(upbeat music) >> You got it, it's theCUBE. We are in Vegas. This is the Cube's live coverage day one of the full event coverage of AWS reInvent '22 from the Venetian Expo Center. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We love being in Vegas, Dave. >> Well, you know, this is where Super Cloud sort of was born. >> It is. >> Last year, just about a year ago. Steve Mullaney, CEO of of Aviatrix, you know, kind of helped us think it through. And we got some fun stories around. It's happening, but... >> It is happening. We're going to be talking about Super Cloud guys. >> I guess I just did the intro, Steve Mullaney >> You did my intro, don't do it again. >> Sorry I stole that from you, yeah. >> Steve Mullaney, joined just once again, one of our alumni. Steve, great to have you back on the program. >> Thanks for having me back. >> Dave: It's happening. >> It is happening. >> Dave: We talked about a year ago. Net Studio was right there. >> That was two years. Was that year ago, that was a year ago. >> Dave: It was last year. >> Yeah, I leaned over >> What's happening? >> so it's happening. It's happening. You know what, the thing I noticed what's happening now is the maturity of the cloud, right? So, if you think about this whole journey to cloud that has been, what, AWS 12 years. But really over the last few years is when enterprises have really kind of joined that journey. And three or four years ago, and this is why I came out of retirement and went to Aviatrix, was they all said, okay, now we're going to do cloud. You fast forward now three, four years from now, all of a sudden those five-year plans of evacuating the data center, they got one year left, two year left, and they're going, oh crap, we don't have five years anymore. We're, now the maturity's starting to say, we're starting to put more apps into the cloud. We're starting to put business critical apps like SAP into the cloud. This is not just like the low-hanging fruit anymore. So what's happening now is the business criticality, the scale, the maturity. And they're all now starting to hit a lot of limits that have been put into the CSPs that you never used to hit when you didn't have business critical and you didn't have that scale. They were always there. The rocks were always there. Just it was, you never hit 'em. People are starting to hit 'em now. So what's happening now is people are realizing, and I'm going to jump the gun, you asked me for my bumper sticker. The bumper sticker for Aviatrix is, "Good enough is no longer good enough." Now it's funny, it came in a keynote today, but what we see from our customers is it's time to upgrade the native constructs of networking and network security to be enterprise-grade now. It's no longer good enough to just use the native constructs because of a lack of visibility, the lack of controls, the lack of troubleshooting capabilities, all these things. "I now need enterprise grade networking." >> Let me ask you a question 'cause you got a good historical perspective on the industry. When you think about when Maritz was running VMWare. He was like any app, he said basically we're building a software mainframe. And they kind of did that, right? But then they, you know, hit the issue with scale, right? And they can't replicate the cloud. Are there things that we can draw from that experience and apply that to the cloud? What's the same, what's different? >> Oh yeah. So, 1992, do you remember what happened in 1992? I do this, weird German software company called SAP >> Yeah, R3. announced a release as R/3. Which was their first three-tier client-server application of SAP. Before that it ran on mainframes, TCP/IP. Remember that Protocol War? Guess what happened post-1992, everybody goes up like this. Infrastructure completely changes. Cisco, EMC, you name it, builds out these PCE client-server architectures. The WAN changes, MPLS, the campus, everything's home running back to that data center running SAP. That was the last 30 years ago. Great transformation of SAP. They've did it again. It's called S/4Hana. And now it's running and people are switching to S/4Hana and they're moving to the cloud. It's just starting. And that is going to alter how you build infrastructure. And so when you have that, being able to troubleshoot in hours versus minutes is a big deal. This is business critical, millions of dollars. This is not fun and games. So again, back to my, what was good enough for the last three or four years for enterprises no longer good enough, now I'm running business critical apps like SAP, and it's going to completely change infrastructure. That's happening in the cloud right now. And that's obviously a significant seismic shift, but what are some of the barriers that customers have been able to eliminate in order to get there? Or is it just good enough isn't good enough anymore? >> Barriers in terms of, well, I mean >> Lisa: The adoption. Yeah well, I mean, I think it's all the things that they go to cloud is, you know, the complexity, really, it's the agility, right? So the barrier that they have to get over is how do I keep the developer happy because the developer went to the cloud in the first place, why? Swipe the credit card because IT wasn't doing their job, 'cause every time I asked them for something, they said no. So I went around 'em. We need that. That's what they have to overcome in the move to the cloud. That is the obstacle is how do I deliver that visibility, that control, the enterprise, great functionality, but yet give the developer what they want. Because the minute I stop giving them that swipe the card operational model, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to go around me again and I can't, and the enterprise can't have that. >> That's a cultural shift. >> That's the main barrier they've got to overcome. >> Let me ask you another question. Is what we think of as mission critical, the definition changing? I mean, you mentioned SAP, obviously that's mission critical for operations, but you're also seeing new applications being developed in the cloud. >> I would say anything that's, I call business critical, same thing, but it's, business critical is internal to me, like SAP, but also anything customer-facing. That's business critical to me. If that app goes down or it has a problem, I'm not collecting revenue. So, you know, back 30 years ago, we didn't have a lot of customer-facing apps, right? It really was just SAP. I mean there wasn't a heck of a lot of cust- There were customer-facing things. But you didn't have all the digitalization that we have now, like the digital economy, where that's where the real explosion has come, is you think about all the customer-facing applications. And now every enterprise is what? A technology, digital company with a customer-facing and you're trying to get closer and closer to who? The consumer. >> Yeah, self-service. >> Self-service, B2C, everybody wants to do that. Get out of the middle man. And those are business critical applications for people. >> So what's needed under the covers to make all this happen? Give us a little double click on where you guys fit. >> You need consistent architecture. Obviously not just for one cloud, but for any cloud. But even within one cloud, forget multicloud, it gets worst with multicloud. You need a consistent architecture, right? That is automated, that is as code. I can't have the human involved. These are all, this is the API generation, you've got to be able to use automation, Terraform. And all the way from the application development platform you know, through Jenkins and all other software, through CICD pipeline and Terraform, when you, when that developer says, I want infrastructure, it has to go build that infrastructure in real time. And then when it says, I don't need it anymore it's got to take it away. And you cannot have a human involved in that process. That's what's completely changed. And that's what's giving the agility. And that's kind of a cloud model, right? Use software. >> Well, okay, so isn't that what serverless does, right? >> That's part of it. Absolutely. >> But I might still want control sometimes over the runtime if I'm running those mission critical applications. Everything in enterprise is a heterogeneous thing. It's like people, people say, well there's going to, the people going to repatriate back to on-prem, they are not repatriating back to on-prem. >> We were just talking about that, I'm like- >> Steve: It's not going to happen, right? >> It's a myth, it's a myth. >> And there's things that maybe shouldn't have ever gone into the cloud, I get that. Look, do people still have mainframes? Of course. There's certain things that you just, doesn't make sense to move to the new generation. There were things, certain applications that are very static, they weren't dynamic. You know what, keeping it on-prem it's, probably makes sense. So some of those things maybe will go back, but they never should have gone. But we are not repatriating ever, you know, that's not going to happen. >> No I agree. I mean, you know, there was an interesting paper by Andreessen, >> Yeah. >> But, I mean- >> Steve: Yeah it was a little self-serving for some company that need more funding, yeah. You look at the numbers. >> Steve: Yeah. >> It tells the story. It's just not happening. >> No. And the reason is, it's that agility, right? And so that's what people, I would say that what you need to do is, and in order to get that agility, you have to have that consistency. You have to have automation, you have to get these people out of the way. You have to use software, right? So it's that you have that swipe the card operational model for the developers. They don't want to hear the word no. >> Lisa: Right. >> What do you think is going to happen with AWS? Because we heard, I don't know if you heard Selipsky's keynote this morning, but you've probably heard the hallway talk. >> Steve: I did, yeah. >> Okay. You did. So, you know, connecting the dots, you know doubling down on all the primitives, that we expected. We kind of expected more of the higher level stuff, which really didn't see much of that, a little bit. >> Steve: Yeah. So, you know, there's a whole thing about, okay, does the cloud get commoditized? Does it not? I think the secret weapon's the ecosystem, right? Because they're able to sell through with guys like you. Make great margins on that. >> Steve: Yeah, well, yeah. >> What are your thoughts though on the future of AWS? >> IAS is going to get commoditized. So this is the fallacy that a lot of the CSPs have, is they thought that they were going to commoditize enterprise. It never happens that way. What's going to happen is infrastructure as a service, the lower level, which is why you see all the CSPs talking about what? Oracle Cloud, industry cloud. >> Well, sure, absolutely, yeah. >> We got to get to the apps, we got to get to SAP, we got to get to all that, because that's not going to get commoditized, right. But all the infrastructural service where AWS is king that is going to get commoditized, absolutely. >> Okay, so, but historically, you know Cisco's still got 60% plus gross margins. EMC always had good margin. How pure is the lone survivor in Flash? They got 70% gross margins. So infrastructure actually has always been a pretty good business. >> Yeah that's true. But it's a hell of a lot easier, particularly with people like Aviatrix and others that are building these common architectural things that create simplicity and abstract the way the complexities of underneath such that we allow your network to run an AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, whatever, exactly the same. So it makes it a hell of a lot easier >> Dave: Super cloud. >> to go move. >> But I want to tap your brain because you have a good perspective of this because servers used to be a great margin business too on-prem and now it's not. It's a low margin business 'cause all the margin went to Intel. >> Yeah. But the cloud guys, you know, AWS in particular, makes a ton of dough on servers, so, or compute. So it's going to be interesting to see over time if that gets com- that's why they're going so hard after silicon. >> I think if they can, I think if you can capture the workload. So AWS and everyone else, as another example, this SAP, they call that a gravity workload. You know what gravity workload is? It's a black hole. It drags everything else with it. If you get SAP or Oracle or a mainframe app, it ain't going anywhere. And then what's going to happen is all your other apps are going to follow it. So that's what they're all going to fight for, is type of app. >> You said something earlier about, forget multicloud, for a moment, but, that idea of the super cloud, this abstraction layer, I mean, is that a real business value for customers other than, oh I got all these clouds, I need 'em to work together. You know, from your perspective from Aviatrix perspective, is it an opportunity for you to build on top of that? Or are you just looking at, look, I'm going to do really good work in AWS, in Azure? Now we're making the same experience. >> I hear this every single day from our customers is they look and they say, good enough isn't good enough. I've now hit the point, I'm hitting route limitations. I'm hitting, I'm doing things manually, and that's fine when I don't have that many applications or I don't have mission critical. The dogs are eating the dog food, we're going into the cloud and they're looking and then saying this is not an operational model for me. I've hit the point where I can't keep doing this, I can't throw bodies at this, I need software. And that's the opportunity for us, is they look and they say, I'm doing it in one cloud, but, and there's zero chance I'm going to be able to figure that out in the two or three other clouds. Every enterprise I talk to says multicloud is inevitable. Whether they're in it now, they all know they're going to go, because it's the business units that demand it. It's not the IT teams that demand it, it's the line of business that says, I like GCP for this reason. >> The driver's functionality that they're getting. >> It's the app teams that say, I have this service and GCP's better at it than AWS. >> Yeah, so it's not so much a cost game or the end all coffee mug, right? >> No, no. >> Google does this better than Microsoft, or better than- >> If you asked an IT person, they would rather not have multicloud. They actually tried to fight it. No, why would you want to support four clouds when you could support one right? That's insane. >> Dave and Lisa: Right. If they didn't have a choice and, and so it, the decision was made without them, and actually they weren't even notified until day before. They said, oh, good news, we're going to GCP tomorrow. Well, why wasn't I notified? Well, we're notifying you now. >> Yeah, you would've said, no. >> Steve: This is cloud bottle, let's go. >> Super cloud again. Did you see the Berkeley paper, sky computing I think they call it? Down at Berkeley, yep Dave Linthicum from Deloitte. He's talking about, I think he calls it meta cloud. It's happening. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's happening. >> No, and because customers, customers want that. They... >> And talk about some customer example or two that you think really articulates the value of why it's happening and the outcomes that it's generating. >> I mean, I was just talking to Lamb Weston last night. So we had a reception, Lamb Weston, huge, frozen potatoes. They serve like, I dunno, some ungodly percentage of all the french fries to all the fast food. It's unbelievable what they do. Do you know, they have special chemicals they put on the french fries. So when you get your DoorDash, they stay crispy longer. They've invented that patented it. But anyway, it's all these businesses you've never heard of and they do all the, and again, they're moving to SAP or they're actually SAP in the cloud, they're one of the first ones. They did it through Accenture. They're pulling it back off from Accenture. They're not happy with the service they're getting. They're going to use us for their networking and network security because they're going to get that visibility and control back. And they're going to repatriate it back from a managed service and bring it back and run it in-house. And the SAP basis engineers want it to happen because they see the visibility and control that the infrastructure guy's going to get because of us, which leads to, all they care about is uptime and performance. That's it. And they're going to say the infrastructure team's going to lead to better uptime and better performance if it's running on Aviatrix. >> And business performance and uptime, business critical >> That is the business. That is the business. >> It is. So what are some of the things next coming down the pike from Aviatrix? Any secret sauce you can share? >> Lot of secrets. So, two secrets. One, the next thing people really want to do, embedded network security into the network. We've kind of talked about this. You're going to be seeing some things from us. Where does network security belong? In the network. Embedded in the fabric of the network, not as this dumb device called the next-gen firewall that you steer traffic to. It has to be into the fabric of what we do, what we call airspace. You're going to see us talk about that. And then the next thing, back to the maturity of the cloud, as they build out the core, guess what they're doing? It's this thing called edge, Dave, right? And guess what they're going to do? It's not about connecting the cloud to the edge to the cloud with dumb things like SD-WAN, right? Or SaaS. It's actually the other way around. Go into the cloud, turn around, look out at the edge and say, how do I extend the cloud out to the edge, and make it look like a VPC. That's what people are doing. Why, 'cause I want the operational model. I want all the things that I can do in the cloud out at the edge. And everyone knows it's been in networking. I've been in networking for 37 years. He who wins the core does what? Wins the edge, 'cause that's what happens. You do it first in the core and then you want one architecture, one common architecture, one consistent way of doing everything. And that's going to go out to the edge and it's going to look like a VPC from an operational model. >> And Amazon's going to support that, no doubt. >> Yeah, I mean every, you know, every, and then it's just how do you want to go do that? And us as the networking and network security provider, we're getting dragged to the edge by our customer. Because you're my networking provider. And that means, end to end. And they're trying to drag us into on-prem too, yeah. >> Lot's going on, you're going to have to come back- >> Because they want one networking vendor. >> But wait, and you say what? >> We will never do like switches and any of the keep Arista, the Cisco, and all that kind of stuff. But we will start sucking in net flow. We will start doing, from an operational perspective, we will integrate a lot of the things that are happening in on-prem into our- >> No halfway house. >> Copilot. >> No halfway house, no two architectures. But you'll take the data in. >> You want one architecture. