>> Narrator: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a Cube conversation. I'm really excited to have our next guest on. You see them all over on social, a very active community member. And we have not heard from him for a little while, so I'm psyched to have him on. He's Bobby Allen. He is a tech and Cloud evangelist. Bobby, how you doing? >> I'm good, Jeff, how are you? >> Good, so, I'm just to have the obligatory check-in. So, you're getting through this madness of COVID, and family's good, everything's good? >> Yeah, everybody's good. I've got a teen and a twin. They haven't driven us crazy yet. So, so far, everybody's healthy and everybody's good. >> Good, good. So, let's jump into it, Bobby. You know, people talk about Cloud as being, there's a lot of great benefits to Cloud, you know, kind of, cost savings, and agility, and more importantly, really as a driver of innovation which I think most people are kind of late to the party there, they think really more on cost savings versus innovation, but now, it's been around, you know, AWS has been around kind of, broke open the door in terms of public Cloud, and then everything was a public Cloud and not because of public Cloud, and then we have hybrid Cloud and we have multicloud. And now, things are kind of, settling down. So, when you talk to people about Cloud, how should they think about the reality of it once they kind of, leave the trade show and they're getting back to their desk, and they actually have to start implementing some things? >> So, great question, Jeff, First of all, thank you for giving me that opportunity to answer that. This is how I think about Cloud. So, we often talk about Cloud in terms of gym memberships, right? Like going to the Cloud is like buying a gym membership. I actually argue that the Cloud is actually more like weights. If you apply weights to a good form you're going to get stronger, if you apply weights to a bad form you're going to hurt yourself. And what we found is that a lot of these companies, Jeff, are applying Cloud and automation to things that really didn't make a lot of sense. And so, they're wasting more money, they're getting more frustrated, and they're wondering why Cloud was not this magic bullet that just solved everything. It didn't fix world peace and global hunger, and now, they're worse off than they were before. There are a couple of reasons I can go into about that but hopefully, that answers the question at first. We're training the wrong way, Jeff. We're adding weight to things that don't make sense and we're hurting ourselves. >> So, it it just I picked the wrong application or are they operating it in a way as they operated it when it was on-prem? 'Cause the thing I always think of, which is interesting, right? Is everybody always talks about spinning up capacity, right? Spin up capacity. You're running a promotion on the Superbowl, and you're going to have a bunch of people hitting your coupon but they'd never talk about spinning it down. And I went to a really interesting presentation one time where a guy talked about their application. He's like, we like when you turn it off, when you turn off our application, we're not making any money, but it tells that you know, kind of how to operate this thing, which is turn it on, but don't forget to turn it off. And I think, you know, we had a situation on one of our little applications that we left open and let something run and ended up with a bill that we weren't necessarily anticipating, not because we did anything wrong, but we just didn't do the right thing, which was to turn off that particular service when we didn't need it. So, what's the wrong way, what's the wrong exercise? Why are people screwing this up? >> So, I think the problem, Jeff, is actually more upstream. So, my personal mantra for 2020 has been, tech is the easy part, data and behavior are the hard parts. And I think you nailed it, right? That Cloud is only about what you need to buy, not what you need to change, then you're going to be woefully disappointed with the results. And so, when I'm saying go upstream, what I'm finding is, missed expectations, Jeff, sink more projects than bad code broken APIs or large bills? The thing that we're missing is, we're thinking that technology replaces the need to have a conversation. So, for example, when we say we want to do something better in the Cloud, what does better actually mean? So, let's talk about food for a second. Hopefully, I don't make your people hungry 'cause it's around lunchtime. But if we think about Cloud application like a recipe, are we tryna make a mediocre recipe better or make a good recipe at scale, right? 'Cause if you take a nasty recipe and scale it out, you're just going to go broke faster. So, really the question is, which problem are we trying to solve? What is the issue that we're really wrestling with? And so, we need to have a better vocabulary, more descriptive conversations. And so, let me give you one that I often talk to customers about, right? We talk about technical debt a lot of times. And technical debt, Jeff, in my opinion, is being used as a misnomer. So, they're kind of, different sorts of debt that I see often in the C-suite. So, there's technical debt where I don't like what we're running, there's data debt where I don't know what we're running, and there's brain debt where I don't know what we want. And Jeff, I would argue that a lot of things that are masquerading as technical debt in the C-suite are really brain debt. I haven't figured out what we want to do, I haven't thought about what we're willing and able to change. And so, that's why the Cloud is a disappointment because we haven't figured out what we want for lunch. (laughs) >> So, it's a classic like people process technology program, you know, problem. And we hear about it all the time, right? And everyone loves to focus on the technology. I haven't heard it really explained that well, but that's what you're saying. It's like, we'll just jump to that part so we don't have to actually ask the hard questions, right? And the thing that makes me think of it when you talked about that is it's kind of like the whole data aggregation problem and all the big data adventures when half the time people don't know what data is where, so, even just going through the exercise of cataloging, finding, organizing, cleansing, all that kind of stuff before you really start to think about what can you do with the big data project? You got to get the baseline down before you can get into the fancy stuff. Sounds kind of like, what you're talking about. >> You nailed it, Jeff. And I'm actually going to piggyback on something you said. This is actually the problem that I think we're wrestling with in Cloud and in life. There it is, right? And we're got to put a fine point in it for the listeners. We are struggling, Jeff, with how to evaluate better versus different. And so, what Cloud has done more importantly, Cloud has shortened the amount of time that we're willing to spend on something before we just start over again. And so, the question that we wrestle with is, do I need to do the same thing a little bit differently? Do I need to tweak it or is there something better that's come along where I need to throw everything away, start all over again, and wipe the slate clean. And so, here's what ends up happening, right? The challenge that we have building on that is how we choose, Jeff, is more important than what we choose because a lot of us are making choices but we're not developing a framework to choose in a world where different things are pushed at us really every day and every night, right? Amazon and Azure are changing literally thousands of things every night. And if I feel like there's something new out there, I have to understand, is this noise, or is this something I pay attention to? Is this a size for a project or is this something that helps my value? If you don't have a way to choose, Jeff, every new option is going to just lead to more confusion and more decommitment. >> Right, well, I mean, you raised a really interesting point which is how do CIOs keep up with all this stuff? I mean, how do they possibly keep the lights on, you know, run digital transformation, kind of, keep up with the, Lord knows, how many changes like you said, get made at Amazon every single day I mean, the feature set when Andy stands on stage at re-invent and lists all the services. I think he's using like a two-and-a-half point font on a 200 foot video screen. I mean, there's so much there. So, how do you help people take a step back from, it's like driving, you know, a car with headlights through snow at night. You know, it's just like kuchu chu chu. How do you help people take a step back and be a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more intentional, a little bit more circumspect to lay a good foundation which is going to be what the rest of the house is built on. If you don't have it, it's just going to crumble, if you have it, then at least you have a chance of success. How do you help guide them and get out of that snow storm? >> So, I'm going to give you a new acronym, Jeff, but I think it starts with humility. It starts with us admitting that we don't have this all figured out yet. I often tell a lot of customers, Cloud is that best a teenager that just learned how to drive. And Cloud similar to teenagers, the ability of what it can do is, kind of, in conflict with what it can comprehend in terms of unintended consequences. And so, if Cloud is changing all the time, let's not talk about, we crushed it, we nailed it, we knocked it out of the park. Let's raise our hand and say, you know what? I humbly need some help, because here's what we do, Jeff. In this industry, we throw around acronyms and terms all the time. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, BDaaS, DBaaS, whatever. I'm going to introduce the term CaaS, but that's not containers as a service job. I think what we're getting is confusion as a service. (laughs) There's so many things that are changing that people are overwhelmed but because we want to act so much like we're crushing it on social media, we really need to say, I need help, I can't do this in a spreadsheet anymore. Please are there solutions out there that can help me automate some of this stuff so that I'm not a victim of my own ignorance. So, humility, right? Embrace other people that have solved some of this problem before, somebody has solved this problem. There are companies out there that are taking in the data, that are automating the decision-making, and that can help you, right? Bring people in, bringing outside help. >> Right, well, the other piece you just talked on is automation, and it goes back to your earlier comment about, you know, scale, bad things at scale are not good. So, if you don't get things dialed in now, and you start applying automation, and you start applying machine speed, you know, then things can get really squirrely really quick. So, that's even another kind of, you know, danger zone coming ahead, start to plan and make sure you've got your stuff organized or now you're going to automate it at machine speed, IOT, 5G, and really run things ragged super quickly. >> Jeff, I agree a hundred percent with that. I want to go back to something you talked about before. People process technology. I want to tweak that. I think we really need to evolve into people, process, product, or people, process, problem. It's got to go back to what am I creating or what am I solving this helping someone? And the technology is something that I will use or not if that helps me meet that outcome. But as technologists, Jeff, a lot of us are getting lazy. I want to play with Kubernetes. I want to play with containers. I want to play with serverless. I want to play with IOT. Who is that actually solving a problem for? Is what we've got to come back to because if I'm not doing that, the less you submit that I'm playing with this, but I'm not really making something better for a customer or adding more value to the business. >> So, again, what are your tips and tricks? 'Cause things are not going to get less complicated, right? As we've talked about Amazon's rolling out new services all the time. Google is really starting, you know, Google Cloud is really starting to rage. Obviously, Satya has done an amazing job with Microsoft, and then there's Oracle Cloud and IBM Cloud, and all these secondary Clouds, Equinix, and that acceleration is only going up. So, how do you, you know encourage people, coach people, tell people to make sure that they're taking a step back and being organized and thoughtful, and not just racing ahead at the next bright shiny object? >> So, great question again, Jeff. I think people have to have to be careful that just because you hear about something a lot doesn't mean it's proven to scale. Social media is dangerous in the sense that we think that we hear something a hundred times then a means that is polished. And I think that as enterprises and as businesses, you know, go with something that's proven, but dip a toe in the water, if you're not sure about it. So, maybe you are experimenting with some things in DevTests, but here's some practical tips that I'll give. Three things, right? I recommend that people typically start here with Cloud strategy, the three D's of data are what I recommend people begin with. Don't begin with the widgets, the shiny objects, begin with data storage, begin with data transport and begin with data organization. We know that data is the lifeblood of the enterprise, right? That's what all of us are focused on right now, right? Data is collected from watches, from websites, from things like self-driving cars, eventually. So, how is my data going to be stored? 'Cause that's the most important part of likely what we're doing as a corporation. How is it going to be transported? Am I okay with spending X amount of dollars on Egress? Do I have latency issues? And then when it comes to data organization, databases, data warehouses, data lakes, I would start with my philosophy, Jeff, on how I plan to leverage that information across any of the multi or hybrid providers that I plan to spin up, because if I start with the data that connects me better to the customer, how am I going to leverage this data then make something better for them? And then any venue honestly, Jeff, that I choose to execute in we'll have tools and utilities and packages that I can leverage to make something better for someone. >> The piece you didn't mention though, was the application. So, where's the application? Say you still start with the data foundationally, and then go to the application or? >> Yes. >> But most of the initiatives driven kind of, at the application level layer? >> They are, and I'm glad you mentioned that. So, practically speaking, let me go down a level to double-click on stuff. Well, people want to be Cloud native, right? 'Cause we don't want to run servers. We don't want to run boxes, we don't even really want to do VMS anymore. One thing that I recommend, that I believe is high reward and low risk is that people strongly consider adopting database as a service, and this is the reason why. It gives us a format to go to something that's Cloud native that doesn't have to be totally rewritten. So, the juice is worth the squeeze there because I'm reducing labor, I'm reducing maintenance, I'm reducing cycles, the DBaaS that people like that have to do, but I'm not paying to refactor an application. Where we struggle, Jeff, and maybe this is another topic, we really struggle with the value of applications, and because we don't know the value of an app, we're using the cost of an app as a proxy. And so, if you don't know the value of something, you're always going to be at risk of over or under improving it. This is why I like database as a service. I can be more nimble, I can reduce labor, and I'm not rewriting an application and spending more to rewrite it than the app is worth. If I totally refactor, or if I totally replatform, the cost may outstrip the value. DBaaS is almost always a slam dunk, 'cause I'm going to reduce manual things that my people are doing that freeze them up, to focus more on customers and evolve in the end. That's what I see pretty consistently in the enterprise. >> That is really scary. That statement that you said that people don't necessarily know the value of the app and using cost as a proxy is not good. You know, I had Butch Rizzo on recently, and he did a study on, you know, trying to figure out the value of data, versus the the value of an app. And he did some research of that UCSF, and what they did is they basically said the value of the data is dependent on the business process that you can improve, or the business project that you want to do. You make an estimate as to what the ROI in that process is, and then you basically see if it's worthwhile to do. And that case and point was, you know, running a promotion at Chipola 'cause bill loves Chipola, but he had a real concrete way that, you know, if we can increase sales at the target stores by, you know, 10%, or we can increase the average ticket by 20 cents or we can increase the average number of items ordered by 0.5 or whatever. So, you know, real far metrics that tie back to real numbers, that tie back to value that you can make an assessment of that project, and that project is enabled by data. So, I hope people are doing that far applications 'cause cost is not the way to figure out value >> The challenge that we have, Jeff, when we look at a lot of the things in the Cloud, there's a big difference between if I have "big C" customers, someone who's literally pulling out a wallet or a credit card to pay for my service or product versus "little C" customers like internally. If I'm paying for a streaming service, and the cost of the streaming service goes up the value of that's likely also going up because I'm serving more big C customers. If the cost of a password reset manager goes up and internal application that nobody was likely paying for, and that's really the dilemma that a lot of folks have in the enterprise, Jeff. Am I going to take something that has limited value like a password application, and put it in a place that can have unlimited spend. Now, if I'm a Netflix or Disney plus, if my spend is going up, my value is going up because I'm serving more big C people that are going to pull out their credit card and give me money. So, a lot of the struggle is when we drill down into this in the enterprise is the people that have the little C customers that don't have anybody paying them 'cause they're tryna understand this is like funny money in our houses job. My kids are teenagers. If I was to charge them, right? For room and board or for dinner, they don't have any money. So, the value of what they think about my cooking on the weekend, right? It's hard to put a value on that because they're not paying me, but if I had a food truck, it's easy to put a value on that, are people buying it or not? So, again, the challenges between internal or external customers and asked me to get any things I charged back and show back, we need a model to understand, is this something that you're tolerating or something that you're actually choosing and are you willing to spend money on it? >> Yeah, and it's a complicated issue, right? Because the other thing is you'd say, you take this conversation over to the security space, which I always find fascinating 'cause investigating security is kind of like investing in insurance and you can't use all your money to insure everything a hundred percent or else you just, why would you even do it? But you have to have some, and it's not a real clear ROI, but the potential downside is pretty huge. So, it's this kind of, balancing act, as you said, it's not really clean as to what the true value of that is unless you tie it back to some specific event, a breach, you know, some type of pins getting stolen, et cetera. So, these are not hard questions, but it's funny 'cause they're not technology questions, right? They're business value questions, and they're priority questions, and they're trade off questions. That's the other thing, right? You don't have infinite resources. So, even if you solve the model here you need to solve it within a portfolio of challenges, opportunities to then, as you said, you know, kind of rank order, where do you spend that next version of dollar? 