>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. Welcome >>back everyone to the cubes live coverage of UI path forward. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, coasting alongside of Dave Volante. We have two guests for the segment. We have Chris career. He is the senior director of service delivery at century link. Thanks so much for coming on the show. And Kumar, he is the client partner at Infosys. Thank you so much for joining us. So show G I'm going to start with you. We're hearing so much about this automation first era and when you are partnering with a company, we hear that automation first requires this real mindset shift. So I'm wondering if you could walk us through the process of when you are partnering with a company and you are saying we will help you add more automation to your work processes. How do you do it? How do you get the company to sort of adopt that mindset shift? >>So it is basically changing the mindset of the individual contributor. So the first thing is how do we make them adapt? Those changes into the organization and making sure that the learning experience and the Cuban experience are getting tased, are adapting by the individual contributor. That is more important for Infosys as a client partner to Centrelink. We are always striving for. >>So Chris, maybe talk a little about your role. Your title is, has service delivery in it. What does that, what does that mean? So we're, we're of course we're a telecommunications providers, so of course we sell our products, we have an extensive product portfolio. Uh, once it's sold, we have to fulfill those products. And that's what our service delivery comes in. Uh, everything from order entry all the way through to activation and delivery to the customer of the final solution of whatever it is they purchase from us. All right, let's get into it. So we just had Gardner on, they were saying, Hey, you know, there's a, there's a lot of things that can be cleaned up, cleaned up in there, >> a lot of things in there. Um, if you think about technology today, telecommunications, especially as a, as a industry, um, it's an industry of aggregation at this point. >>And it has been for a number of years. So with aggregation you, you end up with is um, I use kind of a phrase where we have an aim over the front door and that's the name of how we do business. Uh, that's, that's becomes a brand behind the front door. We're still operating as many of those individual companies still. So we're trying to stitch together in the background, the various networks, delivery options, products, et cetera, in a seamless way for our customers. So to do that, of course using automation becomes a very powerful tool for us right now to do everything that we would have to stitch together with human glue. Um, that's something that we have to deal with on a day in and day out basis. An area of the I focus on is ordering. I'm ordering in our space is highly manual. You're doing a lot of transcription, so to give sales the right tools so they can sell a, you give them a very elegant front end of the house. >>And many of the discussions we've had today, uh, have centered around the front of the house, looks very elegant and very smooth. And the back of the house is where a lot of the stitch together work happens. And that's where that automation comes into play. So partnering with somebody like a shadier, uh, trying to get onto the front end of how do we smooth those things out internally. Um, we're an operations organization. What we are always challenged with is how do we provide the service and product to our customers at an efficient price point. Um, people is a, is a margin drag at the end of the day. Um, but also we want our folks to be doing things that are more interesting. Uh, which is what automation is really about is that digital transformation and how do you transform your employees with you. Uh, and I'm definitely in an area where I have an opportunity there. >>And so that is, that is, that is what you, I've had this really selling, it's this idea that here are your, your employees who are doing these mundane tasks, these dreariness, this Drudge drudgery. And we are giving them an opportunity to do more of the creative work to use their brains. And more interesting and compelling ways. Shoji I mean is, is that the value props, I mean, how much are customers buying into that? I mean, is that, and is that immediate? Is it immediately clear to them, Oh, since I don't have to do that type of data entry anymore, I can now do this. I mean, is it obvious how you'll spend your, the rest of your time? >>So it is more about the analyzing the, what is happened in the history and making sure that how their data can be used and put it into the AI and making sure that how the automations can be revealed through that. That is a way to, you know, out of power we are making as a journey in central link as well, like in, along with the, the other telco organizations we are doing here. So specifically that is what, yea and automation we are specifically into making sure that how the customers can take advantage of the practice using the tools, like a UI path. >>So where's your expertise? automation, RPA, telecommunications, ordering, all of the above. So my ex >>is telecommunication. I have been with the telecommunication companies for about 25 years now. I'm majorly going through the raw from >>push button telephones to the era now it is standing up to fighting. So that's my, uh, expedience. You sound like an old man. Yeah. So Chris, when you do a business case for doing in RPA, I mean, I know a lot of CFOs and where's the hard dollars? You know, where are we going to save money? Well, we're going to, we're going to shift people from here to here and they going to do more productive work. Where's my hard dollars? Did you go through that or is it so blatantly where the potential >>is? Talk about the business case. It's not always a blatantly obvious, right? So when I'm building a business case, there's a number of things as an operations leader that I have to focus on, right? I own budget for my organization. So at the end of the day, I own making sure that I hit my budget targets for the business businesses. Always you're finding those, um, based on our opportunities in the marketplace, so forth. But I also have a lot of people that work for me. So part of the bigger area for me, and it's an area that I've spent a lot of time with consultants like shot to you on, is how do I transform my workforce? How do I bring them with me? How do I make it less scary for my employees? Because the first reaction, human reaction to employees who have been doing a function for so long, we heard it today about the cognitive changes, opening up your brain path, so on and so forth. >>Um, and the first reaction to them is going to be that shortest path to, Oh my God, I'm gonna lose my job and I have to then become a salesperson in addition to operations leader in addition to a budget manager to say, no, this is an opportunity for you to do something more interesting. You have that 20 years of experience in the industry. I want to use that knowledge in a different way. I want to open up some doors and career paths for you. Uh, so for me it's interesting and trying to break a sedentary workforce into a more dynamic workforce to initiate them into the digital age. When I write a business case, mostly what I'm looking at is very some of the it classical things. How do I save those dollars? What's my payback? What's my return on investment? More and more in the automation space, we're thinking much more customer first employee experience first. >>How do I provide the customer a better experience? How do I provide an employee a better experience? So the business cases have become a little bit more challenging, uh, cause you're also have offering some soft benefits, which is our employee experiences is a really big deal. Our customer's experience is going to be how we differentiate ourselves, uh, could be in the difference between the next sale and not making the next sale. So those have to get factored into the business cases and it becomes a bit, uh, art and science on how to quantify that. So there's a lot to unpack there. I want to start with kind of the, the, the sentiment of, Hey, I'm gonna lose my job. How did you deal with that, uh, with your team? Is it carrot stick combination so they can try it. I think a lot of it is first listening. >>Um, at least my style as a leader is to listen to what my people are saying first and then address it with as many facts as I possibly can. Right. Um, most folks think emotion first. Um, and, and you can end up in an adversarial type of situation there where you really don't want to be in an adversarial situation with your employees. You want your employees to support the change, the transformation that, that shift into a digital space. So for me, I have to listen to a lot first. And depending on who I'm listening to, I'm getting a very different story. I have employees from millennials to baby boomers. So as a result, each one of them were coming from a very different place, a carrot versus stick. Interesting concept because from a carrot perspective, the companies getting the care that the employee may not necessarily see that at first where we're saying, Hey, we want you to do more interesting work. >>But to them, they feel it. It's more of a stick at first. Uh, so it's interesting. Um, in my space it's been a, I've consulted with, with other folks, I've talked to a lot of my peer leaders, um, seeking a lot of advice on how do we navigate this cause we're cutting a new path as leaders. Um, I'm more akin to a baby boomer and a Jenner in, you know, a gen X type of a person. That's who I came up under an industry. So I have to temper my own thinking. Um, so it's interesting because for instance, I looked at my people managers and maybe it's a little bit more stick with my people managers where it's very much of a, gives me ideas. How do we crowdsource that, that information, our employees are going to be the best source of our, of our ideas for automating. >>What do we automate? How do we automate the things that they really disliked doing first? Right? So you're kind of giving them a carrot with, you're giving them a little bit of quick wins. We've heard about that today as well. Um, but then it becomes a matter of what about the individual contributor developer, right? How do I take somebody today who hasn't maybe been retooled from a career perspective in