a disruptive world. So really excited about that. And then last, we've got some demos. We have a live interactive demo on our technology renewal center, as well as some on-demand demos of those renewal centers as well. So we've got a lot going on at Discover, and we're really excited about it. >> Great. Gentlemen, thank you for that. So I mean, look, cost of capital is low, but to have a technology partner with you that's also has financial expertise, that, to me, is a killer combination. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate your time. >> Dave, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of HPE Discover 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the que were in Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of Cisco definite create. We've been covering definite create for a number of years, I think since the very first show. And Susie, we and the team really built a practice, built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and getting Debs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and developing solutions and using brain power that's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have our next guest. Ah, partner for someone is Brad Haas. He is the engineering director for Dev Ops at Presidio. Brad, great to see you. >>Hey, Jeff. Great to be here. >>Absolutely. And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect, Francisco Definite partners. And he has been driving ah, whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, Great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. Great to be here. Looking forward to this conversation. >>Absolutely. So let's let's >>start >>with you, Chuck. Because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, you know, software defined networking has been talked about for a long time, and, you know, it's really seems to be maturing. And software to find everything right has been taking over, especially with with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability, custom ability in software and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is toe have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, Absolutely. So along this whole journey of definite, where we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of versus co platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners, and what we hear from our customers and our partners is they wanna our customers one away to be able to identify. Does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey. I'm trying to do do a new implementation. I wanna automate that. How can I find a partner? Thio, Get there. And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this definite journey with us for the last six years. They really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and given edge to my customers to show them that, Yes, I have these capabilities. I built a business practice. I have technology. I have technologists that really understand this capability, and they have the definite certifications to prove it helped me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what are definite partner. Specialization is all about >>right, that's great. And, Brad, you're certainly one of those partners. And I want to get your perspective because partners are often times a little bit closer to the customer because you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on. We know what happened back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home on You can't goto work, so you know there's all the memes and social media about who you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation. The CEO of the CMO or cove it. And we all know what the answer is. Whatever you can share some information. So what happened then? And really, for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it. Six months plus and and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How is the customer? Attitudes kind of change now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment. And really, we need to put in place, um foundation to carry forward for a very long time. Potentially. >>Yeah, it was really quite interesting, actually. You know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests. Thio help with automation of provisioning our customers. And in the whole, you know, digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there, and I'd say it became or of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers. Thio. You know, new topology is where instead of the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly and waited. Have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and program ability building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers. Thio get up and running really fast on. But that is what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit, you know, Now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my office is in a different way, You know, for example, you know how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my e? My conference rooms are there, Uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information like, how many people are in the building at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that? You know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So? So the conversations really changed in ways that you couldn't have imagined before march. >>Now, I wonder with you, Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view. I mean, the network is amazing. It had had co vid struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. You know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly. Entertainment, Um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality. But for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if you know, kind of from your perspective, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, definite with with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space is good spaces. You could be giving this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Uh, Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation. And as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself. I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years this is you know, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore. But my day to day functions are are still the same, and it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry as faras kind of moving to that application type of economy as we go to micro services as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud. Those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this to this covitz situation, and I think it's helped to to justify the investments that that our customers have made. A swell is what our partners have been being able to do to deliver on that multi cloud capability to take those applications, get him closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable. Thio users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls, >>right, right, it's interesting. And Brad, you made a comment on another interview I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of applications. Now, being first class citizens was was what you said, and it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now? Really, it's the infrastructure, that response back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that APS first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that gives them the ability to react in the marketplace to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's a It's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push the cloud was really interesting In the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to you change our applications to be cloud first, you know, And then I think the terminology changed over time. I've, um, team or cloud native. So when we when we look at what Cloud has done over the past five years, with customers moving, you know, there their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center. But what it's really become is a place thio host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're no longer talking about you know, the assets per se. We're talking about the applications and what what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially what with the whole move to cloud native and micro services in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure. As code you're now able toe, bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application as infrastructure is code, the application in this the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are all are wrapped together and you've got changed control, version control. Um, and it's all automated, you know, it's it's a beautiful thing, and I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. You know, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking. I think everybody was trying to figure it out, and they didn't really fully understand what that meant. Now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like, as it's as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's terror, former answerable, whatever that might be. Whatever method or tool that you're using Thio to bring it all together. It Z you know, it's really interesting. You know, I think I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than you know, when those early days of S d. N, we're out, you know, it was a positive controller. Is it the new version of S and M. P? You know, now it makes sense. It's actually something tangible, >>right? Right. But still, Chuckas, you said, right? There's still a lot of AP ice, and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off. The network that all have to fit, uh, have to fit together. You know, we cover pager duty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the problems are within a very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandoned the shopping cart or whatever the particular applications. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability. Super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of. And they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely, Jeff. So the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference? I mean, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the Internet, the amount of people necessary to to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale. It's automation that makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that. Automatic provisions provisioning. Now that we're in micro services, now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to to better to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we could very quickly spend something up to to take that load off where traditionally it was. Open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there. Let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution. Go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team. They just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability in a point that Brad Maeda's faras you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it, I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the A p, i s from the infrastructure and then the ability to tie that into other systems like an I p address management or a change control or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made in infrastructure changed and now I can automatically do that. Documentation up Dayton record. I know who did it. I know when they did it, and I know what they did. And I know what the test results were even five years ago. That was fantasy land. Now, today, that's just the new normal. That's just how we all operates. >>Right? Right, Right. So I want to get your take on the other trend, which is cloud Multi Cloud, Public Cloud. You know, as I think you said, Brad, When Public Cloud first came out, there was kind of this this Russian to we're gonna throw everything in there than for for different reasons. People decided. Maybe that's not the best, the best solution. But really, it's horses for courses, right? And I think it's pretty interesting that that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're gonna put their workloads. And, oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right? It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my my initial Dev and an Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I wanna move it into my data center, and then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something. I wanna flex capability. So from from your perspective and helping customers work through this because still, there's a lot of opinions about what is multi cloud, what is hybrid cloud? And, you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through? You know, everybody talks about their journey. I think they're still, you know, kind of bumbling down, bumbling down past, trying to find new things. What works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. >>Yeah, no doubt is still early days. And you know, I e go back Thio being applications centric because, you know, being able thio understand that application. When you move to the cloud, it may not look like what it used to look like. When you when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service, while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service, and some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier. Those resource is wherever they are and be defined in that infrastructure is code and automation. But you know, decide from provisioning. I think we focus a lot about provisioning when we talk about automation. We also have these amazing capabilities on on the side of operations to like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability Thio gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before or at least in the, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name. Like, maybe it was something from the Hobbit. Right now you've got things coming up in spinning, spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place in that thing. You used to know what that waas Now you have toe quickly. Figure out where it went, so the observe ability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody, um, should be paying attention, attention to moving forward with. Regards, Thio when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers Or, you know, in your premise, um, breaking that in a micro services you really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, program ability in a p I s and, you know, yang models or tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many break things coming out of this, you know? And it's all like a data structure that that people who are going down this path and the definite path they're learning these data structures and be able to rationalize and make sense of them. Once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or a switch. Um, Amazon. You know, it doesn't matter. You're you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great, Chuck. I want to shift gears a little bit because there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about about, you know, definite really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as really more of a software software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you could put a little more color on that, Um, because clearly, as you said partners Air super important, it's your primary go to market and and Presidio's, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world. That's and you know, you said, there's some There's some, you know, nontraditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner, that suddenly you guys were playing with because of really the software lead. >>Yes, Jeff, that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with Devon, it's whether it be at one of the Cisco Live events in the Definite zone or the prior definite create events will have. We'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views as a as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resale market. This what we're doing with the definite specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem share them with are extremely large, definite community so they can get access to those to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there. But they may come into into a scenario where it's working with their vertical or working with the technology piece that they may not have an automation practice for. We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint goto markets where so they could go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value. On top of that traditional stack that brings us to this business, outcomes of the customers are looking for a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. >>That's terrific. Well, again, it zits unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the Cisco definite shows you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computers Museum, I think, the last couple of years. And in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together. Hope maybe, maybe for next year's event. But thank you very much for for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. >>You have a happy to be here. All >>right, Thanks a lot. That's Brad and Chuck. I'm Jeff. You're watching Cisco. Definite live coverage on the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> (soft upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of Ansible Fest 2020, brought to you by RedHat. >> Hello, welcome to the cubes coverage of Ansible Fest 2020. We're not in person, we're virtual. I'm John Furrier , your host of theCube. We've got a great power panel here of RedHat engineers. We have Brad Thorton, Senior Principle Software Engineer for Ansible networking. Adam Miller, Senior Principle Software Engineer for Security and Jill Rouleau, who's the Senior Software Engineer for Ansible Cloud. Thanks for joining me today. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. >> Good to be here. >> We're not in person this year because of COVID, a lot going on but still a lot of great news coming out of Ansible Fest this year. Last year, you guys launched a lot since last year. It's been awesome. Launched the new platform. The automation platform, grown the collections, certified collections community from five supported platforms to over 50, launched a lot of automation services catalog. Brad let's start with you. Why are customers successful with Ansible in networking? >> Why are customers successful with Ansible in networking? Well, let's take a step back to a bit of classic network engineering, right? Lots of CLI interaction with the terminal, a real opportunity for human error there. Managing thousands of devices from the CLI becomes very difficult. I think one of the reasons why Ansible has done well in the networking space and why a lot of network engineers find it very easy to use is because you can still see an attack at the CLI. But what we have the ability to do is pull information from the same COI that you were using manually, and showed that as structured data and then let you return that structured data and push it back to the configuration. So what you get when you're using Ansible is a way to programmatically interface and do configuration management across your entire fleet. It brings consistency and stability, and speed really to network configuration management. >> You know, one of the big hottest areas is, you know, I always ask the folks in the cloud what's next after cloud and pretty much unanimously it's edge, and edge is super important around automation, Brad. What's your thoughts on, as people start thinking about, okay, I need to have edge devices. How does automation play into that? And cause networking, edge it's kind of hand in hand there. So what's your thought on that? >> Yeah, for sure. It really depends on what infrastructure you have at the edge. You might be deploying servers at the edge. You may be administering IOT devices and really how you're directing that traffic either into edge compute or back to your data center. I think one of the places Ansible is going to be really critical is administering the network devices along that path from the edge, from IOT back to the data center, or to the cloud. >> Jill, when you have a Cloud, what's your thoughts on that? Because when you think about Cloud and Multicloud, that's coming around the horizon, you're looking at kind of the operational model. We talked about this a lot last year around having Cloud ops on premises and in the Cloud. What should customers think about when they look at the engineering challenges and the development challenges around Cloud? >> So cloud gets used for a lot of different things, right? But if we step back Cloud just means any sort of distributed applications, whether it's on prem in your own data center, on the edge, in a public hosted environment, and automation is critical for making those things work, when you have these complex applications that are distributed across, whether it's a rack, a data center or globally. You need a tool that can help you make sense of all of that. You've got to... We can't manage things just with, Oh, everything is on one box anymore. Cloud really just means that things have been exploded out and broken up into a bunch of different pieces. And there's now a lot more architectural complexity, no matter where you're running that. And so I think if you step back and look at it from that perspective, you can actually apply a lot of the same approaches and philosophies to these new challenges as they come up without having to reinvent the wheel of how you think about these applications. Just because you're putting them in a new environment, like at the edge or in a public Cloud or on a