>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> While never really meant to be a consumer tech event, the rapid ascendancy of smartphones sucked much of the air out of Mobile World Congress over the years, now MWC. And while the device manufacturers continue to have a major presence at the show, the maturity of intelligent devices, longer life cycles, and the disaggregation of the network stack, have put enterprise technologies front and center in the telco business. Semiconductor manufacturers, network equipment players, infrastructure companies, cloud vendors, software providers, and a spate of startups are eyeing the trillion dollar plus communications industry as one of the next big things to watch this decade. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we bring you part two of our ongoing coverage of MWC '23, with some new data on enterprise players specifically in large telco environments, a brief glimpse at some of the pre-announcement news and corresponding themes ahead of MWC, and some of the key announcement areas we'll be watching at the show on theCUBE. Now, last week we shared some ETR data that showed how traditional enterprise tech players were performing, specifically within the telecoms vertical. Here's a new look at that data from ETR, which isolates the same companies, but cuts the data for what ETR calls large telco. The N in this cut is 196, down from 288 last week when we included all company sizes in the dataset. Now remember the two dimensions here, on the y-axis is net score, or spending momentum, and on the x-axis is pervasiveness in the data set. The table insert in the upper left informs how the dots and companies are plotted, and that red dotted line, the horizontal line at 40%, that indicates a highly elevated net score. Now while the data are not dramatically different in terms of relative positioning, there are a couple of changes at the margin. So just going down the list and focusing on net score. Azure is comparable, but slightly lower in this sector in the large telco than it was overall. Google Cloud comes in at number two, and basically swapped places with AWS, which drops slightly in the large telco relative to overall telco. Snowflake is also slightly down by one percentage point, but maintains its position. Remember Snowflake, overall, its net score is much, much higher when measuring across all verticals. Snowflake comes down in telco, and relative to overall, a little bit down in large telco, but it's making some moves to attack this market that we'll talk about in a moment. Next are Red Hat OpenStack and Databricks. About the same in large tech telco as they were an overall telco. Then there's Dell next that has a big presence at MWC and is getting serious about driving 16G adoption, and new servers, and edge servers, and other partnerships. Cisco and Red Hat OpenShift basically swapped spots when moving from all telco to large telco, as Cisco drops and Red Hat bumps up a bit. And VMware dropped about four percentage points in large telco. Accenture moved up dramatically, about nine percentage points in big telco, large telco relative to all telco. HPE dropped a couple of percentage points. Oracle stayed about the same. And IBM surprisingly dropped by about five points. So look, I understand not a ton of change in terms of spending momentum in the large sector versus telco overall, but some deltas. The bottom line for enterprise players is one, they're just getting started in this new disruption journey that they're on as the stack disaggregates. Two, all these players have experience in delivering horizontal solutions, but now working with partners and identifying big problems to be solved, and three, many of these companies are generally not the fastest moving firms relative to smaller disruptive disruptors. Now, cloud has been an exception in fairness. But the good news for the legacy infrastructure and IT companies is that the telco transformation and the 5G buildout is going to take years. So it's moving at a pace that is very favorable to many of these companies. Okay, so looking at just some of the pre-announcement highlights that have hit the wire this week, I want to give you a glimpse of the diversity of innovation that is occurring in the telecommunication space. You got semiconductor manufacturers, device makers, network equipment players, carriers, cloud vendors, enterprise tech companies, software companies, startups. Now we've included, you'll see in this list, we've included OpeRAN, that logo, because there's so much buzz around the topic and we're going to come back to that. But suffice it to say, there's no way we can cover all the announcements from the 2000 plus exhibitors at the show. So we're going to cherry pick here and make a few call outs. Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced an acquisition of an Italian private cellular network company called AthoNet. Zeus Kerravala wrote about it on SiliconANGLE if you want more details. Now interestingly, HPE has a partnership with Solana, which also does private 5G. But according to Zeus, Solona is more of an out-of-the-box solution, whereas AthoNet is designed for the core and requires more integration. And as you'll see in a moment, there's going to be a lot of talk at the show about private network. There's going to be a lot of news there from other competitors, and we're going to be watching that closely. And while many are concerned about the P5G, private 5G, encroaching on wifi, Kerravala doesn't see it that way. Rather, he feels that these private networks are really designed for more industrial, and you know mission critical environments, like factories, and warehouses that are run by robots, et cetera. 'Cause these can justify the increased expense of private networks. Whereas wifi remains a very low cost and flexible option for, you know, whatever offices and homes. Now, over to Dell. Dell announced its intent to go hard after opening up the telco network with the announcement that in the second half of this year it's going to begin shipping its infrastructure blocks for Red Hat. Remember it's like kind of the converged infrastructure for telco with a more open ecosystem and sort of more flexible, you know, more mature engineered system. Dell has also announced a range of PowerEdge servers for a variety of use cases. A big wide line bringing forth its 16G portfolio and aiming squarely at the telco space. Dell also announced, here we go, a private wireless offering with airspan, and Expedo, and a solution with AthoNet, the company HPE announced it was purchasing. So I guess Dell and HPE are now partnering up in the private wireless space, and yes, hell is freezing over folks. We'll see where that relationship goes in the mid- to long-term. Dell also announced new lab and certification capabilities, which we said last week was going to be critical for the further adoption of open ecosystem technology. So props to Dell for, you know, putting real emphasis and investment in that. AWS also made a number of announcements in this space including private wireless solutions and associated managed services. AWS named Deutsche Telekom, Orange, T-Mobile, Telefonica, and some others as partners. And AWS announced the stepped up partnership, specifically with T-Mobile, to bring AWS services to T-Mobile's network portfolio. Snowflake, back to Snowflake, announced its telecom data cloud. Remember we showed the data earlier, it's Snowflake not as strong in the telco sector, but they're continuing to move toward this go-to market alignment within key industries, realigning their go-to market by vertical. It also announced that AT&T, and a number of other partners, are collaborating to break down data silos specifically in telco. Look, essentially, this is Snowflake taking its core value prop to the telco vertical and forming key partnerships that resonate in the space. So think simplification, breaking down silos, data sharing, eventually data monetization. Samsung previewed its future capability to allow smartphones to access satellite services, something Apple has previously done. AMD, Intel, Marvell, Qualcomm, are all in the act, all the semiconductor players. Qualcomm for example, announced along with Telefonica, and Erickson, a 5G millimeter network that will be showcased in Spain at the event this coming week using Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset platform, based on none other than Arm technology. Of course, Arm we said is going to dominate the edge, and is is clearly doing so. It's got the volume advantage over, you know, traditional Intel, you know, X86 architectures. And it's no surprise that Microsoft is touting its open AI relationship. You're going to hear a lot of AI talk at this conference as is AI is now, you know, is the now topic. All right, we could go on and on and on. There's just so much going on at Mobile World Congress or MWC, that we just wanted to give you a glimpse of some of the highlights that we've been watching. Which brings us to the key topics and issues that we'll be exploring at MWC next week. We touched on some of this last week. A big topic of conversation will of course be, you know, 5G. Is it ever going to become real? Is it, is anybody ever going to make money at 5G? There's so much excitement around and anticipation around 5G. It has not lived up to the hype, but that's because the rollout, as we've previous reported, is going to take years. And part of that rollout is going to rely on the disaggregation of the hardened telco stack, as we reported last week and in previous Breaking Analysis episodes. OpenRAN is a big component of that evolution. You know, as our RAN intelligent controllers, RICs, which essentially the brain of OpenRAN, if you will. Now as we build out 5G networks at massive scale and accommodate unprecedented volumes of data and apply compute-hungry AI to all this data, the issue of energy efficiency is going to be front and center. It has to be. Not only is it a, you know, hot political issue, the reality is that improving power efficiency is compulsory or the whole vision of telco's future is going to come crashing down. So chip manufacturers, equipment makers, cloud providers, everybody is going to be doubling down and clicking on this topic. Let's talk about AI. AI as we said, it is the hot topic right now, but it is happening not only in consumer, with things like ChatGPT. And think about the theme of this Breaking Analysis in the enterprise, AI in the enterprise cannot be ChatGPT. It cannot be error prone the way ChatGPT is. It has to be clean, reliable, governed, accurate. It's got to be ethical. It's got to be trusted. Okay, we're going to have Zeus Kerravala on the show next week and definitely want to get his take on private networks and how they're going to impact wifi. You know, will private networks cannibalize wifi? If not, why not? He wrote about this again on SiliconANGLE if you want more details, and we're going to unpack that on theCUBE this week. And finally, as always we'll be following the data flows to understand where and how telcos, cloud players, startups, software companies, disruptors, legacy companies, end customers, how are they going to make money from new data opportunities? 'Cause we often say in theCUBE, don't ever bet against data. All right, that's a wrap for today. Remember theCUBE is going to be on location at MWC 2023 next week. We got a great set. We're in the walkway in between halls four and five, right in Congress Square, stand CS-60. Look for us, we got a full schedule. If you got a great story or you have news, stop by. We're going to try to get you on the program. I'll be there with Lisa Martin, co-hosting, David Nicholson as well, and the entire CUBE crew, so don't forget to come by and see us. I want to thank Alex Myerson, who's on production and manages the podcast, and Ken Schiffman, as well, in our Boston studio. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE.com. He does some great editing. Thank you. All right, remember all these episodes they are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcasts. I publish each week on Wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com. All the video content is available on demand at theCUBE.net, or you can email me directly if you want to get in touch David.Vellante@SiliconANGLE.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on our LinkedIn posts. And please do check out ETR.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Mobile World Congress '23, MWC '23, or next time on Breaking Analysis. (bright music)

>>Hello, welcome to the Cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special presentation on Cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. I'm John Furr, your host of The Cube. We had a great lineup of three interviews we're streaming today. Meor Ma Makowski, who's the co-founder and VP of Product of Platform nine. She's gonna go into detail around Arlon, the open source products, and also the value of what this means for infrastructure as code and for cloud native at scale. Bickley the chief architect of Platform nine Cube alumni. Going back to the OpenStack days. He's gonna go into why Arlon, why this infrastructure as code implication, what it means for customers and the implications in the open source community and where that value is. Really great wide ranging conversation there. And of course, Vascar, Gort, the CEO of Platform nine, is gonna talk with me about his views on Super Cloud and why Platform nine has a scalable solutions to bring cloudnative at scale. So enjoy the program. See you soon. Hello everyone. Welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for special program on cloud native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or super cloud for modern application cloud native developers. I'm John Furry, host of the Cube. A pleasure to have here, me Makoski, co-founder and VP of product at Platform nine. Thanks for coming in today for this Cloudnative at scale conversation. Thank >>You for having me. >>So Cloudnative at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the, the next level of mainstream success of containers Kubernetes and cloud native develop, basically DevOps in the C I C D pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code, it's accelerating the value proposition and the super cloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on super cloud as it fits to cloud native as scales up? >>Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting, and I think the reason why Super Cloud is a really good, in a really fit term for this, and I think, I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multi-cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model where you have a few large distributions of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right? Where you have a large number of microsites, these microsites could be your public cloud deployment, your private on-prem infrastructure deployments, or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving in that direction. And so you gotta rougher that with a terminology that, that, that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think supercloud is a, is an appropriate term for that. >>So you brought a couple of things I want to dig into. You mentioned edge nodes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning. Wouldn't even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got iot, ot, and IT kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions, global infras infrastructures, big part of it. I just saw some news around CloudFlare shutting down a site here. There's policies being made at scale, These new challenges there. Can you share because you can have edge. So hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that it's a steady state. Yeah. But across multiple clouds brings in this new un engineered area, yet it hasn't been done yet. Spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water, it's happening, it's gonna happen. It's only gonna get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because there's something business consequences as well, but there are technical challenges. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the super cloud or across multiple edges and regions? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, in in the context of this, the, this, this term of super cloud, I think it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two access, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have deploy a number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other axis you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site? Right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity, but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these access, you really get to a point where that scale really needs some well thought out, well structured solutions to address it, right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when you, when you scale, is not at the level. >>Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there, the technology's also getting better. We we're seeing cloud native become successful. There's a lot to configure, there's a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because we're talking about at scale Yep. Challenges here. Yeah, >>Absolutely. And I think, you know, I I like to call it, you know, the, the, the problem that the scale creates, you know, there's various problems, but I think one, one problem, one way to think about it is, is, you know, it works on my cluster problem, right? So I, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a, you know, there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right? Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this chain, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, It's not working. The exact same problem now happens and these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right? Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within the sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right? >>And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the edge location where a cluster is running there, or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer site where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it, or they configured the cluster, right? But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies, or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on. All of these various factors are their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ball game of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you gotta make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So I think that's another example of problems that occur. >>Okay. So I have to ask about scale, because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success of cloud native. You know, you see some, you know, some experimentation. They set up a cluster, say it's containers and Kubernetes, and then you say, Okay, we got this, we can figure it. And then they do it again and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you gotta scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotspot is in when companies transition from, I got this to, Oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >>Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when, you know, the two factors of scale, as we talked about, start expanding. I think one of them is what I like to call the, you know, it, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem, which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with p zeros and pos from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to triage us, right? And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi folds, it goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. >>And so as you give that change to then run at your production edge location, like say your radio cell tower site, or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have not have configured that cluster exactly how you did, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so the things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes nightmarishly hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem, another whole bucket of issues is security, which is, is you have these distributed clusters at scale, you gotta ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that these security policies are configured properly. >>So this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. Yeah. But at scale it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching. Can you share what Arlon is this new product? What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >>Yeah, absolutely. Very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in on-prem or at in the cloud or at edge environments. And what arlon is, it's an open source project, and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for complete end to end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters. All of the infrastructure that goes within and along the site of those clusters, security policies, your middleware, plug-ins, and finally your applications. So what our LA you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >>So what's the elevator pitch simply put for what dissolves in, in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in, what's the, what's the bumper sticker? Yeah, what >>Would it do? There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say, you know, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that that assembly line brings, right? Our line, and if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot. And it's because when we think of online, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale, creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each component, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage. But again, it gets, you know, processed in a standardized way. And that's what arlon really does. That's like the deliver pitch. If you have problems of scale of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed. Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency for >>Those. So keeping it smooth, the assembly on things are flowing. See c i CD pipe pipelining. Exactly. So that's what you're trying to simplify that ops piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really ops, it's their ops, it's coding. >>Yeah. Not just developer, the ops, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers, you know, there is, developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middleware of applications that they interface with, but then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secure properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability integrated. And so it solves problems for both >>Those teams. Yeah. It's DevOps. So the DevOps is the cloud needed developer's. That's right. The option teams have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >>Absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and, and you know, ES really in introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because, you know, s clusters are Yeah. Or your, yeah, you know, specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined a declarative way, and Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so Arlon addresses that problem at the heart of it, and it does that using existing open source well known solutions. >>And do I want to get into the benefits? What's in it for me as the customer developer? But I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the, what's the current state of the product? You run the product group over at Platform nine, is it open source? And you guys have a product that's commercial? Can you explain the open source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? Yeah. And what is the consumption? I mean, open source is great, People want open source, they can download it, look up the code, but maybe wanna buy the commercial. So I'm assuming you have that thought through, can you share open source and commercial relationship? >>Yeah, I think, you know, starting with why open source? I think it's, you know, we as a company, we have, you know, one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open source technologies components and then we, you know, make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model or on-prem model, right? But, so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open source economy, it's only right, I think in my mind that we do our part of the duty, right? And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products starting all the way with fision, which was a serverless product, you know, that we had built to various other, you know, examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why opensource and also open source, because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind, behind a block box. >>Well, and that's, that's what the developers want too. And what we're seeing in reporting with Super Cloud is the new model of consumption is I wanna look at the code and see what's in there. That's right. And then also, if I want to use it, I'll do it. Great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I wanna move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way that long. But that's, that's the benefit. Open source. This is why standards and open source is growing so fast. You have that confluence of, you know, a way for developers to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian Karo uses the dating met metaphor, you know, Hey, you know, I wanna check it out first before I get married. Right? And that's what open source, So this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source, this is how companies are selling. >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, and you know, two things. I think one is just, you know, this, this, this cloud native space is so vast that if you, if you're building a close flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprises use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so, right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us, a SAS hosted version of it as well, for those customers who choose to go that route, you know, once they have used the open source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need, need, need a partner to collaborate with, who can, you know, support them for that production >>Environment. I have to ask you now, let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer. Yep. Why should I be enthused about Arla? What's in it for me? You know? Cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not gonna be confident and it's gonna be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlo? I'm a >>Customer. Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, you know, our customers, where this is a very kind of typical story that you hear, which is we have, you know, a Kubernetes distribution. It could be on premise, it could be public clouds, native Kubernetes, and then we have our C I C D pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is well before you can you, your CS c D pipelines can deploy the apps. Somebody needs to do all of that groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters and yeah. You know, properly configuring them. And as these things, these things start by being done hand grown. And then as the, as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their home homegrown DIY solutions for this. >>I mean, the number of folks that I talk to that have built Terra from automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So it's a typical open source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits the problem. And so that's that pitch. I think Ops FICO would be delighted. The folks that we've talk, you know, spoken with, have been absolutely excited and have, you know, shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on ecos Amazon, and we wanna scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us the >>Ability to, Yeah, I think people are scared. Not sc I won't say scare, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And, and I think this is gonna come up at co con this year where enterprises are gonna say, Okay, I need to see SLAs. I wanna see track record, I wanna see other companies that have used it. Yeah. How would you answer that question to, or, or challenge, you know, Hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLAs? I'm an enterprise, I got tight, you know, I love the open source trying to free fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, so two parts to that, right? One is Arlan leverages existing open source components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically. One is Arlan uses Argo cd, which is probably one of the highest and used CD open source tools that's out there. Right's created by folks that are as part of into team now, you know, really brilliant team. And it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is Alon also makes use of Cluster api cappi, which is a Kubernetes sub-component, right? For lifecycle management of clusters. So there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or, or, or open source projects that will find Arlan to be right up in their alley because they're already comfortable, familiar with Argo cd. Now Arlan just extends the scope of what City can do. And so that's one. And then the second part is going back to a point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, platform line has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy online at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your DEF test environments, you're happy with what you get with it, then Platform nine will stand behind it and provide that >>Sla. And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to Platform nine customers with, with that are familiar with, with Argo and then rlo? What's been some of the feedback? >>Yeah, I, I think the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give you examples of customers where, you know, initially, you know, when you are, when you're telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a card right away. But then we start talking about Arlan and, and we talk about the fact that it uses Argo adn, they start opening up, they say, We have standardized on Argo and we have built these components, homegrown, we would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of our land before we even wrote a single line of code saying this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, If you had it today, I would've purchased it. So it's been really great validation. >>All right. So next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, Look it, I have, I'm so busy, my team's overworked. I got a skills gap. I don't need another project that's, I'm so tied up right now and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform nine help me? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenets of Platform nine has always been been that we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this in a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS hosted manner for our customers, right? So our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customers' hands and offloading it to our hands, right? And giving them that full white glove treatment, as we call it. And so from a customer's perspective, one, something like arlon will integrate with what they have so they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will, even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today and you know, give you an inventory. And that will, >>So if customers have clusters that are growing, that's a sign correct call you guys. >>Absolutely. Either they're, they have massive large clusters, right? That they wanna split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today, or they've done that already on say, public cloud or otherwise. And now they have management challenges. So >>Especially operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure Yep. And or scale out. >>That's right. Exactly. And >>You provide that layer of policy. >>Absolutely. >>Yes. That's the key value here. >>That's right. >>So policy based configuration for cluster scale up, >>Well profile and policy based declarative configuration and lifecycle management for clusters. >>If I asked you how this enables supercloud, what would you say to that? >>I think this is one of the key ingredients to super cloud, right? If you think about a super cloud environment, there's at least few key ingredients that that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale, you know, in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way so that our lot solves then you, you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are gonna happen and you're gonna have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And arlon by the way, also helps in that direction, but you also need observability tools. And then especially if you're running it on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make Super Cloud successful. And you know, our alarm fills in >>One. Okay. So now the next level is, Okay, that makes sense. Is under the covers kind of speak under the hood. Yeah. How does that impact the app developers and the cloud native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me, seems the apps are gonna be impacted. Are they gonna be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact if you do all those things, as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >>Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through, and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge to their, where there's a split responsibility, right? I'm responsible for my code, I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own the stack end to end. I have to rely on my ops counterpart to do their part, right? And so this really gives them, you know, the right tooling for that. >>So this is actually a great kind of relevant point, you know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the full stack developer to the more specialized role. But this is a key point, and I have to ask you because if this RLO solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are gonna be stupid, they're designed to do, the question is, what did does the current pain look like of the apps breaking? What does the signals to the customer Yeah. That they should be calling you guys up into implementing Arlo, Argo and, and all the other goodness to automate? What are some of the signals? Is it downtime? Is it, is it failed apps, Is it latency? What are some of the things that Yeah, absolutely would be indications of things are effed up a little bit. Yeah. >>More frequent down times, down times that are, that take longer to triage. And so you are, you know, the, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they're, they have a number of folks on in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners. And they're extremely interested in this because they're the, the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own script. So these are the kinds of challenges, and those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your meantime to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you are looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small, focused, nimble ops team, which has an immediate impact on your budget. So those are, those are the signals. >>This is the cloud native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application, not where it used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the maybe terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now if technology's running, the business is the business. Yeah. Company's the application. Yeah. So it can't be down. So there's a lot of pressure on, on CSOs and CIOs now and boards is saying, How is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Yep. Do you see that same thing? >>Yeah. It's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CXO CIO level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, that the, the technology that's, you know, that's gonna drive your top line is gonna drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right? Especially when you're talking about, let's say retailers or those kinds of large scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on, you know, providing those goods to their end customers. So I think those, both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >>Final question. What does cloudnative at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want 'em to happen, The magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >>What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee production is running absolutely smooth. And his, he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things, but things are >>Just taking care of the CIO doesn't exist. There's no ciso, they're at the beach. >>Yep. >>Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud native at scale here on the cube. Thank you for your time. >>Fantastic. Thanks for >>Having me. Okay. I'm John Fur here for special program presentation, special programming cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. Thanks for watching. Welcome back everyone to the special presentation of cloud native at scale, the cube and platform nine special presentation going in and digging into the next generation super cloud infrastructure as code and the future of application development. We're here with Bickley, who's the chief architect and co-founder of Platform nine Pick. Great to see you Cube alumni. We, we met at an OpenStack event in about eight years ago, or later, earlier when OpenStack was going. Great to see you and great to see congratulations on the success of platform nine. >>Thank you very much. >>Yeah. You guys have been at this for a while and this is really the, the, the year we're seeing the, the crossover of Kubernetes because of what happens with containers. Everyone now has realized, and you've seen what Docker's doing with the new docker, the open source Docker now just the success Exactly. Of containerization, right? And now the Kubernetes layer that we've been working on for years is coming, bearing fruit. This is huge. >>Exactly. Yes. >>And so as infrastructures code comes in, we talked to Bacar talking about Super Cloud, I met her about, you know, the new Arlon, our, our lawn, and you guys just launched the infrastructures code is going to another level, and then it's always been DevOps infrastructures code. That's been the ethos that's been like from day one, developers just code. Then you saw the rise of serverless and you see now multi-cloud or on the horizon, connect the dots for us. What is the state of infrastructure as code today? >>So I think, I think I'm, I'm glad you mentioned it, everybody or most people know about infrastructures code. But with Kubernetes, I think that project has evolved at the concept even further. And these dates, it's infrastructure is configuration, right? So, which is an evolution of infrastructure as code. So instead of telling the system, here's how I want my infrastructure by telling it, you know, do step A, B, C, and D instead with Kubernetes, you can describe your desired state declaratively using things called manifest resources. And then the system kind of magically figures it out and tries to converge the state towards the one that you specified. So I think it's, it's a even better version of infrastructures code. >>Yeah. And that really means it's developer just accessing resources. Okay. That declare, Okay, give me some compute, stand me up some, turn the lights on, turn 'em