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, totally. >> Right play. >> Amazing stuff. >> And he who wins the core, guess what's more strategic to them? What's more strategic on-prem or cloud? Cloud. >> It flipped three years ago. >> Dave: Yeah. >> So he who wins in the clouds going to win everywhere. >> Got it, We'll keep our eyes on that. >> Steve: Cause and effect. >> Thank you so much for joining us. We've got your bumper sticker already. It's been a great pleasure having you on the program. You got to come back, there's so, we've- >> You posting the bumper sticker somewhere? >> Lisa: It's going to be our Instagram. >> Oh really, okay. >> And an Instagram sto- This is new for you guys. Always coming up with new ideas. >> Raising the bar. >> It is, it is. >> Me advance, I mean, come on. >> I love it. >> All right, for our guest Steve Mullaney and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> This past week we saw two of the Big 3 cloud providers present the latest update on their respective cloud visions, their business progress, their announcements and innovations. The content at these events had many overlapping themes, including modern cloud infrastructure at global scale, applying advanced machine intelligence, AKA AI, end-to-end data platforms, collaboration software. They talked a lot about the future of work automation. And they gave us a little taste, each company of the Metaverse Web 3.0 and much more. Despite these striking similarities, the differences between these two cloud platforms and that of AWS remains significant. With Microsoft leveraging its massive application software footprint to dominate virtually all markets and Google doing everything in its power to keep up with the frenetic pace of today's cloud innovation, which was set into motion a decade and a half ago by AWS. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we unpack the immense amount of content presented by the CEOs of Microsoft and Google Cloud at Microsoft Ignite and Google Cloud Next. We'll also quantify with ETR survey data the relative position of these two cloud giants in four key sectors: cloud IaaS, BI analytics, data platforms and collaboration software. Now one thing was clear this past week, hybrid events are the thing. Google Cloud Next took place live over a 24-hour period in six cities around the world, with the main gathering in New York City. Microsoft Ignite, which normally is attended by 30,000 people, had a smaller event in Seattle, in person with a virtual audience around the world. AWS re:Invent, of course, is much different. Yes, there's a virtual component at re:Invent, but it's all about a big live audience gathering the week after Thanksgiving, in the first week of December in Las Vegas. Regardless, Satya Nadella keynote address was prerecorded. It was highly produced and substantive. It was visionary, energetic with a strong message that Azure was a platform to allow customers to build their digital businesses. Doing more with less, which was a key theme of his. Nadella covered a lot of ground, starting with infrastructure from the compute, highlighting a collaboration with Arm-based, Ampere processors. New block storage, 60 regions, 175,000 miles of fiber cables around the world. He presented a meaningful multi-cloud message with Azure Arc to support on-prem and edge workloads, as well as of course the public cloud. And talked about confidential computing at the infrastructure level, a theme we hear from all cloud vendors. He then went deeper into the end-to-end data platform that Microsoft is building from the core data stores to analytics, to governance and the myriad tooling Microsoft offers. AI was next with a big focus on automation, AI, training models. He showed demos of machines coding and fixing code and machines automatically creating designs for creative workers and how Power Automate, Microsoft's RPA tooling, would combine with Microsoft Syntex to understand documents and provide standard ways for organizations to communicate with those documents. There was of course a big focus on Azure as developer cloud platform with GitHub Copilot as a linchpin using AI to assist coders in low-code and no-code innovations that are coming down the pipe. And another giant theme was a workforce transformation and how Microsoft is using its heritage and collaboration and productivity software to move beyond what Nadella called productivity paranoia, i.e., are remote workers doing their jobs? In a world where collaboration is built into intelligent workflows, and he even showed a glimpse of the future with AI-powered avatars and partnerships with Meta and Cisco with Teams of all firms. And finally, security with a bevy of tools from identity, endpoint, governance, et cetera, stressing a suite of tools from a single provider, i.e., Microsoft. So a couple points here. One, Microsoft is following in the footsteps of AWS with silicon advancements and didn't really emphasize that trend much except for the Ampere announcement. But it's building out cloud infrastructure at a massive scale, there is no debate about that. Its plan on data is to try and provide a somewhat more abstracted and simplified solutions, which differs a little bit from AWS's approach of the right database tool, for example, for the right job. Microsoft's automation play appears to provide simple individual productivity tools, kind of a ground up approach and make it really easy for users to drive these bottoms up initiatives. We heard from UiPath that forward five last month, a little bit of a different approach of horizontal automation, end-to-end across platforms. So quite a different play there. Microsoft's angle on workforce transformation is visionary and will continue to solidify in our view its dominant position with Teams and Microsoft 365, and it will drive cloud infrastructure consumption by default. On security as well as a cloud player, it has to have world-class security, and Azure does. There's not a lot of debate about that, but the knock on Microsoft is Patch Tuesday becomes Hack Wednesday because Microsoft releases so many patches, it's got so much Swiss cheese in its legacy estate and patching frequently, it becomes a roadmap and a trigger for hackers. Hey, patch Tuesday, these are all the exploits that you can go after so you can act before the patches are implemented. And so it's really become a problem for users. As well Microsoft is competing with many of the best-of-breed platforms like CrowdStrike and Okta, which have market momentum and appear to be more attractive horizontal plays for customers outside of just the Microsoft cloud. But again, it's Microsoft. They make it easy and very inexpensive to adopt. Now, despite the outstanding presentation by Satya Nadella, there are a couple of statements that should raise eyebrows. Here are two of them. First, as he said, Azure is the only cloud that supports all organizations and all workloads from enterprises to startups, to highly regulated industries. I had a conversation with Sarbjeet Johal about this, to make sure I wasn't just missing something and we were both surprised, somewhat, by this claim. I mean most certainly AWS supports more certifications for example, and we would think it has a reasonable case to dispute that claim. And the other statement, Nadella made, Azure is the only cloud provider enabling highly regulated industries to bring their most sensitive applications to the cloud. Now, reasonable people can debate whether AWS is there yet, but very clearly Oracle and IBM would have something to say about that statement. Now maybe it's not just, would say, "Oh, they're not real clouds, you know, they're just going to hosting in the cloud if you will." But still, when it comes to mission-critical applications, you would think Oracle is really the the leader there. Oh, and Satya also mentioned the claim that the Edge browser, the Microsoft Edge browser, no questions asked, he said, is the best browser for business. And we could see some people having some questions about that. Like isn't Edge based on Chrome? Anyway, so we just had to question these statements and challenge Microsoft to defend them because to us it's a little bit of BS and makes one wonder what else in such as awesome keynote and it was awesome, it was hyperbole. Okay, moving on to Google Cloud Next. The keynote started with Sundar Pichai doing a virtual session, he was remote, stressing the importance of Google Cloud. He mentioned that Google Cloud from its Q2 earnings was on a $25-billion annual run rate. What he didn't mention is that it's also on a 3.6 billion annual operating loss run rate based on its first half performance. Just saying. And we'll dig into that issue a little bit more later in this episode. He also stressed that the investments that Google has made to support its core business and search, like its global network of 22 subsea cables to support things like, YouTube video, great performance obviously that we all rely on, those innovations there. Innovations in BigQuery to support its search business and its threat analysis that it's always had and its AI, it's always been an AI-first company, he's stressed, that they're all leveraged by the Google Cloud Platform, GCP. This is all true by the way. Google has absolutely awesome tech and the talk, as well as his talk, Pichai, but also Kurian's was forward thinking and laid out a vision of the future. But it didn't address in our view, and I talked to Sarbjeet Johal about this as well, today's challenges to the degree that Microsoft did and we expect AWS will at re:Invent this year, it was more out there, more forward thinking, what's possible in the future, somewhat less about today's problem, so I think it's resonates less with today's enterprise players. Thomas Kurian then took over from Sundar Pichai and did a really good job of highlighting customers, and I think he has to, right? He has to say, "Look, we are in this game. We have customers, 9 out of the top 10 media firms use Google Cloud. 8 out of the top 10 manufacturers. 9 out of the top 10 retailers. Same for telecom, same for healthcare. 8 out of the top 10 retail banks." He and Sundar specifically referenced a number of companies, customers, including Avery Dennison, Groupe Renault, H&M, John Hopkins, Prudential, Minna Bank out of Japan, ANZ bank and many, many others during the session. So you know, they had some proof points and you got to give 'em props for that. Now like Microsoft, Google talked about infrastructure, they referenced training processors and regions and compute optionality and storage and how new workloads were emerging, particularly data-driven workloads in AI that required new infrastructure. He explicitly highlighted partnerships within Nvidia and Intel. I didn't see anything on Arm, which somewhat surprised me 'cause I believe Google's working on that or at least has come following in AWS's suit if you will, but maybe that's why they're not mentioning it or maybe I got to do more research there, but let's park that for a minute. But again, as we've extensively discussed in Breaking Analysis in our view when it comes to compute, AWS via its Annapurna acquisition is well ahead of the pack in this area. Arm is making its way into the enterprise, but all three companies are heavily investing in infrastructure, which is great news for customers and the ecosystem. We'll come back to that. Data and AI go hand in hand, and there was no shortage of data talk. Google didn't mention Snowflake or Databricks specifically, but it did mention, by the way, it mentioned Mongo a couple of times, but it did mention Google's, quote, Open Data cloud. Now maybe Google has used that term before, but Snowflake has been marketing the data cloud concept for a couple of years now. So that struck as a shot across the bow to one of its partners and obviously competitor, Snowflake. At BigQuery is a main centerpiece of Google's data strategy. Kurian talked about how they can take any data from any source in any format from any cloud provider with BigQuery Omni and aggregate and understand it. And with the support of Apache Iceberg and Delta and Hudi coming in the future and its open Data Cloud Alliance, they talked a lot about that. So without specifically mentioning Snowflake or Databricks, Kurian co-opted a lot of messaging from these two players, such as life and tech. Kurian also talked about Google Workspace and how it's now at 8 million users up from 6 million just two years ago. There's a lot of discussion on developer optionality and several details on tools supported and the open mantra of Google. And finally on security, Google brought out Kevin Mandian, he's a CUBE alum, extremely impressive individual who's CEO of Mandiant, a leading security service provider and consultancy that Google recently acquired for around 5.3 billion. They talked about moving from a shared responsibility model to a shared fate model, which is again, it's kind of a shot across AWS's bow, kind of shared responsibility model. It's unclear that Google will pay the same penalty if a customer doesn't live up to its portion of the shared responsibility, but we can probably assume that the customer is still going to bear the brunt of the pain, nonetheless. Mandiant is really interesting because it's a services play and Google has stated that it is not a services company, it's going to give partners in the channel plenty of room to play. So we'll see what it does with Mandiant. But Mandiant is a very strong enterprise capability and in the single most important area security. So interesting acquisition by Google. Now as well, unlike Microsoft, Google is not competing with security leaders like Okta and CrowdStrike. Rather, it's partnering aggressively with those firms and prominently putting them forth. All right. Let's get into the ETR survey data and see how Microsoft and Google are positioned in four key markets that we've mentioned before, IaaS, BI analytics, database data platforms and collaboration software. First, let's look at the IaaS cloud. ETR is just about to release its October survey, so I cannot share the that data yet. I can only show July data, but we're going to give you some directional hints throughout this conversation. This chart shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap or presence in the data, i.e., how pervasive the platform is. That's on the horizontal axis. And we've inserted the Wikibon estimates of IaaS revenue for the companies, the Big 3. Actually the Big 4, we included Alibaba. So a couple of points in this somewhat busy data chart. First, Microsoft and AWS as always are dominant on both axes. The red dotted line there at 40% on the vertical axis. That represents a highly elevated spending velocity and all of the Big 3 are above the line. Now at the same time, GCP is well behind the two leaders on the horizontal axis and you can see that in the table insert as well in our revenue estimates. Now why is Azure bigger in the ETR survey when AWS is larger according to the Wikibon revenue estimates? And the answer is because Microsoft with products like 365 and Teams will often be considered by respondents in the survey as cloud by customers, so they fit into that ETR category. But in the insert data we're stripping out applications and SaaS from Microsoft and Google and we're only isolating on IaaS. The other point is when you take a look at the early October returns, you see downward pressure as signified by those dotted arrows on every name. The only exception was Dell, or Dell and IBM, which showing slightly improved momentum. So the survey data generally confirms what we know that AWS and Azure have a massive lead and strong momentum in the marketplace. But the real story is below the line. Unlike Google Cloud, which is on pace to lose well over 3 billion on an operating basis this year, AWS's operating profit is around $20 billion annually. Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud generated more than $30 billion in operating income last fiscal year. Let that sink in for a moment. Now again, that's not to say Google doesn't have traction, it does and Kurian gave some nice proof points and customer examples in his keynote presentation, but the data underscores the lead that Microsoft and AWS have on Google in cloud. And here's a breakdown of ETR's proprietary net score methodology, that vertical axis that we showed you in the previous chart. It asks customers, are you adopting the platform new? That's that lime green. Are you spending 6% or more? That's the forest green. Is you're spending flat? That's the gray. Is you're spending down 6% or worse? That's the pinkest color. Or are you replacing the platform, defecting? That's the bright red. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get a net score. Now one caveat here, which actually is really favorable from Microsoft, the Microsoft data that we're showing here is across the entire Microsoft portfolio. The other point is, this is July data, we'll have an update for you once ETR releases its October results. But we're talking about meaningful samples here, the ends. 620 for AWS over a thousand from Microsoft in more than 450 respondents in the survey for Google. So the real tell is replacements, that bright red. There is virtually no churn for AWS and Microsoft, but Google's churn is 5x, those two in the survey. Now 5% churn is not high, but you'd like to see three things for Google given it's smaller size. One is less churn, two is much, much higher adoption rates in the lime green. Three is a higher percentage of those spending more, the forest green. And four is a lower percentage of those spending less. And none of these conditions really applies here for Google. GCP is still not growing fast enough in our opinion, and doesn't have nearly the traction of the two leaders and that shows up in the survey data. All right, let's look at the next sector, BI analytics. Here we have that same XY dimension. Again, Microsoft dominating the picture. AWS very strong also in both axes. Tableau, very popular and respectable of course acquired by Salesforce on the vertical axis, still looking pretty good there. And again on the horizontal axis, big presence there for Tableau. And Google with Looker and its other platforms is also respectable, but it again, has some work to do. Now notice Streamlit, that's a recent Snowflake acquisition. It's strong in the vertical axis and because of Snowflake's go-to-market (indistinct), it's likely going to move to the right overtime. Grafana is also prominent in the Y axis, but a glimpse at the most recent survey data shows them slightly declining while Looker actually improves a bit. As does Cloudera, which we'll move up slightly. Again, Microsoft just blows you away, doesn't it? All right, now let's get into database and data platform. Same X Y dimensions, but now database and data warehouse. Snowflake as usual takes the top spot on the vertical axis and it is actually keeps moving to the right as well with again, Microsoft and AWS is dominant in the market, as is Oracle on the X axis, albeit it's got less spending velocity, but of course it's the database king. Google is well behind on the X axis but solidly above the 40% line on the vertical axis. Note that virtually all platforms will see pressure in the next survey due to the macro environment. Microsoft might even dip below the 40% line for the first time in a while. Lastly, let's look at the collaboration and productivity software market. This is such an important area for both Microsoft and Google. And just look at Microsoft with 365 and Teams up into the right. I mean just so impressive in ubiquitous. And we've highlighted Google. It's in the pack. It certainly is a nice base with 174 N, which I can tell you that N will rise in the next survey, which is an indication that more people are adopting. But given the investment and the tech behind it and all the AI and Google's resources, you'd really like to see Google in this space above the 40% line, given the importance of this market, of this collaboration area to Google's success and the degree to which they emphasize it in their pitch. And look, this brings up something that we've talked about before on Breaking Analysis. Google doesn't have a tech problem. This is a go-to-market and marketing challenge that Google faces and it's up against two go-to-market champs and Microsoft and AWS. And Google doesn't have the enterprise sales culture. It's trying, it's making progress, but it's like that racehorse that has all the potential in the world, but it's just missing some kind of key ingredient to put it over at the top. It's always coming in third, (chuckles) but