(digital music) >> Welcome back to VeeamON 2022. We're in the home stretch, actually, Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante here. Daniel Fried is the general manager and senior vice president for EMEA and Worldwide Channel. Daniel, welcome to theCUBE. You got a big job. >> No, I don't have a big job. I have a job that I love. (chuckles) >> Yeah, a job you love. But seriously Veeam, all channel. I mean it has been. >> Yeah, I mean, it's something which just, just a few seconds on, on that piece here, the channel piece, it's something that I love because the ecosystem of partners, an ecosystem of partners, is something which is spending its time moving and developing and changing. You've got a lot of partners changing their roles, their missions, the type of services, type of product that they offer. They all adapt to what the market needs and all the markets around the world are very different because of all these different cultures, languages, and everything. So it's very interesting. In the middle of all that, you know, these tens of thousands of partners and you try to create and try to understand how you can organize, how you can make them happy. So this is fantastic. >> So you're a native of the continent in Europe, obviously. We heard Anton, today, who couldn't be here or chose not to be here, cause he's supporting family and friends in Ukraine. What's the climate like now? Can you share with us what's it like Europe? Just the overall climate and obviously the business climate. >> So the overall climate, the way I see it or I feel it, and obviously there may be some different opinions, that I will always appreciate as also very good opinions. My view is that it seems in Europe that there are a distinction between what people do for businesses, Their thinking for the business, which may be impacted by the situations that we know in Europe between, because of obviously the issues between Ukraine, because of Russia, let's put it this way. And then there is the personal view, which is okay. That happens from time to time, but life continues and we just continue pushing things and enjoying life, and getting the families together and so on and so forth. So, this is in most of the countries in Europe. Obviously, there are a number of countries, which are a little bit more sensitive, a little bit more impacted. All the ones who are next to Russia, or Belarus, so on and so forth. From an emotional standpoint, which is totally understandable. But overall, I'm pretty impressed by how the economy, how people, how the businesses are, you know, continue to thrive in Europe. >> Has Brexit had any...? What impact, if any, has it had? >> So for us Veeam, the impact is... So first there is an impact which is on the currencies. So all the European currencies are no, have slowed down and, and the US dollar is becoming much stronger. >> Despite its debt. >> Right. >> Shouldn't be, but yeah. >> But that doesn't impact on the business. I just... >> Yeah. Right. >> So everything which is economical, macroeconomical is impacted. We have the inflation also, which has an impact, which also has increased because of the oil, because of the gas of everything that they have been stuck, to be stuck. But people get used to it. As Veeam from a business standpoint, one of the big things is we stopped sales, selling into Russia and into Belarus and we are giving our technology, our product, our solutions for free to Ukraine. And that was a piece of the business that we were doing, within EMEA, which was non-neglectable. So it's, I would say a business hole, now that we need to try to fill with accelerating the business service in the other countries of Europe. >> I mean, okay. So thank you for that but we really didn't see it in last quarter's numbers that you guys shared with I mean, IBM. Similarly IBM said, it's noticeable, but it's not really a big impact on our business, but given the cultural ties that you had to Russia and the affinity, I mean you knew how to do business in Russia. It's quite remarkable that you're able to sort of power through that. How about privacy in, around data, in Europe, particularly versus the US? it seems like Europe is setting the trend on things like privacy, certainly on things like acquisitions, we saw the arm acquisition fail. >> Yeah. So there is a big difference. Effectively, there is a big difference between, I would say North America and the rest of the world. And I would say that EMEA, and within EMEA would say the EU is leading very much on what we call server sovereign cloud. So data privacy, which in other words, data is to as much as possible is to remain within either the EU or better within each of the countries, which means that there is again... It's I would say for in EMEA it's good, I would say for the business, for the partners, because then they have to develop around the cloud a number of functions to ensure that because of this data privacy, because of this GDPR or rules and things, all the data remains and resides in a given geographical environment. So it's, which is good because it creates a number of opportunities for the partners. It makes obviously the life of customers and their self a bit more difficult. But again, I think it's good. It's good. It's part of all the way we structure and we organize. And I think that it's going to expand because data is becoming so key, a key limit, a key asset of companies that we absolutely need to take care of it. And it is where Veeam plays a big role in that because we help paying companies managing their data and secure the data in sort of way. >> Yeah. Ransomware has been a big topic of conversation this week. Do you sense that the perception of that as a threat is universal? Are there, are there differences between North America and the EU and other parts of the world? Universal? >> Yeah, it is universal. We see that everywhere. And I think this is a good point, a good question too, is that it's very interesting because we need to get acquainted to the fact that we are going to ever. And so we are going to be attacked. No way out, no. There... Anybody the morning, is waking up, is going on emails and click clicking on an email. Too late. Was a run somewhere. What can you do against that? You know, all humans make mistakes. You can't so it'll happen, but where, where it's absolutely very important and where Veeam plays a big role and where our partners are going to play an even bigger role with our technology is that they can educate the customers to understand that, to have run somewhere is not an issue. What has, what happened is not a problem. What they have to do is to organize so that if they have run somewhere, their letter is safe. And this is where our place a big place. A couple hours back, I was, I was doing a kind of bar with something else. It's totally crazy, but that's okay. I'm going to say it. It's about the COVID. What, no, what do we do? Do we have, do we have something against COVID? No. People were going to get COVID, certainly many people still doing it, but what is important is to be capable of not being too sick. So it is the prevention, which is important. It's the same thing here. So there is this mindset we have psychologically with the partners and they have, they have to provide that services to their customers on how to organize their data using the technology of Veeam in order to be safe, if anything happens. >> So another related question, if I may. When Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA and divulged that the NSA was listening to all the phone calls, there was seemed to be at the time, as I recall, a backlash sentiment in Europe, particularly toward big tech and cloud providers and skepticism toward the cloud. Has the pandemic and the reliance on cloud and the rise of ransomware changed that sentiment? Had the sentiment changed before then? Obviously plenty of Cloud going on in Europe. But can you describe that dynamic? >> Yeah, no, I think that's... Yeah. I think that people were too... You know, as usual. It absolutely reminds me when I was at VMware, when we went from the physical boxes to the virtual machines. I remember the IT people in the company said, "No, I want to be capable of touching." Something here. When you talk about cloud, you talk about something which is virtual, but virtual outside, even outside somewhere. So there is a resistance, psychological resistance to where is my data? How do I control my data? And that is, I think that is very human. Then you need to, you know, it takes time. And again, depending on the cultures, you need to get acquainted to it. So that's what happened be before the pandemic, but then the pandemic took place. And then there was a big problem. There was nobody anymore in the data centers because they couldn't work there and then people were starting to, to work remotely. So the IT needed to be organized to compensate for all these different changes. And cloud was one of them where the data could be stored, where the data could reside, where things could happen. And that's how actually it has accelerated at least in a number of countries where people are a bit leg out to accept the adoption of cloud, cloud-based data. >> So is there a difference in terms of the level of domination by a small group of hyperscale clouds versus smaller service providers? You know, in theory, you have EU behaving in a unified way in sort of the same way that the United States behaves in sort of a federated way. Do you have that same level of domination or is there more, is there more market share available for smaller players in cloud? Any regional differences? >> Yeah. There are big differences. There are big differences again, because of this sovereignty, which is absolutely approved very much in Europe. I'm tell you, I'm going... I'm giving you an example that it was in, I think in October last year, somewhere. The French, the French administration said, "We don't want anymore. Any administration investing in Microsoft 365, because the data is in Azure. The data is out in the cloud." That's what they said. So now these last days, this last week that has changed because Microsoft, you know, introduced a number of technologies, data centers in France, and so on and so forth. So things are going to get better. But the sovereignty, the fact that the data, the privacy of data, everything has to remain in the countries is doing something like the technology of the hyperscalers is used locally wrapped by local companies like systematic writers, local systematic writers, to ensure that the sovereign is set and that the privacy of the data is for real and according to GDPR. So again, it's a value add. It makes things more complex. It doesn't mean that the Google, the Google cloud, the Azure, or the AWS are not going to exist in Europe, but there are going to be a number of layers between them and the customers in order to make sure that everything is totally brought up and that it complies with the EU regulations. >> Help us understand the numbers, Daniel. So the number of customers is mind-boggling it's over 400,000 now, is that right? >> Yeah. Correct. >> Yes. Comparable to VMware, which is again, pretty astounding and the partner ecosystem. Can you help us understand the scope of that? Part one. part two is how do you service and provide that partnership love to all those companies? >> The partners. So yeah, we have about 35,000 around the world, 35,000 partners, but again, it's 10 times less than Microsoft, by the way. So, and this is very interesting. I often have the questions, how do we manage? So first of all, we do tiering, like anybody does. >> Sure. >> We have an organization for that. And we have a two chair sales motion. That means that we use the distributors to take care of the mass, the volume of the smaller, smaller partners. We help the distributors, we help. So it's a leverage system. And we take care obviously more directly, of the large partners or the more complex partners or the ones of interest. But we don't want to forget any of those because even the small one is very important to us because he has these customers maybe in the middle of nowhere, but he's got a few of them. And again, to have a few of these customers, when you adapt, you know, it makes.. At the end, it makes a big business. You know, one plus one plus 1 million times makes, you know, makes huge things. And plus we are in the recurring business now, now that we've introduced three, four years ago, our subscription licenses, which means that it's only incremental. So it's just like the know the telephony, know the telephony business, where the number, the cell phone plans, you know, it's always grabbing as many as possible consumers in this case. So it was the same thing or I have the same, the same kind of, I do a parallel with the French, the French bakery, the French Boulangerie where I say they do their business with the baguette. And then from time to time, they sell the patisserie or they sell the cake, cookie or something, but the same of small things makes a big things. So it is important to have all these small partners everywhere that, that have their small customers or big customers, and that can serve them. So that's that's way. We segment by geography and what we do now is, it is something which is new. We segment by competencies. So it's what I call the soft segmentation. Because if not, we will have a lot of these partners competing to each other, just to sell Veeam. Veeam being number one in many countries, that is what is taking place. And we want them to be happy. We want, we don't want them to fight against each other. So what we do is we do soft segmentation and soft segmentation is this partner is competent in this field with that kind of use case doing this or this or this or this. It's just like you, when you go to the restaurant, you want the restaurant next to your place. So you click for the geography and then you want to, to go for Indian food. So you click restaurant Indian food, and then you want something. So we want to give that possibility to the customers to say, "Yeah, I think I know what I want." And then you can just click and get the partners or the list of partners, which are the most suited for, for his needs. So it's what I call the soft segmentation. The other thing which is important is the network. It's very interesting because when we look at a lot of companies, it's not the network. You've got VARs, you've got cloud and service providers. You've got SARs, you've got all the things. But if you take each of those individually, they don't have the competencies to answer all the request of the customer. So the networking is partnering with partner. That means to have the, the connection so that the partner A who has his customer, but these customer's are requests that this partner cannot fulfill because it's not its competency. That it's going to find the partners or the other partners that can feel this competency and work together. And then it's between them to have the model that they want so that together they can please the customer with their requests. >> Do you ever want to have VeeamON... I mean, I'm happy it's in the US and I like going to Europe, but you, have you ever want to have VeeamON in Europe? >> Yeah, we have VeeamON. We have many VeeamONs in Europe. >> Yeah. The mini ones. Okay. >> VeeamON tours. >> Globally. So where do you have them? >> Europe in APJ, that's what we do. Yes. >> Where do you do it in a APJ? In Japan, obviously in... >> Yeah. I don't know all the locations, tens and tens of them. >> A lot of them. Okay. >> The small ones. What we do, replicate what is done here on one day and then it goes. >> And you'll do that in UK. France, Germany. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Local. >> And also small countries in Saudi, in South Africa, in Israel, in Bulgaria, in all these countries. Because, you know, we can be virtual. That's nice. >> Oh, right. >> But I love to be having a breakfast or a lunch or drink next to a partner or a customer because you learn so much more. The informal information is so important to understand how the business and how the market develops and what the needs are of customers and so on and so forth. >> How was the European attendance this year? It must have been down. It's hard to get into US. It's actually easier to go back to Europe. >> Virtually I, don't have the numbers, but I- >> No. Virtual. I'm sure it was huge. Yeah. But physical. >> Physical here, we've got about 300, 300 Europeans. >> Yeah. Okay. Out of, do we know? What are the numbers here? Do we know? Have we heard numbers? >> I know 45 was supposed to be around 45K combined. >> That's hybrid. >> So, yeah. >> It's hard to get into the US. We're still figuring that out. So I'm not surprised, but now you... >> But it's complimentary. Yeah. >> Do you go to 'em all? >> No >> You can't. >> No. That's not possible. I cannot. I actually, I would love... >> But some, yes. >> I would love to be capable of duplicate myself, but- >> You go to the one. >> I'm unique. >> You go to the one in France, obviously. Yeah? >> Yeah. Usually in France. Well... >> Depends if you're home. >> Yeah. You know, that is interesting is, the way we organize, the way we organize in Europe is I really want the local leaders to be the ones managing the countries. I'm there to support. I'm not there to be, you know? Yeah. The big boss is coming, he showing. No. It is not that. Again, if they request me to come, if they want me to pass a message to certain type of customer partners, I'll do that. But I don't want to run the show. It's not the way I manage that. >> Yeah. I get that. You want to respect that as if you show up in France and that's your home country, it's like rat man showing up here. It's like taking over the stage. You'll be like, you know, it's our turn. >> But it's just like, you know, I give you another example. So obviously we have... It's even the headquarters, the EMEA headquarters is in France. Right? But it is the French office. And I don't go there. I try not to be there because it is the place for the French people taking care of the French market. And for the French manager, if I go there, everybody's going to come and ask me questions and ask me to make decisions and things. No, they have to run their business. >> So where do you spend, where and how do you spend your time? >> In airports and in planes. (indistinct) What are you asking? >> Of course. >> Do you have another question? >> Actually, if we have time really quickly on just on that subject of sovereignty, we are here in Nevada just across the border, California. People in California have no problem at all, replicating things here for disaster recovery, because it's in the US. Now, is there sort of a cultural sense that tearing down those borders from a sovereignty perspective within Europe would fundamentally change the business climate and maybe tilt things in favor of the AWS and GCPs of the world instead of local regional business? The joke that I heard recently from someone, I thought it was funny. I don't know if it would offend either Germans or French, but it was that it was that AWS was confused and they were planning on putting a data center in Strasbourg, because they thought it was in Germany and it was- >> A joke. >> But the point is, the point is it's like, it's a gum bear. >> Is it true? >> No. But it was a dumb American joke. This was told by a French person basically saying... >> But this person was certainly not from- >> Yes. Right. >> Tell you, because I would've been a very bad way. >> But the point is this idea that you have these mega hyper clouds coming in and saying, "Okay, boom, we're putting one here and you're going to use us regardless of the country you're in." How does that, you know... Is there a push within the EU to tear those barriers down? Or are those sovereignty walls enjoyed by the majority because of the way that it changes the business climate? Any thoughts from that perspective? >> Oh yeah. Yeah. To me, it's very simple. It is a hybrid thing. That means that these big hyperscalers are there, not going to be used but what they do is they're going to partition themselves and work with these local people. So that their big thing appears as being independent, smaller data centers. That's the only thing, you know. You build a house and then you put walls between the different, between the different rooms. That's the only thing that happens. So it's not at all, no. At all to Azures or Google cloud. No, it's not that. It just means that there is a structure and organization that has to be put in place in order that the data resides in given geographical locations using their infrastructures, their technologies. That make, does it make sense? >> Yeah. Except that it puts them in the position of having to have a physical presence in each place, which is advantageous in one way and maybe less efficient in another. >> Yeah. But there are some big markets. >> Yeah. And they eventually got to get there. Right. I mean... >> Yeah. >> They started it. One patient in the world where they restarted was in ANZ. And that's what they did. You know, what, 5, 6, 7 years ago. They put their data centers over there because they wanted to gain the Australian market and the New Zealand market. >> So build it and they will come. Daniel, thanks so much for coming to the theCUBE. Very interesting conversation. >> Pleasure. >> Appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, we're wrapping up. Day two at VeeamON 2022. Keep it right there. Dave and I will be back right after this break. (vibrant music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCube here in Palo Alto, California. We're here in 2021 as we get through the pandemic and vaccine on the horizon all around the world. It's great to welcome Sandy Carter, Vice President of Partners and Programs with Amazon Web Services. Sandy, great to see you. I wanted to check in with you for a couple of reasons. One is just get a take on the landscape of the marketplace as well as you've got some always good programs going on. You're in the middle of all the action. Great to see you. >> Nice to see you too, John. Thanks for having me. >> So one of the things that's come out of this COVID and as we get ready to come out of the pandemic you starting to see some patterns emerging, and that is cloud and cloud-native technologies and SAS and the new platforming and refactoring using cloud has created an opportunity for companies. Your partner group within public sector and beyond is just completely exploding and value creation. Changing the world's society is now accelerated. We've covered that in the past, certainly in detail last year at re:Invent. Now more than ever it's more important. You're doing some pretty cutting things. What's your update here for us? >> Well, John, we're really excited because you know the heartbeat of countries of the United States globally are small and medium businesses. So today we're really excited to launch Think Big for Small Business. It's a program that helps accelerate public sector serving small and diverse partners. So you know that these small and medium businesses are just the engine for inclusive growth and strategy. We talked about some stats today, but according to the World Bank, smaller medium business accounts for 98% of all companies, they contribute a 50% of the GDP, two-thirds of the employment opportunities, and the fastest growing areas are in minority owned businesses, women, black owned, brown owned, veteran owned, aborigine, ethnic minorities who are just vital to the economic role. And so today this program enables us as AWS to support this partner group to overcome the challenges that they're seeing today in their business with some benefits specifically targeted for them from AWS. >> Can I ask you what was the driver behind this? Obviously, we're seeing the pandemic and you can't look at on the TV or in the news without seeing the impact that small businesses had. So I can almost imagine that might be some motivation, but what is some of the conversations that you're having? Why this program? Why think Big for Small Business pilot experience that you're launch? >> Well, it's really interesting. The COVID obviously plays a role here because COVID hit small and medium businesses harder, but we also, you know, part of Amazon is working backwards from the customers. So we collected feedback from small businesses on their experience in working with us. They all want to work with us. And essentially they told us that they need a little bit more help, a little bit more push around programmatic benefits. So we listened to them to see what was happening. In addition, AWS grew up with a startup community. That's how we grew up. And so we wanted to also reflect our heritage and our commitment to these partners who represent such a heartbeat of many different economies. That was really the main driver. And today we had, John, one of our follow the sun. So we're doing sessions in Latin America, Canada, the US, APJ, Europe. And if you had heard these partners today it was just such a great story of how we were able to help them and help them grow. >> One of the cultural changes that we've been reporting on SiliconANGLE, you're seeing it all over the world is the shift in who's adopting, who's starting businesses. And you're seeing, you mentioned minority owned businesses but it goes beyond that. Now you have complete diverse set entrepreneurial activity. And cloud has generated this democratization wave. You starting to see businesses highly accelerated. I mean, more than ever, I've never seen in the entrepreneurial equation the ability to start, get started and get to success, get to some measurable MVP, minimal viable product, and then ultimately to success faster than ever before. This has opened up the doors to anyone to be an entrepreneur. And so this brings up the conversation of equality in entrepreneurship. I know this is close to your heart. Share your thoughts on this big trend. >> Yeah, and that's why this program it's not just a great I think achievement for AWS, but it's very personal to the entire public sector team. If you look at entrepreneurs like, Lisa Burnett, she's the President and Managing Director of DLZP. They are a female owned minority owned business from Texas. And as you listen to her story about equity, she has this amazing business, migrating Oracle workloads over to AWS, but as she started growing she needed help understanding a little bit more about what AWS could bring to the table, how we could help her, what go to market strategies we could bring, and so that equalizer was this program. She was part of our pilot. We also had John Wieler on. He is the Vice President of Biz Dev from IMT out of Canada. And he is focused on government for Canada. And as a small business, he said today something that was so impactful, he goes, "Amazon never asked me if I'm a small business. They now treat me like I'm big. I feel like I'm one of the big guys and that enables me grow even bigger." And we also talked today to Juan Pablo De Rosa. He's the CEO of Technogi. And it's a small business in Mexico. And what do they do? They do migrations. They just migrate legacy workloads over. And again, back to that equality point you made, how cool was it that here's this company in Mexico, and they're doing all these migrations and we can help them even be more successful and to drive more jobs in the region. It's a very equalizing program and something that we're very proud of. >> You know what I love about your job and I love talking to you about this (Sandy laughs) because it's so much fun. You have a global perspective. It's not just United States. There's a global perspective. This event you're having this morning that you kicked off with is not just in the US, it's a follow the sun kind of a community. You got quite the global community developing there, Sandy. Can you share some insight behind the curtain, behind AWS, how this is developing? How you're handling it? What you're doing to nurture and grow that community that really wants to engage with you because you are making them feel big because (laughs) that's what cloud does. It makes them punch above their weight class and innovate. >> Yeah, that's very correct. >> This is the core thesis of Amazon. So you've got a community developing, how are you handling it? How are you building it? How are you nurturing it? What are your thoughts? >> You know what, John? You're so insightful because that's actually the goal of this program. We want to help these partners. We want to help them grow. But our ultimate goal is to build that small and medium business community that is based on AWS. In fact, at re:Invent this year, we were able to talk about