(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here. We're exploring all the new Supercloud trends around multiple clouds, hyper scale gaps in their systems, new innovations, new applications, new companies, new products, new brands emerging from this big inflection point. Got a great guest who's going to unpack it with me today, Ramesh Prabagaran, who's the co-founder and CEO of Prosimo, CUBE alumni. Ramesh, legend in the industry, you've been around. You've seen many cycles. Welcome to Supercloud2. >> Thank you. You're being too kind. >> Well, you know, you guys have been a technical, great technical founding team, multiple ventures, multiple times around the track as they say, but now we're seeing something completely different. This is our second event, kind of we're doing to start the the ball rolling around unpacking this idea of Supercloud which evolved from a riff with me and Dave to now a working group paper, multiple definitions. People are saying they're Supercloud. CloudFlare says this is their version. Someone says there over there. Fitzi over there in the blog is always, you know, challenging us on our definitions, but it's, the consensus is though something's happening. >> Ramesh: Absolutely. >> And what's your take on this kind of big inflection point? >> Absolutely, so if you just look at kind of this in layers right, so you have hyper scalers that are innovating really quickly on underlying capabilities, and then you have enterprises adopting these technologies, right, there is a layer in the middle that I would say is largely missing, right? And one that addresses the gaps introduced by these new capabilities, by the hyper scalers. At the same time, one that actually spans, let's say multiple regions, multiple clouds and so forth. So that to me is kind of the Supercloud layer of sorts. One that helps enterprises adopt the underlying hyper scaler capabilities a lot faster, and at the same time brings a certain level of consistency and homogeneity also. >> What do you think the big driver of Supercloud is? Is it the industry growing up or is it the demand for new kinds of capabilities or both? Or just evolution? What's your take? >> I would say largely it depends on kind of who the entity is that you're talking about, right? And so I would say both. So if you look at one cohort here, it's adoption, right? If I have a externally facing digital presence, for example, then I'm going to scale that up and get to as many subscribers and users no matter what, right? And at that time it's a different set of problems. If you're looking at kind of traditional enterprise inward that are bringing apps into the cloud and so forth, it's a different set of care abouts, right? So both are, I would say, equally important problems to solve for. >> Well, one reality that we're definitely tracking, and it's not really a debate anymore, is hybrid. >> Ramesh: Yep >> Hybrid happened. It happened faster than most people thought. But, you know, we were talking about this in 2015 when it first got kicked around, but now you see hybrid in the cloud, on premises and the edge. This kind of forms that distributed computing paradigm that we've always been predicting. And so if that continues to play out the way it is, you're now going to have a completely distributed, connected internet and sets of systems, intra and external within companies. So again, the world is connected 100%. Everything's changing, right? >> And that introduces. >> It wasn't your grandfather's networking anymore or storage. The game is still the same, but the play, the components are acting differently. What's your take on this? >> Absolutely. No, absolutely. That's a very key important point, and it's one that we always ask our customers right at the front end, right? Because your starting assumptions matter. If you have workloads of workloads in the cloud and data center is something that you want to connect into, then you'll make decisions kind of keeping cloud in the center and then kind of bolt on technologies for what that means to extend it to the data center. If your center of gravity is in the data center, and then cloud is let's say 10% right now, but you see that growing, then what choices do you have? Right, do you want to bring your data center technologies into the cloud because you want that consistency in operations? Or do you want to start off fresh, right? So this is a really key, important question, and one that many of our customers are actually are grappling with, right? They have this notion that going cloud native is the right approach, but at the same time that means I have a bifurcation in kind of how do I operate my data center versus my cloud, right? Two different operating models, and slowly it'll shift over to one. But you're going to have to deal with dual reality for a while. >> I was talking to an old friend of mine, CIO, very experienced CIO. Big time company, large deployment, a lot of IT. I said, so what's the big trend everyone's telling me about IT's going. He goes no, not really. IT's not going away for me. It's going everywhere in the company. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> So I need to scale my IT-like capabilities everywhere and then make it invisible. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> Which is essentially code words for saying it's going to be completely cloud native everywhere. This is what is happening. Do you agree? >> Absolutely right, and so if you look at what do enterprises care about it? The reason to go to the cloud is to get speed of operations, and it's apps, apps, apps, right? Do you ever have a conversation on networking and infrastructure first? No, that kind of gets brought into the conversation because you want to deal with users, applications and services, right? And so the end goal is essentially how do users communicate with apps and get the right experience, security and whatnot, and how do apps talk to each other and make sure that you get all of the connectivity and security requirements? Underneath the covers, what does this mean for infrastructure, networking, security and whatnot? It's actually going to be someone else's job, right? And you shouldn't have to think too much about it. So this whole notion of kind of making that transparent is real actually, right? But at the same time, us and all the guys that we talk to on the customer side, that's their job, right? Like we have to work towards making that transparent. Some are going to be in the form of capability, some are going to be driven by data, but that's really where the two worlds are going to come together. >> Lots of debates going on. We just heard from Bob Muglia here on Supercloud2. He said Supercloud's a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So the question that's being debated is is Supercloud a platform or an architecture in your view? >> Okay, that's a tough one actually. I'm going to side on the side on kind of the platform side right, and the reason for that is architectural choices are things that you make ahead of time. And you, once you're in, there really isn't a fork in the road, right? Platforms continue to evolve. You can iterate, innovate and so on and so forth. And so I'm thinking Supercloud is more of a platform because you do have a choice. Hey, am I going AWS, Azure, GCP. You make that choice. What is my center of gravity? You make that choice. That's kind of an architectural decision, right? Once you make that, then how do I make things work consistently across like two or three clouds? That's a platform choice. >> So who's responsible for the architecture as the platform, the vendor serving the platform or is the platform vendor agnostic? >> You know, this is where you have to kind of peel the onion in layers, right? If you talk about applications, you can't go to a developer team or an app team and say I want you to operate on Google or AWS. They're like I'll pick the cloud that I want, right? Now who are we talking to? The infrastructure guys and the networking guys, right? They want to make sure that it's not bifurcated. It's like, hey, I want to make sure whatever I build for AWS I can equally use that on Azure. I can equally use that on GCP. So if you're talking to more of the application centric teams who really want infrastructure to be transparent, they'll say, okay, I want to make this choice of whether this is AWS, Azure, GCP, and stick to that. And if you come kind of down the layers of the stack into infrastructure, they are thinking a little more holistically, a little more Supercloud, a little more multicloud, and that. >> That's a good point. So that brings up the deployment question. >> Ramesh: Exactly! >> I want to ask you the next question, okay, what is the preferred deployment in your opinion for a Supercloud narrative? Is it single instance, spread it around everywhere? What's the, do you have a single global instance or do you have everything synchronized? >> So I would say first layer of that Supercloud really kind of fix the holes that have been introduced as a result of kind of adopting the hyper scaler technologies, right? So each, the hyper scalers have been really good at innovating and providing really massive scale elastic capabilities, right? But once you start to build capabilities on top of that to help serve the application, there's a few holes start to show up. So first job of Supercloud really is to plug those holes, right? Second is can I get to an operating model, so that I can replicate this not just in a single region, but across multiple regions, same cloud, and then across multiple clouds, right? And so both of those need to be solved for in order to be (cross talking). >> So is that multiple instantiations of the stack or? >> Yeah, so this again depends on kind of the capability, right? So if you take a more solution view, and so I can speak for kind of networking security combined right? There you always take a solution view. You don't ever look at, you know, what does this mean for a single instance in a single region. You take a macro view, and then you then break it down into what does this mean for region, what does it mean for instance, what does this mean for AZs? And so on and so forth. So you kind of have to go top to bottom. >> Okay, welcome you down into the trap now. Okay, synchronizing the data, latency, these are all questions. So what does the network Supercloud look like to you? Because networking is big here. >> Ramesh: Yes, absolutely. >> This is what you guys do. >> Exactly, yeah. So the different set of problems as you go up the stack, right? So if you have hundreds of workloads in a single region, the set of problems you're dealing with there are kind of app native connectivity, how do I go from kind of east/west, all of those fun things, right? Which are usually bound in terms of latency. You don't have those challenges as much, but can you build your entire enterprise application architecture in one region? No, you're going to have to create multiple instances, right? So my data lake is invariably going to be in one place. My business logic is going to be spread across a few places. What does that bring in? I need to go across regions. Am I going to put those two regions right next to each other? No, I'm not going to, right? I'm going to have places in Europe. I'm going to have APAC, and I'm going to have a North American presence, and I need to bring all these things together. So this is where, back to your point, latency really matters, right? Because I need to be able to find out not just best path but also how do I reduce the millisecond, microseconds that my application cares about, which brings in a layer of optimization and then so on and so on and so forth. So this is what we call kind of to borrow the Prosimo language full stack networking, right? Because I'm not just dealing with how do I go from one region to another because that's laws of physics. I can only control so much. But there are a few elements up the application stack in software that you can tweak to actually bring these things closer and closer. >> And on that point, you're seeing security being talked a lot more at the network layer. So how do you secure the Supercloud at the network layer? What's that look like? >> Yeah, we've been grappling with essentially is security kind of foundational, and then is the network on top. And then we had an alternative viewpoint which is kind of network and then security on top. And the answer is actually it's neither, right? It's almost like a meshed up sandwich of sorts. So you need to have networking security work really well together, right? Case in point, I mean we were talking to a customer yesterday. He said, hey, I have my data lake in one region that needs to talk to an analytics service in a completely different region of a different cloud. These two things just need to be able to talk to each other, which means I need to bring elements of networking. I need to bring elements of security, secure access, app segmentation, all of those things. Very simple, I have an analytics service that needs to contact a data lake. That's what he starts with, but then before you know it, it actually brings up a whole stack underneath, so that's. >> VMware calls that cloud chaos. >> Ramesh: Yes, exactly. >> And then that's the halfway point between cloud smart. Cloud first, cloud chaos, cloud smart, and the next thing, you can skip that whole step. But again, again, it's pick your strategy right? Again, this comes back down to your earlier point. I want to ask you from a customer standpoint, you got the hyper scalers doing very, very well. >> Ramesh: Yep, absolutely. >> And I love what their Amazon's doing. I think Microsoft again though they had a little bit of downgrade are catching up fast, and they have their installed base. So you got the land of the installed bases. >> Correct. >> First and greater, better cloud. Install base getting better, almost as good, almost as good is a gift, but close. Now you have them specializing. Silicon, special silicon. So there's gaps for other services. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And Amazon Web Services, Adam Selipsky's a open book saying, hey, we want our ecosystem to pick up these gaps and build on them. Go ahead, go to town. >> So this is where I think choices are tough, right? Because if you had one choice, you would work with it, and you would work around it, right? Now I have five different choices. Now what do I do? Our viewpoint is there are a bunch of things that say AWS does really, really well. Use that as a foundational layer, right? Like don't reinvent the wheel on those things. Transit gateways, global accelerators and whatnot, they exist for a reason. Billions of dollars have gone into building those things. Use that foundational layer, right? But what you want to build on top of that is actually driven by the application. The requirements of a lambda application that's serverless, it's very different than a packaged application that's responding for transactions, right? Like it's just completely very, very different. And so bring in the right set of capabilities required for those set of applications, and then you go based on that. This is also where I think whether something is a regional construct versus an overall global construct really, really matters, right? Because if you start with the assumption that everything is going to be built regionally, then it's someone else's job to make sure that all of these things are connected. But if you start with kind of the global purview, then the rest of them start to (cross talking). >> What are some of the things that the enterprises might want that are gaps that are going to be filled by the, by startups like you guys and the ecosystem because we're seeing the ecosystem form into two big camps. >> Ramesh: Yep. >> ISVs, which is an old school definition of independent software vendor, aka someone who writes software. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> SaaS app. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And then ecosystem software players that were once ISVs now have people building on top of them. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> They're building on top of the cloud. So you have that new hyper scale effect going on. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> You got ISVs, which is software developers, software vendors. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And ecosystems. >> Yep. >> What's that impact of that? Cause it's a new dynamic. >> Exactly, so if you take kind of enterprises, want to make sure that that their apps and the data center migrate to the cloud, new apps are developed the right way in the cloud, right? So that's kind of table stakes. So now what choices do they have? They listen to AWS and say, okay, I have all these cloud native services. I want to be able to instantiate all that. Now comes the interesting choice that they have to make. Do I go hire a whole bunch of people and do it myself or do I go there on the platform route, right? Because I made an architectural choice. Now I have to decide whether I want to do this myself or the platform choice. DIY works great for some, but you don't know what you're getting into, and it's people involved, right? People, process, all those fun things involved, right? So we show up there and say, you don't know what you don't know, right? Like because that's the nature of it. Why don't you invest in a platform like what what we provide, and then you actually build on top of it. We will, it's our job to make sure that we keep up with the innovation happening underneath the covers. And at the same time, this is not a closed ended system. You can actually build on top of our platform, right? And so that actually gives you a good mix. Now the care abouts are interesting. Some apps care about experience. Some apps care about latency. Some apps are extremely charty and extremely data intensive, but nobody wants to pay for it, right? And so it's a interesting Jenga that you have to play between experience versus security versus cost, right? And that makes kind of head of infrastructure and cloud platform teams' life really, really, really interesting. >> And this is why I love your background, and Stu Miniman, when he was with theCUBE, and now he's at Red Hat, we used to riff about the network and how network folks are now, those concepts are now up the top of the stack because the cloud is one big network effect. >> Ramesh: Exactly, correct. >> It's a computer. >> Yep, absolutely. No, and case in point, right, like say we're in let's say in San Jose here or or Palo Alto here, and let's say my application is sitting in London, right? The cloud gives you different express lanes. I can go down to my closest pop location provided by AWS and then I can go ride that all the way up to up to London. It's going to give me better performance, low latency, but I'm going to have to incur some costs associated with it. Or I can go all the wild internet all the way from Palo Alta up to kind of the ingress point into London and then go access, but I'm spending time on the wild internet, which means all kinds of fun things happen, right? But I'm not paying much, but my experience is not going to be so great. So, and there are various degrees of shade in them, of gray in the middle, right? So how do you pick what? It all kind of is driven by the applications. >> Well, we certainly want you back for Supercloud3, our next version of this virtual/live event here in our Palo Alto studios. Really appreciate you coming on. >> Absolutely. >> While you're here, give a quick plug for the company. Next minute, we can take a minute to talk about the success of the company. >> Ramesh: Absolutely. >> I know you got a fresh financing this past year. Plenty of money in the bank, going to ride this new wave, Supercloud wave. Give us a quick plug. >> Absolutely, yeah. So three years going on to four this calendar year. So it's an interesting time for the company. We have proven that our technology, product and our initial customers are quite happy with it. Now comes essentially more of those and scale and so forth. That's kind of the interesting phase that we are in. Also heartened to see quite a few of kind of really large and dominant players in the market, partners, channels and so forth, invest in us to take this to the next set of customers. I would say there's been a dramatic shift in the conversation with our customers. The first couple of years or so of the company, we are about three years old right now, was really about us educating them. This is what you need. This is what you need. Now actually it's a lot of just pull, right? We've seen a good indication, as much as a hate RFIs, a good indication is the number of RFIs that show up at our door saying we want you to participate in this because we want to understand more, right? And so as a, I think we are at an interesting point of the, of that shift. >> RFIs always like do all this work and hope for the best. Pray for a deal. You know, you guys on the right side of history. If a customer asks with respect to Supercloud, multicloud, is that your focus? Is that the direction you guys are going into? >> Yeah, so I would say we are kind of both, right? Supercloud and multicloud because we, our customers are hybrid, multiple clouds, all of the above, right? Our main pitch and kind of value back to the customers is go embrace cloud native because that's the right approach, right? It doesn't make sense to go reinvent the wheel on that one, but then make a really good choice about whether you want to do this yourself or invest in a platform to make your life easy. Because we have seen this story play out with many many enterprises, right? They pick the right technologies. They do a simple POC overnight, and they say, yeah, I can make this work for two apps, right? And then they say, yes, I can make this work for 100. You go down a certain path. You hit a wall. You hit a wall, and it's a hard wall. It's like, no, there isn't a thing that you can go around it. >> A lot of dead bodies laying around. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> Dead wall. >> And then they have to unravel around that, and then they come talk to us, and they say, okay, now what? Like help me, help me through this journey. So I would say to the extent that you can do this diligence ahead of time, do that, and then, and then pick the right platform. >> You've got to have the talent. And you got to be geared up. You got to know what you're getting into. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> You got to have the staff to do this. >> And cloud talent and skillset in particular, I mean there's lots available but it's in pockets right? And if you look at kind of web three companies, they've gone and kind of amassed all those guys, right? So enterprises are not left with the cream of the crop. >> John: They might be coming back. >> Exactly, exactly, so. >> With this downturn. Ramesh, great to see you and thanks for contributing to Supercloud2, and again, love your team. Very technical team, and you're in the right side of history in this one. Congratulations. >> Ramesh: No, and thank you, thank you very much. >> Okay, this is Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: theCUBE presents Ignite 22. Brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Palo Alto Ignite 2022. Dave we're just talking about how many times we're in Vegas. And we were here two weeks ago with our guest who's back in Alumni. And it's a blur, right? >> It's true, I lost count. Luckily I'm not flying red eye tonight. So that's good. >> I'm impressed. >> Excited about that. >> Yeah >> I'm actually going to enjoy the, nightlife here for a period of time. And, you know, we were at re-Invent. >> Yeah. >> And what a difference. This is nice and relaxed. You have time. You're not getting bumped in the hallway. >> Right. >> A lot of time for learning. So it's been great show. >> It's been great. And one of the things that we've been talking about is the supply chain. Securing the modern software supply chain is really complicated. We've got an Alumni back with us, to talk about what Palo Alto is doing in that respect. Ankur Shah joins us. The SVP and GM of Cloud Security at Palo Alto Networks. Welcome back. >> Yeah, happy to be back. Good to see you again. Dave and Lisa. >> It's been two long weeks. >> Ankur: I know. It's been two weeks, yeah >> Dave: It's kind of crazy. I mean, ReInvent really was a blur. And it's like you had everything coming at you. And there was obviously a big chunk of security, but you. It was just so much to absorb. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> Yeah, and I couldn't get into any of the sessions versus at Ignite. I mean, you could, you could learn a lot. To your point Dave. And 70,000 people versus 3000 in change. Big difference. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Lisa: Huge difference. >> Yeah. >> Lisa: Huge difference. So we touched on the Cider acquisition. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> Which was announced the intent to acquire last month. Let's dig into a little bit more of that, and then some of the great things that had been announced. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> In the last couple of days. >> Oh, absolutely. So, this is something that we have been marinating for last nine months. Thinking about how best to secure supply chain. And this is software supply chain. The modern application software is fairly complex. You know, back in the days when I was a developer, it was a simple three tier application. Ship the code once a year, et cetera. But now with microservices, new architectures, Kubernetes Public Cloud, we talked about this. It's getting super complicated, and the customers are really worried about securing their entire supply chain. Which is nothing but the software pipeline. And so we started looking at a whole bunch of companies and Cider really stood out. I mean, they had, they were the innovators in this space. Very early days, we've seen supply chain attack. But there hasn't been a really good and strong solution in that space. And Cider just delivered that incredible team. Great technology, super excited about what that integration will look like. in the coming quarters. >> What do we need to know about them? I mean, I'll be honest with you, I wasn't familiar with Cider until I saw you guys made the announcement of the intent to acquire them. What, what should we know about them? Why Cider? What was it that attracted you to them? >> Ankur: Yeah, so, you know, we have a history of technology acquisitions as you know, over the last four years, just in the public cloud. We acquire over half a a dozen companies, small and large. And typically we are always looking for companies who have the next gen technology available. Technology that is more in tune with how application software is going to look like in future. So we're not always going after companies that are making you know, tens of hundreds of millions of dollars in a year and all. We're looking for the right tech. The future. And that's what we found in Cider. Like they have a really strong application security background. And AppSec just broadly speaking, supply chain is part of it. But application security, just broadly speaking, is right for disruption. You've got a lot of vendors, who have been around for like last two decades. Old school stuff, lots and lots of false positives. So we've been bolstering, beefing up our portfolio in the application security space. And Cider really fits right nicely into it. Because it can like I said, secure a lot of technology and tooling, that software developers use as part of their software supply chain. So, great founding team, great technology. It was a perfect fit. >> Talk about integration. We spoke with Nikesh yesterday, with Nir, with a whole bunch of folks. Lee this morning. BJ yesterday as well. And one of the things that seems to stick out at me. With all the shows that we do, is the focus that Palo Alto has on ensuring that it's making the right acquisitions. But that it's the integration, is really seems to be like leading part of the strategy. That seems to be a little bit of a differentiator to me. >> Yeah, it absolutely is. There are two ways to integrate a technology into an existing platform. And Prisma Cloud is a platform as you know. Code-to-cloud, CNAPP platform as we call it. One is just kind of slotted in, put the whole thing in a box. And that's basically making one plus one equal to two. We're looking for high leverage in integrations, whereby once that integration comes along. It makes the rest of the platform even better and superior. It makes that technology look even better. So that's why there's a lot of focus on ensuring that we're delivering the right type of integration, that delivers instant customer value. And that makes the overall platform even superior. So customers don't feel like hey, like there's just one more add-on, on top of the other thing. >> Lisa: Right, not a bolt on. >> So that's why there's a lot of focus on that. Getting the strategy nailed. Because the founding teams generally have a preconceived notion about how the world looks like. Then they understand how Prisma cloud and Palo Alto Networks think about it. And then, we sort of merge the two ideas, and build something that's incredible. So I am, we're spending a lot of time in integration. That honeymoon phase of like, let's high five acquisitions done, that's over. Now it's the grinding work of actually getting this right. And you know, getting hundreds and thousands of customers. >> Well I like how you don't have the private equity mentality. It's not about EBITDA and cashflow. We'll take care of that. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> You know, it's about getting that integration. Getting that flywheel effect, inside the platform. You know, we said one plus one equals, maybe even more than two. Can you explain Prisma Cloud Secrets Security? What is that all about? What do we need to know about that? >> Ankur: Absolutely. So, the developers, you know generally store some stuff in the code repo for their automation work to build application. And that thing, the API keys or as Secrets are stored in code repo. It shouldn't be. Or even if they are, they should be encrypted, or locked down and things of that nature. But, you know, the need for speed trumps everything else. Developers want to go fast. And sometimes they're like, okay well. I guess my application needs this particular, you know API access token or secret. I'm just going to stick it in the code. Now the challenge with that is that, if somebody gets hold of your code repo. Now not only is your code repo, which has all your sensitive data. Your code is the life and blood of a technology company. That's in trouble. But also those secrets and API access keys can be used to log into your cloud accounts. And there you may have sensitive customer data. Everything that you have as a technology company stored in that public cloud accounts. So that's the worry. It's usually the initial access for the kill chain. Because that's where the attacks start. Let me get the secret, let me get the API access key. And let me see what I can do in public cloud. So we are now giving customers the visibility into where the secrets are stored. More importantly, it just right there on developer's face. In the code repo as they're checking in the code. They say why, hey, there's a secret here. Are you sure you want to, you want to keep it like this, no? Okay, well then you can either encrypt it, or just get rid of it. So we're making, we're bringing security where the developers are in their code repo, et cetera. >> So I can see a lot of developers saying, yeah, go ahead, encrypt it. So I don't have to do anything else, you know, extra. It's almost, the analogy is a very small you know, version of this. Its like, use a password manager. You store all your passwords in your contacts on your phone, right? I mean, somebody gets a hold of your contacts, you're screwed. >> Ankur: That's exactly right. >> And so, but I could still see a lot of developers say, check in the box. Say, yeah just encrypt it, leave it there. But you're saying best practice is to not to do that, right? >> Yeah, usually you're not supposed to, you know, store all your secrets, et cetera in code repo to begin with. But if you do, you know, you use a key wall like technology to really encrypt it and store it in a secret manner, yeah. >> Dave: There's an old saying, bad user behavior trump's great security every time. >> Ankur: Every time. >> But this is an example where, we know you're going to have bad behavior. So we're going to protect the bad behavior. >> Yeah, and actually, sorry Lisa, just to that point. The bad user behavior trumps good security. The classic example, this happened three weeks ago. Three, four weeks ago, where Dropbox, one of the file sharing companies there. 