(upbeat music playing) >> Narrator: theCUBE presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Hey guys, girls, welcome back. It's theCUBE Live in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand for Palo Alto Networks Ignite 22. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, We've had some great conversations. This is day one of two days of cube coverage. We're talking with Palo Alto executives, their partner network, their customers, going to be learning a lot about what they've been doing to really be that golden nugget. >> Yeah. We've talked, Lisa, about how Palo Alto Networks is affecting a TAM expansion strategy through acquisitions and integration and company CDW, that I remember, you know, been around a long time. I remember back in the Comdex days talk about transformation of a company. Really excited to have them on. >> We're going to talk about that. Stephanie Hagopian is here, the VP of Security at CDW. >> Stephanie, >> Hey it's great to have you on the program. >> It's so nice to be here. Thank you. >> So lots going on. CDW has made several acquisitions in the past couple of quarters alone as it relates to security. Talk to us about what's going on. >> Yes. So we are way more than the computer warehouse that you used to know. The computer catalog days, we've moved beyond that. We've made a lot of strategic acquisitions in the past several quarters. The reason for that is we're trying to change our image and our brand and how, more importantly, we engage with our customers in security. We used to traditionally be, you know, kind of at the end of the procurement cycle with our customers, and we want to be an advisor. We want to really sell solutions and help influence the outcomes that our clients are trying to achieve when it comes to, not just security, but also risk, governance, threatened vulnerability management, how are they dealing with major issues around zero trust and building a zero trust framework for a company. >> Lisa: And I imagine these acquisitions, that really from a catalyst perspective was really driven >> Yeah. by the customers and what they were >> absolutely wanting to see and feel and hear and be able to do. >> Absolutely. So the acquisitions have given us over 400 delivery resources, consultants, advisors people who can actually engage with our clients who have real life experience, have worked with global organizations, some of the biggest companies in the world in order to solve their problems. And using that experience to be able to to really create higher value, you know as we interact and engage. >> Dave: You were telling us, Stephanie, that you actually came into CDW through an acquisition. >> I did. >> And I think if you go back 10 years ago when the cloud was just sort of hitting its steep steep ramp, and it looked, it was pretty obvious. And at the same time you had what we affectionately called you know, box sellers. And it was very clear that if they didn't transform their businesses and you know, the, they a lot of 'em were small, regional companies. They had the owners had big houses and big boats but the companies were going to go away if they didn't transform. So it's interesting to me that you've chosen security and governance in some of the really most difficult areas to as part of that transformation. Where did that come from, from your perspective and you know, why security and why such challenging areas? >> Well, I've been part of security in the security industry for over 20 years, and I've loved the fact it is challenging. It's what, it's what makes us so important and critical to our clients. Security's not an easy problem to solve. And it, it's because the landscape keeps changing. The advent of cloud and now hybrid infrastructure creates endless challenges for our customers. Threat actors change. We have insider threats, we have external threats. There's all sorts of risk when you talk about third parties and how third parties interact with organizations. We have supply chain management. And now that we've moved into this hybrid work environment of virtual, not virtual. You know, we have people kind of engaging within organizations in different ways. There's just a lot of risk associated with that. It's not easy and you have to engage with stakeholders across the entire organization. You have to understand how legal thinks of this and compliance and HR. It's not just an IT issue, it's a business issue. And we understand that and it's just, it's so interesting for us to engage with our customers on critical initiatives and security is at the top of the list. It's not just a, a CISO or even a CIO problem anymore. Boards care about this, >> Lisa: Right? >> We make or break companies with cybersecurity and risk strategies. That's why it's so critical. So we consider ourselves to be a high priority for every single organization, big or small. >> Lisa: From a security perspective, what's the common denominator among industries that you're seeing? >> Oh, I mean, we see, in terms of common denominator, I think every single organization's contending with ransomware. >> Ah >> That's probably number one. Breaches. You know, how do you prevent bad actors from doing something, you know, that's threatening to information sensitive data, especially consumer data. Third party risk is a big topic, and how to secure hybrid cloud infrastructures which is a key part of, you know, Palo's strategy as well. And we realize that. >> Why do they buy from CDW? Pitch me. I'm a customer, what can you do for me? >> Yeah. Because we want to partner. So we, we provide true advisory and consulting services to our customers. We aren't there just to make a sale and walk away. We want long-term commitments and long-term partnerships with our customer base. We're there to, to give them outcomes, right? And to align to their priorities and their challenges. It's, it's not a one and done for us. This is about a long-term partnership and that's what makes us so different. And we're now through the acquisition strategies. We're the largest security integrator in North America in terms of our revenue and our size just our sheer size and capability and the amount of full-time employees we have dedicated to this part of our business. So they know they can trust us and that we can scale. >> Dave: Do you? Is is it a, a teach me how to fish strategy? Or is it also if >> Yeah, >> if you want to have, if I, if I as a customer want to have you continue to manage or at least provide some kind of managed services, where's the the line? >> Stephanie: Yeah. So we are incredibly unique in the way we've built out our security practice in that we, we do both. And we want our clients to understand that there are going to be elements of what they do that they want to keep in house from a security perspective. That is why, and it also came from an acquisition, we have a workforce development team for security. We actually are a Palo authorized training partner. And we're incredibly proud of that fact because we don't just want to configure technology. We want to enable our customers to enhance and maintain their investments with Palo and with all technologies, with all of security. At the same time, we know they can't do everything in-house, and it just might make more sense to do manage through us. So we have end-to-end managed capabilities as well and we continue to enhance that part of our business. >> So a lot, a lot of opportunities for customers there. Talk a little bit about the Palo Alto Network's extension of the value prop that you just talked about. >> Oh yes. We love, you know, Palo is taking a platform approach and really focusing on helping customers rationalize their IT infrastructure around security. We're doing the same exact thing and focusing on zero trust is huge. We're, we're having those conversations with our customers as well. We want them to take their Palo investment and try to create a platform approach because there's simplicity and cost savings in that. The security conversations becoming a CFO conversation, right? We love rationalizing those technology investments in a way that makes sense. And we're right in line with Palo in that we want to provide those capabilities end to end and we want to ensure they integrate and use that all of the capabilities within your platform to the extent of that investment, right? We want them to use everything and not just parts of the technology or just do a partial deployment. We want them to use everything that it functionally is available to them through that investment. >> Dakesh, in his keynote this morning, said the answer is not just more people. I know there's this, this, this gap between the number of required number of cyber professionals that we need and >> Stephanie: Oh yeah. >> And how many employees we have, et cetera, et cetera. However, you just can't get there overnight. So that's where service providers, you know, come in. >> Stephanie: It's huge. >> I saw a stat recently, I think it said 50% of organizations in North America don't have a SOC. >> That's true. >> Okay. So they, they need managed services. So, >> Stephanie: They do. >> What are you seeing with some of the small and mid-size companies >> Stephanie: Managed >> and, and and how does, how is that, how is that going? We're entering a new era with, >> Stephanie: Yeah with, you know, cloud can can be a, a great help and and reduce the IT load internally. >> Yeah. >> Dave: What, what's the dynamic like in the customer base? >> Smaller customers especially they just can't attract the cyber talent. It's a high demand field because there just aren't many people who have that capability, right? For us, providing managed a managed SOC is huge. One of our key acquisitions, Sirius, was our largest acquisition recently, brought us a 24 7 managed SOC capability. And that's exactly what our mid-size customers want and demand and what they need, and it's more cost effective. And now they don't have to worry about being a security business. That's not what they are. They need to run their businesses and that's what we provide through managed capabilities especially for that customer base in particular. >> Lisa: And and >> Dave: How about the really small customers, right? Who, who, you know, they're in some ways the most vulnerable. >> Yeah >> Right? >> In many ways >> They don't have the budgets they're kind of working hand to mouth. How, how do you help them? >> Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah. So we, we provide cost effective managed capabilities. So there's managed for enterprise, there's managed for mid-market, but then for small medium businesses they want something that is at the right price point. And that's what we're doing actually in co-development with Palos. That's why we're expanding, not just our professional services capabilities with the Palo platform, but also providing managed support for every aspect of the platform so that customers don't need to invest in full-time employees to do that. They can, they have a predictable cost model that's affordable, that they can leverage over time. So we're very intent on making sure we're fulfilling that not just for our big customers but also for SMB and our, and small businesses as well. >> So you really have that whole suite taken care of >> The whole suite, yeah. I want to talk about some of the the large enterprises for a second. I saw a survey recently that, you know, you talked about security is a board level conversation. It is. >> Stephanie: Very much so. >> We talk about that all the time, CFO conversation but the survey that I saw recently was that there's not there's lack of alignment on boards with the executive suite where security is concerned. Are you seeing that and how can CDW and the Palo Alto partnership help gain that important alignment? >> Stephanie: Yeah So we, we face this all the time. What's on the CISO whiteboard might not be on the CFO's whiteboard or the, the board's whiteboard right? We love, and this is the whole part of our strategy and our strategy partnering with Palo, is that we want to engage further up on the, on the cycle. The, you know, we don't want to to talk to them at the end of the purchasing cycle because we're not providing value. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> We want to help advise them and build the business case. And by them, I mean our CISOs are, you know the heads of network security. You know, their are various stakeholders that we want to engage with to help them build the business case and the justification so that they are speaking the same language as the board member, the CFO. And we do that in many ways. I think the biggest is that we've we've built a global security strategy office that encompasses practitioners. So these are former CISOs, CIOs CTOs who have sat in their shoes and done what they've done. And we bring that experience to bear, coincidentally but not so coincidentally, Palo has the same capability. So Palo's also has a team of field CISOs and former practitioners. So we're partnering together to make sure that we're enabling our customers in, in providing the right value statements and the the right ROI within the the board meetings so that they get that investment right. And they're able to do what they need to do to secure the infrastructure. >> Dave: I mean, historically the business case has been we're going to help you not get breached, and you're going to reduce your, your, your loss >> Stephanie: (indistinct) still relevant. >> And, and I'm, and it's still very relevant. Is there any sort of on the other side of the algebra algebraic equation where actually having this kind of security practice can actually drive productivity >> Absolutely. >> Or or even drive revenue and can you talk about that part of the equation? >> Stephanie: Yeah, security as an industry, we're we've gotten a lot smarter. We understand it's not just about the compliance aspect or the data privacy aspect. It's very important to your point, you know breach prevention is certainly, you know, a a great justification. It's also about automation. So you think of SOAR, right? Providing automation and visibility and dashboard views into who's doing what actually really reduces administrative overhead. We, you know, we want to re-allow our clients to repurpose individuals because there are a finite amount of people in the security industry to focus on higher value tasks. So we're enabling just a lot of cost savings through that. Self-service is a big piece of this. You know, when you think about security we bring along a lot of automation, self-service automation of business logic, and business process. There's a huge value in cost savings attached to that. So that's huge. That's a huge part of the security conversation. >> I was reading, you talked about the cybersecurity skills gap and I was reading some interesting numbers that there's 26 million developers in the world less than 3 million cybersecurity professionals. >> Stephanie: Yeah. >> Talk to us about one of your favorite customer stories where you think CDW and Palo really nailed it in terms of helping organization drive that value the top line value, the bottom line value while enabling them with your expertise. >> Oh my gosh, I don't even want to focus on one because since we became a Palo authorized training partner we have worked with over a hundred clients. We just started this this year and we've helped over a hundred clients and thousands of people get enabled on on Palo firewall configuration and training and development. So we've co, we've partnered together as and we've impacted over a hundred organizations this year in making sure their people are enabled and they're, they're going from that I'm a developer generic to I'm a security professional. So we're helping to close that cybersecurity workforce gap. And we're just so excited at the scale we've been able to do that in such a short amount of time that, I mean, if you think about next year and the year following I mean it's going to be thousands of different clients. But you think about each client, we're impact we're, we're holding classes with 30 plus people. So we've already impacted thousands of people which is amazing. >> Right? So the idea to scale the program in in calendar year 2023 >> Absolutely. We're going to, we, we tried it. This was a trial run and it was amazingly successful trial run. So we're incredibly excited to scale this even more and continue to provide, you know, that element, that workforce development element, that training element for the entire Palo's stack, not just elements of it. >> Lisa: Excellent. Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us on the program. >> Stephanie: Thank you. >> Sharing what CDW and Palo Alto Networks are doing together. The what's in it for me from a customer perspective, big impact there. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> Dave: Great to have you >> Lisa: Our pleasure. >> It's great to have, great to be here. >> Yeah. For our guest and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live and emerging tech coverage.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to San Francisco. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. The cube is covering VMware Explorer, 2022 first year with the new name, there's about seven to 10,000 people here. So folks are excited to be back. I was in the keynote this morning. You probably were two David. It was standing room, only lots of excitement, lots of news. We're gonna be unpacking some news. Next. We have Brandon Jackson joining us S DDC architect at CDW and Keith normy is back one of our alumni head of worldwide partner solution sales at NetApp guys. Welcome back to the program. Hey, thank >>You, reunion week. >>So let's talk about what's going on, obviously, lots of news this morning, lots of momentum at VMware, lots of momentum at NetApp CDW. Keith, we'll start with you talk about what was announced yesterday, NetApp, VMware, AWS, and what's in it for customers and partners. >>Yeah, it's a new day. I talked about this in a blog that I wrote that, you know, for me, I started out with VMware and NetApp about 15 years ago when the ecosystem was still kind of emerging back in the ESX three days, for those that remember those days and, and NetApp had a really real dominant position because some of the things that they had delivered with VMware, and we're kind of at that same venture now where everyone needs to have as they talk about today. Multi-cloud, and, and there's been some things that people try to get through as they talk about cloud chaos today. It also is in the, some of the realms, the barriers that you don't often see. So releasing this new FSX capability with the metal data store within VMware cloud, and AWS is a real big opportunity. And it's not just a big opportunity for NetApp. It's a big opportunity for the people that actually deliver this for the customers, which is our partner. So for me, it's full circle. I started with a partner I come back around and I'm now in a great position to kind of work with our partners. And they're the real story here with us. Yeah. >>Brandon, talk about the value in this from CDWs perspective, what is the momentum that your you and the company are excited to carry forward? >>Yeah, this is super exciting. I've been close to the VMware cloud AWS story since its inception. So, you know, almost four years building that practice out at CDW and it's a great solution, but we spent all this time prior driving people to that HCI type of mentality where, Hey, you can just scale the portions that you need and that wasn't available in the cloud. And although it's a great solution, there's pain points there where it just can become cost prohibitive because customers see what they need. But that storage piece is a heavy component. And when that adds to what that cluster size needs to be, that's a real problem with this announcement, right? We can now use those supplemental data stores and be able to shrink that size. So it saves the customer massive amounts of money. I mean, we have like 25, 50% in savings while without sacrificing anything, they're getting the operational efficiency that they know and love from NetApp. They get that control and that experience that they've been using or want to use in VMware cloud. And they're just combining the two in a very cost friendly package. >>So I have one comment and that is finally >>Right. Absolutely. I, >>We used to refer to it as the devil's triangle of CPU, memory and storage. And if those are, if those are inextricably linked to one another, you want a little bit more storage. Okay. Here's your CPU and memory that you can pay for and power and cool that you don't need? No, no, no, no, no, no. I just need, I just need some storage over here. And in the VMware context, think of the affinity that VMware has had with NetApp forever. The irony being that EMC of course, owned VMware for a period of time, kind of owned their stock. Yeah. So you have this thing that is fundamentally built around VMFS that just fits perfectly into the filer methodology. Yeah. And now they're back together in the cloud. And, and the thing is if, if we were, if we were sitting here talking about this 5, 6, 7 years ago, an AWS person would've said we were all crazy. Yeah, yeah. AWS at the time would've said, nah, no, no, no, no. We're gonna figure that out. You, you, you, you guys are just gonna have to go away. It's >>Not lost on me that, you know, it was great seeing and hearing of NetApp in a day, one VMware keynote. >>It's amazing. >>That was great. And so we built off that because the, the, the great thing about kind of where this comes from is, you know, you built that whole HCI or converged infrastructure for simplicity and everyone is simplicity. And so this is just another evolution of the story. And as you do, so, you know, you've, you've freed up for all the workloads, all the scenarios, all the, all the operational situations that you've wanted to kind of get into. Now, if you can save anywhere from 25 to 50% of the costs of previous, you can unleash a whole nother set of workloads and do so by the way, with same consistent operational consistency from NetApp, in terms of the data that you have on-prem to cloud, or even if you don't have NetApp, on-prem, you know, we have the ways to get it to the cloud and VMware cloud and AWS, and, and, and basically give you that data simplicity for management. >>And, but again, it isn't just a NetApp part of this. There is, as everyone knows with cloud, a whole layer of infrastructure around the security networking, there's a ton of work that gets from the partner side to look at applications and workloads and understand sort of what's the composition of those, which ones are ready for the cloud. First, you know, seeing, you know, the AWS person with the SAP title, that's a big workload. Obviously that's making this journey to the cloud, along with all the rest of them. That's what the partners deliver. NetApp has done everything they can do to make that as frictionless as possible in the marketplace as a first party service, and now through VMware cloud. So we've done all we can do on, on that factor. Now it's the partners that could take it. And by the way, the reaction that we've seen kind of in some of, of the private previews are working, has been incredible. These guys bring really the true superhero muscle to what organizations are gonna need to have to take those workloads to VMware cloud and, and evolve it into this new cloud era that they're talking about at the keynote today. >>Yeah, don't get us wrong. We love vSphere eight and vs a, a and VSAN aid in particular, but there's a huge market need for this, for what you guys are delivering. >>Talk to us, Brandon, from your perspective about being able to, to part, to, to have the powerhouses of NetApp, VMware and AWS, and in terms of being able to meet your customers where they are and what they want. >>And I, that's huge, right? That the solution allows these things to come together in a seamless way, right? So we get the, the flexibility of cloud. We get the scalability of easy storage now, in a way we didn't have before, and we get the power that's VMware, right. And in that, in the virtualization platform, and that makes it easy for a customer to say, I need to be somewhere else. And maybe that's not, that's not a colo anymore. That's not a secondary data center. I want to be in the cloud, but I wanna do it on my terms. I wanna do it. So it works for me as a customer. This solution has that, right? And, and we come in as a partner and we look at, we kind of call it the full stack approach, where we really look at the entire, you know, ecosystem that we're talking. >>So from the application all the way down to the infrastructure and even below, and figure out how that's gonna work best for our customers and putting things together with the native cloud services, then with their VMware environment, living on VMware cloud, AWS, leveraging storage with a, you know, with the, the FSX in. So they can easily grow their storage and use all those operational efficiencies and the things that they love about NetApp already. And from a Dr. Use case, we can replicate from a NetApp to NetApp. And it's just, it makes it so easy to have that conversation with the customers and just, it clicks. And like, this is what I need. This is what I've been looking for. And all wrapped up in a really easy package. >>No wonder Dave's comment was finally right. >>Oh, absolutely. I mean, we've been, again, you know, we talked about the HCI, like that made sense. And three or four years ago, maybe even a little bit longer, right. That click, same thing was like, oh my gosh, this is the way infrastructure should work. And we're just having that same Nirvana moment that this is how easy cloud infrastructure can work and that I can have that storage without sacrificing the cost, throw more nodes into my cluster to be able to do so. >>Yeah. I I've just worked with so many customers who struggle to get to where they want to be BEC, and this is something that just feels like a nice worn in pair of shoes or jeans to folks who right now, you know, look, the majority of it spend is still on premises, right? So the typical deployment of VMware today is often VMware with NetApp appliances providing file storage. So this is something that I imagine will help accelerate some of your customers' moves. >>It absolutely will. And in fact, I have three customers off the hand that I know that I've been like, not wanting to say anything like let's talk next week. Right? There's this, there may be something we can talk about when, on, after Explorer waiting for the announcement, because we've been working with NetApp and, and doing some of the private preview stuff. Yeah. And our engineering teams, working with your engineering teams to build this out so that when the announcement came out yesterday, we can go back and say, okay, now let's have that conversation. Now let's talk about what this looks like, >>Where are you having customer conversation? So this is strictly an it conversation has this elevated up the stack, especially as we've seen the massive, I call it cloud migration