>>The cybersecurity landscape continues to be one characterized by a series of point tools designed to do a very specific job, often pretty well, but the mosaic of tooling is grown over the years causing complexity in driving up costs and increasing exposures. So the game of Whackamole continues. Moreover, the way organizations approach security is changing quite dramatically. The cloud, while offering so many advantages, has also created new complexities. The shared responsibility model redefines what the cloud provider secures, for example, the S three bucket and what the customer is responsible for eg properly configuring the bucket. You know, this is all well and good, but because virtually no organization of any size can go all in on a single cloud, that shared responsibility model now spans multiple clouds and with different protocols. Now that of course includes on-prem and edge deployments, making things even more complex. Moreover, the DevOps team is being asked to be the point of execution to implement many aspects of an organization's security strategy. >>This extends to securing the runtime, the platform, and even now containers which can end up anywhere. There's a real need for consolidation in the security industry, and that's part of the answer. We've seen this both in terms of mergers and acquisitions as well as platform plays that cover more and more ground. But the diversity of alternatives and infrastructure implementations continues to boggle the mind with more and more entry points for the attackers. This includes sophisticated supply chain attacks that make it even more difficult to understand how to secure components of a system and how secure those components actually are. The number one challenge CISOs face in today's complex world is lack of talent to address these challenges. And I'm not saying that SecOps pros are not talented, They are. There just aren't enough of them to go around and the adversary is also talented and very creative, and there are more and more of them every day. >>Now, one of the very important roles that a technology vendor can play is to take mundane infrastructure security tasks off the plates of SEC off teams. Specifically we're talking about shifting much of the heavy lifting around securing servers, storage, networking, and other infrastructure and their components onto the technology vendor via r and d and other best practices like supply chain management. And that's what we're here to talk about. Welcome to the second part in our series, A Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure Made Possible by Dell Technologies and produced by the Cube. My name is Dave Ante and I'm your host now. Previously we looked at what trusted infrastructure means and the role that storage and data protection play in the equation. In this part two of the series, we explore the changing nature of technology infrastructure, how the industry generally in Dell specifically, are adapting to these changes and what is being done to proactively address threats that are increasingly stressing security teams. >>Now today, we continue the discussion and look more deeply into servers networking and hyper-converged infrastructure to better understand the critical aspects of how one company Dell is securing these elements so that dev sec op teams can focus on the myriad new attack vectors and challenges that they faced. First up is Deepak rang Garage Power Edge security product manager at Dell Technologies. And after that we're gonna bring on Mahesh Nagar oim, who was consultant in the networking product management area at Dell. And finally, we're close with Jerome West, who is the product management security lead for HCI hyperconverged infrastructure and converged infrastructure at Dell. Thanks for joining us today. We're thrilled to have you here and hope you enjoy the program. Deepak Arage shoes powered security product manager at Dell Technologies. Deepak, great to have you on the program. Thank you. >>Thank you for having me. >>So we're going through the infrastructure stack and in part one of this series we looked at the landscape overall and how cyber has changed and specifically how Dell thinks about data protection in, in security in a manner that both secures infrastructure and minimizes organizational friction. We also hit on the storage part of the portfolio. So now we want to dig into servers. So my first question is, what are the critical aspects of securing server infrastructure that our audience should be aware of? >>Sure. So if you look at compute in general, right, it has rapidly evolved over the past couple of years, especially with trends toward software defined data centers and with also organizations having to deal with hybrid environments where they have private clouds, public cloud locations, remote offices, and also remote workers. So on top of this, there's also an increase in the complexity of the supply chain itself, right? There are companies who are dealing with hundreds of suppliers as part of their supply chain. So all of this complexity provides a lot of opportunity for attackers because it's expanding the threat surface of what can be attacked, and attacks are becoming more frequent, more severe and more sophisticated. And this has also triggered around in the regulatory and mandates around the security needs. >>And these regulations are not just in the government sector, right? So it extends to critical infrastructure and eventually it also get into the private sector. In addition to this, organizations are also looking at their own internal compliance mandates. And this could be based on the industry in which they're operating in, or it could be their own security postures. And this is the landscape in which servers they're operating today. And given that servers are the foundational blocks of the data center, it becomes extremely important to protect them. And given how complex the modern server platforms are, it's also extremely difficult and it takes a lot of effort. And this means protecting everything from the supply chain to the manufacturing and then eventually the assuring the hardware and software integrity of the platforms and also the operations. And there are very few companies that go to the lens that Dell does in order to secure the server. We truly believe in the notion and the security mentality that, you know, security should enable our customers to go focus on their business and proactively innovate on their business and it should not be a burden to them. And we heavily invest to make that possible for our customers. >>So this is really important because the premise that I set up at the beginning of this was really that I, as of security pro, I'm not a security pro, but if I were, I wouldn't want to be doing all this infrastructure stuff because I now have all these new things I gotta deal with. I want a company like Dell who has the resources to build that security in to deal with the supply chain to ensure the providence, et cetera. So I'm glad you you, you hit on that, but so given what you just said, what does cybersecurity resilience mean from a server perspective? For example, are there specific principles that Dell adheres to that are non-negotiable? Let's say, how does Dell ensure that its customers can trust your server infrastructure? >>Yeah, like when, when it comes to security at Dell, right? It's ingrained in our product, so that's the best way to put it. And security is nonnegotiable, right? It's never an afterthought where we come up with a design and then later on figure out how to go make it secure, right? Our security development life cycle, the products are being designed to counter these threats right from the big. And in addition to that, we are also testing and evaluating these products continuously to identify vulnerabilities. We also have external third party audits which supplement this process. And in addition to this, Dell makes the commitment that we will rapidly respond to any mitigations and vulnerability, any vulnerabilities and exposures found out in the field and provide mitigations and patches for in attacking manner. So this security principle is also built into our server life cycle, right? Every phase of it. >>So we want our products to provide cutting edge capabilities when it comes to security. So as part of that, we are constantly evaluating what our security model is done. We are building on it and continuously improving it. So till a few years ago, our model was primarily based on the N framework of protect, detect and rigor. And it's still aligns really well to that framework, but over the past couple of years, we have seen how computers evolved, how the threads have evolved, and we have also seen the regulatory trends and we recognize the fact that the best security strategy for the modern world is a zero trust approach. And so now when we are building our infrastructure and tools and offerings for customers, first and foremost, they're cyber resilient, right? What we mean by that is they're capable of anticipating threats, withstanding attacks and rapidly recurring from attacks and also adapting to the adverse conditions in which they're deployed. The process of designing these capabilities and identifying these capabilities however, is done through the zero press framework. And that's very important because now we are also anticipating how our customers will end up using these capabilities at there and to enable their own zero trust IT environments and IT zero trusts deployments. We have completely adapted our security approach to make it easier for customers to work with us no matter where they are in their journey towards zero trust option. >>So thank you for that. You mentioned the, this framework, you talked about zero trust. When I think about n I think as well about layered approaches. And when I think about zero trust, I think about if you, if you don't have access to it, you're not getting access, you've gotta earn that, that access and you've got layers and then you still assume that bad guys are gonna get in. So you've gotta detect that and you've gotta response. So server infrastructure security is so fundamental. So my question is, what is Dell providing specifically to, for example, detect anomalies and breaches from unauthorized activity? How do you enable fast and easy or facile recovery from malicious incidents, >>Right? What is that is exactly right, right? Breachers are bound to happen and given how complex our current environment is, it's extremely distributed and extremely connected, right? Data and users are no longer contained with an offices where we can set up a perimeter firewall and say, Yeah, everything within that is good. We can trust everything within it. That's no longer true. The best approach to protect data and infrastructure in the current world is to use a zero trust approach, which uses the principles. Nothing is ever trusted, right? Nothing is trusted implicitly. You're constantly verifying every single user, every single device, and every single access in your system at every single level of your ID environment. And this is the principles that we use on power Edge, right? But with an increased focus on providing granular controls and checks based on the principles of these privileged access. >>So the idea is that service first and foremost need to make sure that the threats never enter and they're rejected at the point of entry, but we recognize breaches are going to occur and if they do, they need to be minimized such that the sphere of damage cost by attacker is minimized so they're not able to move from one part of the network to something else laterally or escalate their privileges and cause more damage, right? So the impact radius for instance, has to be radius. And this is done through features like automated detection capabilities and automation, automated remediation capabilities. So some examples are as part of our end to end boot resilience process, we have what they call a system lockdown, right? We can lock down the configuration of the system and lock on the form versions and all changes to the system. And we have capabilities which automatically detect any drift from that lockdown configuration and we can figure out if the drift was caused to authorized changes or unauthorized changes. >>And if it is an unauthorize change can log it, generate security alerts, and we even have capabilities to automatically roll the firm where, and always versions back to a known good version and also the configurations, right? And this becomes extremely important because as part of zero trust, we need to respond to these things at machine speed and we cannot do it at a human speed. And having these automated capabilities is a big deal when achieving that zero trust strategy. And in addition to this, we also have chassis inclusion detection where if the chassis, the box, the several box is opened up, it logs alerts, and you can figure out even later if there's an AC power cycle, you can go look at the logs to see that the box is opened up and figure out if there was a, like a known authorized access or some malicious actor opening and chain something in your system. >>Great, thank you for that lot. Lot of detail and and appreciate that. I want to go somewhere else now cuz Dell has a renowned supply chain reputation. So what about securing the, the supply chain and the server bill of materials? What does Dell specifically do to track the providence of components it uses in its systems so that when the systems arrive, a customer can be a hundred percent certain that that system hasn't been compromised, >>Right? And we've talked about how complex the modern supply chain is, right? And that's no different for service. We have hundreds of confidence on the server and a lot of these form where in order to be configured and run and this former competence could be coming from third parties suppliers. So now the complexity that we are dealing with like was the end to end approach and that's where Dell pays a lot of attention into assuring the security approach approaching and it starts all the way from sourcing competence, right? And then through the design and then even the manufacturing process where we are wetting the personnel leather factories and wetting the factories itself. And the factories also have physical controls, physical security controls built into them and even shipping, right? We have GPS tagging of packages. So all of this is built to ensure supply chain security. >>But a critical aspect of this is also making sure that the systems which are built in the factories are delivered to the customers without any changes or any tapper. And we have a feature called the secure component verification, which is capable of doing this. What the feature does this, when the system gets built in a factory, it generates an inventory of all the competence in the system and it creates a cryptographic certificate based on the signatures presented to this by the competence. And this certificate is stored separately and sent to the customers separately from the system itself. So once the customers receive the system at their end, they can run out to, it generates an inventory of the competence on the system at their end and then compare it to the golden certificate to make sure nothing was changed. And if any changes are detected, we can figure out if there's an authorized change or unauthorize change. >>Again, authorized changes could be like, you know, upgrades to the drives or memory and ized changes could be any sort of temper. So that's the supply chain aspect of it and bill of metal use is also an important aspect to galing security, right? And we provide a software bill of materials, which is basically a list of ingredients of all the software pieces in the platform. So what it allows our customers to do is quickly take a look at all the different pieces and compare it to the vulnerability database and see if any of the vulner which have been discovered out in the wild affected platform. So that's a quick way of figuring out if the platform has any known vulnerabilities and it has not been patched. >>Excellent. That's really good. My last question is, I wonder if you, you know, give us the sort of summary from your perspective, what are the key strengths of Dell server portfolio from a security standpoint? I'm really interested in, you know, the uniqueness and the strong suit that Dell brings to the table, >>Right? Yeah. We have talked enough about the complexity of the environment and how zero risk is necessary for the modern ID environment, right? And this is integral to Dell powered service. And as part of that like you know, security starts with the supply chain. We already talked about the second component verification, which is a beneath feature that Dell platforms have. And on top of it we also have a silicon place platform mode of trust. So this is a key which is programmed into the silicon on the black service during manufacturing and can never be changed after. And this immutable key is what forms the anchor for creating the chain of trust that is used to verify everything in the platform from the hardware and software integrity to the boot, all pieces of it, right? In addition to that, we also have a host of data protection features. >>Whether it is protecting data at risk in news or inflight, we have self encrypting drives which provides scalable and flexible encryption options. And this couple with external key management provides really good protection for your data address. External key management is important because you know, somebody could physically steam the server walk away, but then the keys are not stored on the server, it stood separately. So that provides your action layer of security. And we also have dual layer encryption where you can compliment the hardware encryption on the secure encrypted drives with software level encryption. Inion to this we have identity and access management features like multifactor authentication, single sign on roles, scope and time based access controls, all of which are critical to enable that granular control and checks for zero trust approach. So I would say like, you know, if you look at the Dell feature set, it's pretty comprehensive and we also have the flexibility built in to meet the needs of all customers no matter where they fall in the spectrum of, you know, risk tolerance and security sensitivity. And we also have the capabilities to meet all the regulatory requirements and compliance requirements. So in a nutshell, I would say that you know, Dell Power Service cyber resident infrastructure helps accelerate zero tested option for customers. >>Got it. So you've really thought this through all the various things that that you would do to sort of make sure that your server infrastructure is secure, not compromised, that your supply chain is secure so that your customers can focus on some of the other things that they have to worry about, which are numerous. Thanks Deepak, appreciate you coming on the cube and participating in the program. >>Thank you for having >>You're welcome. In a moment I'll be back to dig into the networking portion of the infrastructure. Stay with us for more coverage of a blueprint for trusted infrastructure and collaboration with Dell Technologies on the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We're back with a blueprint for trusted infrastructure and partnership with Dell Technologies in the cube. And we're here with Mahesh Nager, who is a consultant in the area of networking product management at Dell Technologies. Mahesh, welcome, good to see you. >>Hey, good morning Dell's, nice to meet, meet to you as well. >>Hey, so we've been digging into all the parts of the infrastructure stack and now we're gonna look at the all important networking components. Mahesh, when we think about networking in today's environment, we think about the core data center and we're connecting out to various locations including the cloud and both the near and the far edge. So the question is from Dell's perspective, what's unique and challenging about securing network infrastructure that we should know about? >>Yeah, so few years ago IT security and an enterprise was primarily putting a wrapper around data center out because it was constrained to an infrastructure owned and operated by the enterprise for the most part. So putting a rapid around it like a parameter or a firewall was a sufficient response because you could basically control the environment and data small enough control today with the distributed data, intelligent software, different systems, multi-cloud environment and asset service delivery, you know, the infrastructure for the modern era changes the way to secure the network infrastructure In today's, you know, data driven world, it operates everywhere and data has created and accessed everywhere so far from, you know, the centralized monolithic data centers of the past. The biggest challenge is how do we build the network infrastructure of the modern era that are intelligent with automation enabling maximum flexibility and business agility without any compromise on the security. We believe that in this data era, the security transformation must accompany digital transformation. >>Yeah, that's very good. You talked about a couple of things there. Data by its very nature is distributed. There is no perimeter anymore, so you can't just, as you say, put a rapper around it. I like the way you phrase that. So when you think about cyber security resilience from a networking perspective, how do you define that? In other words, what are the basic principles that you adhere to when thinking about securing network infrastructure for your customers? >>So our belief is that cybersecurity and cybersecurity resilience, they need to be holistic, they need to be integrated, scalable, one that span the entire enterprise and with a co and objective and policy implementation. So cybersecurity needs to span across all the devices and running across any application, whether the application resets on the cloud or anywhere else in the infrastructure. From a networking standpoint, what does it mean? It's again, the same principles, right? You know, in order to prevent the threat actors from accessing changing best destroy or stealing sensitive data, this definition holds good for networking as well. So if you look at it from a networking perspective, it's the ability to protect from and withstand attacks on the networking systems as we continue to evolve. This will also include the ability to adapt and recover from these attacks, which is what cyber resilience aspect is all about. So cybersecurity best practices, as you know, is continuously changing the landscape primarily because the cyber threats also continue to evolve. >>Yeah, got it. So I like that. So it's gotta be integrated, it's gotta be scalable, it's gotta be comprehensive, comprehensive and adaptable. You're saying it can't be static, >>Right? Right. So I think, you know, you had a second part of a question, you know, that says what do we, you know, what are the basic principles? You know, when you think about securing network infrastructure, when you're looking at securing the network infrastructure, it revolves around core security capability of the devices that form the network. And what are these security capabilities? These are access control, software integrity and vulnerability response. When you look at access control, it's to ensure that only the authenticated users are able to access the platform and they're able to access only the kind of the assets that they're authorized to based on their user level. Now accessing a network platform like a switch or a rotor for example, is typically used for say, configuration and management of the networking switch. So user access is based on say roles for that matter in a role based access control, whether you are a security admin or a network admin or a storage admin. >>And it's imperative that logging is enable because any of the change to the configuration is actually logged and monitored as that. Talking about software's integrity, it's the ability to ensure that the software that's running on the system has not been compromised. And, and you know, this is important because it could actually, you know, get hold of the system and you know, you could get UND desire results in terms of say validation of the images. It's, it needs to be done through say digital signature. So, so it's important that when you're talking about say, software integrity, a, you are ensuring that the platform is not compromised, you know, is not compromised and be that any upgrades, you know, that happens to the platform is happening through say validated signature. >>Okay. And now, now you've now, so there's access control, software integrity, and I think you, you've got a third element which is i I think response, but please continue. >>Yeah, so you know, the third one is about civil notability. So we follow the same process that's been followed by the rest of the products within the Dell product family. That's to report or identify, you know, any kind of a vulnerability that's being addressed by the Dell product security incident response team. So the networking portfolio is no different, you know, it follows the same process for identification for tri and for resolution of these vulnerabilities. And these are addressed either through patches or through new reasons via networking software. >>Yeah, got it. Okay. So I mean, you didn't say zero trust, but when you were talking about access control, you're really talking about access to only those assets that people are authorized to access. I know zero trust sometimes is a buzzword, but, but you I think gave it, you know, some clarity there. Software integrity, it's about assurance validation, your digital signature you mentioned and, and that there's been no compromise. And then how you respond to incidents in a standard way that can fit into a security framework. So outstanding description, thank you for that. But then the next question is, how does Dell networking fit into the construct of what we've been talking about Dell trusted infrastructure? >>Okay, so networking is the key element in the Dell trusted infrastructure. It provides the interconnect between the service and the storage world. And you know, it's part of any data center configuration for a trusted infrastructure. The network needs to have access control in place where only the authorized nels are able to make change to the network configuration and logging off any of those changes is also done through the logging capabilities. Additionally, we should also ensure that the configuration should provide network isolation between say the management network and the data traffic network because they need to be separate and distinct from each other. And furthermore, even if you look at the data traffic network and now you have things like segmentation isolated segments and via VRF or, or some micro segmentation via partners, this allows various level of security for each of those segments. So it's important you know, that, that the network infrastructure has the ability, you know, to provide all this, this services from a Dell networking security perspective, right? >>You know, there are multiple layer of defense, you know, both at the edge and in the network in this hardware and in the software and essentially, you know, a set of rules and a configuration that's designed to sort of protect the integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of the network assets. So each network security layer, it implements policies and controls as I said, you know, including send network segmentation. We do have capabilities sources, centralized management automation and capability and scalability for that matter. Now you add all of these things, you know, with the open networking standards or software, different principles and you essentially, you know, reach to the point where you know, you're looking at zero trust network access, which is essentially sort of a building block for increased cloud adoption. If you look at say that you know the different pillars of a zero trust architecture, you know, if you look at the device aspect, you know, we do have support for security for example, we do have say trust platform in a trusted platform models tpms on certain offer products and you know, the physical security know plain, simple old one love port enable from a user trust perspective, we know it's all done via access control days via role based access control and say capability in order to provide say remote authentication or things like say sticky Mac or Mac learning limit and so on. >>If you look at say a transport and decision trust layer, these are essentially, you know, how do you access, you know, this switch, you know, is it by plain hotel net or is it like secure ssh, right? And you know, when a host communicates, you know, to the switch, we do have things like self-signed or is certificate authority based certification. And one of the important aspect is, you know, in terms of, you know, the routing protocol, the routing protocol, say for example BGP for example, we do have the capability to support MD five authentication between the b g peers so that there is no, you know, manages attack, you know, to the network where the routing table is compromised. And the other aspect is about second control plane is here, you know, you know, it's, it's typical that if you don't have a control plane here, you know, it could be flooded and you know, you know, the switch could be compromised by city denial service attacks. >>From an application test perspective, as I mentioned, you know, we do have, you know, the application specific security rules where you could actually define, you know, the specific security rules based on the specific applications, you know, that are running within the system. And I did talk about, say the digital signature and the cryptographic check that we do for authentication and for, I mean rather for the authenticity and the validation of, you know, of the image and the BS and so on and so forth. Finally, you know, the data trust, we are looking at, you know, the network separation, you know, the network separation could happen or VRF plain old wheel Ls, you know, which can bring about sales multi 10 aspects. We talk about some microsegmentation as it applies to nsx for example. The other aspect is, you know, we do have, with our own smart fabric services that's enabled in a fabric, we have a concept of c cluster security. So all of this, you know, the different pillars, they sort of make up for the zero trust infrastructure for the networking assets of an infrastructure. >>Yeah. So thank you for that. There's a, there's a lot to unpack there. You know, one of the premise, the premise really of this, this, this, this segment that we're setting up in this series is really that everything you just mentioned, or a lot of things you just mentioned used to be the responsibility of the security team. And, and the premise that we're putting forth is that because security teams are so stretched thin, you, you gotta shift the vendor community. Dell specifically is shifting a lot of those tasks to their own r and d and taking care of a lot of that. So, cuz scop teams got a lot of other stuff to, to worry about. So my question relates to things like automation, which can help and scalability, what about those topics as it relates to networking infrastructure? >>Okay, our >>Portfolio, it enables state of the automation software, you know, that enables simplifying of the design. So for example, we do have, you know, you know the fabric design center, you know, a tool that automates the design of the fabric and you know, from a deployment and you know, the management of the network infrastructure that are simplicities, you know, using like Ansible s for Sonic for example are, you know, for a better sit and tell story. You know, we do have smart fabric services that can automate the entire fabric, you know, for a storage solution or for, you know, for one of the workloads for example. Now we do help reduce the complexity by closely integrating the management of the physical and the virtual networking infrastructure. And again, you know, we have those capabilities using Sonic or Smart Traffic services. If you look at Sonic for example, right? >>It delivers automated intent based secure containerized network and it has the ability to provide some network visibility and Avan has and, and all of these things are actually valid, you know, for a modern networking infrastructure. So now if you look at Sonic, you know, it's, you know, the usage of those tools, you know, that are available, you know, within the Sonic no is not restricted, you know, just to the data center infrastructure is, it's a unified no, you know, that's well applicable beyond the data center, you know, right up to the edge. Now if you look at our north from a smart traffic OS 10 perspective, you know, as I mentioned, we do have smart traffic services which essentially, you know, simplifies the deployment day zero, I mean rather day one, day two deployment expansion plans and the lifecycle management of our conversion infrastructure and hyper and hyper conversion infrastructure solutions. And finally, in order to enable say, zero touch deployment, we do have, you know, a VP solution with our SD van capability. So these are, you know, ways by which we bring down the complexity by, you know, enhancing the automation capability using, you know, a singular loss that can expand from a data center now right to the edge. >>Great, thank you for that. Last question real quick, just pitch me, what can you summarize from your point of view, what's the strength of the Dell networking portfolio? >>Okay, so from a Dell networking portfolio, we support capabilities at multiple layers. As I mentioned, we're talking about the physical security for examples, say disabling of the unused interface. Sticky Mac and trusted platform modules are the things that to go after. And when you're talking about say secure boot for example, it delivers the authenticity and the integrity of the OS 10 images at the startup. And Secure Boot also protects the startup configuration so that, you know, the startup configuration file is not compromised. And Secure port also enables the workload of prediction, for example, that is at another aspect of software image integrity validation, you know, wherein the image is data for the digital signature, you know, prior to any upgrade process. And if you are looking at secure access control, we do have things like role based access control, SSH to the switches, control plane access control that pre do tags and say access control from multifactor authentication. >>We do have various tech ads for entry control to the network and things like CSE and PRV support, you know, from a federal perspective we do have say logging wherein, you know, any event, any auditing capabilities can be possible by say looking at the clog service, you know, which are pretty much in our transmitter from the devices overts for example, and last we talked about say network segment, you know, say network separation and you know, these, you know, separation, you know, ensures that are, that is, you know, a contained say segment, you know, for a specific purpose or for the specific zone and, you know, just can be implemented by a, a micro segmentation, you know, just a plain old wheel or using virtual route of framework VR for example. >>A lot there. I mean I think frankly, you know, my takeaway is you guys do the heavy lifting in a very complicated topic. So thank you so much for, for coming on the cube and explaining that in in quite some depth. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you indeed. >>Oh, you're very welcome. Okay, in a moment I'll be back to dig into the hyper-converged infrastructure part of the portfolio and look at how when you enter the world of software defined where you're controlling servers and storage and networks via software led system, you could be sure that your infrastructure is trusted and secure. You're watching a blueprint for trusted infrastructure made possible by Dell Technologies and collaboration with the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, your own west product management security lead at for HCI at Dell Technologies hyper-converged infrastructure. Jerome, welcome. >>Thank you Dave. >>Hey Jerome, in this series of blueprint for trusted infrastructure, we've been digging into the different parts of the infrastructure stack, including storage servers and networking, and now we want to cover hyperconverged infrastructure. So my first question is, what's unique about HCI that presents specific security challenges? What do we need to know? >>So what's unique about hyper-converge infrastructure is the breadth of the security challenge. We can't simply focus on a single type of IT system. So like a server or storage system or a virtualization piece of software, software. I mean HCI is all of those things. So luckily we have excellent partners like VMware, Microsoft, and internal partners like the Dell Power Edge team, the Dell storage team, the Dell networking team, and on and on. These partnerships in these collaborations are what make us successful from a security standpoint. So let me give you an example to illustrate. In the recent past we're seeing growing scope and sophistication in supply chain attacks. This mean an attacker is going to attack your software supply chain upstream so that hopefully a piece of code, malicious code that wasn't identified early in the software supply chain is distributed like a large player, like a VMware or Microsoft or a Dell. So to confront this kind of sophisticated hard to defeat problem, we need short term solutions and we need long term solutions as well. >>So for the short term solution, the obvious thing to do is to patch the vulnerability. The complexity is for our HCI portfolio. We build our software on VMware, so we would have to consume a patch that VMware would produce and provide it to our customers in a timely manner. Luckily VX rail's engineering team has co engineered a release process with VMware that significantly shortens our development life cycle so that VMware would produce a patch and within 14 days we will integrate our own code with the VMware release we will have tested and validated the update and we will give an update to our customers within 14 days of that VMware release. That as a result of this kind of rapid development process, VHA had over 40 releases of software updates last year for a longer term solution. We're partnering with VMware and others to develop a software bill of materials. We work with VMware to consume their software manifest, including their upstream vendors and their open source providers to have a comprehensive list of software components. Then we aren't caught off guard by an unforeseen vulnerability and we're more able to easily detect where the software problem lies so that we can quickly address it. So these are the kind of relationships and solutions that we can co engineer with effective collaborations with our, with our partners. >>Great, thank you for that. That description. So if I had to define what cybersecurity resilience means to HCI or converged infrastructure, and to me my takeaway was you gotta have a short term instant patch solution and then you gotta do an integration in a very short time, you know, two weeks to then have that integration done. And then longer term you have to have a software bill of materials so that you can ensure the providence of all the components help us. Is that a right way to think about cybersecurity resilience? Do you have, you know, a additives to that definition? >>I do. I really think that's site cybersecurity and resilience for hci because like I said, it has sort of unprecedented breadth across our portfolio. It's not a single thing, it's a bit of everything. So really the strength or the secret sauce is to combine all the solutions that our partner develops while integrating them with our own layer. So let me, let me give you an example. So hci, it's a, basically taking a software abstraction of hardware functionality and implementing it into something called the virtualized layer. It's basically the virtual virtualizing hardware functionality, like say a storage controller, you could implement it in hardware, but for hci, for example, in our VX rail portfolio, we, our Vxl product, we integrated it into a product called vsan, which is provided by our partner VMware. So that portfolio of strength is still, you know, through our, through our partnerships. >>So what we do, we integrate these, these security functionality and features in into our product. So our partnership grows to our ecosystem through products like VMware, products like nsx, Horizon, Carbon Black and vSphere. All of them integrate seamlessly with VMware and we also leverage VMware's software, part software partnerships on top of that. So for example, VX supports multifactor authentication through vSphere integration with something called Active Directory Federation services for adfs. So there's a lot of providers that support adfs including Microsoft Azure. So now we can support a wide array of identity providers such as Off Zero or I mentioned Azure or Active Directory through that partnership. So we can leverage all of our partners partnerships as well. So there's sort of a second layer. So being able to secure all of that, that provides a lot of options and flexibility for our customers. So basically to summarize my my answer, we consume all of the security advantages of our partners, but we also expand on them to make a product that is comprehensively secured at multiple layers from the hardware layer that's provided by Dell through Power Edge to the hyper-converged software that we build ourselves to the virtualization layer that we get through our partnerships with Microsoft and VMware. >>Great, I mean that's super helpful. You've mentioned nsx, Horizon, Carbon Black, all the, you know, the VMware component OTH zero, which the developers are gonna love. You got Azure identity, so it's really an ecosystem. So you may have actually answered my next question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway cuz you've got this software defined environment and you're managing servers and networking and storage with this software led approach, how do you ensure that the entire system is secure end to end? >>That's a really great question. So the, the answer is we do testing and validation as part of the engineering process. It's not just bolted on at the end. So when we do, for example, VxRail is the market's only co engineered solution with VMware, other vendors sell VMware as a hyper converged solution, but we actually include security as part of the co-engineering process with VMware. So it's considered when VMware builds their code and their process dovetails with ours because we have a secure development life cycle, which other products might talk about in their discussions with you that we integrate into our engineering life cycle. So because we follow the same framework, all of the, all of the codes should interoperate from a security standpoint. And so when we do our final validation testing when we do a software release, we're already halfway there in ensuring that all these features will give the customers what we promised. >>That's great. All right, let's, let's close pitch me, what would you say is the strong suit summarize the, the strengths of the Dell hyper-converged infrastructure and converged infrastructure portfolio specifically from a security perspective? Jerome? >>So I talked about how hyper hyper-converged infrastructure simplifies security management because basically you're gonna take all of these features that are abstracted in in hardware, they're now abstracted in the virtualization layer. Now you can manage them from a single point of view, whether it would be, say, you know, in for VX rail would be b be center, for example. So by abstracting all this, you make it very easy to manage security and highly flexible because now you don't have limitations around a single vendor. You have a multiple array of choices and partnerships to select. So I would say that is the, the key to making it to hci. Now, what makes Dell the market leader in HCI is not only do we have that functionality, but we also make it exceptionally useful to you because it's co engineered, it's not bolted on. So I gave the example of spo, I gave the example of how we, we modify our software release process with VMware to make it very responsive. >>A couple of other features that we have specific just to HCI are digitally signed LCM updates. This is an example of a feature that we have that's only exclusive to Dell that's not done through a partnership. So we digitally signed our software updates so the user can be sure that the, the update that they're installing into their system is an authentic and unmodified product. So we give it a Dell signature that's invalidated prior to installation. So not only do we consume the features that others develop in a seamless and fully validated way, but we also bolt on our own a specific HCI security features that work with all the other partnerships and give the user an exceptional security experience. So for, for example, the benefit to the customer is you don't have to create a complicated security framework that's hard for your users to use and it's hard for your system administrators to manage it all comes in a package. So it, it can be all managed through vCenter, for example, or, and then the specific hyper, hyper-converged functions can be managed through VxRail manager or through STDC manager. So there's very few pains of glass that the, the administrator or user ever has to worry about. It's all self contained and manageable. >>That makes a lot of sense. So you've got your own infrastructure, you're applying your best practices to that, like the digital signatures, you've got your ecosystem, you're doing co-engineering with the ecosystems, delivering security in a package, minimizing the complexity at the infrastructure level. The reason Jerome, this is so important is because SecOps teams, you know, they gotta deal with cloud security, they gotta deal with multiple clouds. Now they have their shared responsibility model going across multiple cl. They got all this other stuff that they have to worry, they gotta secure the containers and the run time and and, and, and, and the platform and so forth. So they're being asked to do other things. If they have to worry about all the things that you just mentioned, they'll never get, you know, the, the securities is gonna get worse. So what my takeaway is, you're removing that infrastructure piece and saying, Okay guys, you now can focus on those other things that is not necessarily Dell's, you know, domain, but you, you know, you can work with other partners to and your own teams to really nail that. Is that a fair summary? >>I think that is a fair summary because absolutely the worst thing you can do from a security perspective is provide a feature that's so unusable that the administrator disables it or other key security features. So when I work with my partners to define, to define and develop a new security feature, the thing I keep foremost in mind is, will this be something our users want to use and our administrators want to administer? Because if it's not, if it's something that's too difficult or onerous or complex, then I try to find ways to make it more user friendly and practical. And this is a challenge sometimes because we are, our products operate in highly regulated environments and sometimes they have to have certain rules and certain configurations that aren't the most user friendly or management friendly. So I, I put a lot of effort into thinking about how can we make this feature useful while still complying with all the regulations that we have to comply with. And by the way, we're very successful in a highly regulated space. We sell a lot of VxRail, for example, into the Department of Defense and banks and, and other highly regulated environments and we're very successful there. >>Excellent. Okay, Jerome, thanks. We're gonna leave it there for now. I'd love to have you back to talk about the progress that you're making down the road. Things always, you know, advance in the tech industry and so would appreciate that. >>I would look forward to it. Thank you very much, Dave. >>You're really welcome. In a moment I'll be back to summarize the program and offer some resources that can help you on your journey to secure your enterprise infrastructure. I wanna thank our guests for their contributions in helping us understand how investments by a company like Dell can both reduce the need for dev sec up teams to worry about some of the more fundamental security issues around infrastructure and have greater confidence in the quality providence and data protection designed in to core infrastructure like servers, storage, networking, and hyper-converged systems. You know, at the end of the day, whether your workloads are in the cloud, on prem or at the edge, you are responsible for your own security. But vendor r and d and vendor process must play an important role in easing the burden faced by security devs and operation teams. And on behalf of the cube production content and social teams as well as Dell Technologies, we want to thank you for watching a blueprint for trusted infrastructure. Remember part one of this series as well as all the videos associated with this program and of course today's program are available on demand@thecube.net with additional coverage@siliconangle.com. And you can go to dell.com/security solutions dell.com/security solutions to learn more about Dell's approach to securing infrastructure. And there's tons of additional resources that can help you on your journey. This is Dave Valante for the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> We're back with a Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure in partnership with Dell Technologies and theCUBE. And we're here with Mahesh Nagarathnam who is a consultant in the area of networking product management at Dell technologies. Mahesh, welcome, good to see you. >> Hey, good morning, Dave. It's nice to meet you as well. >> Hey, so we've been digging into all the parts of the infrastructure stack, and now we're going to look at the all important networking components. Mahesh, when we think about networking in today's environment, we think about the core data center and we're connecting out to various locations including the cloud and both the near and the far edge. So the question is from Dell's perspective what's unique and challenging about securing network infrastructure that we should know about? >> Yeah, so a few years ago, IT security in an enterprise was primarily putting a wrapper around the data center because IT was constrained to an infrastructure owned and operated by the enterprise for the most part. So putting a wrapper around it like a perimeter or a firewall was a sufficient response because you could basically control the enormous data into small enough control. Today, with the distributed data intelligent software different systems, multi-cloud environment and asset service delivery. The infrastructure for the modern era changes the way to secure the network infrastructure. In today's data driven world, IT operates everywhere and data is created and accessed everywhere. So far from the centralized mono data centers of the past. The biggest challenge is how do we build the network infrastructure of the modern era that are intelligent, with automation, enabling maximum flexibility and business agility without any compromise on the security. We believe that in this data era, the security transformation must accompany digital transformation. >> Yeah, that's very good. You talked about a couple of things there. Data by its very nature is distributed, there is no perimeter anymore. So you can't just, as you say, put a wrapper around it, I like the way you phrase that. So when you think about cyber security resilience from a networking perspective, how do you define that? In other words, what are the basic principles that you adhere to when thinking about securing network infrastructure for your customers? >> So our belief is that cybersecurity and cybersecurity resilience, they need to be holistic. They need to be integrated, scalable, one that spans the enterprise and with a consistent and objective and policy implementation. So cybersecurity needs to span across all the devices and running across any application whether the application resets on the cloud or anywhere else in the infrastructure. From a networking standpoint, what does it mean? It's again, the same principles. In order to prevent the threat actors from accessing, changing, destroying or stealing sensitive data, this definition holds good for networking as well. So if you look at it from a networking perspective it's the ability to protect from and withstand attacks on the networking systems. As we continue to evolve, this will also include the ability to adapt and recover from these attacks which is what cyber resilience aspect is all about. So cybersecurity, best practices as you know is continuously changing the landscape primarily because the cyber threats also continue to evolve. >> Yeah, got it. I like that. So, it's got to be integrated. It's got to be scalable. It's got to be comprehensive and adaptable. You're saying it can't be static. >> Right. So I think, you had a second part of the question that says, what are the basic principles when you're thinking about securing network infrastructure. When you are looking at securing the network infrastructure it revolves around core security capability of the devices that form the network. And what are these security capabilities? These are access control, software integrity and vulnerability response. When you look at access control it's to ensure that only the authenticated users are able to access the platform and they're able to access only the kind of the assets that they're authorized to, based on their user level. Now accessing a network platform like a switch or a router, for example, is typically used for configuration and management of the networking switch. So user access is based on roles for that matter role based access control, whether you are security admin or a network admin or a storage admin. And it's imperative that logging is enabled because any of the change to the configuration is actually logged and monitored as well. When we're talking about software's integrity, it's the ability to ensure that the software that's running on the system has not been compromised. And this is important because it could actually get hold of the system and you could get undesired results. In terms of validation of the images, it needs to be done through digital signature. So it's important that when you're talking about software integrity, A, you are ensuring that the platform is not compromised and B, that any upgrades that happens to the platform is happening through validated signature. >> Okay. And now you've, so there's access control, software integrity and I think you got a third element, which is, I think response, but please continue. >> Yeah. So, the third one about vulnerability. So we follow the same process that's been followed by the rest of the products within the Dell Product family that's to report or identify any kind of vulnerability that's being addressed by the Dell Product Security Incident Response Team. So the networking portfolio is no different. It follows the same process for identification for triage and for resolution of these vulnerabilities. And this address either through patches or through new resource via networking software. >> Yeah, got it. I mean, you didn't say zero trust but when you were talking about access control you're really talking about access to only those assets that people are authorized to access. I know zero trust sometimes is a buzzword, but you, I think gave it some clarity there. Software integrity, it's about assurance, validation, your digital signature, you mentioned, and that there's been no compromise. And then how you respond to incidents in a standard way that can fit into a security framework. So outstanding description. Thank you for that. But then the next question is how does Dell Networking fit into the construct of what we've been talking about, Dell Trusted Infrastructure? >> So networking is the key element in the Dell Trusted Infrastructure. It provides the interconnect between the server and the storage world and it's part of any data center configuration. For a trusted infrastructure, the network needs to have access control in place where only the authorized personals are able to make change to the network configuration and logging of any of those changes is also done through the logging capabilities. Additionally, we should also ensure that the configuration should provide network isolation between the management network and the data traffic network because they need to be separate and distinct from each other. And furthermore, even if you look at the data traffic network, you have things like segmentation, isolated segments and via VRFs or micro-segmentation via partners. This allows various level of security for each of those segments. So it's important that the network infrastructure has the ability to provide all these services. From a Dell networking security perspective, there are multiple layers of defense, both at the edge and in the network, in the hardware and in the software. And essentially, a set of rules and a configuration that's designed to sort of protect the integrity, confidentiality and accessibility of the network assets. So each network security layer, it implements policies and controls, as I said, including network segmentation, we do have capabilities, resources, centralized management, automation, and capability and scalability for that matter. Now you add all of these things with the open networking standards or software different principles, and you essentially reach to the point where you're looking at zero trust network access which is essentially sort of a building block for increased cloud adoption. If you look at the different pillars of a zero touch architecture, if you look at the device aspect, we do have support for secure boot, for example, we do have trusted platform, trusted platform models, TPMs on certain offer products. And the physical security, plain simple old WLAN port enable disable. From a user trust perspective, we know it's all done via access control base via role based access control and capability in order to provide remote authentication or things like sticky MAC or MAC learning limit and so on. If you look at a transport and a session trust layer, these are essentially, how do you access this switch. Is it by plain old Telnet, or is it like secure SSH. And when a host communicates to the switch, we do have things like self-signed or a certificate authority based certification. And one of the important aspect is, in terms of the routing protocol the routing protocol, for example, BGP, for example, we do have the capability to support MD5 authentication between the BGP peers so that there is no malicious attack to the network where the routing table is compromised. And the other aspect is about control plain ESL. It's typical that if you don't have a control plane Azure, it could be flooded and the switch could be compromised by denial of service attacks. From an application test perspective, as I mentioned, we do have the application specific security rules where you could actually define the specific security rules based on the specific applications that are running within the system. And I did talk about the digital signature and the cryptographic checks and that we do for authentication and, I mean rather for the authenticity and the validation of the image and the boundary and so on and so forth. Finally the data trust, we are looking at the network separation. The network separation could happen over VRF, plain old VLANs which can bring about multitenancy aspects. We talk about micro-segmentation as it applies to NSX, for example. The other aspect is we do have with our own smart fabric services, that's enabled in a fabric, we have a concept of cluster security. So all of this, the different pillars, they sort of make up for the zero trust infrastructure for the networking assets of an infrastructure. >> Yeah, so thank you for that. There's a lot to unpack there. One of the premise, the premise really this segment that we're setting up in this series, is really that everything you just mentioned, or a lot of things you just mentioned used to be the responsibility of the security team and the premise that we're putting forth is that because security teams are so stretched thin, you got to shift a vendor community, Dell specifically is shifting a lot of those tasks to their own R&D and taking care of a lot of that. 