many, many years and give them the ability to say, no, you're not a programmer but you can automate things and UI path gives us some of those tools to do that with the purveyors of RPA would ha would tell you that people actually love it because it's taking away that undifferentiated heavy lifting. Once they get a taste for it and they can do other things, frees up time. Having said that, they may be really good at entering data into a form. >>They may not be good at doing other strategic things, so there's gotta be some kind of retraining exercise to. My question is, are you seeing either specifically at century link or broadly in the industry some kind of notion of gain share? In other words, if you're going to save this much time slash money and your business case, we'll give you back a portion, I don't know, 30% 50% whatever, so that you can retrain people. You can actually advance their careers. So you see you having conversations like that or is it actually where I think we're having conversations akin to that. Not necessarily have that conversation. Um, conversations that I'm having are more of the nature of, you know, chicken and the egg kind of a thing. When it comes automation, you're under budgetary pressures. How do you take out your employee, retool them and train them on how to automate something using UI pads, tool suite, um, and then re-invest that same knowledge, right? >>Because if you automate something, you free up somebody else you can train to do more automation. Um, a lot of our, our employees who are first adopters, if you will, the willing hands that are going up. Some are millennials, some are many other generations. Um, but it's, it's been there very interesting because it's very powerful for those who have learned the tools and is very powerful and a peer to peer solicitation of, look what I can do for you. We've been complaining about this manual step for 20 years. How come it, we're still having to do it. So it the becomes a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy, right? You get those who evangelize it based on learning the new technology and then they train into their peers. Um, retooling employees is something that you brought up or at least that's what a little bit of what I heard. >>Um, you know, many areas, Hey, I've been doing data entry for a long time. What else am I good at? And a lot of that just becomes creativity. Who else? Who do you interact with the most? Who are the employees or who are the customers, who are the sales organizations, et cetera, where you end up, they know your name, they're going to call you because you know that answer. Well guess what? You're a knowledge base for them. And that often becomes where I ended up retooling and re shifting employees. They see new opportunities that they never seen before. One of the most interesting things I think I hear constantly is I never expected to be in sales, uh, from an operations type of person. They always think of a salesman as that salesperson kind of personality. And they don't see themselves in it, but they never think of themselves as sales support, which is that, that's what they end up becoming. Um, and they always were to begin with. They just never thought of themselves that way. So we're moving a lot more of my customers or my employees, if you will, closer to the customer than they ever saw in themselves. And RPA is enabling that. So that's, that's kind of a, a knowledge revolution. It's a self actualization change. It becomes a skill add that they never thought they had. Um, they're all interesting concepts, but they all, you know, I'm learning something new every day as a leader. >>Well, and you're bringing up so many interesting points that, that what this revolution actually means for people's careers. I mean, the really the re rebooting of work and really changing how we spend our time at the office and changing what we do during the course of our day is shadier. I mean he, he, Chris has been talking about how people are now closer to the customer and therefore the human, the soft skills are becoming increasingly important. So how are you helping companies think through those challenges to make sure that their people do have the appropriate skills? And as Chris said, it can be the difference of not making a sale versus making a sale. >>So it is about, uh, it's about learning. Learning can make, uh, the people transform as well as the company's transformed. So while we are adopting technology, we needed to ensure that how do we ensure the learning platforms are brought in to ensure the, that is part of their curriculum. Like what we have done in four school or colleges in the organization, make it live enterprise for the every organization to move into a live organization. It is always about learning. So what emphasis does is about, it's about the knowledge, what we carry. So we have created platforms like legs for internal to our organization. And wingspan is an AR is an external customized version for all of our external customers that is plugging into all the transformation programs. What we do to ensure that the learning is Paladin for the transformation, why you are path, you look it up. >>There's um, um, we have looked at, looked at others and I think in my career you're always going to have multiple partners. Um, so when it comes to the UI path, it's one of those UI path invested very early. You know, they wanted to be that partner. I think today part of the message we heard, uh, from some of the UI path executives were that, uh, we want to be humble. Um, and therefore it's not always about, Hey, how do I win this dollar so much as I, how do I educate on technology? Um, and how do we help you transform and pull you forward to a certain degree. Um, so I think UI path has a lot of, um, very human possibilities and human traits and how it, it educates its clients. >>Judge generally just a question as a, as a buyer and a practitioner, if you have a choice between best of breed, um, and you know, a suite, right? Let's say, I don't know if you're an ERP customer, but some ERP vendor all of a sudden bolts, you know, RPA on to their solution. How do you decide the convenience of Oh yeah. All in one versus the best of breed? >>Um, I think it depends on the size of your firm because throughout my career I've seen many different answers to the same question. Um, shadier is probably had a relationship with me for a number of years, uh, in various forms if you will, as a consultant and a partner. Um, what he often hears from me is both I'm gonna do both. Um, because some way I'm going to learn something from each of those engagements. So more often than not, the answer is you do a lot. You do both. You don't just pick a single partner. Um, the smaller you are, the more likely you are to do a single partner. The larger you are, the less likely you are to do a single partner. Diversity is a good thing. And so was competition >>where it's still live by Chris shot. Thank you so much for coming on the Kiva. Great conversation. That's going. Sorry. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Volante. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of UI path forward.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back to AWS re:Invent 2017. I am Lisa Martin with theCUBE, our day two of continuing coverage of this event that has attracted 44,000 people. Keith Townsend is my cohost, and we are very excited to welcome to theCUBE family Simon West, the CMO of Cyxtera. Welcome, Simon. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> Cyxtera, a six-month-old company. Tell us about it, what do you guys do? >> Sure, so as you said we are just six months old. It feels longer than that now, born at the intersection of five simultaneous acquisitions. One part of that was the acquisition of 57 data centers and a global co-location business that was formerly owned and operated by Century Link. Into that we've added the security and analytics capabilities of four modern startup software companies, and the vision is to provide a secure infrastructure solution both within our data centers, but interestingly even though I've got 57 data centers around the world, I want to be location agnostic. We recognize that today's enterprises are running multi-clouds, running hybrid environments, so we extend our security solutions on prem and into public clouds which is why we are here at AWS re:Invent. >> Fantastic. >> One of the big challenges that we hear from the enterprise perspective, hybrid IT is that the control that we have internally are very different from the controls that exist in AWS. How do you guys help even that out? >> You are exactly right, we would go so far as to gently suggest that the core method by which we protect access to infrastructure and applications which is still predicated on a physical perimeter is just fundamentally flawed in a 2017 world where your applications are everywhere, your users are everywhere connecting on a myriad of devices. You can't build a wall around that which doesn't exist. You have also obviously, as you say, you've got that problem of hydrogenous platforms, each with their own method of control. Our flagship product in that area is a product called AppGate SDP. SDP stands for software defined perimeter which is an emerging specification born out of the US government's disarm. Now a number of companies are offering software defined perimeter solutions. The basic premise that we hold is that security should be user centric rather than IP centric. A firewall is still predicated on granting access from one IP block to another IP block. The VPN may capture who is coming in, but once you are in, we give you basically unfettered access to flat corporate internal networks and we track you as an IP address rather than as a user. We think we should get more user centric. The user should be at the center of our policy. We think it should be more like cloud in the way we run security so rather than these hardware-based static central chokepoints, we think security should be real-time, it should be adaptive and intelligent, and it should be as agile as the cloud. You build cloud applications that are capable of spawning multiple copies of themselves, auto scaling up and down, moving from availability zone to availability zone yet our typical network security posture is still highly static. When you have some of the high profile attacks that we have seen over the last few months, our ability to change policy, immediately we recognize a problem. A particular operating system, apps in