(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's special presentation of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Jenni Troutman is here, Director of Products and Services, and Training and Certification at AWS, and Heather Ruden, Director of Education Programs, Training and Certification. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and for the International Women's Day special program. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> So, I'll just get it out of the way. I'm a big fan of what you guys do. I've been shouting at the top of my lungs, "It's free. Get cloud training and you'll have a six figure job." Pretty much. I'm over amplifying. But this is really a big opportunity in the industry, education and the skills gap, and the skill velocities that's changing. New roles are coming on around cloud native, cloud native operators, cybersecurity. There's so much excitement going on around the industry, and all these open positions, and they need new talent. So you can't get a degree for some of these things. So, nope, it doesn't matter what school you went to, everyone's kind of level. This is a really big deal. So, Heather, share with us your thoughts as well on this topic. Jenni, you too. Like, where are you guys at? 'Cause this is a big opportunity for women and anyone to level up in the industry. >> Absolutely. So I'll jump in and then I'll hand it over to Jenni. We're your dream team here. We can talk about both sides of this. So I run a set of programs here at AWS that are really intended to help build the next generation of cloud builders. And we do that with a variety of programs, whether it is targeting young learners from kind of 12 and up. We have AWS GetIT that is designed to get women ambassadors or women mentors in front of girls 12 to 14 and get them curious about a career in STEM. We also have a program that is all digital online. It's available in 11 languages. It's got hundreds of courses. That's called AWS Educate that is designed to do exactly what you just talked about, expose the opportunities and start building cloud skills for learners at age 13 and up. They can go online and register with an email and start learning. We want them to understand not only what the opportunity is for them, but the ways that they can help influence and bring more diversity and more inclusion and into the cloud technology space, and just keep building all those amazing builders that we need here for our customers and partners. And those are the programs that I manage, but Jenni also has an amazing program, a set of programs. And so I'll hand it over to her as you get into the professional side of this things. >> So Jenni, you're on the product side. You've got the keys to the kingdom on all the materials and shaping it. What's your view on this? 'Cause this is a huge opportunity and it's always changing. What's the latest and greatest? >> It is a massive opportunity and to give you a sense, there was a study in '21 where IT executives said that talent availability is the biggest challenge to emerging tech adoption. 64% of IT executives said that up from only 4% the year before. So the challenge is growing really fast, which for everyone that's ready to go out there and learn and try something new is a massive opportunity. And that's really why I'm here. We provide all kinds of learning experiences for people across different cloud technologies to be able to not only gain the knowledge around cloud, but also the confidence to be able to build in the cloud. And so we look across different learner levels, different roles, different opportunities, and we provide those experiences where people can actually get hands-on in a totally risk-free environment and practice building in the cloud so they can go and be ready to get their certifications, their AWS certifications, give them the credentials to be able to show an employer they can do it, and then go out and get these jobs. It's really exciting. And we go kind of end to end from the very beginning. What is cloud? I want to know what it is all the way through to I can prove that I can build in the cloud and I'm ready for a job. >> So Jenni, you nailed that confidence word. I think I want to double click on that. And Heather, you talked about you're the dream team. You guys, you're the go to market, you bring this to the marketplace. Jenni, you get the products. This is the key, but to me the the international women days angle is, is that what I hear over and over again is that, "It's too technical. I'm not qualified." It can be scary. We had a guest on who has two double E degrees in robotics and aerospace and she's hard charging. She almost lost her confidence twice she said in her career. But she was hard charging. It can get scary, but also the ability to level up fast is just as good. So if you can break through that confidence and keep the curiosity and be a builder, talk about that dynamic 'cause you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the industry, how do you handle that? 'Cause I think that's a big thing that comes up over and over again. And confidence is not just women, it's men too. But women can always, that comes up as a theme. >> It is. It is a big challenge. I mean, I've struggled with it personally and I mentor a lot of women and that is the number one challenge that is holding women back from really being able to advance is the confidence to step out there and show what they can do. And what I love about some of the products we've put out recently is we have AWS Skill Builder. You can go online, you can get all kinds of free core training and if you want to go deeper, you can go deeper. And there's a lot of different options on there. But what it does is not only gives you that based knowledge, but you can actually go in. We have something called AWS Labs. You can go in and you can actually practice on the AWS console with the services that people are using in their jobs every day without any risk of doing something that is going to blow up in your face. You're not going to suddenly get this big AWS bill. You're not going to break something that's out there running. You just go in. It's your own little environment that gets wiped when you're done and you can practice. And there's lots of different ways to learn as well. So if you go in there and you're watching a video and to your point you're like, "Oh my gosh, this is too technical. I can't understand it. I don't know what I'm going to go do." You can go another route. There's something called AWS Cloud Quest. It's a game. You go in and it's like you're gaming and it walks you through. You're actually in a virtual world. You're walking through and it's telling you, "Hey, go build this and if you need help, here's hints and here's tips." And it continues to build on itself. So you're learning and you're applying practical skills and it's at your own pace. You don't have to watch somebody else talking that is going at a pace that maybe accelerates beyond what you're ready. You can do it at your own pace, you can redo it, you can try it again until you feel confident that you know it and you're really ready to move on to the next thing. Personally, I find that hugely valuable. I go in and do these myself and I sit there and I have a lot of engineers on my team, very smart people. And I have my own imposter syndrome. I get nervous to go talk to them. Like, are they going to think I'm totally lost? And so I go in and I learn some of this myself by experiment. And then I feel like, okay, now I can go ask them some intelligent questions and they're not going to be like, "Oh gosh, my leader is totally unaware of what we're doing." And so I think that we all struggle with confidence. I think everybody does, but I see it especially in women as I mentor them. And that's what I encourage them to do is go and on your own time, practice a bit, get a little bit of experience and once you feel like you can throw a couple words out there that you know what they mean and suddenly other people look at you like, "Oh, she knows what she's talking about." And you can kind of get past that feeling. >> Well Jenni, you nailed it. Heather, she just mentioned she's in the job and she's going and she's still leveling up. That's the end when you're in, but it's also the barriers to entry are lowering. You guys are doing a good job of getting people in, but also growing fast too. So there's two dynamics at play here. How do people do this? What's the playbook? Because I think that's really key, easy to get in. And then once you're in, you can level up fast at your own pace to ride the wave. And then there's new stuff coming. I mean, every re:Invent there's 5,000 announcements. So it's like zillion new things and AI taught now. >> re:Invent is a perfect example of that ongoing imposter syndrome or confidence check for all of us. I think something that that Jenni said too is we really try and meet learners where they are and make sure that we have the support, whether it's accessibility requirements or we have the content that is built for the age that we're talking to, or we have a workforce development program called re/Start that is for people that have very little tech experience and really want to talk about a career in cloud, but they need a little bit more handholding. They need a combination of instructor-led and digital. But then we have AWS educators, I mentioned. If you want to be more self-directed, all of these tools are intended to work well together and to be complimentary and to take you on a journey as a learner. And the more skills you have, the more you increase your knowledge, the more you can take on more. But meeting folks where they are with a variety of programs, tools, languages, and accessibility really helps ensure that we can do that for learners throughout the world. >> That's awesome. Let's get into it. Let's get into the roadmaps of people and their personas. And you guys can share the programs that you have and where people could fit in. 'Cause this comes up a lot when I talk to folks. There's the young person who's I'm a gamer or whatever, I want to get a job. I'm in high school or an elementary or I want to tinker around or I'm in college or I'm learning, I'm an entry level kind of entry. Then you have the re-skilling. I'm going to change my careers, I'm kind of bored, I want to do something compelling. How do I get into the cloud game? And then the advanced re-skill is I want to get into cyber and AI and then there's other. Could you break down? Did I get that right or did I miss anything? And then what's available for those kind of lanes? So those persona lanes? >> Well, let's see, I could start with maybe the high schooler stuff and then we can bring Jenni in as well. I would say a great place to start for anyone is aws.amazon.com/training. That's going to give them the full suite of options that they could take on. If you're in high school, you can go onto AWS Educate. All you need is an email. And if you're 13 years and older, you can start exploring the types of jobs that are available in the cloud and you could start taking some introductory classes. You can do some of those labs in a safe environment that Jenni mentioned. That's a great place to start. If you are in an environment where you have an educator that is willing to go on this with you, this journey with you, we have this AWS GetIT program that is, again, educator-led. So it's an afterschool or it's an a program where we match mentors and students up with cloud professionals and they do some real-time experimentation. They build an app, they work on things together, and do a presentation at the end. The other thing I would say too is that if you are in a university, I would double check and see if the AWS Academy curriculum is already in your university. And if so, explore some of those classes there. We have instructor-led, educator-ready. course curriculum that we've designed that help people get to those certifications and get closer to those jobs and as well as hopefully then lead people right into skill builder and all the things that Jenni talked about to help them as they start out in a professional environment. >> So is the GetIT, is that an instructor-led that the person has to find someone for? Or is this available for them? >> It is through teachers. It's through educators. We are in, we've reached over 19,000 students. We're available in eight countries. There are ways for educators to lead this, but we want to make sure that we are helping the kids be successful and giving them an educator environment to do that. If they want to do it on their own, then they can absolutely go through AWS Educate or even and to explore where they want to get started. >> So what about someone who's educated in their middle of their career, might want to switch from being a biologist to a cloud cybersecurity guru or a cloud native operator? >> Yeah, so in that case, AWS re/Start is one of the great program for them to explore. We run that program with collaborating organizations in 160 cities in 80 countries throughout the world. That is a multi-week cohort-based program where we do take folks through a very clear path towards certification and job skilling that will help them get into those opportunities. Over 98% of the cohorts, the graduates of those cohorts get an interview and are hopefully on their path to getting a job. So that really has global reach. The partnership with collaborating organizations helps us ensure that we find communities that are often unreached by cloud skills training and we really work to keep a diverse focus on those cohorts and bring those folks into the cloud. >> Okay. Jenni, you've got the Skill Builder action here. What's going on on your side? Because you must have to manage all the change. I mean, AI is hot right now. I'm sure you're cranking away on curriculum and content for SageMaker, large language models, computer vision, cybersecurity. >> We do. There are a lot of options. >> How is your world? Tell us about what people can take out of way from your side. >> Yeah. So a great way to think about it is if they're already out in the workforce or they're entering the workforce, but they are technical, have technical skills is what are the roles that are interesting in the technologies that are interesting. Because the way we put out our training and our certifications is aligned to paths. So if you're look interested in a specific role. If you're interested in architecting a cloud environment or in security as you mentioned, and you want to go deep in security, there are AWS certifications that give you that. If you achieve them, they're very difficult. But if you work to them and achieve them, they give you the credential that you can take to an employer and say, "Look, I can do this job." And they are in very high demand. In fact that's where if you look at some of the publications that have come out, they talk about, what are people making if they have different certifications? What are the most in-demand certifications that are out there? And those are what help people get jobs. And so you identify what is that role or that technology area I want to learn. And then you have multiple options for how you build those skills depending on how you want to learn. And again, that's really our focus, is on providing experiences based on how people learn and making it accessible to them. 'Cause not everybody wants to learn in the same way. And so there is AWS Skill Builder where people can go learn on their own that is really great particularly for people who maybe are already working and have to learn in the evenings, on the weekends. People who like to learn at their own pace, who just want to be hands-on, but are self-starters. And they can get those whole learning plans through there all the way aligned to the certification and then they can go get their certification. There's also classroom training. So a lot of people maybe want to do continuous learning through an online, but want to go really deep with an expert in the room and maybe have a more focused period of time if they can go for a couple days. And so they can do classroom training. We provide a lot of classroom training. We have partners all over the globe who provide classroom training. And so there's that and what we find to be the most powerful is when you couple the two. If you can really get deep, you have an expert, you can ask questions, but first before you go do that, you get some of that foundational that you've kind of learned on your own. And then after you go back and reinforce, you go back online, you try out things that maybe you learned in the classroom, but you didn't quite, you hadn't used it enough yet to quite know how to do it. Now you can go back and actually use it, experiment and play around. And so we really encourage that kind of, figure out what are some areas you're interested in, go learn it and then go get a job and continue to learn because then once you learn that first area, you start to build confidence in it. Suddenly other areas become interesting. 'Cause as you said, cloud is changing fast. And once you learn a space, first of all you have to keep going back to stay up on it as it changes. But you quickly find that there are other areas that are really interesting too. >> I've observed that the training side, it's just like cloud itself, it's very agile. You can get hands-on quickly, you don't need to take a class, and then get in weeks later. You're in it like it's real time. So you're immersed in gamification and all kinds of ways to funnel into the either advanced tracks and certification. So you guys do a great job and I want to give you props for that and a shout out. The question I have for you guys is can you scope the opportunity for these certifications and opportunities for women in particular? What are some of the top jobs pulling down? Scope out the opportunity because I think when people hear that they really fall out of their chair, they go, "Wow, I didn't know I could make $200,000 doing cybersecurity." Well, yeah or maybe more. I just made the number, I don't actually know, but like I know people do make that much in cyber, but there are huge financial opportunities with certifications and education. Can you scope that order of magnitude? Can you share any data? >> Yeah, so in the US they certainly are. Certifications on average aligned to six digit type jobs. And if you go out and do a search, there are research studies out there that are refreshed every year that say what are the top IT industry certifications and how much money do they make? And the reason I don't put a number out there is because it's constantly changing and in fact it keeps going up, >> It's going up, not going down. >> But I would encourage people to do that quick search. What are the top IT industry certifications. Again, based on the country you're in, it makes a difference. But if you're US, there's a lot of data out there for the US and then there is some for other countries as well around how much on average people make. >> Do you list like the higher level certifications, stack rank them in terms of order? Like say, I'm a type A personnel, I want to climb Mount Everest, I want to get the highest level certification. How do I know that? Is it like laddered up or is like how do you guys present that? >> Yeah, so we have different types of certifications. There is a foundational, which we call the cloud practitioner. That one is more about just showing that you know something about cloud. It's not aligned to a specific job role. But then we have what we call associate level certifications, which are aligned to roles. So there's the solutions architect, cloud developer, so developer operations. And so you can tell by the role and associate is kind of that next level. And then the roles often have a professional level, which is even more advanced. And basically that's saying you're kind of an Uber expert at that point. And then there are technology specialties, which are less about a specific role, although some would argue a security technology specialty might align very well to a security role, but they're more about showing the technology. And so typically, it goes foundational, advanced, professional, and then the specialties are more on the side. They're not aligned, but they're deep. They're deep within that area. >> So you can go dig and pick your deep dive and jump into where you're comfortable. Heather, talk about the commitment in terms of dollars. I know Amazon's flaunted some numbers like 30 million or something, people they want to have trained, hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. This is key, obviously, more people trained on cloud, more operators, more cloud usage, obviously. I see the business connection. What's the women relationship to the numbers? Or what the experience is? How do you guys see that? Obviously International Women's Day, get the confidence, got the curiosity. You're a builder, you're in. It's that easy. >> It doesn't always feel that way, I'm sure to everybody, but we'd like to think that it is. Amazon and AWS do invest hundreds of millions of dollars in free training every year that is accessible to everyone out there. I think that sometimes the hardest obstacles to get overcome are getting started and we try and make it as easy as possible to get started with the tools that we've talked about already today. We run into plenty of cohorts of women as part of our re/Start program that are really grateful for the opportunity to see something, see a new way of thinking, see a new opportunity for them. We don't necessarily break out our funding by women versus men. We want to make sure that we are open and diverse for everybody to come in and get the training that they need to. But we definitely want to make sure that we are accessible and available to women and all genders outside of the US and inside the US. >> Well, I know the number's a lot lower than they should be and that's obviously why we're promoting this heavily. There's a lot more interest I see in tech. So digital transformation is gender neutral. I mean, it's like the world eats software and uses software, uses the cloud. So it has to get 50/50 in my opinion. So you guys do a great job. Now that we're done kind of promoting Amazon, which I wanted to do 'cause I think it's super important. Let's talk about you guys. What got you guys involved in tech? What was the inspiration and share some stories about your experiences and advice for folks watching? >> So I've always been in traditionally male dominated roles. I actually started in aviation and then moved to tech. And what I found was I got a mentor early on, a woman who was senior to me and who was kind of who I saw as the smartest person out there. She was incredibly smart, she was incredibly kind, and she was always lifting women up. And I kind of latched onto her and followed her around and she was such an amazing mentor. She brought me from throughout tech, from company to company, job to job, was always positioning me in front of other people as the go-to person. And I realized, "Wow, I want to be like her." And so that's been my focus as well in tech is you can be deeply technical in tech or you can be not deeply technical and be in tech and you can be successful both ways, but the way you're going to be most successful is if you find other people, build them up and help put them out in front. And so I personally love to mentor women and to put them in places where they can feel comfortable being out in front of people. And that's really been my career. I have tried to model her approach as much as I can. >> That's a really interesting observation. It's the pattern we've been seeing in all these interviews for the past two years of doing the International Women's Day is that networking, mentoring and sponsorship are one thing. So it's all one thing. It's not just mentoring. It's like people think, "Oh, just mentoring. What does that mean? Advice?" No, it's sponsorship, it's lifting people up, creating a keiretsu, creating networks. Really important. Heather, what's your experience? >> Yeah, I'm sort of the example of somebody who never thought they'd be in tech, but I happened to graduate from college in the Silicon Valley in the early nineties and next thing you know, it's more than a couple years later and I'm deeply in tech and I think it when we were having the conversation about confidence and willingness to learn and try that really spoke to me as well. I think I had to get out of my own way sometimes and just be willing to not be the smartest person in the room and just be willing to ask a lot of questions. And with every opportunity to ask questions, I think somebody, I ended up with good mentors, male and female, that saw the willingness to ask questions and the willingness to be humble in my approach to learning. And that really helped. I'm also very aware that nobody's journey is the same and I need to create an environment on my team and I need to be a role model within AWS and Amazon for allowing people to show up in the way that they're going to be most successful. And sometimes that will mean giving them learning opportunities. Sometimes that will be hooking them up with a mentor. Sometimes that will be giving them the freedom to do what they need for their family or their personal life. And modeling that behavior regardless of gender has always been how I choose to show up and what I ask my leaders to do. And the more we can do that, I've seen the team been able to grow and flourish in that way and support our entire team. >> I love that story. You also have a great leader, Maureen Lonergan, who I've met many conversations with, but also it starts at the top. Andy Jassy who can come across, he's kind of technical, he's dirty, he's a builder mentality. He has first principles and you're bringing up this first principles concept and whether that's passing it forward, what you've learned, having first principles helps in an organization. Can you guys talk about what that's like at your company? 'Cause everyone's different. And sometimes whether, and I sometimes I worry about what I say, but I also have my first principles. So talk about how principles matter in how you guys interface with others and letting people be their authentic self. >> Yeah, I'll jump in Jenni and then you can. The Amazon leadership principles are super important to how we interact with each other and it really does provide a set of guidelines for how we work with each other and how we work for our customers and with our partners. But most of all it gives us a common language and a common set of expectations. And I will be honest, they're not always easy. When you come from an environment that tends to be less open to feedback and less open to direct conversations than you find at Amazon, it could take a while to get used to that, but for me at least, it was extremely empowering to have those tools and those principles as guidance for how to operate and to gain the confidence in using them. I've also been able to participate in hundreds and hundreds of interviews in the time that I've been here as part of an interview team of bar raisers. I think that really helps us understand whether or not folks are going to be successful at AWS and at Amazon and helps them understand if they're going to be able to be successful. >> Bar raising is an Amazon term and it's gender neutral, right Jenni? >> It is gender neutral. >> Bar is a bar, it raises. >> That's right. And it's funny, we say that our culture here is peculiar. And when I started, I had been in consulting for several years, so I worked with a lot of different companies in tech and so I thought I'd seen everything and I came here and I went, "Hmm." I see what they mean by peculiar. It is very different environment. >> In the fullness of time, it'll all work out. >> That's right, that's right. Well and it's funny because when you first started, it's a lot to figure out to how to operate in an environment where people do use a 16 leadership principles. I've worked at a lot of companies with three or four core values and nobody can state those. We could state all 16 leadership principles and we use them in our regular everyday dialogue. That is an awkward thing when you first come to have people saying, "Oh, I'm going to use bias for action in this situation and I'm going to go move fast. And they're actually used in everyday conversations. But after a couple years suddenly you realize, "Oh, I'm doing that." And maybe even sometimes at the dinner table I'm doing that, which can get to be a bit much. But it creates an environment where we can all be different. We can all think differently. We can all have different ways of doing things, but we have a common overall approach to what we're trying to achieve. And that's really, it gives us a good framework for that. >> Jenni, it's great insight. Heather, thank you so much for sharing your stories. We're going to do this not once a year. We're going to continue this Women in Tech program every quarter. We'll check in with you guys and find out what's new. And thank you for what you do. We appreciate that getting the word out and really is an opportunity for everyone with education and cloud and it's only going to get more opportunities at the edge in AI and so much more tech. Thank you for coming on the program. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks, John. >> Thank you. That's the International Women's Day segment here with leaders from AWS. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat musiC)