off, turn 'em on. That's kind of where we see this going. And I like the configuration piece. Some people say composability, I mean now with open source so popular, you don't have to have to write a lot of code, this code being developed. And so it's into integration, it's configuration. These are areas that we're starting to see computer science principles around automation, machine learning, assisting open source. Cuz you got a lot of code that's right in hearing software, supply chain issues. So infrastructure as code has to factor in these new dynamics. Can you share your opinion on these new dynamics of, as open source grows, the glue layers, the configurations, the integration, what are the core issues? >>I think one of the major core issues is with all that power comes complexity, right? So, you know, despite its expressive power systems like Kubernetes and declarative APIs let you express a lot of complicated and complex stacks, right? But you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of these yamo files or resources. And so I think, you know, the emergence of systems and layers to help you manage that complexity is becoming a key challenge and opportunity in, in this space. >>That's, I wrote a LinkedIn post today was comments about, you know, hey, enterprise is a new breed. The trend of SaaS companies moving our consumer comp consumer-like thinking into the enterprise has been happening for a long time, but now more than ever, you're seeing it the old way used to be solve complexity with more complexity and then lock the customer in. Now with open source, it's speed, simplification and integration, right? These are the new dynamic power dynamics for developers. Yeah. So as companies are starting to now deploy and look at Kubernetes, what are the things that need to be in place? Because you have some, I won't say technical debt, but maybe some shortcuts, some scripts here that make it look like infrastructure is code. People have done some things to simulate or or make infrastructure as code happen. Yes. But to do it at scale Yes. Is harder. What's your take on this? What's your view? >>It's hard because there's a per proliferation of methods, tools, technologies. So for example, today it's very common for DevOps and platform engineering tools, I mean, sorry, teams to have to deploy a large number of Kubernetes clusters, but then apply the applications and configurations on top of those clusters. And they're using a wide range of tools to do this, right? For example, maybe Ansible or Terraform or bash scripts to bring up the infrastructure and then the clusters. And then they may use a different set of tools such as Argo CD or other tools to apply configurations and applications on top of the clusters. So you have this sprawl of tools. You, you also have this sprawl of configurations and files because the more objects you're dealing with, the more resources you have to manage. And there's a risk of drift that people call that where, you know, you think you have things under control, but some people from various teams will make changes here and there and then before the end of the day systems break and you have no idea of tracking them. So I think there's real need to kind of unify, simplify, and try to solve these problems using a smaller, more unified set of tools and methodologies. And that's something that we try to do with this new project. Arlon. >>Yeah. So, so we're gonna get into Arlan in a second. I wanna get into the why Arlon. You guys announced that at AR GoCon, which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the, at the community meeting by in two, they had their own little day over there at their headquarters. But before we get there, vascar, your CEO came on and he talked about Super Cloud at our in AAL event. What's your definition of super cloud? If you had to kind of explain that to someone at a cocktail party or someone in the industry technical, how would you look at the super cloud trend that's emerging? It's become a thing. What's your, what would be your contribution to that definition or the narrative? >>Well, it's, it's, it's funny because I've actually heard of the term for the first time today, speaking to you earlier today. But I think based on what you said, I I already get kind of some of the, the gist and the, the main concepts. It seems like super cloud, the way I interpret that is, you know, clouds and infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, all of those things are becoming commodity in a way. And everyone's got their own flavor, but there's a real opportunity for people to solve real business problems by perhaps trying to abstract away, you know, all of those various implementations and then building better abstractions that are perhaps business or applications specific to help companies and businesses solve real business problems. >>Yeah, I remember that's a great, great definition. I remember, not to date myself, but back in the old days, you know, IBM had a proprietary network operating system, so of deck for the mini computer vendors, deck net and SNA respectively. But T C P I P came out of the osi, the open systems interconnect and remember, ethernet beat token ring out. So not to get all nerdy for all the young kids out there, look, just look up token ring, you'll see, you've probably never heard of it. It's IBM's, you know, connection for the internet at the, the layer two is Amazon, the ethernet, right? So if T C P I P could be the Kubernetes and the container abstraction that made the industry completely change at that point in history. So at every major inflection point where there's been serious industry change and wealth creation and business value, there's been an abstraction Yes. Somewhere. Yes. What's your reaction to that? >>I think this is, I think a saying that's been heard many times in this industry and, and I forgot who originated it, but I think that the saying goes like, there's no problem that can't be solved with another layer of indirection, right? And we've seen this over and over and over again where Amazon and its peers have inserted this layer that has simplified, you know, computing and, and infrastructure management. And I believe this trend is going to continue, right? The next set of problems are going to be solved with these insertions of additional abstraction layers. I think that that's really a, yeah, it's gonna >>Continue. It's interesting. I just, when I wrote another post today on LinkedIn called the Silicon Wars AMD stock is down arm has been on a rise. We remember pointing for many years now that arm's gonna be hugely, it has become true. If you look at the success of the infrastructure as a service layer across the clouds, Azure, aws, Amazon's clearly way ahead of everybody. The stuff that they're doing with the silicon and the physics and the, the atoms, the pro, you know, this is where the innovation, they're going so deep and so strong at ISAs, the more that they get that gets come on, they have more performance. So if you're an app developer, wouldn't you want the best performance and you'd wanna have the best abstraction layer that gives you the most ability to do infrastructures, code or infrastructure for configuration, for provisioning, for managing services. And you're seeing that today with service MeSHs, a lot of action going on in the service mesh area in in this community of, of co con, which will be a covering. So that brings up the whole what's next? You guys just announced our lawn at Argo Con, which came out of Intuit. We've had Mariana Tessel at our super cloud event. She's the cto, you know, they're all in the cloud. So they contributed that project. Where did Arlon come from? What was the origination? What's the purpose? Why our lawn, why this announcement? >>Yeah, so the, the inception of the project, this was the result of us realizing that problem that we spoke about earlier, which is complexity, right? With all of this, these clouds, these infrastructure, all the variations around and, you know, compute storage networks and the proliferation of tools we talked about the Ansibles and Terraforms and Kubernetes itself. You can, you can think of that as another tool, right? We saw a need to solve that complexity problem, and especially for people and users who use Kubernetes at scale. So when you have, you know, hundreds of clusters, thousands of applications, thousands of users spread out over many, many locations, there, there needs to be a system that helps simplify that management, right? So that means fewer tools, more expressive ways of describing the state that you want and more consistency. And, and that's why, you know, we built our lawn and we built it recognizing that many of these problems or sub problems have already been solved. So Arlon doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it instead rests on the shoulders of several giants, right? So for example, Kubernetes is one building block, GI ops, and Argo CD is another one, which provides a very structured way of applying configuration. And then we have projects like cluster API and cross plane, which provide APIs for describing infrastructure. So arlon takes all of those building blocks and builds a thin layer, which gives users a very expressive way of defining configuration and desired state. So that's, that's kind of the inception of, And >>What's the benefit of that? What does that give the, what does that give the developer, the user, in this case, >>The developers, the, the platform engineer, team members, the DevOps engineers, they get a a ways to provision not just infrastructure and clusters, but also applications and configurations. They get a way, a system for provisioning, configuring, deploying, and doing life cycle management in a, in a much simpler way. Okay. Especially as I said, if you're dealing with a large number of applications. >>So it's like an operating fabric, if you will. Yes. For them. Okay, so let's get into what that means for up above and below the the, this abstraction or thin layer below as the infrastructure. We talked a lot about what's going on below that. Yeah. Above our workloads. At the end of the day, you know, I talk to CXOs and IT folks that are now DevOps engineers. They care about the workloads and they want the infrastructures code to work. They wanna spend their time getting in the weeds, figuring out what happened when someone made a push that that happened or something happened. They need observability and they need to, to know that it's working. That's right. And is my workloads running effectively? So how do you guys look at the workload side of it? Cuz now you have multiple workloads on these fabric, >>Right? So workloads, so Kubernetes has defined kind of a standard way to describe workloads and you can, you know, tell Kubernetes, I want to run this container this particular way, or you can use other projects that are in the Kubernetes cloud native ecosystem like K native, where you can express your application in more at a higher level, right? But what's also happening is in addition to the workloads, DevOps and platform engineering teams, they need to very often deploy the applications with the clusters themselves. Clusters are becoming this commodity. It's, it's becoming this host for the application and it kind of comes bundled with it. In many cases it is like an appliance, right? So DevOps teams have to provision clusters at a really incredible rate and they need to tear them down. Clusters are becoming more, >>It's kinda like an EC two instance, spin up a cluster. We very, people used words like that. That's >>Right. And before arlon you kind of had to do all of that using a different set of tools as, as I explained. So with Armon you can kind of express everything together. You can say I want a cluster with a health monitoring stack and a logging stack and this ingress controller and I want these applications and these security policies. You can describe all of that using something we call a profile. And then you can stamp out your app, your applications and your clusters and manage them in a very, so >>Essentially standard creates a mechanism. Exactly. Standardized, declarative kind of configurations. And it's like a playbook. You deploy it. Now what's there is between say a script like I'm, I have scripts, I could just automate scripts >>Or yes, this is where that declarative API and infrastructures configuration comes in, right? Because scripts, yes you can automate scripts, but the order in which they run matters, right? They can break, things can break in the middle and, and sometimes you need to debug them. Whereas the declarative way is much more expressive and powerful. You just tell the system what you want and then the system kind of figures it out. And there are these things about controllers which will in the background reconcile all the state to converge towards your desire. It's a much more powerful, expressive and reliable way of getting things done. >>So infrastructure has configuration is built kind of on, it's as super set of infrastructures code because it's >>An evolution. >>You need edge's code, but then you can configure the code by just saying do it. You basically declaring and saying Go, go do that. That's right. Okay, so, alright, so cloud native at scale, take me through your vision of what that means. Someone says, Hey, what does cloud native at scale mean? What's success look like? How does it roll out in the future as you, not future next couple years? I mean people are now starting to figure out, okay, it's not as easy as it sounds. Could be nice, it has value. We're gonna hear this year coan a lot of this. What does cloud native at scale >>Mean? Yeah, there are different interpretations, but if you ask me, when people think of scale, they think of a large number of deployments, right? Geographies, many, you know, supporting thousands or tens or millions of, of users there, there's that aspect to scale. There's also an equally important a aspect of scale, which is also something that we try to address with Arran. And that is just complexity for the people operating this or configuring this, right? So in order to describe that desired state and in order to perform things like maybe upgrades or updates on a very large scale, you want the humans behind that to be able to express and direct the system to do that in, in relatively simple terms, right? And so we want the tools and the abstractions and the mechanisms available to the user to be as powerful but as simple as possible. So there's, I think there's gonna be a number and there have been a number of CNCF and cloud native projects that are trying to attack that complexity problem as well. And Arlon kind of falls in in that >>Category. Okay, so I'll put you on the spot road that CubeCon coming up and obviously this will be shipping this segment series out before. What do you expect to see at Coan this year? What's the big story this year? What's the, what's the most important thing happening? Is it in the open source community and also within a lot of the, the people jogging for leadership. I know there's a lot of projects and still there's some white space in the overall systems map about the different areas get run time and there's ability in all these different areas. What's the, where's the action? Where, where's the smoke? Where's the fire? Where's the piece? Where's the tension? >>Yeah, so I think one thing that has been happening over the past couple of cons and I expect to continue and, and that is the, the word on the street is Kubernetes is getting boring, right? Which is good, right? >>Boring means simple. >>Well, well >>Maybe, >>Yeah, >>Invisible, >>No drama, right? So, so the, the rate of change of the Kubernetes features and, and all that has slowed but in, in a, in a positive way. But there's still a general sentiment and feeling that there's just too much stuff. If you look at a stack necessary for hosting applications based on Kubernetes, there are just still too many moving parts, too many components, right? Too much complexity. I go, I keep going back to the complexity problem. So I expect Cube Con and all the vendors and the players and the startups and the people there to continue to focus on that complexity problem and introduce further simplifications to, to the stack. >>Yeah. Vic, you've had an storied career, VMware over decades with them obviously in 12 years with 14 years or something like that. Big number co-founder here at Platform. Now you guys have been around for a while at this game. We, man, we talked about OpenStack, that project you, we interviewed at one of their events. So OpenStack was the beginning of that, this new revolution. And I remember the early days it was, it wasn't supposed to be an alternative to Amazon, but it was a way to do more cloud cloud native. I think we had a cloud ERO team at that time. We would to joke we, you know, about, about the dream. It's happening now, now at Platform nine. You guys have been doing this for a while. What's the, what are you most excited about as the chief architect? What did you guys double down on? What did you guys tr pivot from or two, did you do any pivots? Did you extend out certain areas? Cuz you guys are in a good position right now, a lot of DNA in Cloud native. What are you most excited about and what does Platform nine bring to the table for customers and for people in the industry watching this? >>Yeah, so I think our mission really hasn't changed over the years, right? It's been always about taking complex open source software because open source software, it's powerful. It solves new problems, you know, every year and you have new things coming out all the time, right? OpenStack was an example when the Kubernetes took the world by storm. But there's always that complexity of, you know, just configuring it, deploying it, running it, operating it. And our mission has always been that we will take all that complexity and just make it, you know, easy for users to consume regardless of the technology, right? So the successor to Kubernetes, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, but you know, you have some indications that people are coming up of new and simpler ways of running applications. There are many projects around there who knows what's coming next year or the year after that. But platform will a, platform nine will be there and we will, you know, take the innovations from the the community. We will contribute our own innovations and make all of those things very consumable to customers. >>Simpler, faster, cheaper. Exactly. Always a good business model technically to make that happen. Yes. Yeah, I think the, the reigning in the chaos is key, you know, Now we have now visibility into the scale. Final question before we depart this segment. What is at scale, how many clusters do you see that would be a watermark for an at scale conversation around an enterprise? Is it workloads we're looking at or, or clusters? How would you, Yeah, how would you describe that? When people try to squint through and evaluate what's a scale, what's the at scale kind of threshold? >>Yeah. And, and the number of clusters doesn't tell the whole story because clusters can be small in terms of the number of nodes or they can be large. But roughly speaking when we say, you know, large scale cluster deployments, we're talking about maybe hundreds, two thousands. >>Yeah. And final final question, what's the role of the hyperscalers? You got AWS continuing to do well, but they got their core ias, they got a PAs, they're not too too much putting a SaaS out there. They have some SaaS apps, but mostly it's the ecosystem. They have marketplaces doing over $2 billion billions of transactions a year and, and it's just like, just sitting there. It hasn't really, they're now innovating on it, but that's gonna change ecosystems. What's the role the cloud play in the cloud native of its scale? >>The, the hyperscalers, >>Yeahs Azure, Google. >>You mean from a business perspective? Yeah, they're, they have their own interests that, you know, that they're, they will keep catering to, they, they will continue to find ways to lock their users into their ecosystem of services and, and APIs. So I don't think that's gonna change, right? They're just gonna keep, >>Well they got great I performance, I mean from a, from a hardware standpoint, yes, that's gonna be key, right? >>Yes. I think the, the move from X 86 being the dominant way and platform to run workloads is changing, right? That, that, that, that, and I think the, the hyperscalers really want to be in the game in terms of, you know, the the new risk and arm ecosystems and the platforms. >>Yeah, not joking aside, Paul Morritz, when he was the CEO of VMware, when he took over once said, I remember our first year doing the cube. Oh the cloud is one big distributed computer, it's, it's hardware and he got software and you got middleware and he kind over, well he's kind of tongue in cheek, but really you're talking about large compute and sets of services that is essentially a distributed computer. >>Yes, >>Exactly. It's, we're back on the same game. Vic, thank you for coming on the segment. Appreciate your time. This is cloud native at scale special presentation with Platform nine. Really unpacking super cloud Arlon open source and how to run large scale applications on the cloud Cloud Native Phil for developers and John Furrier with the cube. Thanks for Washington. We'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up. Hey, welcome back everyone to Super Cloud 22. I'm John Fur, host of the Cuba here all day talking about the future of cloud. Where's it all going? Making it super multi-cloud clouds around the corner and public cloud is winning. Got the private cloud on premise and edge. Got a great guest here, Vascar Gorde, CEO of Platform nine, just on the panel on Kubernetes. An enabler blocker. Welcome back. Great to have you on. >>Good to see you >>Again. So Kubernetes is a blocker enabler by, with a question mark. I put on on that panel was really to discuss the role of Kubernetes. Now great conversation operations is impacted. What's interest thing about what you guys are doing at Platform nine? Is your role there as CEO and the company's position, kind of like the world spun into the direction of Platform nine while you're at the helm? Yeah, right. >>Absolutely. In fact, things are moving very well and since they came to us, it was an insight to call ourselves the platform company eight years ago, right? So absolutely whether you are doing it in public clouds or private clouds, you know, the application world is moving very fast in trying to become digital and cloud native. There are many options for you do on the infrastructure. The biggest blocking factor now is having a unified platform. And that's what we, we come into, >>Patrick, we were talking before we came on stage here about your background and we were gonna talk about the glory days in 2000, 2001, when the first as piece application service providers came out, kind of a SaaS vibe, but that was kind of all kind of cloudlike. >>It wasn't, >>And and web services started then too. So you saw that whole growth. Now, fast forward 20 years later, 22 years later, where we are now, when you look back then to here and all the different cycles, >>I, in fact you, you know, as we were talking offline, I was in one of those ASPs in the year 2000 where it was a novel concept of saying we are providing a software and a capability as a service, right? You sign up and start using it. I think a lot has changed since then. The tooling, the tools, the technology has really skyrocketed. The app development environment has really taken off exceptionally well. There are many, many choices of infrastructure now, right? So I think things are in a way the same but also extremely different. But more importantly now for any company, regardless of size, to be a digital native, to become a digital company is extremely mission critical. It's no longer a nice to have everybody's in the journey somewhere. >>Everyone is going digital transformation here. Even on a so-called downturn recession that's upcoming inflation's here. It's interesting. This is the first downturn in the history of the world where the hyperscale clouds have been pumping on all cylinders as an economic input. And if you look at the tech trends, GDPs down, but not tech. >>Nope. >>Cuz the pandemic showed everyone digital transformation is here and more spend and more growth is coming even in, in tech. So this is a unique factor which proves that that digital transformation's happening and company, every company will need a super cloud. >>Everyone, every company, regardless of size, regardless of location, has to become modernize their infrastructure. And modernizing Infras infrastructure is not just some new servers and new application tools, It's your approach, how you're serving your customers, how you're bringing agility in your organization. I think that is becoming a necessity for every enterprise to survive. >>I wanna get your thoughts on Super Cloud because one of the things Dave Ante and I want to do with Super Cloud and calling it that was we, I, I personally, and I know Dave as well, he can, I'll speak from, he can speak for himself. We didn't like multi-cloud. I mean not because Amazon said don't call things multi-cloud, it just didn't feel right. I mean everyone has multiple clouds by default. If you're running productivity software, you have Azure and Office 365. But it wasn't truly distributed. It wasn't truly decentralized, it wasn't truly cloud enabled. It didn't, it felt like they're not ready for a market yet. Yet public clouds booming on premise. Private cloud and Edge is much more on, you know, more, more dynamic, more real. >>Yeah. I think the reason why we think super cloud is a better term than multi-cloud. Multi-cloud are more than one cloud, but they're disconnected. Okay, you have a productivity cloud, you have a Salesforce cloud, you may have, everyone has an internal cloud, right? So, but they're not connected. So you can say okay, it's more than one cloud. So it's you know, multi-cloud. But super cloud is where you are actually trying to look at this holistically. Whether it is on-prem, whether it is public, whether it's at the edge, it's a store at the branch. You are looking at this as one unit. And that's where we see the term super cloud is more applicable because what are the qualities that you require if you're in a super cloud, right? You need choice of infrastructure, you need, but at the same time you need a single pain, a single platform for you to build your innovations on regardless of which cloud you're doing it on, right? So I think Super Cloud is actually a more tightly integrated orchestrated management philosophy we think. >>So let's get into some of the super cloud type trends that we've been reporting on. Again, the purpose of this event is to, as a pilots, to get the conversations flowing with with the influencers like yourselves who are running companies and building products and the builders, Amazon and Azure are doing extremely well. Google's coming up in third cloudworks in public cloud. We see the use cases on premises use cases. Kubernetes has been an interesting phenomenon because it's become from the developer side a little bit, but a lot of ops people love Kubernetes. It's really more of an ops thing. You mentioned OpenStack earlier. Kubernetes kind of came out of that open stack. We need an orchestration and then containers had a good shot with, with Docker. They re pivoted the company. Now they're all in an open source. So you got containers booming and Kubernetes as a new layer there. What's the, what's the take on that? What does that really mean? Is that a new defacto enabler? It >>Is here. It's for here for sure. Every enterprise somewhere else in the journey is going on. And you know, most companies are, 70 plus percent of them have won two, three container based, Kubernetes based applications now being rolled out. So it's very much here, it is in production at scale by many customers. And the beauty of it is, yes, open source, but the biggest gating factor is the skill set. And that's where we have a phenomenal engineering team, right? So it's, it's one thing to buy a tool >>And just be clear, you're a managed service for Kubernetes. >>We provide, provide a software platform for cloud acceleration as a service and it can run anywhere. It can run in public private. We have customers who do it in truly multi-cloud environments. It runs on the edge, it runs at this in stores are thousands of stores in a retailer. So we provide that and also for specific segments where data sovereignty and data residency are key regulatory reasons. We also un OnPrem as an air gap version. >>Can you give an example on how you guys are deploying your platform to enable a super cloud experience for your >>Customer? Right. So I'll give you two different examples. One is a very large networking company, public networking company. They have, I dunno, hundreds of products, hundreds of r and d teams that are building different, different products. And if you look at few years back, each one was doing it on a different platforms but they really needed to bring the agility and they worked with us now over three years where we are their build test dev pro platform where all their products are built on, right? And it has dramatically increased their agility to release new products. Number two, it actually is a light out operation. In fact the customer says like, like the Maytag service person cuz we provide it as a service and it barely takes one or two people to maintain it for them. >>So it's kinda like an SRE vibe. One person managing a >>Large 4,000 engineers building infrastructure >>On their tools, >>Whatever they want on their tools. They're using whatever app development tools they use, but they use our platform. >>What benefits are they seeing? Are they seeing speed? >>Speed, definitely. Okay. Definitely they're speeding. Speed uniformity because now they're building able to build, so their customers who are using product A and product B are seeing a similar set of tools that are being used. >>So a big problem that's coming outta this super cloud event that we're, we're seeing and we've heard it all here, ops and security teams cuz they're kind of too part of one theme, but ops and security specifically need to catch up speed wise. Are you delivering that value to ops and security? Right. >>So we, we work with ops and security teams and infrastructure teams and we layer on top of that. We have like a platform team. If you think about it, depending on where you have data centers, where you have infrastructure, you have multiple teams, okay, but you need a unified platform. Who's your buyer? Our buyer is usually, you know, the product divisions of companies that are looking at or the CTO would be a buyer for us functionally cio definitely. So it it's, it's somewhere in the DevOps to infrastructure. But the ideal one we are beginning to see now many large corporations are really looking at it as a platform and saying we have a platform group on which any app can be developed and it is run on any infrastructure. So the platform engineering teams, >>You working two sides of that coin. You've got the dev side and then >>And then infrastructure >>Side side, okay. >>Another customer like give you an example, which I would say is kind of the edge of the store. So they have thousands of stores. Retail, retail, you know food retailer, right? They have thousands of stores that are on the globe, 50,000, 60,000. And they really want to enhance the customer experience that happens when you either order the product or go into the store and pick up your product or buy or browse or sit there. They have applications that were written in the nineties and then they have very modern AIML applications today. They want something that will not have to send an IT person to install a rack in the store or they can't move everything to the cloud because the store operations has to be local. The menu changes based on, It's a classic edge. It's classic edge. Yeah. Right. They can't send it people to go install rack access servers then they can't sell software people to go install the software and any change you wanna put through that, you know, truck roll. So they've been working with us where all they do is they ship, depending on the size of the store, one or two or three little servers with instructions that >>You, you say little servers like how big one like a net box box, like a small little >>Box and all the person in the store has to do like what you and I do at home and we get a, you know, a router is connect the power, connect the internet and turn the switch on. And from there we pick it up. >>Yep. >>We provide the operating system, everything and then the applications are put on it. And so that dramatically brings the velocity for them. They manage >>Thousands of them. True plug and play >>Two, plug and play thousands of stores. They manage it centrally. We do it for them, right? So, so that's another example where on the edge then we have some customers who have both a large private presence and one of the public clouds. Okay. But they want to have the same platform layer of orchestration and management that they can use regardless of the location. So >>You guys got some success. Congratulations. Got some traction there. It's awesome. The question I want to ask you is that's come up is what is truly cloud native? Cuz there's lift and shift of the cloud >>That's not cloud native. >>Then there's cloud native. Cloud native seems to be the driver for the super cloud. How do you talk to customers? How do you explain when someone says what's cloud native, what isn't cloud native? >>Right. Look, I think first of all, the best place to look at what is the definition and what are the attributes and characteristics of what is truly a cloud native, is CNC foundation. And I think it's very well documented where you, well >>Con of course Detroit's >>Coming here, so, so it's already there, right? So, so we follow that very closely, right? I think just lifting and shifting your 20 year old application onto a data center somewhere is not cloud native. Okay? You can't put to cloud native, you have to rewrite and redevelop your application and business logic using modern tools. Hopefully more open source and, and I think that's what Cloudnative is and we are seeing a lot of our customers in that journey. Now everybody wants to be cloudnative, but it's not that easy, okay? Because it's, I think it's first of all, skill set is very important. Uniformity of tools that there's so many tools there. Thousands and thousands of tools you could spend your time figuring out which tool to use. Okay? So I think the complexities there, but the business benefits of agility and uniformity and customer experience are truly them. >>And I'll give you an example. I don't know how clear native they are, right? And they're not a customer of ours, but you order pizzas, you do, right? If you just watch the pizza industry, how dominoes actually increase their share and mind share and wallet share was not because they were making better pizzas or not, I don't know anything about that, but the whole experience of how you order, how you watch what's happening, how it's delivered. There were a pioneer in it. To me, those are the kinds of customer experiences that cloud native can provide. >>Being agility and having that flow to the application changes what the expectations of the, for the customer. >>Customer, the customer's expectations change, right? Once you get used to a better customer experience, you learn >>Best car. To wrap it up, I wanna just get your perspective again. One of the benefits of chatting with you here and having you part of the Super Cloud 22 is you've seen many cycles, you have a lot of insights. I want to ask you, given your career where you've been and what you've done and now the CEO platform nine, how would you compare what's happening now with other inflection points in the industry? And you've been, again, you've been an entrepreneur, you sold your company to Oracle, you've been seeing the big companies, you've seen the different waves. What's going on right now put into context this moment in time around Super >>Cloud. Sure. I think as you said, a lot of battles. Cars being been, been in an asp, been in a realtime software company, being in large enterprise software houses and a transformation. I've been on the app side, I did the infrastructure right and then tried to build our own platforms. I've gone through all of this myself with a lot of lessons learned in there. I think this is an event which is happening now for companies to go through to become cloud native and digitalize. If I were to look back and look at some parallels of the tsunami that's going on is a couple of paddles come to me. One is, think of it, which was forced to honors like y2k. Everybody around the world had to have a plan, a strategy, and an execution for y2k. I would say the next big thing was e-commerce. I think e-commerce has been pervasive right across all industries. >>And disruptive. >>And disruptive, extremely disruptive. If you did not adapt and adapt and accelerate your e-commerce initiative, you were, it was an existence question. Yeah. I think we are at that pivotal moment now in companies trying to become digital and cloudnative that know that is what I see >>Happening there. I think that that e-commerce was interesting and I think just to riff with you on that is that it's disrupting and refactoring the business models. I think that is something that's coming out of this is that it's not just completely changing the game, it's just changing how you operate, >>How you think, and how you operate. See, if you think about the early days of eCommerce, just putting up a shopping cart didn't made you an eCommerce or an E retailer or an e e customer, right? Or so. I think it's the same thing now is I think this is a fundamental shift on how you're thinking about your business. How are you gonna operate? How are you gonna service your customers? I think it requires that just lift and shift is not gonna work. >>Mascar, thank you for coming on, spending the time to come in and share with our community and being part of Super Cloud 22. We really appreciate, we're gonna keep this open. We're gonna keep this conversation going even after the event, to open up and look at the structural changes happening now and continue to look at it in the open in the community. And we're gonna keep this going for, for a long, long time as we get answers to the problems that customers are looking for with cloud cloud computing. I'm Sean Feer with Super Cloud 22 in the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you. Thank you, John. >>Hello. Welcome back. This is the end of our program, our special presentation with Platform nine on cloud native at scale, enabling the super cloud. We're continuing the theme here. You heard the interviews Super Cloud and its challenges, new opportunities around the solutions around like Platform nine and others with Arlon. This is really about the edge situations on the internet and managing the edge multiple regions, avoiding vendor lock in. This is what this new super cloud is all about. The business consequences we heard and and the wide ranging conversations around what it means for open source and the complexity problem all being solved. I hope you enjoyed this program. There's a lot of moving pieces and things to configure with cloud native install, all making it easier for you here with Super Cloud and of course Platform nine contributing to that. Thank you for watching.