120 plus code repos were exposed. And the way their attack started, was a simple social engineering attack. Bad user behavior. There was an email, hey, like your passwords are updated for your, you know, this code plugin. Can you enter the password? And boom, now you have access to the code repo. And now if you have secrets inside of it, now, you know all bets are off. >> Are there hard-coded secrets versus like, I mean, like I think like, like you were saying, Dave. Like usernames and passwords and tokens, versus like soft coded secrets. >> Ankur: It's, I think it, this is more so two forms of it, you know. The most primary one is what we call the API access keys. And this keys are used to access cloud accounts, workloads and things of that nature. But there are actually secret secrets. Could be database login passwords, et cetera. The application is using it to spin up databases. Now, you know, you have access to the data stores. Any other application, there's a login password, all of that stuff. So it's less about the user password, but more the application and databases and things of that nature. >> Dave: So again, and, again, everybody should be using password managers. But when you use a password manager, it's going to give you a long list of passwords, that are either been compromised or are weak. And you just go uh, okay. So can you help? How do you help customers identify what the high risk? You know, API, you know, access are versus those ones that they may not have to worry about. >> Ankur: Yeah, look. You know, secrets aside. Risk prioritization is one of the biggest topics that our customers have across the board, in cloud security. All the security vendors are really, really good at one thing, generating alerts. Everybody does it. They generate an alert. You know, your ring camera, if you've got one. I mean this pop up every day, like every minute rather. Well like can you prioritize it for me? What should I really look at it? So that's a number one thing. What Prisma Cloud does is, you know, contextualize it. What the real risk is? They can tell you like, hey, here's the kill chain. If this thing, you know, goes to public internet. These are the potential exposures that you have. So we provide a prioritized risk of critical alerts that customers have to take care of before they can start taking care of more hygiene type of stuff, right? So that's how we do it. Like we leverage a lot of technology. We apply a lot of context. We tell you like, hey, this code repo is not protected by multifactor authentication. And then there's a secret inside. Are you sure, you know, you don't want to fix it? So that's what we do. But it's a great question. Top of mind for all our customers. And that's how we think about it across the board. Versus generating just alerts all the time. >> Dave: Is the strategy, Because we all know phishing is the sort of most, you know obvious way to. It's the top way in which people get hacked. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> Is your strategy essentially to say. Okay we know that's going to happen, so we're going to try to protect it at the back end. How much of the, maybe it's an industry question. more so than just a Palo Alto specifically, How much emphasis is do you think the industry is taking or should be taking on stopping that, you know that those phishing attacks? Because if that's the number one problem you know, maybe that's where we should be starting. >> Yeah, it's a great question. It's typically the initial vector, for a lot of attacks to your point. But there is one thing that technology and AI cannot solve. Which is the user behavior, to your point. Like we can't get into the heads of the user. I mean, you can train them, you can do everything. You can't prevent somebody from clicking a button. Of course there's technology out there for email security that does that. But your point is, right, it's going to happen. Now what do you do? How do you protect your applications, your crown jewel? You know, whether it's in the cloud or it's in the code repo. So a lot of what we are trying to do in code security, or cloud security, or in general at Palo Alto Networks. is to protect those crown jewel. Because we can't prevent somebody from doing something. User behavior is hard to change. >> Dave: So it's almost like, okay, you left your front door open. Somebody's going to walk in, but oh, they walk into a vault. And they don't know where to go. And there's nowhere they can- >> Ankur: Yeah. >> You know, nothing they can take. They can't get to the silverware or the jewelry. >> I think that's it, yeah. >> What are some of the things, like as we look at, we're wrapping up calendar year '22 heading into '23. That customers can look to Palo Alto Networks to help them achieve? One of the things that we talked about with Nikesh and Niri yesterday, is consolidation. Like, and you guys just did a recent, survey. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> About the state of Cyber, and organizations on average have 366 apps in their environment. 31 security tools, 30 to 50 security tools. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> Consolidation is really key there. What are some of the things that you are excited about to deliver to customers where consolidation is concerned? >> Ankur: Yeah. >> Where software supply chain security is concerned in the next year? >> Yeah, absolutely. Look, there are over 3000 security vendors. And this can be, I mean you talked about average customer having 300. I was talking to a CSO, this was last year for one of the largest financial institution I go, "How many security tools do you have?" He got 120. I said, why? He goes, we have a no vendor left behind policy. >> Wow. >> It's crazy. >> Dave: What? >> Obviously he was joking, but it's crazy, right? Like that's how the CSO's are. >> Dave: I mean, he was kidding. >> Yeah. >> Dave: But recognized that. Wow. >> Yeah, and, this is the state the security industry is in. And our mission has been, and Lee and Nikesh and Niri talked about it. Is just platforms, will platforms take moonshots, things long term. And especially the, macro headwinds that we're seeing. We're hearing more and more from the customers that, look we're not going to buy point product. Then we got to buy another product that stitches it all together. We need platforms, whether it's for zero trust, Prisma SaaS, whether it's cloud. Prisma cloud or for your sock transformation. You know XIM and Cortex line of products. So I think you're going to see more and more of that in 2023. I'm confident in that. >> We heard from Lee today, the world record's 400. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> That's crazy. >> He's going for it. He's got a ways to go. 120 He's got to... >> Maybe he wasn't, that guy wasn't kidding about his no vendor left behind policy. (laughing) Do you have Ankur, a favorite customer story that really articulates the value of what Palo Alto delivers and continues to. You know, 'cause one of the things that Nikesh said in his keynote was that you know, security's a data problem. Well every company these days, in every industry has to be a data company. But really what they need to be able to be is a secured data company. >> Ankur: Yeah. >> How are you guys enabling that? >> Oh, absolutely. Look, many customer examples come to mind, but speaking of data. You know, one of, some of our largest customers who are protecting their PCI workers where they have sensitive data. They're using for example, Prisma Cloud, to ensure that malicious attacks don't happen. And those workloads are used for credit card processing. They're processing tens of thousands of credit card transactions a second. And make sure that nobody gets hold of that. And that's why they have to make sure that nobody is. No attacker is trying to get hold of the sensitive data, to your point, So we have customers across financial services, media and entertainment technology company. Where we are helping them go as fast as possible in public cloud. Go through digital transformation, by securing their applications. >> Dave: What's the T-shirt say? I see code. >> Oh yeah. >> Dave: Secure from Code to Cloud. >> Lisa: Shift Happens. >> Shift Happens, Secrets from Code to Cloud. >> I love that. I was looking at that, going back to that, what's next in cyber survey? >> Ankur: Yeah. >> It said 74% of respondents, and I believe there was 1300 CIO's, CXO's that were surveyed globally. Where they said security is slowing down DevOps. Can customers look to Palo Alto Networks to help them? >> Ankur: Be enablers? >> Yes. >> Yeah, hundred percent. Look, the conversation over the last few years have changed now. Security used to say like, oh, I don't know about these people who are building applications. The DevOps is like security slowing down. I think there's an opportunity for companies like Palo Alto Networks, to build the bridge between the two. And the way we do it is make the securities easy, simple and not super intrusive. Where developers have to do a natural thing. And one part of it, and I talked about it earlier, is bring security where the developers are. In their code repo, in their IDE. Make it super simple. Don't make them do unnatural things. And it just, this is no different from changing the behavior of our kids. Right? Like you make them do unnatural things, they're not going to do it. But if it is part of their regular, you know, day-to-day operating procedures. I think they're going to be more open to change. Yeah. So I think it's possible. And Palo Alto has a huge responsibility to bridge the divide between the apps team, or the DevOps and the security organization. >> Lisa: Lots of great stuff to come. We thank you so much for coming back, two weeks. Only being on two weeks ago. We appreciate your insights, learning more information. It's great to see you at Palo Alto Ignite. And we'll have to have you back on. 'Cause we know that there's so much more to follow with respect to what you're doing. And shifting left, shift happens. >> Awesome. Lisa, Dave, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. >> Lisa: Thank you so much. For Ankur Shah and Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. The leader in live and emerging tech coverage.

>>The cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Good morning. Live from the MGM Grand. It's the cube at Palo Alto Networks Ignite 2022. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante, day two, Dave of our coverage, or last live day of the year, which I can't believe, lots of good news coming out from Palo Alto Networks. We're gonna sit down with its Chief product officer next and dissect all of that. >>Yeah. You know, oftentimes in, in events like this, day two is product day. And look, it's all about products and sales. Yeah, I mean those, that's the, the, the golden rule. Get the product right, get the sales right, and everything else will take care of itself. So let's talk product. >>Yeah, let's talk product. Lee Claridge joins us, the Chief Product Officer at Palo Alto Networks. Welcome Lee. Great to have >>You. Thank you so much. >>So we didn't get to see your keynote yesterday, but we heard one of the things, you know, we've been talking about the threat landscape, the challenges. We had Unit 42, Wendy on yesterday. We had Nash on and near talking about the massive challenges in the threat landscape. But we understand, despite that you are optimistic. I am. Talk about your optimism given the massive challenges that every organization is facing today. >>Look, cybersecurity's hard and often in cybersecurity in the industry, a lot of people get sort of really focused on what the threat actors are doing, why they're successful. We investigate breaches and we think of it, it just starts to feel somewhat overwhelming for a lot of folks. And I just happen to think a little bit differently. I, I look at it and I think it's actually a solvable problem. >>Talk about cyber resilience. How does Palo Alto Networks define that and how does it help customers achieve that? Cuz that's the, that's the holy grail these days. >>Yes. Look, the, the way I think about cyber resilience is basically in two pieces. One, it's all about how do we prevent the threat actors from actually being successful in the first place. Second, we also have to be prepared for what happens if they happen to find a way to get through, and how do we make sure that that happens? The blast radius is, is as narrowly contained as possible. And so the, the way that we approach this is, you know, I, I kind of think in terms of like threes three core principles. Number one, we have to have amazing technology and we have to constantly be, keep keeping up with and ideally ahead of what attackers are doing. It's a big part of my job as the chief product officer, right? Second is we, you know, one of the, the big transformations that's happened is the advent of, of AI and the opportunity, as long as we can do it, a great job of collecting great data, we can drive AI and machine learning models that can start to be used for our advantage as defenders, and then further use that to drive automation. >>So we take the human out of the response as much as possible. What that allows us to do is actually to start using AI and automation to disrupt attackers as it's happening. The third piece then becomes natively integrating these capabilities into a platform. And when we do that, what allows us to do is to make sure that we are consistently delivering cybersecurity everywhere that it needs to happen. That we don't have gaps. Yeah. So great tech AI and automation deliver natively integrated through platforms. This is how we achieve cyber resilience. >>So I like the positivity. In fact, Steven Schmidt, who's now the CSO of, of Amazon, you know, Steven, and it was the CSO at AWS at the time, the first reinforced, he stood up on stage and said, listen, this narrative that's all gloom and doom is not the right approach. We actually are doing a good job and we have the capability. So I was like, yeah, you know, okay. I'm, I'm down with that. Now when I, my question is around the, the portfolio. I, I was looking at, you know, some of your alternatives and options and the website. I mean, you got network security, cloud security, you got sassy, you got capp, you got endpoint, pretty much everything. You got cider security, which you just recently acquired for, you know, this whole shift left stuff, you know, nothing in there on identity yet. That's good. You partner for that, but, so could you describe sort of how you think about the portfolio from a product standpoint? How you continue to evolve it and what's the direction? Yes. >>So the, the, the cybersecurity industry has long had this, I'm gonna call it a major flaw. And the major flaw of the cybersecurity industry has been that every time there is a problem to be solved, there's another 10 or 20 startups that get funded to solve that problem. And so pretty soon what you have is you're, if you're a customer of this is you have 50, a hundred, the, the record is over 400 different cybersecurity products that as a customer you're trying to operationalize. >>It's not a good record to have. >>No, it's not a good record. No. This is, this is the opposite of Yes. Not a good personal best. So the, so the reason I start there in answering your question is the, the way that, so that's one end of the extreme, the other end of the extreme view to say, is there such a thing as a single platform that does everything? No, there's not. That would be nice. That was, that sounds nice. But the reality is that cybersecurity has to be much broader than any one single thing can do. And so the, the way that we approach this is, is three fundamental areas that, that we, Palo Alto Networks are going to be the best at. One is network security within network security. This includes hardware, NextGen, firewalls, software NextGen, firewalls, sassy, all the different security services that tie into that. All of that makes up our network security platforms. >>So everything to do with network security is integrated in that one place. Second is around cloud security. The shift to the cloud is happening is very real. That's where Prisma Cloud takes center stage. C a P is the industry acronym. If if five letters thrown together can be called an acronym. The, so cloud native application protection platform, right? So this is where we bring all of the different cloud security capabilities integrated together, delivered through one platform. And then security, security operations is the third for us. This is Cortex. And this is where we bring together endpoint security, edr, ndr, attack, surface management automation, all of this. And what we had, what we announced earlier this year is x Im, which is a Cortex product for actually integrating all of that together into one SOC transformation platform. So those are the three platforms, and that's how we deliver much, much, much greater levels of native integration of capabilities, but in a logical way where we're not trying to overdo it. >>And cider will fit into two or three >>Into Prisma cloud into the second cloud to two. Yeah. As part of the shift left strategy of how we secure makes sense applications in the cloud >>When you're in customer conversations. You mentioned the record of 400 different product. That's crazy. Nash was saying yesterday between 30 and 50 and we talked with him and near about what's realistic in terms of getting organizations to, to be able to consolidate. I'd love to understand what does cybersecurity transformation look like for the average organization that's running 30 to 50 point >>Solutions? Yeah, look, 30 to 50 is probably, maybe normal. A hundred is not unusual. Obviously 400 is the extreme example. But all of those are, those numbers are too big right now. I think, I think realistic is high. Single digits, low double digits is probably somewhat realistic for most organizations, the most complex organizations that might go a bit above that if we're really doing a good job. That's, that's what I think. Now second, I do really want to point out on, on the product guy. So, so maybe this is just my way of thinking, consolidation is an outcome of having more tightly and natively integrated capabilities. Got you. And the reason I flip that around is if I just went to you and say, Hey, would you like to consolidate? That just means maybe fewer vendors that that helps the procurement person. Yes. You know, have to negotiate with fewer companies. Yeah. Integration is actually a technology statement. It's delivering better outcomes because we've designed multiple capabilities to work together natively ourselves as the developers so that the customer doesn't have to figure out how to do it. It just happens that by, by doing that, the customer gets all this wonderful technical benefit. And then there's this outcome sitting there called, you've just consolidated your complexity. How >>Specialized is the customer? I think a data pipelines, and I think I have a data engineer, have a data scientists, a data analyst, but hyper specialized roles. If, if, let's say I have, you know, 30 or 40, and one of 'em is an SD wan, you know, security product. Yeah. I'm best of breed an SD wan. Okay, great. Palo Alto comes in as you, you pointed out, I'm gonna help you with your procurement side. Are there hyper specialized individuals that are aligned to that? And how that's kind of part A and B, how, assuming that's the case, how does that integration, you know, carry through to the business case? So >>Obviously there are specializations, this is the, and, and cybersecurity is really important. And so there, this is why there had, there's this tendency in the past to head toward, well I have this problem, so who's the best at solving this one problem? And if you only had one problem to solve, you would go find the specialist. The, the, the, the challenge becomes, well, what do you have a hundred problems to solve? I is the right answer, a hundred specialized solutions for your a hundred problems. And what what I think is missing in this approach is, is understanding that almost every problem that needs to be solved is interconnected with other problems to be solved. It's that interconnectedness of the problems where all of a sudden, so, so you mentioned SD wan. Okay, great. I have Estee wan, I need it. Well what are you connecting SD WAN to? >>Well, ideally our view is you would connect SD WAN and branch to the cloud. Well, would you run in the cloud? Well, in our case, we can take our SD wan, connect it to Prisma access, which is our cloud security solution, and we can natively integrate those two things together such that when you use 'em together, way easier. Right? All of a sudden we took what seemed like two separate problems. We said, no, actually these problems are related and we can deliver a solution where those, those things are actually brought together. And that's just one simple example, but you could, you could extend that across a lot of these other areas. And so that's the difference. And that's how the, the, the mindset shift that is happening. And, and I I was gonna say needs to happen, but it's starting to happen. I'm talking to customers where they're telling me this as opposed to me telling them. >>So when you walk around the floor here, there's a visual, it's called a day in the life of a fuel member. And basically what it has, it's got like, I dunno, six or seven different roles or personas, you know, one is management, one is a network engineer, one's a coder, and it gives you an X and an O. And it says, okay, put the X on things that you spend your time doing, put the o on things that you wanna spend your time doing a across all different sort of activities that a SecOps pro would do. There's Xs and O's in every one of 'em. You know, to your point, there's so much overlap going on. This was really difficult to discern, you know, any kind of consistent pattern because it, it, it, unlike the hyper specialization and data pipelines that I just described, it, it's, it's not, it, it, there's way more overlap between those, those specialization roles. >>And there's a, there's a second challenge that, that I've observed and that we are, we've, we've been trying to solve this and now I'd say we've become, started to become a lot more purposeful in, in, in trying to solve this, which is, I believe cybersecurity, in order for cyber security vendors to become partners, we actually have to start to become more opinionated. We actually have to start, guys >>Are pretty opinionated. >>Well, yes, but, but the industry large. So yes, we're opinionated. We build these products, but that have, that have our, I'll call our opinions built into it, and then we, we sell the, the product and then, and then what happens? Customer says, great, thank you for the product. I'm going to deploy it however I want to, which is fine. Obviously it's their choice at the end of the day, but we actually should start to exert an opinion to say, well, here's what we would recommend, here's why we would recommend that. Here's how we envisioned it providing the most value to you. And actually starting to build that into the products themselves so that they start to guide the customer toward these outcomes as opposed to just saying, here's a product, good luck. >>What's, what's the customer lifecycle, not lifecycle, but really kind of that, that collaboration, like it's one thing to, to have products that you're saying that have opinions to be able to inform customers how to deploy, how to use, but where is their feedback in this cycle of product development? >>Oh, look, my, this, this is, this is my life. I'm, this is, this is why I'm here. This is like, you know, all day long I'm meeting with customers and, and I share what we're doing. But, but it's, it's a, it's a 50 50, I'm half the time I'm listening as well to understand what they're trying to do, what they're trying to accomplish, and how, what they need us to do better in order to help them solve the problem. So the, the, and, and so my entire organization is oriented around not just telling customers, here's what we did, but listening and understanding and bringing that feedback in and constantly making the products better. That's, that's the, the main way in which we do this. Now there's a second way, which is we also allow our products to be customized. You know, I can say, here's our best practices, we see it, but then allowing our customer to, to customize that and tailor it to their environment, because there are going to be uniquenesses for different customers in parti, we need more complex environments. Explain >>Why fire firewalls won't go away >>From your perspective. Oh, Nikesh actually did a great job of explaining this yesterday, and although he gave me credit for it, so this is like a, a circular kind of reference here. But if you think about the firewalls slightly more abstract, and you basically say a NextGen firewalls job is to inspect every connection in order to make sure the connection should be allowed. And then if it is allowed to make sure that it's secure, >>Which that is the definition of an NextGen firewall, by the way, exactly what I just said. Now what you noticed is, I didn't describe it as a hardware device, right? It can be delivered in hardware because there are environments where you need super high throughput, low latency, guess what? Hardware is the best way of delivering that functionality. There's other use cases cloud where you can't, you, you can't ship hardware to a cloud provider and say, can you install this hardware in front of my cloud? No, no, no. You deployed in a software. So you take that same functionality, you instantly in a software, then you have other use cases, branch offices, remote workforce, et cetera, where you say, actually, I just want it delivered from the cloud. This is what sassy is. So when I, when I look at and say, the firewall's not going away, what, what, what I see is the functionality needed is not only not going away, it's actually expanding. But how we deliver it is going to be across these three form factors. And then the customer's going to decide how they need to intermix these form factors for their environment. >>We put forth this notion of super cloud a while about a year ago. And the idea being you're gonna leverage the hyperscale infrastructure and you're gonna build a, a, you're gonna solve a common problem across clouds and even on-prem, super cloud above the cloud. Not Superman, but super as in Latin. But it turned into this sort of, you know, superlative, which is fun. But the, my, my question to you is, is, is, is Palo Alto essentially building a common cross-cloud on-prem, presumably out to the edge consistent experience that we would call a super cloud? >>Yeah, I don't know that we've ever used the term surfer cloud to describe it. Oh, you don't have to, but yeah. But yes, based on how you describe it, absolutely. And it has three main benefits that I describe to customers all the time. The first is the end user experience. So imagine your employee, and you might work from the office, you might work from home, you might work while from, from traveling and hotels and conferences. And, and by the way, in one day you might actually work from all of those places. So, so the first part is the end user experience becomes way better when it doesn't matter where they're working from. They always get the same experience, huge benefit from productivity perspective, no second benefit security operations. You think about the, the people who are actually administering these policies and analyzing the security events. >>Imagine how much better it is for them when it's all common and consistent across everywhere that has to happen. Cloud, on-prem branch, remote workforce, et cetera. So there's a operational benefit that is super valuable. Third, security benefit. Imagine if in this, this platform-based approach, if we come out with some new amazing innovation that is able to detect and block, you know, new types of attacks, guess what, we can deliver that across hardware, software, and sassi uniformly and keep it all up to date. So from a security perspective, way better than trying to figure out, okay, there's some new technology, you know, does my hardware provider have that technology or not? Does my soft provider? So it's bringing that in to one place. >>From a developer perspective, is there a, a, a PAs layer, forgive me super PAs, that a allows the developers to have a common experience across irrespective of physical location with the explicit purpose of serving the objective of your platform. >>So normally when I think of the context of developers, I'm thinking of the context of, of the people who are building the applications that are being deployed. And those applications may be deployed in a data center, increasing the data centers, depending private clouds might be deployed into, into public cloud. It might even be hybrid in nature. And so if you think about what the developer wants, the developer actually wants to not have to think about security, quite frankly. Yeah. They want to think about how do I develop the functionality I need as quickly as possible with the highest quality >>Possible, but they are being forced to think about it more and more. Well, but anyway, I didn't mean to >>Interrupt you. No, it's a, it is a good, it's a, it's, it's a great point. The >>Well we're trying to do is we're trying to enable our security capabilities to work in a way that actually enables what the developer wants that actually allows them to develop faster that actually allows them to focus on the things they want to focus. And, and the way we do that is by actually surfacing the security information that they need to know in the tools that they use as opposed to trying to bring them to our tools. So you think about this, so our customer is a security customer. Yet in the application development lifecycle, the developer is often the user. So we, we we're selling, we're so providing a solution to security and then we're enabling them to surface it in the developer tools. And by, by doing this, we actually make life easier for the developers such that they're not actually thinking about security so much as they're just saying, oh, I pulled down the wrong open source package, it's outdated, it has vulnerabilities. I was notified the second I did it, and I was told which one I should pull down. So I pulled down the right one. Now, if you're a developer, do you think that's security getting your way? Not at all. No. If you're a developer, you're thinking, thank god, thank you, thank, thank you. Yeah. You told me at a point where it was easy as opposed to waiting a week or two and then telling me where it's gonna be really hard to fix it. Yeah. Nothing >>More than, so maybe be talking to Terraform or some other hash corp, you know, environment. I got it. Okay. >>Absolutely. >>We're 30 seconds. We're almost out of time. Sure. But I'd love to get your snapshot. Here we are at the end of calendar 2022. What are you, we know you're optimistic in this threat landscape, which we're gonna see obviously more dynamics next year. What kind of nuggets can you drop about what we might hear and see in 23? >>You're gonna see across everything. We do a lot more focus on the use of AI and machine learning to drive automated outcomes for our customers. And you're gonna see us across everything we do. And that's going to be the big transformation. It'll be a multi-year transformation, but you're gonna see significant progress in the next 12 months. All >>Right, well >>What will be the sign of that progress? If I had to make a prediction, which >>I'm better security with less effort. >>Okay, great. I feel like that's, we can measure that. I >>Feel, I feel like that's a mic drop moment. Lee, it's been great having you on the program. Thank you for walking us through such great detail. What's going on in the organization, what you're doing for customers, where you're meeting, how you're meeting the developers, where they are. We'll have to have you back. There's just, just too much to unpack. Thank you both so much. Actually, our pleasure for Lee Cler and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Palo Alto Networks Ignite 22, the Cube, the leader in live, emerging and enterprise tech coverage.