(upbeat music beginning) >> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the Cube and ETR, this is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Making predictions about the future of enterprise tech is more challenging if you strive to lay down forecasts that are measurable. In other words, if you make a prediction, you should be able to look back a year later and say, with some degree of certainty, whether the prediction came true or not, with evidence to back that up. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we aim to do just that, with predictions about the macro IT spending environment, cost optimization, security, lots to talk about there, generative AI, cloud, and of course supercloud, blockchain adoption, data platforms, including commentary on Databricks, snowflake, and other key players, automation, events, and we may even have some bonus predictions around quantum computing, and perhaps some other areas. To make all this happen, we welcome back, for the third year in a row, my colleague and friend Eric Bradley from ETR. Eric, thanks for all you do for the community, and thanks for being part of this program. Again. >> I wouldn't miss it for the world. I always enjoy this one. Dave, good to see you. >> Yeah, so let me bring up this next slide and show you, actually come back to me if you would. I got to show the audience this. These are the inbounds that we got from PR firms starting in October around predictions. They know we do prediction posts. And so they'll send literally thousands and thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts in the industry, technologists, consultants, et cetera. And if you bring up the slide I can show you sort of the pattern that developed here. 40% of these thousands of predictions were from cyber. You had AI and data. If you combine those, it's still not close to cyber. Cost optimization was a big thing. Of course, cloud, some on DevOps, and software. Digital... Digital transformation got, you know, some lip service and SaaS. And then there was other, it's kind of around 2%. So quite remarkable, when you think about the focus on cyber, Eric. >> Yeah, there's two reasons why I think it makes sense, though. One, the cybersecurity companies have a lot of cash, so therefore the PR firms might be working a little bit harder for them than some of their other clients. (laughs) And then secondly, as you know, for multiple years now, when we do our macro survey, we ask, "What's your number one spending priority?" And again, it's security. It just isn't going anywhere. It just stays at the top. So I'm actually not that surprised by that little pie chart there, but I was shocked that SaaS was only 5%. You know, going back 10 years ago, that would've been the only thing anyone was talking about. >> Yeah. So true. All right, let's get into it. First prediction, we always start with kind of tech spending. Number one is tech spending increases between four and 5%. ETR has currently got it at 4.6% coming into 2023. This has been a consistently downward trend all year. We started, you know, much, much higher as we've been reporting. Bottom line is the fed is still in control. They're going to ease up on tightening, is the expectation, they're going to shoot for a soft landing. But you know, my feeling is this slingshot economy is going to continue, and it's going to continue to confound, whether it's supply chains or spending. The, the interesting thing about the ETR data, Eric, and I want you to comment on this, the largest companies are the most aggressive to cut. They're laying off, smaller firms are spending faster. They're actually growing at a much larger, faster rate as are companies in EMEA. And that's a surprise. That's outpacing the US and APAC. Chime in on this, Eric. >> Yeah, I was surprised on all of that. First on the higher level spending, we are definitely seeing it coming down, but the interesting thing here is headlines are making it worse. The huge research shop recently said 0% growth. We're coming in at 4.6%. And just so everyone knows, this is not us guessing, we asked 1,525 IT decision-makers what their budget growth will be, and they came in at 4.6%. Now there's a huge disparity, as you mentioned. The Fortune 500, global 2000, barely at 2% growth, but small, it's at 7%. So we're at a situation right now where the smaller companies are still playing a little bit of catch up on digital transformation, and they're spending money. The largest companies that have the most to lose from a recession are being more trepidatious, obviously. So they're playing a "Wait and see." And I hope we don't talk ourselves into a recession. Certainly the headlines and some of their research shops are helping it along. But another interesting comment here is, you know, energy and utilities used to be called an orphan and widow stock group, right? They are spending more than anyone, more than financials insurance, more than retail consumer. So right now it's being driven by mid, small, and energy and utilities. They're all spending like gangbusters, like nothing's happening. And it's the rest of everyone else that's being very cautious. >> Yeah, so very unpredictable right now. All right, let's go to number two. Cost optimization remains a major theme in 2023. We've been reporting on this. You've, we've shown a chart here. What's the primary method that your organization plans to use? You asked this question of those individuals that cited that they were going to reduce their spend and- >> Mhm. >> consolidating redundant vendors, you know, still leads the way, you know, far behind, cloud optimization is second, but it, but cloud continues to outpace legacy on-prem spending, no doubt. Somebody, it was, the guy's name was Alexander Feiglstorfer from Storyblok, sent in a prediction, said "All in one becomes extinct." Now, generally I would say I disagree with that because, you know, as we know over the years, suites tend to win out over, you know, individual, you know, point products. But I think what's going to happen is all in one is going to remain the norm for these larger companies that are cutting back. They want to consolidate redundant vendors, and the smaller companies are going to stick with that best of breed and be more aggressive and try to compete more effectively. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, I'm seeing much more consolidation in vendors, but also consolidation in functionality. We're seeing people building out new functionality, whether it's, we're going to talk about this later, so I don't want to steal too much of our thunder right now, but data and security also, we're seeing a functionality creep. So I think there's further consolidation happening here. I think niche solutions are going to be less likely, and platform solutions are going to be more likely in a spending environment where you want to reduce your vendors. You want to have one bill to pay, not 10. Another thing on this slide, real quick if I can before I move on, is we had a bunch of people write in and some of the answer options that aren't on this graph but did get cited a lot, unfortunately, is the obvious reduction in staff, hiring freezes, and delaying hardware, were three of the top write-ins. And another one was offshore outsourcing. So in addition to what we're seeing here, there were a lot of write-in options, and I just thought it would be important to state that, but essentially the cost optimization is by and far the highest one, and it's growing. So it's actually increased in our citations over the last year. >> And yeah, specifically consolidating redundant vendors. And so I actually thank you for bringing that other up, 'cause I had asked you, Eric, is there any evidence that repatriation is going on and we don't see it in the numbers, we don't see it even in the other, there was, I think very little or no mention of cloud repatriation, even though it might be happening in this in a smattering. >> Not a single mention, not one single mention. I went through it for you. Yep. Not one write-in. >> All right, let's move on. Number three, security leads M&A in 2023. Now you might say, "Oh, well that's a layup," but let me set this up Eric, because I didn't really do a great job with the slide. I hid the, what you've done, because you basically took, this is from the emerging technology survey with 1,181 responses from November. And what we did is we took Palo Alto and looked at the overlap in Palo Alto Networks accounts with these vendors that were showing on this chart. And Eric, I'm going to ask you to explain why we put a circle around OneTrust, but let me just set it up, and then have you comment on the slide and take, give us more detail. We're seeing private company valuations are off, you know, 10 to 40%. We saw a sneak, do a down round, but pretty good actually only down 12%. We've seen much higher down rounds. Palo Alto Networks we think is going to get busy. Again, they're an inquisitive company, they've been sort of quiet lately, and we think CrowdStrike, Cisco, Microsoft, Zscaler, we're predicting all of those will make some acquisitions and we're thinking that the targets are somewhere in this mess of security taxonomy. Other thing we're predicting AI meets cyber big time in 2023, we're going to probably going to see some acquisitions of those companies that are leaning into AI. We've seen some of that with Palo Alto. And then, you know, your comment to me, Eric, was "The RSA conference is going to be insane, hopping mad, "crazy this April," (Eric laughing) but give us your take on this data, and why the red circle around OneTrust? Take us back to that slide if you would, Alex. >> Sure. There's a few things here. First, let me explain what we're looking at. So because we separate the public companies and the private companies into two separate surveys, this allows us the ability to cross-reference that data. So what we're doing here is in our public survey, the tesis, everyone who cited some spending with Palo Alto, meaning they're a Palo Alto customer, we then cross-reference that with the private tech companies. Who also are they spending with? So what you're seeing here is an overlap. These companies that we have circled are doing the best in Palo Alto's accounts. Now, Palo Alto went and bought Twistlock a few years ago, which this data slide predicted, to be quite honest. And so I don't know if they necessarily are going to go after Snyk. Snyk, sorry. They already have something in that space. What they do need, however, is more on the authentication space. So I'm looking at OneTrust, with a 45% overlap in their overall net sentiment. That is a company that's already existing in their accounts and could be very synergistic to them. BeyondTrust as well, authentication identity. This is something that Palo needs to do to move more down that zero trust path. Now why did I pick Palo first? Because usually they're very inquisitive. They've been a little quiet lately. Secondly, if you look at the backdrop in the markets, the IPO freeze isn't going to last forever. Sooner or later, the IPO markets are going to open up, and some of these private companies are going to tap into public equity. In the meantime, however, cash funding on the private side is drying up. If they need another round, they're not going to get it, and they're certainly not going to get it at the valuations they were getting. So we're seeing valuations maybe come down where they're a touch more attractive, and Palo knows this isn't going to last forever. Cisco knows that, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, all these companies that are trying to make a push to become that vendor that you're consolidating in, around, they have a chance now, they have a window where they need to go make some acquisitions. And that's why I believe leading up to RSA, we're going to see some movement. I think it's going to pretty, a really exciting time in security right now. >> Awesome. Thank you. Great explanation. All right, let's go on the next one. Number four is, it relates to security. Let's stay there. Zero trust moves from hype to reality in 2023. Now again, you might say, "Oh yeah, that's a layup." A lot of these inbounds that we got are very, you know, kind of self-serving, but we always try to put some meat in the bone. So first thing we do is we pull out some commentary from, Eric, your roundtable, your insights roundtable. And we have a CISO from a global hospitality firm says, "For me that's the highest priority." He's talking about zero trust because it's the best ROI, it's the most forward-looking, and it enables a lot of the business transformation activities that we want to do. CISOs tell me that they actually can drive forward transformation projects that have zero trust, and because they can accelerate them, because they don't have to go through the hurdle of, you know, getting, making sure that it's secure. Second comment, zero trust closes that last mile where once you're authenticated, they open up the resource to you in a zero trust way. That's a CISO of a, and a managing director of a cyber risk services enterprise. Your thoughts on this? >> I can be here all day, so I'm going to try to be quick on this one. This is not a fluff piece on this one. There's a couple of other reasons this is happening. One, the board finally gets it. Zero trust at first was just a marketing hype term. Now the board understands it, and that's why CISOs are able to push through it. And what they finally did was redefine what it means. Zero trust simply means moving away from hardware security, moving towards software-defined security, with authentication as its base. The board finally gets that, and now they understand that this is necessary and it's being moved forward. The other reason it's happening now is hybrid work is here to stay. We weren't really sure at first, large companies were still trying to push people back to the office, and it's going to happen. The pendulum will swing back, but hybrid work's not going anywhere. By basically on our own data, we're seeing that 69% of companies expect remote and hybrid to be permanent, with only 30% permanent in office. Zero trust works for a hybrid environment. So all of that is the reason why this is happening right now. And going back to our previous prediction, this is why we're picking Palo, this is why we're picking Zscaler to make these acquisitions. Palo Alto needs to be better on the authentication side, and so does Zscaler. They're both fantastic on zero trust network access, but they need the authentication software defined aspect, and that's why we think this is going to happen. One last thing, in that CISO round table, I also had somebody say, "Listen, Zscaler is incredible. "They're doing incredibly well pervading the enterprise, "but their pricing's getting a little high," and they actually think Palo Alto is well-suited to start taking some of that share, if Palo can make one move. >> Yeah, Palo Alto's consolidation story is very strong. Here's my question and challenge. Do you and me, so I'm always hardcore about, okay, you've got to have evidence. I want to look back at these things a year from now and say, "Did we get it right? Yes or no?" If we got it wrong, we'll tell you we got it wrong. So how are we going to measure this? I'd say a couple things, and you can chime in. One is just the number of vendors talking about it. That's, but the marketing always leads the reality. So the second part of that is we got to get evidence from the buying community. Can you help us with that? >> (laughs) Luckily, that's what I do. I have a data company that asks thousands of IT decision-makers what they're adopting and what they're increasing spend on, as well as what they're decreasing spend on and what they're replacing. So I have snapshots in time over the last 11 years where I can go ahead and compare and contrast whether this adoption is happening or not. So come back to me in 12 months and I'll let you know. >> Now, you know, I will. Okay, let's bring up the next one. Number five, generative AI hits where the Metaverse missed. Of course everybody's talking about ChatGPT, we just wrote last week in a breaking analysis with John Furrier and Sarjeet Joha our take on that. We think 2023 does mark a pivot point as natural language processing really infiltrates enterprise tech just as Amazon turned the data center into an API. We think going forward, you're going to be interacting with technology through natural language, through English commands or other, you know, foreign language commands, and investors are lining up, all the VCs are getting excited about creating something competitive to ChatGPT, according to (indistinct) a hundred million dollars gets you a seat at the table, gets you into the game. (laughing) That's before you have to start doing promotion. But he thinks that's what it takes to actually create a clone or something equivalent. We've seen stuff from, you know, the head of Facebook's, you know, AI saying, "Oh, it's really not that sophisticated, ChatGPT, "it's kind of like IBM Watson, it's great engineering, "but you know, we've got more advanced technology." We know Google's working on some really interesting stuff. But here's the thing. ETR just launched this survey for the February survey. It's in the field now. We circle open AI in this category. They weren't even in the survey, Eric, last quarter. So 52% of the ETR survey respondents indicated a positive sentiment toward open AI. I added up all the sort of different bars, we could double click on that. And then I got this inbound from Scott Stevenson of Deep Graham. He said "AI is recession-proof." I don't know if that's the case, but it's a good quote. So bring this back up and take us through this. Explain this chart for us, if you would. >> First of all, I like Scott's quote better than the Facebook one. I think that's some sour grapes. Meta just spent an insane amount of money on the Metaverse and that's a dud. Microsoft just spent money on open AI and it is hot, undoubtedly hot. We've only been in the field with our current ETS survey for a week. So my caveat is it's preliminary data, but I don't care if it's preliminary data. (laughing) We're getting a sneak peek here at what is the number one net sentiment and mindshare leader in the entire machine-learning AI sector within a week. It's beating Data- >> 600. 600 in. >> It's beating Databricks. And we all know Databricks is a huge established enterprise company, not only in machine-learning AI, but it's in the top 10 in the entire survey. We have over 400 vendors in this survey. It's number eight overall, already. In a week. This is not hype. This is real. And I could go on the NLP stuff for a while. Not only here are we seeing it in open AI and machine-learning and AI, but we're seeing NLP in security. It's huge in email security. It's completely transforming that area. It's one of the reasons I thought Palo might take Abnormal out. They're doing such a great job with NLP in this email side, and also in the data prep tools. NLP is going to take out data prep tools. If we have time, I'll discuss that later. But yeah, this is, to me this is a no-brainer, and we're already seeing it in the data. >> Yeah, John Furrier called, you know, the ChatGPT introduction. He said it reminded him of the Netscape moment, when we all first saw Netscape Navigator and went, "Wow, it really could be transformative." All right, number six, the cloud expands to supercloud as edge computing accelerates and CloudFlare is a big winner in 2023. We've reported obviously on cloud, multi-cloud, supercloud and CloudFlare, basically saying what multi-cloud should have been. We pulled this quote from Atif Kahn, who is the founder and CTO of Alkira, thanks, one of the inbounds, thank you. "In 2023, highly distributed IT environments "will become more the norm "as organizations increasingly deploy hybrid cloud, "multi-cloud and edge settings..." Eric, from one of your round tables, "If my sources from edge computing are coming "from the cloud, that means I have my workloads "running in the cloud. "There is no one better than CloudFlare," That's a senior director of IT architecture at a huge financial firm. And then your analysis shows CloudFlare really growing in pervasion, that sort of market presence in the dataset, dramatically, to near 20%, leading, I think you had told me that they're even ahead of Google Cloud in terms of momentum right now. >> That was probably the biggest shock to me in our January 2023 tesis, which covers the public companies in the cloud computing sector. CloudFlare has now overtaken GCP in overall spending, and I was shocked by that. It's already extremely pervasive in networking, of course, for the edge networking side, and also in security. This is the number one leader in SaaSi, web access firewall, DDoS, bot protection, by your definition of supercloud, which we just did a couple of weeks ago, and I really enjoyed that by the way Dave, I think CloudFlare is the one that fits your definition best, because it's bringing all of these aspects together, and most importantly, it's cloud agnostic. It does not need to rely on Azure or AWS to do this. It has its own cloud. So I just think it's, when we look at your definition of supercloud, CloudFlare is the poster child. >> You know, what's interesting about that too, is a lot of people are poo-pooing CloudFlare, "Ah, it's, you know, really kind of not that sophisticated." "You don't have as many tools," but to your point, you're can have those tools in the cloud, Cloudflare's doing serverless on steroids, trying to keep things really simple, doing a phenomenal job at, you know, various locations around the world. And they're definitely one to watch. Somebody put them on my radar (laughing) a while ago and said, "Dave, you got to do a breaking analysis on CloudFlare." And so I want to thank that person. I can't really name them, 'cause they work inside of a giant hyperscaler. But- (Eric laughing) (Dave chuckling) >> Real quickly, if I can from a competitive perspective too, who else is there? They've already taken share from Akamai, and Fastly is their really only other direct comp, and they're not there. And these guys are in poll position and they're the only game in town right now. I just, I don't see it slowing down. >> I thought one of your comments from your roundtable I was reading, one of the folks said, you know, CloudFlare, if my workloads are in the cloud, they are, you know, dominant, they said not as strong with on-prem. And so Akamai is doing better there. I'm like, "Okay, where would you want to be?" (laughing) >> Yeah, which one of those two would you rather be? >> Right? Anyway, all right, let's move on. Number seven, blockchain continues to look for a home in the enterprise, but devs will slowly begin to adopt in 2023. You know, blockchains have got a lot of buzz, obviously crypto is, you know, the killer app for blockchain. Senior IT architect in financial services from your, one of your insight roundtables said quote, "For enterprises to adopt a new technology, "there have to be proven turnkey solutions. "My experience in talking with my peers are, "blockchain is still an open-source component "where you have to build around it." Now I want to thank Ravi Mayuram, who's the CTO of Couchbase sent in, you know, one of the predictions, he said, "DevOps will adopt blockchain, specifically Ethereum." And he referenced actually in his email to me, Solidity, which is the programming language for Ethereum, "will be in every DevOps pro's playbook, "mirroring the boom in machine-learning. "Newer programming languages like Solidity "will enter the toolkits of devs." His point there, you know, Solidity for those of you don't know, you know, Bitcoin is not programmable. Solidity, you know, came out and that was their whole shtick, and they've been improving that, and so forth. But it, Eric, it's true, it really hasn't found its home despite, you know, the potential for smart contracts. IBM's pushing it, VMware has had announcements, and others, really hasn't found its way in the enterprise yet. >> Yeah, and I got to