new, private on premise solution. >> It's interesting, you know, I've been really loving the cloud native action lately, especially with COVID, we're seeing a lot of more modern apps come out of that. If I could follow up there, how do you guys look at tools like Terraform and how does Ansible compare to that? Because you guys are very popular in the cloud configuration, you look at cloud native, Jill, your thoughts. >> Yeah. So Terraform and tools like that. Things like cloud formation or heat in the OpenStack world, they do really, really great at things like deploying your apps and setting up your stack and getting them out there. And they're really focused on that problem space, which is a hard problem space that they do a fantastic job with where Ansible tends to come in and a tool like Ansible is what do you do on day two with that application? How do you run an update? How do you manage it in the longterm of something like 60% of the workloads or cloud spend at least on AWS is still just EC2 instances. What do you do with all of those EC2 instances once you've deployed them, once they're in a stack, whether you're managing it, whatever tool you're managing it with, Ansible is a phenomenal way of getting in there and saying, okay, I have these instances, I know about them, but maybe I just need to connect out and run an update or add a package or reconfigure a service that's running on there. And I think you can glue these things together and use Ansible with these other stack deployment based tools really, really effectively. >> Real quick, just a quick followup on that. what's the big pain point for developers right now when they're looking at these tools? Because they see the path, what are some of the pain points that they're living right now that they're trying to overcome? >> I think one of the problems kind of coincidentally is we have so many tools. We're in kind of a tool explosion in the cloud space, right now. You could piece together as as many tools to manage your stack, as you have components in your stack and just making sense of what that landscape looks like right now and figuring out what are the right tools for the job I'm trying to do, that can be flexible and that are not going to box me into having to spend half of my engineering time, just managing my tools and making sense of all of that is a significant effort and job on its own. >> Yes, too many may add, would choke in years ago in the big data search, the tools, the tool train, one we call the tool shed, after a while, you don't know what's in the back, what you're using every day. People get comfortable with the right tools, but the platform becomes a big part of that thinking holistically as a system. And Adam, this comes back to security. There's more tools in the security space than ever before. Talking about tool challenges, security is the biggest tool shed everyone's got tools they'd buy everything, but you got to look at, what a platform looks like and developers just want to have the truth. And when you look at the configuration management piece of it, security is critical. What's your thoughts on the source of truth when it comes into play for these security appliances? >> So these are... Source of truth piece is kind of an interesting one because this is going to be very dependent on the organization. What type of brownfield environment they've developed, what type of things that they rely on, and what types of data they store there. So we have the ability for various sources of truth to come in for your inventory source and the types of information you store with that. This could be tagged information on a series of cloud instances or series about resources. This could be something you store in a network management tool or a CMDB. This could even be something that you put into a privilege access management system, such as, CyberArk or hashivault. Like those are the things and because of Ansible flexibility and because of the way that everything is put together in a pluggable nature, we have the capability to actually bring in all of these components from anywhere in a brownfield environment, in a preexisting infrastructure, as well as new decisions that are being made for the enterprise as I move forward. And, and we can bring all that together and be that infrastructure glue, be that automation component that can tie all these disjoint loosely coupled, or complete disc couple pieces, together. And that's kind of part of that, that security posture, remediation various levels of introspection into your environment, these types of things, as we go forward, and that's kind of what we're focusing on doing with this. >> What kind of data is stored in the source of truth? >> I mean... So what type of data? This could be credential. It could be single use credential access. This could be your inventory data for your systems, what target systems you're trying to do. It could be, various attributes of different systems to be able to classify them ,and codify them in different ways. It's kind of kind of depending, be configuration data. You know, we have the ability with some of the work that Brad and his team are doing to actually take unstructured data, make it structured, bullet into whatever your chosen source of truth is, store it, and then utilize that to, kind of decompose it into different vendors, specific syntax representations and those types of things. So we have a lot of different capability there as well. >> Brad, you were mentioned, do you have a talk on parsing, can you elaborate on that? And why should network operators care about that? >> Yeah, welcome to 2020. We're still parsing network configuration and operational state. This is an interesting one. If you had asked me years ago, did I think that we would be investing development time into parsing with Ansible network configurations? I would have said, "Well, I certainly hope not. "I hope programmability of network devices and the vendors "really have their API's in order." But I think what we're seeing is network containers are still comfortable with the command line. They're still very familiar with the command line and when it comes time to do operational state assessment and health assessment of your network, engineers are comfortable going to the command line and running show commands. So really what we're trying to do in the parsing space is not author brand new parking and parsing engine ourselves, but really leverage a lot of the open source tools that are already out there bringing them into Ansible, so network engineers can now harvest the critical information from usher operational state commands on their network devices. And then once they've gotten to the structure data, things get really interesting because now you can do entrance criteria checks prior to doing configuration changes, right? So if you want to ensure a network device has a very particular operational state, all the BGP neighbors are, for example before pushing configuration changes, what we have the ability to do now is actually parse the command that you would have run from the command line. Use that within a decision tree in your Ansible playbook, and only move forward when the configuration changes. If the box is healthy. And then once the configuration changes are made at the end, you run those same health checks to ensure that you're in a speck can do a steady state and are production ready. So parsing is the mechanism. It's the data that you get from the parsing that's so critical. >> If I had to ask you real quick, just while it's on my mind. You know, people want to know about automation. It's top of mind use case. What are some of these things around automation and configuration parsing, whether it's parsing to other configuration manager, what are the big challenges around automation? Because it's the Holy grail. Everyone wants it now. What are the couches? where's the hotspots that needs to be jumped on and managed carefully? Or the easiest low hanging fruit? >> Well, there's really two pieces to it, right? There's the technology. And then there's the culture. And, and we talk really about a culture of automation, bringing the team with you as you move into automation, ensuring that everybody has the tools and they're familiar with how automation is going to work and how their day job is going to change because of automation. So I think once the organization embraces automation and the culture is in place. On the technology side, low hanging fruit automation can be as simple as just using Ansible to push the commands that you would have previously pushed to the device. And then as your organization matures, and you mature along this kind of path of network automation, you're dealing with larger pieces, larger sections of the configuration. And I think over time, network engineers will become data managers, right? Because they become less concerned about the network, the vendors specific configuration, and they're really managing the data that makes up the configuration. And I think once you hit that part, you've won at automation because you can move forward with Ansible resource modules. You're well positioned to do NETCONF for RESTCONF or... Right once you've kind of grown to that it's the data that we need to be concerned about and it could fit (indistinct) and the operational state management piece, you're going to go through a transformation on the networking side. >> So you mentioned-- >> And one thing to note there, if I may, I feel like a piece of this too, is you're able to actually bridge teams because of the capability of Ansible, the breadth of technologies that we've had integrations with and our ability to actually bridge that gap between different technologies, different teams. Once you have that culture of automation, you can start to realize these DevOps and DevSecOps workflow styles that are top of everybody's mind these days. And that's something that I think is very powerful. And I like to try to preach when I have the opportunity to talk to folks about what we can do, and the fact that we have so much capability and so many integrations across the entire industry. >> That's a great point. DevSecOps is totally a hop on. When you have software and hardware, it becomes interesting. There's a variety of different equipment, on the security automation. What kind of security appliances can you guys automate? >> As of today, we are able to do endpoint management systems, enterprise firewalls, security information, and event management systems. We're able to do security orchestration, automation, remediation systems, privileged access management systems. We're doing some threat intelligence platforms. And we've recently added to the I'm sorry, did I say intrusion detection? We have intrusion detection and prevention, and we recently added endpoint security management. >> Huge, huge value there. And I think everyone's wants that. Jill, I've