'Cause it really can have a very a huge difference on the return. >> Okay, I think if I was going to give a, maybe a final piece of advice to the audience, Jeff, it would be to not confuse planning and analysis. That's something that I've talked about before. There's a big difference between those two things, and I often use the analogy of tax planning versus tax preparation. Jeff, when we collect our receipts, and our W-2s and 1099s, and go to our CPA at the beginning of the next year, we can't call that tax planning. That's tax preparation. It's already kind of done and dusted as long as you don't mess it up, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion. And the enterprise is doing a lot of analysis and a lot of preparation, but really we need to do more planning. We need to look at the tools and the companies that are helping us simulate and plan for the future that's coming because then when we're talking about it, right? When you're sitting with your CPA and you're saying, what if I do this with my retirement or 401k, or real estate assets, when they can talk to you about what might happen, right? You're not in crisis, it's not a fire drill, it's not a dumpster fire, you can have a very easy conversation around the pros and cons of that. So, I think that's one thing we really have to embrace is press ahead, talk to those consultants and those solution providers, is this really planning or is this just analysis? Is this looking backwards or is it really looking forward and giving me some insight into the things that are coming so that I feel smarter going into the next season? >> And the opportunity to make a change before you hit December 31st. I mean, I think that's a really great analogy. Well, Bobby, a lot of great stuff squeezed in in a few short minutes, it's super fun to catch up, and I just love all your analogies and your stories because at the end of the day, it is about people, and it's about priorities, and it's about business, it's not about the technology. So, thank you so much for sharing your insight. >> Thank you, Jeff. Thanks for having me. >> Oh, absolutely, all right. He's Bobby Allen, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto studio. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (bright music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe, these are cloud native insights. >> Welcome to another episode of Cloud Native Insights. I'm your host Stu Miniman and of course with Cloud Native Insights will really help understand you know, where we have gone from cloud, how we are taking advantage of innovation, a real driver for what happens in the spaces of course developers. You think back to the early days, it was often developers that were grabbing a credit card, using cloud services and then it had to be integrated into what was being done and the rest of the organization saw the large rise of DevOps and all the other pieces around that, that help bring in things like security and finance and the like. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, William Janssen. He is the CEO of DeltaBlue. Deep in this discussion of cloud native DeltaBlue is a European company helping with continuous deployment across cross cloud providers in the space. William, thanks so much for joining us, nice to see you. >> Glad to be on the show, thank you Stu. >> All right, so one of the reasons I'm glad to have you on is because of some of the early episodes here, you know we were discussing really what cloud native is and what it should be. I had my first interview on the program, Joep Piscaer, who you know, had given the analogy and said when you talked about DevOps, DevOps isn't something you could buy. But it's something that lots of vendors would try to sell you. And we're trying to dispel, lots of companies out there, they're like, "Oh, cloud native, well we support Kubernetes. "And we have this tool and you should buy our cloud native, "you know, A, B, C or D." So, want to start a little first with what you see out there and what you think the ultimate goal and outcome of cloud native should be? >> I think cloud native, to start with your last question, I think cloud native should make life fun again. We have a lot of technical problems, we solve them in technical things. You mentioned Kubernetes but Kubernetes is solving a technical problem. And introducing another technical problem. So what I think cloud native should do is focus on what you're actually good at. So a developer should develop. Someone from the infrastructure, an operator, should focus on their key points and not try to mix it up. So, not Kubernetes, Kubernetes is again introducing another technical issue. Our view on cloud native is that people should have fun again and should be focusing on what they're good at. And so it's not about technology, it's about getting the procedures right and focusing on the things you love to do. And not to talk to the cross border, talk to a lot of developers and solve operational kind of things. That's what we try to solve and that's our view of cloud native. >> Yeah, I'll poke that a little bit because one thing you say, people should do what they're good at. It's really what is important for the business, what do we need to get done? There's often new skills that we need to do. So it's really great if we could just keep doing the same thing we're doing. We know how to do it. We optimize it, we play with all of our geek knobs. But the drumbeat that I hear is, we need to be agile, we need to be able to create new applications. IT needs to be responsive for the business and rather than in the past it was about, building this beautiful stack that we could optimize and build these pieces together. Today, the analogy I hear more is, there's layers out there, there's lots of different tooling, especially if you look at the developer world. There is just too many options out there. So, maybe bring us a little bit as to you know, what DeltaBlue does. How you look at allowing developers to build what they, new things that they need but not be, I guess the word, locked into a certain place or certain technology. >> Yes, I've been on IT for 20 years. So I've seen a lot of things go around. And when we started out with DeltaBlue, the only thing we had in mind is how could we make the lifecycle of applications and all the things you had to do, the government around applications way more easy. Back in the days, we already saw that containerization solved some of the issues. But it solves technical issues. So like when you start coding, you don't need to go to the network card anymore. We took the same approach to our cloud native approach. So we started on the top level. We started with applications in mind. And the things back in the day you had Bitnami already had the option to have a VM or standard installation of an application. So what we see is that nowadays, many developers and many organizations try to focus on that specific part, how to get your code into some kind of under configuration solution. We take that for granted. There are so many great solutions out there, already tried to solve that problem. So instead of reinventing that wheel again, we take that for granted. But we take another approach. We think that if the application is there, you need to test it. You need to take it into production. You want to have several versions of a specific application into the production environment. So what we've tried to solve with our platform is to make that part of the life cycle, let's call it horizontal version of your application lifecycle, not getting an application built or running up different stuff, we take that for granted. We take the horizontal approach. How to get your traditional application from your development environment to your testing, acceptance. That's a different kind of people test your application, security testing before you take it into production. And that should be all be done from a logical point of view. So we built one web interface, a logical portal. And you can simply drag and drop any type of application, not just a more than micro service oriented or Kubernetes based application but any type of application from your acceptance environment to your production environment. That's going to solve the real problem. So now, any business can have 10 different acceptance environments for even your old legacy SAP or your Intershop environment. That's going to get your business value. So going back to your definition of cloud native, getting that kind of abstraction between getting your and code your application and get it get somewhere up and running and all the stuff that's needs to be done from your development environment into the production environment. That's going to add to your business value. That's going to speed up your time to market, that's going to make sure that you have a better cloud quality because now you can test even your legacy application from 10 different points of view and 10 different types of different branches, all in a parallel environment. So, when we started with DeltaBlue, we took a different approach, took the technical stuff for granted, and focus on all the government around applications and the governance that's the thing, I think that's the most important part in the cloud native discussion. >> So governance, especially in Europe, has a lot of importance there. If you could, bring us inside a little bit, customers you're talking to, where they are in this journey. If you've got an example of something you're doing specifically we'd love to hear how that happens in real world. >> Yes we have many different customers but I think one of our best examples, for example is Wunderman Thompson, a big eCommerce party across the globe but also here in the Netherlands. And we made a blueprint of their development environment the way they develop application and the way they host applications. So, now they started a new project, 40 developers go to the new big eCommerce application. In the past, everyone had to install their own Intershop environment on their own laptop, Java, Oracle, that kind of stuff. It took me a day and a half. Since we abstracted that into like a simple cell, like you would do in any serverless environment nowadays, they can now simply click on a button. And since they made their laptop or their development environment part of our platform, they can now simply drag and drop the complete initial environment to the laptop and they can send development in 10 minutes instead of a day and a half. That's just the first step that makes their life easier. But also imagine, we have an application up and running for two, three months and our security patch, we all know the trouble of getting a patch installed in production but also then install it into the acceptance environment, test environment, development environment, all those kind of different versions. With our platform, since we have the application in mind, we can, with simple one simple click of the button, we can propagate that security patch across all the different environments. So from a developer point of view, there's no need to have any kind of knowledge of course they need to configure a port or something like that but no need of knowledge of any type of infrastructure anymore. We have made the same blueprint for the complete development environment. So with a single click of the button, they have a complete detail environment, known over the need to go to their infrastructure to get the service to their operating guys, they have them installed, industrial Nexus, very book of repository, all that kind of stuff. It's all within one blueprint. So again, we think that the application should come