be honest, I don't think it's going to, either. So when we did our top trends series, this was basically chosen as an anti-prediction, I would guess, that it just continues to not gain hold. And the reason why was that first comment, right? It's very much a niche solution that requires a ton of custom work around it. You can't just plug and play it. And at the end of the day, let's be very real what this technology is, it's a database ledger, and we already have database ledgers in the enterprise. So why is this a priority to move to a different database ledger? It's going to be very niche cases. I like the CTO comment from Couchbase about it being adopted by DevOps. I agree with that, but it has to be a DevOps in a very specific use case, and a very sophisticated use case in financial services, most likely. And that's not across the entire enterprise. So I just think it's still going to struggle to get its foothold for a little bit longer, if ever. >> Great, thanks. Okay, let's move on. Number eight, AWS Databricks, Google Snowflake lead the data charge with Microsoft. Keeping it simple. So let's unpack this a little bit. This is the shared accounts peer position for, I pulled data platforms in for analytics, machine-learning and AI and database. So I could grab all these accounts or these vendors and see how they compare in those three sectors. Analytics, machine-learning and database. Snowflake and Databricks, you know, they're on a crash course, as you and I have talked about. They're battling to be the single source of truth in analytics. They're, there's going to be a big focus. They're already started. It's going to be accelerated in 2023 on open formats. Iceberg, Python, you know, they're all the rage. We heard about Iceberg at Snowflake Summit, last summer or last June. Not a lot of people had heard of it, but of course the Databricks crowd, who knows it well. A lot of other open source tooling. There's a company called DBT Labs, which you're going to talk about in a minute. George Gilbert put them on our radar. We just had Tristan Handy, the CEO of DBT labs, on at supercloud last week. They are a new disruptor in data that's, they're essentially making, they're API-ifying, if you will, KPIs inside the data warehouse and dramatically simplifying that whole data pipeline. So really, you know, the ETL guys should be shaking in their boots with them. Coming back to the slide. Google really remains focused on BigQuery adoption. Customers have complained to me that they would like to use Snowflake with Google's AI tools, but they're being forced to go to BigQuery. I got to ask Google about that. AWS continues to stitch together its bespoke data stores, that's gone down that "Right tool for the right job" path. David Foyer two years ago said, "AWS absolutely is going to have to solve that problem." We saw them start to do it in, at Reinvent, bringing together NoETL between Aurora and Redshift, and really trying to simplify those worlds. There's going to be more of that. And then Microsoft, they're just making it cheap and easy to use their stuff, you know, despite some of the complaints that we hear in the community, you know, about things like Cosmos, but Eric, your take? >> Yeah, my concern here is that Snowflake and Databricks are fighting each other, and it's allowing AWS and Microsoft to kind of catch up against them, and I don't know if that's the right move for either of those two companies individually, Azure and AWS are building out functionality. Are they as good? No they're not. The other thing to remember too is that AWS and Azure get paid anyway, because both Databricks and Snowflake run on top of 'em. So (laughing) they're basically collecting their toll, while these two fight it out with each other, and they build out functionality. I think they need to stop focusing on each other, a little bit, and think about the overall strategy. Now for Databricks, we know they came out first as a machine-learning AI tool. They were known better for that spot, and now they're really trying to play catch-up on that data storage compute spot, and inversely for Snowflake, they were killing it with the compute separation from storage, and now they're trying to get into the MLAI spot. I actually wouldn't be surprised to see them make some sort of acquisition. Frank Slootman has been a little bit quiet, in my opinion there. The other thing to mention is your comment about DBT Labs. If we look at our emerging technology survey, last survey when this came out, DBT labs, number one leader in that data integration space, I'm going to just pull it up real quickly. It looks like they had a 33% overall net sentiment to lead data analytics integration. So they are clearly growing, it's fourth straight survey consecutively that they've grown. The other name we're seeing there a little bit is Cribl, but DBT labs is by far the number one player in this space. >> All right. Okay, cool. Moving on, let's go to number nine. With Automation mixer resurgence in 2023, we're showing again data. The x axis is overlap or presence in the dataset, and the vertical axis is shared net score. Net score is a measure of spending momentum. As always, you've seen UI path and Microsoft Power Automate up until the right, that red line, that 40% line is generally considered elevated. UI path is really separating, creating some distance from Automation Anywhere, they, you know, previous quarters they were much closer. Microsoft Power Automate came on the scene in a big way, they loom large with this "Good enough" approach. I will say this, I, somebody sent me a results of a (indistinct) survey, which showed UiPath actually had more mentions than Power Automate, which was surprising, but I think that's not been the case in the ETR data set. We're definitely seeing a shift from back office to front soft office kind of workloads. Having said that, software testing is emerging as a mainstream use case, we're seeing ML and AI become embedded in end-to-end automations, and low-code is serving the line of business. And so this, we think, is going to increasingly have appeal to organizations in the coming year, who want to automate as much as possible and not necessarily, we've seen a lot of layoffs in tech, and people... You're going to have to fill the gaps with automation. That's a trend that's going to continue. >> Yep, agreed. At first that comment about Microsoft Power Automate having less citations than UiPath, that's shocking to me. I'm looking at my chart right here where Microsoft Power Automate was cited by over 60% of our entire survey takers, and UiPath at around 38%. Now don't get me wrong, 38% pervasion's fantastic, but you know you're not going to beat an entrenched Microsoft. So I don't really know where that comment came from. So UiPath, looking at it alone, it's doing incredibly well. It had a huge rebound in its net score this last survey. It had dropped going through the back half of 2022, but we saw a big spike in the last one. So it's got a net score of over 55%. A lot of people citing adoption and increasing. So that's really what you want to see for a name like this. The problem is that just Microsoft is doing its playbook. At the end of the day, I'm going to do a POC, why am I going to pay more for UiPath, or even take on another separate bill, when we know everyone's consolidating vendors, if my license already includes Microsoft Power Automate? It might not be perfect, it might not be as good, but what I'm hearing all the time is it's good enough, and I really don't want another invoice. >> Right. So how does UiPath, you know, and Automation Anywhere, how do they compete with that? Well, the way they compete with it is they got to have a better product. They got a product that's 10 times better. You know, they- >> Right. >> they're not going to compete based on where the lowest cost, Microsoft's got that locked up, or where the easiest to, you know, Microsoft basically give it away for free, and that's their playbook. So that's, you know, up to UiPath. UiPath brought on Rob Ensslin, I've interviewed him. Very, very capable individual, is now Co-CEO. So he's kind of bringing that adult supervision in, and really tightening up the go to market. So, you know, we know this company has been a rocket ship, and so getting some control on that and really getting focused like a laser, you know, could be good things ahead there for that company. Okay. >> One of the problems, if I could real quick Dave, is what the use cases are. When we first came out with RPA, everyone was super excited about like, "No, UiPath is going to be great for super powerful "projects, use cases." That's not what RPA is being used for. As you mentioned, it's being used for mundane tasks, so it's not automating complex things, which I think UiPath was built for. So if you were going to get UiPath, and choose that over Microsoft, it's going to be 'cause you're doing it for more powerful use case, where it is better. But the problem is that's not where the enterprise is using it. The enterprise are using this for base rote tasks, and simply, Microsoft Power Automate can do that. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I've had people on theCube that are both Microsoft Power Automate customers and UiPath customers, and I've asked them, "Well you know, "how do you differentiate between the two?" And they've said to me, "Look, our users and personal productivity users, "they like Power Automate, "they can use it themselves, and you know, "it doesn't take a lot of, you know, support on our end." The flip side is you could do that with UiPath, but like you said, there's more of a focus now on end-to-end enterprise automation and building out those capabilities. So it's increasingly a value play, and that's going to be obviously the challenge going forward. Okay, my last one, and then I think you've got some bonus ones. Number 10, hybrid events are the new category. Look it, if I can get a thousand inbounds that are largely self-serving, I can do my own here, 'cause we're in the events business. (Eric chuckling) Here's the prediction though, and this is a trend we're seeing, the number of physical events is going to dramatically increase. That might surprise people, but most of the big giant events are going to get smaller. The exception is AWS with Reinvent, I think Snowflake's going to continue to grow. So there are examples of physical events that are growing, but generally, most of the big ones are getting smaller, and there's going to be many more smaller intimate regional events and road shows. These micro-events, they're going to be stitched together. Digital is becoming a first class citizen, so people really got to get their digital acts together, and brands are prioritizing earned media, and they're beginning to build their own news networks, going direct to their customers. And so that's a trend we see, and I, you know, we're right in the middle of it, Eric, so you know we're going to, you mentioned RSA, I think that's perhaps going to be one of those crazy ones that continues to grow. It's shrunk, and then it, you know, 'cause last year- >> Yeah, it did shrink. >> right, it was the last one before the pandemic, and then they sort of made another run at it last year. It was smaller but it was very vibrant, and I think this year's going to be huge. Global World Congress is another one, we're going to be there end of Feb. That's obviously a big big show, but in general, the brands and the technology vendors, even Oracle is going to scale down. I don't know about Salesforce. We'll see. You had a couple of bonus predictions. Quantum and maybe some others? Bring us home. >> Yeah, sure. I got a few more. I think we touched upon one, but I definitely think the data prep tools are facing extinction, unfortunately, you know, the Talons Informatica is some of those names. The problem there is that the BI tools are kind of including data prep into it already. You know, an example of that is Tableau Prep Builder, and then in addition, Advanced NLP is being worked in as well. ThoughtSpot, Intelius, both often say that as their selling point, Tableau has Ask Data, Click has Insight Bot, so you don't have to really be intelligent on data prep anymore. A regular business user can just self-query, using either the search bar, or even just speaking into what it needs, and these tools are kind of doing the data prep for it. I don't think that's a, you know, an out in left field type of prediction, but it's the time is nigh. The other one I would also state is that I think knowledge graphs are going to break through this year. Neo4j in our survey is growing in pervasion in Mindshare. So more and more people are citing it, AWS Neptune's getting its act together, and we're seeing that spending intentions are growing there. Tiger Graph is also growing in our survey sample. I just think that the time is now for knowledge graphs to break through, and if I had to do one more, I'd say real-time streaming analytics moves from the very, very rich big enterprises to downstream, to more people are actually going to be moving towards real-time streaming, again, because the data prep tools and the data pipelines have gotten easier to use, and I think the ROI on real-time streaming is obviously there. So those are three that didn't make the cut, but I thought deserved an honorable mention. >> Yeah, I'm glad you did. Several weeks ago, we did an analyst prediction roundtable, if you will, a cube session power panel with a number of data analysts and that, you know, streaming, real-time streaming was top of mind. So glad you brought that up. Eric, as always, thank you very much. I appreciate the time you put in beforehand. I know it's been crazy, because you guys are wrapping up, you know, the last quarter survey in- >> Been a nuts three weeks for us. (laughing) >> job. I love the fact that you're doing, you know, the ETS survey now, I think it's quarterly now, right? Is that right? >> Yep. >> Yep. So that's phenomenal. >> Four times a year. I'll be happy to jump on with you when we get that done. I know you were really impressed with that last time. >> It's unbelievable. This is so much data at ETR. Okay. Hey, that's a wrap. Thanks again. >> Take care Dave. Good seeing you. >> All right, many thanks to our team here, Alex Myerson as production, he manages the podcast force. Ken Schiffman as well is a critical component of our East Coast studio. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hoof is our editor-in-chief. He's at siliconangle.com. He's just a great editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these episodes that are available as podcasts, wherever you listen, podcast is doing great. Just search "Breaking analysis podcast." Really appreciate you guys listening. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, or you can email me directly if you want to get in touch, david.vellante@siliconangle.com. That's how I got all these. I really appreciate it. I went through every single one with a yellow highlighter. It took some time, (laughing) but I appreciate it. You could DM me at dvellante, or comment on our LinkedIn post and please check out etr.ai. Its data is amazing. Best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCube Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (upbeat music beginning) (upbeat music ending)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Boston, Massachusetts. We're here at the Seaport. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. My name is Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin is here. He's my cohost for the next day. We are going to dig in to the famous RHEL, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Gunnar Hellekson is here, he's the Vice President and General Manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Gunnar, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thanks for having me. Nice to be here, Dave, Paul. >> RHEL 9 is, wow, nine, Holy cow. It's been a lot of iterations. >> It's the highest version of RHEL we've ever shipped. >> And now we're talking edge. >> Yeah, that's right. >> And so, what's inside, tell us. to keep happy with a new RHEL release. to keep happy with a new RHEL release. The first is the hardware partners, right, because they rely on RHEL to light up all their delicious hardware that they're making, then you got application developers and the ISVs who rely on RHEL to be that kind of stable platform for innovation, and then you've got the operators, the people who are actually using the operating system itself and trying to keep it running every day. So we've got on the, I'll start with the hardware side, So we've got on the, I'll start with the hardware side, which is something, as you know, RHEL success, and I think you talked about this with Matt, just in a few sessions earlier that the success of RHEL is really, hinges on our partnerships with the hardware partners and in this case, we've got, let's see, in RHEL 9 we've got all the usual hardware suspects and we've added, just recently in January, we added support for ARM servers, as general ARM server class hardware. And so that's something customers have been asking for, delighted to be shipping that in RHEL 9. So now ARM is kind of a first-class citizen, right? Alongside x86, PowerZ and all the other usual suspects. And then of course, working with our favorite public cloud providers. So making sure that RHEL 9 is available at AWS and Azure and GCP and all our other cloud friends, right? >> Yeah, you mentioned ARM, we're seeing ARM in the enterprise. We're obviously seeing ARM at the edge. You guys have been working with ARM for a long time. You're working with Intel, you're working with NVIDIA, you've got some announcements this week. Gunnar, how do you keep Linux from becoming Franken OS with all these capabilities? >> This is a great question. First is, the most important thing is to be working closely with, I mean, the whole point of Linux and the reason why Linux works is because you have all these people working together to make the same thing, right? And so fighting that is a bad idea. Working together with everyone, leaning into that collaboration, that's an important part of making it work over time. The other one is having, just like in any good relationship, having healthy boundaries. And so making sure that we're clear about the things that we need to keep stable and the places where we're allowed to innovate and striking the right balance between those two things, that allows us to continue to ship one coherent operating system while still keeping literally thousands of platforms happy. >> So you're not trying to suck in all the full function, you're trying to accommodate that function that the ecosystem is going to develop? >> Yeah, that's right. So the idea is that what we strive for is consistency across all of the infrastructures and then allowing for kind of optimizations and we still let ourselves take advantage of whatever indigenous feature might appear on, such an ARM chip or thus in a such cloud platform. But really, we're trying to deliver a uniform platform experience to the application developers, right? Because they can't be having, like there can't be kind of one version of RHEL over here and another version of RHEL over here, the ecosystem wouldn't work. The whole point of Linux and the whole point of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is to be the same so that everything else can be different. >> And what incentives do you use to keep customers current? >> To keep customers current? Well so the best thing to do I found is to meet customers where they are. So a lot of people think we release RHEL 9 at the same time we have Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, we have Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, all these are running at the same time, and then we also have multiple minor release streams inside those. So at any given time, we're running, let's say, a dozen different versions of RHEL are being maintained and kept up-to-date, and we do this precisely to make sure that we're not force marching people into the new version and they have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, they should just be able to sit there and enjoy the minor version that they like. And we try and keep that going for as long as possible. >> Even if it's 10 years out of date? >> So, 10 years, interesting you chose that number because that's the end of life. >> That's the end of the life cycle. >> Right. And so 10 years is about, that's the natural life of a given major release, but again inside that you have several 10-year life cycles kind of cascading on each other, right? So nine is the start of the next 10-year cycle while we're still living inside the 10-year cycle of seven and eight. So lots of options for customers. >> How are you thinking about the edge? how do you define, let's not go to the definition, but at high level. (Gunnar laughing) Like I've been in a conference last week. It was Dell Tech World, I'll just say it. They were sort of the edge to them was the retail store. >> Yeah. >> Lowe's, okay, cool, I guess that's edgy, I guess, But I think space is the edge. (Gunnar chuckling) >> Right, right, right. >> Or a vehicle. How do you think about the edge? All the above or but the exciting stuff to me is that far edge, but I wonder if you can comment. >> Yeah, so there's all kinds of taxonomies out there for the edge. For me, I'm a simple country product manager at heart and so, I try to keep it simple, right? And the way I think about the edge is, here's a use case in which somebody needs a small operating system that deploys on probably a small piece of hardware, usually varying sizes, but it could be pretty small. That thing needs to be updated without any human touching it, right? And it needs to be reliably maintained without any human touching it. Usually in the edge cases, actually touching the hardware is a very expensive proposition. So we're trying to be as hands off as possible. >> No truck rolls. >> No truck rolls ever, right, exactly. (Dave chuckling) And then, now that I've got that stable base, I'm going to go take an application. I'll probably put it in a container for simplicity's sake and same thing, I want to be able to deploy that application. If something goes wrong, I need to build a roll back to a known good state and then I need to set of management tools that allow me to touch things, make sure that everything is healthy, make sure that the updates roll out correctly, maybe do some AB testing, things like that. So I think about that as, that's the, when we talk about the edge case for RHEL, that's the horizontal use case and then we can do specializations inside particular verticals or particular industries, but at bottom that's the use case we're talking about when we talk about the edge. >> And an assumption of connectivity at some point? >> Yeah. >> Right, you didn't have to always be on. >> Intermittent, latent, eventual connectivity. >> Eventual connectivity. (chuckles) That's right in some tech terms. >> Red Hat was originally a one trick pony. I mean, RHEL was it and now you've got all of these other extensions and different markets that you expanded into. What's your role in coordinating what all those different functions are doing? >> Yes, you look at all the innovations we've made, whether it's in storage, whether it's in OpenShift and elsewhere, RHEL remains the beating heart, right? It's the place where everything starts. And so a lot of what my team does is, yes, we're trying to make all the partners happy, we're also trying to make our internal partners happy, right? So the OpenShift folks need stuff out of RHEL, just like any other software vendor. And so I really think about RHEL is yes, we're a platform, yes, we're a product in our own right, but we're also a service organization for all the other parts of the portfolio. And the reason for that is we need to make sure all this stuff works together, right? Part of the whole reasoning behind the Red Hat Portfolio at large is that each of these pieces build on each other and compliment each other, right? I think that's an important part of the Red Hat mission, the RHEL mission. >> There's an article in the journal yesterday about how the tech industry was sort of pounding the drum on H-1B visas, there's a limit. I think it's been the same limit since 2005, 65,000 a year. We are facing, customers are facing, you guys, I'm sure as well, we are, real skills shortage, there's a lack of talent. How are you seeing companies deal with that? What are you advising them? What are you guys doing yourselves? >> Yeah, it's interesting, especially as everybody went through some flavor of digital transformation during the pandemic and now everybody's going through some, and kind of connected to that, everybody's making a move to the public cloud. They're making operating system choices when they're making those platform choices, right? And I think what's interesting is that, what they're coming to is, "Well, I have a Linux skills shortage and for a thousand reasons the market has not provided enough Linux admins." I mean, these are very lucrative positions, right? With command a lot of money, you would expect their supply would eventually catch up, but for whatever reason, it's not catching up. So I can't solve this by throwing bodies at it so I need to figure out a more efficient way of running my Linux operation. People are making a couple choices. The first is they're ensuring that they have consistency in their operating system choices, whether it's on premise or in the cloud, or even out on the edge, if I have to juggle three, four different operating systems, as I'm going through these three or four different infrastructures, that doesn't make any sense, 'cause the one thing is most precious to me is my Linux talent, right? And so I need to make sure that they're consistent, optimized and efficient. The other thing they're doing is tooling and automation and especially through tools like Ansible, right? Being able to take advantage of as much automation as possible and much consistency as possible so that they can make the most of the Linux talent that they do have. And so with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, in particular, you see us make a big investment in things like more automation tools for things like SAP and SQL server deployments, you'll see us make investments in things like basic stuff like the web console, right? We should now be able to go and point and click and go basic Linux administration tasks that lowers the barrier to entry and makes it easier to find people to actually administer the systems that you have. >> As you move out onto these new platforms, particularly on the edge, many of them will be much smaller, limited function. How do you make the decisions about what features