MST which is based out of Malaysia, as well as cloud prime based out of Korea. And just by talking about it, those two CEOs reached out to each other from Korea and Malaysia and started talking. And then we today introduced folks from Mexico, and Canada, and the US, and Bulgaria. And so, we really pride ourselves on facilitating that community. Our dream here, our vision here is that we would build that small business community to be much more scalable but starting out by making those connections, having that mentoring that will be built in together, doing community meetings that advisory meetings together. We piloted this program in 2020. We already have 37 partners. And they told me as I met with them, they already feel like this small and medium business community or family. Family was the word they used, I think, moving forward. So you nailed it. That's the goal here is to create that community where people can share their thoughts and mentor each other. >> And it's on the ground floor too. It's just beginning. I think it's going to be so much larger. And to piggyback off that I want to also point out and highlight and get your reaction to is the success that you've been having and Amazon Web Services in general but mainly in the public sector side with the public private partnership. You're seeing this theme emerge really been a big way. I've been enclose to it and hosting and being interviewing a lot of folks at that, your customers whether it's cybersecurity in space, the Mars partnership that you guys just got on Mars with partnerships. So it's a global and interstellar soon to be huge everywhere. But this is a big discussion because as from cybersecurity, geopolitical to space, you have this partnership with public private because you can't do it alone. The public markets, the public sector cannot do it alone. And it pretty much everyone's agreeing to that. So this dynamic of public sector and partnering private public is a pretty big deal. Unpack that for us real quickly. >> Yeah, it really is a big deal. And in fact, we've worked with several companies. I'll just use one sector. Public Safety and Disaster Response. We just announced the competency at re:Invent for our tech partners. And what we found is that when communities are facing a disaster, it really is government or the public sector plus the private sector. We had many solutions where citizens are providing data that helps the government manage a disaster or manage or help in a public safety scenario to things like simple things you would think, but in one country they were looking at bicycle routes and discovered that certain bicycle routes there were more crashes. And so one of our partners decided to have the community provide the data. And so as they were collecting that data, putting in the data lake in AWS, the community or the private sector was providing the data that enabled the application, our Public Sector Partner application to identify places where bicycle accidents happen most often. And I love the story, John, because the CEO of the partner told me that they measured their results in terms of ELO, I'm sorry, ROL, Return on Lives not ROI, because they save so many lives just from that simple application. >> Yeah, and the data's all there. You just saw on the news, Tiger Woods got into a car accident and survived. And as it turns out to your point that's a curve in the road where a lot of accidents happen. And if that data was available that could have been telegraphed right into the car itself and slow down, kind of like almost a prevention. So he just an example of just all the innovation possibilities that are abound out there. >> And that's why we love our small businesses and startups too, John. They are driving that innovation. The startups are driving that innovation and we're able to then open access to that innovation to governments, agencies, healthcare providers, space. You mentioned Mars. One of our partners MAXR helped them with the robotics. So it's just a really cool experience where you can open up that innovation, help create new jobs through these small businesses and help them be successful. There's really nothing, nothing better. >> Can I ask you- >> Small, small is beautiful. >> Can I asked you a personal question on this been Mars thing? >> Yeah. >> What's it like at Amazon Web Services now because that was such a cool mission. I saw Teresa Carlson, had a post on the internet and LinkedIn as well as her blog post. You had posted a picture of me and you had thumbs were taking an old picture from in real life. Space is cool, Mars in particular, everyone's fixated on it. Pretty big accomplishment. What's it like at Amazon? People high five in each other pretty giddy, what's happening? >> Oh yeah. The thing about Amazon is people come here to change the world. That's what we want to do. We want to have an impact on history. We want to help make history. And we do it all on behalf of our customers. We're innovating on behalf of our customers. And so, I think we get excited when our customers are successful, when our partners are successful, which is why I'm so excited right now, John, because we did that session this morning, and as I listened to Juan Pablo Dela Rosa, and just all the partners, Lisa, John, and just to hear them say, "You helped us," that's what makes us giddy. And that's what makes us excited. So it could be something as big as Mars. We went to Mars but it's also doing something for small businesses as well. It runs the spectrum that really drives us and fuels that energy. And of course, we've got great leadership as you know, because you get to talk to Andy. Andy is such a great leader. He motivates and he inspires us as well to do more on behalf of our customer. >> Yeah, you guys are very customer focused and innovative which is really the kind of the secret sauce. I love the fact that small medium sized business can also be part of the solutions. And I truly believe that, and why I wanted us to promote and amplify what you're working on today is because the small medium size enterprise and business is the heart of the recovery on a global scale. So important and having the resources to do that, and doing it easily and consuming the cloud so that they can apply the value. It's going to change lives. I think the thing that people aren't really talking much about right now, is that the small medium size businesses will be the road to recovery. >> I agree with you. And I love this program because it does promote diversity, something that Amazon is very much focused on. It's global, so it has that global reach and it supports small business, and therefore the recovery that you talked about. So it is I think an amazing emphasis on all the things that really matter now. During COVID, John, we learned about what really matters, and this program focuses on those things and helping others. >> Well, great to see you. I know you're super busy. Thanks for coming on and sharing the update, and certainly talking about the small mid size business program. I'm sure you're busy getting ready to give the awards out to the winners this year. Looking forward to seeing that come up soon. >> Great. Thank you, John. And don't forget if you are a small and medium business partner 'cause this program is specifically for partners, check out Think Big for Small Business. >> Think Big for Small Business. Sandy Carter, here on theCube, sharing our insight, of course all the updates from the worldwide public sector partner program, doing great things. I'm John Furrier for theCube. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, (upbeat music) covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to theCUBE Coverage of HP Discover Virtual Experience. I'm John Furrier Host of theCUBES. I'm here in the Palo Alto Studios for the remote interviews, were all sheltering in place. And we have two amazing guests on a great topic Women Leaders in Technology Strategy For Growth. Rashmi Kumar, Senior Vice Chief Information Officer at HPE and Marissa Freeman, Chief Brand Officer of HPE. Welcome to theCUBE and looking forward to this great conversation. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you, John. >> Before we jump into it, can you guys explain your roles at HPE as The Chief Information Officer role is pretty well defined but it's changing these days Rashmi and as a Brand Officer with the remote workforce, Marissa, these are changing times. Can you guys take a minute to explain your role? Rashmi we'll start with you. >> Yeah, so my organization and my role is in the middle of digital transformation which has become even more critical in these days of landscape level. My team is involved in end-to-end process transformation for HPE as well as key part of the pivot for as a service and running the operations as smoothly or as well as making all 60,000 employee 20,000 partner move to work from home. We are engaged in this from later part of January, so to say then it first started in China. So the organization is supercritical for the success of HPE to keep our operations running as well as all the employees engaged in their work. >> Awesome. Marissa, your role? >> I am the Chief Brand Officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and my responsibility is to help tell our story to customers, prospects, analysts and press and beat the drum for our employees. So as we pivot our company and our strategy, we work with Antonio to ensure that everyone understands why HPE and how we can be your best transformation partner. >> One of the exciting things that's coming out of this new reality is that the role of work is changing as the workforce, workplace, workloads, workflows, variety of topics, but one of them is the personnel piece and you guys have Women Leaders In Technology Program is really phenomenal. Can you talk about the Mission and Vision and what are the goals? Women in Technology something this important and leadership as well? Could you guys explain the mission and vision of Women Leaders and Technology? >> Yeah, sure. So the Women Leaders in Technology established by Hewlett Packard Enterprise to connect with our customers at our annual conference who shared our common belief in inclusion and diversity, specifically advancing gender equality and empowering women with the support of the men at the workforce as well. The event is a collaborative forum for women and men allies who are committed to drive, learn and leverage best practices and technology innovations to make a difference in their businesses and communities. Our goal is to unite influential leaders from around the world with a charter to increase, attract and retain diverse talent by showcasing great contributions made by women, while their careers in STEMplusC, Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Computing. And I see that all our leaderships are very passionate about making sure that we get the right level of engagement, both from women and men allies to be able to advance this course at the company and with customer says, well. >> Marissa, on the leadership side we've talked about in the past you and I and you're passionate about the women leadership piece. What's your take on this? >> Well, we know that when women leaders are at a company, the company is more financially successful. We know that women lead differently and bring a unique point of view to the table. And so diversity and inclusion generally speaking, is so very important to the success of a company to the happiness and retention of their employees. So, yes, we we focus a lot on that. And I think, importantly, we think about reward, recruit and report. So it's not just something diversity inclusion is not something that we wish for an HP it's something that we action and we work towards, and it's a journey. We weren't we aren't there yet, but we are on path and it's something that we report on internally to each other, we understand exactly where we are. We recruit with purpose and intention of widening the aperture and bringing in people who are different from each other to add to the fabric of our company, and then we also reward our leaders for doing the right thing and being inclusive and hiring diverse talents. So it is very much part of our culture and our performance. >> I always ask the question because I'm male, and I wanted to rush me brought it up as well. How are the HPE male leaders impacting enhancing and participating in this strategy because it takes everyone involvement to make women in leadership successful and beyond, this is super important. Can you share your thoughts on how that's going? >> So as we form our teams as well as these specific, an employee resource group to be able to focus on younger women or women technologists. We do it alongside our men allies, at some point, technology is so critical digitalization is such an hyper-growth mode. If we need to be successful with our products and services in the marketplace, we need to have equal participation from talent from across the bodies of men and women and irrespective if I'm a woman leader or a man leader, I need to be able to tap into that talent to be able to kind of bring our products and services to our markets or run our operations well in the in the company so we we really when we strive to fulfill the causes Marissa mentioned, from a growth perspective, we are equal partner in making this a priority for the company to ensure we get women and both men and smartest men and women from across technology areas to come and work with us. >> Marissa I want to ask you before I go back to Rashmi about the whole workforce and workplace and technology, from a customer perspective, how are you guys seeing their workplace changing from a business perspective? Because you and I, again, talk about about experiences. And that's something that you really believe in having great experiences at the physical events. Now you're doing the virtual event, but your customers are also living a changing workforce and they need to equip themselves with with this how do you see the big picture there because that's a big part of you guys aligning with the customers and I won't say change the experience but align with the new expectations. These are are new things that are happening in real time. >> Part of running the brand is also understanding culture and what's around the corner. And I think that our company does that by nature