a particular service pack, is incredibly out of step with how agile the rest of our IT is. So more like cloud in terms of the way it operates, and finally we think, and so does the software defined perimeter spec, we think that access needs to be thought of as conditional rather than just a X, Y, yes or no. Jim has access to sensitive financial systems should be dependent on what operating system Jim is using whether Jim is on a coffee shop Wi-Fi network or on a structured corporate network, the time of day, the day of week, our overall security posture. The way AppGate works is when a user tries to access a system, the policy can ingest any one of these different conditional items. It can interrogate the device the user is using for the right software revisions. You can look at environmental variables. It can even look at internal business systems and check anything it can get to via an API, and only if those conditions are met will it provide access to a specific system, and then it can monitor that real time, so if your context changes, you move from a trusted network to an untested network, we can alter access. We can prime for a one time multifactor authentication or take any other steps the user wants. We offer that in cloud, on premise, integrated into our data centers to provide one central policy mechanism no matter what platform you are running on. In the case of AWS, we integrate with features like security groups, like AMI machine tagging, so you can build policy natively out of those Amazon features as well. >> Talk about that transition to this user based approach. I would imagine that a user can migrate their legacy systems into one of your 56, 57 data centers, and then as they start to expand out to the cloud, they have to change their operating model from they may migrate their traditional big firewall into your data center. What does that migration process look like? Is that an application by application spec, network by network? How do I transition? >> You know, it really varies. It feels a lot like I'm an old cloud guy, so it feels a lot like cloud did in the late 00s, in 2008, 2009. We think the software defined perimeter is going to have that big of an impact, a cloudlike impact on network and application security, but the way in which organizations will choose to implement it is going to vary. One of the things we did very early on was to integrate AppGate as a service into the data centers. If you think about co-location environments, when you bring new gear into a data center, you racket and stack it, the very next thing you do after that is drag a VPN back to the corporate office so you can access it remotely, which we would respectfully suggest is not necessarily the best way to do it in 2017 out of the chute. We've then integrated AppGate so organizations can just avail themselves of that as a service, and instantly have a kind of easy on-ramp. One of the big areas we see, and we've seen with customers here at re:Invent is customers who are moving workloads to cloud, and want to make sure that they can have that same sense of fine-grained access control common to those on premises and off premises environments, whether that's at migration or that's just an extension of an app into cloud environments, so it's kind of all over the place. >> Sorry Simon, what differentiates Cyxtera's approach to the software defined perimeter from your competitors? >> A couple of things, it's extremely robust in terms of one, being able to run in multiple environments, so a native AWS version, versions that run natively in other public cloud environments. Obviously we think the ability to offer it deeply integrated into the data centers is important. It's also capable of granting access to more than just web applications. You've got some solutions out there that are really web proxies and that are built for SAS apps and born on the cloud apps. This is more of a fundamental network platform by which you can gain access to any system or application you choose, and finally was introduced the concept of what we call scriptable entitlements which is the ability to interrogate third-party systems via API, and bring back those results as part of the building policy. An example there is we've got service provider customers who are running large multitenant environments. You then have a technical support organization who needs to support a huge multi thousands of servers environment with multiple customers running in multiple VLANs and typically the way you have to do that is a jam box in the middle and then giving these technical support folks access to that entire backend management network which is a security risk. With AppGate, you can actually integrate into a ticketing system and when John in support asks for access to a customer database server, at runtime, we can find out whether there is a trouble ticket open on that box assigned to that rep, and only then will we grant access. We don't grant level network access. We grant access to that specific application. We call it a segment of one, secure and cryptic connection between the user's device and the application or the applications they have access to but to nothing else. Everything else on the network is literally dark. It cannot be port scanned. It doesn't show up at all, so it's a much narrower sense of control, a much narrower sense of access, and again it's dynamic. If that trouble ticket that shut off, the access goes away automatically. We think the integration into business systems is a critical piece of the puzzle and an area where I think we have innovated with AppGate. >> Let's talk about security in depth. Obviously you guys are putting the software security perimeter around the data center, what we would classify as the data center which is kind of disappearing in a sense, and the edge. You talked about end-user protection. Where do you guys pickup and drop off when it comes to MDM, mobile device management, which is much more important now with mobile, and then laptops, desktops, et cetera, and you mentioned third parties, pieces of data center equipment that's not in your data center, like a wind farm. >> Sure, so you are right. We are absolutely moving to the edge. I think we continue to think that the data center will be as important as it ever was. The more cloud we have, the more data centers it needs to run in. The more public cloud we have the more people want to move some of their machines that might have historically run on prem to cloud data centers with low latency direct connect to public cloud environments. If you look at our data center footprint with regard to the edge, we are not just in the major markets, although in major metropolitan markets I've got half a dozen data centers all linked together, but I'm also in markets started across the country, so I've got half a dozen in New York and New Jersey, half a dozen in DC, half a dozen in the Bay Area, but I'm in Tampa, I'm in Columbus Ohio, I'm in Dallas, I'm in Denver, and so that distribution becomes particularly important as more customers move data to the edge. From a security perspective, again, we think of that data center as the nexus of enterprise at IT and the cloud. The data center is where our conversation about security in terms of access control starts. It's a physical security message of biometrics, and ID checks, and so forth, but there, we think is the missing piece of the puzzle. The principal point of ingress and egress into a data center today is not to the front door, the back door, or the loading dock. It's the massively clustered multicarrier network core, so if you are not providing some level of access control in and out of the network, I'd offer you are not providing a truly secure infrastructure solution. We start there. We are focused mainly at this point with AppGate at controlling the conversation between the user device and the system applications themselves. One of our other acquisitions, a company called Cat Bird has done some innovative work in terms of east/west segmentation in virtual environments, which is notoriously difficult otherwise to see, to stop the spread of how machines can talk to each other in a large virtualized forms as well, and so it's the infrastructure where we principally focus. >> Where are we, or maybe where are you guys in this revolution of information security? Are we at the forefront of massive change? What is Cyxtera's view on that? >> I think we are at the beginnings of a revolution that's about 20 years late. If you can kind of carbon date year zero of modern IT at around 1996, which is the advent of the Internet as a commercial and consumer force, that was the revolution for enterprise IT. That was the moment that we had to move IT outside the four walls of the machine room on the corporate campus. Prior to that, the applications all ran on big beige boxes in one room. The users were largely tethered to them by smaller beige boxes in other rooms, and the notion of perimeter security worked. It was a valid construct. As soon as enterprises had to start thinking about an increasingly global user base, as soon as users started to connect from all over the place, the concept of this perimeter goes away. Over the last 20 years, you've seen revolution after revolution and the way in which we design, provision, deploy, manage and operate our business applications, our development frameworks, and our infrastructure. We've revolutionized for availability. We've revolutionized agility. We've turned IT into a real-time API driven motion, and we've revolutionized for scalability with platforms like AWS just industrializing this real time IT on a global scale, and if you took a systems administrator from '96, and you showed them IT today, I think you have some explaining to do. If you took a security administrator from 1996 and showed him 2017, I think the construct would be familiar. We are still hardware driven in a software defined world. We are still assuming that access is static, that it's never changing, that it's predicated on the users being someplace, the applications being another, and again, in a world of real time IT, a world in which our underlying application footprint changes without any human intervention whatsoever, and I think you see with WannaCry, with NotPetya, with all of these attacks, the commonalities that they have in the terms of the reason they were so devastating is one, they take advantage of lateral spread. They take advantage of riding an authorized access into a corporate network where port scans show up 10,000s of ports where you can rattle the handles, break the locks, and spread like wildfire, and two, in the case of something like WannaCry, days after we realized what the problem was, we were unable to simply alter as an institution, as an industry, or as an enterprise access policy at the press of a button until we could get things patched. We had to sit, and wait, and watch the fires continue to burn, so it's a question of security being insufficiently agile, insufficiently automated and adaptive, and insufficiently software driven. We think that is just starting. I think on the SDP side, we've noticed in the last six months the conversation changing. We've noticed customers who now have SDP mandates internally who are seriously starting to evaluate these technologies. >> Wow, it sounds like Cyxtera is at the beginning of being potentially a great leader in this security revolution. We wish you, Simon, and the entire company the best of luck. We thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE, and we look forward to hearing great things from you guys down the road. >> Much appreciated, thank you both. >> Absolutely, for my cohost, Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You are watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2017. Stick around guys, we will be right back.