you're going to keep or what you're going to keep in RHEL when you're running on a thermostat? >> Okay, so let me be clear, I don't want RHEL to run on a thermostat. (everybody laughing) >> I gave you advantage over it. >> I can't handle the margins on something like that, but at the end. >> You're running on, you're running on the GM. >> Yeah, no that's, right? And so the, so the choice at the, the most important thing we can do is give customers the tools that they need to make the choice that's appropriate for their deployment. I have learned over several years in this business that if I start choosing what content a customer decide wants on their operating system I will always guess it wrong, right? So my job is to make sure that I have a library of reliable, secure software options for them, that they can use as ingredients into their solution. And I give them tools that allow them to kind of curate the operating system that they need. So that's the tool like Image Builder, which we just announced, the image builder service lets a customer go in and point and click and kind of compose the edge operating system they need, hit a button and now they have an atomic image that they can go deploy out on the edge reliably, right? >> Gunnar can you clarify the cadence of releases? >> Oh yeah. >> You guys, the change that you made there. >> Yeah. >> Why that change occurred and what what's the standard today? >> Yeah, so back when we released RHEl 8, so we were just talking about hardware and you know, it's ARM and X86, all these different kinds of hardware, the hardware market is internally. I tell everybody the hardware market just got real weird, right? It's just got, the schedules are crazy. We got so many more entrance. Everything is kind of out of sync from where it used to be, it used to be there was a metronome, right? You mentioned Moore's law earlier. It was like a 18 month metronome. Everybody could kind of set their watch to. >> Right. >> So that's gone, and so now we have so much hardware that we need to reconcile. The only way for us to provide the kind of stability and consistency that customers were looking for was to set a set our own clock. So we said three years for every major release, six months for every minor release and that we will ship a new minor release every six months and a new major release every three years, whether we need it or not. And that has value all by itself. It means that customers can now plan ahead of time and know, okay, in 36 months, the next major release is going to come on. And now that's something I can plan my workload around, that something I can plan a data center migration around, things like that. So the consistency of this and it was a terrifying promise to make three years ago. I am now delighted to announce that we actually made good on it three years later, right? And plan two again, three years from now. >> Is it follow up, is it primarily the processor, optionality and diversity, or as I was talking to an architect, system architect the other day in his premise was that we're moving from a processor centric world to a connect centric world, not just the processor, but the memories, the IO, the controllers, the nics and it's just keeping that system in balance. Does that affect you or is it primarily the processor? >> Oh, it absolutely affects us, yeah. >> How so? >> Yeah, so the operating system is the thing that everyone relies on to hide all that stuff from everybody else, right? And so if we cannot offer that abstraction from all of these hardware choices that people need to make, then we're not doing our job. And so that means we have to encompass all the hardware configurations and all the hardware use cases that we can in order to make an application successful. So if people want to go disaggregate all of their components, we have to let 'em do that. If they want to have a kind of more traditional kind of boxed up OEM experience, they should be able to do that too. So yeah, this is what I mean is because it is RHEL responsibility and our duty to make sure that people are insulated from all this chaos underneath, that is a good chunk of the job, yeah. >> The hardware and the OS used to be inseparable right before (indistinct) Hence the importance of hardware. >> Yeah, that's right. >> I'm curious how your job changes, so you just, every 36 months you roll on a new release, which you did today, you announced a new release. You go back into the workplace two days, how is life different? >> Not at all, so the only constant is change, right? And to be honest, a major release, that's a big event for our release teams. That's a big event for our engineering teams. It's a big event for our product management teams, but all these folks have moved on and like we're now we're already planning. RHEL 9.1 and 9.2 and 8.7 and the rest of the releases. And so it's kind of like brief celebration and then right back to work. >> Okay, don't change so much. >> What can we look forward to? What's the future look like of RHEL, RHEL 10? >> Oh yeah, more bigger, stronger, faster, more optimized for those and such and you get, >> Longer lower, wider. >> Yeah, that's right, yeah, that's right, yeah. >> I am curious about CentOS Stream because there was some controversy around the end of life for CentOS and the move to CentOS Stream. >> Yeah. >> A lot of people including me are not really clear on what stream is and how it differs from CentOS, can you clarify that? >> Absolutely, so when Red Hat Enterprise Linux was first created, this was back in the days of Red Hat Linux, right? And because we couldn't balance the needs of the hobbyist market from the needs of the enterprise market, we split into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora, okay? So then for 15 years, yeah, about 15 years we had Fedora which is where we took all of our risks. That was kind of our early program where we started integrating new components, new open source projects and all the rest of it. And then eventually we would take that innovation and then feed it into the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The trick with that is that the Red Hat Enterprise Linux work that we did was largely internal to Red Hat and wasn't accessible to partners. And we've just spent a lot of time talking about how much we need to be collaborating with partners. They really had, a lot of them had to wait until like the beta came out before they actually knew what was going to be in the box, okay, well that was okay for a while but now that the market is the way that it is, things are moving so quickly. We need a better way to allow partners to work together with us further upstream from the actual product development. So that's why we created CentOS Stream. So CentOS Stream is the place where we kind of host the party and people can watch the next version of Red Hat Enterprise get developed in real time, partners can come in and help, customers can come in and help. And we've been really proud of the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is the first release that came completely out of CentOS Stream. Another way of putting that is that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is the first version of RHEL that was actually built, 80, 90% of it was built completely in the open. >> Okay, so that's the new playground. >> Yeah, that's right. >> You took a lot of negative pushback when you made the announcement, is that basically because the CentOS users didn't understand what you were doing? >> No, I think the, the CentOS Linux, when we brought CentOS Linux on, this was one of the things that we wanted to do, is we wanted to create this space where we could start collaborating with people. Here's the lesson we learned. It is very difficult to collaborate when you are downstream of the product you're trying to improve because you've already shipped the product. And so once you're for collaborating downstream, any changes you make have to go all the way up the water slide and before they can head all the way back down. So this was the real pivot that we made was moving that partnership and that collaboration activity from the downstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to putting it right in the critical path of Red Hat Enterprise Linux development. >> Great, well, thank you for that Gunnar. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, it's great to, >> Yeah, my pleasure. >> See you and have a great day tomorrow. Thanks, and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow. We start at 9:00 AM. East Coast time. I think the keynotes, we will be here right after that to break that down, Paul Gillin and myself. This is day one for theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022 from Boston. We'll see you tomorrow, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Women In Tech, International Women's Day 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I have two guests from AWS here with me. Carolina Pina joins us, the head of Enterprise Enablement for LATAM and Laura Alvarez Modernel is here as well, Public Sector Programs Manager at AWS. Ladies, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Nice to meet you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Carolina, let's start with you. Talk to me a little bit about your role, what it is that you're doing there. >> So my role in AWS is to actually create mechanisms of massive training to try to close the talent gap that we have in the region. And when I mentioned talent gap, I'm talking about obviously digital and cloud-computing skills. So that's, that's, in a nutshell what my role entails. >> Lisa: Got it. How long have you been in that role? Just curious. >> So I've been at AWS a little bit over, over two years. I was actually in the public sector team when I joined, leading the education vertical for Latin American Canada. And I recently joined the commercial sector now leading these massive training efforts for the region for LATAM. >> And Laura, you're in public sector. Talk to me a little bit about your role. >> Yes, I'm in public sector. I'm also based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. So yeah, I'm from Latin America, and I lead educational and community impact programs in the Southern cone of Latin America. I also lead diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and I'm part of the Women at Amazon global board. That's our affinity group to make sure we make efforts towards building a more equal world. And on a personal note I'm really passionate about the topic of gender equality because I truly think it affects us all as women and as Latins. So that's something that I'm always interested in collaborating with. >> Lisa: Excellent. Carolina back to you. If we think about from an enablement perspective how is AWS partnering with its customers and its partners to train and employ women particularly in technology? >> Oh, sure. Lisa, so it's not a surprise. We, like I mentioned, you know we have a big cloud skills, talent gap in the region. In fact, you know, 69% of companies have reported talent shortages and difficulty hiring. So, and this represents a 15 year high. So, many of these companies are actually, you know, our own commercial customers. So they approach us saying, you know, asking for for support training and developing their talent. So like I mentioned, in my role I create massive training efforts and initiatives. So we always take into consideration women, minorities, underrepresented community, and not just for the current talent, meaning like the people that are currently employed, but also to ensure that we are proactively implementing initiatives to develop a talent of younger you know, a younger generation and a talent. So we can, you know, to inspire them and, and ensure that they, that we're seeing them represented in companies like AWS, you know and our customers, and in our partners. And obviously we, when we sit down with customers to craft these massive trainings you know, leveraging their ecosystems and communities, we actually try to use all our AWS training and certification portfolio which includes, you know, in live in class with live in structures, in classroom trainings. We also have our AWS Skill Builder platform which is the platform that allows us to, you know to reach a broader audience because it has, you know over 500 free and on-demand classes. And we also have a lot of different other programs that touches in different audiences. You know, we have AWS re/Start for underrepresented, and underemployed minorities. We also have AWS Academy, which is the program that we have for higher education institutions. And we have AWS, you know, Educate which also touches, you know, cloud beginners. So in every single of these programs, we ensure that we are encompassing and really speaking to women and developing training and developing women. >> Lisa: That's a great focus there. Laura, talk to me about upskilling. I know AWS is very much about promoting from within. What are some of the things that it's doing to help women in Latin America develop those tech skills and upskill from where, maybe where they are now? >> Well, Lisa, I think that is super interesting because there's definitely a skills gap problem, right? We have all heard about. And what's funny is also that we have this huge opportunity in Latin America to train people and to help further develop the countries. And we have the companies that need the talent. So why is there still a gap, right? And I think that's because there's no magic solution to solving this problem. No, like epic Hollywood movie scene that it's going to show how we close the gap. And it takes stepping out of our comfort zone. And as Carolina mentioned, collaborating. So, we at AWS have a commitment to help 29 million people globally to grow their technical skills with free cloud-computing skills training by 2025. I know that sounds a lot through educational programs but we do have as Carolina mentioned, a Skill Builder you can go into the website for free, enter, choose your path, get trained. We have Academy that we implement with universities. Re/Start that is a program that's already available in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Costa Rica. So there are a lot of opportunities, but you also mentioned something else that I would like to dive a bit deeper that is Latin American women. And yesterday we had the opportunity to record a panel about intersectionality with three amazing Latin women. And what we have to learn from that is that these are two minorities that intersect, right. We're talking about females that are minority. Latinas are minority. And in tech, that is also something that is even bigger minority. So there are more difficulties there and we need to make sure that we are meeting that talent that is there that is in Latin America, that exists. We know for sure we have unicorns in Latin America that are even AWS customers like Mercado Libre, and we have to meet them with the opportunities. And that's why we created a program that came from identifying how this problem evolves in Latin America, that there is a lack of confidence in women also that they don't feel prepared or equipped. There is a cultural component why we don't choose tech careers. And we partner with universities, more than 12 universities in Latin America with the International American Development Bank as well to create tech skills that's a free five weeks program in order to get students and get female in Latin America, into the tech world. And we also have them with mentorship. So I think that is an opportunity to truly collaborate because we as AWS are not going to solve these by ourselves, right? We need everyone pitching in on that. >> Lisa: Right. It's absolutely a team effort. You mentioned something important in terms of helping women, and especially minorities get out of their comfort zone. Carolina, I'm curious when you're talking with women and getting them into the program and sharing with them all of the enablement programs that you have, how do you help them be confident to get out of that comfort zone? That's a hard thing to do. >> Yeah, no, for sure. For sure, Lisa, well, I, you know, a lot of times actually I use myself as an example because, you know, I studied engineering and industrial systems engineering many years ago. And you know, a lot of my career has been in in higher education and innovation and startups. And as I mentioned in the intro I've been at AWS for a little bit over two years. So I, my career has not been in cloud and I recently joined the cloud. So I actually had to go through our own trainings and get our own certifications. So I, that's, you know a lot of times I actually, I use my own example, so people understand that you don't have to come from tech, you don't have to come, you can actually be a non-tech person and, and also see the the benefits of the cloud. And you don't have to only, you know, learn cloud if you're in the IT department or in an IT team. So sometimes, I also emphasize that the cloud and the future is absolutely the cloud. In fact, the world economic foreign, you know teaches us that cloud-computing is that the technology that's going to be mostly adopted by 2025. So that's why we need to ensure that every single person, women and others are really knowledgeable in the cloud. So that's why, you know, technical and untechnical. But I, you know, I use myself as an example for them to say, you know, you can actually do it. And obviously also I collaborate with Laura and a lot of the women at Amazon Latin America Group to also you know, ensure that we're doing webinars and panels. So we show them ourselves as role model like, Laura is an incredible role model for our community. And so it's also to to show examples of what the possibilities are. And that's what we do. >> Lisa: I love that you're sharing >> And can I make a note there also? >> Please, yes. >> To add to that. I think it also requires the companies and the, and the private sector to get out of their comfort zone, right? Because we are not going to find solutions doing what we are already doing. We truly need to go and get near these persons with a new message. Their interest is there in these programs we have reached more than 3,000 women already in Latin America with tech skills. So it's not that women are not interested. It's like, how do we reach them with a message that resounds with them, right? Like how we can explain the power of technology to transform the world and to actually improve their communities. I think there's something there also that we need to think further of. >> It's so important. You know, we say often when we're talking about women in tech, that she needs to see what she can be or if she can't see it, she can't be it. So having those role models and those mentors and sponsors is absolutely critical for women to get, I call it getting comfortably uncomfortable out of that comfort zone and recognizing there's so many opportunities. Carolina, to your point, you know, these days every company is a tech company, a data company whether you're talking about a car dealer, a grocery market. So your point about, you know, and obviously the future being cloud there's so much opportunity that that opens up, for everybody really, but that's an important thing for people to recognize how they can be a part of that get out of their comfort zone and try something that they maybe hadn't considered before. >> Yes. And, actually, Lisa I would love to share an example. So we have a group, O Boticário, which is one of our customers one of the, the lead retails in Brazil. And they've been a customer of AWS since 2013 when they realized that, you know the urgency and the importance of embracing state of the art technology, to your point, like, you know this is a retail company that understands that needs to be, you know embrace digital transformation, especially because, you know they get very busy during mother's days and other holidays during the year. So they realized that they, instead of outsourcing their IT requirements to technology experts they decided to actually start developing and bringing the talent, you know within itself, within, you know, technology in-house. So they decided to start training within. And that's when we, obviously we partnered with them to also create a very comprehensive training and certification plan that started with, you know a lot of the infrastructure and security teams but then it was actually then implemented in the rest of the company. So going back to the point like everybody really needs to know. And what we also love about O Boticário is they they really care about the diversion and inclusion aspect of this equation. And we actually collaborated with them as well through this program called Desenvolve with the Brazilian government. And Desenvolve means developing Portuguese and they this program really ensures that we are also closing that gender and that race gap and ensuring that they're actually, you know, developing talent in cloud for Brazil. So we, you know, obviously have been very successful with them and we will continue to do even more things with them particular for this topic. >> Lisa: I've always known how customer focused AWS is every time we get to go to re:Invent or some of the events but it's so nice to hear these the educational programs that you're doing with customers to help them improve DEI to help them enable their own women in their organizations to learn skills. I didn't realize that. I think that's fantastic very much a symbiotic part of AWS. If we think about the theme for this year's International Women's Day, Breaking The Bias I want to get both of your opinions and Laura we'll start with you, what that means to you, and where do you think we are in Latin America with breaking the bias? >> Well, I think breaking the bias is the first step to truly being who we are every day and being able to bring that to our work as well. I think we are in a learning curve of that. The companies are changing culturally, as Carolina mentioned we have customers that are aware of the importance of having women. And as we say at AWS not only because there is a good business reason because there is, because there are studies that show that we can increase the country's CPD, but also because it's important and it's the right thing to do. So in terms of breaking the bias I think we are learning and we have a long way to go. I talked a bit earlier about intersectionality and that is something that is also important to highlight, right? Because we are talking about females but we are also talking about another minorities. We're talking about underrepresented communities, Indigenous People, Latins. So when these overlap, we face even bigger challenges to get where we want to get, right? And to get to decision making places because technology is transforming the ways we take decisions, we live, and we need someone like us taking those decisions. So I think it's important at first to be aware and to see that you can get there and eventually to start the conversation going and to build the conversation, not to just leave it but to make sure we hear people and their input and what they're going through. >> Lisa: Yes. We definitely need to hear them. Carolina, what's your take on breaking the bias and where do you from your experience, where do you think we are with it? >> Yeah, no, I'm as passionate as Laura on this topic. And that's why we, you know we're collaborating in the Women at Amazon Latin America Chapter, because we're both very, I think breaking the bias starts with us and ourselves. And we are very proactive within AWS and externally. And I feel it's also, I mean, Lisa, what we've been doing is not only, obviously gathering you know, the troops and really making sure that, that we have very aggressive goals internally, but also bringing you know, bringing our male counterparts, and other, you know, other members of the other communities, because the change, we're not going to make it alone. Like the change where it is not women only talking to women is going to make the change. We actually need to make sure the male and other groups are represented. And the dialogue that they're that we're very conscious about that. And I feel like we're seeing more and more that the topic is becoming more of a priority not only within AWS and Amazon but we also see it because now that I meet with when I meet with customers around the region they really want to see how we can collaborate in these diversion and inclusion initiatives. So I think we are breaking the bias because now this topic is more top of mind. And then we are being more proactively addressing it and and training people and educating people. And I feel we're really in a pivoted point where the change that we've really been wanting to we will see in the next you know, few years which is very exciting. >> Lisa: Excellent, and we'll see that with the help of women like you guys. Thank you so much for joining me today, talking about what you're doing, how you're helping organizations across AWS's ecosystem, customers, partners, and helping, of course, folks from within you, right. It's a holistic effort, but we are on our way to breaking that bias and again, I thank you both for your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa, for the opportunity. >> My pleasure. For Carolina Pina and Laura Alvarez Modernel, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Women in Tech, International Women's Day 2022. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021, we're in person for a real event. I'm John Furrier, your host. We have two sets here on the floor, also a hybrid event online as well for Amazon, also on theCUBE Zone, go to cubereinvent.com and check out all theCUBE footage there. Maureen Lonergan, VP of Training and Certification AWS CUBE alumni, Maureen, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Nice to see you. >> So I remember, years ago, at re:Invent when you came on first time on theCUBE, this was when cloud was just getting going, I don't want to say just getting going, it was going, but it was just like training was going, now you're swimming in needs. You got the big milestone for, what's that? 27 million people, what's that number? >> 29 million training free, yeah. >> 29 million is the target for training, we hear the certifications are up, the pandemic has got everyone geared up for training. Give us the update, what's happening? >> Yeah, so we're doing a lot of interesting things. Obviously, the pandemic changed the world for everyone, but it's been a really good opportunity for us to pivot the business and move things to virtual and digital. And, in 2020, we did make that commitment to train 29 million people for free by 2025. And, you know, we've trained 6 million so far, so we're making great progress on that goal. We've largely done that through a couple of different programs. So we just a month ago launched our Skill Builder platform that provides 500 free training courses in 16 languages, across 200 countries. We also launched the AWS Skill Center in Seattle, which is learner acquisition and bringing in people from the community to learn about cloud. And, we also launched a course on Amazon Books. So, we were really excited about-- >> So you guys, again, this is free training. >> All free training. >> Free training. >> Everything I just mentioned is free. >> What's the most important things, skills are people learning right now? >> I think it's still this, you know, it's the same thing, it's solution architecture, security for sure, DevOps, developer, but we're also seeing a huge interest in business, the business roles, really understanding what cloud is and how it can, you know, help them with their business. >> How about organizations? 