>>Partnerships in the technology business, they take many forms. For example, technology engineering partnerships, they drive value in terms of things like integration and simplification for customers. There are product partnerships. They fill gaps to create more comprehensive portfolios and more fluid relationships. Partner ecosystems offer high touch services. They offer managed services, specialty services, and other types of value based off of strong customer knowledge and years of built up trust partner. Ecosystems have evolved quite dramatically over the last decade with the explosion of data and the popularity of cloud models. Public, private, hybrid cross clouds. You know, yes it's true. Partnerships are about selling solutions, but they're also about building long term sustainable trust, where a seller learns the ins and outs of a customer's organization and can anticipate needs that are gonna drive bottom line profits for both sides of the equation, the buyer and the seller. >>Hello and welcome to our program. My name is Dave Ante and along with Lisa Martin, we're going to explore how Hitachi Van Tara drives customer success with its partners. First up, Lisa speaks with Kim King. She's the senior vice president of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Van. And they'll set the table for us with an overview of how Hitachi is working with partners and where their priorities are focused. Then Russell Kingsley, he's the CTO and global VP of Technical sales at Hitachi Van Tara. He joins Lisa for a discussion of the tech and they're gonna get into cloud generally and hybrid cloud specifically in the role that partners play in the growing as a service movement. Now, after that I'll talk with Tom Christensen, he's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Vitara. And we're gonna talk about a really important topic, sustainability. We're gonna discuss where it came from, why it matters, and how it can drive bottom line profitability for both customers and partners. Let's get right to it. >>Where for the data driven, for those who understand clarity is currency. Believe progress requires precision and no neutral is not an option. We're for the data driven. The ones who can't tolerate failure, who won't put up with downtime or allow access to just anyone. We're for the data driven who act on insight instead of instinct. Bank on privacy instead of probabilities and rely on resilience instead of reaction. We see ourselves in the obsessive, the incessant, progressive, and the meticulously engineered. We enable the incredible identify with the analytical and are synonymous with the mission critical. We know what it means to be data driven because data is in our dna. We were born industrial and and we breathe digital. We speak predictive analytics so you can keep supply chains moving. We bleed in store and online insights so you can accurately predict customer preferences. We sweat security and digital privacy so you can turn complex regulations into competitive advantage. We break down barriers and eliminate silos. So you can go from data rich to data driven because it's clear the future belongs to the data driven. >>Hey everyone, welcome to this conversation. Lisa Martin here with Kim King, the SVP of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Ventera. Kim, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you so much for joining me today. >>Thanks Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Let's talk about, so as we know, we talk about cloud all the time, the landscape, the cloud infrastructure landscape increasingly getting more and more complex. What are some of the biggest challenges and pain points that you're hearing from customers today? >>Yeah, so lot. There are lots, but I would say the, the few that we hear consistently are cost the complexity, right? Really the complexity of where do they go, how do they do it, and then availability. They have a lot of available options, but again, going back to complexity and cost, where do they think that they should move and how, how do they make that a successful move to the cloud? >>So talk to me, Hitachi Ventura has a great partner ecosystem. Where do partners play a role in helping customers to address some of the challenges with respect to the cloud landscape? >>Yeah, so part, our partners are really leading the way in the area of cloud in terms of helping customers understand the complexities of the cloud. As we talked about, they're truly the trusted advisor. So when they look at a customer's complete infrastructure, what are the workloads, what are the CRI critical applications that they work with? What's the unique architecture that they have to drive with that customer for a successful outcome and help them architect that? And so partners are truly leading the way across the board, understanding the complexities of each individual customer and then helping them make the right decisions with and for them. And then bringing us along as part of that, >>Talk to me a little bit about the partner landscape, the partner ecosystem at Hitachi Ventura. How does this fit into the overall strategy for the company? >>So we really look at our ecosystem as an extension of our sales organization and and really extension across the board, I would say our goal is to marry the right customer with the right partner and help them achieve their goals, ensure that they keep costs in check, that they ensure they don't have any security concerns, and that they have availability for the solutions and applications that they're trying to move to the cloud, which is most important. So we really, we really look at our ecosystem as a specialty ecosystem that adds high value for the right customers. >>So Kim, talk to me about how partners fit into Hitachi van's overall strategy. >>So I think our biggest differentiators with partners is that they're not just another number. Our partner organization is that valued extension of our overall sales pre-sales services organization. And we treat them like an extension of our organization. It's funny because I was just on a call with an analyst earlier this week and they said that AWS has increased their number of partners to 150,000 partners from, it was just under a hundred thousand. And I'm really not sure how you provide quality engagement to partners, right? And is how is that really a sustainable strategy? So for us, we look at trusted engagement across the ecosystem as a def differentiation. Really our goal is to make their life simple and profitable and really become their primary trusted partner when we go to market with them. And we see that paying dividends with our partners as they engage with us and as they expand and grow across the segments and then grow globally with us as well. >>And that's key, right? That synergistic approach when you're in customer conversations, what do you articulate as the key competitive differentiators where it relates to your partners? >>So really the, that they're the trusted advisor for that partner, right? That they understand our solutions better than any solution out there. And because we're not trying to be all things to our customers and our partners that we being bring best breaths of breed, best of breed solutions to our customers through our partner community, they can truly provide that end user experience and the successful outcome that's needed without, you know, sort of all kinds of, you know, crazy cha challenges, right? When you look at it, they really wanna make sure that they're driving that co-developed solution and the successful outcome for that customer. >>So then how do you feel that Hitachi Ventura helps partners really to grow and expand their own business? >>Wow, so that's, there's tons of ways, but we've, we've created a very simplified, what we call digital selling platform. And in that digital selling platform, we have allowed our partners to choose their own price and pre-approve their pricing and their promotions. They've actually, we've expanded the way we go to market with our partners from a sort of a technical capabilities. We give them online what we call Hitachi online labs that allow them to really leverage all of the solutions and demo systems out there today. And they have complete access to any one of our resources, product management. And so we really have, like I said, we actually provide our partners with better tools and resources sometimes than we do our own sales and pre-sales organization. So we, we look at them as, because they have so many other solutions out there that we have to be one step ahead of everybody else to give them that solution capability and the expertise that they need for their customers. >>So if you dig in, where is it that Hiti is helping partners succeed with your portfolio? >>Wow. So I think just across the board, I think we're really driving that profitable, trusted, and simplified engagement with our partner community because it's a value base and ease of doing business. I say that we allow them to scale and drive that sort of double digit growth through all of the solutions and and offerings that we have today. And because we've taken the approach of a very complex technical sort of infrastructure from a high end perspective and scale it all the way through to our mid-size enterprise, that allows them to really enter any customer at any vertical and provide them a really quality solution with that 100% data availability guarantee that we provide all of our customers. >>So then if we look at the overall sales cycle and the engagement, where is it that you're helping cus your partners rather succeed with the portfolio? >>Say that again? Sorry, my brain broke. No, >>No worries. So if we look at the overall sales cycle, where is it specifically where you're helping customers to succeed with the portfolio? >>So from the sales cycle, I think because we have the, a solution that is simple, easy, and really scaled for the type of customer that we have out there, it allows them to basically right size their infrastructure based on the application, the workload, the quality or the need that application may have and ensure that we provide them with that best solution. >>So then from a partner's perspective, how is it that Hitachi van is helping them to actually close deals faster? >>Yeah, so lots of great ways I think between our pre-sales organization that's on call and available a hundred percent of the time, I think that we've seen, again, the trusted engagement with them from a pricing and packaging perspective. You know, we, you know, two years ago it would take them two to three weeks to get a pre-approved quote where today they preapproved their own quotes in less than an hour and can have that in the hands of a customer. So we've seen that the ability for our partners to create and close orders in very short periods of time and actually get to the customer's needs very quickly, >>So dramatically faster. Yes. Talk about overall, so the partner relationship's quite strong, very synergistic that, that Hitachi Ventura has with its customers. Let's kind of step back out and look at the cloud infrastructure. How do you see it evolving the market evolving overall in say the next six months, 12 months? >>Yeah, so we see it significantly, we've been doing a lot of studies around this specifically. So we have a couple of different teams. We have our sort of our standard partner team that's out there and now we have a specialty cloud service provider team that really focuses on partners that are building and their own infrastructure or leveraging the infrastructure of a large hyperscaler or another GSI and selling that out. And then what we found is when we dig down deeper into our standard sort of partner reseller or value added reseller market, what we're seeing is that they are want to have the capability to resell the solution, but they don't necessarily wanna have to own and manage the infrastructure themselves. So we're helping both of them through that transition. We see that it's gonna, so it's funny cuz you're seeing a combination of many customers move to really the hyperscale or public cloud and many of them want to repatriate their infrastructure back because they see costs and they see challenges around all of that. And so our partners are helping them understand, again, what is the best solution for them as opposed to let's just throw everything in the public cloud and hope that it works. We're we're really helping them make the right choices and decisions and we're putting the right partners together to make that happen. >>And how was that feedback, that data helping you to really grow and expand the partner program as a whole? >>Yeah, so it's been fantastic. We have a whole methodology that we, we created, which is called PDM plan, develop monetize with partners. And so we went specifically to market with cloud service providers that'll, and we really tested this out with them. We didn't just take a solution and say, here, go sell it, good luck and have, you know, have a nice day. Many vendors are doing that to their partners and the partners are struggling to monetize those solutions. So we spend a lot of time upfront planning with them what is not only the storage infrastructure but your potentially your data resiliency and, and everything else that you're looking at your security solutions. How do we package those all together? How do we help you monetize them? And then who do you target from a customer perspective so that they've built up a pipeline of opportunities that they can go and work with us on and we really sit side by side with them in a co-development environment. >>In terms of that side by side relationship, how does the partner ecosystem play a role in Hitachi Venturas as a service business? >>So our primary go to market with our, as a service business is with and through partners. So our goal is to drive all, almost all of of our as a service. Unless it's super highly complex and something that a partner cannot support, we will make sure that they really, we leverage that with them with all of our partners. >>So strong partner relationships, very strong partner ecosystem. What would you say, Kim, are the priorities for the partner ecosystem going forward? The next say year? >>Yeah, so we have tons of priorities, right? I think really it's double digit growth for them and for us and understanding how a simpler approach that's customized for the specific vertical or customer base or go to market that they have that helps them quickly navigate to be successful. Our goal is always to facilitate trusted engagements with our partners, right? And then really, as I said, directionally our goal is to be 95 to a hundred percent of all of our business through partners, which helps customers and then really use that trusted advisor status they have to provide that value base to the customer. And then going back on our core tenants, which are, you know, really a trusted, simplified, profitable engagement with our partner community that allows them to really drive successful outcomes and go to market with us. And the end users >>Trust is such an important word, we can't underutilize it in these conversations. Last question. Sure. From a channel business perspective, what are some of the priorities coming down the pi? >>Oh, again, my biggest priority right, is always to increase the number of partner success stories that we have and increase the value to our partners. So we really dig in, we, we right now sit about number one or number two in, in our space with our partners in ease of doing business and value to our channel community. We wanna be number one across the board, right? Our goal is to make sure that our partner community is successful and that they really have those profitable engagements and that we're globally working with them to drive that engagement and, and help them build more profitable businesses. And so we just take tons of feedback from our partners regularly to help them understand, but we, we act on it very quickly so that we can make sure we incorporate that into our new program and our go to markets as we roll out every year. >>It sounds like a great flywheel of communications from the partners. Kim, thank you so much for joining me today talking about what Hitachi Vanta is doing with its partner ecosystem, the value in IT for customers. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you very much. >>Up next, Russell Kingsley joins me, TTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi van you watch in the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Hey everyone, welcome back to our conversation with Hitachi van Tara, Lisa Martin here with Russell Skillings Lee, the CTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi Van Russell. Welcome to the program. >>Hi Lisa, nice to be here. >>Yeah, great to have you. So here we are, the end of calendar year 2022. What are some of the things that you're hearing out in the field in terms of customers priorities for 2023? >>Yeah, good one. Just to, to set the scene here, we tend to deal with enterprises that have mission critical IT environments and this has been been our heritage and continues to be our major strength. So just to set the scene here, that's the type of customers predominantly I'd be hearing from. And so that's what you're gonna hear about here. Now, in terms of 20 23, 1 of the, the macro concerns that's hitting almost all of our customers right now, as you can probably appreciate is power consumption. And closely related to that is the whole area of ESG and decarbonization and all of that sort of thing. And I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on that one because that would be a whole session in itself really, but sufficient to say it is a priority for us and we, we are very active in, in that area. >>So aside from from that one that that big one, there's also a couple that are pretty much in common for most of our customers and, and we're in areas that we can help. One of those is in an exponential growth of the amount of data. It's, it's predicted that the world's data is going to triple by 2025 as opposed to where it was in 2020. And I think everyone's contributing to that, including a lot of our customers. So just the, the act of managing that amount of data is, is a challenge in itself. And I think closely related to that, a desire to use that data better to be able to gain more business insights and potentially create new business outcomes and business ideas are, is another one of those big challenges in, in that sense, I think a lot of our customers are in what I would kind of call, I affectionately call the, the post Facebook awakening era. >>And that, and what I mean by that is our traditional businesses, you know, when Facebook came along, they kind of illustrated, hey, I can actually make some use out of what is seemingly an enormous amount of useless data, which is exactly what Facebook did. They took a whole lot of people's Yeah. The minutia of people's lives and turned it into, you know, advertising revenue by gaining insights from, from those, you know, sort of seemingly useless bits of data and, you know, right. And I think this actually gave rise to a lot of digital business at that time. You know, the, this whole idea of what all you really need to be successful and disrupt the business is, you know, a great idea, you know, an app and a whole bunch of data to, to power it. And I think that a lot of our traditional customers are looking at this and wondering how do they get into the act? Because they've been collecting data for decades, an enormous amount of data, right? >>Yes. I mean, every company these days has to be a data company, but to your point, they've gotta be able to extract those insights, monetize it, and create real value new opportunities for the business at record speed. >>Yes, that's exactly right. And so being able to, to wield that data somehow turn it, it kind of turns out our customer's attentions to the type of infrastructure they've got as well. I mean, if you think about those, those companies that have been really successful in leveraging that data, a lot of them have, especially in the early days, leverage the cloud to be able to build out their capabilities. And, and the reason why the cloud became such a pivotal part of that is because it offered self-service. IT and, you know, easy development platforms to those people that had these great ideas. All they needed was access to, to, you know, the provider's website and a credit card. And now all of a sudden they could start to build a business from that. And I think a lot of our traditional IT customers are looking at this and thinking, now how do I build a similar sort of infrastructure? How do I, how do I provide that kind of self-service capability to the owners of business inside my company rather than the IT company sort of being a gatekeeper to a selected set of software packages. How now do I provide this development platform for those internal users? And I think this, this is why really hybrid cloud has become the defacto IT sort of architectural standard, even even for quite traditional, you know, IT companies. >>So when it comes to hybrid cloud, what are some of the challenges the customers are facing? And then I know Hitachi has a great partner ecosystem. How are partners helping Hitachi Ventura and its customers to eliminate or solve some of those hybrid cloud challenges? >>Yeah, it's, it, it's a great question and you know, it's, it's not 1975 anymore. It's not, it's not like you're going to get all of your IT needs from, from one, from one vendor hybrid by sort of, it's, you know, by definition is going to involve multiple pieces. And so there basically is no hybrid at all without a partner ecosystem. You really can't get everything at, at a one stop shop like you used to. But even if you think about the biggest public cloud provider on the planet, aws even, it has a marketplace for partner solutions. So, so even they see, even for customers that might consider themselves to be all in on public cloud, they are still going to need other pieces, which is where their marketplace come comes in. Now for, for us, you know, we are, we're a company that, we've been in the IT business for over 60 years, one of one of the few that could claim that sort of heritage. >>And you know, we've seen a lot of this type of change ourselves, this change of attitude from being able to provide everything yourself to being someone who contributes to an overall ecosystem. So partners are absolutely essential. And so now we kind of have a, a partner first philosophy when it comes to our routes to market on, you know, not just our own products in terms of, you know, a resale channel or whatever, but also making sure that we are working with some of the biggest players in hybrid infrastructure and determining where we can add value to that in our, in our own solutions. And so, you know, when it comes to those, those partner ecosystems, we're always looking for the spaces where we can best add our own capability to those prevailing IT architectures that are successful in the marketplace. And, you know, I think that it's probably fair to say, you know, for us, first and foremost, we, we have a reputation for having the biggest, most reliable storage infrastructure available on the planet. >>And, and we make no apologies for the fact that we tout our speeds and feeds and uptime supremacy. You know, a lot of our, a lot of our competitors would suggest that, hey, speeds and feeds don't matter. But you know, that's kind of what you say when, when you're not the fastest or not the most reliable, you know, of course they matter. And for us, what we, the way that we look at this is we say, let's look at who's providing the best possible hybrid solutions and let's partner with them to make those solutions even better. That's the way we look at it. >>Can you peel the, the onion a little bit on the technology underpinning the solutions, give a glimpse into that and then maybe add some color in terms of how partners are enhancing that? >>Yeah, let me, let me do that with a few examples here, and maybe what I can do is I can sort of share some insight about the way we think with partnering with, with particular people and why it's a good blend or why we see that technologically it's a good blend. So for example, the work we do with VMware, which we consider to be one of our most important hybrid cloud partners and in, and in fact it's, it's my belief, they have one of the strongest hybrid cloud stories in the industry. It resonates really strongly with, with our customers as well. But you know, we think it's made so much better with the robust underpinnings that we provide. We're one of the, one of the few storage vendors that provides a 100% data availability guarantee. So we, we take that sort of level of reliability and we add other aspects like life cycle management of the underpinning infrastructure. >>We combine that with what VMware's doing, and then when you look at our converged or hyper-converged solutions with them, it's a better together story where you now have what is one of the best hybrid cloud stories in the industry with VMware. But now for the on premise part, especially, you've now added a hundred percent data, data availability guarantee, and you've made managing the underlying infrastructure so much easier through the tools that we provide that go down to that level A level underneath where VMware are. And so that's, that's VMware. I've got a couple, couple more examples just to sort of fill, fill that out a bit. Sure. Cisco is another part, very strong partner of ours, a key partner. And I mean, you look at Cisco, they're a 50 billion IT provider and they don't have a dedicated storage infrastructure of their own. So they're going to partner with someone. >>From our perspective, we look at Cisco's, Cisco's customers and we look at them and think they're very similar to our own in terms of they're known to appreciate performance and reliability and a bit of premium in quality, and we think we match them them quite well. They're already buying what we believe are the best converge platforms in the industry from Cisco. So it makes sense that those customers would want to compliment that investment with the best array, best storage array they can get. And so we think we are helping Cisco's customers make the most of their decision to be ucs customers. Final one for, for you, Lisa, by way of example, we have a relationship with, with Equinix and you know, Equinix is the world's sort of leading colo provider. And the way I think they like to think of themselves, and I too tend to agree with them, is their, they're one of the most compelling high-speed interconnect networks in the world. >>They're connected to all of the, the, the significant cloud providers in most of the locations around the world. We have a, a relationship with them where we find we have customers in common who really love the idea of compute from the cloud. Compute from the cloud is great because compute is something that you are doing for a set period of time and then it's over you. Like you have a task, you do some compute, it's done. Cloud is beautiful for that. Storage on the other hand is very long lived storage doesn't tend to operate in that same sort of way. It sort of just becomes a bigger and bigger blob over time. And so the cost model around public cloud and storage is not as compelling as it is for compute. And so our, with our relationship with Equinix, we help our customers to be able to create, let's call it a, a data anchor point where they put our arrays into, into an Equinix location, and then they utilize Equinix as high speeding interconnects to the, to the cloud providers, okay. To take the compute from them. So they take the compute from the cloud providers and they own their own storage, and in this way they feel like we've now got the best of all worlds. Right. What I hope that illustrates Lisa is with those three examples is we are always looking for ways to find our key advantages with any given, you know, alliance partners advantages, >>Right? What are, when you're in customer conversations, and our final few minutes here, I wanna get, what are some of the key differentiators that you talk about when you're in customer conversations, and then how does the partner ecosystem fit into Hitachi vans as a service business? We'll start with differentiators and then let's move into the as service business so we can round out with that. >>Okay. Let's start with the differentiators. Yeah. Firstly and I, and hopefully I've kind of, I've hit this point hard, hard enough. We do believe that we have the fastest and most reliable storage infrastructure on the planet. This is kind of what we are known for, and customers that are working with us already sort of have an appreciation for that. And so they're looking for, okay, you've got that now, how can you make my hybrid cloud aspirations better? So we do have that as a fundamental, right? So, but secondly I'd say, I think it's also because we go beyond just storage management and, and into the areas of data management. You know, we've got, we've got solutions that are not just about storing the bits. We do think that we do that very well, but we also have solutions that move into the areas of enrichment, of the data, cataloging of the data, classification of the data, and most importantly, analytics. >>So, you know, we, we think it's, some of our competitors just stop at storing stuff and some of our competitors are in the analytics space, but we feel that we can bridge that. And we think that that's a, that's a competitive advantage for us. One of the other areas that I think is key for us as well is, as I said, we're one of the few vendors who've been in the marketplace for 60 years and we think this, this, this gives us a more nuanced perspective about things. There are many things in the industry, trends that have happened over time where we feel we've seen this kind of thing before and I think we will see it again. But you only really get that perspective if you are, if you are long lived in the industry. And so we believe that our conversations with our customers bear a little bit more sophistication. It's not just, it's not just about what's the latest and greatest trends. >>Right. We've got about one minute left. Can you, can you round us out with how the partner ecosystem is playing a role in the as service business? >>They're absolutely pivotal in that, you know, we, we ourselves don't own data centers, right? So we don't provide our own cloud services out. So we are 100% partner focused when it comes to that aspect. Our formula is to help partners build their cloud services with our solutions and then onsell them to their customers as as as a service. You know, and by what quick way of example, VMware for example, they've got nearly 5,000 partners selling VMware cloud services. 