>>Hello, and welcome to the cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John furier host of the cube. We got a great guest, a chief information security officer CISO, Alex Shukman who's with Colgate Paul mall of company, Alex. Thanks for coming on this cube conversation. >>Thanks for having me, >>John. So fresh off the heels of RSA in San Francisco was quite the spectacle people back in person. Um, a lot of great conversations, kind of the old conversations, moving to the new, uh, really good to see, but CISO, the CISO agenda was clear on everyone's mind, more attacks, no surface area. Perimeter's dead. You got cloud native shift left, SBOs open sourced, supply chain and technology. Uh, software's now open source. How do you deal with that? A lot of complicated issues all through the prism of constantly being hacked with ransomware, everything else going on, you're in the middle of it. You gotta protect manufacturing assets, people, assets, intellectual property, you're in the middle of it. What's, what's the view. What's your current scope, the problem that you're dealing with every day. >>Yeah, it's really interesting world we live in today. Um, and, and definitely, uh, you know, the key topics were jumping around in RSA. Um, you know, everyone seems to be really trying to understand the, the environment better. And, you know, I, I think in the past we saw a lot of attacks against financial sector, a a lot of, of tax against critical infrastructure, but now many of us in the private sector, uh, especially in the non-critical manufacturing areas, you know, we're seeing the same thing that those industries have seen for many years. And so the criminals are getting, you know, less picky about their targets and, and they're targeting, uh, publicly traded companies, as much as they're targeting critical infrastructure. They're not as, uh, picky as they used to be. >>Yeah. You know, you see healthcare, financial services, uh, manufacturing, um, all there, intellectual, property's a big one, but you have, you know, now as you guys have your business, you're dealing with a global, um, borderless environment. You know, that's a big thing. You also have service providers probably work with. So you gotta have the business operations run modern in a modern way at the same time, protect in the modern way. What is the top agenda item for you in your sector, in, in manufacturing, in this area? What's the main high level, um, important task that you usually face every day? >>Yeah. When we talk to a lot of our, our peer companies or peers in the security industry, uh, especially in, in, at RSA, you know, a lot of 'em are very focused on their, their us business, a as well as you know, how to protect themselves. You know, I think one of the things that's really interesting about FGI Pala is that we are a global company and we really do have operations everywhere, uh, both from an, an office presence, a business presence, as well as manufacturing. So, you know, everything that, that those companies have to deal with who are primarily us based, and maybe they're aligning with some us intelligence, uh, we have to, to really incorporate global threats into our security program. Uh, and, and I think that's one of the really interesting things about Colgate, especially for people, uh, maybe who are familiar with our products, cuz they grew up using them. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, you know, we have products, uh, all over the world and depending on which area you're in, you know, we are the one security team who's responsible for protecting the entire Colgate world. >>How has the pandemic pulled forward issues or highlighted more necessity around certain areas? Obviously the work from home thing is pretty obvious for many people and who would've thought you'd have to provision a hundred percent VPNs or whatever endpoint protection. Um, what, how has that affected you, your, your area, your company and your sector, um, how has the pandemic impacted your security? >>Yeah, and I think this is a really interesting topic. You've I I've heard many other people, uh, talk about their response to the COVID 19 pandemic over the last few years. Um, you know, I, I think the, the, the best way to answer it from, from my personal perspective is if, if you were prepared for remote work or you were prepared for a partially remote workforce, then you really could have been very prepared for the pandemic. So even prior to the pandemic, you had people traveling on business and you needed to provide system access, but in a secure way, you had people doing short term assignments, you had a remote sales force and you had a number of different, especially being a global company, uh, people working out of an office, that's not their traditional office. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. If, if you look at all the security prepared, preparedness that you need to do to enable all that, it's not that much different than the pandemic, except that it's really on steroids and it's gone a hundred times further. >>It makes everyone work harder. Yeah. You have to prepare for the a hundred percent scenario, not, you know, not some, uh, um, estimate, um, good, good call out. And the other thing too, is that there's also these, these markets where it gets pulled forward, but then pulls back when the pandemic is over. Have you seen any of that as we kind of come into our third year of, I guess, hybrid being steady state, what has kind of gone away, fell off the plate? What's been, what's the steady state. How do you, have you seen anything kind of go back? >>Yeah, I, I think one of the things that kind of seems to ping pong back and forth is, is our ability to really rely on suppliers to, to deliver it equipment. So, you know, being a, a global company we're, we have employees all over the world, we have it infrastructure that we're supporting across the globe. And, and as you see, different countries go into lockdowns, as you see different suppliers faced with, with different pressures, you know, that seems to be something that kind of ebbs and flows over the last few years, uh, being able to get laptops, being able to get multiple devices, being able to get communications equipment. So, um, you know, I think some of those industries are still trying to evolve, uh, post pandemic. Right. >>You know, I always, I always like to ask the question privately, but I won't do it on camera, how much budget you have and how much you spend on cyber. Um, but you know, generally speaking, I think it's pretty safe to say the number's going up and up, um, cuz of the threats and you got more vectors coming in, but on the question of what tools and platforms work best for you, what are you looking for? What works best from your perspective, as you evaluate new things, right? You gotta look at the new, then you gotta keep up with the state of the art to, to be ahead of the bad guys and obvious you take risk management very seriously, as well as prepare. Right. So what are some of the tools that work for you? What do you see out there that that's getting your attention? >>Yeah, you know, I, I look at a lot of different vendor solutions. I think, uh, that's pretty prevalent in our industry. I look for solutions from large names, suppliers that have been around for a number of years, but I also like to, to look at startup companies who are really trying to innovate and, and make a solution, that number one is easy to implement. And number two is, is easy to keep working. If, if we're spending more time keeping a solution working than we are using the solution. I think that's one of the pain points that than other security, uh, programs are, are fighting with. You know, we try to really avoid those types of solutions, put something in, make sure that it works well so that we can really focus on getting the value out of the solution versus trying to keep it running. >>You know, the old SAS equation, helping the enterprise get better at the old enterprise playbook, which was how do you solve complexity by adding more complexity and, you know, lock in or, you know, <laugh> more costs, hidden costs under the water, so to speak or the shark fan or the iceberg, uh, cost of ownership. I mean, so it's a time to value shift, um, cuz your time's valuable and you've got staff and the hiring's not easy. This is a huge point. >>Yeah. We're a manufacturing organization. Obviously our, our goal as a company is to produce, to sell to consumers. You know, it is a cost center. We're trying to be as efficient as possible yet still support our business and keep it safe. So, uh, if we're investing in a security solution or if we're investing in, in a, a vendor solution that that does provide some layer of protection, you know, we wanna make sure that that's efficient as possible for us and, and that we get value out of it immediately. Uh, you know, that's always the, the hardest thing to try to find a solution that, that fits your business, but also delivers value to your organization. >>You know, it's interesting, you mention it as a cost center and you're talking about cyber security, which is the, the jewels of the company. You're talking about the criticality of the business model. One hat could really take down companies. So you, you it's really offense you're it's profit center in inherently. If you look at it that way. Um, and a lot of people are looking at this this way because you're a private company, you're not a government, you don't have a militia, you got cyber protection issues. So there's a real trend for CISOs to come together. And we're seeing this, uh, about sharing for instance, you know, sharing a threat information. So there's been a big movement in the CISO community. Uh, and I'm curious to get your reaction to this and what your conversations are, where sharing is really about collective intelligence and winning and ex and helping each other. And there's this, it's a, it's a, it's an enable user enablement, a CISO enablement kind of vibe. How do you have those conversations? What is, uh, when you huddle with your CISO buddies and friends and colleagues, what's the conversations like, is this sharing thing real is how do you do it effectively? Is it data rooms? Is it, how do you protect the information? Can you share your perspective on that? Cause this is a kind of a real cutting edge area right now. >>Yeah, I think in the, in the public sector, especially in, in, uh, in the government side, as well as critical manufacturing, critical infrastructure, you know, they really do it best in class and have done it for years out, out of necessity. Uh, what's really nice to see, especially on CS a and some of the latest initiatives like shields up is, is a lot more public private sharing going on. There's a lot more information available to us as a private company. Who's not part of, of the DIB or any of the intelligence community, but at the same time, we need to protect ourselves from the bad guys as much as they do. So, you know, I like the fact that that we're seeing CS a do more and more outreach to connect public and private sector, plus there's more and more sharing initiatives going on in the ISAC communities and making sure that barrier is low and, and they're, they're sharing, uh, threat Intel IOCs, but in a safe way among a, a community of security practitioners, security practitioners are, are great at sharing. They just need the permission to do so. >>Exactly. And then getting that, getting that mindset of, we're not just a cost setter, we're a critical division or group that protects the assets. And I think that's where I seen security elevate from the it world where yeah, King's born in it, cuz that's where that, where everything is, assets are all there. And then as assets change it, you guys have a lot of operational technology called OT on your manufacturing. You gotta deal with that. Now that's usually locked down. Pretty good. Right. <laugh> so as you bring OT and it together, you guys are in the middle of that industrial I OT world. >>Yeah. What's really interesting about my, uh, career at Colgate. I I've been here for, for 25 years and uh, actually the majority of my career has been in it supporting business applications, uh, either for our sales force or our manufacturing organization, our finance and HR teams. So I really got a, a good partnership with our business teams and really understood what they were trying to deliver. Then in the last few years, when I shifted over security, it really helped me bridge that gap and understand, you know, what the business systems are doing, what the OT systems are doing and then how to best secure them. >>Yeah, it's interesting. It's it kind of goes away. It's everything now it's digital, right? Digital digitization, digital transformation. This is what what's awesome. And this is what I love about the cloud scale and it's about bringing the two worlds together and the hybrid is a steady state. Now, both workforce and environment, Alex. Great to get your perspective. Um, thanks for sharing, um, insight here on the cube. Final question, give a plug for what you're working on. What's the cool projects you got going. If you can share a little bit without getting confidential information out there, what's going on at Colgate? Uh what's on your plate. What are you excited about? Put a plug. Are you looking for hiring, give a quick plug for what you got working on? >>I mean, we have a great team. Uh, we've been growing the team steadily, uh, building out our, our security program. Uh, you know, we're always looking to hire new talent, uh, from different industries. Uh, we've been very focused on making sure that that we're building a diverse talent group inside my security program. So I'm not just looking for, uh, security practitioners. Who've been doing this for 25 years, but I've been hiring from various places like, uh, infrastructure service provider consultants, pen testers, and really trying to build, uh, uh, the best team possible. >>Yeah, just as a side to real quick note is I was chatting with a friend of mine the other day were old, old Foggie. Um, the young guns have never racked gear before. Right. They don't, they've never loaded Linux on a box. So, you know, as you start hiring some of the young talent, what's it like, what are they coming in? Obviously they probably probably have a broader CS perspective. Maybe they're probably more familiar, but you know, some of the different really rack gear all. So what is it like, what, what are some of the new, new, new young folks looking at right now? What's the, what's the skill. >>Yeah, they they're, they're used to cloud consoles and right clicking to, uh, to spin up a computer. And in an our day we unboxed the computer, put racks on, you know, had to plug in power and network and figure out, uh, you know, the right way to, to, to hook everything up and even load an OS. I mean, uh, you know, you're right out of, uh, university today, you, you probably right. Click spin up a, uh, an image in, in one of the public clouds and the OS boom comes up automatically for you, like imagine. So they >>Probably are like fish to water on the, on the dashboards and the, on some of the security challenges I can imagine they have a nice fit there, >>But at the same time, uh, you know, they have a great understanding of, uh, containers. They have a great understanding of server list. So you can really, uh, kind of marry the, the old school technology with some of the new ways of working. >>Yeah. Great stuff. Great. We'll have to do a segment on, uh, on talent and what the new roles are. A lot of openings, a lot of new opportunities. It really is a great time to be in this new digital, I don't know what the call it's nearly not it anymore. It's just digital transformation. Uh, it's just, it's just the way it is. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it, Alex. Thanks for your time. >>Thanks a lot, John. Okay. Take >>Care. Just a cube conversation here in Palo Alto. I'm John fur host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of day, one of the snowflake summit 22 live from seizures forum in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin. My co-host for the week is Dave ante, Dave and I are pleased to welcome Naga Raj Sastry to the program, the vice president of data and analytics at HCL technologies. Welcome. Great to have you. >>Same here. Thank you for inviting me here. >>Isn't it great to be back in person? >>Oh, love it. >>This the keynote this morning. I don't know if you had a chance to see it standing room only there was overflow rooms. People are ready for this, and it was a jam packed morning of announcements. >>Absolutely. >>Talk to us a little bit about the HCL snowflake partnership, but anybody in the audience who may not be familiar with HCL, give us a little bit of a background, vision, mission differentiation, and then that snowflake duo. >>Sure, sure. So let me first start off with, um, uh, talking about H at seal, we are 11.5 billion organization. Uh, we have three modes of working mode. One is everything to do with our infrastructure business and application services and maintenance mode. Two is anything that we do in the cutting edge, uh, ecosystem, whether it is cloud, whether it is application modernization, ERPs, uh, SA all of those put together is more to data. Analytics is part of our more to culture. Um, the whole ecosystem is called digital services business and, uh, within digital, uh, services, the one of the arms is data and analytics. We are about a billion dollars in terms of revenues from a data and analytics perspective, uh, of the 11 billion that I was talking to you about. And mode three is everything to do with our software services. So we have got our own software products, and that's a third of our business. So that's about HCL. So at C and, uh, snowflake relationship, we are a elite partner with snowflake. We are one of the fastest growing partners. We achieved the elite level within 18 months of us signing up as a snowflake partner. We're close to about 50 plus implementations worldwide, and, uh, about 800 people who are snowflake professionals within, within that CLE ecosystem, large customers that we serve. >>And how long have you been partners? >>Uh, about 18 to 20 months now. >>Okay. So, so the, during the last couple of tumultuous years, why snowflake, what was it about their vision, their strategy, their leadership that really to spoke to HCL as this is a partner for us? >>So, so one of the, uh, biggest things that we realized, uh, probably about four years ago was in terms of, you know, you had all the application databases or RDBMSs PPS, the huddle P ecosystems, which are getting expense systems, which were getting expensive, not in terms of the cost, but in terms of the pro processing times, the way the queries were getting created. And we knew that there was, there is something that is going to come and the people and the people. Yeah. >>And, uh, and we knew that, you know, there will be a hyperscaler that will come. And, uh, of course there was Azure was already there. AWS was there, Google was just picking it up. And at that point in time, we realized that, you know, there will be a cloud data warehouse because we had started reading about snowflake at that point in time. So fast forward a couple of years after that, and we realized that if we are to be in this business, you know, the, the right way of doing it is by getting partnering a partnering with the right tooling company. And snowflake brings that to table. We all know that now. And, uh, with, with what, what the keynote speakers were also saying, right, from 150 member team about five years ago in, uh, conference to about 12,000 people now. So you know that this is the right thing to do, and this is the right place to be at. So we, we devised a methodology in terms of saying that let's get into the partnership, let's get our resources trained and certified on the snowflake ecosystem. And let's take a point of view to our customers in terms of how data migrations and transformations have to be done in the snowflake arena. When >>You, when you think about your modes, you talked about modes one, two, and three. If I feel like snowflake touches on each of those, maybe not so much of the infrastructure and the apps, but although maybe going forward, it does increasingly. So, yeah, that's my question is where do you see snowflake vectoring into your modes? >>So it doesn in both in the first two modes, uh, and mode three also, uh, because, and I'll give you the reasons why mode one is predominantly because you can do application development on cloud yep. On the data cloud now, um, which basically means that I can have a qu application run on snowflake. Eventually that's the goal. Second is, uh, in, in more two, because it is a cloud data warehouse, it fits in exactly because the application data is in snowflake. I've got my, uh, regular data sets within snowflake. Both are talking to each other. There is zero, um, lapse time from a user perspective, >>It's a direct >>Tip. And then more three, the reason why I said more three was because software as a service or software services and products is because I can power by snowflake. I can implement that. So that's why it cuts across our entire ecosystem. >>The, the dig, the whole thing is called your dig business, correct? Yes. Is that right? So that's, this is the, the next wave of digital business that we're seeing here, cuz it's digital is data <laugh> right. That's really what it's about. It's about putting that data to work. >>So the president of our digital business, a BJA who was, who had done the, who had done a session in the, in the afternoon today, he says the D in the digital is data. >>There is right. >>And, uh, that's what we are seeing with our customers, large implementations that we do in this ecosystem. There is one other thing that we are focusing, uh, very heavily on is industrial solutions or industry led solutions. Like whether it is for healthcare, whether it's for retail or financial services, name, a vertical. And we have got our own capabilities around industrialized solutions that's fit that fit certain use cases. >>So in thinking about the D in, in digital is really data. If you think about the operating model for data, it's obviously evolved, you mentioned, had do, went to the cloud and all the data went to the cloud, but today it's, you've got an application development model, you got database, which is sort of hardened. And then you've got your data pipeline and your, your data stack and, and that's kind of the operating model. There's sort of siloed to a great degree. Mm-hmm <affirmative> how is that operating model changing as a result of, of data? So >>I answered it in two parts. Part is if you, if you realize over the years, what used to happen is you had a CIO in an organization or C more CIO, but, and then you had enterprise architecture teams, application development teams, support teams, and so on and so forth in the last 36 months. If you see there is an emergence of a new role, which is called the da chief data and analytics officer. So the data and analytics officer is a role that has been created. And the purpose of creating that role is to ensure that organizations will pull out our call out resources within the CIO organizations who are enterprise architects, who are data architects, who are application architects or security architects, and bring them under into the ecosystem of the data office from an operating model perspective. So that innovations can be driven. >>Data driven enterprises could be created and innovations can come through there. The other part of that is the use cases get prioritized when you start innovating. And then it is a factory model in terms of how those use cases get built, which is, which is, which is a no brainer in my mind, at least. But that is how the operating model is coming up from a people perspective, from a technology perspective. Also there is an operating model that is emerging. If you see all the hyperscalers that are there today, snowflake with its LA most latest and greatest announcements. If you see the way the industry is going, is everything will be housed into one ecosystem and the beauty of this entire thing. And if you, you are to, you'll be able to fathom it effectively, right? Because if you are, if I'm, multi-cloud kind of an environment and if I'm on snowflake, I don't care why, because I'm snowflake, which is, which can work around across the multi clouds. So my data is in one place >>Effectively. Yeah. It's interesting what you were saying about the chief data officer, the chief data officer, that role emerged out of the, the ashes, like a Phoenix of, of, you know, compliance data quality and, and healthcare and financial services and government, the highly regulated industries. And then it took a while, but it, it increasingly became, wow, this is a really front front of the board level role, if you will, you know, data, and now you're seeing it. It's it's, it is integrated with digital. >>Absolutely. And there is one other point, if you think about it, the emergence of the chief data officer came in because there were issues associated to data quality. Yeah. There were issues associated to data cataloging as to how data is cataloged. And there were issues in terms of trustability of the data. Now, the trustability of the data can be in two places. One is a data quality, Hey, bad data, garbage and garbage out. But then the other aspect of the trustability is in terms of, can I do the seven CS of data quality and say that, okay, I can hallmark this data platinum or gold or silver or bronze or UN hallmark data. And with snowflake, the advantage is if I, if you have a hallmark data set, that is a, say a platinum or a gold, and thanks to the virtual warehouse, the same data set gets penetrated across the enterprise. That's the beauty with which it comes. And then of course the metadata aspect of it, bringing in the technical metadata and the business metadata together for the purpose of creating the data catalogs is another key cool thing and enabled again by snowflake. >>What are some of it when you're in customer conversations, some of the myths or misconceptions that customers historically have typically been making when it comes to creating a data strategy, some of the misconceptions, and then what is your recommendation for those folks since every company, these days to be competitive has to be a data company. >>Yeah. So around data structures, the, the whole thought process has to be, uh, either do in the past, we used to go with, from source applications, we would gather requirements. Then we would figure out what sources are there, do a profiling of the data and then say, okay, the target data, data model should be this >>Too slow, >>Too slow right now, fast forward to the digital transformation. There is producers of data, which is basically that applications that are being modernized today are producers of data. They're actually telling you that I'm producing this kind of data. This is the kind of events that I'm producing. And this is my structure. Now the whole deal is I don't need to figure out what the requirements are. I know what the use case the application is going to be helping me with. So therefore the entire data model is supported. So, but at the same point in time, the newer generation applications that are getting created are not only created getting created in terms of the customer experience. Of course, that is very critical, but they're also taking into account aspects around metadata, the technical metadata associated within an application, the data quality rules or business rules that are implemented within an application, all of that is getting documented as a result, the whole timeline from source to profile to model, which used to be X number of days in the past is X minus, at least 20% now or 30% actually. So that is how the structures, uh, the data structures are coming into a play future futuristic thought process would be, there will be producers of data and there'll be consumers of data. Where is ETL then or ELT. Then there is not going to be any ETL or ELT because a producer is going to say that I'm producing the data for this. A consumer says that, okay, I wanna consume the data for this purpose. There, they meet through an API layer. So where is ETL eventually going to go away? >>Well, and those consumers of, if you think about the, the way it works today, the, the data operating model, if you will, the transaction systems and other systems draw off a bunch of exhaust, they gets thrown over the fence to the analytics system. They're not operation the data, the data pipeline, the data systems are not operationalized in a way that they need to be. And obviously Snowflake's trying to change that. >>So data >>That's a big change, please. >>Yeah. Sorry. Didn't mean to cut you off. My >>Apologies. No, no. I'm >>So data operations is a very, very critical aspect. And if you think about it holistically, we used to have ETL pipelines T pipelines. And then we used to have queries being written on top of metadata or PPS and HaLoop and all of that and reporting tools that would have number of reports that were created and certain self-service BI reports into the ecosystem. Now, when you think in terms of a cloud data warehouse, what is happening? Is this the way you are architecting your solution today in terms of data pipelines, those data pipelines are self manageable or self-healing do not need the number of people where there was no documentation in terms of what ETL pipelines were written in the past on certain ETL tools or why something is failing. Nobody knew why something was failing because these are age old code, but take it forward today. >>What happens is our organizations are migrating from on-prem to cloud and to the cloud data warehouse. And the overall cost of ownership is decreasing. The reason is the way we are implementing the data pipelines, the way the data operations are being done in terms of, you know, even before a pipeline is kicked, uh, or kicked in, then, you know, there is a check process to say whether the source application is ready or not ready. So such things, small, small things, which are part and parcel of the entire data operations lifecycle are taking the center stage as a result, self fueling mechanisms are coming in. And because of those self fueling mechanisms, metrics are being captured as a result, you know exactly where to focus on and where not to focus on as, as a result, the number of resources needed to support gets reduced. Cost of one service >>Is low, much higher trust self-service infrastructure, uh, data context in the hands of, of business users. Data is now more discoverable it's governed. So you can now create data products more quickly. So speed and scale become extremely important. >>Absolutely. And in fact, one of the things that, that, uh, that is changing is the way search is getting implemented here to in the past, you created an index and then, you know, the data is searchable, but now it is contextual search. Can I contextualize the entire search? Can I create a machine learning algorithm that will actually say that, okay, Nara as a persona was looking for this kind of data and then Nara as a person, or comes back again and looks for some different kind of data. Can the machine learning algorithm go and figure out, okay, what is, what is going on in a garage's mind? What is he trying to look at? And then, you know, improve the, the whole learnability of the, of the entire algorithm. That's how search is going to also take, get into a change kind of a scenario. >>Excellent NAAU garage. Thank you so much for joining us, talking about data modernization at speed, end scale HCL, what you're doing, what you're doing with snowflake, and the sounds like incredible power that you're enabling. And we're only just scratching the surface. I have a feeling there's a lot more under there that you guys are gonna uncover. >>Sure. So we have, we have a tool or an accelerator. We call it an accelerator in the HCL parlance, but just actually a tool. So when you think about data modernization onto snowflake, it is predominantly migrating the data set from your existing ecosystem onto snowflake. That is one aspect of it. The second aspect of it is the modernization of the ETL or E LT pipelines. The third aspect associated to the data that is there within this, these ecosystems is the reconciliation older application, uh, sorry, older legacy, uh, platform snowflake legacy platform gives me result. X does snowflake give me result X that kind of a reconciliation has to be done. Data reconciliation and testing. And then the third fourth layer associated is the reporting and visualization. So these four layers are part and parcel of something that we call as advantage. Migrate advantage migrate will convert your ter data, data, uh, model into a snowflake understandable data model automatically whether it's ter data, whether it is Oracle, extra data, green plum, <inaudible> you name a ecosystem. >>We have the mechanism to convert a data model from whatever it is into snowflake readable, understandable data model. The second aspect is the et L E L T pipeline. Whether you want to go from Informatica to DBT or Informatica to something else or data stage to something else doesn't matter. There is a, there is an algorithm, or there is a tool which is called the ETL pipeline. We call it gateway suit, gateway suit actually converts the code. It reads the code that is there on the left hand side, which is the legacy code, understands the logic, it reverse engineers and understands the logic. And then what it does is we use that understanding or that logic that has been called out into spark code or DBT or any other tool of your choice from a customer standpoint. That's the second layer. Third layer I talked about, which is basically data testing, automated data testing and data reconciliation and the last, but not the least is the reporting because older ways of reporting and visualization with, with current day reporting and visualization, which is more persona based, the art of visualization is something difficult or different in this, in this aspect, come over to our booth at 2 1, 1 4, and you'll see, uh, advantage migrate in the works >>Advantage. Migrate. There you go. Nero, thank you so much for joining us on the program and unpacking HCL, giving us really that technical dissection of what you guys are doing and together with snowflake. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you >>For our guest and Dave ante. This is Lisa Martin live from the show floor of snowflake summit 22, Dave and I will be right back with our final guest of day one in just a minute.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit '22. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm here with one of our alumni. Jonathan Rendy joins me, the SVP of products at PagerDuty. Jonathan, great to have you on the program. >> It's wonderful to be here. Thank you, Lisa. >> Lisa: It's great to be back at PagerDuty Summit. So much news this morning. So much buzz and excitement. Talk to me about some of the things that you're most excited about as we are in such a massively different work environment these days. >> Yeah, so much has been going on and we've been innovating in so many areas. I think you heard in the keynote this morning, automation is such a foundational part of PagerDuty now, and that comes to us via the Rundeck acquisition from a couple of years ago. And we've also extended PagerDuty to new audiences. So we've been a big part of the back office for a long time with SREs and developers and ITOps, and we've really come to realize that the front office is so important, and one of the leading departments there that we can make an impact and extend into with our solution is customer service. >> Lisa: Customer service is absolutely critical these days as we all know. One of the things that was in very short supply the last couple of years is patience. Patience when you're a consumer, patience when you're a business person. And so the voice of the customer, being able to get things escalated quickly and resolved quickly, to those customer service folks is critical for any organization. Without that, people easily go to Twitter or Reddit and escalate problems publicly, and suddenly that becomes a brand reputation problem for the organization. >> Yeah, you're spot on. I mean expectations are at an all time high. People's tolerance is at an all time low. And that gets translated, I always think, to the front door of the organization when there is something that doesn't go right, and that's typically the poor customer service agents who have to deal with that kind of feedback and open up cases and deal with it. And, you know, unfortunately they're not armed a lot of times with the information that could help them not only be better reactive but be better proactive and have information to actually turn what could be a bad experience into a really good one. >> Lisa: You mentioned something really interesting. Jonathan had a great fireside chat this morning that I was able to watch. And you said it takes, for every negative experience that a customer or consumer has, it takes seven additional positive experiences to turn them back around. And I thought, wow, do we even have the patience or the tolerance to your point, to give a business seven more options to turn our experience around? >> Yeah, it's tough. And it's very, very hard for a lot of organizations and nobody's exempt from it. The connection between the front office and the back office, there is no real gold standard for that. And so, is there a path forward? Is there a way forward? We believe there is and we believe there's a way to help, but teams really need to focus on getting information to those folks so that these very negative kind of situations can become a customer satisfaction, can become something where a customer feels like, "Wow, I didn't expect that." There was another statistic that we heard about the other day, which is, you know, greater than 50% of issues are often identified from customers, not from the monitoring products. So, you know, whether it's 50, or 40, or 30, it doesn't really matter. The customer is a signal and it's so important to be attentive to that signal. >> Lisa: What are some, well... you'd rather have that found out before the customer even notices. Talk to me about some of the things that PagerDuty just announced that are going to help not just the front office, back office kind of blurred lines there, but also to ensure that the incident response is smarter, it's faster, and it's being able to detect things before the customer even notices. >> Yeah, so the trick, the $64,000 question, however you want to phrase it or characterize it, is all about getting teams ahead of problems. And while I think it's unrealistic to ever, like every single customer, get ahead of any issue that any customer could see, it's so important that the first customer that comes in with an issue becomes near to the last customer that comes in with an issue, meaning that one, everybody knows about that and they know how it's related to existing issues. That's important so that other customers can be preemptively explained, but then given what PagerDuty's always done, sometimes we know about issues on the back end that may be impacting customers that they don't know about yet. So a shopping cart may not be working correctly, but before somebody hits it, if the customer service team knows about that right away, they can proactively get ready for communication to their customers to let them know, "Hey, there might be an issue here. We know about it, we're working on it. Please stay tuned", or direct them to something else that can help them. >> I can imagine that goes a long way to CSAT scores NPS scores, brand reputation, reducing churn. >> Jonathan: Oh, big time, big time, whether it's CSAT or NPS, you know, everybody is familiar on that big shopping day of the year, of getting that big sale, going to, wanting to order that, and then either not being able to complete the order or having to wait too long for it to be delivered. And then you end up having to go to a brick and mortar outlet to buy it there anyway. So there's so many opportunities and those situations will happen, outages will occur, it's just a matter of when. Those can be avoided in those bad situations via the use of other discounts, coupons, other customer satisfaction areas. You can turn those bad experiences into really good ones. >> Definitely. And I think we all have that expectation that that's going to happen, when outages do happen, 'cause to your point, those are the things that it's not, "Is it going to happen?" It's when, and how quickly can we recover from that so we minimize the impact on everybody else? Couple of the things that you announced this morning, Incident Objects and Service Cloud, talk to me about what that is. It looks like a deeper partnership integration with Salesforce. What are some of the benefits that