'Cause they have skill issues too, I know you guys are going all in on training, which is great, and by the way, congratulations on the mission. I know you're getting close to the numbers. I think there was an announcement, we're getting an update as you guys, have you hit the numbers yet? 29 million? >> The 29 million, yeah. So 6 million we've done so far, yeah. >> So you're on your way. What about organizations? How do they get involved? Because they're trying the same thing. Are you partnering with people? >> Yeah, so we partner with, well, for customers, they're looking for the same thing that we are. We also have a program for underserved and unemployed communities where we go in and do a kind of non-tech to tech training. And we're offering that program in 90 locations this year and really trying to address the early pipeline. >> What are some of the most important things that you're working on for AWS, for training and certification right now? >> The biggest thing that we're doing is just trying to make everything as free and accessible as we can and moving as much as we can to digital, making it where we've really focused this year on experiential learning, so labs and getting engaged with the customer and keeping them because obviously, we release services every day, you know? And it's important that we just work with organizations to have a learning, curious culture. >> Is there any way people can get involved, or you guys have any open programs? What can we do to help on theCUBE? Do you guys have new, cool digital ways to get the word out? What's going on? >> Yes, so, I mean, it depends on what you mean, we always are partnering with collaborating organizations, especially for programs like re/Start, so organizations within communities that are trying to get their community skilled up. So we work with a bunch of different partnerships. And I think, for me, it's really just about, we really think we're very, very focused on building diverse builders. And so, we want to make sure that we're getting the message out that cloud's accessible to anybody. And, by providing free training, we hope that that will attract a new set of learners and start to close the gap on their training pipeline. >> So, have you guys got the Gen Z nailed down yet? 'Cause they're hungry for content, they're on the Discord servers, they're on Twitch. >> Yeah, we actually were training to Twitch this year, because you have to meet the learner where they are, right? And I think, you know, traditional instructor-led training just doesn't work for some people. And so, we have content out on Twitch, we're working on some really cool interactive gaming stuff. And so, we really have pivoted. >> So there's a Discord server called "Ace of Diamonds" that's turning out to be quite the business vibe for the young kids. A lot of young kids from 13 to 17 years old in that kind of learning mode and they want to talk about cloud. Like to them, they're geeking out on NVIDIA GPUs, they want to hear about the graviton, they're nerds. >> Yeah, we actually have a very cool program called "Get IT", and it's very focused on girls in tech and we go into schools and run competitions and do hackathons and they present, and it's a really great way to get, you know, girls interested in tech in a big way. >> Cal Poly hosted a robotics competition, that was pretty interesting, the women's division was phenomenal. There's divisions now, I mean, robotics is like a varsity sport now. >> Yeah, exactly, exactly. >> I mean, this just shows you where the interest level is. Okay, so obviously, there's a young demographic and you've got the re-skilling on the higher end of the demographic of age wise that maybe have come from IT. So you've got the IT folks and/or people that had some business training or whatever, and then you have the young, what's the programs that are working the best that you see to getting those folks, the older folks, in retraining? >> For the younger ones, or? >> John: Older ones, not younger ones, older ones. >> I think what we're trying to do is work with organizations to make training accessible and comfortable. We always say it, you know, we want companies to build an environment where they can experiment and learn. So we're working with large organizations to try and transform them and make them cloud fluent and move people from traditional skills onto cloud skills. And, we're having great success with customers in doing that. But I think providing a really comfortable environment and a place and space for them to learn and building communities within that organization is important. >> What did you learn during the pandemic in your evolution? 'Cause you guys were doing like mid-flight of training, I know you've been rolling, you've been working really hard over the years, I know that for a fact. Pandemic hits, it's now virtual, digital is now a priority. What are some of the new things that have been spawned onto you from digital that are working? >> Yeah, I mean, we learned how to, you know, we're building out labs and we learned to cut content into smaller pieces so people could consume them. I think the biggest thing that we learned is that we just need to, that people were hungry to learn. Everyone was at home and we actually saw a tremendous increase in people taking training, especially digital training. And then, we also pivoted all of our certifications to virtual very rapidly so that people could then validate their skills. I think in light of the pandemic, you know, the great resignation is real, right? And people are assessing where they are. And so, we'd like to acquire people that are interested in that. >> And those jobs that are available with certification are very high paying jobs. >> Yes they are, yeah. >> So you walk through a certification, you're looking at some pretty good salary levels and you could be living anywhere. >> I met a guy last night at an event and he was in finance and he moved from a job making 30,000 to six figures and he did all through self-learning and he came to an event, was super excited about that. >> That's the top story right there, we've got to leave it at that. I know you got to go, I know you've got a hard deadline. Thank you for spending the time to come on theCUBE and sharing this important information around the certification, your goal for free training, it's free. >> Maureen: Free. >> If you want to get a raise, get cloud certification, pro tip. >> Please. >> That's a pro tip right there. Thanks for coming on, Maureen, great to see you. >> Appreciate it. Maureen Lonergan, great work she's doing in Amazon getting free content, you don't have to pay for it, it's free. Just like theCUBE content here, bringing you free insights. I'm John Furrier, worldwide leader in tech coverage at theCUBE, here in person in Las Vegas. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host for theCUBE. In this segment, we're going to be talking about Red Hat and the AWS evolving partnership. A great segment, really talking about how Hybrid and the Enterprise are evolving, certainly multicloud and the horizon. But a lot of benefits in the cloud, we've been covering on theCUBE and on SiliconANGLE with Red Hat for the past year. Very relevant. We've got Gunnar Hellekson, GM of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, And Joe Fernandes, VP and GM of the Hybrid Platforms, both of Red Hat. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us John. >> So, you know, me, I'm a fan boy of Red Hat. So I always say, you guys made all the right investments, OpenShift, all these things that you guys made decisions years ago playing out beautifully. And I think, you know, with Amazon's re:Invent, you're seeing the themes all play out. Modern application stack, you're starting to see things at the top of the stack evolve, you've got 5G in the Edge, workloads being redefined and expanded on the cloud with Cloud Scale. So everything has been going down to Hybrid and Enterprise grade level discussions. This is in the Wheelhouse of Red Hat. So I want to congratulate you. But what's your reaction? What do you guys see this year at re:Invent? What's the top story? >> I can start. >> Who wants to start with first? >> Sure, I mean, clearly, AWS itself is huge. But as you mentioned, the world is Hybrid, right, so customers are running still in their data center, in the Amazon Public Cloud across multiple Public Clouds and out to the Edge and bring in more and more workloads. So it's not just the applications, analytics. It's AI, it's machine learning. And so, yeah, we can expect to see more discussion around that, more great examples of customer use cases. And as you mentioned, Red Hat has been right in the middle of this for some time John. >> You guys also had some success with the fully managed OpenShift service called ROSA, R-O-S-A, which is Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, another acronym, but really this is about what the customers are looking for. Can you take us through an update on OpenShift on AWS, because the combination of managed services in the cloud, refactoring applications, but working on-premises is a big deal. Take us through why that's so important. >> Yeah, so, we've had customers running OpenShift on AWS for a long time, right? So whether it's our software-based offerings where customers deploy OpenShift themselves, or our fully managed cloud service. We've had cloud services on AWS for over five years. What ROSA brings or Red Hat OpenShift on AWS is a jointly managed service, right? So we're working in partnership with Amazon, with AWS to make OpenShift available as a jointly-managed service offering. It's a native AWS service offering. You can get it right through the AWS console. You can leverage your AWS committed spend. But, most importantly, you know, it's something that we're working on together. Bringing new customers to the table for both Red Hat and AWS. And we're really excited about it because it's really helping customers accelerate their move to the public cloud and really helping them drive that Hybrid strategy that we talked about. >> Gunnar, you know what I want to get your thoughts on this, because one of the things that I love about this market right now is open-source continues to be amazing, continues to drive more value, and there's new migration of talent coming in. The numbers are just continuing to grow and grow. But the importance of Red Hat's history with AWS is pretty significant. I mean, Red Hat pioneered Open-source and it's been involved with AWS from the early days. Can you take us through a little bit of history for the folks that may not know Red Hat's partnership with AWS? >> Yeah. I mean, we've been collaborating with AWS since 2008. So for over a decade we've been working together, and what's made the partnership work is that we have a common interest in making sure that customers have a consistent approachable experience. Whether they're going on-premise or in the cloud. Nobody wants to have to go through an entire retraining and retooling exercise just to take advantage of all the great advantages of the cloud. And, so being able to use something like Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a consistent substrate on which you can build your application platforms is really attractive. So, that's where the partnership started. And since then we've had the ability to better integrate with native AWS services. And one thing I want to point out is that, a lot of these integrations are kind of technical. It's not just about technical consistency across these platforms, it's also about operational consistency and business concerns. And when you're moving into an Open Hybrid Cloud kind of a situation, that's what becomes important, right? You don't want to have two completely different tool sets on two completely different platforms. You want as much consistency as possible as you move from one to the other. And I think a lot of customers see value in that, both for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux side of the business, and also on the OpenShift side of the business. >> Well that's interesting. I'd love to get your both perspective on this whole Enterprise focus, because the Enterprise is, as you know, guys you've been there from the beginning, they have requirements. And there're sometimes, they're different by Enterprise. So as you see cloud, and I remember early days of Amazon, it's the 15th year of AWS, 10th year of re:Invent as a conference. I mean, that seems like a lifetime ago. But that's not, not too far ago where, you know, it was like, well, Amazon might not make it, its only for developers. Enterprisers do their own thing. Now it's like, it's all about the Enterprise. How are Enterprise customers evolving with you guys? Because they're all seeing the benefit of replatforming. But as they refactor, how has Red Hat evolved with that trend and how have you helped Amazon? >> Yeah, so as we mentioned, Enterprisers really across the globe are adopting a Hybrid Cloud Strategy. But, Hybrid actually isn't just about the infrastructure. So, its certainly the infrastructure where these Enterprisers are running these applications is increasingly becoming Hybrid as you move from data center to multiple public clouds and out to the Edge. But the Enterprisers application portfolios are also Hybrid, right? It's a Hybrid mix of very traditional monolithic and tier type applications. But also new cloud native services that have either been built from scratch, or as you mentioned, existing applications have been refactored. And then they're moving beyond the applications, as I mentioned to make better use of data. Also evolving their processes for how they build, deploy, and manage, leveraging, CI/CD and GitOps and so forth. So really for us it's, how do you help Enterprises bring all that together, right? Manage this Hybrid infrastructure that's supporting this Hybrid portfolio of applications that really help them evolve their processes. We've been working with Enterprises on these types of challenges for a long time. And we're now partnering with Amazon to do the same in terms of our joint product and service offerings. >> Talking about the RHEL evolution. I mean, because that's the bread and butter for Red Hat. It has been there for a long time. OpenShift again, making argument earlier, I mentioned the bets you guys made with Kubernetes, for instance, and it's all been made with all the right moves. So I love ROSA. You got me sold on that. RHEL though has been the tried and true steady workhorse. How has that evolved with workloads? >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think when customers were at the stage, when they were wondering, if well, can I use AWS to solve my problem, or should I use AWS to solve my problem? Our focus was largely on kind of technical enablement. Can we keep up with the pace of new hardware that Amazon is rolling up? Can we ensure that consistency with the on-premise and off-premise? And I think now we're starting to shift focus into really differentiating RHEL on the AWS platform. Again, integrating natively with AWS services, making it easier to operate in AWS. And a good example of this is using tools like Red Hat Insights, which we announced, I guess, about a year ago. Which is now included in every Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. Using tools like Insights in order to give customers advice on maybe potential problems that are coming up, helping customer solve them. Can the customers identify problems before they happen? Helping them with performance problems. And again, having additional tools like that, additional cloud-based tools, makes RHEL as easy to use on the Cloud despite all the complexity of all the redeploying, refactoring, microservices, there is now a proliferation of infrastructure options, and to the extent that RHEL can be the thing that is consistent, solid, reliable, secure, just as customers are getting in, then we can make customer successful. >> You know, Joe, we talked about this last time we were chatting, I think Red Hat Summit or Ansible Fest, I forget which event it was, but we were talking about how modern application developers at the top of the stack just want to code. They want to write some code, and now they want the infrastructure's code, AKA DevOps, DevSecOps, but as this trend of moving up the stack continues to be a big theme at re:Invent, that requires automation. That requires a lot of stuff that happened under the covers. Red Hat is at the center of all this action from historical perspective, pre-existing Enterprises before Cloud now, during Cloud, and soon to be Cloud Scale, how do you see that evolving? Because how are customers shaping their architecture? Cause this is distributed computing in the cloud. It's essentially, we've seen this moving before, but now at such a scale where data, security, these are all new elements. How do you talk about that? >> Yeah, well, first of all, got to mention, Linux is a given right. Linux is going to be available in every environment, data center, Public Cloud, Edge. Linux combined with Linux containers and Kubernetes, that's the abstraction like abstracting the applications away from the infrastructure. And now it's all about how do you build on top of that to bring that automation that you mentioned. So, we're very focused on helping customers really build fully automated end to end deployment pipelines, so they can build their applications more efficiently. They can automate the continuous integration and deployment of those applications into whatever Cloud or Edge footprint they choose. And that they can promote across environments. Because again, it's not just about developing the applications, it's about moving them all the way through to production where their customers are relying on those services to do their work and so forth. And so that's what we're doing is, you know, obviously I think, Linux is a given, Linux, Containers, Kubernetes. Those decisions have been made and now it's a matter of how can we put that together with the automation that allows them to accelerate those deployments out to production so customers can take advantage of them? >> You know, Gunnar, we were joking in theCUBE. I was old enough to remember we used to install Linux on a server back in the day. Now a lot of these young developers never actually have to install the software and do some of those configurations 'cause it's all automated now. Again, the commoditization and automation trend, abstraction layers, some say, is a good thing. So how do you see the evolution of this DevOps movement with the partnership with AWS going forward? What types of things are you working on with Amazon Web Services and what kind of offerings can customers look forward to? >> Yeah, sure. So, I mean, it used to be that as you say, Linux was something that you managed with a mouse and keyboard. And I think it's been quite a few years since any significant amount of Linux has been managed with a mouse and a keyboard. A lot of it is scripts, automation tools, configuration management tools, things like this. And the investments we've made both in RHEL and in specifically RHEL on AWS is around enabling RHEL to be more manageable. And so, including things like something we call System Roles. So these are Ansible modules that kind of automate routine system's administration tasks. We've made investments in something called Image Builder. And so this is a tool that allows customers to kind of compose the operating system that they need, create a blueprint for it, and then kind of stamp out the same image, whether it's an ISO image, so you can install it on-premise or an AMI so we can deploy it in AWS. So again, the problem used to be helping customers package and manage dependencies and that kind of old world, three and a half-inch floppy disc kind of Linux problems. And now we've evolved towards making Linux easier to deploy and manage at a grand scale whether you're in AWS or whether you're On premise. >> Joe, take us through the Hybrid story. I know obviously success with OpenShifts Managed Service on AWS. What's the update there for you? What are customers expecting this re:Invent and what's the story for you guys? >> Yeah, so, you know, the OpenShift Managed Services business this is the fastest growing segment of our business. We're seeing lots of new customers. And again, bringing new customers, I think for both Red Hat and AWS through this service. So, we expected to hear from customers at re:Invent about what they're doing. Again, not only with OpenShift and our Red Hat solutions, but really with what they're building on top of those service offerings, of those solutions to sort of bring more value to their customers. To me, that's always the best part of re:Invent is really hearing from customers. And when we all start going there in person again, to actually be able to meet with them one-on-one, whether it's in person or virtual and so forth. So, looking forward to that. >> Well, great to have you guys on theCUBE. Congratulations on all success. The Enterprise continues to adopt more and more Cloud which benefits all the work you guys have done both on the RHEL side, and as you guys modernize with all these great services and managed services continues to be the center of all the action. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Thanks John. >> Thank you. >> Okay, Red Hat's partnership with AWS evolving as Cloud scale Edge, all distributed computing, all happening at large scale. This is theCUBE with CUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome back to AnsibleFest. I'm Matthew Jones, I'm the architect of the Ansible Automation Platform. And today I want to talk to you a little bit about what we've got coming in 2021, and some of the things that we're working on for the future. Today, I really want to cover some of the work that we're doing on scale and flexibility, and how we're going to focus on that for the next year. I also want to talk about how we're going to help you grow and manage and use your content on the Automation platform. And then finally, I want to look a little bit beyond the automation platform itself. So, last year we introduced Ansible Content Collections. Earlier this year, we introduced the Ansible Automation Hub on Red Hat Cloud. And yesterday you heard Richard mentioned on private automation hub that's coming later this year. And automation hub, Ansible tower, this is really what the automation platform means for us. It's bringing together that content, with the ability to execute and run and manage that content, that's really important. And so what we really want to do, is we want to help you bring Red Hat and partner content that you trust together with community content from galaxy that you may need, and bring this together with content that you develop for yourself, your roles, your collections, the automation that you actually do. And we want to give you control over that content and help you curate that content and build a community around your automation. We want to focus on a seamless experience with this automation from Ansible Tower and from Automation Hub for the automation platform itself, and make it accessible to the automation and infrastructure that you're managing. Now that we've talked about content a little bit, I want to talk about how you run Ansible. Today an Ansible Tower, use virtual environments to manage the actual execution of Ansible, and virtual environments are okay, but they have some drawbacks. Primarily they're not very portable. It's difficult to manage dependencies and the version of Ansible. Sometimes those dependencies conflict with the other systems that are on the infrastructure itself, even Ansible Tower. So what we've done is created a new system that we call execution environments. Execution environments are container-based. And what we're doing is bringing the flexibility and portability of containers to these Ansible execution environments. And the goal really is portability. And we want to be able to leverage the tools that the community develops as well as the tools that Red Hat provides to be able to produce these container images and use them effectively. At Ansible we've developed a tool called Ansible Builder. Ansible builder will let you bring content collections together with the version of Ansible and Red Hats base container image so that you can put together your own images for execution environments. And you'll be able to host these on your own private registry infrastructure. If you don't already have a container registry solution, Automation Hub itself provides that registry. The idea here is that, unlike today where your virtual environments and your production execution environments diverge a little bit from what your developers, your content developers and your automation developers experience, we want to give you the same experience between your production environments and your development environments, all the way through your test and validation workloads. Red Hat's also going to provide some prebuilt execution environments. We want to have some continuity between the experience that you have today on the Ansible tower and what you'll have next year, once we bring execution environments into production. We want you to be able to trust the Ansible, the version of Ansible that's running on your execution environments, and that you have the content that you expect. At the same time, we're going to provide a version of the execution environment, that's just the base execution environment. All it has is Ansible. This will let you take those using Ansible builder, take the collections that you've developed, that you need in your automation and combine them without having to bring in things that you don't need, or that you don't want in your automation and build them together into a very opinionated, container image. If you're interested in execution