'cause SecOps teams got a lot of other stuff to worry about. So my question relates to things like automation which can help and scalability. What about those topics as it relates to networking infrastructure? >> Our portfolio, it enables state of the automation software that enables simplifying of the design. So for example, we do have the fabric design center, a tool that automates the design of the entire fabric and from a deployment and the management of the network infrastructure, there are simplicities using like Ansible playbooks for SONiC, for example. Or for a better storage, we do have smart fabric services that can automate the entire fabric for a storage solution or for one of the workloads, for example. Now we do help reduce the complexity by closely integrating the management of the physical and the virtual networking infrastructure. And again, we have those capabilities using SONiC or smart traffic services. If you look at SONiC for example, it delivers automated intent based secure containerized network. And it has the ability to provide network visibility and awareness and of these things are actually valid for a modern networking infrastructure. So now if you look at SONiC, the usage of those tools that are available within the SONiC NAS is not restricted just to the data center infrastructure, it's a unified NAS that's well applicable beyond the data center, right up to the edge. Now, if you look at our NAS from a smart traffic OS10 perspective, as I mentioned, we do have smart traffic services, which essentially simplifies the deployment, day one day two deployment expansion plans and the life cycle management of our converged infrastructure and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions. And finally, in order to enable zero touch deployment, we do have a VEP solution with our SD-WAN capability. So these are in a ways by which we bring down the complexity by enhancing the automation capability using a singular NAS that can expand from a data center now, right to the edge. >> Great, thank you for that. Last question real quick. Pitch me, can you summarize from your point of view what's the strength of the Dell networking portfolio? >> So from a Dell networking portfolio we support the capabilities at multiple layers, as I mentioned. We've talking about the physical security, for example, let's say disabling of the unused interface, sticky MAC and trusted platform modules are the things that to go after. And when you're talking about secure boot, for example, it delivers the authenticity and the integrity of the OS10 images at the startup. And secure boot also protects the startup configuration so that the startup configuration file is not compromised. And secure boot also enables the bootloader protection, for example. That is at another aspect of software image, integrity validation, wherein the image is validated for the digital signature prior to any upgrade process. And if you are looking at secure access control we do have things like role-based access control, SSH to the switches, control plane, access control, that pre-onset attacks and access control through multifactor authentication. We do have Radius Tech ads for entry control to the network and things like CSE and PRV support from a federal perspective. We do have logging wherein any event, any auditing capabilities can be possible by looking at the syslog servers which are pretty much in our transmitter from the devices ORTS, for example. And last we talked about network separation. And this separation ensures that that is a contained segment for a specific purpose or for the specific zone. And this can be implemented by a micro-segmentation, just a plain old WLAN or using virtual route of framework VRF, for example. >> A lot there. I mean, I think frankly, my takeaway is you guys do the heavy lifting in a very complicated topic. So thank you so much for coming on theCUBE and explaining that in quite some depth. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Oh, you're very welcome. Okay in a moment, I'll be back to dig into the hyperconverged infrastructure part of the portfolio, and look at how, when you enter the world of software defined where you're controlling servers and storage and networks via software led system, you could be sure that your infrastructure is trusted and secure. You're watching a Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure made possible by Dell technologies and collaboration with theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (soft upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Yukon and Cloud. Native Con North America. 2020. Virtual Brought to You by Red Hat, The Cloud, Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the Cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios with our ongoing coverage of Q. Khan Cloud, Native Con 2020 North America. Of course, it's virtual like everything else is in 2020 but we're excited to be back. It's a terrific show, and we're excited our next guest. So let's introduce him. And we've got Sam Warner, the VP of offering manager and business line executive for storage for IBM. Sam. Great to see you. >>Great to be here. >>And also joining us is Brent Compton. He's a senior director of data services for Redhead. Great. See you, Brent. >>Thank you. >>So let's let's jump into it. Cloud Native. Everything's about cloud native. Everything's about containers. Everything is about kind of container ization and flexibility. But then there's this thing in the back and called storage. We actually have toe keep this stuff and record this stuff and have data protection for this stuff in business resiliency love to jump into it, so lets you know where does storage fit within a container world? And how is the growth of containers and the adoption containers really had you rethink the way that you think about storage and how clients you think about stories saying, Let's start with you >>e mean, it's a great question. And first off, I'm really excited about another cube con. Uh, we did Europe now, uh, doing North America so very excited to be, you know, seeing all the you know, all the news and all the people talking about the advancements around kubernetes. And we're very excited about it now. You asked a very good question. Important question. We're seeing an acceleration of digital transformation, and the people that are going through this digital transformation are using containers to now modernize the rest of their infrastructure. The interesting thing about it, though, is those initiatives are being driven out of the application teams. The business lines in an organization, and a lot of them don't understand that there's a lot of complexity to this storage piece here. So the storage teams I talked to are all of a sudden getting these initiatives thrown on them or a kind of halfway their strategy. And they're scratching their heads, trying to figure out now how they can support these applications with persistent storage. Because that's not where containers started. They started with micro services, and now now they're in a quandary. They have to deliver a certain S L. A to their customers, and they're trying to figure out how they do it in this new environment, which in a lot of cases, has been designed outside of their scope. So they're seeing issues with data protection. Some of the kind of core things that they've been dealing with for years are now. They're now having to solve all over again. So that's what we're working on helping them with reinventing how storage is deployed to help them deliver the same level of security, availability and everything they have in the past. Uh, in these new environments, >>right? So, yeah, e say you've been involved in this for a long time. You know, you've worked in hyper converge. You've worked in big data. You know, the evolution of big data continues to change, as ultimately we want to get people the information to make good decisions, but we've gone through a lot of integrations over the years. So how is it different? You know? Now how is it different with containers? What can we finally do you as a as an architect that we couldn't do before? >>Infrastructure is code. That's, I think, one of the fundamental differences of the storage admin of yesteryear versus storage admin of today today, Azaz Sam mentioned As people are developing and deploying applications, those applications need to dynamically provisioned the infrastructure dynamically provisioned what they need from compute dynamically provisioned what they need from storage dynamically provisioned network paths and so that that that element of infrastructure is code. A dynamically provisioned infrastructure is very different from well from yesterday, when applications or teams needed to. Well, when they needed storage, they would you know, they would file a ticket and typically wait. Now they make an a p A. Now they make an A p. I call and storage is dynamically provisioned and provided to their application. >>But what what I think hard to understand for the layman. And maybe it's just me, right? I It's very easy to understand dynamic infrastructure around, um compute right, I'm Pepsi. I'm running it out for the Super Bowl. I need I know how much people are gonna hit by hit my site and it's kind of easy to understand. Dynamic provisioning around networking again for the same example. What's less easy to understand its dynamic provisioning for storage? It's one thing to say, you know, there's a there's a pool of storage resource is that I'm going to dynamically provisioned for this particular after this particular moment. But one of the whole things about the dynamic is not only is it available when you need it, but I could make it big, and conversely, I could make it smaller go away. I get that for servers, and I kind of get that for networking, supporting an application and that example I just talked about. But we can't It doesn't go away a lot of the time for storage, right? That's important data that's maybe feeding another process. There's all kinds of rules and regulations, So when you talk about dynamic infrastructure for storage, it makes a lot of sense for grabbing some to provision for some new application. But it's >>hard to >>understand in terms of true dynamics in terms of either scaling down or scaling up or turning off when I don't particularly need that much capacity or even that application right now, how does it work within storage versus No, just servers or I'm grabbing them and then I'm putting it back in the pool. >>Let me start on this one, and then I'm gonna hand it off to Brent. Um, you know, let's not forget, by the way, that enterprises have very significant investments in infrastructure and they're able to deliver six nines of availability on their storage. And they have d are worked out in all of their security, encryption, everything. It's already in place, and they're sure that they can deliver on their SLS. So they want to start with that. You have to leverage that investment. So first of all, you have to figure out how to automate that into the environment, that existing sand, and that's where things like uh, a P I s the container storage interface CS I drivers come in. IBM provides that across your entire portfolio, allowing you to integrate your storage into a kubernetes environment into an open shipped environment so that it can be automated, but you have to go beyond that and be able to extend that environment, then into other infrastructure, for example, into a public cloud. So with the IBM flash system, family with our spectrum virtualized software were actually able to deploy that storage layer not only on Prem on our award winning a race, but we can also do it in the cloud. So we allow you to take your existing infrastructure investments and integrate that into your communities environment and using things like danceable, fully automated environment. I'll get into data protection before we're done talking. But I do want Brent to talk a bit about how container native storage comes into that next as well. On how you can start building out new environments for, uh, for your applications. >>Yeah, What the two of you are alluding to is effectively kubernetes services layer, which is not storage. It consumes storage from the infrastructure, Assam said. Just because people deploy Kubernetes cluster doesn't mean that they go out and get an entirely new infrastructure for that. If they're deploying their kubernetes cluster on premises, they have servers. If they're deploying their kubernetes cluster on AWS or an azure on G C P. They have infrastructure there. Uh, what the two of you are alluding to is that services layer, which is independent of storage that can dynamically provisioned, provide data protection services. As I mentioned, we have good stuff to talk about their relative to data protection services for kubernetes clusters. But that's it's the abstraction layer or data services layer that sits on top of storage, which is different. So the basics of storage underneath in the infrastructure, you know, remain the same, Jeff. But the how that storage is provisioned and this abstraction layer of services which sits on top of the storage storage might be IBM flash system array storage, maybe E m c sand storage, maybe a W S E B s. That's the storage infrastructure. But this abstraction layer that sits on top this data services layer is what allows for the dynamic interaction of applications with the underlying storage infrastructure. >>And then again, just for people that aren't completely tuned in, Then what's the benefit to the application developer provider distributor with that type of an infrastructure behind And what can they do that they just couldn't do before? >>Well, I mean Look, we're, uh, e I mean, we're trying to solve the same problem over and over again, right? It's always about helping application developers build applications more quickly helps them be more agile. I t is always trying to keep up with the application developer and always struggles to. In fact, that's where the emergency cloud really came from. Just trying to keep up with the developer eso by giving them that automation. It gives them the ability to provision storage in real time, of course, without having open a ticket like friends said. But really, the Holy Grail here is getting to a developed once and deploy anywhere model. That's what they're trying to get to. So having an automated storage layer allows them to do that and ensure that they have access to storage and data, no matter where their application gets it >>right, Right, that pesky little detail. When I have to develop that up, it does have to sit somewhere and and I don't think storage really has gotten enough of of the bright light, really in kind of this app centric, developer centric world, we talk all the time about having compute available and and software defined networking. But you know, having this software defined storage that lives comfortably in this container world is pretty is pretty interesting. In a great development, I want to shift gears a >>little bit. Just one thing. Go >>ahead, >>plus one to Sam's comments. There all the application developer wants, they want an A P I and they want the same a p I to provision the storage regardless of where their app is running. The rest of the details they usually don't care about. Sure. They wanted to perform what not give him an A p I and make it the same regardless of where they're running the app. >>Because not only do they want to perform, they probably just presume performance, right? I mean, that's the other thing is that the best in class quickly becomes presumed baseline in a very short short period of time. So you've got to just you just got to just deliver the goods, right? They're gonna get frustrated and not be productive. But I wanted to shift gears up a little bit and talk about some of the macro trends. Right? We're here towards the end of 2020. Obviously, Cove It had a huge impact on business and a lot of different ways. And it's really evolved from March, this light switch moment. Everybody work from home, too. Now, this kind of extended time, that's probably gonna go on for a while. I'm just curious some of the things that you've seen with your customers not so much at the beginning, because that was that was a special and short period of time. But mawr, as we've extended and and are looking to, um, probably extended this for a while, you know, What is the impact of this increased work from home increase attack surface? You know, some of these macro things that we're seeing that cove it has caused and any other kind of macro trends beyond just this container ization that you guys were seeing impacting your world. Start with you, Sam. >>You know, I don't think it's actually changed what people were going to do or the strategy. What I've seen it do is accelerate things and maybe changed the way they're getting their, uh and so they're actually a lot of enterprises were running into challenges more quickly than they thought they would. And so they're coming to us and asking us to help them. Saw them, for example, backing up their data and these container environments as you move mission critical applications that maybe we're gonna move more slowly. They're realizing that as they've moved them, they can't get the level of data protection they need. And that's why actually we just announced it at the end of October. Updates to our modern data protection portfolio. It now is containerized. It could be deployed very easily in an automated fashion, but on top of that, it integrates down into the A P. I layer down into CSE drivers and allows you to do container where snapshots of your applications so you could do operational recovery. If there's some sort of an event you can recover from that you can do D R. And you can even use it for data migration. So we're helping them accelerate. So the biggest I think requests I'm getting from our customers, and how can you help us accelerate? And how can you help us fix these problems that we went running into as we tried to accelerate our digital transformation? >>Brent, Anyone that you wanna highlight? >>Mm. Okay. Ironically, one of my team was just speaking with one of the cruise lines, um, two days ago. We all know what's happened them. So if we just use them as an example, I'm clearly our customers need to do things differently now. So plus one to Sam's statement about acceleration on I would add another word to that which is agility, you know, frankly, they're having to do things in ways they never envisioned 10 months ago. So there need to cut cycle times to deploy effectively new ways of how they transact business has resulted in accelerated poll for these types of infrastructure is code technologies. >>That's great. The one that jumped in my mind. Sam, is you were talking. We've we've had a lot of conversations. Obvious security always comes up on baking security and is is a theme. But ransomware as a specific type of security threat and the fact that these guys not only wanna lock up your data, but they want to go in and find the backup copies and and you know and really mess you up so it sounds like that's even more important to have the safe. And we're hearing, you know, all these conversations about air gaps and dynamic air gaps and, you know, can we get air gaps and some of these infrastructure set up so that we can, you know, put put those backups? Um, and recovery data sets in a safe place so that if we have a ransomware issue, getting back online is a really, really important thing, and it seems to just be increasing every day. We're seeing things, you know, if you can actually break the law sometimes if you if you pay the ransom because where these people operate, there's all kind of weird stuff that's coming out of. Ransomware is a very specific, you know, kind of type of security threat that even elevates, you know, kind of business continuity and resiliency on a whole nother level for this one particular risk factor. When if you're seeing some of that as well, >>it's a great point. In fact, it's clearly an industry that was resilient to a pandemic because we've seen it increase things. Is organized crime at this point, right? This isn't the old days of hackers, you know, playing around this is organized crime and it is accelerating. And that's one thing. I'm really glad you brought up. It's an area we've been really focused on across our whole portfolio. Of course, IBM tape offers the best most of the actual riel air gapping, physical air gapping We could take a cartridge offline. But beyond that we offer you the ability to dio you know, different types of logical air gaps, whether it's to a cloud we support. In fact, we just announced Now the spectrum protect. We have support for Google Cloud. We already supported AWS Azure IBM Cloud. So we give you the ability to do logical air gapping off to those different cloud environments. We give you the ability to use worm capability so you can put your backups in a vault that can't be changed. So we give you lots of different ways to do it. In our high end enterprise storage, we offer something called Safeguarded copy where we'll actually take data off line that could be recovered almost instantly. Something very unique to our storage that gives you, for the most mission critical applications. The fastest path recovery. One of things we've seen is some of our customers have done a great job creating a copy. But when the event actually happens, they find is gonna take too long to recover the data and they end up having to pay the ransom anyway. So you really have to think through an Indian strategy on we're able to help customers do a kind of health checks of their environment and figure out the right strategy. We have some offerings to help come in and do that for our customers. >>Shift gears a little bit, uh, were unanswerable fest earlier this year and a lot of talk about automation. Obviously, answer was part of the Red Hat family, which is part of the IBM family. But, you know, we're seeing Mawr and Mawr conversations about automation about, you know, moving the mundane and the air prone and all the things that we shouldn't be doing as people and letting people doom or high value stuff. When if you could talk a little bit about the role of automation, that the kind of development of automation and how you're seeing that, you know, impact your deployments, >>right? You want to take that one first? >>Yeah, sure. Um, s o the first is, um when you think about individual kubernetes clusters. There's a level of automation that's required there. I mean, that's the fundamental. I mean, back to the infrastructure is code that's inherently. That's automation. To effectively declare the state of what you want your application, your cluster to be, and that's the essence of kubernetes. You declare what the state is, and then you pass that declaration to kubernetes, and it makes it so. So there's the kubernetes level automation. But then there's, You know what happens for larger enterprises when you have, you know, tens or hundreds of kubernetes clusters. Eso That's an area of Jeff you mentioned answerable. Now that's an area of with, you know, the work, the red hats doing the community for multi cluster management, actually in the community and together with IBM for automating the management of multiple clusters. And last thing I'll touch on here is that's particularly important as you go to the edge. I mean, this is all well and good when you're talking about, you know, safe raised floor data center environments. But what happens when you're tens or hundreds or even thousands of kubernetes clusters are running in an oil field somewhere? Automation becomes not only nice to have, but it's fundamental to the operation. >>Yeah, but let me just add onto that real quick. You know, it's funny, because actually, in this cove it era, you're starting to see that same requirement in the data center in the core data center. In fact, I would say that because there's less bodies now in the data center, more people working remotely. The automation in need for automation is actually actually accelerating as well. So I think what you said is actually true for the core data center now as well, >>right? So I wanna give you guys the last word before before we close the segment. Um, I'm gonna start with you, Brent. Really, From a perspective of big data and you've been involved again in big data for a long time. As you look back, it kind of the data warehouse era. And then we had kind of this whole rage with the Hadoop era, and, you know, we just continue to get more and more sophisticated with big data processes and applications. But at the end of the day, still about getting the right data to the right person at the right time to do something about it. I wonder if if you can, you know, kind of reflect over that journey and where we are now in terms of this mission of getting, you know, the right data to the right person at the right time so they could make the right decision. >>I think I'll close with accessibility. Um, that Z these days, we you know, the data scientists and data engineers that we work with. The key problem that they have is is accessibility and sharing of data. I mean, this has been wonderfully manifest. In fact, we did some work with the province of Ontario. You could look that stop hashtag house my flattening eso the work with them to get a pool of data. Scientists in the community in the province of Ontario, Canada, toe work together toe understand how to track co vid cases s such so that government could make intelligent responses and policy based on based on the fax so that that need highlights the accessibility that's required from today's, you know, yesteryear. It was maybe, uh, smaller groups of individual data scientists working in silos. Now it's people across industry as manifest by that That need accessibility as well as agility. They need to be able to spin up an environment that will allow them to in this case, um, to develop and deploy inference models using shared data sets without going through years of design. So accessibility on back to the back to the the acceleration and agility that Sam talked about. So I'll close with those words >>That's great. And the consistent with the democratization of two is another word that we're here, you know, over and over again in terms of, you know, getting it out of the hands of the data scientists and getting it into the hands of the people who are making frontline business decisions every day. And Sam for you, for your clothes. I love for you Thio reflect on kind of the changing environment in terms of your requirements for the types of workloads that you now are, you know, looking to support. So it's not just taking care of the data center and relatively straightforward stuff. But you've got hybrid. You've got multi cloud, not to mention all the media, the developments in the media between tape and obviously flash, um, spinning, spinning drives. But you know, really, We've seen this huge thing with flash. But now, with cloud and the increased kind of autumn autonomy ization of of units to be able to apply big batches in small batches to particular workloads across all these different requirements. When if you could just share a little bit about how you guys are thinking about, you know, modernizing storage and moving storage forward. What are some of your what are some of your your priorities? What are you looking forward to, uh, to be able to deliver, You know, basically the stuff underneath all these other applications. I mean, applications basically is data whether you I and some in some computer on top. You guys something underneath the whole package? >>Yeah. Yeah. You know, first of all, you know, back toe what Brent was saying, Uh, data could be the most valuable asset of an enterprise. You could give an enterprising, incredible, uh, competitive advantage as an incumbent if you could take advantage of that data using modern analytics and a I. So it could be your greatest asset. And it can also be the biggest inhibitor to digital transformation. If you don't figure out how to build a new type of modern infrastructure to support access to that data and support these new deployment models of your application. So you have to think that through. And that's not just for your big data, which the big data, of course, is extremely important and growing at incredible pace. All this unstructured data, You also have to think about your mission critical applications. We see a lot of people going through their transformation and modernization of S a p with move toe s four Hana. They have to think about how that fits into a multi cloud environment. They need to think about the life cycle of their data is they go into these new modern environments. And, yes, tape is still a very vibrant part of that deployment. So what we're working on an IBM has always been a leader in software defined storage. We have an incredible portfolio of capabilities. We're working on modernizing that software to help you automate your infrastructure. And sure, you can deliver enterprise class sls. There's no nobody's going to alleviate the requirements of having, you know, near perfect availability. You don't because you're moving into a kubernetes environment. Get a break on your downtime. So we're able to give that riel enterprise class support for doing that. One of the things we just announced that the end of October was we've containerized our spectrum scale client, allowing you now toe automate the deployment of your cluster file system through communities. So you'll see more and more of that. We're offering you leading modern native protection for kubernetes will be the first to integrate with OCP and open ship container storage for data protection. And our flashes from family will continue to be on the leading edge of the curve around answerable automation and C s I integration with who are already so we'll continue to focus on that and ensure that you could take advantage of our world class storage products in your new modern environment. And, of course, giving you that portability between on from in any cloud that you choose to run in >>exciting times. No, no shortage of job security for you, gentlemen, that's for sure. All right, Well, Brent, Sam, thanks for taking a few minutes and, uh, is great to catch up. And again. Congratulations on the success. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Alrighty, Sammy's Brent. I'm Jeff, You're watching the cubes. Continuing coverage of Q. Khan Cloud, Native Con North America 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. I'm stew Minuteman, and this is we've actually reached the end of the cubes coverage of VM World 2020. Hard to believe. 11 years we've done lots of interviews here has been great to be able to engage with the audience talk, talk to the executives, talk some customers, but saving one more for you. So happy to welcome to the program is the first time on the Cube. But we've been talking to him since they came out of stealth. So I have the co founder and CEO of Minhai. Oh, and that is a non Babu Harry Asami A B. So nice to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank >>you too. Thank you for having me on the show. >>Alright. So we love when we get to talk to the founders of companies were gonna dig into your company. But before we do just frame for us, you're not really high performance. I Oh, I oh, is in the name of your company. Um, men might make me think that there's some miniaturization, but give us the VM Ware connection. Obviously, VM Ware talked a lot about Cloud this week. They've talked about going deep into a I and computing. So we know this ecosystem has changed a lot in the 11 years that we've been covering it. Tell us how you and your company high end >>sounds good. Yeah. So men in many of those stands for minimalism right somehow in the enterprise like it has always been like shiny, heavy, complex things, find complex solutions to simple problems and charge them a lot. That has been the trend in the past, right? That's what Cloud has recent in the Enterprise and men on mini Iot is actually about solving that data storage problem. A very large scale. And the solution is like find simple solutions to complex problems. And we grew in the cloud in the both in the public and Private Cloud, and we are now the fastest growing object storage for the private cloud. And now we, um, we're coming into the government, the territory we actually CVM where is set to lead the kubernetes race. And in the Cooper Natives, if you look for an object storage pretty much, many ways standard. And this is where we bring our ecosystem toe. Be aware. And we, um where brings the enterprise market of cloud And this is the start off the private cloud. In the long run, I think public and private cloud will look alike. >>Yeah, absolutely. We've We've been writing about this for for for for many years a b We saw the enterprises taking on more of the characteristics of the hyper scholars, the hyper scholars. Of course, they're coming more to the enterprise. Ah, lot of discussion about hybrid and multi cloud these days. But what I want you to explain a little bit when? When When when your company was formed. You talk about, you know, doing these kubernetes environment. You do partner with AWS and azure, but ah, lot of what you do is on premises and that strikes people as a little bit unconventional in the thing. Or definitely 2017 and even for 2020. So help us understand. You know what it is exactly that you know the technology bring and why you think it's the fit for if you extend making private cloud on par with public. >>Yeah, it's not surprising to us at all, but it made no sense when we started with the rest of the world, right? Even the investors like not our other investors but the typical venture community toe the rest of the world. They thought that an object storage if it is not useful inside AWS, there is no use but an object storage at all. And we our question was very simple that the amount of data the world will produce in the next 10 years bulk off the data. Where is it going to be? Right? And it's not going to be in the public cloud. And it didn't sound obvious back then, right? And we saw that in the long run, public and private cloud will look alike but bulk of the data if it's going to be generated outside AWS while AWS s three sets the standard, the rest of the world what are they going to do? So many who was raised to be the S three for the rest of the world and the rest of the world is the biggest market. And back then there was no private cloud. There was public cloud and public cloud. What meant only AWS, right? And this was not so long ago. We're talking like 56 years, right? And then soon multi cloud came from multi cloud private cloud came what really accelerated. This is basically kubernetes and containers, right? In fact, containers started the trend and then Coburn It has accelerated it further nowadays. If you if you see why it's no longer a dream, are a faith based model, right, it's actually we're we're talking about, like a $540,000. Actually, 540,000 doctors pulled a day, right? And 400 like 400 well million or so Dr Pools in aggregate. That shows that the entire industry has changed, and it's already the Coburn. It is even public or private cloud. It is the one hybrid infrastructure layer, and now it has now it's no longer private Cloud is that question right? And customers are now able to move between public and private cloud. The trend is hybrid hybrid cloud. I think it's irreversible. >>Alright, you talked about Dr Poles and the code there, so let's make sure our audience understand exactly what you are. Sounds like your software sounds like open source is a piece of it. Help us understand. You know how you fit with Because if we're talking about object storage, there's gotta be some infrastructure underneath that. What does mean I owe provide and where do you turn to the partners? >>Yeah, so just like server less, it means that it's not like there is no server, right? It's about a software problem. Similarly, storage right When store when object storage is containerized, we still need drives, right? That is where VM ware V Sand comes. Descends Job is to virtualized the physical layer toe the basically container layer. But end of the day if you see the it is a software problem and what may I would just like a database would solve the metadata data store problem. I mean, I will solve the blob data problem. And in the public, cloud object storage is the foundational piece. It is the primary storage, but we saw this as a software problem, and when customers started building these applications, they actually containerized their application and use Cooper notice to roll out their application infrastructure. And when they do that, they cannot possibly by a hardware appliance on the public cloud. And even on the on the private cloud, they when they when they completely orchestrate two containers, they cannot roll out hardware appliances. This is where the the industry the cloud native community always saw this as a software problem. It was obvious to them for the enterprise I t it was not so clear. And the storage industry giants, if you see everyone off them is a hardware appliance play, and they are in for a total shock. And we were basically as a as reset with their seven or to update one, if there is a lot of interesting things to come. >>All right, So if if I understand Here you sit from a VM Ware environment, I've got V sand underneath. I've got Tangguh above, and you're you're providing that object service in between. So for our for our friends in the in the channel market on when thinking about gear, anything that V san can sit on, you just can come along for the ride. Do I have that right? >>Yeah. So underneath the sand is basically bunch of J boards, right? These are like Dell and HP servers with the drives in them on This is not a hardware appliance anymore, right? You look at the storage market, it is. Stand our NASA plans. That is how the enterprise I t operated not in the club world. And as we and we're moves into the cloud world, everything looks cloud native and in this case, the sand. NASA plans have no role to play. Even the object storage hardware appliance has no role to play because we and we're becomes the end where Visa becomes the new block storage layer. And then they have positioned object storage database. Everything as a data data store are a data persist since layer. So only this software only the software that is contained race gets to play on top of, um, where in the new World, including the storage itself. And it's No, there is no appliance here. >>All right, so and your your solution is is listed as kubernetes kubernetes native. So now you mentioned VCR seven, VCR seven, update one Now house full kubernetes support. I'm assuming Then you can plug into tansy you you can plug into, uh, Amazon Azure. Other kubernetes options out there. Is that the case? >>Yeah, So from a customer point of view, right? If you are on the enterprise, I d. Environment Now from I t administrator point off you. Nothing changes much other than from the V Center console itself. You now get to see me, and I will in in the first suspend data services. You click and deploy entirely as a software without even learning to spell Cooper notice. You can build a private cloud storage multi tenant exactly like how public cloud storage outrage. And that is from the private cloud point a few right, and it's purely software. You're not waiting for six months, but the hardware to arrive and long procurement cycles and provisioning all that is now provisioned as a software container. In just five minutes, you can actually set up a private cloud in Prospector. That's for the private cloud, right? But why? The reason why customers want this to be a software problem is they roll out their software on the on the private cloud on the public cloud for burst, wear clothes and sustained work clothes on private cloud burst workloads on public cloud. Noncritical jobs are anything that is fast moving on, convenience based. They push it to public cloud. Customers do want tohave one leg here and one like there. And nowadays even the edge on decentralized on the from the telco space toe video on other other areas even the edges now growing toe. They want a your software solution. The entire data center software is now containerized. They can roll out Public cloud Our private cloud are on the edge On with me No, we solve the data side the compute side Then we're already has done a wonderful job on the networking side. They have done it on on the beast on the storage site dated the physical toe container layer movies. And now the data storage part is what we solved. Now what does this do to the end user? Now they can build software and truly deploy on public private our age without any modification on entirely it is a software problem. This >>great. What do you find? Or some of the more prevalent use cases, you know, sitting on top, What applications or the key ones that people are deploying your solution for >>Yeah, So in the public cloud, if you see, that's that. That's actually a good place to start if you see in the public cloud, right, starting from even simple static website hosting toe aml, big data, workloads toe. Even the modern databases like Snowflake, for example is built on object storage in the public cloud. It has become a truly horizontal play. And that is how it started right there. W started with history and then came everything else. And now that trend is beginning to percolate into the enterprise. And surprisingly, we found that the enterprise was the explosion of data. Growth is actually not about like cat videos, right? What? What are these touring? Mostly We found that bulk of the data that is drowning that crisis messing generated data. And these are basically like some kind of log data event data data streams that are continuously produced on that actually can grow from 10 terabytes to 10 petabytes in a very short time. This is where clearly object storage has become the right choice, just like in the public cloud. But customers are now adopting object storage as the primary storage and now multiple applications. Whether it is the cloud native applications in like the Hangzhou Application Service like spring boot and like all the clothes on re stack from their toe. So all the m l big data workloads pretty much everybody has been verging to object storage as there foundation. >>Yeah, absolutely. You seen some of those use cases very prevalent here in the VM Ware community. I heard you talking about it. I was expecting to hear you talk about Splunk data protection, something that's been a big topic of conversation in the last few years. Obviously, VM Ware has a number of key partners. So I'm assuming many of those air who you are also working with. >>Look, it felt good broad Splunk Splunk itself is actually is an important move that what we did recently with VM where finally we can run Splunk natively on BM where at large scale and without any performance penalty and at a price point that it becomes really attractive Now comparing Splunk Cloud, where's the Splunk on Prem? We can actually show like at least like one third off what it would cost to run on Splunk load. So I don't know Splunk themselves would like it, But I think Splunk as a company would like what customers like, right? And this is where Splunk actually now can sit on many, many us, all the all their data stores. They call it smart store underneath underneath me. I will now, when the previous original Visa incarnation, we couldn't actually your huge amounts of data. But now, with the visa and direct, we actually have access to the local drives and you can attach as many drives as you want. Then if you want more capacity, more more number of servers so you can pack thousands and thousands off drives at a price point that even public cloud cannot be anywhere closer. And this is actually important. Yeah, environment for the Splunk customers. Because for them, not only the cost right, even the data is sensitive for them. They cannot really, really push it to the public cloud data generated outside of the public cloud. If data generated inside Public Cloud, probably Amazon has their own solution, and Splunk cloud makes sense. But when data is produced outside, these are sensitive data and it's huge volume, and they produce on an average, like the kind of users VCs center about. It's a day on on, then it's only growing at an accelerated pace. And this is where the Visa and Direct and Mini Oh, you can now bring that workload onto the number. Finally, the ICTY can control the control, the Splunk deployments. This is something important for I t right in the past, if you see big data workloads always ran on bare metal and silos, something I d hated right This time it is flexible that it's not just flexible, exactly gets better. >>Well, it sure sounds like the technology maturation has finally caught up on the VM ware standpoint with the vision that you and the team had. So give us a little bit. Look forward now that you've got kubernetes really being embraced by VM where on and starting to see maturation in this space. Where do we go from here? >>So we were actually, If you see what they brought to the table this time, they didn't actually catch up with others, right? Typically, the innovation in the recent times happened in the open source space and then the large vendors will come and innovate. Startups and open source started the innovation large, large. When the large winters come in later. But this time around, remember, actually did the innovation part and these and direct. It's actually a big step forward in the Covenant of CSE space. And the reason why it's a big step is C s A. Traditionally is designed for the sand gnats vendors and using the same C s. A model, remember, was able to bring in large work clothes and that allowed entirely to use the local drive possibility. Right now it moving forward. What What we will see. What were said to see is the cloud native workload. Actually a ran as a silo in the Enterprise, right? There was big data workloads. There was the applications team that ran Cooper knitters and containers on their own. There are on their on their own develop shop on enterprise. I'd ran the idea introspect These three were not connected on finally this time around. By bringing cover natives native into the I T infrastructure, there is going to be a convergence. You will not. The silos will get eliminated. Big data, big data workloads, ml wear clothes on bare metal will now come toe come toe. Then I will be aware that the Governor disk combination and you will see the the coordinative applications space. They will hand over the physical layer infrastructure onto the VM Ware e and everybody coming together. I think it's the best. Big step forward. >>Well, maybe. I sure hope you're right. We love to see the breaking down of silos. Things coming together. We've been a little bit concerned over the last few years that we're rebuilding the silos in the cloud. We've got different skill sets different there, but we always love some good tech optimism here, uh, to say that we're gonna move these sorts of Thank you so much. Great to catch up with you and definitely look forward to hearing more from you and your customers in the future. >>Thank you to this. Wonderful to be on your show. >>All right. We want to thank everybody for joining VM World 2020 for day. Volonte John, for your big thanks to the whole production team and of course, VM Ware and our sponsors for helping us to bring this content to you. As always, I'm stew Minuteman and thank you for joining us on the Cube

