>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's live coverage of snowflake summit 22 live from Las Vegas. Caesar's forum. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. We've got a couple of guests here. We're gonna be talking about every day. AI. You wanna know what that means? You're in the right spot. Kurt UL joins us, the chief customer officer at data ICU and the mod Conn, the head of AI and ML strategy at snowflake guys. Great to have you on the program. >>It's wonderful to be here. Thank you so much. >>So we wanna understand Kurt what everyday AI means, but before we do that for the audience who might not be familiar with data, I could give them a little bit of an overview. What about what you guys do your mission and maybe a little bit about the partnership? >>Yeah, great. Uh, very happy to do so. And thanks so much for this opportunity. Um, well, data IKU, we are a collaborative platform, uh, for enterprise AI. And what that means is it's a software, you know, that sits on top of incredible infrastructure, notably snowflake that allows people from different backgrounds of data, analysts, data, scientists, data, engineers, all to come together, to work together, to build out machine learning models and ultimately the AI that's gonna be the future, uh, of their business. Um, and so we're very excited to, uh, to be here, uh, and you know, very proud to be a, a, a very close partner of snowflake. >>So Amad, what is Snowflake's AI strategy? Is it to, is it to partner? Where do, where do you pick up? And Frank said today, we, we're not doing it all. Yeah. The ecosystem by design. >>Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So we believe in the best of breed look. Um, I think, um, we, we think that we're the best data platform and for data science and machine learning, we want our customers to really use the best tool for their use cases. Right. And, you know, data ICU is, is our leading partner in that space. And so, you know, when, when you talk about, uh, machine learning and data science, people talk about training a model, but it's really the difficult part and challenges are really, before you train the model, how do you get access to the right data? And then after you train the model, how do you then run the model? And then how do you manage the model? Uh, that's very, very important. And that's where our partnership with, with data, uh, IKU comes in place. Snowflake provides the platform that can process data at scale for the pre-processing bit and, and data IKU comes in and really, uh, simplifies the process for deploying the models and managing the model. >>Got it. Thank >>You. You talk about KD data. Aico talks about everyday AI. I wanna break that down. What do you mean by that? And how is this partnership with snowflake empowering you to deliver that to companies? >>Yeah, absolutely. So everyday AI for us is, uh, you know, kind of a future state that we are building towards where we believe that AI will become so pervasive in all of the business processes, all the decision making that organizations have to go through that it's no longer this special thing that we talk about. It's just the, the day to day life of, uh, of our businesses. And we can't do that without partners like snowflake and, uh, because they're bringing together all of that data and ensuring that there is the, uh, the computational horsepower behind that to drive that we heard that this morning in some of the keynote talking about that broad democratization and the, um, let's call it the, uh, you know, the pressure that that's going to put on the underlying infrastructure. Um, and so ultimately everyday AI for us is where companies own that AI capability. They're building it themselves very broad, uh, participation in the development of that. And all that work then is being pushed down into best of breed, uh, infrastructure, notably of course, snowflake. Well, >>You said push down, you, you guys, you there's a term in the industry push down optimization. What does that mean? How is it evolving? Why is it so important? >>So Amma, do you want to take a first step at that? >>Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, when, when you're, you know, processing data, so saying data, um, before you train a, uh, a model, you have to do it at scale, that that, that data is, is coming from all different sources. It's human generated machine generated data, we're talking millions and billions of rows of data. Uh, and you have to make sense of it. You have to transform that data into the right kind of features into the right kind of signals that inform the machine learning model that you're trying to, uh, train. Uh, and so that's where, you know, any kind of large scale data processing is automatically pushed down by data IQ, into snowflakes, scalable infrastructure. Um, so you don't get into like memory issues. You don't get into, um, uh, situations where you're where your pipeline is running overnight, and it doesn't finish in time. Right? And so, uh, you can really take advantage of the scalable nature of cloud computing, uh, using Snowflake's infrastructure. So a lot of that processing is actually getting pushed down from data I could down into the scalable snowflake compute engine. How >>Does this affect the life of a data scientist? You always hear a data scientist spend 80% of the time wrangling data. Uh, I presume there's an infrastructure component around that you trying, we heard this morning, you're making infrastructure, my words, infrastructure, self serve, uh, does this directly address that problem and, and talk about that. And what else are you doing to address that 80% problem? >>It, it certainly does, right? Uh, that's how you solve for, uh, data scientists needing to have on demand access to computing resources, or of course, to the, uh, to the underlying data, um, is by ensuring that that work doesn't have to run on their laptop, doesn't have to run on some, you know, constrained, uh, physical machines, uh, in, in a data center somewhere. Instead it gets pushed down into snowflake and can be executed at scale with incredible parallelization. Now what's really, uh, I important is the ongoing development, uh, between the two products, uh, and within that technology. And so today snowflake, uh, announced the introduction of Python within snow park, um, which is really, really exciting, uh, because that really opens up this capability to a much wider audience. Now DataCo provides that both through a visual interface, um, in historically, uh, since last year through Java UDFs, but that's kind of the, the two extremes, right? You have people who don't code on one side, you know, very no code or a low code, uh, population, and then a very high code population. On the other side, this Python, uh, integration really allows us to, to touch really kind the, the fat center of the data science population, who, uh, who, for whom, you know, Python really is the lingua franca that they've been learning for, uh, for decades now. Sure. So >>Talking about the data scientist, I wanna elevate that a little bit because you both are enterprise customers, data ICO, and snowflake Kurt as the chief customer officer, obviously you're with customers all the time. If we look at the macro environment of all the challenges, companies have to be a data company these days, if you're not, you're not gonna be successful. It's how do we do that? Extract insights, value, action, take it. But I'm just curious if your customer conversations are elevating up to the C-suite or, or the board in terms of being able to get democratize access to data, to be competitive, new products, new services, we've seen tremendous momentum, um, on, on the, the part of customer's growth on the snowflake side. But what are you hearing from customers as they're dealing with some of these current macro pains? >>Yeah, no, I, I think it is the conversation today, uh, at that sea level is not only how do we, you know, leverage, uh, new infrastructure, right. You know, they they're, you know, most of them now are starting to have snowflake. I think Frank said, uh, you know, 50% of the, uh, fortune 500, so we can say most, um, have that in place. Um, but now the question is, how do we, how do we ensure that we're getting access to that data, to that, to that computational horsepower, to a broader group of people so that it becomes truly a transformational initiative and not just an it initiative, not just a technology initiative, but really a core business initiative. And that, that really has been a pivot. You know, I've been, you know, with my company now for almost eight years, right. Uh, and we've really seen a change in that discussion going from, you know, much more niche discussions at the team or departmental level now to truly corporate strategic level. How do we build AI into our corporate strategy? How do we really do that in practice? And >>We hear a lot about, Hey, I want to inject data into apps, AI, and machine intelligence into applications. And we've talked about, those are separate stacks. You got the data stack and analytics stack over here. You got the application development, stack the databases off in the corner. And so we see you guys bringing those worlds together. And my question is, what does that stack look like? I took a snapshot. I think it was Frank's presentation today. He had infrastructure at the lowest level live data. So infrastructure's cloud live data. That's multiple data sources coming in workload execution. You made some announcements there. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, uh, to expend expand that application development. That's the tooling that is needed. Uh, and then marketplace, that's how you bring together this ecosystem. Yes. Monetization is how you turn data into data products and make money. Is that the stack, is that the new stack that's emerging here? Are you guys defining that? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. You talked about like the 80% of the time being spent by data scientists and part of that is actually discovering the right data. Right. Um, being able to give the right access to the right people and being able to go and discover that data. And so you, you, you go from that angle all the way to processing, training a model. And then all those predictions that are insights that are coming out of the model are being consumed downstream by data applications. And so the two major announcements I'm super excited about today is, is the ability to run Python, which is snow park, uh, in, in snowflake. Um, that will do, you know, you can now as a Python developer come and bring the processing to where the data lives rather than move the data out to where the processing lives. Right. Um, so both SQL developers, Python developers, fully enabled. Um, and then the predictions that are coming out of models that are being trained by data ICU are then being used downstream by these data applications for most of our customers. And so that's where number, the second announcement with streamlet is super exciting. I can write a complete data application without writing a single line of JavaScript CSS or HTML. I can write it completely in Python. It's it makes me super excited as, as a Python developer, myself >>And you guys have joint customers that are headed in this direction, doing this today. Where, where can you talk about >>That? Yeah, we do. Uh, you know, there's a few that we're very proud of. Um, you know, company, well known companies like, uh, like REI or emeritus. Um, but one that was mentioned today, uh, this morning by Frank again, uh, Novartis, uh, pharmaceutical company, you know, they have been extremely successful, uh, in accelerating their AI and ML development by expanding access to their data. And that's a combination of, uh, both the data ICU, uh, layer, you know, allowing for that work to be developed in that, uh, in that workspace. Um, but of course, without, you know, the, the underlying, uh, uh, platform of snowflake, right, they, they would not have been able to, to have re realized those, uh, those gains. And they were talking about, you know, very, very significant increases in inefficiency everything from data access to the actual model development to the deployment. Um, it's just really, really honestly inspiring to see. >>And it was great to see Novartis mentioned on the main stage, massive time to value there. We've actually got them on the program later this week. So that was great. Another joint customer, you mentioned re I we'll let you go, cuz you're off to do a, a session with re I, is that right? >>Yes, that's exactly right. So, uh, so we're going to be doing a fireside chat, uh, talking about, in fact, you know, much of the same, all of the success that they've had in accelerating their, uh, analytics, workflow development, uh, the actual development of AI capabilities within, uh, of course that, uh, that beloved brand. >>Excellent guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about everyday AI, what you're doing together, data ICO, and snowflake to empower organizations to actually achieve that and live it. We appreciate your insights. Thank you both. You guys. Thank you for having us for our guests and Dave ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's live coverage of snowflake summit 22 from Las Vegas. Stick around our next guest joins us momentarily.