your customers can expect? >> Jonathan: Yeah, so we have several partners in the front office, and one of the biggest known to the world is Salesforce. And so we've been working with the Service Cloud team there for going on a couple of years now, better integrating our platform into what they're doing. And we've actually built an app that runs inside of Service Cloud. So a customer service agent doesn't need to swivel chair around and look at other products in order to understand what's going on in the back office, it's all built into their experience. That's one, number one. Number two, we've upped that relationship and invested more where Service Cloud, Salesforce has come out with a new incident capability. And so we're integrating directly to that so we can sync up with that system of record from PagerDuty. So wherever the issues are found, whether it's in distributed DevOps teams, or whether it's in a central team, or whether it's a case agent working on the front end, everything will be kept in sync. So we're really excited about that bidirectional integration >> That bidirectional sync is critical. We have, you know, one of the biggest challenges, we've been talking about it since we were back at HP days back in the day, Jonathan, silos, right? That's one of the biggest challenges, is there's still silos between teams and systems, which impacts, you know, time to identify an incident, time to repair that incident, and then of course let alone repair the relationship with the customer on the other end. >> Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, and there's some great examples, working with our own customers, that we run into where when we can make that golden connection between the front office and the back office and sync up customer cases with incidents, magic starts to happen. So we've seen situations where the back office team working on an incident doesn't realize that the issue is customer impacting. They don't realize that there were three, and then four, and then five case tickets opened up, that it's really impacting customers. And when they see that rise in customer impact, they change the priority. They get other people involved. The urgency changes on that issue. Imagine working in a world where that visibility doesn't exist, people continue to work at their own pace and who suffers? The customer, the customer experience. >> Lisa: Without that visibility, so much can suffer. And quickly, we also have this expectation, I mentioned one of the things that was in short supply in the pandemic as patience and tolerance, but another thing is we expect things in real time, realtime access to data, realtime access to the customer, to a product or service, is no longer a nice to have, it is business critical for organizations in every industry. >> Yeah. Yep. And you know, customer service is such a obviously service-centered activity, that it can be, you know, death by a thousand paper cuts to a customer experience. And to the point that you're raising, nobody likes to contact finally someone as an agent, and then get passed to another agent, who gets passed to another agent, and have to repeat the problem that you're having so many times. What if we could capture all that context together. What if we could empower that agent to be able to manage that case from beginning to end more effectively? Like what would the reflection be on the customers who are calling in? They would feel taken care of. They would feel like they were heard. They wouldn't feel ignored, so to speak. So all of that is a part of our solution that we're partnering not only with Salesforce, but also with Zendesk and others to deliver. >> Talk about the automation in CS Ops and some of the main benefits. Obviously, you mentioned this a minute ago, but the ability to empower those agents to have that context is night and day compared to, you know, the solutions from back in the day. >> Jonathan: Yeah. Automation is so fundamental and foundational to everything we do at PagerDuty and if you look at all the audiences that make use of PagerDuty today, whether it's developers, whether it's IT operations and now customer service agents, it's no surprise that, you know, everyone has to do more with less, everyone's working in a more siloed, disconnected manner. So the amount of potential toil, potential manual steps, having to open up a system to get the status of something and then pivot over to my other system, or do research, or ask a customer multiple times when it could automatically be captured what their problem is, what the environment is, and all that information from an agent could be automatically inserted into the case. How valuable is that? Not only for the case, but then the teams on the back end, that helps them diagnose and fix those problems. So the amount of automation that we've built and now just announced and made available as a part of Customer Service Ops just like in DevOps with our automation actions, really important to automating some of those manual toil steps for those agents where, again, 50, 60% of their time is spent doing manual activities. We can get rid of that. We can empower them to do more, to do more with less. >> To do more with less and do more faster and it makes such a huge difference there. Talk a little bit about the DevOps-CS Ops relationship. You know, one of the things that's kind of ironic is here we are in 2022, we have so many tools to collaborate and connect, yet there's still so many silos, and that can either break trust between a customer and a vendor or a solution provider, or it can really facilitate trust. And that was a big theme of the keynote this morning is that trust. But talk about the trust that is you, PagerDuty, really thinks essential between the DevOps folks and the CS Ops folks. >> Yeah. It's critical, as I kind of mentioned before, there really isn't a golden path, a golden connection, a standard that's been set between CS, the customer service organizations and the back office. And how I like to characterize it and what I've seen over the years working with customers is frequently it's almost like when I was a little kid I lived nearby a semi-pro baseball team and I could never get tickets and I would ride my bike to the back of the fence and I would look at the game through a little knot hole in the fence and I'd be like, "Man that would be so great to be in there" Well, that's essentially customer service, sitting there looking at the game happening, constantly trying to interrupt the teams and saying, "Hey, what about us?" And so, by making that a seamless connection, by making customer service a part of the solution, a part of the team in a non impactful, intrusive way, everybody gets what they need, no one's interrupted, and now those customer service agents, they're sitting in the stands. They're not looking through the little knot hole at the back of the center field. >> Lisa: Well you got to tell us, did you ever get tickets? Can you go to pro games now? >> No. No. >> Aww >> Still waiting. >> Oh man. Talk to me, last question here, I asked you before we started filming if you had a crystal ball or a Magic 8-Ball, so next time at least bring me a Magic 8-Ball. What are some of the predictions that you have as you see where we are in... now half of calendar '22 almost gone, the announcements coming from PagerDuty today, this synergy is between PagerDuty, its, what, 21,000 plus customers, your partners, What are some of the things that you're excited about that are coming? >> Jonathan: So a couple things. One is I really think the first example, we talk about the Operations Cloud, what PagerDuty is. And to me, what it really is, is it's not just the DevOps audiences and the ITOps and the SRE teams in the back offices that have to deal with interrupted realtime work, but it's other parts of the organization as well that have to get proactive versus reactive. And the first of those, the first step that kind of personifies the Operations Cloud outside of that back office is customer service. But there will be more, there will be more, whether it's security or other teams. So it's the audiences that can participate and engage in realtime work, that's one. And then I think in the area of customer service and Customer Service Operations, where we are, what we've been doing and what we've been so focused on is making sure that those agents can start to get proactive and start to get to the next step. But wouldn't it be amazing if we could help them, proactively, in a targeted way, talk to their customers and provide that as an automated part of the process. Today that's very manual, so we can empower them with information, but a lot of their communication with their customers is manual. What if we could automate that? And that's our plans, and that's what I'm really excited about doing. >> Can you imagine the trust built between an empowered, proactive CS agent and a customer on the other end. The sky is the limit on that one. >> If I'm a platinum customer or I'm a silver customer, I'm paying for a certain level of customer service. How great would it be if based on the extra that I'm paying, I'm actually getting that service proactively and I'm hearing about issues long before I see them. That to me is building trust. >> Lisa: Absolutely. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today. Great to see you back in person. Great to hear some of the things coming down the road for PagerDuty, and we're excited to see your predictions come true. Thanks for your time. >> Likewise, Lisa. Thank you very much. >> My pleasure. For Jonathan Rendy. I'm Lisa Martin covering theCUBE on the ground at PagerDuty summit '22. Stick around, I'll be right back with my next guest. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit '22. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm here with one of our alumni. Jonathan Rendy joins me, the SVP of products at PagerDuty. Jonathan, great to have you on the program. >> It's wonderful to be here. Thank you, Lisa. >> Lisa: It's great to be back at PagerDuty Summit. So much news this morning. So much buzz and excitement. Talk to me about some of the things that you're most excited about as we are in such a massively different work environment these days. >> Yeah, so much has been going on and we've been innovating in so many areas. I think you heard in the keynote this morning, automation is such a foundational part of PagerDuty now, and that comes to us via the Rundeck acquisition from a couple of years ago. And we've also extended PagerDuty to new audiences. So we've been a big part of the back office for a long time with SREs and developers and ITOps, and we've really come to realize that the front office is so important, and one of the leading departments there that we can make an impact and extend into with our solution is customer service. >> Lisa: Customer service is absolutely critical these days as we all know. One of the things that was in very short supply the last couple of years is patience. Patience when you're a consumer, patience when you're a business person. And so the voice of the customer, being able to get things escalated quickly and resolved quickly, to those customer service folks is critical for any organization. Without that, people easily go to Twitter or Reddit and escalate problems publicly, and suddenly that becomes a brand reputation problem for the organization. >> Yeah, you're spot on. I mean expectations are at an all time high. People's tolerance is at an all time low. And that gets translated, I always think, to the front door of the organization when there is something that doesn't go right, and that's typically the poor customer service agents who have to deal with that kind of feedback and open up cases and deal with it. And, you know, unfortunately they're not armed a lot of times with the information that could help them not only be better reactive but be better proactive and have information to actually turn what could be a bad experience into a really good one. >> Lisa: You mentioned something really interesting. Jonathan had a great fireside chat this morning that I was able to watch. And you said it takes, for every negative experience that a customer or consumer has, it takes seven additional positive experiences to turn them back around. And I thought, wow, do we even have the patience or the tolerance to your point, to give a business seven more options to turn our experience around? >> Yeah, it's tough. And it's very, very hard for a lot of organizations and nobody's exempt from it. The connection between the front office and the back office, there is no real gold standard for that. And so, is there a path forward? Is there a way forward? We believe there is and we believe there's a way to help, but teams really need to focus on getting information to those folks so that these very negative kind of situations can become a customer satisfaction, can become something where a customer feels like, "Wow, I didn't expect that." There was another statistic that we heard about the other day, which is, you know, greater than 50% of issues are often identified from customers, not from the monitoring products. So, you know, whether it's 50, or 40, or 30, it doesn't really matter. The customer is a signal and it's so important to be attentive to that signal. >> Lisa: What are some, well... you'd rather have that found out before the customer even notices. Talk to me about some of the things that PagerDuty just announced that are going to help not just the front office, back office kind of blurred lines there, but also to ensure that the incident response is smarter, it's faster, and it's being able to detect things before the customer even notices. >> Yeah, so the trick, the $64,000 question, however you want to phrase it or characterize it, is all about getting teams ahead of problems. And while I think it's unrealistic to ever, like every single customer, get ahead of any issue that any customer could see, it's so important that the first customer that comes in with an issue becomes near to the last customer that comes in with an issue, meaning that one, everybody knows about that and they know how it's related to existing issues. That's important so that other customers can be preemptively explained, but then given what PagerDuty's always done, sometimes we know about issues on the back end that may be impacting customers that they don't know about yet. So a shopping cart may not be working correctly, but before somebody hits it, if the customer service team knows about that right away, they can proactively get ready for communication to their customers to let them know, "Hey, there might be an issue here. We know about it, we're working on it. Please stay tuned", or direct them to something else that can help them. >> I can imagine that goes a long way to CSAT scores NPS scores, brand reputation, reducing churn. >> Jonathan: Oh, big time, big time, whether it's CSAT or NPS, you know, everybody is familiar on that big shopping day of the year, of getting that big sale, going to, wanting to order that, and then either not being able to complete the order or having to wait too long for it to be delivered. And then you end up having to go to a brick and mortar outlet to buy it there anyway. So there's so many opportunities and those situations will happen, outages will occur, it's just a matter of when. Those can be avoided in those bad situations via the use of other discounts, coupons, other customer satisfaction areas. You can turn those bad experiences into really good ones. >> Definitely. And I think we all have that expectation that that's going to happen, when outages do happen, 'cause to your point, those are the things that it's not, "Is it going to happen?" It's when, and how quickly can we recover from that so we minimize the impact on everybody else? Couple of the things that you announced this morning, Incident Objects and Service Cloud, talk to me about what that is. It looks like a deeper partnership integration with Salesforce. What are some of the benefits that your customers can expect? >> Jonathan: Yeah, so we have several partners in the front office, and one of the biggest known to the world is Salesforce. And so we've been working with the Service Cloud team there for going on a couple of years now, better integrating our platform into what they're doing. And we've actually built an app that runs inside of Service Cloud. So a customer service agent doesn't need to swivel chair around and look at other products in order to understand what's going on in the back office, it's all built into their experience. That's one, number one. Number two, we've upped that relationship and invested more where Service Cloud, Salesforce has come out with a new incident capability. And so we're integrating directly to that so we can sync up with that system of record from PagerDuty. So wherever the issues are found, whether it's in distributed DevOps teams, or whether it's in a central team, or whether it's a case agent working on the front end, everything will be kept in sync. So we're really excited about that bidirectional integration >> That bidirectional sync is critical. We have, you know, one of the biggest challenges, we've been talking about it since we were back at HP days back in the day, Jonathan, silos, right? That's one of the biggest challenges, is there's still silos between teams and systems, which impacts, you know, time to identify an incident, time to repair that incident, and then of course let alone repair the relationship with the customer on the other end. >> Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, and there's some great examples, working with our own customers, that we run into where when we can make that golden connection between the front office and the back office and sync up customer cases with incidents, magic starts to happen. So we've seen situations where the back office team working on an incident doesn't realize that the issue is customer impacting. They don't realize that there were three, and then four, and then five case tickets opened up, that it's really impacting customers. And when they see that rise in customer impact, they change the priority. They get other people involved. The urgency changes on that issue. Imagine working in a world where that visibility doesn't exist, people continue to work at their own pace and who suffers? The customer, the customer experience. >> Lisa: Without that visibility, so much can suffer. And quickly, we also have this expectation, I mentioned one of the things that was in short supply in the pandemic as patience and tolerance, but another thing is we expect things in real time, realtime access to data, realtime access to the customer, to a product or service, is no longer a nice to have, it is business critical for organizations in every industry. >> Yeah. Yep. And you know, customer service is such a obviously service-centered activity, that it can be, you know, death by a thousand paper cuts to a customer experience. And to the point that you're raising, nobody likes to contact finally someone as an agent, and then get passed to another agent, who gets passed to another agent, and have to repeat the problem that you're having so many times. What if we could capture all that context together. What if we could empower that agent to be able to manage that case from beginning to end more effectively? Like what would the reflection be on the customers who are calling in? They would feel taken care of. They would feel like they were heard. They wouldn't feel ignored, so to speak. So all of that is a part of our solution that we're partnering not only with Salesforce, but also with Zendesk and others to deliver. >> Talk about the automation in CS Ops and some of the main benefits. Obviously, you mentioned this a minute ago, but the ability to empower those agents to have that context is night and day compared to, you know, the solutions from back in the day. >> Jonathan: Yeah. Automation is so fundamental and foundational to everything we do at PagerDuty and if you look at all the audiences that make use of PagerDuty today, whether it's developers, whether it's IT operations and now customer service agents, it's no surprise that, you know, everyone has to do more with less, everyone's working in a more siloed, disconnected manner. So the amount of potential toil, potential manual steps, having to open up a system to get the status of something and then pivot over to my other system, or do research, or ask a customer multiple times when it could automatically be captured what their problem is, what the environment is, and all that information from an agent could be automatically inserted into the case. How valuable is that? Not only for the case, but then the teams on the back end, that helps them diagnose and fix those problems. So the amount of automation that we've built and now just announced and made available as a part of Customer Service Ops just like in DevOps with our automation actions, really important to automating some of those manual toil steps for those agents where, again, 50, 60% of their time is spent doing manual activities. We can get rid of that. We can empower them to do more, to do more with less. >> To do more with less and do more faster and it makes such a huge difference there. Talk a little bit about the DevOps-CS Ops relationship. You know, one of the things that's kind of ironic is here we are in 2022, we have so many tools to collaborate and connect, yet there's still so many silos, and that can either break trust between a customer and a vendor or a solution provider, or it can really facilitate trust. And that was a big theme of the keynote this morning is that trust. But talk about the trust that is you, PagerDuty, really thinks essential between the DevOps folks and the CS Ops folks. >> Yeah. It's critical, as I kind of mentioned before, there really isn't a golden path, a golden connection, a standard that's been set between CS, the customer service organizations and the back office. And how I like to characterize it and what I've seen over the years working with customers is frequently it's almost like when I was a little kid I lived nearby a semi-pro baseball team and I could never get tickets and I would ride my bike to the back of the fence and I would look at the game through a little knot hole in the fence and I'd be like, "Man that would be so great to be in there" Well, that's essentially customer service, sitting there looking at the game happening, constantly trying to interrupt the teams and saying, "Hey, what about us?" And so, by making that a seamless connection, by making customer service a part of the solution, a part of the team in a non impactful, intrusive way, everybody gets what they need, no one's interrupted, and now those customer service agents, they're sitting in the stands. They're not looking through the little knot hole at the back of the center field. >> Lisa: Well you got to tell us, did you ever get tickets? Can you go to pro games now? >> No. No. >> Aww >> Still waiting. >> Oh man. Talk to me, last question here, I asked you before we started filming if you had a crystal ball or a Magic 8-Ball, so next time at least bring me a Magic 8-Ball. What are some of the predictions that you have as you see where we are in... now half of calendar '22 almost gone, the announcements coming from PagerDuty today, this synergy is between PagerDuty, its, what, 21,000 plus customers, your partners, What are some of the things that you're excited about that are coming? >> Jonathan: So a couple things. One is I really think the first example, we talk about the Operations Cloud, what PagerDuty is. And to me, what it really is, is it's not just the DevOps audiences and the ITOps and the SRE teams in the back offices that have to deal with interrupted realtime work, but it's other parts of the organization as well that have to get proactive versus reactive. And the first of those, the first step that kind of personifies the Operations Cloud outside of that back office is customer service. But there will be more, there will be more, whether it's security or other teams. So it's the audiences that can participate and engage in realtime work, that's one. And then I think in the area of customer service and Customer Service Operations, where we are, what we've been doing and what we've been so focused on is making sure that those agents can start to get proactive and start to get to the next step. But wouldn't it be amazing if we could help them, proactively, in a targeted way, talk to their customers and provide that as an automated part of the process. Today that's very manual, so we can empower them with information, but a lot of their communication with their customers is manual. What if we could automate that? And that's our plans, and that's what I'm really excited about doing. >> Can you imagine the trust built between an empowered, proactive CS agent and a customer on the other end. The sky is the limit on that one. >> If I'm a platinum customer or I'm a silver customer, I'm paying for a certain level of customer service. How great would it be if based on the extra that I'm paying, I'm actually getting that service proactively and I'm hearing about issues long before I see them. That to me is building trust. >> Lisa: Absolutely. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today. Great to see you back in person. Great to hear some of the things coming down the road for PagerDuty, and we're excited to see your predictions come true. Thanks for your time. >> Likewise, Lisa. Thank you very much. >> My pleasure. For Jonathan Rendy. I'm Lisa Martin covering theCUBE on the ground at PagerDuty summit '22. Stick around, I'll be right back with my next guest. (upbeat music)

>>Hey, welcome to the Cubes coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021, the virtual experience, I'm lisa martin, I have two guests joining me. One is a cube alum kamal Shah is back, he's now the VP of cloud platforms at Brent had come on, it's great to have you back on the program. You're in a new role, we're going to talk about that. Thank you. And Kirsten newcomer is here as well. She's the Director of cloud and Death stickups strategy at Red Hat, Kirsten, Welcome and thank you for bringing the red hat vibe to the segment. >>Absolutely, very happy to be here. >>So looking forward to this conversation that we're going to be having in the next 20 minutes or so. We're gonna be talking about the last time come on, you were on, you were the ceo of stack rocks In January of 2021. The announcement that red hat plans to acquire stack rocks, it wouldn't be talking all about that. But I'd like to start with Kirsten, give us your perspective from red hats perspective, why is red hat a good fit for stack rocks? >>You know, there are so many reasons first of all as as you know, right? Red hat has been working with product Izing kubernetes since kubernetes one dato. Right, so so open shift three dato shipped with kubernetes one dot Oh, so we've been working with kubernetes for a long time, stack rocks embraces kind of is kubernetes native security embraces the declarative nature of kubernetes and brings that to security. Red hats, Custer's red hat enterprise customers, we have a great set across different verticals that are very security conscious and and during my five years at red hat, that's where I spend the majority of my time is talking with our customers about container and kubernetes security. And while there's a great deal of security built in to open shift as it goes to market out of the box, customers need the additional capabilities that stack rock springs. Historically, we've met those needs with our security partners. We have a great ecosystem of security partners. And with the stack rocks acquisition, we're now in a position to offer additional choice. Right. If a customer wants those capabilities from Red hat tightly integrated with open shift, we'll have those available and we continue to support and work with our broad ecosystem of security partners. >>Excellent customers always want choice. Come on. Give me your perspective. You were at the helm the ceo of stack rocks as you were last time you were on the cube. Talk to me about the redhead acquisition from your seat. >>Yeah. So as as Kirsten mentioned, we were partners of red hat. You're part of the red hat partner ecosystem. And uh, what we found is that was both a great strategic fit and a great cultural fit between our two companies. Right? And so the discussions that we had were how do we go and quickly enable our customers to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives to move workloads to the cloud, to containerized them, to manage them through kubernetes and make sure that we seamlessly addressed their security concerns. Right? Because it continues to be the number one concern for large enterprises and medium sized enterprises and frankly any enterprise that uh, you know, uh, working out today. So, so that was kind of the impetus behind it. And I must say that so far the the acquisition has been going on very smoothly. So we had two months in roughly and everybody and has been very welcoming, very collaborative, very supportive. And we are already working hand in hand to to integrate our companies and to make sure that we are working closely together to make our customers successful. >>Excellent. We're gonna talk about that integration in a second. But I can imagine challenging going through an acquisition during a global pandemic. Um but that is one of the things that I think lends itself to the cultural alignment. Kamal that you talked about, Kirsten. I want to get your perspective. We know we talk about corporate culture and corporate culture has changed a lot in the last year with everybody or so many of us being remote. Talk to me about kind of the core values that red hat and stack rocks share >>actually, you know, that's been one of the great joys doing during the acquisition process in particular, Kamal and and ali shared kind of their key values and how they um how they talked to talk with their team And some of the overlap was just so resonated so much for all of us. In particular the sense of transparency, uh, that the, that the team the stack rocks executive team brings and approaches. That's a that's a clear value for red hat um strongly maintained. Uh, that was one of the key things the interest in um uh, containers and kubernetes. Right. So the technology alignment was very clear. We probably wouldn't have proceeded without that. But again, um and I think the investment in people and the independence and the and the strong drive of the individuals and supporting the individuals as they contribute to the offering so that it really creates that sense of community um and collaboration that is key. Uh and and it's just really strong overlap in in cultural values and we so appreciated that >>community and collaboration couldn't be more important these days. And ultimately the winner is the customers. So let's dig in. Let's talk about what stack rocks brings to open shift Kirsten take it away >>man. So as I said earlier, um so I think we we really believe in continuous security at red hat and in defense and depth. And so when we look at an enterprise kubernetes distribution that involves security at the real core os layer security and kubernetes adding the things into the distribution, making sure they're there by default, that any distribution needs to be secured to be hardened, auditing, logging, identity, access management, just a wealth of things. And Red hat has historically focused on infrastructure and platform security, building those capabilities into what we bring to market stack rocks enhances what we already have and really adds workload protection, which is really when it comes down to it. Especially if you're looking at hybrid cloud, multi cloud, how you secure, not just the platform, but how you secure your workloads changes. And we're moving from a world where, you know, you're deploying anti virus or malware scanners on your VMS and your host operating system to a world where those work clothes may be very short lived. And if they aren't secured from the get go, you miss your opportunity to secure them right? You can't rely on, you know, you do need controls in the infrastructure but they need to be kubernetes native controls and you need to shift that security left. Right? You never patch a running container. You always have to rebuild and redeploy if you patch the running container the next time that container images deployed, you've missed, you've lost that patch. And so the whole ethos the whole shift left. The Deb sec ops capabilities that stack rock springs really adds such value. Right? You can't just do DEF SEc or set cops. You need to do a full infinity loop to really have def SEc ops and stack rocks. I'm gonna let Kamal tell you about it, but they have so many capabilities that that really drive that shift left and enable that closed loop. We're just so excited that they're part of our offerings. >>So can you take us through that? How does stack rocks facilitate the shift left? >>Yeah, absolutely. So stack rocks, which we we announced at summit is now being rebranded as red hat. Advanced cluster security was really purpose built to help our customers address the use cases across the entire application lifecycle. Right? So from bill to deploy to run time. So this is the infinite loop that Kirsten mentioned earlier and one of our foundations was to be kubernetes native to ensure that security is really built into the application is supposed to bolt it on. So specifically, we help our customers shift left by securing the supply chain and we're making sure that we identifying vulnerabilities early during the build process before they make it to a production environment. We helped them secure the infrastructure by preventing miS configurations again early in the process because as we all know, MIS configurations often lead to breaches at at runtime. Right? We help them address uh compliance requirements by ensuring that we can check for CS benchmarks are regulatory requirements around the C I P C I, hip hop and this and and that's uh you know, just focusing on shift left, doesn't really mean that you ignore the right side or ignore the controls you need uh when your applications are running in production. So we help them secure that at runtime by identifying preventing breaches the threat detection, prevention and incident response. >>That built in security is you both mentioned that built in versus bolt on Kirsten? Talk to me about that, that as really kind of a door opener. We talked a lot about security issues, especially in the last year. I don't know how many times we've talked about miS configurations leading to breaches that we've seen so many security challenges present in the last year. We talked to me a little bit Kirsten about >>what >>customers appetites are for going. All right now, I've got cloud native security, I'm going to be able to, I'm going to feel more comfortable with rolling out production deployments. >>It's, it's a great place to go. So there are a number of elements to think about. And if I could, I could, I could start with by building on the example that Kamal said, Right, So when we think about um I need to build security into my pipeline so that when I deliver my containerized workloads, they're secure. What if I miss a step or what if a new vulnerability is discovered after the fact? Right. So one of the things that stack rocks or redhead a CS offers is it has built in policy checks to see whether a container or running image has something like a package manager in it. Well, a package manager can be used to load software that is not delivered with the container. And so the idea of ensuring that you are including workload, built in workload, protect locks with policies that are written for you. So you can focus on building your applications. You don't necessarily have to learn everything there is to know about the new attack vectors that are really just it it's new packaging, it's new technology. It's not so much there are some new attack vectors, but mostly it's a new way of delivering and running your applications. That requires some changes to how you implement your security policies. And so ensuring that you have the tools and the technology that you're running on have those capabilities built in. So that when we have conversations with our security conscious customers, we can talk with them about the attack vectors they care about. We can illustrate how we are addressing those particular concerns. Right? One of them being malware in a container, we can look for stack. Rocks can look for a package manager that could be used to pull in, you know, code that could be exploited and you can stop a running container. Um, we can do deeper data collection with stack rocks. Again, one of the challenges when you're looking at moving your security capabilities from a traditional application environment is containers come and go all the time. In a kubernetes cluster nodes, your servers can come and go in a cloud native kubernetes cluster, right? If you're running on on cloud public cloud infrastructure, um, those things are the nodes are ephemeral to, they're designed to be shut down and brought back up. So you've got a lot more data that you need to collect and that you need to analyze and you need to correlate the information between these. Right? I no longer have one application stack running on one or more VMS, it's just things are things are moving fast so you want the right type of data collection and the right correlation to have good visibility into your environment. >>And if I can just build on that a little bit. The whole idea here is that these policies really serve as god rails right for the developers. So the it allows developers to move quickly to accelerate the speed of development without having to worry about hundreds of potential security issues because there are guardrails that will notify that with concrete recommendations early in the process. And the analogy I often use is that you know the reason we have breaks in our cars, it's not to slow us down but to allow us to go faster because we know we can slow down when we need to write. So similarly these policies are really it's really designed to accelerate the speed of development and accelerate digital transformation initiatives that our customers are embarking on >>and come on. I want to stick with you on the digital transformation front. We've talked so much about how accelerated that has been in the last year with everything going on in such a dynamic market. Talk to me Kamal about some of the feedback that you've gotten from stack rocks customers about the acquisition and how it is that maybe that facilitator of the many pivots that businesses have had to do in the last year to go from survival mode to thriving business. >>Yeah. Yes, absolutely. The feedback from all of our customers bar none has been very very positive. So it's been it's allowed us to invest more in the business and you know, we publicly stated that we are going to invest more in adding more capabilities. We are more than doubling the size of our teams as an example. And really working hand in hand with our uh the broader team at Red had to uh further accelerate the speed of development and digital transformation initiatives. So it's been extremely positive because we're adding more resources, We're investing more. We're accelerating the product roadmap uh based on uh compared to what we could do as a, as a start up as you can imagine. And and the feedback has been nothing but positive. So that's kind of where we are today. And what we're doing with the summit is rolling out a new bundle called open shift uh, Open shift platform plus, which includes not just Red hat A CS which used to be Stock rocks, but also red hat open shift hybrid cloud platform as well as Red hat advanced uh container cluster management, ACM capabilities as well as create the container registry. So we're making it easier for our customers to get all the capabilities that they need to for the drive digital transformation initiatives to get. It goes back to this whole customer centric city team that red hat has, that was also core value of stack rocks and and the winner and all of this, we believe ultimately is our, our our customers because that's where we exist to serve them, >>right. And I really like that if I could chime in kind of on top of that a little bit. Um so, so I think that one of the things we've seen with the pandemic is more of the red Hat customers are accelerating their move to public cloud and away from on premises data centers. Uh and and you know, that's just part partly because of so many people working remotely. Um it just has really pushed things. And so with Hybrid cloud becoming even more key to our joint customer base and by hybrid cloud, I mean that they have some environments that are on premises as they're making this transition. Some of those environments may stay that footprint may stay on premises, but it might be smaller, they may not have settled on a single public cloud. They could, in fact, they often are picking a public cloud based on where their development focuses. Google is very popular for ai and ml workloads. Amazon of course is just used, you know, by pretty much everybody. Um and then Azzurri is popular with um a subset of customers as well. And so we see our customers investing in all of these environments and stack rocks red hat A CS like open shift runs in all these environments. So with open shift platform plus you get a complete solution that helps with multi cluster management with a C. M with security across all of these environments, right? You can take one approach to how you secure your cluster, how you secure your workloads, how you manage configurations, You get one approach no matter where you're running your containers and kubernetes platform when you're doing this with open shift platform plus. So you also get portability. If today you want to be running an amazon maybe tomorrow you need to spin up a cluster in google, you can do that if you're working with the K s or G K E, you can or a Ks, you can do that with red hat a CS as well. So we really give you everything you need to be successful in this move and we give you back to that choice word, right? We give you the opportunity to choose and to migrate at the speed that works for you. >>So that's simplicity. That streamlining. I gotta ask you the last question here in our last couple of minutes. Come on, what's the integration process been like? as we said the acquisition just a couple of months in. But talk to me about that integration process. What that's been like? >>Yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned earlier, the process has been very smooth so far, so two months in and it's largely driven by the common set of culture and core values that exists between our two companies. And so uh you know, from a product standpoint, we've been working hand in hand because I mentioned earlier, we were partners are working hand in hand on accelerating the road map the joint roadmap that we have here uh from a go to market perspective teams are well integrated. We are going to be rolling out the rolling out the bundle and we're gonna be rolling out additional uh options for our customers. We've also publicly announced that will be open sourcing uh red hat A. C. S. Uh formerly known as Stock Rock. So stay tuned for further news and that announcement. And, and so you know, uh, again two months and everybody's been super collaborative. Super helpful, super welcoming. And the team is the well settled and we're looking forward to now focusing on our primary objective is just to make sure that our customers are successful. >>Absolutely. That customer focus is absolutely critical. But also so is the employee experience. And it sounds like we both talked about the ethos and the and the core value alignment. They're probably being pretty critical to doing an integration during a very challenging time globally. I appreciate both of you joining me on the program today, sharing what's going on stack rocks now asks the opportunities for customers to have that built in cuBA and the security. Thanks so much for your time. >>Thank you. Thank >>you for Camel shaw and Kirsten newcomer. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of Red Hat Summit, The virtual experience. Mhm