by from Las Vegas it's the cube coverage AWS executive summary brought to you by Accenture hello everyone and welcome back to the cubes live coverage of the Accenture executive summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas part of aw reinvent of course I'm your host Rebecca Knight we have two guests for this segment we have Leandro Nunez he is the vice president product development at MasterCard thank you so much for coming on the show thanks for having me and Christine Leung she is the managing director Accenture blockchain and biometrics thank you so much you so sustainability is a hot topic in the industry too in all industry today and especially here at AWS reinvent I want to talk to you about circular supply chain which was an idea that germinated in your brain a couple of years ago but it's really just sort of launched a year ago tell us more about why you started Cs sure we started this actually because a couple of things I we drink coffee every single day and we go into every coffee shop and we think about well you know you see packets saying this is my single origin coffee this is I pay extra for this and it's sustainably grown and yet you see news saying that you know the rain forest is being burnt down and animals are being killed and so about two years ago I looked at this and I thought wow you know how do I know this is really sustainable what I'm drinking the extra five books that I'm hanging at my coffee shop is it really is it really sink origin is it really going to the right people is it really killing the orangutans and the rainforest and then I see a statistic success well for every coffee a cup of coffee that we drink a square inch of rain forests get burnt down and I mean I drink at least five cups of coffee a day and working actually with MasterCard at the time I'm doing a and still do actually doing a lot of work with MasterCard in around identity and biometrics and I thought well you know how can we combine some of these capabilities we have with blockchain identity to say to put our money where our mouths is to change incentives as the base of the pyramid where you know performers produces smallholders if I can say to them that I really won't care but you don't burn a fat forest out that you produce in a good way and they just tried to survive they're not bad people if they're just hand-to-mouth but if they we can say right will hate you more as consumers and we know it's definitely going to that right person then maybe we can help to change some of you know and not have the rain force and don't have my guilty cup of coffee right so even if we don't drink quite as much coffee as you we are as a as a group consumers are more socially conscious than they ever have been what are some of the statistics here that people just care more about this stuff in general and they're willing to pay a premium for it so for example the green trade is estimated and this came out for Unilever at two trillion dollars a year by the by next year actually a growing statistic and let's just see I mean more and more on social media or literally you know every platform that you can see sustainability is a huge topic with you know sort of the the recent sort of UN climate discussions I mean it's this week with next week we're in Madrid this a big topic that we should all as a responsible consumers care about so Leander what do you see as the benefits of CSE to to small actors well it's a great point because when you see that just think about it do you usually say a lot about consumers in the big brands and now we're protecting the big brands but just think about the sourcing side of the supply chain right the small communities the ones that are growing the coffee the ones that are the farm the farmers over there or the fishermen now these ones are there's meaning for a while they're just been because it squeezed by the whole supply chain it's but the whole business right you think like let's remove a little bit of their margin let's put in something else now when they have the circular supply chain because consumers and this new generation is so interested in knowing where the product comes from you know if you're then doing the right thing now it has a change that you can pay them back it's all about come up with incentive model that's why we should in a MasterCard right when you create a network like that which the blockchain solution is a big network so how we can gain traction how we can gain adoption one thing is you need to establish incentives through all of the parties that you have at a network so if you're just taking care of the brand and they're gonna say bran mandate to your suppliers that needs to do that this is not going to work what it works is what is the incentive the farmers gonna have what's the sourcing so we don't mean it so don't don't you think the farmers wants to do the right thing of course they do but do they have incentives for that if it's just a letter if you're just someone mandating they're not gonna do it but if you come with the idea of hey I pay you back your your coffee or whatever your products you're doing we can help you can have a premium so we can it's going to be sustainable to your family as well your business can be more profitable so they you see okay I want to be part of it so it's creating incentives for people to for the for the for the producers themselves to grow things more sustainably it's all about that it's not only them and then you go to the suppliers you go to the logistic transportation companies how do you creative you give them the visibility they always complain about how can I have the visibility of my supply chain why can you create the visibility you give the transparency that you create the trust in and if you ask people in a supply chain business what the big problem is supply chain is trust they don't trust each other but they have to trade things and they don't trust each other you do business with people you don't trust every single day it's not a good thing so if we bring this visibility you facilitate this and they see there's an incentive to be also part of it so Christine what are the kind of technologies that are bad that are that are powering the CSC and and how are we how does it create that trust i cultivate that trust um and Leandra is for Honor's and in terms of trust it's about trusting the people but trusting the data and trusting the entities that I put in some of this data there are components of blockchain of course the surface the traceability aspects of the any of the product blockchain also helps with the decentralized identity capability that we've put in we've made also biometrics for the for the individual but this is optional depending on how you know in terms of using it very responsibly payments of course digital payments and you know having the ability to actually direct payments through the MasterCard rails and then of course with you know the power of AWS and then hosting on the cloud and be able to have that anywhere and the different aspects of including a iot so we know that let's say for fisheries this product is actually really came from displays you know the sensors we know that it's kept the right temperature we did that therefore you know insurance payers and things like that would be right and tracked all the way through and knowing that the product is really fresh and really kept you know intact throughout the journey so a whole bunch of different technology totally great projects with blockchain only would tend not to succeed and the reason is because you need to come up with you need to nurture the ecosystem so how you bring the IOT yes to the table how you doing you know payments how you bring AI so you get at all these solutions together and then you create what this visibility that's trust we need so companies are trying to do one side you know which is just a blockchain they're not going anywhere the reason that I like it our alliance with Accenture and AWS is because we know that we needed to do this end-to-end and this can be broader than just talk about watching and it's about the people because you have the ultimate is the consumer and the the base of pyramid producer both have identities and if we are able to say this is the identity of the person I can then help to influence their their livelihoods so it's putting a real face on the supply chain for the end consumer I mean at a time where consumers are demanding more transparency in the supply chain demanding to know more about the source of the goods that they put the products that they're buying what has been the reception and and what are you hearing back I think we've had great receptions we launched at Davos earlier this year we've had a huge amount of interest and now slowly we're gaining sort of traction in terms of getting the pilots I'm putting them in place and I think it's also something that we'll need to UM in initially it's a little bit of Education understanding well how does this actually all work you know is it just traceability is it just identity well it's actually all those things are understanding the use cases and embracing that there are it's not just one way of doing something and this is really a concept that embracing better business through better technology and innovation can actually be more sustainable and responsible businesses so the traction has been great and we've had a we have a number of pilots in the pipeline yeah well we will in the past I used to believe that some things we should stop doing or stop eating because of the sustainable part of it and I have learned that it's not the case you can do the right thing you can make sure that they're doing the right thing and you can eat with no guilt that's why everybody wants right so so this is this is the the type of you know visibility when to give from the consumer side but not from the from the company side of I like the brands are ok I'm safe because brands they have a very good visibility from the distributor on but they don't know what's going on behind that you know products the this is so globalized now they so fragmented you know it comes from so many different places Princeton that there's no way that they can control it if they don't have this you know there's this view so that's why we're trying to bring together so when so when this when this fully does launch and a consumer is then seeing the face of the coffee grower in Brazil or in Kenya and saying ok so then what what happens then how are they able to to to incentivize that farmer to do the right thing as you say there's a digital payment channel of powered by monster cop that you can then so sue speaks if the farmer donate money and actually say well there's multiple ways of doing things right so for example if I'm the consumer scanning the the product and there is we have a whole lego city built upstairs that can show cases and say right this is how it works and you know scan the product and what I can save right I want to be able to donate an extra dollar for this farmer because I really like the fact that you are sustainable and not burning the rainforests and protecting the orangutan or elephant so the the the birds so great I'm going to give you an extra dollar so this is how it's going to work on the app and there are other consequences well there's so many organic products nowadays they're not really organic so you can prove with the organic so the farmers would feel more motivated to really grow that as a organic product because there is a premium so it's not only the the tea that you give it to them but also the fact that you can create a premium price situation that will motivate others to do the same so brands would grieve the differentiator farmers would feel like okay if I do this way how to get will be more profitable and consumers will benefit from that from a real organic or a real product what the sustainability you know behind it consumers can trust more so how do what are some of the I mean this is such a cool concept what is what are some of the biggest challenges in in really launching and making it a reality what is keeping you up at night I think some of it is actually just education and getting it out there and understanding that this is it's a lot of stakeholders so from consumer brands all the way down to the the smallholder providers so it's a lot of people to link up and a lot of organizations to talk to so some of it is just getting through that process and getting people to understand and also actually hopefully we'll get consumers understand that this is something that they will want to do yeah and that this whole integration I Christine said it's in it's important right so you understand all the key stakeholders don't need to beat all of them at the beginning but at least the key stakeholders in the supply chain and how you can create this business incentive in a dissented model for them to be part of that so it's a mapping exercise which is we are getting there and in intestine we gain adoption and and if you gather the consumer side doing this as well so it creates a network effect and that's why we try to do in a MasterCard assist in our DNA like building networks right everybody knows that so we wanted to bring this to you know >> to the ecosystem to contribute okay so how can I create a network effect that they can it exponentially scale you know for for the whole market share for the whole you know marketplace so I want to ask you a personal question you've been in technology for a really long time time and now but in terms of the kinds of projects you've worked on and the kinds of ways you're thinking about technology and then this particular project at a time where climate change is a monumental challenge the fate of our planet really hangs in the balance with what with the decisions that we're making policymakers and consumers are making today wait how what is it like to work on this kind of products a great question I yeah I was for this all these years so go to work with this business mentality you know we're gonna make more money for someone else we're gonna work for a big company and see some friends and family doing things for the society and say oh my gosh there's something like that and now I feel like I can do both right we're talking you know it's a business it's it's a great solution but makes it so well for the you know for the whole society you know it makes me feel really every day going to work and say oh this is what I want to do you know this is so cool I mean I'm helping I'm benefiting myself as I go to the supermarket I'm gonna be the one who's gonna tip the farmer I'm gonna be the one who's gonna check where my shrimp comes from right so so I'm doing this for my family my kids are like I hope they can live in a better planet that know exactly where the products come from and the family that you have it's not even been born yet so that's the other generation that's amazing really doing things that we never know thank you so much Lee under and Christine for coming on the cube a really fun and fascinating conversation thank you thank you I'm Rebecca night stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage at the Accenture executive summit coming up after lunch [Music]

our Studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hello and welcome to the cube studios in Palo Alto California for another cube conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry I'm your host Peter Burris almost everybody's heard of the term black hat and white hat and it constitutes groups of individuals that are either attacking or defending security challenges it's been an arms race for the past 10 20 30 years as the world has become more digital and an arms race that many of us are concern that black hats appear to have the upper hand but there's new developments in technology and new classes of tooling that are actually racing to the aid of white hats and could very well upset that equilibrium in favor of the white hats to have that conversation about the Ascension of the white hats we're joined by Derek manky who's chief security insights and global threat alliances lead at Ford Annette dereck thanks for joining us for another cube conversation it's always a pleasure speaking yeah all right Derrick let's start what's going on afforda labs at four Dannette so 2019 we've seen a ton of development a lot pretty much on track with our predictions when we talked last year obviously a big increase in volume thanks offense of automation we're also seeing low volume attacks that are disrupting big business models I'm talking about targeted ransom attacks right you know criminals that are able to get into networks caused millions of dollars of damages thanks to critical revenue streams being out usually in the public sector we've seen a lot of this we've seen a rise in sophistication the adversary's are not slowing down AET s advanced evasion techniques are on the rise and so you know to do this and for the guard loves to be able to track this and map this we're not just relying on blogs anymore and you know 40 50 page white papers so we're actually looking at that playbooks now mapping the adversary's understanding their tools techniques procedures how they're operating why they're operating who are they hitting on and what what might be their next move so that's a big development on the intelligence sides here all right so I mentioned upfront this notion that the white hats may be ascending I'm implying a prediction here tell us a little bit about what we see on the horizon for that concept of the white hats ascending and specifically why is there reason to be optimistic yeah so as it's it's it's been gloomy for you for decades like he said and for many reasons right and I think those reasons there are no secrets I mean cyber criminals and black hats have always been able to move very you know with with agility right I'm sorry crime has no borders it's often a slap on the wrist that they get they can do a million things are on they don't care there's no ethics and quite frankly no no rules by right on the white hand side we've always had rules binding us we've had to we've had to take due care and we've had to move methodically which slows us down so a lot of that comes in place because of frameworks because of technology as well having to move um after it's in able to it with frameworks so specifically with you know making corrective action and things like that so those are the challenges that we face against but you know like thinking ahead to to 2020 particularly with the use of artificial intelligence everybody talks about AI you know it's it's impacted our daily lives but when it comes to cybersecurity on the white hat side um you know a proper AI and machine learning model it takes time you think it can take you years in fact in our case in our experience about four to five years before we can actually roll it out to production but the good news is that we have been investing and when I say we I'm just talking to the industry in general and wait we've been investing into this technology because quite frankly we've had to it takes a lot of data it takes a lot of smart minds a lot of investment a lot of processing power and that foundation has now been set over the last five years if we look at the blackcats it's not the case and why because they've been enjoying living off the land on a low-hanging truth path of least resistance because they've been able to so one of the things that's changing that equilibrium then is the availability of AI as you said it could take four or five years to get to a point we've actually got useful AI is it can have an impact I guess that means that we've been working on these things for four or five years what's the state of the art with AI as it pertains to security and are we seeing different phases of development start to emerge as we gain more experience with these technologies yeah absolutely and it's quite exciting right ai isn't this universal brain that's that's always good the world's problems that everyone thinks it might right it's very specific it relies on machine learning models each machine learning model is very specific to its task right I mean you know voice learning technology versus autonomous vehicle driving versus cybersecurity it's very different when it comes to the swimming purposes so so in essence the way I look at it you know there's three generations of AI we have generation 1 which was the past generation 2 which is a current where we are now and the generation 3 is where we're going so generation 1 was pretty simple right it was just a central processing lyrtle of machine learning model that'll take in data they'll correlate that data and then take action based off of it some simple inputs simple output right generation to where we're currently sitting is more advances looking at pattern recognition more advanced inputs are distributed models where we have the you know sensor is lying around networks I'm talking about even IOT devices security appliances and so forth but still report up to this centralized brain that's learning and acting on things but where things get really interesting moving forward in 2020 gets into this third generation where you have especially you know moving towards about computer sorry I'm computing where you have localized learning notes that are actually processing and learning so you can think of them as these mini brains instead of having this monolithic centralized brain you have individual learning modes individual brains doing their own machine learning that are actually connected to each other learning from each other speaking to each other it's a very powerful model we actually refer to this as federated machine learning in our industry so we've been first phase we simply use statistics to correlate events take action yeah now we're doing exceptions pattern recognition or exceptions and building patterns and in the future we're going to be able to further distribute at that so that increasingly the AI is going to work with other AI so that the aggregate this federated aggregate gets better I got that right yeah absolutely and what's the advantage of that a couple of things I'm it's very similar to the human immune system right I mean if you have you know if I were to cut my finger on my hand what's gonna happen well localized white blood cells get localized not nothing from a foreign entity or further away in my body are gonna come to the rescue and start healing right it's the same idea it's because it's interconnected within the nervous system it's the same idea of this federated machine learning right if security appliance is to detect a threat locally on-site its able to alert other security appliances so that they can actually take action on this and learn from that as well so connected machine learning models it means that that you know by properly implementing these these AI this federated AI machine learning models in an organization that that system is able to actually in an auto you may pick up what that threat is be able to act on that threat which means it's able to respond to these threats quicker shut them down to the point where it can be you know virtually instantaneous right before you know that the damage is done and bleeding starts happening so the common time safe common baseline is constantly getting better even as we're giving opportunities for local local managers to perform the work in response to local conditions so that takes us to the next notion of we've got this federated a la a I on the horizon how are people how is the role of people security professionals going to change what kind of recipes are they going to follow to ensure that they are working in a maximally productive way with these new capabilities these new federated capabilities especially as we think about the introduction of 5g and greater density of devices and faster speeds and lower latencies yeah so you know that the the the the world of cyber computer cyber security has always been incredibly complex so we're trying to simplify that and that's where again this this federated machine learning comes into place particularly with playbooks so you know if we look at 2019 and where we're going in 2020 we've put a lot of a lot of groundwork quite frankly into pioneering the work of playbooks right so when I say playbooks I'm talking about adversary's playbook knowing the offense knowing the tools techniques procedures the way that these cybercrime operations are moving right and the black hats are moving the more that we can understand that the more we can predict their next move and that centralized language right once you know that offense we can start to create automated Blue Team playbook so defensive play books that a human that that's a security technology can automatically integrate and respond to it but to getting back to your question we can actually create human readable sea cecil guides that can actually say look there's a threat here's why it's a problem here's here here are the gaps in your security that we've identified if you're some recommended course of action as my deity right so that's that's where the humans and the machines are really going to be worked working together and and quite frankly moving speed being able to do that a machine level but also being being able to simplify a complex landscape that is where we can actually gain traction right that this is part of that ascendancy of the white hat because because it's it's allowing us to move in a more agile nature it's an it's allowing us to gain ground against heat actors and quite frankly it allows us to start disrupting their business model right it's more resilient Network in the future this leads to the whole notion of self-healing networks as well that quite frankly just makes it a big pain it disrupts your business model it forces them to go back to the drawing board - well it also seems as though when we start talking about 5g that the speeds as I said the speeds the dentin see the reduced latency the the potential for a bad thing to propagate very quickly demands that we have a more consistent coherent response at both the Machine level but also at the people level we 5g into this conversation what's what will be the impact of 5g on how these playbooks and AI start to come together over the next few years yeah it's it's it's it's gonna be very impactful it's gonna take a couple of years and we're just at the dawn of 5g right now but if you think of 5g you're talking about a lot more volume essentially as we move to the future we're entering into the age of five G and edge computing and 5g and edge computing is gonna start eating the cloud in a sense that more of that processing power that was in the cloud is starting to shift now towards edge computing right this is that on-premises so it is gonna allow models like I was talking about federated machine learning models at first from the the white hats point of view which I again I think we are in the driver's seat and in a better you know more advantageous position here because we have more experience again like I said we've been doing this for years where the black hats quite frankly haven't yes they're toying with it but not to the same level at scale that we have but you know you know it's I'm always a realist this isn't a completely rosy picture I mean there it is optimistic that we are able to get this upper hand it has to be done right but if we think about the weaponization of 5g that's also very large problem right last year we're talking about sworn networks right the idea of sworn networks is a whole bunch of devices that can connect to each other share intelligence and then act to do something like a large-scale DDoS attack that's absolutely in the in the realm of possibility when it comes to the weaponization of 5g as well so one of the things I guess the last question I want to ask you is you noted that these play books incorporate the human element in ways that are uniquely human so having C so readable recipes for how people have to respond does that also elevate the conversation with the business and does allows us to do a better job of understanding risk pricing risk and appropriately investing to manage and assure the business against risk in the right way absolutely absolutely it does yeah yeah because the more you know about going back to the playbook some more you know about the office and their tools you know you the more you know about how much of a danger it is what sort of targets they're after right I mean if they're just going trying to look to to to collect a little bit of information on you know to do some reconnaissance that first phase attack might not cause a lot of damage but if this group is knowing to go in hit hard steal intellectual property shut down critical business streams to do s that in the past we know and we've seen has caused four or five million dollars from one you know from one breach that's a very good way to start classifying risk so yeah I mean it's all about really understanding the picture first on the offense and that's exactly what these automated playbook guides are going to be doing on the on the on the blue team and again not only from a CSE suite perspective certainly that on the human level but the nice thing about the play books is because we've done the research the threat hunting and understood this you know from a machine level it's also able to put a lot of those automated let's say day-to-day decisions making security operation center is so I'm talking about like sect DevOps much more efficient to so he's talking about more density at the edge amongst these devices I also want to bring back one last thought here and that is you said that historically some of the black hats have been able to act with a degree of impunity they haven't necessarily been hit hard there a lot of slapping on the wrist as I think you said talk about how the playbooks and AI is going to allow them to more appropriately share data with others that can help both now but also in some of the forensics and the the enforcement side namely the the legal and policing world how are we going to share the responsibility or how is that going to change over the next few years to incorporate some of the folks that actually can then turn a defense into a legal attack illumination this is what I call it right so again if we look at the current state we've made great strides great progress you know working with law enforcement so we've set up public private sector relationships we need to do that have security experts working with law enforcement law enforcement working on there and to train process prosecutors to understand cybercrime and so forth that foundation has been set but it's still slow-moving you know there's only a limited amount of playbooks right now it takes a lot of work to unearth and and and do to really move the needle what we need to do again like we're talking about is to integrate artificial intelligence with playbooks the more that we understand about groups the more that we do this threat illumination the more we have cover about them the more we know about them and by doing that we can start to form predictive models right basically I always say old habits die hard so you know if an attacker goes in hits a network and they're successful following a certain sequence of patterns they're likely going to follow that say that's that same sequence on their next victim or their next target so the more that we understand about that the more that we can forecast eight from a mitigation standpoint but the also by the same token the more correlation we're doing on these playbooks the more machine learning we're doing on this playbooks the more we were able to do attribution and attribution is the Holy Grail it's always been the toughest thing to do when it comes to research but by combining the framework that we're using with playbooks and AI machine learning it's a very very powerful recipe and that's that's what we need to get right and move forward in the right direction Derrick McKey ordinance chief of security insights and threat alliances thanks again for being on the cube it's a pleasure anytime happy to talk and I want to thank you for joining us for another cube conversation I'm Peter Burris see you next time [Music]

our Studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hello and welcome to the cube studios in Palo Alto California for another cube conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry I'm your host Peter Burris almost everybody's heard of the term black hat and white hat and it constitutes groups of individuals that are either attacking or defending security challenges it's been an arms race for the past 10 20 30 years as the world has become more digital and an arms race that many of us are concern that black hats appear to have the upper hand but there's new developments in technology and new classes of tooling that are actually racing to the aid of white hats and could very well upset that equilibrium in favor of the white hats to have that conversation about the Ascension of the white hats we're joined by Derek manky who's chief security insights and global threat alliances lead at Ford Annette dereck thanks for joining us for another cube conversation it's always a pleasure speaking yeah all right Derrick let's start what's going on afforda labs at four Dannette so 2019 we've seen a ton of development a lot pretty much on track with our predictions when we talked last year obviously a big increase in volume thanks offense of automation we're also seeing low volume attacks that are disrupting big business models I'm talking about targeted ransom attacks right you know criminals that are able to get into networks caused millions of dollars of damages thanks to critical revenue streams being out usually in the public sector we've seen a lot of this we've seen a rise in sophistication the adversary's are not slowing down AET s advanced evasion techniques are on the rise and so you know to do this and for the guard loves to be able to track this and map this we're not just relying on blogs anymore and you know 40 50 page white papers so we're actually looking at that playbooks now mapping the adversary's understanding their tools techniques procedures how they're operating why they're operating who are they hitting on and what what might be their next move so that's a big development on the intelligence sides here all right so I mentioned upfront this notion that the white hats may be ascending I'm implying a prediction here tell us a little bit about what we see on the horizon for that concept of the white hats ascending and specifically why is there reason to be optimistic yeah so as it's it's it's been gloomy for you for decades like he said and for many reasons right and I think those reasons there are no secrets I mean cyber criminals and black hats have always been able to move very you know with with agility right I'm sorry crime has no borders it's often a slap on the wrist that they get they can do a million things are on they don't care there's no ethics and quite frankly no no rules by right on the white hand side we've always had rules binding us we've had to we've had to take due care and we've had to move methodically which slows us down so a lot of that comes in place because of frameworks because of technology as well having to move um after it's in able to it with frameworks so specifically with you know making corrective action and things like that so those are the challenges that we face against but you know like thinking ahead to to 2020 particularly with the use of artificial intelligence everybody talks about AI you know it's it's impacted our daily lives but when it comes to cybersecurity on the white hat side um you know a proper AI and machine learning model it takes time you think it can take you years in fact in our case in our experience about four to five years before we can actually roll it out to production but the good news is that we have been investing and when I say we I'm just talking to the industry in general and wait we've been investing into this technology because quite frankly we've had to it takes a lot of data it takes a lot of smart minds a lot of investment a lot of processing power and that foundation has now been set over the last five years if we look at the blackcats it's not the case and why because they've been enjoying living off the land on a low-hanging truth path of least resistance because they've been able to so one of the things that's changing that equilibrium then is the availability of AI as you said it could take four or five years to get to a point we've actually got useful AI is it can have an impact I guess that means that we've been working on these things for four or five years what's the state of the art with AI as it pertains to security and are we seeing different phases of development start to emerge as we gain more experience with these technologies yeah absolutely and it's quite exciting right ai isn't this universal brain that's that's always good the world's problems that everyone thinks it might right it's very specific it relies on machine learning models each machine learning model is very specific to its task right I mean you know voice learning technology versus autonomous vehicle driving versus cybersecurity it's very different when it comes to the swimming purposes so so in essence the way I look at it you know there's three generations of AI we have generation 1 which was the past generation 2 which is a current where we are now and the generation 3 is where we're going so generation 1 was pretty simple right it was just a central processing lyrtle of machine learning model that'll take in data they'll correlate that data and then take action based off of it some simple inputs simple output right generation to where we're currently sitting is more advances looking at pattern recognition more advanced inputs are distributed models where we have the you know sensor is lying around networks I'm talking about even IOT devices security appliances and so forth but still report up to this centralized brain that's learning and acting on things but where things get really interesting moving forward in 2020 gets into this third generation where you have especially you know moving towards about computer sorry I'm computing where you have localized learning notes that are actually processing and learning so you can think of them as these mini brains instead of having this monolithic centralized brain you have individual learning modes individual brains doing their own machine learning that are actually connected to each other learning from each other speaking to each other it's a very powerful model we actually refer to this as federated machine learning in our industry so we've been first phase we simply use statistics to correlate events take action yeah now we're doing exceptions pattern recognition or exceptions and building patterns and in the future we're going to be able to further distribute at that so that increasingly the AI is going to work with other AI so that the aggregate this federated aggregate gets better I got that right yeah absolutely and what's the advantage of that a couple of things I'm it's very similar to the human immune system right I mean if you have you know if I were to cut my finger on my hand what's gonna happen well localized white blood cells get localized not nothing from a foreign entity or further away in my body are gonna come to the rescue and start healing right it's the same idea it's because it's interconnected within the nervous system it's the same idea of this federated machine learning right if security appliance is to detect a threat locally on-site its able to alert other security appliances so that they can actually take action on this and learn from that as well so connected machine learning models it means that that you know by properly implementing these these AI this federated AI machine learning models in an organization that that system is able to actually in an auto you may pick up what that threat is be able to act on that threat which means it's able to respond to these threats quicker shut them down to the point where it can be you know virtually instantaneous right before you know that the damage is done and bleeding starts happening so the common time safe common baseline is constantly getting better even as we're giving opportunities for local local managers to perform the work in response to local conditions so that takes us to the next notion of we've got this federated a la a I on the horizon how are people how is the role of people security professionals going to change what kind of recipes are they going to follow to ensure that they are working in a maximally productive way with these new capabilities these new federated capabilities especially as we think about the introduction of 5g and greater density of devices and faster speeds and lower latencies yeah so you know that the the the the world of cyber computer cyber security has always been incredibly complex so we're trying to simplify that and that's where again this this federated machine learning comes into place particularly with playbooks so you know if we look at 2019 and where we're going in 2020 we've put a lot of a lot of groundwork quite frankly into pioneering the work of playbooks right so when I say playbooks I'm talking about adversary's playbook knowing the offense knowing the tools techniques procedures the way that these cybercrime operations are moving right and the black hats are moving the more that we can understand that the more we can predict their next move and that centralized language right once you know that offense we can start to create automated Blue Team playbook so defensive play books that a human that that's a security technology can automatically integrate and respond to it but to getting back to your question we can actually create human readable sea cecil guides that can actually say look there's a threat here's why it's a problem here's here here are the gaps in your security that we've identified if you're some recommended course of action as my deity right so that's that's where the humans and the machines are really going to be worked working together and and quite frankly moving speed being able to do that a machine level but also being being able to simplify a complex landscape that is where we can actually gain traction right that this is part of that ascendancy of the white hat because because it's it's allowing us to move in a more agile nature it's an it's allowing us to gain ground against heat actors and quite frankly it allows us to start disrupting their business model right it's more resilient Network in the future this leads to the whole notion of self-healing networks as well that quite frankly just makes it a big pain it disrupts your business model it forces them to go back to the drawing board - well it also seems as though when we start talking about 5g that the speeds as I said the speeds the dentin see the reduced latency the the potential for a bad thing to propagate very quickly demands that we have a more consistent coherent response at both the Machine level but also at the people level we 5g into this conversation what's what will be the impact of 5g on how these playbooks and AI start to come together over the next few years yeah it's it's it's it's gonna be very impactful it's gonna take a couple of years and we're just at the dawn of 5g right now but if you think of 5g you're talking about a lot more volume essentially as we move to the future we're entering into the age of five G and edge computing and 5g and edge computing is gonna start eating the cloud in a sense that more of that processing power that was in the cloud is starting to shift now towards edge computing right this is that on-premises so it is gonna allow models like I was talking about federated machine learning models at first from the the white hats point of view which I again I think we are in the driver's seat and in a better you know more advantageous position here because we have more experience again like I said we've been doing this for years where the black hats quite frankly haven't yes they're toying with it but not to the same level at scale that we have but you know you know it's I'm always a realist this isn't a completely rosy picture I mean there it is optimistic that we are able to get this upper hand it has to be done right but if we think about the weaponization of 5g that's also very large problem right last year we're talking about sworn networks right the idea of sworn networks is a whole bunch of devices that can connect to each other share intelligence and then act to do something like a large-scale DDoS attack that's absolutely in the in the realm of possibility when it comes to the weaponization of 5g as well so one of the things I guess the last question I want to ask you is you noted that these play books incorporate the human element in ways that are uniquely human so having C so readable recipes for how people have to respond does that also elevate the conversation with the business and does allows us to do a better job of understanding risk pricing risk and appropriately investing to manage and assure the business against risk in the right way absolutely absolutely it does yeah yeah because the more you know about going back to the playbook some more you know about the office and their tools you know you the more you know about how much of a danger it is what sort of targets they're after right I mean if they're just going trying to look to to to collect a little bit of information on you know to do some reconnaissance that first phase attack might not cause a lot of damage but if this group is knowing to go in hit hard steal intellectual property shut down critical business streams to do s that in the past we know and we've seen has caused four or five million dollars from one you know from one breach that's a very good way to start classifying risk so yeah I mean it's all about really understanding the picture first on the offense and that's exactly what these automated playbook guides are going to be doing on the on the on the blue team and again not only from a CSE suite perspective certainly that on the human level but the nice thing about the play books is because we've done the research the threat hunting and understood this you know from a machine level it's also able to put a lot of those automated let's say day-to-day decisions making security operation center is so I'm talking about like sect DevOps much more efficient to so he's talking about more density at the edge amongst these devices I also want to bring back one last thought here and that is you said that historically some of the black hats have been able to act with a degree of impunity they haven't necessarily been hit hard there a lot of slapping on the wrist as I think you said talk about how the playbooks and AI is going to allow them to more appropriately share data with others that can help both now but also in some of the forensics and the the enforcement side namely the the legal and policing world how are we going to share the responsibility or how is that going to change over the next few years to incorporate some of the folks that actually can then turn a defense into a legal attack illumination this is what I call it right so again if we look at the current state we've made great strides great progress you know working with law enforcement so we've set up public private sector relationships we need to do that have security experts working with law enforcement law enforcement working on there and to train process prosecutors to understand cybercrime and so forth that foundation has been set but it's still slow-moving you know there's only a limited amount of playbooks right now it takes a lot of work to unearth and and and do to really move the needle what we need to do again like we're talking about is to integrate artificial intelligence with playbooks the more that we understand about groups the more that we do this threat illumination the more we have cover about them the more we know about them and by doing that we can start to form predictive models right basically I always say old habits die hard so you know if an attacker goes in hits a network and they're successful following a certain sequence of patterns they're likely going to follow that say that's that same sequence on their next victim or their next target so the more that we understand about that the more that we can forecast eight from a mitigation standpoint but the also by the same token the more correlation we're doing on these playbooks the more machine learning we're doing on this playbooks the more we were able to do attribution and attribution is the Holy Grail it's always been the toughest thing to do when it comes to research but by combining the framework that we're using with playbooks and AI machine learning it's a very very powerful recipe and that's that's what we need to get right and move forward in the right direction Derrick McKey ordinance chief of security insights and threat alliances thanks again for being on the cube it's a pleasure anytime happy to talk and I want to thank you for joining us for another cube conversation I'm Peter Burris see you next time [Music]