first. That should be abstracted, and not abstracted just in a single spin up a container or spinning up a VM. Now, the complete business case, application, complete environment should be up and running with a single click of a button. So now they can start if they have a demo tomorrow, for example, and they want to have a demo setup. With a single click, they have a complete environment up and running, instead of having to wait three weeks, four weeks before they can start coding. And the same comes with a production environment. We now have an intelligent proxy in front of it. So they can have three different versions of the same shot in their production environment. And based on business rules, we can spread the load against the different versions of a business application, eCommerce application. We signed a new contract with New Relic last week. And the next thing we're going to do, and it's going to be there in two weeks, is fit New Relic data, I mean, an eCommerce application is about performance. A longer response time of a page page load time will drop your drop your revenue. So what we're going to do with New Relic is feed it's performance data back into that the intelligent proxy in front of their application. So now they're going to drop the new version of their intershop application on a Thursday evening, they go to sleep. Friday morning, they wake up and from the three versions, and the best performing website will be up and running. That's the kind of intelligence and that's the kind of feedback we can put into our platform since we started with applications in mind first. It's getting better quality, because you can do better testing. I mean, we all want to test, but we never want to wait for those different kinds of setups, they want to have fast development cycles. That kind of flexibility where you do the functional deployment, the functional release, not the technical stuff. What we now see in the market is that most people, when they go to the cloud, try to solve the technical release problems of getting the application up and running in a technical way into the production time, we try to focus on the functional level. >> So, William, being data driven, a very important piece of what you talked about there. What I want to help our audience understand is concerns about if you talk about abstractions, or if you want to be able to live across different environments, is can you take advantage of the full capabilities of the underlying platform? Because, that is, one of the reasons we go to cloud isn't just because it's got limitless compute Pricing comes down. But there's only new features coming out, or I want to be able to go to, a cloud provider and take advantage of some specific feature. So help us understand how I can live across these environments, but still take advantage of those cloud native features and innovations as they come out. >> Great. There are actually two ways. For most alternatives, we also have an alternative component in our platform as well. We have complete marketplace with all kinds of functionality like AWS has, but I can imagine that people want to develop an AWS and get our AWS lambda functions or s3 buckets or that that kind of specific functionality. And going back to the Intershop example, they run their application as a CaaS solution on Azure. So when you went to Azure DevOps, or that kind of specific functionality included, our platform connects over 130 different data centers across the globe and Azure and AWS, and Oviedo Digital Ocean are all part of the huge mix of different cloud providers. For every provider, we have what we call gateway components. We deploy natively, mostly bare metal or equivalents of bare metal within those cloud providers. And we made an abstraction layer on the network layer. So now we can include those kind of specific services like they were part of our platform natively. Because if we would have just build a layer and couldn't use the specific components of an AWS or an Azure or that kind of stuff, we would just be another hosting provider. I haven't liked VMware. So that kind of stuff. We want to and we are aware that we need to include a specific stuff, functionality. And what we do with this with what we call gateway components. So we have AWS, gay components, educators, but also for IBM, or Google specific environment. So we can combine the network of AWS, with our specific network. And that's possible, because we made a complete abstraction layer between the network of the infrastructure provider and our network. So we can complete IP subnets DNS resolver as if it was running on their local environment. And thereby, since we have that abstraction layer, we can even move the workloads on AWS to Azure. And since we have the abstraction layer network, we can even make sure that you don't need to reconfigure your application. I think that's the flexibility that people are looking for. And if they have a specific workload and Azure and it's getting too expensive, for the ones that includes AWS stuff, they want to shift the workload to different kind of cloud providers based on the characteristics of a specific worker, or even if you want to have the cheapest option, you can even use your on premise data center. >> William, do that there absolutely is interest in doing that. One of the barriers to being able to just go between environments is of course that the skills required to do this. So, there's something to be said about, if I use a single provider, I understand how to do it, I understand how to optimize it, I understand the finances of it. And while there may be very similar things in another cloud, or in my own data center, the management tools are different and everything. So how do we overcome, that skill set challenge, between different environments. >> We had a different approach the same as we do it on application level, we took it also in data center level, so we're going to handle most cannot say all because there's always specific components. But from our interface, you can simply go to a specific application and select the type of data center you want to run on your application. And if your application is running on an AWS, you get the gateway components with the components, like an s3 bucket or a lambda or an RDS, based on the data center you're running in. So we took that abstraction layer even on that level. But I got to be honest, I think 80% of our customers is not interested in the data center, they run their application in unless they have specific functionality, and which is not available on our platform, or they have a long running application, or use a specific or they bought a specific application. Otherwise, they don't care. Because from a traditional application, there is no difference between running on Azure or Google Cloud or an IBM cloud or whatever. The main difference is that we can make a guarantee about the SLA. I mean, IBM has a better uptime guarantee. A better performance and a better network compared to let's say, digitalocean. Kind of set this up. But there is a huge difference. But it's more like the guarantee that we can give them. So we have this abstraction layers, and we try to put as many as possible as much as possible into our portal interface. There will no way that we're going to redesign and we work about the complete AWS interface, or we're not going to include 100% of their functionality. That's not possible. We're, small company. AWS is somewhat more developers in place. But the main components and people are asking for like RDS or these kind of specific setups, that's where we have the gateway components for available and they can include them into their own application. But we also going to advise them why they were looking for those specific AWS components. Is it within the application architecture or is it something gauges right? Isn't there a better solution or an other solution? And I think, since we have that objection that one of the biggest benefits is, and what we see our customers also do is we incorporate that data center into our platform. And we have one huge network across all the cloud providers and including their own data center. So in the past, they had to have two different development teams, one specialized in AWS development, with all that kind of specific stuff. And all one development team which had more like a traditional point of view, because their internal system and data which was not allowed to go outside the company or had to stay within the firewall. And since we have now one big network, which is transparent to them, we can make sure that their code for their internal systems stays internal and is running on internal systems. But we could still use some kind of functionality from the outside. We do it all unencrypted today, and we have one big platform available. So with our gateway components, we can make sure that that data and application data is really staying internally. And only is allowed to grow internal data access and that kind of stuff, but still use external functionality or price. But again, I would say 80% of our customers, they don't care because they just want to get rid of the burden. I think going back to what we think cloud native means is just getting rid of the burden. And you shouldn't be concerned about what type of cloud we're actually using. >> Absolutely, William, the goal of infrastructure support, my applications and my data and we want companies to be able to focus on what is important for the business and not get bogged down and certain technical arguments introduction. So William, thank you so much for joining us. Really great to hear about Delta blue. Looking forward to hearing more in the future. >> Thank you. >> I'm Stu Miniman. And look forward to hearing more of your cloud native insights.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SUSECON Digital brought to you by SUSE. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome to the program one of SUSE's partners, we have Marc O'Regan, he is the CTO of EMEA for Dell Technologies. Marc, it is great to see you, we all wish, I know when I talked to Melissa Di Donato and the team, everybody was really looking forward to coming to Ireland, but at least we're talking to you in Ireland so thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, thanks very much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. You know, really looking forward to getting you guys here, unfortunately it wasn't a beaver, once we're all safe and well, great to talk. >> Yeah, absolutely, that's the important thing. Everybody is safe, we've had theCUBE a couple of times in Dublin. I'd actually, you know, circled this one on my calendar 'cause I wanted to get back the Emerald Isle but, Marc, let's talk first, you know, the Dell and SUSE relationship you know, disclaimer, you know, I've got a little bit of background on this. You know, I was the product manager for Linux at a company known as EMC back before Dell bought them, many moons ago, so I know that, you know, Dell and the Dell EMC relationship with SUSE go back a couple of decades, but, you know, bring us into, you know, what your teams are working together and we'll go from there. >> Yeah, sure, Stu, so, quite correct, nearly a two decade long relationship with SUSE and one that we hold very dear to our heart. I think what both organizations have in common is their thirst and will to innovate and we've been doing that with SUSE for 16, 17 years, right back to, you know, SUSE Enterprise Linux sitting on, you know, PowerEdge architecture way, way back in the day into you know, some of the developments and collaborations that we, that we worked through with the SUSE teams. I remember back 2013, 2014 doing a pretty cool program with our then Fluid Cache technology. So, when you look at, you know, OLTP kind of environments, what you want to kind of get away from is the, you know, the read-write, commits and latency that are inherent in those types of environments. So, as you start to build and get more users hitting the, hitting the ecosystem, you need to be able to respond and SUSE has been absolutely, you know, instrumental to helping us build an architecture then with our Fluid Cache technology back in the day, and the SUSE technology sitting around and under that and then of course, in more recent times, really extending that innovation aspiration, I guess, has been absolutely a pleasure to, to watch and to be involved with, see it mature so some of the cool platforms that we're developing with SUSE together it's a, it's pretty neat so I'm, you know, one of those being-- >> So, Marc, yeah, well, you know, bring us up to speed, you know, right in the early days, it was, you know, Linux on the SUSE side, it was, you know, servers and storage from the Dell side, you know, today it's, you know, microservice architectures, cloud native solutions. So, you know, bring us up to speed as to some of the important technologies and obviously, you know, both companies have matured and grown and have a much broader portfolio other than they would have years ago. >> Yeah, for sure, absolutely. So, I mean, what's exciting is when you look at some of the architectures that we are building together, we're building reference architectures. So we're taking this work that we're doing together and we're building edge architectures that are suitable for small, medium, and you know, and large environments. And the common thread that pulls those three architectures together is that they are all enterprise grade architectures. And the architectures are used as frameworks. We don't always expect our customers to use them, you know, by the letter of the law, but they are a framework and, by which they can look to roll out scalable storage solutions. For example, like the Ceph, the SUSE Enterprise Storage solution that we collaborate with and have built such a reference architecture for. So this is, you know, it's built on Ceph architecture under the hood, but, you know, both ourselves and SUSE have brought a level of innovation, you know, into an arena, where you need cost, and you need low latency, and you need those types of things that we spoke about, I guess a moment ago, and into, you know, this new cloud native ecosystem that you just spoke to a few moments ago. So on the cloud native side, we're also heavily collaborating, and near co-engineering with SUSE on their CaaS technologies. So here it's really interesting to look at organizations like SAP and what we're doing with data hub and SAP, it's all part of the intelligent enterprise for SAP. This is where SUSE and Dell Tech together really get, you know, into looking at how we can extract information out of data, different data repositories. You know, you may have Oracle you may have, you know, you may have HDFS, you may have Excel and you're trying to extract data and information from that data, from those different siloed environments and the CaaS technology brings its, you know, its micro, capability to the forum in that regard, our hardware architecture is the perfect fit to, to bring that scalar platform, cloud native platform into the ecosystem. >> So, you know, Marc, you've got the CTO hat on for the European theater there. When we, we've been talking to SUSE, when they talk about their innovation, obviously, the community and open-source is a big piece of what they're doing. You were just walking through some of the cloud native pieces, give us what you're seeing when it comes to, you know, how is Dell helping drive innovation, you know, and how does that connects with what you're doing with partners like SUSE. >> Yeah, well, you know, innovation is massively, massively important. So there's a number of different factors that, you know, make up a very good innovation framework or a good innovation program. And at Dell Tech we happen to have what we believe to be an extraordinarily good innovation framework. And we have a lot of R&D budget assigned to helping innovate and we get the chance to go out and work with SUSE and other partners as well. What SUSE and Dell Tech do really, really well together is bring other partners and other technologies into the mix. And, you know, this allows us to innovate, co-innovate together as part of that framework that I just mentioned. So on the Dell Tech framework, we'll obviously, you know, take technologies, you know, we'll take them, perhaps into the office of the CTO, look at new, you know, emerging tech and look at, you know, more traditional tech, for example, and we will blend those together. And, you know, as part of the process and the innovation process, we generally take a view on some of the partners that we actually want to get involved in that process. And SUSE is very much one of those partners, as a matter of fact, right now, we're doing a couple of things with SUSE, one in the labs in Walldorf in Germany, where we're looking at high availability solution that we're trying to develop and optimize there right now at this point in time. And another good example that I can think of at the moment is looking at how customers are migrating off, you know, older, more traditional platforms, they need to look at the cloud native world, they need look at how they can, platform for success in this cloud native world. And we're looking at how we can get smarter, I guess about migrating them from that, you know, extraordinarily stealthy world that they had been in the past but that needs to get from that stealthy world into an even stealthier scalable world that is, that is cloud native world. >> Yeah, Marc, you talk about customers going through these transformations, I wonder if you can help connect the dots for us as to how these types of solutions fit into customers overall cloud strategies. So, you know, obviously, you know, Dell has broad portfolio, a lot of different pieces that are on the cloud, you know, I know there's a long partnership between Dell and SUSE and like SAP solutions, we've been looking at how those modernize so, you know, where does cloud fit in and we'd love any of kind of the European insights that you can give on that overall cloud discussion. >> Yeah, sure, so, again, ourselves and SUSE go back on, in history, you know, on the cloud platforming side, I mean, we've collaborated on developing a cloud platform in the past as well. So we had an OpenStack platform that we both collaborated on and you know, it was very successful for both of us. Where I'm seeing a lot of the requirement in this multicloud world that we're kind of living in right now, is the ability to be able to build a performant scalable platform that is going to be able to respond in the cloud native ecosystem. And that is going to be able to traverse workloads from on-prem to off-prem and from different cloud platforms with different underlying dependencies there. And that's really the whole aspiration, I guess, of this open cloud ecosystem. How do we get workloads to traverse across, across those types of domain. And the other is bringing the kind of, you know, performance that's expected out of these new workloads that are starting to emerge in the cloud native spaces. And as we start to look to data and extract information from data, we are also looking to do so in an extraordinary, accurate and in an extraordinary performant way and having the right kind of architecture underneath that is absolutely, absolutely essential. So I mentioned, you know, SAP's data hub a little earlier on, that's a really, really good example. As is, a matter of fact, SAP's Leonardo framework so, you know, my background is HPC, right? So, I will always look to how we can possibly architect to get the compute engineering as close to the data sources as possible as we can. And that means having to, in some way get out of these monolithic stacks that we've been used to over the last, you know, for a number of decades into a more horizontally scaled out kind of architecture. That means landing the right architecture into those environments, being able to respond, you know, in a meaningful way that's going to ultimately drive value to users and for the users and for the providers of the services, who are building these type of, these type of ecosystems. Again, you know, as I said, you know, data hub, and some of the work that Dell Tech are doing with the CaaS platform is absolutely, you know, perfectly positioned to address those types of, those types of problems and those types of challenges. On the other side, as I mentioned, the, you know, the story solutions that we're doing with SUSE are really taking off as well. So I was involved in a number of years ago in the Ceph program on the Irish government network and, so these would have been very big. And one of the earliest to be honest, Ceph firm I was involved with probably around five, six years ago, perhaps. And the overlying architecture, funnily enough, was, as you probably have guessed by now was SUSE Enterprise. And here we are today building, you know, entire, entire Ceph scale out storage solutions with SUSE. So yeah, what we're seeing is an open ecosystem, a scalable ecosystem and a performant ecosystem that needs to be able to respond and that's what the partnership with SUSE is actually bringing. >> So, Marc, I guess the last thing I'd like to ask you is, you know, we're all dealing with the, the ripple effects of what are happening with the COVID-19 global pandemic. >> Sure. >> You know, I know I've seen online