we're watching and Google's obviously, making some investments as we shared with earlier. All right. Some final thoughts on what we learned this week and in this research: customers and partners should be thrilled that both Microsoft and Google along with AWS are spending so much money on innovation and building out global platforms. This is a gift to the industry and we should be thankful frankly because it's good for business, it's good for competitiveness and future innovation as a platform that can be built upon. Now we didn't talk much about multi-cloud, we haven't even mentioned supercloud, but both Microsoft and Google have a story that resonates with customers in cross cloud capabilities, unlike AWS at this time. But we never say never when it comes to AWS. They sometimes and oftentimes surprise you. One of the other things that Sarbjeet Johal and John Furrier and I have discussed is that each of the Big 3 is positioning to their respective strengths. AWS is the best IaaS. Microsoft is building out the kind of, quote, we-make-it-easy-for-you cloud, and Google is trying to be the open data cloud with its open-source chops and excellent tech. And that puts added pressure on Snowflake, doesn't it? You know, Thomas Kurian made some comments according to CRN, something to the effect that, we are the only company that can do the data cloud thing across clouds, which again, if I'm being honest is not really accurate. Now I haven't clarified these statements with Google and often things get misquoted, but there's little question that, as AWS has done in the past with Redshift, Google is taking a page out of Snowflake, Databricks as well. A big difference in the Big 3 is that AWS doesn't have this big emphasis on the up-the-stack collaboration software that both Microsoft and Google have, and that for Microsoft and Google will drive captive IaaS consumption. AWS obviously does some of that in database, a lot of that in database, but ISVs that compete with Microsoft and Google should have a greater affinity, one would think, to AWS for competitive reasons. and the same thing could be said in security, we would think because, as I mentioned before, Microsoft competes very directly with CrowdStrike and Okta and others. One of the big thing that Sarbjeet mentioned that I want to call out here, I'd love to have your opinion. AWS specifically, but also Microsoft with Azure have successfully created what Sarbjeet calls brand distance. AWS from the Amazon Retail, and even though AWS all the time talks about Amazon X and Amazon Y is in their product portfolio, but you don't really consider it part of the retail organization 'cause it's not. Azure, same thing, has created its own identity. And it seems that Google still struggles to do that. It's still very highly linked to the sort of core of Google. Now, maybe that's by design, but for enterprise customers, there's still some potential confusion with Google, what's its intentions? How long will they continue to lose money and invest? Are they going to pull the plug like they do on so many other tools? So you know, maybe some rethinking of the marketing there and the positioning. Now we didn't talk much about ecosystem, but it's vital for any cloud player, and Google again has some work to do relative to the leaders. Which brings us to supercloud. The ecosystem and end customers are now in a position this decade to digitally transform. And we're talking here about building out their own clouds, not by putting in and building data centers and installing racks of servers and storage devices, no. Rather to build value on top of the hyperscaler gift that has been presented. And that is a mega trend that we're watching closely in theCUBE community. While there's debate about the supercloud name and so forth, there little question in our minds that the next decade of cloud will not be like the last. All right, we're going to leave it there today. Many thanks to Sarbjeet Johal, and my business partner, John Furrier, for their input to today's episode. Thanks to Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast and Ken Schiffman as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight helped get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does some wonderful editing. And check out SiliconANGLE, a lot of coverage on Google Cloud Next and Microsoft Ignite. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcast wherever you listen. Just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can always get in touch with me via email, david.vellante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me at dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai, the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our special presentation with TheCUBE and Horizon3.ai. I'm John Ferrier host of TheCUBE here in Palo Alto with the CEO and co-founder of Horizon3 Snehal Antani who's here with me to talk about the big news, we've been talking about your global expansion, congratulations on the growth, and international, and just overall success of, what looks like to be a very high margin, relevant business in the security space. >> Yeah, thank you John. Very excited to be here and especially this focus on partners, because partners in cyber security have such an important role and we've built a company that enables partners to grow with us. >> We had a chance to talk to some of your staff and some of the people in the industry around the channel. I mean the old school technology vendors would go in build channels and distributed resellers, VARs value added resellers, value added businesses all kinds of different ways to serve customers, indirectly. And then you got the direct sales force. You guys seem to have a perfect product for a hard, profitable, market where channels are starved for solutions in the security space. What did you guys find as you guys launched this? What was some of the feedback? What was some of the reasoning behind- obviously indirect sales helps your margins, you enable MSPs to sell for you, but what's the, what was the epiphany? >> So when you think about the telecommunications industry back in the two thousands, we always talked about the last mile in Telco, right? It was easy to get fiber run to the neighborhood but the last mile from the neighborhood to the house was very difficult. So what we found during Covid was, this was especially true in cybersecurity because in Covid you've got individuals that need security capabilities whether they are IT directors, barely treading water or CSOs and so on. And they needed these trusted relationships to decide what security technologies to use, how to improve their posture. And they're not going to go to just some website to learn. They've got years of relationships built with those regional partners, those regional resellers MSSPs, MSPs, IT consulting shops. So what we did over the past two years was embrace this idea that regional partners are the last mile of cybersecurity. So how do we build a product and a business model that enables those last miles channel partners to make even more revenue using us to underpin their offerings and services and get them to take advantage of the trust that they've built over many hard years and use that trust to not only improve the posture of their customers but have Horizon3 become a force enabler along the way. >> Yeah it's interesting you have that pre-built channel makeup, but also new opportunities for people to bring security 'cause you guys have the node zero capability. 'Cause pen testing is only one of the things you guys are starting to do now. And everyone knows, we've talked about this on our previous interviews, it's hard. People have, y'know, all kinds of AppSec review, application reviews, all the time. And if you're doing cloud native you're constantly pushing new code. So the need for a pen test is kind of a continuous thing. Okay, So I get that. The other thing that I found out on the interviews was, and I want to get your reaction to this, is that there's an existing channel of pen testers that are high IQ, high paid services. So it almost feels like you guys have created kind of like a way to automate some of the basic stuff but still enable the existing folks out there doing this work. I won't say it was below their pay grade but a lot of it was kind of, y'know remedial things, explain and react to that. Because I think that's a key nuance point to this expansion. >> Yeah, so the key thing is how do you run a security test at scale? So if you are a human pen tester maybe in a couple of weeks you could pen test 5,000 hosts. If you're really good, maybe 10,000 hosts. But when you've got a large manufacturer or a bank that's got hundreds of thousands or millions of hosts, there's no way a human's going to be able to do that. So for the really large shops, what we've found is this idea of human machine teaming. Where you run us to run infrastructure testing at scale we'll conduct reconnaissance, we'll do exploitation at scale, we'll find all the juicy interesting stuff. And then that frees up the time for the human to focus on the stuff humans are gifted at. And there's this joke that "Let us focus on all the things that will test at scale, so the human can focus on the problems that get them to speak at DEFCON and let them focus on the really hard interesting juicy stuff while we are executing tests. And at a large scale that's important but also think about Europe. In Germany there are less than 600 certified pen testers for the entire country, in Norway I think there's less than 85, in Estonia there's less than 20. There's just not enough supply of certified testers to be able to effectively meet the demand. >> It's interesting, when you ever have to see these inflection points in industries there's always a 10x multiple or some multiple inflection point that kicks up the growth. Google pioneered site reliability engineers you're seeing it now in cloud native with containers and Kubernetes writing scripts is now going to be more about architecture operating large scale systems. So instead of being a pen tester they're now a pen architect. >> Yeah, well in many ways it's a security by design philosophy which is, I would rather verify my architecture up front, verify my security posture up front, and not wait for the bad guys to show up to poke holes in my environment. And then even economically, the way we design the product most of our users are not pen testers they're actually IT admins, network engineers, people with the CISSP type certification and we give them superpowers. And there are, in back to 10x, for every one certified ethical hacker there are 10 to 20 certified CISSPs. So even the entire experience was designed around those types of security practitioners and network engineers versus the very exquisite pen test types. >> Yeah, it's a great market opportunity. I think this is going to be a big kind of a, an example of how scale works So congratulations. Couple questions I had for you for this announcement was, what are some of the obstacles that you see organizations facing that the channel partners can participate in? 'Cause again, more feet on the street, I get the expansion, but what problems are they solving? >> Yeah, when you think about, back when I was a CIO, there was a very well defined journey I went through. Assess my security posture, I have to assess it at least once or twice a year, I want to assess it as often as possible. From there, as I find problems, the hardest part of my job was deciding what not to fix. And I didn't have enough people to remediate all the issues. So the natural next step is how do I get surge expertise to remediate all of the findings from those assessments. From there, the next thing is, okay while I'm fixing those problems, did my security team or outsourced MSSP detect and respond to those attacks? Not, and if so, great, if not what are the blind spots in my detection response? And then the final step is being that trusted advisor to the executive team, the board, and the regulators around that virtual CISO or strategic security advice. So that is the spectrum of requirements that any customer has. Assess, remediate, verify your detections, and then strategic advice and guidance. Every channel partner has some aspect of those businesses within their portfolio and we enable revenue to be generated for our partners across every one of those. Use us to do assessments at scale, automatically generate the statement of work for everything that we've found, and then our partners make money fixing the issues that we've identified. Use us to audit the blind spots of your security stack and then finally use our results over time to provide strategic advice to the CISO, the board, and their regulators. >> Yeah, it's great, great gap you fill for sure. And with the op, the scale you give other pen testers a lot of growth there. The question that comes up though, I have to ask you and this is what's on people's minds, probably, 'cause it would be, first thing that I would ask Well you guys are kind of new and I get this thing. So what will make you an ideal partner? Why Horizon3.ai as the partner? What do you bring to the table? >> Yeah, I think there's a few things. One is we're approaching our three year anniversary, we've scaled very quickly, we've built a great team. But what differentiates us is our authenticity at scale, our transparency of how we work as a partner, and the fact that we've built a company, that very specifically enables partners to make money, high quality money. In my previous companies I've worked at, partners are kind of relegated to doing low level professional services type work. And if I'm a services shop, that's not going to be very valuable for me. That's a one and done come in, install a product, tune, and so on. What I want, if I'm a partner, is working with technology companies that care deeply about my growth as a partner and then is creating an offering that allows me to white label it, to build my own high margin business above it, give me predictable cost of goods sold so I can build and staff a high functioning organization. That's what we did at Horizon3 is we built the entire company around enabling MSSPs, MSPs, consulting shops, and so on. >> From day one. This is- >> From day one, that was the goal. And so the entire company's been designed you can white label the product, the entire experience can look like yours if you want it to be. The entire company was built from day one to be channel friendly >> This is again, a key point again, I want to double click on that because y'know, at the end of the day, money making's pretty big important thing. Partners don't, channel partners, and resellers, and partners don't want to lose their customer. Want to add value and make high margins. So is it easy to use? How do I consume it? How do I deploy it? You feel comfortable that you guys can deliver on that. >> Yeah, and in fact, a big cultural aspect of Horizon3 is we let our results do the talking. So I don't need to convince people through PowerPoint. What partners will do is they'll show up, they will run us for themselves, they'll run us against some trusted customers of theirs. They get blown away by the results. They get a Horizon3 tattoo at the end. >> Yeah. >> And then they become our biggest champions and advocates. >> And ultimately when you have that land and you can show results and it's a white label, it's an instant money maker. Right? For the partner. That's great Snehal, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. That's a wrap here, big news and the big news announcement around Horizon3.ai global expansion, new opportunities new channel partners, great product, good for the channel, makes money, helps customers. Can't beat that. I'm John Ferrier with TheCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome back to the VMware Explorer. 2022 live from San Francisco. Lisa Martin, here with Dave. Valante good to be sitting next to you, sir. >>Yeah. Yeah. The big set >>And we're very excited to be welcoming buck. One of our esteemed alumni Sanja poin joins us, the CEO and president of cohesive. Nice to see >>You. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Dave. It's great to meet with you all the time and the new sort of setting here, but first >>Time, first time we've been in west, is that right? We've been in north. We've been in south. We've been in Las Vegas, right. But west, >>I mean, it's also good to be back with live shows with absolutely, you know, after sort of the two or three or hiatus. And it was a hard time for the whole world, but I'm kind of driving a little bit of adrenaline just being here with people. So >>You've also got some adrenaline, sorry, Dave. Yeah, you're good because you are new in the role at cohesive. You wrote a great blog that you are identified. The four reasons I came to cohesive. Tell the audience, just give 'em a little bit of a teaser about that. >>Yeah, I think you should all read it. You can Google and, and Google find that article. I talked about the people Mohi is a fantastic founder. You know, he was the, you know, the architect of the Google file system. And you know, one of the senior Google executives was on my board. Bill Corrin said one of the smartest engineers. He was the true father of hyperconverge infrastructure. A lot of the code of Nutanix. He wrote, I consider him really the father of that technology, which brought computer storage. And when he took that same idea of bringing compute to secondary storage, which is really what made the scale out architect unique. And we were at your super cloud event talking about that, Dave. Yeah. Right. So it's a people I really got to respect his smarts, his integrity and the genius, what he is done. I think the customer base, I called a couple of customers. One of them, a fortune 100 customer. I, I can't tell you who it was, but a very important customer. I've known him. He said, I haven't seen tech like this since VMware, 20 years ago, Amazon 10 years ago and now Ko. So that's special league. We're winning very much in the enterprise and that type of segment, the partners, you know, we have HPE, Cisco as investors. Amazon's an investors. So, you know, and then finally the opportunity, I think this whole area of data management and data security now with threats, like ransomware big opportunity. >>Okay. So when you were number two at VMware, you would come on and say, we'd love all our partners and of course, okay. So you know, a little bit about how to work with, with VMware. So, so when you now think about the partnership between cohesive and VMware, what are the things that you're gonna stress to your constituents on the VMware side to convince them that Hey, partnering with cohesive is gonna gonna drive more value for customers, you know, put your thumb on the scale a little bit. You know, you gotta, you gotta unfair advantage somewhat, but you should use it. So what's the narrative gonna be like? >>Yeah, I think listen with VMware and Amazon, that probably their top two partners, Dave, you know, like one of the first calls I made was to Raghu and he knew about this decision before. That's the level of trust I have in him. I even called Michael Dell, you know, before I made the decision, there's a little bit of overlap with Dell, but it's really small compared to the overlap, the potential with Dell hardware that we could compliment. And then I called four CEOs. I was, as I was making this decision, Andy Jassey at Amazon, he was formerly AWS CEO sat Nadela at Microsoft Thomas cor at Google and Arvin Christian, IBM to say, I'm thinking about this making decision. They are many of the mentors and friends to me. So I believe in an ecosystem. And you know, even Chuck Robbins, who the CEO of Cisco is an investor, I texted him and said, Hey, finally, we can be friends. >>It was harder to us to be friends with Cisco, given the overlap of NSX. So I have a big tent towards everybody in our