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios for a CUBE Conversation. We're talking about the Citrix Workspace Summit. It happened earlier today. And we've got one of the experts in the field, CUBE alumni and always a really fun guest to have on. Let's give a welcome to Tamara McCleary. She's coming to us from Colorado. She's the CEO of Thulium but you know her from social media and seeing her at all the conferences and speaking. And Tamara, it's great to see you again >> Jeff, it's so good to be here. Hey, next best thing to being in person, right? >> Absolutely. I mean, there is some good stuff. Neither of us had to get on an airplane today and we were able just to connect via the magic of the internet, which I think people forget how magic it truly is. So I looked up, we last spoke, it was mid-April. We were about a month into this thing after the kind of shutdown. And really the topic there was about this light switch moment on the work from home front. Now we're seven months into this, eight months into this, and clearly it's not going away anytime soon. And even when it does, it's not going to go back exactly to the way it was. So first off, how are you doing? 'Cause I know you spend a lot of time at conferences and traveling all over the world, so your life's been changed quite a bit. And then two, just your kind of perspective as we've moved from the light switch moment to the, that this is the new normal and will be the new normal going forward. Maybe not exactly how it is today, but we're not going back to the way that it was before. >> You couldn't be more spot on, Jeff. In fact, when you said April, to me, it almost feels like not seven months. It feels much longer ago. And since the last time I got on an airplane was the end of February, and that was a huge disruption to me in my life. I had always been in three, four cities a week, every week, and haven't traveled on an airplane since February. So the world is different, and it has shifted, and there's no going back. We can't step in the river twice and hit that same spot. I totally messed up that quote, but that's me. You're used to that already. >> Jeff: Exactly. >> But some things don't change. But I think when we look at work, and what we were talking about back in April is that now we're looking at the potential for kind of a hybrid approach, whether we're talking about work or even kids, some kids going back to school, there's a hybrid approach. And with that comes its own set of complexities that we have to consider. So not only has the culture shifted into a place where you have your workforce who has gotten used to working remotely, and there's a lot of things with working remotely that we didn't have when office was the centrical focus for the workplace. So there's a lot of flexibility when you work from home. And I think one of the interesting things with the Citrix Workspace Summit was when CEO David Henshall talked about how it's the people, right? So it's our workforce, our employees who are our most valuable, but also our most costly assets. So we have to make sure that the employee experience is one that is pleasing and helps us to have not only talent acquisition, but also talent retention in a really dynamic, competitive atmosphere. And I'm sure I just posed this question so we could go a million different places with this. Where do you want to go with it, Jeff? >> Well, I was going to say, and of course we can go forever, and we don't have forever, so at some point we'll have to stop talking at the end of this interview. But I just love having you on. And what I want to drill in is as we've talked about the new way to work for a very, very long time. This is not a new topic. And we've had remote work tools and we've had VPNs and we've had mobile phones now since 2007, but we didn't have this forcing function, and I think that's what's really different here is that now it wasn't a choice anymore. There was no more planning and talking about it and maybe or maybe not. Work from home was kind of a first-class citizen in terms of priority. COVID changed all that dramatically overnight. And it's driven home this other kind of concept which we talk a lot about generically in terms of the customer experience as they interact with our applications, which is the way that now they actually interact with the company. And we've talked a little bit about new way to work, but now it's really driven to the forefront, because as you said, there's a lot of benefits from working from home. You could eat dinner with your family, maybe can pick up a few more of the kids' activities, whether it's a sports game in the middle of the afternoon or something in the evening, but there's also a lot of stress. There's a lot of kind of this always on and this constant notifications, whether it's coming from email or text or Slack or Teams or Asana or whatever. So refocusing on the employee experience and elevating that up into a much more important thing, as you said, for both wellness and employee satisfaction, but also retention and getting new employees. It's really changed the priority of that whole set of, kind of point of view around the employee experience that wasn't there kind of pre-COVID. >> Absolutely. And I think you just tapped onto something that I think affects all of us who are juggling these multifaceted lives, and that is the constant interruption and distraction, and that costs money. And I think about that as the CEO of our organization is that how many of these distractions could be avoided to create efficiency and productivity. It also creates happiness for the individual. I don't think anybody likes to be constantly distracted, but when you have a bunch of different applications and you don't have them in one accessible place and you're constantly having to flip between these applications, it can cause a lot of friction and frustration. And I think genuinely that was my very first introduction to Citrix was the ability to really streamline and have everything in one place on a beautiful dashboard that was personalized to the individual. Not everybody in the organization needs to have all the applications, right? Some of your employees only need a few, and it just depends on who they are and what they're doing within the organization. And so I think decreasing that friction, making it easier for people, and certainly ensuring not only a frictionless experience at home but also ensuring security is huge. I mean, how many times have we talked about cybersecurity is not a bolt on afterwards. It has to be all the way up through the stack. And certainly we did have an increased threat landscape with work from home situations because there were all these security breaches and issues and vulnerabilities. So I know we're not talking security today, but I'm wild about it. But I think that all of these things, what I like about what Citrix is doing, and I enjoy the Summit, is the fact that they're blending everything into a single solution so that it just gets done. Work gets done from wherever you are, whether you're at home, you're in office, or in your car, work gets done. >> And not only work but I thought the theme that's interesting that came out in David's keynote is our best work. It's good work and high-value work. And there's really kind of two aspects of that. One, as you just said, is please help me with the distractions and use machine learning and artificial intelligence and this unified platform to decide whether I should or should not be distracted. Also help me prioritize what I should be working on kind of right now, which, again, a great opportunity for AI and ML to elevate that which is most important to the top of my inbox. But even more in one of the keynotes was integrating the concept of wellness, and not just wellness in the HR manual at the back after vision and dental and getting your health checks, but wellness even where the application suggests that you take a two-hour window in this particular period of time to be thoughtful and do some deep thinking. And someone mentioned the people we talk about in automation and getting rid of drudgery and errors and all the bad stuff that comes from doing crappy work, not only is it not fun, but super error prone. This is a really different to use technology to help the employee, as you said, not only just get work done, but get good work done, get high-value work done, prioritize good stuff, and not just deal with the incessant henpecking that is the notification world that it's really easy to fall into if you don't turn some of that stuff off or at least tone them down a little bit. >> That's so true. I don't know if you saw this, but there a study by Stanford of, I think it was 16,000 workers, and over a nine-month period, they did this study, and it was a study looking at work from home and whether productivity was increased. And every, 'cause at first you remember what it was, Jeff. I mean, in the old regime, we would thought, oh dear, we don't want a remote workforce because everybody's going to be hanging out in their pajamas and screwing around and not doing work. And that's not true. What ends up happening is that this study showed that productivity increased by 13%. And, I mean, that's huge, right? So there was a huge bump in performance. And in this particular study, the variables that they cited was perhaps that they had a quieter workspace. I mean, you're not getting barraged by all the endless meetings, unless you have endless Zoom meetings, but that's a whole nother conversation. But you're having more time to focus and flexibility on when you work, which also increases focus. But I thought what you mentioned, the wellness piece was important, because then if you look at other studies, there was a Forbes article that cited that the average worker starts at 8:32 a.m. or something like that and works until 5:38 p.m. And I think the days of the week that were the most productive were Tuesday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. But this was interesting, I thought. Telephone calls were up by 230%, so the calls that employees were making, and CRM activity was up by 176% and email up by 57% and chats up by 9%. So what we're seeing is that people are trying to find creative ways to remain connected and communicate, but in different ways. And I think that's where the wellness piece comes in and kind of what you were saying with that. I think it's a microapp that Citrix has on their Workspace, their workspace dashboard that pops up a reminder and says, hey, you think you should take a break or get up from your desk. But I think that what's nice about that is it's easy to get sucked into your computer all day. I'm guilty. I will definitely say I can start off pretty darn early in the morning or usually around by five and go till late at night. But, and it's all in front of the computer screen. So maybe I need that Citrix workspace solution to tap me on the shoulder and tell me to go take a meditation break. >> At least one of those watches that'll tell you to get up and twist around. Well, let's shift gears a little bit. They had Satya Nadella on, and Satya is a phenomenal executive, been super successful turning that big, very large boat, Microsoft, into really a cloud company and a SaaS company, and nothing but great success. Always happy to hear him. He had some interesting comments I want to run by you. One of them he said is we were dogmatic about work before, but don't replace what we were with just a new dogma. And what he really highlighted, A, obviously without the technology platform and cloud and all these tools that we have in place, this couldn't have happened. But more importantly, he said it really highlights the need for flexibility and resiliency, and to really, again, kind of elevate those as the first class citizens as to what you should be optimizing for. And really the highlight within this sudden shift with COVID that if you've got those capabilities, you're going to be successful, and if you don't, you're in real trouble >> I'm glad you brought Satya up, because he also said something really cool that I think is true, and that is we are running right now, currently we are running a global scale experiment. Do you remember him saying that? >> Yeah. >> And it's so true. I think right now the social scientists are going wild because finally they've got their captive collection of their study, their guinea pigs. But the other thing he was saying, too, is that we're going to be harnessing all these technologies to be able to re-skill and up-skill. And how long have we been talking about this, Jeff, with the future of work, that it will be a re-skilling and up-skilling of the workforce. He even mentioned holographic technology. He didn't go into it, but just the mention of it got me thinking about how we are currently using some of those nascent technologies to be able to up-skill and re-skill our workforces and also protect a workforce that doesn't necessarily need to be on scene on the edge of it all. And then he gave an example of an engineer being able to communicate with a first-line worker without having to be actually in the physical presence. And so I think this crucible that we're in called a global pandemic, forcing our hand, really, to do all the things that we've been talking about at all these conferences that we've been to, for me, maybe the past two decades, is that it's show, don't tell. So we're not talking about it anymore. We actually have to do it. And another thing that Satya said was that nine to five is definitely not true anymore with work. It's flexibility. And it's really... He also mentioned this EEG study into meeting fatigue. >> Jeff: Yes. >> I thought it was pretty wild. An EEG study into meeting fatigue. And I bet even without reading that study, all of us who are on video conferencing systems can probably tell what the outcome of that was. But concentration wanes very quickly. In fact, I think in that study it was after 20 minutes. But, so kudos to Citrix for putting on their summits, because did you notice for once we had the enjoyment of all these just really contents, deliciously packed segments that were short. >> Jeff: Right. >> Whereas at live events, they went on way too long. I mean, even customer stories went on way too long. And I really love the staccato nature of these customer stories and partnerships and what was working, and I just thought that they did a really nice job, and it was interesting because it met perfectly with staying underneath that 20-minute window before attention wanes. >> Right, right. And they even broke it up into three conferences, right? It was Citrix Synergy before. >> Right. >> Now it's workspaces, it's cloud, and then the third one will be security. But I want to double down on another concept. We talked about it last time with you and with Amy about measuring work and about kind of old work paradigms in terms of measuring performance that were really based more on activity than output. And this concept that work is an output, not a place. And it kind of makes you think of talking about cloud and a cloud-centric way of thinking about things. It's not necessarily the delivery method. It's about adopting quick change and rapid pace and having everything available that you need anywhere you are at the same time. So it seems strange to me that it took this to drive people to figure out that they should be measuring output and not activity. And were some early applications that came out when this all went down that are going to report back as to how often are you looking at your Zoom calls and how often are you sitting in front of your desk and all this silly stuff that just, again, misses the point. And I think this whole employee experience is, as you said, make 'em happy, make 'em feel fulfilled. They want to do meaningful work. They want to do high-value work. They just don't want to be an integration machine between the email system and the accounts receivable system and the accounts payable system. There's so much of an opportunity to get more value from the people, which, oh, by the way, makes for happier people. So do you think finally we're at a point where we can start getting away from just measuring activity unless that's your job to put a widget on a screw and really focus on output and high-value output and innovative output and deep thinking output versus just checking another box and passing the paper down the line? >> You know, Jeff, that reminds me of what Erica Volini, I think she's global human capital practice at Deloitte. I really loved her presentation. I also like the fact that I felt like she was speaking from her home, and she mentioned she's a new mom, and so there was this warmth and connection there which also I think is something really that we don't think about being, but it is a gift since we've all had to work from home is being able to see kind of executive individuals in a regular environment, and it humanizes it all, right? She said something really interesting in her talk. She was talking about rearchitecting the future of work, and she was talking about essentially, the premise was that human beings need, crave, have to have work that's meaningful and real. And part of this whole experience piece, part of this removing the friction from the experience of the employee and providing opportunities, stimulating growth opportunities for employees to give them that sense of meaning. But also she talked about the relationships. I mean, work is a huge part of the relationships in our life. And so this meaningful relationships and connections and in her architecting the work of the future, it's harnessing technology in service to humans to do a better job. And I think the word she used was augmentation, right? So the augmentation piece would be as we think about reinventing or re-imagining or re-architecting, we look at what's going to happen when we have the human working with the machine, but the machine in service to augmenting that human being to do, potential is what she was talking about, to really reach their potential. And so it's not about being replaced by technology. It's not being replaced by artificial intelligence, with machine learning algorithms. It's actually working in tandem so that technology potentiates the human that is using the technology. And I think that was a really good way of putting it. >> Right, right. I mean, we talk, it's one of our taglines, right? To separate the signal from the noise. And the problem is with so many systems now, and I forget, you may know off the top of your head, the average number of applications that people have to interact with every day to get their job done. >> Too many. >> Too many. >> Too many. >> It's a lot. So, so there is a lot of noise, but there's also some signal. And so if you're not paying attention, you can miss the signal that might be super, super important because you're overwhelmed by the noise. And so I think it is a real interesting challenge. It's a technology challenge to apply the machine learning and artificial intelligence, to sort through the total flow, to be able to prioritize and separate the signal from the noise to make sure we're working on the stuff that we should be working on. And I think it's a growing challenge as we just seem to always be adding new applications and adding new notifications and adding new systems that we have to interact with versus taking them away. So Citrix has this approach where we're just going to bring it all in together under one place. And so whether it's your Salesforce notification or your Slack notification or Zoom meeting, whatever, to have it orchestrated as a single place so I don't have 18 tabs, 14 browsers, and two laptops running just to get my day job done. >> You're going to make me self-conscious of all the tabs I have right now. Thanks a lot, Jeff. But, it's kind of, I like hearing stories, right? I think stories communicate to me kind of these practical applications. And I think Citrix did a brilliant job in the Workspace Summit of highlighting some of these customer stories that were really inspiring during the pandemic. One of 'em was City National Bank and Ariel Carrion? This is a test of my memory. He's the CTO, right, of City National Bank. And he's talking about that they had already had a partial migration to the cloud prior to the pandemic. So obviously there was an advantage for those organizations that already had their toe in the water. So, but when the pandemic hit, then it really catalyzed that movement all the way into the cloud and essentially creating a digital bank. And what was really interesting to me is that they funded 9600 loans and taking on new clients during that time of transformation to a digital bank. And one of the coolest things that he said to me was that in a regular program, it would've taken, mind you, get this. It would've taken 14 years, 14 years to accomplish what they did in three months. >> That's a long time. >> I was blown away, right? Just to me, that speaks a lot, because what we're talking about here is their clients are small business, and who do you think was impacted most during the pandemic? Small business. So the ability to get loans was critically important to the survival of a lot of companies. And the same story they had with eBay and David Lessor was talking, he's a senior manager in the office of the CIO, I think I remember. And he was talking about how obviously eBay is a digital platform, right? But if you think about the pandemic when we were all had these shelter in place orders, lots of people were able to still make money and earn a living because they were able to do business on eBay. And both eBay and City National Bank are obviously customers of Citrix. But I just found this to be really inspiring, because for eBay pre-pandemic, it was like, I don't know. I think they said they had 11,000 connected users prior to the pandemic, and a lot of those were in physical call centers. >> Jeff: Right. >> And then post-pandemic, I think he was reaching, saying end of Q4 was going to be something like 14,000 connected users. That's huge from 11 to 14. >> Yeah. >> And again, to your point, it's kind of forcing our hand into really not only pivoting, but increasing our speed in this ever-changing dynamic environment. >> Right. >> You know, one of the other things that came up, before I let you go, that it's always nice to have frameworks. Sometimes it just helps us organize our thoughts and it's kind of a mental cheat sheet. And they talked about the four Cs, connectivity, content, collaboration, and culture. And I would have to say they're in inverse order of how I would potentially have prioritized them. But I just wanted to zero in on the culture piece, 'cause I don't think people focus enough on culture. And one of the things I think we talked about in April, and I've certainly talked about a number of times going through this thing in leadership in these crazy times is that the frequency and the type and the topics in communication within your internal world have gone up dramatically. I think we had the, we had a CMO on the other day, and she said internal comms, this is a big company, prior to COVID was important, but not that important within the list of the CMO's activity. But then once this thing hit, right, suddenly internal communications, again, in terms of frequency and the types of topics you're talking about and the forums that you talk about and the actual vehicles in which you talk about, whether it's a all hands Zoom call or it's more frequent one-on-ones with your manager, really, really increase the importance of culture, and then I think probably is going to show over time the people that have it right, getting some separation distance from the people that got it wrong. I wonder if you could just talk about, 'cause you're a big culture person and you know how important the people part of the whole thing is. >> Yeah, culture drives everything. You're right. And that was Citrix's CIO who gave those four Cs, I think, Meerah Rajavel. >> Yeah, yeah. >> She gave those four Cs. And you couldn't be, you couldn't have tapped into something that I think is the soft underbelly of the organization, which is what is the culture. And anyone who's worked in an organization with a sick culture knows that it's just, it's cancerous, right? It grows and it causes decay. And I don't care how much innovation you have. If the culture is sick, you just, you're going to lose your best people. It's hard to work in a sick culture. And so I think what we had to do is when we all started working remotely, that was a culture shift, because we were siloed off of it. We weren't actually hanging out in physical space. Some of the things that we enjoyed about meeting with other human beings physically changed. And so it really behooved organizations to take a look at how they were going to foster culture digitally, how they were going to create that sense of bonding between not only those within your departmental area, but cross over into other areas. And I think that creating that culture that says I don't have to be in the exact same physical space, but we can still connect. I mean, you and I are doing this. We're not in the same physical space. >> Jeff: Right. >> But I'm still going to feel like we met today. >> Jeff: Right. >> You can create that for your employees. And it also means that we learned that we don't have to be in that same physical space, right? And I thought that was a really interesting position when Hayden Brown, the CEO of Upwork, was talking at the summit and saying that even when we look at creating culture with employees who aren't necessarily, maybe it's a workforce from all over the world that you're using, a remote workforce. And when you're using things like employees, if you've got work to do and you can find a really good talent and you can grab them for what it is that you need, you're actually increasing your ability to be able to deliver on things versus having to worry about whether you have that person in house, but you still can create that culture where everyone is inclusive, where someone can be in Australia and someone's in San Francisco and someone's in the UK, and you still have to create a cohesive, inclusive culture. And it matters not anymore whether or not you are a full-time employee or if you're a contract worker. I think in today's space, and certainly in those future of work conversations, it's more about, to the very first thing you said at the beginning, it's more about output. How's that for tying it back up again? >> Jeff: Yeah, very good. >> And that was totally unplanned. But it is about output, and that's going to be the future of work culture. It's not going to be the title that you have, whether or not you're a full-time employee or a part-time employee or a contract worker. It's going to be who are you meeting with? Who are you having these digital interfaces with and Slacking with or using any sort of platform application that you want to use. It's remaining in touch and in communication, and no longer is it about a physical space. It's a digital space. >> Right, right. All right, well, I'm going to give you the last word. You are a super positive person, and there's reasons, and for people that haven't watched your TED Talk, they should. I think it's super impactful and it really changed the way I look at you. So of all the negatives, wrap us up with some positives that you see as we come out of COVID that going through this experience will make in our lives, both our work lives as well as our personal lives. >> Well, since you're going to allow me to go deep here, I would say one of the things that COVID has brought us is pause. It caused us to go in. And with any dark night of the soul, we have to wrestle with the things that are real for us, and the things that fall away are those that were false, false perceptions, false ideas, illusions of even thinking who we are, what we're doing. And we had to come home to ourselves. And I think one of the things that COVID gave us through uncertainty was finding a center in that uncertainty. And maybe we got to know our beloveds a bit more. Maybe we got to know our kids a bit more, even if they drive us crazy sometimes. But in the end, I think maybe we all got to know ourselves a little bit more. And for that, I think we can harness those seeds of wisdom and make better choices in the future to co-create together a future that we are all pleased to wake up in, one that is fair, one that is equal, one that is inclusive, and one that we can be proud to have contributed to. And that's what I hope we've taken from this extremely hard time. >> Well, Tamara, thanks for sharing your wisdom with us. Really appreciate it. And great to see ya. >> Good to see you, too, thank you. >> All right, she's Tamara, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (bright music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Coop con and cloud, native con Europe 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners >>Welcome back. This is the Cube coverage of Cube Con Cloud, native con, the European show for 2020. I'm your host to Minuteman. And when we talk about the container world, we talk about what's happening in cloud. Native storage has been one of those sticking points. One of those things that you know has been challenging, that we've been looking to mature and really happy to welcome back to the program two of our cube alumni to give us the update on the state of storage for the container world. Both of them are oh, founders and CEOs. First of all, we have Xiang Yang from Rancher Labs, of course, was recently acquired by Sue Save it and the intention to acquire on and also joining us from early the relay. Who is with port works? Shang Amerli. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. Alright. So early. I actually I'm going to start with you just cause you know we've seen, you know, a couple of waves of companies working on storage. In this environment, we know storage is difficult. Um, And when we change how we're building things, there's architectural things that can happen. Eso maybe if you could just give us a snapshot, you know, Port works, you know, was created to help unpack this. You know, straight on here in 2020 you know, where you see things in the overall kind of computer storage landscape? >>Absolutely. Still, before I kind of jump into port works. I just want to take a minute to publicly congratulate the the whole rancher team, and and Shang and Shannon And will China have known those folks for a while there? They're kind of true entrepreneurs. They represent the serial entrepreneur spirit that that so many folks know in the valley, and so, you know, great outcome for them. We're very happy for them and ah, big congrats and shout out to the whole team. What works is is a little over five years old, and we've been kind of right from the inception of the company recognized that to put containers in production, you're gonna have to solve, not just the orchestration problem. But the issue of storage and data orchestration and so in a natural kubernetes orchestrates containers and what works orchestrates storage and data. And more specifically, by doing that, what we enable is enterprises to be able to take APS that are containerized into production at scale and and have high availability. Disaster recovery, backup all of the things that for decades I t has had to do and has done to support application, reliability and availability. But essentially we're doing it for purpose with the purpose build solution for containerized workloads. >>Alright, shaming. Of course, storage is a piece of the overall puzzle that that ranchers trying to help with. Maybe if you could just refresh our audience on Longhorn, which your organization has its open source. It's now being managed by the CN. CF is my understanding. So help us bring Longhorn into the discussion >>thanks to. So I'm really glad to be here. We've I think rancher and port work started about the same time, and we started with a slightly different focus. More is exactly right to get containers going, you really need both so that the computer angle orchestrating containers as well as orchestrating the storage and the data. So rancher started with, ah, it's slightly stronger focus on orchestrating containers themselves, but pretty quickly, we realized, as adoption of containers grow, we really need it to be able to handle ah, storage feather. And like any new technology, you know, uh, Kubernetes and containers created some interesting new requirements and opportunities, and at the time, really, they weren't. Ah, a lot of good technologies available, you know, technologies like rook and SEF at the time was very, very premature, I think, Ah, the You know, we actually early on try to incorporate ah, the cluster technology. And it was just it was just not easy. And And at the time I think port Works was, ah, very busy developing. Ah, what turned out to be there flagship product, which we end up, end up, uh, partnering very, very closely. But but early on, we really had no choice but to start developing our own storage technology. So Long horn. As a piece of container storage technology, it's actually almost as oh, there's rancher itself. When about funding engineers, we hired he he ended up, you know, working on it and Then over the years, you know the focus shift that I think the original version was written in C plus plus, and over the years it's now being completely re written in Golan. It was originally written more for Docker workload. Now, of course, everything is kubernetes centric. And last year we you know, we we decided to donate the Longhorn Open Source project to CN CF. And now it's a CN CF sandbox project, and the adoption is just growing really quickly. And just earlier this year, we we finally ah decided to we're ready to offer a commercial support for it. So So that's that's where rancher is. And with longhorn and container storage technology. >>Yeah, it has been really interesting to watch in this ecosystem. A couple of years ago, one of the Q con shows I was talking to people coming out of the Believe It was the Sigs, the special interest group for storage, and it was just like, Wow, it was heated. Words were, you know, back and forth. There's not a lot of agreement there. Anybody that knows the storage industry knows that you know standards in various ways of doing things often are contentious and there's there's differences of opinion. Look at the storage industry. You know, there's a reason why there's so many different solutions out there. So maybe it love to hear from early. From your standpoint, things are coming to get a little bit more. There are still a number of options out there. So you know, why is this kind of coop petition? I actually good for the industry? >>Yeah, I think this is a classic example of Coop petition. Right? Let's let's start with the cooperation part right? The first part of time the you know, the early days of CN, CF, and even sort of the Google Communities team, I think, was really very focused on compute and and subsequent years. In the last 34 years, there's been a greater attention to making the whole stack works, because that's what it's going to take to take a the enterprise class production and put it in, you know, enterprise class application and put it in production. So extensions like C and I for networking and CS I container storage interface. We're kind of put together by a working group and and ah ah you know both both in the CN CF, but also within the kubernetes Google community. That's you talked about six storage as an example. And, you know, as always happens, right? Like it It looks a little bit in the early days. Like like a polo game, right where folks are really? Ah, you know, seemingly, uh, you know, working with each other on on top of the pool. But underneath they're kicking each other furiously. But that was a long time back, and we've graduated from then into really cooperating. And I think it's something we should all be proud of. Where now the CS I interface is really a A really very, very strong and complete solution tow, allowing communities to orchestrate storage and data. So it's really strengthened both communities and the kubernetes ecosystem. Now the competition part. Let's kind of spend. I want to spend a couple of minutes on that too, right? Um, you know, one of the classic things that people sometimes confuse is the difference between an overlay and an interface. CSC is wonderful because it defines how the two layers off essentially kind of old style storage. You know, whether it's a san or ah cloud, elastic storage bucket or all of those interact with community. So the the definition of that interface kind of lay down some rules and parameters for how that interaction should happen. However, you still always need an overlay like Port Works that that actually drives that interface and enables Kubernetes to actually manage that storage. And that's where the competition is. And, you know, she mentioned stuff and bluster and rook and kind of derivatives of those. And I think those have been around really venerable and and really excellent products for born in a different era for a different time open stack, object storage and all of that not really meant for kind of primary workloads. And they've been they've been trying to be adapted for, for for us, for this kind of workload. Port Works is really a built from right from the inception to be designed for communities and for kubernetes workloads at enterprise scale. And so I think, you know, as I as I look at the landscape, we welcome the fact that there are so many more people acknowledging that there is a vital need for data orchestration on kubernetes right, that that's why everybody and their