environments and you want to know how these are built and how you'll use them, we actually have them available for you to use today. Shane McDonald and Adam Miller are giving a talk later with a walk through how to build execution environments and how you'll use them. You can use this to make sure that you're ready for execution environments coming to the automation platform next year. Now that we've talked about how we build execution environments, I want to talk about how execution runs in your infrastructure. So today when you deploy Ansible tower, you're deploying a monolithic web application. Your execution capability is tied up into how you actually deploy Ansible tower. This makes scaling Ansible tower and your automation workloads difficult, and everything has to be co-located together in the same data center. Isolated nodes solve this a little bit, but they bring about their own sort of opinionated challenges in setting up SSH and having direct connectivity between the control nodes and the execution nodes themselves. We want to make this more flexible and easier to use. And so one of the things that we've created over the last year and that we've been working on over the last year is something that we call receptor. Receptor is an overlay network that's an Automation Mesh. And the goal here is to separate the execution capability of your Ansible content from the control plane capability, where you manage the web infrastructure, the users, the role-based access control. We want to draw a line between those. We want you to be able to deploy execution environments anywhere. Chris Wright earlier today mentioned Edge. Well Edge Cloud, we want you to be able to manage data centers anywhere in the world, and you can do this with the Automation Mesh,. The Automation Mesh connects your control plane with those execution nodes, anywhere in the world. Another thing that the Automation Mesh brings is, we're going to be able to draw the lines between the control plane themselves and each Automation Mesh node. This means that if you have an outage or a problem on your network and on your infrastructure, if you can draw a line between the control plane itself and the node that needs to execute, the sensible work, the Automation Mesh can route around problems. The Automation Mesh in the way it's deployed, also allows this to fit closer with ingress and egress policies that you have between your infrastructure. It doesn't matter which direction the Automation Mesh itself connects in. Once the connection is established, automation will be able to flow from the control systems to the execution nodes and get responses back. Now, this all works together with automation of the content collections that we mentioned earlier, the execution environments that we were just talking about and your container registries. All of these work together with these Automation Mesh nodes. They're very lightweight and very simple systems. This means you can scale up and scale down execution capacity as your needs increase or decrease. You don't need to keep around a lot of extra capacity just in case you automate more, just because you're not sure when your execution capacity needs will increase and decrease. This fits into an automated system for scaling your infrastructure and scaling your execution capacity. Now that we've talked about the content that you use to manage, and how that execution is performed and where that execution is performed. I want to look a little bit beyond the actual automation platform itself. And specifically, I want to talk about how the automation platform works with OpenShift and Kubernetes. Now we have an existing installer for Ansible tower that we'll deploy to OpenShift Kubernetes, and we support OpenShift and Kubernetes as a first-class system for deploying Ansible tower. But I mentioned automation hub and Ansible tower as this is what the automation platform is for us. So we want to take that installer and replace it with an operator-based full life cycle approach to deploying and managing the automation platform on OpenShift. This operator will be available in OperatorHub. So there's no need to manage complex YAML files that represent the deployment. Since it's available in OperatorHub, you have one place that you can go to manage deployments, upgrades, backup and restore. And all of this work seamlessly with the container groups feature that we introduced last year. But I want to take this a little bit beyond just deploying and upgrading the automation platform from the operator. We want to look at what other capabilities that we can get out of those operators. So beyond just deploying and upgrading, we're also creating a resource operators and CRDs that will allow other systems running in OpenShift or Kubernetes to directly manage resources within the automation platform. Anything from triggering jobs and getting the status of jobs back, we want to enable that capability if you're using OpenShift and Kubernetes. The first place we're starting with this, is Red Hats Advanced Cluster Management system. Advanced Cluster Management brings together the ability to manage OpenShift and Kubernetes clusters to install them and manage them, as well as applications and products in managing the life cycle of those across your clusters. So what we really want to do, is give you the ability to connect traditional and container-based workloads together. You're already using the Ansible automation platform to manage workloads with Ansible. When using Advanced Cluster Management and OpenShift and Kubernetes, now you have a full system. You can manage across clouds across clusters, anywhere in the world. And this sort of brings me back to one of the areas of focuses for us. Our goal is complete end-to-end automation. We want to connect your people, your domains and the processes. We want to help you deliver for you and your customers by expanding the capabilities of the Ansible automation platform. And we want to make this a seamless experience to both curate content, control the content for your organization, and run the content and run Ansible itself using the full suite of the Ansible automation platform. So the Advanced Cluster management team is giving a talk later where you'll actually be able to see Advanced cluster Management and the Ansible automation platform working together. Don't forget to check out Adam and Shane's talk on execution environments, how those are built and how you can use those. Thank you for coming to AnsibleFest, and we'll see you next time.

>> Live, from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the District, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Day two of the AWS Public Sector Summit. We saw Teresa Carlson yesterday, a lot of keynotes, we saw the CIA. Todd Osbourne is here, he's the Vice President of Alliances of New Relic, a company that's been smokin' hot, six billion dollar market cap, and really is takin' the world by storm. He's joined by Scott Drossos, who's the president of Infiniti, who is a public sector consultancy. Gentleman, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks, good to be here. >> Thank you. >> So Todd, you heard me, I mean really, everybody's talkin' about New Relic, stocks been smoking, I read an article recently, "it's got to cool off, it's too hot." So why so hot, what's goin' on, why the appeal of New Relic? >> Well as our CEO Lew Cirne has been on a couple of times talking to you about, every business is becoming a software business in the public sector, which we're here representing at the Amazon public sector event. It's the same thing with agencies and all the digital experiences that are happening across all the government and whether it's education, higher ed, healthcare, any of the DOD or other agencies, there's always some sort of digital experience that folks are having with the citizens that all the agencies and organizations are tryin' to support, and New Relic's right there, right there at the forefront of every one of those digital experiences. Everyone's running software that's modern software, or shifting to that with modern software running microservices, running containers, shifting to the cloud, and anyone deploying that type of software needs to have New Relic as part of their engagement to monitor what's happening at the citizen or the customer level, what's going on in the back end, on through the infrastructure. And New Relic, whether it's a large enterprise that we're out there, like Dunkin' Donuts or Dominos, monitoring their applications and their eCommerce sites, or it's an agency in the public sector space, you got to have New Relic as part of those engagements. >> So Scott, when AWS services first came out, 2006 timeframe, we looked at it, we said okay, this is the future, but as much as it potentially simplifies lives, it brings a lot of new complexities. So you know, Stu and I used to talk about, look, the AWS is awesome, we're big fans, but the ecosystem has to grow. Consultancies have to come out of the woodworks, and help customers really, adopt. So that's really exactly what's happened. I presume that's how Infiniti got started, maybe you could tell us a little bit about the company, and what your value is. >> Sure, thanks Dave, so Infiniti is a 15 year old company. We're originally founded in public sector IT consulting, and we realized several years ago that the world was changing and that we needed to make the shift from IT consulting to cloud services. And so we dove in headfirst with AWS, and we really tried to move to the top of the curve very quickly, and so we were a little bit ahead of our market in public sector, being a public sector focused organization, but we felt it was important to get ahead of the market because now the market really is smokin' hot. But we thought it was important that if we're going to move into the cloud, we wanted to move to the top of the curve, and deal with things like DevOps, migrations, even machine learning, predictive analytics, so we kind of pride ourselves on having some of the largest public sector contracts in the US, even though we're, right now, predominantly California based, California focused. >> And what's your head count? >> We're about a hundred people. >> I mean this is the thing, we're seeing this trend toward a lot of, you know, smaller specialists, are really doing super. Why is that, or how are you able to differentiate from these big global SIs that have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees, vertical expertise, why are you guys winning? >> Well, first of all, I think we're able to be nimble and shift our focus pretty quickly to serve our market, to serve our customers, I think more successfully. But one of the thing's that's changed when the cloud arrived, is the cloud really let smaller organizations like us, act like big organizations, so we didn't need to go deploy millions of dollars of capital to go set up a massive data center, we can build an environment on the fly, as you know, in the cloud, and we can have access to world-class platform tools like New Relic, and we can help a customer, a large customer, perform just as well as if we were a large multi-billion dollar services organization. >> Todd, one of the interesting things to talk to customers about is their journey, and where are they, and the cloud migration and how do they do this, reinvent? A year ago or two I heard there were like seven or nine ARS to get there, anything from the full refactoring and building cool new stuff with server lists and things like that, to just the re-platforming. Lift and shift, is that a good thing, isn't that? Walk us through how New Relic with Infiniti, how are you involved in some of those migrations? There's no typical customer, but give us some examples. >> Yeah absolutely, so Infiniti, just like many of the integrators that we work with are all delivering services generally in a couple different areas. One is typically a cloud adoption, or cloud migration practice. So working with Amazon, how do we get more and more of customer's workloads shifted to the cloud? Usually those projects are also going on with something in the refactoring world or application space. Usually they're also developing or shifting to some sort of DevOps practice, and that's also part of our sweet spot, what's happening in the application there, whether it's on the cloud yet or not, we're going to provide that visibility to that. And then the third piece is, there's usually something else happening with that, as I was mentioning before, the customer experience or the citizen experience, so what's the browser impact, what's the user experience on that, what's the, if it's on a mobile app, what's the user experience on there? So while Infiniti's delivering all those services for the clients, New Relic's part of all those services, so our whole model that we're tryin' to do with all of our partners is embed ourselves into all of those services, such that we can help Infiniti be more successful, deliver those projects on time, and really resolve any issues that may come up during those migration issues. >> Scott, I'd love to hear especially, I know I hear DevOps talked about a lot in New Relic's customers, is it pervasive around the agencies that you work with and please do add some color there too. >> So in the public sector, it's a range of readiness, but we're seeing a real wave building, we believe. We worked with New Relic on a very large DevOps, SysOps, very complex cloud services engagement, largest higher education cloud services engagement in the US, and in that case, just like Todd was referencing, when we implemented the migration of the legacy platform to the cloud, first of all we had to do, make choices around refactory, host, rearchitect and so forth, but then when we're managing that environment, and there's millions of users hitting that environment, we need to be able to make sure that we can monitor the application to make sure the application's performing well, and if there's an issue, we want to see the line of code that's causing the problem as quickly as possible so we can keep the environment up all the time. Even though public sector may not be driven by the same financials as say, commercial, they still expect to be up all the time. They still want to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud and so New Relic allows us to do that, but then, as we're looking at the users interface with the application environment, New Relic's browser and mobile, they let us monitor how that experience is going, and we can proactively get at the performance issues there that the application may not tell us, if there's an issue there. And then, we can do things like test middleware with synthetics and make sure that the whole environment's working, and then obviously on the infrastructure side, it lets us make sure that we're optimizing the environment for our clients. One of the cool thing is, when you in the past, you'd set up an EC2 instance, you may not see that you don't need as much CPU as you're using, and so you can size that appropriately, and allow your environment to still run at a high performance, 100% up time, but give them the cost efficiencies at the same time. So we use New Relic across board to help support the entire environment. >> I wonder if we could talk about the marketplace a little bit, generally and then specifically, the public sector? So Scott, I presume you're obviously public sector focused, but are you exclusive to AWS, no, you probably do some other stuff, is that right, is that fair? >> Well we are both AWS and Azure Gold, in terms of partner, but we do more of our work in AWS for sure. >> Okay, so we'll come back to that. And New Relic, of course you're a software company, so you want everybody to love your software, so if there's a cloud that a customer wants to use, you want your software to be on that cloud, fair enough? >> Sure, and also on PRIM, I mean a lot of our... >> On PRIM too. >> A lot of our applications we monitor are still on PRIM, and there's a tremendous amount of value there regardless of... >> I would just add, Infiniti is a trusted advisor, we like to see ourselves as a trusted advisor, so we do feel like we have to be multi-cloud and have an objective perspective. >> And New Relic is presumably the same way, I mean let the customers decide, so, and it's a hybrid world, folks, despite what Amazon wants, it's a hybrid world, and they even recognize that. My question is, there's a lot of discussion in the industry about Amazon as an infrastructure service provider and their lead or relative lead on the competition. It's our sense that there's still a lead there, what's your sense? >> Well AWS is still the leading cloud services provider in the marketplace. They lead in innovation, they lead in disruption, they lead in market share, they lead in so many metrics, and because they have that lead, and that's where we started, we've benefited from that, and we've invested heavily, and in the same way, we see New Relic, when we made a choice around who we were going to pick as a platform to support our customers, we wanted something that was cloud-born, didn't come out of on-premise and get sort of bootstrapped into the cloud, and we wanted something that was a complete platform. So New Relic was really a clear choice for us. It was not a, we looked at the entire market when we made that choice. >> So the narrative in the market used to be, oh, security in the cloud, now we hear the CIA say hey, security on the worst day in Amazon's cloud is way better than I ever saw with client server. It was a pretty powerful statement, so let's assume security, people are relatively comfortable with security these days, even though I'm sure there's still some issues with regard to corporate edicts, and flexibility, and audits, let's put that aside. SLAs is another big one. People often criticize the public cloud SLAs, and cost, oh it's so expensive, I can do it cheaper on PRIM. Are those myths, are those realities, is it a it depends? What's your sense? >> I mean they're all, they're all factors that all of our customers are looking into. I would say what we're hearing a lot about right now, is how do we help provide more visibility to everything that's happening, so if you've got a developer now that has the ability to write code, put it on any cloud they want, spin up containers, spin down containers, go try out server-less base of architectures, they've got a lot of flexibility to do what they want. Government agencies, as well as customers, one of the things they're looking for is what's actually happening? Who's doing what? The governance piece is a big piece and I think New Relic plays right into that in terms of helping control all that. One of the things that we're, is one of our sweet spots, is as you move to DevOps and a truly microservices architecture, one of the whole values of that is speed, keeping up with how fast the whole market is moving, and customers and agencies, what they want out of that, is to deploy applications where they're releasing multiple times a day. You have to have visibility into everything you're doing across the stack to be successful in that, and that's really New Relic's sweet spot in terms of doing that. So providing that visibility, instrumenting the applications in the infrastructure before, and then helping provide visibility to things like governance, things that other, not necessarily our sweet spot, but other companies in the industry are doing things throughout the DevOps life cycle in the governance realm, things like that. So we're part of that ecosystem that's helping Amazon and the other cloud providers be very successful, helping customers and agencies be very successful deploying modern applications. >> It's all about that visibility. >> Scott, one of the things, when we look at any rollout of new technology or migration, once it's up and running, then what, so wondering how your firm's involved in, you know, is there re-training, is there things go on, once this is in place, now what? >> Well Infiniti, what we found in public sector is that everybody wants to take advantage of the cost efficiencies and the benefits, and most public sector isn't going to reduce cost, they're just going to want to re-use cost more wisely. So some of the confusion around cost savings is that they're getting way more for their dollar in the future state, and the choices you have to make around how fast you want to get to the cloud, and what you want to get out of the cloud when you're there, those all effect the equation in terms of what you're actually outcomes are immediately and in the long term. So we often see that in public sector, some of the legacy applications, they may not naturally or easily move all at once, and so you have to make a choice, are you going to do some refactory and architecting before you get it there, are you going to get in the cloud now, and then do it afterwards. Either way, there's benefits, but you have to make choices about what, how you want to approach it. >> Yeah, when you talk about, after I've rolled this in, I've heard from some customers, they're like, after I've gotten a cloud, I love it, but I had to dedicate an engineer for financial architecting because there's all of these things we need to do. Are we still in that state? And once again, do you help with some of the training as to, okay, or is it plugging them into the Amazon ecosystem and how do they get certified and ready to use all of this. >> So Infiniti works with clients differently, we work with some in a more episodic, lighter capacity, and we work with some in a wholistic capacity where we are that engine for them, where we provide them the complete cloud services team to do everything from migrations, architecture, DevOps, SysOps, SecOps, machine learning and all the way through. And so when we're providing those services, we're doing those kind of things, we're making sure that the next improvement is worked into the architecture. Last year, the customer I was referencing earlier, we did just under a hundred releases, so that's a hundred releases that we're using the New Relic platform and our architectural solution, our solution architects, rather, to make sure that it's faultless, that the process is efficient, it's effective, it's secure, and that we're driving efficiencies wherever possible. So it really depends on what the customer wants. If the customer wants to hone the environment, they may have to go a little slower to account for their learning, their learning curve, and we'll help them, if that's what they want, but if they want to go faster, and they want to take advantage of our expertise, we make that available, and we're happy to do that. >> We had the former CTO of the NSA on yesterday, who now works for Accenture, and we were asking about sort of, federal versus commercial, are we sort of still taking, learning lessons from commercial and bringing it to federal, or is it because federal has so much interesting technology around analytics, does it go the other way, and he said, "it's funny, when you're on the inside, you think all the innovation is goin' on outside, now that I'm on the outside I say wow, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in federal." We heard Teresa yesterday talk about Aurora, she talked about the VM wear partnership, so things that were announced a while ago and actually being adopted in commercial coming in to federal. So how does it work? Is it more of a two-way than it used to be 20 years ago and I wonder if you could comment? >> Yeah, from Infiniti's perspective, absolutely. We work with clients to understand the problems and where they want to get to, and then we innovate with them. You're pretty dependent on the subject matter expertise of the organization. I think our customers like that, they like that they're part of the solution, but then they need the expertise that we bring to create the next generation solution. We just created something in the higher ed space called, a college called Architecture Builder, and it was after teaming with a specific college, and working in that space for a long time, but we wanted to create a way for colleges to rapidly implement a complete architecture integrated with all the different things, including New Relic, quickly and successfully, and that was done in partnership with them, so we did the work, but we couldn't have done it without them. >> Todd, New Relic obviously, you're a believer, you drink the Koolaid every day. Why New Relic relative to the competition? How do you guys differentiate? Pitch me. >> So it's really all about being successful in that modern software space, again, as I've mentioned, and so New Relic is the only SAS only platform, so we're not going to put anything on PRIM. We've got ourselves one of the biggest and best DevOps team that develops our software, we roll code everyday, and our customers get the benefit of us being a pure SAS platform. Part of that is scalability. What we can do at scale is unbelievable. There was a customer that was just talked about on the news today that I can't mention, but they just went from basically zero to $100 million on an application just in the past 90 days. It's one of our customers and we've scaled, we have no problem scaling with customers that are doing things like that, and again, the full platform value that we have now, looking at everything from the front end on the browser and mobile applications, through the application, which is core to us, it's where we provide that code-level visibility, the ability to trace across all the different microservices that are happening, connected back to that infrastructure. That full platform now provides such tremendous value up and down the stack, but not only to the technology leaders but also to those folks that are business leaders, chief marketing officers, heads of practices at the consultants we work with, all these folks are all getting value out of New Relic. >> What would that customer who should not be named say about the value contribution of New Relic to that scale? >> The value's unbelievable. That's a commercial customer, but their business is taking off like so many of our customer's businesses are at an unbelievable scale. They can't be hamstrung by having to do a server upgrade, or having to go back, working with a release of code from a couple weeks ago, they have to be as fast as possible 'cause their business is moving so fast, their agencies are moving so fast, they need a provider that's going to provide that visibility to that at the speed with which they're moving. >> Awesome so, you got one more? >> No, we've got to run. >> Yeah, we've got to go. So this is the last question, so impressions of AWS Public Sector Summit? I presume you guys, like we did, had to register yesterday. There were some logistic issues, but other than that, maybe you could give us your last word on the summit? >> Well Infiniti is very committed to public sector, so we really enjoy coming to the Public Sector Summit. It's great to connect with our partners, like New Relic and others, and it's great to see the latest innovations coming out from AWS. >> Yeah and I've been to, I don't know, 10 or so summits around the world so far this year. It is unbelievable the excitement and the amount of people that are now excited about what's happening in the clouded option world, and Amazon's piece in that, and what's happening here in D.C. this week is no exception. >> I would second that. It's been a while since I've been at summits. Stu, you go all the time, and they are just exploding and growing, and this is one of the best that's out there. So thanks guys, for comin' on theCUBE, we really appreciate it. >> Thanks very much. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest after this short break. John Furrier's here, you're watchin' theCUBE live, from AWS Public Sector Summit. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (electronic music flourish) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando Florida. Joining me, my co-host for this segment Dave Vellante sitting in for John Furrier and happy to welcome to the program Jeff Eckard, who's the Vice President of Storage Solutions at IBM. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, good to see you guys. >> All right, and 26,000 people here. It'd been many years since I'd been to Cisco Live. There's some things that are same, many of the same faces, but a lot of new jobs, a lot of buzz going on. What's your impression been of the show this week? >> Yeah, it's been an interesting, great show for IBM and our presence, but it's a very large ecosystem of Cisco partners, a lot of their, our joint end users and a lot of focus on multi-cloud. You've consistently heard that as a theme from Cisco as well as IBM since last fall at their partner forum and they've continued it here with a lot of focus on being able to take tools and capabilities and enabling enterprises to manage data where they want to manage it. And it's really interesting, from traditional systems vendors like Cisco, to see that focus particularly around developers. >> It's been fascinating for me to watch. Jeff, you and I have some background in the storage and storage networking piece, specifically, where it was like, OK, where I sit in the stack and I've got a couple of integrations, and we work on our standards here. It's much broader. >> Oh, absolutely. The things that we're working on. We're talking about cloud. There's a lot of software that flows. Data and applications are critically important. Talk a little bit about some of that transformation and how you're seeing the expansion, and-- >> Yeah, no, it's a interesting time. If you think about the opportunities and challenges facing all enterprises, data is at the core of digital transformation, digital enhancement, whatever term you wanna use with it. Typically, it's focused in on wanting to provide realtime insights so that you make better decisions against threats or opportunities. Being able to deliver personalized services to your clients, and then also improving your internal processes and business outcomes. And so data is core for digital transformation, and you kinda see, kind of this web of what we're talking about here and then what we're doing with clients as well. >> You know, Jeff, you talk about multi-cloud, you've been in the business for a while, and throughout your career you've tried to help customers simplify their lives, and everybody felt, I thought, OK, I'm gonna put stuff in the cloud, it's gonna get simpler, and now you see this spate of clouds, whether it's infrastructures of service, private clouds, SaaS, and complexity is, in some regards, never have been higher, particularly as it relates to the data. >> That's right. >> You've gotta figure out, where do you put this stuff? How do you protect it, what about governance? Even if you think security's better in the cloud, it might be different for every cloud. So how is IBM approaching, generally in your team, specifically approaching simplifying the complex of this multi-cloud world? >> Sure, so from an IBM Perspective, at the top level we approached it with innovative technology and a lot of industry expertise, whether it's in financial services or healthcare, cloud and what we do with the public IBM cloud is really important around the services we provide there, data and AI, and then as you come down from that, modern infrastructure is key because modern infrastructure supports the data. So when you look at 80% of enterprises are intending to be multi-cloud. Something like 70% already are, right? Because of what you referenced with the consumption of SaaS. So, multi-cloud is the defacto operating model for applications and then, therefore, for the data. So from an IBM storage and SDI perspective, we kind of view... There are three primary adoption patterns that we're seeing with our clients. The first is around modernizing traditional applications or workloads, which also drags modern infrastructure, flash-based systems, leveraging more of storage efficiency technologies, like compression and dedupe, being able to protect that data, whether it's in a traditional VMware environment or the emerging containers environment. So, yeah, data's at the core. The partnership that we have with Cisco around VersaStack enables us to support traditional private clouds, whether those are built on the VMware set of tools or now, as last week we announced, the VersaStack for IBM Cloud Private. IBM Cloud Private is an enterprise platform for developers to leverage microservices and containerized IBM Middleware Services, whether that's WebSphere or MQ or Microservices Builder, as well as a whole catalog of open source technologies and tools to get agility out of the DevOps process and then also layer on analytics on top of that. >> So customers, they're gonna want consistency across all those clouds. So what role do you guys bring? Are you trying to be a platform of platforms, or is that too aspirational? Obviously, you can't have 100% market shares, so that's not practical. But to the extent that people adopt your technologies, is that how we should be thinking of about it? >> Well, so IBM Cloud Private is an open platform. It's built on Docker runtimes and Kubernetes orchestration. It's open to where you can leverage things like Red Hat OpenShift if you've chosen them for your containers platform, and then we also support the traditional Private Clouds with VMware. So, there's a whole set of tools in there. What we're trying to do from a data management perspective is protect it, whether that's backup and recovery, morphing into this new category of secondary data reuse. So, for instance, from a traditional workflow of just doing backup and recovery, we can now take native format copies of the data, whether that's in Oracle or SQL Server database, et cetera, and take that data to the Public Cloud, where different personas and use cases can act on that data. So you can spin up a VM from that Native format within our tools in the IBM cloud. So that's from a data protection standpoint. On data management, we have, later this year, we'll talk more formally about programs that we have around metadata management. That's where you can index and classify, for instance, unstructured or structured data, and act on that in terms of, where was it last accessed? Who should be accessing it? Is it personally identifiable information? Do I wanna run analytics on it? So the metadata management is an opportunity to plug in to broader IBM things, whether it's Watson data platform or information governance catalogs, to provide that kind of uber across cloud infrastructure management. >> And that's a machine sort of intelligence, automation component, that scale, right? >> It could absolutely be used for augmented intelligence, artificial intelligence, some of the machine learning pieces as well. >> Jeff, Jeff, I'm wondering if you could give us a little insight of some of the places that customers are falling down. We were just talking to a systems integrator before you came on and he said, "Well, sometimes I take a virtualized environment "and I move it and it's not really geared "for this modern platform." Containerization can help in a lot of these environments, so when you talk about the pattern we've seen that works many times is you modernize the platform, and then I can modernize the application, start pulling things apart, start refactoring, start playing with some of these environments because I can't just... Lift and shift can help, but it can't be that's the only move. There's a lot of work that needs to get done, and a lot of time that's underestimated. >> Right, well it's not a panacea, but there is a key tool called Transformation Advisor that is part of the IBM cloud platform. It's intended to assist with the challenge that you just stated, which is, OK, how do I take a traditional workload, determine if it's ready to be containerized, and then start the process of containerization. You can go back to some of the VM migration pieces, too. There's a whole set of tools that enterprises have used. Transformation Advisor is one tooling example of what we can do in the platform. And then we obviously have services through Global Services that can help at a large scale for enterprises to kinda make that step. >> You bring up a good point there, 'cause we always struggle with some of these tool transformations, but if you go back to virtualization it was really some of the organizational things that had to shift. Wonder if you can talk about some of the things that are changing here. This show, we've spent a lot of time talking about Cisco's moving up the stack, network people are much more closer tied to some of those new application development, especially with things like intent-based networking. >> Well, it's a interesting reminder that we get often from clients, 'cause you're really touching at some of the remember the operational steps, things like containerization are interesting new technologies, and there's a lot of advantages to them. But just going back a minute, of the heritage with what we've been doing with Cisco around VersaStack, leveraging it on a VMware environment, we hear a lot from customers that their operational practices really are set around Vmware and the VMware tooling. So one of the things that we did with IBM Cloud Private is, it can run on top of VMware. So as customers want to take a kind of transitive step towards microservices, they can continue to leverage their operational practices around VMware. So it's important to, it sometimes takes enterprises a little bit longer than you may guess, right, to embrace the new set of things. Our product portfolio and our directions are set where they can leverage some of the operational pieces they already have. >> Well, just for our viewers who may not know, I mean, the recent history of IBM and Cisco is quite interesting. IBM at one point purchased a company called BNT, which got sold as part of the X86 sale to Lenovo. That opened up a huge opportunity for IBM and Cisco to partner because it was very clear swim lanes. And that sorta catalyzed a relationship that from your standpoint, VersaStack was sort of the first instantiation of that relationship. So, take us through, sort of, where you guys are in the partnership and where you see it going. >> Sure, yeah, so VersaStack, for folks who may not be familiar, it's a Converge System, right? So it's IBM storage, flash or otherwise, leverages Cisco UCS servers, and then their Nexus and MDS Switching. So it's integrated, validated as a single solution to, as the name implies, to be very versatile and provide agility and flexibility. And so, through our routes to market, either with distribution or resellers or system integrators, it is a way that we can address platforms that matter to our joint customers. We've talked about IBM Cloud Private. A lot of heritage around VMware and SQL server and Oracle and a lot of focus around SAP HANA. So, we typically will partner around which enterprise platforms are we going, and then we also partner, in general, around MDS Switching with Cisco, and we'll talk more about that in months to come as we enhance that relationship. >> So, the solutions part of your title, you just mentioned VMware, Oracle, SAP HANA, there may be others. How do you guys approach solutions? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, so a solution, at a PetaLogic level, is a successful repeatable outcome. And what we focus on, then, are the integrations that matter. Those could be, integrations with IBM tools, like we talked about with IBM Cloud Private. Could be the integrations that we do jointly with Cisco through the validated design process for some of these applications or databases. And so we have teams that do the validation work and figure out how we marry IBM capabilities with ecosystem capabilities. And there's a whole, whether we're automating private clouds or accelerating workloads including the partnership that IBM and Cisco have with Horton Works. And then in industry context as well, particularly in healthcare and financial services. We'll pick the platforms that really matter and then do the integrations that enable us to take, whether it's our systems or our software or IBM level capabilities to market. >> I wanna come back to this simplicity theme, specifically in the context of data protection. With all this multi-cloud, data protection has become a really hot topic. You guys have dramatically simplified your data protection offering with Spectra Protect Plus. Talk about data protection, how it's changing from where it used to be just, OK, it's a virtualized world. We kind of understand the challenges of virtual data protection. That has played itself out, and now there's a whole new wave coming. What's your perspective on this? >> Well, I don't know if the virtual is play, I mean, the virtualized environment is still kind of paying the freight, if you will. >> Yeah, played out in terms of-- >> Yes, no, no, yeah, right. >> We understand what had to change. >> Right. And customers have made that change >> Yeah, and your simplicity point on that is really key. So one of the enhancements that we announced last year at VMWorld was Spectrum Protect Plus. So that's an agent list, OVA based, VM based backup and recovery tool. And it's very simple to use. The trick is that we've focused its capabilities around secondary data re-use. So I mentioned earlier, that whole workflow has evolved to where the data has increasing value beyond its primary use, right? So backup and recover, but then we can leverage those native format copies. Spectrum Protect Plus is available either on a bring your own license or a monthly subscription in the IBM cloud, other clouds over time. And so we enable enterprises to not only do the traditional backup and protection, but very simply, move that data to either a secondary or tertiary data center, if that's still a part of their backup architecture, or into the public cloud. And so the simplicity factor comes in, again, that it's agent lists. There's a catalog of where all your copies are, and you can reuse that data for whether it's DevOps or DevTest or analytics purposes. >> OK, so that's helpful. So what I'm trying to get to was sort of the enablers, maybe from a technology standpoint, because in the virtualization world, it was all about efficiency because you didn't have the underutilized physical resources anymore. >> Yep, right. >> All the servers utilized 10%. (chuckles) Well, I got rid of a lot of those physical servers, and the one job that needed that power was backup, so I needed a new way to approach it. What I'm hearing is, in this multi-cloud world, it's a focus on simplicity. I'm inferring from that, a cloud-like experience, maybe some other capabilities that you guys are-- >> Yeah, so. >> Doing away with. >> The containers are a progression. I mean, VMware came around to maximize your CPU and storage utilization. Containers provide yet another level of efficiency on top of that. They bring with them the need for changes in your data protection. And so we, at Think in March, we talked about our directions around container aware data protection and container aware snapshots. Most vendors will use snapshots and then volume level controls of how we've traditionally done backup. We have a progression, and we'll talk more about it later in the year, of how we do snapshots, again, that are container aware. They leverage our tools, such as Spectrum Copy Data Management, Spectrum Protect Plus, integrate with our arrays. But they'll bring the same level of capability that we've had traditionally in a virtualized environment to also support data protection in a container world. >> Well, it's an interesting landscape right now in data protection. >> Oh, it's awesome! There's so many new tools, and it's great to be able, (Dave chuckling) like we talked about earlier, to partner with Cisco around some of this as well. >> Great, Jeff, I wanna give you the final word, as if, for those that couldn't make it to the show, either share key conversation you're having, you're hearing from customers, or a big takeaway from the show that you'd like to share. >> Sure, yeah, we've had a lot of customers come up and wanna know, OK, well, how do you start, right? And we talked about, there are three primary adoption patterns, whether it's modernizing, and typically it will start with modernizing traditional workloads. 70% of private cloud usage is for that particular use case. Well, you can pretty quickly show them, then, the progression to, OK, they wanna be more agile. They wanna go cloud-native. From that private cloud infrastructure, you can do that, and then you can have a consistent way that you interact around services in the public cloud. And so that's what we've been talking to clients about. They wanted to know, how do I start with what I have, and then how do I get to this better future? And how do I leverage your tools and capabilities? And so whether that's with IBM systems components or what we do with our partnership with Cisco, we're showing them how we, collectively, can help them on that journey. >> All right, Jeff, I really appreciate all the updates. Dave, thanks so much for joining me for this segment. >> Yeah, thank you. >> We still have a full day here, three days wall-to-wall coverage of theCUBE, Cisco Live 2018. Thanks so much for watching. (techno musical flourish)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18, here in Las Vegas. I'm your hose, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Josh Kahn. He is the General Manager of Platforms, ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE again. >> Yeah, really excited to be here. Thanks for being here and thanks for being part of our event. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> It's been a lot of fun. >> Newly minted. >> Yeah that's right. (laughing) >> Yes, congrats on the recent promotion. So tell us about your new role. >> Yeah, so I run the Platform Business Unit. We use the word platform a lot of different ways at ServiceNow and I think we're trying to get a little bit more clear about that. On the one hand, our platform is the core foundation that all of our applications and all of our customers' applications are built on. It's also a way that independent software vendors and our customers can build their own applications. So what my group is trying to do is really be more thoughtful and structured about how we go about gathering those requirements from our customers and our independent software vendor partners and make sure we're bringing the products to market that meet their needs, and that we're doing all of the things across the board as a company we need to do to make them successful because there's a lot that goes into long-term customer success from the sales teams to the solutions consultants to professional services and the Customer Success Management Team. We're bringing all those things to make sure that, as our customers are building applications, we're helping them be successful. >> I remember we had Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee on and they were making a point. This was years ago when they wrote their, I think, most recent book. They were saying platforms beat products, I'm like, okay, what do you mean? Look, you can make a great living doing products, but we are entering a platform era. It reminds me of the old Scott McNealy, car dealers versus car makers. If you want to be a car maker in this day and age, unfortunately Sun Microsystems never became that car maker, but you've got to have a platform. What's your perspective on all that? >> I totally agree. I think that every customer I talk to is looking for fewer, more strategic vendors and partners, and they're really saying, hey, be a strategic partner to me. Digital transformation is everywhere. Disruption is everywhere, and they're saying, hey, we need a few people we can really count on to help us build a strategy and execute on that strategy to get to the next place. Isolated, independent pieces of software tend to have a hard time becoming one of those strategic vendors, and I think the more you can be thought of as a platform, the more different kinds of workloads run on the same common shared infrastructure that provide shared data services, that can provide simple ways to get work across each other, the more value that you can bring and the more you can be thought of in that strategic partner realm. >> So you guys are a platform of platforms, we use that terminology a lot, and I think there's no question that for a lot of the C-level executives, particularly the CIOs that I talk to, you are becoming, ServiceNow is becoming a strategic platform provider. Who else is in there? Let's throw some... IBM, because of its huge services in certain industries, for sure, SAP because of its massive ERP estate. I mean, I don't know, Oracle, maybe, but it feels different, but maybe in some cases. Who do you see as your peers? >> The category of players that are in this space are really people that are investing big in the Cloud and investing big in intelligence and automation. And, I think, a lot of times automation can have kind of a negative connotation to it, but we really believe that automation can be used to serve people in the workplace and to make the world work better for people, not just make the world of work work without people. So when you look around at the people that are moving into that strategic realm, it's Cloud players, people who are providing either Cloud infrastructure or Cloud functions, a wide set of microservices capabilities, and people providing applications software as a service that start to cover a broader and broader portfolio. Clearly, Workday is thought of oftentimes as a strategic partner to their customers, because they provide a human capital management capability that's broader than just being a data repository. Salesforce is clearly a strategic partner to the sales and marketing organizations. The reality, though, is a lot of work that happens in the Enterprise cuts across these things, and so there's an opportunity for us to work with the Saleforces and the Workdays and the Googles and the Amazon Web Services of the world to help bring all of those things together. I think that what customers want is not only strategic technology providers, but strategic technology providers that will work with each other to solve customers' problems. >> John Donahoe on, I guess it was Tuesday, was saying we're very comfortable being that horizontal layer. We don't have to be the top layer, although I would observe that the more applications you develop, the more interesting the whole landscape becomes. >> Yeah, well, I think that's absolutely true. We're in the early stages of this, right? If you look at the amount of money that's spent in IT in the enterprise sector and then you start adding up all of these areas that I just mentioned, Cloud and SAS, it's still a very small amount of that overall spent. So clearly, big legacy technology vendors are incredibly relevant still today, but the challenge they'll have is making sure they stay relevant as this tide shifts to more Cloud, more intelligence, more automation in the workplace. >> I wonder if you could walk us through the process that you go through when you are working closely with customers, collaborating, trying to figure out what their problems are and solve them and then also solve the problems they don't even know they have, that you can provide solutions for. >> Actually, it's amazing, because in a lot of cases, the innovation, and this has been a phenomenal week, because I've gotten to meet with so many customers and see what they're doing. And what tends to happen with ServiceNow is the IT organization, oftentimes, it starts there. The IT organization brings it in for IT service management, and people start using that to request things that they need from IT, and they very quickly say, man, I have a process that would really benefit from exactly what you just did. Can you build my application on that? And so there starts to become this tidal wave of people asking the IT organization if they can start hosting applications on the platform. I'll give you one example from a company called Cox Automotive. Donna Woodruff, who's an innovation leader there and leads the ServiceNow platform team, found a process where they had a set of safety checks they do at all these remote sites as part of a car auctions, and it was a very spreadsheet-driven process that involved a lot of people doing manual checks, but it also had regulatory implications, insurance implications, and workplace happiness implications. And they were able to take this, put it on ServiceNow, and automate a lot of that process, make it faster, I should say digitize it, 'cause you still need the people going through and doing the checks, but were able to digitize it and make that person's job that much better. These applications are all over the place. They're in shared email inboxes, they're in Excel spreadsheets, they're in legacy applications. We don't actually have to go drive the innovation and the ideas. They end up coming to the ServiceNow platform owners and our customers. >> I'd like you to comment on some of the advantages of the platform and maybe some of the challenges that you face. When I think about enterprise software, I would generally characterize enterprise software as not a great user experience, oftentimes enterprise software products don't play well with other software products. They're highly complex. Oftentimes there's lots of customerization required, which means it's really