ecosystem with VMware. I think the simple answer is there's no overlap okay. With, with the kind of the primary storage capabilities with VSAN. And by the same thing with Nutanix, we will be friends and, and extend that to be the best data protection solution. But given also what we could do with security, I think this is gonna go a lot further. And then it's all about meet the field. We have common partners. I think, you know, sort of the narrative I talked about in that blog is just like snowflake was replacing Terada and ServiceNow replace remedy and CrowdStrike, replacing Symantec, we're replacing legacy vendors. We are viewed as the modern solution cloud optimized for private and public cloud. We can help you and make VMware and vs a and VCF very relevant to that part of the data management and data security continuum, which I think could end VMware. And by the way, the same thing into the public cloud. So most of the places where we're being successful is clearly withs, but increasingly there's this discussion also about playing into the cloud. So I think both with VMware and Amazon, and of course the other partners in the hyperscaler service, storage, networking place and security, we have some big plans. >>How, how much do you see this? How do you see this multi-cloud narrative that we're hearing here from, from VMware evolving? How much of an opportunity is it? How are customers, you know, we heard about cloud chaos yesterday at the keynote, are customers, do they, do they admit that there's cloud chaos? Some probably do some probably don't how much of an opportunity is that for cohesive, >>It's tremendous opportunity. And I think that's why you need a Switzerland type player in this space to be successful. And you know, and you can't explicitly rule out the fact that the big guys get into this space, but I think it's, if you're gonna back up office 365 or what they call now, Microsoft 365 into AWS or Google workspace into Azure or Salesforce into one of those clouds, you need a Switzerland player. It's gonna be hard. And in many cases, if you're gonna back up data or you protect that data into AWS banks need a second copy of that either on premise or Azure. So it's very hard, even if they have their own native data protection for them to be dual cloud. So I think a multi-cloud story and the fact that there's at least three big vendors of cloud in, in the us, you know, one in China, if include Alibaba creates a Switzerland opportunity for us, that could be fairly big. >>And I think, you know, what we have to do is make sure while we'll be optimized, our preferred cloud is AWS. Our control plane runs there. We can't take an all in AWS stack with the control plane and the data planes at AWS to Walmart. So what I've explained to both Microsoft and AWS is that data plane will need to be multi-cloud. So I can go to an, a Walmart and say, I can back up your data into Azure if you choose to, but the control plane's still gonna be an AWS, same thing with Google. Maybe they have another account. That's very Google centric. So that's how we're gonna believe the, the control plane will be in AWS. We'll optimize it there, but the data plane will be multicloud. >>Yeah. And that's what Mo had explained at Supercloud. You know, and I talked to him, he really helped me hone in on the deployment models. Yes. Where, where, where the cohesive deployment model is instantiating that technology stack into each cloud region and each cloud, which gives you latency advantages and other advantages >>And single code based same platform. >>And then bringing it, tying it together with a unified, you know, interface. That was he, he was, he was key. In fact, I, I wrote about it recently and, and gave him and the other 29 >>Quite a bit in that session, he went deep with you. I >>Mean, with Mohi, when you get a guy who developed a Google file system, you know, who can technically say, okay, this is technically correct or no, Dave, your way off be. So I that's why I had to >>Go. I, I thought you did a great job in that interview because you probed him pretty deep. And I'm glad we could do that together with him next time. Well, maybe do that together here too, but it was really helpful. He's the, he's the, he's the key reason I'm here. >>So you say data management is ripe for disrupt disruption. Talk about that. You talked about this Switzerland effect. That sounds to me like a massive differentiator for cohesive. Why is data management right for disruption and why is cohesive the right partner to do it? >>Yeah, I think, listen, everyone in this sort of data protection backup from years ago have been saying the S Switzerland argument 18 years ago, I was a at Veras an executive there. We used the Switzerland argument, but what's changed is the cloud. And what's changed as a threat vector in security. That's, what's changed. And in that the proposition of a, a Switzerland player has just become more magnified because you didn't have a sales force or Workday service now then, but now you do, you didn't have multi-cloud. You had hardware vendors, you know, Dell, HPE sun at the time. IBM, it's now Lenovo. So that heterogeneity of, of on-premise service, storage, networking, HyperCloud, and, and the apps world has gotten more and more diverse. And I think you really need scale out architectures. Every one of the legacy players were not built with scale out architectures. >>If you take that fundamental notion of bringing compute to storage, you could almost paralyze. Imagine you could paralyze backup recovery and bring so much scale and speed that, and that's what Mo invented. So he took that idea of how he had invented and built Nutanix and applied that to secondary storage. So now everything gets faster and cheaper at scale. And that's a disruptive technology ally. What snowflake did to ator? I mean, the advantage of snowflake is when you took that same concept data, warehousing is not a new concept it's existed from since Ralph Kimball and bill Inman and the people who are fathers of data warehousing, they took that to Webscale. And in that came a disruptive force toter data, right on snowflake. And then of course now data bricks and big query, similar things. So we're doing the same thing. We just have to showcase the customers, which we do. And when large customers see that they're replacing the legacy solutions, I have a lot of respect for legacy solutions, but at some point in time of a solution was invented in 1995 or 2000, 2005. It's right. For change. >>So you use snowflake as an example, Frank SL doesn't like when I say playbook, cuz I says, Dave, I'm a situational CEO, no playbook, but there are patterns here. And one of the things he did is to your point go after, you know, Terra data with a better data warehouse, simplify scale, et cetera. And now he's, he's a constructing a Tam expansion strategy, same way he did at ServiceNow. And I see you guys following a similar pattern. Okay. You get your foot in the door. Let's face it. I mean, a lot of this started with, you know, just straight back. Okay, great. Now it's extending into data management now extending to multi-cloud that's like concentric circles in a Tam expansion strategy. How, how do you, as, as a CEO, that's part of your job is Tam expansion. >>So yeah, I think the way to think about the Tam is, I mean, people say it's 20, 30 billion, but let me tell you how you can piece it apart in size, Dave and Lisa number one, I estimate there's probably about 10 to 20 exabytes of data managed by these legacy players of on-prem stores that they back up to. Okay. So you add them all up in the market shares that they respectively are. And by the way, at the peak, the biggest of these companies got to 2 billion and then shrunk. That was Verto when I was there in 2004, 2 billion, every one of them is small and they stopped growing. You look at the IDC charts. Many of them are shrinking. We are the fastest growing in the last two years, but I estimate there's about 20 exabytes of data that collectively among the legacy players, that's either gonna stay on prem or move to the cloud. Okay. So the opportunity as they replace one of those legacy tools with us is first off to manage that 20 X by cheaper, faster with the Webscale glass offer the cloud guys, we could tip that into the cloud. Okay. >>But you can't stop there. >>Okay. No, we are not doing just backup recovery. We have a platform that can do files. We can do test dev analytics and now security. Okay. That data is potentially at a risk, not so much in the past, but for ransomware, right? How do we classify that? How do we govern that data? How do we run potential? You know, the same way you did antivirus some kind of XDR algorithms on the data to potentially not just catch the recovery process, which is after fact, but maybe the predictive act of before to know, Hey, there's somebody loitering around this data. So if I'm basically managing in the exabytes of data and I can proactively tell you what, this is, one CIO described this very simply to me a few weeks ago that I, and she said, I have 3000 applications, okay. I wanna be prepared for a black Swan event, except it's not a nine 11 planes getting the, the buildings. >>It is an extortion event. And I want to know when that happens, which of my 3000 apps I recover within one hour within one day within one week, no later than one month. Okay. And I don't wanna pay the bad guys at penny. That's what we do. So that's security discussions. We didn't have that discussion in 2004 when I was at another company, because we were talking about flood floods and earthquakes as a disaster recovery. Now you have a lot more security opportunity to be able to describe that. And that's a boardroom discussion. She needs to have that >>Digital risk. O O okay, go ahead please. I >>Was just gonna say, ransomware attack happens every what? One, every 11, 9, 11 seconds. >>And the dollar amount are going up, you know, dollar are going up. Yep. >>And, and when you pay the ransom, you don't always get your data back. So you that's not. >>And listen, there's always an ethical component. Should you do it or not do it? If you, if you don't do it and you're threatened, they may have left an Easter egg there. Listen, I, I feel very fortunate that I've been doing a lot in security, right? I mean, I built the business at, at, at VMware. We got it to over a billion I'm on the board of sneak. I've been doing security and then at SAP ran. So I know a lot about security. So what we do in security and the ecosystem that supports us in security, we will have a very carefully crafted stay tuned. Next three weeks months, you'll see us really rolling out a very kind of disciplined aspect, but we're not gonna pivot this company and become a cyber security company. Some others in our space have done that. I think that's not who we are. We are a data management and a data security company. We're not just a pure security company. We're doing both. And we do it well, intelligently, thoughtfully security is gonna be built into our platform, not voted on. Okay. And there'll be certain security things that we do organically. There's gonna be a lot that we do through partnerships, this >>Security market that's coming to you. You don't have to go claim that you're now a security vendor, right? The market very naturally saying, wow, a comprehensive security strategy has to incorporate a data protection strategy and a recovery, you know, and the things that we've talking about Mount ransomware, I want to ask you, you I've been around a long time, longer than you actually Sanjay. So, but you you've, you've seen a lot. You look, >>Thank you. That's all good. Oh, >>Shucks. So the market, I've never seen a market like this, right? I okay. After the.com crash, we said, and I know you can't talk about IPO. That's not what I'm talking about, but everything was bad after that. Right. 2008, 2000, everything was bad. I've never seen a market. That's half full, half empty, you know, snowflake beats and raises the stock, goes through the roof. Dev if it, if the area announced today, Mongo, DB, beat and Ray, that things getting crushed and, and after market never seen anything like this. It's so fed, driven and, and hard to protect. And, and of course, I know it's a marathon, you know, it's not a sprint, but have you ever seen anything like this? >>Listen, I walk worked through 18 quarters as COO of VMware. You've seen where I've seen public quarters there and you know, was very fortunate. Thanks to the team. I don't think I missed my numbers in 18 quarters except maybe once close. But we, it was, it's tough. Being a public company of the company is tough. I did that also at SAP. So the journey from 10 to 20 billion at SAP, the journey from six to 12 at VMware, that I was able to be fortunate. It's humbling because you, you really, you know, we used to have this, we do the earnings call and then we kind of ask ourselves, what, what do you think the stock price was gonna be a day and a half later? And we'd all take bets as to where this, I think you just basically, as a, as a sea level executive, you try to build a culture of beaten, raise, beaten, raise, beaten, raise, and you wanna set expectations in a way that you're not setting them up for failure. >>And you know, it's you, there's, Dave's a wonderful CEO as is Frank Salman. So it's hard for me to dissect. And sometimes the market are fickle on some small piece of it. But I think also the, when I, I encourage people say, take the long term view. When you take the long term view, you're not bothered about the ups and downs. If you're building a great company over the length of time, now it will be very clear over the arc of many, many quarters that you're business is trouble. If you're starting to see a decay in growth. And like, for example, when you start to see a growth, start to decay significantly by five, 10 percentage points, okay, there's something macro going on at this company. And that's what you won't avoid. But these, you know, ups and downs, my view is like, if you've got both Mongo D and snowflake are fantastic companies, they're CEOs of people I respect. They've actually kind of an, a, you know, advisor to us as a company, you knows moat very well. So we respect him, respect Frank, and you, there have been other quarters where Frank's, you know, the Snowflake's had a down result after that. So you build a long term and they are on the right side of history, snowflake, and both of them in terms of being a modern cloud relevant in the case of MongoDB, open source, two data technology, that's, you know, winning, I, I, we would like to be like them one day >>As, as the new CEO of cohesive, what are you most ask? What are you most anxious about and what are you most excited about? >>I think, listen, you know, you know, everything starts with the employee. You, I always believe I wrote my first memo to all employees. There was an article in Harvard business review called service profit chains that had a seminal impact on my leadership, which is when they studied companies who had been consistently profitable over a long period of time. They found that not just did those companies serve their customers well, but behind happy engaged customers were happy, engaged employees. So I always believe you start with the employee and you ensure that they're engaged, not just recruiting new employees. You know, I put on a tweet today, we're hiring reps and engineers. That's okay. But retaining. So I wanna start with ensuring that everybody, sometimes we have to make some unfortunate decisions with employees. We've, we've got a part company with, but if we can keep the best and brightest retained first, then of course, you know, recruiting machine, I'm trying to recruit the best and brightest to this company, people all over the place. >>I want to get them here. It's been, so I mean, heartwarming to come Tom world and just see people from all walks, kind of giving me hugs. I feel incredibly blessed. And then, you know, after employees, it's customers and partners, I feel like the tech is in really good hands. I don't have to worry about that. Cuz Mo it's in charge. He's got this thing. I can go to bed knowing that he's gonna keep innovating the future. Maybe in some of the companies I've worried about the tech innovation piece, but most doing a great job there. I can kind of leave that in his cap of hands, but employees, customers, partners, that's kind of what I'm focused on. None of them are for me, like a keep up at night, but there are are opportunities, right? And sometimes there's somebody you're trying to salvage to make sure or somebody you're trying to convince to join. >>But you know, customers, I love pursuing customers. I love the win. I hate to lose. So fortune 1000 global, 2000 companies, small companies, big companies, I wanna win every one of them. And it's not, it's not like, I mean, I know all these CEOs in my competitors. I texted him the day I joined and said, listen, I'll compete, honorably, whatever have you, but it's like Kobe and LeBron Kobe's passed away now. So maybe it's Steph Curry. LeBron, whoever your favorite athlete is you put your best on the court and you win. And that's how I am. That's nothing I've known no other gear than to put my best on the court and win, but do it honorably. It should not be the one that you're doing it. Unethically. You're doing it personally. You're not calling people's names. You're competing honorably. And when you win the team celebrates, it's not a victory for me. It's a victory for the team. >>I always think I'm glad that you brought up the employee experience and we're almost out of time, but I always think the employee experience and the customer experience are inextricably linked. This employees have to be empowered. They have to have the data that they need to do their job so that they can deliver to the customer. You can't do one without the other. >>That's so true. I mean, I, it's my belief. And I've talked also on this show and others about servant leadership. You know, one of my favorite poems is Brenda Naor. I went to bed in life. I dreamt that life was joy. I woke up and realized life was service. I acted in service was joy. So when you have a leadership model, which is it's about, I mean, there's lots of layers between me and the individual contributor, but I really care about that sales rep and the engineer. That's the leaf level of the organization. What can I get obstacle outta their way? I love skipping levels of going right. That sales rep let's go and crack this deal. You know? So you have that mindset. Yeah. I mean, you, you empower, you invert the pyramid and you realize the power is at the leaf level of an organization. >>So that's what I'm trying to do. It's a little easier to do it with 2000 people than I dunno, either 20, 20, 2000 people or 35,000 reported me at VMware. And I mean a similar number at SAP, which was even bigger, but you can shape this. Now we are, we're not a startup anymore. We're a midsize company. We'll see. Maybe along the way, there's an IP on the path. We'll wait for that. When it comes, it's a milestone. It's not the destination. So we do that and we are, we, I told people we are gonna build this green company. Cohesive is gonna be a great company like VMware one day, like Amazon. And there's always a day of early beginnings, but we have to work harder. This is kind of like the, you know, eight year old version of your kid, as opposed to the 18 year old version of the kid. And you gotta work a little harder. So I love it. Yeah. >>Good luck. Awesome. Thank you. Best of luck. Congratulations. On the role, it sounds like there's a tremendous amount of adrenaline, a momentum carrying you forward Sanjay. We always appreciate having you. Thank >>You for having in your show. >>Thank you. Our pleasure, Lisa. Thank you for Sanja poin and Dave ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022, stick around our next guest. Join us momentarily.