>> Narrator: Live from Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the CUBE. Covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost John Troyer. We're here at the CUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2017, we're the world wide leader in live tech coverage. Happy to welcome to the program Kim Bannerman who does the Developer Relations at Google. Recently to Google. And Ben Kepes who's an analyst with Diversity Limited. Thanks so much both for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> Kim, you were up on the main stage yesterday and today MCing the event, really appreciate you joining us. Why are you at this event, why is the event important for developers? >> I got involved with Cloud Foundry before there was a Foundation so this has been my community for almost three years now. I'm not one of the oldie, oldie people but I feel like these are my people. >> Yeah, we had James on before so... >> Yeah, so you know. It's important to developers because it helps them move faster. I started out my career in consulting so one of the big heavy lifting items that we would always have to for our customers would be building a custom platform for an application. When I first heard about Cloud Foundry, shortly after it was launched into open source, I was like that's really interesting to me. >> Ben, do I remember right, is this the first time you've actually been at this event in person? >> Yeah it's funny, so I've been covering Cloud Foundry, writing about Cloud Foundry since before it was called Cloud Foundry. >> Yeah Ben, you were one of those clouderati people talking about ads >> Like platform right? >> and the temperature, for years about that stuff. >> And it's bizarre, I remember when Heroku and Engine Yard were all it was when it comes to pass. So I've been following the space but I've never actually been to a Cloud Foundry summit so it's awesome to be here and to get a sense and vibe of the community which is always a really important thing. >> What's your take so far, what's your overlay of the market? We're not talking about paths so much anymore, so what are we talking about. >> No it's interesting. Just recently I read a post opining about the death or otherwise of paths. I think what we're seeing now is really what Cloud Foundry is is more than a path. It's really about a fabric, a control fabric for a bunch of different modes of operating. From that perspective, it's been really great to be here. Seeing the new announcements, obviously Microsoft joining us is a big deal. Things like Cubo. It really does position Cloud Foundry in this container, server-less world. >> Kim, we were joking with Chip when we had him on earlier, talked about enterprise grade and that means a salesperson goes in and the front of the company, the C level suite, talking about digital transformation, how do you reconcile that with what you're hearing from developers? How do you have the business and developers, are they coming together more? >> Right, so I'll tell you this. If you see a message and tweets or collateral or a deck or a talk and it kind of hits you wrong, understand that you may not be the intended audience. So I think that serves... That will speak to a CTO level type of person but increasingly nowadays we're seeing enterprises saying, hey, don't call me enterprise, we're actually an internet company like you are Google, we want to be like you. Don't call us this legacy, old school, all these different connotations that are attached to enterprise. Really we're just talking about larger companies of 10,000 employees or above, right. As far as meeting in the middle, The New Kingmakers, I love that book, Red Monk, great people. >> We're going to have Steve O'Grady on later. >> Yup, love them. I was seeing this happening when I started organizing user groups back in Atlanta in 2010 and 2011 where deals were happening but used to happen and say here, I'm signing this but you're going to have to live with it and I'm throwing it over the fence to my team and we're done. More and more those folks are coming into EBCs, tech leads, architects, developers, systems administrators, devOps, whatever. They're absolutely influencing the deal and they really do want to see it and try it and know that they've got a community behind them, supporting them before they agree. >> Kim, you have worked with a lot of different developers and your perspective now at Google and IBM was the last place. So sure, the developers are going to be the new kingmakers but they're having to choose between different platforms. The joke used to be at the front end, the web, HTML people, the great thing about Java Script is there are so many frameworks to choose from and they're tearing their hair out every year cause there's a new set. Now the backend, the folks who are doing the orchestration and the distributed systems and all the stuff we're talking about here, they also have some choices to make, look at different architectures, look at different stacks. What do you see as the developers that you're talking with, how are they approaching this in this multi-cloud world that they're dealing with? >> Ben made a good point on Twitter earlier today about multi-cloud, it happens for multiple reasons. Someone said this is the reason and then Ben, I'll let him speak to that, I won't steal his thunder. But for me, it's different, we can say it from the product level, it's different use cases. But quite frankly, there are multitudes of various different types of developers doing various different types of applications inside any given large customer. That's why you've seen, not to shield, Google has partnered we're doing PCF, Google roadshows, getting in with each other customers because that's definitely a big use case that we keep seeing. Then we also have container engine that's run by Kubernetes. It's just a matter of who your developers are. >> Google is big enough to embrace a lot of sets of developers. >> Absolutely, and it's not just about developers, which is a big pet peeve of mine, you got to think about all my ops people too and everyone else that's keeping the ship running. >> Shout out to ops people. >> Absolutely. >> Well Ben, what was your comment on Twitter? >> It's interesting. I guess there's a couple of different options and we've been told that multi-cloud the value propers that you've got a workload running on JCP, you want to move it to Azure or AWS. It's lists about that it's more about the CIO deciding that she wants to enable her developers to use whatever platform they want to use. It's funny, the developers are the new kingmakers meme. I'm not 100% comfortable with that because I think that absolutely developers build the solutions that allow an organization to be EdgeAll. But really it's still the CIO that gives them, or allows them, gives them the framework to use whatever tools they need. So I actually think that the developers versus IT tension is actually a fake one. What really needs to happen, what we're seeing in these more forward looking large enterprises, is the bringing together of those two worlds and enabling developers to use what they need. I totally agree with what Kim said about speed. At the end of the day, it's not the bigs that eat the small, it's the fast that eat the slow. Large enterprises want to feel more like a startup, more like an EdgeAll organization so I think that enterprise grade way of looking at the world was a way of looking at it from legacy days and we need to change that way I think. >> Ben, it feels like that Cloud Foundry and if I look at Pivotal specifically, are focused at those large enterprises getting a lot of traction. We see big companies that are on stage and here which there's a large opportunity there but different from what I see at certain shows where you're seeing smaller companies that are maybe embracing Kubernetes and containers a little bit more and not looking at Cloud Foundry. What are you seeing? >> I think it's pragmatic, it's totally not the sexy thing to say, but at the end of the day, developers will do what they are told to do, cause at the end of the day, they're in a job they have to deliver. So I actually think, I've spent some time talking to James Waters earlier on today to get an update on where Pivotal is with regard to PCF and I think this theme of allowing the CIO to enable their people to do what their people need to do is actually the right one. It's a really pragmatic approach. I think it's less about hey, let's try and keep all of these developers happy and try and be the cool tech vendor for the developer, it's about being the tech vendor that can help the CIO be the hero of their own development teams. >> Kim, there was a good question at the new stack panel this morning, how do people keep up with all of the new things, of course there's many answers but you're involved with lots of meetups, lots of different channels, what are you seeing as some of the best ways for people to try to get involved and try to keep up? >> It's a information overload. I would say tailor your feeds, whatever they are, to be very finite into the things that matter most to you. Like Sarah and some other folks said, there's Telepathy, there's Slack, there's