5,000 blows me away. And many of them are our partners too. So we kind of see this as a virtuous cycle. We've got product, we've got an an alliance with VMware and we work together with partners in common for the delivery of an as a service business. >>Got it. So the, as you said, the partner ecosystem is absolutely pivotal. Russell, it's been a pleasure having you on the program talking about all things hybrid cloud challenges, how Hitachi van is working with its partner ecosystems to really help customers across industries solve those big problems. We really appreciate your insights and your time. >>Thank you very much, Lisa. It's been great. >>Yeah, yeah. For Russell Stingley, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment we're gonna continue our conversation with Tom Christensen. Stay tuned. >>Sulfur Royal has always embraced digital technology. We were amongst the first hospitals in the UK to install a full electronic patient record system. Unfortunately, as a result of being a pioneer, we often find that there's gaps in the digital solutions. My involvement has been from the very start of this program, a group of us got together to discuss what the problems actually were in the hospital and how we could solve this. >>The digital control center is an innovation that's been designed in partnership between ourselves, anti touch, and it's designed to bring all of the information that is really critical for delivering effective and high quality patient care. Together the DCC is designed not only to improve the lives of patients, but also of our staff giving us information that our demand is going to increase in the number of patients needing support. The technology that we're building can be replicated across sulfur, the NCA, and the wider nhs, including social care and community services. Because it brings all of that information that is essential for delivering high quality efficient care. >>The DCC will save time for both staff and more importantly our patients. It will leave clinicians to care for patients rather than administrate systems and it will allow the system that I work with within the patient flow team to effectively and safely place patients in clinically appropriate environments. >>But we chose to partner with Hitachi to deliver the DCC here at Sulfur. They were willing to work with us to co-produce and design a product that really would work within the environment that we find ourselves in a hospital, in a community setting, in a social care setting. >>My hopes for the DCC is that ultimately we will provide more efficient and reliable care for our patients. >>I do believe the digital control center will improve the lives of staff and also the patients so that we can then start to deliver the real change that's needed for patient care. >>Okay, we're back with Tom Christensen, who's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Van Tara. And we're exploring how Hitachi Van Tower drives customer success specifically with partners. You know Tom, it's funny, back in the early part of the last decade, there was this big push around, remember it was called green it and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis sort of put that on the back burner. But sustainability is back and it seems to be emerging as a mega trend in in it is, are you seeing this, is it same wine new label? How real is this trend and where's the pressure coming from? >>Well, we clearly see that sustainability is a mega trend in the IT sector. And when we talk to CIOs or senior IT leaders or simply just invite them in for a round table on this topic, they all tell us that they get the pressure from three different angles. The first one is really end consumers and end consumers. Nowaday are beginning to ask questions about the green profile and what are the company doing for the environment. And this one here is both private and public companies as well. The second pressure that we see is coming from the government. The government thinks that companies are not moving fast enough so they want to put laws in that are forcing companies to move faster. And we see that in Germany as an example, where they are giving a law into enterprise companies to following human rights and sustainability tree levels back in the supply chain. >>But we also see that in EU they are talking about a new law that they want to put into action and that one will replicate to 27 countries in Europe. But this one is not only Europe, it's the rest of the world where governments are talking about forcing companies to move faster than we have done in the past. So we see two types of pressure coming in and at the same time, this one here starts off at the CEO at a company because they want to have the competitive edge and be able to be relevant in the market. And for that reason they're beginning to put KPIs on themself as the ceo, but they're also hiring sustainability officers with sustainability KPIs. And when that happens it replicates down in the organization and we can now see that some CIOs, they have a kpi, others are indirectly measured. >>So we see direct and indirect. The same with CFOs and other C levels. They all get measured on it. And for that reason it replicates down to IT people. And that's what they tell us on these round table. I get that pressure every day, every week, every quarter. But where is the pressure coming from? Well the pressure is coming from in consumers and new laws that are put into action that force companies to think differently and have focus on their green profile and doing something good for the environment. So those are the tree pressures that we see. But when we talk to CFOs as an example, we are beginning to see that they have a new store system where they put out request for proposal and this one is in about 58% of all request for proposal that we receive that they are asking for our sustainability take, what are you doing as a vendor? >>And in their score system cost has the highest priority and number two is sustainability. It waits about 15, 20 to 25% when they look at your proposal that you submit to a cfo. But in some cases the CFO say, I don't even know where the pressure is coming from. I'm asked to do it. Or they're asked to do it because end consumers laws and so on are forcing them to do it. But I would answer, yeah, sustainability has become a make trend this year and it's even growing faster and faster every month we move forward. >>Yeah, Tom, it feels like it's here to stay this time. And your point about public policy is right on, we saw the EU leading with privacy and GDPR and it looks like it's gonna lead again here. You know, just shifting gears, I've been to a number of Hitachi facilities in my day. OWA is my favorite because on a clear day you can see Mount Fuji, but other plants I've been to as well. What does Hitachi do in the production facility to reduce CO2 emissions? >>Yeah, I think you're hitting a good point here. So what we have, we have a, a facility in Japan and we have one in Europe and we have one in America as well to keep our production close to our customers and reduced transportation for the factory out to our customers. But you know, in the, in the, in the May region back in 2020 13, we created a new factory. And when we did that we were asked to do it in an energy, energy neutral way, which means that we are moving from being powered by black energy to green energy in that factory. And we build a factory with concrete walls that were extremely thick to make it cold in the summertime and hot in the winter time with minimum energy consumption. But we also put 17,000 square meters of solar panel on the roof to power that factory. >>We were collecting rain waters to flush it in the toilet. We were removing light bulbs with L E D and when we sent out our equipment to our customers, we put it in a, instead of sending out 25 packages to a customer, we want to reduce the waste as much as possible. And you know, this one was pretty new back in 2013. It was actually the biggest project in EA at that time. I will say if you want to build a factory today, that's the way you are going to do it. But it has a huge impact for us when electricity is going up and price and oil and gas prices are coming up. We are running with energy neutral in our facility, which is a big benefit for us going forward. But it is also a competitive advantage to be able to explain what we have been doing the last eight, nine years in that factory. We are actually walking to talk and we make that decision even though it was a really hard decision to do back in 2013, when you do decisions like this one here, the return of investment is not coming the first couple of years. It's something that comes far out in the future. But right now we are beginning to see the benefit of the decision we made back in 2013. >>I wanna come back to the economics, but before I do, I wanna pick up on something you just said because you know, you hear the slogan sustainability by design. A lot of people might think okay, that's just a marketing slogan, slogan to vector in into this mega trend, but it sounds like it's something that you've been working on for quite some time. Based on your last comments, can you add some color to that? >>Yeah, so you know, the factory is just one example of what you need to do to reduce the CO2 emission and that part of the life of a a product. The other one is really innovating new technology to drive down the CO2 emission. And here we are laser focused on what we call decarbonization by design. And this one is something that we have done the last eight years, so this is far from you for us. So between each generation of products that we have put out over the last eight years, we've been able to reduce the CO2 emission by up to 30 to 60% between each generation of products that we have put into the market. So we are laser focused on driving that one down, but we are far from done, we still got eight years before we hit our first target net zero in 2030. So we got a roadmap where we want to achieve even more with new technology. At its core, it is a technology innovator and our answers to reduce the CO2 emission and the decarbonization of a data center is going to be through innovating new technology because it has the speed, the scale, and the impact to make it possible to reach your sustainability objectives going forward. >>How about recycling? You know, where does that fit? I mean, the other day it was, you know, a lot of times at a hotel, you know, you used to get bottled water, now you get, you know, plant based, you know, waters in a box and, and so we are seeing it all around us. But for a manufacturer of your size, recycling and circular economy, how does that fit into your plans? >>Yeah, let me try to explain what we are doing here. Cause one thing is how you produce it. Another thing is how you innovate all that new technology, but you also need to combine that with service and software, otherwise you won't get the full benefit. So what we are doing here, when it comes to exploring circular economics, it's kind of where we have an eternity mindset. We want to see if it is possible to get nothing out to the landfill. This is the aim that we are looking at. So when you buy a product today, you get an option to keep it in your data center for up to 10 years. But what we wanna do when you keep it for 10 years is to upgrade only parts of the system. So let's say that you need more CBU power, use your switch the controller to next generation controller and you get more CPU power in your storage system to keep it those 10 years. >>But you can also expand with new this media flash media, even media that doesn't exist today will be supported over those 10 years. You can change your protocol in the, in the front end of your system to have new protocols and connect to your server environment with the latest and greatest technology. See, the benefit here is that you don't have to put your system into a truck and a recycle process after three years, four years, five years, you can actually postpone that one for 10 years. And this one is reducing the emission again. But once we take it back, you put it on the truck and we take it into our recycling facility. And here we take our own equipment like compute network and switches, but we also take competitor equipment in and we recycle as much as we can. In many cases, it's only 1% that goes to the landfill or 2% that goes to the landfill. >>The remaining material will go into new products either in our cycle or in other parts of the electronic industry. So it will be reused for other products. So when we look at what we've been doing for many years, that has been linear economics where you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and it goes into land feed afterwards. The recycling economics, it's really, you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and you recycle as much as possible. The remaining part will go into the landfill. But where we are right now is exploring circle economics where you actually buy material, make it, put it into production, and you reuse as much as you can. And only one 2% is going into the landfill right now. So we have come along and we honestly believe that the circular economics is the new economics going forward for many industries in the world. >>Yeah. And that addresses some of the things that we were talking about earlier about sustainability by design, you have to design that so that you can take advantage of that circular economy. I, I do wanna come back to the economics because, you know, in the early days of so-called green, it, there was a lot of talk about, well, I, I, I'll never be able to lower the power bill. And the facilities people don't talk to the IT people. And that's changed. So explain why sustainability is good business, not just an expense item, but can really drive bottom line profitability. I, I understand it's gonna take some time, but, but help us understand your experience there, Tom. >>Yeah, let me try to explain that one. You know, you often get the question about sustainability. Isn't that a cost? I mean, how much does it cost to get that green profile? But you know, in reality when you do a deep dive into the data center, you realize that sustainability is a cost saving activity. And this one is quite interesting. And we have now done more than 1,200 data center assessment around the world where we have looked at data centers. And let me give you just an average number from a global bank that we work with. And this one is, it is not different from all the other cases that we are doing. So when we look at the storage area, what we can do on the electricity by moving an old legacy data center into a new modernized infrastructure is to reduce the electricity by 96%. >>This is a very high number and a lot of money that you save, but the CO2 mission is reduced by 96% as well. The floor space can go up to 35% reduction as well. When we move down to the compute part, we are talking about 61% reduction in electricity on the compute part just by moving from legacy to new modern infrastructure and 61% on the CO2 emission as well. And see this one here is quite interesting because you save electricity and you and you do something really good for the environment. At the same time, in this case I'm talking about here, the customer was paying 2.5 million US dollar annually and by just modernizing that infrastructure, we could bring it down to 1.1 million. This is 1.4 million savings straight into your pocket and you can start the next activity here looking at moving from virtual machine to containers. Containers only use 10% of the CPU resources compared to a virtual machine. Move up to the application layer. If you have that kind of capability in your organization, modernizing your application with sustainability by design and you can reduce the C, the CO2 emission by up to 50%. There's so much we can do in that data center, but we often start at the infrastructure first and then we move up in the chain and we give customers benefit in all these different layers. >>Yeah, A big theme of this program today is what you guys are doing with partners do, are partners aware of this in your view? Are they in tune with it? Are they demanding it? What message would you like to give the channel partners, resellers and, and distributors who may be watching? >>So the way to look at it is that we offer a platform with product, service and software and that platform can elevate the conversation much higher up in the organization. And partners get the opportunity here to go up and talk to sustainability officers about what we are doing. They can even take it up to the CEO and talk about how can you reach your sustainability KPI in the data center. What we've seen this round table when we have sustainability officers in the room is that they're very focused on the green profile and what is going out of the company. They rarely have a deep understanding of what is going on at the data center. Why? Because it's really technical and they don't have that background. So just by elevating the conversation to these sustainability officers, you can tell them what they should measure and how they should measure that. And you can be sure that that will replicate down to the CIO and the CFO and that immediately your request for proposal going forward. So this one here is really a golden opportunity to take that story, go out and talk to different people in the organization to be relevant and have an impact and make it more easy for you to win that proposal when it gets out. >>Well really solid story on a super important topic. Thanks Tom. Really appreciate your time and taking us through your perspectives. >>Thank you Dave, for the invitation. >>Yeah, you bet. Okay, in a moment we'll be back. To summarize our final thoughts, keep it right there. >>Click by click. The world is changing. We make sense of our world by making sense of data. You can draw more meaning from more data than was ever possible before, so that every thought and every action can build your path to intelligent innovation to change the way the world works. Hitachi Van Tara. >>Okay, thanks for watching the program. We hope you gained a better understanding of how Hitachi Ventura drives customer success with its partners. If you wanna learn more about how you can partner for profit, check out the partner togetherPage@hitachiventera.com and there's a link on the webpage here that will take you right to that page. Okay, that's a wrap for Lisa Martin. This is Dave Valante with the Cube. You a leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(upbeat intro music) >> Good afternoon, fellow tech nerds. My name is Savannah Peterson, coming to you from theCube's Remote Studio here in Motown, Detroit, Michigan where we are at KubeCon. John, this is our 12th interview of the day. How are you feeling? >> I'm feeling fresh as the first interview. (Savannah laughs) As always. >> That delivery really implied a level of freshness. >> Let's go! No, this is only Day 1. In three days, reinvent. We go hardcore. These are great events. We get so much great content. The conversations are amazing. The guests are awesome. They're technical, they're smart, and they're making the difference in the future. So, this next segment about Scale MySQL should be awesome. >> I am very excited to introduce our next guest who actually has a Twitter handle that I think most people, at least of my gender in this industry would love to have. She is @ATechGirl. So you can go ahead and tweet her and tell her how great this interview is while we're live. Please welcome Deepthi Sigireddi. Thank you so much for being here with us. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're feeding us in. You've got two talks you're giving while we're here. >> Yes, yes. So tomorrow we will be talking about VTR, myself and one of the other maintainers of Vitess and on Friday we have the Vitess Maintainer Talk. All graduated projects get a maintainer talk. >> Wow, so you are like KubeCon VIP celebrity. >> Well, I hope so. >> Well, you're a maintainer and technical lead, also software engineer at the PlanetScale. But talk about the graduation process where that means to the project and the people involved. >> So Vitess graduated in 2019 and there are strict criteria for graduation and you don't just have to meet the minimum, you sort of have to over perform on the graduation criteria. Some of which are like there must be at least two large production deploys and people from those companies have to go in front of the CNCF committee that approves these things and say that, "Yes, this project is critical to our business." >> A lot of peer review, a lot of deployment success. >> Yes. >> Good consistency in the code. >> Deepthi: Community diversity. >> All that. >> All those things. >> Talk about the importance of this project. What is the top story that people should know about around the project? Why it exists, why it's important, why it's relevant, why it's cool. How would you answer that? >> So MySQL is now 30 years old and yet they are still- >> Makes me feel a little sidebar. (Deepthi laughs) Yeah. >> And yet even though there are many other newer databases, it continues to be used at many of the largest internet scale companies. And some of them, for example, Slack, GitHub, Square, they have grown to a level where they could not have if they had tried to do it with Vanilla MySQL that they started with, and the only reason they are where they are is Vitess. So that is I think the number one thing people should know about Vitess. >> And the origination story on notes say "Came from YouTube." >> Yes. So the way Vitess started was that YouTube was having problems with their MySQL deployment and they got tired of dealing with the site being down. So the founders of Vitess decided that they had to do something about it and they started building Vitess which started as a pretty small, relatively code-based with limited features, and over time they built charting and all of the other things that we have today. >> Well, this is exciting Savannah because we've seen this industry. Like with Facebook, when they started, everyone built their own stuff. MySQL was a great- >> Oh gosh, and everyone wanted to build it their way, reinventing the wheel. >> And MySQL was great. And then as it kind of broke when it grew, it got retrofitted. So, it was constantly being scaled up to the point where now you guys, if I get this right, said, "Hey, we're going to work on this. We're going to make it next-gen." So it's kind of like next-gen MySQL. Almost. >> Yes, yes. I would say that's pretty accurate, yeah. So there are still large companies which run their own MySQL and they have scaled it in their own way, but Vitess happens to be an open source way of scaling MySQL that people can adopt without having to build all of their own tooling around it. >> Speaking of that and growing, you just announced a new version today. >> Yes, yes. >> Tell us about that. >> The focus in this version was to make Vitess easier to use and to deploy. So in the past, there was one glaring gap in Vitess which was that Vitess did not automatically detect and repair MySQL level failures. With this release, we've actually closed that gap. And what that means for people using Vitess is that they will actually spend less time dealing with outages manually, or less human intervention, More automated recovery is what it means. The other thing we've released today is a new web UI. Vitess had a very old web UI, ugly, hard to maintain. Nobody liked it. But it was functional, except we couldn't add anything new to it because it was so old. So, the backend functionality kept advancing but the front end was kind of frozen. Now we have a next generation UI to which in upcoming releases we can add more and more functionality. >> So, it's extensible. They add things in. >> Deepthi: Oh yes, of course. Yeah. >> Awesome. What's the biggest thing that you like about the new situation? Is it more contributors are on board the UI? What's the fresh new impact that's happening in the community? What's getting you excited about with the current project? And the UI's great 'cause usability is important. >> Deepthi: Right. >> Scalability is important. >> I think Vitess solved the scalability problem way early and only now we are really grappling with the usability problem. So the hope and the desire is to make Vitess autopilot so that you reduce human intervention to a minimum once you deploy it. Obviously, you have to go through the process of deploying it. But once you've deployed it, it should just run itself. >> Runs at scale. So, the scale's huge? >> Deepthi: Yes. >> How many contributors are involved in the project? Can you give some numbers? Do you have any handy that you can speak to? >> Right. So, CNCF actually tracks these statistics for all the projects and we consolidated some numbers for the last two full calendar years, 2020 and 2021. We had over 400 contributors and 200 plus of them contributed code and the others contributed documentation issues, website changes, and things like that. So that gives- >> How about downloads? Download's good? >> Oh, okay. So we started publishing the current official Vitess Docker Image in 2018. And by October of 2020, we had about 3.8 million downloads. And by August of 2021, we had 5.2 million. And today, we have had over 10 million downloads- >> Wow! >> Of the main image. >> Starting to see a minute of that hockey stick that we all like to see. Seems like you're very clearly a community-first leader and it seems like that's in the PlanetScale and the test's DNA. Is that how the whole company culture views it? Would you say it's community-first business? >> PlanetScale is very much committed to Vitess as an open source project and to serving the Vitess community. So as part of my role at PlanetScale, some of the things I do are helping new contributors whether they are from PlanetScale or from outside PlanetScale. A number of PlanetScale engineers who don't work full-time on Vitess still contribute bug fixes and features to Vitess. We spend a significant amount of our energy helping users in our community Slack. The releases we do are mainly for the benefit of the community and PlanetScale is making those releases because for Planet Scale... Within PlanetScale, we actually do separate releases versus the public ones. >> One of the things that's coming up here at the show is deploying on Kubernetes. How does that look like? Everyone wants ease of use. Are you guys easy to use? >> Yes, yes. So PlanetScale also open sourced a Kubernetes operator for Vitess that people outside PlanetScale are using to run their production deployments of Vitess. Prior to that, there were Vitess users who actually built their own Kubernetes deployments of Vitess and they are still running those, but new users and new adopters of Vitess tend to use the Kubernetes operator that we are publishing. >> And you guys are the managed service for Vitess for the people that that's the business model for PlanetScale. >> Correct. So PlanetScale has a serverless database on demand which is built on Vitess. So if someone's starting something new and they just need a database, you sign up. It takes 30 seconds to get a database. Connect to it and start doing things with it. Versus if you are a large enterprise and you have a huge database deployment, you can migrate to PlanetScale, import all of your existing data, cut over with minimal downtime and then go, and then PlanetScale manages that. >> And why would they do that? What's the use case for that? Save time new development team or refactoring? >> Save time not being able to hire people with the skills to run it in-house. Not wanting to invest engineering resources in what businesses think is not their core competency. They want to focus on their business value. >> So, this database is a service in their whatever they're doing without adding more costs. >> Right. >> And speed. Okay, cool. How's that going? >> It's going well. >> Any feedback from customers in terms of why that there are any benefit statements you seek popping out? What are the big... What's the big aha when they... When people realize what they have here, what's the aha moment for them? Do they go, "Wow, this is awesome. It's so easy. Push a button. Migrate." Or is it... >> All of those. And people have actually seen cost savings when they've migrated from Amazon RDS to PlanetScale and we have testimonials from people who've said that, "It was so easy to use PlanetScale. Why would we try to do it ourselves?" >> It's the best thing a customer could say, right? We're all about being painkillers and solving some sort of problem. I think that that's a great opportunity to let you show off some of your customers. So, who is receiving this benefit? 'Cause I know PlanetScale specifically is for a certain style of business. >> Hmm. We have a list of customers on the website. >> Savannah: I was going to say you have a really- >> John: She's a software engineer. She's not marketing. >> You did sexy. >> You're doing a great job as much as marketing. >> So the reason I am bringing this up is because it's clear this is a solution for companies like Square, SoundCloud, Etsy, Jordan, and other exciting brands. So when you're talking about companies at scale, these companies are very much at scale, which is awesome. >> Yeah. >> What's next? What do you guys see the future for the project? >> I think we talked about that a little bit already. So, usability is a big thing. We did the new UI. It's not complete, right? Because over the last four years we've built more features into the backend which you can't yet access from the UI. So we want to be able for people to use things like online schema changes which is a big feature of Vitess. Doing schema changes without downtime from the UI. So, schema management from the UI. Vitess has something called VReplication which is the core technology that enables charting. And right now you can from the UI monitor your charting status, but you can't actually start charting from the UI. So more of the administrative functions we want to enable from the UI. >> John: Awesome. >> Last question. What are you personally most excited about this week being here with our wonderful community? >> I always enjoy being at KubeCon. This is my fifth or sixth in-person and I've done a couple of virtual ones. >> Savannah: Awesome. >> Because of the energy, because you get to meet people in person whom previously you've only met in Slack or maybe in a monthly community Zoom calls. We always have people come to our project booth. We have a project booth here for Vitess. People come to the company booth. PlanetScale has a booth. People come to our talks, ask questions. We end up having design discussions, architecture discussions. We get feedback on what is important to the people who show up here. That always informs what we do with the project in future releases. >> Perfect answer. I already mentioned that you can get a hold and in touch with Deepthi through her wonderful Twitter handle. Is there any other website or anything you want to shout out here before I do our close? >> vitess.io. V-I-T-E-S-S dot I-O is the Vitess website and planetscale.com is the PlanetScale website. >> Deepthi Sigireddi, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. John, thanks for keeping me company as always. >> You're welcome. >> And thank all of you for tuning into theCUBE. We will be here in Detroit, Michigan all week live from KubeCon and we hope to see you there. (gentle upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome, everyone, to this Cube conversation. It's part of our season two, episode four of the ongoing AWS Startup Showcase Series. Today's theme, "Cybersecurity: Detect and Protect Against Threats." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got one of our alumni back with us. Rakesh Narasimhan joins me, President and CEO of Anitian. Rakesh, it's great to have you back on the program. >> Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. >> So some congratulations are in order. I see that Anitian was recently awarded nine global InfoSec awards at RSA conference just this year including couple great titles here hot company and security company of the year. Talk to the audience who knows Anitian what is it doing to enable and empower the digital transformation for enterprises that are, I mean, we've been talking about the acceleration of digital transformation. How is Anitian an enabler of that? >> Thank you again for the opportunity. I think the big change that we brought to the table in Anitian is really what is typically a very manual, complex time consuming and quite expensive process. We've just brought software innovations to it and really that's customers who are trying to do compliance or security in the cloud which just provide a platform that basically accelerates a customer's application migration to cloud. And so that ability is the software innovation that we were able to bring to the space and that just wasn't there before. And so we're just happy that we took the opportunity to innovate there and just bring it to the customers. >> So let's now talk to and address those AWS customers. When you're talking to prospects, existing AWS customers what do you say are the differentiators that makes Anitian so unique when in AWS. >> That's a great question. I think the biggest innovation, the biggest thing that we bring to the table is really an acceleration and timeline and completion of their application. So if you're a customer and you're trying to get into a new market for compliance, for example or you're trying to basically get a new application up and running in a secure environment in either one of those cases, we have a product offering a platform offering that enables you to quickly get up and running and get to production. And that's been the reason why we've enjoyed enormous success in the marketplace in the AWS customer base. >> One of the areas where I see that an Anitian has been very successful is in helping cloud software vendors get FedRAMP compliance and be able to access what is a huge federal market. How are you able to do that? >> Yeah, I think the big thing that we focused on was you have a complete class of SaaS vendors out there who provide enormous innovation that they bring to the marketplace but the government market in general has not been able to participate in it because it again, like I said, it's very complex. It takes time and it's very expensive. And so we focused on that opportunity to really make it easier for all these cloud service providers to be able to bring their innovations to the government market, for example, with FedRAMP and so we help with the automation and the acceleration with our platform offering on top of cloud providers like AWS, and that enables the SaaS provider to offer that opportunity that hitherto is not available to now make it available in the government marketplace. And that's a huge buyer, if you will their budgets are huge. They're still buying even on a downturn in the market even as commercial vendors, who look at that, that market everybody's nervous about it. But if you look at the government market they have budget, they're buying and that needs to be provided to the install base. And so we help make that happen. >> How does that make you unique from a competitive perspective to be able to accelerate veteran for AWS customers in particular? >> I think the biggest issue has always been three things, right? It's complex, it's time consuming but most importantly, how quickly can a company make their software innovations available to a large market has always been sort of the challenge especially in the federal market. So we basically pre-engineering a platform taking care of all the requirements of the standard in compliance and security and then essentially help the customer bring that innovation on top of the AWS environment and making that available to the customers and record time. That's the reason why we're able to enjoy the success. Historically, the space has been very very focused on a lot of consulting folks really providing consulting on an hourly basis. We thought of actually bringing a software oriented approach just like people buy email, they buy service and then all the innovations that come along with it for the subscription that you pay. It's a very similar concept we brought to this space prior to this, either people did it themselves or they hired a lot of consulting folks to tell them what to do. And that could take a long time and then not just time and expense but every single time they made a change they would still, again, have to go redo all that work. We just brought a platform approach which is well understood by now in the industry you pay a subscription, you buy a platform and all the innovations come along for them. So that's huge productivity, time to market but most importantly it enables them to achieve their revenue goals because they're trying to get to market and service the customer, right? So we help them accomplish that in record time. >> So you are really impacting your customer's bottom line. You've been very successful in helping AWS public sector customers to accelerate FedRAMP. As you talked about FedRAMP compliance how are you now switching gears to focus on the AWS commercial customers and even enterprise DevOps teams to be able to accelerate cloud application security? >> Yeah, I think, again we started from a place of humility, if you will. You know, there's a lot of vendors a lot of folks make a lot of claims. We wanted to make sure that we first we're very good at doing something. And that's something was really go after the federal market and the success we achieved in that marketplace had a few insights for ourselves which was people really struggle in all kinds of environments, not just public sector. And what we found is that commercial customers are also trying to go to cloud. They're also dealing with the issues of security in securing their environments. And it's really the DevOps and DevSecOps folks on whom this burden falls. And they have to answer to so many different constituencies in an enterprise company. And so we time and time again while we did the work in FedRAMP we learned that, you know it's not just about compliance. It's also about securing on a base of standards. So how could we provide the same pre-engineered environment for DevOps and DevSecops teams to be able to run that environment for their applications that became an 'aha' for us because we were running into it all the time in the public sector side. So we went and talked to a few customers and said, 'Hey, how about we do the same thing on the commercial side for you?' And I wish I could take credit for this but it's actually not true. It's actually customers who came to us and said, 'Hey you did this really well for us in public sector side. Could you provide the same thing for us in the commercial side?' where it's not about all the documentation and all the audits and things that happen on the compliance side of the house. I just want you to provide an environment so that our DevOps teams could just operate in that environment and Devs can work on it. Can you do that? And we'll pay you. And that was born really our idea of secure cloud enterprise. Our primary offering historically has been secure cloud compliance with a compliance business if you will, where people could go into market and have a completely new market to go after. Whereas in the enterprise side we brought those innovations, those learnings and brought it to a commercial market. And so that's the new product, if you will, that we're launching to service that customer base, if you will. >> So if I'm an AWS customer when do I know it's time to contact Anitian and say, 'Guys we need help and we think you're the right ones to help us accelerate.' >> Yeah, I think it's re really straightforward if you are a customer commercial SaaS vendor, if you will, that runs an AWS and you want to go after a new market then you come to us and we can help you quickly get to all the compliance standards so that you can go sell in the government marketplace. That's an offering we already have, or you are a a brand new company and B2B company and you're developing an application and you want a pre-engineered environment that passes all the security standards so that you don't have to worry about it. You have a subscription to AWS and you have a subscription to us. And then that basically provides you a secure environment in which you can start developing your applications and start developing, deploying them much like your DevOps cycle would work. So we provide that basis already for you. So if you're a customer on the B2B side and you're going to cloud to get your applications to the marketplace on AWS, we're a great solution for you to actually have that engineered platform in place already. So those are the two areas where you can contact us and we can help you out. >> And talk to me about when you are in customer conversations especially as we've had such challenging times the last couple of years, how have those customer conversations changed and evolved? Are you seeing an acceleration up the C-suite stack? Is this a key priority for the CEO and his or her team? >> Yeah, I think it's a phenomenal point. I think security's always been top of mind for folks, not just the C-suite, but in boardrooms as well. But you know, the key thing we found is that even in a down market, sometimes in the environment that is playing out in the macro environment. I think the thing that has not changed is people are still trying to figure out how to make their dollar go further. And how do I get a better return on investment? So if you look at our compliance business that growth is all about that market is growing. There's still opportunity, and people are still having budgets and spending. So commercial companies are still trying to figure out how can I extend my market reach into new markets? So that's an area that the C-suite is really interested in. Funny enough, you would think in the cyber world it's a CSOs who are the ones who actually are looking for solutions from us that certainly an audience but CEOs and CROs are the folks who really clamor for our solution because it is their ability to enter a new market and go after a new budget that can grow their business and have an ROI pretty quickly. That's the ability for them to make that decision. So it's very pertinent to their buying behavior that we have aligned ourselves to very simply put by engaging us. They get to go after a new market to establish a new line of revenue they didn't have before. So that's always interesting to any C-suite member as you can imagine. And that's the compliance side. >> Absolutely establishing new revenue streams is huge and that's a big competitive differentiator. We've seen a lot of customers that weren't able in any industry to do that during the challenging pandemic times. And that is a game changer for organizations across industries. >> Exactly, exactly. And wishing that play out, not just on that side, but even on the commercial side where people are also trying to figure out how do I basically make sure it's pre-done so that it's one less thing for me to have to worry about so that I can be more productive. I can get to market pretty quickly which means I can, again, deliver to my customers quickly which means revenue for them as well. So we are the security business, but really if you notice we're solving a business problem for our customers and we're aligned to their ROI so that it's relatively easier for them to make a decision. They certainly get security in compliance but the bigger benefit for them is to grow their business itself. So we are trying to accelerate that momentum for them. >> That's critical, and I'm sure your customers really appreciate the impact that you're having on their growth, their ability to deliver to what I can only presume is their demanding customers. As one of the things I know that's been in short supply the last couple of years, is patience and tolerance. Is there Rakesh a customer story that you think really articulates the value of what Anitian is delivering? Maybe a favorite customer story that you mentioned when you're giving talks? >> Sure, sure. We really have a very customer base across the landscape. If you think about our compliance business, Smartsheet is a great example who partnered early. They were not even in the cloud before. And then that's a great example with AWS where the three of us work together to offer Smartsheet the collaboration software public SaaS company, if you will, who really established themselves and differentiated themselves in the marketplace by offering that on AWS. And we helped them accomplish their FedRAMP itself not just for once, but you know they've been great customers of ours multiple renewals over the years and every single year that the business that they get on the federal sizes increased because of the work that they did first with us. And so, you know, we've look for more opportunities with them, certainly on that part. And increasingly we start thinking about where else can we help them grow? Because typically most customers have a thing to solve on a compliance standard, but it turns out that the compliance journey is, you know some companies are trying to do Socto to be able to even sell. Then you want to do electronic commerce. You might have to do PCI or you want to sell under the federal government. You'll have to do FedRAMP and FedRAMP has moderate, high but depending on the customers you have, including DOD and once you get to DOD, they'll ask for IL4 and IL5. So these are different compliance regimes. If you will think of them as a journey and we want to be the company that provides a seamless progression for customers as they're on that journey so that we can actually deliver something of value. We're not interested in nickel and diamond customers and charging them by the hour, we're a platform player. We want to make sure that they use it to basically get their ROI and growth happening. And we just take care of the hard part of making sure that they're in compliance, right? And similarly, we're bringing the same idea like Smartsheet. I told you about to a commercial marketplace of customers who can do the same thing for commercial apps in the cloud. And so that gives us a very clean way for customers to really become not just productive, but satisfy their customers quickly and hence grow their business. And we celebrate that collaboration and all of that happens because of AWS and our ability to focus on those customers >> Sounds like a great partnership and definite synergy there on I know, and, you know as well, how customer obsessed in their own words AWS. Speaking of customers one more question for you in terms of being on that journey that compliance journey, which isn't a destination, right? It's probably a zigzaggy path. Do you work with customers that both haven't started the process to FedRAMP plans or those that maybe have with a competitor are running into roadblocks? Are those both routes to market for you? >> Yeah, we interestingly enough historically we used to see a lot of folks who have tried to do it themselves and found it hard or for a variety of reasons they just gave up. And so they would come to us. We have also examples of customers who have tried to go down the consulting path and has not worked and come to us so that it's sort of a broken project. We start from there, but a majority of our business is people who've gotten a contract from one of the agencies. Then they're like, 'oh now what!' We need to get this done before September. And so what's the quickest way to get there. And generally that's where we can help you because we are the best, fastest way to get there. And so we get that mix of customers people who have already tried hasn't worked out people who have tried with other folks hasn't worked out, but a majority of the folks are people who don't even know, you know how to go about doing it, but they know they have to do it in order for them to keep the customer that they've won one of the agencies, if you will. So that has given us a very healthy perspective on how to help customers of different kinds in that journey. The other thing is, you know, we've grown tremendously in the last couple of years. And the other thing we learned is every customer is different. And we tried to bring a very common approach to addressing this problem. Even though customers come in all shapes and forms we have startup companies in, you know early forms of maturity. And we have like really iconic, you know unicorn companies who we've helped go through FedRAMP. So the gamut is large, but you know we're learning a lot by doing this. And I think that's the key thing for me. I want our company to be one that is growing with innovation, but at the same time keeping flexibility in our approach so that we are not just learning new things, we're delivering on the harder problems our customers are facing. Cause I think that's where software innovation can really play a big differentiating role. And that's the reason why I always enjoyed being at Anitian and growing the business and keeping the company really, fast moving and innovative. >> Speaking of being fast moving and innovative here we are coming up on the fourth quarter of calendar year 22, what's next for Anitian? What are some of the exciting things that have you pumped up? Have you mojo going for what's next for the rest of the year? >> Yeah, I think a big portion of my enthusiasm for the company and the road ahead is I think it's rare if you look at the industry, oftentimes you see companies that start out with a single solution and then are able to grow from there. One of the best advantages Anitian has is this platform centric approach to do compliance on the journey I talked about. So if you think about that journey every customer that is going to cloud has this challenge that, they either have to comply do a bunch of standards, one or many. And then how do I do that in a platform approach in a common way so that I don't have to worry about it. I play a subscription and I am just protected by that. And I actually get the marketplace. So that's a tremendous journey we are on. We've only done a few of them and we have a whole new set of compliance standards coming on our platform. So that's one way, look forward to that. The other one I'm really looking forward to is the commercial customers. There's a huge opportunity for people to really know that they're sitting on top of a very secure environment in AWS. And how do I quickly propel myself into the marketplace so that I can be differentiated. I can get to market quickly but I can also make sure my innovations are getting to the marketplace as a customer, right? So I think I'm really excited about the things we are bringing to market just not just this year, but next year early next year on the compliance side, as well as the commercial side, that'll actually differentiate us and make it a lasting part of a customer's journey. And that's, I think the best thing you can hope for building a lasting company where your innovations are powering the productivity of your customers in a meaningful manner. And I always feel proud of the team. You mentioned the awards, but honestly more than anything else, we've put together a great team. And the team does a tremendous job with a very good ecosystem of partners. And our humility is it's not just us it's the ecosystem together. And the partnership with Amazon that helps us be the company we are able to be. We live in really story times and we're lucky to be part of this opportunity if you will. >> Yeah better together. That ecosystem is incredibly powerful. Thank you so much Rakesh for talking about what's going on at Anition, how you're helping customers, accelerate FedRAMP compliance, what you're doing in the commercial space and how you're helping your customers really improve their bottom line. We thank you so much for partnering with the Cube for season two, episode four of the AWS startup showcase. >> My pleasure. Thank you very much. >> And we want to thank you for watching but keep it right here for more action on the Cube which as you know, is your leader in tech coverage. I'm Lisa Martin. See you next time. (lively music)

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

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

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

>>With me now or Maneesh outer wall, senior director of product management for a HyperFlex. It's Cisco at flash for all. Number four. I love that on Twitter and Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco, Mr. HyperFlex at Mr. HyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and in HyperFlex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks David. >>Hi, Darren. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private adamant. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the, the whole benefit of the cloud model you build in, in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. High conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud in their building with hyper conversions in particular HyperFlex, Mexican bank, all that work. They need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SAS offering Nathan looks around simplified operations, give some optimization and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days? W when it comes to implementing hyper-converged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >>So, so there's many things they're trying to achieve. My probably the most brutal, honest is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at, in terms of simplicity, how can they remove laser components they've had before in their infrastructure, we see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that class into a hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure, also about scalability. They don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper-conversion. It's very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads, they need that consistency all the way through. >>And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management to make it easier for their operations. And we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in that operations model, deploying flex also around the time-savings. They make massive time savings, which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces where you've seen as people move away from the three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper-converged, especially with edge edge is a major, key use case for us. And what our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data center at the edge without a big investment. They don't want to compromise on performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and employment. >>And we've seen our analyst recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyper conversions. And as I said, the savings elements, the key there, and again, not always, but obviously there's all case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people could make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >>Great. Thank you for that, Darren, uh, Monisha, we have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced. >>Yeah. Thanks Dave. Um, so there are several things that we are seeing today. The first one is a new offer, um, called HyperFlex express. This is, uh, you know, Cisco intersite lend and Cisco intersect managed it HyperFlex configurations that we feel are the fastest spot to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our service portfolio by adding support for each X on EMD rack, uh, UCS M D rack. And the code is a new capability that we're introducing that we calling, um, local and containerized witness and get, let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty, uh, capability to optimize for, for an edge environments. So, you know, this leverage is the Cisco's ubiquitous presence, uh, of the networking, um, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is, uh, configuration, which is primarily used in edge environments, think of a, you know, a backup woman or department store, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere on the blue for these two, not two configurations. >>There is always a need for a third entity that, uh, you know, industry down for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is where do you host this witness? It cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the infrastructure is going. Now, it basically breaks, um, sort of, uh arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster, but finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environments. So what we've done is we've taken that test. We've converted it into a container or a form factor, and then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR ESR, mixers, catalyst, industrial routers, uh, even, uh, even as we buy that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure are doing any, um, you know, Caden feeding or that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >>I want to ask you about HyperFlex express. You know, obviously the, the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can, can HyperFlex express help customers respond to some of these issues? >>Yeah, indeed. The, um, you know, the primary motivation for HyperFlex express was indeed, uh, an idea that, uh, you know, one of the folks on my team had, we was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time, but as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and, uh, make sure that, uh, you know, that is in it for something in it for customers, for sales, as well as our partners. Uh, so for example, uh, you know, for customers, uh, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex express. These are still high-paced configurations, and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster, but the part to that cluster is much, much, uh, simplifying. Uh, second is that we've added an flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with, or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. >>Um, we've also added a, uh, attractive price point for these. And, uh, of course, uh, you know, these will have a better lead times because we made sure, uh, that, uh, you know, we are using components that are, um, that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a foster doughnut around time, uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a set of distinct friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stock. And with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for, uh, the disease as well. >>It's interesting Maneesh, I'm looking at some fresh survey data set more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed. This is ETR survey. Again, I mentioned them at the top more than the 70% said they had difficulty procuring a server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So, so that's encouraging. Um, what about ministry, uh, AMD that's new for HyperFlex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, Dave, so, uh, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS EMD direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a, it's a, it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it is, it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the masters compute together with the foster storage and this, we are logging that will, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, um, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads, uh, that were previously locked out from the hyper-converged experience. >>Yeah. Cool. Um, so Darren, can you, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >>Sure, absolutely. So I've made, Maneesha been involved right from the Stein before it was called hype and we we've had a great journey and it's very exciting to see where we're taking, where we've been with the $10 year. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. Um, the majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've, uh, approved for technology and are comfortable with the technology. They repeat by expanded capacity, putting more workloads on they use in different use cases on that. And from an age perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement, the technology, um, we get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical, uh, applications, as well as the, uh, traditional virtual server infrastructures, uh, and where the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers. >>They want example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audiences, uh, the super bowl. So, uh, the like, uh, stadium that house, the soup, well actually has Cisco HyperFlex, right? In all the management services through, from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's compete completely cashless. So if that were to break during the super bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution were able to collapse down nearly 200 service into a few nodes, across a few racks and at a hundred, 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run super bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with the high place where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases we're getting involved in very, very excited. >>He come on Darren Superbowl, NFL, that's, uh, that's international now. And you know, it's, it's dating London. Of course, I see the, the picture of the real football over your shoulder. But anyway, last question for minis. Give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for HyperFlex. >>Yeah, so, you know, as Dan said, what data and I have been involved with type of flicks since the beginning, uh, but, uh, I think the best is we have to come. Uh, there are three main pillars for, uh, for HyperFlex. Um, one is intersite is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass, um, management, but we are going to date this beyond the lifecycle management, which is a for HyperFlex, which is integrated. You're going to say today and element management, we're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI ops, because intersect really provides us a ideal platform to gather slides from all the clusters across the globe, do AIML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer value, um, actionable insights. >>So that is one, uh, the second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms and newer, uh, UCS, several platforms as well. But the highlight, there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is HX on X, CDs, uh, extra users. And other thing that'd be able to, uh, you know, uh, uh, get announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. Uh, but each Axonics cities will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X of hosting, a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We were hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, uh, that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex need a platform. >>This is the heart of the offering today, and you'll see the hyperlinks data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, a unique architecture, primarily where we get our, you know, uh, they got bidding performance wrong. You'll see it get foster a more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for, uh, you know, containerized workloads, meaning it will get a granular container, a container, granular management capabilities and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay guys, we gotta leave it there. And, you know, Monisha was talking about the HX on X series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that. And it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with VKS Ratana and Jim leech, and we're going to dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.