(tranquil music) >> Alation was an early pioneer in solving some of the most challenging problems in so-called big data. Founded early last decade, the company's metadata management and data catalog have always been considered leading examples of modern tooling by customers and analysts alike. Governance is one area that customers identified as a requirement to extend their use of Alation's platform. And it became an opportunity for the company to expand its scope and total available market. Alation is doing just that today, announcing new data governance capabilities, and partner integrations that align with the market's direction of supporting federated governance. In other words, a centralized view of policy to accommodate distributed data in this world of an ever expanding data cloud, which we talk about all the time in theCUBE. And with me to discuss these trends and this announcement is Satyen Sangani, who's the CEO and co-founder of Alation. Satyen, welcome back to the CUBE. Good to see you. >> Thank you Dave, It's great to be back. >> Okay, so you heard my open, please tell us about the patterns that you were seeing in the market and what you were hearing from customers that led you in this direction and then we'll get into the announcement. >> Yeah, so I think there are really two patterns, right? I mean, when we started building this notion of a data catalog, as you said a decade ago, there was this idea that metadata management broadly classified was something that belonged in IT, lived in IT and was essentially managed by IT, right? I always liken it to kind of an inventory management system within a warehouse relative to Amazon.com, which has obviously broadly published for the business. And so, with the idea of bringing all of this data directly to the business and allowing people arbitrarily, depending on their role to use the data. You know, you saw one trend, which was just this massive, shift in how much data was available at any given time. I think the other thing that happened was that at the same time, data governance went through a real transitionary phase where there was a lot of demand often spurred by regulations. Whether that's GDPR, CCPA or more recently than that, certainly the Basel accord. And if you think about all of those regulations, people had to get something in a place. Now what we ended up finding out was when we were selling in to add accounts, people would say, well guess what? I've got this data governance thing going on, but nobody's really using it. I built this business glossary, it's been three years. Nothing's been really very effective. And we were never able to get the value and we need to get value because there are so many more people now accessing and using and leveraging the data. And so with that, we started really considering whether or not we needed to build a formal capability in the market. And that's what we're today that we're doing. >> I liked the way you framed that. And if you think back, we were there as you were in the early big day-to-days. And all the talk was about volume, variety and velocity. And those are sort of IT concepts. How do you deal with all these technical challenges? And then the fourth V which you just mentioned was value. And that's where the line of business really comes in. So let's get into the news. What are you announcing today? >> So we're announcing a new application on top of Alation's Catalog platform, which is an Alations data governance application. That application will be released with our 2021.3 release on September 14th. And what's exciting about that is that we are going to now allow customers to discreetly and elegantly and quickly consume a new application to get data governance regimes off the ground and initiatives off the ground, much more quickly than they've ever been able to do. This app is really all about time to value. It's about allowing customers to be able to consume what they need when they need it in order to be able to get successful governance initiatives going. And so that's what we're trying to deliver. >> So maybe you could talk a little bit about how you think about data governance and specifically your data governance approach. And maybe what's different about Alation's solution. >> Yeah, I think there's a couple of things that are different. I think the first thing that's most critically different is that we move beyond this notion of sort of policy declaration into the world of policy application and policy enforcement, right? I think a lot of data governance regimes basically stand up and say, look you know, it's all about people and then process and then technology. And what we need to do is declare who all the governors are and who all the stewards are. And then we're going to get all our policies in the same place and then the business will follow them. And the reality is people don't change their workflows to go off and arbitrarily follow some data governance policy that they don't know exists, or they don't want to actually have to follow up. And so really what you've got to do is make sure that the policy and the knowledge exists as in where the data exists. And that's why it's so critical to build governance into the catalog. And so what we're doing here is we're basically saying, look, you could declare policies with a new policy center inside of Alation. Those policies will get automatically created in some cases by integrating with technologies like Snowflake. But beyond that, what we're also doing is we're saying, look, we're going to move into the world of taking those policies and applying them to the data on an automated basis using ML and AI and basically saying that now it doesn't have to be some massive boil the ocean three-year regime to get very little value in a very limited business loss rate. Rather all of your data sets, all of your terms can be put into a single place on an automated basis. That's constantly being used by people and constantly being updated by the new systems that are coming online. And that's what's exciting about it. >> So I just want to follow up on that. So if I'm hearing you correctly, it's the humans are in the loop, but it's not the only source of policy, right? The machines are assisting. And in some cases managing end-to-end that policy. Is that right? >> You've got it. I think the the biggest challenge with data governance today is that it basically relies a little bit like the Golden Gate Bridge. You know, you start painting it and by the time you're done painting it, you've got to go back and start painting it again, because it relies upon people. And there's just too much change in the weather and there's too much traffic and there's just too much going on in the world of data. And frankly in today's world, that's not even an apt analogy because often what happens is midway through. You've got to restart painting from the very beginning because everything's changed. And so there's so much change in the IT landscape that the traditional way of doing data governance just doesn't work. >> Got it, so in winning through the press release, three things kind of stood out. I wonder if we could unpack them, there were multi-cloud, governance and security. And then of course the AI or what I like to call machine intelligence in there. And what you call the people centric approach. So I wonder if we could dig in into these and help us understand how they fit together. So thinking about multi-cloud governance, how do you think about that? Why is that so challenging and how are you solving that problem? >> Yeah, well every cloud technology provider has its own set of capabilities and platforms. And often those slight differences are causing differences in how those technologies are adopted. And so some teams optimize for certain capabilities and certain infrastructure over others. And that's true even within businesses. And of course, IT teams are also trying to diversify their IT portfolios. And that's another reason to go multi-cloud. So being able to have a governance capability that spans, certainly all of the good grade called megascalers, but also these new, huge emerging platforms like Snowflake of course and others. Those are really critical capabilities that are important for our customers to be able to get a handle on top of. And so this idea of being cloud agnostic and being able to sort of have a single control plane for all of your policies, for all of your data sets, that's a critical must have in a governance regime today. So that's point number one. >> Okay and then the machine learning piece, the AI, you're obviously injecting that into the application, but maybe tell us what that means both maybe technically and from a business stand point. >> Yeah, so this idea of a data policy, right? Can be sometimes by operational teams, but basically it's a set of rules around how one should and should not be able to use data, right? And so those are great rules. It could be that people who are in one country shouldn't be able to access the data of another country, very simple role, right? But how do you actually enforce that? Like you can declare it, but if there is a end point on a server that allows you to access the data, the policy is effectively moot. And so what you got to go do is make sure that at the point of leverage or at the point of usage, people know what the policy happens to be. And that's where AI come in. You can say let's document all the data sets that happened to be domiciled in Korea or in China. And therefore make sure that those are arbitrarily segregated so that when people want to use that as datasets, they know that the policy exists and they know that it's been applied to that particular dataset. That's somewhere where AI and ML can be super valuable rather than a human being trying to document thousands of databases or tens of thousands of data sets, which is really kind of a (mumbles) exercise. And so, that application of automation is really critical and being able to do governance at the scale that most enterprises have to do it. >> You got it 'cause humans just can't do that at scale. Now what do you mean by people-centric approach? Can you explain that? >> Yeah, often what I find with governance is that there's this notion of kind of there's this heavy notion of how one should deal with the data, right? So often what I find is that there are certain folks who think, oh well, we're going to declare the rules and people are just going to follow them. And if you've ever been well, a parent or in some cases seeing government operate, you realize that that actually isn't how things work. And involve them in how things are run. And if you do that, right? You're going to get a lot more success in how you apply rules and procedures because people will understand that and people know why they exist. And so what we do within this governance regime is we basically say, look, we want to make sure that the people who are using the data, leveraging the data are also the people who are stewarding the data. There shouldn't be a separate role of data steward that is arbitrarily defined off, just because you've been assigned to a job that you never wanted to do. Rather it should be a part of your day job. And it should be something that you do because you really want to do it. And it's a part of your workflow. And so this idea of being people centric is all about how do you engage the analyst, the product managers, the sales operation managers, to document those sales data sets and those product data sets. So that in fact, those people can be the ones who are answering the questions, not somebody off to the side who knows nothing about the data. >> Yeah, I think you've talked in previous CUBE interviews about context and that really fits to this discussion. So these capabilities are part of an application, which is what? it's a module onto your existing platform. And it's sort of it's a single platform, right? I mean, we're not bespoke products. Maybe you can talk about that. >> Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, it's funny because we've evolved and built a relation with a lot of capability. I mean, interestingly we're launching this data governance application but I would say 60% of our almost 300 customers would say they do a form or a significant part of data governance, leveraging relations. So it's not like we're new to this market. We've been selling in this market for years. What's different though, is that we've talked a lot about the catalog as a platform over the last year. And we think that that's a really important concept because what is a platform? It's a capability that has multiple applications built on top of it, definitionally. And it's also a capability where third party developers can leverage APIs and SDKs to build applications. And thirdly, it has all of the requisite capabilities and content. So that those application developers, whether it's first party from Alation or third party can really build those applications efficiently, elegantly and economically well. And the catalog is a natural platform because it contains all of the knowledge of the datasets. And it has all of the people who might be leveraging data in some fundamental way. And so this idea of building this data governance module allows a very specialized audience of people in governance to be able to leverage the full capabilities of the platform, to be able to do their work faster, easier, much more simply and easily than they ever could have. And that's why we're so excited about this launch, because we think it's one example of many applications, whether it's ourselves building it or third parties that could be done so much more elegantly than it previously could have been. Because we have so much knowledge of the data and so much knowledge of how the company operates. >> Irrespective of the underlying cloud platform is what I heard before. >> irrespective of the underlying cloud platform, because the data as you know, lives everywhere. It's going to live in AWS, it's going to live in Snowflake. It's going to live on-premise inside of an Oracle database. That's not going to be changed. It's going to live in Teradata. It's going to live all over the place. And as a consequence of that, we've got to be able to connect to everything and we've got to be able to know everything. >> Okay, so that leads me to another big part of the announcement, which is the partnership and integration with Snowflake. Talk about how that came about. I mean, why snowflake? How should customers think about the future of data management. In the context of this relationship, obviously Snowflake talks about the data cloud. I want to understand that better and where you fit. >> Yeah, so interestingly, this partnership like most great partnerships was born in the field. We at the late part of last year had observed with Snowflake that we were in scores of their biggest accounts. And we found that when you found a really, really large Snowflake engagement, often you were going to be complementing that with a reasonable engagement with Alation. And so seeing that pattern as we were going out and raising our funding route at the beginning of this year, we basically found that Snowflake obviously with their Snowflake Ventures Investment arm realized how strategic having a great answer in the governance market happened to be. Now there are other use cases that we do with Snowflake. We can certainly get into those. But what we realized was that if you had a huge scale, Snowflake engagement, governance was a rate limiter to customers' ability to grow faster. And therefore also Snowflake's ability to grow faster within that account. And so we worked with them to not only develop a partnership but much more critically a roadmap that was really robust. And so we're now starting to deliver on that roadmap and are super excited to share a lot of those capabilities in this release. And so that means that we're automatically ingesting policies and controls from Snowflake into Alation, giving full transparency into both setting and also modifying and understanding those policies for anybody. And so that gives you another control plane through which to be able to manage all of the data inside of your enterprise, irrespective of how many instances of Snowflake you have and irrespective of how many controls you have available to you. >> And again, on which cloud runs on. So I want to follow up with that really interesting because Snowflake's promise of the data cloud, is it essentially abstracts the underlying complexity of the cloud. And I'm trying to understand, okay, how much of this is vision, how much is is real? And it's fine to have a Northstar, but sometimes you get lost in the marketing. And then the other part of the promise, and of course, big value proposition is data sharing. I mean, I think they've nailed that use case, but the challenge when you start sharing data is federated governance. And as well, I think you mentioned Oracle, Teradata that stuff's not all in the cloud, a lot of that stuff on-prem and you guys can deal with that as well. So help us sort of to those circles, if you can. Where do you fit into that equation? >> I think, so look, Snowflake is a magical technology and in the sense that if you look at the data, I mean, it reveals a very, very clear story of the ability to adopt Snowflake very quickly. So any data team with an organization can get up and running with the Snowflake instance with extraordinary speed and capability. Now that means that you could have scores, hundreds of instances of Snowflake within a single institution. And to the extent that you want to be able to govern that data to your point, you've got to have a single control plane through which you can manage all of those various instances. Whether they're combined or merged or completely federated and distinct from each other. Now, the other problem that comes up on governance is also discoverability. If you have all these instances, how do you know what the right hand is doing if the left hand is working independently of it? You need some way to be able to coordinate that effort. And so that idea of discoverability and governance is really the value proposition that Alation brings to the table. And the idea there is that people can then can get up and running much more quickly because, hey, what if I want to spin up a Snowflake instance, but there's somebody else, two teams over those already solved the problem or has the data that I need? Well, then maybe I don't even need to do that anymore. Or maybe I can build on top of that work to be able to get to even better outcome even faster. And so that's the sort of kind of one plus one equals three equation that we're trying to build with them. >> So that makes sense and that leads me to one of my favorite topics with the notion is this burgeoning movement around the concept of a data mesh in it. In other words, the notion that increasingly organizations are going to push to decentralize their data architectures and at the same time support a centralized policy. What do you think about this trend? How do you see Alation fitting in? >> Yeah, maybe in a different CUBE conversation. We can talk a little bit about my sort of stylized history of data, but I've got this basic theory that like everybody started out what sort of this idea of a single source of truth. That was a great term back in the 90s where people were like, look, we just need to build a single source of truth and we can take all of our data and physically land it up in a single place. And when we do that, it's going to all be clean, available and perfect. And we'll get back to the garden of Eden, right? And I think that idea has always been sort of this elusive thing that nobody's ever been able to really accomplish, right? Because in any data environment, what you're going to find is that if people use data, they create more data, right? And so in that world, you know, like that notion of centralization is always going to be fighting this idea of data sprawl. And so this concept of data mesh I think is, you know, there's formal technical definitions. But I'll stick with maybe a very informal one, which is the one that you offered. Which is just sort of this decentralized mode of architecture. You can't have decentralization if nobody knows how to access those different data points, 'cause otherwise they'll just have copies and sprawl and rework. And so you need a catalog and you need centralized policies so that people know what's available to them. And people have some way of being able to get conformed data. Like if you've got data spread out all over the place, how do you know which is the right master? How do you know what's the right customer record? How do you know what's your right chart of accounts? You've got to have services that exist in order to be able to find that stuff and to be able to leverage them consistently. And so, to me the data mesh is really a continuation of this idea, which the catalog really enabled. Which is if you can build a single source of reference, not a single source of truth, but a single place where people can find and discover the data, then you can govern a single plane and you can build consistent architectural rules so that different services can exist in a decentralized way without having to sort of bear all the costs of centralization. And I think that's a super exciting trend 'cause it gives power back to people who want to use the data more quickly and efficiently. >> And I think as we were talking about before, it's not about just the IT technical aspects, hey, it works. It's about putting power in the hands of the lines of business. And a big part of the data mesh conversation is around building data products and putting context or putting data in the hands of the people who have the context. And so it seems to me that Alation, okay, so you could have a catalog that is of the line of businesses catalog, but then there's an Uber catalog that sort of rolls up. So you've got full visibility. It seems that you've fit perfectly into that data mesh. And whether it's a data hub, a data warehouse, data lake, I mean, you don't care. I mean, that's just another node that you can help manage. >> That's exactly right. I mean, it's funny because we all look at these market scapes where people see these vendor landscapes of 500 or 800 different data and AI and ML and data architecture vendors. And often I get asked, well, why doesn't somebody come along and like consolidate all this stuff? And the reality is that tools are a reflection of how people think. And when people have different problems and different sets of experiences, they're going to want to use the best tool in order to be able to solve their problem. And so the nice thing about having a mesh architecture is you can use whatever tool you want. You just have to expose your data in a consistent way. And if you have a catalog, you can be able to have different teams using different infrastructure, different tools, different fundamental methods of building the software. But as long as they're exposing it in a consistent way, it doesn't matter. You don't necessarily need to care how it's built. You just need to know that you've got good data available to you. And that's exactly what a catalog does. >> Well, at least your catalog. I think the data mesh, it should be tools that are agnostic. And I think there are certain tools that are, I think you guys started with that principle. Not every data catalog is going to enable that, but I think that is the trend Satyen. And I think you guys have always fit into that. It's just that I think you were ahead of the time. Hey, we'll give you the last word. Give us the closing thoughts and bring us home. >> Well, I mean that's exactly right. Like, not all the catalogs are created equal and certainly not all governance is created equal. And I think most people say these words and think that are simple to get into. And then it's a death by a thousand cuts. I was literally on the phone with a chief data officer yesterday of a major distributor. And they basically said, look, like we've got sprawl everywhere. We've got data everywhere. We've got it in every type of system. And so having that sophistication turned into something that's actually easy to use is a super hard problem. And it's the one that we're focused on every single day that we wake up and every single night when we go to sleep. And so, that's kind of what we do. And we're here to make governance easy, to make data discovery easy. Those are the things that we hold our hats on. And we're super excited to put this release out 'cause we think it's going to make customers so much more capable of building on top of the problems that they've already solved. And that's what we're here to do. >> Good stuff, Satyen. Thanks so much, congratulations on the announcement and great to see you again. >> You too, Dave. Great talking. >> All right, thanks for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time. (tranquil music)