>> Narrator: The cube presents, the Kubecon and Cloudnativecon Europe, 2022 brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Valencia, Spain in Kubecon and Cloudnativecon Europe, 2022. I'm your host Keith Townsend. It's been a amazing day, three days of coverage 7,500 people, 170 sponsors, a good mix of end user organizations, vendors, just people with open source at large. I've loved the conversations. We're not going to stop that coverage just because this is the last session of the conference. Colin Murphy, senior software engineer, Adobe, >> Adobe. >> Oh, wow. This is going to be fun. And then Liam Randall, the chair of CNCF Cloud Native WebAssembly Day. >> That's correct. >> And CNCF & CEO of Cosmonic. >> That's right. >> All right. First off, let's talk about the show. How has this been different than other, if at all of other Kubecons? >> Well, first I think we all have to do a tremendous round of applause, not only for the vendors, but the CNC staff and all the attendees for coming out. And you have to say, Kubecon is back. The online experiences have been awesome but this was the first one, where Hallwaycon was in full effect. And you had the opportunity to sit down and meet with so many intelligent and inspiring peers and really have a chance to learn about all the exciting innovations that have happened over the last year. >> Colin. >> Yeah, it's been my most enjoyable Kubecon I've ever been to. And I've been to a bunch of them over the last few years. Just the quality of people. The problems that we're solving right now, everywhere from this newer stuff that we're talking about today with WebAssembly but then all these big enterprises trying to getting involved in Kubernetes >> Colin, to your point about the problems that we're solving, in many ways the pandemic has dramatically accelerated the pace of innovation, especially inside the CNCF, which is by far the most critical repository of open source projects that enterprises, governments and individuals rely on around the world, in order to deliver new experiences and to have coped and scaled out within the pandemic over the last few years. >> Yeah, I'm getting this feel, this vibe of the overall show that feels like we're on the cuff for something. There's other shows throughout the year, that's more vendor focused that talk about cloud native. But I think this is going to be the industry conference where we're just getting together and talking about it and it's going to probably be, in the next couple of years, the biggest conference of the year, that's just my personal opinion. >> I actually really strongly agree with you. And I think that the reason for that is the diversity that we get from the open source focus of Kubecon Kubecon has started where the industry really started which was in shared community projects. And I was the executive at Capital One that led the donation of cloud custodian into the CNCF. And I've started and put many projects here. And one of the reasons that you do that is so that you can build real scalable communities, Vendors that oftentimes even have competing interest but it gives us a place where we can truly collaborate where we can set aside our personal agendas and our company's agendas. And we can focus on the problems at hand. And how do we really raise the bar for technology for everybody. >> Now you two are representing a project that, you know as we look at kind of, how the web has evolved the past few decades, there's standards, there's things that we know that work, there's things that we know that don't work and we're beyond cloud native, we're kind of resistant to change. Funny enough. >> That's right. >> So WebAssembly, talk to me about what problem is WebAssembly solving that need solving? >> I think it's fitting that here on the last day of Kubecon, we're starting with the newest standard for the web and for background, there's only four languages that make up what we think of as the modern web. There's JavaScript, there's HTML, there's CSS, and now there's a new idea that's WebAssembly. And it's maybe not a new idea but it's certainly a new standard, that's got massive adoption and acceleration. WebAssembly is best thought of as almost like a portable little virtual machine. And like a lot of great ideas like JavaScript, it was originally designed to bring new experiences to browsers everywhere. And as organizations looked at the portability and security value props that come from this tiny little virtual machine, it's made a wonderful addition to backend servers and as a platform for portability to bring solutions all the way out to the edge. >> So what are some of the business cases for WebAssembly? Like what problem, what business problem are we solving? >> So it, you know, we would not have been able to bring Photoshop to the web without WASM. >> Wow. >> And just to be clear, I had nothing to do with that effort. So I want to make sure everybody understands, but if you have a lot of C++ or C code and you want to bring that experience to the web browser which is a great cost savings, cause it's running on the client's machines, really low latency, high performance experiences in the browser, WASM, really the only way to go. >> So I'm getting hints of fruit berry, Java. >> Liam: Yeah, absolutely. >> Colin: Definitely. >> You know, the look, WebAssembly sounds similar to promises you've heard before, right ones, run anywhere. The difference is, is that WebAssembly is not driven by any one particular vendor. So there's no one vendor that's trying to bring a plug in to every single device. WebAssembly was a recognition, much like Kubecon, the point that we started with around the diversity of thought ideas and representation of shared interest, of how do we have a platform that's polyglot? Many people can bring languages to it, and solutions that we can share and then build from there. And it is unlocking some of the most amazing and innovative experiences, both on the web backend servers and all the way to the edge. Because WebAssembly is a tiny little virtual machine that runs everywhere. Adobe's leadership is absolutely incredible with the things that they're doing with WebAssembly. They did this awesome blog post with the Google Chrome team that talked about other performance improvements that were brought into Chrome and other browsers, in order to enable that kind of experience. >> So I get the general concept of WebAssembly and it's one of those things that I have to ask the question, and I appreciate that Adobe uses it but without the community, I mean, I've dedicated some of my team's resources over the years to some really cool projects and products that just died on the buying cause there was no community around. >> Yeah. >> Who else uses WebAssembly? >> Yeah, I think so. We actually, inside the CNCF now, have an entire day devoted just to WebAssembly and as the co-chair of the CNCF Cloud Native WebAssembly Day, we really focus on bringing those case studies to the forefront. So some of the more interesting talks that we had here and at some of the precursor weekend conferences were from BMW, for example, they talked about how they were excited about not only WebAssembly, but a framework that they use on WebAssembly called WASM cloud, that lets them a flexibly scale machine learning models from their own edge, in their own vehicles through to their developer's workstations and even take that data onto their regular cloud Kubernetes and scale analysis and analytics. They invested and they just released a machine learning framework for one of the many great WebAssembly projects called WASM cloud, which is a CNCF project, a member project here in the CNCF. >> So how does that fit in overall landscape? >> So think of WebAssembly, like you think of HTML. It's a technology that gives you a lot of concept and to accelerate your journey on those technologies, people create frameworks. For example, if you were going to write a UI, you would not very likely start with an empty document you'd start with a react or view. And in a similar vein, if you were going to start a new microservice or backend application, project for WebAssembly, you might use WASM cloud or you might use ATMO or you might use a Spin. Those are three different types of projects. They all have their own different value props and their own different opinions that they bring to them. But the point is is that this is a quickly evolving space and it's going to dramatically change the type of experiences that we bring, not only to web browsers but to servers and edges everywhere. >> So Colin, you mentioned C+ >> Colin: Yeah. >> And other coding. Well , talk to me about the ramp up. >> Oh, well, so, yeah, so, C++ there was a lot of work done in scripting, at Adobe. Taking our C++ code and bringing it into the browser. A lot of new instructions, Cimdi, that were brought to make a really powerful experience, but what's new now is the server side aspect of things. So, just what kind of, what Liam was talking about. Now we can run this stuff in the data center. It's not just for people's browsers anymore. And then we can also bring it out to the edge too, which is a new space that we can take advantage of really almost only through WebAssembly and some JavaScript. >> So wait, let me get this kind of under hook. Before, if I wanted a rich experience, I have to run a heavy VDI instance on the back end so that I'm basically getting remote desktop calls from a light thin client back to my backend server, that's heavy. >> That is heavy. >> WebAssembly is alternative to that? >> Yes, absolutely. Think of WebAssembly as a tiny little CPU that is a shim, that we can take the places that don't even traditionally have a concept of a processor. So inside the browser, for example, traditionally cloud native development on the backend has been dominated by things like Docker and Docker is a wonderful technology and Container is a wonderful technology that really drove the last 10 years of cloud native with the great lift and shift, if you will. Take our existing applications, package them up in this virtual desktop and then deliver them. But to deliver the next 10 years of experiences, we need