>> The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid 2000s, permanently changed the way we think about IT. At the heart of it, the cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs. More than half of IT budgets were spent on people, and much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning, management, recovery, optimization, and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This has not only cut cost, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to Simplifying Hybrid Cloud, made possible by Cisco. Today, we're going to explore Hybrid Cloud as an operating model for organizations. Now the definite of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud, on-premises infrastructure, and it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where IT managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing. The growth and diversity of applications continues. And now, we're living in a world where the workforce is remote. Hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIOs by Enterprise Technology Research, ETR, indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode. Splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. So the challenge for IT managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem, public cloud, and edge locations. This is the future of IT. Now today, we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding Hybrid Cloud. First up, is DD Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next, we're going to hear from Manish Agarwal and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex which is Cisco's hyperconverged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment will drill into Unified Compute. More than a decade ago, Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly, changed the legacy server market with UCS, Unified Compute System. The X-Series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade and we'll explore how it fits into the world of Hybrid Cloud, and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So, thanks for being here. Let's go. (upbeat music playing) Okay, let's start things off. DD Dasgupta is back on theCUBE to talk about how we're going to simplify Hybrid Cloud complexity. DD welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Yeah, our pleasure. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >> Well, I think first off, every customer these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but, every customer is looking to move workloads, new services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's one of the big things that we're seeing. While that is happening, we're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got, you know, bare metal applications, you always have virtualized applications, and then most modern applications are containerized, and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, in the application landscape as well. And, probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves, it's triggering a change in the IT organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >> Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game in server and compute when it developed the original UCS. And you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team and of course the storage team as well. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >> No, I think you're right Dave, back to the origins of UCS and we, you know, why did a networking company build a server? Well, we just enabled with the best networking technologies so, would do compute better. And now, doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our hyperconvergence, for our, you know, Rack server, for our blade servers. And, you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. The software is called Intersight, and, you know, we started out with Intersight being just the element manager, the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. But then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that a customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software, would do manage the hardware, the underlying hardware. And then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then a third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization, or cost optimization. A fourth tool to now manage, you know, Kubernetes and like, not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi-cluster, multi-cloud. They should not have to have a fifth tool that does, goes into observability anyway. I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure. But it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the, the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, I mean, whether it's on-prem or in a cloud. So, overall that's the strategy. Bring it to a single platform, and a platform is a loaded word we'll get into that a little bit, you know, in this conversation, but, that's the overall strategy, simplify. >> Well, you know, you brought platform. I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day, and you could still point to some examples today in the IT industry where, hey, another tool we can monetize that. And another one to solve a different problem, we can monetize that. And so, tell me more about how Intersight came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through, you said, "We can do better." So tell us the story there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, look, it started with, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, "Look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director." And these are just the Cisco's management, you know, for our, softwares for our own platforms. And every company has their own flavor. We said, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not, when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service. Or we're going to create a SaaS offering. Because the same, the infrastructure built by us whether it's on networking or compute, or the cyber cloud software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SaaS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. They live and die by how their applications work or don't. And so, we were like, "We want to eat our own dog food here," right? We want to deliver this as a SaaS offering. And so that's how it started, we've being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it was a pretty big, bold ambition 'cause you know, the big change with SaaS as you're familiar Dave is, the job of now managing this piece of software, is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's to announce scalability, reliability, working with, our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SaaS service. So again, it's been a wonderful journey, but, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food 'cause we built a SaaS application that helps other companies deliver their SaaS applications. >> So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compare, of course compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business and, you're obviously a very profitable company, you're a large company, you're growing faster than most of the traditional competitors. And, so that means that you have more to invest. You, can afford things, like to you know, stock buybacks, and you can invest in R&D you don't have to make those hard trade offs that a lot of your competitors have to make, so-- >> You got to have a talk with my boss on the whole investment. >> Yeah, right. You'd never enough, right? Never enough. But in speaking of R&D and innovations that you're intro introducing, I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud, the operations there, improve flexibility, and things around Cloud Native initiatives as well? >> Absolutely, absolutely. Well, look, I think, one of the fundamentals where we're kind of philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is, we don't need to build everything ourselves, we don't. I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, searchability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants. I need to create a really good platform, and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and 1/2 companies and then figure out how to stich it all together. 'Cause it's almost impossible. And if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's three times more difficult for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference and how we went about building Intersight. We've created a hardened platform that's always on, okay? And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, you know, infrastructure partners, like, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or PR, or you know, others, who want their conversion infrastructures also to be managed, or their other SaaS offerings and software vendors who have now become partners. Like we did not write Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Hashi and now, you know, Terraform service's available on the Intersight platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem. We partner with a company called Turbonomic and so that's now an offering on the Intersight platform. So that's where we're philosophically different, in sort of, you know, how we have gone about this. And, it actually dovetails well into, some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the Intersight platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters which are not on-prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on GC, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there. But in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use Intersight, and since you're using it on-prem you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud. Or even manage DMS in a EC2 instance. So. >> Yeah so, the fact that you could, you mentioned Storage Pure, NetApp, so Intersight can manage that infrastructure. I remember the Hashi deal and I, it caught my attention. I mean, of course a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco 'cause you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move, Turbonomic you mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud. So a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve on for the next few years? >> Well, I think it's the evolution of the model and I, really look at Cloud, you know, 2.0 or 3.0, or depending on, you know, how you're keeping terms. But, I think one thing has become very clear again, we, we've be eating our own dog food, I mean, Intersight is a hybrid cloud SaaS application. So we've learned some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is for sure that the customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the COLO, public cloud, on-prem, no data center, it doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governance, for upgrades, for reliability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What (indistinct) tells me I think there's going to be a rise of more custom clouds. It's still going to be hybrid, so applications will want to reside wherever it most makes most sense for them which is obviously data, 'cause you know, data is the most expensive thing. So it's going to be complicated with the data goes on the edge, will be on the edge, COLO, public cloud, doesn't matter. But, you're basically going to see more custom clouds, more industry specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance, or transportation, or retail, industry specific, I think sovereignty is going to play a huge role, you know, today, if you look at the cloud provider there's a handful of, you know, American and Chinese companies, that leave the rest of the world out when it comes to making, you know, good digital citizens of their people and you know, whether it's data latency, data gravity, data sovereignty, I think that's going to play a huge role. Sovereignty's going to play a huge role. And the distributor cloud also called Edge, is going to be the next frontier. And so, that's where we are trying line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really, your cloud, your way. Every customer is on a different journey, they will have their choice of like workloads, data, you know, upgrade reliability concern. That's really what we are trying to enable for our customers. >> You know, I think I agree with you on that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is, you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers, they're connecting their on-prem to their public cloud. They're doing that across clouds, and they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work, and give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of. 'Cause I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model, or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with, I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco and your R&D to do that. Do you buy that? >> Absolutely. I think again, it goes back to what I was talking about with platform. You got to give the world a solid open, flexible platform. And flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some of our customers are fine with the SaaS, you know, software. But if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. And so, how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, (indistinct) you know, sovereignty we talked about. So, I think, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is to give the world a open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API tool kit. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. And I think some of my colleagues are going to get into some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X-Series, you know, platform or HyperFlex, but it's really, it's going to be software defined, it's a SaaS service and then, you know, give the world an open rock solid platform. >> Got to run on something All right, Thanks DD, always a pleasure to have you on the, theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged, and where HyperFlex fits, and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today. >> It used to be all your infrastructure was managed here. But things got more complex in distributing, and now IT operations need to be managed everywhere. But what if you could manage everywhere from somewhere? One scalable place that brings together your teams, technology, and operations. Both on-prem and in the cloud. One automated place that provides full stack visibility to help you optimize performance and stay ahead of problems. One secure place where everyone can work better, faster, and seamlessly together. That's the Cisco Intersight cloud operations platform. The time saving, cost reducing, risk managing solution for your whole IT environment, now and into the future of this ever-changing world of IT. (upbeat music) >> With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for HyperFlex at Cisco, @flash4all, number four, I love that, on Twitter. And Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco. MrHyperFlex, @MrHyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and HyperFlex, and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks a lot Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right Darren, let's start with you. So, for a hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So, you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, we agree. You can't have a hybrid cloud without that prime element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. Hyperconversions provides that. We see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building it with Hyperconversions, in particular HyperFlex. Now to make all that work, they need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at Intersight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SaaS offering. That looks around simplified operations, gives them optimization, and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >> Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days when it comes to implementing hyperconverged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >> So there's many things they're trying to achieve, probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money, that's probably the quickest answer. But, I think they're trying to look in terms of simplicity, how can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that collapse into a hyperconversion infrastructure away from their Three Tier infrastructure. Also about scalability, they don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now, and how they can grow that with hyperconvergence very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all all way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management. To make it easier for their operations, yeah, we've got customers that have told us, they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model on deploying HyperFlex, also around the time savings they make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyperconverged, especially with Edge. Edge is a major key use case for us. And, what I want, what our customers want to do is get the benefit of a data center at the edge, without A, the big investment. They don't want to compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and deployment. And, we've seen our analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployment's key for our IT operations teams. And how much they're actually saving by deploying Edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyperconversions. And as I said, the savings elements is the key bit, and again, not always, but obviously those are case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times, over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So, I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >> Great, thank you for that Darren. Manish, we have some hard news, you've been working a lot on evolving the HyperFlex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. The first one is a new offer called HyperFlex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Intersight led and Cisco Intersight managed eight HyperFlex configurations. That we feel are the fastest path to hybrid cloud. The second is we are expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AMD Rack, UCS AMD Rack. And the third is a new capability that we are introducing, that we are calling, local containerized witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty capability to optimize for Edge environments. So, you know, this leverages the, Cisco's ubiquitous presence of the networking, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is a 2-node configuration, which is primarily used in Edge environments. Think of a, you know, a backroom in a departmental store or a oil rig, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere around the globe. For these 2-node configurations, there is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. We had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is, where you host this witness. It cannot be on the cluster because the job of the witness is to, when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, sort of arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure to actually host this is a problem, especially in the Edge environments where these are resource constraint environments. So what we've done is we've taken that witness, we've converted it into a container reform factor. And then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR, ASR, Nexus, Catalyst, industrial routers, even a Raspberry Pi that can host this witness. Eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure, or doing any, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >> So I want to ask you about HyperFlex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can HyperFlex Express help customers respond to some of these issues? >> Yeah indeed Dave. You know the primary motivation for HyperFlex Express was indeed an idea that, you know, one of the folks are on my team had, which was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for, something in it for our customers, for sales, as well as our partners. So for example, you know, for our customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex Express. These are still HyperFlex configurations and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much, much simplified. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. We've also, you know, added attractive price point for these, and of course, you know, these will have better lead times because we've made sure that, you know, we are using components that are, that we have clear line of sight from our supply perspective. For partner and sales, this is, represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. This is actually a set of disty-friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk, and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the distys as well. >> It's interesting Manish, I'm looking at some fresh survey data, more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed, this is the ETR survey again, we mentioned 'em at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So that's encouraging. What about, Manish, AMD? That's new for HyperFlex. What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >> Yeah Dave, so, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS AMD Rack support, we've had several record making benchmark results that we've published. So it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the fastest compute, together with the fastest storage. And this, we are hoping that we'll, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyperconverged experience. >> Yeah, cool. So Darren, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >> Sure, absolutely. So, both me and Manish been involved right from the start even before it was called HyperFlex, and we've had a great journey. And it's very exciting to see where we are taking, where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've proved the technology and are comfortable with the technology. They, repeat buyer for expanded capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an Edge perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement of the technology. We get used across all verticals, all segments, to house mission critical applications, as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. And we are the lifeblood of our customers around those, mission critical customers. I think one big example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audience is, the Super Bowl. So, the SoFi stadium that housed the Super Bowl, actually has Cisco HyperFlex running all the management services, through from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's completely cashless. So, if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would've been a big news article. But it was run perfectly. We, in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few nodes, across a few racks, and have 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium, without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl, and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons, that's a win for us. So we really are, really happy with HyperFlex, where it's going, what it's doing, and some of the use cases we're getting involved in, very, very exciting. >> Hey, come on Darren, it's Super Bowl, NFL, that's international now. And-- >> Thing is, I follow NFL. >> The NFL's, it's invading London, of course, I see the, the picture, the real football over your shoulder. But, last question for Manish. Give us a little roadmap, what's the future hold for HyperFlex? >> Yeah. So, you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved with HyperFlex since the beginning. But, I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for HyperFlex. One is, Intersight is central to our strategy. It provides a, you know, lot of customer benefit from a single pane of class management. But we are going to take this beyond the lifecycle management, which is for HyperFlex, which is integrated into Intersight today, and element management. We are going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI Ops, because Intersight really provides us a ideal platform to gather stats from all the clusters across the globe, do AI/ML and do some predictive analysis with that, and return back as, you know, customer valued, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms, and newer UCS server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help. Is HX on X-Series. X-Series is another thing that we are going to, you know, add, we're announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But HX on X-Series will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X-Series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex data platform. This is the heart of the offering today. And, you'll see the HyperFlex data platform itself it's a distributed architecture, a unique distributed architecture. Primarily where we get our, you know, record baring performance from. You'll see it can foster more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for you know, containerized workloads, meaning it'll get granular containerized, container granular management capabilities, and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year, and talking about some of these newer capabilities. >> That's great. Thank you very much for that, okay guys, we got to leave it there. And you know, Manish was talking about the HX on X-Series that's huge, customers are going to love that and it's a great transition 'cause in a moment, I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach, and we're going to dig into X-Series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're going to explore what it all means. You're watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. >> The power is here, and here, but also here. And definitely here. Anywhere you need the full force and power of your infrastructure hyperconverged. It's like having thousands of data centers wherever you need them, powering applications anywhere they live, but manage from the cloud. So you can automate everything from here. (upbeat music) Cisco HyperFlex goes anywhere. Cisco, the bridge to possible. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to theCUBE, 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 organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are 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, you know, that's a great question. And you know, customer centric view is the way that we've taken, is 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 that our 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 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 the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move and process large data sets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think to give our customers kind of some, you know, pause some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they, you know, 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 keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I right size it without over provisioning, for example? But also, there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning 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 a Rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data centric applications have, and that creates a lot of you know, opportunity for siloing the infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again, drive a lot of complexity. So that, complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally, I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, 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 manage this, you know, 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, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really right size for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked 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 a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure, but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools, 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 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 for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things, these data intensive workload, 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 with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually, it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. 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 all, you know, both in terms of, you know, 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 exist, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, but we're actually bring 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. 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, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture. And, we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. And I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leap frog game, as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today, and, you know, 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, you know, 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 X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So Vikas, I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way and hybrid cloud. So, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures 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 confusion with the X series, right? I mean, so how so can you explain that? >> Sure. And, that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across. Because, every application has its unique needs, and, hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory dense system, GPU dense system, core dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and, every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is (indistinct), the adapter is (indistinct). The power and cooling implication. The Rack, you know, face challenges. And, above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with, which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across, across the firmware and software and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade processes of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really seeing an inter, slowness in that agility, and high burden in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities. They become more agile, and drive lower TCOs. 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. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the Rack footprint that is required. An infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify by delivering a cloud operating model, where they can and create the policy once across compute network storage and deploy it 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're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their TCOs. >> Oh, that's key, less friction is always a good thing. Now, of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex 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 exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year, Dave. And we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X-Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby, our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node, and thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, 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 densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the FCI workload, the SDS workload. All these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular 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've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig end to end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters made with ethernet adapter, made with power channel adapters, or made with, the other storage adapters. They've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in this month's release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. 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 how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to, and think about some of the things that we mentioned before, in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhance that story and really move again, to the, kind of, to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI. That's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy 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 market in 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, and a lot of room to grow. We have the, you know, the premier cloud based management, you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry, right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that Vikas 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, you know, I think finally, the fifth generation of fabric interconnect and virtual interface card, and, intelligent fabric module go hand in hand in creating this 100 gig end to 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, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? This solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X-Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate, like the GPUs that solve these life cycle 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 disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, 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 GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together is critical, and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the development that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. And the X-Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into to 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, right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So, 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, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas. Give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to? >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about, and as Jim also hinted, this is a future ready 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 refund replace. And, there we are looking into, enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCI generation four, to five to six without driven replace, as they embrace CXL without driven replace. As they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCIe or NVMe based dense drives, and so forth. We are also looking forward to X-Fabric next generation, which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again, all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO by keeping them not only covered for today, but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay. Thank you guys we'll leave it there, in a moment, I'll have some closing thoughts. (upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution, perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something IT figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change, don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations. And is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality. And it supports much more diverse and data intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watch word, enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation. Remember, all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net. And if you want to learn more, please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>mhm. >>With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for Hyper Flex at Cisco at Flash for all number four. Love that on Twitter And Deron Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco Mister Hyper flex at Mr Hyper Flex on Twitter. Thanks, guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and and hyper flex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks, David. >>Thanks. Hi, >>Daryn. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud you gotta have on Prem Connection. Right? So you've got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, but you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud, you need a strong foundation. I'm conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building with hyper convergence in particular hyper flex no to make all that work. They need a good, strong Cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that. To be able to connect that around a Saas offering that looks around simplified operations, gives them optimisation and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren, let's stay with you for a minute when you talk to your customers. What are they thinking these days, when it comes to implementing hyper converged infrastructure in both the the enterprise and and at the edge? What are they trying to achieve? >>So there's many things they're trying to achieve? Probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at in terms of simplicity. How can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyper conversions and storage networking, and we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that, a collapse into hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure. Also about scalability. They don't know the end game, so they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper conversions. Very easy is one of the major factors and benefits of hyper conversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all the way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around. The simplicity model is the management layer ease of management to make it easier for their operations that we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model, deploying out flex also around the time savings. They make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think that we one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements, and the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper converged, especially with edge edges of major key use case for us and what I want. What our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data centre at the edge without a big investment. They don't compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management employment. And we've seen analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deployed hyper conversions. As I said, the savings elements to keep it and again, not always, but obviously those are his studies around about public Cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. We again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers looking for >>Great. Thank you for that, Darrin minutes. We have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >>Yeah, Thanks. Leave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. the first one is a new offer, um, called hyper Flex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Inter site lead and Cisco and decide managed it Hyper flex configurations that we feel are the fastest part to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AM Iraq, U. C s and Iraq. And the third is a new capability that we're introducing that we're calling local contemporaries witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a very nifty capability to optimise for forage environments. So, you know, this leverages the Ciscos ubiquitous presence. Uh, the networking, um, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest hyper flex configuration that we have is, uh it do not configuration, which is primarily used in edge environment. Think of a, you know, a back home in a department store or a oil rig. Or it might even be a smaller data centre, uh, somewhere, uh, on the globe. For these two not configurations. There is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for hyper flex as well. The problem that customers faces where you host this witness it cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, um, sort of upgrade rates. Which note gets to survive, so it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environment. So what we've done is we've taken that witness. We've converted it into a container reform factor and then qualified a very large a slew of Cisco networking products that we have right from S. R. S R. Texas catalyst, industrial routers, even even a raspberry pi that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure or doing any, um, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we're announcing today. >>So I want to ask you about hyper Flex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's global supply chain issues are in the news. Everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that? A little bit more Can can hyper flex express help customers respond to some of these issues. >>Yeah, indeed. The, uh, you know, the primary motivation for hyper Flex Express was indeed, uh, an idea that, you know, one of the folks around my team had, which was to build a set of hyper flex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for something in it for customers, for sales as well as our partners. So, for example, you know, for customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the instal for hyper flex express. These are still hypertext configurations, and you would, at the end of it, get a hyper flex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much much simplifying. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data centre configurations But you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy it with your existing top of rack. Um, we've also, you know, already attract attractive price point for these. And of course, you know these will have better lead times because we made sure that, you know, we are using components that are that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, Uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a settled, risky, friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the deceased as well. >>It's interesting many. So I'm looking at some fresh survey data. More than 70% of the customers that were surveyed this GTR survey again mentioned at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring, uh, server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So so that's encouraging. What about Manisha AMG that's new for hyper flex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, so you know, in the short time that we've had UCS am direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a it's a It's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it and hyper flex. Uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from Day one is that it is. It has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we're going to get the fastest compute together with the fastest storage and this we are hoping that will basically unlock, you know, a unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyper converged experience. >>Yeah, cool. Uh, so, Darren, can >>you can you give us >>an idea as to how hyper flexes is doing in the field? >>Sure, Absolutely So both me and my initial been involved right from the start and before it was called Hyper Flex, and we've had a great journey, and it's very excited to see where we're taking where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they approved the technology and are comfortable with technology. They repeat by for expanding capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an energy perspective, more numbers of science so really good. Endorsement the technology. We get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical applications as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. Uh, and we are the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers think one example, and I apologise for the worldwide audience. But this resonates with the American audiences the Super Bowl. So the sofa like stadium that housed the Super Bowl actually has Cisco hyper Flex running all the management services through from the entire stadium for digital signage. Four K video distribution, and it's complete completely cashless. So if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few notes across a few racks and have 100 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with High Flex where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases were getting involved in very, very excited. >>Come on, Darren. It's Super Bowl NFL. That's a That's international now. And, you know, the NFL >>NFL. It's >>invading London. Of course I see the picture of the real football over your shoulder, But last question for many is give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for hyper flex? >>Yeah, so you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved the type of flicks since the beginning, Uh, but I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for for hyper Flex. One is in. The site is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass management. But we're going to take this beyond the Lifecycle management, which is for hyper flex, which is integrated in winter side today and element management. We're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of a job. Because Interstate really provides us an ideal platform to gather starts from all the clusters across the globe. Do AML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer valued, um, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is you'll see us expand the hyper flex portfolio. Go beyond you see us to third party server platforms, and newer, you see a server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is a checks on X CDs. Experience is another thing that we're able to, uh you know, uh, announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But a check sonic series. We'll have that by the end of this calendar year, and that should unlock with the flexibility of X series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of hyper flex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, that we're locked out previously. And then the last thing is hyper flex leader platform. This is the heart of the offering today, Uh, and you'll see the hyper flex data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, unique distributed architecture primarily where we get our, you know, record breaking performance from you'll see it get faster, more scalable, more resilient. And we'll optimise it for, you know, containerised workloads, meaning it will get granular containerised container granular management capabilities and optimised for public. So those are some things that were the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum and maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay, guys, we got to leave it there and you know many She was talking about the HX on X Series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that, and it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach and we're gonna dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube, your leader in enterprise tech coverage.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to theCUBE's AWS startup showcase. This is season two of the startup showcase, episode one. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Pleased to be welcoming back one of our alumni, Alexis Richardson, the founder >> Hey. >> and CEO of Weaveworks. Alexis, welcome back to the program. >> Thank you so much, Lisa, I'm really happy to be here. Good to see you again. >> Likewise. So it's been a while since we've had Weaveworks on the program. Give the audience an overview of Weaveworks. You were founded in 2014, pioneering getopts, automating Kubernetes across all industries, but help us understand, unpack that a bit. >> Well, so my previous role was at Pivotal, where I was head of application platform and I was responsible for Spring and Vfabric, and some pieces of Cloud Foundry. And you may remember back in those days, everybody wanted to build like a Heroku, but for the enterprise. And so they were asking, how can we build more cloud services? And my team was involved in building out cloud services, but we were running into trouble with the technology that we had. And then when containers appeared, we thought this is the technology for us to roll out cloud services. So with some of my team, we decided to start a new company, Weaveworks, really intending to focus on developers. Because these new containers were pretty cool, but they were really complex operational centric tools, and enterprise developers need simplicity. That's what we'd learned from things like Spring. They want simplicity, productivity, velocity, all of that stuff, they don't want operational complexity. So Weaveworks' mission is to make applications easy for developers with containers. >> Talk to me about how you've accomplished that over the last seven years, and some of the things that you're doing to facilitate a DevOps practice within organizations across any industry? >> Yeah, well, our story is pretty interesting because of course in 2014, all of this was incredibly new. You couldn't even take two containers and put them together into a single application. So forget about enterprise. What we did was we built a network, which gave the company its name, Weave. But then we spent several years building out more and more pieces of the stack. We decided that we should go to market commercially because we're an open source company with a commercial SaaS. And we thought we would be like new Relic, that there'll be lots of customers in the cloud. And, therefore, they would need monitoring and management. And Weave started writing a SaaS based on Kubernetes, which was what we chose as our platform, back in the day, very, very, very early. We were one of the very first companies to start running Kubernetes in production other than Google. And so what we learned was customers didn't want to have management and monitoring for applications in the cloud, based on Kubernetes. Because they were all still struggling to get Docker working, to get basic Kubernetes clusters set up. And they kept saying to us "this is great, we love your tool, but we really need simpler things right now." So what we had done was we'd learned how to operate Kubernetes. And we discovered that we were doing it in this specific way, a way that meant that we could be reliable, we could set things up remotely, we could move things between zones. And so we called this approach getopts. So we've named the practice of getopts, which is really DevOps for Kubernetes. We decided that it was exciting after we had an outage and made a very quick recovery. Told people about it and they said, "well, we can't even Kubernetes started, let alone recover it from a crash." So we started evangelizing getopts and saying to people that we knew how to set up and run Kubernetes as operators for developers of apps, based on this experience. And people said, "well, why don't you help us do that?" So we pivoted the company away from a SaaS business, doing management, and straight back into enterprise software, providing a solution for people to run Kubernetes stacks, deploy applications, detect drifts, and operate them at scale. And we've never looked back. And since then we've built, very successfully, a big business out of telco customers, banks, car companies, really global two thousands. Starting from that open source base, continuing to respect that, but always keeping in mind helping developers build applications at scale. >> So in terms of that pivot that you've made, it sounds like you made that in conjunction with developers across industries to really understand what the right direction is here. What's the approach, what's their appetite? Talk to me about a customer example or two that really you think articulate the value and the right decision that that pivot was and how you're helping customers to really further their DevOps practice. >> Well, one of our first customers was actually Fidelity in this new world. Fidelity has a very advanced technology organization, a very forward thinking CTO, who I seem to recall is, or CEO, who I think is female. Really is into technology as a source of, you know, velocity and business strength. And we were brought to Fidelity by our partner, Amazon. And they said, "look, Fidelity have been using your open source tools, they want to run on Kubernetes, the early EKS service on AWS, but they need help, because what they want is a shared application platform that people can use across Fidelity to deploy and manage apps." So the idea Fidelity had was they're going to split their IT into a platform team, that was going to provide this platform, and a bunch of app teams that were going to write business apps like risk management, other financial processing. Paths, basically. And we came in to help Fidelity. And what we did was help Fidelity rollout, using getopts, a Amazon wide application platform. We also helped them to build, this was very early days for us post pivot, we really helped them to build an add on layer. So you could take any Kubernetes cluster and add other components to it, and then you'd have your platform right there. And the whole stack would be managed by getopts, which nobody had done before. Nobody who'd come up with a way of managing the whole stack, so you could start and stop stacks wherever you wanted, at will, correctly. I mean, if you talk to people about what's hard in IT, they'll tell you shutting down Kubernetes is hard, 'cause I know I'm never going to know how to start it again. So being able to start and stop things, move them around is really crucial. What Fidelity also wanted, which made I think the whole thing even more exciting, was to duplicate this environment on Azure and actually also on-premise later on. So where Fidelity are today is the whole Fidelity platform runs on Microsoft and on Amazon and on-premise, using three different implementations of Kubernetes. But using this platform technology and getopts that we helped Fidelity rollout. And if you want to know a bit about the story, type FIDEKS, F I D E K S into Google and you'll find a video of me three or four years ago on stage at Cube Con talking with a Fidelity chief architect about this story. It's pretty exciting and these are early days for these new Kubernetes platforms. >> Early days, but so transformative. And I can't imagine the events of the last few years without having this capability and this technology to facilitate such pivots and transformation where we would all be. I want to kind of dig into some use cases, 'cause one of the things that you just mentioned with the Fidelity example got me thinking use case of hybrid, multi-cloud, but also continuous app development. Talk to me about some of the key use cases that you work with customers on. >> Well you just named two. So hybrid and multi-cloud is absolutely critical, and also sovereign, which is when you're actually offline and you only update your cloud periodically. That's one of the major use cases for us. And what customers want there is they want consistency. They want a single operating model, across all of these different locations, so that all of their teams can get trained on one set of technologies and then move from place to place. They're not looking for magic, where apps move with the sun or any of that stuff. They just want to know they can base everything on a single, homogeneous skillset and have scale across their teams. Maybe tens of thousands of developers, all who know how to do the same thing. That's a really important use case. You also mentioned continuous delivery. That's probably the second really critical use case for us. People say, "I've got Kubernetes set up now, and I have Jenkins." At JP Morgan once told me they had 40,000 Jenkins servers, or something like that, you know, Jenkins at scale. And they're like, "okay, how do I push changes from Jenkins into the cloud?" So getopts provides a bridge between the world of CI and the runtime of Kubernetes. So one group of our customers is help me to put that middle piece of CD that gets you CI, CD, to Kubernetes, that's a classic. And then what they're looking for is an increase in velocity. And what we typically see is people go from deploying once every six months to deploying once a week, to deploying once a day, to deploying several times a day. And then they split things up into teams and suddenly, wow, that vision of microservices has come and everybody's excited 'cause IT velocity has gone up by two X. Another really >> So, >> Sorry, carry on. >> Go ahead, I was just going to say in terms of IT velocity it sounds like that's a major business outcome that you're enabling for, whether it's teleco, financial services, or whatnot. That velocity is, as you just described, is rapidly accelerating. >> Yeah, if you go to our website, you'll find a bunch of these use cases. And one that I really like is NatWest mettle, which is another financial example. They're not all financial by the way. But there's some metrics in there. We're getting people up to two X productivity, which at scale is huge, really makes a difference. Also, meantime to recovery. If you know the metric space, you'll know these are all DORA metrics. And DORA, which was acquired by Google a couple of years ago, is a really fantastic analyst in the space that came up with a bunch of ways of thinking about how to measure your performance as a business and IT organization. Recovery time and things like this that you really need to focus on if you're in this world. >> Well, from an IT velocity perspective, if I translate that to business outcomes, especially given the dynamics in the market over the last two years, this is transformative and probably helped a lot of organizations to pivot multiple times during the last couple of years. To get to that survival mode and into that thriving mode, enabling organizations to meet customer demand that was changing faster, et cetera. That's a really big imperative that this technology can deliver to the business. >> Yeah, I mean, that's been huge for us. So when the pandemic first began, obviously, we had some road bumps and there were some challenges, but what we found out very quickly was that people were moving into digital much faster. And we've been mostly enabling them, not just in finance, as I said, but also, car companies, utilities, et cetera. The other one, of course, is modern operations. So, everyone's excited about the potential for automation. If I have thousands and thousands of developers and thousands of applications, do I need thousands of operations staff? And the answer is, with Kubernetes in this new era, you can reduce your operational loads. So that actually very few people are needed to keep systems up, to do basic monitoring, to do redeployments and so on, which are all boring infrastructure tasks that no developer wants to do. If we can automate all of that, we can modernize the whole IT space. And that's what I think the promise of Kubernetes that we're also seeing as well. So applications speed first and then operational competence second. >> So you guys had a launch, here we are in early calendar year 2022, you guys had a launch just about six or eight weeks ago in November of 2021, where you were launching announcing the GA of Weave getopts enterprise, which is a licensed product building on the free open source Weave getopts core. Talk to me about that and what the significance of that is. >> Well, this is an enterprise solution that helps customers build these critical use cases, like shared service platform or secure DevOps or multi-cloud, using getopts, which gives them higher security, lower costs of management, and better operations, and higher velocity. And all of it is taking all the best practices that we've learned starting from those days of running our own Kubernetes stack and then through those early customers like Fidelity into the modern era where we have an at-scale platform for these people. And the crucial properties are it provides you with a platform, it provides you with trusted delivery, and it provides you with what we call release orchestration, which is when you deploy things at scale into production, using tools like canaries and other modern practices. So, all of it is enabling what we call the cloud native enterprise, application delivery, modern operations. >> So what's the upgrade path for customers that are using the free open-source tier to the enterprise package, what does that look like? >> The good news is it's an add on. So, I have been in the industry a while and I strongly believe it's really important that if you have an open source product, you shouldn't ask people to delete it or uninstall it to install your enterprise product, unless you really, really, really have to. And I'm not trying to be picky here. Maybe there are cases where it's important, but actually in our case, it's very simple. If you're already using one of our upstream tools, like Flux, for example, then going from Flux to Weave getopts enterprise is an add-on installation. So you don't have to change or take out what you're doing. You might be using Flux without knowing it. You may not be aware of this, but it's also insight as your AKS and ARC, it's inside the Amazon EKS anywhere bundle. It's available on Alibaba, VMware have used it in cartographer and Tanzu application platform. And even Red Hat use it too in some cases. So you may be using it already, from one of the big vendors who are partners of ours, as a precursor to buying Weave getopts enterprise. So, you know, don't be scared. Get in touch is what I would say to people. >> Get in touch. And of course, folks can go to weave.works to learn more about that. And, also we want to watch the Weave.works space, 'cause you have some news coming out relatively soon that sounds pretty exciting, Alexis. >> Well, I mentioned trusted delivery. And I think one of the things with that is no CIO wants to go faster, unless they also have the safety wheels on, let's face it. And the big question we get asked is "I love this getopts stuff, but how can I bring my team with me? How can I introduce change?" I have all of these approvals mechanisms in place, can I move into the world of getopts? And the answer is yes, yes you can because we now support policy engines as baked into our enterprise product. Now, if you don't know what policy is, it's really a way of applying rules to what you're seeing in IT. And you can detect whether something passes or fails conditions, which means that we can detect if something bad is about to happen in a deployment and stop it from happening, this is really critical. It also goes hand in hand with things like supply chain and security, which I'm sure we read about in the news far too much. >> Yeah, pretty much daily supply chain and security >> Pretty much daily. >> is one of those things that we're all in every generation concerned about. Well, Alexis, it's been a pleasure having you back on the program, talking to us about what's new at Weaveworks, the direction that you're going, how you're helping organizations across industries really advance their DevOps practice. And we will check weave.works in the next couple of weeks for more on that news that you started to break a little bit with us today. We appreciate your time, Alexis. >> Thank you very much, indeed, take care. >> Likewise. For Alexis Richardson, I'm Lisa Martin. Keep it right here on theCUBE, your leader in hybrid tech event coverage. (bright music) (music fades)

(bright music) >> Welcome back to AWS re:Invent. You're watching theCUBE. And we're here with Steve Mullaney, who is the president and CEO of Aviatrix. Steve, I got to tell ya, great to see you man. >> We started the whole pandemic, last show we did was with you guys. >> Steve: Don't say we started, we didn't start it. (steve chuckles) >> Right, we kicked it off (all cross talking) >> It's going to be great. >> Our virtual coverage, that hybrid coverage that we did, how ironic? >> Steve: Yeah, was as the world was shutting down. >> So, great to see you face to face. >> Steve: Great to see you too. >> Wow, so you're two years in? >> Steve: Two and a half years yeah. >> Started, the company was standing start $2 billion valuation, raised a bunch of dough. >> Steve: Yeah. >> That's good, you got to feel good about that. >> We were 38 people, two and a half years ago, we're now 400. We had a couple million in ARR, we're now going to be over a 100 million next year, next calendar year, so significant growth. We just raised $200 million, three months ago at a $2 billion valuation. Now have 550 customers, 54 of them are fortune 500, when I started two and a half years ago, we didn't have any fortune 500s, we had probably about a 100 customers. So, massive growth, big growth (indistinct). >> Awesome, I got to ask you, I love to ask CEO's, entrepreneurs, how did you know when to scale? >> You just know it, when you see it. (indistinct) Yeah, there's no formula, you just know it and what you look for is that point where you say, okay, we've now proven the model and until you do that you minimize things and we actually just went through this. We had 12 sales teams, four months ago, we now have 50. 50, five zero and it's that step function as a company, you don't want to linearly grow 'cause you want to hold until you say, it's happening. And then once you say it's happening, okay, the dogs are eating the dog food, this is good then you flip the other way, and then you say, let's grow as fast as we possibly can and that's kind of the mode we're in right now. >> Okay, You've... >> You just know it when you see it. >> Other piece of that is how fast do you scale? And now you're sort of doing that step function as your going. >> Steve: We are going as fast as we possibly can. >> Wow, that's awesome, congratulations and I know you've got to long way to go. So okay, let's talk about the big trends that you're seeing that Aviatrix has taken advantage of, maybe explain a little bit about what you guys do. >> Yeah. So we are, what I like to call Multi- Cloud Native Networking and Network Security. So, if you think of... >> David: What is multicloud native? You got to explain that. >> I got to to explain that. Here's what's happened, it's happening and what I mean by it's happening is, enterprises at two and a half years ago, this is why I joined Aviatrix, all decided for the first time, we mean it now, we are going into Cloud 'cause before that they were just mouthing it. And they said, "We're going into the Cloud." And oh by the way, I knew two and a half years ago of course it was going to be multicloud, 'cause enterprises run workloads where they run best. That's what they do, it's sometimes it's AWS, sometimes it's ads or sometimes it's Google, it's of course going to be multicloud. And so from an enterprise perspective, they love the DevOps, they love the simplicity, the automation, the infrastructure is code, the Terraform, that Cloud operational model, because this is a business transformation, moving to Cloud is not a technology transformation it's the business. It's the CEO saying we are digitizing we have an existential threat to the survival of our company, I want to grow a market share, I want to be more competitive, we're doing this, stop laying across the tracks technology people, will run you over, we're doing this. And so when they do that as an enterprise, I'm BNY Mellon, I'm United Airlines, you name it, your favorite enterprise. I need the visibility and control from a networking and network security perspective like I used to have on-prem. Now I'm not going to do it in the horrible complex operational model the Cisco 1994 data center, do not bring that crap into my wonderful Cloud, so that ain't happening but, all I get from the Native constructs, I don't get enough of that visibility and control, it's a little bit of a black box, I don't get that. So where do I get the best of the Cloud from an operational model, but yet with the visibility and control that I need, that I used to have on-prem from networking network security, that's Aviatrix. And that's where people find us and so from a networking and network security, so that's why I call it multicloud Native because what we do is, create a layer basically an abstraction layer above all the different Clouds, we create one architecture for networking and network security with advanced services not basic services that run on AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, Ali Cloud, Top Secret Clouds, GovClouds, you name it. And now the customer has one architecture, which is what enterprises want, I want one network, I want one network security architecture, not AWS Native, Azure Native, Google Native. >> David: Right. >> We leverage those native constructs, abstract it, and then provide a single common architecture with demand services, irrespective of what Cloud you're on. >> Dave, I've been saying this for a couple of years now, that Cloud Native... >> Does that make sense Dave? >> Absolutely. >> That abstraction layer, right? And I said, "The guys who do this, who figure this out are going to make a lot of dough." >> Yeah. >> Snowflakes obviously doing it. >> Yeah. >> You guys are doing it, it's the future. >> Yeah. >> And it's really an obvious construct when you look back at the world of call it Legacy IT for a moment... >> Steve: Yeah. >> Because did we have different networks to hookup different things in a data center? >> No, one network. >> One network of course. I don't care if the physical stack comes from Dell, HP or IBM. >> Steve: That's right, I want an attraction layer above that, yeah. >> Exactly. >> So the other thing that happens is, everybody and you'll understand this from being at Oracle, everybody wants to forget about the network. Network security, it's down in the bowels, it's like plumbing, electricity, it's just, it has to be there but people want to forget about it and so you see Datadog, you see Snowflake, you see HashiCorp going IPO in early December. Guess what? That next layer underneath that, I call it the horsemen of the multicloud infrastructure is networking and network security, that's going to be Aviatrix. >> Well, you guys make some announcements recently in that space, every company is a security company but you're really deep into it. >> Well, that's the interesting thing about it. So I said multicloud Native Networking and Network Security, it's integrated, so guess where network security is going to be done in the Cloud? In the network. >> David: Network. >> Yeah in the network. >> What a strange concept but guess what on-prem it's not, you deflect traffic to this thing called a firewall. Well, why was that? I was at Synoptics, I was at Cisco 'cause we didn't care about network security, so that's why firewall companies existed. >> Dave: Right. >> It should be integrated into the infrastructure. So now in the Cloud, your security posture is way worse than it was on-prem. You're connected to the internet by default so guess what? You want your network to do network security, so we announced two things in security; one, we're now a security competency partner for AWS, they do not give that out lightly. We were networks competency four years ago, we're now network security competency. One of the few that are both, they don't do that, that took us nine months of working with them to get there. And they only do that for the people that really are delivering value. And then what we just announced what we call, 'ThreatIQ with ThreatGuard.' So again, built into the network because we are the network, we understand the traffic, we're the control plane and the data plane, we see all traffic. We integrate into the network, we subscribe to threat databases, public databases, where we see what are the malicious IPS. If we have any traffic anywhere in your overall, and this is multicloud, not just AWS, every single Cloud, if we see that malicious traffic going some into IP guess what? It's probably BIT Mining, Bitcoin, crypto mining, it's probably some sort of data ex filtration. It could be some tour thing that you're connected to, whatever it is, you should not have traffic going. And so we do two things we alert and we show you where that all is and then with ThreatGuard, we actually will do a firewall rule right at that gateway, at that point that it's going out and immediately gone. >> You'll take the action. >> We'll take the action. >> Okay. >> And so every single customer, Dave and David, that we've shown this new capability to, it lights up like a Christmas tree. >> Yeah al bet. Okay, but now you've made some controversial statements... >> Steve: Which time? >> Okay, so you said Cisco, I think VMware... >> Dave: He's writing them down. >> I know but I can back it up. >> I think you said the risk, Cisco, VMware and Arista, they're not even in the Cloud conversation now. Arista, Jayshree Ullal is a business hero of mine, so I don't want to... >> Steve: Yeah, mine too. >> I don't want to interrogate her, she's awesome. >> Steve: Yeah. >> But what do you mean by that? Because can't Cisco come at this from their networking perspective and security and bring that in? What do you mean by they're not in the Cloud conversation? >> They're not in the conversation. >> David: Okay, defend that. >> And the reason is they were about four years ago. So when you're four years ago, you're moving into the Cloud, what's the first thing you do? I'm going to grab my CSR and I'm going to try to jam it in the Cloud. Guess what? The CSR doesn't even know it's in the Cloud, it's looking for ports, right? And so what happens is the operational model is horrendous, so all the Cloud people, it just is like oil and water, so they go, oh, that was horrendous. So no one's doing that, so what happens in the Cloud is they realize the number one thing is the Cloud operational model. I need that simplicity, I have to be a single Terraform provider, infrastructure is code. Where do I put my box with my wires? That's what the on-prem hardware people think. >> David: The selling ports your saying? >> The selling boxes. >> David: Yeah. >> And so they'll say, "Oh, we got us software version of it, it runs as a VM, it has no idea it's in the Cloud." It is not Cloud Native, I call that Cloud naive, they don't understand so then the model doesn't work. And so then they say, "Okay, I'm not going to do that." Then the only other thing they can do, is they look at the Cloud providers themselves and they say, "All right, I'm going to use Native constructs, what do you got?" And what happens basically is the Cloud providers say, "Well, we do everything and anything you'll ever need and networking and network security." And the customers, "Oh my God, it's fantastic." Then they try to use it and what they realize is you get very basic level services, and you get no visibility and control because they're a black box, you don't get to go in. How about troubleshooting, Packet Captures, simple things? How about security controls, performance traffic engineering, performance controls, visibility nothing, right? And so then they go, "Oh shit, I'm an enterprise, I'm not just some DevOps Danny three years ago, who was just spinning up workloads and didn't care about security." No, that was the Cloud three years ago. This is now United, BNY, Nike. This is like elite of elite. So when my VC was here, he said, "It's happening." That's what he meant, it's happening. Meaning enterprises, the dogs are eating the dog food and they need visibility and control, they cannot get it from the Cloud providers. >> It's happening in early days Dave. >> So Steve, we're going to stipulate that you can't jam this stuff into Cloud, but those dinosaurs are real and they're there. Explain how you... >> Steve: Well you called them dinosaurs not me but they're roaming the earth and they're going to run out of food pretty soon. (all laughing) The comet hit the earth. >> Hey, they're going to go down fighting. (all laughing) >> But the dinosaurs didn't all die the day after the comet hit the earth... >> Steve: That's right. >> They took awhile. >> Steve: They took a while. >> So, how are you going to saddle them up? That's the question because you're... >> Steve: It's over there walking dead, I don't need to do anything. >> Is it the captain Kirk to con, let them die. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Because you're in the Cloud, you're multicloud... >> Steve: Yeah. >> That's great, but 80% of my IT still on-prem and I still have Cisco switches. Isn't that just not your market or? >> When IBM and DEC did we have to do anything with IBM and DEC in the 90s, early 90s, when we created BC client server, IP architectures? No, they weren't in the conversation. >> David: Yeah. >> So, we dint compete with them, just like whatever they do on-prem, keep doing it, I wish you the best. >> But you need to integrate with them and play with them. >> Steve: No. >> Not at all? >> No, no we integrate, here is the thing that's going to happen, so to the on-prem people, it's all point of reference. They look at Cloud as off-prem, I'm going to take my operational model on-prem and I'm going to push it into the Cloud. And if I push it into multiple Clouds, they're going to call that multicloud, see we are multicloud. You're pushing your operational model into the Cloud. What's happening is Cloud has won, it won two and a half years ago with every enterprise. It's like a rock in the water. And what's going to happen is that operational model is moving out to the edge, it's moving to the branch, it's moving to the data center and it's moving into edge computing. That's what's happening... >> So outpost, so I put an outpost in my data center... >> Outpost looks like... >> Is that Aviatrix? >> Absolutely, we're going to get dragged with that... >> Dave: Okay, alright. >> Because we're the networking and network security provider, and as the company pushes out, that operational model is going to move out, not the existing on-prem OT, IT branch office then pushing in. And so, what's happening is you're coming at it from the wrong perspective. And this wave is just going to push over and so I'm just following behind this wave of AWS and Azure and Google. >> Here's the thing, you can do this and you don't have a bunch of legacy deductible debt... >> Steve: Yeah. >> So you can be Cloud Native, multicloud native, I think you called it? >> Steve: Yeah, yeah. >> I love it, you're building castles on the sand. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Jerry Chen's thing. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Now, the thing is, today's executives, they're not as naive as Ken Olsen, UNIX as, "Snake oil," who would need a PC, so they're not in denial. >> They're probably not in denial, yeah. >> Right, and so they have some resources, so the problem is they can't move as fast as you can. So, you're going to do really well. >> Steve: Yeah. >> I think they'll eventually get there Steve, but you're going to be, I don't know how many, four or five years ahead, that's a nice lead. >> That's a bet I'll take any day. >> David: Then what you don't think they'll ever get there? >> No, 10 years. (steve laughing) >> Okay, but they're not going out of business. >> No, I didn't say that. >> I know you didn't. >> What they're doing, I wish them all the best. >> Because a lot of their customers move... >> I don't compete with them. >> Yeah. We were out of time. >> Yeah. >> What did you mean by AWS is like Sandals? You mean like cool like Sandals? >> Steve: Oh, no, no, no. I don't want to... >> You mean like the vacation place? >> Have you ever been to Sandals? >> I never done it. What do you mean by that? >> There coming, there coming. Which version of sandals (indistinct)? (people cross talking) >> This is for an enterprise by the way, and look, Sandals is great for a lot of people but if you're a Cloud provider, you have to provide the common set of services for the masses because you need to make money. And oh, by the way, when you go to Sandals, go try it, like get a bottle of wine, they say, "We got red wine or white wine?" "Oh, great, what kind of red wine?" "No, red wine and it's in a box." And they hope that you won't know the difference. The problem is some people in enterprises want Four Seasons, so they want to be able to swipe the card and get a good bottle of wine. And so that's the thing with the Cloud, but the Cloud can't offer up a 200 bottle of wine to everybody. My mom loves box wine, so give her box wine. Where ISBs like us come in, is great but complimentary to the Cloud provider for that person who wants that nice bottle of wine because if AWS had to provide all this level of functionality for everybody, their instant sizes would be too big, >> Too much cost for that. (people cross talking) You're right on. And as long as you can innovate fast and stay ahead of that and keep adding value... >> Well, here's the thing, they're not going to do it for multicloud either though. >> David: I wouldn't trust them to do it with multicloud. >> No. >> David: I wouldn't. >> No enterprise would and I don't think they would ever do it anyway. >> That makes sense. Steve, we've got to go man. You're awesome, love to have you on theCUBE, come back anytime. >> Awesome, thank you. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech coverage. (bright music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome, everyone, to theCUBE's, continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. And we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two live sets, two remote studios, and over 100 guests on the program talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. We're very excited to be welcoming back one of our CUBE alumni, Peter McKay, the CEO of Snyk. He's set to talk about reinventing application security with Snyk. Peter, welcome back to the program. >> It's great to be back, Lisa. Thanks for having me. >> Great to talk to you. So, my goodness, Snyk has had an incredible year, last year, this year, I was just looking at your Series F funding raised over 600 million in the month of September alone. Your valuation is, I think I saw over 9.6 billion, which is nearly doubled. This year-- >> Don't rush at 8.6, but yes, it was double the last time. Yeah, it's been been a crazy 2021, that's for sure. >> So, talk to me about some of that before we get into what you guys are doing with AWS. Let's talk about that, we talked about that funding. What are some of the strategic areas of investment? I know you've done a recent acquisition cloud skiff, but where are you really going to be focusing the Series F funding? >> Yeah, we've been very aggressive in building out our platform. We have a great vision for where we see developer security evolving and we want to get there fast. A lot of our customers and developers are kind of pushing us in that direction of really consolidating a platform. And so, to get there quickly, we do it organically building it ourselves, and we do it in inorganically where we can see other companies accelerate that roadmap. And so, it's this combination of very aggressive, organic expansion of both the breadth of our products, but also the depth, like adding more to our platform, but also the inorganic, because a lot of companies who have team and technologies that are very complimentary to what we're doing and allows us to continue to consolidate what is a very fragmented market in and around developers security. And so, we're going to continue to use the resources to accelerate that roadmap. The second part of it is, we are a little bit different than some companies where they kind of follow where the decision headquarters are of companies for us, we follow developers. And so, around the globe, Multinational Corporations have developers in the Philippines, in Argentina and all around the world and we needed to be there. And so, expanding our community, expanding our customer success organization around the world is critical for us. And so, that's something part of our kind of use of proceeds is the expansion of our go-to-market as well. >> Peter, modern development has changed. Next thing modern development has changed. So, traditional AppSec doesn't apply anymore. A new approach is needed. Talk to me about why Snyk believes that and what that new approach is. >> Yeah, you just go back to for 30 years, security was owned by application security teams and that's when it was kind of this waterfall application development model where they develop an app and every three, six, nine months, and then the security teams would audit that application and kind of send all the feedback, hear all the issues, go fix it, developers, and it was incredibly inefficient. And then you throw on top of this digital transformation and companies moving incredibly fast in building new applications. This agile development motion and all the incredible tools that allow developers to develop really fast. But then you get this very slow antiquated way of kind of testing it at the very end, right before you move the applications in production. So, it just didn't scale. And so, the concept is just way too late in the process. You really need to move security testing into that developer environment from the IDE, the CI/CD all the way through. So, when you're developing along the way, you're fixing the issues well ahead of time. And that's where modern development organizations are all this concept of shift left and building it in, into that's really the driver is moving security earlier and earlier in the software development life cycle. >> And that's key, especially you talked about the acceleration of digital transformation, but we've also seen the acceleration of the threat landscape in the last 20 months. There's been significant changes. The perimeter is so fragmented, it's expanding, the threat landscape goes all the way into outer space to low earth orbit these days. Talk to me about that as kind of a facilitator or an accelerator of what Snyk is doing to really focus on shifting security left with those developers. >> Yeah, I think people are kind of waking up to the fact that up to this point, they've spent billions and billions of dollars on endpoint securities and runtime security and all the things that are kind of in production. And they're realizing that, okay, well, why are we still vulnerable? Why are we still have these issues? And I think it's the realization that they're waiting too long to fix it. And a lot of the issues are happening. They're either new issues with moving to the cloud or they're issues that happen well before it got into production. And so, this realization that we've got to go earlier and earlier and fix these issues well before we go into production and don't wait till the very end. So, I think that's really driving the market to this shift lab. >> And you guys have actually kind of really pivoted your go-to-market model around that developers don't try and buy software the way that IT and security teams do. Talk to me about Snyk's GTM. >> Yeah, it's very unique in that it's really marrying this model developer security approach with the way developers want to buy. So, we start with our community and we do free content and tools all around building awareness for the developer community. We have, all of our products are free, so developers can try before they buy. And if you're truly a developer solution, you offer it free and let them use it. And then when they want to collaborate and they want to integrate and automate that moves from free to paid. So, it's very much of this bottoms up motion that really allowed developers to try MI. That's a big, big driver for our business, inbound motion drives 70% of our pipeline from them coming to us from this community. And then we come in kind of top down once they kind of get into different places. And we go in through those security organizations, which are trying to shift labs, trying to move security earlier, earlier and we work together with the security organizations to help move that to the developer world. So, you've got this bottoms up, developer adoption, viral adoption of Snyk within those organizations. Now, with the top-down kind of, and we become this bridge between the developer teams in engineering, and the security teams that are all trying to move in the same direction. And so, that's kind of how this market is evolved. And we're kind of that bridge for both those organizations. >> I was going to ask you about that, that bridge is critical, but also that bridge is a cultural change. I'm curious, how do you see organizations? It sounds like obviously you're, what over, I think, six, 700 customers now, a couple of million developers using the technology, so-- >> 1300 customers today >> 1300, okay. Wow! You have had a big year. 1300 customers, millions of developers using the technology. Talk to me a little bit about how you guys have figured out how to facilitate that cultural shift and shift security left, but also bridge between the IT and the security folks which have tended to be on sort of opposite sides of the spectrum. >> Yeah, I think the realization, I think a lot of people are very early on and I was... We'd been in the software industry for 25 years. Even nobody ever thought developers would care about security. Like there's no way developers really care about security. And really, if you think about, if you asked the developer, would you rather develop a secure app or an insecure app? If all things were equal, of course, they'd want it to be secure, but it needs to be easy. It needs to be like, don't slow me down, whatever you do, don't slow me down. And so, we have this, "Hey, it's all about speed of development, speeds, speed, speed." So, for us, we need to make it embedded, like integrated completely into that software development life cycle. So, developers don't have to be security experts, developers don't have to get out of their flow to do it, learn a different piece of software to figure out it's all embedded into that process. So, you can be fast and you can be agile, but you can also be secure at the same time. And so, part of that is embedding education and other things in there to learn that expansion of getting in the door and kind of building that momentum within these development communities all around the world. And so, I think we help all our customers with that kind of developer adoption and working together with the security teams and engineering teams on how we roll that out around best practices. And in some of the things we've learned over the six and a half years of doing this. >> It sounds very strategic and methodical and a great approach that is obviously quite successful. We talked about the growth trajectory now, 1300 customers. Let's talk about what you guys are doing with AWS. Here we are at reinvent this year. Talk to me about this Snyk, AWS partnership. >> Yeah, it's been really gaining momentum over the past year and a half, almost two years now. AWS, a lot of the workloads, one of the reasons, a lot of the applications don't go to the cloud is because of security issues and moving workloads to the cloud. Also developing applications in the cloud, security is a critical part of it. So, AWS is obviously infrastructure, but they also need solutions that allow them to make sure that those companies that are developing on AWS are secure. And so, we've integrated our Intel database into AWS inspector. We have a lot of offerings, very specific AWS offerings that our mutual customers can leverage. And we work very collaboratively with AWS in not only our technical roadmap with them, but also our go-to-market side, which is very much aligned. And it's continuing, we kind of, I say, we're in the second inning of that game. We got a lot more coming. >> Okay, but well aligned. Give me a customer example, if you will, have joined AWS Snyk customer that you've really helped with this transition, shifting security left they're building apps in the AWS cloud very successfully and securely. >> Yeah, I'd well, almost every company has some relationship with size with AWS. And so, for us, it's one of the first questions we ask anybody coming in is what's your relationship with one of the cloud vendors? And that inevitably it'll be, yeah, we have a relationship with AWS. And so, we talk about our roadmap that we have with AWS. They can buy our software through the AWS marketplace. You could leverage kind of your EDPs that you have with AWS to kind of build that scale. So, we're very technically aligned with the AWS platform. And so, you look at financial services, we've done a fair amount of financial services, insurance companies that are all kind of moving more workloads to AWS. Some of them have been our customers before, some of them separate from AWS, and now they're kind of, "Hey, can I move all my apps over and leveraged, Snyk in that process?" So, it's now, a good part of our go-to-market motion is coming through AWS marketplace as well. So, it's been a very successful partnership on both parties. >> A lot of momentum there, speaking of momentum, we talked about the funding raise this year alone, tremendous momentum going on for the company. What are some of the things that we can expect to see from Snyk in calendar year 22? >> Yeah, well, aggressive roadmap. I mean, that's still, we see, we have four modules today. We started with one and we added to, that was open to a security. We added a container security, infrastructure as code security. Then we added code security or a stats solution. We see modules five, six, seven coming out. we made an acquisition of drift technology, adding into kind of adding some more depth. So, you're going to see just a lot more continued aggressiveness on our side, as we scale both our engineering, organically and inorganically, but also, the go-to-market, now we're almost in all the major countries around the world and we're going to continue to invest in building that out and going where the developers are, the 28 million developers around the world. Our goal is to reach every one of them as fast as we possibly can with our free or paid, or whatever way is to get to 28 million developers as fast as we can. >> So, for those developers watching, where do you want to point them to go to, to start their free trial. >> Just go right to our website, snyk.io and you can get all of our products free, you can chat, schedule demos, you can do everything very easily if not. And it's very self-service so, if you don't want to talk to anybody, you don't have to talk to anybody, but if you do, we have plenty of people you can talk to. That's our world, frictionless motion. >> Frictionless and contactless at the same time, Peter, congratulations on the growth and momentum of the company. What you're doing, the evolution of the partnership with AWS and that lofty goal to reach 28 million developers. Am looking forward to our next conversation to see where you are on that progress. >> Same thing, same here, Lisa, thank you for your time. >> Oh, likewise. For Peter McKay, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Stick around, more great content coming up next. (soft upbeat music)

>>Welcome to the cubes, continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 find Lisa Martin and we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events with AWS in this ecosystem partners. This year, we have two live sets, two remote sites over 100 guests talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. And we're excited to be joined by Patrick Jeanne, the CTO of OutSystems Patrick. Welcome to the program. >>Thank you. I appreciate being one of those 100 guests, >>One of the 100, one of the elite, 100, we'll say it like that. Right? So, so OutSystems has some revolutionary news. You guys are saying, you know, what developer experience needs to change? Tell us more. >>It does. I mean, it needs to change. And I've been in the industry developing applications for too many years dimensions basically since I was 12 years old writing software and, you know, going over that time and thinking about it, doing the traditional software development route. So many applications that take too long was, you know, costly to build so much risk involved in it. Eventually it didn't meet all the requirements. And if you look at the investment we make in software, which is important, I mean, software is a, is a unique differentiator for, for businesses. That investment has such a high risk and a high cost, and that needs to change and it needs to change just because of the complexity that is in that process inherent in it that's. And that is what we are doing and OutSystems is tackling that problem. And, um, from a business standpoint, it must change. >>It must change that that is strong words there. So talk to me about what you're announcing, what, what were the gaps in the market customer feedback? Was it, or were there any catalysts from the pandemic going we've got to change this developer experience and this is the time >>For sure. I mean, if you think about from the pandemic and I mean, we were on a journey for digital transformation. We've been on this journey for a number of years and it really accelerated that the experiences that we have with each other, with you and me, we're not the same studio today. I mean, there's there reasons that we have used this experience remote, we have a technology that can do it, the pandemic accelerated that. And so, so much of the experiences we have are digital experiences. And if you think about it, there's a device in between us. There's going to be a device in between all the people viewing what we're looking at, that experience that, uh, that they will have with us will be basically surfaced through an application on that device. And the pandemic has really accelerated that. And that's an area that we play in, obviously for what's considered low code application development. >>And if you just think about application development in general, that's what powers all of these experiences. And going back to that, you know, statement about that, it needs to change if we need these experiences to be diverse, if we need these experiences to be meaningful, if we need them to make sure that when people engage, as far as what that device is, something that brings, you know, delight and pleasure to them, we need developers across the board. Investing in that today, there is a very constrained market for professional developers, but because of the inherent complexity in software development. And so if you think about how that's almost almost you're limiting access to the people who can create those experiences, that's not a good situation. There's about 25 million developers in the world that would consider themselves developers today, 7, 8, 9, 10 billion devices out there. Think of that disparity between those two numbers. >>And so we need a larger number of people to actually develop applications. So that experience can be much more diverse. We need to expose development to many more people. That is the problem today with software development is that it is complex. It is too specialized. It's too inherit as far as with failure when you get it together. And so either you shy away from that as an organization or as an individual to do development, or you go on these very long development as far as cycles to actually create these applications. What we do is we take the approach of let's make it very simple to get into, you know, some terms and call it citizen developer, low code, basically all they're saying is let's, let's reduce the risk of development. Let's go into a process where we make it accessible to more and more people. You can go through and develop applications with the lower risk. You can build change into that process and you can get value into end users as rapidly as possible. So that's, that is the value proposition. That is what needs to change >>Strong value proposition well said, Patrick, talking about reducing the complexity, uh, the risk as well. So, so go ahead and crack crack open what you guys are actually announcing today. >>Yeah, for sure. So with, we we've been doing this for many years, we have, um, software development, we have 14 million plus as far as end-users using applications that have been developed with the Al systems platform, what we're announcing is taking some of the great benefits that we have to what you'd consider as the first part of that low code process, where you have a, you have a developer that has an idea, and there's a canvas in front of you. You know, you're, you're an artist, right? But again, this is what you are as a developer. And so you go in and you create that application. We've been doing this for many years and it works really well. But thing that we're improving upon now is the ability to do that and scale that out to millions of end-users 10 millions of end-users. So if you think about that inherent speed of developing an application, using a platform like OutSystems, we're taking that same concept and rolling that into an internet scale application, hosting architecture. >>So any developer that uses our systems, basically like it would be comparable to a traditional development team that has application architects, cloud architects, security, engineers, database engineers, a whole team of very smart individuals that generally the, the biggest technology companies in the world can put together. Most companies can't do that. You don't have access to that type of that type of skillset. And so we're providing that with project Neo, which is what we're announcing today in our, um, at our user conference and customer conference, is this brand new as far as platform that allows you to build these applications at scale. And this is initially built on AWS using all the great AWS technologies. If you look at what AWS has done and provided to developers today, it's amazing. It is absolutely amazing. The amount of technologies that you can leverage. It's also daunting because as a traditional developer, you have to go in and choose, you know, what do you do? It's like, there's just massive cognitive load as far as upfront when you're going to design and application and what type of messaging what's at the data store. Well, how do I host my application? What type of network, you know, as far as security do I use, we're taking all that heavy lifting, all that undifferentiated, heavy lifting off of the developers, putting it into the project, Neo platform, allowing a single developer or a small group of developers to actually leverage that best in class architecture on AWS today. >>So when you're talking to developers, what are some of the things that you described as the unique differentiators of project Neo? It sounds like this was really apt and apt time for change, but when you're talking to those folks, what do you say? You know, 1, 2, 3, these are the things that make project Neo unique. >>Yeah. So you're the first is don't worry about the application architecture. Like I mentioned, don't when you go in that, the idea, the concept of that application and what it means to, to deliver some value, whether it's into a business or a hobby or whatever. I mean, however, you're developing application, you're doing it for a reason. You want that value to come out as quickly as possible. You want that experience. And so that first thing is you don't have to worry about the architecture anymore. So in the past, you know, you'd have to think about if it's a very large application, it's millions and millions of end-users. How do you structure that? How do you put it together? That concern is removed from you in that process? The other thing is we solve the problem of software disintegration. So with traditional development, when you develop an application and you get it into the hands of end, users get immediately starts to disintegrate. >>So there will be bugs that will appear. There will be, as far as, um, security flaws that will come up services that you use will become deprecated. We'll swap out cloud services, you know, AWS or Azure or Google, we'll swap out cloud services with different services behind the scenes version that we new versions of those that is software disintegration. As soon as you develop software today and all of these beautiful cloud services that you use and components, they often something will become outdated almost by the time you release it. A lot of times with software development projects, it literally is you start with some version or some component before you can get that out in a traditional mode. Something becomes outdated. We solve that issue. What I like to call software disintegration, we, as far as our systems, ensure we invest in that platform. And so when we need to change out those components, so services, those versions fix is for a security flaws, fixed bugs. >>We do that and it seamless. And so your application, you do not have to rewrite your application. You do not have to go through that process as a tradition, as a developer on our systems like you would, as your traditional developer, we solve that software disintegration issue. So it is it's, it's very empowering to developers to not have to worry about that. There are many, you look at the numbers today about how much is invested in innovation versus maintenance. You know, a lot of companies start out at 70% innovation, 30% as far as maintenance. And then over time that flips and you'll get to 30% of your time spent on innovations development, 70% maintenance, that burden we removed that burden. >>Those are some really powerful statements protect that you mean, I really liked the way that you described software disintegration. I've actually never heard that term before. And it kind of reminded me of, you know, when you buy a brand new car, you drive it off. The lot the value goes down right away, then before you even get things out. And on the consumer side, we know that as soon as we buy the newest iPhone, the next one's going to be out, or there's some part of it, that's going to be outdated in terms of technical debt. I was reading a stat that technical debt is expected to reach and costs businesses 5 trillion us dollars over the next 10 years. How does OutSystems helps customers address the challenges with technical debt and even reduce it? >>Yeah. If you think about the guy, the truest sense of technical debt, it's a, it's a decision that you make in the development process to basically, you know, load up the future with some work that you don't want to do right now. And so we're solving that issue where number one, we, you don't even have to make that decision. So you can go back to that concept of removing that cognitive load of, do I get the software out right now or do I get it out in the right way? And that's really what technical debt technical debt is saying. I need to get it out now. And there are some things I want to do that it'd be better if I did them now, but I'm going to go ahead and push that out into the future. You don't have to do that today with us. >>And so what happens with our systems? We invest in that platform, and this is hard. I mean, this is not an easy thing to do. This is why we have some of the best and brightest engineers focusing on this process at the heart of this, not to get too technical, but the heart of this is what we call the true change engine. But then, um, within our platform, we go through and we look at all of the changes that you need to make. So if you think of that concept of technical debt of like, oh, I want to get this into the hands of man users, but I don't want to invest in the time to do something right. It's always done right. As far as with the OutSystems platform. So we take that, we look at the intent of your change. So it's like a, it's like a process where you tell us the intent. >>When you, as a application developer, you're designing an application, you tell us the intent of the application is to look and feel. It could be some business processes can be some integrations. We determine what's the best way to do that. And then once again, from a software disintegration standpoint, we continue to invest in all the right ways to do that the best way possible. And so, I mean, we have customers that have written applications. That's 10, 15 years ago, they're still using our platform with those same applications they've added to them, but they actually have not rewritten those applications. And so if you think about the normal traditional development process, the technical debt incurred over that type of lifetime would be enormous with us. There's no technical debt. They're still using the same application. They have simply added capabilities to it. We invest in that platform. So they don't have to >>So big business outcomes there, obviously from a developer productivity perspective, but from the company wide perspective, the ability to eliminate technical debt, some significant opportunities there. Talk to me about the existing OutSystems customers. When are they going to be able to take advantage of this? What is the migration or upgrade path that they can take? >>Yeah. And so it's, it was very important to me and, and, uh, and the team, as far as our systems, to be able to integrate, to innovate as far as for customers, without disrupting customers. And we've probably all been through this path of great new technology is awesome. But then to actually utilize that technology when you're a current customer, it creates pain. And so we've invested heavily in making sure that the process is pain-free so you can use project Niamh. So we are announcing it as it was in public preview, as far as now, and then we will release it from GA as far as in the first quarter of next year. So over this timeframe, you'll be able to get in and try it out and all that continue to use your current version, which is OutSystems 11. So what we, what we affectionately call it 11, as far as Alice systems, Al systems, 11 version, and continued to use, and you can continue to use that today. >>Side-by-side and coexistence with the project, Neo and project Neo is a code name. So we will, we will have an official product name is for as at launch, but it's our it's. Our affectionate is kind of a unofficial mascot as Neo. So we call it project Neo bit of a fun thing, and you can use it side by side. And then in the future, you'll be able to migrate applications over, or you can just continue to coexist. I mean, we see a very long lifetime for OutSystems 11, it's a different platform, different technology behind the scenes project, Neos, Kubernetes base, Lennox containers. Based once again on the bill, we went in with the, just looked at it and said, rearchitect re-imagined, how would you do this? If you had the best and brightest, as far as engineers, architects, um, you know, we have, which we do, you know, very smart in those people. >>And we did that. And so we did that for our customers. And so Neo is that how systems 11 still a great choice. If you have applications on it, you can use it. And we have, we anticipate that customers will actually side by side, develop on both in which we have some customers in preview today. And that's the process that they have. They will develop on 11, they will develop on the Neo and they will continue to do that. And there's no, we, we are dedicated to making sure that there's no disruption and no pain in that process. And then when customers are ready to migrate over, if that's what they choose, we'll help them migrate over. >>You make it sound easy. And I was wondering if project Neo had anything to do with the new matrix movie, I just saw the trailer for it the other day. >>It was a happy coincidence. It is not easy. Let me, let me be clear. It is something we have been working on for three years and really this last year really kicked into high gear. And, um, you know, a lot of behind the scenes work, obviously for us, but once again, that's our value proposition. It's we do the hard work. So developers and customers don't have to do that hard work, uh, but no relations in the L I love, I do love the matrix movies. So it's a, it's a nice coincidence. >>It is a nice coincidence. Last question, Patrick, for you, you know, as we wrap up the calendar year 2021, we head into 20, 22. I think we're all very hopeful that 2022 will be a better year than the last two. What are some of the things that you see as absolutely critical for enterprises? What are they most concerned about right now? >>Yeah, I think it's look, I mean, it's, obviously it has been a crazy couple of years. And, um, and if you think about what enterprises want, I mean, they want to provide, uh, a great experiences for their customers, a great experience for their employees. Once again, digital transformation, we're where you don't even kind of talk about digital transformation more because we're in it. And I think that customers need to make sure that the experiences they provide these digital experiences are the best possible experiences. And these are differentiators. These are differentiators for employees is, are differentiators for customers. I believe that software is one of the big differentiators for businesses today and going forward, and that will continue to be so we're where businesses may be invested in supply chains and invested in certain types of technologies. Business will continue to invest in software because software is that differentiator. >>And if you look at where we fit, you can go, you can go buy, you know, some great satisfied where my software as a service off the shelf in the end, you're just like every other business you bought the same thing that everybody else has bought. You can go the traditional development route, where you invest a bunch of money. It's a high risk, takes a long time. And once again, you may not get what you want. We believe what is most important to businesses. Get that unique software that fits like a glove that is great for employees is great for their customers. And it is a unique differentiator for them. And I really see that in 2022, that's going to be big and, and going forward. They're the legs for that type of investment that companies make and their return on that is huge. >>I agree with you on that in terms of software as a differentiator. No, we're seeing every company become a software company in every industry these days to be first to survive in the last 20 months and now to be competitive, it's really kind of a must have. So Patrick, thank you for joining me on the program, talking about project Neo GA in quarter of calendar year 22 exciting stuff. We appreciate your feedback and your insights and congratulations on project Neil. Thanks, Lisa. Appreciate it for Patrick Jean I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of re-invent 2021.