live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering Adobe summit 2019 brought to you by Accenture Interactive okay welcome back everyone so cubes live coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe summit 2019 I'm John ferry with Jeff Frick our next guest is Jim LaLanne CX orchestration practice lead at Accenture customer experience engine welcome to the cube Thank You Forex for joining us customer experience engine CX e CX a yes that's your product I should we work on what's the importance of that what's the big deal so the big deal is there's a proliferation of technology in the world and and one of the main challenges is everything's silent everybody has a different lens when you talk to the sales folks they have a view of the customer when you talk to marketing day of you nobody ever talks and the problem is when these organizations they think technology is the answer so and one of the things that we're always asked inside of the Accenture interactive is well how do you bring all this stuff together and we kept getting asked the same question over and over and over again and so finally we decided you know what let's do something about it let's make this so that you move the discussion away from technology and how can you accelerate your transformation and use something like CX e to bring that to life Jim you've been a pro in this business know digital back we're gonna you're mister you've seen many ways of the hype and the reality you know the titles of customer success man and your orchestration practice manager you know we're relevant but now more than ever those actually means something look at orchestration that's a big term used in cloud computing around orchestrating workloads customer success that's the theme of the show sure experiences so now more than every we're starting to see some visibility into tech implementations to hard problems that were being tackled by pioneers on the bass now in front and center here how do you summarize that that market right now because do you believe that to be true and what is that visibility what are people looking at right now and then what's behind it well for far too long it was always about the technology providers themselves or the in the cusp who are our customers the organizations that hire Accenture to help them transform but what we've seen is just a complete seismic shift it's all about what is the customer or the consumer one it's not about what we as organizations want it's about what the consumers want so we do very much see that as a trend that's moving and in in order to do that you really need to decouple your systems of engagement from your systems of record and by doing that it allows organizations to experiment so there's new technology coming in everyday probably while we're sitting here at least a hundred others have come to life yeah but it becomes hard because when you're always having that technology come into play how can you plug it into your own ecosystem to let the consumer get done what they want to get done on their terms because that's their expectation they don't really care what your internal problems are they just want to be able to get done what they want to get done and if they can't with you it'll go somewhere else so the practice what you're seeing is the practices have an environment that allows you to try stuff yes without a lot of hurdles and you know integration yeah so the standard thing would be any time an organization wanted to try a new product it could take anywhere from 6 12 18 months just before they could even figure out does it work what we're trying to do with cxe is turn that into a matter of weeks in some cases in a matter of days so by having a platform or a capability set up so as a new application comes in great I already know about the customer information because I'm making that transparent to everything I can plug it in I can experiment I spend a month I measured does this actually work if it doesn't great get it out let me try the next thing so it gives that flexibility to organizations which marketers love because the last thing you want to do is tell us CMO is like that idea you have that's great that's what really agility exactly come talk to me in nine months different now in terms of the people process and technically been talking about 360 view of the customer is short for donkey years right so what's now is different is it just a perfect storm of some of these things finally coming together is there some particular process or kind of secret sauce to get us over this you know finally we're here you know we can finally get that view of the customer one of the things that that started to happen was you started moving the I the idea and the concept of a single view of a customer out of back-end master data management legacy hard really complex applications and with the poll earlier for Asian what they call customer data platform CDP's there are applications that are built natively in the cloud that are exposed through api's it makes it easier to stand up those capabilities so it really starts becoming a question of well why wouldn't you do this so in the past it would be well I gotta go get capital expenditure money and I gotta go through this whole business justification now it's I can have something stood up literally in a matter of Miss villains which is purpose-built and it gives you that capability to then plug in place so that gives especially for us as system integrators it makes it exciting for us because we can say you know what I can stand up a single view of your customer I can be couple that from the sales force the Adobe's the Marketo we are the world up that would never built for that right that's not their expertise take a minute to explain what is the customer experience engine the CSE what is it so in essence it's the plumbing it's all the stuff that nobody ever wants to do that always destroys transformations so again this was one of these things where every single transformation you had ever seen I don't care pick your vendor Adobe s AP Microsoft where they always fall down is in integration it's just it's just the nature of the business so what we did with CX II was we said you know what what I want to be able to do is I want to have a micro services based architecture that allows me to if I have a client telling app one week I can plug that in three weeks later I want to use something like tulip I'm going to unplug what I have I'm going to plug tulip in but the experience that the consumer sees on the glass it doesn't change so when I'm writing a mobile application I'm going to use the experience API what sits underneath it and this is what CXC provides is that system API layer to then say you know what I'm going to unplug tulip I'm going to plug in something else the consumer is done to what it's like it's like a Tesla versus a car there's all the software updates going on behind the scenes changing the configuration of the automobile yeah similar experience you're gonna automate creating mechanisms so that the application the workload for the user is not disrupted by you're making modifications under the hood so to speak well think of it this way so and we'll go with the car analogy which was probably why with the engine engine mechanism but I was explaining it to another another gentleman and he said he's like you guys are like to pimp my ride of ID I'm not changing my engine what I'm doing is I'm adding a spoiler here I'm adding new tires and rims here I'm you know putting on you know flames I'm doing all these things but the underlying engine or the heartbeat of the engagement that stays the same what you're enabling me to do as a business is tailor and adjust based on consumer expectations so if today they really want to engage with us with email next week it's through a RvR I they have that ability and I don't have to completely retrofit my entire IT architect and this is the modern approach that we see people that are winning take a take a certain formula and that is build software abstractions in their areas of expertise so here if I get this right the the CXC the customer experience engine is essentially your domain knowledge of the center interactive extract it away to make it easier for the vendors to work through your system yeah so you solve your own problems but unstop being a customer benefit right because what we firmly believe the hard part in a digital transformation is not the tech which is easy for me to say because I'm the propellerhead in the room but to me it's it's a much more fascinating conversation to say how do we transform your people and your process to be customer centric that's actually the hard part it's not the tech so by taking the tech difficulty off the table then that allows them to jumpstart and get to the actual meet of changing how they operate and the other piece of that which i think is ensuring you didn't touch on that specifically but I'm I'm sure it's got to be there is it democratizes the access apps and the ability to do things with that data to the people that aren't necessarily tied into the ERP and tied into these other systems so you can now have other people running out algorithms doing tests doing experimentation so really that democratization is so important well it's amazing the empowerment that you give people when you just provide transparency of the data so when when the sales staff if the retail rep in the store all of a sudden has transparency of what have been the engagements that have been going on with the consumer they can have a meaningful conversation and they're focused on how can they help that consumer in that moment so we look at it as you know the last moment that you engage with a consumer is usually the most telling because typically you are 20% more likely to maintain loyalty if it's a positive you're only four percent likely if it's negative yeah and if anything you will lose 32 percent of your population on one bad experience so you look at your thoughts on the vendor relationship and that's so much locking because I think lock-in is really about value you do a good job you get value because we will use you but with cloud tick tools and api's are becoming a very key part of the tool chest if you will for the users and your customer base and so we're seeing that the skills gap and the retraining that's trying to happen tends to focus on api's and tools so Amazon's got a cloud everybody's no one wants to learn ten different tool sets right how do you view that because I think we hear from practitioners all the time and they always say you know I just want it to work I want infrastructure as code I love DevOps I love agility but I don't want to learn all these new tool sets all right but I'm comfortable with this cloud I'm comfortable with this these kinds of tooling tool chains or api's how do you see that evolving is that going to be automated away will it be innovation there what's your thoughts there so my general feeling is I think you're going to continue to see more and more consolidation of adoptions in the rest based API space just because one it's easier on developers and developers win so if you make a developer's life difficult they're just going to move to something else so for the organizations that embrace that they're gonna continue to see that you will you will start to see more and more automation but I mean ultimately at the end of the day the economy that we work in runs off of api's and it's really the more you embrace it the more you share information are willing to share information within reason I mean there's you know legal and all sorts of things that have to have to be looked after but you know that's what that's what drives things so we as Accenture we look at application partners that embrace that methodology embrace that belief system of let's make it easy to share data that's one of the things that you know Adobe Microsoft and sa P are doing what the open data initiative is also trying to make it easier to share information amongst different stacks so it's a it's a variation of that and I I do believe that you're gonna continue to see more of that just because again the consumer that's what they expect and also the cloud native trend also that's a tailwind for that movement as well because they expect it to short standards I mean to a certain extent if you think about what's even cloud native it anymore cuz a lot of times people say well I'm on Fram well where are you I'm from ma well I've got my virtual cloud sitting over here or my privacy it's just distributed computing all right what's getting you excited here at Adobe summit I mean I'm impressed with the platform play I think they got that right I think they didn't over reach its laid out nice single view the customer got the data pipelining and semantic engine on the on the other side of it and a variety of app integrations looks solid to me what's your thoughts on Adobe I think it's a good first step to be fair I think it's a good first step I actually applaud them for for going down that path I'm excited about the possibilities it gives to our customers who are embracing the Adobe stack I'd like to see them go further especially with in terms of extending it out to other partners as well because it's one of those things of there's no one platform that solves everything that's a large reason why we established cxe is the days where you could just have all Adobe and that's going to solve everything across they'll service marketing and commerce that's there's no one provider that has that so you need to have that ability to transfer data and to drive that experience so I'm excited about where Adobe's going with the experience platform because I think it's a good first step especially on their side to try and make it easier again it's about how do you make it easier to deploy applications so that you can serve the purpose for the consumer so I think it I think it's a good first I would you describe the makeup of the ecosystem community breaking down from developers to integrators and partners because as you start to see this kind of enabling platforms as you said it's a first step is foundational you'll see how it kind of evolves sure ultimately developers will to me will be a canary in a coal mine on this one but how does has the makeup of the community on the development side what did what it's the personas are the developers the hardcore cloud guys are they mostly app developers is there some segmentation what's your view of this I think so what I'm seeing is developers turning more into cross utilization of skills if there's there's less and less of I'm just this type of developer it's usually more of I'm gonna experiment and do a little bit of everything what I've actually been finding interesting is a lot of developers are turning into people that sit in marketing or sit in sales operations or you know some people have turned it citizen integrators but it's people who do not come from a technical background but the tools that are being created today are enabling them to do more of the integration work on their own and that's one of the benefits when you have open API is recipes api's is you can put more of that power in the hands of less technical users there's that's not to say you're not going to ever need hard for developers but what I'm seeing is more and more non-technical people are getting into the developers of time cycles are changing they want to be closer to those customers that the closer to the front line is not in the back office kind of coding away right you just you don't with with consumer expectations shifting on a dime you can't wait and that's one of the things that we spend a lot of time trying to help our IT side of the house customers is how to be flexible how to be nimble so that when marketing where any business leader comes to you and says hey I want to try this out you don't say I'll get back to you in nine months it should be I'll get back to you next week yeah and that's really the goal of what we're trying to do with new titles we had a guest on the queue we've been doing the queue for 10 years first time we've ever had a guest with a title marketing CIO which was kind of business saying look I got I got to sit in the marketing team and be a CIO over here and translate and put projects together and make things happen to your point about it's an integrator kind of like putting it all together well I mean it's no different than you see more and more CIOs become much more business focused business savvy they're not just hey I'm going to keep the lights on from a technology perspective the the more successful CIOs have that business lens no different than the CMO the CMO czar having to get smarter on technology and a lot of times what we're saying is the CMOS are driving the tech agenda not the CIOs so as a result I'm not surprised to see I'm the would you say was a marketing CIO Marketing CIO thanks for the insights great to have you on yeah I think get the talk tech and under the hood marketing text great final question for you what's next for CXC customer experience engine what's going on what's the next leg of the journey for you so the next leg of a journey is we've already got the integration layer laid out so we can pretty much plug-and-play any application that is out there we're really diving into real time analytics real time segmentation taking some of the power of the capabilities that are in the CDP space to drive those engagements so it's really it's it's an expansion and then that data space and making it that much more accessible to our customers that's great you guys bring some abstraction some automation to the table for customers it's a cube bringing you all the data here and insights I'm chef Fred chef Rick stay with us more day 2 coverage after this short break

>> PA Announcer: Off the plastic tab, and we'll turn on the colors. Welcome to New Orleans. ♪ This is it ♪ ♪ The part when I say I don't want ya ♪ ♪ I'm stronger than I've been before ♪ ♪ This is the part when I set your free ♪ (New Orleans jazz music) ("When the Saints Go Marching In") (rock music) >> PA Announcer: Ladies and gentleman, would you please welcome state of Louisiana chief design officer Matthew Vince and Choice Hotels director of infrastructure services Stacy Nigh. (rock music) >> Well good morning New Orleans, and welcome to my home state. My name is Matt Vince. I'm the chief design office for state of Louisiana. And it's my pleasure to welcome you all to .Next 2018. State of Louisiana is currently re-architecting our cloud infrastructure and Nutanix is the first domino to fall in our strategy to deliver better services to our citizens. >> And I'd like to second that warm welcome. I'm Stacy Nigh director of infrastructure services for Choice Hotels International. Now you may think you know Choice, but we don't own hotels. We're a technology company. And Nutanix is helping us innovate the way we operate to support our franchisees. This is my first visit to New Orleans and my first .Next. >> Well Stacy, you're in for a treat. New Orleans is known for its fabulous food and its marvelous music, but most importantly the free spirit. >> Well I can't wait, and speaking of free, it's my pleasure to introduce the Nutanix Freedom video, enjoy. ♪ I lose everything, so I can sing ♪ ♪ Hallelujah I'm free ♪ ♪ Ah, ah, ♪ ♪ Ah, ah, ♪ ♪ I lose everything, so I can sing ♪ ♪ Hallelujah I'm free ♪ ♪ I lose everything, so I can sing ♪ ♪ Hallelujah I'm free ♪ ♪ I'm free, I'm free, I'm free, I'm free ♪ ♪ Gritting your teeth, you hold onto me ♪ ♪ It's never enough, I'm never complete ♪ ♪ Tell me to prove, expect me to lose ♪ ♪ I push it away, I'm trying to move ♪ ♪ I'm desperate to run, I'm desperate to leave ♪ ♪ If I lose it all, at least I'll be free ♪ ♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, I'm free ♪ >> PA Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome chief marketing officer Ben Gibson ♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, I'm free ♪ >> Welcome, good morning. >> Audience: Good morning. >> And welcome to .Next 2018. There's no better way to open up a .Next conference than by hearing from two of our great customers. And Matthew, thank you for welcoming us to this beautiful, your beautiful state and city. And Stacy, this is your first .Next, and I know she's not alone because guess what It's my first .Next too. And I come properly attired. In the front row, you can see my Nutanix socks, and I think my Nutanix blue suit. And I know I'm not alone. I think over 5,000 people in attendance here today are also first timers at .Next. And if you are here for the first time, it's in the morning, let's get moving. I want you to stand up, so we can officially welcome you into the fold. Everyone stand up, first time. All right, welcome. (audience clapping) So you are all joining not just a conference here. This is truly a community. This is a community of the best and brightest in our industry I will humbly say that are coming together to share best ideas, to learn what's happening next, and in particular it's about forwarding not only your projects and your priorities but your careers. There's so much change happening in this industry. It's an opportunity to learn what's coming down the road and learn how you can best position yourself for this whole new world that's happening around cloud computing and modernizing data center environments. And this is not just a community, this is a movement. And it's a movement that started quite awhile ago, but the first .Next conference was in the quiet little town of Miami, and there was about 800 of you in attendance or so. So who in this hall here were at that first .Next conference in Miami? Let me hear from you. (audience members cheering) Yep, well to all of you grizzled veterans of the .Next experience, welcome back. You have started a movement that has grown and this year across many different .Next conferences all over the world, over 20,000 of your community members have come together. And we like to do it in distributed architecture fashion just like here in Nutanix. And so we've spread this movement all over the world with .Next conferences. And this is surging. We're also seeing just today the current count 61,000 certifications and climbing. Our Next community, close to 70,000 active members of our online community because .Next is about this big moment, and it's about every other day and every other week of the year, how we come together and explore. And my favorite stat of all. Here today in this hall amongst the record 5,500 registrations to .Next 2018 representing 71 countries in whole. So it's a global movement. Everyone, welcome. And you know when I got in Sunday night, I was looking at the tweets and the excitement was starting to build and started to see people like Adile coming from Casablanca. Adile wherever you are, welcome buddy. That's a long trip. Thank you so much for coming and being here with us today. I saw other folks coming from Geneva, from Denmark, from Japan, all over the world coming together for this moment. And we are accomplishing phenomenal things together. Because of your trust in us, and because of some early risk candidly that we have all taken together, we've created a movement in the market around modernizing data center environments, radically simplifying how we operate in the services we deliver to our businesses everyday. And this is a movement that we don't just know about this, but the industry is really taking notice. I love this chart. This is Gartner's inaugural hyperconvergence infrastructure magic quadrant chart. And I think if you see where Nutanix is positioned on there, I think you can agree that's a rout, that's a homerun, that's a mic drop so to speak. What do you guys think? (audience clapping) But here's the thing. It says Nutanix up there. We can honestly say this is a win for this hall here. Because, again, without your trust in us and what we've accomplished together and your partnership with us, we're not there. But we are there, and it is thanks to everyone in this hall. Together we have created, expanded, and truly made this market. Congratulations. And you know what, I think we're just getting started. The same innovation, the same catalyst that we drove into the market to converge storage network compute, the next horizon is around multi-cloud. The next horizon is around whether by accident or on purpose the strong move with different workloads moving into public cloud, some into private cloud moving back and forth, the promise of application mobility, the right workload on the right cloud platform with the right economics. Economics is key here. If any of you have a teenager out there, and they have a hold of your credit card, and they're doing something online or the like. You get some surprises at the end of the month. And that surprise comes in the form of spiraling public cloud costs. And this isn't to say we're not going to see a lot of workloads born and running in public cloud, but the opportunity is for us to take a path that regains control over infrastructure, regain control over workloads and where they're run. And the way I look at it for everyone in this hall, it's a journey we're on. It starts with modernizing those data center environments, continues with embracing the full cloud stack and the compelling opportunity to deliver that consumer experience to rapidly offer up enterprise compute services to your internal clients, lines of businesses and then out into the market. It's then about how you standardize across an enterprise cloud environment, that you're not just the infrastructure but the management, the automation, the control, and running any tier one application. I hear this everyday, and I've heard this a lot already this week about customers who are all in with this approach and running those tier one applications on Nutanix. And then it's the promise of not only hyperconverging infrastructure but hyperconverging multiple clouds. And if we do that, this journey the way we see it what we are doing is building your enterprise cloud. And your enterprise cloud is about the private cloud. It's about expanding and managing and taking back control of how you determine what workload to run where, and to make sure there's strong governance and control. And you're radically simplifying what could be an awfully complicated scenario if you don't reclaim and put your arms around that opportunity. Now how do we do this different than anyone else? And this is going to be a big theme that you're going to see from my good friend Sunil and his good friends on the product team. What are we doing together? We're taking all of that legacy complexity, that friction, that inability to be able to move fast because you're chained to old legacy environments. I'm talking to folks that have applications that are 40 years old, and they are concerned to touch them because they're not sure if they can react if their infrastructure can meet the demands of a new, modernized workload. We're making all that complexity invisible. And if all of that is invisible, it allows you to focus on what's next. And that indeed is the spirit of this conference. So if the what is enterprise cloud, and the how we do it different is by making infrastructure invisible, data centers, clouds, then why are we all here today? What is the binding principle that spiritually, that emotionally brings us all together? And we think it's a very simple, powerful word, and that word is freedom. And when we think about freedom, we think about as we work together the freedom to build the data center that you've always wanted to build. It's about freedom to run the applications where you choose based on the information and the context that wasn't available before. It's about the freedom of choice to choose the right cloud platform for the right application, and again to avoid a lot of these spiraling costs in unanticipated surprises whether it be around security, whether it be around economics or governance that come to the forefront. It's about the freedom to invent. It's why we got into this industry in the first place. We want to create. We want to build things not keep the lights on, not be chained to mundane tasks day by day. And it's about the freedom to play. And I hear this time and time again. My favorite tweet from a Nutanix customer to this day is just updated a lot of nodes at 38,000 feed on United Wifi, on my way to spend vacation with my family. Freedom to play. This to me is emotionally what brings us all together and what you saw with the Freedom video earlier, and what you see here is this new story because we want to go out and spread the word and not only talk about the enterprise cloud, not only talk about how we do it better, but talk about why it's so compelling to be a part of this hall here today. Now just one note of housekeeping for everyone out there in case I don't want anyone to take a wrong turn as they come to this beautiful convention center here today. A lot of freedom going on in this convention center. As luck may have it, there's another conference going on a little bit down that way based on another high growth, disruptive industry. Now MJBizCon Next, and by coincidence it's also called next. And I have to admire the creativity. I have to admire that we do share a, hey, high growth business model here. And in case you're not quite sure what this conference is about. I'm the head of marketing here. I have to show the tagline of this. And I read the tagline from license to launch and beyond, the future of the, now if I can replace that blank with our industry, I don't know, to me it sounds like a new, cool Sunil product launch. Maybe launching a new subscription service or the like. Stay tuned, you never know. I think they're going to have a good time over there. I know we're going to have a wonderful week here both to learn as well as have a lot of fun particularly in our customer appreciation event tonight. I want to spend a very few important moments on .Heart. .Heart is Nutanix's initiative to promote diversity in the technology arena. In particular, we have a focus on advancing the careers of women and young girls that we want to encourage to move into STEM and high tech careers. You have the opportunity to engage this week with this important initiative. Please role the video, and let's learn more about how you can do so. >> Video Plays (electronic music) >> So all of you have received these .Heart tokens. You have the freedom to go and choose which of the four deserving charities can receive donations to really advance our cause. So I thank you for your engagement there. And this community is behind .Heart. And it's a very important one. So thank you for that. .Next is not the community, the moment it is without our wonderful partners. These are our amazing sponsors. Yes, it's about sponsorship. It's also about how we integrate together, how we innovate together, and we're about an open community. And so I want to thank all of these names up here for your wonderful sponsorship of this event. I encourage everyone here in this room to spend time, get acquainted, get reacquainted, learn how we can make wonderful music happen together, wonderful music here in New Orleans happen together. .Next isn't .Next with a few cool surprises. Surprise number one, we have a contest. This is a still shot from the Freedom video you saw right before I came on. We have strategically placed a lucky seven Nutanix Easter eggs in this video. And if you go to Nutanix.com/freedom, watch the video. You may have to use the little scrubbing feature to slow down 'cause some of these happen quickly. You're going to find some fun, clever Easter eggs. List all seven, tweet that out, or as many as you can, tweet that out with hashtag nextconf, C, O, N, F, and we'll have a random drawing for an all expenses paid free trip to .Next 2019. And just to make sure everyone understands Easter egg concept. There's an eighth one here that's actually someone that's quite famous in our circles. If you see on this still shot, there's someone in the back there with a red jacket on. That's not just anyone. We're targeting in here. That is our very own Julie O'Brien, our senior vice president of corporate marketing. And you're going to hear from Julie later on here at .Next. But Julie and her team are the engine and the creativity behind not only our new Freedom campaign but more importantly everything that you experience here this week. Julie and her team are amazing, and we can't wait for you to experience what they've pulled together for you. Another surprise, if you go and visit our Freedom booths and share your stories. So they're like video booths, you share your success stories, your partnerships, your journey that I talked about, you will be entered to win a beautiful Nutanix brand compliant, look at those beautiful colors, bicycle. And it's not just any bicycle. It's a beautiful bicycle made by our beautiful customer Trek. I actually have a Trek bike. I love cycling. Unfortunately, I'm not eligible, but all of you are. So please share your stories in the Freedom Nutanix's booths and put yourself in the running, or in the cycling to get this prize. One more thing I wanted to share here. Yesterday we had a great time. We had our inaugural Nutanix hackathon. This hackathon brought together folks that were in devops practices, many of you that are in this room. We sold out. We thought maybe we'd get four or five teams. We had to shutdown at 14 teams that were paired together with a Nutanix mentor, and you coded. You used our REST APIs. You built new apps that integrated in with Prism and Clam. And it was wonderful to see this. Everyone I talked to had a great time on this. We had three winners. In third place, we had team Copper or team bronze, but team Copper. Silver, Not That Special, they're very humble kind of like one of our key mission statements. And the grand prize winner was We Did It All for the Cookies. And you saw them coming in on our Mardi Gras float here. We Did It All for Cookies, they did this very creative job. They leveraged an Apple Watch. They were lighting up VMs at a moments notice utilizing a lot of their coding skills. Congratulations to all three, first, second, and third all receive $2,500. And then each of them, then were able to choose a charity to deliver another $2,500 including Ronald McDonald House for the winner, we did it all for the McDonald Land cookies, I suppose, to move forward. So look for us to do more of these kinds of events because we want to bring together infrastructure and application development, and this is a great, I think, start for us in this community to be able to do so. With that, who's ready to hear form Dheeraj? You ready to hear from Dheeraj? (audience clapping) I'm ready to hear from Dheeraj, and not just 'cause I work for him. It is my distinct pleasure to welcome on the stage our CEO, cofounder and chairman Dheeraj Pandey. ("Free" by Broods) ♪ Hallelujah, I'm free ♪ >> Thank you Ben and good morning everyone. >> Audience: Good morning. >> Thank you so much for being here. It's just such an elation when I'm thinking about the Mardi Gras crowd that came here, the partners, the customers, the NTCs. I mean there's some great NTCs up there I could relate to because they're on Slack as well. How many of you are in Slack Nutanix internal Slack channel? Probably 5%, would love to actually see this community grow from here 'cause this is not the only even we would love to meet you. We would love to actually do this in a real time bite size communication on our own internal Slack channel itself. Now today, we're going to talk about a lot of things, but a lot of hard things, a lot of things that take time to build and have evolved as the industry itself has evolved. And one of the hard things that I want to talk about is multi-cloud. Multi-cloud is a really hard problem 'cause it's full of paradoxes. It's really about doing things that you believe are opposites of each other. It's about frictionless, but it's also about governance. It's about being simple, and it's also about being secure at the same time. It's about delight, it's about reducing waste, it's about owning, and renting, and finally it's also about core and edge. How do you really make this big at a core data center whether it's public or private? Or how do you really shrink it down to one or two nodes at the edge because that's where your machines are, that's where your people are? So this is a really hard problem. And as you hear from Sunil and the gang there, you'll realize how we've actually evolved our solutions to really cater to some of these. One of the approaches that we have used to really solve some of these hard problems is to have machines do more, and I said a lot of things in those four words, have machines do more. Because if you double-click on that sentence, it really means we're letting design be at the core of this. And how do you really design data centers, how do you really design products for the data center that hush all the escalations, the details, the complexities, use machine-learning and AI and you know figure our anomaly detection and correlations and patter matching? There's a ton of things that you need to do to really have machines do more. But along the way, the important lesson is to make machines invisible because when machines become invisible, it actually makes something else visible. It makes you visible. It makes governance visible. It makes applications visible, and it makes services visible. A lot of things, it makes teams visible, careers visible. So while we're really talking about invisibility of machines, we're talking about visibility of people. And that's how we really brought all of you together in this conference as well because it makes all of us shine including our products, and your careers, and your teams as well. And I try to define the word customer success. You know it's one of the favorite words that I'm actually using. We've just hired a great leader in customer success recently who's really going to focus on this relatively hard problem, yet another hard problem of customer success. We think that customer success, true customer success is possible when we have machines tend towards invisibility. But along the way when we do that, make humans tend towards freedom. So that's the real connection, the yin-yang of machines and humans that Nutanix is really all about. And that's why design is at the core of this company. And when I say design, I mean reducing friction. And it's really about reducing friction. And everything we do, the most mundane of things which could be about migrating applications, spinning up VMs, self-service portals, automatic upgrades, and automatic scale out, and all the things we do is about reducing friction which really makes machines become invisible and humans gain freedom. Now one of the other convictions we have is how all of us are really tied at the hip. You know our success is tied to your success. If we make you successful, and when I say you, I really mean Main Street. Main Street being customers, and partners, and employees. If we make all of you successful, then we automatically become successful. And very coincidentally, Main Street and Wall Street are also tied in that very same relation as well. If we do a great job at Main Street, I think the Wall Street customer, i.e. the investor, will take care of itself. You'll have you know taken care of their success if we took care of Main Street success itself. And that's the narrative that our CFO Dustin Williams actually went and painted to our Wall Street investors two months ago at our investor day conference. We talked about a $3 billion number. We said look as a company, as a software company, we can go and achieve $3 billion in billings three years from now. And it was a telling moment for the company. It was really about talking about where we could be three years from now. But it was not based on a hunch. It was based on what we thought was customer success. Now realize that $3 billion in pure software. There's only 10 to 15 companies in the world that actually have that kind of software billings number itself. But at the core of this confidence was customer success, was the fact that we were doing a really good job of not over promising and under delivering but under promising starting with small systems and growing the trust of the customers over time. And this is one of the statistics we actually talk about is repeat business. The first dollar that a Global 2000 customer spends in Nutanix, and if we go and increase their trust 15 times by year six, and we hope to actually get 17 1/2 and 19 times more trust in the years seven and eight. It's very similar numbers for non Global 2000 as well. Again, we go and really hustle for customer success, start small, have you not worry about paying millions of dollars upfront. You know start with systems that pay as they grow, you pay as they grow, and that's the way we gain trust. We have the same non Global 2000 pay $6 1/2 for the first dollar they've actually spent on us. And with this, I think the most telling moment was when Dustin concluded. And this is key to this audience here as well. Is how the current cohorts which is this audience here and many of them were not here will actually carry the weight of $3 billion, more than 50% of it if we did a great job of customer success. If we were humble and honest and we really figured out what it meant to take care of you, and if we really understood what starting small was and having to gain the trust with you over time, we think that more than 50% of that billings will actually come from this audience here without even looking at new logos outside. So that's the trust of customer success for us, and it takes care of pretty much every customer not just the Main Street customer. It takes care of Wall Street customer. It takes care of employees. It takes care of partners as well. Now before I talk about technology and products, I want to take a step back 'cause many of you are new in this audience. And I think that it behooves us to really talk about the history of this company. Like we've done a lot of things that started out as science projects. In fact, I see some tweets out there and people actually laugh at Nutanix cloud. And this is where we were in 2012. So if you take a step back and think about where the company was almost seven, eight years ago, we were up against giants. There was a $30 billion industry around network attached storage, and storage area networks and blade servers, and hypervisors, and systems management software and so on. So what did we start out with? Very simple premise that we will collapse the architecture of the data center because three tier is wasteful and three tier is not delightful. It was a very simple hunch, we said we'll take rack mount servers, we'll put a layer of software on top of it, and that layer of software back then only did storage. It didn't do networks and security, and it ran on top of a well known hypervisor from VMware. And we said there's one non negotiable thing. The fact that the design must change. The control plane for this data center cannot be the old control plane. It has to be rethought through, and that's why Prism came about. Now we went and hustled hard to add more things to it. We said we need to make this diverse because it can't just be for one application. We need to make it CPU heavy, and memory heavy, and storage heavy, and flash heavy and so on. And we built a highly configurable HCI. Now all of them are actually configurable as you know of today. And this was not just innovation in technologies, it was innovation in business and sizing, capacity planning, quote to cash business processes. A lot of stuff that we had to do to make this highly configurable, so you can really scale capacity and performance independent of each other. Then in 2014, we did something that was very counterintuitive, but we've done this on, and on, and on again. People said why are you disrupting yourself? You know you've been doing a good job of shipping appliances, but we also had the conviction that HCI was not about hardware. It was about a form factor, but it was really about an operating system. And we started to compete with ourselves when we said you know what we'll do arm's length distribution, we'll do arm's length delivery of products when we give our software to our Dell partner, to Dell as a partner, a loyal partner. But at the same time, it was actually seen with a lot of skepticism. You know these guys are wondering how to really make themselves vanish because they're competing with themselves. But we also knew that if we didn't compete with ourselves someone else will. Now one of the most controversial decisions was really going and doing yet another hypervisor. In the year 2015, it was really preposterous to build yet another hypervisor. It was a very mature market. This was coming probably 15 years too late to the market, or at least 10 years too late to market. And most people said it shouldn't be done because hypervisor is a commodity. And that's the word we latched on to. That this commodity should not have to be paid for. It shouldn't have a team of people managing it. It should actually be part of your overall stack, but it should be invisible. Just like storage needs to be invisible, virtualization needs to be invisible. But it was a bold step, and I think you know at least when we look at our current numbers, 1/3rd of our customers are actually using AHV. At least every quarter that we look at it, our new deployments, at least 35% of it is actually being used on AHV itself. And again, a very preposterous thing to have said five years ago, four years ago to where we've actually come. Thank you so much for all of you who've believed in the fact that virtualization software must be invisible and therefore we should actually try out something that is called AHV today. Now we went and added Lenovo to our OEM mix, started to become even more of a software company in the year 2016. Went and added HP and Cisco in some of very large deals that we talk about in earnings call, our HP deals and Cisco deals. And some very large customers who have procured ELAs from us, enterprise license agreements from us where they want to mix and match hardware. They want to mix Dell hardware with HP hardware but have common standard Nutanix entitlements. And finally, I think this was another one of those moments where we say why should HCI be only limited to X86. You know this operating systems deserves to run on a non X86 architecture as well. And that gave birth to this idea of HCI and Power Systems from IBM. And we've done a great job of really innovating with them in the last three, four quarters. Some amazing innovation that has come out where you can now run AIX 7.x on Nutanix. And for the first time in the history of data center, you can actually have a single software not just a data plane but a control plane where you can manage an IBM farm, an Power farm, and open Power farm and an X86 farm from the same control plane and have you know the IBM farm feed storage to an Intel compute farm and vice versa. So really good things that we've actually done. Now along the way, something else was going on while we were really busy building the private cloud, we knew there was a new consumption model on computing itself. People were renting computing using credit cards. This is the era of the millennials. They were like really want to bypass people because at the end of the day, you know why can't computing be consumed the way like eCommerce is? And that devops movement made us realize that we need to add to our stack. That stack will now have other computing clouds that is AWS and Azure and GCP now. So similar to the way we did Prism. You know Prism was really about going and making hypervisors invisible. You know we went ahead and said we'll add Calm to our portfolio because Calm is now going to be what Prism was to us back when we were really dealing with multi hypervisor world. Now it's going to be multi-cloud world. You know it's one of those things we had a gut around, and we really come to expect a lot of feedback and real innovation. I mean yesterday when we had the hackathon. The center, the epicenter of the discussion was Calm, was how do you automate on multiple clouds without having to write a single line of code? So we've come a long way since the acquisition of Calm two years ago. I think it's going to be a strong pillar in our overall product portfolio itself. Now the word multi-cloud is going to be used and over used. In fact, it's going to be blurring its lines with the idea of hyperconvergence of clouds, you know what does it mean. We just hope that hyperconvergence, the way it's called today will morph to become hyperconverged clouds not just hyperconverged boxes which is a software defined infrastructure definition itself. But let's focus on the why of multi-cloud. Why do we think it can't all go into a public cloud itself? The one big reason is just laws of the land. There's data sovereignty and computing sovereignty, regulations and compliance because of which you need to be in where the government with the regulations where the compliance rules want you to be. And by the way, that's just one reason why the cloud will have to disperse itself. It can't just be 10, 20 large data centers around the world itself because you have 200 plus countries and half of computing actually gets done outside the US itself. So it's a really important, very relevant point about the why of multi-cloud. The second one is just simple laws of physics. You know if there're machines at the edge, and they're producing so much data, you can't bring all the data to the compute. You have to take the compute which is stateless, it's an app. You take the app to where the data is because the network is the enemy. The network has always been the enemy. And when we thought we've made fatter networks, you've just produced more data as well. So this just goes without saying that you take something that's stateless that's without gravity, that's lightweight which is compute and the application and push it close to where the data itself is. And the third one which is related is just latency reasons you know? And it's not just about machine latency and electrons transferring over the speed light, and you can't defy the speed of light. It's also about human latency. It's also about multiple teams saying we need to federate and delegate, and we need to push things down to where the teams are as opposed to having to expect everybody to come to a very large computing power itself. So all the ways, the way they are, there will be at least three different ways of looking at multi-cloud itself. There's a centralized core cloud. We all go and relate to this because we've seen large data centers and so on. And that's the back office workhorse. It will crunch numbers. It will do processing. It will do a ton of things that will go and produce results for you know how we run our businesses, but there's also the dispersal of the cloud, so ROBO cloud. And this is the front office server that's really serving. It's a cloud that's going to serve people. It's going to be closer to people, and that's what a ROBO cloud is. We have a ton of customers out here who actually use Nutanix and the ROBO environments themselves as one node, two node, three node, five node servers, and it just collapses the entire server closet room in these ROBOs into something really, really small and minuscule. And finally, there's going to be another dispersed edge cloud because that's where the machines are, that's where the data is. And there's going to be an IOT machine fog because we need to miniaturize computing to something even smaller, maybe something that can really land in the palm in a mini server which is a PC like server, but you need to run everything that's enterprise grade. You should be able to go and upgrade them and monitor them and analyze them. You know do enough computing up there, maybe event-based processing that can actually happen. In fact, there's some great innovation that we've done at the edge with IOTs that I'd love for all of you to actually attend some sessions around as well. So with that being said, we have a hole in the stack. And that hole is probably one of the hardest problems that we've been trying to solve for the last two years. And Sunil will talk a lot about that. This idea of hybrid. The hybrid of multi-cloud is one of the hardest problems. Why? Because we're talking about really blurring the lines with owning and renting where you have a single-tenant environment which is your data center, and a multi-tenant environment which is the service providers data center, and the two must look like the same. And the two must look like the same is that hard a problem not just for burst out capacity, not just for security, not just for identity but also for networks. Like how do you blur the lines between networks? How do you blur the lines for storage? How do you really blur the lines for a single pane of glass where you can think of availability zones that look highly symmetric even though they're not because one of 'em is owned by you, and it's single-tenant. The other one is not owned by you, that's multi-tenant itself. So there's some really hard problems in hybrid that you'll hear Sunil talk about and the team. And some great strides that we've actually made in the last 12 months of really working on Xi itself. And that completes the picture now in terms of how we believe the state of computing will be going forward. So what are the must haves of a multi-cloud operating system? We talked about marketplace which is catalogs and automation. There's a ton of orchestration that needs to be done for multi-cloud to come together because now you have a self-service portal which is providing an eCommerce view. It's really about you know getting to do a lot of requests and workflows without having people come in the way, without even having tickets. There's no need for tickets if you can really start to think like a self-service portal as if you're just transacting eCommerce with machines and portals themselves. Obviously the next one is networking security. You need to blur the lines between on-prem and off-prem itself. These two play a huge role. And there's going to be a ton of details that you'll see Sunil talk about. But finally, what I want to focus on the rest of the talk itself here is what governance and compliance. This is a hard problem, and it's a hard problem because things have evolved. So I'm going to take a step back. Last 30 years of computing, how have consumption models changed? So think about it. 30 years ago, we were making decisions for 10 plus years, you know? Mainframe, at least 10 years, probably 20 plus years worth of decisions. These were decisions that were extremely waterfall-ish. Make 10s of millions of dollars worth of investment for a device that we'd buy for at least 10 to 20 years. Now as we moved to client-server, that thing actually shrunk. Now you're talking about five years worth of decisions, and these things were smaller. So there's a little bit more velocity in our decisions. We were not making as waterfall-ish decision as we used to with mainframes. But still five years, talk about virtualized, three tier, maybe three to five year decisions. You know they're still relatively big decisions that we were making with computer and storage and SAN fabrics and virtualization software and systems management software and so on. And here comes Nutanix, and we said no, no. We need to make it smaller. It has to become smaller because you know we need to make more agile decisions. We need to add machines every week, every month as opposed to adding you know machines every three to five years. And we need to be able to upgrade them, you know any point in time. You can do the upgrades every month if you had to, every week if you had to and so on. So really about more agility. And yet, we were not complete because there's another evolution going on, off-prem in the public cloud where people are going and doing reserved instances. But more than that, they were doing on demand stuff which no the decision was days to weeks. Some of these things that unitive compute was being rented for days to weeks, not years. And if you needed something more, you'd shift a little to the left and use reserved instances. And then spot pricing, you could do spot pricing for hours and finally lambda functions. Now you could to function as a service where things could actually be running only for minutes not even hours. So as you can see, there's a wide spectrum where when you move to the right, you get more elasticity, and when you move to the left, you're talking about predictable decision making. And in fact, it goes from minutes on one side to 10s of years on the other itself. And we hope to actually go and blur the lines between where NTNX is today where you see Nutanix right now to where we really want to be with reserved instances and on demand. And that's the real ask of Nutanix. How do you take care of this discontinuity? Because when you're owning things, you actually end up here, and when you're renting things, you end up here. What does it mean to really blur the lines between these two because people do want to make decisions that are better than reserved instance in the public cloud. We'll talk about why reserved instances which looks like a proxy for Nutanix it's still very, very wasteful even though you might think it's delightful, it's very, very wasteful. So what does it mean for on-prem and off-prem? You know you talk about cost governance, there's security compliance. These high velocity decisions we're actually making you know where sometimes you could be right with cost but wrong on security, but sometimes you could be right in security but wrong on cost. We need to really figure out how machines make some of these decisions for us, how software helps us decide do we have the right balance between cost, governance, and security compliance itself? And to get it right, we have introduced our first SAS service called Beam. And to talk more about Beam, I want to introduce Vijay Rayapati who's the general manager of Beam engineering to come up on stage and talk about Beam itself. Thank you Vijay. (rock music) So you've been here a couple of months now? >> Yes. >> At the same time, you spent the last seven, eight years really handling AWS. Tell us more about it. >> Yeah so we spent a lot of time trying to understand the last five years at Minjar you know how customers are really consuming in this new world for their workloads. So essentially what we tried to do is understand the consumption models, workload patterns, and also build algorithms and apply intelligence to say how can we lower this cost and you know improve compliance of their workloads.? And now with Nutanix what we're trying to do is how can we converge this consumption, right? Because what happens here is most customers start with on demand kind of consumption thinking it's really easy, but the total cost of ownership is so high as the workload elasticity increases, people go towards spot or a scaling, but then you need a lot more automation that something like Calm can help them. But predictability of the workload increases, then you need to move towards reserved instances, right to lower costs. >> And those are some of the things that you go and advise with some of the software that you folks have actually written. >> But there's a lot of waste even in the reserved instances because what happens it while customers make these commitments for a year or three years, what we see across, like we track a billion dollars in public cloud consumption you know as a Beam, and customers use 20%, 25% of utilization of their commitments, right? So how can you really apply, take the data of consumption you know apply intelligence to essentially reduce their you know overall cost of ownership. >> You said something that's very telling. You said reserved instances even though they're supposed to save are still only 20%, 25% utilized. >> Yes, because the workloads are very dynamic. And the next thing is you can't do hot add CPU or hot add memory because you're buying them for peak capacity. There is no convergence of scaling that apart from the scaling as another node. >> So you actually sized it for peak, but then using 20%, 30%, you're still paying for the peak. >> That's right. >> Dheeraj: That can actually add up. >> That's what we're trying to say. How can we deliver visibility across clouds? You know how can we deliver optimization across clouds and consumption models and bring the control while retaining that agility and demand elasticity? >> That's great. So you want to show us something? >> Yeah absolutely. So this is Beam as just Dheeraj outlined, our first SAS service. And this is my first .Next. And you know glad to be here. So what you see here is a global consumption you know for a business across different clouds. Whether that's in a public cloud like Amazon, or Azure, or Nutanix. We kind of bring the consumption together for the month, the recent month across your accounts and services and apply intelligence to say you know what is your spent efficiency across these clouds? Essentially there's a lot of intelligence that goes in to detect your workloads and consumption model to say if you're spending $100, how efficiently are you spending? How can you increase that? >> So you have a centralized view where you're looking at multiple clouds, and you know you talk about maybe you can take an example of an account and start looking at it? >> Yes, let's go into a cloud provider like you know for this business, let's go and take a loot at what's happening inside an Amazon cloud. Here we get into the deeper details of what's happening with the consumption of a specific services as well as the utilization of both on demand and RI. You know what can you do to lower your cost and detect your spend efficiency of a dollar to see you know are there resources that are provisioned by teams for applications that are not being used, or are there resources that we should go and rightsize because you know we have all this monitoring data, configuration data that we crunch through to basically detect this? >> You think there's billions of events that you look at everyday. You're already looking at a billon dollars worth of AWS spend. >> Right, right. >> So billions of events, billing, metering events every year to really figure out and optimize for them. >> So what we have here is a very popular international government organization. >> Dheeraj: Wow, so it looks like Russians are everywhere, the cloud is everywhere actually. >> Yes, it's quite popular. So when you bring your master account into Beam, we kind of detect all the linked accounts you know under that. Then you can go and take a look at not just at the organization level within it an account level. >> So these are child objects, you know. >> That's right. >> You can think of them as ephemeral accounts that you create because you don't want to be on the record when you're doing spams