lots that Dell is doing, I'm wondering what is the impact that, you know, you're seeing and anything specific regarding, you know, how this impact partnerships and how, you know, tech communities come together in these challenging times? >> Yeah, that's a great question to end on, Stu. And I think it's times like we're living through at the moment when we see, you know, the real potential of, I guess of human and machine collaboration when you think of the industry we're in, when you think of some of the problems that we're trying to solve. Here we are, a global pandemic, we have a problem that's distributed by its very nature, and I'm trying to find patterns, I guess, I'm trying to model, you know, for the treatment of, you know, COVID-19 is something that's very, very close to our heart. So we're doing a lot on the technology side where we're looking to, as I said, model for treatment but also use distributed analytical architectures to collaborate with partners in order to be able to, you know, contribute to the effort of finding treatments for COVID-19. On the commercial side of things then Dell Tech are doing a huge amount so, you know, we're, for instance, we're designing a, we're designing a financial model or framework, if you will, where our customers and our partners have, you know, can take our infrastructure and our partners infrastructure and those collaborations that we spoke about today. And they can land them into their ecosystem with pretty much zero percent finance. And so it's kind of a, it's an opportunity where, you know, we're taking the technology and we're taking the capability to land that technology into these ecosystems at a very, very low cost, but also give organizations the breadth and opportunity to consume those technologies without having to worry about, you know, ultimately paying up front they can start to look at the financial model that will suit them and that will, that will, that will, hopefully, accelerate their time, their time to market, trying to solve some of these problem that we've been speaking about. >> Well, Marc, thank you so much for the updates. Definitely good to hear about the technology pieces as well as some of these impacts that will have a more global impact. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, my pleasure. Thank you, take care and stay safe. >> Thanks, same to you. All right, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more covered from SUSECON Digital '20. Thank you, for always, for watching theCUBE. 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>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by Five9. >> Welcome back to Orlando, Florida. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Minuteman and we are live on day one of Enterprise Connect 2019. You can hear a ton of people behind us at the expo centers it's getting busier and busier throughout the day. We're welcoming to theCube, for the first time, John Bourne, the Senior Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances at Verint. John thanks for joining us on theCube this afternoon. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I know we're in Five9's booth, so graciously hosting us this week. Verint is a partner of Five9, which we'll get into in a second. But give us a little bit about who Verint is, what your main brand is and how you're helping customers. >> Sure, so you know Verint has branded itself as a customer engagement company. We do employee and customer engagement solutions. We sit on top of CaaS like Five9, although Five9 is probably our biggest and most strategic partner in the space. And we provide everything end-to-end including work for software optimization, which was our legacy, but now we also provide digital feedback and outbound surveys and bots and AI and all the other things everyone else is talking about here as well. But the thing that makes us different is we're completely agnostic to the infrastructure that we sit on top of. And we'll mix and match pieces of our portfolio with the vendors pieces as well. And so we have an IVR but we don't use our IVR with CaaS vendors, for example, we use theirs. Just an example. >> What a pivot on the word legacy that you mentioned, because you have been to this event, which has been around for a very long time. Many, many years back when it was VoiceCon, so you've seen a lot of vendors that, probably, weren't even here five or 10 years ago. Tell us a little about the evolution and communication and customer experience as table stakes for a business. >> Let me talk about the industry for bit, because I'm fascinated by this. As an English guy, we don't get excited very often, but let me tell ya, it's really exciting times to be in this industry. I remember when we went from TDM to voiceover IP and that was the biggest thing that ever happened. If you think back to that, what's happening now, it's unreal. There are more vendors, more players, more solutions, more, more good stories that are talking about real customer outcomes today than there ever were before. You have to remember our industry is quite conservative. We're sort of laggers, quite conservative. We build bulletproof systems that work. And the phone always worked and dial tone was always there, but it's a whole new world, as you know. >> John, you bring up some great points here. I think about networking and telecommunications, we used to measure these things, you'd put it out in the decade of change. >> Absolutely. >> We'd go through this and then the standard rolls out and then the customer adoption. But you brought up this excitement here. When I look at my career, you scroll back a couple of decades ago, the importance of data, the importance of intelligence of the systems, we actually talked about some of those terms. It's different now. >> Very different. >> Maybe explain a little bit why it's so much different. Billions of customers out there, but why is it so exciting today. >> So, if you look at our industry, as far as- and even true for us, right? We really didn't even know who the customer was. We only cared about the interaction and we were building systems that would optimize the performance of the agent. Or we'd make sure there were enough agents with the right skills at the right time. It was all about agents and interactions. Now, we're seeing the confluence of customer engagement management, which means we're more integrated with CRM systems, we care about the customer's journey. So our perspective has changed, it's much more than just the agent. But we're not forgetting the agent. So, customer experience is very important, obviously, but so is the employee experience as well. It's both. We cater to both sides of that. >> When you're having customer conversations, I'm curious, where does that come up in terms of pivoting, or maybe over rotating towards improving customer experience? Because we have spent, historically, time ensuring that the agents are properly trained. Are they kind of over rotating back? Because they're so closely related. >> That's a great questions. Let's talk about how the buyer's changed, right? And you'll remember this. In the old days, you were selling to the techies or IT. Especially true with Five9 and many others, we're now selling to the business, we're selling business outcomes. They don't want to know about the technology underneath, they want to know what sort of experience their customer's going to have when they interact with them as a businesses. Providing the seamless journey regardless of the channel they're using. Voice is obviously still big, voice is not going away, no matter what anyone may tell you. Voice conversations are getting more complex but they're so much more self service now, both reactive and proactive. It's fun, but tying it all together, it's hard, it's hard. >> One of the things in this space, these are not push button simple solutions that are rolling out. When I talked to Five9 getting ready for this, they said, look, it's in the cloud and could someone do this on there, sure. But we white glove it, we really engage there. As a key partner of yours, how do you see that? Where does that tie into what Verint's doing? >> What we do with Five9, all of that technology is deployed, collocated with Five9's environment. It's the way we get the tighter integration. It's the way, when we're provisioning new tenets, so that everything gets done at the same time. It's not easier to do it that way. And again, I'll come back to the buyer, the buyer's the business and they're saying this is the outcome I want. And I just want to deal with one vendor and I want to pay per agent, per month for everything. That's the thing that's so different. It's an OpEx budget as well and that's where the world is going. I think perpetual licenses should be gone in the next two or three year, but they're still out there, they're still out there. >> One of the things I'm curious about is, we've been in this multichannel world, we're now in an omnichannel world that all of us as consumers are demanding. We want to be able to not just be able to talk to a contact center and agent on any channel we want, but want to have that conversation integrated so that there is progress from issue identification all the way to resolution. Where are businesses on that maturation of actually delivering an integrated omni channel experience? >> I think that's a really good question and I think that truth of it is it's still fairly early for most businesses. Because one, it's hard to do. If you look around the show, there are all sorts of vendors here who do one point solution, one piece. To make this work in a true integrated journey, the bots and the IVRs need to be communicating with the digital channels and email and chat and the self service channels on the web, as well as the voice. Because ultimately, what really matters to us as a consumer is when we do actually end up talking to an agent. We want them to know everything we've already done, and, quite frankly, we didn't really want to be talking to a live person unless we absolutely have to. Repeating all that is the biggest frustration out there. Getting all that tied together, that's what Verint does with Five9 together. That's really what makes us different and that's hard, it's hard. >> When you look at- these are business buyers, meaning to you, to deliver business outcomes, what are some of the key metrics that customers use? I mean when we think of context, we think of customer lifetime value, net promoter score. What are some of the key indicators that you help them? >> Those are exactly it. It's customer experience, it's however they decide to measure customer experience. It's like you said, some of them like a net promoter