brother now has a CS I interface. However, I think there's a big difference between having an interface. This is actually having the software that provides the functionality for H. A, D R. And and for backup, as as the kind of life cycle matures and doing it not just at scale, but in a way that allows kind of really significant removal or reduction off the storage admin role and replaces it with self service that is fully automated within communities. Yeah, if I >>can, you know, add something that that I completely agree. I mean, over the Longhorns been around for a long time. Like I said, I'm really happy that over the years it hasn't really impacted our wonderful collaborative partnership with what works. I mean, Poll works has always been one of our premier partners. We have a lot of, ah, common customers in this fight. I know these guys rave about what works. I don't think they'll ever get out for works. Ah, home or not? Uh huh. Exactly. Like Morissette, you know, in the in the storage space, there's interface, which a lot of different implementations can plugging, and that's kind of how rancher works. So we always tell people Rancher works with three types of storage implementations. One is let we call legacy storage. You know, your netapp, your DMC, your pure storage and those are really solid. But they were not suddenly not designed to work with containers to start with, but it doesn't matter. They've all written CS I interfaces that would enable containers to take advantage of. The second type is some of the cloud a block storage or file storage services like EBS, GFS, Google Cloud storage and support for these storage back and the CS I drivers practically come with kubernetes itself, so those are very well supported. But there's still a huge amount of opportunities for the third type of you know, we call container Native Storage. So that is where Port Works and the Longhorn and other solutions like open EBS storage OS. All these guys fitting is a very vibrant ecosystem of innovation going on there. So those solutions are able to create basically reliable storage from scratch. You know, when you from from just local disks and they're actually also able to add a lot of value on top of whatever traditional or cloud based, persistent storage you already have. So so the whole system, the whole ecosystem, is developing very quickly. A lot of these solutions work with each other, and I think to me it's really less of a competition or even Coop petition. It's really more off raising the bar for for the capabilities so that we can accelerate the amount of workload that's been moved onto this wonderful kubernetes platform in the end of the benefit. Everyone, >>Well, I appreciate you both laying out some of the options, you know, showing just a quick follow up on that. I think back if you want. 15 years ago was often okay. I'm using my GMC for my block. I'm using my netapp for the file. I'm wondering in the cloud native space, if we expect that you might have multiple different data engine types in there you mentioned you know, I might want port works for my high performance. You said open EBS, very popular in the last CN CF survey might be another one there. So is do we think some of it is just kind of repeating itself that storage is not monolithic and in a micro service architecture. You know, different environments need different storage requirements. >>Yeah, I mean quick. I love to hear more is view as well, especially about you know, about how the ecosystem is developing. But from my perspective, just just the range of capabilities that's now we expect out of storage vendors or data management vendors is just increased tremendously. You know, in the old days, if you can store blocks to object store file, that's it. Right. So now it's this is just table stakes. Then then what comes after that? There will be 345 additional layers of requirements come all the way from backup, restore the our search indexing analytics. So I really think all of this potentially off or in the in the bucket of the storage ecosystem, and I just can't wait to see how this stuff will play out. I think we're still very, very early stages, and and there, you know what? What, what what containers did is they made fundamentally the workload portable, but the data itself still holds a lot of gravity. And then just so much work to do to leverage the fundamental work load portability. Marry that with some form of universal data management or data portability. I think that would really, uh, at least the industry to the next level. Marie? >>Yeah. Shanghai Bean couldn't. Couldn't have said it better. Right? Let me let me let me kind of give you Ah, sample. Right. We're at about 160 plus customers now, you know, adding several by the month. Um, just with just with rancher alone, right, we are. We have common customers in all common video expedient Roche March X, Western Asset Management. You know, charter communications. So we're in production with a number off rancher customers. What are these customers want? And why are they kind of looking at a a a Port works class of solution to use, You know, Xiang's example of the multiple types, right? Many times, people can get started with something in the early days, which has a CS I interface with maybe say, $10 or 8 to 10 nodes with a solution that allows them to at least kind of verify that they can run the stack up and down with, say, you know, a a rancher type orchestrator, workloads that are containerized on and a network plug in and a storage plugging. But really, once they start to get beyond 20 notes or so, then there are problems that are very, very unique to containers and kubernetes that pop up that you don't see in a in a non containerized environment, right? Some. What are some of these things, right? Simple examples are how can you actually run 10 to hundreds of containers on a server, with each one of those containers belonging to a different application and having different requirements? How do you actually scale? Not to 16 nodes, which is sort of make typically, maybe Max of what a San might go to. But hundreds and thousands of notes, like many of our customers, are doing like T Mobile Comcast. They're running this thing at 600 thousands of notes or scale is one issue. Here is a critical critical difference that that something that's designed for Kubernetes does right. We are providing all off the storage functions that Shang just described at container granted, granularity versus machine granularity. One way to think about this is the old Data center was in machine based construct. Construct everything you know. VM Ware is the leader, sort of in that all of the way. You think of storage as villains. You think of compute and CPUs, everything. Sub sub nets, right? All off. Traditional infrastructure is very, very machine centric. What kubernetes and containers do is move it into becoming an app defined control plane, right? One of the things were super excited about is the fact that Kubernetes is really not just a container orchestrator, but actually a orchestrator for infrastructure in an app defined way. And by doing that, they have turned, uh, you know, control off the infrastructure via communities over to a kubernetes segment. The same person who uses rancher uses port works at NVIDIA, for example to manage storage as they use it, to manage the compute and to manage containers. And and that's marvellous, because now what has happened is this thing is now fully automated at scale and and actually can run without the intervention off a storage admin. No more trouble tickets, right? No more requests to say, Hey, give me another 20 terabytes. All of that happens automatically with the solution like port works. And in fact, if you think about it in the world of real time services that we're all headed towards right Services like uber now are expected in enterprises machine learning. Ai all of these things analytics that that change talk about are things that you expect to run in a fully automated way across vast amounts of data that are distributed sometimes in the edge. And you can't do that unless you're fully automated and and not really the storage admin intervention. And that's kind of the solution that we provide. >>Alright, well, we're just about out of time. If I could just last piece is, you know, early and saying to talk about where we are with long for and what we should expect to see through the rest of this year and get some early for you to you know, what differentiates port works from Just, you know, the open source version. So And maybe if we start with just kind of long or in general and then really from from your standpoint, >>yeah, so it's so so the go along one is really to lower the bar for folks to run state for workloads on on kubernetes we want you know, the the Longhorn is 100% open source and it's owned by CN cf now. So we in terms of features and functionalities is obviously a small subset of what a true enterprise grade solution like Port Works or, um, CEO on that that could provide. So there's just, you know, the storage role. Ah, future settle. The roadmap is very rich. I don't think it's not really Ranchers go Oh, our Longhorns goal to, you know, to try to turn itself into a into a plug in replacement for these enterprise, great storage or data management solutions. But But they're you know, there's some critical critical feature gaps that we need address. And that's what the team is gonna be focusing on, perhaps for the rest of the year. >>Yeah, uh, still, I would I would kind of, you know, echo what Chang said, right? I think folks make it started with solutions, like longer or even a plug in connector plug in with one of their existing storage vendors, whether it's pure netapp or or EMC from our viewpoint, that's wonderful, because that allows them to kind of graduate to where they're considering storage and data as part of the stack. They really should that's the way they're going to succeed by by looking at it as a whole and really with, You know, it's a great way to get started on a proof of concept architecture where your focus initially is very much on the orchestration and the container ization part. But But, as Xiang pointed out, you know what what rancher did, what I entered it for Kubernetes was build a simple, elegant, robust solution that kind of democratized communities. We're doing the same thing for communities storage right? What Port works does is have a solution that is simple, elegant, fully automated, scalable and robust. But more importantly, it's a complete data platform, right? We we go where all these solutions start, but don't kind of venture forward. We are a full, complete lifecycle management for data across that whole life cycle. So there's many many customers now are buying port works and then adding deal right up front, and then a few months later they might come back and I'd backup from ports. So two shanks point right because of the uniqueness of the kubernetes workload, because it is an app defined control plane, not machine to find what is happening is it's disrupting, Just like just like virtualization day. VM exist today because because they focused on a VM version off. You know, the their backup solution. So the same thing is happening. Kubernetes workloads are district causing disruption of the D r and backup and storage market with solutions like sports. >>Wonderful. Merlin Chang. Thank you so much for the updates. Absolutely. The promise of containers A Z you were saying? Really, is that that Atomic unit getting closer to the application really requires storage to be a full and useful solution. So great to see the progress that's being made. Thank you so much for joining us. >>Welcome, Shannon. We look forward to ah, working with you as you reach for the stars. Congratulations again. We look >>forward to the containing partnership morally and thank you. Still for the opportunity here. >>Absolutely great talking to both of you And stay tuned. Lots more coverage of the Cube Cube Con cloud, native con 2020 Europe. I'm stew minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Coop Con and Cloud, Native Con Europe 2020 Virtual brought to You by Red Hat, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its Ecosystem Partners. >>And welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Cube Con Cloud, Native Con Europe 20 twenties Virtual event. I'm Stew Minimum and and happy to Welcome back to the program, two of our Cube alumni. We're gonna be talking about storage in this kubernetes and container world. First of all, we have Sam Warner. He is the vice president of storage, offering management at IBM, and joining him is Brent Compton, senior director of storage and data architecture at Red Hat and Brent. Thank you for joining us, and we get to really dig in. It's the combined IBM and red hat activity in this space, of course, both companies very active in the space of the acquisition, and so we're excited to hear about what's going going. Ford. Sam. Maybe if we could start with you as the tee up, you know, Both Red Hat and IBM have had their conferences this year. We've heard quite a bit about how you know, Red Hat the solutions they've offered. The open source activity is really a foundational layer for much of what IBM is doing when it comes to storage, you know, What does that mean today? >>First of all, I'm really excited to be virtually at Cube Con this year, and I'm also really excited to be with my colleague Brent from Red Hat. This is, I think, the first time that IBM storage and Red Hat Storage have been able to get together and really articulate what we're doing to help our customers in the context of kubernetes and and also with open shift, the things we're doing there. So I think you'll find, ah, you know, as we talked today, that there's a lot of work we're doing to bring together the core capabilities of IBM storage that been helping enterprises with there core applications for years alongside, Ah, the incredible open source capabilities being developed, you know, by red Hat and how we can bring those together to help customers, uh, continue moving forward with their initiatives around kubernetes and rebuilding their applications to be develop once, deploy anywhere, which runs into quite a few challenges for storage. So, Brennan, I'm excited to talk about all the great things we're doing. Excited about getting to share it with everybody else. A cube con? >>Yes. So of course, containers When they first came out well, for stateless environments and we knew that, you know, we've seen this before. You know, those of us that live through that wave of virtualization, you kind of have a first generation solution. You know what application, What environment and be used. But if you know, as we've seen the huge explosion of containers and kubernetes, there's gonna be a maturation of the stack. Storage is a critical component of that. So maybe upfront if you could bring us up to speed you're steeped in, you know, a long history in this space. You know, the challenges that you're hearing from customers. Uhm And where are we today in 2020 for this? >>Thanks to do the most basic caps out there, I think are just traditional. I'm databases. APS that have databases like a post press, a longstanding APS out there that have databases like DB two so traditional APs that are moving towards a more agile environment. That's where we've seen in fact, our collaboration with IBM and particularly the DB two team. And that's where we've seen is they've gone to a micro services container based architecture we've seen pull from the market place. Say, you know, in addition to inventing new Cloud native APS, we want our tried true and tested perhaps I mean such as DB two, such as MQ. We want those to have the benefits of a red hat, open shift, agile environment. And that's where the collaboration between our group and Sam's group comes in together is providing the storage and data services for those state labs. >>Great, Sam, you know I IBM. You've been working with the storage administrator for a long time. What challenges are they facing when we go to the new architectures is it's still the same people it might There be a different part of the organization where you need to start in delivering these solutions. >>It's a really, really good question, and it's interesting cause I do spend a lot of time with storage administrators and the people who are operating the I T infrastructure. And what you'll find is that the decision maker isn't the i t operations or storage operations. People These decisions about implementing kubernetes and moving applications to these new environments are actually being driven by the business lines, which is, I guess, not so different from any other major technology shift. And the storage administrators now are struggling to keep up. So the business lines would like to accelerate development. They want to move to a developed, once deploy anywhere model, and so they start moving down the path of kubernetes. In order to do that, they start, you know, leveraging middleware components that are containerized and easy to deploy. And then they're turning to the I T infrastructure teams and asking them to be able to support it. And when you talk to the storage administrators, they're trying to figure out how to do some of the basic things that are absolutely core to what they do, which is protecting the data in the event of a disaster or some kind of a cyber attack, being able to recover the data, being able to keep the data safe, ensuring governance and privacy of the data. These things are difficult in any environment, but now you're moving to a completely new world and the storage administrators have ah tough challenge out of them. And I think that's where IBM and Red Hat can really come together with all of our experience and are very broad portfolio with incredibly enterprise hardened storage capabilities to help them move from their more traditional infrastructure to a kubernetes environment. >>Maybe if you could bring us up to date when we look back, it, like open stack of red hat, had a few projects from an open source standpoint to help bolster the open source or storage world in the container world. We saw some of those get boarded over. There's new projects. There's been a little bit of argument as to the various different ways to do storage. And of course, we know storage has never been a single solution. There's lots of different ways to do things, but, you know, where are we with the options out there? What's that? What's what's the recommendation from Red Hat and IBM as to how we should look at that? >>I wanna Bridget question to Sam's earlier comments about the challenges facing the storage admin. So if we start with the word agility, I mean, what is agility mean for it in the data world. We're conscious for agility from an application development standpoint. But if you use the term, of course, we've been used to the term Dev ops. But if we use the term data ops, what does that mean? What does that mean to you in the past? For decades, when a developer or someone deploying production wanted to create new storage or data, resource is typically typically filed a ticket and waited. So in the agile world of open shift in kubernetes, it's everything is self service and on demand or what? What kind of constraints and demands that place on the storage and data infrastructure. So now I'll come back to your questions. Do so yes. At the time, that red hat was, um, very heavily into open stack, Red Hat acquired SEF well acquired think tank and and a majority of the SEF developers who are most active in the community. And now so and that became the de facto software defying storage for open stack. But actually for the last time that we spoke at Coop Con and the Rook project has become very popular there in the CN CF as away effectively to make software defined storage systems like SEF. Simple so effectively. The power of SEF, made simple by rook inside of the open shift operator frame where people want that power that SEF brings. But they want the simplicity of self service on demand. And that's kind of the diffusion. The coming together of traditional software defined storage with agility in a kubernetes world. So rook SEF, open shift container storage. >>Wonderful. And I wonder if we could take that a little bit further. A lot of the discussion these days and I hear it every time I talk to IBM and Red Hat is customers air using hybrid clouds. So obviously that has to have an impact on storage. You know, moving data is not easy. There's a little bit of nuance there. So, you know, how do we go from what you were just talking about into a hybrid environ? >>I guess I'll take that one to start and Brent, please feel free to chime in on it. So, um, first of all, from an IBM perspective, you really have to start at a little bit higher level and at the middleware layer. So IBM is bringing together all of our capabilities everything from analytics and AI. So application, development and, uh, in all of our middleware on and packaging them up in something that we call cloud packs, which are pre built. Catalogs have containerized capabilities that can be easily deployed. Ah, in any open shift environment, which allows customers to build applications that could be deployed both on premises and then within public cloud. So in a hybrid multi cloud environment, of course, when you build that sort of environment, you need a storage and data layer, which allows you to move those applications around freely. And that's where the IBM storage suite for cloud packs was. And we've actually taken the core capabilities of the IBM storage software to find storage portfolio. Um, which give you everything you need for high performance block storage, scale out, um, file storage and object storage. And then we've combined that with the capabilities, uh, that we were just discussing from Red Hat, which including a CS on SEF, which allow you, ah, customer to create a common, agile and automated storage environment both on premises and the cloud giving consistent deployment and the ability to orchestrate the data to where it's needed >>I'll just add on to that. I mean that, as Sam noted and is probably most of you are aware. Hybrid Cloud is at the heart of the IBM acquisition of Red Hat with red hat open shift. The stated intent of red hat open shift is to be to become the default operating environment for the hybrid cloud, so effectively bring your own cloud wherever you run. So that that is at the very heart of the synergy between our companies and made manifest by the very large portfolios of software, which would be at which have been, um, moved to many of which to run in containers and embodied inside of IBM cloud packs. So IBM cloud packs backed by red hat open shift on wherever you're running on premises and in a public cloud. And no, with this storage suite for cloud packs that Sam referred to also having a deterministic experience. That's one of the things as we work, for instance, deeply with the IBM DB two team. One of the things that was critical for them, as they couldn't have they couldn't have their customers when they run on AWS have a completely different experience than when they ran on premises, say, on VM, where our on premises on bare metal critical to the DB two team t give their customers deterministic behavior wherever they can. >>Right? So, Sam, I I think any of our audience that it followed this space have heard Red House story about open shift in how it lives across multiple cloud environments. I'm not sure that everybody is familiar with how much of IBM storage solutions today are really this software driven. So ah, And therefore, you know, if I think about IBM, it's like, okay, and by storage or yes, it can live in the IBM Cloud. But from what I'm hearing from Brent in you and from what I know from previous discussion, this is independent and can live in multiple clouds, leveraging this underlying technology and can leverage the capabilities from those public cloud offers. That right, Sam? >>Yeah, that's right. And you know, we have the most comprehensive portfolio of software defined storage in the industry. Maybe to some, it's ah, it's a well kept secret, but those that use it No, the breadth of the portfolio. We have everything from the highest performing scale out file System Teoh Object store that can scale into the exabytes. We have our block storage as well, which runs within the public clouds and can extend back to your private cloud environment. When we talk to customers about deploying storage for hybrid multi cloud in a container environment, we give them a lot of houses to get there. We give them the ability to leverage their existing san infrastructure through the CS I drivers container storage interface. So our whole, uh, you know, physical on Prem infrastructure supports CS I today and then all the software that runs on our arrays also supports running on top of the public clouds, giving customers then the ability to extend that existing san infrastructure into a cloud environment. And now, with storage suite for cloud packs a sprint described earlier, we give you the ability to build a really agile infrastructure, leveraging the capabilities from Red Hat to give you a fully extensible environment and a common way of managing and deploying both on Prem and in the cloud. So we give you a journey with our portfolio to get from your existing infrastructure. Today, you don't have to throw it out it started with that and build out an environment that goes both on Prem and in the cloud. >>Yeah, Brent, I'm glad that you started with database, cause it's not something that I think most people would think about. You know, in a kubernetes environment, you Do you have any customer examples you might be able to give? Maybe Anonymous? Of course. Just talking about how those mission critical applications can fit into the new modern architect. The >>big banks. I mean, just full stop the big banks. But what I'd add to that So that's kind of frequently they start because applications based on structured data remain at the heart of a lot of enterprises. But I would say workload, category number two, our is all things machine Learning Analytics ai and we're seeing an explosion of adoption within the open shift. And, of course, cloud pack. IBM Cloud private for data, is a key market participant in that machine learning analytic space. So an explosion of the usage of of open shift for those types of workloads I was gonna touch just briefly on an example, going back to our kind of data data pipeline and how it started with databases, but it just it explodes. For instance, data pipeline automation, where you have data coming into your APS that are kubernetes based that our open shift based well, maybe we'll end up inside of Watson Studio inside of IBM ah, cloud pack for data. But along the way, there are a variety of transformations that need to occur. Let's say that you're a big bank. You need Teoh effectively as it comes in. You need to be able to run a CRC to ensure to a test that when when you modify the data, for instance, in a real time processing pipeline that when you pass it on to the next stage that you can guarantee well that you can attest that there's been no tampering of the data. So that's an illustration where it began, very with the basics of basic applications running with structured data with databases. Where we're seeing the state of the industry today is tremendous use of these kubernetes and open shift based architectures for machine learning. Analytics made more simple by data pay data pipeline automation through things like open shift container storage through things like open shift server lis or you have scale double functions and what not? So yeah, it began there. But boy, I tell you what. It's exploded since then. >>Yeah, great to hear not only traditional applications, but as you said so, so much interest. And the need for those new analytics use cases s so it's absolutely that's where it's going. Someone. One other piece of the storage story, of course, is not just that we have state full usage, but talk about data protection, if you could, on how you know things that I think of traditionally my backup restore and like, how does that fit into the whole discussion we've been having? >>You know, when you talk to customers, it's one of the biggest challenges they have honestly. And moving to containers is how do I get the same level of data protection that I use today? Ah, the environments are in many cases, more complex from a data and storage perspective. You want Teoh be able to take application consistent copies of your data that could be recovered quickly, Uh, and in some cases even reused. You can reuse the copies, for they have task for application migration. There's there's lots of or for actually AI or analytics. There's lots of use cases for the data, but a lot of the tools and AP eyes are still still very new in this space. IBM has made, uh, prior, uh, doing data protection for containers. Ah, top priority for our spectrum protect suite. And we provide the capabilities to do application aware snapshots of your storage environment so that a kubernetes developer can actually build in the resiliency they need. As they build applications in a storage administrator can get a pane of glass Ah, and visibility into all of the data and ensure that it's all being protected appropriately and provide things like S L A. So I think it's about, you know, the fact that the early days of communities tended to be stateless. Now that people are moving some of the more mission critical workloads, the data protection becomes just just critical as anything else you do in the environment. So the tools have to catch up. So that's a top priority of ours. And we provide a lot of those capabilities today and you'll see if you watch what we do with our spectrum. Protect suite will continue to provide the capabilities that our customers need to move their mission. Critical applications to a kubernetes environment. >>Alright And Brent? One other question. Looking forward a little bit. We've been talking for the last couple of years about how server lists can plug into this. Ah, higher kubernetes ecosystem. The K Native project is one that I, IBM and Red Hat has been involved with. So for open shift and server lis with I'm sure you're leveraging k native. What is the update? That >>the update is effectively adoption inside of a lot of cases like the big banks, but also other in the talk, uh, the largest companies in other industries as well. So if you take the words event driven architecture, many of them are coming to us with that's kind of top of mind of them is the need to say, you know, I need to ensure that when data first hits my environment, I can't wait. I can't wait for a scheduled batch job to come along and process that data and maybe run an inference. I mean, the classic cases you're ingesting a chest X ray, and you need to immediately run that against an inference model to determine if the patient has pneumonia or code 19 and then kick off another serverless function to anonymous data. Just send back in to retrain your model. So the need. And so you mentioned serverless. And of course, people say, Well, I could I could handle that just by really smart batch jobs, but kind of one of the other parts of server less that sometimes people forget but smart companies are aware of is that server lists is inherently scalable, so zero to end scalability. So as data is coming in, hitting your Kafka bus, hitting your object store, hitting your database and that if you picked up the the community project to be easy, Um, where something hits your relational database and I can automatically trigger an event onto the Kafka bus so that your entire our architecture becomes event >>driven. All right. Well, Sam, let me give you the funding. Let me let you have the final word. Excuse me on the IBM in this space and what you want them to have his takeaways from Cube con 2020 Europe. >>I'm actually gonna talk to I think, the storage administrators, if that's OK, because if you're not involved right now in the kubernetes projects that are happening within your enterprise, uh, they are happening and there will be new challenges. You've got a lot of investments you've made in your existing storage infrastructure. We had IBM and Red Hat can help you take advantage of the value of your existing infrastructure. Uh, the capabilities, the resiliency, the security of built into it with the years. And we can help you move forward into a hybrid, multi cloud environment built on containers. We've got the experience and the capabilities between Red Hat and IBM to help you be successful because it's still a lot of challenges there. But But our experience can help you implement that with the greatest success. Appreciate it. >>Alright, Sam and Brent, Thank you so much for joining. It's been excellent to be able to watch the maturation in this space of the last couple of years. >>Thank you. >>Alright, we'll be back with lots more coverage from Cube Con Cloud, native con Europe 2020 the virtual event. I'm stew Minimum And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019 brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (upbeat techno music) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise, and we're here at the MIT CDOIQ Conference, Chief Data Officer Information Quality Conference. It is the 13th year here at the Tang building. We've outgrown this building and have to move next year. It's fire marshal full. Gokula Mishra is here. He is the Senior Director of Global Data and Analytics and Supply Chain-- >> Formerly. Former, former Senior Director. >> Former! I'm sorry. It's former Senior Director of Global Data Analytics and Supply Chain at McDonald's. Oh, I didn't know that. I apologize my friend. Well, welcome back to theCUBE. We met when you were at Oracle doing data. So you've left that, you're on to your next big thing. >> Yes, thinking through it. >> Fantastic, now let's start with your career. You've had, so you just recently left McDonald's. I met you when you were at Oracle, so you cut over to the dark side for a while, and then before that, I mean, you've been a practitioner all your life, so take us through sort of your background. >> Yeah, I mean my beginning was really with a company called Tata Burroughs. Those days we did not have a lot of work getting done in India. We used to send people to U.S. so I was one of the pioneers of the whole industry, coming here and working on very interesting projects. But I was lucky to be working on mostly data analytics related work, joined a great company called CS Associates. I did my Master's at Northwestern. In fact, my thesis was intelligent databases. So, building AI into the databases and from there on I have been with Booz Allen, Oracle, HP, TransUnion, I also run my own company, and Sierra Atlantic, which is part of Hitachi, and McDonald's. >> Awesome, so let's talk about use of data. It's evolved dramatically as we know. One of the themes in this conference over the years has been sort of, I said yesterday, the Chief Data Officer role emerged from the ashes of sort of governance, kind of back office information quality compliance, and then ascended with the tailwind of the Big Data meme, and it's kind of come full circle. People are realizing actually to get value out of data, you have to have information quality. So those two worlds have collided together, and you've also seen the ascendancy of the Chief Digital Officer who has really taken a front and center role in some of the more strategic and revenue generating initiatives, and in some ways the Chief Data Officer has been a supporting role to that, providing the quality, providing the compliance, the governance, and the data modeling and analytics, and a component of it. First of all, is that a fair assessment? How do you see the way in which the use of data has evolved over the last 10 years? >> So to me, primarily, the use of data was, in my mind, mostly around financial reporting. So, anything that companies needed to run their company, any metrics they needed, any data they needed. So, if you look at all the reporting that used to happen it's primarily around metrics that are financials, whether it's around finances around operations, finances around marketing effort, finances around reporting if it's a public company reporting to the market. That's where the focus was, and so therefore a lot of the data that was not needed for financial reporting was what we call nowadays dark data. This is data we collect but don't do anything with it. Then, as the capability of the computing, and the storage, and new technologies, and new techniques evolve, and are able to handle more variety and more volume of data, then people quickly realize how much potential they have in the other data outside of the financial reporting data that they can utilize too. So, some of the pioneers leverage that and actually improved a lot in their efficiency of operations, came out with innovation. You know, GE comes to mind as one of the companies that actually leverage data early on, and number of other companies. Obviously, you look at today data has been, it's defining some of the multi-billion dollar company and all they have is data. >> Well, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft. >> Exactly. >> Apple, I mean Apple obviously makes stuff, but those other companies, they're data companies. I mean largely, and those five companies have the highest market value on the U.S. stock exchange. They've surpassed all the other big leaders, even Berkshire Hathaway. >> So now, what is happening is because the market changes, the forces that are changing the behavior of our consumers and customers, which I talked about which is everyone now is digitally engaging with each other. What that does is all the experiences now are being captured digitally, all the services are being captured digitally, all the products are creating a lot of digital exhaust of data and so now companies have to pay attention to engage with their customers and partners digitally. Therefore, they have to make sure that they're leveraging data and analytics in doing so. The other thing that has changed is the time to decision to the time to act on the data inside that you get is shrinking, and shrinking, and shrinking, so a lot more decision-making is now going real time. Therefore, you have a situation now, you have the capability, you have the technology, you have the data now, you have to make sure that you convert that in what I call programmatic kind of data decision-making. Obviously, there are people involved in more strategic decision-making. So, that's more manual, but at the operational level, it's going more programmatic decision-making. >> Okay, I want to talk, By the way, I've seen a stat, I don't know if you can confirm this, that 80% of the data that's out there today is dark data or it's data that's behind a firewall or not searchable, not open to Google's crawlers. So, there's a lot of value there-- >> So, I would say that percent is declining over time as companies have realized the value of data. So, more and more companies are removing the silos, bringing those dark data out. I think the key to that is companies being able to value their data, and as soon as they are able to value their data, they are able to leverage a lot of the data. I still believe there's a large percent still not used or accessed in companies. >> Well, and of course you talked a lot about data monetization. Doug Laney, who's an expert in that topic, we had Doug on a couple years ago when he, just after, he wrote Infonomics. He was on yesterday. He's got a very detailed prescription as to, he makes strong cases as to why data should be valued like an asset. I don't think anybody really disagrees with that, but then he gave kind of a how-to-do-it, which will, somewhat, make your eyes bleed, but it was really well thought out, as you know. But you talked a lot about data monetization, you talked about a number of ways in which data can contribute to monetization. Revenue, cost reduction, efficiency, risk, and innovation. Revenue and cost is obvious. I mean, that's where the starting point is. Efficiency is interesting. I look at efficiency as kind of a doing more with less but it's sort of a cost reduction, but explain why it's not in the cost bucket, it's different. >> So, it is first starts with doing what we do today cheaper, better, faster, and doing more comes after that because if you don't understand, and data is the way to understand how your current processes work, you will not take the first step. So, to take the first step is to understand how can I do this process faster, and then you focus on cheaper, and then you focus on better. Of course, faster is because of some of the market forces and customer behavior that's driving you to do that process faster. >> Okay, and then the other one was risk reduction. I think that makes a lot of sense here. Actually, let me go back. So, one of the key pieces of it, of efficiency is time to value. So, if you can compress the time, or accelerate the time