on Facebook for example. >> Right, let's go and take a look at what's happening inside a Facebook ad spend account. So we have you know consumption of the services. Let's go deeper into compute consumption, and you kind of see a trendline. You can do a lot of computing. As you see, looks like one campaign has ended. They started another campaign. >> Dheeraj: It looks like they're not stopping yet, man. There's a lot of money being made in Facebook right now. (Vijay laughing) >> So not only just get visibility at you know compute as a service inside a cloud provider, you can go deeper inside compute and say you know what is a service that I'm really consuming inside compute along with the CPUs n'stuff, right? What is my data transfer? You know what is my network? What is my load blancers? So essentially you get a very deeper visibility you know as a service right. Because we have three goals for Beam. How can we deliver visibility across clouds? How can we deliver visibility across services? And how can we deliver, then optimization? >> Well I think one thing that I just want to point out is how this SAS application was an extremely teachable moment for me to learn about the different resources that people could use about the public cloud. So all of you who actually have not gone deep enough into the idea of public cloud. This could be a great app for you to learn about things, the resources, you know things that you could do to save and security and things of that nature. >> Yeah. And we really believe in creating the single pane view you know to mange your optimization of a public cloud. You know as Ben spoke about as a business, you need to have freedom to use any cloud. And that's what Beam delivers. How can you make the right decision for the right workload to use any of the cloud of your choice? >> Dheeraj: How 'about databases? You talked about compute as well but are there other things we could look at? >> Vijay: Yes, let's go and take a look at database consumption. What you see here is they're using inside Facebook ad spending, they're using all databases except Oracle. >> Dheeraj: Wow, looks like Oracle sales folks have been active in Russia as well. (Vijay laughing) >> So what we're seeing here is a global view of you know what is your spend efficiency and which is kind of a scorecard for your business for the dollars that you're spending. And the great thing is Beam kind of brings together you know through its intelligence and algorithms to detect you know how can you rightsize resources and how can you eliminate things that you're not using? And we deliver and one click fix, right? Let's go and take a look at resources that are maybe provisioned for storage and not being used. We deliver the seamless one-click philosophy that Nutanix has to eliminate it. >> So one click, you can actually just pick some of these wasteful things that might be looking delightful because using public cloud, using credit cards, you can go in and just say click fix, and it takes care of things. >> Yeah, and not only remove the resources that are unused, but it can go and rightsize resources across your compute databases, load balancers, even past services, right? And this is where the power of it kind of comes for a business whether you're using on-prem and off-prem. You know how can you really converge that consumption across both? >> Dheeraj: So do you have something for Nutanix too? >> Vijay: Yes, so we have basically been working on Nutanix with something that we're going to deliver you know later this year. As you can see here, we're bringing together the consumption for the Nutanix, you know the services that you're using, the licensing and capacity that is available. And how can you also go and optimize within Nutanix environments >> That's great. >> for the next workload. Now let me quickly show you what we have on the compliance side. This is an extremely powerful thing that we've been working on for many years. What we deliver here just like in cost governance, a global view of your compliance across cloud providers. And the most powerful thing is you can go into a cloud provider, get the next level of visibility across cloud regimes for hundreds of policies. Not just policies but those policies across different regulatory compliances like HIPA, PCI, CAS. And that's very powerful because-- >> So you're saying a lot of what you folks have done is codified these compliance checks in software to make sure that people can sleep better at night knowing that it's PCI, and HIPA, and all that compliance actually comes together? >> And you can build this not just by cloud accounts, you can build them across cloud accounts which is what we call security centers. Essentially you can go and take a deeper look at you know the things. We do a whole full body scan for your cloud infrastructure whether it's AWS Amazon or Azure, and you can go and now, again, click to fix things. You know that had been probably provisioned that are violating the security compliance rules that should be there. Again, we have the same one-click philosophy to say how can you really remove things. >> So again, similar to save, you're saying you can go and fix some of these security issues by just doing one click. >> Absolutely. So the idea is how can we give our people the freedom to get visibility and use the right cloud and take the decisions instantly through one click. That's what Beam delivers you know today. And you know get really excited, and it's available at beam.nutanix.com. >> Our first SAS service, ladies and gentleman. Thank you so much for doing this, Vijay. It looks like there's going to be a talk here at 10:30. You'll talk more about the midterm elections there probably? >> Yes, so you can go and write your own security compliances as well. You know within Beam, and a lot of powerful things you can do. >> Awesome, thank you so much, Vijay. I really appreciate it. (audience clapping) So as you see, there's a lot of work that we're doing to really make multi-cloud which is a hard problem. You know think about working the whole body of it and what about cost governance? What about security compliance? Obviously what about hybrid networks, and security, and storage, you know compute, many of the things that you've actually heard from us, but we're taking it to a level where the business users can now understand the implications. A CFO's office can understand the implications of waste and delight. So what does customer success mean to us? You know again, my favorite word in a long, long time is really go and figure out how do you make you, the customer, become operationally efficient. You know there's a lot of stuff that we deliver through software that's completely uncovered. It's so latent, you don't even know you have it, but you've paid for it. So you've got to figure out what does it mean for you to really become operationally efficient, organizationally proficient. And it's really important for training, education, stuff that you know you're people might think it's so awkward to do in Nutanix, but it could've been way simpler if you just told you a place where you can go and read about it. Of course, I can just use one click here as opposed to doing things the old way. But most importantly to make it financially accountable. So the end in all this is, again, one of the things that I think about all the time in building this company because obviously there's a lot of stuff that we want to do to create orphans, you know things above the line and top line and everything else. There's also a bottom line. Delight and waste are two sides of the same coin. You know when we're talking about developers who seek delight with public cloud at the same time you're looking at IT folks who're trying to figure out governance. They're like look you know the CFOs office, the CIOs office, they're trying to figure out how to curb waste. These two things have to go hand in hand in this era of multi-cloud where we're talking about frictionless consumption but also governance that looks invisible. So I think, at the end of the day, this company will do a lot of stuff around one-click delight but also go and figure out how do you reduce waste because there's so much waste including folks there who actually own Nutanix. There's so much software entitlement. There's so much waste in the public cloud itself that if we don't go and put our arms around, it will not lead to customer success. So to talk more about this, the idea of delight and the idea of waste, I'd like to bring on board a person who I think you know many of you actually have talked about it have delightful hair but probably wasted jokes. But I think has wasted hair and delightful jokes. So ladies and gentlemen, you make the call. You're the jury. Sunil R.M.J. Potti. ("Free" by Broods) >> So that was the first time I came out from the bottom of a screen on a stage. I actually now know what it feels to be like a gopher. Who's that laughing loudly at the back? Okay, do we have the... Let's see. Okay, great. We're about 15 minutes late, so that means we're running right on time. That's normally how we roll at this conference. And we have about three customers and four demos. Like I think there's about three plus six, about nine folks coming onstage. So we'll have our own version of the parade as well on the main stage for the next 70 minutes. So let's just jump right into it. I think we've been pretty consistent in terms of our longterm plans since we started the company. And it's become a lot more clearer over the last few years about our plans to essentially make computing invisible as Dheeraj mentioned. We're doing this across multiple acts. We started with HCI. We call it making infrastructure invisible. We extended that to making data centers invisible. And then now we're in this mode of essentially extending it to converging clouds so that you can actually converge your consumption models. And so today's conference and essentially the theme that you're going to be seeing throughout the breakout sessions is about a journey towards invisible clouds, but make sure that you internalize the fact that we're investing heavily in each of the three phases. It's just not about the hybrid cloud with Nutanix, it's about actually finishing the job about making infrastructure invisible, expanding that to kind of go after the full data center, and then of course embark on some real meaningful things around invisible clouds, okay? And to start the session, I think you know the part that I wanted to make sure that we are all on the same page because most of us in the room are still probably in this phase of the journey which is about invisible infrastructure. And there the three key products and especially two of them that most of you guys know are Acropolis and Prism. And they're sort of like the bedrock of our company. You know especially Acropolis which is about the web scale architecture. Prism is about consumer grade design. And with Acropolis now being really mature. It's in the seventh year of innovation. We still have more than half of our company in terms of R and D spend still on Acropolis and Prism. So our core product is still sort of where we think we have a significant differentiation on. We're not going to let our foot off the peddle there. You know every time somebody comes to me and says look there's a new HCI render popping out or an existing HCI render out there, I ask a simple question to our customers saying show me 100 customers with 100 node deployments, and it will be very hard to find any other render out there that does the same thing. And that's the power of Acropolis the code platform. And then it's you know the fact that the velocity associated with Acropolis continues to be on a fast pace. We came out with various new capabilities in 5.5 and 5.6, and one of the most complicated things to get right was the fact to shrink our three node cluster to a one node, two node deployment. Most of you actually had requirements on remote office, branch office, or the edge that actually allowed us to kind of give us you know sort of like the impetus to kind of go design some new capabilities into our core OS to get this out. And associated with Acropolis and expanding into Prism, as you will see, the first couple of years of Prism was all about refactoring the user interface, doing a good job with automation. But more and more of the investments around Prism is going to be based on machine learning. And you've seen some variants of that over the last 12 months, and I can tell you that in the next 12 to 24 months, most of our investments around infrastructure operations are going to be driven by AI techniques starting with most of our R and D spend also going into machine-learning algorithms. So when you talk about all the enhancements that have come on with Prism whether it be formed by you know the management console changing to become much more automated, whether now we give you automatic rightsizing, anomaly detection, or a series of functionality that have gone into it, the real core sort of capabilities that we're putting into Prism and Acropolis are probably best served by looking at the quality of the product. You probably have seen this slide before. We started showing the number of nodes shipped by Nutanix two years ago at this conference. It was about 35,000 plus nodes at that time. And since then, obviously we've you know continued to grow. And we would draw this line which was about enterprise class quality. That for the number of bugs found as a percentage of nodes shipped, there's a certain line that's drawn. World class companies do about probably 2% to 3%, number of CFDs per node shipped. And we were just broken that number two years ago. And to give you guys an idea of how that curve has shown up, it's now currently at .95%. And so along with velocity, you know this focus on being true to our roots of reliability and stability continues to be, you know it's an internal challenge, but it's also some of the things that we keep a real focus on. And so between Acropolis and Prism, that's sort of like our core focus areas to sort of give us the confidence that look we have this really high bar that we're sort of keeping ourselves accountable to which is about being the most advanced enterprise cloud OS on the planet. And we will keep it this way for the next 10 years. And to complement that, over a period of time of course, we've added a series of services. So these are services not just for VMs but also for files, blocks, containers, but all being delivered in that single one-click operations fashion. And to really talk more about it, and actually probably to show you the real deal there it's my great pleasure to call our own version of Moses inside the company, most of you guys know him as Steve Poitras. Come on up, Steve. (audience clapping) (rock music) >> Thanks Sunil. >> You barely fit in that door, man. Okay, so what are we going to talk about today, Steve? >> Absolutely. So when we think about when Nutanix first got started, it was really focused around VDI deployments, smaller workloads. However over time as we've evolved the product, added additional capabilities and features, that's grown from VDI to business critical applications as well as cloud native apps. So let's go ahead and take a look. >> Sunil: And we'll start with like Oracle? >> Yeah, that's one of the key ones. So here we can see our Prism central user interface, and we can see our Thor cluster obviously speaking to the Avengers theme here. We can see this is doing right around 400,000 IOPs at around 360 microseconds latency. Now obviously Prism central allows you to mange all of your Nutanix deployments, but this is just running on one single Nutanix cluster. So if we hop over here to our explore tab, we can see we have a few categories. We have some Kubernetes, some AFS, some Xen desktop as well as Oracle RAC. Now if we hope over to Oracle RAC, we're running a SLOB workload here. So obviously with Oracle enterprise applications performance, consistency, and extremely low latency are very critical. So with this SLOB workload, we're running right around 300 microseconds of latency. >> Sunil: So this is what, how many node Oracle RAC cluster is this? >> Steve: This is a six node Oracle RAC deployment. >> Sunil: Got it. And so what has gone into the product in recent releases to kind of make this happen? >> Yeah so obviously on the hardware front, there's been a lot of evolutions in storage mediums. So with the introduction of NVME, persistent memory technologies like 3D XPoint, that's meant storage media has become a lot faster. Now to allow you to full take advantage of that, that's where we've had to do a lot of optimizations within the storage stack. So with AHV, we have what we call AHV turbo mode which allows you to full take advantage of those faster storage mediums at that much lower latency. And then obviously on the networking front, technologies such as RDMA can be leveraged to optimize that network stack. >> Got it. So that was Oracle RAC running on a you know Nutanix cluster. It used to be a big deal a couple of years ago. Now we've got many customers doing that. On the same environment though, we're going to show you is the advent of actually putting file services in the same scale out environment. And you know many of you in the audience probably know about AFS. We released it about 12 to 14 months ago. It's been one of our most popular new products of all time within Nutanix's history. And we had SMB support was for user file shares, VDI deployments, and it took awhile to bake, to get to scale and reliability. And then in the last release, in the recent release that we just shipped, we now added NFS for support so that we can no go after the full scale file server consolidation. So let's take a look at some of that stuff. >> Yep, let's do it. So hopping back over to Prism, we can see our four cluster here. Overall cluster-wide latency right around 360 microseconds. Now we'll hop down to our file server section. So here we can see we have our Next A File Server hosting right about 16.2 million files. Now if you look at our shares and exports, we can see we have a mix of different shares. So one of the shares that you see there is home directories. This is an SMB share which is actually mapped and being leveraged by our VDI desktops for home folders, user profiles, things of that nature. We can also see this Oracle backup share here which is exposed to our rack host via NFS. So RMAN is actually leveraging this to provide native database backups. >> Got it. So Oracle VMs, backup using files, or for any other file share requirements with AFS. Do we have the cluster also showing, I know, so I saw some Kubernetes as well on it. Let's talk about what we're thinking of doing there. >> Yep, let's do it. So if we think about cloud, cloud's obviously a big buzz word, so is containers in Kubernetes. So with ACS 1.0 what we did is we introduced native support for Docker integration. >> And pause there. And we screwed up. (laughing) So just like the market took a left turn on Kubernetes, obviously we realized that, and now we're working on ACS 2.0 which is what we're going to talk about, right? >> Exactly. So with ACS 2.0, we've introduced native Kubernetes support. Now when I think about Kubernetes, there's really two core areas that come to mind. The first one is around native integration. So with that, we have our Kubernetes volume integration, we're obviously doing a lot of work on the networking front, and we'll continue to push there from an integration point of view. Now the other piece is around the actual deployment of Kubernetes. When we think about a lot of Nutanix administrators or IT admins, they may have never deployed Kubernetes before, so this could be a very daunting task. And true to the Nutanix nature, we not only want to make our platform simple and intuitive, we also want to do this for any ecosystem products. So with ACS 2.0, we've simplified the full Kubernetes deployment and switching over to our ACS two interface, we can see this create cluster button. Now this actually pops up a full wizard. This wizard will actually walk you through the full deployment process, gather the necessary inputs for you, and in a matter of a few clicks and a few minutes, we have a full Kubernetes deployment fully provisioned, the masters, the workers, all the networking fully done for you, very simple and intuitive. Now if we hop back over to Prism, we can see we have this ACS2 Kubernetes category. Clicking on that, we can see we have eight instances of virtual machines. And here are Kubernetes virtual machines which have actually been deployed as part of this ACS2 installer. Now one of the nice things is it makes the IT administrator's job very simple and easy to do. The deployment straightforward monitoring and management very straightforward and simple. Now for the developer, the application architect, or engineers, they interface and interact with Kubernetes just like they would traditionally on any platform. >> Got it. So the goal of ACS is to ensure that the developer ecosystem still uses whatever tools that they are you know preferring while at that same time allowing this consolidation of containers along with VMs all on that same, single runtime, right? So that's ACS. And then if you think about where the OS is going, there's still some open space at the end. And open space has always been look if you just look at a public cloud, you look at blocks, files, containers, the most obvious sort of storage function that's left is objects. And that's the last horizon for us in completing the storage stack. And we're going to show you for the first time a preview of an upcoming product called the Acropolis Object Storage Services Stack. So let's talk a little bit about it and then maybe show the demo. >> Yeah, so just like we provided file services with AFS, block services with ABS, with OSS or Object Storage Services, we provide native object storage, compatibility and capability within the Nutanix platform. Now this provides a very simply common S3 API. So any integrations you've done with S3 especially Kubernetes, you can actually leverage that out of the box when you've deployed this. Now if we hop back over to Prism, I'll go here to my object stores menu. And here we can see we have two existing object storage instances which are running. So you can deploy however many of these as you wanted to. Now just like the Kubernetes deployment, deploying a new object instance is very simple and easy to do. So here I'll actually name this instance Thor's Hammer. >> You do know he loses it, right? He hasn't seen the movies yet. >> Yeah, I don't want any spoilers yet. So once we specified the name, we can choose our capacity. So here we'll just specify a large instance or type. Obviously this could be any amount or storage. So if you have a 200 node Nutanix cluster with petabytes worth of data, you could do that as well. Once we've selected that, we'll select our expected performance. And this is going to be the number of concurrent gets and puts. So essentially how many operations per second we want this instance to be able to facilitate. Once we've done that, the platform will actually automatically determine how many virtual machines it needs to deploy as well as the resources and specs for those. And once we've done that, we'll go ahead and click save. Now here we can see it's actually going through doing the deployment of the virtual machines, applying any necessary configuration, and in the matter of a few clicks and a few seconds, we actually have this Thor's Hammer object storage instance which is up and running. Now if we hop over to one of our existing object storage instances, we can see this has three buckets. So one for Kafka-queue, I'm actually using this for my Kafka cluster where I have right around 62 million objects all storing ProtoBus. The second one there is Spark. So I actually have a Spark cluster running on our Kubernetes deployed instance via ACS 2.0. Now this is doing analytics on top of this data using S3 as a storage backend. Now for these objects, we support native versioning, native object encryption as well as worm compliancy. So if you want to have expiry periods, retention intervals, that sort of thing, we can do all that. >> Got it. So essentially what we've just shown you is with upcoming objects as well that the same OS can now support VMs, files, objects, containers, all on the same one click operational fabric. And so that's in some way the real power of Nutanix is to still keep that consistency, scalability in place as we're covering each and every workload inside the enterprise. So before Steve gets off stage though, I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about something that you know how many of you been to our Nutanix headquarters in San Jose, California? A few. I know there's like, I don't know, 4,000 or 5,000 people here. If you do come to the office, you know when you land in San Jose Airport on the way to longterm parking, you'll pass our office. It's that close. And if you come to the fourth floor, you know one of the cubes that's where I sit. In the cube beside me is Steve. Steve sits in the cube beside me. And when I first joined the company, three or four years ago, and Steve's if you go to his cube, it no longer looks like this, but it used to have a lot of this stuff. It was like big containers of this. I remember the first time. Since I started joking about it, he started reducing it. And then Steve eventually got married much to our surprise. (audience laughing) Much to his wife's surprise. And then he also had a baby as a bigger surprise. And if you come over to our office, and we welcome you, and you come to the fourth floor, find my cube or you'll find Steve's Cube, it now looks like this. Okay, so thanks a lot, my man. >> Cool, thank you. >> Thanks so much. (audience clapping) >> So single OS, any workload. And like Steve who's been with us for awhile, it's my great pleasure to invite one of our favorite customers, CSC Karen who's also been with us for three to four years. And I'll share some fond memories about how she's been with the company for awhile, how as partners we've really done a lot together. So without any further ado, let me bring up Karen. Come on up, Karen. (rock music) >> Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, thank you. So I remember, so how many of you guys were with Nutanix first .Next in Miami? I know there was a question like that asked last time. Not too many. You missed it. We wished we could go back to that. We wouldn't fit 3/4s of this crowd. But Karen was our first customer in the keynote in 2015. And we had just talked about that story at that time where you're just become a customer. Do you want to give us some recap of that? >> Sure. So when we made the decision to move to hyperconverged infrastructure and chose Nutanix as our partner, we rapidly started to deploy. And what I mean by that is Sunil and some of the Nutanix executives had come out to visit with us and talk about their product on a Tuesday. And on a Wednesday after making the decision, I picked up the phone and said you know what I've got to deploy for my VDI cluster. So four nodes showed up on Thursday. And from the time it was plugged in to moving over 300 VDIs and 50 terabytes of storage and turning it over for the business for use was less than three days. So it was really excellent testament to how simple it is to start, and deploy, and utilize the Nutanix infrastructure. Now part of that was the delight that we experienced from our customers after that deployment. So we got phone calls where people were saying this report it used to take so long that I'd got out and get a cup of coffee and come back, and read an article, and do some email, and then finally it would finish. Those reports are running in milliseconds now. It's one click. It's very, very simple, and we've delighted our customers. Now across that journey, we have gone from the simple workloads like VDIs to the much more complex workloads around Splunk and Hadoop. And what's really interesting about our Splunk deployment is we're handling over a billion events being logged everyday. And the deployment is smaller than what we had with a three tiered infrastructure. So when you hear people talk about waste and getting that out and getting to an invisible environment where you're just able to run it, that's what we were able to achieve both with everything that we're running from our public facing websites to the back office operations that we're using which include Splunk and even most recently our Cloudera and Hadoop infrastructure. What it does is it's got 30 crawlers that go out on the internet and start bringing data back. So it comes back with over two terabytes of data everyday. And then that environment, ingests that data, does work against it, and responds to the business. And that again is something that's smaller than what we had on traditional infrastructure, and it's faster and more stable. >> Got it. And it covers a lot of use cases as well. You want to speak a few words on that? >> So the use cases, we're 90%, 95% deployed on Nutanix, and we're covering all of our use cases. So whether that's a customer facing app or a back office application. And what are business is doing is it's handling large portfolios of data for fortune 500 companies and law firms. And these applications are all running with improved stability, reliability, and performance on the Nutanix infrastructure. >> And the plan going forward? >> So the plan going forward, you actually asked me that in Miami, and it's go global. So when we started in Miami and that first deployment, we had four nodes. We now have 283 nodes around the world, and we started with about 50 terabytes of data. We've now got 3.8 petabytes of data. And we're deployed across four data centers and six remote offices. And people ask me often what is the value that we achieved? So simplification. It's all just easier, and it's all less expensive. Being able to scale with the business. So our Cloudera environment ended up with one day where it spiked to 1,000 times more load, 1,000 times, and it just responded. We had rally cries around improved productivity by six times. So 600% improved productivity, and we were able to actually achieve that. The numbers you just saw on the slide that was very, very fast was we calculated a 40% reduction in total cost of ownership. We've exceeded that. And when we talk about waste, that other number on the board there is when I saved the company one hour of maintenance activity or unplanned downtime in a month which we're now able to do the majority of our maintenance activities without disrupting any of our business solutions, I'm saving $750,000 each time I save that one hour. >> Wow. All right, Karen from CSE. Thank you so much. That was great. Thank you. I mean you know some of these data points frankly as I started talking to Karen as well as some other customers are pretty amazing in terms of the genuine value beyond financial value. Kind of like the emotional sort of benefits that good products deliver to some of our customers. And I think that's one of the core things that we take back into engineering is to keep ourselves honest on either velocity or quality even hiring people and so forth. Is to actually the more we touch customers lives, the more we touch our partner's lives, the more it allows us to ensure that we can put ourselves in their shoes to kind of make sure that we're doing the right thing in terms of the product. So that was the first part, invisible infrastructure. And our goal, as we've always talked about, our true North is to make sure that this single OS can be an exact replica, a truly modern, thoughtful but original design that brings the power of public cloud this AWS or GCP like architectures into your mainstream enterprises. And so when we take that to the next level which is about expanding the scope to go beyond invisible infrastructure to invisible data centers, it starts with a few things. Obviously, it starts with virtualization and a level of intelligent management, extends to automation, and then as we'll talk about, we have to embark on encompassing the network. And that's what we'll talk about with Flow. But to start this, let me again go back to one of our core products which is the bedrock of our you know opinionated design inside this company which is Prism and Acropolis. And Prism provides, I mentioned, comes with a ton of machine-learning based intelligence built into the product in 5.6 we've done a ton of work. In fact, a lot of features are coming out now because now that PC, Prism Central that you know has been decoupled from our mainstream release strain and will continue to release on its own cadence. And the same thing when you actually flip it to AHV on its own train. Now AHV, two years ago it was all about can I use AHV for VDI? Can I use AHV for ROBO? Now I'm pretty clear about where you cannot use AHV. If you need memory overcome it, stay with VMware or something. If you need, you know Metro, stay with another technology, else it's game on, right? And if you really look at the adoption of AHV in the mainstream enterprise, the customers now speak for themselves. These are all examples of large global enterprises with multimillion dollar ELAs in play that have now been switched over. Like I'll give you a simple example here, and there's lots of these that I'm sure many of you who are in the audience that are in this camp, but when you look at the breakout sessions in the pods, you'll get a sense of this. But I'll give you one simple example. If you look at the online payment company. I'm pretty sure everybody's used this at one time or the other. They had the world's largest private cloud on open stack, 21,000 nodes. And they were actually public about it three or four years ago. And in the last year and a half, they put us through a rigorous VOC testing scale, hardening, and it's a full blown AHV only stack. And they've started cutting over. Obviously they're not there yet completely, but they're now literally in hundreds of nodes of deployment of Nutanix with AHV as their primary operating system. So it is primetime from a deployment perspective. And with that as the base, no cloud is complete without actually having self-service provisioning that truly drives one-click automation, and can you do that in this consumer grade design? And Calm was acquired, as you guys know, in 2016. We had a choice of taking Calm. It was reasonably feature complete. It supported multiple clouds. It supported ESX, it supported Brownfield, It supported AHV. I mean they'd already done the integration with Nutanix even before the acquisition. And we had a choice. The choice was go down the path of dynamic ops or some other products where you took it for revenue or for acceleration, you plopped it into the ecosystem and sold it at this power sucking alien on top of our stack, right? Or we took a step back, re-engineered the product, kept some of the core essence like the workflow engine which was good, the automation, the object model and all, but refactored it to make it look like a natural extension of our operating system. And that's what we did with Calm. And we just launched it in December, and it's been one of our most popular new products now that's flying off the shelves. If you saw the number of registrants, I got a notification of this for the breakout sessions, the number one session that has been preregistered with over 500 people, the first two sessions are around Calm. And justifiably so because it just as it lives up to its promise, and it'll take its time to kind of get to all the bells and whistles, all the capabilities that have come through with AHV or Acropolis in the past. But the feature functionality, the product market fit associated with Calm is dead on from what the feedback that we can receive. And so Calm itself is on its own rapid cadence. We had AWS and AHV in the first release. Three or four months later, we now added ESX support. We added GCP support and a whole bunch of other capabilities, and I think the essence of Calm is if you can combine Calm and along with private cloud automation but also extend it to multi-cloud automation, it really sets Nutanix on its first genuine path towards multi-cloud. But then, as I said, if you really fixate on a software defined data center message, we're not complete as a full blown AWS or GCP like IA stack until we do the last horizon of networking. And you probably heard me say this before. You heard Dheeraj and others talk about it before is our problem in networking isn't the same in storage. Because the data plane in networking works. Good L2 switches from Cisco, Arista, and so forth, but the real problem networking is in the control plane. When something goes wrong at a VM level in Nutanix, you're able to identify whether it's a storage problem or a compute problem, but we don't know whether it's a VLAN that's mis-configured, or there've been some packets dropped at the top of the rack. Well that all ends now with Flow. And with Flow, essentially what we've now done is take the work that we've been working on to create built-in visibility, put some network automation so that you can actually provision VLANs when you provision VMs. And then augment it with micro segmentation policies all built in this easy to use, consume fashion. But we didn't stop there because we've been talking about Flow, at least the capabilities, over the last year. We spent significant resources building it. But we realized that we needed an additional thing to augment its value because the world of applications especially discovering application topologies is a heady problem. And if we didn't address that, we wouldn't be fulfilling on this ambition of providing one-click network segmentation. And so that's where Netsil comes in. Netsil might seem on the surface yet another next generation application performance management tool. But the innovations that came from Netsil started off at the research project at the University of Pennsylvania. And in fact, most of the team right now that's at Nutanix is from the U Penn research group. And they took a really original, fresh look at how do you sit in a network in a scale out fashion but still reverse engineer the packets, the flow through you, and then recreate this application topology. And recreate this not just on Nutanix, but do it seamlessly across multiple clouds. And to talk about the power of Flow augmented with Netsil, let's bring Rajiv back on stage, Rajiv. >> How you doing? >> Okay so we're going to start with some Netsil stuff, right? >> Yeah, let's talk about Netsil and some of the amazing capabilities this acquisition's bringing to Nutanix. First of all as you mentioned, Netsil's completely non invasive. So it installs on the network, it does all its magic from there. There're no host agents, non of the complexity and compatibility issues that entails. It's also monitoring the network at layer seven. So it's actually doing a deep packet inspection on all your application data, and can give you insights into services and APIs which is very important for modern applications and the way they behave. To do all this of course performance is key. So Netsil's built around a completely distributed architecture scaled to really large workloads. Very exciting technology. We're going to use it in many different ways at Nutanix. And to give you a flavor of that, let me show you how we're thinking of integrating Flow and Nestil together, so micro segmentation and Netsil. So to do that, we install Netsil in one of our Google accounts. And that's what's up here now. It went out there. It discovered all the VMs we're running on that account. It created a map essentially of all their interactions, and you can see it's like a Google Maps view. I can zoom into it. I can look at various things running. I can see lots of HTTP servers over here, some databases. >> Sunil: And it also has stats, right? You can go, it actually-- >> It does. We can take a look at that for a second. There are some stats you can look at right away here. Things like transactions per second and latencies and so on. But if I wanted to micro segment this application, it's not really clear how to do so. There's no real pattern over here. Taking the Google Maps analogy a little further, this kind of looks like the backstreets of Cairo or something. So let's do this step by step. Let me first filter down to one application. Right now I'm looking at about three or four different applications. And Netsil integrates with the metadata. So this is that the clouds provide. So I can search all the tags that I have. So by doing that, I can zoom in on just the financial application. And when I do this, the view gets a little bit simpler, but there's still no real pattern. It's not clear how to micro segment this, right? And this is where the power of Netsil comes in. This is a fairly naive view. This is what tool operating at layer four just looking at ports and TCP traffic would give you. But by doing deep packet inspection, Netsil can get into the services layer. So instead of grouping these interactions by hostname, let's group them by service. So you go service tier. And now you can see this is a much simpler picture. Now I have some patterns. I have a couple of load balancers, an HA proxy and an Nginx. I have a web application front end. I have some application servers running authentication services, search services, et cetera, a database, and a database replica. I could go ahead and micro segment at this point. It's quite possible to do it at this point. But this is almost too granular a view. We actually don't usually want to micro segment at individual service level. You think more in terms of application tiers, the tiers that different services belong to. So let me go ahead and group this differently. Let me group this by app tier. And when I do that, a really simple picture emerges. I have a load balancing tier talking to a web application front end tier, an API tier, and a database tier. Four tiers in my application. And this is something I can work with. This is something that I can micro segment fairly easily. So let's switch over to-- >> Before we dot that though, do you guys see how he gave himself the pseudonym called Dom Toretto? >> Focus Sunil, focus. >> Yeah, for those guys, you know that's not the Avengers theme, man, that's the Fast and Furious theme. >> Rajiv: I think a year ahead. This is next years theme. >> Got it, okay. So before we cut over from Netsil to Flow, do we want to talk a few words about the power of Flow, and what's available in 5.6? >> Sure so Flow's been around since the 5.6 release. Actually some of the functionality came in before that. So it's got invisibility into the network. It helps you debug problems with WLANs and so on. We had a lot of orchestration with other third party vendors with load balancers, with switches to make publishing much simpler. And then of course with our most recent release, we GA'ed our micro segmentation capabilities. And that of course is the most important feature we have in Flow right now. And if you look at how Flow policy is set up, it looks very similar to what we just saw with Netsil. So we have load blancer talking to a web app, API, database. It's almost identical to what we saw just a moment ago. So while this policy was created manually, it is something that we can automate. And it is something that we will do in future releases. Right now, it's of course not been integrated at that level yet. So this was created manually. So one thing you'll notice over here is that the database tier doesn't get any direct traffic from the internet. All internet traffic goes to the load balancer, only specific services then talk to the database. So this policy right now is in monitoring mode. It's not actually being enforced. So let's see what happens if I try to attack the database, I start a hack against the database. And I have my trusty brute force password script over here. It's trying the most common passwords against the database. And if I happen to choose a dictionary word or left the default passwords on, eventually it will log into the database. And when I go back over here in Flow what happens is it actually detects there's now an ongoing a flow, a flow that's outside of policy that's shown up. And it shows this in yellow. So right alongside the policy, I can visualize all the noncompliant flows. This makes it really easy for me now to make decisions, does this flow should it be part of the policy, should it not? In this particular case, obviously it should not be part of the policy. So let me just switch from monitoring mode to enforcement mode. I'll apply the policy, give it a second to propagate. The flow goes away. And if I go back to my script, you can see now the socket's timing out. I can no longer connect to the database. >> Sunil: Got it. So that's like one click segmentation and play right now? >> Absolutely. It's really, really simple. You can compare it to other products in the space. You can't get simpler than this. >> Got it. Why don't we got back and talk a little bit more about, so that's Flow. It's shipping now in 5.6 obviously. It'll come integrated with Netsil functionality as well as a variety of other enhancements in that next few releases. But Netsil does more than just simple topology discovery, right? >> Absolutely. So Netsil's actually gathering a lot of metrics from your network, from your host, all this goes through a data pipeline. It gets processed over there and then gets captured in a time series database. And then we can slice and dice that in various different ways. It can be used for all kinds of insights. So let's see how our application's behaving. So let me say I want to go into the API layer over here. And I instantly get a variety of metrics on how the application's behaving. I get the most requested endpoints. I get the average latency. It looks reasonably good. I get the average latency of the slowest endpoints. If I was having a performance problem, I would know exactly where to go focus on. Right now, things look very good, so we won't focus on that. But scrolling back up, I notice that we have a fairly high error rate happening. We have like 11.35% of our HTTP requests are generating errors, and that deserves some attention. And if I scroll down again, and I see the top five status codes I'm getting, almost 10% of my requests are generating 500 errors, HTTP 500 errors which are internal server errors. So there's something going on that's wrong with this application. So let's dig a little bit deeper into that. Let me go into my analytics workbench over here. And what I've plotted over here is how my HTTP requests are behaving over time. Let me filter down to just the 500 ones. That will make it easier. And I want the 500s. And I'll also group this by the service tier so that I can see which services are causing the problem. And the better view for this would be a bar graph. Yes, so once I do this, you can see that all the errors, all the 500 errors that we're seeing have been caused by the authentication service. So something's obviously wrong with that part of my application. I can go look at whether Active Directory is misbehaving and so on. So very quickly from a broad problem that I was getting a high HTTP error rate. In fact, usually you will discover there's this customer complaining about a lot of errors happening in your application. You can quickly narrow down to exactly what the cause was. >> Got it. This is what we mean by hyperconvergence of the network which is if you can truly isolate network related problems and associate them with the rest of the hyperconvergence infrastructure, then we've essentially started making real progress towards the next level of hyperconvergence. Anyway, thanks a lot, man. Great job. >> Thanks, man. (audience clapping) >> So to talk about this evolution from invisible infrastructure to invisible data centers is another customer of ours that has embarked on this journey. And you know it's not just using Nutanix but a variety of other tools to actually fulfill sort of like the ambition of a full blown cloud stack within a financial organization. And to talk more about that, let me call Vijay onstage. Come on up, Vijay. (rock music) >> Hey. >> Thank you, sir. So Vijay looks way better in real life than in a picture by the way. >> Except a little bit of gray. >> Unlike me. So tell me a little bit about this cloud initiative. >> Yeah. So we've won the best cloud initiative twice now hosted by Incisive media a large magazine. It's basically they host a bunch of you know various buy side, sell side, and you can submit projects in various categories. So we've won the best cloud twice now, 2015 and 2017. The 2017 award is when you know as part of our private cloud journey we were laying the foundation for our private cloud which is 100% based on hyperconverged infrastructure. So that was that award. And then 2017, we've kind of built on that foundation and built more developer-centric next gen app services like PAS, CAS, SDN, SDS, CICD, et cetera. So we've built a lot of those services on, and the second award was really related to that. >> Got it. And a lot of this was obviously based on an infrastructure strategy with some guiding principles that you guys had about three or four years ago if I remember. >> Yeah, this is a great slide. I use it very often. At the core of our infrastructure strategy is how do we run IT as a business? I talk about this with my teams, they were very familiar with this. That's the mindset that I instill within the teams. The mission, the challenge is the same which is how do we scale infrastructure while reducing total cost of ownership, improving time to market, improving client experience and while we're doing that not lose sight of reliability, stability, and security? That's the mission. Those are some of our guiding principles. Whenever we take on some large technology investments, we take 'em through those lenses. Obviously Nutanix went through those lenses when we invested in you guys many, many years ago. And you guys checked all the boxes. And you know initiatives change year on year, the mission remains the same. And more recently, the last few years, we've been focused on converged platforms, converged teams. We've actually reorganized our teams and aligned them closer to the platforms moving closer to an SRE like concept. >> And then you've built out a full stack now across computer storage, networking, all the way with various use cases in play? >> Yeah, and we're aggressively moving towards PAS, CAS as our method of either developing brand new cloud native applications or even containerizing existing applications. So the stack you know obviously built on Nutanix, SDS for software fine storage, compute and networking we've got SDN turned on. We've got, again, PAS and CAS built on this platform. And then finally, we've hooked our CICD tooling onto this. And again, the big picture was always frictionless infrastructure which we're very close to now. You know 100% of our code deployments into this environment are automated. >> Got it. And so what's the net, net in terms of obviously the business takeaway here? >> Yeah so at Northern we don't do tech for tech. It has to be some business benefits, client benefits. There has to be some outcomes that we measure ourselves against, and these are some great metrics or great ways to look at if we're getting the outcomes from the investments we're making. So for example, infrastructure scale while reducing total cost of ownership. We're very focused on total cost of ownership. We, for example, there was a build team that was very focus on building servers, deploying applications. That team's gone down from I think 40, 45 people to about 15 people as one example, one metric. Another metric for reducing TCO is we've been able to absorb additional capacity without increasing operating expenses. So you're actually building capacity in scale within your operating model. So that's another example. Another example, right here you see on the screen. Faster time to market. We've got various types of applications at any given point that we're deploying. There's a next gen cloud native which go directly on PAS. But then a majority of the applications still need the traditional IS components. The time to market to deploy a complex multi environment, multi data center application, we've taken that down by 60%. So we can deliver server same day, but we can deliver entire environments, you know add it to backup, add it to DNS, and fully compliant within a couple of weeks which is you know something we measure very closely. >> Great job, man. I mean that's a compelling I think results. And in the journey obviously you got promoted a few times. >> Yep. >> All right, congratulations again. >> Thank you. >> Thanks Vijay. >> Hey Vijay, come back here. Actually we forgot our joke. So razzled by his data points there. So you're supposed to wear some shoes, right? >> I know my inner glitch. I was going to wear those sneakers, but I forgot them at the office maybe for the right reasons. But the story behind those florescent sneakers, I see they're focused on my shoes. But I picked those up two years ago at a Next event, and not my style. I took 'em to my office. They've been sitting in my office for the last couple years. >> Who's received shoes like these by the way? I'm sure you guys have received shoes like these. There's some real fans there. >> So again, I'm sure many of you liked them. I had 'em in my office. I've offered it to so many of my engineers. Are you size 11? Do you want these? And they're unclaimed? >> So that's the only feature of Nutanix that you-- >> That's the only thing that hasn't worked, other than that things are going extremely well. >> Good job, man. Thanks a lot. >> Thanks. >> Thanks Vijay. So as we get to the final phase which is obviously as we embark on this multi-cloud journey and the complexity that comes with it which Dheeraj hinted towards in his session. You know we have to take a cautious, thoughtful approach here because we don't want to over set expectations because this will take us five, 10 years to really do a good job like we've done in the first act. And the good news is that the market is also really, really early here. It's just a fact. And so we've taken a tiered approach to it as we'll start the discussion with multi-cloud operations, and we've talked about the stack in the prior session which is about look across new clouds. So it's no longer Nutanix, Dell, Lenova, HP, Cisco as the new quote, unquote platforms. It's Nutanix, Xi, GCP, AWS, Azure as the new platforms. That's how we're designing the fabric going forward. On top of that, you obviously have the hybrid OS both on the data plane side and control plane side. Then what you're seeing with the advent of Calm doing a marketplace and automation as well as Beam doing governance and compliance is the fact that you'll see more and more such capabilities of multi-cloud operations burnt into the platform. And example of that is Calm with the new 5.7 release that they had. Launch supports multiple clouds both inside and outside, but the fundamental premise of Calm in the multi-cloud use case is to enable you to choose the