score, some of them have far more complex scenarios. It's all this stuff about average handle time, first time resolution, it's not important. It's all about what was the experience the customer had, was it seamless? Are they going to be loyal? But everybody measures it differently. It's not, from what I've seen anyway. >> John, one of the things I love coming to an event like this is you get to talk to some of the users and hear from some of the users. My understanding is Verint has some of your customers talking and sharing their journeys. Maybe give us a little insight into some of the flavor of what customers are going to be talking about here at the show this week. >> We have several customers that are doing sessions here. We've got, one of our customer's talking about what they're doing with speech analytics and the ability to understand the conversations that people are having. It wasn't that long ago you could go to our contact centers, supervisor, or a manager and say, well, what conversations are your agent having? I don't know, I don't care. That's all changed, now people really want to understand what are people talking about. The sentiment analysis is incredibly important, that's where things like speech analytics comes in. We've got other people here that are talking about the digital experiences, how they're marrying together the web interactions that customers have with their contact centers. A couple of years ago that never happened either. Contact centers were always very insular and were always the cost center. People of science realizing, intellectually they've always understood it, but somehow they haven't capitalized on the fact that the contact centers is the one place that is the face of the company for most consumers. And we need to get serious about them. >> Absolutely. Are you seeing this has a horizontal opportunity that lots of industries are taking advantage of? Or are there some early adopters who have really serious need to pivot quickly? >> Another really good questions. It is a very horizontal plane, but I'll tell you, the way the banks moved the big banks, the big insurance companies move, is different from maybe some of the smaller retail players. I think there are, even though the technology's the same, there still are some sweeps you can do. What people have on their desktop, what agents have on their desktops, for example, varies quite a bit. A lot of retail companies have Salesforce on their desktop, or Zendesk, or one of those types of products which, obviously, we all integrate with. The bigger companies are still running Legacy. The banks, the insurance companies, the telecos, they're running mainframes still in the background. There's all sorts of stuff on the agent's desktop. It's different, it's different. They're all active, I wouldn't tell you that there are any laggard industry verticals, but they're all coming at this at a different way. The banks especially need this. The insurance companies need this. Loyalty is so critical to them. And then retail, obviously they want to sell stuff. They want you to keep coming back and buy more stuff and they're competing with people like Amazon. Amazon does it really well. >> It's interesting, the question is, sometimes, if I'm a smaller or younger company that doesn't have all of the legacy, then a lot of times I have an opporutnity to be able to do things a new way. >> And that's the beauty about cloud, right? Now, probably for the first time ever I can be a relatively small contact center and I can get all this functionality and affordable price. I couldn't do that before because it was all premise based, it was big ticket, seven figure items, it's just not possible. Now, huge advantage for them now, huge advantage. >> Well John, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon and sharing what Verint is doing with Five9, and also the experiences and evolution that you're seeing in enterprise communication. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> For Stu Minuteman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

(uptempo techno music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana. It's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> One of the only constants in the technology world is that everything is always changing. Talking a lot about digital transformation. If I roll back to 2012, converged infrastructure, changes in data centers and infrastructure were all of the buzz, and it was before we were talking about things like hyper-converged infrastructure. We ran across a company called Nutanix. First interview we did in 2012 with Dheeraj Pandey, the CEO of the now public company. Surprised us a little bit in that not how they put things together but the why and what they had behind it. That almost 40 minute interview with John Furrier and I did really talked about the biggest challenge of our time is distributed architectures. Not about boxes, not about even just reconfiguring some of the silos but really some of the softer challenges that we've been attacking for decades really in our industry. Fast forward here we are in 2018 and want to welcome you to theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT Conference here in New Orleans. I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host for these two days of broadcast, Keith Townsend. Keith, thanks for joining me. >> Thanks for having me Stu. >> So we spend time, it's like what are we doing today? I think right down the block from here is the World War II monument, and how many years after World War II before it was called World War II? >> Keith: Yeah, good point. >> When we look back at what was happening converged infrastructure was a wave. At Wikibon, we were tracking cool things like flash really invading what's going on. Hyperscale architecture, for me personally I'd gone from looking at these enterprise architectures really hardware focused, failure domains, make sure that nothing ever breaks to the softer model of applications where you expect everything is going to break. And that's okay, chaos monkey rules supreme. At the end of the day, your application lives on. Much more granular, we weren't talking microsegmentation architectures and the like. Want to bring you in here, we've had the pleasure of being at every single Nutanix show. This is your first one for you so give us your first impressions of Nutanix .NEXT and what you're seeing. >> I go to a awful lot of shows and I've heard that Nutanix .NEXT was special and all to itself. I had breakfast with just customers, regular attendees, and there is slightly a different energy here. I was surprised at how open customers are about talking about their journey. Just talking about how they're using Nutanix. Where they have it deployed. Their origin stories much different atmosphere than many of the conferences that I've attended. >> And actually so when you talk software companies. There's certain shows where there's the passion and love. Keith, you and I cut our teeth on the virtualization community. >> Right. >> And I use to have the I love VMware bumper stickers and things like that. We've got a team at ServiceNow Knowledge. Dave Vellante said is one of the most passionate groups there. And it's interesting, some of the board members of Nutanix actually co-populate with what's going at ServiceNow. Another show we have going on this week is Red Hat. Obviously the open source community. Very passionate communities. The goal that Nutanix has is rather audacious. When they set out it's not like they said, "Hey, we want to be the leading "hyper-converged infrastructure player." They started in 2009. That word didn't even exist in our lexicon. They have a rather audacious goal. They want to be the next VMware in the model of Microsoft platform. What do they own, where does it fit? What does their ecosystem look like? And we've been watching this maturity, and we're going to have a lot of guests, customers, partners and executives but yeah, comments there. >> The goal is three billion dollars in software billings by 2011. I mean sorry by 2021. That is a big, big number. I think VMware revenues are somewhere around eight billion to put this into perspective, big ambitions. I think on stage, Sunil said that Nutanix is the world's best or leading cloud OS. That was a bold, bold statement. While one part of the Nutanix is a lot bravado backed with some pretty decent technology. The customers that we've talked to have said, they have not ran into a more humble company, and wanting to build brick by brick a relationship to help solve. I'm surprised that customers used this word, partner. They believe Nutanix is truly a partner in their journey towards cloud in delivering IT services. So while again, very bold from the financial statement, very bold from a technology statement. The customer passion here about Nutanix being a true partner in their journey. That's quite real. >> Yeah and it's interesting when you look at the pace of change. The half life of how long people love a brand has been shrinking very fast. >> Keith: Right. >> You think of the old days, it was brands like IBM and Microsoft had decades that they were in love. Apple still beloved by many but they get poked and poked and prodded. We talked about VMware, talked about Nutanix. The landscape today is one of the things. Let's talk about cloud for a second. You and I were making some comments in the Twitter stream during the keynote. When I think hybrid cloud, and I think who's got leadership there. Well first of all, you can't talk about cloud without talking about AWS. >> Keith: Right. >> First solution that anyone's going to support. The Nutanix solutions. It's either API compatibility or integration with what Amazon is doing. Secondly, you talk about hybrid. That's Microsoft's strategy from day one. Azure Stack, same OS, same operating model that's there. So for Nutanix to say they have the best. It's like Microsoft been doing this for a few years. They have a few more customers than Nutanix. >> Right. Not saying Nutanix is not doing great. They're adding a thousand customers a quarter, which is great for an infrastructure company. For a software company, it's good. >> Keith: Yes. >> It's not blowing it out of the water. If you're a Salesforce and you said, you're only adding a thousand new companies a quarter. It's like well Wall Street is not thrilled. So different space, how they're positioning themselves. We mentioned revenue. They're well over a billion dollars. Looking back, some of the shows we've done. I think it's like a $1.4 billion run rate. Market cap, a phenomenal nine billion dollars. When we talk about just value creation, the customers that they're doing. A lot of things really