adoption of the last couple of years. >>I, I I'll speak fairly from the partner level. It is an elevated conversation. So we're not only talking, at least I'm not only talking to it. Administrators, directors, C levels like this is a story that resonates because it's about business value, right? I have an initiative, I have a goal. And that goal is wrapped into that it solution. And typically has some sort of resource or financial cost to it. We want to hear that story. And so it resonates when we can talk about how you can achieve your goals, do it in a way with a specific solution that encompasses everything at a price point that you'll like, and then that can flow down to the directors and the it administrators. And we can start talking about, you know, turning the screws and the knobs. >>Yeah. And for us, it does start with a partner because the reality is that's who the that's, who the customers all engage. And the reality is there's not just one partner type there's many, you know, we, in fact, what the biggest thing that we've been really modernizing is how to address the different partner types. Cuz you obviously have the Accentures of the world that are the big GSIs, the big SI you have folks that are hosting providers, you have Equinox X in the middle of that. You've got partners that just do services that might be only influenced partners that are influencing the, the design. And so if you look up and down between, you know, VMware's partner ecosystem and NetApp's partner ecosystem overlap pretty well, but there's this factor with AWS about, you know, both born and the cloud partners and partners, you know, like CW that have really, you know, taken the step forward to be relevant in that phase going forward. >>And that's, what's exciting to us is to see that kind of come forward. So when something like a FSX end comes forward in this VMware cloud and AWS scenario, they can take and, and just have instant ignition with it. And for us, that's what it's about. Our job is really just to remove friction back what they do and get outta the way, help them win. And last week we were in Chicago at the AWS reinvent thing and seeing AWS with another partner in their whole briefing and how they came to life with the, with this whole anticipation for this week, you know, it's, it's all the partners are very excited for it. So we're just gonna fuel that. And you know, I often wonder we got the, the t-shirt that says, you know, two's company three is a cloud maybe should have been four because it takes the, the partner for the, the completion. >>We appreciate that for sure. >>It does. It sounds like there's tremendous momentum in the market, an appetite across all three companies, four, if you include CDW. So in terms of, of the selling motion, it sounds like you've got folks that are gonna be eating out of eating out of your pocket. Who've been waiting for this for quite a while. Yeah. >>I think you, the analogy used earlier, it's nice when the tires are already on the Ferrari, right. This thing could just go, yes. And we've got people that we're already talking to that this fits, we've got some great go to market strategies. As we start doing partner in sales enablement to make sure that our people behind the scenes are telling the story and the way that we want it to jointly so that all of us can, you know, come together and have that aligned common message to really, you know, make this win and make this pop >>One correction though is technically we sponsor Aston Martin. So it's not a fry. It's an Aston Martin. There >>You go. >>That's right. Quite taken, not a car guy. Can >>You, can you talk a little bit Brendan about the, the routes to market and the, the GTM that you guys are working on together, even at a high level? Yeah. >>At a high level, we've already had some meetings talking about how we can get this message out. The nice thing about this is it's not relegated to a single industry vertical. It's not a single type of customer. We see this across the board and, and certainly with any of our cloud infrastructure solutions, it seems very, even from a regional standpoint and an industry vertical standpoint. So really it's just about how to get our sellers, you know, that get that message to them. So we had meetings here this week. We've been talking to your teams, oh, for probably six weeks now on what's that gonna look like? You know, what type of events are we gonna hold? Do we wanna do some type of road show? Yeah. We've done that with FlexPod very successfully, a few years ago where our teams working with your teams and VMware, we all came out and, and showed this to the world and doing something similar with this to show how easy it is to add supplemental storage to VMC. And just get that out to the masses through events, maybe through sales webinars. I mean, we're still in this world where maybe it's more virtual than on person, but we're starting to shift back, but it's just about telling the message and, and showing, Hey, here's how you do it. Come talk to us. We can help you. And we want to help >>Talk about the messaging from a, a multi-cloud perspective. Here we are at VMware Explorer, the theme, the center of the multi-cloud universe, how is this solution from NetApp's perspective? And then CDWs, how does it an enabler of customers that so many are living in the multi-cloud world by default? >>Yeah. And I think the big subtlety there that, that maybe was MIS missed was the private cloud being just so their cloud. The reality of that is probably a little bit short of, you know, of what people kind of deal with with their on on-prem data centers, just because of some of the applications, data sets they're trying to work through for AI ML and analytics. But that's what the partner's great at is, is helping them kind of leap forward and actually realize the on-prem to become the private cloud and really operate in this multi-cloud scenario and, and get beyond this cloud chaos factor. So again, you know, the beautiful part about all this is that, you know, the, the, the never ending sort of options, the optionality that you have on security, on networking, on applications, data sets, locations, governance, these are all factors that the partner deals with way better than we could even think of. So for us, it's really about just trying to connect with them, get their feedback and actually design in from the partner to take something like this and make it something that works for them >>Back to your shirt. What does it say? Two's company, three's a cloud that's right. But if you want rain, you need a fourth. Yeah. Right. We're here in California. I don't care about clouds. We need it to rain. All >>Right. So >>It's all well and good that yeah. If you know, a couple of you get together and offer something up, but where the rubber meets the road, you know, the customer relationship, the strategic seat at the customer table, there, aren't more of those than there have been in the past. And, and, and ecosystems have obviously gotten more complicated. I can't help thinking back as I think back on the history of, of NetApp and VMware and CDW, there was a time when, when things were bad, you get rid of marketing. And then, and then after that, it was definitely alliances and partnerships cuz who the heck are those people right now? Everything is an ecosystem. Yeah. Everything is an ecosystem. So talk about how CW CDW has changed through its history in terms of where CDW has come from. >>Sure. And you >>Know, not everybody knows that CDW is involved in as sophisticated in area as you are. >>And, and that's true. I mean, sometimes it's tongue in cheek, but you know, we've fulfilled a lot of needs throughout the years and, and maybe at times just a fulfillment or a box pusher, but we're really so much more that, and we've been so much more than that for years. And through some of our acquisitions, you know, Sirius last year I G N w our international arm with Kway when it became CDW, K we have a, you know, a premier experience around consultative services. And that we talk about that full stack, right? Yeah. From the application to the cloud, to the infrastructure, to the security around it, to the networking, we can help out with all of that. And we've got experts and, and, you know, on the presales and postsales that, that's what they live for. It's their passion. And working with partners close in hand, that that's, we've had great relationships with, with NetApp. And again, I've been with CDW for over 12 years. And in all 12 of those years, I've been very close to NetApp in one way, shape or form, and to see how we work together to solve our customers' challenges. It's less about what we want to do. It's more about what we're doing to help the customer. And, and I've seen that day in and day out from our relationship and, you know, kind of our partnership. >>So say we're back here in six months, or maybe we're back here at reinvent, talking with you guys and a customer. What are some of the outcomes that at this stage you were expecting customers to be able to achieve, >>Be able to do more, put more out there, right. To not be limited by the construct of, I only have X amount of space. And so maybe the use case or the initiative is, is wrapped around that. Let's turn that around and say, that's, you're limitless, let's have move what you need. And you're not gonna have to worry so much about the cost, the way you did six months ago or seven months ago, or six months in a day ago that you can do more with it. And if we have an X amount in our bucket in, in July, we could do 200 VMs. You know, and now six months later, we've done 500 VMs because of those efficiency savings because of that cost savings and using supplemental storage. So I, I see that being a growth factor and being say, Hey, this was easy. We always knew this was a solution we liked, but now it's easy and bigger. >>Yeah. I think on our end, the spectrum, I'll just say what Phil Brons would say. I said previously, he was in the previous segment, which is, this could go pretty quick, folks that have wanted to do this now that they know this is something to do and that they can go at it. The part we already know, the partners are very much in like ready to go mode. They've been waiting for this day to just get the announcement out so they can get kind of get going. And it's funny because you know, when we've presented, we've kind of presented some of the tech behind what we're doing and then the ROI T C calculator last, and everyone's feedback is the same. They said you should just lead to the calculator. So then yeah, you can see exactly how much money you save. In fact, one of the jokes is there's not many times you've saved this much money in it before. And so it's, it's a big, wow. Factor, >>Big, wow. Factor, big differentiator, guys. Thank you so much for joining David, me talking about what NetApp, VMware, AWS are doing, how it's being delivered through CDW, the evolution of all these companies. We're excited to watch the solution. We better let you go because you probably have a ton of meeting. People are just chopping at the bit to get this. Yeah. >>It's, it's exciting times. I'm loving it being here and being able to talk about this finally, in a public setting. So this has been great. >>Awesome guys. Thank you again for your time. We appreciate it. Yep. For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022. We'll be back after a short break, stick around.

live from the mandalay bay convention center in las vegas it's the cues covering vmworld 2016 rock you buy vmware and its ecosystem sponsors well welcome back inside mandalay bay as we continue our coverage at vmworld here on the cube along with peter burrows i'm john walls are now joined by David Cabrera Solutions Architect CDW and leek as well vice president product storage for the VMware storage and availability business unit gentlemen thanks for being here good to see you great to hear house show going so far for you oh it's on fire man did we give a tiger by the tail here that's been great don't let go don't let go even though this for a long time and we were just talking about your history your back i said yeah i first got into virtualization back at y2k wow I remember that how far we've come huh and yeah yeah again I did it why i use it for y2k testing and then from there i worked for a disaster recovery services company and we have these customers katrina rita in 911 they just came in with their stuff and i didn't have enough physical servers to you know in their contract to recover their businesses and they were taking out vmware evaluation licenses to get their businesses up and running and vmware was super supportive of that and they knew you know the licenses would come and wow yeah it was it was like rust in the esxi or ESX at the time I you know just it's actually you know easy and as we think about what's happening on hyper conversions now right yeah it's the same idea right I mean it was actually practicality you not a necessity right of using VMware because gosh I needed to do it for kind of TCO reasons and what happened was esxi started out at the fringe almost right and then came roaring into the you know into the core as people realize hey I really can run like mission-critical applications business collapse the same trajectory is happening now with VC an HCI right and our DCM writing notes we're starting off like outside startup VDI test and dev right you know all that you know to management clusters right but now what's happening the majority of applications mates business apps right yeah yeah it's it I firmly 1,000% believe that you know any application can run ova n no I say and it's we were talking about this i still have customers they they talk about running exchange or sequel on physical servers and I'm like why so now you take all those benefits of virtualization and you add v san on top of it and make everything totally portable on on just you know commodity based hardware and you know pretty soon our job as storage architects building figuring out sans and raid groups and you know how big my lund is supposed to be who cares throw some storage in the server adam as you need and keep going well to that point lee you're talking before we went on the air here about how people you know professionals company who's saying i want to get my attention from here to up here all right i want to be able to look at business and not so much about what's going on behind the scenes in the back office is this thing i was even at CDW recently right we're talking about how long it takes to train someone on enterprise storage versus you know the actually the less you know about storage that the more a hyper conversion system words to what you expect i add a note yeah of course it gets bigger right i mean why wouldn't it right so the idea that you can get people trained up not just using the product but actually selling the product I mean it's actually a very interesting dynamic one of the other interesting things we're seeing right now is just a overlap of flash right all flash right which first you know blue you know came blazing onto the scene for performance right for an application is now coming in because customers want to spend less time actually man is that looking down I want to look down anymore right and so the idea that the customer satisfy you arts because the risk of Miss configuring something actually really low right it is you know that nearly as much time and you don't worry about it right right so you have the performance you need you have the space you need you know you get the deduplication and and it just as you will you need more performance you need more space at another node and on top of that you get compute memory and everything else so their stores some challenges associated with applications and selecting the technology and there's a lot of transformation and transition there's a lot of new technologies coming online that's right even in the storage world so how is virtualization helping customers or helping protect customers for making bad choices with current products now one thing you want to look at is where do I manage this from right how many silos do I have right and so the extent that you can leverage the Center for example right as a common management domain not just for storage by the way right well we started off with compute right they get source we also have networking right so what we have today with NSX right integrating that together we've heard what we announced the show here there it is this VMware cloud foundation great way to go and integrate right all the rich functionality and now you've got it in one user interface right that simplifies the deployment and then the support right making everything easy so you know putting everything together plug it in run a wizard everything's set up for you and it and it's set up the way it should be yeah so it's not as dependent upon the underlying type or choice that you made about storage it's now more what does the application need and let's just point the application at the pool yeah so so there's still I still see you know there's going to be those needs where that super low latency super fast care that shared storage is going to be critical and is going to be needed for specific applications but all that other stuff all that normal day-to-day web servers applications email file shares all that stuff you can just throw it on there and it works you don't have to worry about all the silos and all the different management people that you need so going back to John's question the day on your point later the idea that getting people to raise up defectives Dave how much time are you now saving not doing the physical stuff actually starting to talk to developers the people are taking all of this day to all these assets and turning it into the business value are you able to spend more time and directly supporting them as you go into customers and design the it does seem like that that shadow IT or DevOps or you know the people that aren't depending or depend on IT the consumer is becoming more of the decision maker or at least the influencer and what what V San brings to the table for those kind of people especially with the automation and and and you know the whole private cloud piece of it it takes down that I call it the IT stop sign okay so you know why is DevOps going to the public cloud because it's easy so you have to be as easy as wherever they're going in order to bring them back and and keep that governance on your data and keep your IP where it belongs whether it's in that private cloud or off into a secure more secure public cloud or through a hybrid cloud or whatever v san kind of keeps everything contained for that so yeah and I think there seems to be a trend or at least a thread here that I'm hearing a different conversation here about simplicity right felicity just not keeping things simple for people letting them focus on their core competencies and the right there really what they're paid to do and not distract them away from having to learn like you said it up to speed in 15 minutes as opposed to hours or weeks of training week looks you having these three clicks yeah yes yeah I ask customers pretty routinely now you know what is your budget gonna be is it higher or lower this year the answer it's like it's lower right there like you do you have more people or less people and I call less people they're shrinking data centers right and all of a sudden and then you say well and how many projects do you have like all of every every project now as an IT component right so now it's the pace of change right and so if you don't have to worry about the underlying infrastructure as much now all of a sudden it just becomes easier to start worrying about hey how do I go in scale we had a customer this morning I was talking to Buddy that was talking about well you know the other thing it does is it gives me the opportunity to have kind of bite-size chunks right so the risk of making the wrong decision is actually low right up by a set of servers and as opposed to you know I buy something that's this big where I have to basically predict what's going to happen for the next five years this looks more like hey you know what I kind of have to know what's going to happen over the next six months and then we'll figure it out from there that's today's mentality so easier to change one piece instead of the whole puzzle that I died nobody the dance for that that's a great point it's it there's not that many IT shops that are refreshing their entire data set there are but that's not that many usually it's a silo so but there's always projects PDI some sort of new essay p application or you know we're migrating to a new version of exchange or whatever it is it's okay let's start there and and and and let's just slip it in try it out you'll see you like it it's like sorry it's like crack everybody needs more all right so Rach wait liberal lawyers yeah try it out and you'll see you like it and then from there it'll just roll and and and as the the old siloed equipment starts to age out they'll just easily transition it into visa it's wedding we just get emotional over at a new server shut that down we could we just finished a survey of 250 decent customers and you know one of the things that we were watching is so what about the applications right because when we started like it was hey I'm going to try this in test em I'll try it over here or dr is a good one right I try it and you know it's not i'm not running like my real stuff on it right you know now what we're finding it this year's switched right so we flipped into the majority are now business-critical applications right there an X equal exchange share with the whole Microsoft stack during Oracle databases right there make Percona right i mean of mice equal variance right it's really your singing so all of a sudden they're like that you know there's no real hesitation right and it's the economics that drive this right once you started looking to say you know here's how i can go and do this in more bite-sized chunks starts to become more you know but it's more cloud like i think from that standpoint it's also the risk because as you said you make a design decision today yeah it's not going to be the right design decision in 18 months to make a product decision today it's probably not going to be the right product decision in 18 months you make the right you know you want to your company decides to buy a new company or wants to diverse the vessel you don't want the infrastructure getting in the way of those business decisions so it's it's certainly economics but it's a lot of it has to do with the fact that as you said the pace of change is so great that the only way to ensure that you can keep up is to focus on where the change really needs to be and diminish I focus on where the change isn't as required that make sense it does make sense in you know one of the things that you know degrees of freedom that customers also want is we're finding you know they're pretty used to being able to configure servers and choose their own server all right so the idea that we give choice right running software on a server where you get to choose right i mean we have what 15 different partners right server partners building something called a vc n ready node right so you can take our software pre-configured right to strip out the integration risk if you will there's also some customers who just want like the simplest easiest fully integrated we're working with emc that VX rail product is an integrated CDW offers both of these right so for customers who want just to say I want a single point of support integrated backup I mean that's a world-class product right as an integrated appliance that's one way to buy right one way to deploy but on the other hand if I'm a ucs shop I can go and say hey here's how i get a ucs if I may HPE shop here's how I do it 100 right all works all precor oh oh ya habla del e course right exactly yeah yeah thank you for that by the way so no sway be back yeah value out of the right there we go exactly yeah you know last before your eyes therefore that's all good right right but this this choice right i mean it's interesting because certainly customers are looking at like what level of choice and flexibility do they want and this server choice right is a big one yeah yeah it there's the reason why people buy servers isn't because it's a specific brand I mean you know if you if you look at the open up servers and you look inside it's really it's Intel processors or maybe an AMD processor a bunch of ram and some disks the the software that the vendors offer to manage those or what's important and and it's funny since vcenter mm-hmm even before it was vcenter you know just I guess 20 was it being able to integrate the management of the servers into vcenter and having all those sensors and all that stuff kind of bubble up into vcenter is huge and be able to hook in and take like we realize automation or viewer orchestrator and make it to pull the physical hardware as well as a virtual it's it's big have that in with ES and it just kind of makes it easy so Dave's you working with a lot of customers every single day yep they are also starting to deploy cloud or at least procure plot proud as part of their core strategy talk a bit about about talk a little bit about the challenges associated with intercloud communication and a role that brutalization plays yeah yeah so it's it's still kind of the wild wild west out there with with that I know you know VMware with NSX trying to and that with the new announcements and I haven't fully digested all this stuff from yesterday but it was out just the idea of providing that that kind of peanut butter of policy you know for security and networking and all that from you know whatever you need to keep up button the other way that's a technical term I like that or Paula I like that I have more creative butter of policy in your private cloud and being able to kind of spark that up in in whatever public cloud you choose to use kind of brings that core via you know so vmware's message was always whatever Hardware you have your choice now it's whatever cloud you have your choice yeah it kind of makes sense now and and yet security and the networking is is the biggest piece of it and that if you look at the NIS T official version of hybrid cloud it's it's being able to move things back and forth seamlessly and that's what it brings his David a big part of this cross cloud message right and there's an obligation and it turns out I I'd argue that your most strategic engagement with the cloud is actually data alright VMS you can spin up spin down right there transitory it's on or off but you know the decision about where you place data is long-standing what do and what data sovereignty issues about you know it takes you know data is not quick to move anywhere right so it takes time and it takes you know from a cost standpoint right you all of a sudden lock yourself in on data to keeping it going right so those sort of issue didn't if you want to take it back by the way you know there's some egress fees and other things to go and manage so what we announced right in this cross cloud world about how we're running for example you know in IBM SoftLayer right and you can now spin up vcn and soft layer right and see the same policy based management right across the cloud now right I mean that extension right into the public clouds right is a really interesting way for us to go and talk about moving from just a storage you know provide into a data services data management right that becomes a key element how do you convince people to be early adopters then of that because now that they're making decisions that not that they they all matter that are those matter maybe a little more is it really early adoption though this far into the game I mean wow I mean everybody we came out a transitory element yeah you're saying ok I want you to take another step yeah I want you go a little further out and so that's what I was saying well here's here's where I'd let me out a little bit too that is what I'd say is that you said data management yes i would say data Asset Management's there that's so you know we were talking earlier digital business is about how you're going to apply data differently to retain and sustain your customers and so this point ocean of data as an asset you really elevates this conversation about what data where when all those other things and to the degree that virtualization simplifies those conversations it's going to have a major impact on business flexibility agility even designed so you guys agree so degree yes so think about that and and I have to credit a vmware se his name is Paul Rowan think of NSX as kind of a bodyguard okay and every chunk of data whatever it is as a bodyguard kind of leading them leading the way and protecting that piece of data from whatever it is that it needs to protect it wherever it goes and that's really a real simple analogy so it's not just I have to configure a firewall over here and make sure that if it goes into cloud that that firewall has the same rules it doesn't matter anymore because my bodyguards going with me and and and I'm that bodyguard is making sure that all the policies are applied no matter where I end it also opens up new areas you know when you talk about data asset management now I started thinking about well you know maybe I want to do some big data analytics I'm where my data is right where where do i locate it right and you could locate different places for sovereignty security local performance for example right back up any geolocation issues right and then I also started thinking of a policy base rate we call source policy based management and that sort now it says you know it's not just capacity right maybe want to be thinking of a performance right how do I think about allocating performance how do I think about managing performance across different assets for example right so lot I mean this is what's exciting i think is once you start where we've started from which is at the hypervisor level you're at a natural architectural injection point to go and say we could take all of these pieces in and very efficiently go and manage them provide new functionality right that's a really interesting way as customers trying an SS like my date it may not just be here anymore right may be out here may be out there how do i go and get a handle on that that's true once you hit that inflection point where in the industry starts coming to you right that's right VMware's clearly hit that point and then some yeah interesting well we've had peanut butter policy we've had bodyguards i wish made more time to do morals of wisdom okay the big IT stop sign I like that too are you good thanks for joining this guy's thank you have a great show all right our coverage on the cube vmworld continues in just a moment here from Las Vegas