got to ask you about the Cloud because the modules came up. What use cases do you see the Ansible modules in for the public cloud? Because you got a lot of cloud native folks in public cloud, you've got enterprises lifting and shifting, there's a hybrid and multicloud horizon here. What's some of the use cases where you see those Ansible modules fitting well with public level. >> The modules that we have in public cloud can work across all of those things, you know. In our public clouds, we have support for Amazon web services, Azure GCP, and they all support your main services. You can spin up a Lambda, you can deploy ECS clusters, build AMI, all of those things. And then once you get all of that up there, especially looking at AWS, which is where I spend the most time, you get all your EC2 instances up, you can now pull that back down into Ansible, build an inventory from that. And seamlessly then use Ansible to manage those instances, whether they're running Linux or windows or whatever distro you might have them running, we can go straight from having deployed all of those services and resources to managing them and going between your instances in your traditional operating system management or those instances and your cloud services. And if you've got multiple clouds or if you still have on prem, or if you need to, for some reason, add those remote cloud instances into some sort of on-prem hardware load balancer, security endpoint, we can go between all of those things and glue everything together, fairly seamlessly. You can put all of that into tower and have one kind of view of your cloud and your hardware and your on-prem and being able to move things between them. >> Just put some color commentary on what that means for the customer in terms of, is it pain reduction, time savings? How would you classify their value? >> I mean, both. Instead of having to go between a number of different tools and say, "Oh, well for my on-prem, I have to use this. "But as soon as I shift over to a cloud, "I have to use these tools. "And, Oh, I can't manage my Linux instances with this tool "that only knows how to speak to, the EC2 to API." You can use one tool for all of these things. So like we were saying, bring all of your different teams together, give them one tool and one view for managing everything end to end. I think that's, that's pretty killer. >> All right. Now I get to the fun part. I want you guys to weigh in on the Kubernetes. Adam, if you can start with you, we'll start with you go in and tell us why is Kubernetes more important now? What does it mean? A lot of hype continues to be out there. What's the real meet around Kubernetes what's going on? >> I think the big thing is the modernization of the application development delivery. When you talk about Kubernetes and OpenShift and the capabilities we have there, and you talk about the architecture, you can build a lot of the tooling that you used to have to maintain, to be able to deliver sophisticated resilient architectures in your application stack, are now baked into the actual platform, so the container platform itself takes care of that for you and removes that complexity from your operations team, from your development team. And then they can actually start to use these primitives and kind of achieve what the cloud native compute foundation keeps calling cloud native applications and the ability to develop and do this in a way that you are able to take yourself out of some of the components you used to have to babysit a lot. And that becomes in also with the OpenShift operator framework that came out of originally Coral S, and if you go to operator hub, you're able to see these full lifecycle management stacks of infrastructure components that you don't... You no longer have to actually, maintain a large portion of what you start to do. And so the operator SDK itself, are actually developing these operators. Ansible is one of the automation capabilities. So there's currently three supported there's Ansible, there's one that you just have full access to the Golang API and then helm charts. So Ansible's specifically obviously being where we focus. We have our collection content for the... carries that core, and then also ReHat to OpenShift certified collection's coming out in, I think, a month or so. Don't hold me to the timeline. I'm shoving in trouble for that one, but we have those things going to come out. Those will be baked into the operator's decay that we fully supported by our customer base. And then we can actually start utilizing the Ansible expertise of your operations team to container native of the infrastructure components that you want to put into this new platform. And then Ansible itself is able to build that capability of automating the entire Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster in a way that allows you to go into a brownfield environment and automate your existing infrastructure, along with your more container native, futuristic next generation, net structure. >> Jill this brings up the question. Why don't you just use native public cloud resources versus Kubernetes and Ansible? What's the... What should people know about where you use that, those resources? >> Well, and it's kind of what Adam was saying with all of those brownfield deployments and to the same point, how many workloads are still running just in EC2 instances or VMs on the cloud. There's still a lot of tech out there that is not ready to be made fully cloud native or containerized or broken up. And with OpenShift, it's one more layer that lets you put everything into a kind of single environment instead of having to break things up and say, "Oh, well, this application has to go here. "And this application has to be in this environment.' You can do that across a public cloud and use a little of this component and a little of that component. But if you can bring everything together in OpenShift and manage it all with the same tools on the same platform, it simplifies the landscape of, I need to care about all of these things and look at all of these different things and keep track of these and are my tools all going to work together and are my tools secure? Anytime you can simplify that part of your infrastructure, I think is a big win. >> John: You know, I think about-- >> The one thing, if I may, Jill spoke to this, I think in the way that a architectural, infrastructure person would, but I want to try to really quick take the business analyst component of it as the hybrid component. If you're trying to address multiple footprints, both on prem, off prem, multiple public clouds, if you're running OpenShift across all of them, you have that single, consistent deployment and development footprint for everywhere. So I don't disagree with anything they said, I just wanted to focus specifically on... That piece is something that I find personally unique, as that was a problem for me in a past life. And that kind of speaks to me. >> Well, speaking of past lives-- >> Having me as an infrastructure person, thank you. >> Yeah. >> Well, speaking of past lives, OpenStack, you look at Jill with OpenStack, we've been covering the Cuba thing when OpenStack was rolling out back in the day, but you can also have private cloud. Where you used to... There's a lot of private cloud out there. How do you talk about that? How do people understand using public cloud versus the private cloud aspect of Ansible? >> Yeah, and I think there is still a lot of private cloud out there and I don't think that's a bad thing. I've kind of moved over onto the public cloud side of things, but there are still a lot of use cases that a lot of different industries and companies have that don't make sense for putting into public cloud. So you still have a lot of these on-prem open shift and on-prem OpenStack deployments that make a ton of sense and that are solving a bunch of problems for these folks. And I think they can all work together. We have Ansible that can support both of those. If you're a telco, you're not going to put your network function, virtualization on USC as to one in spot instances, right? When you call nine one one, you don't want that going through the public cloud. You want that to be on dedicated infrastructure, that's reliable and well-managed and engineered for that use case. So I think we're going to see a lot of ongoing OpenStack and on-prem OpenShift, especially with edge, enabling those types of use cases for a long time. And I think that's great. >> I totally agree with you. I think private cloud is not a bad thing at all. Things that are only going to accelerate my opinion. You look at the VM world, they talked about the telco cloud and you mentioned edge when five G comes out, you're going to have basically have private clouds everywhere, I guess, in my opinion. But anyway, speaking of VMware, could you talk about the Ansible VMware module real quick? >> Yeah, so we have a new collection that we'll be debuting at Ansible Fest this year bore the VMware REST API. So the existing VMware modules that we have usually SOAP API for VMware, and they rely on an external Python library that VMware provides, but with these fare 6.0 and especially in vSphere 6.5, VMware has stepped up with a REST API end point that we find is a lot more performance and offers a lot of options. So we built a new collection of VMware modules that will take advantage of that. That's brand new, it's a lighter way. It's much faster, we'll get better performance out of it. You know, reduced external requirements. You can install it and get started faster. And especially with these sphere seven, continuing to build on this REST API, we're going to see more and more interfaces being exposed so that we can take advantage. We plan to expand it as new interfaces are being exposed in that API, it's compatible with all of the existing modules. You can go back and forth, use your existing playbooks and start introducing these. But I think especially on the performance side, and especially as we get these larger clouds and more cloud deployments, edge clouds, where you have these private clouds and lots and lots of different places, the performance benefits of this new collection that we're trying to build is going to be really, really powerful for a lot of folks. >> Awesome. Brad, we didn't forget about you. We're going to bring you back in. Network automation has moved towards the resource modules. Why should people care about them? >> Yeah. Resource modules, excuse me. Probably I think having been a network engineer for so long, I think some of the most exciting work that has gone into Ansible network over the past year and a half, what the resource modules really do for you is they will reach out to network devices. They will pull back that network native, that vendor native configuration. While the resource module actually does the parsing for you. So there's none of that with