in the Nutanix tail wind pushing them along. As you said, coming to these shows it's always when you talk to the customers. When you talk to the customers in the hallway, are there certain things. It's like oh well we're glad the micro-segmentation stuff is something that we really wanted, but not the big gripes. They're not yet complaining about the pricing models. >> There is not a Nutanix text yet. Not a age retext. And it will be interesting, they made a lot of announcements today. Around Kalm, around flow, around database management. A lot of features. Extremely ambitious technically, and those technologies have to be paid for somehow. So long term, I really want to see if that love extends into when Nutanix needs to get to that three billion dollar in revenue. >> Yeah so maybe quick take on the announcement so far and the keynotes. I thought it was a good balance. A little bit of pageantry upfront, Mardi Gras. >> Keith: Marching band. >> The marching band and everything coming through. They had partners, Hackathon winners, customers up on the floats coming in. No beat probably four. Wanted to make sure that they weren't pegging somebody in the head with that stuff. But they had a good mix, I felt. They had a few customers onstage tell their stories. They got through the announcements. Some real meaningful announcements. Their first SaaS product with Beam. One of the four acquisitions that they've had over the last couple of years. That was from Minjar, was the acquisition. Netsol is another acquisition that they had recently and then Kalm was the basis. >> Keith: Right. >> A long with PernixData a couple years ago. Saccharin Vagoni, PernixData is somebody working on the IoT in Edge stuff. Keynote, announcements, what's your take? >> You know what, there's a lot there. They are innovating extremely fast. I think I interviewed Gar-iage, maybe a couple of years ago at Dell EMC World and I asked, is Nutanix a platform yet? And he say, "You know what. "We might be a little bit early to call Nutanix a platform. "I think today we've solved the completion of the foundation "of being called a platform." As we look out onto the show floor, we're starting to see a growing number of partners who are looking to integrate. We'll have Beam on later on in the program but specific announcements. The things that I'm somewhat excited about Netsil. They're taking a very different approach to network segmentation. And their micro segmentation and VM warriors. There are some advantages, disadvantages. Really looking forward to having that conversation. One click database management with Oracle and Microsoft. There's some guard rails around that we're thinking wow, how does Nutanix walk the line of making database administration deployment simple, but not anger Oracle to the point if there is court action. That's going to be an interesting set of conversation. >> I mean Keith, you know better than me. I hear database migrations and I just think of all the customer horror stories. David Foro from our Wikibon team has talked about, it's never easy. You'll get 80% or 90% of the way there and then things break, and you have to put it back together. AWS has been doing a lot of database migrations, and they've got 80, 90,000 of these that they've done. So how do they do this? It's great to say push button simplicity, but the proof is in the pudding. What are customers seeing? >> Yeah, when you're talking about big database mission critical. And that's another thing we heard on the stage this morning. A lot about mission critical. They're trying to shed this persona of being a VDI platform and that the platform is ready for mission critical applications. We've talked to customers that are indeed using it for mission critical stuff. But again, migration. They've had the relationship with IBM and Power for a couple of years now. And they still ran into a lot of customers that are saying they have no plans of moving AIX to Nutanix, however there's a plate. >> Well since you mention it actually, that was one of the announcements today. Nutanix is now supporting the AAX. >> Keith: Right. >> So before it was Power, now you need to get over to Linux, and that's something we've heard, gosh Keith. How long have we've been hearing the migration from Unix to Linux with the work load. 10 years ago, I remembered going events, and we were talking about that. And it's challenging, you need to-- >> Yeah, I remember getting excited about being-- >> The platform, the tool. >> Having IBM support Linux on mainframes, and thinking man I can finally get this stuff off of AIX. And then to Linux, and that was literally almost 20 years ago, so there you go. >> Yes, so many different announcements but started some the basic piece of it. 'Cause if you talk, there are customers that they have that are drawing over new things. We've got one of the customers that was on the keynote stage, Northern Trust. And he's throwing out things like PaaS and CaaS, which I'm hoping is containers as a service that he's talking about. Some of us propeller heads love talking about this. Lamb-dogot mentioned in the keynote talking about server list but the average Nutanix customers. This is the sand replacement. Many of the customers come and they say, going from my three tiered architecture, server, storage whether that be a traditional storage array or even an all flash array. I'm going to save 20%-40% just by collapsing it down to this architecture. Multi-Hypervisor, VMware of course very heavy, interesting dynamic always between VMware and Nutanix. Aged V growth, a little bit less of the aged V, the Acropolis Hypervisor and surrounding Acropolis services. At least to me, it felt a little bit less than before just 'cause the portfolio is broadening. But you've got so many pieces, it's basically almost any server you want. Nutanix is either an OEM or they will support it. There's all the Hypervisors they can connect to the cloud. When I look at that hybrid cloud message. It does start in your data center but it does extend to all of those pieces. If there is a little criticism I have there is that, at least my quick take. 50%-75% of the Nutanix customers are mostly of the, I use SaaS but I don't use a ton of public cloud. And therefore, I want to control my environment as opposed to but there are other customers that are, I'm doing a ton on Amazon, and Nutanix is great there. So went on about a bunch of things there. But just the base platform, what do you hear from people that are using Nutanix specifically HCI in general, and how that fits in the overall cloud picture? >> So overall they're cautious like you said. A lot of what core customers that I have talked to are very lets call it cloud anti pattern. However they're consuming Kalm, they're consuming Prism, they are consuming Nutanix in a cloud-like manner on premises. They're looking to one customer said, "To their internal customer, they are the cloud." They make IT and consuming Nutanix infrastructure simple, so it is a perspective thing. As we start to expand out Kalm and expect design become much more critical to this long term vision. And customers are still in a wait and see pattern. They're saying, "Well let's look." One to two years where the technology gets to be a little bit more mature. A little bit more tested. Tested by who is a good question and that ability to extend their internal infrastructure and operations to the external public cloud becomes more of a reality. >> Okay, Keith want you to just, what are you looking forward to get out of these next two days. Quick take from me. The three pieces that Sunil and Dheeraj been talking for a couple years. Invisible infrastructure, solid basis. They're there, they've got great feature functionality. I think when we talked to customers, other than these two features that VMware has that aren't yet here. I can move 75%-85% AIX one piece to get another 5% of that if we need. Invisible data centers, making good progress. Can see what they're doing today. They have a lot of the pieces. Things like Prism and Kalm are, Prism has been out for years, but Kalms GA and making progress. And then invisible clouds. First pieces are in place. They've got some software pieces there. What are we, look at Nutanix 3-5 years from now, are they a SaaS player? Are they primarily an infrastructure software player? The question I want to point to them. I had an interview with Rowan from Cisco, the number two guy and he said, "Cisco, the networking company. "10 years from now, they're a software company." It's not boxes and ports and things like that. So how far did they go as opposed to you and I were at Dell last week. Dell wants to be the leading infrastructure company, and therefore servers, storage, network are key pieces there. Tie into software, tie into cloud but that's my quick take around as to what I'm looking for. The progress that they're making is we always sniff out what's real. What has some work. Marketing is okay as long as the proof is in the pudding. >> We heard a lot about the delivery. Enterprise, cloud, company is the tag line. That is part of the company's brand. I want to understand how they make the claim. Not just how, how and why they made the claim. They are the leading enterprise cloud company. What does enterprise cloud mean to them when they say that? And you can't have a conversation about enterprise cloud without talking about the developer. So Nutanix by saying that they are enterprise cloud company is they're going in the opposite direction especially of Dell EMC. Dell EMC provides infrastructure to cloud companies. They might point to pivotal in VMware as being the software components of a complete cloud strategy. But Dell EMC itself, infrastructure company. Nutanix is making the claim, they are an enterprise cloud company. How are they pursing the relationship and capability with developers, infrastructure team, operations to make sure that they can live up to that mantle. >> Yeah, Keith, great point to help us wrap up one of the segments we heard talking about Edge computing. Nutanix wants to make invisible Kubernetes Tensorflow functions as a service. Made my head spin a little bit because we know the maturity of those solutions in what you need to do to understand it. So being able to simplify that. Well that would truly be genius. >> That would, if they can Nutanixise that, that will be great. >> Alright, well Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor. Thank you for helping me break down, looking forward to two days of interviews. I'm Stu Miniman. We're going to have wall to wall coverage here from the New Orleans convention center. Nutanix .NEXT 2018. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. (uptempo techno music)