mailing lists, Twitter obviously, User Groups, GitHub, that kind of thing. It's really important. I think a lot of us have gone through and looked at talks and videos after a conference, maybe we weren't able to make it. Those are super valuable to hear what the state of the union is on certain things. I like seeing independent analysts talk about a project. I think my customers enjoy that and they want to hear it from an objective perspective not just the company branding. >> I also think people still share things on blogs, even in 2017, a real-world development experience out there as it goes. In your new, as you're moving on in your role at Google, is there a broader role that you'll be looking at in terms of this whole ecosystem of developers and operators? >> Broader role. So building a program and basically attaching myself, we always laugh and say someone has to do a shot for every time you mention Kelsey Hightower's name, but Kelsey and I are going to be sticking together for a little while and I'm going to see what works for him. I did programs like this at IBM and at Century Link for Jared and those folks. I just want to see what the state of the union is there. >> You said you've been involved with Cloud Foundry for years, can you pull one or two things that you really have enjoyed about this community and how it has grown that people might not know if they aren't a part of it? >> Yeah, I think if you were here two years ago, it very much looked like the Pivotal show. There was a very close, Foundation had just been formed so there was a blurry line between where Foundation picked up and where Pivotal stopped. Those other companies that helped found the Foundation and the projects and were contributing upstream kind of felt like, oh well, okay, we're all in this together. But there was definitely a little how do we do this thing. This year's show, even from last year's show has grown significantly. The big differences are we've got people from all over the globe contributing to the project where I feel like we had a few places here and there early on. I love meeting the people and hearing their stories. >> Ben, with your analyst hat on, what do you going to be looking at the next few days? >> As I said, it's the first time I've actually been here but I have been following it since day one. I think I agree with Kim, I said a couple years before the Foundation was born that it was time for the project to grow up and move out from VMware as it was then. That's happened and it's actually quite neat to be here and to see that it isn't all Pivotal centric, that the fact that Microsoft is now a big part of the Foundation. It does feel like a mature and a vibrant ecosystem. It feels like things are in good form. >> Ben, slightly different question for you, you also wear a hat of working with a number of startups as an advisor. What do you see in the marketplace today? What are some of the big opportunities and big challenges for startups? >> I think helping with the complexity. At the end of the day, the world is going to be increasingly heterogeneous, whether that's multi-cloud or hybrid cloud or whatever name you want to put on that. So helping tools that help people wrap their arms around this increased complexion. There's a real opportunity there, things are getting busier, more and more complex. Removing some of that noise is a good opportunity. >> Well, if you don't like the complexity, you can always just live on Google's platforms and the things that they enable, right Kim? >> I think we are up to 60 something products now and more coming, so it's a lot. >> Alright, Kim want to give you and Ben final word, takeaways from the show. Maybe Kim, some of the community aspects. >> We're on day one really. Yesterday was kind of day one with the different workshops and Hackathons and things like that. I'm really looking forward to more talks and attracts today and tomorrow we have diversity luncheon and we'll see how the keynotes go in the morning but I'm meeting so many great customers and so I'm looking forward to meeting more tomorrow morning. >> Ben, you go to so many shows, what differentiates this one? >> Yeah I do and for me, I'm not an open source fanatic, by any stretch of the imagination, I equally go to propriety vendors and product shows as well as these ones. But what I will say is that I've been impressed with the coming together of the community and the supportive environment among the organizers and the attendees, so that's really refreshing to see. >> Ben, Kim, thank you so much for joining us. For John and myself, thanks for watching, we'll be back with lots more programming, thanks for watching the CUBE.

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco it's The Cube. Covering Devnet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back everyone. Live in San Francisco this is The Cube's exclusive coverage of Cisco Systems inaugural DevNet Create event an augmentation, extension and build upon their successful three year old DevNet Developer Program. Our next guest is Amanda Whaley who's the director of development experience at Cisco DevNet. Congratulations Amanda on one DevNet being successful for three years and now your foray into DevNet Create which is some call it the hoodie crowd, the cloud native developers, open source, completely different animal but important. >> Yes. >> From DevNet. >> Absolutely so the hoodie crowd is more my tribe that's my background is from software development and I came to Cisco because I was intrigued when they reached out and said we want to start a developer community, we want to start a developer program. I talked to Suzie Wee for a long time about it and what was interesting to me was there were new problems to solve in developer experience. So we know how to do rest APIs, there's a lot of best practices around how you make those easy for developers to use. How you make very consumable and developer friendly and there's a lot of work to do there but we do know how to do that. When you start adding in hardware so IOT, network devices, infrastructure, collaboration, video, there's a lot of new interesting developer experience problems to solve. So I was really intrigued to join Cisco bringing my software developer background and coming from more the web and startup world, coming into Cisco and trying to tackle what's this new connection of hardware plus software and how do we do the right developer experience around... >> Okay so I have to ask you what was your story, take us through the day in the life as you enter in to Cisco, you have Suzie wooed you in you got into the tractor beam 'cause she's brilliant she's awesome and then you go woah I'm in Cisco. >> Amanda: Yeah! >> You're looking around what was the reaction? >> So what was interesting was so DevNet started three years ago at Cisco live we had our first DevNet developer zone within Cisco Live. That was actually my first day at Cisco so my first day at Cisco. >> Peter: Baptism by fire. >> Yes absolutely and so that was my first day at Cisco and Suzie talked to me and she said hey there's a lot of network engineers that want to learn how to code and they want to learn about rest APIs. Could you do like a coding 101 and start to teach them about that so literally my first day at Cisco I was teaching this class on what's a rest API, how do you make the call, how do you learn about that and then how do you write some Python to do that? And I thought is anyone interested in this that's here? And I had this room packed with network engineers which I at that time I mean I knew some networking but definitely nothing compared to the CCIEs that were in the audience. >> John: Hardcore plumber networking guys. >> Yeah very very yeah. And so I taught the course and it just like caught on like wildfire they were so excited about because they saw this is actually pretty accessible and easy to do and one thing that stood out was we made our first rest call from Python and instead of getting your twitter followers or something like that it retrieved a list of network devices. You got IP addresses back and so it related to their world and so I think it was very fortunate that I had that on my first day 'cause I had an instant connection to what that community... >> They're like who is she's awesome come on! >> Co-Ost: Gimme that code! >> You're like ready to go for a walk around the block now come on kindergartners come on out. No but these network guys they're smart >> Really smart. so they can learn I mean it's not like they're wet behind the ears in terms smarts it's just new language for them. >> And that was the point of the class was like you guys are super smart you know all of this you just need some help getting tarted on this tooling. And so many of them I keep up with them on Twitter and other places and they have taken it so far beyond and they just needed that start and they were off to the races. So that's been really interesting and then the other piece of it has been working in our more app developer technologies as developer experience for DevNet I get to work across collaboration, IOT, Networking, data center like the whole spectrum of Cisco technologies. So on the other side in application we have Cisco Spark they have javascript SDKs and it's very developer friendly and so that is kind of going back to my developer tribe and bringing them in and saying to you want to sell to the enterprise, do you want to work with the enterprise, Cisco's got a lot to offer and there's a lot of interesting things to do there. >> Yeah a lot of them have Cisco networks and gear all around the place so it's important. Now talk about machine learning and AI the hottest trend on the planet right now in your tribe and in developer tribe a lot of machine learning going on and machine learning's been around data center, networking guys it's not new to them either so that's an interesting convergence point. IOT as a network device. >> Amanda: Right right. >> So you got IOT you got AI and machine learning booming, this seems like it's a perfect storm for the melting pot of... >> It really is so today in my keynote I talked a little bit about first of all why have I always liked working with the APIs and doing these integrations and I've always thought that it's what I like about it is the possibility you have a defined set of tools or Legos and then you can build them into whatever interesting thing you want to and I would say right now developers have a really interesting set of Legos, a new set of Legos because with sensors, whether