solutions that let us have portability first and a security model that's portable across the entire landscape. So this isn't just browsers and servers on the back end, WebAssembly creates an a layer of equality from truly edge to edge. It's can transcend different CPUs, different operating systems. So where containers have this lower bound off you need to be running Linux and you need to be in a place where you're going to bring Kubernetes. WebAssembly is so small and portable, it transcends that lower bound. It can go to places like iOS. It can go to places like web browsers. It can even go to teeny tiny CPUs that don't even traditionally have a full on operating systems inside them. >> Colin: Right, places where you can't run Docker. >> So as I think about that, and I'm a developer and I'm running my back end and I'm running whatever web stack that I want, how does this work? Like, how do I get started with it? >> Well, there's some great stuff Liam already mentioned with WASM cloud and Frmion Spin. Microsoft is heavily involved now on providing cloud products that can take advantage of WebAssembly. So we've got a lot of languages, new languages coming in.net and Ruby, Rust is a big one, TinyGo, really just a lot of places to get involved. A lot of places to get started. >> At the highest level Finton Ryan, when he was at Gartner, he's a really well known analyst. He wrote something profound a few years ago. He said, WebAssembly is the one technology, You don't need a strategy to adopt. >> Mm. >> Because frankly you're already using it because there's so many wonderful experiences and products that are out there, like what Adobe's doing. This virtual CPU is not just a platform to run on cloud native and to build applications towards the edge. You can embed this virtual CPU inside of applications. So cases where you would want to allow your users to customize an application or to extend functionality. Give you an example, Shopify is a big believer in WebAssembly because while their platform covers, two standard deviations or 80% of the use cases, they have a wonderful marketplace of extensions that folks can use in order to customize the checkout process or apply specialized discounts or integrate into a partner ecosystem. So when you think about the requirements for those scenarios, they line up to the same requirements that we have in browsers and servers. I want real security. I want portability. I want reuseability. And ultimately I want to save money and go faster. So organizations everywhere should take a few minutes and do a heads up and think about one, where WebAssembly is already in their environment, inside of places like Envoy and Istio, some of the most popular projects in the cloud native ecosystem, outside of Kubernetes. And they should perhaps consider studying, how WebAssembly can help them to transform the experiences that they're delivering for their customers. This may be the last day of Kubecon, but this is certainly not the last time we're going to be talking about WebAssembly, I'll tell you that. >> So, last question, we've talked a lot about how to get started. How about day two, when I'm thinking about performance troubleshooting and ensuring clients have a great experience what's day two operation like? >> That's a really good question. So there's, I know that each language kind of brings their own tool chain and their, and you know we saw some great stuff on, on WASM day. You can look it up around the .net experience for debugging, They really tried to make it as seamless and the same as it was for native code. So, yeah, I think that's a great question. I mean, right now it's still trying to figure out server side, It's still, as Liam said, a shifting landscape. But we've got some great stuff out here already >> You know, I'd make an even bigger call than that. When I think about the last 20 years as computing has evolved, we've continued to move through these epics of tech that were dominated by a key abstraction. Think about the rise of virtualization with VMware and the transition to the cloud. The rise of containerization, we virtualized to OS. The rise of Kubernetes and CNCF itself, where we virtualize cloud APIs. I firmly believe that WebAssembly represents the next epic of tech. So I think that day two WebAssembly continues to become one of the dominant themes, not only across cloud native but across the entire technical computing landscape. And it represents a fundamentally gigantic opportunity for organizations such as Adobe, that are always market leading and at the cutting edge of tech, to bring new experiences to their customers and for vendors to bring new platforms and tools to companies that want to execute on that opportunity. >> Colin Murphy, Liam Randall, I want to thank you for joining the Cube at Kubecon Cloudnativecon 2022. I'm now having a JavaScript based app that I want to re-look at, and maybe re-platforming that to WebAssembly. It's some lot of good stuff there. We want to thank you for tuning in to our coverage of Kubecon Cloudnativecon. And we want to thank the organization for hosting us, here from Valencia, Spain. I'm Keith Townsend, and you're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage. (bright music)

>>Mm. >>Welcome back to the Cube. Special presentation. Simplifying Hybrid Cloud Brought to You by Cisco We're here with Vegas Rattana, who's the director of product management for you? CSS Cisco and James Leach, who was director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to the Cube. Good to see you again. >>Hey, thanks for having us. >>Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers and as organisations that they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, one of the most common challenges that they face. What are they telling you? How is Cisco specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >>Well, you know, first, I think that's a That's a great question. And, you know, the customer centric view is is the way that we've taken. Um, it's kind of the approach we've taken from Day one, right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for their customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's the That's where the rubber meets your proverbial road. Um, with the customer. And I would say that you know, what we're seeing is the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data centric applications. For example, um, those require that we are able to move, um, and process large datasets really in real time. Um, and the other aspect of application, I think, to give our customers kind of some pose some challenges would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application. That application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can't keep up with today. So, um, that creates some some challenges around. How do I build the infrastructure? How do I write? Size it without over provisioning, for example. But also there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planting those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements and within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges. We see customers who are being forced to move away from the like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits. And they have to move to something like, um, Iraq server model for some applications because of these needs that these data centric applications have. And that creates a lot of opportunity for silo going. The infrastructure and those silos, in turn, create multiple operating models within the A data centre environment that, you know, again drive a lot of complexity. So that complexity is definitely the the enemy here. Um, and then finally, I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratisation of of processing, if you will, right, so it's no longer just CPU focus. We have GPU. We have F p g A. We have things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can can manage this these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So that is a kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management at its core is really right size for for our customers and give them the most value when it when it meets the mark around scale and scope. Um, back in 2000 and nine, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put at the top of the rack, and that works great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, Right? So we're talking about hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centres across clouds. And, um, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those those operational pieces that that touched the application that touched the infrastructure. But they're not the same tool. They tend to be, um, disparate tools that have to be put together. So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of building their own tools. So, um, so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >>Right? You know, Jim, I said in my my Open that you guys, Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS. But the X Series is the next generation, the generation of the next decade, which is really important cause you touched on a lot of things. These data intensive workloads, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs. The whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So how's it going with the X Series? You made a big splash last year. What's the reception been in the field? >>Actually, it's been great. Um, you know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our UCS X series story. Um, I think that the main reason they relate to it as they helped create it, right, it was their feedback and their partnership that they gave us Really, those problem areas, those, uh, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add significant value. So, you know, since we brought you see s to market back in 2000 and nine, we had this unique architectural, um uh, paradigm that we created. And I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history. Um, in terms of growth, Um, what we're seeing now is X series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing, uh, both in terms of the number of customers. But also, more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using and the types of workloads are growing. Right? So we're growing this modular segment that exists not just, um, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, But we're actually bringing them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. Um, I think the other piece, you know that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry and I think right now is a You know, a great example. Our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, um, at a kind of a new next architecture, and we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any any of our competitors have seen. When they announced something, um, that was new to this space. So I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. Um, and I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leapfrog game, Um, as it may have been in the past, Um, X series is out in front today, and we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers, and we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So as our competitors hit walls, I think we're you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched that series to the world. And, uh, you know, as we as we continue to do that, um, we're seeing, you know, again tremendous uptake from our customers. >>So thank you for that, Jim. So viscous. I was just on Twitter just today, actually talking about the gravitational pull. You've got the public clouds pulling C x o is one way. And you know I'm Prem folks pulling the other way and hybrid cloud So organisations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away, and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that