the resource modules. And we returned structured data back to the user that represents the configuration. Going back to your question about source of truth. You can take that structure data, maybe for your interface CONFIG, your OSPF CONFIG, your access list CONFIG, and you can store that data in your source of truth under source of truth. And then where you are moving forward, is you really spend time as every engineer managing the data that makes up the configuration, and you can share that data across different platforms. So if you were to look at a lot of the resource modules, the data model that they support, it's fairly consistent between vendors. As an example, I can pull OSPF configuration from one vendor and with very small changes, push that OSPF configuration to a different vendor's platform. So really what we've tried to do with the resource modules is normalize the data model across vendors. It'll never be a hundred percent because there's functionality that exists in one platform that doesn't exist and that's exposed through the configuration, but where we could, we have normalized the data model. So I think it's really introducing the concept of network configuration management through data management and not through CLI commands anymore. >> Yeah, that's a great point. It just expands the network automation vision. And one of the things that's interesting here in this panel is you're talking about, cloud holistically, public multicloud, private hybrid security network automation as a platform, not just a tool, we're still going to have all kind of tools out there. And then the importance of automating the edge. I mean, that's a network game Brad. I mean, it's a data problem, right? I mean, we all know about networking, moving packets from here to there, but automating the data is critical and you give have bad data and you don't have... If you have misinformation, it sounds like our current politics, but you know, bad information is bad automation. I mean, what's your thoughts? How do you share that concept to developers out there? What should they be thinking about in terms of the data quality? >> I think that's the next thing we have to tackle as network engineers. It's not, do I have access to the data? You can get the data now for resource modules, you can get the data from NETCONF, from RESTCONF, you can get it from OpenConfig, you can get it from parsing. The question really is, how do you ensure the integrity and the quality of the data that is making up your configurations and the consistency of the data that you're using to look at operational state. And I think this is where the source of truth really becomes important. If you look at Git as a viable source of truth, you've got all the tools and the mechanisms within Git to use that as your source of truth for network configuration. So network engineers are actually becoming developers in the sense that they're using Git ops to worklow to manage configuration moving forward. It's just really exciting to see that transformation happen. >> Great panel. Thanks for everyone coming on, I appreciate it. We'll just end this by saying, if you guys could just quickly summarize Ansible fast 2020 virtual, what should people walk away with? What should your customers walk away with this year? What's the key points. Jill, we'll start with you. >> Hopefully folks will walk away with the idea that the Ansible community includes so many different folks from all over, solving lots of different, interesting problems, and that we can all come together and work together to solve those problems in a way that is much more effective than if we were all trying to solve them individually ourselves, by bringing those problems out into the open and working together, we get a lot done. >> Awesome, Brad? >> I'm going to go with collections, collections, collections. We introduced in last year. This year, they are real. Ansible2.10 that just came out is made up of collections. We've got certified collections on automation. We've got cloud collections, network collections. So they are here. They're the real thing. And I think it just gets better and deeper and more content moving forward. All right, Adam? >> Going last is difficult. Especially following these two. They covered a lot of ground and I don't really know that I have much to add beyond the fact that when you think about Ansible, don't think about it in a single context. It is a complete automation solution. The capability that we have is very extensible. It's very pluggable, which has a standing ovation to the collections and the solutions that we can come up with collectively. Thanks to ourselves. Everybody in the community is almost infinite. A few years ago, one of the core engineers did a keynote speech using Ansible to automate Philips hue light bulbs. Like this is what we're capable of. We can automate the fortune 500 data centers and telco networks. And then we can also automate random IOT devices around your house. Like we have a lot of capability here and what we can do with the platform is very unique and something special. And it's very much thanks to the community, the team, the open source development way. I just, yeah-- >> (Indistinct) the open source of truth, being collaborative all is what it makes up and DevOps and Sec all happening together. Thanks for the insight. Appreciate the time. Thank you. >> Thank you. I'm John Furrier, you're watching theCube here for Ansible Fest, 2020 virtual. Thanks for watching. (soft upbeat music)

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019 brought to you by the M Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> I am Stew Minimum and my co host, Justin Warren. And you're watching The Cube live from VM World 2019 here in Moscow North. Actually, the 10th year that we've had the cubit this event joining me on the program, I have Brad Anderson and Keith Norby, both with Netapp. Brad is an executive vice president, and Keith is director of strategic alliances. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. So, Brad, I've had >> the pleasure of working with the, um where since 2002 it's one of the highlights of my career in Tech has been watching that growth of virtual ization a company that, you know. It was about 100 people when I first started watching them. And that wave, a virtualization that had ripples throughout the industry, was really impressive. But >> I didn't actually >> get to come to this show until 2010 Asai said. Our 10th year of the show, you were one of the few that were at the inaugural event that it's the 16th year of it. So >> just give us a >> little bit of ah ah, look back in. You know what you've seen changing Netapp, of course. You know, long longtime partner of ah of Via Mers. >> Absolutely. He was like 3 4000 for it was at a hotel in San Diego. And there's probably about 1000 people there, but I don't think they were planning 1000. So is the longest kind of room. And we had people that were just kind of a mile down. And finally, uh uh, the comment was, Hey, could we knock down a wall and kind of get people a little bit closer? So, no, that was a long time ago. And in fact, it was Diane Mendel. I had an opportunity of Aquino, and I think there was another key note from IBM. >> Yeah, well, you know, I'm sorry they didn't invite you back on stage this morning, but, you know, >> a little big, bigger show today. >> A little bigger. I think we're somewhere the ballpark. 20 thousands. What? This show's been for about the last five years. Conversations very different today. As I made commentary were in the post VM era. Today, V EMS are no longer the center of the conversation. And you know, multi cloud is something that they put out there, which is the story I've been hearing from net out for many years software company, living in all of these cloud environment. So talk to us a little bit about how that relationship with VM wear and what we're not upsets in the ecosystem is >> changing. I mean, you know, Veum, where has never happened, then where has been a great partner for a long, long time? And, uh, and net have strategies Clearly hybrid multi cloud. When you think about private clouds today, VM where has a huge footprint in that space, So they continue be super important. We probably have a more expansive definition of hybrid to us. Hybrid is private cloud and public cloud in all kinds of combinations. And but we also so strongly believe the multi cloud and so we are. You know, we're driving very hard for the hybrid multi cloud, letting customers basically start anywhere they want to with any cloud provider on Prem in the cloud, and have that you know that control of data irrespective of and move at their own pace. >> Yes, sir. Vienna, Where has long been one of those places where everybody can meet? So you mentioned knocking down walls. VM. Where is one of the few companies that actually succeeded in doing that and having people be able to work with partners in other eras? There was often a lot of fighting between different vendors, or it's here. It's whatever you as a customer wants to do, we will be there to do that with you. And that's another one of those companies. All right, if you have some data, we will help you manage it, no matter where it is. So what tell it tells about something that what are you doing right now in this Is New World, where a stew mentions it's a post of'em world. So in this post of'em world, how do you manage your data in that post VM world? >> Well, it's it's it's Ah, it's managing first of all, I mean, we really strongly believe place, and so we're gonna manage, you know, you know the data and start where the customer starts. I mean, we're not advocating that they have to start in cloud. They have to be on prim. There's an orderly path because depending on the customer, they're all going to take a very different path. And and so what we want to do is give him control. Their data, irrespective of the path, allow them to move on that path. But we're seeing at Netapp that it's it's the but the data is beyond the data that's increasingly about applications. And so, you know, you heard a little bit about Ah Kubernetes. That's That's something we've strongly feel as well on providing a set of tools to provide choice where, you know, you know, independent the cloud, you know, same kubernetes service, same different tools, same tool set. Same service is on prim or in the cloud. >> Yeah, Ned has a strong cloud. President's summer things like cloud volumes. Some of the other acquisitions that you've made that help you with the cloud journey, like some of them have sufferings, are really strong, >> know very much so. And and we think we can provide Ah ah, the superior customer experience. But then, if the customer wants to use, you know, a variety interesting set of tools we support that as well. We are supporting the customer on his journey with the tools as they ah