the cube presents ignite 22. brought to you by Palo Alto Networks hey guys and girls welcome back to Las Vegas it's thecube we are live at Palo Alto networks ignite 22. this is day one of two days of cube coverage Lisa Martin here with Dave vellante Dave we've had great conversations today talking with Executives the partner ecosystem is evolving it's growing at Palo Alto networks going to be digging into that next well we heard a lot of talk about you know Palo Alto you know the goal 100 billion dollar you know market cap company and to me a way and I think a critical way in which you get there is partner with the ecosystem because you can't do it alone the power of many versus the resources of one agree completely agree we've got Carl Sutherland with us SVP of North America ecosystem sales at Palo Alto networks welcome to the cube thanks so much for having me it's great being here so here we are the first full day of the conference actually started yesterday with the partner Summit give the audience a flavor of the partner Summit who was there what was talked about what's the current voice of the partner these days yeah great questions so we had a 150 Partners from around the globe representing all of our different routes to Market and for us our partner Community is expanding we work with system integrators we work with gsis we work with service providers Distributors traditional value-added resellers so it was a whole host of partners that were there it was a c-level audience and we really talked about the direction of where we're going as a company how they can continue to invest with us and have greater success long term and so from a voice of the partner standpoint what they're here to do is share with us where they want to engage more how we can enable them to be successful you talked about the Power of One Versus a community we're really looking at a segment of the marketplace right now for us to scale and hit our aspirational goals we can't do it with Palo Alto Network employees we have an employee base of 12 000 people if you take our ecosystem it's over a hundred thousand employees so if we can get them aligned and selling and motivated it's going to be a good day for all of us what so what are they telling you where do they want to spend their time where do they want to add value where are they winning yeah that's a great question so there's a transformation that's going on right now in the partner Community what's happening is a lot of Partners going that are transitioning from what would be traditional transactional Partners or resale Partners to being services-led and the Market's driving them there and what I mean by that is that customers are in a desperate dire State needing assistance figuring out and solving these very complex security problems so if there is a subset of Partners out there that have the skill set and capabilities that can come in from a consultative standpoint help them to develop the structure through deployment a full-blown management and do life cycle management that's a tremendous value I mean the numbers you hear thrown around in the industry right now is up to seven million uh security I.T jobs right now that are out there the open head count is tremendous people can't hire people fast enough all of us in the industry are going through and trying to find early in career or college graduates so we can train quickly or cross-train from other segments to get them into cyber security so if our part of the community can continue to get skilled and expand it's only going to help and the cloud is obviously where does the cloud fit in Carl because you know a lot of the partners when the clouds really start on the Steep part of the s-curve are like we have an opportunity here and by the way if we don't transition our business we could get commoditized yes so that you know that but you were talking about the transactional we can help people move to the cloud and a big part of that has got to be we can secure them in the cloud because it's a more in a lot of ways you know Cloud security is great but in a lot of ways it adds complexity what are you hearing from the party yeah so we are fortunate at Palo Alto networks when you look across the three loud largest cloud service provider from a Google AWS and Microsoft Azure we're either their number one isv or absolutely their number one security ISP so we've got a great uh relationships with them now our partners are coming along and saying how do we transact how do we add value a lot of times that value to your question is wrapping services around it to make sure it's a successful deployment because exactly what you stated the complexity is an all-time high so how do we make sure that we can solve a complex problem in a short term while increasing their security posture and that's really the goal and so where there there's sometimes complexity and mystery there's opportunity and partners can be profitable in doing that I wrote a piece once chaos is cash I have a security you know the criminals and vendors as well yes yes where there is is challenge and complexity there is great opportunity yeah talk about some of the partner program Evolution and some of the things that were announced with respect to the next wave program just yesterday yeah so at next wave um the program's been around for 12 years we constantly are looking to make enhancements and how we make those enhancements are by going out and speaking with these partners and listening to what they need so I have the honor to get to represent what their needs are and how we bring it to market for them so a couple interesting announcements that we made yesterday first of all we announced a new structural format for the program which is really going to allow our different route to markets to have a program that's fit for them because in the past when we were just traditionally a firewall company when the ecosystem just meant resale it was an easy model to have it's complex right now sometimes it's resale sometimes it's influence sometimes its services only we really need to be flexible and credible so we announced a Services only path so if you are a consulting company if you are a insurance company and you want to bring opportunities and leads to Palo Alto Network and you want to provide the services if you're not interested in the transaction you don't want to get involved in that we now have a pathway for you to support you to enable you and Kennedy to give you recognition within Palo Alto networks from an alignment standpoint so we're super excited about that uh as I know you guys speak quite a bit about the managed Services industry so it's a red hot area within Palo Alto networks one of the needs out there was that all not all managed Service Partners are created equally and so some have fantastic capabilities some have gaps we were calling it a P2P part of the partner program within managed services so our two managed Services Partners can actually work together to solve the problem that the end user has and give them a better outcome and fill each other's gaps so candidly it's been going on for a while the partnering but we've never really recognized it so we really built a program around it and now are sponsoring and supporting it versus people doing it on a sidebar so those guys were here in force yesterday yes sir right and and so obviously a lot of energy I'm sure do you see a day where they're here in force on the show floor yeah and and how do you see that evolving so they are here enforcement just right here you see a few of them I'm looking at AWS who's our you know we are their largest isv I'm looking at CDW we had them on the floor is our if not largest second largest partner globally right now and continuing to grow at a rate well they will probably be our first billion dollar partner to think about the size and scale of that relationship and where we've come from um their name CDW don't they never really thought of CDW right as a as a security firm wow what a transformation but please carry on and think about that let's talk about CDW saying think about reach that CDW has it's a 23 billion dollar organization and in a way an inside out sales model meaning there's a tremendous reach they have from their inside sales team and the relationships that they have traditionally historically they were procurement relationships in a way and I said this to the CDW team they were the easy button in the past now what they're doing is they made Seven Acquisitions over the last two years all of them Services oriented so now they're coming in as a consultative Viewpoint and solving a lot of complex problems and I see Google Cloud right here another great partner for us that we continue to invest in we have a great amount of integration and Technology integration with them and so and those are the three that I'm seeing just looking over my left shoulder right if I turn around I'll probably name five more so the majority of this room are the partners that fall within our ecosystem today fantastic so okay so what's your vision for where you want to take this ecosystem because as I said at the top I mean ecosystems are sort of the Hallmark of a I guess you're not a cloud company see I think you of you as a cloud company and so okay good so and I know you don't own your own public cloud and you know your history is you had your own data centers but yeah but you're the security Cloud yeah and so a security Cloud any Cloud needs a great ecosystem so what's your vision for the ecosystem let's go you know five plus years out sure you we start with the end in mind and what I mean by that is we always start with the end user what's the end user's needs the end user today needs flexibility with how they consume the technology they need help in how they support and deploy the technology they need guidance in how they plan out for their future and what their growth is so what we're doing is building a very diverse set of Partners in our ecosystem that all have special skills that they bring to the table so when nikesh sits up here and talks about being a 10 billion or a 20 billion or a 50 billion dollar company we absolutely cannot do it without our ecosystem and without having a very diverse ecosystem that all has different skills that can help us scale because again Palo Alto does not want to be a services company right let's work with the people who are the best at that when we think about the deloittees and accentures and the value they have within the end user base and our joint customer base what a fantastic time to to partner together and solve those boardroom challenges and that's where I really see the vision is that at the boardroom we're building out a plan that's three to five years that's going to continue to increase their security posture because we're not thinking if we're not forward thinking like that will be left behind because the Bad actors are thinking about how they find the different areas to penetrate they're getting so sophisticated the badocracy adversaries they are well funded they're motivated Grant the ransomware attack numbers in terms of the Velocity the complexity yes no longer are we going to get if it's when yeah uh big challenge for organizations Acro across I mean really across an organization regardless of Industry are you guys having any conversations with boards in the partner organization to help align the board with the executive level and really not just have security as a board level initiative but actually being able to execute a strategy yeah and you you nailed it it's not an initiative the initiative to me means there's a beginning and an end right a strategy means there's going to be a comprehensive approach how you continue to improve and we are very fortunate that a lot of our largest Partners around the globe have that position within the boards where they are the trusted advisor so what we're doing now is enabling them and giving them the skills so they can have a more comprehensive conversation around our platform approach around the challenges you know BJ I knew who was with you earlier today likes to say that the average customer he goes and sees has 50 to 70 disparate Technologies within their environment how do you manage that how do you maintain it how do you do renewals oh and by the way most likely the people who actually initially procured that aren't with you anymore they're in a different company so the need for a platform approach is there more so than ever but the decision for the platform quite often has to come from the most senior levels within the organization because again I'm going to go back to your what was your chaos line that you said chaos is Cash chaos is Cash well also chaos is job security so if you're at at the lower level within an organization that chaos and that magic gives you a little job security but that's a short term long term you really need to think about how you're protecting the environment holistically so it is a boardroom decision down that we need to have and you know that chaos the the motivation for that piece that I wrote was from the criminals standpoint right and then I was like okay but there's great opportunities for the technology industry but but I think that you know where we're headed I wonder if I get your thoughts on thoughts on this Carlos we always talk about the Board Room I think we're going now Beyond it here I am you know I'm hypersensitive about my security I got password managers two-factor authentication I don't want SMS based two-factor authentication I want my own authenticator and that's still not enough yeah I got air gaps yeah you know for my crypto you know and I'm super paranoid my point is I think the the individuals are getting much more Savvy about security why because we've all been hacked you know it's like when you lost your data in the because you weren't backed up you know that never happens anymore it's in the cloud or you know some people have multiple backups so it's it's becoming a cultural Trend beyond the board and it's because of the board lord said hey this is really important and so I think it's not only top down I think you're going to see bottom up and middle out and the exciting part for Palo Alto networks is and maybe for you as well is there any more exciting environment to talk about that's rapidly changing and constantly changing you could come back next week and our conversation is going to change as far as what we're doing we constantly need to be thinking three steps ahead of where we're going to move and be flexible and dynamic enough to change and that's what's going to keep us ahead of the economy yeah there's no segment as Dynamic I mean data is dynamic but not as fast changing as cyber I mean because of the adversary as you mentioned I mean so smart so now now they have open adversary ecosystems I mean the adversaries are building ecosystems right absolutely insane I've got peers that are bad guys yeah right right chaos is Cash what's your favorite partner story that you think really demonstrates the value of the ecosystem that Palo Alto networks has built yeah so without sharing names I'll talk about a large U.S national partner that was very uh that was founded on a networking business and partnered with a very large networking company and built that business and was successful doing that they wanted to Pivot into the security space and very early on they made a commitment to Paulo and Ulta networks to say we're going to learn we're going to invest we're going to align with your sales force and we're going to work together and right now they are our largest partner globally and they grew 70 year over year wow so think about that this is not on a small base we're talking about a half a billion dollars in Revenue growing at 70 year over year because to your point earlier it wasn't an initiative it was a strategy and they're executing on the strategy so I tell a lot of we call War Stories like that to other partners that are looking to invest from different markets it could be a large service provider that's you know trying to transform themselves into a security player and talk about the potential of what it could be in for their Marketplace and by the way I say publicly quite often Palo Alto networks will be your most profitable relationship that you have because of the total addressable Market that we're going after because of the solutions that we bring to Market and because of the opportunity within the end users right now and we're excited I want to come back to the mssp in that in its context so we've seen the rise of the mssp and particularly you know we were talking earlier I think it was with Wendy that uh no it was with CDW like 50 of the organizations in North America don't even have a sock yeah right so they need a service provider to come out so you said we you don't want to be in the services business right you're a product company right and that's from a financial standpoint that's phenomenal you're roughly 50 billion dollar market cap company let's let's call it six billion in Revenue so that's a nice Revenue multiple 8X you know and and and the Market's down so you're a 10x Revenue multiple company typically services companies are a 1x or a 2X are you seeing a change there where technology is giving these service providers operating leverage where they're able to scale whether it's because of the cloud because of the Partnerships the Eco would you call it before the the peer-to-peer ecosystem yes like the Gap fillers yes are you do you see the economics of services changing yeah from a baseline economic standpoint not looking at the valuations but let's look at it from a an opportunity to be profitable with Palo Alto networks we know if you are just doing the transaction you have a certain range of margin that you're going to make in the opportunity we know if you wrap services around it you're going to get 3x to 4X that margin we know that if it's managed services and there's life cycle management you're talking 5x to 8X that initial transaction and by the way it's recurring revenue for them so when you think about it if you just do a transaction you're only recurring revenue is a renewal that's predictable but it's not extremely profitable now we're saying the operating leverage you get is if you wrap that services and you're going to have an increased opportunity for a greater margin and it's sticky it's hard to replace a partner who's adding value to your team and A lot of times you walk in the end user you can't tell who the partner is and who the end user is because they are one team that's value yes and that's going to drive ebit yep for your partners and that's going to drive valuation you know you know I want to come back to valuation not that I'm not you can do that okay but because I was I predicted I do my prediction post every year and I predicted last year that we're going to see you know a Spate of MSS mssps I predicted you're going to see someone go public nobody's going public these days but I still think it's a great business yeah that's an untapped opportunity it's not an 8X or it's not a software marginal economics or but it's really sticky super high value yeah and I think it has you know long-term potential yeah to your point if you want to talk valuations for a second let's look at what's happened to the marketplace over the last 12 to 18 months the large majority of the non-public partners that we work with have taken on Capital from private Equity the private Equity that has come in has challenged them to go through a transformation that transformation is you we need you to be Services LED and that service is value because they believe there's going to is going to be a great greater evaluation from that end and they'll be able to scale and grow and stay ahead of the market doing that so when we have conversations when I have conversations yes I'm talking about the technology and the direction of the company but I'm also in there as a consultant saying where's the direction of your company and how do we have this great platform and how do we build it into your business and you wrap services around it and those are the conversations that CEOs want to have when I'm sitting down with our partner CEOs I bet they don't want to talk about our product being better than someone else's product they want to talk about the direction and health of their business yeah it's their business that's a business discussion business decision and they're thinking about okay what's my five-year strategic plan because they got to make bets yeah they're going to bet on a platform that they can add value to that creates that flywheel effect and they get a bet on your ecosystem as well correct oh correct absolutely good to be the leader it's good to be a leader and you know I'm sure as you've heard a few times we believe that economic headwinds are going to favor the market leaders and economic headwinds are going to favor the platform approach so we're going in more aggressive with our partner Community than ever before and there's just so much energy and excitement I feel like I keep on using that term over and over again but that's really what we walk away with last question for you is we have about 30 seconds left a lot of momentum in the partner ecosystem as you've described eloquently what's next what's next what's next yeah so when I I rolled out the strategy for what's next and what it is is a foundational platform that is going to allow flexibility for the partners and for them to decide where they want to invest and it can be in new areas it can be I went online closer with the cloud service providers it could be I want to build a managed Services business can you help us do this it could be I want to go through and I want to drive greater penetration into geographical areas we haven't been before so again we're almost acting as a consultant looking at what they're going from the direction and building a program and a platform where we can grow and work with them it's exciting it's fun it's great highly collaborative highly collaborative highly collaborative thank you for joining us on the program on the partner program the ecosystem Better Together what you guys are doing and ultimately how it benefits the end user customer we really appreciate your insights excellent thank you thank you so much appreciate it all right our pleasure for our guests and Dave vellante I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube the leader in live Enterprise and emerging Tech coverage [Music]

>>Welcome to the convergence of file and object, a special program made possible by pure storage and co-created with the cube we're running. What I would call a little mini series and we're exploring the conversions of file and object storage. What are the key trends? Why would you want to converge file and object? What are the use cases and architectural considerations and importantly, what are the business drivers of U F F O so-called unified fast file and object in this program, you'll hear from Matt Burr, who was the GM of pure flash blade business. And then we'll bring in the perspectives of a solutions architect, Garrett who's from CDW, and then the analyst angle with Scott St. Claire of the enterprise strategy group ESG. And then we'll wrap with a really interesting technical conversation with Chris and bond CB bond, who is a lead data architect at Microfocus. And he's got a really cool use case to share with us. So sit back and enjoy the pros.