with that confusion with the X series. Right? So how so? Can you explain that? >>Sure. And and and that's the right, Uh, the context that you built up right there, Dave, if you walk into Enterprise Data Centre, you see platform of computer systems spread all across because every application has its unique needs. And hence you find Dr Note Driving system memory system, computing system, coordinate system and a variety of farm factors. When you do, you, for you and every one of them typically come with a variety of adapters and cables and so forth Just create silence of resources. Fabric is broad. The actress brought the power and cooling implications the rack, you know, the space challenges and above all, the multiple management plane that they come of it, which makes it very difficult for I t to have one common centre policy and enforce it all across across the firmware and software and so forth and then think about the great challenges of the baroness makes it even more complex as these go through the great references of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers. Uh, you know, really, uh, seeing Anna slowness in that agility and high burden, uh, in the cost of overall ownership, this is where the X rays powered by inter side. We have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities. They become more Asyl and drive lower tco and we are delivering it by doing three things. Three aspects of simplification first simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure and infrastructure, which removes the narrowness of fun factor and infrastructure which reduces direct from footprint that is required infrastructure were power and cooling better served in the Lord. Second, we want to simplify it with by delivering a cloud operating model where they can create the policy ones across compute network stories and deployed all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they are going to go through the next 23 years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity lowering down there. >>That's key. Less friction is is always a good thing now, of course, because we heard from the hyper flex guys earlier, they had news. Not to be outdone, you have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X series today? >>Absolutely. So we are following up on the excited, exciting extras announcement that we made in June last year. Day and we are now introducing three innovation on experience with the bowl of three things First, expand the supported World War and extra days. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third dramatically reduced the complex cities in the data centre by driving down the number of adapters and cables. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU note using a cable list and very unique X fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPS to the compute note in the model of form factor thereby, our customers can now power in AML workload on any workload that needs many more number of GPS. Second, we are bringing in GPS right onto the computer note and thereby the our customers can now fire up the accelerated video upload, for example, and turf, which is what you know we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology with the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and density is that we have on the computer note our customers can now fire up the big data workloads the F C I work. Lord, uh, the FDA has worked with all these workloads that have historically not lived in the model of form. Factor can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig and two and single board banned word and the multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco validated design to oversee a franchise. And third, the innovations in, uh, in the in the fifth and public again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters, made the Internet adapter made with our general doctors or maybe the other stories adapters. They reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable so very, very excited about these three big announcements that we're making in this part of the great >>A lot There. You guys have been busy. So thank you for that. Because so, Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have. Customers are adopting. What problems are they telling you that X series addresses and and how do they align with where where they want to go in the future? >>Um, that's a great question. I think if you go back to um and think about some of the things that we mentioned before. Um, in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what the cost mentioned, I think, is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhanced that story and really move again to kind of to the next level of, of taking advantage of some of these problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look, you know, I think the cost mentioned accelerated VD. That's a great example. Um, these are where customers you know, they need to have this dense compute. They need video acceleration, they need type policy management, right. And they need to be able to deploy these, um, these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X series right now, we're hitting the mark in every every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs. Um, and a lot of room to grow. Um, we have the the premier cloud based management. You know, hybrid cloud suite. Um uh, in the industry. Right. So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that that the cost just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the through the use of the X fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well. And, uh, you know, I think finally, the fifth generation of fabric interconnect and virtual interface card, um, and an intelligent fabric module go hand in hand in creating this 100 gig and end bandwidth story that we can move a lot of data again. You know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere be able to get the bandwidth that they need to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible to that fit exactly their needs. This is huge, right? This solves a lot of the problems we can take off right away with the infrastructure. As I mentioned, X fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here. We're talking about GPS today, but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate like the GPS that solve these lifecycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for like it does for GPU. We can do that with storage or memory in the future, So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregate Asian that actually delivers right. It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing. This is something that that customers can really get value out of Day one. And then finally, I think the future readiness here. You know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPS going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve the drives, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together. It's critical, and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the developments that are coming with C XL with with some of the the PC express changes that are coming in the in the very near future. So we're ready to go X and the X fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers. Our customers are out there saying that you know, they want to buy into something like X Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future. We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt, um, their competition as well. So, um, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X Series brings And, um, again, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >>A lot of headroom, uh, for scale and the management piece is key. There just have time for one more question because talk to give us some nuggets on the road map. What's next for? For X X series that we can look forward to? >>Absolutely Dave, as as we talked about. And James also hinted this is the future radio architecture, a lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up no infantry place. And there we are, looking into enabling the customer journey as the transition from PCH in less than 4 to 5 to six without rip and replace as they embraced the Excel without rip and replace as they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the desegregated memory desegregated P. C, A, r N B and dance drives and so forth. We're also looking forward to extract Brick Next Generation, which will and now that dynamic assignment of GPS anywhere within the chassis and much more. Um, so this this is again all about focusing on the innovation that will make the Enterprise Data Centre operations a lot more simpler and drive down the PCO by keeping them not only covered for today, but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on there. >>Okay, Thank you guys. We'll leave it there in a moment. I'll have some closing thoughts. >>Mhm

>> Narrator: Live from Nashville, Tennessee. It's the Cube. Covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Comvault. >> Welcome back to the Music City. This is the Cube at Commvault GO. I'm Stu Miniman with my Co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program one of the users of the show, actually, going to get to see her on stage at the keynote tomorrow. Ah, Michele Buschman who's the Vice President of Information Services at American Pacific Mortgage. Thanks so much for jointing us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, ah, give us a little bit about your company and your roles of responsibility there. >> Sure, so, um, as you mentioned, I'm the Vice President of Information Services at American Pacific Mortgage. Um, I pretty much am responsible, you know, in the acting role or CIO, CTO, and CISO. So, I manage all technology for the company reporting to the COO. Um, our company is a top 15 independent mortgage bank. Um, we do about 10 billion dollars in mortgages a year, and have about a 25 hundred employee user base. >> Alright, so you've just got a couple of roles there, and luckily your in an industry, not much regulation to worry about, things aren't changing, things are kind of static. You just kind of put in a couple hours at the office and go, go take a nap, right? >> Ya, right (laughing). >> Um, why don't you tell us, what are some of those dynamics that are driving your up level business that are impacting, uh, the technology side. >> Oh, absolutely, so, um, you know, the mortgage industry is somewhat cyclical, and we are in that range where interest rates are going up, um, margin pressures are high. So, you know it's all about doing more with less and saving money. Um, in traditionally in the mortgage banking world, um, you know, IT resources, you're always a little bit short? Um, and so, that, you know, drives me to look for strategies that allow me to leverage my technical resources more for business value operations, than managing infrastructure, keeping lights on, um, which has really motivated us to move to the Cloud, and adopt platform type solutions similar to Commvault to be able to be more efficient with our few resources that we do have in our technology team. >> Alright, can you speak a little bit about Cloud. What is that driver, what does Cloud mean to your organization? And ah, yeah, what is the strategy as it sits today? >> Absolutely, so, um, we're kind of unique, I guess, to an extent in that, you know, when I walked into the organization four and a half years ago. The bulk of our critical business applications were already Sass hosted applications. Um, that grew out of the need because they had such a small technical team, um, you know, for the investments to manage the infrastructure to host applications