right cloud for the right workload. That's the automation part. On the governance part, and this we kind of went through in the last half an hour with Dheeraj and Vijay on stage is something that's even more, if I can call it, you know first order because you get the provisioning and operations second. The first order is to say look whatever my developers have consumed off public cloud, I just need to first get our arm around to make sure that you know what am I spending, am I secure, and then when I get comfortable, then I am able to actually expand on it. And that's the power of Beam. And both Beam and Calm will be the yin and yang for us in our multi-cloud portfolio. And we'll have new products to complement that down the road, right? But along the way, that's the whole private cloud, public cloud. They're the two ends of the barbell, and over time, and we've been working on Xi for awhile, is this conviction that we've built talking to many customers that there needs to be another type of cloud. And this type of a cloud has to feel like a public cloud. It has to be architected like a public cloud, be consumed like a public cloud, but it needs to be an extension of my data center. It should not require any changes to my tooling. It should not require and changes to my operational infrastructure, and it should not require lift and shift, and that's a super hard problem. And this problem is something that a chunk of our R and D team has been burning the midnight wick on for the last year and a half. Because look this is not about taking our current OS which does a good job of scaling and plopping it into a Equinix or a third party data center and calling it a hybrid cloud. This is about rebuilding things in the OS so that we can deliver a true hybrid cloud, but at the same time, give those functionality back on premises so that even if you don't have a hybrid cloud, if you just have your own data centers, you'll still need new services like DR. And if you think about it, what are we doing? We're building a full blown multi-tenant virtual network designed in a modern way. Think about this SDN 2.0 because we have 10 years worth of looking backwards on how GCP has done it, or how Amazon has done it, and now sort of embodying some of that so that we can actually give it as part of this cloud, but do it in a way that's a seamless extension of the data center, and then at the same time, provide new services that have never been delivered before. Everyone obviously does failover and failback in DR it just takes months to do it. Our goal is to do it in hours or minutes. But even things such as test. Imagine doing a DR test on demand for you business needs in the middle of the day. And that's the real bar that we've set for Xi that we are working towards in early access later this summer with GA later in the year. And to talk more about this, let me invite some of our core architects working on it, Melina and Rajiv. (rock music) Good to see you guys. >> You're messing up the names again. >> Oh Rajiv, Vinny, same thing, man. >> You need to back up your memory from Xi. >> Yeah, we should. Okay, so what are we going to talk about, Vinny? >> Yeah, exactly. So today we're going to talk about how Xi is pushing the envelope and beyond the state of the art as you were saying in the industry. As part of that, there's a whole bunch of things that we have done starting with taking a private cloud, seamlessly extending it to the public cloud, and then creating a hybrid cloud experience with one-click delight. We're going to show that. We've done a whole bunch of engineering work on making sure the operations and the tooling is identical on both sides. When you graduate from a private cloud to a hybrid cloud environment, you don't want the environments to be different. So we've copied the environment for you with zero manual intervention. And finally, building on top of that, we are delivering DR as a service with unprecedented simplicity with one-click failover, one-click failback. We're going to show you one click test today. So Melina, why don't we start with showing how you go from a private cloud, seamlessly extend it to consume Xi. >> Sounds good, thanks Vinny. Right now, you're looking at my Prism interface for my on premises cluster. In one-click, I'm going to be able to extend that to my Xi cloud services account. I'm doing this using my my Nutanix credential and a password manager. >> Vinny: So here as you notice all the Nutanix customers we have today, we have created an account for them in Xi by default. So you don't have to log in somewhere and create an account. It's there by default. >> Melina: And just like that we've gone ahead and extended my data center. But let's go take a look at the Xi side and log in again with my my Nutanix credentials. We'll see what we have over here. We're going to be able to see two availability zones, one for on premises and one for Xi right here. >> Vinny: Yeah as you see, using a log in account that you already knew mynutanix.com and 30 seconds in, you can see that you have a hybrid cloud view already. You have a private cloud availability zone that's your own Prism central data center view, and then a Xi availability zone. >> Sunil: Got it. >> Melina: Exactly. But of course we want to extend my network connection from on premises to my Xi networks as well. So let's take a look at our options there. We have two ways of doing this. Both are one-click experience. With direct connect, you can create a dedicated network connection between both environments, or VPN you can use a public internet and a VPN service. Let's go ahead and enable VPN in this environment. Here we have two options for how we want to enable our VPN. We can bring our own VPN and connect it, or we will deploy a VPN for you on premises. We'll do the option where we deploy the VPN in one-click. >> And this is another small sign or feature that we're building net new as part of Xi, but will be burned into our core Acropolis OS so that we can also be delivering this as a stand alone product for on premises deployment as well, right? So that's one of the other things to note as you guys look at the Xi functionality. The goal is to keep the OS capabilities the same on both sides. So even if I'm building a quote, unquote multi data center cloud, but it's just a private cloud, you'll still get all the benefits of Xi but in house. >> Exactly. And on this second step of the wizard, there's a few inputs around how you want the gateway configured, your VLAN information and routing and protocol configuration details. Let's go ahead and save it. >> Vinny: So right now, you know what's happening is we're taking the private network that our customers have on premises and extending it to a multi-tenant public cloud such that our customers can use their IP addresses, the subnets, and bring their own IP. And that is another step towards making sure the operation and tooling is kept consistent on both sides. >> Melina: Exactly. And just while you guys were talking, the VPN was successfully created on premises. And we can see the details right here. You can track details like the status of the connection, the gateway, as well as bandwidth information right in the same UI. >> Vinny: And networking is just tip of the iceberg of what we've had to work on to make sure that you get a consistent experience on both sides. So Melina, why don't we show some of the other things we've done? >> Melina: Sure, to talk about how we preserve entities from my on-premises to Xi, it's better to use my production environment. And first thing you might notice is the log in screen's a little bit different. But that's because I'm logging in using my ADFS credentials. The first thing we preserved was our users. In production, I'm running AD obviously on-prem. And now we can log in here with the same set of credentials. Let me just refresh this. >> And this is the Active Directory credential that our customers would have. They use it on-premises. And we allow the setting to be set on the Xi cloud services as well, so it's the same set of users that can access both sides. >> Got it. There's always going to be some networking problem onstage. It's meant to happen. >> There you go. >> Just launching it again here. I think it maybe timed out. This is a good sign that we're running on time with this presentation. >> Yeah, yeah, we're running ahead of time. >> Move the demos quicker, then we'll time out. So essentially when you log into Xi, you'll be able to see what are the environment capabilities that we have copied to the Xi environment. So for example, you just saw that the same user is being used to log in. But after the use logs in, you'll be able to see their images, for example, copied to the Xi side. You'll be able to see their policies and categories. You know when you define these policies on premises, you spend a lot of effort and create them. And now when you're extending to the public cloud, you don't want to do it again, right? So we've done a whole lot of syncing mechanisms making sure that the two sides are consistent. >> Got it. And on top of these policies, the next step is to also show capabilities to actually do failover and failback, but also do integrated testing as part of this compatibility. >> So one is you know just the basic job of making the environments consistent on two sides, but then it's also now talking about the data part, and that's what DR is about. So if you have a workload running on premises, we can take the data and replicate it using your policies that we've already synced. Once the data is available on the Xi side, at that point, you have to define a run book. And the run book essentially it's a recovery plan. And that says okay I already have the backups of my VMs in case of disaster. I can take my recovery plan and hit you know either failover or maybe a test. And then my application comes up. First of all, you'll talk about the boot order for your VMs to come up. You'll talk about networking mapping. Like when I'm running on-prem, you're using a particular subnet. You have an option of using the same subnet on the Xi side. >> Melina: There you go. >> What happened? >> Sunil: It's finally working.? >> Melina: Yeah. >> Vinny, you can stop talking. (audience clapping) By the way, this is logging into a live Xi data center. We have two regions West Coat, two data centers East Coast, two data centers. So everything that you're seeing is essentially coming off the mainstream Xi profile. >> Vinny: Melina, why don't we show the recovery plan. That's the most interesting piece here. >> Sure. The recovery plan is set up to help you specify how you want to recover your applications in the event of a failover or a test failover. And it specifies all sorts of details like the boot sequence for the VMs as well as network mappings. Some of the network mappings are things like the production network I have running on premises and how it maps to my production network on Xi or the test network to the test network. What's really cool here though is we're actually automatically creating your subnets on Xi from your on premises subnets. All that's part of the recovery plan. While we're on the screen, take a note of the .100 IP address. That's a floating IP address that I have set up to ensure that I'm going to be able to access my three tier web app that I have protected with this plan after a failover. So I'll be able to access it from the public internet really easily from my phone or check that it's all running. >> Right, so given how we make the environment consistent on both sides, now we're able to create a very simple DR experience including failover in one-click, failback. But we're going to show you test now. So Melina, let's talk about test because that's one of the most common operations you would do. Like some of our customers do it every month. But usually it's very hard. So let's see how the experience looks like in what we built. >> Sure. Test and failover are both one-click experiences as you know and come to expect from Nutanix. You can see it's failing over from my primary location to my recovery location. Now what we're doing right now is we're running a series of validation checks because we want to make sure that you have your network configured properly, and there's other configuration details in place for the test to be successful. Looks like the failover was initiated successfully. Now while that failover's happening though, let's make sure that I'm going to be able to access my three tier web app once it fails over. We'll do that by looking at my network policies that I've configured on my test network. Because I want to access the application from the public internet but only port 80. And if we look here under our policies, you can see I have port 80 open to permit. So that's good. And if I needed to create a new one, I could in one click. But it looks like we're good to go. Let's go back and check the status of my recovery plan. We click in, and what's really cool here is you can actually see the individual tasks as they're being completed from that initial validation test to individual VMs being powered on as part of the recovery plan. >> And to give you guys an idea behind the scenes, the entire recovery plan is actually a set of workflows that are built on Calm's automation engine. So this is an example of where we're taking some of power of workflow and automation that Clam has come to be really strong at and burning that into how we actually operationalize many of these workflows for Xi. >> And so great, while you were explaining that, my three tier web app has restarted here on Xi right in front of you. And you can see here there's a floating IP that I mentioned early that .100 IP address. But let's go ahead and launch the console and make sure the application started up correctly. >> Vinny: Yeah, so that .100 IP address is a floating IP that's a publicly visible IP. So it's listed here, 206.80.146.100. And that's essentially anybody in the audience here can go use your laptop or your cell phone and hit that and start to work. >> Yeah so by the way, just to give you guys an idea while you guys maybe use the IP to kind of hit it, is a real set of VMs that we've just failed over from Nutanix's corporate data center into our West region. >> And this is running live on the Xi cloud. >> Yeah, you guys should all go and vote. I'm a little biased towards Xi, so vote for Xi. But all of them are really good features. >> Scroll up a little bit. Let's see where Xi is. >> Oh Xi's here. I'll scroll down a little bit, but keep the... >> Vinny: Yes. >> Sunil: You guys written a block or something? >> Melina: Oh good, it looks like Xi's winning. >> Sunil: Okay, great job, Melina. Thank you so much. >> Thank you, Melina. >> Melina: Thanks. >> Thank you, great job. Cool and calm under pressure. That's good. So that was Xi. What's something that you know we've been doing around you know in addition to taking say our own extended enterprise public cloud with Xi. You know we do recognize that there are a ton of workloads that are going to be residing on AWS, GCP, Azure. And to sort of really assist in the try and call it transformation of enterprises to choose the right cloud for the right workload. If you guys remember, we actually invested in a tool over last year which became actually quite like one of those products that took off based on you know groundswell movement. Most of you guys started using it. It's essentially extract for VMs. And it was this product that's obviously free. It's a tool. But it enables customers to really save tons of time to actually migrate from legacy environments to Nutanix. So we took that same framework, obviously re-platformed it for the multi-cloud world to kind of solve the problem of migrating from AWS or GCP to Nutanix or vice versa. >> Right, so you know, Sunil as you said, moving from a private cloud to the public cloud is a lift and shift, and it's a hard you know operation. But moving back is not only expensive, it's a very hard problem. None of the cloud vendors provide change block tracking capability. And what that means is when you have to move back from the cloud, you have an extended period of downtime because there's now way of figuring out what's changing while you're moving. So you have to keep it down. So what we've done with our app mobility product is we have made sure that, one, it's extremely simple to move back. Two, that the downtime that you'll have is as small as possible. So let me show you what we've done. >> Got it. >> So here is our app mobility capability. As you can see, on the left hand side we have a source environment and target environment. So I'm calling my AWS environment Asgard. And I can add more environments. It's very simple. I can select AWS and then put in my credentials for AWS. It essentially goes and discovers all the VMs that are running and all the regions that they're running. Target environment, this is my Nutanix environment. I call it Earth. And I can add target environment similarly, IP address and credentials, and we do the rest. Right, okay. Now migration plans. I have Bifrost one as my migration plan, and this is how migration works. First you create a plan and then say start seeding. And what it does is takes a snapshot of what's running in the cloud and starts migrating it to on-prem. Once it is an on-prem and the difference between the two sides is minimal, it says I'm ready to cutover. At that time, you move it. But let me show you how you'd create a new migration plan. So let me name it, Bifrost 2. Okay so what I have to do is select a region, so US West 1, and target Earth as my cluster. This is my storage container there. And very quickly you can see these are the VMs that are running in US West 1 in AWS. I can select SQL server one and two, go to next. Right now it's looking at the target Nutanix environment and seeing it had enough space or not. Once that's good, it gives me an option. And this is the step where it enables the Nutanix service of change block tracking overlaid on top of the cloud. There are two options one is automatic where you'll give us the credentials for your VMs, and we'll inject our capability there. Or manually you could do. You could copy the command either in a windows VM or Linux VM and run it once on the VM. And change block tracking since then in enabled. Everything is seamless after that. Hit next. >> And while Vinny's setting it up, he said a few things there. I don't know if you guys caught it. One of the hardest problems in enabling seamless migration from public cloud to on-prem which makes it harder than the other way around is the fact that public cloud doesn't have things like change block tracking. You can't get delta copies. So one of the core innovations being built in this app mobility product is to provide that overlay capability across multiple clouds. >> Yeah, and the last step here was to select the target network where the VMs will come up on the Nutanix environment, and this is a summary of the migration plan. You can start it or just save it. I'm saving it because it takes time to do the seeding. I have the other plan which I'll actually show the cutover with. Okay so now this is Bifrost 1. It's ready to cutover. We started it four hours ago. And here you can see there's a SQL server 003. Okay, now I would like to show the AWS environment. As you can see, SQL server 003. This VM is actually running in AWS right now. And if you go to the Prism environment, and if my login works, right? So we can go into the virtual machine view, tables, and you see the VM is not there. Okay, so we go back to this, and we can hit cutover. So this is essentially telling our system, okay now it the time. Quiesce the VM running in AWS, take the last bit of changes that you have to the database, ship it to on-prem, and in on-prem now start you know configure the target VM and start bringing it up. So let's go and look at AWS and refresh that screen. And you should see, okay so the SQL server is now stopping. So that means it has quiesced and stopping the VM there. If you go back and look at the migration plan that we had, it says it's completed. So it has actually migrated all the data to the on-prem side. Go here on-prem, you see the production SQL server is running already. I can click launch console, and let's see. The Windows VM is already booting up. >> So essentially what Vinny just showed was a live cutover of an AWS VM to Nutanix on-premises. >> Yeah, and what we have done. (audience clapping) So essentially, this is about making two things possible, making it simple to migrate from cloud to on-prem, and making it painless so that the downtime you have is very minimal. >> Got it, great job, Vinny. I won't forget your name again. So last step. So to really talk about this, one of our favorite partners and customers has been in the cloud environment for a long time. And you know Jason who's the CTO of Cyxtera. And he'll introduce who Cyxtera is. Most of you guys are probably either using their assets or not without knowing their you know the new name. But is someone that was in the cloud before it was called cloud as one of the original founders and technologists behind Terremark, and then later as one of the chief architects of VMware's cloud. And then they started this new company about a year or so ago which I'll let Jason talk about. This journey that he's going to talk about is how a partner, slash customer is working with us to deliver net new transformations around the traditional industry of colo. Okay, to talk more about it, Jason, why don't you come up on stage, man? (rock music) Thank you, sir. All right so Cyxtera obviously a lot of people don't know the name. Maybe just give a 10 second summary of why you're so big already. >> Sure, so Cyxtera was formed, as you said, about a year ago through the acquisition of the CenturyLink data centers. >> Sunil: Which includes Savvis and a whole bunch of other assets. >> Yeah, there's a long history of those data centers, but we have all of them now as well as the software companies owned by Medina capital. So we're like the world's biggest startup now. So we have over 50 data centers around the world, about 3,500 customers, and a portfolio of security and analytics software. >> Sunil: Got it, and so you have this strategy of what we're calling revolutionizing colo deliver a cloud based-- >> Yeah so, colo hasn't really changed a lot in the last 20 years. And to be fair, a lot of what happens in data centers has to have a person physically go and do it. But there are some things that we can simplify and automate. So we want to make things more software driven, so that's what we're doing with the Cyxtera extensible data center or CXD. And to do that, we're deploying software defined networks in our facilities and developing automations so customers can go and provision data center services and the network connectivity through a portal or through REST APIs. >> Got it, and what's different now? I know there's a whole bunch of benefits with the integrated platform that one would not get in the traditional kind of on demand data center environment. >> Sure. So one of the first services we're launching on CXD is compute on demand, and it's powered by Nutanix. And we had to pick an HCI partner to launch with. And we looked at players in the space. And as you mentioned, there's actually a lot of them, more than I thought. And we had a lot of conversations, did a lot of testing in the lab, and Nutanix really stood out as the best choice. You know Nutanix has a lot of focus on things like ease of deployment. So it's very simple for us to automate deploying compute for customers. So we can use foundation APIs to go configure the servers, and then we turn those over to the customer which they can then manage through Prism. And something important to keep in mind here is that you know this isn't a manged service. This isn't infrastructure as a service. The customer has complete control over the Nutanix platform. So we're turning that over to them. It's connected to their network. They're using their IP addresses, you know their tools and processes to operate this. So it was really important for the platform we picked to have a really good self-service story for things like you know lifecycle management. So with one-click upgrade, customers have total control over patches and upgrades. They don't have to call us to do it. You know they can drive that themselves. >> Got it. Any other final words around like what do you see of the partnership going forward? >> Well you know I think this would be a great platform for Xi, so I think we should probably talk about that. >> Yeah, yeah, we should talk about that separately. Thanks a lot, Jason. >> Thanks. >> All right, man. (audience clapping) So as we look at the full journey now between obviously from invisible infrastructure to invisible clouds, you know there is one thing though to take away beyond many updates that we've had so far. And the fact is that everything that I've talked about so far is about completing a full blown true IA stack from all the way from compute to storage, to vitualization, containers to network services, and so forth. But every public cloud, a true cloud in that sense, has a full blown layer of services that's set on top either for traditional workloads or for new workloads, whether it be machine-learning, whether it be big data, you know name it, right? And in the enterprise, if you think about it, many of these services are being provisioned or provided through a bunch of our partners. Like we have partnerships with Cloudera for big data and so forth. But then based on some customer feedback and a lot of attention from what we've seen in the industry go out, just like AWS, and GCP, and Azure, it's time for Nutanix to have an opinionated view of the past stack. It's time for us to kind of move up the stack with our own offering that obviously adds value but provides some of our core competencies in data and takes it to the next level. And it's in that sense that we're actually launching Nutanix Era to simplify one of the hardest problems in enterprise IT and short of saving you from true Oracle licensing, it solves various other Oracle problems which is about truly simplifying databases much like what RDS did on AWS, imagine enterprise RDS on demand where you can provision, lifecycle manage your database with one-click. And to talk about this powerful new functionality, let me invite Bala and John on stage to give you one final demo. (rock music) Good to see you guys. >> Yep, thank you. >> All right, so we've got lots of folks here. They're all anxious to get to the next level. So this demo, really rock it. So what are we going to talk about? We're going to start with say maybe some database provisioning? Do you want to set it up? >> We have one dream, Sunil, one single dream to pass you off, that is what Nutanix is today for IT apps, we want to recreate that magic for devops and get back those weekends and freedom to DBAs. >> Got it. Let's start with, what, provisioning? >> Bala: Yep, John. >> Yeah, we're going to get in provisioning. So provisioning databases inside the enterprise is a significant undertaking that usually involves a myriad of resources and could take days. It doesn't get any easier after that for the longterm maintence with things like upgrades and environment refreshes and so on. Bala and team have been working on this challenge for quite awhile now. So we've architected Nutanix Era to cater to these enterprise use cases and make it one-click like you said. And Bala and I are so excited to finally show this to the world. We think it's actually Nutanix's best kept secrets. >> Got it, all right man, let's take a look at it. >> So we're going to be provisioning a sales database today. It's a four-step workflow. The first part is choosing our database engine. And since it's our sales database, we want it to be highly available. So we'll do a two node rack configuration. From there, it asks us where we want to land this service. We can either land it on an existing service that's already been provisioned, or if we're starting net new or for whatever reason, we can create a new service for it. The key thing here is we're not asking anybody how to do the work, we're asking what work you want done. And the other key thing here is we've architected this concept called profiles. So you tell us how much resources you need as well as what network type you want and what software revision you want. This is actually controlled by the DBAs. So DBAs, and compute administrators, and network administrators, so they can set their standards without having a DBA. >> Sunil: Got it, okay, let's take a look. >> John: So if we go to the next piece here, it's going to personalize their database. The key thing here, again, is that we're not asking you how many data files you want or anything in that regard. So we're going to be provisioning this to Nutanix's best practices. And the key thing there is just like these past services you don't have to read dozens of pages of best practice guides, it just does what's best for the platform. >> Sunil: Got it. And so these are a multitude of provisioning steps that normally one would take I guess hours if not days to provision and Oracle RAC data. >> John: Yeah, across multiple teams too. So if you think about the lifecycle especially if you have onshore and offshore resources, I mean this might even be longer than days. >> Sunil: Got it. And then there are a few steps here, and we'll lead into potentially the Time Machine construct too? >> John: Yeah, so since this is a critical database, we want data protection. So we're going to be delivering that through a feature called Time Machines. We'll leave this at the defaults for now, but the key thing to not here is we've got SLAs that deliver both continuous data protection as well as telescoping checkpoints for historical recovery. >> Sunil: Got it. So that's provisioning. We've kicked off Oracle, what, two node database and so forth? >> John: Yep, two node database. So we've got a handful of tasks that this is going to automate. We'll check back in in a few minutes. >> Got it. Why don't we talk about the other aspects then, Bala, maybe around, one of the things that, you know and I know many of you guys have seen this, is the fact that if you look at database especially Oracle but in general even SQL and so forth is the fact that look if you really simplified it to a developer, it should be as simple as I copy my production database, and I paste it to create my own dev instance. And whenever I need it, I need to obviously do it the opposite way, right? So that was the goal that we set ahead for us to actually deliver this new past service around Era for our customers. So you want to talk a little bit more about it? >> Sure Sunil. If you look at most of the data management functionality, they're pretty much like flavors of copy paste operations on database entities. But the trouble is the seemingly simple, innocuous operations of our daily lives becomes the most dreaded, complex, long running, error prone operations in data center. So we actually planned to tame this complexity and bring consumer grade simplicity to these operations, also make these clones extremely efficient without compromising the quality of service. And the best part is, the customers can enjoy these services not only for databases running on Nutanix, but also for databases running on third party systems. >> Got it. So let's take a look at this functionality of I guess snapshoting, clone and recovery that you've now built into the product. >> Right. So now if you see the core feature of this whole product is something we call Time Machine. Time Machine lets the database administrators actually capture the database tape to the granularity of seconds and also lets them create clones, refresh them to any point in time, and also recover the databases if the databases are running on the same Nutanix platform. Let's take a look at the demo with the Time Machine. So here is our customer relationship database management database which is about 2.3 terabytes. If you see, the Time Machine has been active about four months, and SLA has been set for continuously code revision of 30 days and then slowly tapers off 30 days of daily backup and weekly backups and so on, so forth. On the right hand side, you will see different colors. The green color is pretty much your continuously code revision, what we call them. That lets you to go back to any point in time to the granularity of seconds within those 30 days. And then the discreet code revision lets you go back to any snapshot of the backup that is maintained there kind of stuff. In a way, you see this Time Machine is pretty much like your modern day car with self driving ability. All you need to do is set the goals, and the Time Machine will do whatever is needed to reach up to the goal kind of stuff. >> Sunil: So why don't we quickly do a snapshot? >> Bala: Yeah, some of these times you need to create a snapshot for backup purposes, Time Machine has manual controls. All you need to do is give it a snapshot name. And then you have the ability to actually persist this snapshot data into a third party or object store so that your durability and that global data access requirements are met kind of stuff. So we kick off a snapshot operation. Let's look at what it is doing. If you see what is the snapshot operation that this is going through, there is a step called quiescing the databases. Basically, we're using application-centric APIs, and here it's actually RMAN of Oracle. We are using the RMan of Oracle to quiesce the database and performing application consistent storage snapshots with Nutanix technology. Basically we are fusing application-centric and then Nutanix platform and quiescing it. Just for a data point, if you have to use traditional technology and create a backup for this kind of size, it takes over four to six hours, whereas on Nutanix it's going to be a matter of seconds. So it almost looks like snapshot is done. This is full sensitive backup. You can pretty much use it for database restore kind of stuff. Maybe we'll do a clone demo and see how it goes. >> John: Yeah, let's go check it out. >> Bala: So for clone, again through the simplicity of command Z command, all you need to do is pick the time of your choice maybe around three o'clock in the morning today. >> John: Yeah, let's go with 3:02. >> Bala: 3:02, okay. >> John: Yeah, why not? >> Bala: You select the time, all you need to do is click on the clone. And most of the inputs that are needed for the clone process will be defaulted intelligently by us, right? And you have to make two choices that is where do you want this clone to be created with a brand new VM database server, or do you want to place that in your existing server? So we'll go with a brand new server, and then all you need to do is just give the password for you new clone database, and then clone it kind of stuff. >> Sunil: And this is an example of personalizing the database so a developer can do that. >> Bala: Right. So here is the clone kicking in. And what this is trying to do is actually it's creating a database VM and then registering the database, restoring the snapshot, and then recoding the logs up to three o'clock in the morning like what we just saw that, and then actually giving back the database to the requester kind of stuff. >> Maybe one finally thing, John. Do you want to show us the provision database that we kicked off? >> Yeah, it looks like it just finished a few seconds ago. So you can see all the tasks that we were talking about here before from creating the virtual infrastructure, and provisioning the database infrastructure, and configuring data protection. So I can go access this database now. >> Again, just to highlight this, guys. What we just showed you is an Oracle two node instance provisioned live in a few minutes on Nutanix. And this is something that even in a public cloud when you go to RDS on AWS or anything like that, you still can't provision Oracle RAC by the way, right? But that's what you've seen now, and that's what the power of Nutanix Era is. Okay, all right? >> Thank you. >> Thanks. (audience clapping) >> And one final thing around, obviously when we're building this, it's built as a past service. It's not meant just for operational benefits. And so one of the core design principles has been around being API first. You want to show that a little bit? >> Absolutely, Sunil, this whole product is built on API fist architecture. Pretty much what we have seen today and all the functionality that we've been able to show today, everything is built on Rest APIs, and you can pretty much integrate with service now architecture and give you your devops experience for your customers. We do have a plan for full fledged self-service portal eventually, and then make it as a proper service. >> Got it, great job, Bala. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, John. Good stuff, man. >> Thanks. >> All right. (audience clapping) So with Nutanix Era being this one-click provisioning, lifecycle management powered by APIs, I think what we're going to see is the fact that a lot of the products that we've talked about so far while you know I've talked about things like Calm, Flow, AHV functionality that have all been released in 5.5, 5.6, a bunch of the other stuff are also coming shortly. So I would strongly encourage you guys to kind of space 'em, you know most of these products that we've talked about, in fact, all of the products that we've talked about are going to be in the breakout sessions. We're going to go deep into them in the demos as well as in the pods. So spend some quality time not just on the stuff that's been shipping but also stuff that's coming out. And so one thing to keep in mind to sort of takeaway is that we're doing this all obviously with freedom as the goal. But from the products side, it has to be driven by choice whether the choice is based on platforms, it's based on hypervisors, whether it's based on consumption models and eventually even though we're starting with the management plane, eventually we'll go with the data plane of how do I actually provide a multi-cloud choice as well. And so when we wrap things up, and we look at the five freedoms that Ben talked about. Don't forget the sixth freedom especially after six to seven p.m. where the whole goal as a Nutanix family and extended family make sure we mix it up. Okay, thank you so much, and we'll see you around. (audience clapping) >> PA Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our morning keynote session. Breakouts will begin in 15 minutes. ♪ To do what I want ♪

(upbeat techno music) >> Announcer: Good morning ladies and gentlemen. This is Lenovo Transform. Please welcome to the stage Lenovo's Rod Lappin. (upbeat instrumental) >> Alright, ladies and gentlemen. Here we go. I was out the back having a chat. A bit faster than I expected. How are you all doing this morning? (crowd cheers) >> Good? How fantastic is it to be in New York City? (crowd applauds) Excellent. So my name's Rod Lappin. I'm with the Data Center Group, obviously. I do basically anything that touches customers from our sales people, our pre-sales engineers, our architects, et cetera, all the way through to our channel partner sales engagement globally. So that's my job, but enough of that, okay? So the weather this morning, absolutely fantastic. Not a cloud in the sky, perfect. A little bit different to how it was yesterday, right? I want to thank all of you because I know a lot of you had a lot of commuting issues getting into New York yesterday with all the storms. We have a lot of people from international and domestic travel caught up in obviously the network, which blows my mind, actually, but we have a lot of people here from Europe, obviously, a lot of analysts and media people here as well as customers who were caught up in circling around the airport apparently for hours. So a big round of applause for our team from Europe. (audience applauds) Thank you for coming. We have some people who commuted a very short distance. For example, our own server general manager, Cameron (mumbles), he's out the back there. Cameron, how long did it take you to get from Raleigh to New York? An hour-and-a-half flight? >> Cameron: 17 hours. >> 17 hours, ladies and gentleman. That's a fantastic distance. I think that's amazing. But I know a lot of us, obviously, in the United States have come a long way with the storms, obviously very tough, but I'm going to call out one individual. Shaneil from Spotless. Where are you Shaneil, you're here somewhere? There he is from Australia. Shaneil how long did it take you to come in from Australia? 25 hour, ladies and gentleman. A big round of applause. That's a pretty big effort. Shaneil actually I want you to stand up, if you don't mind. I've got a seat here right next to my CEO. You've gone the longest distance. How about a big round of applause for Shaneil. We'll put him in my seat, next to YY. Honestly, Shaneil, you're doing me a favor. Okay ladies and gentlemen, we've got a big day today. Obviously, my seat now taken there, fantastic. Obviously New York City, the absolute pinnacle of globalization. I first came to New York in 1996, which was before a lot of people in the room were born, unfortunately for me these days. Was completely in awe. I obviously went to a Yankees game, had no clue what was going on, didn't understand anything to do with baseball. Then I went and saw Patrick Ewing. Some of you would remember Patrick Ewing. Saw the Knicks play basketball. Had no idea what was going on. Obviously, from Australia, and somewhat slightly height challenged, basketball was not my thing but loved it. I really left that game... That was the first game of basketball I'd ever seen. Left that game realizing that effectively the guy throws the ball up at the beginning, someone taps it, that team gets it, they run it, they put it in the basket, then the other team gets it, they put it in the basket, the other team gets it, and that's basically the entire game. So I haven't really progressed from that sort of learning or understanding of basketball since then, but for me, personally, being here in New York, and obviously presenting with all of you guys today, it's really humbling from obviously some of you would have picked my accent, I'm also from Australia. From the north shore of Sydney. To be here is just a fantastic, fantastic event. So welcome ladies and gentlemen to Transform, part of our tech world series globally in our event series and our event season here at Lenovo. So once again, big round of applause. Thank you for coming (audience applauds). Today, basically, is the culmination of what I would classify as a very large journey. Many of you have been with us on that. Customers, partners, media, analysts obviously. We've got quite a lot of our industry analysts in the room. I know Matt Eastwood yesterday was on a train because he sent a Tweet out saying there's 170 people on the WIFI network. He was obviously a bit concerned he was going to get-- Pat Moorhead, he got in at 3:30 this morning, obviously from traveling here as well with some of the challenges with the transportation, so we've got a lot of people in the room that have been giving us advice over the last two years. I think all of our employees are joining us live. All of our partners and customers through the stream. As well as everybody in this packed-out room. We're very very excited about what we're going to be talking to you all today. I want to have a special thanks obviously to our R&D team in Raleigh and around the world. They've also been very very focused on what they've delivered for us today, and it's really important for them to also see the culmination of this great event. And like I mentioned, this is really the feedback. It's not just a Lenovo launch. This is a launch based on the feedback from our partners, our customers, our employees, the analysts. We've been talking to all of you about what we want to be when we grow up from a Data Center Group, and I think you're going to hear some really exciting stuff from some of the speakers today and in the demo and breakout sessions that we have after the event. These last two years, we've really transformed the organization, and that's one of the reasons why that theme is part of our Tech World Series today. We're very very confident in our future, obviously, and where the company's going. It's really important for all of you to understand today and take every single snippet that YY, Kirk, and Christian talk about today in the main session, and then our presenters in the demo sections on what Lenovo's actually doing for its future and how we're positioning the company, obviously, for that future and how the transformation, the digital transformation, is going ahead globally. So, all right, we are now going to step into our Transform event. And I've got a quick agenda statement for you. The very first thing is we're going to hear from YY, our chairman and CEO. He's going to discuss artificial intelligence, the evolution of our society and how Lenovo is clearly positioning itself in the industry. Then, obviously, you're going to hear from Kirk Skaugen, our president of the Data Center Group, our new boss. He's going to talk about how long he's been with the company and the transformation, once again, we're making, very specifically to the Data Center Group and how much of a difference we're making to society and some of our investments. Christian Teismann, our SVP and general manager of our client business is going to talk about the 25 years of ThinkPad. This year is the 25-year anniversary of our ThinkPad product. Easily the most successful brand in our client branch or client branch globally of any vendor. Most successful brand we've had launched, and this afternoon breakout sessions, obviously, with our keynotes, fantastic sessions. Make sure you actually attend all of those after this main arena here. Now, once again, listen, ask questions, and make sure you're giving us feedback. One of the things about Lenovo that we say all the time... There is no room for arrogance in our company. Every single person in this room is a customer, partner, analyst, or an employee. We love your feedback. It's only through your feedback that we continue to improve. And it's really important that through all of the sessions where the Q&As happen, breakouts afterwards, you're giving us feedback on what you want to see from us as an organization as we go forward. All right, so what were you doing 25 years ago? I spoke about ThinkPad being 25 years old, but let me ask you this. I bet you any money that no one here knew that our x86 business is also 25 years old. So, this year, we have both our ThinkPad and our x86 anniversaries for 25 years. Let me tell you. What were you guys doing 25 years ago? There's me, 25 years ago. It's a bit scary, isn't it? It's very svelte and athletic and a lot lighter than I am today. It makes me feel a little bit conscious. And you can see the black and white shot. It shows you that even if you're really really short and you come from the wrong side of the tracks to make some extra cash, you can still do some modeling as long as no one else is in the photo to give anyone any perspective, so very important. I think I might have got one photo shoot out of that, I don't know. I had to do it, I needed the money. Let me show you another couple of photos. Very interesting, how's this guy? How cool does he look? Very svelte and athletic. I think there's no doubt. He looks much much cooler than I do. Okay, so ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it gives me great honor to obviously introduce our very very first guest to the stage. Ladies and gentlemen, our chairman and CEO, Yuanqing Yang. or as we like to call him, YY. A big round of applause, thank you. (upbeat techno instrumental) >> Good morning everyone. Thank you, Rod, for your introduction. Actually, I didn't think I was younger than you (mumbles). I can't think of another city more fitting to host the Transform event than New York. A city that has transformed from a humble trading post 400 years ago to one of the most vibrant cities in the world today. It is a perfect symbol of transformation of our world. The rapid and the deep transformations that have propelled us from the steam engine to the Internet era in just 200 years. Looking back at 200 years ago, there was only a few companies that operated on a global scale. The total value of the world's economy was around $188 billion U.S. dollars. Today, it is only $180 for each person on earth. Today, there are thousands of independent global companies that compete to sell everything, from corn and crude oil to servers and software. They drive a robust global economy was over $75 trillion or $1,000 per person. Think about it. The global economy has multiplied almost 450 times in just two centuries. What is even more remarkable is that the economy has almost doubled every 15 years since 1950. These are significant transformation for businesses and for the world and our tiny slice of pie. This transformation is the result of the greatest advancement in technology in human history. Not one but three industrial revolutions have happened over the last 200 years. Even though those revolutions created remarkable change, they were just the beginning. Today, we are standing at the beginning of the fourth revolution. This revolution will transform how we work (mumbles) in ways that no one could imagine in the 18th century or even just 18 months ago. You are the people who will lead this revolution. Along with Lenovo, we will redefine IT. IT is no longer just information technology. It's intelligent technology, intelligent transformation. A transformation that is driven by big data called computing and artificial intelligence. Even the transition from PC Internet to mobile Internet is a big leap. Today, we are facing yet another big leap from the mobile Internet to the Smart Internet or intelligent Internet. In this Smart Internet era, Cloud enables devices, such as PCs, Smart phones, Smart speakers, Smart TVs. (mumbles) to provide the content and the services. But the evolution does not stop them. Ultimately, almost everything around us will become Smart, with building computing, storage, and networking capabilities. That's what we call the device plus Cloud transformation. These Smart devices, incorporated with various sensors, will continuously sense our environment and send data about our world to the Cloud. (mumbles) the process of this ever-increasing big data and to support the delivery of Cloud content and services, the data center infrastructure is also transforming to be more agile, flexible, and intelligent. That's what we call the infrastructure plus Cloud transformation. But most importantly, it is the human wisdom, the people learning algorithm vigorously improved by engineers that enables artificial intelligence to learn from big data and make everything around us smarter. With big data collected from Smart devices, computing power of the new infrastructure under the trend artificial intelligence, we can understand the world around us more accurately and make smarter decisions. We can make life better, work easier, and society safer and healthy. Think about what is already possible as we start this transformation. Smart Assistants can help you place orders online with a voice command. Driverless cars can run on the same road as traditional cars. (mumbles) can help troubleshoot customers problems, and the virtual doctors already diagnose basic symptoms. This list goes on and on. Like every revolution before it, intelligent transformation, will fundamentally change the nature of business. Understanding and preparing for that will be the key for the growth and the success of your business. The first industrial revolution made it possible to maximize production. Water and steam power let us go from making things by hand to making them by machine. This transformed how fast things could be produced. It drove the quantity of merchandise made and led to massive increase in trade. With this revolution, business scale expanded, and the number of customers exploded. Fifty years later, the second industrial revolution made it necessary to organize a business like the modern enterprise, electric power, and the telegraph communication made business faster and more complex, challenging businesses to become more efficient and meeting entirely new customer demands. In our own lifetimes, we have witnessed the third industrial revolution, which made it possible to digitize the enterprise. The development of computers and the Internet accelerated business beyond human speed. Now, global businesses have to deal with customers at the end of a cable, not always a handshake. While we are still dealing with the effects of a digitizing business, the fourth revolution is already here. In just the past two or three years, the growth of data and advancement in visual intelligence has been astonishing. The computing power can now process the massive amount of data about your customers, suppliers, partners, competitors, and give you insights you simply could not imagine before. Artificial intelligence can not only tell you what your customers want today but also anticipate what they will need tomorrow. This is not just about making better business decisions or creating better customer relationships. It's about making the world a better place. Ultimately, can we build a new world without diseases, war, and poverty? The power of big data and artificial intelligence may be the revolutionary technology to make that possible. Revolutions don't happen on their own. Every industrial revolution has its leaders, its visionaries, and its heroes. The master transformers of their age. The first industrial revolution was led by mechanics who designed and built power systems, machines, and factories. The heroes of the second industrial revolution were the business managers who designed and built modern organizations. The heroes of the third revolution were the engineers who designed and built the circuits and the source code that digitized our world. The master transformers of the next revolution are actually you. You are the designers and the builders of the networks and the systems. You will bring the benefits of intelligence to every corner of your enterprise and make intelligence the central asset of your business. At Lenovo, data intelligence is embedded into everything we do. How we understand our customer's true needs and develop more desirable products. How we profile our customers and market to them precisely. How we use internal and external data to balance our supply and the demand. And how we train virtual agents to provide more effective sales services. So the decisions you make today about your IT investment will determine the quality of the decisions your enterprise will make tomorrow. So I challenge each of you to seize this opportunity to become a master transformer, to join Lenovo as we work together at the forefront of the fourth industrial revolution, as leaders of the intelligent transformation. (triumphant instrumental) Today, we are launching the largest portfolio in our data center history at Lenovo. We are fully committed to the (mumbles) transformation. Thank you. (audience applauds) >> Thanks YY. All right, ladies and gentlemen. Fantastic, so how about a big round of applause for YY. (audience applauds) Obviously a great speech on the transformation that we at Lenovo are taking as well as obviously wanting to journey with our partners and customers obviously on that same journey. What I heard from him was obviously artificial intelligence, how we're leveraging that integrally as well as externally and for our customers, and the investments we're making in the transformation around IoT machine learning, obviously big data, et cetera, and obviously the Data Center Group, which is one of the key things we've got to be talking about today. So we're on the cusp of that fourth revolution, as YY just mentioned, and Lenovo is definitely leading the way and investing in those parts of the industry and our portfolio to ensure we're complimenting all of our customers and partners on what they want to be, obviously, as part of this new transformation we're seeing globally. Obviously now, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado once again, to tell us more about what's going on today, our announcements, obviously, that all of you will be reading about and seeing in the breakout and the demo sessions with our segment general managers this afternoon is our president of the data center, Mr. Kirk Skaugen. (upbeat instrumental) >> Good morning, and let me add my welcome to Transform. I just crossed my six months here at Lenovo after over 24 years at Intel Corporation, and I can tell you, we've been really busy over the last six months, and I'm more excited and enthusiastic than ever and hope to share some of that with you today. Today's event is called "Transform", and today we're announcing major new transformations in Lenovo, in the data center, but more importantly, we're celebrating the business results that these platforms are going to have on society and with international supercomputing going on in parallel in Frankfurt, some of the amazing scientific discoveries that are going to happen on some of these platforms. Lenovo has gone through some significant transformations in the last two years, since we acquired the IBM x86 business, and that's really positioning us for this next phase of growth, and we'll talk more about that later. Today, we're announcing the largest end-to-end data center portfolio in Lenovo's history, as you heard from YY, and we're really taking the best of the x86 heritage from our IBM acquisition of the x86 server business and combining that with the cost economics that we've delivered from kind of our China heritage. As we've talked to some of the analysts in the room, it's really that best of the east and best of the west is combining together in this announcement today. We're going to be announcing two new brands, building on our position as the number one x86 server vendor in both customer satisfaction and in reliability, and we're also celebrating, next month in July, a very significant milestone, which will we'll be shipping our 20 millionth x86 server into the industry. For us, it's an amazing time, and it's an inflection point to kind of look back, pause, but also share the next phase of Lenovo and the exciting vision for the future. We're also making some declarations on our vision for the future today. Again, international supercomputing's going on, and, as it turns out, we're the fastest growing supercomputer company on earth. We'll talk about that. Our goal today that we're announcing is that we plan in the next several years to become number one in supercomputing, and we're going to put the investments behind that. We're also committing to our customers that we're going to disrupt the status quo and accelerate the pace of innovation, not just in our legacy server solutions, but also in Software-Defined because what we've heard from you is that that lack of legacy, we don't have a huge router business or a huge sand business to protect. It's that lack of legacy that's enabling us to invest and get ahead of the curb on this next transition to Software-Defined. So you're going to see us doing that through building our internal IP, through some significant joint ventures, and also through some merges and acquisitions over the next several quarters. Altogether, we're driving to be the most trusted data center provider in the industry between us and our customers and our suppliers. So a quick summary of what we're going to dive into today, both in my keynote as well as in the breakout sessions. We're in this transformation to the next phase of Lenovo's data center growth. We're closing out our previous transformation. We actually, believe it or not, in the last six months or so, have renegotiated 18,000 contracts in 160 countries. We built out an entire end-to-end organization from development and architecture all the way through sales and support. This next transformation, I think, is really going to excite Lenovo shareholders. We're building the largest data center portfolio in our history. I think when IBM would be up here a couple years ago, we might have two or three servers to announce in time to market with the next Intel platform. Today, we're announcing 14 new servers, seven new storage systems, an expanded set of networking portfolios based on our legacy with Blade Network Technologies and other companies we've acquired. Two new brands that we'll talk about for both data center infrastructure and Software-Defined, a new set of premium premiere services as well as a set of engineered solutions that are going to help our customers get to market faster. We're going to be celebrating our 20 millionth x86 server, and as Rod said, 25 years in x86 server compute, and Christian will be up here talking about 25 years of ThinkPad as well. And then a new end-to-end segmentation model because all of these strategies without execution are kind of meaningless. I hope to give you some confidence in the transformation that Lenovo has gone through as well. So, having observed Lenovo from one of its largest partners, Intel, for more than a couple decades, I thought I'd just start with why we have confidence on the foundation that we're building off of as we move from a PC company into a data center provider in a much more significant way. So Lenovo today is a company of $43 billion in sales. Absolutely astonishing, it puts us at about Fortune 202 as a company, with 52,000 employees around the world. We're supporting and have service personnel, almost a little over 10,000 service personnel that service our servers and data center technologies in over 160 countries that provide onsite service and support. We have seven data center research centers. One of the reasons I came from Intel to Lenovo was that I saw that Lenovo became number one in PCs, not through cost cutting but through innovation. It was Lenovo that was partnering on the next-generation Ultrabooks and two-in-ones and tablets in the modem mods that you saw, but fundamentally, our path to number one in data center is going to be built on innovation. Lastly, we're one of the last companies that's actually building not only our own motherboards at our own motherboard factories, but also with five global data center manufacturing facilities. Today, we build about four devices a second, but we also build over 100 servers per hour, and the cost economics we get, and I just visited our Shenzhen factory, of having everything from screws to microprocessors come up through the elevator on the first floor, go left to build PCs and ThinkPads and go right to build server technology, means we have some of the world's most cost effective solutions so we can compete in things like hyperscale computing. So it's with that that I think we're excited about the foundation that we can build off of on the Data Center Group. Today, as we stated, this event is about transformation, and today, I want to talk about three things we're going to transform. Number one is the customer experience. Number two is the data center and our customer base with Software-Defined infrastructure, and then the third is talk about how we plan to execute flawlessly with a new transformation that we've had internally at Lenovo. So let's dive into it. On customer experience, really, what does it mean to transform customer experience? Industry pundits say that if you're not constantly innovating, you can fall behind. Certainly the technology industry that we're in is transforming at record speed. 42% of business leaders or CIOs say that digital first is their top priority, but less than 50% actually admit that they have a strategy to get there. So people are looking for a partner to keep pace with that innovation and change, and that's really what we're driving to at Lenovo. So today we're announcing a set of plans to take another step function in customer experience, and building off of our number one position. Just recently, Gartner shows Lenovo as the number 24 supply chains of companies over $12 billion. We're up there with Amazon, Coca-Cola, and we've now completely re-architected our supply chain in the Data Center Group from end to end. Today, we can deliver 90% of our SKUs, order to ship in less than seven days. The artificial intelligence that YY mentioned is optimizing our performance even further. In services, as we talked about, we're now in 160 countries, supporting on-site support, 50 different call centers around the world for local language support, and we're today announcing a whole set of new premiere support services that I'll get into in a second. But we're building on what's already better than 90% customer satisfaction in this space. And then in development, for all the engineers out there, we started foundationally for this new set of products, talking about being number one in reliability and the lowest downtime of any x86 server vendor on the planet, and these systems today are architected to basically extend that leadership position. So let me tell you the realities of reliability. This is ITIC, it's a reliability report. 750 CIOs and IT managers from more than 20 countries, so North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, Africa. This isn't anything that's paid for with sponsorship dollars. Lenovo has been number one for four years running on x86 reliability. This is the amount of downtime, four hours or more, in mission-critical environments from the leading x86 providers. You can see relative to our top two competitors that are ahead of us, HP and Dell, you can see from ITIC why we are building foundationally off of this, and why it's foundational to how we're developing these new platforms. In customer satisfaction, we are also rated number one in x86 server customer satisfaction. This year, we're now incentivizing every single Lenovo employee on customer satisfaction and customer experience. It's been a huge mandate from myself and most importantly YY as our CEO. So you may say well what is the basis of this number one in customer satisfaction, and it's not just being number one in one category, it's actually being number one in 21 of the 22 categories that TBR talks about. So whether it's performance, support systems, online product information, parts and availability replacement, Lenovo is number one in 21 of the 22 categories and number one for six consecutive studies going back to Q1 of 2015. So this, again, as we talk about the new product introductions, it's something that we absolutely want to build on, and we're humbled by it, and we want to continue to do better. So let's start now on the new products and talk about how we're going to transform the data center. So today, we are announcing two new product offerings. Think Agile and ThinkSystem. If you think about the 25 years of ThinkPad that Christian's going to talk about, Lenovo has a continuous learning culture. We're fearless innovators, we're risk takers, we continuously learn, but, most importantly, I think we're humble and we have some humility. That when we fail, we can fail fast, we learn, and we improve. That's really what drove ThinkPad to number one. It took about eight years from the acquisition of IBM's x86 PC business before Lenovo became number one, but it was that innovation, that listening and learning, and then improving. As you look at the 25 years of ThinkPad, there were some amazing successes, but there were also some amazing failures along the way, but each and every time we learned and made things better. So this year, as Rod said, we're not just celebrating 25 years of ThinkPad, but we're celebrating 25 years of x86 server development since the original IBM PC servers in 1992. It's a significant day for Lenovo. Today, we're excited to announce two new brands. ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. It's an important new announcement that we started almost three years ago when we acquired the x86 server business. Why don't we run a video, and we'll show you a little bit about ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. >> Narrator: The status quo is comfortable. It gets you by, but if you think that's good enough for your data center, think again. If adoption is becoming more complicated when it should be simpler, think again. If others are selling you technology that's best for them, not for you, think again. It's time for answers that win today and tomorrow. Agile, innovative, different. Because different is better. Different embraces change and makes adoption simple. Different designs itself around you. Using 25 years of innovation and design and R&D. Different transforms, it gives you ThinkSystem. World-record performance, most reliable, easy to integrate, scales faster. Different empowers you with ThinkAgile. It redefines the experience, giving you the speed of Cloud and the control of on-premise IT. Responding faster to what your business really needs. Different defines the future. Introducing Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. (exciting and slightly aggressive digital instrumental) >> All right, good stuff, huh? (audience applauds) So it's built off of this 25-year history of us being in the x86 server business, the commitment we established three years ago after acquiring the x86 server business to be and have the most reliable, the most agile, and the most highest-performing data center solutions on the planet. So today we're announcing two brands. ThinkSystem is for the traditional data center infrastructure, and ThinkAgile is our brand for Software-Defined infrastructure. Again, the teams challenge themselves from the start, how do we build off this rich heritage, expanding our position as number one in customer satisfaction, reliability, and one of the world's best supply chains. So let's start and look at the next set of solutions. We have always prided ourself that little things don't mean a lot. Little things mean everything. So today, as we said on the legacy solutions, we have over 30 world-record performance benchmarks on Intel architecture, and more than actually 150 since we started tracking this back in 2001. So it's the little pieces of innovation. It's the fine tuning that we do with our partners like an Intel or a Microsoft, an SAP, VMware, and Nutanix that's enabling us to get these world-record performance benchmarks, and with this next generation of solutions we think we'll continue to certainly do that. So today we're announcing the most comprehensive portfolio ever in our data center history. There's 14 servers, seven storage devices, and five network switches. We're also announcing, which is super important to our customer base, a set of new premiere service options. That's giving you fast access directly to a level two support person. No automated response system involved. You get to pick up the phone and directly talk to a level two support person that's going to have end-to-end ownership of the customer experience for ThinkSystem. With ThinkAgile, that's going to be completely bundled with every ThinkAgile you purchase. In addition, we're having white glove service on site that will actually unbox the product for you and get it up and running. It's an entirely new set of solutions for hybrid Cloud, for big data analytics and database applications around these engineered solutions. These are like 40- to 50-page guides where we fine-tuned the most important applications around virtual desktop infrastructure and those kinds of applications, working side by side with all of our ISP partners. So significantly expanding, not just the hardware but the software solutions that, obviously, you, as our customers, are running. So if you look at ThinkSystem innovation, again, it was designed for the ultimate in flexibility, performance, and reliability. It's a single now-unified brand that combines what used to be the Lenovo Think server and the IBM System x products now into a single brand that spans server, storage, and networking. We're basically future-proofing it for the next-generation data center. It's a significantly simplified portfolio. One of the big pieces that we've heard is that the complexity of our competitors has really been overwhelming to customers. We're building a more flexible, more agile solution set that requires less work, less qualification, and more future proofing. There's a bunch of things in this that you'll see in the demos. Faster time-to-service in terms of the modularity of the systems. 12% faster service equating to almost $50 thousand per hour of reduced downtime. Some new high-density options where we have four nodes and a 2U, twice the density to improve and reduce outbacks and mission-critical workloads. And then in high-performance computing and supercomputing, we're going to spend some time on that here shortly. We're announcing new water-cooled solutions. We have some of the most premiere water-cooled solutions in the world, with more than 25 patents pending now, just in the water-cooled solutions for supercomputing. The performance that we think we're going to see out of these systems is significant. We're building off of that legacy that we have today on the existing Intel solutions. Today, we believe we have more than 50% of SAP HANA installations in the world. In fact, SAP just went public that they're running their internal SAP HANA on Lenovo hardware now. We're seeing a 59% increase in performance on SAP HANA generation on generation. We're seeing 31% lower total cost to ownership. We believe this will continue our position of having the highest level of five-nines in the x86 server industry. And all of these servers will start being available later this summer when the Intel announcements come out. We're also announcing the largest storage portfolio in our history, significantly larger than anything we've done in the past. These are all available today, including some new value class storage offerings. Our network portfolio is expanding now significantly. It was a big surprise when I came to Lenovo, seeing the hundreds of engineers we had from the acquisition of Blade Network Technologies and others with our teams in Romania, Santa Clara, really building out both the embedded portfolio but also the top racks, which is around 10 gig, 25 gig, and 100 gig. Significantly better economics, but all the performance you'd expect from the largest networking companies in the world. Those are also available today. ThinkAgile and Software-Defined, I think the one thing that has kind of overwhelmed me since coming in to Lenovo is we are being embraced by our customers because of our lack of legacy. We're not trying to sell you one more legacy SAN at 65% margins. ThinkAgile really was founded, kind of born free from the shackles of legacy thinking and legacy infrastructure. This is just the beginning of what's going to be an amazing new brand in the transformation to Software-Defined. So, for Lenovo, we're going to invest in our own internal organic IP. I'll foreshadow: There's some significant joint ventures and some mergers and acquisitions that are going to be coming in this space. And so this will be the foundation for our Software-Defined networking and storage, for IoT, and ultimately for the 5G build-out as well. This is all built for data centers of tomorrow that require fluid resources, tightly integrated software and hardware in kind of an appliance, selling at the rack level, and so we'll show you how that is going to take place here in a second. ThinkAgile, we have a few different offerings. One is around hyperconverged storage, Hybrid Cloud, and also Software-Defined storage. So we're really trying to redefine the customer experience. There's two different solutions we're having today. It's a Microsoft Azure solution and a Nutanix solution. These are going to be available both in the appliance space as well as in a full rack solution. We're really simplifying and trying to transform the entire customer experience from how you order it. We've got new capacity planning tools that used to take literally days for us to get the capacity planning done. It's now going down to literally minutes. We've got new order, delivery, deployment, administration service, something we're calling ThinkAgile Advantage, which is the white glove unboxing of the actual solutions on prem. So the whole thing when you hear about it in the breakout sessions about transforming the entire customer experience with both an HX solution and an SX solution. So again, available at the rack level for both Nutanix and for Microsoft Solutions available in just a few months. Many of you in the audience since the Microsoft Airlift event in Seattle have started using these things, and the feedback to date has been fantastic. We appreciate the early customer adoption that we've seen from people in the audience here. So next I want to bring up one of our most important partners, and certainly if you look at all of these solutions, they're based on the next-generation Intel Xeon scalable processor that's going to be announcing very very soon. I want to bring on stage Rupal Shah, who's the corporate vice president and general manager of Global Data Center Sales with Intel, so Rupal, please join me. (upbeat instrumental) So certainly I have long roots at Intel, but why don't you talk about, from Intel's perspective, why Lenovo is an important partner for Lenovo. >> Great, well first of all, thank you very much. I've had the distinct pleasure of not only working with Kirk for many many years, but also working with Lenovo for many years, so it's great to be here. Lenovo is not only a fantastic supplier and leader in the industry for Intel-based servers but also a very active partner in the Intel ecosystem. In the Intel ecosystem, specifically, in our partner programs and in our builder programs around Cloud, around the network, and around storage, I personally have had a long history in working with Lenovo, and I've seen personally that PC transformation that you talked about, Kirk, and I believe, and I know that Intel believes in Lenovo's ability to not only succeed in the data center but to actually lead in the data center. And so today, the ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile announcement is just so incredibly important. It's such a great testament to our two companies working together, and the innovation that we're able to bring to the market, and all of it based on the Intel Xeon scalable processor. >> Excellent, so tell me a little bit about why we've been collaborating, tell me a little bit about why you're excited about ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile, specifically. >> Well, there are a lot of reasons that I'm excited about the innovation, but let me talk about a few. First, both of our companies really stand behind the fact that it's increasingly a hybrid world. Our two companies offer a range of solutions now to customers to be able to address their different workload needs. ThinkSystem really brings the best, right? It brings incredible performance, flexibility in data center deployment, and industry-leading reliability that you've talked about. And, as always, Xeon has a history of being built for the data center specifically. The Intel Xeon scalable processor is really re-architected from the ground up in order to enhance compute, network, and storage data flows so that we can deliver workload optimized performance for both a wide range of traditional workloads and traditional needs but also some emerging new needs in areas like artificial intelligence. Second is when it comes to the next generation of Cloud infrastructure, the new Lenovo ThinkAgile line offers a truly integrated offering to address data center pain points, and so not only are you able to get these pretested solutions, but these pretested solutions are going to get deployed in your infrastructure faster, and they're going to be deployed in a way that's going to meet your specific needs. This is something that is new for both of us, and it's an incredible innovation in the marketplace. I think that it's a great addition to what is already a fantastic portfolio for Lenovo. >> Excellent. >> Finally, there's high-performance computing. In high-performance computing. First of all, congratulations. It's a big week, I think, for both of us. Fantastic work that we've been doing together in high-performance computing and actually bringing the best of the best to our customers, and you're going to hear a whole lot more about that. We obviously have a number of joint innovation centers together between Intel and Lenovo. Tell us about some of the key innovations that you guys are excited about. >> Well, Intel and Lenovo, we do have joint innovation labs around the world, and we have a long and strong history of very tight collaboration. This has brought a big wave of innovation to the marketplace in areas like software-defined infrastructure. Yet another area is working closely on a joint vision that I think our two companies have in artificial intelligence. Intel is very committed to the world of AI, and we're committed in making the investments required in technology development, in training, and also in R&D to be able to deliver end-to-end solutions. So with Intel's comprehensive technology portfolio and Lenovo's development and innovation expertise, it's a great combination in this space. I've already talked a little bit about HPC and so has Kirk, and we're going to hear a little bit more to come, but we're really building the fastest compute solutions for customers that are solving big problems. Finally, we often talk about processors from Intel, but it's not just about the processors. It's way beyond that. It's about engaging at the solution level for our customers, and I'm so excited about the work that we've done together with Lenovo to bring to market products like Intel Omni-Path Architecture, which is really the fabric for high-performance data centers. We've got a great showing this week with Intel Omni-Path Architecture, and I'm so grateful for all the work that we've done to be able to bring true solutions to the marketplace. I am really looking forward to our future collaboration with Lenovo as we have in the past. I want to thank you again for inviting me here today, and congratulations on a fantastic launch. >> Thank you, Rupal, very much, for the long partnership. >> Thank you. (audience applauds) >> Okay, well now let's transition and talk a little bit about how Lenovo is transforming. The first thing we've done when I came on board about six months ago is we've transformed to a truly end-to-end organization. We're looking at the market segments I think as our customers define them, and we've organized into having vice presidents and senior vice presidents in charge of each of these major groups, thinking really end to end, from architecture all the way to end of life and customer support. So the first is hyperscale infrastructure. It's about 20% on the market by 2020. We've hired a new vice president there to run that business. Given we can make money in high-volume desktop PCs, it's really the manufacturing prowess, deep engineering collaboration that's enabling us to sell into Baidu, and to Alibaba, Tencent, as well as the largest Cloud vendors on the West Coast here in the United States. We believe we can make money here by having basically a deep deep engineering engagement with our key customers and building on the PC volume economics that we have within Lenovo. On software-defined infrastructure, again, it's that lack of legacy that I think is propelling us into this space. We're not encumbered by trying to sell one more legacy SAN or router, and that's really what's exciting us here, as we transform from a hardware to a software-based company. On HPC and AI, as we said, we'll talk about this in a second. We're the fastest-growing supercomputing company on earth. We have aspirations to be the largest supercomputing company on earth, with China and the U.S. vying for number one in that position, it puts us in a good position there. We're going to bridge that into artificial intelligence in our upcoming Shanghai Tech World. The entire day is around AI. In fact, YY has committed $1.2 billion to artificial intelligence over the next few years of R&D to help us bridge that. And then on data center infrastructure, is really about moving to a solutions based infrastructure like our position with SAP HANA, where we've gone deep with engineers on site at SAP, SAP running their own infrastructure on Lenovo and building that out beyond just SAP to other solutions in the marketplace. Overall, significantly expanding our services portfolio to maintain our number one customer satisfaction rating. So given ISC, or International Supercomputing, this week in Frankfurt, and a lot of my team are actually over there, I wanted to just show you the transformation we've had at Lenovo for delivering some of the technology to solve some of the most challenging humanitarian problems on earth. Today, we are the fastest-growing supercomputer company on the planet in terms of number of systems on the Top 500 list. We've gone from zero to 92 positions in just a few short years, but IDC also positions Lenovo as the fast-growing supercomputer and HPC company overall at about 17% year on year growth overall, including all of the broad channel, the regional universities and this kind of thing, so this is an exciting place for us. I'm excited today that Sergi has come all the way from Spain to be with us today. It's an exciting time because this week we announce the fastest next-generation Intel supercomputer on the planet at Barcelona Supercomputer. Before I bring Sergi on stage, let's run a video and I'll show you why we're excited about the capabilities of these next-generation supercomputers. Run the video please. >> Narrator: Different creates one of the most powerful supercomputers for the Barcelona Supercomputer Center. A high-performance, high-capacity design to help shape tomorrow's world. Different designs what's best for you, with 25 years of end-to-end expertise delivering large-scale solutions. It integrates easily with technology from industry partners, through deep collaboration with the client to manufacture, test, configure, and install at global scale. Different achieves the impossible. The first of a new series. A more energy-efficient supercomputer yet 10 times more powerful than its predecessor. With over 3,400 Lenovo ThinkSystem servers, each performing over two trillion calculations per second, giving us 11.1 petaflop capacity. Different powers MareNostrum, a supercomputer that will help us better understand cancer, help discover disease-fighting therapies, predict the impact of climate change. MareNostrom 4.0 promises to uncover answers that will help solve humanities greatest challenges. (audience applauds) >> So please help me in welcoming operations director of the Barcelona Supercomputer Center, Sergi Girona. So welcome, and again, congratulations. It's been a big week for both of us. But I think for a long time, if you haven't been to Barcelona, this has been called the world's most beautiful computer because it's in one of the most gorgeous chapels in the world as you can see here. Congratulations, we now are number 13 on the Top500 list and the fastest next-generation Intel computer. >> Thank you very much, and congratulations to you as well. >> So maybe we can just talk a little bit about what you've done over the last few months with us. >> Sure, thank you very much. It is a pleasure for me being invited here to present to you what we've been doing with Lenovo so far and what we are planning to do in the next future. I'm representing here Barcelona Supercomputing Center. I am presenting high-performance computing services to science and industry. How we see these science services has changed the paradigm of science. We are coming from observation. We are coming from observation on the telescopes and the microscopes and the building of infrastructures, but this is not affordable anymore. This is very expensive, so it's not possible, so we need to move to simulations. So we need to understand what's happening in our environment. We need to predict behaviors only going through simulation. So, at BSC, we are devoted to provide services to industry, to science, but also we are doing our own research because we want to understand. At the same time, we are helping and developing the new engineers of the future on the IT, on HPC. So we are having four departments based on different topics. The main and big one is wiling to understand how we are doing the next supercomputers from the programming level to the performance to the EIA, so all these things, but we are having also interest on what about the climate change, what's the air quality that we are having in our cities. What is the precision medicine we need to have. How we can see that the different drugs are better for different individuals, for different humans, and of course we have an energy department, taking care of understanding what's the better optimization for a cold, how we can save energy running simulations on different topics. But, of course, the topic of today is not my research, but it's the systems we are building in Barcelona. So this is what we have been building in Barcelona so far. From left to right, you have the preparation of the facility because this is 160 square meters with 1.4 megabytes, so that means we need new piping, we need new electricity, at the same time in the center we have to install the core services of the system, so the management practices, and then on the right-hand side you have installation of the networking, the Omni-Path by Intel. Because all of the new racks have to be fully integrated and they need to come into operation rapidly. So we start deployment of the system May 15, and we've now been ending and coming in production July first. All the systems, all the (mumbles) systems from Lenovo are coming before being open and available. What we've been installing here in Barcelona is general purpose systems for our general workload of the system with 3,456 nodes. Everyone of those having 48 cores, 96 gigabytes main memory for a total capacity of about 400 terabytes memory. The objective of this is that we want to, all the system, all the processors, to work together for a single execution for running altogether, so this is an example of the platinum processors from Intel having 24 cores each. Of course, for doing this together with all the cores in the same application, we need a high-speed network, so this is Omni-Path, and of course all these cables are connecting all the nodes. Noncontention, working together, cooperating. Of course, this is a bunch of cables. They need to be properly aligned in switches. So here you have the complete presentation. Of course, this is general purpose, but we wanted to invest with our partners. We want to understand what the supercomputers we wanted to install in 2020, (mumbles) Exascale. We want to find out, we are installing as well systems with different capacities with KNH, with power, with ARM processors. We want to leverage our obligations for the future. We want to make sure that in 2020 we are ready to move our users rapidly to the new technologies. Of course, this is in total, giving us a total capacity of 13.7 petaflops that it's 12 times the capacity of the former MareNostrum four years ago. We need to provide the services to our scientists because they are helping to solve problems for humanity. That's the place we are going to go. Last is inviting you to come to Barcelona to see our place and our chapel. Thank you very much (audience applauds). >> Thank you. So now you can all go home to your spouses and significant others and say you have a formal invitation to Barcelona, Spain. So last, I want to talk about what we've done to transform Lenovo. I think we all know the history is nice but without execution, none of this is going to be possible going forward, so we have been very very busy over the last six months to a year of transforming Lenovo's data center organization. First, we moved to a dedicated end-to-end sales and marketing organization. In the past, we had people that were shared between PC and data center, now thousands of sales people around the world are 100% dedicated end to end to our data center clients. We've moved to a fully integrated and dedicated supply chain and procurement organization. A fully dedicated quality organization, 100% dedicated to expanding our data center success. We've moved to a customer-centric segment, again, bringing in significant new leaders from outside the company to look end to end at each of these segments, supercomputing being very very different than small business, being very very different than taking care of, for example, a large retailer or bank. So around hyperscale, software-defined infrastructure, HPC, AI, and supercomputing and data center solutions-led infrastructure. We've built out a whole new set of global channel programs. Last year, or a year passed, we have five different channel programs around the world. We've now got one simplified channel program for dealer registration. I think our channel is very very energized to go out to market with Lenovo technology across the board, and a whole new set of system integrator relationships. You're going to hear from one of them in Christian's discussion, but a whole new set of partnerships to build solutions together with our system integrative partners. And, again, as I mentioned, a brand new leadership team. So look forward to talking about the details of this. There's been a significant amount of transformation internal to Lenovo that's led to the success of this new product introduction today. So in conclusion, I want to talk about the news of the day. We are transforming Lenovo to the next phase of our data center growth. Again, in over 160 countries, closing on that first phase of transformation and moving forward with some unique declarations. We're launching the largest portfolio in our history, not just in servers but in storage and networking, as everything becomes kind of a software personality on top of x86 Compute. We think we're very well positioned with our scale on PCs as well as data center. Two new brands for both data center infrastructure and Software-Defined, without the legacy shackles of our competitors, enabling us to move very very quickly into Software-Defined, and, again, foreshadowing some joint ventures in M&A that are going to be coming up that will further accelerate ourselves there. New premiere support offerings, enabling you to get direct access to level two engineers and white glove unboxing services, which are going to be bundled along with ThinkAgile. And then celebrating the milestone of 25 years in x86 server compute, not just ThinkPads that you'll hear about shortly, but also our 20 million server shipping next month. So we're celebrating that legacy and looking forward to the next phase. And then making sure we have the execution engine to maintain our position and grow it, being number one in customer satisfaction and number one in quality. So, with that, thank you very much. I look forward to seeing you in the breakouts today and talking with many of you, and I'll bring Rod back up to transition us to the next section. Thank you. (audience applauds) >> All right, Kirk, thank you, sir. All right, ladies and gentlemen, what did you think of that? How about a big round of applause for ThinkAgile, ThinkSystems new brands? (audience applauds) And, obviously, with that comes a big round of applause, for Kirk Skaugen, my boss, so we've got to give him a big round of applause, please. I need to stay employed, it's very important. All right, now you just heard from Kirk about some of the new systems, the brands. How about we have a quick look at the video, which shows us the brand new DCG images. >> Narrator: Legacy thinking is dead, stuck in the past, selling the same old stuff, over and over. So then why does it seem like a data center, you know, that thing powering all our little devices and more or less everything interaction today is still stuck in legacy thinking because it's rigid, inflexible, slow, but that's not us. We don't do legacy. We do different. Because different is fearless. Different reduces Cloud deployment from days to hours. Different creates agile technology that others follow. Different is fluid. It uses water-cooling technology to save energy. It co-innovates with some of the best minds in the industry today. Different is better, smarter. Maybe that's why different already holds so many world-record benchmarks in everything. From virtualization to database and application performance or why it's number one in reliability and customer satisfaction. Legacy sells you what they want. Different builds the data center you need without locking you in. Introducing the Data Center Group at Lenovo. Different... Is better. >> All right, ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause, once again (mumbles) DCG, fantastic. And I'm sure all of you would agree, and Kirk mentioned it a couple of times there. No legacy means a real consultative approach to our customers, and that's something that we really feel is differentiated for ourselves. We are effectively now one of the largest startups in the DCG space, and we are very much ready to disrupt. Now, here in New York City, obviously, the heart of the fashion industry, and much like fashion, as I mentioned earlier, we're different, we're disruptive, we're agile, smarter, and faster. I'd like to say that about myself, but, unfortunately, I can't. But those of you who have observed, you may have noticed that I, too, have transformed. I don't know if anyone saw that. I've transformed from the pinstripe blue, white shirt, red tie look of the, shall we say, our predecessors who owned the x86 business to now a very Lenovo look. No tie and consequently a little bit more chic New York sort of fashion look, shall I say. Nothing more than that. So anyway, a bit of a transformation. It takes a lot to get to this look, by the way. It's a lot of effort. Our next speaker, Christian Teismann, is going to talk a lot about the core business of Lenovo, which really has been, as we've mentioned today, our ThinkPad, 25-year anniversary this year. It's going to be a great celebration inside Lenovo, and as we get through the year and we get closer and closer to the day, you'll see a lot more social and digital work that engages our customers, partners, analysts, et cetera, when we get close to that birthday. Customers just generally are a lot tougher on computers. We know they are. Whether you hang onto it between meetings from the corner of the Notebook, and that's why we have magnesium chassis inside the box or whether you're just dropping it or hypothetically doing anything else like that. We do a lot of robust testing on these products, and that's why it's the number one branded Notebook in the world. So Christian talks a lot about this, but I thought instead of having him talk, I might just do a little impromptu jump back stage and I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about. So follow me for a second. I'm going to jaunt this way. I know a lot of you would have seen, obviously, the front of house here, what we call the front of house. Lots of videos, et cetera, but I don't think many of you would have seen the back of house here, so I'm going to jump through the back here. Hang on one second. You'll see us when we get here. Okay, let's see what's going on back stage right now. You can see one of the team here in the back stage is obviously working on their keyboard. Fantastic, let me tell you, this is one of the key value props of this product, obviously still working, lots of coffee all over it, spill-proof keyboard, one of the key value propositions and why this is the number one laptop brand in the world. Congratulations there, well done for that. Obviously, we test these things. Height, distances, Mil-SPEC approved, once again, fantastic product, pick that up, lovely. Absolutely resistant to any height or drops, once again, in line with our Mil-SPEC. This is Charles, our producer and director back stage for the absolute event. You can see, once again, sand, coincidentally, in Manhattan, who would have thought a snow storm was occurring here, but you can throw sand. We test these things for all of the elements. I've obviously been pretty keen on our development solutions, having lived in Japan for 12 years. We had this originally designed in 1992 by (mumbles), he's still our chief development officer still today, fantastic, congratulations, a sand-enhanced notebook, he'd love that. All right, let's get back out front and on with the show. Watch the coffee. All right, how was that? Not too bad (laughs). It wasn't very impromptu at all, was it? Not at all a set up (giggles). How many people have events and have a bag of sand sitting on the floor right next to a Notebook? I don't know. All right, now it's time, obviously, to introduce our next speaker, ladies and gentlemen, and I hope I didn't steal his thunder, obviously, in my conversations just now that you saw back stage. He's one of my best friends in Lenovo and easily is a great representative of our legendary PC products and solutions that we're putting together for all of our customers right now, and having been an ex-Pat with Lenovo in New York really calls this his second home and is continually fighting with me over the fact that he believes New York has better sushi than Tokyo, let's welcome please, Christian Teismann, our SVP, Commercial Business Segment, and PC Smart Office. Christian Teismann, come on up mate. (audience applauds) >> So Rod thank you very much for this wonderful introduction. I'm not sure how much there is to add to what you have seen already back stage, but I think there is a 25-year of history I will touch a little bit on, but also a very big transformation. But first of all, welcome to New York. As Rod said, it's my second home, but it's also a very important place for the ThinkPad, and I will come back to this later. The ThinkPad is thee industry standard of business computing. It's an industry icon. We are celebrating 25 years this year like no other PC brand has done before. But this story today is not looking back only. It's a story looking forward about the future of PC, and we see a transformation from PCs to personalized computing. I am privileged to lead the commercial PC and Smart device business for Lenovo, but much more important beyond product, I also am responsible for customer experience. And this is what really matters on an ongoing basis. But allow me to stay a little bit longer with our iconic ThinkPad and history of the last 25 years. ThinkPad has always stand for two things, and it always will be. Highest quality in the industry and technology innovation leadership that matters. That matters for you and that matters for your end users. So, now let me step back a little bit in time. As Rod was showing you, as only Rod can do, reliability is a very important part of ThinkPad story. ThinkPads have been used everywhere and done everything. They have survived fires and extreme weather, and they keep surviving your end users. For 25 years, they have been built for real business. ThinkPad also has a legacy of first innovation. There are so many firsts over the last 25 years, we could spend an hour talking about them. But I just want to cover a couple of the most important milestones. First of all, the ThinkPad 1992 has been developed and invented in Japan on the base design of a Bento box. It was designed by the famous industrial designer, Richard Sapper. Did you also know that the ThinkPad was the first commercial Notebook flying into space? In '93, we traveled with the space shuttle the first time. For two decades, ThinkPads were on every single mission. Did you know that the ThinkPad Butterfly, the iconic ThinkPad that opens the keyboard to its size, is the first and only computer showcased in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, right here in New York City? Ten years later, in 2005, IBM passed the torch to Lenovo, and the story got even better. Over the last 12 years, we sold over 100 million ThinkPads, four times the amount IBM sold in the same time. Many customers were concerned at that time, but since then, the ThinkPad has remained the best business Notebook in the industry, with even better quality, but most important, we kept innovating. In 2012, we unveiled the X1 Carbon. It was the thinnest, lightest, and still most robust business PC in the world. Using advanced composited materials like a Formula One car, for super strengths, X1 Carbon has become our ThinkPad flagship since then. We've added an X1 Carbon Yoga, a 360-degree convertible. An X1 Carbon tablet, a detachable, and many new products to come in the future. Over the last few years, many new firsts have been focused on providing the best end-user experience. The first dual-screen mobile workstation. The first Windows business tablet, and the first business PC with OLED screen technology. History is important, but a massive transformation is on the way. Future success requires us to think beyond the box. Think beyond hardware, think beyond notebooks and desktops, and to think about the future of personalized computing. Now, why is this happening? Well, because the business world is rapidly changing. Looking back on history that YY gave, and the acceleration of innovation and how it changes our everyday life in business and in personal is driving a massive change also to our industry. Most important because you are changing faster than ever before. Human capital is your most important asset. In today's generation, they want to have freedom of choice. They want to have a product that is tailored to their specific needs, every single day, every single minute, when they use it. But also IT is changing. The Cloud, constant connectivity, 5G will change everything. Artificial intelligence is adding things to the capability of an infrastructure that we just are starting to imagine. Let me talk about the workforce first because it's the most important part of what drives this. The millennials will comprise more than half of the world's workforce in 2020, three years from now. Already, one out of three millennials is prioritizing mobile work environment over salary, and for nearly 60% of all new hires in the United States, technology is a very important factor for their job search in terms of the way they work and the way they are empowered. This new generation of new employees has grown up with PCs, with Smart phones, with tablets, with touch, for their personal use and for their occupation use. They want freedom. Second, the workplace is transforming. The video you see here in the background. This is our North America headquarters in Raleigh, where we have a brand new Smart workspace. We have transformed this to attract the new generation of workers. It has fewer traditional workspaces, much more meaning and collaborative spaces, and Lenovo, like many companies, is seeing workspaces getting smaller. An average workspace per employee has decreased by 30% over the last five years. Employees are increasingly mobile, but, if they come to the office, they want to collaborate with their colleagues. The way we collaborate and communicate is changing. Investment in new collaboration technology is exploding. The market of collaboration technology is exceeding the market of personal computing today. It will grow in the future. Conference rooms are being re-imagined from a ratio of 50 employees to one large conference room. Today, we are moving into scenarios of four employees to one conference room, and these are huddle rooms, pioneer spaces. Technology is everywhere. Video, mega-screens, audio, electronic whiteboards. Adaptive technologies are popping up and change the way we work. As YY said earlier, the pace of the revolution is astonishing. So personalized computing will transform the PC we all know. There's a couple of key factors that we are integrating in our next generations of PC as we go forward. The most important trends that we see. First of all, choose your own device. We talked about this new generation of workforce. Employees who are used to choosing their own device. We have to respond and offer devices that are tailored to each end user's needs without adding complexity to how we operate them. PC is a service. Corporations increasingly are looking for on-demand computing in data center as well as in personal computing. Customers want flexibility. A tailored management solution and a services portfolio that completes the lifecycle of the device. Agile IT, even more important, corporations want to run an infrastructure that is agile, instant respond to their end-customer needs, that is self provisioning, self diagnostic, and remote software repair. Artificial intelligence. Think about artificial intelligence for you personally as your personal assistant. A personal assistant which does understand you, your schedule, your travel, your next task, an extension of yourself. We believe the PC will be the center of this mobile device universe. Mobile device synergy. Each of you have two devices or more with you. They need to work together across different operating systems, across different platforms. We believe Lenovo is uniquely positioned as the only company who has a Smart phone business, a PC business, and an infrastructure business to really seamlessly integrate all of these devices for simplicity and for efficiency. Augmented reality. We believe augmented reality will drive significantly productivity improvements in commercial business. The core will be to understand industry-specific solutions. New processes, new business challenges, to improve things like customer service and sales. Security will remain the foundation for personalized computing. Without security, without trust in the device integrity, this will not happen. One of the most important trends, I believe, is that the PC will transform, is always connected, and always on, like a Smart phone. Regardless if it's open, if it's closed, if you carry it, or if you work with it, it always is capable to respond to you and to work with you. 5G is becoming a reality, and the data capacity that will be out there is by far exceeding today's traffic imagination. Finally, Smart Office, delivering flexible and collaborative work environments regardless on where the worker sits, fully integrated and leverages all the technologies we just talked before. These are the main challenges you and all of your CIO and CTO colleagues have to face today. A changing workforce and a new set of technologies that are transforming PC into personalized computing. Let me give you a real example of a challenge. DXC was just formed by merging CSE company and HP's Enterprise services for the largest independent services company in the world. DXC is now a 25 billion IT services leader with more than 170,000 employees. The most important capital. 