that's an IOT sensor or a phone or a video camera or a piece of a switch in your data center a lot of those you can get information from them. So whatever kind of sensor it is plus easy connectivity and kind of connectivity everywhere plus could computing plus data equals like magic because now you can do now machine learning finally has enough data to do the real thing. My original background was chemical engineering and I actually did predictive model control and we did machine learning on it but we didn't have quite enough data. We couldn't store quite enough of it, we didn't have enough connectivity we couldn't really get there. And now it's like all of my grad school dreams are coming true and you can do all these amazing things that seemed possible then and so I think that's what DevNet Create has been about to me is getting the infrastructure, the engineers, the app developers together with the machine learning community and saying like now's the time there's a lot of interesting things we can build. >> And magic can come out of that. >> Magic yeah right! >> And you think about it that's chemical reaction. The chemistry of bringing multiple things together and there's experimentation sometimes it might blow up. >> Amanda: Hopefully not! >> Innovation you know has is about experimentation and Andy Jassy at Amazon web services I mean I've talked to him multiple times and him and Jeff Bezos consistently talk about do experiments try things and I think that is the ethos. >> It is and that is particularly our ethos in DevNet in fact in DevNet Create an experiment right a new conference let's get people together and start this conversation and see how it comes together. >> What's your reaction to the show here? The vibe your feeling? Feedback your getting? Observations. >> I'm so happy it's been great. I had someone tell mt today that this was the most welcome they had felt at any developer conference that they'd been to and I took that as a huge complement that they felt very comfortable, they liked the conversations they were having they were learning lots of new information so I think that's been good and then I think exactly that mix of infrastructure plus app developer that we were trying to put together is absolutely happening. I see it in the sessions I see it in the birds of a feather and there's a lot of good conversations happening around that. >> Question for you that we get all the time and it comes up on crowd chat I'd like to ask you the question just get your reaction to is what misperception of devops is out there that you would like to correct? If there could be one and you say you know it's not that what's your... >> The one that seems the most prevalent to me and I think it's starting to get some attention but it's still out there is that devops is just about about the tools. Like just pick the right devops tools. Docker docker docker or use puppet and chef and you're good you're devopsing and it's like that is not the case right? It's really a lot more about the culture and the way the teams work together so if there was anything I could, and the people right, so it's flipping the emphasis from what's the devops tool that you're using to how are you building the right culture and structure of people? That's the one I would correct. >> Suzie was on yesterday and Peter and Suzie had a little bit of a bonding moment because they recognize each other from previous lives HP and his old job and it brought up a conversation around what Peter also did at his old job at Metagroup where he talked about this notion of an infrastructure engineer and what's interesting. >> Peter: Infrastructure developer. >> I mean infrastructure developer sorry. That was normally like a network engineer. So the network engineer's now on the engineering side meeting with developers almost like there seems I can't put my finger on it just like I can feel it my knee weather patterns coming over that a new developer is emerging. And we've talked a little bit about it last night about this what is a full stack developer it doesn't stop at the database it can go all the way down to the network so you're starting to see the view a little bit of a new kind of developer. Kind of like when data science emerged from not being an analyst but to being an algorithms specialist meets data person. >> Right I think it's interesting and this shows up in a lot of different places. When I think about devops I think about this spectrum of the teams working and there's the infrastructure teams who are working on the most deepest layer of the infrastructure and you kind of build up through there into the Devops teams into the app dev teams into maybe even something sort of above the app dev team which would be like a low code solution where you're just using something like build.io or something like that. Something that we wouldn't normally think of as developers right. So that spectrum is broadening on both ends and people are moving down the stack and moving up the stack. The network engineers one of the things in DevNet we're working on is what we call the evolution of the network engineer and where is that going and network engineers have had to learn new technology before and now there's just a new set which includes automation and APIs and configuration management, infrastructures, code and so they're moving up the stack. And then developers are also starting to think I really want my application to run well on the network because if no one can use it then my application's not doing anything and so things like the optimized for business that we have with Apple where a developer can go in through an SDK and say I want to set these QOS settings so that my app gets treatment like that's a way that they're converging and I think that's really interesting. >> Peter: So one of the things that we've been working on at Wikibon I want to test this assumption by we've talked a little bit about it is the idea of a data zone. Where just as we use a security zone as a concept where everything that's in that zone and it's both the technologies there's governmental there's other types of, has this seized security characteristics and if it's going to be part of that conglomeration it must have these security characteristics. And we're no thinking you could do the same thing with data. Where you start saying so for example we talked earlier about the idea that the network is what connects places together and that developers think in terms of the places things are like the internet of things. I'm wondering if it's time for us to think in terms of the network in time or the network is time and not think in terms of where something is but think in terms of when it is. And whether or not that's going to become a very powerful way of helping developers think about the role that the network's going to play is the data available now because I have an event that I have to support now and it seems as though that could be one of those things that snaps this group, these two communities together to think it's in time that you're trying to make things happen and the network has to be able to present things in time and you have to be cognisant of in time. It's one of the reasons for example why restful is not the only way to do things. >> Right exactly. >> IOT thinks in time what do you think about that? >> Yeah I think that's really interesting and actually that's something we're diving in with our community on is so you've been a developer you've worked with rest services and now you're doing IOT well you need to learn a lot of new protocols and how to do things more in real time and that's a skill set that some developers maybe don't have they're interested in learning so we're looking at how do we help people along that way. >> John: Well data in motion is a big topic. >> Exactly yeah absolutely. And so I think and then the network, thinking about from a network provider like I need this data here at this time is very interesting concept and that starts to speak to what can be done at the edge which is obviously like an interesting concept for us. >> But also the role the network's going to play in terms of predicatively anticipating where stuff is and when it needs to be there. >> Yeah yeah I think that's a really interesting space. >> But it's programmable if you think about what' Cisco's always been good at and most network and ops guys is they've been good at policy based stuff and they really they know what events are they have network events right things happen all the time. Network management software principles have always been grounded in software so now how do you take that to bridging against hat's why I see a convergence. >> Amanda: We should have a conference around that. >> It's called DevNet Create. Okay so final question for you as you guys have done this how's your team doing with the talks was one going on behind us is a birds of a feather IOT session you've got a hack-a-thon over here. Pretty cool by design that we heard yesterday that it's not 90% Cisco it's 90% community 10% Cisco so this is not a Cisco coming in and saying hey we're in cloud native get used to us we're here you know. >> Absolutely not so it's I'm really proud of how my team came together around that so I have our team of developer evangelists who we connect with the developer community and we really look at our job as this full circle of we get materials out and learning and get people excited about using Cisco APIs and we also bring information back about like here's what customers think about using it, here's what the community's doing all of that. So when we started DevNet Create we set the stake in the ground of we want this to be way more community content than our content we produce ourselves. And so the evangelists did a great job of reaching out into communities, connecting with speakers, finding the content that we wanted to highlight to this audience and bringing it in so that the talks have been fabulous, the workshops have been a huge hit it's like standing room only in there and people getting a seat and not wanting to leave because they want to keep their seat and so they'll stay for four workshops in a row you know it's been amazing. >> I think it's great it's exciting for me to watch 'cause I know the developer goodness is happening. People are donating soft we see Google donating a lot of open source even Amazon on the machine learning you guys have a lot of people that open source but I got to ask you know within Cisco and it's ecosystem of a company we see a lot or Cisco on our Cube events that we go to. We go to 100 events last year we've been to 150 this year. We saw Dehli and Ciro we saw some Cisco folks there. Sapphire there's a deal with Century Link and Honna Cloud, Enterprise Cloud so there's Cisco everywhere. There's relationships that Cisco has, how are you looking at taking DevNet Create or are you going to stay a little bit decoupled, be more startup like and kind of figure that scene out or is that on the radar yet? >> So I think we know with starting DevNet Create for this first year what we really want to do is get foundation out there, stake in the ground, get a community started and get this conversation started. And we're really looking to in the iterative experimental way look at what comes out of this year and where the community really wants to take it. So I think we'll be figuring that out. >> John: So see what grows out of it. It's a thousand flowers kind of thing. >> Yeah and I think that it will be, we will always have the intention of keeping that we want to keep the mix of audience of infrastructure and app and we'll see how that grows so... >> Well Amanda congratulations to you, Rick and Suzie and the teams. I'd like to get some of those experts on the Cube interviews as soon as possible. >> Absolutely! >> And some crowd chats. You guys did an amazing IOT crowd chat. I'll share that out to the hashtag. >> That was really fun. >> Very collaborative you guys are a lot of experts and Cisco's got a lot of experts in hiding behind the curtain there you're bringing them out in public here. >> That's right. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> We're here live with special inaugural coverage of DevNet Create, Cisco's new event. Cloud native, open source, all about the community. Like The Cube we care about that and we'll bring you more live coverage after this short break. >> Hi I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior director of Strategy and Planning for Cisco.

>> Narrator: It's the Cube. Covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform. And HANA Enterprise Cloud. (electronic music) >> Welcome to the Cube everyone. We're here for the special exclusive Sapphire Now 2017 coverage from Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier, three days of Sapphire coverage. Our next guest is Jason Kotsaftis who's with Senior Director Database Solutions at EMC. Who came in here in Palo Alto. You guys have some news down there, full team down there. I know, normally we cover SAP, it's our first year we're doing it from our studio. But EMC's always been on the cube. You guys had a great relationship with SAP. I think our first year we've done the cube in 2010. >> Jason: That's right, yes, I remember. >> You were that SAP Sapphire. >> You guys were. You were on the Cube. You've been with us for awhile, but the relationship with an SAP, and EMC, now Dell EMC, it's pretty significant. What's the big news you guys have going on? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a huge relationship for us. We've been, even before we were merged with Dell, one of our top partnerships. Now it's even bigger. We've been amazed at how much Dell had been doing with SAP, and we're bringing the best of the two companies together right now. So, yeah, we have a huge presence at Sapphire as you mentioned. We saw Michael Dell do a brief speech at the show, and I thought that really helped set the stage for, not just Dell and EMC with SAP, but even some of the words he said were a good microcosm of Dell and EMC talking about the importance of bringing together people and processes. And we're going through that right now, and we're we're going through how we're going to merge the portfolio to go after Cloud, go after HANA, internet of things, data center transformation, all of those major things. >> Well surely SAP, the theme is Cloud, Multi-Cloud is a big message. >> SAP Cloud platform, we had Dan Lahl on the Cube. We also interviewed the HANA Enterprise Cloud group there also, got a huge alliance with Amazon Web Service, Terry Wise, there. We all saw Century Link. So you start to see the industry formation going on. The fog is lifting, you're starting to get some clear visibility on swim lanes, tactics, we'll help people with settling in. Whatever metaphor you want to use, people are finding it. Dell EMC is just absolutely just a monster now. I mean that in a good way, I don't mean that in a bad way. But it's so big. EMC was already very powerful, and winning in the storage business. Great enterprise jobs, the sales force, the culture, really well, great culture as you know, we know them. Dell has been lean and mean, like a speed boat. Great with channels, great with operations, very lean and efficient. EMC, the direct selling, you bring them together and now the supplier relationships are changed. I was talking with your team. Dell brings to the table deep Microsoft Intel relations. Not that you guys didn't have them, but they have deep relationships. >> Correct. >> You guys bring deep relationships. How has that new culture dealings changed your relationship? And specifically, what's the impact to SAP? >> Sure, you know, great question. First of all, it's been very complimentary. And we felt that going into the merger. I've been at EMC for 21 years right. So I had worked with Dell 10-15 years ago. Very, very complimentary, and you nailed it. They're very good at one segment of the market historically, we're very good at another. You know, for the most part I think it's been a really, really good matching, made sense from merger perspective. If we think about SAP for a second, one of the first things that we've been bringing together is, we have two very complimentary HANA portfolios. So, HANA is obviously a huge focus for SAP customers. I was just at Dell EMC world last week, every single customer that I talked to, whether they were running Oracle or Microsoft, they're all asking about HANA. We had a great focus at EMC with our enterprise HANA systems. And at Dell they have a very good packaged appliances and Scale Up bundles. And right now we feel like we can address the whole breath of what people may want to do with HANA. Whether it's, TDI, Scale Up, Scale Out. Very, very strong and >> John: Where does HANA fit in, because I want you to just take a minute to explain this, because it used to be a blanket word, even when they were kind of getting it out early. It was great marketing from the beginning, You know, it has legacy to it, but as the market changed, HANA changed. And as SAP changed, they changed from their positioning. Specifically, they used to call it HANA Cloud Platform. And they have HANA Enterprise Cloud. Now they've renamed it to SAP Cloud Platform, which is the platform as a service, the cloud native stuff. And then HANA Enterprise Cloud, which is really the managed service. So from your perspective, how do you define what HANA is today. And where is is settling in? Is it just the core engine of SAP? But how's it relate to all these new things? >> Yeah, for us it's really a platform. So if we think about where HANA began when we started working with SAP, it was all about analytics. Collecting data, analyzing data, making better business decisions. Now with S4 on the horizon, and the inevitable cut over to that from all the other enterprise applications of SAP, we really view it as a platform. And it's going to have big implications. If we look at our own SAP install base at EMC, there's a lot of customers that run Oracle underneath their SAP apps. So it's part of the HANA transformation, where we're going to be getting them, hopefully, on the road to, not just take advantage of HANA today, but as they go forward how are they going to get ready for S4 and have, hopefully, a smooth migration path to that. >> Obviously their cloud platform, I mean, their cloud strategy, or cloud direction. I don't know if you can have a cloud strategy. As Michael Dell said, Clouds like the internet, it's everything. >> Jason: Right. >> So, there's no real strategy, it's just the way life is. They're going to be on premise and off premise. And they're clearly targeting multiple Clouds, unlike say Oracle, for instance. But neither here nor there. The point is, is that on premise there's still going to be a 10 year plus journey, nothing's going to be disappearing over night. So the on prem Cloud dynamic is interesting, cuz they used the word mission critical. That was a big buzz word with when I talked to Michael Dell, He banged home mission critical. A lot of the teams in Dell EMC World last week was around mission critical work loads and choice. So you guys have that same mojo going on with SAP, how is that translating for you guys? Big new business, new opportunities? >> Great question. So one of the big things that we've acquired and focused on in the SAP space was Virtustream. So they've been a really big off premise cloud provider for us, but at the same time, when you look at what we've been building at EMC even before that we had our own enterprise hybrid cloud offering. One of the things that we're talking about this week at Sapphire is actually bringing those two together. So we can have people have an off premise and an on premise experience, a single view of their data, a uniform way to manage SAP in the cloud, and to the point of mission critical like you said is, as much as we see people moving to the cloud, there are still people that want to have for certain production systems they want to control that. They don't want to give it off to the cloud yet. They may not want to control the hardware but they certainly want to control the data. And with this new relationship that we're blending in the EHC and Virtustream we can actually allow them to have that choice to your point. >> John: What's EHC? >> The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. So that's our own self service automation of software framework that we put around the cloud. >> Which cloud, your cloud or other people's cloud? >> Right now it's our cloud offering. >> So you have a public cloud. >> We have a cloud offering that's a hybrid cloud offering. That you can deploy on premise or off premise, and Virtustream has been historically used off premise. >> So you use Virtustream as your off premise component of that piece? >> Correct. >> That makes sense. Cuz you bought them in January, I get that. >> That's right, and we had to bring the two together, and that's been a big new step for us. In that regard we think it's very, very complementary for SAP, that's one option