is very high. So, um, luckily enough, I already had a head start, ah, in that the bulk of our critical business applications were CSS Sass hosted, so, um, what I've done since then is to look for those solutions that are more commodities. So, you know, why manage email on Prem when, you know, Microsoft can do a way better job than we could with the small staff we have. So, you know, it's slowly been, you know, taking each application, pulling it out, putting it into the Cloud, so that my team can be better leveraged to actually work on security initiatives, and um, business value, and transformation type of solutions. So, it is part of it is a, you know accessibility as well. Um, you know, we're in a changing environment where we want to be able to deliver our, um, employee workforce to be able to work anywhere, anytime, on any device, and in order to do that, we have to have solutions that are sitting out there, and accessible to them, um, and not always just sitting behind the firewall in the data center. >> So, let's talk a little bit about data management, data protection as it pertains to the business. What are some of the drivers, especially if you are in the Sass world that make you look at data protection suites as opposed to consuming native solutions within those services? >> Oh, absolutely. So, I very much have a strategy around platform services. Uh, when I walked into the organization, there's probably 30 different applications that were out in the environment, and none of them talked to each other. Um, when you're trying to manage, you know, bringing data across the organization to compile it and aggregate it to actually have something useful to the business. You have to have connected systems, but when you have a small team, it's very difficult to do that development working, connect all those systems, and manage them. So, what I like to look for is a platform solution, um, that will allow me to grow, um, as my budget allows, to add on the different modules that that platform solution, um, offers to me. So, you know, for example, you know, today's budget, I might have a certain limited amount that I can invest, but if I pick a solution that ultimately might give me 70, maybe 80 percent of the needs, um, then I'm only having to add in maybe a couple of other solutions and that cost to integrate and manage, and so overall it reduces the overall cost and complexity of the environment. >> So, you're in a mismatch of ten billion dollars a year in mortgages issued, yet, small IT staff, Sass solutions. When you think of Commvault 20 years, enterprise less solution, you don't think necessarily simple, easy to use, initially, so, why Commvault? >> Oh, absolutely, so, um, again within the first year I was there we went through a huge market share grab and so we grew 75 percent market share, and when I walked in the door, we needed to do investment in infrastructure. So, um, the original forecasts were totally blown out of the water, so the investment we made in small to midsize business type of solutions, we out grew before our contracts were due. So, when I went into this, um, we took about an 18 months, um, to take out time to find the right solution. Uh, we looked at about 6 different vendors, um, you know, we did a little bit of POC work, uh, we did references, um, and ah, basically at the end of the day I was looking for something that had a really good vision, um, that was platform driven, so I could continue to add additional products as budget allowed. Um, that had the ability to have more of a single pane of glass and very little man power to manage, um, and then, reliability was huge. Um, you know, we had some challenges with our previous solution of feeling comfortable that our backups would work in the event we had an incident. So, you know, when we looked at Commvault, um, you know, it may have been, um, you know, it's an enterprise solution which is what I wanted. I could scale without rip and replace. Um, great reputation, great vision, good, technology, you know, bones. Um, and so, you know, when I would go to the board for that, I said, you know, the investment may be a little bit more than a lower end solution, but it's going to give us the capability to grow with the business. >> You know Michele, it's interesting, if you dialed back and said you were looking at this five years ago, I wonder if the pricing strategy that Commvault had in place would fit what you're looking for. I'm sure you've seen as a customer, um, when I hear, you know, I kind of want to be able to reach that vision, but do it incrementally. Sounds like something you might get more from a startup? Maybe give us a little bit of insight what you've seen, how you look at this relationship, and what are some of those things that you are looking to add on in the future. >> Oh, absolutely, so, you know, absolutely, financials always come into place, right? You've got to be able to afford what you're putting into place. Um, you know, I will say that, um, their pricing model did change, you know, cause we had looked at that previously, and it was a pretty high price point to get in with the licensing under the perpetual licensing models. Um, so, with the change of how Commvault kind of moved with the times, more subscription style, made it a little more affordable for some of the smaller businesses to take advantage of. Um, and so, you know, that's how I kind of looked at it for, plus at the end of the day, if you're looking for a quality product around security, and recovery, and backup, it's worth the money to invest in something you feel comfortable that's going to meet that need. Um, and grow with you without, again, having you know, who wants to go through a migration every three years when your contracts up, right? Um, and then, as far as the other products, I'm looking, you know, at some of the new products that they've officially announced. It was really exciting to hear the CEO and COO talk today about the automation that they are building cause that plays absolutely into what we're trying to do in our organization. As we need stuff, you know, again, acception processing is what I always talk about. I only want to have to touch things when it's not working, and, you know, when there's some sort of exception. Um, and, so, I'm really excited about the way Commvault's headed down that path with the automation. Um, and then, also the data piece. Being able to really categorized the data, know if it's outdated or not. I mean, this is a very well known industry issue that we have, we are data hogs in the mortgage business. Um, and our users are as well. Uh, and so being able to identify the data that I have, I mean, you know, I walked into a situation where there's been no purge of data. You know, being able to really identify what is valuable date to not purge vs. the data we want to purge to reduce that footprint to reduce the risk for any kind of potential breech, or security incident. You know, the more you have out there, the more the chance you are going to get hit. >> So, you wear a bunch of hats that seem kind of in conflict especially, seeing that you report up to the COO. Security being the most interesting one. >> (Michele) Uh huh. >> How does your role as the CISO and your selection of the data protection suite, data management, impact your decision to go with a Commvault. >> Oh absolutely, that's huge as well, right? Um, you know, in our industry, we obviously are responsible for um, being custodians to a lot of personal information to consumers, so we have NPI, PI all over, and it's not even just with my critical business system vendor, you know, caus I rely on them heavily, they're much larger, they have, um, larger security teams, and larger budgets to typically protect our data. But, we also have that data internally into our own data warehouse. So, um, data protection is key. Um, so looking at products that will allow us to simplify that, have visibility into it, you know, that's another area I'm really looking forward to expanding my Commvalt use into as we start to actually, Um, you know, one of the other projects we're going to be working on potentially is moving our data warehouse to Microsoft Azure. So, um, you know, really having that, um, security plan figure out before the data is up in the cloud. >> Michele, I wonder what your experience has been with recovery. Is that something you test? Have you had to actually do a recovery? What is your experience been? >> Yeah, so, you know, knock on wood, I'm not sure if there's wood under here, but, you know, knock on wood. We haven't had a major incident, um, however, what we do, have done, now that we've actually deployed Commvault fully, um, is in, you know, it's too bad it's not a couple weeks from now because we're actually going to do a full DR exercise with our new backups now that are fully deployed with Commvault. >> So, you'll take a vacation the week after (laughing). >> So, we're going to actually test that out. That's one of the things that I task my team with is once my backups and everything was in place that we're going to, you know, do a tabletop exercise, but actually try to do a full recovery of some systems with the new backups to make sure we are all in good shape. Uh, but with that being said, I can already tell you just from a, um, you know, our old system to our new system, you know, with the features sets that we have available in Commvault compared to what we had in our other solution. The time to recover individual files is exponential. You know, our other solution, we had to recover an entire folder, not just individual files. And then, we're really excited also of being able to eventually being able to push out some self service file restoration capabilities that Commvalt allows us to do as well. >> So, as a natural consumer of, as a service, offering a mission critical businesses. How important is Commvalut role map to, as a service, for enterprise class solutions. >> Oh, I think that's great. I actually can't wait to see what they have to offer around that. Again, you know, um, I might be a unique use case, I don't know, because that's really how we manage our business from the IT side because of limited budget, limited resources is leveraging vendors. Um, so, I'm really excited to see how that evolves actually. Um, you know, from a service perspective. >> Okay, Michele, it's your second time coming to this event. For audiences that didn't come, what did you get out of it, what excites you the most coming to an event like this? >> I think there's two key things that I really enjoy going to conferences about. Um, one of course, is always the networking opportunities. I always, meet other people who have the same challenges that I do, and you know, they're looking at the same products, and being able to exchange ideas, um, and how you solve problems, and, you know talking to other people about real life issues, um, is so valuable. Uh, the other piece is always getting myself out of the office and getting more education. So, you know, really seeing what's evolving, what's changing, um, you know, what are the partners doing that work with Commvault, what's Commvault, you know, doing? Really, getting out of the office to have a chance to really get educated around that and what's really unique to about Commvalt GO to, is that a lot of it is customer based. Uh, you have customers up talking about their use cases and how they've implemented the product, so it's real life, ah, education, and not just, you know, um, a vendor up there talking about their product and selling it, right? >> Absolutely, we appreciate you sharing your story, Ah, with our audience here, and uh, congratulations on all the progress, ah, American Pacific Mortgage. And ah, boy, you know, tired of thinking of all the hats you've been wearing for those of us that wear a few hats, ah, we can definitely, ah, you know, appreciate that, alright. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more programming here at Commvault GO. Thanks for watching The Cube. >> Michele: Thank you.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Magento. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. We are at the Wynn, Las Vegas with Magento at their Imagine 2018 Conference 3000 plus people here, really cool day we've been talking about all things commerce and digital commerce innovation. Excited to be joined by Peter Sheldon, the VP of Strategy from Magento, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, yeah. >> So this has been really fun, there's a lot of merchants behind us here in the marketplace, we've been talking to some of your customers who, a direct consumer, we just had Coca-Cola on. But we also see a lot of businesses here. Talk to us about what you guys are doing to help, not just the retailers, you started, right, being building this reputation as Magento, helping retailers to target online shoppers, but there's a lot more opportunity that you guys have been successful in, in the business, B2B space. Talk to us about, the vision, the strategy, on both sides. >> Yeah, so I think what's fascinating about Magento is their diversity of our client base, and I think it's a little bit of a testament to the flexibility and agility of the platform, but you're absolutely right, we started out primarily serving the B2C market, working with retailers, CPG firms, branded manufacturers and so forth, luxury goods. But commerce has really evolved and moved on, and I think what we see today is a lot of opportunity in B2B, and so when I think about B2B, these are typically manufacturers and distributors wholesalers who are looking to digitally transform their businesses, and really make the buying process more efficient. So whether it's a distributor who's buying products from a manufacturer, or an end-buyer might be a contractor, especially in home improvement, or something, who needs to buy tools and materials from either a manufacturer or distributor. Traditionally, it was a very traditional sort of, retail based buying experience. You would go to a branch, a distributor's branch face to face, engagement over sales person, or the sales rep would come visit you, and you would through a paper catalog. >> Relationship based. >> Relationship building. >> Exactly. >> And so forth, and that's a high cost of acquisition channel, and so I think what a lot of B2B firms are realizing is there's significant, first of all, there's demand from the buyers because all buyers have their consumer life as well, e-commerce is so mature and the B2C space with Amazon, that buyers are incredibly frustrated if in their business life they don't get that great ease of e-commerce experience, and instead they're still faxing and picking up the phone or even if it is a digital order entry experience, it's really terrible, and it's not intuitive to use, it's not easy to use. So, there's a real demand to digitize that ordering process, but more importantly, I think for B2B firms, there's some real operational savings and putting margin back into the bottom line by creating a lower cost of doing business and serving customers, and it's e-commerce and so I think we see one of the areas where a lot of firms first start out is in the spare parts business, so we work with a lot of manufacturers. It just makes so much sense to move their spare parts and warranty business online, so it's very easy to re-order spare parts, I don't need to pick up and call my sales rep to do that, I can do it in a digital manner. But I think what's really fascinating us is just the diversity of different B2B clients, their backgrounds, there's not a vertical that's immune to this. We see pharmaceutical companies, we see agriculture, we see traditional heavy manufacturing, light manufacturing, life sciences, you name it. And so the diversity of clients we see wanting to use our platform for digitizing their selling relationship that they have, it's really fascinating. >> We've heard a lot today that commerce is limitless, and it sounds like that's kind of what you're talking about, is that this day and age, every buyer is a consumer at some point, right, or everyday. We have these expectations, Amazon set the bar really high and every company to be successful has to be a technology company. So, from your standpoint as the VP of Strategy, some great exciting things have been announced at this year's Magento Imagine Conference. Share with us some of those, and especially I'm curious what you're seeing in the mobile space. >> Yeah, so mobile's really fascinating and I think it actually continues on to what we were talking about a moment ago in B2B. So, if we think about that B2B buyer, often the B2B buyer is an engineer, a contractor, a field service representative. They don't live in an office, they don't have ready, convenient access to either a laptop or desktop. They are out on a site, they are, if it's agriculture, they're out at a farm. >> In a field, yeah. >> Or in a field, or they're in a construction site, or they're inside a plant, and their primary means, or their only means of digital access is their smartphone. And typically they're having a slightly larger screen, phablet type smartphone, probably in a hard case if it gets dropped and so forth. But the way that they're going to engage with a brand digitally and to make a B2B commerce order, to look up the status of their order etc. It's not, we often talk about mobile first, it's not mobile first, it's mobile only. They don't have easy access anymore to desktop, laptop. If you're not serving them through mobile, they're not able to buy from you and they're going to buy from one of your competitors. And we see this thing across the board. Perhaps less so here in the US, but in some of the merging markets where we operate and where we have great success, markets like India. They again, it's very much a mobile only society now, and certainly in mainland China and other sort of emerging markets. So I think we're rapidly going down a path where if you think even in our day to day consumer lives, as we're thinking about making purchases, we're sitting on the couch, we're multitasking or watching television, but it's our phone that we're interacting with. >> Right. >> And if we think about the challenge today about buying through a phone, traditionally commerce purchase experience, it's really not that great. In fact in some cases it's pretty awful. Typical sort of page load time on a mobile can be five, six seconds, and as you want to navigate around using your thumb and scroll through and do some product research, every time you make an action, every time you touch that screen, the page reloads again, and it's actually frustratingly slow. If you actually get to the point of buying, obviously you've got to enter your shipping address, and that's just- >> Can imagine that conversion rates, and things and attrition. >> Exactly. And so- >> What have you guys done to change the game? >> Right, right exactly. So, those conversion rates on the mobile web today are pretty bad. They're about sort of, 1.7% and on a traditional desktop, it's 3.5% but yeah 70% of all traffic and visitors are coming on mobile devices, it's actually quite a profound sort of issue in the marketplace around us. So what are we doing about it? Well there's a really exciting new, and I call it technology, but it's really just a set of standards around open web technologies, Javascript, CSS, HTML, called PWA, or Progressive Web Apps. Now, Progressive Web Apps is not a proprietary technology, it's just open web technologies, but what's changed and evolved are the browsers themselves, so Chrome and Safari, Firefox, they've evolved and they now support what we call service workers, which is the ability for the browser to do more backbone processing. And the end result of all of this are a lot of brands are now rebuilding their websites away from responsive websites, which is the big investment we've had over the last five years to now building Progressive Web Apps. And a really nice thing about Progressive Web Apps is that they perform like a native app, they're very very fast, the page load times are typically around a second or so, and there's no refresh. Every navigation and action is almost instant gratification, so very fast, very slick to use. It feels like you're using an native app, but you're not, you're actually using a web experience in a browser. And so there's a couple of really important things for merchants around that. One, much, much better conversion rates. So all of the KPIs that a VP of e-commerce is ultimately responsible for, they're measured by there's a conversion rate, average order value, bounce rates. They all see significant improvements. And I never say there's some merchants always sort of facing a little bit of a dilemma, should we build native apps, or what should our native app strategy be? And the problem with native apps is they're incredibly expensive to develop, incredibly, a lot of maintenance with all the updates to iOS and Android. And many merchants really didn't see success because consumers will only download and give you real estate on their phones for an app that you really engage with on a very frequent, on a multiple times a day basis. Most of our customers are retailers that perhaps only have two or three transactions a year with their clients, with their end shoppers, and so a native app strategy just doesn't work. So the real exciting thing I think with merchants are, you can actually almost put the need for an app strategy to bed, they don't need one anymore. They invest there in PWA. So here at the conference we announce Magento's support for Progressive Web Apps. We've launched a new development toolkit we call the PWA Studio, and it's really a native capability for our merchants and our system integrators to be able to build Progressive Web Apps on the Magento platform. So we're super excited about it. >> Yeah, sounds super exciting and also really the consumer, the convenience is that consumers are demanding, and you're really reacting to the mobile only experience there. >> That's right. >> Has a huge potential, upside, for the merchants. How are you seeing that being used or use cases for that in the B2B space? >> Yeah, so if anything, it's almost kind of, more applicable in B2B than it is in B2C, although they're both going to adopt PWAs. So what's interesting about B2B is that there is a much more frequent transaction or interaction with the end buyer. B2B buyers are frequent purchasers, they are buying in bulk and they're making purchases perhaps multiple times a day, perhaps multiple times a week. And so they are power users and they do have a great deal of engagement with the brand, with their distributor, so again, it's starkly, I think the B2B firms have built native apps and have done so on top of Mangento, it's very easy to build a native app and integrate it into our Rest APIs etc. But again it's expensive and often it can be a seven figure front sum to initially develop an app strategy and to continue to maintain it, so there's a real there's a real TCO advantage of actually switching that strategy to do a PWA. The adoption can be higher because you don't need to install the app, and just the cost and support of building and supporting a PWA is significantly lower than a native app, and so again there's a lot of use cases for using PWAs in the B2B commerce space as well. >> Awesome. So besides what you announce with Progressive Web Apps, what are some of the exciting announcements you guys have made at Imagine? >> Yeah, so I think product