6,000 clients and eight million managed devices. I'd like to welcome their CIO, who has one of the most challenging workforce transformation in front of him. Erich Windmuller, please give him a round of applause. (audience applauds). >> Thank you Christian. >> Thank you. >> It's my pleasure to be here, thank you. >> So first of all, let me congratulation you to this very special time. By forming a new multi-billion-dollar enterprise, this new venture. I think it has been so far fantastically received by analysts, by the press, by customers, and we are delighted to be one of your strategic partners, and clearly we are collaborating around workforce transformation between our two companies. But let me ask you a couple of more personal questions. So by bringing these two companies together with nearly 200,00 employees, what are the first actions you are taking to make this a success, and what are your biggest challenges? >> Well, first, again, let me thank you for inviting me and for DXC Technology to be a part of this very very special event with Lenovo, so thank you. As many of you might expect, it's been a bit of a challenge over the past several months. My goal was really very simple. It was to make sure that we brought two companies together, and they could operate as one. We need to make sure that could continue to support our clients. We certainly need to make sure we could continue to sell, our sellers could sell. That we could pay our employees, that we could hire people, we could do all the basic foundational things that you might expect a company would want to do, but we really focused on three simple areas. I called it the three Cs. Connectivity, communicate, and collaborate. So we wanted to make sure that we connected our legacy data centers so we could transfer information and communicate back and forth. We certainly wanted to be sure that our employees could communicate via WIFI, whatever locations they may or may not go to. We certainly wanted to, when we talk about communicate, we need to be sure that everyone of our employees could send and receive email as a DXC employee. And that we had a single-enterprise directory and people could communicate, gain access to calendars across each of the two legacy companies, and then collaborate was also key. And so we wanted to be sure, again, that people could communicate across each other, that our legacy employees on either side could get access to many of their legacy systems, and, again, we could collaborate together as a single corporation, so it was challenging, but very very, great opportunity for all of us. And, certainly, you might expect cyber and security was a very very important topic. My chairman challenged me that we had to be at least as good as we were before from a cyber perspective, and when you bring two large companies together like that there's clearly an opportunity in this disruptive world so we wanted to be sure that we had a very very strong cyber security posture, of which Lenovo has been very very helpful in our achieving that. >> Thank you, Erich. So what does DXC consider as their critical solutions and technology for workplace transformation, both internally as well as out on the market? >> So workplace transformation, and, again, I've heard a lot of the same kinds of words that I would espouse... It's all about making our employees productive. It's giving the right tools to do their jobs. I, personally, have been focused, and you know this because Lenovo has been a very very big part of this, in working with our, we call it our My Style Workplace, it's an offering team in developing a solution and driving as much functionality as possible down to the workstation. We want to be able, for me, to avoid and eliminate other ancillary costs, audio video costs, telecommunication cost. The platform that we have, the digitized workstation that Lenovo has provided us, has just got a tremendous amount of capability. We want to streamline those solutions, as well, on top of the modern server. The modern platform, as we call it, internally. I'd like to congratulate Kirk and your team that you guys have successfully... Your hardware has been certified on our modern platform, which is a significant accomplishment between our two companies and our partnership. It was really really foundational. Lenovo is a big part of our digital workstation transformation, and you'll continue to be, so it's very very important, and I want you to know that your tools and your products have done a significant job in helping us bring two large corporations together as one. >> Thank you, Erich. Last question, what is your view on device as a service and hardware utility model? >> This is the easy question, right? So who in the room doesn't like PC or device as a service? This is a tremendous opportunity, I think, for all of us. Our corporation, like many of you in the room, we're all driven by the concept of buying devices in an Opex versus a Capex type of a world and be able to pay as you go. I think this is something that all of us would like to procure, product services and products, if you will, personal products, in this type of a mode, so I am very very eager to work with Lenovo to be sure that we bring forth a very dynamic and constructive device as a service approach. So very eager to do that with Lenovo and bring that forward for DXC Technology. >> Erich, thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to work with you, today and going forward on all sides. I think with your new company and our lineup, I think we have great things to come. Thank you very much. >> My pleasure, great pleasure, thank you very much. >> So, what's next for Lenovo PC? We already have the most comprehensive commercial portfolio in the industry. We have put the end user in the core of our portfolio to finish and going forward. Ultra mobile users, like consultants, analysts, sales and service. Heavy compute users like engineers and designers. Industry users, increasingly more understanding. Industry-specific use cases like education, healthcare, or banking. So, there are a few exciting things we have to announce today. Obviously, we don't have that broad of an announcement like our colleagues from the data center side, but there is one thing that I have that actually... Thank you Rod... Looks like a Bento box, but it's not a ThinkPad. It's a first of it's kind. It's the world's smallest professional workstation. It has the power of a tower in the Bento box. It has the newest Intel core architecture, and it's designed for a wide range of heavy duty workload. Innovation continues, not only in the ThinkPad but also in the desktops and workstations. Second, you hear much about Smart Office and workspace transformation today. I'm excited to announce that we have made a strategic decision to expand our Think portfolio into Smart Office, and we will soon have solutions on the table in conference rooms, working with strategic partners like Intel and like Microsoft. We are focused on a set of devices and a software architecture that, as an IoT architecture, unifies the management of Smart Office. We want to move fast, so our target is that we will have our first product already later this year. More to come. And finally, what gets me most excited is the upcoming 25 anniversary in October. Actually, if you go to Japan, there are many ThinkPad lovers. Actually beyond lovers, enthusiasts, who are collectors. We've been consistently asked in blogs and forums about a special anniversary edition, so let me offer you a first glimpse what we will announce in October, of something we are bring to market later this year. For the anniversary, we will introduce a limited edition product. This will include throwback features from ThinkPad's history as well as the best and most powerful features of the ThinkPad today. But we are not just making incremental adjustments to the Think product line. We are rethinking ThinkPad of the future. Well, here is what I would call a concept card. Maybe a ThinkPad without a hinge. Maybe one you can fold. What do you think? (audience applauds) but this is more than just design or look and feel. It's a new set of advanced materials and new screen technologies. It's how you can speak to it or write on it or how it speaks to you. Always connected, always on, and can communicate on multiple inputs and outputs. It will anticipate your next meeting, your next travel, your next task. And when you put it all together, it's just another part of the story, which we call personalized computing. Thank you very much. (audience applauds) Thank you, sir. >> Good on ya, mate. All right, ladies and gentlemen. We are now at the conclusion of the day, for this session anyway. I'm going to talk a little bit more about our breakouts and our demo rooms next door. But how about the power with no tower, from Christian, huh? Big round of applause. (audience applauds) And what about the concept card, the ThinkPad? Pretty good, huh? I love that as well. I tell you, it was almost like Leonardo DiCaprio was up on stage at one stage. He put that big ThinkPad concept up, and everyone's phones went straight up and took a photo, the whole audience, so let's be very selective on how we distribute that. I'm sure it's already on Twitter. I'll check it out in a second. So once again, ThinkPad brand is a core part of the organization, and together both DCG and PCSD, what we call PCSD, which is our client side of the business and Smart device side of the business, are obviously very very linked in transforming Lenovo for the future. We want to also transform the industry, obviously, and transform the way that all of us do business. Lenovo, if you look at basically a summary of the day, we are highly committed to being a top three data center provider. That is really important for us. We are the largest and fastest growing supercomputing company in the world, and Kirk actually mentioned earlier on, committed to being number one by 2020. So Madhu who is in Frankfurt at the International Supercomputing Convention, if you're watching, congratulations, your targets have gone up. There's no doubt he's going to have a lot of work to do. We're obviously very very committed to disrupting the data center. That's obviously really important for us. As we mentioned, with both the brands, the ThinkSystem, and our ThinkAgile brands now, highly focused on disrupting and ensuring that we do things differently because different is better. Thank you to our customers, our partners, media, analysts, and of course, once again, all of our employees who have been on this journey with us over the last two years that's really culminating today in the launch of all of our new products and our profile and our portfolio. It's really thanks to all of you that once again on your feedback we've been able to get to this day. And now really our journey truly begins in ensuring we are disrupting and enduring that we are bringing more value to our customers without that legacy that Kirk mentioned earlier on is really an advantage for us as we really are that large startup from a company perspective. It's an exciting time to be part of Lenovo. It's an exciting time to be associated with Lenovo, and I hope very much all of you feel that way. So a big round of applause for today, thank you very much. (audience applauds) I need to remind all of you. I don't think I'm going to have too much trouble getting you out there, because I was just looking at Christian on the streaming solutions out in the room out the back there, and there's quite a nice bit of lunch out there as well for those of you who are hungry, so at least there's some good food out there, but I think in reality all of you should be getting up into the demo sessions with our segment general managers because that's really where the rubber hits the road. You've heard from YY, you've heard from Kirk, and you've heard from Christian. All of our general managers and our specialists in our product sets are going to be out there to obviously demonstrate our technology. As we said at the very beginning of this session, this is Transform, obviously the fashion change, hopefully you remember that. Transform, we've all gone through the transformation. It's part of our season of events globally, and our next event obviously is going to be in Tech World in Shanghai on the 20th of July. I hope very much for those of you who are going to attend have a great safe travel over there. We look forward to seeing you. Hope you've had a good morning, and get into the sessions next door so you get to understand the technology. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. (upbeat innovative instrumental)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas for SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE's three-day exclusive coverage of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HPE Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Our seven-years covering HPE, and we have our next guest whose been on the job for seven weeks, Parvesh Sethi, Senior Vice-President of HPE Pointnext Consulting. Industry veteran of cloud. You understand what's going on. Appreciate you coming in and sharing-- >> Thank you for having me. >> Your talking points with seven weeks on the job, but you're new to HPE, welcome to theCUBE. So fresh in to HPE, got a fresh eye. You've been around the industry for a while. What is the hybrid journey for HP? Because you were just in the Q&A with Meg and Antonio with the press and the analysts, and still people are trying to put it together. Like, with no cloud, how do you guys fit in this? So, hybrid cloud, simplifying hybrid IT. They're not saying simplifying hybrid cloud, simplifying hybrid IT, which implies cloud. >> Exactly, I think the approach that I would take is if you look at the role of the IT, it's really changing. I mean, you can consider IT to be the strategic sourcer now. It's no longer we built it, we own it, we run it, because now they're really managing a supply chain. So, you're looking at the private cloud, public cloud, and people having the highly-automated infrastructure, or software-defined infrastructure, and legacy b-spoke systems. The job of the IT is really getting very complex. When you heard Meg talked about making hybrid IT simple, so for Pointnext Consulting standpoint, it's really working with the clients about making that journey much more simpler, and making sure it's not just simple, but the speed is there. Also we'll ask that we are focused on the workloads to really moving the workload securely. Because, at the end of the day, the whole journey is really centered around the workload-side of the house. >> And your role is, am I correct, is tip-of-the-spear consultant? Is that right, and strategy consulting? >> That's correct. It includes the consulting and the professional service portfolio. >> So, help us understand, because when EDS went to CSE with the spin-merge, all of the sudden you're seeing Accenture, Deloitte, and others come out of the woodworks. And this is their wheelhouse, in strategic consulting, so where do you pick up, and how do you relate to those guys? >> Yeah, no, it's a great question. In fact, it's with the spinoffs, it's also given us a great opportunity to really work with number of the SIs, and so we're have a close work relationship with number of them, and the way I look at the strategic consulting, where we add value is really more around the technology consulting piece of it. And because that's where we feel that we can really add differentiation. And partnering with some of our SIs, that's where they can help us from the verticalization piece of it, the business process side of it, because that's not really our core strength. Our core strength is really around the technology consulting, and also being around, and dealing with, and doing 11,0000 plus engagements every year. From Pointnext perspective, that's lot of experience that we bring to the table partnering with the ecosystem, we truly bring some of these outcome-based solutions that we keep referring to. >> Dave's team at Wikibon has put out some pretty seminal research. I think it's very unique. I don't think any other research firm has actually documented this, even captured the numbers. But, they just did a report called The True Private Cloud Report, go to wikibon.com for the folks watching, but really what it illustrates is that IT is not declining, it's only increasing in its capabilities. So, yes, server shipments might be declining, but, at the end of the day, IT is changing and growing with cloud. But one of the points in that survey is the TAM is 260 billion plus in true private cloud. And that doesn't include hybrid. But, the other statistic besides the TAM is the fact that the labor costs are undifferentiated, and being automated away with cloud, which is a good opportunity. And then the shifting of those resources to differentiated apps or services is the focus. That's business transformation. That's what you guys are doing. Share with us your thoughts, and how you guys look at that. Obviously, you're only seven weeks in from an HP perspective but you been in the industry. How are you guys going to attack that trend, and ride that wave of shifting that to differentiated capabilities? >> Yeah, I think so one of the things you always hear about from a technology standpoint, lot of folks focus on just the technology piece of it. What we're finding is when we engage with the clients, it's really taking a look at, even before the technology, it's what is the strategic framework. Why do so many digital transformation projects stall, or fail? Because there's no interned alignment in terms of business, IT, and OT side of the house, so what you're seeing is from the consulting side of the house is kind of making sure that we bring these things together. And we have a methodology called Unified Transformational Framework, UTF, which has seven key domains, and one of the first things we do when we engage with the client, we bring them together, business side of it, the IT side of it, and we assess where they're at today in each one of those domains, and assess the gaps. We actually put together a strategic framework with them in terms of what is the desired state where they want to be, where they're at today, and how do we map out that cloud journey together with them. And, more importantly, what are the key outcomes they are really seeking. And so if they are looking at focusing on achieving certain cost-efficiency, or launching new services faster, or securing information network, or from an IOT perspective, what are the specific use cases, like for oil and gas, you may have heard some of the examples here with Tech Smart on refinery of the future. What are some of the outcomes they're looking for, and then kind of working backwards to make sure that we can take them on that journey roadmap, and accelerate that whole journey. It's the time to value equation. >> So it would seem like the hybrid IT message that you guys provide is the foundational infrastructure for a digital transformation. Okay, sounds good, now, let's peel that back a little bit. Because, if I'm an executive in a board, I'm saying, "Okay, great, how do we get started, "how do we pay for it?" You come in with your maturity model, here's where you guys are at. How much of that conversation is around the data? And data, data value, how to monetize data, how it contributes to whatever objective, raise revenue, cut costs, et cetera. How much of the conversation do you anticipate is going to be around that data? >> No, it actually is quite a bit of floor discussion on the data as well. So, I'll take it in steps of there's two main types that come up. One is really around the workloads as to enterprises have hundreds, thousands of applications running but not every application, not every workload needs to move to a public cloud or private cloud. Some of them may be more suited towards just a dedicated infrastructure that they already have. One of the first things we focusing on through the tool, we do an inventory, as well as through the interviews. Because one path doesn't give you all the information that you seek. Synthesizing the two really gives you the full picture. And, then on top of it, more and more data is getting generated at the edge, and so in terms of what do you do with the data, how can you help them drive a real-time action, and then what can you do to monetize on that data, just like the example with the M1GD team that's been showcased here, that's not just change the fan experience, it's also helping them taking the look at the data, the loyalty, and everything else, and then increasing opportunities to drive top-end growth from the revenues in the concession stand, or promotional material, your absolutely right, the focus is more about not just guarding the data, the data production, data consumption, it's how do you monetize on that piece of it. >> And does HPE focus more on the IT transformation, and your partners like the big SIs on the business transformation, or no, is it not that simple, it's not that clear? >> Yeah, I mean, it's hardly just kind of say, okay, those are in their silos because there's that intersection point that really drives additional transformation. That's one thing that I think we are uniquely positioned, because number of these solutions you see on the demo floor here who are jointly partnered up with our ecosystem, and that really drives that value up from the business outcome standpoint, it's not just what the technology is able to do, it's not just, yeah, if we're able to have a faster server, this then that, it's really more about what will that enable. In turn, what is the business outcome that's enabling. >> But I would imagine your partners are deep experts in some healthcare business process that HPE doesn't possess, then you guys, from a technology standpoint, can go much deeper than they can. My question is how much of the conversation from your partners has been, or do you expect it to be, "Hey, you know what, if you could do this, you know, "with the technology, you know, we can really "help this company, and win a large deal," for example, which is a semi-custom, you know, and it requires a deep technological expertise to marry with that business process. >> No, absolutely, in fact, I was with a partner earlier, and actually what you just called out was very similar discussion with him. From a healthcare perspective, one of the things we can do, and we have done, where the picture in archiving communication system, we can package what one of the other providers does along with computing and for storage, package that up, and where the configuration provisioning time is reduced dramatically when they show up on site, everything is preconfigured. But, then jointly with a partner who has more knowledge about the patient experience. Marrying the two, you can actually see not just how the healthcare provider and the patient are going to interact, but how also the information that's generated there, how can that be analyzed at a remote location through a specialist. So it's that whole value chain that you can do with a partner that you're just not able to do yourself. >> Am I correct that you run a PNL, right, this is not a free-beat. >> That's correct, no. >> Okay. >> Yes, so from that standpoint we do work with the ecosystem where there is some investment made on the solution of it, but then, obviously, you take a look at does the solution make sense, is there a market for it, can you do the repeatability aspect of it, and, if the answer is yes, then certainly both starts get much more happily engaged. >> Parvesh, talk about the dynamic in digital transformation, specifically, around as companies really transform from being analog to digital. That basically makes them cloud service providers. >> Right. >> So if you have a sass-ification, that's kind of a shift, this is the shift in IT we're talking about, yeah, keeping the lights on, running servers in the data center, old way, classic enterprise. Portions of their operations now have to be shifted to this new way of doing IT to be a service provider, yet they're not service providers, but they're becoming one, or the end-user customer might buy from a partner that's becoming a service provider, either building their own cloud. Is that how you guys see it at Pointnext, and how are you nurturing this, or working with this mega-trend that's the cloud is enabling? >> Couple of things happens. I was with a client very recently, and they've been actually doing number of use cases, fifty plus use cases in the labs, and on the whole use cases around digital transformation. Each use case theoretically can generate millions of savings for them. By the same token, they haven't been able to take it out of the lab and mainstream it, so this goes back into the alignment piece of it, and then also the cultural and the organizational aspect always gets overlooked. Because if the focus is just on the solution piece of it, or digitalization of the workflow, and you have not the trends from the workforce in terms of how they should evolve, how the skillsets should evolve, and if certain roles are getting combined, how should they be dealing with that piece of it. We are talk about DevOps or OpsDev. It's really the whole notion around how they should be working differently than before. If that aspect of it hasn't been put a lot of focus on, most of these transformations literally stall or fail. >> You mean on the cultural piece of it. >> On the cultural piece of it, absolutely. This is another area that we put lot of focus on, and, in fact, one of the offers we rolled out, the management of change, is actually getting lot of traction just because of that reason. >> You know, one of the challenges that the companies that I talk to have is actually funding the digital transformation. The incentive to do it is well, if we don't do it, we're going to get uber-ized, okay. So people get that, but, at the same, then the CFO's are, "Okay, that's fine, "but how are we going to make money at this, "how are we going to actually pay for this?" And, really, for organizations that can show that type of path to profitability, if I may, it seems like it gets more traction, and has staying power. I wonder if you could comment on that. >> Well said. In fact, a number of the engagements we start off with, that discussion always comes up that we don't have any extra funds to go do this thing, but we have to do this thing in order to stay relevant. >> John: What do we do. >> Yeah, so one of the things we focus on is safe-to-invest initiatives. For example, you heard the example of ALDO Group, one of the large global retailers. The federate structure, and then moving towards where it can be had they can move towards a centralized as well as a global centers architecture that can help them drive more speed, cut down the provisioning time, cut down on the operating cost. When you have initiatives like that, the enterprises can then take those savings and then show the CFO that this is how we can apply those savings into these key initiatives that can continue to make us more relevant, and also transform the end-user experience, or their end-customer experience. So, I think as you do this on prioritized use cases, that gives you more credibility in the organization to go do lot more and much faster. >> So, final question for you. Observations, new to HPE, now, Pointnext, New to HPE Discover here, as an employee, what's your observation about HPE Discover, their position in the marketplace, vis-a-vis, the industry scope and trends that are out there? >> First of all, I think coming out here, this is my first Discover so I see a lot of excitement here, and I think up to the point that you made earlier, Dave, with the spun-offs, I think that has really opened up a lot of the doors where a lot of the partners say, "Look, this is something we can do more together of." So, every meeting that I've been with a customer since we're partners, they see us kind of where we're the top stack, who are not biased towards that, right, because this is not where we play, but we play more for roll out the solution aggregation, plus also bring lot that experience to really guide them on their journey. One of the things I constantly hear is if you can help us accelerate time to value, and you can help us drive the acceleration, because a lot of these initiatives stalling, help us on that journey, there's tremendous opportunity for both sides. So that's what we see lot of excitement here. Parvesh Sethi, Senior Vice-President, Pointnext, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for your commentary and insight. >> Thank you for having me. >> Appreciate it, good luck with your journey. This theCUBE bringing you all the digital transformation and conversations here at HPE Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

and we're here with sicky junta and psyche is with CSC she's uh she's an entrepreneur she's a cloud expert she's a technologist a businessperson her official title is global vice president of cloud computing and cloud services at CSC welcome thank you it's good to see good to see you here and we're very excited to be at sapphire this is day 3 of course we're gonna talk cloud with the woods with sicky so so why don't we start off sick you tell us you know what is what is cloud all about is that is it living up to the hype I personally believe that cloud it is the way of the future we don't have enough trees and data centers for the generation that we are breathing you know the generation that we are breathing produce a tremendous amount of these data by the minute us digital data texting data voice data and all this data has to be Monte so the cloud it is the future to go and it's actually changed in the last three years I've been working loud for quite a while the dynamics of the last 12 months people have gone from being educational I want to know and we have to spell MC sounds like cloud and and then you say to them now their projects they have money they have value added in Rio the termination in that cloud project how was it changing good business Missy SC is a very well-known you know broad-based service provider outsourcing and so far how is the cloud changing your business it is very interesting because it's kind of transforming the business of cici's it transformed the way that we interact with our customers and prospects we use a lot of digital new yahoo the way we approach to our custom is very different we do pilots in our cloud the business model is changing we run we don't take hasit and people like it outsourcing deal we just run it for my fabric or we deliver cloud fabric at the customer data centers and we managers or we can say to them will give you the cloud fabric and you are like an Amazon you can manage it yourselves and we just keep the fabric well we'll provide the provisioning we provide your constructions and you are your own service provider is it very different than what she does to the top reason folks talk to you about you get a lot of clouds going on building clouds and you've been in technology preneur in the past sold your companies but you're at CC big brands are coming to you what is the number one thing you're seeing the pattern of the customer requests and or the new customers I think the customers they're really serious about cloud want agility version Assad Julia um I T delivery time to deliver a off even six weeks three months that is traditional it is not possible today customers wants to build application and modern weeks instead of months the new platforms like force calm and a zoo or do you have spring source vm having google apps they actually have this very beautiful object-oriented way for you to write application we're very very fast and so that requires a delivery mechanisms that can sustain that more I think that they want to build brand new applications so they can stay with them for the next 20 years and and we're waiting to us come on this morning we're talking on prior you said the cloud is a user experience I think that's really profound can you expand on that that was pretty compelling I think people look at the cloud as is odd this tech I and big iron in there but you talk about what you mean by the cloud is a user experience so I there are two type of Christ there is the consumer clouds that's the cloud that we do every your typing on the cloud and we have facebook and twitter and all this i play Angry Birds that's a gaming it's a big cloud that's any user experience of the cloud so if you leave in your cloud and use your spirits and then you go away you just say why do I have to win six weeks when I can play you know I can play final fantasy in real time with people in Hong Kong that's really the experience of the castle and enterprise is not there yet and there has two issues first of all the technology really was not they are still provide that the applications like sa peas and and the evolution of the systems second the processes are going internal IT are really very rigid sometimes you have to go fill up in requesting gotta get all this approval and has to be seen by 25 people on business model and all that so we have the challenge of accelerating a business classes and providing the same end user experience there and that's why it's CSC we have pilots in our plans we say to customer currents bosses and you know use our portal our provisioning environments upload workloads start to understand what does it mean interacting with about you know try it out there like in a mixed thing you know they got us growing you know puppy and then there they're stuck with the animal the cloud that's yeah I do never compare Jonna come up with a lot of those in the next half hour secure your company is technology agnostic of anyways right you know the real you get wed to a particular technology or services company so you have to be a trusted advisor to use clients on we're here at sapphire we're hearing a lot about in-memory computing and hannah we were talking a little bit about that off-camera what's your take on on this notion that sa p is putting forth they call them the ram cloud in-memory computing the Hana cloud what's your angle on that so first of all let's all understand the ROM and memory is the juice of clouds and I'll give you an analogy the cloud is like an apartment building where if the guy at the top takes a hot shower and uses all the shot that hot water the guy the bottom has no it has a cold shower and that's really the real analogy in a cloud vector if I have a very intense memory usage workload some could be SI p JD edwards and some others the other everybody in that community in that multi-tenant that's what it is multi-tenant ones we are all together feels the same problems and so memory it is deduce a cloud but that doesn't mean that because i have a lot of memory I don't have to optimize systems systems should be optimized and agile by themselves that's why a lot of refactoring a lot of building you know legacy java to a spring environment where you have encapsulation to take home see where you have object orientations and that makes you a John workers that really are optimized to use the maximum of the memory we actually going through this period right now he talks about private clouds and public laws in a hybrid clouds we've sort of in this period where we've got one foot in the legacy camp because you can't we don't a rip rip and replace and we've got another foot in this you know agile new world are you seeing a lot of sort of native new application development that's going to take advantage of these new cloud architectures new potential business processes you've seen that today and how long do you think it will take to actually see that bring true innovation to business I think that today the biggest usage of cloud are Gavin test so if the Devon test is the biggest user God that means that all the new projects are being developed to be delivered on the cloud vector and that's really very very very important today gets virtualized uses a platform but there is a big movement to refactor my applications because waiting for everything new there is only twenty percent of innovation in every large shop of IT today so there is a lot of companies that do create a roadmap for their workload and and when I talk to them I say divide you your workload part in three categories the legacy one that will never move that's the one that I in agreed environments and virtualized their heart the databases to bake the construct is not a job and the one that you want to do straight away Devon test email unified communications serum and the other things evaluate do I have to do I is it core that I have to own it and build it on or could I sauce it so to provide I system that it was already out there that it's like for sales culture of this world the NetSuite of this world workday is success factor 0 or any type of HR systems and say why do I have to own it why can't i have a SAS cloud environment where i can buy the serious doing this exercise helps them understand what its core what is not and why should I spend the money to take legacy applications to to the cloud can see it's a major changes in all layers who invited the you've got your your your device here your iPad we've hearing a lot of changes at the application layer and of course the infrastructure as well how is infrastructure changing and there's a lot of talk about convergence and there's logical blocks of infrastructure what are your thoughts there well I think that and the infrastructure layer we are actually seeing two major chain changes that are coming very fast first of all the multi-core environment 20 course is gonna beat ah here soon you're just sooner than we think and so all this memory conversation will already evaluated again because how's that memory gonna work with all this capacity our computer we have and that's that's a real conversations in and the IKE advisor that has the interaction with the fabric will need to be optimized to be able to take advantage of that storage is going through a lot of chambers multi-tier being the ability to say I don't want to maintain this for a long time understanding the retention here is it's even more critical than before because the access to the data now it's very fast and understanding the tiering and how you're going to do or not network storage what they're gonna cash what are you gonna close it creates a lot of questions when you build an application or when we refactor the applications a lot of it I think we have to realize that the systems have speed as a requirement and optimize from the end user to the art to the bear models what's the most efficient path just mentioned some real hot tech areas that we were all over I'll see the multicores and you the course the in-memory got solid state changing her essay p guys here saying summaries the new disc disc is the new tape tape is dead pretty pretty simple message there but multi core memory the hypervisor role of virtualization and the change will storage all those forces are colliding yeah when twins win some argue that that's an opportunity for redefinition of a new operating environment so to your point about optimization how do you see that revolving is that fantasy it gotta like a wish list you see new architectures developing definitely new architecture love being developed tonight's a new architecture for instance it's an optimized act architecture for mobility and to create a very pleasant user experience with all the data that sa p has because as if he has all this come on up data lock deals and so it's a new architecture you just say instead of changing the structure of the data or the app i am actually moving the interaction at the mobility level to a new device so that the experience is better in some cases used we will have to go back all the way and brought in right brand new systems that can suppose support that but I i believe the new architecture I've built all the time I think that um we haven't probably have a scene um what's the preferred what's the preferred visually for the future for this type of texture that that you're seeing and that you're driving towards mostly memory stuff immediate benefits to caching what do you see is the preferred methods that are driving right now I think that sounds looking at mobility so that that you can divide the user from the system's is very protesting because if you don't do that we actually slow down the end user experience and the end user is the productivity that we get every day second it's we have to look at business logics and can isolate the business logic so that I can can I really change it in a dynamic way in the last 10 years of 20 years we built system where we encoded everything he has to talk to this database over this IP address with that all this um hardcore stana configurations yes it's very hard in the cloud environment dynamic environment new media environment so we have to look at the system say how can I use so object orientations platforms separations logic how can i isolate the data if I have to how can I put it you know virtual data Mart's on top of it so that I can I'll cute the data because if I kind of a what Hana is was I'm sorry structure data then I cubix and then the cube gets talked to everybody and normally i know that in dededo there is eighty percent again used 20 bars are all right reverse so it's really an interaction and reactant acting from the end user best experience i want to do that facebook experience i want to give it that um gaming experience so how do i get to the data and adina you know it's probably 20 years old and it's really mainframe in monster well you're not gonna go ahead sir so when we talk to some of the vendors like for instance an emc they talk about the block at ciscos pushing UCS and it and they call it cloud ready or cloud enabled or cloud optimized i guess the term they use is that just good marketing or is it really the right model for the cloud to have that sort of single logical block of infrastructure which you're taking away well CC is a V block user we use Vblock for all our fabric cloth fabric deployment and a full hour in this cloud that is the first we have private cloud delivered on premises on the red card it's a unique value proposition no nobody has meaning you don't have to buy millions we delivered to you it's ready just provision the workload we teach you how to do it and we can do it in 10 weeks now we can only do it with a optimized block well the hard work and they're hard when storage and network and compute off very integrated and then we used EDM where I'd advisors are um has their communication macaluso we believe and I personally believe that that's today the best technology available UCS was built for cloud means project California that server was built thinking virtualization the optimization to the upper visor to the chip so that's why I think it is for CCM for our customer the best solutions it has a future-proof solution all the other architecture in the hardware have to change like HP just did a brand new set of equipment so and so I use that word future proof yeah it's like a punch like it Flashman does that expand know it's a good term it means basically you buy something and yes headroom you could it takes you into the future so just drill down on that more detail cuz that's a really important point that folks they don't want the cloud washing mentality they want to see specific so just expand on that you could so first of all um clouds there's no magic there and there is a project you say I want to take my Devon test to the cloud you have to plan it rough too tested you have to make it happen so there's no magic in cloud no pixie dust is like any other the ability to what I call future proof is what I call cloud plus far something that I can sustain in the next five years and not having to do it an architecture change or a major change I will do refreshes because the hardware is moving faster point releases add some stuff to it yeah but my architectural substantial architectural layers and everything is kind of stable for that but cloud pushes innovation to the US as a provider to our suppliers and to our end users all the time because it as a brand new paradigms so future is the roadmap that you built for yourself their customers i'm gonna say i have my roadmap I know what my clouds are gonna look in five years I know they thinks that I'm you know evaluating html5 for everything that is an end you see this vblock for the fabric I'm looking at how do i integrate cloud providers the api structures we are building a very interesting platform for cloud service programs where we will be the broker on all the cloud providers and look at the Echelon and maintain transparency so I know exactly what my cloud I'm gonna look in five years so that's when I seed with my CIS I say you don't have to do cloud the doctor doesn't say that you have to do cloud but if you do understand the business value and what's the roadmap and what's the current state to end state and the value that you want to be able to the post so CSE obviously cloud service provider and the Chinese proverb may you live in interesting times and we're in the technology business so we always live in interesting times i guess but so you have your cloud business your provisioning your own cloud you have your own data centers we see SI p announced today the Hana cloud and so but you of course a big SI p partner now you're sort of quasi competitor are you gonna build your own Hana cloud of me how does that all work you live in this age of cooperation can you talk about that a little bit but that's the beauty of cloud cloud doesn't bring competition brings integration so I'll give you another example we work very strongly with Microsoft Azure in their environment but our customer comes to CSC because they they want the full service experience and they want security and they want somebody that really looks at the architecture of what they do it expertise not just a class so we have created a federation model where no customer comes in our cloud is called cloud belt and say I want to build myself a force applications the integration to the force platform is similis to the end users we actually integrated us force platform and we'd actually run the code in the first platform but the customer said I want to now put it as my data in the public knowledge I want to get having them physical I wanted on your data center so we take care of all that in the Federation loss so we talked a lot about SCP with SI p in the last a day about hannah and they have their business on demand a platform that it is a way to write applications in situ and we asked him you know we want to run the application they plot from ourselves because I value added and then already so that's okay we will do a fixed platform like force or Google oh I absorb but we have portable platforms like spring or chorus or alarm stock and but remember well the customer fields a lock-in because they know they can only run it down beauty and and when you wrote it a nap in a strict platform you kind of just say okay I take it and I run in there he runs only there it's off two months like if you ride a force up you can write it in a matter of days I runs only there you can't just say I don't like yourself horse I'm gonna walk with my data we're going yeah you walk with you did about the Alpha stays there Thank so there is a lot of lock-in in this new their plan yet but Federation is the value on it the CSC brings we understand the de world is dynamic in nature and we will push hard on all our suppliers to say when can we have the ability for them to have portable bar codes instead of fix work that the CSC leading executive forum did some work a couple years ago that I read and it was they were talking to some CIOs those guys and they said as part of CSC very good work that they do and they said anecdotally that the discussions with CIOs this is probably 2001 9 time frame during the downturn suggested that CIOs are accelerating IT organizations are accelerating their adoption of cloud by as much as 12 to 18 months and then he went out into the Wikibon community and confirm that same thing I was really compressing that cycle and and I think it you would describe it as everybody needed the cloud it was sort of this cloud frenzy and now it's a little bit more selective one of the areas that seems to be having good uptake in flowers the federal government they seem to you know the new federal CIO is really hitting hard on cloud um is a supporter yeah and so um so what are you seeing there why is that is and how much money can you actually save with clouds that's a very good question so in the federal case since 1999 they had 400 data centers and when they lead the last census of all the data center i think was 2008 they had over a thousand data centers and so that's a huge growth everybody I want my own data centers until the garlic laptops iPads yeah that's a data center so I am so I think the government has come to the conclusion to say we all belong to the same family yes we all have our differences and security and privacy but let's trot learn how to share and I think there's a strong mandate for federal to use cloud vectors in fact CeCe's part of the data center consolidation committee where Jim Schaffer our president of public sector is a contributing member they are interesting things that we see is that actually federal for the first time turns to commercial and says good what is he working on the commercial side let's take commercial structures and architectures and apply so that we can move much much faster and reduce the cost so now comes to the cops um i dissect the cost of cloud in various sections first of all you have to virtualize and so virtualization brings in fifteen percent you're going from 700 servers to let's say 200 servers and that's a saving say he said in energy is saving now agility you you save them space and he'd never thing and that's a real hardcore cost rather cost that you have to buy new our hardware they will around and virtualized environment poverty if you take all your refresh cycle everything that's coming to be done you buy new hardware that can support that you can synchronize that as you can see what a nice day Saudi there is in the big girls then if you do infrastructure-as-a-service you got another you know 15 I mean maybe ten percent like I go to Amazon but then you hit a brick wall and that r equal is your applications and don't run on the cloud and you know you don't have any more things to cry so that's why I say to my CL we have to look at the IT Park and your eyes we have to go to the hardcore runner Montaigne IT budget today is sixty percent and evaluate how are we going to write new applications that get modernized or how can we refactor the application so that we can reduce this run and montane down to no more than fifty percent so we can use all the other 50 for your innovation and that's why it's seriously we believe we've somebody takes this portfolio approach we can commit up to forty to forty-five percent cartridge on a traditional on a traditional company which now if you are a brand new company and you really do the analysis core versus non core and you go this route you actually can reduce your cost a lot when I was a CIO I add a data set I see the data center and I said I don't want to run datacenters I just builds after I don't have to have a data center the last person that was holding up was my CFO and he says oh I like my sister now I ever say well six months you are not sweet otherwise you are met and and now is the number one that sweets speaker for public company of using cell system so it is a culture that's a great I mean it's great movement right now cloud there's a SiliconANGLE TV the worldwide leader and online tech coverage this is the cube this is where we talk about all the great stories and content with Suki Kunta great conversation here at SiliconANGLE dot TV question on the service is angle Dave and I have been talking for weeks now about how the services business changing both the services of delivery consulting integration which you mentioned that's where cloud is not about competition bout integration and also the services that can be offered on the cloud so how was the the services business changing the value chain of the architecture to the wind services that are being delivered we call that services angle mean what's your angle on the services business is changing into in two ways one it becomes more strategic so all this road mapping and understanding of the asset portfolio and why do you want to be on three years and what's the type of IT leader you want to be for your organization so it's moving upwards and then actually is becoming very very technical people the really most virtualization optimization infrastructure and can really what i call the youngsters the guys that can really write apps very fast the young Dae young coders know what we are crap that really don't want to spend the times on you know I'll ride this big proposal he's there and I'll show you and that's when i interviewed it for CSC the kid in five minutes his own is the ipod alive stop on top here I know that he lives the cloud everyday leavin this is really the new people that I say we have to look for but there is a big difference the culture change the consultant with the tie and phil italia proceeds one in two and three so the kids say give me two hours and i give it back to you yeah it's a huge there's conflict back in the 90s remember that that's the consultant suit they're making a lot of money project management huge schedules kind of slow now it's like you got these gunslinger coders who can whip up apps deploy it on the cloud in a couple days in a day and set change very used to start with a word document to powerpoint and now they're starting with you know code well know if they're the most used tool is a mind map for a project instead of a bullet and and I think that's when you start come in a conversation with a customer you follow the threads of where he wants to be and then the end you end up with a map or what it needs to be done but it is a different culture and the beauty of having the traditional thing though is is that you can have you can actually provide structure to discredit creativity so the end result is a quality because you know cowboy is intact it's cowboying intact and I you don't want to have that especially with our customers where we get them and can't we have small and large I mean I have olympic system a small bite active coupons so that that's my spectrum but quality is the most important thing nothing so we have to put quality within relationships we're here with the