anyway, because we are a technology company and we have to think about where our customers are going, where they're heading, skate to where the puck is going and meet them there. So translate approximately 50% of workers will probably not go back to the office full time. So we have a whole suite of products and services that we have been talking about very much in recent times that help everyone work from home. So many of the offerings that we have, for example, during COVID, many of our customers couldn't or wouldn't send their employees into the data centers or into their offices to work on their technology. We had ourselves service people able to help them remotely and in some cases actually show up 25,000 people around the globe there to help. In fact, that was our campaign. And it still is. And it's the theme of HPE Discover, HPE is here to help. So as your workplace changes as you go through the recovery, as you're returned to work as you continue your digital transformation, HPE is here to help with very actionable, instantaneous solutions to help with COVID and beyond. >> We've been following HPE, I've been following HP for many many years and decades and I know and for the folks watching that you guys have a really robust internal intranet and system that you guys have built out and you're really on the leading edge as well. Your own HP, equipment and technology and software always been resilient from my perspective. So Rashmi, I got to ask you, this disruption we're seeing hasn't been forecast. It's not like disaster and recovery scenarios. A hurricane is not a flood or a hurricane Sandy, like we saw in the past, this was a new kind of disruption vector not seen on cybersecurity radars. This is new, so at the end of the day, it's still a disruption. It's a challenging time but there is an opportunity for CxOs out there to look at the projects and saying, where are we exposed? Where are the gaps, and I think we're seeing new app development. We're seeing new kinds of technology projects, kind of being tweaked a little bit, some kind of being sunsetted. It's an opportunity for CxOs to really double down on this. I want to get your take on how you see the challenge being met by the customers and the tech opportunities that they can lead through this. >> Absolutely. So anything this pandemic has taught us that digitalization is our way forward, we have been engaged in the transformation for HPE on a journey for last Couple of years of entire quote to cash process as well as our supply chain and fulfillment process, entire experience for our customers has been changing as well as for our employees. So as our customers look at this pandemic and think about what they need to invest in, is the for the employees work from anywhere anytime and be available to work for and we have technologies, which enables that at the same time. We are right in the middle of providing the best ERP solutions best quote to cash type solutions and our infrastructure and capabilities power that if you take our Edge, Aruba solution, we were in the middle of powering up all the makeshift hospitals as well as the cruise ships which were transitioned as hospital to be able to provide them in internet for connectivity, if you look at the initiatives we had here in the South Bay area and on providing WiFi in the parking lot for schools so that students could complete there studies. So he has this kind of end-to-end solutions around these technologies, which could create resiliency in our customers and provide them product and solution to be able to continue their operations seamlessly even during these times. >> It's interesting, I've always loved the future of work kind of scenario and discussions. But they all kind of felt a little bit too fuzzy around just collaboration, future of work, which is cool. I'm not against that. But when you look at what we're living now, what you were just talking about is it's not its work, place, work force, work, loads, workflows. It's not just collaboration. That's just one aspect of it. I think we're seeing now this new reality is that it's going to impact the entire end-to-end as you point out. Other areas that you see are opportunities for customers. Because, we've heard DevOps has always been on the fringe of kind of the tech community, always leading edge in the cloud for the past 10 years. But now you got operations, IT operations, network operations, all these other systems that were kind of on a nice, path before disrupted. This is not just work, collaboration. It's every What's your thoughts? >> Yes, yeah, great point. So if you look at collaboration, collaboration is kind of the facade versus everything that happens behind the scenes. So if you look at the TV show, what you're seeing is the end result, but there was a huge production effort behind it, to be able to get you that content. And if you look at a particular transaction today from ERP perspective, or a customer buying a product from you, this is the facade there's a lot of stuff that goes behind it for providing our employees the right tools, keeping our networks connected, so that employees can use those to successfully as well as securely. So this time has taught us to quickly pivot and bring in some new capabilities from technology and digital capability perspective in every area of the business, starting from the facade, which is the collaboration tool, at the same time ability to run your business through these technology capabilities. And do it very securely providing connectivity from our data center to manufacturing factories, location to now employees home to our partners and as well as clouds. And that has created a very complex ecosystem of connected universe. For every company. I feel. We are a global company. So we were a little lucky in getting early warnings in January and preparing to come to where we were coming and I'm so proud of the IT team here. We did a major release of our transformation program which we call NDIT on 13th 14th 15th March right before we started sheltering in place. And there were thousands of people working globally to bring this capability for our ERP systems and it went flawlessly. And since then we have done four or five releases and the organization has been able to carry through it. >> Preparedness and resiliency, great features Marissa, back to this brand experience in your role the facade or collaboration of the user experience is the front end of the back end. So you don't have a real hyper-digital or hyper-virtual is my word for it environment where people's businesses and the business impact is going to be severely impacted because people can leave a brand. So if I'm a customer of yours, I'm like, look, I need to get busy reinventing and getting my apps meeting the expectations of the customer. So you got to bring the experience piece of it as well as at enablement. This is a new expectation radically more accelerated than it was in the past? What's your thoughts? >> Well, Antonio a couple of years ago said, the action is at the edge and the cloud is an experience, not a destination. So in order to create those very meaningful and differentiated experiences for their customers, our customers need to have one single platform that's open and secure, so that they can innovate from end to end every workflow from beginning to end so that their experiences they deliver their customers are intuitive, intelligent, differentiated. So that is what we have been working for this entire last few years is to provide that cloud experience to our customers wherever their apps and data live so that they can have the freedom to innovate across the entire estate and do it securely. That is the only way you're going to really provide these truly differentiated and insightful experiences at the edge, which is where the action is. >> Yeah, you guys are really putting out some really insight there. And I would just say that this highlights what I've always believed as making the innovation strategy concept, not just a cliche, but you if you don't have an innovation strategy with tech and people, it's going to be exposed and that table stakes are there because of the of the marketplace. If you don't deliver, the stakes are really high. And this brings back to the women leaders in IT, you guys are doing, how do people get involved? I mean, what's the take on this? You guys doing a great job. What's the process is that the adjoin you guys recruit? I mean, how does someone who's watching or participating in HPE Discover Virtual get involved? >> Let me do a quick commercial because it is HPE discover and the best way to get involved with Women Leaders in Technology is to join up register for HPE discover and join us on July 1st, Managing The Workplace in a New Normal, July 8th, Navigating Change the Mindset for Success in Turbulent Times. And the first one Leading Through Recovery with Rashmi right here. And I believe that's on the first Friday, so coming up next week. So those are three ways in to at least be able to get involved with what we're doing. But we also do throughout the year events with our customers in multiple offices around the globe, where we get together as leaders, we talk about leadership we recruit, then there's all of the other things that we support. And Rashmi maybe want to talk about that from Grace Hopper and all the way through some of the other wonderful organizations that our Women Leaders in Technology are supportive of and engaged in. Rashmi? >> Yes, absolutely. So First of all our global women leader ERG as well as there are a couple other ERGs within business unit which works diligently to create engagement for men, allies and women employees. So, my last travel before this pandemic hit and children place came in was for International Women's Day celebration in Sofia, Bulgaria. And what we did as women leaders of the company is created a competition for the location to host that event. There was an enormous amount of energy when I was in Sofia, with guest speakers with executive speakers and our main allies who were speaking at the event as well. And it was webcasted across the globe for all HPE employees to experience. There were watch parties there was enormous amount of energy going into the event. Similarly, when we participate in Grace Hopper, it's like a carnival for us, we have our boots, we do interviews, Marissa hosted a great event at Disney for our college students who were attending Grace Hopper to come experience, what HPE is all about and how dedicated we are to the cause of women and STEM and young women to showcase our leaders there and what you can be once you are at HPE. So a lot of such events also happen at various locations and as being women, we create everything fun, everything more engaging, and everybody wants to participate in these events. >> Well, certainly know you got to do it virtually >> And I think importantly John, I don't want to overlook that the Allyship. The man at HPE are very, very much a part of this and very supportive of everything that we do. It's not just all women, it is a lot of women but our men are definitely part of the part of the whole fabric of it, including Grace Hopper. >> And it's always great talent coming out of schools and seeing a lot of jobs out there right now there's new job so this brings up the shift. You look at cybersecurity and all cross in tech, it's the aperture of computer science has changed. You don't have to be a coder, you can do a lot of different things. This brings up the culture question I really love to get you guys personal opinions on this. For folks watching wants to see the new kind of Instagram picture of HPE if they want to look inside. How would you describe the culture of HPE these days? Obviously, the innovation you guys are super impressive. What's it like inside? What's it like to work there? How would you describe the culture of HPE? >> Well, it's a wonderful place to work and our culture is the primary reason why it is so, it started with Bill and Dave. And were about community. They were not about building a conglomerate. They were about building a community and that has just stayed with us throughout. Innovation is critical to us being bold, being inclusive. These are our values, but they're not just words on a page, they are actually our values, and we live them and our belief system and then they were put down on a page so that we can all look at them, recognize them, celebrate them, and it starts at the very top. Antonio has been with the company 26 years now I think it is. He is a true HPE, died in the role, Engineer himself. And we all feel really good about being here and being with each other. We have a mission and a purpose and that is to advance the way people live and work. That is why every HPE teammate gets up in the morning. That is what we do for a living. And it comes through in everything that we do. >> Rashmi? >> Yeah, I would like to add there is what Bill and Dave created for us, and the good things that is retained by HPE, as well as our ability to change and pivot. So, as you talked about John, we are an innovation company. We are a huge product and research based company. Now with as a service, though, we are also looking at how do we understand more outside in what our customers are looking for? What kind of experiences when they interact with our products, and how do we really understand it and drive alignment early on with our customers to be able to put these as a service products out to them as well as quickly learn and pivot again as needed. So the points that Marissa mentioned about take risk, be bold don't be afraid to be afraid to fail, as well as customer focus, relentless journey to ensure our customers are getting what they need, has has been kind of a new HPE culture manifesto, which is really embodied by Antonio and the leadership team which is then taken by our employees. So while we are keeping what's good from Dave Vellente, we are also augmenting it based on the changing needs of our customers and the industry that we are in where we cannot be stagnant forever. >> I think carrying that mission and spirit of Bill and Dave is great. In fact, John Chamberlin notices on his on the keynote here at Virtual Experience. He said to me privately that he has mad respect for HPE going back, he was hiring all the executives that from Bill and Dave's cloth there and brought them into Cisco now he's out helping companies and I think that is really about the community and the respect for the Individual citizenship. Those are values that I think, stand the test of time. I think that's great that you guys are keeping that going and that's awesome. And we appreciate the community support with theCUBE and collaborate. So thank you very much for that. And don't forget the innovation. I mean, Marissa go back 30 minutes you guys first coined hybrid cloud. I think that was like happening now innovation is still there. You got to be tech leaders. >> Better is yet to come Greenlake, we love our Greenlake. >> Great stuff. Thank you guys so much for this conversation. I really it was so awesome. Great insight there. Congratulations on the Women Leaders in Technology. Final question for you both complete the sentence. Women Leaders in Technology is a competitive advantage to your clients because, blank. >> Because it's one more way that they can partner with HPE to improve the way their customers live ans more. >> Rashmi, complete the sentence Women Leaders and Tech is a competitive advantage to your customers and clients because? >> We can collaborate to bring better products and services for their customers together. >> Awesome. Thank you so much, and congratulations on the Women in Technology, we'll be following it will be if you got to do the virtual events, let us know. We got the remote studio, we always love collaborating and of course, we got women Wednesdays on theCUBE every week on our site. And thanks for again, all your support and this is a great experience. Thanks for spending the time appreciate Marissa and Rashmi. >> Thank you, stay well >> Thank you. >> Stay well. >> Okay, HPE Virtual Experience. This is theCUBE HPE Discover Virtual Experience for bringing you coverage and great interviews from thought leaders, experts, community practitioners and customers. I'm John Furrier, for theCUBE Thanks for watching. (ambient music)