hard to go from one state to another. Those are things that you generally don't suffer from. Are there others that give you advantages? And what are maybe some of the challenges that you face? >> I think it's true. Enterprise software, you used to have to train yourself to it. It's like, hey, we're going to roll out the new system. How are we going to train all the users? But you don't do that with the software we use in the consumer world. You download it from the app store and you start using it. If you can't figure it out, it's not going to go. >> You aint going to use it. >> Josh: Exactly right. So we put a lot of that thought process from the consumer world into our technology, but not just the technology we provide. We're trying to make it easier for our customers to then provide that onto their internal and external customers as well. Things like the Mobile Application Builder that we showed earlier today, that's coming in Madrid, it's an incredibly simple way to build a beautiful mobile application for almost anything in the workplace. And, again, as I was saying before, a lot of the ideas for applications come from people in the workplace. We've got to make it easy enough for them to not only to identify what the application potential is, but then build something that's amazing. What we're trying to do is put a lot of those design concepts, not just into the end products we sell, but into tools and technology that are part of the platform and the Platform Business Unit so that our customers can build something just like it in terms of experience, usability, simplicity, and power without having to have as many developers as we do. >> You and I have known each other for a number of years now, and just as we observed the other day, off camera, that you've been forced into a lot of challenges. I say forced, but welcomed a lot of challenges. >> I love it, I love it. >> All right, I mean, it's like, hey, I'll take that. No problem. You've had a variety of experiences at large companies. Things you've learned, opportunities ahead, maybe advice you'd give for others, like the hard stuff. >> I think one of the biggest things I've learned here, particularly at ServiceNow, is just the importance of staying focused on customers rather than competitors. I think a lot of times when you're in the business roles or strategy roles, you can really think a lot about who am I competing against, and you can forget that you really just need to solve the customer's problem as well as you possibly can. Be there for them when they need it. Have something that's compelling that addresses their needs, and stay laser-focused on what works for them, and at the end of the day you're got be successful. So that's a strategy we've really tried to take to heart at ServiceNow, is put the customers at the center of everything we do. We don't worry that much about competitors. They're out there and we know they're there and we study them, but it's really the customer that gets us up every morning. >> You know, it's interesting, I've had this, as well as John Furrier has, had this conversation with Andy Jassy a lot, and they're insanely focused on the customer where he says, even though he'll say, we get into a competitive situation, we'll take on anybody, but his point was both methods can work. Your former company, I would put into the very competitive, Oracle, I think, is the same way. Microsoft maybe used to me, maybe that's changing, but to a great extent would rip your face off if you were a competitor. My question is this: Is the efficacy of the head-to-head, competitive drive as effective as it used to be, and are we seeing a change toward a customer-centric success model? >> I think there's two things going on. I think one is once a market really kind of reaches maturity, the competitive dynamic really heats up. >> Dave: 'Cause you got to gain share. >> Yeah, you got to gain share. And today, in the Cloud world, in the intelligence world, there's just so much opportunity that you could just keep going for a long time before you even bump into people. I think in mature markets it's different, so I think a lot of times, partly at EMC, that was one of the dynamics we had is a very, very mature market on on-premise storage, and so you had to go head-to-head every time. But I think there's also the changing tenor of the world. People have a lot less, they don't care for that kind of dialogue as much anymore. They don't like it when you come in and talk bad about anybody else. So I think there's both dynamics at one, and the markets we're in, they're so new, they're growing so fast that it's not as important, but also, people don't care for it. I don't think it helps, if anything, sometimes it makes people wonder if they ought to be, oh, I didn't think about talking to them, maybe we should go call the competitor you just mentioned. (laughing) so, all that said, when you get into a fight, you got to fight hard and you got to come with the best stuff, so I think that's the reality. >> Dave: Great answer. >> That's a good note to end on. Thanks so much, Josh, for coming on theCUBE again. It's been a real pleasure having you here. >> All right. Thank you, I really appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18 just after this. (techy music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its Ecosystem Partners. >> Well everyone, welcome back to the live coverage of theCUBE here in Copenhagen, Denmark for KubeCon, Kubernetes Con 2018, part of the CNCF, Cloud Native Compute Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, the founder of Spark Labs, breaking down day two, wrapping up our coverage of KubeCon and all the success that we've seen with Kubernetes, I thought it would be really appropriate to bring on the cofounder of KubeCon originally, Joseph Jacks, known as JJ in the industry, a good friend of theCUBE and part of the early formation of what is now Cloud Native. We were all riffing on that at the time. welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thank you for having me John. >> So, for the story, for the folks out there, you know Cloud Native was really seen by the devops community, and infrastructure code was no secret to the insiders in the timeframes from 2010 through 2015, 16 timeframe, but really it was an open stack summit. A lot of people were kind of like, hey, you know, Google's got Kubernetes, they're going to open it up and this could be a real game changer, container, Docker was flying off the shelves. So we just kind of saw, right, and you were there and we were talking so there was a group of us. You were one of them. And you founded KubeCon, and bolted into the, at that time, the satellite Linux Foundation events, and then you pass it off as a good community citizen to the CNCF, so I wanted to just make sure that people knew that. What a great success. What's your impression? I mean, are you blown away? >> I am definitely blown away. I mean I think the size and scale of the European audience is remarkable. We had something like slightly less than half this in Austin last year. So to see more than that come here in Europe I think shows the global kind of growth curve as well as like, I think, Dan and someone else was asking sort of raise your hand if you've been to Kubecon Austin and very few actually, so there's a lot of new people showing up in Europe. I think it just shows the demand-- >> And Dan's been traveling around. I've seen him in China, some events I've been to. >> Joseph: All over. >> He's really working hard so props to him. We gave him some great props earlier. But he also told us Shanghai is coming online. >> Joseph: Yeah. >> So you got Shanghai, you to Barcelona next year for the European show, and of course Seattle. This is a community celebrating right now because there's a lot of high fives going on right now because there's a lot of cool, we've got some sort of core standard, defacto standard, now let's go to work. What are you working on now? You got a stealth startup? Share a little bit about it. I know you don't want to give the details out, but where is it kind of above the stack? Where you going to be playing? >> Sure, so we're not talking too much in terms of specifics and we're pretty stealthy, but I can tell you what I'm personally very excited about in terms of where Kubernetes is going and kind of where this ecosystem is starting to mature for practitioners, for enterprises. So one of the things that I think Kubernetes is starting to bring to bear is this idea of commoditizing distributed systems for everyday developers, for everyday enterprises. And I think that that is sort of the first time in sort of maybe, maybe the history of software development, software engineering and building applications, we're standardizing on a set of primitives, a set of building blocks for distributed system style programming. You know we had in previous eras things like Erlang and fault tolerant programming and frameworks, but those were sort of like pocketed into different programming communities and different types of stacks. I think Kubernetes is the one sort of horizontal technology that the industry's adopting and it's giving us these amazing properties, so I think some of the things that we're focusing on or excited about involve sort of the programming layer on top of Kubernetes in simplifying the experience of kind of bringing all stateful and enterprise workloads and different types of application paradigms natively into Kubernetes without requiring a developer to really understand and learn the Kubernetes primitives themselves. >> That's next level infrastructure as code. Yeah so as Kubernetes becomes more successful, as Kubernetes succeeds at a larger and larger scale, people simply shouldn't have to know or understand the internals. There's a lot of people, I think Kelsey and a few other people, started to talk about Kubernetes as the Linux kernel of distributed computing or distributed systems, and I think that's a really great way of looking at it. You know, do programmers make file system calls directly when they're building their applications? Do they script directly against the kernel for maybe some very high performance things. But generally speaking when you're writing a service or you're writing a microservice or some business logic, you're writing at a higher level of abstraction and a language that's doing some IO and maybe some reading and writing files, but you're using higher level abstractions. So I think by the same token, the focus today with Kubernetes is people are learning this API. I think over time people are going to be programming against that API at a higher level. And what are you doing here, the show? Obviously you're (mumbles) so you're doing some (mumbles) intelligence. Conversations you've been in, can you share your opinion of what's going on here? Your thoughts on the content program, the architecture, the decisions they've made. >> I think we've just, so lots of questions in there. What am I doing here? I just get so energized and I'm so, I just get reinvigorated kind of being here and talking to people and it's just super cool to see a lot of old faces, people who've been here for a while, and you know, one of the things that excites me, and this is just like proof that the event's gotten so huge. I walk around and I see a lot of familiar faces, but more than 80, 90% of people I've never seen before, and I'm like wow this has like gotten really super huge mainstream. Talking with some customers, getting a good sense of kind of what's going on. I think we've seen two really huge kind of trends come out of the event. One is this idea of multicloud sort of as a focus area, and you've talked with Bassam at Upbound and the sort of multicloud control plane, kind of need and demand out there in the community and the user base. I think what Bassam's doing is extremely exciting. The other, so multicloud is a really big paradigm that most companies are sort of prioritizing. Kubernetes is available now on all the cloud providers, but how do we actually adopt it in a way that is agnostic to any cloud provider service. That's one really big trend. The second big thing that I think we're starting to see, just kind of across a lot of talks is taking the Kubernetes API and extending it and wrapping it around stateful applications and stateful workloads, and being able to sort of program that API. And so we saw the announcement from Red Hat on the operator framework. We've seen projects like Kube Builder and other things that are really about sort of building native custom Kubernetes APIs for your applications. So extensibility, using the Kubernetes API as a building block, and then multicloud. I think those are really two huge trends happening here. >> What is your view on, I'm actually going to put you on test here. So Red Hat made a bet on Kubernetes years ago when it was not obvious to a lot of the other big wales. >> Joseph: From the very beginning really. >> Yeah from the very beginning. And that paid off huge for Red Hat as an example. So the question is, what bets should people be making if you had to lay down some thought leadership on this here, 'cause you obviously are in the middle of it and been part of the beginning. There's some bets to be made. What are the bets that the IBMs and the HPs and the Cisco's and the big players have to make and what are the bets the startups have to make? >> Well yeah, there's two angles to that. I mean, I think the investment startups are making, are different set of investments and motivated differently than the multinational, huge, you know, technology companies that have billions of dollars. I think in the startup category, startups just should really embrace Kubernetes for speeding the way they build reliable and scalable applications. I think really from the very beginning Kubernetes is becoming kind of compelling and reasonable even at a very small scale, like for two or three node environment. It's becoming very easy to run and install and manage. Of course it gives you a lot of really great properties in terms of actually running, building your systems, adopting microservices, and scaling out your application. And that's what's sort of like a direct end user use case, startups, kind of building their business, building their stack on Kubernetes. We see companies building products on top of Kubernetes. You see a lot of them here on the expo floor. That's a different type of vendor startup ecosystem. I think there's lots of opportunities there. For the big multinationals, I think one really interesting thing that hasn't really quite been done yet, is sort of treating Kubernetes as a first-class citizen as opposed to a way to commercialize and enter a new market. I think one of the default ways large technology companies tend to look at something hypergrowth like Kubernetes and TensorFlow and other projects is wrapping around it and commercializing in some way, and I think a deeper more strategic path for large companies could be to really embed Kubernetes in the core kind of crown jewel IP assets that they have. So I'll give you an example, like, for let's just take SAP, I'll just pick on SAP randomly, for no reason. This is one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world. I would encourage the co-CEOs of SAP, for example. >> John: There's only one CEO now. >> Is there one CEO now? Okay. >> John: Snabe left. It's now (drowned out by talking). >> Oh, okay, gotcha. I haven't been keeping up on the SAP... But let's just say, you know, a CEO boardroom level discussion of replatforming the entire enterprise application stack on something like Kubernetes could deliver a ton of really core meaningful benefits to their business. And I don't think like deep super strategic investments like that at that level are being made quite yet. I think at a certain point in time in the future they'll probably start to be made that way. But that's how I would like look at smart investments on the bigger scale. >> We're not seeing scale yet with Kubernetes, just the toe is in the water. >> I think we're starting to see scale, John. I think we are. >> John: What's the scale number in clusters? >> I'll give you the best example, which came up today, and actually really surprised me which I think was a super compelling example. The largest retailer in China, so essentially the Amazon of China, JD.com, is running in production for years now at 20,000 compute nodes with Kubernetes, and their largest cluster is a 5,000 node cluster. And so this is pushing the boundary of the sort of production-- >> And I think that may be the biggest one I've heard. >> Yeah, that's certainly, I mean for a disclosed user that's pretty huge. We're starting to see people actually talk publicly about this which is remarkable. And there are huge deployments out there. >> We saw Tyler Jewell come on from WSO2. He's got a new thing called Ballerina. New programming language, have you seen that? >> Joseph: I have, I have. >> Thoughts on that? What's your thoughts on that? >> You know, I think that, so I won't make any particular specific comments on Ballerina, I'm not extremely informed on it. I did play with a little bit, I don't want to give any of my opinions, but what I'd say, and I think Tyler actually mentioned this, one of the things that I believe is going to be a big deal in the coming years, is so, trying to think of Kubernetes as an implementation detail, as the kernel, do you interact directly with that? Do you learn that interface directly? Are you sort of kind of optimizing your application to be sort of natively aware of those abstractions? I think the answer to all of those questions is no, and Kubernetes is sort of delegated as a compiler target, and so frankly like directionally speaking, I think what Ballerina's sort of design is aspiring towards is the right one. Compile time abstraction for building distributed systems is probably the next logical progression. I like to think of, and I think Brendan Burns has started to talk about this over the last year or two. Everyone's writing assembly code 'cause we're swimming yaml and configuration based designs and systems. You know, sort of pseudodeclarative, but more imperative in static configurations. When in reality we shouldn't be writing these assembly artifacts. We should be delegating all of this complexity to a compiler in the same way that you know, we went from assembly to C to higher level languages. So I think over time that starts to make a lot of sense, and we're going to see a lot of innovation here probably. >> What's your take on the community formation? Obviously, it's growing, so, any observations, any insight for the folks watching what's happening in the community, patterns, trends you'd see, like, don't like. >> I think we could do a better job of reducing politics amongst the really sort of senior community leaders, particularly who have incentives behind their sort of agendas and sort of opinions, since they work for various, you know, large and small companies. >> Yeah, who horse in this race. >> Sure, and there's, whether they're perverse incentives or not, I think net the project has such a high quality genuine, like humble, focused group of people leading it that there isn't much pollution and negativity there. But I think there could be a higher standard in some cases. Since the project is so huge and there are so many very fast moving areas of evolution, there tends to be sort of a fast curve toward many cooks being in the kitchen, you know, when new things materialize and I think that could be better handled. But positive side, I think like the project is becoming incredibly diverse. I just get super excited to see Aparna from Google leading the project at Google, both on the hosted Saas offering and the Kubernetes project. People like Liz and others. And I just think it's an awesome, welcoming, super diverse community. And people should really highlight that more. 'Cause I think it's a unique asset of the project. >> Well you're involved in some deep history. I think we're going to be looking this as moment where there was once a KubeCon that was not part of the CNCF, and you know, you did the right thing, did a good thing. You could have kept it to yourself and made some good cash. >> It's definitely gotten really big, and it's way beyond me now at this point. >> Those guys did a good job with CNCF. >> They're doing phenomenal. I think vast majority of the credit, at this scale, goes to Chris Anasik and Dan Conn, and the events team at the Linux Foundation, CNCF, and obviously Kelsey and Liz and Michelle Noorali and many others. But blood, sweat, and tears. It's no small feat pulling off an event like this. You know, corralling the CFP process, coordinating speakers, setting the themes, it's a really huge job. >> And now they got to deal with all the community, licenses, Lauren your thoughts? >> Well they're consistent across Apache v2 I believe is what Dan said, so all the projects under the CNCF are consistently licensed. So I think that's great. I think they actually have it together there. You know, I do share your concerns about the politics that are going on a little bit back and forth, the high level, I tend to look back at history a little bit, and for those of us that remember JBoss and the JBoss fork, we're a little bit nervous, right? So I think that it's important to take a look at that and make sure that that doesn't happen. Also, you know, open stack and the stuff that we've talked about before with distros coming out or too many distros going to be hitting the street, and how do we keep that more narrow focused, so this can go across-- >> Yeah, I started this, I like to list rank and iterate things, and I started with this sheet of all the vendors, you know, all the Kubernetes vendors, and then Linux Foundation, or CNCF took it over, and they've got a phenomenal sort of conformance testing and sort of compliance versioning sheet, which lists all the vendors and certification status and updates and so on and I think there's 50 or 60 companies. On one hand I think that's great, because it's more innovation, lots of service providers and offerings, but there is a concern that there might be some fragmentation, but again, this is a really big area of focus, and I think it's being addressed. Yeah, I think the right ones will end up winning, right? >> Joseph: Right, for sure. >> and that's what's going to be key. >> Joseph: Healthy competition. >> Yes. >> All right final question. Let's go around the horn. We'll start with you JJ, wrapping up KubeCon 2018, your thoughts, summary, what's happened here? What will we talk about next year about what happened this week in Denmark? >> I think this week in Denmark has been a huge turning point for the growth in Europe and sort of proof that Kubernetes is on like this unstoppable inflection, growth curve. We usually see a smaller audience here in Europe, relative to the domestic event before it. And we're just seeing the numbers get bigger and bigger. I think looking back we're also going to see just the quality of end users and the end user community and more production success stories starting to become front and center, which I think is really awesome. There's lots of vendors here. But I do believe we have a huge representation of end users and companies actually sharing what they're doing pragmatically and really changing their businesses from Financial Times to Cern and physics projects, and you know, JD and other huge companies. I think that's just really awesome. That's a unique thing of the Kubernetes project. There's some hugely transformative companies doing awesome things out there. >> Lauren your thoughts, summary of the week in Denmark? >> I think it's been awesome. There's so much innovation happening here and I don't want to overuse that word 'cause I think it's kind of BS at some point, but really these companies are doing new things, and they're taking this to new levels. I think that hearing about the excitement of the folks that are coming here to actually learn about Kubernetes is phenomenal, and they're going to bring that back into their companies, and you're going to see a lot more actually coming to Europe next year. I also true multicloud would be phenomenal. I would love that if you could actually glue those platforms together, per se. That's really what I'm looking for. But also security. I think security, there needs to be a security seg. We talked to customers earlier. That's something they want to see. I think that that needs to be something that's brought to the table. >> That's awesome. My view is very simple. You know I think they've done a good job in CNCF and Linux Foundation, the team, building the ecosystem, keeping the governance and the technical and the content piece separate. I think they did a good job of showing the future state that we'd like to get to, which is true multicloud, workload portability, those things still out of reach in my opinion, but they did a great job of keeping the tight core. And to me, when I hear words like defacto standard I think of major inflection points where industries have moved big time. You think of internetworking, you think of the web, you think of these moments where that small little tweak created massive new brands and created a disruptor enabler that just created, changed the game. We saw Cisco coming out of that movement of IP with routers you're seeing 3Com come out of that world. I think that this change, this new little nuance called Kubernetes is going to be absolutely a defacto standard. I think it's definitely an inflection point and you're going to see startups come up with new ideas really fast in a new way, in a new modern global architecture, new startups, and I think people are going to be blown away. I think you're going to see fast rising growth companies. I think it's going to be an investment opportunity whether it's token economics or a venture backer private equity play. You're going to see people come out of the wood work, real smart entrepreneur. I think this is what people have been waiting for in the industry so I mean, I'm just super excited. And so thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for everything you do for the community. I think you truly extract the signal from the noise. I'm really excited to see you keep coming to the show, so it's really awesome. >> I appreciate your support, and again we're co-developing content in the open. Lauren great to host with you this week. >> Thank you, it's been awesome. >> And you got a great new venture, high five there. High five to the founder of KubeCon. This is theCUBE, not to be confused with KubeCon. And we're theCUBE, C-U-B-E. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. It's a wrap of day two global coverage here exclusively for KubeCon 2018, CNCF and the Linux Foundation. Thanks for watching. (techno music)