determined. >> So, Keith, tell us about some of the strategic partnerships that helped net up. To be able to partner with these different customers and to bring different vendors together to help themselves. Customer problems? >> Yeah, well takes a lot of them. Thio, meet the customer needs, as you saw today in the landscape folks that are on the solutions exchange floor. It takes not just a partnership between net up and VM wear, but net up in Vienna, where plus v m net up in Vienna, where plus ah ton of other folks, Cisco has an example longtime partner of ours and flex pot. Then you know the fact that we're doing memory accelerator flex pod takes, you know, something that has had a long tradition of the, um where excellence with Cisco and is now the order of magnitude faster than anything you want for APS that need scale, performance, all the service capabilities of on tap for things like Metro Cluster and beyond. >> So you remember back years ago it was you know, you know who has the most integrations and with the M wear. And you know, if you know all the A I and Viv balls and all of those pieces and netapp always, you know, was right at the top of the list. You know, working in those environments may be brought if you want to enter this. But, you know, today, how do you give us some examples That kind of that joint engineering work that goes on between Netapp and VM, where obviously there's bundle solutions like flex pod, that's, you know, the sphere plus netapp in there. But you know that engineering level, you know, where does rubber with road? >> Yeah, it's funny because I've been at every vehicle except to, And so I've been with you. In the sense I've seen the landscape of these innovations where Steve Haired and some others would talk about the movie previews of things like the aye aye and bossy providers all coming. And that was the big thing you'd focus on. Now it's less about that, and I think it's more about what Brad is kind of brought to net happened in the focus on simplicity. Now the funny part about simplicity is that to deliver simplicity, much like the engineering detail to deliver Tesla or an iPhone is extraordinary, so the work isn't less. In fact, the work is Maur and you pre configuring or pre what you were wearing as much as possible. The work we started to do over a year ago between George Curry in our CEO and Sanjay Poon got together. We started planning on some multi cloud plans, and, uh, that's where you see a lot of our persistence and cloud volumes on VMC. You see us having a view more vow, didn't design Aneta Page C. I for your Private Cloud VD I solutions. And these air meant to draw NSX a kn and when his net I've ever had in NSX immigration all said, Now we have had a sex and integrations to make that easier to bring on board. We have the realized integration so you could build a self serve portal catalog just like it talked about today, and the list goes on and on, so it's funny how it's less. The features are important. But what's more important is trying to make this a simple it's possible for you to consume and then for the folks that need things like scale of maps and service is or they need the same cloud volumes in this data fabric on any one of the hyper scale er's. We have really the only end in story on that, and that's what makes the via More plus net up thing worked really well. >> So how do you balance the flexibility of being able to solve multiple customer problems? And they all have different needs. How do you balance the simplicity with that? With that complexity? And it was mentioned by Pat, make a note as well that you've got this kind of tension between. I need to be able to do everything flexibly, but that can sometimes lead the complexity. So how do you change that? To become simple for customers to use? >> I mean, I think the biggest thing it Z it's a design input. I mean, if if you start out with just trying to make the technology all it can be with a end of you know, one particular cloud or one particular partner, then it becomes very difficult. As he tried to expand it to multiple partners and because it's about choice. We're kind of think about that right up front. And so if it's a design input, it puts, it puts, as he said, to put some burden on the technical team. But it is a much more powerful solution if we if you can pull it off, and that's been a big part, and I think it kind of starts with this mentality that you know, it's about choice, and we gotta make simplicity. And now part of the value proposition, rather than after for thought as it has, may be historically has been. What if >> we could talk a little bit about customers? Because, you know the message I hear this morning is you know, you talk multi cloud, a cloud native. There's a lot of change in the industry, you know, I'm participating in couple of career advice events because remember back 10 years ago, it was Oh, my gosh, if I'm a server admin, I need to learn to be virtualization than it was cloud. You know, architects, but way know that change in the industry is constant. So, you know, what are some of the key drivers when you're talking to customers in general and specifically when you talk about in engaging in part with the M where, >> Yeah, I mean, I I think it starts with people just recognizing. Even if people haven't moved the cloud today, that tends to be their primary strategy. In a recent survey, I think we found 98% of the customers, said Cloud is her strategy. However, 53% said still on Prem is their primary compute centers. So you know they're not there yet. And so But because that's their strategy, then you know we have to respect that. And so So, uh, you know, increasingly you're seeing at Netapp Waleed with clout, even though we know customers aren't quite ready there. But we align to that long term vision. But then our strange made up helping the modernize What they have currently on prim helping build private clouds for the same service is they have him public cloud, and then let them have the complete absolute choice. What public cloud or multiple public clouds they want and designed with with, you know, that full spectrum in mind, knowing they could start anywhere on that on that scale. >> Yeah, the customers ultimately are gonna dictate to the market What Israel and I think over time, Pios sort of vet who is right on this stuff. And so history's a great lesson teacher of all those things, you know, for me, it seems less less about how many different things you can offer. And as you see whether we're at Veum World or at Red Hat Summit were made obvious. Reinvent or, um, coup con every every every vector, turn of the customers. Prism on this will say something different. But I think in general, categorically, if you look at it, you could start to just, you know, glean what you think are the real requirements. And by the way, the rule carpets are not all technical. You know, I think what what gets lost on folks is that there is a lot of operational political factors, probably political factors, a lot more than what a lot of people think. You know, they're just talking about what the what The speed is to re factor APs or to migrate APS. Frankly, there's just a lot of politics that goes with that. There's a lot of just stuff to work through, >> and that's where I think simplicity is so important because of those non technical reason. Simplicity resonates across the board. >> But I would say you have to have simplicity with capabilities. >> I mean, just one of the things you talk about, right? If I modernize some application, well, the people that were using that application, they were probably complaining about that old one. But at least they do have to relearn >> that. Have that that new one. So we're gonna have some exciting announcements tomorrow. So I'm kind of check out tomorrow's stuff that will announce with VM, where with Netapp tomorrow We're here at the show floor will be showcasing some of those things. We can't give away too much of that today. But, you know, we think the future is bright and together with with Veum Or, you know, this partnership, I think, has a lot of upside. Like you said, we've had We've had a 17 year history with, you know, hundreds of thousands of customers together and installed base that goes back to like you said to be very beginning. Um, I remember back to the very beginning of the ecosystem. Net up was one of the strongest players in that market on dhe Since then, it's evolved beyond just NFS. >> Well, hopefully bread. We can get you on a keynote for in another 10 years. Waken Knock that wall down Exactly. Exactly. >> All right, great. Want to give you both the final word? You know, so so many big themes going on, you know, takeaways that you want people to have from the emerald 2019 bread >> I think the biggest takeaway is that just like the show today you didn't hear a whole lot about virtualization. It's moving to contain her eyes and and we had netapp view that, you know, we support all virtualized environments on from across the cloud, moving to supporting all containerized application environments on premises and cloud. And it's about choices in combinations of both, but keeping data control. >> Yeah, I'd say for me, it's it's really the power of the of of the better together, you know, to me, it's nobody's great apart. It takes really an ecosystem of players to kind of work together for the customer benefit and the one that we've demonstrated of'em. Where with that plus Veum, where has been a powerful one for well, well over 17 years and the person that putting in terms of joint customers that have a ton of loyalty to both of us, and they want us just to work it out. So you know, whether you're whether your allegiance on one side of the Cooper natty criminals battle or another or you're on one side of anyone's stores. Choice or another. I think customers want Netapp on via mortar work. It's out and come up with solutions that we've done that. And now what? We wait for the second act of this to come out. We'll start that tomorrow. Teeth and >> Brad, thank you so much if you couldn't tell by the sirens on the street. We are live here at San Francisco at Mosconi, north of lots more coverage. Three days wall to wall coverage for Justin Warren. I'm stew. Minimum is always thank you for watching the cue