>>approximately two years after HP split into two separate companies, antonioni Ranieri was named president and Ceo of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Under his tenure, the company has streamlined its operations, sharpened his priorities, simplified the product portfolio and strategically aligned its human capital with key growth initiatives. He's made a number of smaller but high leverage acquisitions and return the company to growth while affecting a massive company wide pivot to an as a service model. Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. This is Dave Volonte for the cube and it's my pleasure to welcome back Antonio. Neary to the program Antonio it's been a while. Great to see you again. >>Dave Thanks for having me. >>That's really our pleasure. I was just gonna start off with >>the big picture. >>Let's talk about trends. You're a trend spotter. What do you see today? Everybody talks about digital transformation. We had to force marks to digital last year now it's really come into focus. But what are the big trends that you're seeing that are affecting your customers transformations? >>Okay. I mean obviously we have been talking about digital transformation for some time uh in our view is no longer a priority is a strategic imperative. And through the last 15 months or so since we have been going through the pandemic we have seen that accelerated to a level we haven't never seen before. And so what's going on is that we live in a digital economy and through the pandemic now we are more connected than ever. We are much more distributed than ever before and an enormous amount of data is being created and that data has tremendous value. And so what we see in our customers need more connectivity, they need a platform from the edge to the cloud to manage all the data and most important they need to move faster and extracting that inside that value from the data and this is where HP is uniquely positioned to deliver against those experiences the way we haven't imagined before. >>Yeah, we're gonna dig into that now, of course, you and I have been talking about data and how much data for decades, but I feel like we're gonna look back at, you know, in 2030 and say, Wow, we never, we're not gonna do anything like that. So we're really living in a data centric era as the curves are going exponential. What do you see? How do you see customers handling this? How are they thinking about the opportunities? >>Well, I think, you know, customer realized now that they need to move faster, they need to absolutely be uh much more agile and everything. They do. They need to deploy a cloud experience for all the war clothes and data that they manage and they need to deliver business outcomes to stay ahead of the competition. And so we believe technology now plays even a bigger role and every industry is a technology industry in many ways. Every company right, is a technology company, whether your health care, your manufacturer, your transportation company, you are an education, everybody needs more. It no less I. T. But at the same time they want the way they want to consumer Dave is very different than ever before, right? They want an elastic consumption model and they want to be able to scale up and down based on the needs of their enterprise. But if you recall three years ago I knew and I had this conversation, I predicted that enterprise of the future will be edge centric cloud enable and data driven. The edge is the next frontier. We said in 2018 and think about it, you know, people now are working remotely and that age now is much more distribute than we imagined before. Cloud is no longer a destination, it is an experience for all your apps and data, but now we are entering what we call the edge of insight which is all about that data driven approach and this is where all three have to come together in ways that customer did envision before and that's why they need help. >>So I see that I see the definition of cloud changing, it's no longer a set of remote services, you know, somewhere up there in the cloud, it's expanding on prem cross clouds, you mentioned the Edge and so that brings complexity. Every every company is a technology company but they may not be great at technology. So it seems that there are some challenges around there, partly my senses, some of some of what you're trying to do is simplify that for your customers. But what are the challenges that your customers are asking you to solve? >>Well the first they want a consistent and seamless experience, whatever that application and data lives. And so um you know for them you know they want to move away from running I. T. to innovate in our 90 and then obviously they need to move much faster. As I said earlier about this data driven approaches. So they need help because obviously they need to digitize every every aspect of the company but at the same time they need to do it in a much more cost effective way. So they're asking for subject matter expertise on process engineering. They're asking for the fighting the right mix of hybrid experiences from the edge to cloud and they need to move much faster as scale in deploying technologies like Ai deep learning and machine learning. Hewlett Packard Enterprise uh is extremely well positioned because we have been building an age to cloud platform where you provide connectivity where you bring computing and storage uh in a soft of the fine scalable way that you can consume as a service. And so we have great capabilities without HP Point next technology services and advice and run inside. But we have a portfolio with HP Green Lake, our cloud services, the cloud that comes to you that are addressing the most critical data driven warlords. >>Probably about 24 months ago you announced that HP was, was going to basically go all in on as a service and get there by by 2022 for all your solutions. I gotta get, I gotta say you've done a good job communicating the Wall Street, I think. I think culturally you've really done a good job of emphasizing that to your, to the workforce. Uh, but but how should we measure the progress that you've made toward that goal? How our customers responding? I know how the markets responding, you know, three or four year big competitors have now announced. But how should we measure, you know, how you're tracking to that goal? >>Well, I think, you know, the fact that our competitors are entering the other service market is a validation that our vision was right. And that's that's that's good because in the end, you know, it tells us we are on the right track. However, we have to move much faster than than ever before. And that's why we constantly looking for ways to go further and faster. You're right. The court of this is a cultural transformation. Engineering wise, once you step, once you state the North Star, we need to learn our internal processes to think cloud first and data first versus infrastructure. And we have made great progress. The way we measure ourselves. Dave is very simple is by giving a consistent and transparent report on our pivot in that financial aspect of it, which is what we call the annualized revenue run rate, Which we have been disclosed enough for more than a year and a half. And this past quarter grew 30% year over year. So we are on track to deliver at 30 to 40% cake or that we committed two years ago And this business going to triple more than uh more than one year from now. So it's gonna be three times as bigger as we enter 2022 and 2023. But in the end it's all about the experience you deliver and that's why architecturally uh while we made great progress. I know there is way more work to be done, but I'm really excited because what we just announced here this week is just simply remarkable. And you will see more as we become more a cloud operating driven company in the next month and years to come. >>I want to ask you kind of a personal question. I mean, COVID-19 has sharpened our sensitivity and empathy to a lot of different things. And I think ceos in your position of a large tech company or any large company, they really can't just give lip service to things like E. S. G. Or or ethical uh digital transformation, which is something that you've talked about in other words, making sure that it's inclusive. Everybody is able to participate in this economy and not get left behind. What does this mean to you personally? >>Well, they remember I'm in a privileged position, right? Leading a company like Hewlett Packard Enterprise that has Hewlett and Packard on the brand is an honor, but it's also a big responsibility. Let's remember what this company stands for and what our purpose is, which is to advance the way people live and work. And in that we have to be able to create a more equitable society and use this technology to solve some of the biggest societal challenge you have been facing Last 18 months has been really hard on a number of dimensions, not just for the business but for their communities. Uh, we saw disruption, we saw hardships on the financial side, we saw acts of violence and hatred. Those are completely unacceptable. But if we work together, we can use these technologies to bring the community together and to make it equitable. And that's one is one of my passion because as we move into this digital economy, I keep saying that connecting people is the first step and if you are not connected you're not going to participate. Therefore we cannot afford to create a digital economy for only few. And this is why connectivity has to become an essential service, not different than water and electricity. And that's why I have passion and invest my own personal time working with entities like World Economic Forum, educating our government, which is very important because both the public sector and the private sector have to come together. And then from the technology standpoint, we have to architect these things. They are commercially accessible and viable to everyone. And so it's uh it's I will say that it's not just my mission. Uh this is top of mind for many of my colleagues ceos that talked all the time and you can see of movement, but at the same time it's good for business because shareholders now want to invest in companies that take care about this. How we make, not just a world more inclusive and equitable, but also how we make a more sustainable and we with our technologies we can make the world way more sustainable with circular economy, power, efficiency and so forth. So a lot of work to be done dave but I'm encouraged by the progress but we need to do way way more. >>Thank you for that Antonio I want to ask you about the future and I want to ask you a couple of different angles. So I want to start with the edge. So it seems to me that you're you're building this vision of what I call a layer that abstracts the underlying complexity of the whether it's the public cloud across clouds on prem and and and the edge And it's your job to simplify that. So I as the customer can focus on more strategic initiatives and that's clearly the vision that you guys are setting forth on. My question is is how far do you go on the edge? In other words, it seems to me that Aruba for example, for example, awesome acquisition can go really, really deep into the far edge. Maybe other parts of your portfolio, you're kind of more looking at horizontal. How should we think about HP es positioning and participation in that edge opportunity? >>Well, we believe we are becoming one of the merger leaders at the intelligent edge. Right. These edges becoming more intelligent. We live in a hyper connected world and that will continue to grow at an exponential pace. Right? So today we we might have billions of people and devices pursue. We're entering trillions of things that will be connected to the network. Uh, so you need a platform to be able to do with the scale. So there is a horizontal view of that to create these vertical experiences which are industry driven. Right? So one thing is to deliver a vertical experience in healthcare versus manufacturer transportation. And so we take a really far dave I mean, to the point that we just, you know, put into space 256 miles above the earth, a supercomputer that tells you we take a really far, but in the end it's about acting where the data is created and bringing that knowledge and that inside to the people who can make a difference real time as much as possible. And that's why I start by connecting things by bringing a cloud experience to that data wherever it lives because it's cheaper and it's where more economical and obviously there is aspects of latest in security and compliance that you have to deal with it and then ultimately accelerate that inside into some sort of outcome and we have many, many use cases were driving today and Aruba is the platform by the way, which we have been using now to extend from the edge all the way to the core into the cloud business and that's why you HP has unique set of assets to deliver against that opportunity. >>Yes, I want to talk about some of the weapons you have in your arsenal. You know, some people talk about a week and we have to win the architectural battle for hybrid cloud. I've heard that statement made, certainly HPV is in that balance is not a zero sum game, but but you're a player there. And so when I when I look at as a service, great, you're making progress there. But I feel like there's more, there's there's architecture there, you're making acquisitions, you're building out as moral, which is kind of an interesting data platform. Uh, and so I want to ask you, so how you see the architecture emerging and where H. P. S sort of value add i. P. Is your big player and compute you've got actually you've got chops and memory disaggregate asian, you've done custom silicon over the years. How how should we think about your contribution to the next decade of innovation? >>Well, I think it's gonna come different layers of what we call the stock, right? Obviously, uh, we have been known for an infrastructure company, but the reality is what customers are looking for Our integrated solutions that are optimized for the given workload or application. So they don't have to spend time bringing things together. Right? And and spend weeks sometimes months when they can do it in just in a matter of minutes a day so they can move forward innovative or 90. And so we we are really focused on that connectivity as the first step. And Aruba give us an enormous rich uh through the cloud provisioning of a port or a wifi or a one. As you know, as we move to more cloud native applications. Much of the traffic through the connectivity will go into the internet, not through the traditional fixed networks. And that's what we did acquisitions like Silver Peak because now we can connect all your ages and all your clouds in an autonomous software defined way as you go to the other spectrum, right. We talk about what load optimization and uh for us H. P. S. My role is the recipe by which we bring the infrastructure and the software in through that integrated solution that can run autonomously that eventually can consume as a service. And that's why we made the introduction here of HP Green like lighthouse which is actually I fully optimised stack the with the push of a bottom from HP Green Lake cloud platform we can deploy whatever that that is required and then be able to Federated so we can also address other aspects like disaster recovery and be able to share all the knowledge real time. So I'm learning is another thing that people don't understand. I mean if you think about it. So I'm learning is a distributed Ai learning uh ecosystem and think about what we did with the D. C. Any in order to find cures for Alzheimer's or dementia. But swam learning is gonna be the next platform sitting on this age to cloud architecture so that instead of people worrying about sharing data, what we're doing is actually sharing insights And be able to learn to these millions of data points that they can connect with each other in a secure way. Security is another example, right? So today on an average takes 28 days to find a bridge in your enterprise with project Aurora, which we're gonna make available at the end of the year, by the end of the year. We actually can address zero day attacks within seconds. And then we're work in other areas like disaster recovery when you get attacked. Think about the ransom ramp somewhere that we have seen in the last few weeks, right? You know, God forbid you have to pay for it. But at the same time, recovery takes days and weeks. Sometimes we are working on technology to do it within 23 seconds. So this is where HP can place across all spectrums of the stack. And at the same time, of course, people expect us to innovate in infrastructural layer. That's why we also partnered with companies like Intel, we're with the push of a bottle. If you need more capacity of the court, you don't have to order anything, just push the bottle. We make more calls available so that that will load can perform and when you don't need to shut it off so you don't have to pay for it. And last finalist, you know, I will say for us is all about the consumption availability of our solutions And that's what I said, you know, in 2019 we will make available everything as a service by 2022. You know, we have to say as you know, there is no need to build the church for easter sunday when you can rent it for that day. The point here is to grow elastically and the fact that you don't need to move the data is already a cost savings because cost of aggression data back and forth is enormous and customers also don't want to be locked in. So we have an open approach and we have a through age to cloud architecture and we are focusing on what is most valuable aspect for the customer, which is ultimately the data. >>Thank you for that. One of the other things I wanted to ask you about, and again, another weapon in your arsenal is you mentioned uh supercomputing before up in space where we're on the cusp of exa scale and that's the importance of high performance computing. You know, it used to be viewed as just a niche. I've had some great conversations with Dr go about this, but that really is the big data platform, if you will. Uh can I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how that fits into the future. Your expertise in HPC, you're obviously a leader in that space. What's the fit with this new vision? You're laying out? >>Well, HPC, high performance computer in memory computer are the backbone to be able to manage large data sets at massive scale. Um and, you know, deployed technologies like deep learning or artificial intelligence for this massive amount of data. If we talked about the explosion of data all around us and uh, you know, and the algorithms and the parameters to be able to extract inside from the day is getting way more complex. And so the ability to co locate data and computed a massive scale is becoming a necessity, whether it's in academia, whether it's in the government obviously to protect your, your most valuable assets or whether it is in the traditional enterprise. But that's why with the acquisition of Cray, S. G. I. And our organic business, we are absolutely the undisputed leader to provide the level of capabilities. And that's why we are going to build five of the top six exa scale systems, which is basically be able to process they billion billion, meaning billion square transactions per second. Can you imagine what you can do with that? Right. What type of problems you can go solve climate problems? Right. Um you know, obviously be able to put someone back into the moon and eventually in mars you know, the first step to put that supercomputer as an edge computer into the international space station. It's about being able to process data from the images that take from the ice caps of the, of the earth to understand climate changes. But eventually, if you want to put somebody in in into the Marks planet, you have to be able to communicate with those astronauts as they go and you know, you can't afford the latency. Right? So this is where the type of problems we are really focused on. But HPC is something that we are absolutely uh, super committed. And it's something that honestly we have the full stack from silicon to software to the system performance that nobody else has in the industry. >>Well, I think it's a real tailwind for you because the industry is moving that direction. Everybody talks about the data and workloads are shifting. We used to be uh, I got LTP and I got reporting. Now you look at the workloads, there's so much diversity. So I'll give you the last word. What what really is the most exciting to you about the future of HPV? >>Well, I'm excited about the innovation, will bring it to the market and honestly, as the Ceo, I care about the culture of the company. For me, the last almost 3.5 years have been truly remarkable. As you said at the beginning, we are transforming every aspect of this company. When I became CEO, I had three priorities for myself. One is our customers and partners. That's why we do these events right to communicate, communicate, communicate. Uh they are our North Star, that's why we exist. Uh, second is our innovation right? We compete to win with the best innovation, solving the most complex problems in a sustainable and equitable way. And third is the culture of the company, which are the core is how we do things in our Team members and employees. You know, I represent my colleagues here, the 60,000 strong team members that have incredible passion for our customers and to make a contribution every single day. And so for me, I'm very optimistic about what we see the recovery of the economy and the possibilities of technology. But ultimately, you know, we have to work together hand in hand. Uh and I believe this company now is absolutely on the right track to not just be relevant, but really to make a difference. And remember that in the end we we have to be a force for good. And let's not forget that while we do all of this, we have some farm with technology. We have to also help some uh to address some of the challenges we have seen in the last 18 months. An H. P. E is a whole different company, uh, that you knew 3.5 years ago. >>And as you said, it's, it's knowledge is the right thing to do. It's good. It's good for business Antonio. Neary. Thanks so much for coming back to the cube. Is always a pleasure to see you. >>Thanks for having me Dave >>and thank you for watching this version of HP discover 2021 on the cube. This is David want to keep it right there for more great coverage. >>Mm