we provide, right. We also work through SAP's own offerings to make sure we give them the right and the best infrastructure behind what they're trying to do with their own cloud. I was at a large partner of ours recently, OpenText, and we were talking about content archive, all the things that they do there, they're very deep in the SAP cloud, so we're working with them to start to potentially build the right archiving and capabilities behind that. >> So what's the big news for SAP this year, obviously we saw the coverage, we got some folks calling in, we had some folks down on the floor giving us some input, but from an SAP EMC, Dell, now Dell EMC relationship, what's the big news, what's the big story for you guys? What are you leading with, what's the announcements, be specific. >> The big news is we're all about the cloud. The bringing together of the on premise and off premise EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Virtustream, giving them that uniform way to consume SAP in a cloud based model, whether it be on premise or off premise, that is absolutely our biggest new highlight. >> You guys released that was a hard news that went out for you guys or... >> Yeah it was part of an EHC evolution story that we brought out, the other things that we have that are not necessarily formally announced but are more things that help the day to day administration of SAP applications, we often forget about that. We're pushing people to the cloud and we all talk about cloud. >> So there's no big splash in the pool like, hey we're releasing a new VxRail version of whatever, it's momentum specific. >> Correct. >> What are the big momentum's you plan, you can look back now and we've seen a lot of the evolution, we've seen the relationship with SAP grow, we've seen the converge infrastructure movement, now going to a whole nother level, hybrid cloud and converge infrastructure is happening. What's the new wave that you guys are riding with SAP together besides the cloud, it's generically cloud. What's specifically, can the customer pinpoint that you guys have solved? >> I think you just touched upon it, it's the whole build versus buy model. So historically if you look at where the SAP customers spend the most of their money, it's the op ex. It's the operational expense of administering and maintaining the SAP landscapes. >> You mean like total cost of ownership stuff, just like, easing some of the pain between deployment and costing. >> Workflow automation, copy clone refresh, backup recovery, performance automation, disaster recovery, all the things that you got to do to keep the SAP applications generating value to the business is heavy operational cost to them. That holds them back from doing innovation and investments. >> Those are the details you got to get down and dirty on. >> Yeah. We've done some great studies with you guys on this, one of the things that, there's different ways to go about tackling that. One of the ways that we believe is good is to simplify what you can. And so one way to do that is, well from an infrastructure perspective, you should have the ability to basically buy the infrastructure as an outcome, not have to build all the components and get it together. >> All the provisioning pain that goes with it. >> Yeah, and so when we were just EMC, we had one choice. We had what was called a Vblock, and then we build VxRacks and VxRails. >> Vblock was so successful, it really was, you did a good job of that. >> Yeah, a lot of customers from the SAP. Now that we're Dell though, we have the PowerEdge family, and we've been bringing that in to not only Racks and Rails, but looking at that in terms of building what we call Ready Bundles, where we can actually deliver as a single... >> Think about this ready solution, because the thing that got me at Dell EMC World was two things. The purpose built mission continued, I mean that in a good way. And two, the disruption of data backup protection and backup with the cloud. With the cloud as a new disruptor. For some reason backup and recoveries, clearly different in the cloud than it is on prem. So we've seen a lot of action in there too. Those are the two ready areas, and then also, dynamic changes going on with backup and recovery. >> Yeah, ready solutions was a huge thing, and this is part of the merger we rebranded our solutions organizations into one. Our whole, as the name implies, the whole goal is to deliver a ready infrastructure to the customer that they can just deploy, so they can focus on their applications and their business and not worry about the server, the network, the storage, which ones do I put together for what reason. We want to give them that menu of choice, whether it's a single node, a bundle of components, or an actual system, and deploy that in any way they want. >> What can we expect from Dell EMC, from your team VZB, with respect to SAP? Next couple months, next year, what's the plans, what's the continued momentum playbook? >> Some things that you'll be seeing more of if you go to the Dell blueprints page where we have all our solutions. You'll be seeing some new and refreshed offerings around HANA, you'll be seeing some new things around SAP landscapes, and you'll be seeing much more formal communication around the cloud offering I talked about. >> And cloud seems to be, again, cloud is taking it outside the four walls, which is different, great capabilities, people going in analytics, putting a lot of analytics in the cloud. So seeing that being the first wave beyond dev tests. Dev tests, even though Oracle says dev tests is really going to be around for a long, long time, people are already moving to analytics in the cloud. That's interesting for instrumenting for backup and recovery, what's possible. Quick thoughts on the changes there, in the landscape between the old way of thinking about backup and recovery, and by the way you guys have some of the best solutions out there that will data domain, scratch record goes to history, but now it goes to the cloud. What's the tricky parts that you guys are watching? >> Well I think on the one hand there'll be people that want to worry about their mission critical, like you said we have great integrated offerings to the workload, so you can have a backup team handle it or you can have your workload team handle it, it's really up to you. As people go into the cloud I think they have to decide, what's the tiering strategy they want to approach that, what's the retention data strategies that they need, how's that going to, >> Where the hell is the data going? >> Where's the data going, is it safe and secure, and how does that relate to how they're protecting their on premise data. I mean from our perspective, and back to the SAP example of where we have this uniform cloud approach, we have the backup capabilities built into that. Whether it's long term data retention, short term backup and recovery, yep. >> Question for you, this is a test, a real time cube test. I'm sure you'll pass with flying colors. What is the most, what are the biggest two waves that the customers should be surfing in the enterprise, top two most important waves? >> I think one of them we've already talked about, which is certainly cloud. I think if you look at the whole digital transformation, which I know is related to cloud, but the whole digital transformation wave I think is separate from that. So if you look at big data and analytics and machine data, every customer, whether it's a traditional RDBMS environment or what have you, they're all looking at how to harness that data. I think when you get into that and look at all the data in your data center that you may not be using today, you may not have been trying to take advantage of, with technologies like Splunk and other things that are out there to help you do that, that's a great thing to look at. We're seeing heavy.. >> So data basically, cloud and data are the two big waves. >> Yeah, digital transformation of data and taking advantage of that data. >> Well they go hand in hand, cuz you got the scale of the cloud for compute and other things, data drives the digital chest of digitalized data, digital assets are data, right, everything's data. So you would agree, cloud and data, two big waves. >> Yes. >> Jason, thanks so much for coming on the Cube special coverage and final comment, I'll give you the last word on SAP Sapphire, I know you got a relationship, you're probably going to be like oh yeah, SAP, everything's great. Be straight, what's going on with SAP. What's the outlook for SAP from your perspective. >> I think there's a great opportunity to your point, but there's also a good challenge, cuz we're going through a merger. I think we're making great progress to bring the two portfolios together, and SAP's being a great partner helping working with us. >> And you're cool with them now, you guys feel good about SAP. >> We feel great about them, we use them in our own environment at Dell as Michael talked about, to run our own business. So it's a great relationship >> Jeremy's been a remote telecast performer at EMC World. >> As you know, these partnerships in the industry go up and down, we talked a little bit about Oracle over the years, that's fluctuated. >> I was dating myself the other day on a Cube gig, and I said, oh it's a Barney deal, which my language was, you know, no real deal, cuz Barney was a character that kids watched, my kids watched, you know, I love you, you love me, it's kind of a love fest, but nothing happens. It's called a Barney deal. I need a new meme now because most of the people in the industry don't know who Barney is. >> Oh I remember, we used to joke about him when I was in alliances, we called them Barney meetings. You got a good meeting with a partner, you'd all talk and nothing would happen. >> You guys do not have a Barney deal with SAP, it's pretty deep across the board, SAP has good relationships, I got to say, they tend to do really, really good. They're either in or they're not, it's pretty obvious. Thank you Jason, so much. Jason Kotsaftis, who's the senior director of the database solutions group with Dell EMC joining us for a special three day coverage of Sapphire now from our studio. Great week, we had Informatica World in San Francisco, Google IO going on today as well, we've got live coverage today with Rob Hove, also VeeamOn is in New Orleans, Dave Vellante is there, and I'm in SAP Sapphire. A lot of coverage for events for the Cube, stay with us more for live coverage after this short break. (techno music)