and you get the value that means more cash in house faster, whether it's cost reduction or-- >> And the other aspect you look at is, can you automate more of the processes, and in that way it can be faster. >> And that hits the income statement as well because you're reducing headcount cost of your, maybe not reducing headcount cost, but you're getting more out of different, out ahead you're reallocating them to more strategic initiatives. Everybody says that but the reality is you hire less people because you just automated. And then, risk reduction, so the degree to which you can lower your expected loss. That's just instead thinking in insurance terms, that's tangible value so certainly to large corporations, but even midsize and small corporations. Innovation, I thought was a good one, but maybe you could use an example of, give us an example of how in your career you've seen data contribute to innovation. >> So, I'll give an example of oil and gas industry. If you look at speed of innovation in the oil and gas industry, they were all paper-based. I don't know how much you know about drilling. A lot of the assets that goes into figuring out where to drill, how to drill, and actually drilling and then taking the oil or gas out, and of course selling it to make money. All of those processes were paper based. So, if you can imagine trying to optimize a paper-based innovation, it's very hard. Not only that, it's very, very by itself because it's on paper, it's in someone's drawer or file. So, it's siloed by design and so one thing that the industry has gone through, they recognize that they have to optimize the processes to be better, to innovate, to find, for example, shale gas was a result output of digitizing the processes because otherwise you can't drill faster, cheaper, better to leverage the shale gas drilling that they did. So, the industry went through actually digitizing a lot of the paper assets. So, they went from not having data to knowingly creating the data that they can use to optimize the process and then in the process they're innovating new ways to drill the oil well cheaper, better, faster. >> In the early days of oil exploration in the U.S. go back to the Osage Indian tribe in northern Oklahoma, and they brilliantly, when they got shuttled around, they pushed him out of Kansas and they negotiated with the U.S. government that they maintain the mineral rights and so they became very, very wealthy. In fact, at one point they were the wealthiest per capita individuals in the entire world, and they used to hold auctions for various drilling rights. So, it was all gut feel, all the oil barons would train in, and they would have an auction, and it was, again, it was gut feel as to which areas were the best, and then of course they evolved, you remember it used to be you drill a little hole, no oil, drill a hole, no oil, drill a hole. >> You know how much that cost? >> Yeah, the expense is enormous right? >> It can vary from 10 to 20 million dollars. >> Just a giant expense. So, now today fast-forward to this century, and you're seeing much more sophisticated-- >> Yeah, I can give you another example in pharmaceutical. They develop new drugs, it's a long process. So, one of the initial process is to figure out what molecules this would be exploring in the next step, and you could have thousand different combination of molecules that could treat a particular condition, and now they with digitization and data analytics, they're able to do this in a virtual world, kind of creating a virtual lab where they can test out thousands of molecules. And then, once they can bring it down to a fewer, then the physical aspect of that starts. Think about innovation really shrinking their processes. >> All right, well I want to say this about clouds. You made the statement in your keynote that how many people out there think cloud is cheaper, or maybe you even said cheap, but cheaper I inferred cheaper than an on-prem, and so it was a loaded question so nobody put their hand up they're afraid, but I put my hand up because we don't have any IT. We used to have IT. It was a nightmare. So, for us it's better but in your experience, I think I'm inferring correctly that you had meant cheaper than on-prem, and certainly we talked to many practitioners who have large systems that when they lift and shift to the cloud, they don't change their operating model, they don't really change anything, they get a bill at the end of the month, and they go "What did this really do for us?" And I think that's what you mean-- >> So what I mean, let me make it clear, is that there are certain use cases that cloud is and, as you saw, that people did raise their hand saying "Yeah, I have use cases where cloud is cheaper." I think you need to look at the whole thing. Cost is one aspect. The flexibility and agility of being able to do things is another aspect. For example, if you have a situation where your stakeholder want to do something for three weeks, and they need five times the computing power, and the data that they are buying from outside to do that experiment. Now, imagine doing that in a physical war. It's going to take a long time just to procure and get the physical boxes, and then you'll be able to do it. In cloud, you can enable that, you can get GPUs depending on what problem we are trying to solve. That's another benefit. You can get the fit for purpose computing environment to that and so there are a lot of flexibility, agility all of that. It's a new way of managing it so people need to pay attention to the cost because it will add to the cost. The other thing I will point out is that if you go to the public cloud, because they make it cheaper, because they have hundreds and thousands of this canned CPU. This much computing power, this much memory, this much disk, this much connectivity, and they build thousands of them, and that's why it's cheaper. Well, if your need is something that's very unique and they don't have it, that's when it becomes a problem. Either you need more of those and the cost will be higher. So, now we are getting to the IOT war. The volume of data is growing so much, and the type of processing that you need to do is becoming more real-time, and you can't just move all this bulk of data, and then bring it back, and move the data back and forth. You need a special type of computing, which is at the, what Amazon calls it, adds computing. And the industry is kind of trying to design it. So, that is an example of hybrid computing evolving out of a cloud or out of the necessity that you need special purpose computing environment to deal with new situations, and all of it can't be in the cloud. >> I mean, I would argue, well I guess Microsoft with Azure Stack was kind of the first, although not really. Now, they're there but I would say Oracle, your former company, was the first one to say "Okay, we're going to put the exact same infrastructure on prem as we have in the public cloud." Oracle, I would say, was the first to truly do that-- >> They were doing hybrid computing. >> You now see Amazon with outposts has done the same, Google kind of has similar approach as Azure, and so it's clear that hybrid is here to stay, at least for some period of time. I think the cloud guys probably believe that ultimately it's all going to go to the cloud. We'll see it's going to be a long, long time before that happens. Okay! I'll give you last thoughts on this conference. You've been here before? Or is this your first one? >> This is my first one. >> Okay, so your takeaways, your thoughts, things you might-- >> I am very impressed. I'm a practitioner and finding so many practitioners coming from so many different backgrounds and industries. It's very, very enlightening to listen to their journey, their story, their learnings in terms of what works and what doesn't work. It is really invaluable. >> Yeah, I tell you this, it's always a highlight of our season and Gokula, thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to see you. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest, Dave Vellante. Paul Gillin is in the house. You're watching theCUBE from MIT. Be right back! (upbeat techno music)

>> (upbeat electronic music) >> Live, from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and it's ecosystem partners. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back to the nation's capital, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. This is day two of the AWS Public Sector Summit. Taylor Carol is here. He's the co-founder of the GameChanger charity and ZOTT. Taylor, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> Keynote yesterday got rave reviews. Let me just set this up. So, ZOTT is a content platform that creates virtual experiences for children, giving them an outlet for creativity, intellectual engagement, a lot more. We're going to talk about that. And then GameChanger is the non-profit and it's a majority share holder of the for-profit organization. So, that's an interesting business model. >> Thank you. >> Explain, please. >> Absolutely, we started GameChanger roughly twelve years ago, when I, at 11, was diagnosed terminal, with a rare form of cancer, given roughly two weeks left to live, thankfully a long two weeks, totally healthy now. But-- >> Congratulations, that's awesome. >> Hey, thank you so much. >> Good to have you with us. >> Glad to be here. But, from those five years I spent in hospital, combined with the 20,000 hospital rooms my dad and I have visited on behalf of GameChanger charity we saw how much need there was in the patient care space and the patient engagement space. And those insights led to first found GameChanger charity, now a nearly 12 year old 501(c)(3), an international non-profit. Started an endeavor in our garage. This year, we've taken in over 20 million dollars in donations, 93 cents on every dollar going to the cause. And GameChanger really focuses in on leveraging gaming, technology, and innovation to support patient's rights to play, learn and socialize. And we do that through virtual reality, through augmented reality, through custom gaming solutions, through character based scholarships, to support post-hospital dreams. And then with GameChanger days, where we go in and we bring in bundles of toys for the patients and a catered meal for staff, to sit down to talk with them and to learn about the bespoke gaming and tech solutions we can make to support each individual hospital's needs. So that's GameChanger. And then from that insight, from all that time in the hospital, something we really saw was that the strict patient engagement. How patients watch TV or get clinical health content was so broken. It's one TV mounted on the wall with 20 channels of basic cable. We saw it could be so much better. So, we made ZOTT, which is a device agnostic, cloud-based content distribution system. So, now, through ZOTT, from participating hospitals, any patient, any family member can get their own content, their own experiences, from any device, a laptop, a tablet, a phone, everywhere in the hospital. So, linear TV, gaming, clinical health content, even custom live-streams exclusively for the patients. And ZOTT is owned in entirety by GameChanger charity. >> That's awesome. >> So anything good that happens to ZOTT, goes back to support the GameChanger cause. >> So, completely changing the experience for the patient, from first-hand. What's been some of the outcomes, just in, either anecdotally, or I don't know if you have any kind of measurements. You're changing the world, but if you could share with us how, and any examples, would be great. >> Thank you for saying that. One of the most profound things we've seen at GameChanger charity and at ZOTT is how deleterious boredom is for the patient experience. Understandably, individuals are locked in a boring, white room for a day, a week, a month, years at times. >> Craving visitors, anything. >> Any form of interaction or social engagement. And you know something we've seen, is that boredom often magnifies pain and anxiety, isolation, over use of pain medication. And understanding that issue, that pain, something we've been able to do is incorporate custom VR rigs, custom VR experiences, for distraction therapy. So that's where we'll go in, meet with patients, and bring the care providers VR sets so when a patient is getting ready for a surgery, they can put on a VR rig, try a tranquil experience, and we've seen pain scores go down by as much as six points on a 10 point pain scale, as a result of such distraction therapy. >> That's fantastic. >> Yeah. >> Thank you. >> It's fascinating, we're really powerful the discussion we had in the keynote. So, making this happen, there's some technology behind this. Maybe walk us through a little bit, what's the connection with the cloud discussion. >> Absolutely, absolutely. Something we've seen in growing from a garage endeavor, to now an international organization that supports 11 countries, 20 million dollars in revenue this year, is the importance of scalability and being able to, one, help as many patients as possible, while still focusing on the individual and never losing sight of the fact that each patient we work with is an individual life and truly a family, impacted by acute or prolonged illnesses. So, what the cloud has really allowed us to do is to magnify our efforts and to take it from, say, five hospitals to now over 100. And, one example of that would be in how we use AWS's Sumerian. So, that is a cloud-based VR experience. And rather than needing to download really content-heavy VR experiences on say a gaming computer, in order to facilitate these experiences, now care providers can interact with them through the cloud. And go beyond that, they can actually customize a VR experiences for the needs of each patient. So, let's say there's a patient who needs to get a tour through their new hospital ward. Thanks to creating templates on Amazon Sumerian, GameChanger creating them, these care specialists now can go in and customize the script that that AR or VR host will speak to include the patient's name or to say I know this is a big change from California, or from Colorado or wherever they hail from. Really making that otherwise generic hospital integration experience feels so bespoke, so personalized to the individual. >> And if I remember right, one of the things you can do is actually, get them engaged with their care. Like, here's the surgery, going to take you inside what's going to be, and I've heard studies of this, you understand, what's going to be doing and can focus on it, kind of the power of understanding and thinking on it can actually improve the results that you get out of it. >> You are so right. That has been one of the most profound things for me personally. When I was sick, I was in the hospital for five years, and for roughly six months of those five years, I was in an isolation unit, where the only person that could come in was my doctor, my nurse in a hazmat suit. And, during that time, I was scared. I was an 11 year old boy, didn't understand what was happening. And I felt an utter loss of agency. An utter loss of empowerment regarding my illness and more importantly my healing. So, what we're able to do now with Sumerian, is we created a collaborative learning experience between CS Mott Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Children's Hospital, Colorado in Denver. So, experts 1200 miles apart, were able to collaborate in real time, through the cloud, through Amazon Sumerian, to make a VR experience where patients about to receive aortic valve replacements could actually go through human hearts in virtual reality and simulate the surgery they would soon be receiving leading to this huge spike in empowerment and identity and ownership over their healing. >> That's amazing. I mean, I remember, I've only had surgery once, I've been really lucky, >> Yeah. >> But when the surgeon explained to me how it worked and just opened up my mind, and made me so much more comfortable when I understood that, being able to visualize that has to be a complete game changer. Taylor, what does the hospital have to do? Take us through their infrastructure needs, or how do hospitals get on-boarded? >> That's a fantastic question. An anecdote or a saying that we always hold on to near and dear to our heart, at GameChanger and at ZOTT, is that when you know one hospital you know one hospital. (laughter) And we mean that in the sense that every hospital is it's own behemoth, it's own ecosystem that has spent the past one, five, ten, 50 years building what is now an incredibly outdated technology stack. So, purely from the patient engagement side, let's say looking at ZOTT, traditional engagement, just to get that TV on the wall, and to get the cable going and the basic clinical health information there's a satellite on the roof, there are server racks in the basement, there's a TV with a computer mounted on the back, there's a laptop in the waiting room. It's just everything is so cumbersome, so outdated. And what we've been able to do is take this really thin client-based cloud approach where we're able to create a bespoke cloud solution that totally bypasses all of that heavy technology stack. Equally, because Amazon and AWS services are so modifiable and you can really pick and choose what you need from the suite, we've been able to go in and instead of have the hospital change to us, we've been able to modify to the hospital, to fit into their ecosystem rather than bring in a bull dozer and try and change everything that they have. >> Awesome. So you can utilizing their existing infrastructure, and bring in a light-weight both cloud and thin-client infrastructure and be up and running. >> Absolutely. A metric that we have to speak to the groundbreaking nature of what we're able to do now is typical patient engagement systems can take up to 18 months to install. Cost millions of dollars, be incredibly cumbersome, and expensive in terms of hours it takes to maintain the hardware. ZOTT, our technology, when we bring it in, goes live in hospitals in as little as 15 minutes. >> And not millions and millions of dollars? >> (laughs) Exponentially less. >> Okay, so the hospital has to buy into it, they really don't have to bring in any new infrastructure. You guys kind of turn-key that for them. So really need a champion inside the hospital. And a go. >> Absolutely, absolutely. A mindfulness we really maintain is where in the hospital is that each hospital decision maker's priority is to safeguard the individual patient and their families. We understand that there's sensitivity, there's a lot of security requirements. And one of the beauties of working with AWS, as you all know is, is AWS is HIPAA compliant. And, in working with AWS, we've been able to add an extra degree of security and safeguarding for any information we collect, any experience we work with the hospitals, so that everyone is safe. That all decision makers feel like their needs and requirements are being satisfied and safeguarded. >> So does that mean the kids can't play Fortnite? >> Fortnite (laughs). Neither Fortnite nor PUBG's (laughs). >> Well, because if they're playing Fortnite, you'd never get 'em home. >> (laughs) >> Same with PUBG. >> One thing that is pretty fun is through ZOTT and through GameChanger, all of our relationships with all of the big game developers around the world, is we may not have PUBG, but we do have Steam integration, and through our game developers, we have over a million dollars worth of Steam codes continually replenished, so patients and their siblings can download a 20, 30, 40, 50 dollar game, keep it on their laptop, on their tablet, take it with them when they leave. As a gift for their strength while they were in the hospital. >> Amazing. Taylor, thanks so much for the contribution you're making to the children and to the world. Really a phenomenal story. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you both so much for letting us be here and sharing our story. >> You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from AWS Public Sector Summit. Stay right there. (upbeat electronic music)

>> CUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018 brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBe's Ecosystem Partners. (techno music) >> Welcome back. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage. Wait, we're surrounded by green. I've got two gentlemen from Veeam here. No, but we're not at VeeamON. We're at Cisco Live 2018 here in Orlando, happy to welcome back to the program Carey Stanton and Rob Emsley. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Ace too. >> All right, yeah, so I was with you guys not too long ago at the VeeamON conference. I had a lot of fun in Chicago, brought back some of the famous popcorn for my family, but we're here in Orlando, so way bigger convention center, 26,000 people. We're all walking a lot, talking a lot about networking in Multi-Cloud and everything there. Tell us a little bit about your experience here at the show and what you've taken. >> Yeah, it's great, thanks, Stu. We have as you may know a tier-one partnership with Cisco. We're a platinum sponsor at this event and we're here all around our relationships with them on their data protection with their hyper-flex and their 32-60 and S2-40 relationships and we continue to see rapid growth in the channel and we have a direct-dedicated team selling with them on a global basis, so here making a lot of new connections across their other business units. >> Rob, I see the Green Veeam booth at almost every show I go to. >> Absolutely. >> How's Cisco different from some of the other ones that we go to? >> Well, one of the the things that Chuck Robins talked about in his keynote yesterday was how they summarize the focus of the company, and there's two specific areas that Veeam works very closely with Cisco on. One is the powering the Multi-Cloud, and unlocking the power of data. Those are two big focuses for us. You remember in Chicago, we're all about Multi-Cloud, On-Premises, Manage Cloud, Software as a Service, the Public Cloud; that's the reality of where data lives, so we're very much in lock-step with Cisco. We've been working with Cisco for several years. We last year became available through their global price list, so we're actually finding that Cisco in the data sensor, especially when you think about conversion infrastructure and hyper-conversion infrastructure, it's an area where we can really compliment what they're doing with their opportunities. >> Yeah, Carey, it's interesting because we go a lot of shows and we're hearing a lot of similar themes. Even I think the last time I'd come to the Cisco Live US show was 2009. Applications and data, it's like, oh, come on, those are just bits running through our pipes. It's not really a big deal. Well, we're here in the DevNet zone. We're talking about how Cisco's been moving up the stacks, how they're enabling companies to build new application, do cool things with wireless and SD-WAN and everything like that. I'm sure you must be seeing big change in a lot of your infrastructure partners that fits, as Rob said, that power of data and where that fits. >> Yeah, we're seeing it across the board and what we like about the relationship we have with Cisco is they look to us as their data availability experts, right? That we go into the data center conversation and they bring us in as their subject-matter experts, and that's where I think they want to expand their footprint in their TEM with their product lines, and whether it's UCS or hyper-flex, and they're bringing us into those discussions because we solve a unique problem that they otherwise wouldn't be able to solve. >> Yeah, Rob, you saw the keynote yesterday. I think we were a little surprised. Diane Green comes walking out there. Cisco of course, big push in Cloud. I've actually interviewed a number of Cisco executives of things like AWS Reinvent and the like. Does the Veeam partnership with Cisco, do you touch on some of the Public Cloud pieces as well as? >> Yeah, very much so. One of the things that Cisco is very focused on is their SOS provider right to market, so that's an area where we've been very focused over the last probably three to four years, building out and enabling often our resellers to become managers providers themselves, but the reality is that you're starting to look at that Public Cloud tie-in, whether it be Microsoft Azure, whether it be AWS or IBM Cloud, so these are really all areas where we can provide an on-ramp to connect any Cisco data center environment and provide a relationship with the Public Cloud, provide that data management level layer. >> Yeah, I think back. Cisco really helped a lot of the channel community mature their market. Went from being the silo network to building data center businesses back eight years ago when we started talking about conversion infrastructure. Today, this week I've interviewed Presidio and WWT. They're talking a lot about how they're helping customers, enabling that Cloud. I'd love to hear your perspectives on the maturation of the channel and how they fit in this multi-cloud world. >> Yeah, I mean, if you look at Veeam, where there are 55,000 channel partners our brand promises to remain a 100% channel-driven company, but having these relationships that are primary Cisco-predominant partners, like WWT, Presidio, ePlus, I think it's just opening up discussions that we otherwise wouldn't have had, and we're seeing 50% of the opportunities that we're closing in the field are Cisco-led opportunities that are being driven from these new channel partners, and so again, I think this is the one plus one equals three story that we talk a lot about, that we're bringing a lot to the table and 50% of the opportunities for them and vice versa for us. >> Yeah, one of the things that we really like about Cisco is their focus on their partner community is extremely high, both from the enablement perspective and the educational perspective. They have a fully resourced partner marketing team, and we've been doing a lot of work with them. One of the things that Cisco has been transitioning to, it sort of fits into your space, is the whole move to marketing in a digital world and the whole need to change the type of content, and this type of content you can think about the video sort of assets becomes so much more important, so we've been working very closely with them to do joint digital marketing. It's very easy sometimes to do joint event-based marketing, but when you start getting into digital, you really have to think outside the box about how you bring two companies together to meet in the digital world, so we've been really doing that to drive joint opportunities, and that's been something that we've really got some some success with from our relationship with Cisco. >> In fact, you were just in Barcelona. >> Yeah, every year they run a marketing summit for their channel partners and ecosystem partners, and we actually won the Cisco marketing innovation award for a digital marketing always on campaign slope, just full of assets for joint digital, for joint Cisco and Veeam customers. >> Congratulations, I did see some of that on some of the social media. Yeah, it's interesting to look at how marketing changes in this new digital world. I ask every CMO I talk to these days is to, "How is digital changing the way things happen?" >> Yeah, and you mentioned our other infrastructure partners and there's no other partner that we've worked with at the size of Cisco that embraced it day one, so they look to Veeam as, "Okay, we're going "to work with Veeam, we're going to go deeper, "we're going to bring them on our global prices," and day one they were, "How can we get intertwined "into what Veeam does extremely well as our digital marketing machine?" And just from the get-go they've just continued to accelerate through that process. >> Yeah, one of the things I know every partner loves when they come to an event like this, there's a lot of customers here. Give us a little insight if you can, either specific examples or give us some of the themes you're hearing from customers at the show. What's top of mind? What're some of the biggest challenges that they're facing today? >> Yeah, I mean, I think what they're looking at doing is from a refresh of legacy backup solutions and replication solutions into modernizing their data center, and so they're looking to Cisco as their experts through the last decade plus, and now that Veeam is tied directly in with Cisco in some of those relationships, so it's from a refresh standpoint, from a modernizing their data center to the hybrid Cloud strategies that it's intertwined. We fit very well into those discussions, and we're seeing our customers come to us in these large ELAs, where Cisco is bringing us in as part of those discussions, so again, where otherwise we would have had a hard time getting into it, their customers are coming and saying, "What is the relevancy? "Should I really be looking at this," and Cisco's backing up those discussions. >> Certainly, to tap down on the data sensor, conversion infrastructure and hyper-conversion infrastructure is top of mind for a lot of the customers that come in by the booth. Certainly, which works well for us, because some of our relationships with our other storage alliance partners, whether it be Pure or NetOut, big partners of Cisco, so rather than one plus one equals three, it's one plus one plus one equals five quite often. We're going together as a group in order to go after opportunities, so that's definitely an area. If you think about conversion, IP Converge, it's always highly virtualized, so that plays very well to where we've built the company from: a big focus on virtual machine availability, but we're just more moving that now to the whole concept of data management across a Multi-Cloud world. >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things we talk at all the shows is the pace of change and how receptive are customers to making changes. What are you hearing from the customers here? The storage market has long been it's sticky, it's a little bit entrenched, making changes, and networking we used to measure in decades as to you roll this out and then I'll wait for the next major speed bump before we'll do that, and you'll roll that out over years. Today, we think things are moving faster, but we'd love to hear points or counterpoints that you're hearing. >> Well, I think that the customers are looking to Cisco, indirectly to Veeam from removing complexity, and I think what they've seen in the past is they've deployed solutions that have bogged down their process. They look to the Cloud as an agile environment and they look back with their Legacy systems that they know they can't continue, and so from my standpoint, the customers that we talk to consistently is, "Are you gonna be the platform that's gonna allow me "to embrace a hybrid Cloud and to remove the complexity "that I have and to be agile," and so that's constantly what the Veeam messaging is solving, right? Mission critical backup and recovery workloads and doing it at a fraction of the cost and accelerating that Veeam speed. >> Yeah, I mean, if you just take the Legacy backup market, Legacy back up installed base, it seems that the openness to change is greater now than I've ever seen it, and you know I've been playing around in this space for quite a few years, but certainly recently we've found the openness to people to look for something new. Our friends that gotten it always used to say the three things that people worry about, the three Cs: Cost, complexity, and capabilities, and those are still very much top of mind around what causes a customer to say, "Hey, what I've been doing for the last several years "hasn't quite been getting it done for me." I think the big change is that backup as an insurance policy is no longer good enough. I think the ability to leverage your backup infrastructure and the data contained within it is really driving people to think about, that's more of a value to me than simply having an insurance policy. >> Absolutely, backup was never enough. We do backup, I need to restore, but it's about that data. Want to give you the opportunity. Veeam is I think we said kind of a tweener. You're not what I would consider an old company. You've always been a software company, born in the virtualization age, but there's a bunch of newer developer focused and Cloud-native. How does Veeam stay and fight and compete against some of the new ones coming after this multi-billion dollar market? >> Want to take that? >> Yeah, well, I think that we pride ourselves on innovation. We pride ourselves on iterating very quickly, and we pride ourselves on adhering to our NPS score of 73, where there at 300,000 customers, and what we are gonna continue on our path, on what's made us successful, and we know that there's always competition. There's lots of VC money out there, and it's not that we're looking away from what the competition is doing. It's that we believe with our 4000 customers a month, our 133 customers that we close on a daily basis across all segments of SNB, commercial, and enterprise is indicative that our strategy is working. We're not going to stray away. We're just going to look to partners like Cisco and others to expand our target market, but stay true to the solution that we've provided in that virtualization environment. You were at VeeamON. You saw the announcements that we're making to support additional workloads and additional environments in the days to come. >> Yeah, I think our ability to evolve and adapt is second to none, and some of that is just based upon the structure of the company. We're still private, we're still pretty much driving our own growth, and I think that allows us to make decisions quickly and very strategically to allow us to go into the areas that I think people instinctively know what is needed to evolve in this space around supporting multi-Cloud, supporting data as an asset, leveraging it as an asset, and I think that's where we've been fueling, both in an engineering perspective, in a capacity to meet with customers and grow, and that's certainly what's going to I think sustain us as we keep going forward. >> All right, gentlemen, I want to give you a final word as to key takeaways you see here from Cisco Live 2018. >> That we will be here for the duration of the time, and our relationship with Cisco will continue to expand, and that we look forward to meeting everyone at the Veeam booth and walking through our product solutions and meeting the Veeam team and answering any questions they may have, but we're thrilled to be part of the Cisco family, and hopefully, again, in the years to come that we'll just continue to expand our relationship. >> And I'll leave you with an African proverb. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. >> Absolutely. Rob Emsley, Carey Stanton, always a pleasure to catch up with you. I'll leave with the final aphorism of my own, which is, never confuse activity with progress. Ben Franklin, so I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> We're back at Dell Technologies World. It's the inaugural Dell Technologies World. You're watchin' The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vallante, and I'm really excited to have Sanjay Poonen on, COO of VMWare, long-time Cube alum. Great to see you, my friend. >> Always great, Dave. >> Thanks again so much for makin' time. I know you're in and out, but things are good. We had Pat on, on Monday. You guys made the call early on. You said to the industry, you know, I think the industry handed us and maybe the forecasts are a little bit conservative. We're seeing great demand. We love our business right now, and it's comin' true. Data centers booming, VMWare's kickin' butt. It's goin' great. >> You know it's been obviously a very good couple of years, since the Dell EMC merger. It's really helped us, and you know, when we think about our partnerships, we put this in a very special place. In the last two years, partnerships like Dell and AWS have been very instrumental, built on top of the partnerships we've had for many years. And our core principles at VMWare have not changed. We're really focused on software defining the data center. Why? Because it makes you more agile, removes costs, reduces complexity, makes the planet more green. We think we've got a long way to go in just building that private cloud, making the data center feel like a cloud. That's priority number one. Priority number two, extending tno the hybrid cloud. Last time we talked was at AWS Reinvent. That's very important. We're doing a bit of work there at AWS and many other clouds. And user computing, making sure that every one of these type of devices are secure and managed, whether it's Apple devices, Google, or Microsoft. Those three priorities have still stayed the same, and now Dell's comin' to give us a lot more of that sort of draft, to help us do that inside the Dell EMC customer base, too. >> Yeah, I mean you guys are doin' it again, the whole, NSX obviously is booming. >> Sanjay: Big launch this week. >> You know, it's funny, the whole software-defined networking thing. Everybody flocked to it. VCs flocked to it. You guys changed the game with that Nycera acquisition. I mean, could you imagine, I guess you did imagine what it was going to become, I mean it's really taken off in a big way. >> Bold move. I got to give credit to the, I mean I wasn't at the company at the time, but I got to tell you, when I saw that I was stunned. Paying 1.2 billion for a company that didn't have much revenue. But here we are. We talked about it in our earnings call being a 1.4 billion one rate business. 4,500 hundred customers. We were zero customers five years ago when we did the acquisition, and what we really defined is that the future of networking is going to be software-defined, clearly, and it's much the same way a Tesla is transforming the automotive industry, right? What's the value of a Tesla? It's not just the hardware, but the software that's changing the way in which you drive, park, all of the mapping, all of that stuff. We believe the same way the networking industry's going to go through mighty revolution. We think the data center gets more efficeint and driven through software. The path into the into the public cloud, and the path to the branch, and that's what we as we launched our virtual cloud networking. It's extremely differentiated in the industry. We're the only ones really pioneering that, and we think it's extremely visionary. And we're excited to take our customers on this journey. It was a big launch for us this week, and we think NSX is just getting started. 