>>From around the globe, it's the Cube with digital coverage of postgres Vision 2021 brought to you by >>enterprise DB. Hello everyone. This is Dave Volonte for the cube we're covering Postgres Vision 2021. The virtual cube edition. Welcome to our conversation with the Ceo Ed Boyajian is here is the Ceo of enterprise DB and we're gonna talk about what's happening in open source and database in the future of tech. Ed welcome. >>Hi Dave, Good to be here. >>Hey, several years ago, at a, at a Postgres Vision event, you put forth the premise that the industry was approaching a threshold moment, a digital transformation was the linchpin of that shift now. Ed Well you were correct and I have no doubt the audience agreed. Most people went back to their offices after that event and they returned to their hyper focus of their day to day jobs. Maybe a few accelerated their digital initiatives, but generally pre Covid, we moved in a pretty incremental pace and then the big bang hit. And if you were digital business, you are out of business. So that single event created the most rapid change that we've ever seen in the tech industry by far, nothing really compares. So the question is why is Postgres specifically and e d B generally the right fit for this new world? >>Yeah, I think, look, a couple of things are happening gave right along the bigger picture of digital transformation. We are seeing the database market in transformation and and I think the things that are driving that shift are the things that are resulting the success of Postgres and the success of B D B I think first and foremost we're seeing a dramatic re platform ng. And just like we saw in the world of Lennox where I was at red hat during that shift where people are moving from UNIX based systems to x 86 systems. We're seeing that similar re platform in happening. Whether that's from traditional infrastructures to cloud based infrastructures or container based infrastructures, it's a great opportunity for databases to be changed out. Postgres wins in that context because it's so easily deployed anywhere. I think the second thing that's changing is we're seeing a broad expansion of developers across the enterprise so they don't just live in I. T. Anymore. And I think as developers take on more power and control their defining the agenda and it's another place where Postgres shines, it's been a priority of the dBS to make postgres easier. Uh and that's coming to life. And I think the last Stack Overflow Developer Survey suggested that I think they survey 65 developers, the second most loved and the second most used database by developers, Postgres. And so I think there again Postgres shines in a moment of change. Uh and then I think the third is kind of obvious. It's always an elephant in the room, no pun intended. But it's this relentless nagging burden of the expenses of the incumbent proprietary databases and the need. And we especially saw this in Covid to start to change that more dramatically, change that economic equation here Again. PostGres shines. >>You know, I want to ask you, I'm gonna jump ahead to the future for a second because you're talking about the re platform NG and with your red hat chops, I kind of want to pick your brain on this because you're right, you saw it with red hat and you're kind of seeing it again when you think about open shift and where it's going my my question is related to replant forming around new types of workloads, new processing models at the edge. I mean you're seeing an explosion of processing power, GPU SNP us accelerators, dSPs and it appears that this is happening at a very low cost. I'm referring that you're saying Postgres can take advantage of that trend as well that that broader re platform ng trend to the edge, is that correct? >>It is. And I think you know this is, this has been one of the, I think the most interesting things with posters now I've been here almost 13 years. So if you put that in some perspective, I've watched Uh and participated in leading transformation in the category, you know, we've been squarely focused on postgres. So we've got 300 engineers who worry about making postgres better. And as you look across that landscape of time, not only as Postgres gotten more performant and more scalable, it's also proven to be the right database choice in the world of not just legacy migrations, but new application development. And I think that stack overflow developer survey is a good indicator of how developers feel about postgres. But you know, over that time frame I think if you went back to 2008 when I joined E D. B, post chris was considered a really good general purpose database. And today I think post chris is a great general purpose database. General purpose isn't sexy in the market broadly speaking, but Postgres capabilities across workloads in every area is really robust. Let me just spend a second on it. We look at our customer base is deploying in what we think of as systems of record, which are the traditional er, P type apps, uh you know where there's a single source of truth you might think of the RP apps there. We look at our customers deploying in systems of engagement. And those are apps that you might think of in the context of social media style apps or websites that are backed by a database in the third area Systems of analytics where you would typically think of data warehouse style applications interestingly. Postgres performs well and our customers report using us across that whole landscape of application areas. And I think that is one of postgres hidden superpowers. Is that ability to reach into each area of requirement on the workload side. >>And as always alluding to before that that itself is evolving as you now inject ai into the equation ai influencing and it's just a very exciting times ahead. There's no there's no database, You know, 20 years ago it was kind of boring. Now it's just exploding. I want to come back to that the notion of of post grass and maybe talk about other database models. Uh, I mean you mentioned that you've evolved from this, you know, system of record. You can take a system engagement on structured data etcetera. Jason. It's so how should we think about post grass in relation to other databases and specifically other business models of companies that provide database services? Why is Postgres attractive? Where is it winning? >>Yeah, I think a couple of places. So I mean first and foremost Postgres, you know, at his core, post chris is a sequel, relational databases in acid compliance, equal relational database. And that is inherently a strength of Postgres. But it's also a multi model database, which means we handle a lot of other, um, you know, database requirements, whether that's geospatial or or Jason, uh, for documents or time series, things like that. And so Postgres extensive bility is one of its inherent strengths and that's kind of been built in from the beginning of Postgres. So not surprisingly, people use postgres across the number of workloads because at the end of the day there's still value in having a database is able to do more. There are a lot of important specialty databases and I think they will remain important specialty databases, but Postgres thrives in its ability to cross cross over in that way. Um and I think that is, you know, one of the different key differentiators in how we've seen the market in the business development and that's the breadth of of workloads that Postgres succeeds in. But but our growth, if you kind of ventured it across vectors, we see growth happening, you know, in a few dimensions. First we see growth happening in new applications. About half of our customers that come to us today for new uh new postgres users are deploying us on new applications. The others are our second area migrating away from some existing legacy in companies often oracle. Not always. Um The third area of growth we see is in cloud, where Postgres is deployed very prolifically, both in the traditional cloud platforms, Uh like EC two, but then then again also uh in the database as a service environment. And then the fourth area growth we're seeing now is around uh container deployment, kubernetes deployment. >>Well, you may Oracle's prominent because it's just it's a big installed base and it's expensive and people, >>you >>know, they got a look at them. It's funny, I do a lot of TCO work and mostly, you know, usually TCO is about labor costs. When it comes to Oracle, it's about license costs and maintenance costs. And so to the extent that you can reduce that, at least for a portion of your state, you're gonna you're gonna drop right to the bottom line. But but but but I want to ask you about that kind of that spectrum that you think about the prevailing models for database you've got. On the one hand, You've got the right tool for the right job approach. It might be 10 or 12 data stores in the cloud. On the other hand, you've got, you know, kind of a converged approach. Oracle's going that direction clearly. Postgres with its open source innovation is going that direction. And it seems to me that at scale that's a more the latter is a more cost effective model. How do you think about that? >>Well, you know, I think at the end of the day, you kind of have to look at it. I mean, the business side of my brain looks at that as an addressable market question. Right? And you've heard me talk about three broad categories of workloads and you know, people define workloads in different bucket, but that's how we do it. But if you look at just a system of record in the system of engagement market, I think that's what would be traditionally viewed as the database market. Uh and there that's you know, let's just say for the sake of arguments of $45-$50 billion $18 billion dollar market. And you know, as we talk about that. So all in it's still between 60 and $70 billion market. And I think what happens there's so much heat and light poured on the valuation multiples of some of the specialty players. That the market gets confused, but the reality is our customers don't get confused. I mean if you look at those specialty players take that $48 billion market. I mean add up Mongo red is cockroach neo, all of those. I mean hugely valued companies. All unicorn companies. But combined to add up to a billion bucks don't get me wrong that's important revenue and meaningful in the workloads they support. But it's not. It doesn't define the full transformation of this category. Look at the systems of analysis again, another great great market example. I mean if you add up the consolidation of the Hadoop vendors add in there. Um Snowflake, you're still talking you know a billion five in revenue and an $18 billion market. So while those are all important technologies, the question is in this transformation move to the database market fully transform you. And my view is no it didn't were in the first maybe second inning of a $65 billion transformation. And I think this is where Postgres will ultimately shine. I think this is how Postgres wins because at the end of the day the nature of the workloads fits with postgres and the future tech that we're building in post schools will serve that broader set of needs I think more effectively >>well. And I love these tam expansion discussions because I think you're right on and I think it comes back to the data and we all talk about the data growth, the data explosion, we see the I. D. C. Numbers and you ain't seen nothing yet. And so data by its very nature is distributed. That's why I get so excited about these new platform models and and I want to tie it back to developers and open source because to me that is the linchpin of innovation um in the next decade it has been, I would even say for the last decade we've seen it, but it's gaining momentum, so, so in thinking about innovation and and specifically Postgres and an open source, you know, what can you share with us in terms of how we should think about your advantage, and again, what, where people are glomming leaning in to that advantage? >>Yeah, so, I mean, I think I think you bring up a really important topic for us as a company. Postgres we think is an incredibly powerful community, uh and when you step away from it again, I remember I told you I was at red hat before, now here at E D B, and there's a common thread that runs through those two experiences in both experiences. The companies are attached and prominent alongside a strong independent, open source community, and I think the notion of an independent community is really important to understand around postgres. There are hundreds and thousands of people contributing to Postgres now. E D B plays a big role in that. About approaching a third of the contributions. In the last release released, 13 of Postgres came from E D B. You might look at that and say gee, that sounds like a lot, but if you step away from it, you know, about 30% of those contributions, Most of the contributions come from a universe around D D. B. And that's inherently healthy for the community's ability to innovate and accelerate. And I think that while we play a strong role there, you can imagine that having and there are other great companies that are contributing to Postgres, I think having those companies participating and contributing gets the best, the best ideas to the front in innovation. So I think the inherent nature Postgres community makes it strong and healthy. And then contrast that to some of the other prominent high value open source companies, the companies and the communities are intimately intertwined. They're one and the same. They're actually not independent open source communities. And I think that therein lies one of the, one of the inherent weaknesses in those but postgres to rise because you know, we bring all those ideas from the DB, we bring a commercial contingent with us all the things we hope we emphasize and focus on in growth and postgres, whether that's in the areas of scalability, manageability, all hot topics, of course security, all of those areas. And then, you know, performance as always, all of those areas are informed to us by enterprise customers deploying post chris at scale. And I think that's the heart of what makes a successful independent project. >>Yeah. The combinatorial powers of of that ecosystem. Uh they their their multiplication, I've as opposed to the resources of one. I want to talk about postgres Vision 2021 sort of set up that a little bit. The theme this year is the future. Is you, what do you mean by that? >>So if you think about what we just said post the category is in transit database categories and transformation. And we know that many of our people are interested in. Postgres are early in their journey, their early in their experience. And so we want to focus this year's postcards vision on them that we understand as a company has been committed to postgres as long as we have and with the understanding we have the technology and best practices, we want to share that view those insights uh, with those who are coming to postgres, Some for the first time, some who are experienced >>Postgres. Vision 21 is june 22nd and 23rd. Go to enterprise db dot com and register the cube is going to be there. We hope you will be too. Ed, thanks for coming to the Cuban previewing the event. >>Thanks Dave. >>Thank you. We'll see you at Vision 21 >>mm mm.

>>At the beginning of the last decade, the technology industry was a buzzing because we were on the cusp of a new era of data. The promise of so-called big data was that it would enable data-driven organizations to tap a new form of competitive advantage. Namely insights from data at a much lower cost. The problem was data became plentiful, but insights. They remained scarce, a rash of technical complexity combined with a lack of trust due to conflicting data sources and inconsistent definitions led to the same story that we've heard for decades. We spent a ton of time and money to create a single version of the truth. And we're further away than we've ever been before. Maybe as an industry, we should be approaching this problem differently. Perhaps it should start with the idea that we have to change the way we serve business users. I E those who understand data context, and with me to discuss the evolving data space, his company, and the upcoming data citizens conference is Felix van de Mala, the CEO and founder of Collibra. Felix. Welcome. Great to see you. >>Great to see you. Great to be here. >>So tell us a little bit about Collibra and the problem that you're solving. Maybe you could double click on my upfront narrative. >>Yeah, I think you said it really well. Uh, we've seen so much innovation over the last couple of years in data, the exploding volume complexity of data. We've seen a lot of innovation of how to store and process that data, that, that volume of data more effectively or more cost-effectively, but fundamentally the source of the problem as being able to really derive insights from that data effectively when it's for an AI model or for reporting, it's still as difficult as it was, let's say 10 years ago. And if only in a way it's only become more, uh, more difficult. And so what we fundamentally believe is that next to that innovation on the infrastructure side of data, you really need to look at the people on process side of data. There's so many more people that today consume and produce data to do their job. >>That's why we talk about data citizens. They have to make it easier for them to find the right data in a way that they can trust that there's confidence in that data to be able to make decisions and to be able to trust the output of that, uh, of that model. And that's really what is focused on initially around governance. Uh, how do you make sure people actually are companies know what data they have and make sure they can trust it and they can use it in a compliant way. And now we've extended that into the only data intelligence platform today in the industry where we just make it easier for organizations to truly unite around the data across the whole organization, wherever that data is stored on premise and the cloud, whoever is actually using or consuming data. Uh, that's why we talk about data citizens. I >>Think you're right. I think it is more complex. There's just more of it. And there's more pressure on individuals to get advantage from it. But I, to ask you what sets Culebra apart, because I'd like you to explain why you're not just another data company chasing a problem with w it's going to be an incremental solution. It's really not going to change anything. What, what sets Collibra apart? >>Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think what's fundamentally sets us apart. What makes us unique is that we look at data or the problem around data as truly a business problem and a business function. So we fundamentally believe that if you believe that data is an asset, you really have to run it as a, as a, as a strategic business functions, just like your, um, uh, your HR function, your people function, your it functioning says a marketing function. You have a system to run that function. Now you have Salesforce to run sales and marketing. You have service now to run your, it function. You have Workday to run your people function, but you need the same system to really run your data from. And that's really how we think about GDPR. So we not another kind of faster, better database we know than other data management tool that makes the life of a single individual easier, which really a business application that focuses on how do we bring people together and effective rate so that they can collaborate around the data. It creates efficiency. So you don't have to do things ad hoc. You can easily find the right information. You can collaborate effectively. And it creates the confidence to actually be able to do something with the outcomes of it, the results of all of that work. And so fundamentally I'm looking at the problem as a, as a business function that needs a business system. We call it the system of record or system of engagement for the, for the data function, I think is absolutely critical and, and really unique in the, in our approach. So >>Data citizens are big user conference, data citizens, 21, it's coming up June 16th and 17th, the cubes stoked because we love talking about data. This is the first time we're bringing the cube to that event. So we're really gearing up for it. And I wonder if it could tell us a little bit about the history and the evolution of the data citizens conference? >>Absolutely. I think the first one is set at six years ago where we had a small event at a hotel downtown New York. Uh, most of the customers as their user conference, a lot of the banks, which are at the time of the main customers at 60 people. So very small events, and it exploded ever since, uh, this year we expect over 5,000 people. So it's really expanded beyond just the user conference to really become more of almost the community conference and the industry, um, the conference. So we're really excited, a big part of what we do, why we care so much about the conference. That's an opportunity to build that data citizens community. That's what we hear from our customers, from all attendees that come to the conference, uh, bring those people to get us all care about the same topic and are passionate about doing more at data, uh, being able to connect, uh, connect people together as a big part of that. So we've always, uh, we're always looking forwards, uh, through the event, uh, from that perspective >>Competition, of course, for virtual events these days with them, what's in it for me, what, who should attend and what can attendees expect from data citizens? 