>> From Cambridge, Massachusetts it's theCUBE, covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by, SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Paul Gillan. Chris Lynch, good friend is here CEO, newly minted CEO and AtScale and legend. Good to see you. >> In my own mind. >> In mine too. >> It's great to be here. >> It's awesome, thank you for taking time. I know how busy you are, you're running around like crazy your next big thing. I was excited to hear that you got back into it. I predicted it a while ago you were a very successful venture capitalists but at heart, you're startup guy, aren't ya? >> Yeah 100%, 100%. I couldn't be more thrilled, I feel invigorated. I think I've told you many times, when you've interviewed me and asked me about the transition from being an entrepreneur to being a VC and since it's a PG show, I've got a different analog than the one I usually give you. I used to be a movie star and now I'm an executive producer of movies. Now am back to being a movie star, hopefully. >> yeah well, so you told me when you first became a VC you said, I look for startups that have a 10X impact either 10X value, 10X cost reduction. What was it that attracted you to AtScale? What's the 10X? >> AtScale, addresses $150 billion market problem which is basically bringing traditional BI to the cloud. >> That's the other thing you told me, big markets. >> Yeah, so that's the first thing massive market opportunity. The second is, the innovation component and where the 10X comes we're uniquely qualified to virtualize data into the pipeline and out. So I like to say that we're the bridge between BI and AI and back. We make every BI user, a citizen data scientist and that's a game changer. And that's sort of the new futuristic component of what we do. So one part is steeped in, that $150 billion BI marketplace in a traditional analytics platforms and then the second piece is into you delivering the data, into these BI excuse me, these AI machine learning platforms. >> Do you see that ultimately getting integrated into some kind of larger, data pipeline framework. I mean, maybe it lives in the cloud or maybe on prem, how do you see that evolving over time? >> So I believe that, with AtScale as one single pane of glass, we basically are providing an API, to the data and to the user, one single API. The reason that today we haven't seen the delivery of the promise of big data is because we don't have big data. Fortunate 2000 companies don't have big data. They have lots of data but to me big data means you can have one logical view of that data and get the best data pumped into these models in these tools, and today that's not the case. They're constricted by location they're constricted by vendor they're constricted by whether it's in the cloud or on prem. We eliminate those restrictions. >> The single API, I think is important actually. Because when you look at some of these guys what they're doing with their data pipeline they might have 10 or 15 unique API's that they're trying to manage. So there's a simplification aspect to, I suppose. >> One of the knocks on traditional BI has always been the need for extract databases and all the ETL that goes that's involved in that. Do you guys avoid that stage? You go to the production data directly or what's the-- >> It's a great question. The way I put it is, we bring Moses to the mountain the mountain being the data, Moses being the user. Traditionally, what people have been trying to do is bring the mountain to Moses, doesn't scale. At AtScale, we provide an abstraction a logical distraction between the data and the BI user. >> You don't touch, you don't move the data. >> We don't move the data. Which is what's unique and that's what's delivering I think, way more than a 10X delivery in value. >> Because you leave the data in place you bring that value to wherever the data is. Which is the original concept of Hadoop, by the way. That was what was profound about Hadoop everybody craps on it now, but that was the game changer and if you could take advantage of that that's how you tap your 10X. >> To the difference is, we're not, to your point we're not moving the data. Hadoop, in my humble opinion why it plateaued is because to get the value, you had to ask the user to bring and put data in yet another platform. And the reason that we're not delivering on big data as an industry, I believe is because we've too many data sources, too many platforms too many consumers of data and too many producers. As we build all these islands of data, with no connectivity. The idea is, we'll create this big data lake and we're going to physically put everything in there. Guess what? Someday turned out to be never. Because people aren't going to deal with the business disruption. We move thousands of users from a platform like Teradata to a platform like Snowflake or Google BigQuery, we don't care. We're a multi-cloud and we're a hybrid cloud. But we do it without any disruption. You're using Excel, you just continue and use it. You just see the results are faster. You use Tableau, same difference. >> So we had all the vertical rock stars in here. So we had Colin in yesterday, we had Stonebraker around earlier. Andy Palmer just came on and Chris here with the CEO who ultimately sold the company to HP. That really didn't do anything with it and then spun it off and now it's back. Aaron was, he had a spring in his step yesterday. So when you think about, Vertica. The technology behind Vertica go back 10 years and where we come now give us a little journey of, your data journey. >> So I think it plays into the, the original assertion is that, vertical is a best-in-class platform for analytics but it was yet another platform. The analog I give now, is now we have Snowflake and six months, 12 months from now we're going to have another one. And that creates a set of problems if you have to live in the physical world. Because you've all these islands of data and I believe, it's about the data not about the models, it's about the data. You can't get optimal results if you don't have an optimal access to the pertinent data. I believe that having that Universal API is going to make the next platform that more valuable. You're not going to be making the trade-off is, okay we have this platform that has some neat capability but the trade-off is from an enterprise architecture perspective we're never going to be able to connect all this stuff. That's how all of these things proliferated. My view is, in a world where you have that single pane of glass, that abstraction layer between the user and the data. Then innovation can be spawned quicker and you can use these tools effectively 'cause you're not compromising being able to get a logical view of the data and get access to it as a user. >> What's your issue with Snowflake you mentioned them, Mugli's company-- >> No issue, they're a great partner of ours. We eliminate the friction between the user going from an on-prem solution to the cloud. >> Slootman just took over there. So you know where that's going. >> Yep (laughing) >> Frank's got the magic touch. Okay good, you say they're a partner yours how are you guys partnering? >> They refer us into customers that, if you want to buy Snowflake now the next issue is, how do i migrate? You don't. You put our virtualization layer in and then we allow you access to Snowflake in a non-disruptive way, versus having to move data into their system or into a particular cloud which creates sales friction. >> Moving data is just, you want to avoid it at all cost. >> I do want to ask you because I met with your predecessors, Dave Mariani last year and I know he was kind of a reluctant CEO he didn't really want to be CEO but wanted to be CTO, which is what he is now. How did that come about, that they found you that you connected with them and decided this was the right opportunity. >> That's a great question. I actually looked at the company at the seed stage when I was in venture, but I had this thing as you know that, I wanted to move companies to Boston and they're about my vintage age-wise and he's married with four kids so that wasn't in the cards. I said look, it doesn't make sense for me to seed this company 'cause I can't give you the time you're out in California everything I'm instrumenting is around Boston. We parted friends. And I was skeptical whether he could build this 'cause people have been talking about building a heterogeneous universal semantic layer, for years and it's never come to fruition. And then he read in Fortune or Forbes that I was leaving Accomplice and that I was looking for one more company to operate. He reached out and he told me what they were doing that hey, we really built it but we need help and I don't want to run this. It's not right for the company and the opportunity So he said, "I'll come and I'll consult to you." I put together a plan and I had my Vertica and data robot. NekTony guys do the technical diligence to make sure that the architecture wasn't wedded to the dupe, like all the other ones were and when I saw it wasn't then I knew the market opportunity was to take that, rifle and point it at that legacy $150 billion BI market not at the billion dollar market of Hadoop. And when we did that, we've been growing at 162% quarter-over-quarter. We've built development centers in Bulgaria. We've moved all operations, non-technical to Boston here down in our South Station. We've been on fire and we are the partner of choice of every cloud manner, because we eliminate the sales friction, for customers being able to take advantage of movement to the cloud and we're able through our intelligent pipeline and capability. We're able to reduce the cost significantly of queries because we understand and we were able to intelligently cash those queries. >> Sales ops is here, all-- >> Sales marketing, customer support, customer success and we're building a machine learning team here at Dev team here. >> Where are you in that sort of Boston build-out? >> We have an office on 711 Atlantic that we opened in the fall. We're actually moving from 4,000 square feet to 10,000 this month. In less than six months and we'll house by the first year, 100 employees in Boston 100 in Bulgaria and about that same hundred in San Mateo. >> Are you going after net new business mainly? Or there's a lot of legacy BI out there are you more displacing those products? >> A couple of things. What we find is that, customers want to evolve into the cloud, they don't want a revolution they want a evolution. So we allow them, because we support hybrid cloud to keep some data behind the firewall and then experiment with moving other data to the cloud platform of choice but we're still providing that one logical view. I would say most of our customers are looking to reap platform, off of Teradata or something onto a, another platform like Snowflake. And then we have a set of customers that see that as part of the solution but not the whole solution. They're more true hybrids but I would say that 80% of our customers are traditional BI customers that are trying to contemporize their environments and be able to take advantage of tabular support and multidimensional, the things that we do in addition to the cube world. >> They can keep whatever they're using. >> Correct, that's the key. >> Did you do the series D, you did, right? >> Yes, Morgan Stanely led. >> So you're not actively but you're good for now, It was like $50 million >> Yeah we raised $50 million. >> You're good for a bit. Who's in the Chris Lynch target? (laughs) Who's the enemy? Vertica, I could say it was the traditional database guys. Who's the? >> We're in a unique position, we're almost Switzerland so we could be friend to foe, of anybody in that ecosystem because we can, non-disruptively re-platform customers between legacy platforms or from legacy platforms to the cloud. We're an interesting position. >> So similar to the file sharing. File virtualization company >> The Copier. >> Copier yeah. >> It puts us in an interesting position. They need to be friends with us and at the same time I'm sure that they're concerned about the capabilities we have but we have a number of retail customers for instance that have asked us to move down from Amazon to Google BigQuery, which we accommodate and because we can do that non-disruptively. The cost and the ability to move is eliminated. It gives customers true freedom of choice. >> How