we're running what i would call a little mini series and we're exploring the convergence of file and object storage what are the key trends why would you want to converge file an object what are the use cases and architectural considerations and importantly what are the business drivers of uffo so-called unified fast file and object in this program you'll hear from matt burr who is the gm of pure's flashblade business and then we'll bring in the perspectives of a solutions architect garrett belsner who's from cdw and then the analyst angle with scott sinclair of the enterprise strategy group esg he'll share some cool data on our power panel and then we'll wrap with a really interesting technical conversation with chris bond cb bond who is a lead data architect at microfocus and he's got a really cool use case to share with us so sit back and enjoy the program from around the globe it's thecube presenting the convergence of file and object brought to you by pure storage we're back with the convergence of file and object a special program made possible by pure storage and co-created with the cube so in this series we're exploring that convergence between file and object storage we're digging into the trends the architectures and some of the use cases for unified fast file and object storage uffo with me is matt burr who's the vice president and general manager of flashblade at pure storage hello matt how you doing i'm doing great morning dave how are you good thank you hey let's start with a little 101 you know kind of the basics what is unified fast file and object yeah so look i mean i think you got to start with first principles talking about the rise of unstructured data so um when we think about unstructured data you sort of think about the projections 80 of data by 2025 is going to be unstructured data whether that's machine generated data or um you know ai and ml type workloads uh you start to sort of see this um i don't want to say it's a boom uh but it's sort of a renaissance for unstructured data if you will we move away from you know what we've traditionally thought of as general purpose nas and and file shares to you know really things that focus on uh fast object taking advantage of s3 cloud native applications that need to integrate with applications on site um you know ai workloads ml workloads tend to look to share data across you know multiple data sets and you really need to have a platform that can deliver both highly performant and scalable fast file and object from one system so talk a little bit more about some of the drivers that you know bring forth that need to unify file an object yeah i mean look you know there's a there's there's a real challenge um in managing you know bespoke uh bespoke infrastructure or architectures around general purpose nas and daz etc so um if you think about how a an architect sort of looks at an application they might say well okay i need to have um you know fast daz storage proximal to the application um but that's going to require a tremendous amount of dams which is a tremendous amount of drives right hard drives are you know historically pretty pretty pretty unwieldy to manage because you're replacing them relatively consistently at multi-petabyte scale um so you start to look at things like the complexity of daz you start to look at the complexity of general purpose nas and you start to just look at quite frankly something that a lot of people don't really want to talk about anymore but actual data center space right like consolidation matters the ability to take you know something that's the size of a microwave like a modern flash blade or a modern um you know uffo device uh replaces something that might be you know the size of three or four or five refrigerators so matt what why is is now the right time for this i mean for years nobody really paid much attention to object s3 already obviously changed you know that course most of the world's data is still stored in file formats and you get there with nfs or smb why is now the time to think about unifying object and file well because we're moving to things like a contactless society um you know the the things that we're going to do are going to just require a tremendous amount more compute power network um and quite frankly storage throughput and you know i can give you two sort of real primary examples here right you know warehouses are being you know taken over by robots if you will um it's not a war it's a it's a it's sort of a friendly advancement in you know how do i how do i store a box in a warehouse and you know we have we have a customer who focuses on large sort of big box distribution warehousing and you know a box that carried a an object two weeks ago might have a different box size two weeks later well that robot needs to know where the space is in the data center in order to put it but also needs to be able to process hey i don't want to put the thing that i'm going to access the most in the back of the warehouse i'm going to put that thing in the front of the warehouse all of those types of data you know sort of real time you can think of the robot as almost an edge device is processing in real time unstructured data in its object right so it's sort of the emergence of these new types of workloads and i give you the opposite example the other end of the spectrum is ransomware right you know today you know we'll talk to customers and they'll say quite commonly hey if you know anybody can sell me a backup device i need something that can restore quickly um if you had the ability to restore something in 270 terabytes an hour or 250 terabytes an hour uh that's much faster when you're dealing with a ransomware attack you want to get your data back quickly you know so i want to add i was going to ask you about that later but since you brought it up what is the right i guess call it architecture for for for ransomware i mean how and explain like how unified object and file which appointment i get the fast recovery but how how would you recommend a customer uh go about architecting a ransomware proof you know system yeah well you know with with flashblade and and with flasharray there's an actual feature called called safe mode and that safe mode actually protects uh the snapshots and and the data from uh sort of being a part of the of the ransomware event and so if you're in a type of ransomware situation like this you're able to leverage safe mode and you say okay what happens in a ransomware attack is you can't get access to your data and so you know the bad guy the perpetrator is basically saying hey i'm not going to give you access to your data until you pay me you know x in bitcoin or whatever it might be right um with with safe mode those snapshots are actually protected outside of the ransomware blast zone and you can bring back those snapshots because what's your alternative if you're not doing something like that your alternative is either to pay and unlock your data or you have to start retouring restoring excuse me from tape or slow disk that could take you days or weeks to get your data back so leveraging safe mode um you know in either the flash for the flash blade product uh is a great way to go about architecting against ransomware i got to put my my i'm thinking like a customer now so safe mode so that's an immutable mode right can't change the data um is it can can an administrator go in and change that mode can you turn it off do i still need an air gap for example what would you recommend there yeah so there there are still um uh you know sort of our back or roll back role-based access control policies uh around who can access that safe mode and who can right okay so uh anyway subject for a different day i want to i want to actually bring up uh if you don't object a topic that i think used to be really front and center and it now be is becoming front and center again i mean wikibon just produced a research note forecasting the future of flash and hard drives and those of you who follow us know we've done this for quite some time and you can if you could bring up the chart here you you could and we see this happening again it was originally we forecast the the the death of of quote-unquote high spin speed disc drives which is kind of an oxymoron but you can see on here on this chart this hard disk had a magnificent journey but they peaked in volume in manufacturing volume in 2010 and the reason why that is is so important is that volumes now are steadily dropping you can see that and we use wright's law to explain why this is a problem and wright's law essentially says that as you your cumulative manufacturing volume doubles your cost to manufacture decline by a constant percentage now i won't go too much detail on that but suffice it to say that flash volumes are growing very rapidly hdd volumes aren't and so flash because of consumer volumes can take advantage of wright's law and that constant reduction and that's what's really important for the next generation which is always more expensive to build uh and so this kind of marks the beginning of the end matt what do you think what what's the future hold for spinning disc in your view uh well i can give you the answer on two levels on a personal level uh it's why i come to work every day uh you know the the eradication or or extinction of an inefficient thing um you know i like to say that uh inefficiency is the bane of my existence uh and i think hard drives are largely inefficient and i'm willing to accept the sort of long-standing argument that um you know we've seen this transition in block right and we're starting to see it repeat itself in in unstructured data and i'm going to accept the argument that cost is a vector here and it most certainly is right hdds have been considerably cheaper uh than than than flash storage um you know even to this day uh you know up up to this point right but we're starting to approach the point where you sort of reach a a 3x sort of um you know differentiator between the cost of an hdd and an std and you know that really is that point in time when uh you begin to pick up a lot of volume and velocity and so you know that tends to map directly to you know what you're seeing here which is you know a a slow decline uh which i think is going to become even more rapid kind of probably starting around next year um where you start to see sds excuse me ssds uh you know really replacing hdds uh at a much more rapid clip particularly on the unstructured data side and it's largely around cost the the workloads that we talked about robots and warehouses or you know other types of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence type applications and workflows you know they require a degree of performance that a hard drive just can't deliver we are we are seeing sort of the um creative innovative uh disruption of an entire industry right before our eyes it's a fun thing to live through yeah and and we would agree i mean it doesn't the premise there is that it doesn't have to be less expensive we think it will be by you know the second half or early second half of this decade but even if it's a we think around a 3x delta the value of of ssd relative to spinning disk is going to overwhelm just like with your laptop you know it got to the point where you said why would i ever have a spinning disc in my laptop we see the same thing happening here um and and so and we're talking about you know raw capacity you know put in compression and d-dupe and everything else that you really can't do with spinning discs because of the performance issues you can do with flash okay let's come back to uffo can we dig into the challenges specifically that that this solves for customers give me give us some examples yeah so you know i mean if we if we think about the examples um you know the the robotic one um i think is is is the one that i think is the marker for you know kind of of of the the modern side of of of what we see here um but what we're you know what we're what we're seeing from a trend perspective which you know not everybody's deploying robots right um you know there's there's many companies that are you know that aren't going to be in either the robotic business uh or or even thinking about you know sort of future type oriented type things but what they are doing is green field applications are being built on object um generally not on not on file and and not on block and so you know the rise of of object as sort of the the sort of let's call it the the next great protocol for um you know for uh for for modern workloads right this is this is that that modern application coming to the forefront and that could be anything from you know financial institutions you know right down through um you we've even see it and seen it in oil and gas uh we're also seeing it across across healthcare uh so you know as as as companies take the opportunity as industries to take this opportunity to modernize you know they're modernizing not on things that are are leveraging you know um you know sort of archaic disk technology they're they're they're really focusing on on object but they still have file workflows that they need to that they need to be able to support and so having the ability to be able to deliver those things from one device in a capacity orientation or a performance orientation uh while at the same time dramatically simplifying uh the overall administration of your environment both physically and non-physically is a key driver so the great thing about object is it's simple it's a kind of a get put metaphor um it's it scales out you know because it's got metadata associated with the data uh and and it's cheap uh the drawback is you don't necessarily associate it with high performance and and and as well most applications don't you know speak in that language they speak in the language of file you know or as you mentioned block so i i see real opportunities here if i have some some data that's not necessarily frequently accessed you know every day but yet i want to then whether end of quarter or whatever it is i want to i want to or machine learning i want to apply some ai to that data i want to bring it in and then apply a file format uh because for performance reasons is that right maybe you could unpack that a little bit yeah so um you know we see i mean i think you described it well right um but i don't think object necessarily has to be slow um and nor does it have to be um you know because when you think about you brought up a good point with metadata right being able to scale to a billions of objects being able to scale to billions of objects excuse me is of value right um and i think people do traditionally associate object with slow but it's not necessarily slow anymore right we we did a sort of unofficial survey of of of our of our customers and our employee base and when people described object they thought of it as like law firms and storing a word doc if you will um and that that's just you know i think that there's a lack of understanding or a misnomer around what modern what modern object has become and perform an object particularly at scale when we're talking about billions of objects you know that's the next frontier right um is it at pace performance wise with you know the other protocols no uh but it's making leaps and grounds so you talked a little bit more about some of the verticals that you see i mean i think when i think of financial services i think transaction processing but of course they have a lot of tons of unstructured data are there any patterns you're seeing by by vertical market um we're you know we're not that's the interesting thing um and you know um as a as a as a as a company with a with a block heritage or a block dna those patterns were pretty easy to spot right there were a certain number of databases that you really needed to support oracle sql some postgres work et cetera then kind of the modern databases around cassandra and things like that you knew that there were going to be vmware environments you know you could you could sort of see the trends and where things were going unstructured data is such a broader horizontal thing right so you know inside of oil and gas for example you have you know um you have specific applications and bespoke infrastructures for those applications um you know inside of media entertainment you know the same thing the the trend that we're seeing the commonality that we're seeing is the modernization of you know object as a starting point for all the all the net new workloads within within those industry verticals right that's the most common request we see is what's your object roadmap what's your you know what's your what's your object strategy you know where do you think where do you think object is going so um there isn't any um you know sort of uh there's no there's no path uh it's really just kind of a wide open field in front of us with common requests across all industries so the amazing thing about pure just as a kind of a little you know quasi you know armchair historian the industry is pure was really the only company in many many years to be able to achieve escape velocity break through a billion dollars i mean three part couldn't do it isilon couldn't do it compellent couldn't do it i could go on but pure was able to achieve that as an independent company and so you become a leader you look at the gartner magic quadrant you're a leader in there i mean if you've made it this far you've got to have some chops and so of course it's very competitive there are a number of other storage suppliers that have announced products that unify object and file so i'm interested in how pure differentiates why pure um it's a great question um and it's one that uh you know having been a long time puritan uh you know i take pride in answering um and it's actually a really simple answer um it's it's business model innovation and technology right the the technology that goes behind how we do what we do right and i don't mean the product right innovation is product but having a better support model for example um or having on the business model side you know evergreen storage right where we sort of look at your relationship to us as a subscription right um you know we're going to sort of take the thing that that you've had and we're going to modernize that thing in place over time such that you're not rebuying that same you know terabyte or you know petabyte of storage that you've that you that you've paid for over time so um you know sort of three legs of the stool uh that that have made you know pure clearly differentiated i think the market has has recognized that um you're right it's it's hard to break through to a billion dollars um but i look forward to the day that you know we we have two billion dollar products and i think with uh you know that rise in in unstructured data growing to 80 by 2025 and you know the massive transition that you know you guys have noted in in in your hdd slide i think it's a huge opportunity for us on you know the other unstructured data side of the house you know the other thing i'd add matt i've talked to cause about this is is it's simplicity first i've asked them why don't you do this why don't you do it and the answer is always the same is that adds complexity and we we put simplicity for the customer ahead of everything else and i think that served you very very well what about the economics of of unified file an object i mean if you bring in additional value presumably there's a there there's a cost to that but there's got to be also a business case behind it what kind of impact have you seen uh with customers yeah i mean look i'll i'll i'll go back to something i mentioned earlier which is just the reclamation of floor space and power and cooling right um you know there's a you know there's people people people want to search for kind of the the sexier element if you will when it comes to looking at how we how you derive value from something but the reality is if you're reducing your power consumption by you know by by a material percentage power bills matter in big in big data centers um you know customers typically are are facing you know a paradigm of well i i want to go to the cloud but you know the clouds are not being more expensive than i thought it was going to be or you know i figured out what i can use in the cloud i thought it was going to be everything but it's not going to be everything so hybrid's where we're landing but i want to be out of the data center business and i don't want to have a team of 20 storage people to match you know to administer my storage um you know so there's sort of this this very tangible value around you know hey if i could manage um you know multiple petabytes with one full-time engineer uh because the system uh to yoran kaz's point was radically simpler to administer didn't require someone to be running around swapping drives all the time would that be a value the answer is yes 100 of the time right and then you start to look at okay all right well on the uffo side from a product perspective hey if i have to manage a you know bespoke environment for this application if i have to manage a bespoke environment for this application and a bespoke environment for this application and this book environment for this application i'm managing four different things and can i actually share data across those four different things there's ways to share data but most customers it just gets too complex how do you even know what your what your gold.master copy is of data if you have it in four different places or you try to have it in four different places and it's four different siloed infrastructures so when you get to the sort of the side of you know how do we how do you measure value in uffo it's actually being able to have all of that data concentrated in one place so that you can share it from application to application got it i'm interested we use a couple minutes left i'm interested in the the update on flashblade you know generally but also i have a specific question i mean look getting file right is hard enough uh you just announced smb support for flashblade i'm interested in you know how that fits in i think it's kind of obvious with file and object converging but give us the update on on flashblade and maybe you could address that specific question yeah so um look i mean we're we're um you know tremendously excited about the growth of flashblade uh you know we we we found workloads we never expected to find um you know the rapid restore workload was one that was actually brought to us from from from a customer actually and has become you know one of our one of our top two three four you know workloads so um you know we're really happy with the trend we've seen in it um and you know mapping back to you know thinking about hdds and ssds you know we're well on a path to building a billion dollar business here so you know we're very excited about that um but to your point you know you don't just snap your fingers and get there right um you know we've learned that doing file and object uh is is harder than block um because there's more things that you have to go do for one you're basically focused on three protocols s b nfs and s3 not necessarily in that order um but to your point about smb uh you know we we are uh on the path through to releasing um you know smb uh full full native smb support in in the system that will allow us to uh service customers we have a limitation with some customers today where they'll have an s b portion of their nfs workflow um and we do great on the nfs side um but you know we didn't we didn't have the ability to plug into the s p component of their workflow so that's going to open up a lot of opportunity for us um on on that front um and you know we continue to you know invest significantly across the board in in areas like security which is you know become more than just a hot button you know today security's always been there but it feels like it's blazing hot today um and so you know going through the next couple years we'll be looking at uh you know developing some some um you know pretty material security elements of the product as well so uh well on a path to a billion dollars is the net on that and uh you know we're we're fortunate to have have smb here and we're looking forward to introducing that to to those customers that have you know nfs workloads today with an s p component yeah nice tailwind good tam expansion strategy matt thanks so much really appreciate you coming on the program we appreciate you having us and uh thanks much dave good to see you [Music] okay we're back with the convergence of file and object in a power panel this is a special content program made possible by pure storage and co-created with the cube now in this series what we're doing is we're exploring the coming together of file and object storage trying to understand the trends that are driving this convergence the architectural considerations that users should be aware of and which use cases make the most sense for so-called unified fast file in object storage and with me are three great guests to unpack these issues garrett belsner is the data center solutions architect he's with cdw scott sinclair is a senior analyst at enterprise strategy group he's got deep experience on enterprise storage and brings that independent analyst perspective and matt burr is back with us gentlemen welcome to the program thank you hey scott let me let me start with you uh and get your perspective on what's going on the market with with object the cloud a huge amount of unstructured data out there that lives in files give us your independent view of the trends that you're seeing out there well dave you know where to start i mean surprise surprise date is growing um but one of the big things that we've seen is we've been talking about data growth for what decades now but what's really fascinating is or changed is because of the digital economy digital business digital transformation whatever you call it now people are not just storing data they actually have to use it and so we see this in trends like analytics and artificial intelligence and what that does is it's just increasing the demand for not only consolidation of massive amounts of storage that we've seen for a while but also the demand for incredibly low latency access to that storage and i think that's one of the things that we're seeing that's driving this need for convergence as you put it of having multiple protocols consolidated onto one platform but also the need for high performance access to that data thank you for that a great setup i got like i wrote down three topics that we're going to unpack as a result of that so garrett let me let me go to you maybe you can give us the perspective of what you see with customers is is this is this like a push where customers are saying hey listen i need to converge my file and object or is it more a story where they're saying garrett i have this problem and then you see unified file and object as a solution yeah i think i think for us it's you know taking that consultative approach with our customers and really kind of hearing pain around some of the pipelines the way that they're going to market with data today and kind of what are the problems that they're seeing we're also seeing a lot of the change driven by the software vendors as well so really being able to support a disaggregated design where you're not having to upgrade and maintain everything as a single block has really been a place where we've seen a lot of customers pivot to where they have more flexibility as they need to maintain larger volumes of data and higher performance data having the ability to do that separate from compute and cache and those other layers are is really critical so matt i wonder if if you could you know follow up on that so so gary was talking about this disaggregated design so i like it you know distributed cloud etc but then we're talking about bringing things together in in one place right so square that circle how does this fit in with this hyper-distributed cloud edge that's getting built out yeah you know i mean i i could give you the easy answer on that but i could also pass it back to garrett in the sense that you know garrett maybe it's important to talk about um elastic and splunk and some of the things that you're seeing in in that world and and how that i think the answer to dave's question i think you can give you can give a pretty qualified answer relative what your customers are seeing oh that'd be great please yeah absolutely no no problem at all so you know i think with um splunk kind of moving from its traditional design and classic design whatever you want you want to call it up into smart store um that was kind of one of the first that we saw kind of make that move towards kind of separating object out and i think you know a lot of that comes from their own move to the cloud and updating their code to basically take advantage of object object in the cloud uh but we're starting to see you know with like vertica eon for example um elastic other folks taking that same type of approach where in the past we were building out many 2u servers we were jamming them full of uh you know ssds and nvme drives that was great but it doesn't really scale and it kind of gets into that same problem that we see with you know hyper convergence a little bit where it's you know you're all you're always adding something maybe that you didn't want to add um so i think it you know again being driven by software is really kind of where we're seeing the world open up there but that whole idea of just having that as a hub and a central place where you can then leverage that out to other applications whether that's out to the edge for machine learning or ai applications to take advantage of it i think that's where that convergence really comes back in but i think like scott mentioned earlier it's really folks are now doing things with the data where before i think they were really storing it trying to figure out what are we going to actually do with it when we need to do something with it so this is making it possible yeah and dave if i could just sort of tack on to the end of garrett's answer there you know in particular vertica with neon mode the ability to leverage sharded subclusters give you um you know sort of an advantage in terms of being able to isolate performance hot spots you an advantage to that is being able to do that on a flashblade for example so um sharded subclusters allow you to sort of say i'm you know i'm going to give prioritization to you know this particular element of my application and my data set but i can