4500 customers is about 1% of our roughly 500,000 customers Every single one of them should be looking at NSX. Big opportunity ahead of us. >> Huge. And the cloud play, we talked about this at VM World last summer. The clarity now that your customers have. They can now make bets for a couple of cycles anyway, really having confidence in your cloud strategy. You've seen that, I'm sure, in your customer base. >> We have, and you know, it started off by telling the world that the 4,000 service providers that have built their stack on VMWare, VMWare Cloud Providers, VCPP, are all going to be very special to us as they build out their clouds, often in many specialized country that have country-specific cloud requirements. But the we're going to take the public clouds and systematically start working them. IBM cloud was the first, When they acquired software we had a strong relationship with them, announced two or three years ago. And then I think the world was shocked. It was almost, as I've described on the media, a Berlin Wall moment, when AWS and VMWare came together because it sort of felt like the United States and Soviet German in 1987, okay? And you know, here we have these two companies, really workin'. That's worked out very well for us, and then we've done systematic other things with Azure, Google, and so on and so forth, and we'll see how the public cloud plays out, but we think that that hybrid cloud bridge. We're going to be probably the only company who can really play a very pivotal role in the world moving from private cloud to public cloud and there's going to be balance on both sides of that divide. >> So you really essentially are trying to become the infrastructure for the digital world now, aren't you? Talk about that a little bit. You're seeing new workloads, obviously AI's all the buzz. You guys are doing some work in blockchains. It's going to take a while for all that to pick up, but really it's the ability and containers is the other thing. Everybody thought, oh containers, that's the end of VMs, and Pat at the time said, no no no, you guys don't understand. Let me explain it. He sort of laid it out. You seem to be embracing that, again embracing change. >> I got to tell you, that one for me because I'll tell you when I first joined the company four and a half years ago, I was at SAP. I asked Pat two questions. I said the public cloud's going to, I mean, probably take out VMWare, aren't you concerned with Amazon. Here we are taking that headwind and making a tailwind. The second was like, everyone's talking about Docker. Aren't containers going to just destroy VMs? And that one wasn't as clear to us at the time, but we were patient. And what happened we started to notice in the last few years. We began to notice on GitHub tremendous amount of activity around Kubernetes, and here comes Google almost taking the top off of a lot of you know parts of Docker Two, Docker Swarm, Enterprise, Docker still remains a very good container format, but the orchestration layers become a Google-based project called Kubernetes. And I think our waiting allowed us and pivotal to embrace Google in the partnership that we announced last year. And we plan to become the de facto enterprise container platform. If VMs became the VM in VMWare and we have 500,000 customers, tens of millions of VMs, you'd think we could multiply those VMs by some number to get number of containers. VMWare has its rightful place, a birthright, to become the de facto enterprise container platform. We're just getting started, both between us and Pivotal, the Kubernetes investment, Big deal. And we're going to do it in partnership with companies like Google. >> I want to ask you about Pivotal. When Joe Tucci was the swansong in the MC world, he came out with an analyst meeting and we asked them, if you had a mulligan, you know, what would you do over again. He said, you know, we're going to answer it this way. He said, I wished I had done more to bring together the family, you know, the federation. We laid that vision out, and I probably, he said, personally I probably could've done more. I feel like Michael has taken this on. I almost feel like Joe, when he laughs at Michael. My one piece of advice is do a better job than I did with that integration. And it seems like Michael's takin' that on as an outsider. What can you tell us about the relationship between all the companies, particularly Pivotal. >> Yeah, you know Joe's a very special man, as our chairman, and Joe and Pat are the reasons I joined VMWare, and so I have tremendous respect for them. And he stayed on as an advisor to Mike O'Dell. And I think Mike O'Dell just took a lot of those things and improved on it. I wouldn't say that anything was dramatically bad, but you know he tightened up much of the places where we could work together. One material change was having the Dell EMC reps carry quota, for example VMWare. They're incetivized. That has been a huge difference to allow us to have our sales forces completely align together. Big big huge difference. I mean, sales people care about our product when they're compensated, carry quota on it, and drive it. The second aspect was in many of these places where Dell and VMWare or VMWare and Pivotal were needed to just take obstacles out of the way, and I don't think Pivotal would've been really successful if it had stayed in VMWare four or five years ago. So Paul Mertz leaving, the genius of that whole move, which Joe orchesthrated, and allowing them to flourish. Okay, here they have four or five years, they've gone public. They have a tremendous amount of traction. Then last year, we began to see that Kubernetes Coming back allowed us to get closer to them, okay? We didn't need to do that necessarily by saying that Pivotal needs to be part of VMWare. We just needed to build a joint engineering effort around Kubernetes And make that enormously successful. So you get the best of both worlds. We're an investor, obviously, in Pivotal. We're proud of their success in the public markets. We benefit some from that sort of idea process, but at the same time we want to make sure this Kubernetes Effort and the broader app platform, our cloud foundry, is enormously successful, and every one of our customers who have VMs starts looking containers. >> Well, I always said Pivotal was formed with a bunch of misfit toys that just didn't seem to fit into VMWare. >> Sanjay: It's come a long way. >> And you took that, but it was smart because you took it and said, here it is. Let's start figuring that out. Who better to do that than Paul? And it's really come together and obviously a very successful. >> Yeah, Rob, Scott, Bill, Yara, many of that team there. They're passionate about developers, okay? We understand the infratstructure role very well, but when you can get dev and ops together, in a way they collaborate, so we're excited about it. And we have a key part for us, we have a very simple mission: to make the container platform just very secure. What's the differenetiation between us and other companies trying to build container platforms? NSX? So our contribution into that is to take Kubernetes Watch for some of the management capabilities, and then add NSX to it, highly differentiate it. And now all of a sudden customers say, this is the reason why I mean, 'cause every container brings a place where the port could be insecure. NSX makes that secture, and we think that that's another key part to what's made NSX the launch this week extremely sepcial is that its story relates to cloud and containers. Those two Cs, I would say, cloud and containers. We've taken what were headwinds to us, VMWare over the last four or five years, and made them tailwinds. And for us that's been a tremendous learnnig lesson, not just I would say in our own technology road map, but in leadership and management. That's important for us as business leaders, too. >> Dave: And I got to give some love to my friends in the Vsin world, Yen Bing and those guys. Obviously Vsin doin' very well. Give us the update there. I mean, you're doin', he's doin' exactly what you said: we're going to do to networking and storage what we did to compute. >> I mean, again you know, when we start things off. If you'll remember, three or four years ago, we were confusing EMC and VMWare, Evo, Rails, some of those things. We just had to clean that up. And as Dell EMC came together and VMWare, we said, listen. We're going to do software-defined storage really well because it has a very close synergy point to the Kubernetes I mean, we know a lot about storage because it's very closely connected to Compute. And if we could do that better than anybody else, and in the meantime all these startups were doing reasonably well, Simplicity, Nutanics, Pivotry, so on and so forth. I mean there's no reason if we don't have our act together we could build the best software-defined storage and then engineer a system together with Dell that has the software, and that's what VX rails has become. So a few false stubs of the toe when we started off, you know three or four years ago, but we've come a long way. Pat talked about over 10,000 customers at the revenue run rate that we announced last year, and a 600 million run rate at the end of Q4. We believe we are, for just the software piece, we are the de facto leader, and we have to continue to make customers happy and to drive, you know, this as the future of hyper converge infrastructure because converged had its place. And now the coming together of Compute Storage, over time networking with a layer of management, that's the future of the data center. >> Yeah, I was watching. THere's some good, interesting maneuvering goin' on in the marketplace. A lot of fun for a company like ours to watch. I want to talk about leadership. There's a great, you got to go to Sanjay's LinkedIn profile. There's an awesome video on there. It's like a mini TED talk that some of your folks mashed up and put out there. It's only about eight minutes. But I want to touch on some of the things that I learned from that video. Your background, I mean I knew you came from India. You came over at 18 years old, right? >> Sanjay: I was very fortunate. I grew up in a poor home in India, and I came here only because I got a scholarship to go to Dartmouth College. And I think I might have been one of the few brown-skinned guys in Hanover, New Hampshire. I mean, you've been there, you know there's not much Indian goin' on here. (laughter) But I'm very forutnate. And this country is a very special country to immigrants, if you work hard and if you're willing to apply yourself. I'm a product of that hard work. And now as an Indian American living in California. So I feel very fortunate for all that both the country and people who invested in me over the last many decades have helped me become who I am. >> So you were on a scholarship to Dartmouth. >> Yes, that's right. >> As a student in India. So obviously an accomplished student in India, and you said, you know, I got bullied a little bit. I had the glasses, right? Somebody once told me, Dave, don't peak in high school. It's good advice, right? So it was funny to hear you tell that story because I see you as such a charismatic, dynamic leader. I can't picture you as, you know, a little kid getting bullied. >> We were always geeks at one point in time, but one of the things my mother and dad always taught me, especially my mom, who had a tremendous influence on my life and is my hero, is, listen, don't worry what people say about you, okay? Your home is always going to feel a safety and a fortress to us, and I appreciate the fact that irrespective of what happened on the playground, if I was bullied, at home I knew it was secure. And I seek to have that same attitude twoards my children and everybody I consider my extended family, people at work, and so on and so forth. But once you've done that, you don't build your identity just to what people say about you. You're going to build your identity over what's done over a long period of time, okay? With, of course, if everybody in the world hates you, that's a tough place. That's happened to a few people in the world. I wasn't in that state at all. And as I came to this country, just got tougher because I was a minority in a place. But many of those lessons I learned as a young boy helped me as an 18 year old, as I came here, and I'm very thankful for that. >> And you came here with no money, alright? >> A scholarship. >> Right. >> Maybe 50 bucks in the pocket. >> You had 50 bucks and an opportunity, and made the most of it. And then obviously you did very well at Dartmouth. You graduated from Harvard, right? >> I did my MBA at Harvard. >> MBA at Harvard, probably met some interesting people there. >> Andy Jackson being one of them. >> I know he's a friend of yours. >> Sam Berg, who's the head of the client business, was also a classmate of mine at HBS. The '97 class of HBS had some accomplished people: Chris Kapensky is running McDonald's. She's President of US. So I'm very fortunate to have some good classmates there. >> So what did you do? Did you go right to Harvard from? >> No, I spent four years working at Apple. And then went back to do my business school. >> And then what'd you do after that? >> I came back to Silicon Valley at a startup. I was one of the founding product managers at AlphaBlocks. Then went to Informatica. And bulk of my time was at SAP, and most of my life was in the analytics, big data business. What we called big data at the time. >> And that's when we first met it. >> Analytics at BI, and then when Joe and Pat called me for this, the end-user computing role at VMWare four and a half years ago. That's when I came to VMWare. >> And that was a huge coup for VMWare. We knew you from SAP, and that business was struggling. You always give credit to your team, of course. Awesome. Which is what a good leader does. The other thing I wanted to touch on before we break is, you talked about leadership and how importatn it is to embrace cahnge. You said you have three choices when change hits you. What are those three choices? >> You either embrace it, okay? You either stand on the sidelines or you leave. And that's typically what happens in any kind of change, whether it's change in work, change in fafmilies, change in other kinds of religious settings, I mean it's a time-old prinicple. And you want to let the people who are not on board with it leave if they want to leave. The people who are staying in the middle and not yet convinced, you'll hope they'll do. But they cannot yet throw the grenades, 'cause then they're just going to be. And you want to take that nucleus of people who are with you in the change to help you get the people who sit on the sidelines in. And to me when I joined VMWare, the end-user computing team had the highest attrition, okay, and the lowest satisfaction. And I found the same thing. There were popel who were leaving in droves. Some people sittin' on the sidelines, but a core group of people I loved that were willing to really work with me, 'cause I didn't really know a lot about it. The smarter people were in the team and some people that we hired in. We had to take that group and become the chagne agents, and when that happens it's a beautiful thing because from within starts to form this thing that's the phoenix rising out of the ashes. And the company, and then these people who are sidelineers start to get involved. New people want to join. Now everybody wants to be part of the end-user computing team at VMWare because we're a winner, but it wasn't that way four and a half years ago. Same thing in cloud. How are we going to transform this cloud business to be one where, VCloudAir. We're being made fun of, like how are you ever going to compete with Amazon. We had to go through our own catharsis. We divested that business, but out of that pain point came a fundamental change. Some people left. Some people stayed, but I'm just grateful through all of this that we learned a tremendous amount. I think change is the most definitive thing that happens to every company, and you have to embrace it. If you embrace chance, it's going to make you a much stronger leader. I'll tell you, the Mandarin word, okay, for crisis is two symbols: one that shows disaster and one that shows opportunity. I choose the opportunity side. >> Dave: You choose? Right? Yeah! >> And eveyrone makes that choice, right? And if you make the right path, it could be a beautiful learning experience. >> Sanjay, words to live by. Definitely check out that video on Sanjay's profile. >> It's on LinkedIn. >> Really fabulous always to sit down and talk to you. >> Always a pleasure, Dave. Congratulations to all your success. >> Dave: Thank you! I really appreaciate your support. >> Thank you. >> Alright, everybody that's it from Dell Technologies World 2018. You can hear the music behind us. Next week, big week. We've got Red Hat Summit. I'll be at Service Now Knowledge. We got a couple of other shows and tons of shows coming up. I don't know, you were at Vmon last year. I don't know if you're going to be there this year, maybe maybe not, we'll see. >> Well we got a big one coming up at VM World. We'll see you there. >> We got big one coming up, VM World, at the end of August through early September, which is back at Mosconi this year? >> It's back at Las Vegas still. One more thing and then it's going back to Mosconi after the construction's over. >> So go to theCUBE.net, check out all the shows. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. (digital music)

>> Announcer: Live from midtown Manhattan, it's theCUBE covering BigData New York City 2017. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media, and its ecosystem sponsors. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our day one, at Big Data NYC, of three days of wall to wall coverage. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, with my co-hosts Jim Kobielus and Peter Burris. We do this event every year, this is theCUBE's BigData NYC. It's our event that we run in New York City. We have a lot of great content, we have theCUBE going live, we don't go to Strata anymore. We do our own event in conjunction, they have their own event. You can go pay over there and get the booth space, but we do our media event and attract all the influencers, the VIPs, the executives, the entrepreneurs, we've been doing it for five years, we're super excited, and thank our sponsors for allowing us to get here and really appreciate the community for continuing to support theCUBE. We're here to wrap up day one what's going on in New York, certainly we've had a chance to check out the Strata situations, Strata Data, which is Cloudera, and O'Reilly, mainly O'Reilly media, they run that, kind of old school event, guys. Let's kind of discuss the impact of the event in context to the massive growth that's going outside of their event. And their event is a walled garden, you got to pay to get in, they're very strict. They don't really let a lot of people in, but, okay. Outside of that the event it going global, the activity around big data is going global. It's more than Hadoop, we certainly thought about that's old news, but what's the big trend this year? As the horizontally scalable cloud enters the equation. >> I think the big trend, John, is the, and we've talked about in our research, is that we have finally moved away from big data, being associated with a new type of infrastructure. The emergence of AI, deep learning, machine learning, cognitive, all these different names for relatively common things, are an indications that we're starting to move up into people thinking about applications, people thinking about services they can use to get access, or they can get access to build their applications. There's not enough skills. So I think that's probably the biggest thing is that the days of failure being measured by whether or not you can scale your cluster up, are finally behind us. We're using the cloud, other resources, we have enough expertise, the technologies are becoming simpler and more straightforward to do that. And now we're thinking about how we're going to create value out of all of this, which is how we're going to use the data to learn something new about what we're doing in the organization, combine it with advanced software technologies that actually dramatically reduce the amount of work that's necessary to make a decision. >> And the other trend I would say, on top of that, just to kind of put a little cherry on top of that, kind of the business focus which is again, not the speeds and feeds, although under the hood, lot of great innovation going on from deep learning, and there's a ton of stuff. However, the conversation is the business value, how it's transforming work and, but the one thing that nobody's talking about is, this is why I'm not bullish on these one shows, one show meets all kind of thing like O'Reilly Media does, because there's multiple personas in a company now in the ecosystem. There are now a variety of buyers of some products. At least in the old days, you'd go talk to the IT CIO and you're in. Not anymore. You have an analytics person, a Chief Data Officer, you might have an IT person, you might have a cloud person. So you're seeing a completely broader set of potential buyers that are driving the change. We heard Paxata talk about that. And this is a dynamic. >> Yeah, definitely. We see a fair amount of, what I'm sensing about Strata, how it's evolving these big top shows around data, it's evolving around addressing a broader, what we call maker culture. It's more than software developers. It's business analysts, it's the people who build the hardware for the internet of things into which AI and machine learning models are being containerized and embedded. I've, you know, one of the takeaways from today so far, and the keynotes are tomorrow at Strata, but I've been walking the atrium at the Javits Center having some interesting conversations, in addition, of course, to the ones we've been having here at theCUBE. And what I'm notic-- >> John: What are those hallway conversations that you're having? >> Yeah. >> What's going on over there? >> Yeah, what I've, the conversations I've had today have been focused on, the chief trend that I'm starting to sense here is that the productionization of the machine learning development process or pipeline, is super hot. It spans multiple data platforms, of course. You've got a bit of Hadoop in the refinery layer, you've got a bit of in-memory columnar databases, like the Act In discussed at their own, but the more important, not more important, but just as important is that what users are looking at is how can we build these DevOps pipelines for continuous management of releases of machine learning models for productionization, but also for ongoing evaluation and scoring and iteration and redeployment into business applications. You know there's, I had conversations with Mapbar, I had conversations with IBM, I mean, these were atrium conversations about things that they are doing. IBM had an announcement today on the wires and so forth with some relevance to that. And so I'm seeing a fair, I'm hearing, I'm sensing a fair amount of It's The Apps, it's more than just Hadoop. But it's very much the flow of these, these are the core pieces, like AI, core pieces of intellectual property in the most disruptive applications that are being developed these days in all manner, in business and industry in the consumer space. >> So I did not go over to the show floor yet, I've not been over to the Atrium. But, I'll bet you dollars to donuts this is indicative of something that always happens in a complex technology environment. And again, this is something we've thought about particularly talked about here on theCUBE, in fact we talked to Paxata about it a little bit as well. And that is, as an organization gains experience, it starts to specialize. But there's always moments, there' always inflection points in the process of gaining that experience. And by that, or one of the indications of that is that you end up with some people starting to specialize, but not quite sure what they're specializing in yet. And I think that's one of the things that's happening right now is that the skills gap is significant. At the same time that the skills gap is being significant, we're seeing people start to declare their specializations that they don't have skills, necessarily, to perform yet. And the tools aren't catching up. So there's still this tension model, open source, not necessarily focusing on the core problem. Skills looking for tools, and explosion in the number of tools out there, not focused on how you simplify, streamline, and put into operation. How all these things work together. It's going to be an interesting couple of years, but the good news, ultimately, is that we are starting to see for the first time, even on theCUBE interviews today, the emergence of a common language about how we think about the characteristics of the problem. And I think that that heralds a new round of experience and a new round of thinking about what is all the business analysts, the data scientists, the developer, the infrastructure person, business person. >> You know, you bring up that comment, those comments, about the specialists and the skills. We talked, Jim and I talked on the segment this morning about tool shed. We're talking about there are so many tools out there, and everyone loves a good tool, a hammer. But the old expression is if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, that's cliche. But what's happened is there are a plethora of tools, right, and tools are good. Platforms are better. As people start to replatformize everything they could have too many tools. So we asked the C Chief Data Officer, he goes yeah, I try to manage the tool tsunami, but his biggest issue was he buys a hammer, and it turns into a lawnmower. That's a vendor mentality of-- >> What a truck. Well, but that's a classic example of what I'm talking about. >> Or someone's trying to use a hammer to mow the lawn right? Again, so this is what you're getting at. >> Yeah! >> The companies out there are groping for relevance, and that's how you can see the pretenders from the winners. >> Well, a tool, fundamentally, is pedagogical. A tool describes the way work is going to be performed, and that's been a lot of what's been happening over the course of the past few years. Now, businesses that get more experience, they're describing their own way of thinking throughout a problem. And they're still not clear on how to bring the tools together because the tools are being generated, put into the marketplace by an expanding array of folks and companies, and they're now starting to shuffle for position. But I think ultimately, what we're going to see happen over the next year and I think this is an inflection point, going back to this big tent notion, is the idea that ultimately we are going to see greater specialization over the next few years. My guess is that this year will probably, should get better, or should get bigger, I'm not certain it will because it's focused on the problems that we already solved and not moving into the problems that we need to focus on. >> Yeah, I mean, a lot of the problems I have with the O'Reilly show is that they try to throw default leadership out there, and there's some smart people that go to that, but the problem is is that it's too monetization, they try to make too much money from the event when this action's happening. And this is where the tool becomes, the hammer becomes a lawnmower, because what's happening is that the vendor's trying to stay alive. And you mentioned this earlier, to your point, the customers that are buyers of the technology don't want to have something that's not going to be a fit, that's going to be agile from us. They don't want the hammer that they bought to turn into something that they didn't buy it for. And sometimes, teams can't make that leap, skillset-wise, to literally pivot overnight. Especially as a startup. So this is where the selection of the companies makes a big difference. And a lot of the clients, a lot of customers that we're serving on the end user side are reaching the conclusion that the tools themselves, while important, are clearly not where the value is. The value is in how they put them together for their business. And that's something that's going to have to, again, that's a maturation process, roles, responsibilities, the chief data officer, they're going to have a role in that or not, but ultimately, they're going to have to start finding their pipelines, their process for ingestion out to analysis. >> Let me get your reaction, you guys, your reactions to this tape. Because one of the things that I heard today, and I think this validates a bigger trend as we talk about the landscape of the markup from the event to how people are behaving and promoting and building products and companies. The pattern that I'm hearing, we said it multiple times on theCUBE today and one from the guy who's basically reading the script, is, in his interview, explaining 'cause it's so factual, I asked him the straight-up question, how do you deal with suppliers? What's happening is the trend is don't show me sizzle. I want to see the steak. Don't sell me hype, I got too many business things to work on right now, I need to nail down some core things. I got application development, I got security to build out big time, and then I got all those data channels that I need, I don't have time for you to sell me a hammer that might not be a hammer in the future! So I need real results, I need real performance that's going to have a business impact. That is the theme, and that trumps the hype. I see that becoming a huge thing right now. Your thoughts, reactions, guys-- >> Well I'll start-- >> What's your reaction then? True or false on the trend? Be-- >> Peter: True! >> Get down to business. >> I'll say that much, true, but go ahead. >> I'll say true as well, but let me just add some context. I think a show like O'Reilly Strata is good up to a point, especially to catalyze an industry, a growing industry like big data's own understanding of it, of the value that all these piece parts, Hadoop and Spark and so forth, can add, can provide when deployed in a unit according to some emerging patterns, whatever. But at a certain point where a space like this becomes well-established, it just becomes a pure marketing event. And customers, at a certain point say, you know, I come here for ideas about things that I can do in my environ, my business, that could actually many ways help me to do new things. You know, you can't get that at a marketing-oriented, you can get that, as a user, more at a research-oriented show. When it's an emerging market, like let's say Spark has been, like the Spark Summit was in the beginning, those are kind of like, when industries go through the phase those are sort of in the beginning, sort of research-focused shows where industry, the people who are doing the development of this new architecture, they talk ideas. Now I think in 2017, where we're at now, is what the idea is everybody's trying to get their heads around, they're all around AI, what the heck that is. For a show like an O'Reilly Ready show to have relevance in a market that's in this much ferment of really innovation around AI and deep learning, there needs to be a core research focus that you don't get at this point in the lifecycle of Strata, for example. So that's my take on what's going on. >> So, my take is this. And first of all, I agree with everything you said, so it's not in opposition to anything. Many years ago I had this thought that I think still is very true. And that is the value of industry, the value of infrastructure is inversely correlated with the degree to which anybody knows anything about it. So if I know a lot about my infrastructure, it's not creating a lot of business value. In fact, more often than not, it's not working, which is why people end up knowing more about it. But the problem is, the way that technology has always been sold is as a differentiated, some sort of value-add thing. So you end up with this tension. And this is an application domain, a very, very complex application domain like big data. The tension is, my tool is so great that, and it's differentiating all those other stuff, yeah but it becomes valuable to me if and only if nobody knows it exists. So I think, and one of the reasons why I bring this up, John, is many of the companies that are in the big data space today that are most successful are companies that are positioning themselves as a service. There's a lot of interesting SaaS applications for big data analysis, pipeline management, all the other things you can talk about, that are actually being rendered as a service, and not as a product. So that all you need to know is what the tool does. You don't need to know the tool. And I don't know that that's necessarily going to last, but I think it's very, very interesting that a lot of the more successful companies that we're talking to are themselves mere infrastructure SaaS companies. >> Because-- >> AtScale is interesting, though. They came in as a service. But their service has an interesting value proposition. They can allow you to essentially virtualize the data to play with it, so people can actually sandbox data. And if it gets traction, they can then double-down on it. So to me that's a freebie. To me, I'm a customer, I got to love that kind of environment because you're essentially giving almost a developer-like environment-- >> Peter: Value without necessarily-- >> Yeah, the cost, and the guy gets the signal from the marketplace, his customer, of what data resolves. To me that's a very cool scene. I don't, you saying that's bad, or? >> No, no, I think it's interesting. I think it's-- >> So you're saying service is-- >> So what I'm saying is, what I'm saying is, that the value of infrastructure is inversely proportional to the degree to which anybody knows anything about it. But you've got a bunch of companies who are selling, effectively, infrastructure software, so it's a value-add thing, and that creates a problem. And a lot of other companies not only have the ability to sell something as a service as opposed to a product, they can put the service froward, and people are using the service and getting what they need out of it without knowing anything about the tool. >> I like that. Let me just maybe possibly restate what you just said. When a market goes toward a SaaS go-to-market delivery model for solutions, the user, the buyer's focus is shifted away from what the solution can do, I mean, how it works under the cover. >> Peter: Quote, value-add-- >> To what it can do potentially for you. >> The business, that's right. >> But you're not going to, don't get distracted by the implementation details. You have then as a user become laser-focused on, wow, there's a bunch of things that this can do for me. I don't care how it works, really. You SaaS provider, you worry about that stuff. I can worry now about somehow extracting the value. I'm not distracted. >> This show, or this domain, is one of the domains where SaaS has moved, just as we're thinking about moving up the stack, the SaaS business model is moving down the stack in the big data world. >> All right, so, in summary, the stack is changing. Predictions for the next few days. What are we going to see come out of Strata Data, and our BigData NYC? 'Cause remember, this show was always a big hit, but it's very clear from the data on our dashboards, we're seeing all the social data. Microsoft Ignite is going on, and Microsoft Azure, just in the past few years, has burst on the scene. Cloud is sucking the oxygen out of the big data event. Or is it? >> I doubt it was sucking it out of the event, but you know, theCUBE is in, theCUBE is not at Ignite. Where's theCUBE right now? >> John: BigData NYC. >> No, it's here, but it's also at the Splunk show. >> John: That's true. >> And isn't it interesting-- >> John: We're sucking the data out of two events. >> Did a lot of people coming in, exactly. A lot of people coming-- >> We're live streaming in a streaming data kind of-- >> John just said we suck, there's that record saying that. >> We're sucking all the data. >> So we are-- >> We're sharing data. These videos are data-driven. >> Yeah, absolutely, but the point is, ultimately, is that, is that Splunk is an example of a company that's putting forward a service about how you do this and not necessarily a product focus. And a lot of the folks that are coming on theCUBE here are also going on to theCUBE down in Washington D.C., which is where the Splunk show's at. And so I think one of the things, one of the predictions I'll make, is that we're going to hear over the next couple of days more companies talk about their SaaS trash. >> Yeah, I mean I just think, I agree with you, but I also agree with the comments about the technology coming together. And here's one thing I want to throw on the table. I've gotten the sense a few times about connecting the dots on it, we'll put it out publicly for comment right now. The role that communities will play outside of developer, is going to be astronomical. I think we're seeing signals, certainly open-source communities have been around for a long time. They continue to grow shoulders of giants before them. Even these events like O'Reilly, which are a small community that they rely on is now not the only game in town. We're seeing the notion of a community strategy in things like Blockchain, you're seeing it in business, you're seeing people rolling out their recruitment to say, data scientists. You're seeing a community model developing in business, yes or no? >> Yes, but I would say, I would put it this way, John. That it's always been there. The difference is that we're now getting enough experience with things that have occurred, for example, collaboration, communal, communal collaboration in open-source software that people are now saying, and they've developed a bunch of social networking techniques where they can actually analyze how those communities work together, but now they're saying, hmm, I've figured out how to do an assessment analysis understanding that community. I'm going to see if I can take that same concept and apply it over here to how sales works, or how B-to-B engagement works, or how marketing gets conducted, or how sales and marketing work together. And they're discovering that the same way of thinking is actually very fruitful over there. So I totally agree, 100%. >> So they don't rely on other people's version of a community, they can essentially construct their own. >> They are, they are-- >> John: Or enabling their own. >> That's right, they are bringing that approach to thinking about a community-driven business and they're applying it to a lot of new ways, and that's very exciting. >> As the world gets connected with mobile and internet of things as we're seeing, it's one big online community. We're seeing things, I'm writing a post right now, what you could, what B-to-B markets should learn from the fake news problem. And that is content and infrastructure are now contextually tied together. >> Peter: Totally. >> And related. The payload of the fake news is also related to the gamification of the network effect, hence the targeting, hence the weaponization. >> Hey, we wrote the three Cs, we wrote a piece on the three Cs of strategy a year and a half ago. Content, community, context. And at the end of the day, the most important thing to what you're saying about, is that there is, you know, right now people talk about social networking. Social media, you think Facebook. Facebook is a community with a single context, stay in touch with your friends. >> Connections. >> Connections. But what you're really saying is that for the first time we're now going to see an enormous amount of technology being applied to the fullness of all the communities. We're going to see a lot more communities being created with the software, each driven by what content does, creates value, against the context of how it works, where the community's defined in terms of what do we do? >> Let me focus on the fact that bringing, using community as a framework for understanding how the software world is evolving. The software world is evolving towards, I've said this many times in my work about a resurge, the data scientists or data people, data science skills are the core developers in this new era. Now, what is data science all about at its heart? Machine learning, building, and training machine learning models. And so training machine learning models is everything towards making sure that they are fit for their predicted purpose of classification. Training data, where you get all the training data from to feed all, to train all these models? Where do you get all the human resources to label, to do the labeling of the data sets, and so forth, that you need communities, crowdsourcing and whatnot, and you need sustainable communities that can supply the data and the labeling services, and so forth, to be able to sustain the AI and machine learning revolution. So content, creating data and so forth, really rules in this new era, like-- >> The interest in machine learning is at an all-time high, I guess. >> Jim: Yeah, oh yeah, very much so. >> Got it, I agree. I think the social grab, interest grab, value grab is emerging. I think communities, content, context, communities are relevant. I think a lot of things are going to change, and that the scuttlebutt that I'm hearing in this area now is it's not about the big event anymore. It's about the digital component. I think you're seeing people recognize that, but they still want to do the face-to-face. >> You know what, that's right. That's right, they still want, let's put it this way. That there are, that the whole point of community is we do things together. And there are some things that are still easier to do together if we get together. >> But B-to-B marketing, you just can't say, we're not going to do events when there's a whole machinery behind events. Legion batch marketing, we call it. There's a lot of stuff that goes on in that funnel. You can't just say hey, we're going to do a blog post. >> People still need to connect. >> So it's good, but there's some online tools that are happening, so of course. You wanted to say something? >> Yeah, I just want to say one thing. Face to face validates the source of expertise. I don't really fully trust an expert, I can't in my heart engage with them, 'til I actually meet them and figure out in person whether they really do have the goods, or whether they're repurposing some thinking that they got from elsewhere and they gussy it up. So face, there's no substitute for face-to-face to validate the expertise. The expertise that you value enough to want to engage in your solution, or whatever it might be. >> Awesome, I agree. Online activities, the content, we're streaming the data, theCUBE, this is our annual event in New York City. We've got three days of coverage, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, here, theCUBE in Manhattan, right around the corner from Strata Hadoop, the Javits Center of influencers. We're here with the VIPs, with the entrepreneurs, with the CEOs and all the top analysts from WikiBon and around the community. Be there tomorrow all day, day one wrap up is done. Thanks for watching, see you tomorrow. (rippling music)