worried are you, that AWS tries to replicate what you guys do. You're in their sights. >> I think there are technical, legal and structural barriers to them doing that. The technical is, this team has been at it for six and a half years. So to do what we do, they'll have to do what we've done. Structurally from a business perspective if they could, I'm not sure they want to. The way to think about Amazon is, they're no different than Teradata, except for they want the same vendor lock-in except they want it to be the Amazon Cloud when Teradata wanted it to be, their data warehouse. >> They don't promote multi-cloud versus-- >> Yeah, they don't want multi-cloud they don't want >> On Prem >> Customers to have a freedom of choice. Would they really enable a heterogeneous abstraction layer, I don't think they would nor do I think any of the big guys would. They all claim to have this capability for their system. It's like the old IBM adage I'm in prison but the food's going to get three squares a day, I get cable TV but I'm in prison. (laughing) >> Awesome, all right, parting thoughts. >> Parting thoughts, oh geez you got to give me a question I'm not that creative. >> What's next, for you guys? What should we be paying attention to? >> I think you're going to see some significant announcements in September regarding the company and relationships that I think will validate the impact we're having in the market. >> Give you some leverage >> Yeah, will give us, better channel leverage. We have a major technical announcement that I think will be significant to the marketplace and what will be highly disruptive to some of the people you just mentioned. In terms of really raising the bar for customers to be able to have the freedom of choice without any sort of vendor lock-in. And I think that that will create some counter strike which we'll be ready for. (laughing) >> If you've never heard of AtScale before trust me you're going to in the next 18 months. Chris Lynch, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> It's my pleasure. >> Great to see you. All right, keep it right there everybody we're back with our next guest, right after this short break you're watching theCUBE from MIT, right back. (upbeat music)

>> Female Voice: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware RADIO 2019, brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware RADIO 2019, Lisa Martin with John Furrier in San Francisco, talking all sorts of innovation in this innovation long history culture at VMware, welcoming back to theCUBE, Mornay Van Der Walt, VP of R&D in the Explorer Group. Mornay, thank you for joining John and me on theCUBE today. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, I got to start with Explorer Group. Super cool name. >> Yeah. >> What is that within R&D? >> So the origins of the Explorer Group. I've had many roles at VMware, and I've been fortunate enough to do a little bit of everything. Technical marketing; product development; business development; one of the big things I did before the Explorer group was created was actually EVO:RAIL. I was the founder of that, pitched that idea. Raghu and Ray and Pat were very supportive. We took that to market, took it to (inaudible), handed that off to Dell EMC, the rest is history, right? And then was, "what's next?" So Ray and me look at some special projects, go and look at IoT, go and look at Telemetry, and did some orders for them, and then said "Alright, why don't you look at all our innovation programs." Because beyond RADIO, we actually have four other programs. And everyone, was -- RADIO gets a lot of airtime and press, but it's really the collective. It's the power of those other four programs that support RADIO that allow us to take an idea from inception to an impactful outcome. So hence the name, the Explorer Group. We're going out there, we're exploring for new ideas, new technologies, what's happening in the market. >> Talk about the R&D management style. You've actually got all these-- RADIO's one-- kind of a celebration, it's kind of the best of the best come together, with papers and submissions. Kind of a symposium meets kind of a, you know, successive end for all the top engineers. There's more, as you've mentioned. How does all of it work? Because, in this modern era of distributed teams, decentralization, decisions around business, decisions on allocating to the portfolio, what gets invested, money, spend, how do you organize? Give a quick minute to explain how R&D is structured. >> So, obviously, we have the BUs structured-- well there's PCS, Raghu and Rajeev head that up. And then we've got the OCTO organization, which Ray O'Farrell heads up. And the business, you know, it's innovating every day to get products out the door, right, and that's something that we've got to be mindful of because, I mean, that's ultimately what's allowing us to get products into the hands of our customers, solving tough problems. But then in addition to that, we want to give our engineers an avenue to go and explore, and, you know, tinker on something that's maybe related to their day job, or completely off, unrelated to their day job. The other thing that's important is, we also want to give, because we're such a global R&D, you know, our setup globally, we want to give teams the opportunity to work together, collaborate together, get that diversity of thought going, and so a lot of times, if we do a Hackathon, which we call a Borathon, we actually give bonus points if teams pull from outside of their business units. So you've got an idea, well, let's make it a diverse idea in terms of thought and perspective. If you're from the storage business unit, bring in folks from the network business unit. Bring in folks from the cloud business unit. Maybe you've partnered with some folks that are in IT. It's very, you know, sometimes engineers will go, "Ah, it's just R&D that's innovating." But in reality, there's great innovation coming out of our IT department. There's great innovation coming out of our global support organization. Our SEs that are on the front lines, sometimes are seeing the customers' pain points firsthand, and then they bring that back, and some of that makes it into the product. >> How much of R&D is applied R&D, which is kind of business unit aligned, or somewhat aligned, versus the wacky, crazy ideas: "Go solve a big, hairy problem", that's out there, that's not, kind of, related to the current product sets? >> Ah, that's tough to put an actual number on it, >> John: Well ballpark, I mean. >> But if I just say, like, if I had to just think about budgets and that, it's probably ten to fifteen percent is the wacky stuff, that's, you know, not tied to a roadmap, that's why we call it "off-road innovation", and the five programs that my Explorer Group ultimately leads is all about driving that off-road innovation. And eventually you want to find an on-ramp, >> Yeah. >> to a roadmap, you know, that's aligned to a business unit, or a new emerging, you know, technology. >> How does someone come up with an idea and say, "Hey, you know, I want to do this"? Do they submit, like, a form? Is there a proposal? Who approves it? I mean, do you get involved? How does that process work? >> So that's a good question. It really depends on the engineer, right? You take someone who's just a new college grad, straight out of, you know, college. That's why we have these five programs. Because some of these folks, they've got a good idea, but they don't really know how to frame it, pitch it. And so if you've got a good idea, and let's say, this is your first rodeo, so to speak, We have a program called TechTalks where it allows you to actually go and pitch your idea; get some feedback. And that's sometimes where you get the best feedback, because you go and, you know, present your idea, and somebody will come back and say, "Well, you know, have you met, you know, Johnny and Sue over there, in this group? They're actually working on something similar. You should go and talk to them, maybe you guys can bring your ideas together." Folks that are, you know, more seasoned, you know, longer tenure, sometimes they just come up, and-- "I'm going to pitch an idea to xLabs," and for xLabs, for example --that's an internal incubator-- there is, like, a submissions process. We want to obviously make sure, that, you know, your idea's timing in the market's correct, we've got limited funding there so we're going to make sure we're really investing on the right, you know, type of ideas. But if you don't want to go and pitch your idea and get feedback, go and do a Borathon. Turn an idea into a little prototype. And we see a lot of that happening, and some of the greatest ideas are coming from our Borathons, you know? And it's also about tracking the journey. So, we have RADIO here today, we have mentioned xLabs, TechTalks, we have another program called Flings. Some of our engineers are shipping product, and they've got an idea to augment the product. They put it out as a Fling, and our customers and the ecosystem download these, and it augments the product. And then we get great feedback. And then that makes it back into the product roadmap. So there's a lot of different ways to do it, and RADIO, the process for RADIO, there's a lot of rigor in it. It's, like, it's run as a research program. >> Lisa: It's a call for papers, right? >> Call for papers, you know, there's a strict format, it's got to be, you know, this many pages; if you go over about one line, you're sort of, disqualified, so to speak. And then once you've got those papers, like this year we had 560 papers be submitted, out of those 560, 31 made it onto mainstage, and another 61 made it as posters, as you can see in the room we're sitting in. >> I have an idea. Machine learning should get all those papers. (laughs) I mean, that's-- >> Funny you say that. We actually have, one of our engineers, Josh Simons, is actually using machine learning to go back in time and look at all the submissions. So idea harvesting is something we're paying a lot of attention to, because you submit an idea, >> Interesting. >> the market may not be right for it, or reality is, I just don't have a budget to fund it if it's an xLab. >> John: So it's like a Google search for your, kind of, the indexing all those workers. >> Internally, yeah, and sometimes it's-- there's a great idea here, you merge that with another idea from another group or another geo, and then you can actually go and fund something. >> Well, that's important because timing is critical, in these early-- most stuff can be early in just incubation, gestation period for that tech or concept, could be in play because the computer-- all the new things, right? >> Correct. And, do you actually have the time? You're an engineer working on a release, the priority is getting that release out the door, right? >> (laughs) >> So, put the idea on the back burner, come off the release, and then, you know, get a couple of colleagues together and maybe there's a Borathon being held and you go and move that idea forward that way. Or, it's time for RADIO submissions, get a couple of colleagues together and submit a RADIO paper. So we want to have different platforms for our engineers to submit ideas outside of their day job. >> And it sounds like, the different programs that you're talking about: Flings, xLab, Borathon, RADIO, what it sounds like is, there isn't necessarily a hierarchy that ideas have to go through. It really depends on the teams that have the ideas, that are collaborating, and they can put them forward to any of these programs, >> Correct, yeah. >> and one might get, say, rejected for RADIO, but might be great for a Borathon or a Fling? >> Correct. >> So they've got options there, and there's multiple committees, I imagine? Is that spearheaded out of Ray's OCTO group, >> Yep. >> that's helping to make the selections? Tell us a little bit about that process. >> Sure, so. That's a great point, right? To get an idea out the door, you don't always have to take the same pathway. And so one thing we started tracking was these innovation journeys that all take different pathways. We just published an impact report on innovation for FY19, and we've got the vSAN story in there, right? It was an idea. A group of engineers had an idea, like, in 2009, and they worked on their idea a little bit-- it first made it to RADIO in 2011. And then they came back in 2013, and, sort of, the rest is history, you know. vSAN launched in 2014. We had a press release this week for Carbon Avoidance Meter. It was an idea that actually started as a calculator many years ago. Was used, and then sort of died on the vine, so to speak? One of our SEs said, "You know, this is a good idea. I want to evolve this a little bit further." Came and pitched an xLabs idea, and we said, "Alright, we're going to fund this as an xLabs Lite. Three to six months project, limited funding, work on one objective --you're still doing your day job-- move the project forward a little bit." Then Nicola Acutt, our Sustainability VP, got involved, wanted to move the idea a little bit further along, came back for another round of funding through an xLabs Lite, and then GSS, with their Skyline platform, picked it up, and that's going to be integrated in the coming months into Skyline, and we're going to be able to give our customers a carbon, sort of, readout of their data center. And then they'll be able to, you know, map that, and get a bigger picture, because obviously, it's not just the servers that are virtualized, there's cooling in the data center plants, and all these other factors that you've got to, you know, take into account when you want to look at your carbon footprint for your facility. So, we have lots of examples of how these innovation pathways take different turns, and sometimes it's Team A starting with an idea, Team B joins in, and then there's this convergence at a particular point, and then it goes nowhere for a couple of months, and then, a business unit picks it up. >> One of the things that's come out-- Pat Gelsinger mentioned that a theme outside of the normal product stuff is how people do work. There's been some actual R&D around it, because you guys have a lot of distributed, decentralized operations in R&D because of the global nature. >> Yeah. >> How should companies and R&D be run when the reality is that developers could