still share those share that data across those across those subclusters so um you know as you see you know vertica advance with eon mode or you see splunk advance with with smart store you know these are all sort of advancements that are you know it's a chicken in the egg thing um they need faster storage they need you know sort of a consolidated data storage data set um and and that's what sort of allows these things to drive forward yeah so vertica eon mode for those who don't know it's the ability to separate compute and storage and scale independently i think i think vertica if they're if they're not the only one they're one of the only ones i think they might even be the only one that does that in the cloud and on-prem and that sort of plays into this distributed you know nature of this hyper-distributed cloud i sometimes call it and and i'm interested in the in the data pipeline and i wonder scott if we could talk a little bit about that maybe we're unified object and file i mean i'm envisioning this this distributed mesh and then you know uffo is sort of a node on that that i i can tap when i need it but but scott what are you seeing as the state of infrastructure as it relates to the data pipeline and the trends there yeah absolutely dave so when i think data pipeline i immediately gravitate to analytics or or machine learning initiatives right and so one of the big things we see and this is it's an interesting trend it seems you know we continue to see increased investment in ai increased interest and people think and as companies get started they think okay well what does that mean well i got to go hire a data scientist okay well that data scientist probably needs some infrastructure and what they end what often happens in these environments is where it ends up being a bespoke environment or a one-off environment and then over time organizations run into challenges and one of the big challenges is the data science team or people whose jobs are outside of it spend way too much time trying to get the infrastructure to to keep up with their demands and predominantly around data performance so one of the one of the ways organizations that especially have artificial intelligence workloads in production and we found this in our research have started mitigating that is by deploying flash all across the data pipeline we have we have data on this sorry interrupt but yeah if you could bring up that that chart that would be great um so take us through this uh uh scott and share with us what we're looking at here yeah absolutely so so dave i'm glad you brought this up so we did this study um i want to say late last year uh one of the things we looked at was across artificial intelligence environments now one thing that you're not seeing on this slide is we went through and we asked all around the data pipeline and we saw flash everywhere but i thought this was really telling because this is around data lakes and when when or many people think about the idea of a data lake they think about it as a repository it's a place where you keep maybe cold data and what we see here is especially within production environments a pervasive use of flash storage so i think that 69 of organizations are saying their data lake is mostly flash or all flash and i think we have zero percent that don't have any flash in that environment so organizations are finding out that they that flash is an essential technology to allow them to harness the value of their data so garrett and then matt i wonder if you could chime in as well we talk about digital transformation and i sometimes call it you know the coveted forced march to digital transformation and and i'm curious as to your perspective on things like machine learning and the adoption and scott you may have a perspective on this as well you know we had to pivot we had to get laptops we had to secure the end points you know and vdi those became super high priorities what happened to you know injecting ai into my applications and and machine learning did that go in the back burner was that accelerated along with the need to digitally transform garrett i wonder if you could share with us what you saw with with customers last year yeah i mean i think we definitely saw an acceleration um i think folks are in in my market are still kind of figuring out how they inject that into more of a widely distributed business use case but again this data hub and allowing folks to now take advantage of this data that they've had in these data lakes for a long time i agree with scott i mean many of the data lakes that we have were somewhat flash accelerated but they were typically really made up of you know large capacity slower spinning near-line drive accelerated with some flash but i'm really starting to see folks now look at some of those older hadoop implementations and really leveraging new ways to look at how they consume data and many of those redesigned customers are coming to us wanting to look at all flash solutions so we're definitely seeing it we're seeing an acceleration towards folks trying to figure out how to actually use it in more of a business sense now or before i feel it goes a little bit more skunk works kind of people dealing with uh you know in a much smaller situation maybe in the executive offices trying to do some testing and things scott you're nodding away anything you can add in here yeah so first off it's great to get that confirmation that the stuff we're seeing in our research garrett's seeing you know out in the field and in the real world um but you know as it relates to really the past year it's been really fascinating so one of the things we study at esg is i.t buying intentions what are things what are initiatives that companies plan to invest in and at the beginning of 2020 we saw a heavy interest in machine learning initiatives then you transition to the middle of 2020 in the midst of covid some organizations continued on that path but a lot of them had the pivot right how do we get laptops to everyone how do we continue business in this new world well now as we enter into 2021 and hopefully we're coming out of this uh you know the pandemic era um we're getting into a world where organizations are pivoting back towards these strategic investments around how do i maximize the usage of data and actually accelerating those because they've seen the importance of of digital business initiatives over the past year yeah matt i mean when we exited 2019 we saw a narrowing of experimentation and our premise was you know that that organizations are going to start now operationalizing all their digital transformation experiments and and then we had a you know 10 month petri dish on on digital so what do you what are you seeing in this regard a 10 month petri dish is an interesting way to interesting way to describe it um you know we saw another there's another there's another candidate for pivot in there around ransomware as well right um you know security entered into the mix which took people's attention away from some of this as well i mean look i'd like to bring this up just a level or two um because what we're actually talking about here is progress right and and progress isn't is an inevitability um you know whether it's whether whether you believe that it's by 2025 or you or you think it's 2035 or 2050 it doesn't matter we're on a forced march to the eradication of disk and that is happening in many ways uh you know in many ways um due to some of the things that garrett was referring to and what scott was referring to in terms of what are customers demands for how they're going to actually leverage the data that they have and that brings me to kind of my final point on this which is we see customers in three phases there's the first phase where they say hey i have this large data store and i know there's value in there i don't know how to get to it or i have this large data store and i've started a project to get value out of it and we failed those could be customers that um you know marched down the hadoop path early on and they they got some value out of it um but they realized that you know hdfs wasn't going to be a modern protocol going forward for any number of reasons you know the first being hey if i have gold.master how do i know that i have gold.4 is consistent with my gold.master so data consistency matters and then you have the sort of third group that says i have these large data sets i know how to extract value from them and i'm already on to the verticas the elastics you know the splunks etc um i think those folks are the folks that that ladder group are the folks that kept their their their projects going because they were already extracting value from them the first two groups we we're seeing sort of saying the second half of this year is when we're going to begin really being picking up on these on these types of initiatives again well thank you matt by the way for for hitting the escape key because i think value from data really is what this is all about and there are some real blockers there that i kind of want to talk about you mentioned hdfs i mean we were very excited of course in the early days of hadoop many of the concepts were profound but at the end of the day it was too complicated we've got these hyper-specialized roles that are that are you know serving the business but it still takes too long it's it's too hard to get value from data and one of the blockers is infrastructure that the complexity of that infrastructure really needs to be abstracted taking up a level we're starting to see this in in cloud where you're seeing some of those abstraction layers being built from some of the cloud vendors but more importantly a lot of the vendors like pew are saying hey we can do that heavy lifting for you uh and we you know we have expertise in engineering to do cloud native so i'm wondering what you guys see uh maybe garrett you could start us off and other students as some of the blockers uh to getting value from data and and how we're going to address those in the coming decade yeah i mean i i think part of it we're solving here obviously with with pure bringing uh you know flash to a market that traditionally was utilizing uh much slower media um you know the other thing that i that i see that's very nice with flashblade for example is the ability to kind of do things you know once you get it set up a blade at a time i mean a lot of the things that we see from just kind of more of a you know simplistic approach to this like a lot of these teams don't have big budgets and being able to kind of break them down into almost a blade type chunk i think has really kind of allowed folks to get more projects and and things off the ground because they don't have to buy a full expensive system to run these projects so that's helped a lot i think the wider use cases have helped a lot so matt mentioned ransomware you know using safe mode as a place to help with ransomware has been a really big growth spot for us we've got a lot of customers very interested and excited about that and the other thing that i would say is bringing devops into data is another thing that we're seeing so kind of that push towards data ops and really kind of using automation and infrastructure as code as a way to now kind of drive things through the system the way that we've seen with automation through devops is really an area we're seeing a ton of growth with from a services perspective guys any other thoughts on that i mean we're i'll tee it up there we are seeing some bleeding edge which is somewhat counterintuitive especially from a cost standpoint organizational changes at some some companies uh think of some of the the the internet companies that do uh music uh for instance and adding podcasts etc and those are different data products we're seeing them actually reorganize their data architectures to make them more distributed uh and actually put the domain heads the business heads in charge of the the data and the data pipeline and that is maybe less efficient but but it's again some of these bleeding edge what else are you guys seeing out there that might be yes some harbingers of the next decade uh i'll go first um you know i think specific to um the the construct that you threw out dave one of the things that we're seeing is um you know the the application owner maybe it's the devops person but it's you know maybe it's it's it's the application owner through the devops person they're they're becoming more technical in their understanding of how infrastructure um interfaces with their with their application i think um you know what what we're seeing on the flashblade side is we're having a lot more conversations with application people than um just i.t people it doesn't mean that the it people aren't there the it people are still there for sure they have to deliver the service etc um but you know the days of of i.t you know building up a catalog of services and a business owner subscribing to one of those services you know picking you know whatever sort of fits their need um i don't think that constru i think that's the construct that changes going forward the application owner is becoming much more prescriptive about what they want the infrastructure to fit how they want the infrastructure to fit into their application and that's a big change and and for for um you know certainly folks like like garrett and cdw um you know they do a good job with this being able to sort of get to the application owner and bring those two sides together there's a tremendous amount of value there for us it's been a little bit of a retooling we've traditionally sold to the i.t side of the house and um you know we've had to teach ourselves how to go talk the language of of applications so um you know i think you pointed out a good a good a good construct there and and you know that that application owner taking playing a much bigger role in what they're expecting uh from the performance of it infrastructure i think is is is a key is a key change interesting i mean that definitely is a trend that's put you guys closer to the business where the the infrastructure team is is serving the business as opposed to sometimes i talk to data experts and they're frustrated uh especially data owners or or data product builders who are frustrated that they feel like they have to beg beg the the data pipeline team to get you know new data sources or get data out how about the edge um you know maybe scott you can kick us off i mean we're seeing you know the emergence of edge use cases ai inferencing at the edge a lot of data at the edge what are you seeing there and and how does this unified object i'll bring us back to that and file fit wow dave how much time do we have um two minutes first of all scott why don't you why don't you just tell everybody what the edge is yeah you got it figured out all right how much time do you have matt at the end of the day and that that's that's a great question right is if you take a step back and i think it comes back today of something you mentioned it's about extracting value from data and what that means is when you extract value from data what it does is as matt pointed out the the influencers or the users of data the application owners they have more power because they're driving revenue now and so what that means is from an i.t standpoint it's not just hey here are the services you get use them or lose them or you know don't throw a fit it is no i have to i have to adapt i have to follow what my application owners mean now when you bring that back to the edge what it means is is that data is not localized to the data center i mean we just went through a nearly 12-month period where the entire workforce for most of the companies in this country had went distributed and business continued so if business is distributed data is distributed and that means that means in the data center that means at the edge that means that the cloud that means in all other places in tons of places and what it also means is you have to be able to extract and utilize data anywhere it may be and i think that's something that we're going to continue to and continue to see and i think it comes back to you know if you think about key characteristics we've talked about things like performance and scale for years but we need to start rethinking it because on one hand we need to get performance everywhere but also in terms of scale and this ties back to some of the other initiatives and getting value from data it's something i call that the massive success problem one of the things we see especially with with workloads like machine learning is businesses find success with them and as soon as they do they say well i need about 20 of these projects now all of a sudden that overburdens it organizations especially across across core and edge and cloud environments and so when you look at environments ability to meet performance and scale demands wherever it needs to be is something that's really important you know so dave i'd like to um just sort of tie together sort of two things that um i think that i heard from scott and garrett that i think are important and it's around this concept of scale um you know some of us are old enough to remember the day when kind of a 10 terabyte blast radius was too big of a blast radius for people to take on or a terabyte of storage was considered to be um you know an exemplary budget environment right um now we sort of think as terabytes kind of like we used to think of as gigabytes in some ways um petabyte like you don't have to explain anybody what a petabyte is anymore um and you know what's on the horizon and it's not far are our exabyte type data set workloads um and you start to think about what could be in that exabyte of data we've talked about how you extract that value we've talked about sort of um how you start but if the scale is big not everybody's going to start at a petabyte or an exabyte to garrett's point the ability to start small and grow into these products or excuse me these projects i think a is a really um fundamental concept here because you're not going to just go by i'm going to kick off a five petabyte project whether you do that on disk or flash it's going to be expensive right but if you could start at a couple hundred terabytes not just as a proof of concept but as something that you know you could get predictable value out of that then you could say hey this either scales linearly or non-linearly in a way that i can then go map my investments to how i can go dig deeper into this that's how all of these things are gonna that's how these successful projects are going to start because the people that are starting with these very large you know sort of um expansive you know greenfield projects at multi-petabyte scale it's gonna be hard to realize near-term value excellent we gotta wrap but but garrett i wonder if you could close when you look forward you talk to customers do you see this unification of of file and object is it is this an evolutionary trend is it something that is that that is that is that is going to be a lever that customers use how do you see it evolving over the next two three years and beyond yeah i mean i think from our perspective i mean just from what we're seeing from the numbers within the market the amount of growth that's happening with unstructured data is really just starting to finally really kind of hit this data deluge or whatever you want to call it that we've been talking about for so many years it really does seem to now be becoming true as we start to see things scale out and really folks settle into okay i'm going to use the cloud to to start and maybe train my models but now i'm going to get it back on prem because of latency or security or whatever the the um decision points are there this is something that is not going to slow down and i think you know folks like pure having the ability to have the tools that they give us um to use and bring to market with our customers are really key and critical for us so i see it as a huge growth area and a big focus for us moving forward guys great job unpacking a topic that you know it's covered a little bit but i think we we covered some ground that is uh that is new and so thank you so much for those insights and that data really appreciate your time thanks steve thanks yeah thanks dave okay and thank you for watching the convergence of file and object keep it right there right back after this short break innovation impact influence welcome to the cube disruptors developers and practitioners learn from the voices of leaders who share their personal insights from the hottest digital events around the globe enjoy the best this community has to offer on the cube your global leader in high-tech digital coverage [Music] okay now we're going to get the customer perspective on object and we'll talk about the convergence of file and object but really focusing on the object piece this is a content program that's being made possible by pure storage and it's co-created with the cube christopher cb bond is here he's a lead architect for microfocus the enterprise data warehouse and principal data engineer at microfocus cb welcome good to see you thanks dave good to be here so tell us more about your role at microfocus it's a pan microfocus role of course we know the company is a multinational software firm and acquired the software assets of hp of course including vertica tell us where you fit yeah so microfocus is uh you know it's like i said wide worldwide uh company that uh sells a lot of software products all over the place to governments and so forth and um it also grows often by acquiring other companies so there is the problem of of integrating new companies and their data and so what's happened over the years is that they've had a a number of different discrete data systems so you've got this data spread all over the place and they've never been able to get a full complete introspection on the entire business because of that so my role was come in design a central data repository an enterprise data warehouse that all reporting could be generated against and so that's what we're doing and we selected vertica as the edw system and pure storage flashblade as the communal repository okay so you obviously had experience with with vertica in your in your previous role so it's not like you were starting from scratch but but paint a picture of what life was like before you embarked on this sort of consolidated a approach to your your data warehouse what was it just disparate data all over the place a lot of m a going on where did the data live right so again the data was all over the place including under people's desks in just dedicated you know their their own private uh sql servers it a lot of data in in um microfocus is run on sql server which has pros and cons because that's a great uh transactional database but it's not really good for analytics in my opinion so uh but a lot of stuff was running on that they had one vertica instance that was doing some select uh reporting wasn't a very uh powerful system and it was what they call vertica enterprise mode where had dedicated nodes which um had the compute and storage um in the same locus on each uh server okay so vertica eon mode is a whole new world because it separates compute from storage you mentioned eon mode uh and the ability to to to scale storage and compute independently we wanted to have the uh analytics olap stuff close to the oltp stuff right so that's why they're co-located very close to each other and so uh we could what's nice about this situation is that these s3 objects it's an s3 object store on the pure flash plate we could copy those over if we needed to uh aws and we could spin up um a version of vertica there and keep going it's it's like a tertiary dr strategy because we actually have a we're setting up a second flashblade vertica system geo-located elsewhere for backup and we can get into it if you want to talk about how the latest version of the pure software for the flashblade allows synchronization across network boundaries of those flash plays which is really nice because if uh you know there's a giant sinkhole opens up under our colo facility and we lose that thing then we just have to switch the dns and we were back in business off the dr and then if that one was to go we could copy those objects over to aws and be up and running there so we're feeling pretty confident about being able to weather whatever comes along so you're using the the pure flash blade as an object store um most people think oh object simple but slow uh not the case for you is that right not the case at all it's ripping um well you have to understand about vertica and the way it stores data it stores data in what they call storage containers and those are immutable okay on disk whether it's on aws or if you had a enterprise mode vertica if you do an update or delete it actually has to go and retrieve that object container from disk and it destroys it and rebuilds it okay which is why you don't you want to avoid updates and deletes with vertica because the way it gets its speed is by sorting and ordering and encoding the data on disk so it can read it really fast but if you do an operation where you're deleting or updating a record in the middle of that then you've got to rebuild that entire thing so that actually matches up really well with s3 object storage because it's kind of the same way uh it gets destroyed and rebuilt too okay so that matches up very well with vertica and we were able to design this system so that it's append only now we had some reports that were running in sql server okay uh which were taking seven days so we moved that to uh to vertica from sql server and uh we rewrote the queries which were which had been written in t sql with a bunch of loops and so forth and we were to get this is amazing it went from seven days to two seconds to generate this report which has tremendous value uh to the company because it would have to have this long cycle of seven days to get a new introspection in what they call their knowledge base and now all of a sudden it's almost on demand two seconds to generate it that's great and that's because of the way the data is stored and uh the s3 you asked about oh you know is it slow well not in that context because what happens really with vertica eon mode is that it can they have um when you set up your compute nodes they have local storage also which is called the depot it's kind of a cache okay so the data will be drawn from the flash and cached locally uh and that was it was thought when they designed that oh you know it's that'll cut down on the latency okay but it turns out that if you have your compute nodes close meaning minimal hops to the flashblade that you can actually uh tell vertica you know don't even bother caching that stuff just read it directly on the fly from the from the flashblade and the performance is still really good it depends on your situation but i know for example a major telecom company that uh uses the same topology as we're talking about here they did the same thing they just they just dropped the cache because the flash player was able to to deliver the the data fast enough so that's you're talking about that that's speed of light issues and just the overhead of of of switching infrastructure is that that gets eliminated and so as a result you can go directly to the storage array that's correct yeah it's it's like it's fast enough that it's it's almost as if it's local to the compute node uh but every situation is different depending on your uh your knees if you've got like a few tables that are heavily used uh then yeah put them um put them in the cash because that'll be probably a little bit faster but if you have a lot of ad hoc queries that are going on you know you may exceed the storage of the local cache and then you're better off having it uh just read directly from the uh from the flash blade got it look it pure's a fit i mean i sound like a fanboy but pure is all about simplicity so is object so that means you don't have to you know worry about wrangling storage and worrying about luns and all that other you know nonsense and and file i've been burned by hardware in the past you know where oh okay they're building to a price and so they cheap out on stuff like fans or other things and these these components fail and the whole thing goes down but this hardware is super super good quality and uh so i'm i'm happy with the quality that we're getting so cb last question what's next for you where do you want to take this uh this this initiative well we are in the process now of we um when so i i designed this system to combine the best of the kimball approach to data warehousing and the inland approach okay and what we do is we bring over all the data we've got and we put it into a pristine staging layer okay like i said it's uh because it's append only it's essentially a log of all the transactions that are happening in this company just they appear okay and then from the the kimball side of things we're designing the data marts now so that that's what the end users actually interact with and so we're we're taking uh the we're examining the transactional systems to say how are these business objects created what's what's the logic there and we're recreating those logical models in uh in vertica so we've done a handful of them so far and it's working out really well so going forward we've got a lot of work to do to uh create just about every object that that the company needs cb you're an awesome guest to really always a pleasure talking to you and uh thank you congratulations and and good luck going forward stay safe thank you [Music] okay let's summarize the convergence of file and object first i want to thank our guests matt burr scott sinclair garrett belsener and c.b bohn i'm your host dave vellante and please allow me to briefly share some of the key takeaways from today's program so first as scott sinclair of esg stated surprise surprise data's growing and matt burr he helped us understand the growth of unstructured data i mean estimates indicate that the vast majority of data will be considered unstructured by mid-decade 80 or so and obviously unstructured data is growing very very rapidly now of course your definition of unstructured data and that may vary across across a wide spectrum i mean there's video there's audio there's documents there's spreadsheets there's chat i mean these are generally considered unstructured data but of course they all have some type of structure to them you know perhaps it's not as strict as a relational database but there's certainly metadata