announcements, we got an exciting new product we're calling Page Builder, it's a content management and page building tool. So what this really does is it allows the marketer merchandiser the real control over building and maintaining the pages on their site, and that's mobile web, mobile desktop and building able to do that, and it really alleviates any dependency on having to a front end developer where there's a true wiz with drag and drop capability, gives them complete creative to build very sophisticated content pages, but to do and have complete control over their publishing schedule, being able to preview that. So we're very excited about that. I think it empowers the marketers and merchandisers to be more creative and to get more done in the day, we're empowering them to be, act independently of needing to work with a front end developer. >> Awesome, and you guys speaking of developers, have a very large community. >> We do, we do. >> Of 300,000+ developers. >> It's quite incredible, I mean here at the conference, it's sort of their main annual get together of what we call the community. I'll come here to Las Vegas every year and to the Wynn and the community is here, and a lot of that community is made up of developers, and those developers, many of them work for our merchants, many of them work for system integrators, many of them work for other technology partners, and some are contractors, self-employed specialists and so forth. But as you say, that community is over 300,000 developers strong, that's 300,000 people who make a livelihood doing development on Magento. So it's really an amazing community, and they're incredibly passionate about Magento, and they contribute back to Magento. We are, have our roots as being an open source platform, one of the great differentiative benefits of that is that our community help us innovate and they help us, they contribute code, they contribute features and capabilities back into the platform that means that we can extend our R&D team to be this much, much greater force where we can develop new capabilities and deliver value to our clients at a far faster pace than any competitors do. So it's a really interesting aspect of our business. >> Well Peter, thanks for stopping by theCUBE and sharing the great announcements that you guys have made today and this week, and the direction you're able to go in and help take best practices and things learned in the consumer space, and apply it to businesses. We wish you the best of luck, and we look forward to being back at the Magento Imagine next year. >> Yeah, great. Love to have you back. Thanks so much for chatting with me today. >> Our pleasure. We wanted to thank you for watching theCUBE again, we are live at the Wynn in Las Vegas with Magento at Imagine 2018. I am Lisa Martin, stick around, we're back with one more guest after a short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Interconnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay for IBM InterConnect 2017 exclusive Cube coverage. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest Dr. Angel Diaz who is the vice president of developer technology. Also you know him from the open source world. Great to see you again. >> Nice to see you. Thanks for spending time with us. >> Thank you. >> Boy, Blockchain, open source, booming, cloud-native, booming, hybrid cloud, brute force but rolling strong. Enterprise strong, if you will, as your CEO Ginni Rometty started talking about yesterday. Give us the update on what's going on with the technology and developers because this is something that you guys, you personally, have been spending a lot of time with. Developer traction, what's the update? >> Well you know if you look at history there's been this democratization of technology. Right, everything from object oriented programming to the internet where we realize if we created open communities you can build more skill, more value, create more innovation. And each one of these layers you create abstractions. You reduce the concept count of what developers need to know to get work done and it's all about getting work done faster. So, you know, we've been systematically around cloud, data, and AI, working really hard to make sure that you have open source communities to support those. Whether it's in things like compute, storage, and network, platform as a service like say Cloud Foundry, what we're doing around the open container initiatives and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to all the things you see in the data space and everywhere else. So it's real exciting and it's real important for developers. >> So two hot trends that we're tracking obviously, one's pretty obvious. That's machine learning in cloud. Really hand and glove together. You see machine learning really powering the AI, hitting IOT all the way up to apps and wearables and what not, autonomous vehicles. Goes on and on. The other one is Kubernetes, and Kubernetes, the rise of Kubernetes has really brought the containers to a whole nother level around multi-cloud. People might not know it, but you are involved in the CNCF formation, which is Kubernetes movement, which was KubeCon, then it became part of the Linux Foundation. So, IBM has had their hand in these two trends pretty heavily. >> Angel: Oh yeah, absolutely. >> Give the perspective, because the Kubernetes one, in particular, we'll come back to the machine learning, but Kubernetes is powering a whole nother abstraction layer around helping containers go to the next level with microservices, where the develop equation has changed. It's not just the person writing code anymore, a person writing code throws off an application that has it's own life in relationship to other services in the community, which also has analytics tied to it. So, you're seeing a changing dynamic on this potential with Kubernetes. How important is Kubernetes, and what is the real impact? >> No, it is important. And what there actually is, there's a couple of, I think, application or architecture trends that are fundamentally changing how we build applications. So one of them I'll call, let's call it Code First. This is where you don't even think about the Kubernetes layer. All you do is you want to write your code and you want to deploy your code, and you want it to run. That's kind of the platform. Something like Cloud Foundry addresses the Code First approach. Then there's the whole event-drive architecture world. Serverless, right? Where it has a particular use case, event-driven, standing, stuff up and down, dealing with many types of inputs, running rules. Then you have, let's say the more transactional type applications. Microservices, right? These three thing, when combined allows you to kind of break the shackles of the monolith of old application architectures, and build things the way that best suit your application model, and then come together in much more coherent way. Specifically in Kubernetes, and that whole container stuff. You think think about it, initially, when, containers have been around a long time, as we all know, and Docker did a great job in making container accessible and easy, right? And we worked really closely with them to create some multisource activities around the base container definitions, the open container initiative in the Linux Foundation. But of course, that wasn't enough. We need to then start to build the management and the orchestration around that. So we teamed up with others and started to kind of build this Kubernetes-based community. You know, Docker just recently brought ContainerD into the CNCF, as well, as another layer. They are within the equation. But by building this, it's almost just Russian doll of capability, right, you know, you're able to go from one paradigm, whether it's a serverless paradigm running containers, or having your microservices become use in serverless or having Code First kick off something, you can have these things work well together. And I think that's the most exciting part of what we're doing at Kubernetes, what we're doing in serverless, and what we're doing, say, in this Code First world. >> So, development's always been kind of an art form. How is that art form evolving and changing as these trends that you're describing-- >> Oh, that's a great, I love that. 'Cause I always think of ourselves as computer science artists. You and I haven't spoken about that. That's awesome. Yeah, because, you know, it is an art form, right? Your screen is your canvas, right, and colors are the services that you can bring in to build, and the API calls, right? And what's great is that your canvas never ends, because you have, say, a cloud infrastructure, which is infinitely scalable or something, right? So, yeah. But the definition of the developer is changing because we're kind of in this next phase of lowering concept count. Remember I told you this lowering of concept count. You know, I love those O'Reilly books. The little cute animals. You know, as a developer today, you don't have to buy as many of those books, because a lot of it is done in the API calls that you've used. You don't write sorting algorithms anymore. Guess what, you don't need to do speech to text algorithms. You don't need to do some analysis algorithms. So the developer is becoming a cognitive developer and a data science developer, in addition to a application developer. And that is the future. And it's really important that folks skill up. Because the demand has increased dramatically in those areas, and the need has increased as well. So it's very exciting. >> So the thing about that, that point about cognitive developer, is that in the API calls, and the reason why we don't buy all those books is, the codes out there are already in open source and machine learning is a great example, if you look at what machine learning is doing. 'Cause now you have machine learning. It used to be an art and a science. You had to be a great computer scientist and understand algorithms, and almost have that artistic view. But now, as more and more machine learning comes out, you can still write custom machine learning, but still build on libraries that are already out there. >> Exactly. So what does that do? That reduces the time it takes to get something done. And it increases the quality of what you're building, right? Because, you know, this subroutine or this library has been used by thousands and thousands of other people, it's probably going to work pretty well for your use case, right? But I can stress the importance of this moment you brought up. The cognitive data application developer coming together. You know, when the Web happened, the development market blew up in orders of magnitude. Because everybody's is sort of learning HTML, CSS, Javascript, you know, J2E, whatever. All the things they needed to build, you know, Web Uize and transactional applications. Two phase commit apps in the back, right? Here we are again, and it's starting to explode with the microservices, et cetera, all the stuff you mentioned, but when you add cognitive and data to the equation, it's just going to be a bigger explosion than the Web days. >> So we were talking with some of the guys from IBM's GBS, the Global Business Services, and the GTS, Global Technology Services, and interesting things coming out. So if you take what you're saying forward, and you open innovation model, you got business model stacks and technology stacks. So process, stacks, you know, business process, and then technology, and they now have to go hand-in-hand. So if you take what you're saying about, you know, open source, open all of this innovation, and add say, Blockchain to it, you now have another developer type. So the cognitive piece is also contributing to what looks like to be a home run