be anywhere? They could be at a coffee shop, they could be overseas, they could be in any geography, how do you create an environment where you have that kind of innovation? Can you just share some of the best practices that you guys have found? >> I'm not sure if there's 'best practices', per se, but to make sure that the programs are open and inclusive to everybody on the planet. So, I'll give you some stats. For example, when RADIO started in the early days, we were founded in Palo Alto. It was a very Palo Alto-centric company. And for the first few years, if you looked at the percentage of attendees, it was probably over 75% were coming from Palo Alto. We've now over the years shifted that, to where Palo Alto probably represents about 44%, 16% is the rest of North America, and then the balance is from across the globe. And so that shift has been deliberate, obviously that impacts the budget a little bit, but in our programs, like a Borathon, you can hack from anywhere. We've got a lot of folks that are remote office workers, using, you know, collaborative tools, they can be part of a team. If the Borathon's happening in China, it doesn't stop somebody in Palo Alto or in Israel or in Bulgaria, participating. And, you know, that's the beautiful nature of being global, right? If you think about how products get out of the door, sometimes you've got teams and you are literally following the sun, and you're doing handoff, you know, from Team A to B to C, but at the end of the day you're delivering one product. And so that's just part of our culture, I mean, everybody's open to that, we don't say, "Oh, we can't work with those guys because they're in that geo-location." It's pretty open. >> This is also, really, an essential driver, and I think I saw last year's RADIO, there were participants from 25+ countries. But this is an essential-- not only is VMware a global company, but many of your customers are as well, and they have very similar operating models. So that thought diversity, to be able to build that into the R&D process is critical. >> Absolutely. And also, think about, you know, when you're going to Europe. Smaller borders, countries, you deploy technology differently. And so, you want to have that diversity in thought as well, because you don't just want to be thinking, "Alright, we're going to deploy a disaster recovery product in North America where they can fail over from, you know, East Coast to West Coast. You go to Europe, and typically you're failing over from, you know, site A to site B, and they're literally three or four miles apart. And so, just having that perspective as well, is very important. And we see that, you know, when we release certain products, you'll get, you know, better uptick in a certain geo, and then, "Why is it stalling over here?" well it's, sometimes it's cultural, right? How do you deploy that technology? Just because it works in the US, doesn't mean it's going to work in Europe or in APJ. >> How was your team involved in the commercialization? You mentioned vSAN and the history of that, but I'm just wondering, looking at it from an investment standpoint of deciding which projects to invest in, and then there's also the-- if they're ready to go to market, the balance of "How much do we need to invest in sales and marketing to be able to get this great idea-- because if we can't market it and sell it, you know, then there's obviously no point." So what's that balance like, within your organization, about, "how do we commercialize this effectively, at scale"? >> So that is ultimately not the responsibility of my group. We'll incubate ideas, like, for example, through an xLabs project. And, you know, sometimes we'll get to a point and we'll work, collaborate with a business unit, and we'll say, "Alright, we feel this project's probably a 24 months project", if it's an xLabs Full. So these folks are truly giving up their day job. But at the end of the day, you want to have an exit and when we say exit, what does that exit mean? Is that an exit into a business unit? Are you exiting the xLabs project because we're now out of funding? You know, think about a VC, I'm going to fund you to, you know, to a particular point; if there is no market traction, >> Right. >> we may, you know, sunset the project. And, you know, so our goal is to get these ideas, select which ones we want to invest in, and then find a sort of off-ramp into a business unit. And sometimes there'll be an off-ramp into a business unit, and the project goes on for a couple of months, and then we make a decision, right? And it's not a personal decision, it's like, "Well we funded that as an xLabs; we're now going to shut it down because, you know, we're going to go and make an acquisition in this space. And with the talent that's going to come onboard, the talent that was working on this xLab project, we can push the agenda forward." >> John: You have a lot of action going on so you move people around. >> Exactly. >> Kind of like the cloud, elastic resource, yeah? (laughs) >> So, then, some of these things, because xLabs is only a two-year-old, you know, we haven't had things exit yet that are, you know, running within a business unit that we're seeing this material impact. You know, from a revenue point of view. So that's why tracking the journeys is very important. And, you know, stay tuned, maybe in about three or four years we'll have this, similar, you know, interview, and I'll be able to say, "Yeah, you know, that started as an xLab, and now it's three years into the market, and look at the run rate. >> So there's 31-- last question for you-- there's 31 projects that were presented on mainstage. Are there any that you could kind of see, early on, "ooh", you know, those top five? Anything that really kind of sticks out-- you don't have to explain it in detail, but I'm just curious, can you see some of that opportunity in advance? >> Absolutely. There's been some great papers up on mainstage. And covering, you know, things on the networking side, there's a lot of innovation going in on the storage side. If you think about data, right, the explosion of data because of edge computing, how are you going to manage that data? How are you going to take, you know, make informed decisions on that data? How can you manipulate that data? What are you going to have to do from a dedupe point of view, or a replication point of view, because you want to get that to many locations, quickly? So, I saw some really good papers on data orchestration, manipulation, get it out to many places, it can take an informed decision. I saw great-- there was a great paper on, you know, you want to go and put something in AWS. There's a bull that you get at the end of the month, right? Sometimes those bulls can be a little bit frightening, right? You know, what can you do to make sure that you manage those bulls correctly? And sometimes, the innovation has got nothing to do with the product per se, but it has to do with how we're going to develop. So we have some innovation on the floor here where an engineer has looked at a different way of, basically, creating an application. And so, there's a ton of these ideas, so after RADIO, it doesn't stop there. Now the idea harvesting starts, right? So yes, there were 31 papers that made it onto mainstage, 61 that are posters here. During that review process, and you asked that question earlier and I apologize, I didn't answer it-- you know, when we look at the papers, there's a team of over 100 folks from across the globe that are reviewing these papers. During that review process, they'll flag things like "This is not going to make it onto mainstage, but the idea here is very novel; we should send this off to our IP team," you know. So this year at RADIO, there were 250 papers that were flagged for further followup with our IP team, so, do we go and then file an IDF, Invention Disclosure Form, do those then become patents, you know? So if we look at the data last year, it was 210. Out of those 210, 74 patents were filed. So there's a lot of work that now will happen post-RADIO. Some of these papers come in, they don't make it onto mainstage; they might become a poster. But at the same time they're getting flagged for a business unit. So from last year, there were 39 ideas that were submitted that are now being mapped to roadmap across the BUs. Some of these papers are great for academic research programs, so David Tennenhouse's research group will take these papers and then, you know, evolve them a little bit more, and then go and present them at academic conferences around the world. So there's a lot of, like, the "what's next?" aspect of RADIO has become a really big deal for us. >> The potential is massive. Well, Mornay, thank you so much for joining John and me, >> Thank you. >> and I've got to follow xLabs, there's just a lot of >> (laughs) >> really, really, innovative things that are so collaborative, coming forward. We thank you for your time. >> Thank you. >> For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin; you're watching theCUBE, exclusive coverage of VMware RADIO 2019, from San Francisco. Thanks for watching.

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Radio 2018. Brought to you by VMware. (lively electronic music) Hello everyone and welcome to special Cube coverage here in San Francisco, California. We're at VMware's Radio 2018 event. This is their annual R&D event where all the best people, smartest people, come together to collaborate on new projects, new innovations. Not imitation, innovation. Had great speakers up there. They had Steve Herrick, Cube alumni, now a venture capitalist, formerly CTO of VMware. And our first guest here today is Ray O'Farrell, executive vice president and CTO of VMware, been on theCUBE before. Great to see you, thanks for joining us. >> Great to see you, good morning. >> So I love this event 'cause it's, like you mentioned before we came on camera, Steve Herrick said it's like a sales kick-off for engineers. >> Correct yeah, yep. >> Which is like a rah, rah but also, you know, really motivating, but also putting out the north star. >> [Ray] Yep. >> Which is the innovation message. >> [Ray] Correct. >> So take minute to talk about what this event is. Explain to the folks, what is Radio 2018? There's a lot of history involved here. >> [Ray] Yep. >> Behind us is a t-shirt row of, you know, key milestones of VMware history. You know, think inside the box, now it's, think inside the cloud. What's this event about? >> So, um, the event has quite a few years. This is like the 14th year we've done this, right? And when it started, what it was really focused on was, in some ways, a recognition that, as the company begins to grow, as you begin to build new products and engage in new partnerships, In order to keep innovation alive, you almost need to manage it. The problem is you can't manage innovation. Almost by, you know, by definition it's something chaotic. It's an inspirational idea. It's something that was not expected. That's what makes it innovation. But what you can do, is you can create a culture which promotes that innovation or creates opportunities for those ideas to emerge. Or when those ideas do emerge, make sure there's a place for them to be heard and there's an opportunity for a network to build around them. And Radio is a part of that. We have lots of other programs in VMware to help keep driving that culture of innovation, but Radio is probably the primary one. >> Talk about some of the history from this event. What has come out of these events? 'Cause I wanna get into some of the specific questions around how R&D works these days vis-a-vis how it used to work. But, specifically, what has come out of these events? Can you point to any things that kind of popped out? Because R&D, I won't say hit or miss, but it's the idea is to experiment and try new things and nail it. What has come out of VMware's Radio years of history? >> Yeah, so, very practically, we get a lot of patents out of Radio. That's just a very practical sense. As people are building up the papers, as they're looking at the ideas they want to drive, as they work with different teams to build prototypes. Quite a few times people do that at Radio when they're making a presentation. They'll generate ideas, invention disclosures, which generate new patents. This show alone, even though we just actually entering the show at this stage, has already generated about nearly 240 IDFs. A lot of those have the potential to become patents. So it's very, very practical and pragmatic about the generation of patents and new ideas. When you look at the products side of things, quite often what you see at Radio is not necessarily a new product in a whole new area. What you tend to see is, we have existing technologies bubbling in different spaces and now, because you're able to bring these teams together, somebody gets an idea that says, Oh, I can combine machine learning with what we're doing in terms of logging and now I've got an interesting product to help support our customers, you know, deal with real world problems. >> So, it's not take that hill, build me a blockchain product, it's more of, take a step back, zoom back, look at the big picture, understand the fusion of where things are coming together, look at architecture. Is that kind of the-- >> Yeah, actually, sometimes there is the, take that hill, take the blockchain product, but quite often, it starts as something small. You have a Radio event where somebody will say blockchain is cool and interesting. Here's how you run it in a more efficient fashion on vSphere, something like that. And that would be a poster session. And it's only then when somebody sees that that says, I can really run blockchain on vSphere? Can I do it better even now it's physical in some way? And that's when the story emerges. So you don't necessarily see the product announcement coming from Radio itself. What you see is the core of that idea and then a few months later, or the next major VMWorld, or two VMWorlds out, you begin to see these things emerging. >> It's like you're creating sparks of innovation, throw onto the fire, create some action. >> That's exactly the way it works. You know, things like, a lot of stuff what we do in containers. You know, the VMware integrated containers, the combination of containers and VMs from a security point of view. You can trace a