and certain structure to these types of use cases that i just mentioned now the key to what pure is promoting is this idea of unified fast file and object uffo look object is great it's inexpensive it's simple but historically it's been less performant so good for archiving or cheap and deep types of examples organizations often use file for higher performance workloads and let's face it most of the world's data lives in file formats what pure is doing is bringing together file and object by for example supporting multiple protocols ie nfs smb and s3 s3 of course has really given new life to object over the past decade now the key here is to essentially enable customers to have the best of both worlds not having to trade off performance for object simplicity and a key discussion point that we've had on the program has been the impact of flash on the long slow death of spinning disk look hard disk drives they had a great run but hdd volumes they peaked in 2010 and flash as you well know has seen tremendous volume growth thanks to the consumption of flash in mobile devices and then of course its application into the enterprise and that's volume is just going to keep growing and growing and growing the price declines of flash are coming down faster than those of hdd so it's the writing's on the wall it's just a matter of time so flash is riding down that cost curve very very aggressively and hdd has essentially become you know a managed decline business now by bringing flash to object as part of the flashblade portfolio and allowing for multiple protocols pure hopes to eliminate the dissonance between file and object and simplify the choice in other words let the workload decide if you have data in a file format no problem pure can still bring the benefits of simplicity of object at scale to the table so again let the workload inform what the right strategy is not the technical infrastructure now pure course is not alone there are others supporting this multi-protocol strategy and so we asked matt burr why pure or what's so special about you and not surprisingly in addition to the product innovation he went right to pure's business model advantages i mean for example with its evergreen support model which was very disruptive in the marketplace you know frankly pure's entire business disrupted the traditional disk array model which was fundamentally was flawed pure forced the industry to respond and when it achieved escape velocity velocity and pure went public the entire industry had to react and a big part of the pure value prop in addition to this business model innovation that we just discussed is simplicity pure's keep its simple approach coincided perfectly with the ascendancy of cloud where technology organizations needed cloud-like simplicity for certain workloads that were never going to move into the cloud they're going to stay on-prem now i'm going to come back to this but allow me to bring in another concept that garrett and cb really highlighted and that is the complexity of the data pipeline and what do you mean what do i mean by that and why is this important so scott sinclair articulated he implied that the big challenge is organizations their data full but insights are scarce scarce a lot of data not as much insights it takes time too much time to get to those insights so we heard from our guests that the complexity of the data pipeline was a barrier to getting to faster insights now cb bonds shared how he streamlined his data architecture using vertica's eon mode which allowed him to scale compute independently of storage so that brought critical flexibility and improved economics at scale and flashblade of course was the back-end storage for his data warehouse efforts now the reason i think this is so important is that organizations are struggling to get insights from data and the complexity associated with the data pipeline and data life cycles let's face it it's overwhelming organizations and there the answer to this problem is a much longer and different discussion than unifying object and file that's you know i can spend all day talking about that but let's focus narrowly on the part of the issue that is related to file and object so the situation here is that technology has not been serving the business the way it should rather the formula is twisted in the world of data and big data and data architectures the data team is mired in complex technical issues that impact the time to insights now part of the answer is to abstract the underlying infrastructure complexity and create a layer with which the business can interact that accelerates instead of impedes innovation and unifying file and object is a simple example of this where the business team is not blocked by infrastructure nuance like does this data reside in a file or object format can i get to it quickly and inexpensively in a logical way or is the infrastructure in a stovepipe and blocking me so if you think about the prevailing sentiment of how the cloud is evolving to incorporate on premises workloads that are hybrid and configurations that are working across clouds and now out to the edge this idea of an abstraction layer that essentially hides the underlying infrastructure is a trend we're going to see evolve this decade now is uffo the be all end-all answer to solving all of our data pipeline challenges no no of course not but by bringing the simplicity and economics of object together with the ubiquity and performance of file uffo makes it a lot easier it simplifies life organizations that are evolving into digital businesses which by the way is every business so we see this as an evolutionary trend that further simplifies the underlying technology infrastructure and does a better job supporting the data flows for organizations so they don't have to spend so much time worrying about the technology details that add a little value to the business okay so thanks for watching the convergence of file and object and thanks to pure storage for making this program possible this is dave vellante for the cube we'll see you next time [Music] you

>>From around the globe presenting the convergence of file and object brought to you by pure storage. Okay. >>We're back with the convergence of file and object and a power panel. This is a special content program made possible by pure storage. And co-created with the cube. Now in this series, what we're doing is we're exploring the coming together of file and object storage, trying to understand the trends that are driving this convergence, the architectural considerations that users should be aware of and which use cases make the most sense for so-called unified fast file in object storage. And with me are three great guests to unpack these issues. Garrett bell center is the data center solutions architect he's with CDW. Scott Sinclair is a senior analyst at enterprise strategy group. He's got deep experience on enterprise storage and brings that independent analyst perspective. And Matt Burr is back with us, gentlemen, welcome to the program. >>Thank you. >>Hey Scott, let me, let me start with you, uh, and get your perspective on what's going on in the market with, with object to cloud huge amount of unstructured data out there. It lives in files. Give us your independent view of the trends that you're seeing out there. >>Well, Dave, you know where to start, I mean, surprise, surprise data's growing. Um, but one of the big things that we've seen is that we've been talking about data growth for what decades now, but what's really fascinating is or changed is because of the digital economy, digital business, digital transformation, whatever you call it. Now, people are not just storing data. They actually have to use it. And so we see this in trends like analytics and artificial intelligence. And what that does is it's just increasing the demand for not only consolidation of massive amounts of storage that we've seen for awhile, but also the demand for incredibly low latency access to that storage. And I think that's one of the things that we're seeing, that's driving this need for convergence, as you put it of having multiple protocols can Solidated onto one platform, but also the need for high performance access to that data. >>Thank you for that. A great setup. I got, like I wrote down three topics that we're going to unpack as a result of that. So Garrett, let me, let me go to you. Maybe you can give us the perspective of what you see with customers is, is this, is this like a push where customers are saying, Hey, listen, I need to converge my file and object. Or is it more a story where they're saying, Garrett, I have this problem. And then you see unified file and object as a solution. >>Yeah, I think, I think for us, it's, you know, taking that consultative approach with our customers and really kind of hearing pain around some of the pipelines, the way that they're going to market with data today and kind of what are the problems that they're seeing. We're also seeing a lot of the change driven by the software vendors as well. So really being able to support a dis-aggregated design where you're not having to upgrade and maintain everything as a single block has been a place where we've seen a lot of customers pivot to where they have more flexibility as they need to maintain larger volumes of data and higher performance data, having the ability to do that separate from compute and cash. And some of those other layers are, is really critical. >>So, Matt, I wonder if you could follow up on that. So, so Gary was talking about this dis-aggregated design, so I like it, you know, distributed cloud, et cetera, but then we're talking about bringing things together in one place, right? So square that circle. How does this fit in with this hyper distributed cloud edge that's getting built out? >>Yeah. You know, I mean, I could give you the easy answer on that, but I can also pass it back to Garrett in the sense that, you know, Garrett, maybe it's important to talk about, um, elastic and Splunk and some of the things that you're seeing in, in that world and, and how that, I think the answer today, the question I think you can give, you can give a pretty qualified answer relative to what your customers are seeing. >>Oh, that'd be great, please. >>Yeah, absolutely. No, no problem at all. So, you know, I think with, um, Splunk kind of moving from its traditional design and classic design, whatever you want to, you want to call it up into smart store? Um, that was kind of one of the first that we saw kind of make that move towards kind of separating object out. And I think, you know, a lot of that comes from their own move to the cloud and updating their code to basically take advantage of object object in the cloud. Um, but we're starting to see, you know, with like Vertica Ian, for example, um, elastic other folks taking that same type of approach where in the past we were building out many to use servers. We were jamming them full of, uh, you know, SSDs and then DME drives. Um, that was great, but it doesn't really scale. >>And it kind of gets into that same problem that we see with hyperconvergence a little bit where it's, you know, you're all, you're always adding something maybe that you didn't want to add. Um, so I think it, you know, again, being driven by software is really kind of where we're seeing the world open up there. Um, but that whole idea of just having that as a hub and a central place where you can then leverage that out to other applications, whether that's out to the edge for machine learning or AI applications to take advantage of it. I think that's where that convergence really comes back in. Um, but I think like Scott mentioned earlier, it's really folks are now doing things with the data where before I think they were really storing and trying to figure out what are we going to actually do with it when we need to do something with it? So this is making it possible. >>Yeah. And Dave, if I could just sort of tack onto the end of the Garrett's answer there, you know, in particular verdict with beyond mode, the ability to leverage sharted sub clusters, give you, um, you know, sort of an advantage in terms of being able to isolate performance, hotspots you an advantage to that as being able to do that on a flash blade, for example. So, um, sharted, sub clusters allow you to sort of say, I am, you know, I am going to give prioritization to, you know, this particular element of my application in my dataset, but I can still share those, share that data across those, across those sub clusters. So, um, you know, as you see, you know, Vertica with the non-motor, >>You see Splunk advanced with, with smart store, um, you know, these are all sort of advancements that are, you know, it's a chicken and the egg thing. Um, they need faster storage, they need, you know, sort of a consolidated data storage data set. Um, and, and that's what sort of allows these things to drive forward. Yes, >>The verdict eon mode, there was a no, no, it's the ability to separate compute and storage and scale independently. I think, I think Vertica, if they're, if they're not the only one, they're one of the only ones I think they might even be the only one that does that in the cloud and on prem and that sort of plays into this distributed nature of this hyper distributed cloud. I sometimes call it and I'm interested in the, in the data pipeline. And I wonder Scott, if we can talk a little bit about that maybe where unified object and file fund. I mean, I'm envisioning this, this distributed mesh and then, you know, UFO is sort of a note on that, that I can tap when I need it. But, but Scott, what are you seeing as the state of infrastructure as it relates to the data pipeline and the trends there? >>Yeah, absolutely. Dave, so w when I think data pipeline, I immediately gravitate to analytics or, or machine learning initiatives. Right. And so one of the big things we see, and this is, it's an interesting trend. It seems, you know, we continue to see increased investment in AI, increase interest and people think, and as companies get started, they think, okay, well, what does that mean? Well, I gotta go hire a data scientist. Okay. Well that data scientist probably needs some infrastructure. And what they end, what often happens in these environments is where it ends up being a bespoke environment or a one-off environment. And then over time organizations run into challenges. And one of the big challenges is the data science team or people whose jobs are outside of it, spend way too much time trying to get the infrastructure, um, to, to keep up with their demands and predominantly around data performance. So one of the, one of the ways organizations that especially have artificial intelligence workloads in production, and we found this in our research have started mitigating that is by deploying flash all across the data pipe. We have. Yeah, >>We have data on this. Sorry to interrupt, but Pat, if you could bring up that, that chart, that would be great. Um, so take us through this, uh, Scott and, and share with us what we're looking at here. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, so Dave, I'm glad you brought this up. So we did this study. Um, I want to say late last year, uh, one of the things we looked at was across artificial intelligence environments. Now, one thing that you're not seeing on this slide is we went through and we asked all around the data pipeline and we saw flash everywhere. But I thought this was really telling because this is around data lakes. And when many people think about the idea of a data Lake, they think about it as a repository. It's a place where you keep maybe cold data. And what we see here is especially within production environments, a pervasive use of flash stores. So I think that 69% of organizations are saying their data Lake is mostly flash or all flash. And I think we had 0% that don't have any flash in that environment. So organizations are out that thing that flashes in essential technology to allow them to harness the value of their data. >>So Garrett, and then Matt, I wonder if you could chime in as well. We talk about digital transformation and I, I sometimes call it, you know, the COVID forced March to digital transformation. And, and I'm curious as to your perspective on things like machine learning and the adoption, um, and Scott, you may have a perspective on this as well. You know, we had to pivot, he had to get laptops. We had to secure the end points, you know, VDI, those became super high priorities. What happened to, you know, injecting AI into my applications and, and machine learning. Did that go in the back burner? Was that accelerated along with the need to digitally transform, uh, Garrett, I wonder if you could share with us what you saw with, with customers last year? >>Yeah. I mean, I think we definitely saw an acceleration. Um, I think folks are in, in my market are, are still kind of figuring out how they inject that into more of a widely distributed business use case. Um, but again, this data hub and allowing folks to now take advantage of this data that they've had in these data lakes for a long time. I agree with Scott. I mean, many of the data lakes that we have were somewhat flashing, accelerated, but they were typically really made up of large capacity, uh, slower spinning nearline drives, um, accelerated with some flash, but I'm really starting to see folks now look at some of those older Hadoop implementations and really leveraging new ways to look at how they consume data. And many of those redesigned customers are coming to us, wanting to look at all flash solutions. So we're definitely seeing it. And we're seeing an acceleration towards folks trying to figure out how to actually use it in more of a business sense now, or before I feel it goes a little bit more skunkworks kind of people dealing with, uh, you know, in a much smaller situation, maybe in the executive offices trying to do some testing and things. >>Scott you're nodding away. Anything you can add in here. >>Yeah. So, well, first off, it's great to get that confirmation that the stuff we're seeing in our research, Garrett seeing, you know, out in the field and in the real world, um, but you know, as it relates to really the past year, it's been really fascinating. So one of the things we, we studied at ESG is it buying intentions. What are things, what are initiatives that companies plan to invest in? And at the beginning of 2020, we saw heavy interest in machine learning initiatives. Then you transition to the middle of 2020 in the midst of COVID. Uh, some organizations continued on that path, but a lot of them had the pivot, right? How do we get laptops, everyone? How do we continue business in this new world? Well, now as we enter into 2021, and hopefully we're coming out of this, uh, you know, the, the pandemic era, um, we're getting into a world where organizations are pivoting back towards these strategic investments around how do I maximize the usage of data and actually accelerating those because they've seen the importance of, of digital business initiatives over the past >>Year. >>Yeah, Matt, I mean, when we exited 2019, we saw a narrowing of experimentation in our premise was, you know, that that organizations are going to start now operationalizing all their digital transformation experiments. And, and then we had a 10 month Petri dish on, on digital. So what are you, what are you seeing in this regard? >>It's 10 months, Petri dish is an interesting way to interesting way to describe it. Um, you know, we, we saw another, there's another, there's another candidate for pivot in there around ransomware as well. Right. Um, you know, security entered into the mix, uh, which took people's attention away from some of this as well. I mean, look, I I'd like to bring this up just a level or two, um, because what we're actually talking about here is progress, right? And, and progress is an, is an inevitability. Um, you know, whether it's whether, whether you believe that it's by 20, 25 or you, or you think it's 20, 35 or 2050, it doesn't matter. We're on a forced March to the eradication of desk. And that is happening in many ways. Uh, you know, in many ways, um, due to some of the things that Garrett was referring to and what Scott was referring to in terms of what our customer's demands for, how they're going to actually leverage the data that they have. >>And that brings me to kind of my final point on this, which is we see customers in three phases. There's the first phase where they say, Hey, I have this large data store, and I know there's value in there. I don't know how to get to it. Or I have this large data store and I've started a project to get value out of it. And we failed. Those could be customers that, um, you know, marched down the dupe, the Hadoop path early on. And they, they, they got some value out of it. Um, but they realized that, you know, HDFS, wasn't going to be a modern protocol going forward for any number of reasons. You know, the first being, Hey, if I have gold dot master, how do I know that I have gold dot four is consistent with my gold dot master? So data consistency matters. >>And then you have the sort of third group that says, I have these large datasets. I know how to extract value from them. And I'm already on to the Vertica is the elastics, you know, the Splunks et cetera. Um, I think those folks are the folks that, that latter group are the folks that kept their, their, their projects going because they were already extracting value from them. The first two groups we were seeing, sort of saying the second half of this year is when we're going to begin really being picking up on these, on these types of initiatives again. >>Well, thank you, Matt, by the way, for, for hitting the escape key, because I think value from data really is what this is all about. And there are some real blockers there that I kind of want to talk about. You've mentioned HDFS. I mean, we were very excited, of course, in the early days of a dupes, many of the concepts were profound, but at the end of the day, it was too complicated. We've got these hyper specialized roles that are, that are serving the business, but it still takes too long. It's, it's too hard to get value from data. And one of the blockers is infrastructure that the complexity of that infrastructure really needs to be abstracted taken up a level. We're starting to see this in, in cloud where you're seeing some of those abstraction layers being built from some of the cloud vendors, but more importantly, a lot of the vendors like pure, Hey, we can do that heavy lifting for you. Uh, and we, you know, we have expertise in engineering to do cloud native. So I'm wondering what you guys see. Maybe Garrett, you could start us off and the other salmon as some of the blockers, uh, to getting value from data and how we're going to address those in the coming decade. >>Yeah. I mean, I think part of it we're solving here obviously with, with pure bringing, uh, you know, flash to a market that traditionally was utilizing a much slower media. Um, you know, the other thing that I, that I see that's very nice with flash blade for example, is the ability to kind of do things, you know, once you get it set up a blade at a time. I mean, a lot of the things that we see from just kind of more of a simplistic approach to this, like a lot of these teams don't have big budgets and being able to kind of break them down into almost a blade type chunk, I think has really kind of allowed folks to get more projects and, and things off the ground because they don't have to buy a full expensive system to run these projects. Um, so that's helped a lot. >>I think the wider use cases have helped a lot. So, um, Matt mentioned ransomware, um, you know, using safe mode as a, as a place to help with ransomware has been a really big growth spot for us. We've got a lot of customers, very interested and excited about that. Um, and the other thing that I would say is bringing dev ops into data is another thing that we're seeing. So kind of that push towards data ops and really kind of using automation and infrastructure as code as a way to now kind of drive things through the system. The way that we've seen with automation through dev ops is, is really an area we're seeing a ton of growth with from a services perspective, >>Guys, any other thoughts on that? I mean, we're, I I'll, I'll tee it up there. I, we are seeing some bleeding edge, which is somewhat counterintuitive, especially from a cost standpoint, organizational changes at some, some companies, uh, think of some of the, the, the, the internet companies that do, uh, music, uh, for instance, and adding podcasts, et cetera. And those are different data products. We're seeing them actually reorganize their data architectures to make them more distributed, uh, and actually put the domain heads, the business heads in charge of the data and the data pipeline. And that is maybe less efficient, but, but it's, again, some of these bleeding edge. What else are you guys seeing out there that might be some harbinger of the next decade? >>Uh, I'll go first. Um, you know, I think specific to, um, the, the construct that you threw out, Dave, one of the things that we're seeing is, um, you know, the, the, the application owner, maybe it's the dev ops person, but it's, you know, maybe it's, it's, it's, it's the application owner through the dev ops person. They're, they're becoming more technical in their understanding of how infrastructure, um, interfaces with their, with their application. I think, um, you know, what, what we're seeing on the flash blade side is we're having a lot more conversations with application people than, um, just it people. It doesn't mean that the, it people aren't there, the it, people are still there for sure if they have to deliver the service, et cetera. Um, but you know, the days of, of it, you know, building up a catalog of services and a business owner subscribing to one of those services, you know, picking, you know, whatever sort of fits their need. >>Um, I don't think that constant, I think that's the construct that changes going forward. The application owner is becoming much more prescriptive about what they want the infrastructure to fit, how they want the infrastructure to fit into their application. Um, and that's a big change. And for, for, um, you know, certainly folks like, like Garrett and CDW, um, you know, they do a good job with this being able to sort of get to the application owner and bring those two sides together. There's a tremendous amount of value there, uh, for us to spend a little bit of a, of a retooling we've traditionally sold to the it side of the house. And, um, you know, we've had to teach ourselves how to go talk the language of, of applications. So, um, you know, I think you pointed out a good, a good, a good construct there, and you know, that that application owner tank playing a much bigger role in what they're expecting from the performance of it, infrastructure I think is, is, is a key, is a key change. >>Interesting. I mean, that definitely is a trend. That's puts you guys closer to the business where the infrastructure team is serving the business, as opposed to sometimes I talked to data experts and they're frustrated, uh, especially data owners or data, product builders who are frustrated that they feel like they have to beg, beg the, the data pipeline team to get, you know, new data sources or get data out. How about the edge? Um, you know, maybe Scott, you can kick us off. I mean, we're seeing, you know, the emergence of, of edge use cases, AI inferencing at the edge, lot of data at the edge. W what are you seeing there and how does this unified object I'll bring us back to that in file fit. >>Wow. Dave, how much time do we have, um, tell me, first of all, Scott, why don't you, why don't you just tell everybody what the edge is? Yeah. You got it all figured out. How much time do you have end of the day. And that's, that's a great question, right? Is if you take a step back and I think it comes back to Dave, something you mentioned it's about extracting value from data. And what that means is when you extract value from data, what it does is as Matt pointed out the, the influencers or the users of data, the application owners, they have more power because they're driving revenue now. And so what that means is from an it standpoint, it's not just, Hey, here are the services you get, use them or lose them, or, you know, don't throw a fit. It is no, I have to, I have to adapt. I have to follow what my application owners me. Now, when you bring that back to the edge, what it means is, is that data is not localized to the data center. I mean, we just went through a nearly 12 month period where >>The entire workforce for most of the companies in this country had went distributed and business continued. So if business is distributed, data is distributed. And that means, that means in the data center, that means at the edge, that means that the cloud, and that means in all other places and tons of places. And what it also means is you have to be able to extract and utilize data anywhere it may be. And I think that's something that we're going to continue to and continue to see. And I think it comes back to, you know, if you think about key characteristics, we've talked about, um, things like performance and scale for years, but we need to start rethinking it because on one hand, we need to get performance everywhere. But also in terms of scale, and this ties back to some of the other initiatives and getting value from data, it's something I call the, the massive success problem. One of the things we see, especially with, with workloads like machine learning is businesses find success with them. And as soon as they do they say, well, I need about 20 of these projects now will all of a sudden that overburdens it organizations, especially across, across core and edge and cloud environments. And so when you look at environments ability to meet performance and scale demands, wherever it needs to be is something that's really important. You know, >>Dave, I'd like to, um, just sort of tie together sort of two things that, um, I think that I heard from Scott and Garrett that I think are important and it's around this concept of scale. Um, you know, some of us are old enough to remember the day when kind of a 10 terabyte blast radius was too big of a blast radius for people to take on, or a terabyte of storage was considered to be, um, you know, uh, uh, an exemplary budget environment. Right. Um, now we sort of think as terabytes, kind of like we used to think of as gigabytes in some ways, um, petabyte, like you don't have to explain to anybody what a petabyte is anymore. Um, and you know, what's on the horizon and it's not far are our exabyte type dataset workloads. Um, and you start to think about what could be in that exabyte of data. >>We've talked about how you extract that value. And we've talked about sort of, um, how you start, but if the scale is big, not everybody's going to start at a petabyte or an exabyte to Garrett's point, the ability to start small and grow into these products, or excuse me, these projects, I think is a, is a really, um, fundamental concept here because you're not going to just go buy five. I'm going to go kick off a five petabyte project, whether you do that on disk or flash, it's going to be expensive, right. But if you could start at a couple of hundred terabytes, not just as a proof of concept, but as something that, you know, you could get predictable value out of that, then you could say, Hey, this either scales linearly, or non-linearly in a way that I can then go map my investments to how I can go dig deeper into this. That's how all of these things are going to, that's how these successful projects are going to start, because the people that are starting with these very large, you know, sort of, um, expansive, you know, Greenfield projects at multi petabyte scale, it's gonna be hard to realize near-term value. Excellent. Uh, >>We we're, we gotta wrap, but, but Garrett, I wonder if you could close it, when you look forward, you talk to customers, do you see this unification of file and object? Is it, is this an evolutionary trend? Is it something that is, that is, that is, that is going to be a lever that customers use. How do you see it evolving over the next two, three years and beyond? >>Yeah, I mean, I think from our perspective, I mean, just from what we're seeing from the numbers within the market, the amount of growth that's happening with unstructured data is really just starting to finally really kind of hit this data delusion or whatever you want to call it that we've been talking about for so many years. Um, it really does seem to now be becoming true, um, as we start to see things scale out and really folks settle into, okay, I'm going to use the cloud to start and maybe train my models, but now I'm going to get it back on prem because of latency or security or whatever the, the, the, um, decision points are there. Um, this is something that is not going to slow down. And I think, you know, folks like pure having the ability to have the tools that they give us, um, do use and bring to market with our customers are, are really key and critical for us. So I see it as a huge growth area and a big focus for us moving forward, >>Guys, great job unpacking a topic that, you know, it's covered a little bit, but I think we, we covered some ground. That is a, that is new. And so thank you so much for those insights and that data really appreciate your time. >>Thanks, Dave. Thanks. Yeah. Thanks, Dave. >>Okay. And thank you for watching the convergence of file and object. Keep it right there. Bright, bright back after the short break.