with Blockchain going open source, with the ledger. So now you have the process and the stacks coming together. So now, it's almost the Holy Grail. It used to be this, "Hey, those business processor guys, they did stuff, and then the guys coded it out, built stacks. Now they're interdependent a bit. >> Yeah. Well I mean, what's interesting to me about Blockchain, I always think of, at this point about business processes, you know, business processes have always been hard to change, right? You know, once you have partners in your ecosystem, it's hard to change. Things like APIs and all the technology allows it to be much quicker now. But with Blockchain, you don't need a human involved in the decision of who's in your partner network as long as they're trusted, right? I remember when Jerry Cuomo and Chris Ferris, in my team, he's the chairman of the Blockchain, of the hyperledger group, we're talking initially when we kind of brought it to the Linux Foundation. We were talking a lot about transactions, because you know, that was one of the initial use cases. But we always kind of new that there's a lot of other use cases for this, right, in addition to that. I mean, you know, the government of China is using Blockchain to deal with carbon emissions. And they have, essentially, an economy where folks can trade, essentially, carbon units to make sure that as an industry segment, they don't go over, as an example. So you can have people coming in and out of your business process in a much more fluid way. What fascinates me about Blockchain, and it's a great point, is it takes the whole ecosystem to another level because now that they've made Blockchain successful, ecosystem component's huge. That's a community model, that's just like open source. So now you've got the confluence of open source software, now with people in writing just software, and now microservices that interact with other microservices. Not agile within a company, agile within other developers. >> Angel: Right. >> So you have a data piece that ties that together, but you also have the process and potential business model disruption, a Blockchain. So those two things are interesting to me. But it's a community role. In your expert opinion on the community piece, how do you think the community will evolve to this new dynamic? Do you think it's going to take the same straight line growth of open source, do you think there's going to be a different twist to it? You mentioned this new persona is already developing with cognitive. How do you see that happening? >> Yes, I do. There's two, let's say three points. The first on circling the community, what we've been trying to do, architecturally, is build an open innovation platform. So all these elements that make up cloud, data, AI, are open so that people can innovate, skills can grow, anything, grow faster. So the communities are actually working together. So you see lots of intralocks and subcommittees and subgroups within teams, right? Just say this kind of nesting of technology. So I think that's one megatrend that will continue-- >> Integrated communities, basically. >> Integrated communities. They do their own thing. >> Yeah. >> But to your point earlier, they don't reinvent the wheel. If I'm in Cloud Foundry and I need a container model, why am I going to create my own? I'll just use the open compute initiative container model, you know what I'm saying? >> Dave: And the integration point is that collaboration-- >> Is that collaboration, right. And so we've started to see this a lot, and I think that's the next megatrend. The second is, we just look at developers. In all this conversation, we've been talking about the what? All the technology. But the most important thing, even more so than all of this stuff, is the how. How do I actually use the technology? What is the development methodology of how I add scale, build these applications? People call that DevOp, you know, that whole area. We at IBM announced about a year and a half ago, at Gene Kim's summit, he does DevOps, the garage method, and we open sourced it, which is a methodology of how you apply Agile and all the stuff we've learned in open source, to actually using this technology in a productive way at scale. Often times people talk about working in theses little squads and so forth, but once you hire, say you've got 10 people in San Francisco, and you're going to hire one in San Ramon, that person might as well be on Mars. Because if you're not on the team there, you're not in the decision process. Well, that's not reality. Open source is not that way, the world doesn't behave that way. So this is the methodology that we talked about. The how is really important. And then the third thing, is, if you can help developers, interlock communities, teach them about the how to do this effectively, then they want samples to fork and go. Technology journeys, physical code. So what you're start to see a lot of us in open source, and even IBM, is provide starters that show people how to use the technology, add the methodology, and then help them on their journey to get value. >> So at the base level, there's a whole new set of skills that are emerging. You mentioned the O'Reilly books before, it was sort of a sequential learning process, and it seems very nonlinear now, so what do you recommend for people, how do they go about capturing knowledge, where do they start? >> I think there's probably two or three places. The first one is directly in the open source communities. You go to any open source community and there's a plethora of information, but more so, if you hang out in the right places, you know, IRC channels or wherever, people are more than willing to help you. So you can get education for free if you participate and contribute and become a good member of a community. And, in fact, from a career perspective today, that's what developers want. They want that feeling of being part of something. They want the merit badge that you get for being a core committer, the pride that comes with that. And frankly, the marketability of yourself as a developer, so that's probably the first place. The second is, look, at IBM, we spend a huge amount of time trying to help developers be productive, especially in open source, as we started this conversation. So we have a place, developer.ibm.com. You go there and you can get links to all the relevant open source communities in this open innovation platform that I've talked about. You can see the methodologies that I spoke about that is open. And then you could also get these starter code journeys that I spoke about, to help you get started. So that's one place-- >> That's coming out in April, right? >> That's right. >> The journeys. >> Yeah, but you can go now and start looking at that, at developer.ibm.com, and not all of it is IBM content. This is not IBM propaganda here, right? It is-- >> John: Real world examples. >> Real world examples, it's real open source communities that either we've helped, we've shepherded along. And it is a great place, at least, to get your head around the space and then you can subset it, right? >> Yeah. So tell us about, at the last couple of minutes we have, what IBM's doing right now from a technology, and for developers, what are you guys doing to help developers today, give the message from what IBM's doing. What are you guys doing? What's your North Star? What's the vision and some of the things you're doing in the marketplace people can get involved in? You mentioned the garage as one. I'm sure there's others. >> Yeah, I mean look, we are m6anically focused on helping developers get value, get stuff done. That's what they want to do, that's what our clients want to do, and that's what turns us on. You build your art, you talk, you're going back to art, you build your drawing, you want to look at it. You want it to be beautiful. You want others to admire it, right? So if we could help you do that, you'll be better for it, and we will be better for it. >> As long as they don't eat their ear, then they're going to be fine. >> It's subjective, but give value of what they do. So how do they give value? They give value by open technologies and how we've built, essentially, cloud, data, AI, right? So art, arts technology adds value. We get value out of the methodology. We help them do this, it's around DevOps, tooling around it, and then these starters, these on-ramps, right, to getting started. >> I got to ask you my final question, a more personal one, and Dave and I talk about this all the time off camera, being an older guy, computer science guy, you're seeing stuff now that was once a major barrier, whether it's getting access to massive compute, machine learning, libraries, the composability of the building blocks that are out there, to create art, if you will, it's phenomenal. To me, it's just like the most amazing time to be be a computer scientist, or in tech, in general, building stuff. So I'm going to ask you, what are you jazzed up about? Looking back, in today's world, the young guns that are coming onto the scene not knowing that we walked barefoot in the snow to school, back in the old days. This is like, it's a pretty awesome environment right now. Give us personal color on your take on that, the change and the opportunity. >> Yeah, so first of all, when you mentioned older guys, you were referring to yourselves, right? Because this is my first year at IBM. I just graduated, there's nothing old here, guys. >> John: You could still go to, come on (laughs). >> What does that mean? Look you know, there's two things I'm going to say. Two sides of the equation. First of all, the fundamentals of computer science never go away. I still teach, undergrad seminars and so forth, and you have to know the fundamentals of computer science. That does not go away because you can write bad code. No matter what you're doing or how many abstractions you have, there are fundamental principles you need to understand. And that guides you in building better art, okay? Now putting that aside, there is less that you need to know all the time, to get your job done. And what excites me the most, so back when we worked on the Web in the early 90s, and the markup languages, right, and I see some in the audience there, Arno, hey, Arno, who helped author some of the original Web standards with me, and he was with the W3C. The use cases for math, for the Web, was to disseminate physics, that's why Tim did it, right? The use case for XML. I was co-chair of the mathematical markup language. That was a use case for XML. We had no idea that we would be using these same protocols, to power all the apps on your phone. I could not imagine that, okay? If I would have, trust me, I would have done something. We didn't know. So what excites me the most is not being able to imagine what people will be able to create. Because we are so much more advanced than we were there, in terms of levels of abstraction. That's what's, that's the exciting part. >> All right. Dr. Angel Diaz, great to have you on theCUBE. Great inspiration. Great time to be a developer. Great time to be building stuff. IOT, we didn't even get to IOT, I mean, the prospects of what's happening in industrialization, I mean, just pretty amazing. Augmented intelligence, artificial intelligence, machine learning, really the perfect storm for innovation. Obviously, all in the open. >> Angel: Yes. Awesome stuff. Thanks for coming on the theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you guys, appreciate it. >> IBM, making it happen with developers. Always have been. Big open source proponents. And now they got the tools, they got the garages for building. I'm John Furrier, stay with us, there's some great interviews. Be right back with more after this short break. (tech music)