lot of that back to ideas that were generated for Radio. And it's pretty rigorous. People have to go through, submit papers, there's a submit ideas. And, you know, our most senior engineers crawl all over those and critique them and so, you know-- >> So it's competitive? >> Oh, it's very competitive. That it is, in many ways, it's a mark of honor to be invited to Radio or to present a paper and so people fight very hard to do so. >> Built in gamifications called just be smart and show some good papers. >> Yes, it's a little bit tougher today. >> How much goes into the prep for this? Because obviously that's a great bar. You guys set a high bar, high is great. And it's a great place here for people to stretch and flex their technical muscle. >> Yep. >> What's the process? How do people get to that bar? Do they collaborate? Is there meet-ups? Is there organic processes of top-down? How do you guys handle it? >> So we've a lot of different processes or programs around driving innovation, but when you look at Radio itself, and it leverages some of those others, but when you look at Radio itself, basically we create a Radio committee. The one for next year will be starting somewhere in the next couple of weeks, right? We create a Radio committee. It is typically driven by members of the office of the CTO, but works and pulls in our fellows, our principle engineers, and we form a committee which really splits into two different directions. One of which is all around the technical papers, the presentations which are gonna be presented later here today. And another one which focuses around how do you do the keynotes? How do you get invited speakers? How do you create this inspirational, you know pervasive sense of innovation. And so you have those two groups working, while cooperating somewhat independently of each other. And it takes a long time. So for instance, only about 15% of the papers which are actually submitted are presented here. So there's a lot of work going through, scanning those, combining those. One of the most exciting things you can do at VMware is, if you go back somewhere in around the February timeframe, all of our most senior engineers sit in one of our largest conference rooms with a bunch of engineers submitting papers and so on, and there is a lively debate working through paper after paper, idea after idea, and saying is this a good thing for Radio? Is this original? Hey, nobody else thought of that. What we gonna be able to do to do that? Or, in some cases, saying these two people, one from Bangalore, one from Bulgaria, we've earned these sites all over the world, these ideas look similar. Can we get those guys to talk to each other? And see what comes out of that. >> So it's kind of a team-building exercise. At the same time, pre-innovation, but it's interesting. You've mentioned you've got the challenge of the papers, which is, you know, get the accuracy on the facts, original content, original ideas. >> [Ray] Correct. >> And then the content program for the event has to be inspiring and motivating at the same time Two different things, but two design standards for you guys. >> Yeah. And, you know, we need to combine them both and, 80% to 90% of the people who are here are hardcore R&D engineers. Their day job is to write code, produce product, archetype product, right? And, you know, if you haven't worked with a group of senior engineers, they are not going to be tolerant of presentations which, oh, we saw that before-- >> [John] Or fluff. >> Or fluff, right. They want to get hardcore into the meat. In fact, the presentations that you see that get some of the highest ratings, tend to be those that are deeply technical in nature. You know VMware's software base is primarily systems software, systems engineering. They expect to see deeply technical solutions to how to attack some real world problems. >> You guys do have some smart people. It's great to have you on theCUBE. This is our ninth year doing VMWorld. Great to start coming in to the more technical events. It's fantastic. The question I gotta ask for you is, Pat Gelsinger always says on theCUBE, he's says on theCUBE a few times, but consistent theme, you gotta get out in front of that next wave or you're driftwood. To the point of, don't just take that point product at view, jump on the wave. And the wave is all about the next 10 years or 20 years. What is the wave that you guys are, that you would categorize, obviously Cloud is key, but as you have the hyper-convergence and the on-premise private cloud boom and VSAN's great. We've seen great results from that. The cloud's right there. You've got Amazon, you got Microsoft, kicking butt on the numbers. As the R&D tries not to get caught up into the fashionable day to day, you can have the long view. >> [Ray] Yeah. >> What's the wave for the long view? >> So I think there's two waves we're looking at. One of them is you need to spend a lot of time with customers and understand what their agenda is. What their innovation agenda is. You look at that, you see, you know, products popping up. How will I leverage AI in a new and interesting way? How will I do something with Blockchain? You know, I want to run AI algorithms, I need different hardware and different management software to do that. So we focus on those and make sure we're doing that. But perhaps, more importantly, I think when you begin to look at what's happening with the industry right now, you know, you saw private cloud, you saw public cloud, you see how you connect these together. It's actually that connectivity is going to be important. You know, I believe you're going to see the emergence of Edge infrastructure, but isolated? That's not powerful. Now combine that Edge infrastructure with how you can leverage what's going into the public cloud or how you're going to be able to secure all these in a way that falls back into, you know, even Teleco in some way. You're now beginning to see this synergy across all of those things. And I think, you know, that's where our sweet spot is. We know how to deal with those hard, how do I connect things together? How do I manage complex different piece of systems software? So that's where we're gonna see it. >> Well, it's great stuff. One of the benefits of being so close to VMware over the past nine years, and I was showing you some of our online data analysis. When I look at the VMware ecosystem, the interesting see the evolution and kind of the journey, 14 years. And looking at the milestones. Clearly, infrastructure, on-premise data center. And then you saw that emergence of clouds. You start to see these markets emerge. Cloud, big data comes on the scene. Data warehouse in the infrastructure. Now, that's AI, cloud is bigger. All kind of taking a little bit off the infrastructure, kind of squeezing that down, but it moves up into the Cloud. And now you've got that, over the top, Blockchain, cryptocurrency, decentralized applications. In the middle of these circles, is security, IOT, and data. >> Correct. >> You guys are right there, so I have to ask you, because they're all, the confluence of all of those are coming together. You're not up here playing Blockchain, although there's some stuff we can get into. You got some AI influencing. So, in the center of infrastructure, Cloud, AI, and Blockchain, etc. is security data, IOT. How is that coming together? What's the R&D task? >> So, actually, I think the key word you used there was confluence. You cannot really look at these as independent things. And, you know, so our focus is what does it mean to be, essentially, the infrastructure. The infrastructure management story for that new form of multi-Cloud, Edge, IOT type of narrative. So our role there is, we believe security is one of the key things to focus on. And we believe that, in that new world, connectivity is a key part of what goes on. The Edge was taught to the Cloud. The Cloud was taught to the Teleco. The Teleco was taught to the IOT. >> [John] They need power. >> Right. They need power, they need communication. They need those things. So a lot of the time, a lot of where we focus comes back to intersects. We do believe that software-defined networking is a key way of being able to deliver a new fluidity of when you get that confluence. And intersects very quickly brings you into security. That's how you begin to understand how you isolate those components, understand what you need to do to detect. When that Edge IOT device is not even the device you think it is. Somebody might have replaced it. That's where you begin to be able to see the communications as a result sort of from that. So security is key, interconnectivity is key, and you know, when we speak about IOT itself, I've got kind of a dual role at VMware. While I'm the CTO at VMware, I also focus on IOT for Dell Technologies. And when we look at that, you know, today many of the examples of IOT are very narrow, almost point, solutions. The real power will come when you begin to combine across those solutions. You know, the thing that tells you the weather, the thing that tells you the traffic, and then the thing that tells you, you know, what's the best way to get there in your car, or whatever it is. Combine those things, now you gotta secure all that. 'Cause you're sharing information. >> [John] It's super exciting. It's probably the best time to be doing R&D because Dave Vellante and I always talk about on theCUBE all the time, that, you know, if everything was Cloud operations, because the confluence is happening, what is IOT? >> [Ray] Yep. >> You have a thin Edge, could be a windfarm, traffic signal, sensor network, or it could be a data center. The data center could be an Edge. I mean, you could look at it any way, it depends on how you look at it. >> One of the biggest questions that comes up all the time is what exactly is the edge, right? And I think, you know, it means different things within different industries. It's very clear on the extreme edge. That's a device, it's a windfarm, it's measuring the behavior of a robot, or something like that. And it's very clear on the other side. That's a Cloud, I run a bunch of analytics over there. It's the interesting piece in the middle where it is both, you know, a lot of opportunity and a lot of, you know, difficulty defining it. Is the SD1 server inside of an office, is that edge? Yeah, that looks like edge, it's at the edge of the network. But it's not controlling something physical. But that SD1 server inside in a retail store, may well also be doing something with the refrigerators or the cold chain or something in that store. And now you begin to see it more as kind of an IOT device. >> That's awesome, and it's great conversation. Certainly fodder for more R&D and more innovation and the management site's key. And, I think the holy grail on all this is programmable networks, right? Come on, we've been waiting. How fast is that coming, pedal harder, come on. I know you've got to go thanks for coming on. >> But I do wanna ask you, you guys are, I wanna give you some props and just get your thoughts on obviously Blockchain. We see things like Filecoin had a very huge ICO on the IPFs side, but, you know, they didn't really have a product, but they're promising, hey, store using decentralized, we have them in the Blockchain. Obviously, it's a network storage infrastructure, it's not so much selling tokens with token economics, although it does have a piece of it. That's gonna impact you guys on the horizon. What's the current state of you guys view, your view, the team's view of Blockchain-- >> Of Blockchain? Obviously, a lot of the hype and even some of the valuations and things you see are tied to what's happening on the financial side. Bitcoin, and so on. We're not focused on that at all. What we're saying is Blockchain, or more specifically, a distributed hyper-ledger, forms the basis of a community of companies or organizations being able to, essentially, look at trust as a service. I've got a contract with you, we're now able to look across a group of companies and say we all agree, that contract is valid because of our leverage of this blockchain. That then becomes an application story. How do I run it more efficiently? How do I make sure I run it securely? How do I make sure that that community is able to leverage that service in a shared fashion? And that's what we're focused on. In fact, one of the more interesting things is when you look at things like Blockchain, when it's used in the context of something like Bitcoin, there's a degree what people value is an anonymity. We don't know who bought it, but somebody bought it. But when you look at it from a trust point of view, we actually want to be able to see who exactly did the contract. I agree that you put the contract, we worked the contract together, and we're all agreeing with that. So you see these changes when you begin to bring these technologies into enterprise. >> Efficiencies come, big time-- >> Correct. >> On supply chain. >> Exactly. Actually, we've put a lot of focus on efficiencies. We've got a research team whose job has been very focused on, given Blockchain, how do I improve the core algorithms? How do I make them more applicable to something that'd be run by a typical enterprise, or by a group of enterprises? And, you know, that's a little bit unusual for us because we're entering a kind of an application space, but what's good about this application space, it is hard systems engineering. And that's what we know how to do and that's why we think this is a great application space for us to be able to deliver real value. >> And the key word is engineering, you also mentioned earlier, community. Open Source has brought this community dynamic together where there's no middle men. This is the beautiful thing of the future infrastructure. How do you manage it? How do you make it secure trust as a service. >> Yes. >> You guys are doing a great job. Based on our data, you are on the ecosystem. You guys have all the waves covered. >> Okay. >> Ray thanks for coming on. >> Great, thank you very much. >> I appreciate the conversation. I'm John Furrier, here in San Francisco for VMware's Radio 2018. 14th year of their annual engineering kick-off, motivation, hardcore engineering critique, and also collaboration where the sparks of innovation are happening. Be right back with more. Thanks for watching. (lively electronic music)