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all >>around the world. This is a cube conversation, Everyone. Welcome to this week's Cube insights, powered by ET are My name is Dave Volante, and we've been reporting every week really on the code. 19. Impact on Budgets Docker Korakia is back in with me soccer. It's great to see you really >>again for having >>your very welcome. Soccer is, of course, the director of research, that we are our data partner and man. I mean, you guys have just been digging into the data or a court reiterate We're down, you know, roughly around minus 5% for the year. The thing about what we're doing here and where they want to stress in the audience that that's going to change. The key point is we don't just do ah, placeholder and update you in December. Every time we get new information, we're going to convey it to you. So let's get right into it. What we want to do today is you kind of part two from the takeaways that we did last week. So let's start with the macro guys. If you bring up the first chart, take us through kind of the top three takeaways. And just to reiterate where we're at >>Yeah, no problem. And look, as you mentioned, uh, what we're doing right now is we're collecting the pulse of CIOs. And so things change on and we continue to expect them to change, you know, in the next few weeks, in the next few months, as things change with it. So just kind of give a recap of the survey and then kind of going through some of our top macro takeaways. So in March mid March, we launched our Technology Spending Intention Survey. We had 1250 CIOs approximately. Take that survey. They provided their updated 2020 verse 2019 spending intentions, right? So effectively, they first Davis, those 20 21st 19 spending intentions in January. And then they went ahead and up state of those based on what happened with move it and then in tandem with that, we did this kind of over 19 drill down survey where we asked CEOs to estimate the budget impact off overnight in versus what they originally forecast in the year. And so that leads us to our first take away here, where we essentially aggregated the data from all these CIOs in that Logan 19 drill down survey. And we saw a revision of 900 basis points so down to a decline of 5%. And so coming into the year, the consensus was about 4% growth. Ah, and now you can see we're down about 5% for the year. And again, that's subject to change. And we're going again re measure that a Z kind of get into June July and we have a couple of months under our belt with the folks at night. The second big take away here is, you know, the industries that are really indicating those declines and spend retail, consumer airlines, financials, telco I key services in consulting. Those are the verticals, as we mentioned last week, that we're really seeing some of the largest Pullbacks and spend from consumers and businesses. So it makes sense that they are revising their budgets downwards the most. And then finally, the last thing we captured that we spoke about last week as well as a few weeks before that, and I think that's really been playing out the last kind of week in 1/2 earnings is CIOs are continuing to press the pedal on digital transformation. Right? We saw that with Microsoft, with service now last night, right, those companies continued the post good numbers and you see good demand, what we're seeing and where those declines that we just mentioned earlier are coming from. It's it's the legacy that's the on premise that your place there's such a concentration of loss and deceleration within some of those companies. And we'll kind of get into that more a Z go through more slides. But that's really what kind of here, you know, that's really what we need to focus on is the declines are coming from very select vendors. >>Yeah, and of course you know where we were in earning season now, and we're paying close attention to that. A lot of people say I just ignore the earnings here, you know, you got the over 19 Mulligan, but But that's really not right. I mean, obviously you want to look at balance sheets, you want to look at cash flows, but also we're squinting through some of the data your point about I t services and insulting is interesting. I saw another research firm put out that you know, services and consulting was going to be OK. Our data does, you know, different. Uh, and we're watching. For instance, Jim Kavanaugh on IBM's earnings call was very specific about the metrics that they're watching. They're obviously very concerned about pricing and their ability. The book business. There we saw the cloud guys announced Google was up in the strong fifties. The estimate is DCP was even higher up in the 80% range. Azure, you know, we'll talk about this killing it. I mean, you guys have been all over of Microsoft and its presence, you know, high fifties aws solid at around 34% growth from a larger base. But as we've been reporting, you know, downturns. They've been they've been good to cloud. >>That's right. And I think, you know, based on the data that we've captured, um, you know, it's people are really pressing the pedal on cloud and SAS with this much remote work, you need to have you know, that structure in place to maintain productivity. >>Okay, let's bring up the next slide. Now. We've been reporting a lot on this sort of next generation work loads Bob one Dato all about storage and infrastructures of service. Compute. There's an obviously some database, but there's a new analytics workload emerging. Uh, and it's kind of replacing, or at least disinter mediating or disrupting the traditional e d ws. I've said for years. CDW is failed to live up to its expectations of 360 degree insights and real time data, and that's really what we're showing here is some of the traditional CDW guys are getting hit on Some of the emerging guys, um, are looking pretty good. So take us through what we're looking at here. Soccer. >>Yeah, no problem. So we're looking at the database data warehousing sector. What you're looking at here is replacement rates. Um And so, as example, if you see up in with roughly 20% replacement, what that means is one out of five people who took the survey for that particular sector for that vendor indicated that they were replacing, and so you can see here for their data. Cloudera, IBM, Oracle. They have very elevated and accelerating replacement rates. And so when we kind of think about this space. You can really see the bifurcation, right? Look how well positioned the Microsoft AWS is. Google Mongo, Snowflake, low replacements, right low, consistent replacements. And then, of course, on the left hand side of the screen, you're really seeing elevated, accelerating. And so this space is It kind of goes with that theme that we've been talking about that we covered last week by application, right when you think about the declines that you're seeing and spend again, it's very targeted for a lot of these kind of legacy legacy vendors. And we're again. We're seeing a lot of the next gen players that Microsoft AWS in your post very strong data. And so here, looking within database, it's very clear as to which vendors are well positioned for 2020 and which ones look like they're being ripped out and swapped out in the next few months. >>So this to me, is really interesting. So you know, you you've certainly reported on the impact that snowflake is having on Terra data. And in some of IBM's business, the old man, he's a business. You can see that here. You know, it's interesting. During the Hadoop days, Cloudera Horton works when they realize that it didn't really make money on Hadoop. They sort of getting the data management and data database and you're seeing that is under pressure. It's kind of interesting to me. Oracle, you know, is still not what we're seeing with terror data, right, Because they've got a stranglehold on the marketplace That's right, hanging in there. Right? But that snowflake would no replacements is very impressive. Mongo consistent performer. And in Google aws, Microsoft AWS supports with Red Shift. They did a one time license with Park Cell, which was an MPP database. They totally retooled a thing. And now they're sort of interestingly copycatting snowflake separating compute from storage and doing some other moves. And yet they're really strong partners. So interesting >>is going on and even, you know, red shift dynamodb all. They all look good. All these all these AWS products continue screen Very well. Ah, in the data warehousing space, So yeah, to your point, there's a clear divergence of which products CIOs want to use and which ones they no longer want in their stack. >>Yeah, the database market is very much now fragment that it used to be in an Oracle db two sequel server. As you mentioned, you got a lot of choices. The Amazon. I think I counted, you know, 10 data stores, maybe more. Dynamodb Aurora, Red shift on and on and on. So a really interesting space, a lot of activity in that new workload that I'm talking about taking, Ah, analytic databases, bringing data science, pooling into that space and really driving these real time insights that we've been reporting on. So that's that's quite an exciting space. Let's talk about this whole workflow. I t s m a service now. Just just announced, uh, we've been consistently crushing it. The Cube has been following them for many, many years, whether, you know, from the early days of Fred Luddy, Bruce Lukman, the short time John Donahoe. And now Bill McDermott is the CEO, but consistent performance since the AIPO. But what are we actually showing here? Saga? Yeah, You bring up that slot. Thank you. >>So our key take away on kind of the i t m m i t s m i t workflow spaces. Look, it's best in breed, which is service now, or some of the lower cost providers. Right There's really no room for middle of the pack, so >>this is an >>interesting charts. And so what you're looking at here, there's a few directives, so kind of walk you through it and then I'll walk through. The actual results is we're looking within service now accounts. And so we're seeing how these companies are doing within or among customers that are using service. Now, today, where you're looking at on the ex, access is essentially shared market share our shared customers, and then on the Y axis you're seeing essentially the spend velocity off those vendors within service. Now's outs, right? So if the vendor was doing well, you would see them moving up into the right, right? That means they're having more customer overlap with service now, and they're also accelerating Spend, but you can see if you will get zendesk. If you look at BMC, it's a managed right. You can see there either losing market share and spend within service now accounts or they're losing spend right and zendesk is another example Here, Um, and what's actually interesting is, and we've had a lot of anecdotal evidence from CIOs is that look they start with service. Now it's best in breed, but a few of them have said, Look, it's got expensive, Um, and so they would move over Rezendes. And then they would look at it versus a conference that last year, and we had a few CEO say, Look at last quarter of the price of zendesk. Andi moved away from Zendesk and subsequently well, with last year. And so it's just it's interesting that, you know, during these times where you know CIOs are reducing their budgets on that look, it's either best of breed or low cost. There's really no room in the middle, and so it's actually kind of interesting. In this space, it's It's an interesting dynamic and being usually it's best of breed or low cost. Rarely do you kind of see both win, and I think that's what kind of makes the space interesting. >>I've been following service now for a number of years. I just make a few comments there. First of all, you know, workday was the gold standard in enterprise software for the longest time and, you know, company and and and I I always considered service now to be kind of part of that you know Silicon Valley Mafia with Frank's Loop. But what's happened is, you know, Sluman did a masterful job of identifying the total available market and executing with demand, and now you know, his successors have picking it beyond there. You know, service now has a market cap that's not quite double, but I mean, I think workday last I checked was in the mid thirties. Service now is market valuation is up in the 60 billion range. I mean, they announced, um uh, just recently, very interestingly, they be expectations. They lowered their guidance relative to consensus guide, but I think the street hose, first of all, they beat their numbers and they've got that SAS model, that very predictable model. And I think people are saying, Look there, just leaving meat on the bone so they can continue to be because that's been their sort of m o these last several years. So you got to like their positioning and you get to talk to customers. They are pricey. You do hear complaints about that, and they've got a strong lock spec. But generally I got my experiences. If people can identify business value and clear productivity, they work through the lock in, you know, they'll just fight it out in the negotiations with procurement. >>That's right, and two things on that. So with service now and and even Salesforce, right, they are a platform like approach type of vendors right where you build on them. And that's what makes them such break companies, right? Even if they have, you know, little nicks and knacks here and there. When they report people see past that right, they understand their best of breed. You build your companies on the service now's and the sales forces of the world. And to the second point, you're exactly right. Businesses want to maintain consistent productivity on, and I think that, you know, is it kind of resonates with the theme, right, doubling down on Cloud and sas. Um, as as you have all this remote work, as you have kind of, you know, questionable are curating marquee a macro environment organizations want to make sure that their employees continue to execute that they're generating consistent productivity. And using these kind of best of breed tools is the way to go. >>It's interesting you mentioned, uh, salesforce and service now for years I've been saying they're on a collision course we haven't seen yet because they're both platforms. I still, uh I'm waiting for that to happen. Let's bring up the next card and let's get into networking way talk. Um Ah. Couple of weeks ago, about the whole shift from traditional Mpls moving to SD win. And this sort of really lays it out. Take us through the data here, please. >>Yeah, no problem. So we're just looking at a handful of vendors here. Really? We're looking at networking vendors that have the highest adoption rates within cloud accounts. And so what we did was we looked inside of aws azure GCC, right. We essentially isolated just those customers. And then we said which networking vendors are seeing the best spend data and the most adoptions within those cloud accounts. And so you get you can kind of see some, uh, some themes here, right? SD lan. Right. You can see Iraqi their VM. Where nsx. You see some next gen load balance saying are they're on the cdn side right then. And so you're seeing a theme here of more next gen players on You're not really seeing a lot of the mpls vendors here, right? They're the ones that have more flattening, decreasing and replacing data. And so the reason just kind of going on this slide is you know, when you kind of think about the networking space as a whole, this is where adoptions are going. This is this is where spends billing and expanded, arise it. And what we just talked about >>your networking such a fascinating space to me because you got you got the leader and Cisco That has helped 2/3 of the market for the longest time, despite competitors like Arista, Juniper and others trying to get in the Air Force and NSX. And the big Neisseria acquisition, you know, kind of potentially disrupted that. But you can see, you know, Cisco, they don't go down without a fight. And ah, there, let's take a look at the next card on Cdn. You know, this is interesting. Uh, you know, you think with all this activity around work from home and remote offices, there's a hot area, But what are we looking at here? >>Yeah, no problem. And that's right, right? You would think. And so we're looking at Cdn players here you would think with the uptake in traffic, you would see fantastic. That scores right for all the cdn vendor. So what you're looking at here and again there's a few lenses on here, so I kind of walk. You kind of walk the audience through here is first we isolated only those individuals that were accelerating their budgets due to work from home. Right. So we've had this conversation now for a few weeks where support employees working from home. You did see a decent number of organizations. I think it was 20 or 30% of organizations at the per server that indicated they're actually accelerate instead. So we're looking at those individuals. And then what we're doing is we're seeing how are how's Cloudflare and aka my performing within those accounts, right? And so we're looking at those specific customers and you could just see within Cloudflare and we practice and security and networking which by more the Cdn piece, How consistent elevated the date is right? This is spend in density, right? Not overall market share is obviously aka my you know, their brand father CD ends. They have the most market share and if you look at optimized to the right. Now you can see the spend velocity is not very good. It's actually negative across boats sector. So you know it's not. We're not saying that. Look, there's a changing of the guard that's occurring right now. We're still relatively small compared talk my But there's just such a start on trust here and again, it kind of goes to what we're talking about. Our macro themes, right? CIOs are continuing to invest in next gen Technologies, and better technologies on that is having an impact on some of these legacy. And, you know, grandfather providers. >>Well, I mean, I think as we enter this again, I've said a number of times. It's ironic overhead coming into a new decade. And you're seeing this throughout the I T. Stack, where you've got a lot of disruptors and you've got companies with large install bases, lot of on Prem or a lot of historical legacy. Yeah, and it's very hard for them to show growth. They often times squeeze R and D because they gotta serve Wall Street. And this is the kind of dilemma they're in, and the only good news with a comma here is there is less bad security go from negative 20% to a negative 8% net score. Um, but wow, what a what a contrast, but to your point, much, much smaller base, but still very relevant. We've seen this movie before. Let's let's wrap with another area that we've talked about. What is virtualization? Desktop virtualization? Beady eye again. A beneficiary of the work from home pivot. Um, And we're focused here, right on Fortune 500 net scores. But give us the low down on this start. >>Yeah, So this is something that look, I think it's it's pretty obvious to into the market you're seeing an uptake and spend across the board versus three months ago in a year ago and spending, etc. Among your desktop virtualization players, there's FBI, right? So that's gonna be your VPN right now. Obviously, they reported pretty good numbers there, so this is an obvious slide, but we wanted to kind of throw it in there. Just say, look, you know, these organizations are seeing nice upticks incent, you know, within the virtualization sectors, specifically within Fortune 500 again, that's kind of, you know, work from home spend that we're seeing here, >>right? So, I mean, this is really a 100% net score in the Fortune 500 for workspaces is pretty amazing. And I think the shared in on this that the end was actually quite large. It wasn't like single digits, Many dozens. I remember when Workspaces first came out, it maybe wasn't ready for prime time. But clearly there's momentum there, and we're seeing this across the board saga. Thanks so much for coming in this week. Really appreciate it. We're gonna be in touch with with you with the TR. We're gonna continue to report on this, but start Dr stay safe. And thanks again. >>Thanks again. Appreciate it. Looking for to do another one. >>All right. Thank you. Everybody for watching this Cube insights Powered by ET are this is Dave Volante for Dr Sadaaki. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. I published weekly on wiki bond dot com Uh, and also on silicon angle dot com Don't forget tr dot Plus, Check out all the action there. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE, covering VEEAMON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to VEEAMON 2018 in Chicago, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Karl Rautenstrauch is here, Karl Rautenstrauch, Senior Program Manager for Azure Storage at Microsoft. Karl, thanks for coming on. >> It's a pleasure, guys. Thank you for having me. >> You've got a beautiful picture of your family. You got three boys at home, is that right? >> Karl: Three boys. >> Alright. >> They keep me out of trouble. They get into it, they keep me out of it. >> I'm one of three boys. My mom, you know, kept us going. You must have a strong woman at home. >> She is a saint. >> At any rate, thanks for coming on. We love talking Microsoft Azure, Cloud and storage. Let's start with your role. >> Karl: Sure. What do you have? >> What do you do at Microsoft? >> Absolutely. So for the last year I've been program manager with the storage team, and I've kind of a unique role. Usually you see program managers who focus on features, right? You are championing a new feature in your service, your platform. For me, I get to work with our partner ecosystem. So I spend a lot of time with our great partners, like Veeam, and our channel partners, like SHI, CDW, Softchoice, Insight. I'll tell you, I've got the best job in the business. I can't complain. I get to work with great, smart people everyday. >> So is your role transferring knowledge to those partners, assisting those partners, acting as a catalyst, gathering information from them and feeding it back to the product teams? >> Yeah, really all of the above. Helping to make sure that we've got a combined solution, an end-to-end solution, that's the best thing for our customers. So everything from upfront assessment through implementation through health check afterwards, our goal is to have the happiest customers in the public Cloud, and we can't do that without our partners. >> How should we think about the Azure Storage portfolio? Can you paint a picture for us? >> Oh boy, it has grown drastically just in the last couple of months. So not only do we have our first party offerings in the disk, traditional VM disk as we all know it, you're going to attach to a server, we have hosted file infrastructures where we provide file shares that don't require a server to manage, our partnership with NetApp where we are going to be operating NetApp systems in our data centers and offering their native services. And we just continue to expand with big data solutions, with Avere, our new acquisition, that is really aimed at high performance compute environments like we see in genomics and media and entertainment. It's just a portfolio that continues to grow. We all joke that storage is boring, right? Nobody cares about storage, but honestly, it's one of the most interesting and fastest growing and evolving platforms in Azure. >> We joke, sometimes we call it snore-age, but Stu and I are kind of boring people, so we love talking about it. >> I like that. >> So you got file, you got object, you got block, you got big data solutions, you got high performance file solutions. Okay, like you say, this expanding portfolio. >> Karl, I look back at my career and Microsoft's had a long partnership, not only on the compute side, but really on the storage side, maybe isn't as well known as shipping on every PC and server out there. Lot has changed, when you talk about Azure and Azure Stack coming out. Maybe explain a little bit, I believe you called it the first party versus the second party. How that Microsoft does it versus Microsoft partners, how those mesh together. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well I'll tell you. So I joined the company about five years ago, and I've been on the storage team for the last year. I was a field specialist, a subject matter expert, before that working very, very closely with customers. And what I love that I've seen over this period through the Satya Nadella era, is just this open Microsoft that says, we don't have to do everything. We don't have to try to provide everything to the customer. We really believe in, and I think we just diffuse that best of breed attitude going forward. Our partners feel that. Whether we're working with Veeam in Azure Public Cloud as a target, or them offering protection of VMs in public cloud, which is necessary by the way. I think that's a huge fallacy in the industry, that you place your app, you place your machine in a public cloud, and it's magically protected by pixies. It's not. >> Backup and security aren't a concern, wherever you put it, right? >> Absolutely, wherever they are. So we rely on our partners like Veeam to provide that. And really where Azure Stack comes in, is providing that consistent experience, not just to our customers, but also to out partners. So Veeam is able to protect Azure Public assets, in the same manner they're able to protect Azure Private, for Azure Stack resources. So really it's just offering customers choice to use best of breed solutions, and allowing our partners to have an easy means to support both on-premises and public Cloud. >> So it's like a service catalog that you guys offer, and then you advise customers or they pick and choose what they want? How's that all work? >> Yeah, so really what we do, and that's a great way to put it. We have what we call the Azure Marketplace that's present in the Azure Public Cloud, and we extend that to Azure Stack. So if I'm a customer who wants to deploy Veeam, per se, in either infrastructure, I go to this catalog of apps. I mean it literally is a catalog of apps. Search for Veeam, there it is, and I can single click deploy in either Azure Stack or Azure Public. >> Microsoft is unique in the sense of its hybrid strategy, in terms of what you have in the cloud you have on-prem. You're trying to, wherever possible, make it identical. >> Karl: Absolutely. >> Microsoft and Oracle are really the only two companies that have a stated strategy to do that. Let's talk about Microsoft in terms of where you're at, in terms of getting that substantially similar capability in on-prem and in the public Cloud. >> Yeah, absolutely. That's a great, great topic to discuss. Azure Stack, I always like to tell folks, full disclosure, and we don't try to hide this at all, that's not who we are, but it will always lag a little bit behind Azure Public. When you think about the controls in customers' data centers for rolling out code updates and new versions of software, new capabilities, there's always an adoption curve. You have folks who are a little more hesitant to release quickly and adopt quickly. So Azure Stack offers them the capability to defer some of those updates for a period of time. So there will be a lag. We have to qualify for multiple vendor platforms, we've chosen to go to market in a hyperconverged model with our partners, like Dell EMC, HP, Lenovo and Cisco. Whereas Azure Public, that's a completely controlled infrastructure, and we're able to deploy very quickly. And we do; we're constantly iterating and releasing new features. So I think that's the biggest difference between the two. >> So Karl, you give a session here at the show called Migrating to Azure. That whole move is pretty challenging. >> Karl: Oh yes. Am I lift and shifting? Am I transforming? Am I building new? What are you hearing from customers? And give our audience a taste of some of the key takeaways that you were talking about. >> Yeah, absolutely. So that's one of the biggest concerns that we've had over the last couple of years. I said earlier, we want the happiest customers in Public Cloud, and no Cloud regret or remorse. So what we talked about in our session was a tool that we released recently called Azure Migrate, that is all about assessing and setting expectations for customers around what can and cannot migrate, how much it will cost to run that infrastructure in Public Cloud, either as is or optimized, and then suggestions for optimizing their infrastructure to get the best bang for their buck. So there are great opportunities to save cost when platforms are adopted, like Azure sql, platform as a service offerings. When I've got that time-sharing concept, when I take away maintenance activities around operating systems and software releases, there are significant cost savings versus a lift and shift, which can quite honestly be more expensive than what that customer is doing on-premises today. So Azure Migrate is meant to help customers avoid that, no regrets. >> I wonder what you're hearing from customers cuz there's some concern. Maybe I should just do infrastructure as a service. Cuz if I get into those platform as a service, am I locked in? Microsoft is used for lots of business scribble applications. I see Microsoft strongly in the Kubernetes ecosystem, getting into the functions as a service, which those things are trying to give me a little bit more portability and flexibility. Maybe discuss some of that. >> Yeah, that's great, and I'm glad you brought that back around. So there is always that concern about the Cloud Hotel California, right? And that said, I like to half jokingly refer to it as you get in, you can never leave. And there is that jeopardy with any provider. That if you're using some proprietary platform that you can be locked-in, and really we try to promote the use of containers extensively with those customers who have that concern. And even with our hosted analytics and hosted database infrastructures, we make sure to provide those portable cross-Cloud platforms, like Postgres, MySQL. Our analytics is all Ubuntu based. Really we don't want that lock-in to be there, we don't want that to be a concern. So continuing support for open platforms and ecosystems is really something we're committed to. >> The lock-in, openness choice, it's a spectrum. I've been in this business for a long time, and Unix used to be the open system. And then today, you can't get more locked-in then a Unix platform. So I feel as though, and I wonder if you guys can comment, the Cloud has transparent pricing and transparent billing. And so lock-in is if I have a customer and they're trying to move and they're up for a contract renewal or something or a maintenance, I'm going to jack their maintenance. But you can't just do that across the board, if you have transparent billing. So there's the pricing aspect. There's certainly a lock-in with the processes and procedures that you choose, but no matter what you choose, whether it's open source, a Cloud provider like Amazon, an on-prem provider like the many that we know out there, you're going to be locked-in to your processes and procedures. So it's a matter of degree. I personally see it, because of the Cloud, as a lot less onerous than it used to be. Do you guys agree with that? >> I mean Dave, it's that application is the long pole in the tent for ones I see. What I've been using and if I go to something new, if I go build this new architecture, Cloud Nader or whatever, that's a pretty big bet. So depending on how deep and tied that is to a specific platform, even if I'm choosing a database, migrating databases aren't easy. >> But that's the issue. It's the bet that you're making. It's more so than the lock-in because lock-in, you're going to be locked in to whatever bet you make, so you've got to make the right bet. To me, it's a way for consultants to act like an advocate for the customer. What's more important in my view, is negotiation strategies, how you place that bet, how you architect your Cloud strategy. >> And I mean Dave, just quickly, I remember four years ago you and I interviewed Brad Anderson with Microsoft, and we were poking him on licensing. I don't hear that discussion about Microsoft as much, of course we always want it cheaper, and everything like that, but Microsoft's done a great job. In the Cloud communities, they're known as participating in those communities, and giving customers- >> Well that's our take, what's your take? >> No, I love it. And I think what I'm seeing is customers are hedging their bets. So you do, and it is a bet. You do have to not go all in with somebody, with any Cloud provider, but you got to put your chips with some proprietary platforms. And what I'm seeing is that multi-Cloud that we're all talking about is really becoming the reality. I can think of very few customers that I've worked with who have had Azure as their single public Cloud. And really that's how they avoid that z-series down the road, right? Where you're locked-in, you got one provider that platform. They're saying, look, I'm going to deploy on the best service in the best public Cloud for that application instance, as Stu mentioned. That's happening. >> Horses for courses, as they say in England. >> Karl: There you go. >> So we're here at VEEAMON. Your relationship with Veeam, they've obviously partnered up with you guys in a big way. Your thoughts on the partnership? >> Yeah, love working with these guys. I'm very fortunate in that I get to work with some of the best that we have, and everything from the relationship that we have on a marketing level, an engineering level, a field level, they're really ingrained in our ecosystem at all levels. Just a very, very easy partner to work with, very responsive to their customer needs. And that's what we look for. We want to work with the partners that customers love. So I'm just thrilled to be part of this relationship. >> Karl, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I think you embody the new open Microsoft, and you guys are making great progress. Congratulations and thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you Dave, it was a pleasure. Stu, thank you very much. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. VEEAMON live from Chicago, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman here with my cohost, Justin Warren, and you are watching theCUBE SiliconANGLE Media's live production of AWS re:Invent 2017. Happy to welcome back to the program, Rishi Yadav, who is the CEO of Zettabytes, and Bart Hickenlooper, who is the SAP of client services. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> So Rishi, yesterday you on the other set with John Furrier and with Justin, and we were really excited to really launch Zettabytes, help you bring the company out. We've known Infoobjects and your company for a while, so of course we want people to go check out the other interview, but in today's hybrid multi-cloud world, we've seen Amazon kind of slowly moderating a little bit the way they discuss it, but why don't you bring us inside a little bit? What are you hearing from customers, and what kind of led to the creation of Zettabytes? >> What we are hearing from customers is that there is a lot of talk about the cloud and AWS. The challenges that what I discussed yesterday also was that how do I take those baby steps toward our option of the cloud? That is where the challenge comes. On one side and they say everything on prem is bad. Everything on cloud is good. Those kind of statements are okay, but somebody who has got billions of dollars of business running, for them it doesn't make any sense. They want to have logical steps, and they also want to have, with every step, what value they are adding. >> We always hear, right, we always take in and it's like all in on any one thing. Oh come on, you are using various SAS providers. You probably have multiple cloud providers. Yes, you've still got something sitting in the backend of your data center, where many things, and that migration takes time. What kind of strategy and tactics do you hear customers doing that gets Zettabyte engaged? >> What was in most enterprises is an effort to really modernize their applications. They want to make those so that they are cloud native leveraging the innovation that's taking place in the cloud. That application modernization is really what's driving an enterprise to do some things and move quickly to the cloud. It's no longer the economics of moving to the cloud, but that innovation engine that can be really egnited with those technologies. Getting there from their legacy platforms is a little tricky. They need a development cycle that works in a hybrid fashion to really go cloud native with those applications. >> When they're starting off on that journey, where do you find customers starting with? What are the applications that they do first, and what are the functions that they use from AWS, like are they going with just EC2 type things? Are they using S3 for storage? What do they start with? >> That's a good point that for the first phase of the cloud out option most of the work was on IES. Whatever you have on prem, you just put that on the cloud then obviously you go through your storage and things like that. That is where there was a lot of talk. If you remember a few years back, everybody was saying, "The cloud is not cheap, "the cloud is costly," and as Bart said, it's not about economics. Has always about convenience. It's always about the value-added, and especially when enterprises started getting into the cloud, started the all opt in cloud a few years back, that's where those things became very important because that is what they wanted. You just cannot save someone 20% in investiture cost and that may not even come and that it's worth the option of the cloud. >> We were talking yesterday about the 100 services, the number of services that you as an orginzation have to wrap your brain around and one of the things that Zettabytes helps with that is to give you some focus so again, what are the things that Zettabytes is focusing on that they find that customers actually really, really want from cloud. Amazon is so huge. Making sense of the whole thing is quite tricky. When you talk about application modernization, if you have a monolithic application, EC2 and S3 are great. If you are going to migrate it, you can do that. What we are seeing is really a switch to DevOps for application development, microservices development that leverage certain platform services from Amazon that are specific to enable an application, and those are things like Lambda, Kinesis, Elasticsearch, and you can write microservices that consume those services in addition to your traditional storage and compute, and really get cloud native. We've selected those services on our platform to help with that application modernization and really enable a customer to make applications with microservices enablement. >> WikiBon has been looking at many years really. What has happened with this transformation of the data center. The research that we put out a few years ago is what we call true private cloud because like you said, what was happening the virtualization plus. I love virtualization. I spent 15 years on that wave, but it wasn't enough, and even when we started simplifying with even some automation on there, that application journey, and how do we get ready for modern applications? I worked a lot on the HCI wave. It was, "Let's modernize our infrastructure, "and then we will worry about that application stuff later, "and maybe it's not a fit." What is different now? What are the toolings available? Why is now, can I put that stuff, I mean, the cloud native, isn't it? That should all live in a public cloud, no? What cannot live in many places? >> I think that's a great point. Three pieces of the puzzle, infrastructure, data, and the applications so there has been a lot of talk about infrastructure and not having infrastructure. Data, every other company in the Bay Area is a backup and restore company. Nobody is talking about applications. Yes, they are SAS players, right? We are like, okay, we will just host an application for you and you don't have to worry about anything else, but what about a lot of these legacy applications which have been built over the last 20 or 30 years? Nobody is talking about that. Everybody talks about greenfield applications. What about we start new? Everything is going to be the cloud. Is going to be cloud native. Everything is awesome, and then the clients say, "Yes "but I already invested $5 million in the applications "in the last 10 years." What's going to happen to them? >> To say that the first 80% of writing software is putting the bugs in, and then the second 80% of writing software is taking them out again, so if you have to completely start with these core business applications that are generating revenue, there's a lot of risk there in going to something brand-new. I know we've had Andy Jassy talking about if I was starting the company again today, I would go completely all serverless. And I think, really? Right now in 2017? Is it really that established and that great? What is your take on that? For an enterprise that have this investment already, should they be going completely all into serverless, or should they be picking off some of these other more mature services do you think? >> I would say it would be really application-specific. If it's traditional transactional, you may or may not want to go serverless because you've got that relational database really kind of structured around it. If it's a modern application and you are a company that has, for example, a brand-new mobile application, then you are going to want to leverage things like Lambda in those application development so you can trigger the correct service to spin up in that application. I think modernization is really specific to the use case. What we are seeing is a digital transformation in most companies where they are really requiring some newer applications to leverage past services like Lambda, Elasticsearch, Kinesis, and other things. >> Rishi, one of the things that we've heard from customers for many years is they so that they'd like to have the same in their data center as in the public cloud. We did a survey years ago and everybody, it was like 80% said that then said, "What do you have?" I've got VMware here and I've got an AWS there. Is it about having the whole stack? Are APIs enough? How much commonality do you need? How does Zettabytes look at this And had to help customers bridge this model? >> Yes absolutely, so number one is that the VMware type of solution is still pretty much, I like VMware but it's pretty much infrastructure as a service base. The second thing is the reason we have come up with our platform is that few core services and for few key workloads, IOT is being one of them, low intensive uploads being another of them, the workloads in which you need special type of security and governance which clients are used to from the last 20 years. Yes, AWS have amazing security and governance, no doubt about that, but still, part of the workload they may want to run locally, and they should at least have that freedom. Only those part of workloads are going to be run on Zettabytes plans, but the API compatibility will provide complete, so whether you want to run it on Zettabytes or on AWS, most of the workloads are going to work on AWS, and that you can run from our platform. >> I want to keep off the word you mentioned there. You mentioned appliances. We have seen lots of solutions over the last decade. You have done quite well as appliances. Talk about the HCI, talk about the backup recovery, lots of things there, but it's a software world now. Hex serverless, Andy Jassy says we will build serverless. Why an appliance? Talk a little bit about the go to market. What do people get today? How do they buy it? Why does that make sense for your customers? >> Yes absolutely, a value added more from the sales perspective but appliance, from the optimization perspective is perfect. In our case, yes, we have figured out a spec which is perfect perfectly optimized for tuning our software platform and we can provide to the clients. If they want to have a similar stack built themselves that is perfectly okay, but the idea is that hardware has an equally important role to play as software has. >> When you think about the platform services that we have like S3, RDS, and others, you definitely need hardware to support a real workload and for us to really standardize on something that someone can do, true development with that depth on the platform is really critical. You can go to GitHub and get open source S3 and work around it, but it's a mock. Really what you need is a platform to develop application, and the other thing is I worked for Cisco for 10 years, and the channel there is extremely powerful with companies like CDW, WWT, the routes to market there is really compelling for combined solution and I think part of the reason you are seeing success with those combined solutions is the customers are used to a service model where it's one throat to choke on those types of platforms, and the channel is a trusted advisor. It's a great way for us to go to market. >> Yeah, to just give my two cents on that, people conflate that we've had some commoditization of what's happening in infrastructure. It doesn't mean just grab stuff off of the shelf. I read an article 4 years ago. AWS infrastructure is hyper optimized. If you went to the Tuesday night's keynote, oh my gosh, they spent way more on hardware than anybody else in this ecosystem, I'm sure, and spent more as much, so it's not that you have IP in hardware. From my understanding it you are making sure you've got, your software is natural to package. If I can do it, somebody else can do it. >> Bart: Yeah, go ahead. >> Absolutely, I think that part is very, very important that one throat to choke, one company which supports everything. In our case, yes, if you want to have your own hardware, then you can do that, but in our case, if you take the whole appliance from us, that we are providing you complete support. Hardware, operating system, as well as the software. >> And in a certain sense, we are really trying to, l like you said, Stu, match the performance of those optimized environments on AWS for our clients so they get a similar experience from our platform that they would get on AWS. If they build something on Zettabytes and then deploy on AWS, they should get the same experience. >> I want to give you the last word. I'm sure you have lots of customers coming by our booth. It's not far from where you're sitting right now. What are some of the key things they are hearing? What is getting them excited, interested in, that they want to follow up with? >> I think most of the customers we've talked to we say, "Okay, are you using AWS?" they say, "Yes," because they are at re:Invent. I say, "Okay, how far you are in the AWS option?" that's where the devil comes in the details. These applications we have been able to migrate, these we have not been able to migrate. We are building our exponents around it and things like that, and then the question comes, "Do you really want to go too deep into figuring out "the problems which the vendors have solved, "or would you rather focus on your business problems?" that's what I would say. They would say one package, one platform when you get to focus on your business problems and we take care of the rest. >> Yeah, and I think in the keynote yesterday, Andy Jassy said it's all about the analytics and what we are hearing is we've given a lot of thought to putting together a platform that supports big data analytics in addition to the AWS abstraction that we've done, so those analytics workloads were really intriguing to people that are talking with us, our support of machine learning, converting what may be a traditional spark job into a Lambda function is really something people are raising their eyebrows about. >> Bart Hickenlooper, Rishi Yadav asking how deep you are into AWS? Well here at theCUBE we are about 60 interviews in which means we have a few more hours left of great interviews here, so for Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE.

(upbeat pop music) >> [Narrator] France! It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. (upbeat pop music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCube. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, gonna help me with some analysis of what's been happening here at the show, Keith Humphreys, who is the managing consultant at euroLAN Research. Thanks so much for joining us. >> My pleasure, Stu. >> Alright, so, Keith, you and I were the only analysts at the Vienna show last year, they've grown he analyst program a little bit as, you know, most of us in the community been watching Nutanix for many years. Tell us a little bit about kind of your background, and what specifically you focus on. >> Okay, so, euroLAN is an industry analyst company focused on helping vendors optimize routes to market in Europe. So, we're a channel analyst company founded in '93, in Paris, France, I was employee number five, and we're still about five consultants, and as I say, we're very vendor focused on channels. >> Yeah, well, it goes without saying, in our industry things are changing a lot, but boy, has the channel been changing massively, you know, everything from the impact of service providers to the public cloud. So, let's start kind of at the macro level a little bit. What are some of the big issues? The channels always, you know, we say they're coin operated. Where do they make money, where are they concerned about, what's exciting them these days? >> I think at a macro level what's really exciting, if you look at the book B four B, it describes the risk having gone from corporate back to the vendor. So, before the enterprise used to buy kit, buy stuff, buy products and have to integrate them themselves, take 18 months before they actually got a working product, but in the mean time the vendors had produced the invoice, maybe not even shipped the kit before they could recognize the revenue, now with as-a-service that's totally changed. The risk is gone from the customer, right they way back to the vendor, it's a fascinating point, and the channel's stuck in between here, trying to be the good guys, still trying to integrate that stuff, still trying to produce those solutions, but only getting paid at an annuity revenue model. It's very different. >> Yeah, you know, I was involved in some of the early convergent infrastructure solutions, and you go to some companies and they're like, "We make tons of money racking and stacking and cabling." We're like, "Come on, that's not huge value add, let's help you add more value, get more involved, be more consultative solution-selling and the like." We've only seen that accelerate with the like of hyper converge infrastructure and solutions-as-a-service as you said where sometimes it's just frictionless, just acquire what I need when I need it. How's the channel doing? >> I think the channel's doing okay, but they're in denial, because of this issue. I think if you look at the way Nutanix started as a box provider and now moving to software, some of the channel is really railing against that, and saying, "We still want to do it this way." They're not learning the lesson that they must move to an annuity model basis, because it's a huge business transformation. We jointly run a workshop with IDC to help system integrators make that transition across, and we've only booked through a half a dozen companies for it. They should be knocking our door down to go through this, but they're finding it really hard. >> Alright, so, how's Nutanix doing in the channel? >> So, I think, interestingly, I think it was Chad Sakac of VMware said that they're having to bring out a proof of concept box for vSphere. So they can put that box into customers, so they can try it out. Interesting for a software vendor you're having to package something, so they've gone in that direction. Where as Nutanix are moving in the other direction, going to software only from the box. That's fascinating, but they're trying to drag that channel with them. Are CDW really happy that they're moving to a software-only model? Maybe not. >> Well, look, we've been discussing this week the software-only model, of course, there's still gotta be an appliance somewhere. So, from a channel standpoint, if tomorrow Nutanix says, "Hey, we're only gonna do software and you're gonna do..." does that have a significant impact on the channel, if they now get it if it's a distributor, or some other piece, how much will that impact the channel? >> I think it's going back to the old model of digital days where the channel partner's going back to integrating stuff. Which I think is great news for them, because they can add value, but have they still got the skills? A lot of them have lost those skills, they've been de-franchised or they've de-franchised themselves. >> Yeah, we'll see how that plays out, as to whether it comes in a similar form factor. I don't expect that they're gonna be getting Lego pieces and putting together, it's still mostly gonna be pieces. How 'bout Nutanix's been going a lot of new directions, trying to expand, software-only isn't just about saying, kinda the base stack and AHV, but Zai and calm. Some of these other pieces. Is the channel ready for these kind of things? Does Nutanix have to then do way more of it and the channel's just for filling it? How does that dynamic work? >> I think Nutanix has to go out and create the market. They've got to make end customers aware of this and then the enterprise customers will be asking their channel partners for it so they'll have to get up to speed. You know it's a push and pull model to channel. You can't just push through the channel. I heard someone from Nutanix describe the channel as an extension of their sales force. It's just not. You know computer center's go out and sell computer centers. They don't sell Nutanix. They sell their customer benefit and Nutanix is a small part of that solution. Every project is software based. It's around SAP. It's around Oracle and there's some infrastructure to run it on. It's a small part. >> It's interesting, I got to interview a service provider that has then become a reseller of Nutanix solutions. We sometimes say that service providers are the new channel. How is that dynamic playing out? >> Well, if I was to want infrastructure in our office I wouldn't phone British Telecom for it. (laughs) >> Fair enough. What about, we're talking about the multi cloud world. I've found that there's some systems integrators out there that are offering Azure services, some are engaging AWS has been really good at building out their channel. How's that in Europe these days? How much is the channel engaged in the public cloud? >> We're seeing Amazon with AWS starting to reach out to the channel at long last, with channel programs, channel recruitment. They're not gonna get rich reselling that but they'll get rich by putting the professional services on there. You know, what should I run on here? Is it good for computers? Is it good for scaling? Is it good for additional workloads? They've gotta add professional services but even as we run our workshops we see exactly the same thing. As they move to as-a-service, it might be profitable to a degree but it takes you four or five years to get there. So you've gotta be adding professional services on top of that revenue to maintain it. >> Well, I have to think there's good opportunity there because while there was this promise the future's gonna be simple. Right? Public cloud, it's nice and easy swipe a credit card and good. There's so many features out there. SaaS, anybody's that's used SaaS providers when they really wanna use it there's requirements there. So is the channel stepping up to fill some of that gap or will the Accentures, those kind of consulting come in and take that revenue? >> I think it depends on the company's size. We profiled in our newsletter a small UK company who get digital transformation. This quarter we profiled Accenture. They're both doing the same things, just addressing different parts of the market. I think the other interesting thing is, you mentioned the difficulty, obviously AWS uses its own terminology and it looks very complicated but what I do like is the Nutanix one click based around machine learning. That's really exciting. Sudheesh Nair was just talking about DeepMind's AlphaGo Zero and how it's learned the Chinese Go Program. It self learned that. No one taught that. It actually self learned that. There was an article on the FT which was trying to say this is frightening. It's not frightening if we're gonna move into an IoT age, if we're gonna move into an autonomous car age. We're gonna need software that's written to Sigma Nine not Sigma Six and I think only machines can do that. We're not very good at writing software. >> Keith, what more should Nutanix be doing? What advice do you give them on what they can do to engage even more with the channel? >> They've gotta ramp up the marketing. They've gotta provide the air cover for the channel. They've gotta go out and create the demand, create the awareness. The channel will follow through on that. >> One last question I have for you, what advice do you give to the channel today? For them to stay profitable, stay relevant, in this ever changing future? >> It's professional services and annuity revenue. Days of selling boxes are gone. They'll always be boxes you say but you know, it's pure commodity now. Maybe they should invest in super micro? >> Alright. Well Keith Humphries, pleasure to talk with you again and thank you much for joining us. >> Thanks Stu >> We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix .Next in Nice, France. You're watching theCube. (upbeat pop music)