>> Announcer: From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS IMAGINE Nonprofit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in the waterfront in Seattle, Washington, it's absolutely gorgeous here the last couple of days. We're here for the AWS IMAGINE Nonprofit event. We were here a couple weeks ago for the education event, now they have a whole separate track for nonprofits, and what's really cool about nonprofits is these people, these companies are attacking very, very big, ugly problems. It's not advertising, it's not click here and get something, these are big things, and one of the biggest issues is human trafficking. You probably hear a lot about it, it's way bigger than I ever thought it was, and we're really excited to have an expert in the field that, again, is using the power of AWS technology as well as their organization to help fight this cause. And we're excited to have Brad Myles, he is the CEO of Polaris and just coming off a keynote, we're hearing all about your keynote. So Brad, first off, welcome. >> Yeah, well thank you, thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so Polaris, give us a little bit about kind of what's the mission for people that aren't familiar with the company. >> Yeah, so Polaris, we are a nonprofit that works full-time on this issue. We both combat the issue and try to get to long-term solutions, and respond to the issue and restore freedom to survivors by operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline for the United States, so, it's part kind of big data and long-term solutions, and it's part responding to day-to-day cases that break across the country every day. >> Right, in preparing for this interview and spending some time on the site there was just some amazing things that just jump right off the page. 24.9 million people are involved in this. Is that just domestically here in the States, or is that globally? >> That's a global number. So when you're thinking about human trafficking, think about three buckets. The first bucket is any child, 17 or younger, being exploited in the commercial sex trade. The second bucket is any adult, 18 or over, who's in the sex trade by force, fraud, or coercion. And the third bucket is anyone forced to work in some sort of other labor or service industry by force, fraud, or coercion. So you've got the child sex trafficking bucket, you've got the adult sex trafficking bucket, and then you've got all the labor trafficking bucket, right? You add up those three buckets globally, that's the number that the International Labour Organization came out and said 25 million around the world are those three buckets in a given year. >> Right, and I think again, going through the website, some of the just crazy discoveries, it's the child sex trafficking you can kind of understand that that's part of the problem, the adult sex trafficking. But you had like 25 different human trafficking business models, I forget the term that was used, for a whole host of things well beyond just the sex trade. It's a very big and unfortunately mature industry. >> Totally, yeah, so we, so the first thing that we do that we're kind of known for is operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline. The National Human Trafficking Hotline leads to having a giant data set on trafficking, it's 50,000 cases of trafficking that we've worked on. So then we analyzed that data set and came to the breakthrough conclusion that there are these 25 major forms, and almost any single call that we get in to the National Hotline is going to be one of those 25 types. And once you know that then the problem doesn't seem so overwhelming, it's not, you know, thousands of different types, it's these 25 things, so, it's 18 labor trafficking types and seven sex trafficking types. And it enables a little bit more granular analysis than just saying sex trafficking or labor trafficking which is kind of too broad and general. Let's get really specific about it, we're talking about these late night janitors, or we're talking about these people in agriculture, or we're talking about these women in illicit massage businesses. It enables the conversation to get more focused. >> Right, it's so interesting right, that's such a big piece of the big data trend that we see all over the place, right? It used to be, you know, you had old data, a sample of old data that you took an aggregate of and worked off the averages. And now, because of big data, and the other tools that we have today, now actually you can work on individual cases. So as you look at it from a kind of a big data point of view, what are some of the things that you're able to do? And that lead directly to, everyone's talking about the presentation that you just got off of, in terms of training people to look for specific behaviors that fit the patterns, so you can start to break some of these cases. >> Exactly, so, I think that the human trafficking field risks being too generic. So if you're just saying to the populace, "Look for trafficking, look for someone who's scared." People are like, that's not enough, that's too vague, it's kind of slipping through my fingers. But if you say, "In this particular type of trafficking, "with traveling magazine sales crews, "if someone comes to your door "trying to sell you a magazine with these specific signs." So now instead of talking about general red flag indicators across all 25 types, we're coming up with red flag indicators for each of the 25 types. So instead of speaking in aggregate we're getting really specific, it's almost like specific gene therapy. And the data analysis on our data set is enabling that to happen, which makes the trafficking field smarter, we could get smarter about where victims are recruited from, we could get smarter about intervention points, and we could get smarter about where survivors might have a moment to kind of get help and get out. >> Right, so I got to dig into the magazine salesperson, 'cause I think we've all had the kid-- >> Brad: Have you had a kid come to you yet? >> Absolutely, and you know, you think first they're hustlin' but their papers are kind of torn up, and they've got their little certificate, certification. How does that business model work? >> Yeah, so that's one of the 25 types, they're called mag crews. There was a New York Times article written by a journalist named Ian Urbina who really studied this and it came out a number of years ago. Then they made a movie about it called "American Honey," if you watch with a number of stars. But essentially this is a very long-standing business model, it goes back 30 or 40 years of like the door-to-door salesperson, and like trying to win sympathy from people going to door-to-door sales. And then these kind of predatory groups decided to prey on disaffected U.S. citizen youth that are kind of bored, or are kind of working a low-wage job. And so they go up to these kids and they say, "Tired of working at the Waffle House? "Well why don't you join our crew and travel the country, "and party every night, and you'll be outdoors every day, "and it's coed, you get to hang out with girls, "you get to hang out with guys, "we'll drink every night and all you have to do "is sell magazines during the day." And it's kind of this alluring pitch, and then the crews turn violent, and there's sometimes quotas on the crew, there's sometimes coercion on the crew. We get a lot of calls from kids who are abandoned by the crew. Where the crew says, "If you act up "or if you don't adhere to our rules, "we'll just drive away and leave you in this city." >> Wherever. >> Is the crews are very mobile they have this whole language, they call it kind of jumping territory. So they'll drive from like Kansas City to a nearby state, and we'll get this call from this kid, they're like, "I'm totally homeless, my crew just left me behind "because I kind of didn't obey one of the rules." So a lot of people, when they think of human trafficking they're not thinking of like U.S. citizen kids knocking on your door. And we're not saying that every single magazine crew is human trafficking, but we are saying that if there's force, and coercion, and fraud, and lies, and people feel like they can't leave, and people feel like they're being coerced to work, this is actually a form of human trafficking of U.S. citizen youth which is not very well-known but we hear about it on the Hotline quite a lot. >> Right, so then I wonder if you could tell us more about the Delta story 'cause most of the people that are going to be watching this interview weren't here today to hear your keynote. So I wonder if you can explain kind of that whole process where you identified a specific situation, you train people that are in a position to make a difference and in fact they're making a big difference. >> Yeah. So the first big report that we released based on the Hotline data was the 25 types, right? We decided to do a followup to that called Intersections, where we reached out to survivors of trafficking and we said, "Can you tell us about "the legitimate businesses that your trafficker used "while you were being trafficked?" And all these survivors were like, "Yeah, sure, "we'll tell you about social media, "we'll tell you about transportation, "we'll tell you about banks, "we'll tell you about hotels." And so we then identified these six major industries that traffickers use that are using legitimate companies, like rental car companies, and airlines, and ridesharing companies. So then we reached out to a number of those corporate partners and said, "You don't want this stuff on your services, right?" And Delta really just jumped at this, they were just like, "We take this incredibly seriously. "We want our whole workforce trained. "We don't want any trafficker to feel like "they can kind of get away with it on our flights. "We want to be a leader in transportation." And then they began taking all these steps. Their CEO, Ed Bastian, took it very seriously. They launched a whole corporate-wide taskforce across departments, they hosted listening sessions with survivor leaders so survivors could coach them, and then they started launching this whole strategy around training their flight attendants, and then training their whole workforce, and then supporting the National Human Trafficking Hotline, they made some monetary donations to Polaris. We get situations on the Hotline where someone is in a dangerous situation and needs to be flown across the country, like an escape flight almost, and Delta donated SkyMiles for us to give to survivors who are trying to flee a situation, who needs a flight. They can go to an airport and get on a flight for free that will fly them across the country. So it's almost like a modern day Underground Railroad, kind of flying people on planes. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So they've just been an amazing partner, and they even then took the bold step of saying, "Well let's air a PSA on our flights "so the customer base can see this." So when you're on a Delta flight you'll see this PSA about human trafficking. And it just kept going and going and going. So it's now been about a five-year partnership and lots of great work together. >> And catching bad guys. >> Yeah, I mean, their publicity of the National Human Trafficking Hotline has led to a major increase in calls. Airport signage, more employees looking for it, and I actually do believe that the notion of flying, if you're going to be a trafficker, flying on a Delta flight is now a much more harrowing experience because everyone's kind of trained, and eyes and ears are looking. So you're going to pivot towards another airline that hasn't done that training yet, which now speaks to the need that once one member of an industry steps up, all different members of the industry need to follow suit. So we're encouraging a lot of the other airlines to do similar training and we're seeing some others do that, which is great. >> Yeah, and how much of it was from the CEO, or did he kind of come on after the fact, or was there kind of a champion catalyst that was pushing this through the organization, or is that often the case, or what do you find in terms of adoption of a company to help you on your mission? >> That's a great question. I mean, the bigger picture here is trafficking is a $150 billion industry, right? A group of small nonprofits and cops are not going to solve it on their own. We need the big businesses to enter the fight, because the big businesses have the resources, they have the brand, they have the customer base, they have the scale to make it a fair fight, right? So in the past few years we're seeing big businesses really enter the fight against trafficking, whether or not that's big data companies like AWS, whether or not that's social media companies, Facebook, whether or not that's hotel companies, like Wyndham and Marriott, airlines like Delta. And that's great because now the big hitters are joining the trafficking fight, and it happens in different ways, sometimes it's CEO-led, I think in the case of Delta, Ed Bastian really does take this issue very seriously, he was hosting events on this at his home, he's hosted roundtables of other CEOs in the Atlanta area like UPS, and Chick-fil-A, and Home Depot, and Coca-Cola, all those Atlanta-based CEOs know each other well, he'll host roundtables about that, and I think it was kind of CEO-led. But in other corporations it's one die hard champion who might be like a mid-level employee, or a director, who just says, "We really got to do this," and then they drive more CEO attention. So we've seen it happen both ways, whether or not it's top-down, or kind of middle-driven-up. But the big picture is if we could get some of the biggest corporations in the world to take this issue seriously, to ask questions about who they contract with, to ask questions about what's in their supply chain, to educate their workforce, to talk about this in front of their millions of customers, it just puts the fight against trafficking on steroids than a group of nonprofits would be able to do alone. So I think we're in a whole different realm of the fight now that business is at the table. >> And is that pretty much your strategy in terms of where you get the leverage, do you think? Is to execute via a lot of these well-resourced companies that are at this intersection point, I think that's a really interesting way to address the problem. >> Yeah, well, it's back to the 25 types, right? So the strategies depend on type. Like, I don't think big businesses being at the table are necessarily going to solve magazine sales crews, right? They're not necessarily going to solve begging on the street. But they can solve late night janitors that sometimes are trafficked, where lots of big companies are contracting with late night janitorial crews, and they come at 2:00 a.m., and they buff the floors, and they kind of change out the trash, and no one's there in the office building to see those workers, right? And so asking different questions of who you procure contracts with, to say, "Hey, before we contract with you guys, "we're going to need to ask you a couple questions "about where these workers got here, "and what these workers thought they were coming to do, "and we need to ID these workers." The person holding the purse strings, who's buying that contract, has the power to demand the conditions of that contract. Especially in agriculture and large retail buyers. So I think that big corporations, it's definitely part of the strategy for certain types, it's not going to solve other types of trafficking. But let's say banks and financial institutions, if they start asking different questions of who's banking with them, just like they've done with terrorism financing they could wipe out trafficking financing, could actually play a gigantic role in changing the course of how that type of trafficking exists. >> So we could talk all day, I'm sure, but we don't have time, but I'm just curious, what should people do, A, if they just see something suspicious, you know, reach out to one of these kids selling magazines, or begging on the street, or looking suspicious at an airport, so, A, that's the question. And then two, if people want to get involved more generically, whether in their company, or personally, how do they get involved? >> Yeah, so there are thousands of nonprofit groups across the country, Polaris is in touch with 3,000 of them. We're one of thousands. I would say find an organization in your area that you care about and volunteer, get involved, donate, figure out what they need. Our website is polarisproject.org, we have a national Referral Directory of organizations across the country, and so that's one way. The other way is the National Human Trafficking Hotline, the number, 1-888-373-7888. The Hotline depends on either survivors calling in directly as a lifeline, or community members calling in who saw something suspicious. So we get lots of calls from people who were getting their nails done, and the woman was crying and talking about how she's not being paid, or people who are out to eat as a family and they see something in the restaurant, or people who are traveling and they see something that doesn't make, kind of, quite sense in a hotel or an airport. So we need an army of eyes and ears calling tips into the National Human Trafficking Hotline and identifying these cases, and we need survivors to know the number themselves too so that they can call in on their own behalf. We need to respond to the problem in the short-term, help get these people connected to help, and then we need to do the long-term solutions which involves data, and business, and changing business practice, and all of that. But I do think that if people want to kind of educate themselves, polarisproject.org, there are some kind of meta-organizations, there's a group called Freedom United that's kind of starting a grassroots movement against trafficking, freedomunited.org. So lots of great organizations to look into, and this is a bipartisan issue, this is an issue that most people care about, it's one of the top headlines in the newspapers every day these days. And it's something that I think people in this country naturally care about because it references kind of the history of chattel slavery, and some of those forms of slavery that morphed but never really went away, and we're still fighting that same fight today. >> In terms of, you know, we're here at AWS IMAGINE, and they're obviously putting a lot of resources behind this, Teresa Carlson and the team. How are you using them, have you always been on AWS? Has that platform enabled you to accomplish your mission better? >> Yeah, oh for sure, I mean, Polaris crunches over 60 terabytes of data per day, of just like the computing that we're doing, right? >> Jeff: And what types of data are you crunching? >> It's the data associated with Hotline calls, we collect up to 150 variables on each Hotline call. The Hotline calls come in, we have this data set of 50,000 cases of trafficking with very sensitive data, and the protections of that data, the cybersecurity associated with that data, the storage of that data. So since 2017, Polaris has been in existence since 2002, so we're in our 17th year now, but starting three years ago in 2017 we started really partnering with AWS, where we're migrating more of our data onto AWS, building some AI tools with AWS to help us process Hotline calls more efficiently. And then talking about potentially moving our, all of our data storage onto AWS so that we don't have our own server racks in our office, we still need to go through a number of steps to get there. But having AWS at the table, and then talking about the Impact Computing team and this, like, real big data crunching of like millions of trafficking cases globally, we haven't even started talking about that yet but I think that's like a next stage. So for now, it's getting our data stronger, more secure, building some of those AI bots to help us with our work, and then potentially considering us moving completely serverless, and all of those things are conversations we're having with AWS, and thrilled that AWS is making this an issue to the point that it was prioritized and featured at this conference, which was a big deal, to get in front of the whole audience and do a keynote, and we're very, very grateful for that. >> And you mentioned there's so many organizations involved, are you guys doing data aggregation, data consolidation, sharing, I mean there must be with so many organizations, that adds a lot of complexity, and a lot of data silos, to steal classic kind of IT terms. Are you working towards some kind of unification around that, or how does that look in the future? >> We would love to get to the point where different organizations are sharing their data set. We'd love to get to the point where different organizations are using, like, a shared case management tool, and collecting the same data so it's apples to apples. There are different organizations, like, Thorn is doing some amazing big data-- >> Jeff: Right, we've had Thorn on a couple of times. >> How do we merge Polaris's data set with Thorn's data set? We're not doing that yet, right? I think we're only doing baby steps. But I think the AWS platform could enable potentially a merger of Thorn's data with Polaris's data in some sort of data lake, right? So that's a great idea, we would love to get to that. I think the field isn't there yet. The field has kind of been, like, tech-starved for a number of years, but in the past five years has made a lot of progress. The field is mostly kind of small shelters and groups responding to survivors, and so this notion of like infusing the trafficking field with data is somewhat of a new concept, but it's enabling us to think much bigger about what's possible. >> Well Brad, again, we could go on all day, you know, really thankful for what you're doing for a whole lot of people that we don't see, or maybe we see and we're not noticing, so thank you for that, and uh. >> Absolutely. >> Look forward to catching up when you move the ball a little bit further down the field. >> Yeah, thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. >> All right, my pleasure. He's Brad, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at AWS IMAGINE Nonprofits, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (futuristic music)