21. >>Yeah, absolutely. The good thing about the virtual event, uh, event is that everybody can attend. It's free, it's open from across the road, of course, but what we want for people to take away as attendees is that you learn something at pragmatics or the next day on the job, you can do something. You've learned something very specific. We've also been, um, um, excited and looked at what is possible from an innovation perspective. And so that's how we look at the events. We bring a lot of, um, uh, customers on my realization that they're going to share their best practices, very specifically, how they are, how they are handling data governance, how they're doing data, data, cataloging, how they're doing data privacy. So very specific best practices and tips on how to be successful, but then also industry experts that can paint the picture of where we going as an industry, what are the best practices? >>What do we need to think about today to be ready for what's going to come tomorrow? So that's a big focus. We, of course, we're going to talk about and our product. What are we, what do we have in store from a product roadmap and innovation perspective? How are we helping these organizations get their foster and not aspect as we were being in a lot of partners as well? Um, and so that's a big part of that broader ecosystem, uh, which is, which is really interesting. And I finally, like I said, it's really around the community, right? And that's what we hear continuously from the attendees. Just being able to make these connections, learn new people, learn what they're doing, how they've, uh, kind of, um, solved certain challenges. We hear that's a really big part of, uh, of the value proposition. So as an attendee, uh, the good thing is you can, you can join from anywhere. Uh, all of the content is going to be available on demand. So later it's going to be available for you to have to look at as well. Plus you're going to be farther out. You're going to become part of that data, citizens community, which has a really thriving and growing community where you're going to find a lot of like-minded people with the same passion, the same interest that McConnell learned the most from, well, I'd rather >>Like the term data citizen. I consider myself a data citizen, and it has implications just in terms of putting data in the hands of, of business users. So it's sort of central to this event, obviously. W what is a data citizen to Collibra? >>Yeah, it's, it's a really core part of our mission and our vision that we believe that today everyone needs data to do their job. Everyone in that sense has become a data citizen in the sense that they need to be able to easily access trustworthy data. We have to make it easy for people to easily find the right data that they can trust that they can understand. And I can do something like with and make their job easier. On the other hand, like a citizen, you have rights and you have responsibilities as a data citizen. You also have the responsibility to treat that data in the right way to make sure from a privacy and security perspective, that data is a as again, like I said, treated in the right way. And so that combination of making it easy, making it accessible, democratizing it, uh, but also making sure we treat data in the right way is really important. And that's a core part of what we believe that everyone is going to become a data citizen. And so, um, that's a big part of our mission. I like that >>We're to enter into a contract, I'll do my part and you'll give me access to that data. I think that's a great philosophy. So the call to action here, June 16th and 17th, go register@citizensdotcollibra.com go register because it's not just the normal mumbo jumbo. You're going to get some really interesting data. Felix, I'll give you the last word. >>No, like I said, it's like you said, go register. It's a great event. It's a great community to be part of June 16 at 17, you can block it in your calendar. So go to citizens up pretty bad outcome. It's going to be a, it's going to be a great event. Thanks for helping >>Us preview. Uh, this event is going to be a great event that really excited about Felix. Great to see you. And we'll see you on June 16th and 17th. Absolutely. All right. Thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cube. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> At the beginning of last decade technology industry was a buzzing because we were on the cusp of a new era of data. The promise of so-called big data was that it would enable data-driven organizations to tap a new form of competitive advantage. Namely insights from data at a much lower cost. The problem was data became plentiful, but insights, they remain scarce. A rash of technical complexity combined with a lack of trust due to conflicting data sources and inconsistent definitions led to the same story that we've heard for decades. We spent a ton of time and money to create a single version of the truth. And we're further away than we've ever been before. Maybe as an industry, we should be approaching this problem differently. Perhaps it should start with the idea that we have to change the way we serve business users i.e. those who understand data context. And with me, to discuss the evolving data space, his company and the upcoming Data Citizens Conference is Felix Van De Maele, the CEO and Founder, of Collibra. Felix, welcome. Great to see you. >> Great to see you. Great to be here. >> So tell us a little bit about Collibra and the problem that you're solving. Maybe you could double click on my upfront narrative. >> Yeah, I think you said it really well. We've seen so much innovation over the last couple of years in data, the exploding volume complexity of data. We've seen a lot of innovation of how to store and process that data, that volume of data more effectively, more cost-effectively. But fundamentally the source of the problem as being able to really derive insights from that data effectively when it's for an AI model or for reporting is still as difficult as it was let's say 10 years ago. And it only... In a way it's only become more difficult. And so what we fundamentally believe is that next to that innovation on the infrastructure side of data you really need to look at the people on process side of data. There are so many more people that today consume and produce data to do their job. That's why we talk about data citizens. They have to make it easier for them to find the right data in a way that they can trust that there's confidence in that data to be able to make decisions and to be able to trust the algorithm of that model. And that's really what Collibra is focused on. Initially, around governance. How do you make sure people actually or companies know what data they have and make sure they can trust it and they can use it in a compliant way. And now we've extended that into the only data intelligence platform today in the industry where we just make it easier for organizations to truly unite around the data across the whole organization. wherever that data stored on premise and the cloud whoever is actually using or consuming that data. That's why we talk about data citizens. >> I think you're right. I think yours is more complex. There's more of it. And there's more pressure on individuals to get advantage from it. But I want to ask you, what sets Collibra apart because I'd like you to explain why you're not just another data company chasing a problem with it's going to be an incremental solution, it's really not going to change anything. What sets Collibra apart? >> Yeah, that's a really good question. And what fundamentally sets us apart, or makes us unique is that we look at data or the problem around data as truly a business owner and a business function. So we fundamentally believe that if you believe that data is an asset, you really have to run it as a strategic business function. Just like you run your HR function, your people function, your IT function your sales and marketing function. You have a system to run that function. And you have Salesforce to run sales and marketing. You have service now to run your IT function. You have word day to run your people function. Like you need the same system to really run your data function. And that's really how we think about Collibra. So we're not another kind of faster better database. We're not another data management tool that makes the life of a single individual easier. We're truly a business application that focuses on how do we bring people together and effective rates so that they can collaborate around the data. It creates efficiency. So you don't have to do things ad hoc. You can easily find the right information. You can collaborate effectively. And it creates the confidence to actually be able to do something with the outcomes or with the results of all of that work. And so fundamentally, looking at the problem as a business function that needs a business system. We call it the system of record or system of engagement. For the data function, I think it's absolutely a critical and really unique in our approach. >> So Data Citizens your big user conference. Data Citizens '21 it's coming up June 16th and 17th cubes stoked because we love talking about data. This is the first time we're bringing theCUBE to that event. And so we're really gearing up for it. And I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about the history and the evolution of the Data Citizens conference? >> Absolutely. I think the first one it started six years ago where we had a small event at a hotel downtown New York mostly customers as their user conference, a lot of the banks, which are at the time are the main customers at 60 people. So very small events. And it's exploded ever since this year, we expect over 5,000 people. So it's really expanded beyond just a user conference to really become more of almost a community conference and an industry conference. So we're really excited. A big part of what we do, why we care so much about the conference. That's an opportunity to build that data citizens community. That's where we hear from our customers, from all attendees that come to the conference, bring those people together that all care about the same topic and are passionate about doing more with data, being able to connect people together as a big part of that. So we've always... We're always looking forward to event from that perspective. >> Well, a lot of competition of course, for virtual events these days with them. What's in it for me? Who should attend? And what can attendees expect from Data Citizens '21? >> Yeah, absolutely. The good thing about the virtual event is that everybody can attend. It's free, it's open from across the world, of course. But what we want for people to take away as attendees is that you learn something pragmatic. So the next day on the job, you can do something. You've learned something very specific. We've also been excited and looked at what is possible from an innovation perspective? And so that's how we look at the event. We bring a lot of customers and organization that are going to share their best practices. Very specifically, how they're handling data governance. How they're doing data cataloging. How they're doing data privacy. So very specific best practices and tips on how to be successful, but then also industry experts that can paint a picture of where we're going as an industry, what are the best practices? What do we need to think about today to be ready for what's going to come tomorrow? So that's a big focus. We, of course, we're going to talk about Collibra and our product. What do we have in store from a product roadmap. And innovation perspective, how we're helping these organizations get there faster and all that aspect as we bring in a lot of partners as well. And so that's a big part of that broader ecosystem which is really interesting. And I finally, like I said it's really around the community. That's what we hear continuously from the attendees. Just being able to make these connections, learn new people, learn what they're doing how they've kind of solved certain challenges. We hear that's a really big part of the value proposition. So as an attendee, the good thing is you can join from anywhere. All of the content is going to be available on demand. So later it's going to be available for you to have to look at as well. Plus you're going to be part, or you're going to become part of that data citizens community. Which is a really thriving and growing community where you're going to find a lot of like-minded people with the same passion, the same interest, that we can all learn a lot from. >> I rather like the term data citizen. I consider myself a data citizen and it has implications just in terms of putting data in the hands of business users. So it's just sort of central to this event, obviously. What is a data citizen to Collibra? >> Yeah. It's a really core part of our mission and our vision that we believe that today everyone needs data to do their job. Everyone in that sense has become a data citizen in the sense that they need to be able to easily access trustworthy data. We have to make it easy for people to easily find the right data that they can trust, that they can understand and they can do something with and make their job easier. On the other hand, like a citizen, you have rights and you have responsibilities. As a data citizen, you also have the responsibility to treat that data in the right way. To make sure from a privacy and security perspective, that data is as again like I said, treated in the right way. And so that combination of making it easy, making it accessible, democratizing it but also making sure we treat data in the right way is really important. And it's a core part of what we believe that everyone is going to become a data citizen. And so that's a big part of our mission. >> I like that. We're going to enter into a contract. I'll do my part and you'll give me access to that data. I think that's a great philosophy. So the call to action here, June 16th and 17th go register at citizens.collibra.com go register because it's not just the normal mumbo jumbo. You're going to get some really interesting data. Felix, I'll give you the last word. >> No, like I said, like you said, go register. It's a great event. It's a great community to be part of at June 16th and 17th you can block it in your calendar. So go to citizens.collibra.com. It's going to be a great event. >> Well, thanks for helping us preview this event. It's going to be a great event that we're really excited about. Felix, great to see you. And we'll see you on June 16th and 17th. >> Absolutely. >> All right. Thanks for watching everyone. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> We're here theCUBE on Cloud Startup Showcase brought to you by AWS. And right now we're going to explore the next frontier for privacy, you know, security, privacy, and compliance, they're often lumped together and they're often lumped on as an afterthought bolted on to infrastructure, data and applications. But, you know, while they're certainly related they're different disciplines and they require a specific domain knowledge and expertise to really solve the challenges of today. One thing they all share is successful implementations, must be comprehensive and designed in at the start and with me to discuss going beyond compliance and designing privacy protections into products and services. Justin Antonipillai, who is the founder and CEO of WireWheel, Justin awesome having you on the AWS Startup Showcase. Thanks for being here >> Dave, thanks so much for having me. It's a real honor, and I appreciate it. Look forward to the discussion. >> So I always love to ask founders, like, take us back. Why did you start this company? Where did your inspiration come from? >> So Dave, I was very lucky. I had the honor of serving in president Obama's second term as an Acting Under Secretary for Economic Affairs. So I ran the part of the government that includes the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. So core economic statistical bureaus. But I helped lead a lot of the Obama administration's, outreach and negotiations on data privacy around the world. Including on something called the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield. So at the time the two jobs I had really aligned with what our discussion is here today. The first part of it was, I could see that all around the world in the U.S. and around the world, data privacy and protecting privacy, had become a human rights issue. It was a trade issue. You could see it as a national security issue and companies all around the world were just struggling with how to get legal, how to make sure that I do it right, and how I make sure that I'm treating my customer's data, in the right way. But when I was also leading the agency, a lot of what we were trying to do was to help our U.S. citizens, our folks here around the country solve big public problems by ethically and responsibly using government data to do it. And I can talk about what that meant in a little while. So the inspiration behind why WireWheel was, we need better more technically driven ways to help companies get compliance, to show their customers that they're protecting privacy and to put customers, our customers onto a path where they can start using the customer data better, faster and stronger, but most importantly, ethically. And that's really what we try to tackle at WireWheel. >> Right, excellent. Thank you for that. I mean, yeah you know, in the early days of social media, people kind of fluffed it off and oh there is no privacy in the internet, blah, blah, blah. And then wow, it became a huge social issue and public policy really needed to step in but also technology needs this to help solve this problem. So let's try to paint a picture for people as to really dig into the problem that you solve and why it's so complicated. We actually have a graphic. It's a map of the U S that we want to pull up here. Explain this. >> Yeah, I mean, what you're saying here is that every one of your, our viewers today is going to be looking at privacy laws moving across the country Dave but there's a lot of different ones. You know, if you're a company that's launching and building your product, that you might be helping your customers your consumer facing. The law, and you're even let's assume you want to do the right thing. You want to treat that customer data responsibly and protect it. When you look at a map like this and you can see three States have already passed different privacy laws, but look at the number of different States all across the country that are considering their own privacy laws. It really could be overwhelming. And Virginia, as you can see is just about to pass it's next privacy law but there's something like 23,24 States that are moving them through. The other thing Dave, that's really important about this is, these are not just breach laws. You know, I think years ago we were all looking at these kinds of laws spreading across the country and you would be saying, okay, that's just a breach law. These laws are very comprehensive. They have a lot to them. So what we have been really helping companies with is to enable you to get compliant with a lot of these very quickly. And that's really what we've tried to take on. Because if you're trying to do the right thing there should be a way to do it. >> Got it. Yeah, I can't even imagine what the it had been so many permutations and complexities but imagine this, if this were a globe we were looking at it says it gets out of control. Okay, now you guys well you use a term called phrase beyond compliance? What do we mean by that? >> There are a couple of things. So I'd say almost every company taking a product to market right now, whether you're B2C or B2B you want to make sure you can answer the customer question and say, yes, I'm compliant. And usually that means if you're a B2C company it means that your customers can come to your site. Your site is compliant with all of the laws out there. You can take consents and preferences. You can get their data back to them. All of these are legal requirements. If you're a B2B company, you're also looking at making sure you can create some critical compliance records that's it, right? But when we think beyond compliance, we think of a couple of basic things. Number one, do you tell the story about all the trust and protection you put around your data in a way that your customers want to do business with you? I mean Dave, if you went to CES the last couple of years and you were walking into the center or looking at a virtual version of it, on every billboard, the top five, top 10 global companies advertise that they take care of your data and they're onto something, they're onto something. You can actually build a winning strategy by solving a customer's problem and also showing them that you care, and that they're trustworthy. Because there are too many products out there, that aren't. The second thing, I'm sorry, go ahead. >> No, please carry on. >> No, I mean the second thing, and then I think I'd say is going beyond compliance also means that you're thinking about how you can use that data for your customer, to solve all of their problems. And Dave, what I'd say here is imagine a world right now, in which, you know you trusted that the data that you gave to companies or to the government, was protected and that if you changed your mind and you wanted it back that they would delete it or give it back to you. Can you imagine how much more quickly we would have solved getting a COVID vaccine? Can you imagine how much data would have been available to pharmaceutical companies to actually develop a vaccine? Can you imagine how much more quickly we would have opened the economy? The thing is companies can't solve every problem that they could for a customer because customers don't trust that the data is going to be used correctly and companies don't know how to use it in that way and ethically. And that's what we're talking about when we say getting beyond compliance which is we want to enable our customers to use the data in the best way and most ethical way to solve all of their customer's problems. >> Okay, so I ask the elephant in the room question. If you asked most businesses about personal information, where it's stored, you know who has access to it, the fact is that most people can't answer it. And so when they're confronted with these uncomfortable questions. The other documents and policies that maybe check some boxes, why is that not a good idea? I mean, there's an expense to going beyond that but so why is that not just a good idea to check it off? >> Well look, a lot of companies do need to just check it off and what I mean, get it right, make sure you label and the way we've thought about this is that when you're building on a backbone like AWS, it does give you the ability to buy a lot of services quickly and scale with your company. But it also gives us an ability to comply faster by leveraging that infrastructure to get compliant faster. So if you think about it, 20 years ago whenever I wanted to buy storage or if I wanted to buy servers and look we're a company that built in the cloud, Dave it would have been very difficult for us to buy the right storage and the processing we needed, given that we were starting. But I was able to buy very small amounts of it until our customer profile grew. But that also means my data moved out of a single hard drive and out of a single set of servers, into other places that are hosted in the cloud. So the entire tech stack that all of our customers are building on means they're distributing personal data into the cloud, into SAS platforms. And there's been a really big move through integration platforms as a service to allow you to spread the personal data quickly. But that same infrastructure can be used to also get you compliant faster, and that's the differentiation. So we built a platform that enables a company to inventory their systems, to track what they're doing in those systems and to both create a compliance record faster by tracking what they're doing inside the cloud and in SAS systems. And that's the different way we've been thinking about it as we've been going to market. >> So, okay. So what actually do you sell, you sell a service? Is it a subscription? >> Yeah. >> And AWS is underneath that, maybe you could put down a picture for us. >> Sure, we're a cloud hosted software as a service. We have two core offerings. One is the WireWheel Trust Access Consent Solution. So if you go to a number of major brands, and you go to their website, when they tell you here's the data we're collecting about you, when they collect your consents and preferences, when they collect a request for data correction or deletion of the data, all the way from the request to delivery back to the consumer, we have an end to end system that our customers use with their customers, a completely cloud hostable in a subscription. So enables even very small startups, to build that experience into their website and into their products, from the very beginning, at a cost efficient point. So if you want to stand up a compliant website or you want to build into your product that Trust Access Consent Solution, we have a SAS platform, and we have developer tools and our developer portal to let you do it quickly. The second thing we do is we have a privacy operations manager. So this is the most security center but for privacy operations. It helps you inventory your systems, actually create data flow maps and most critically create compliance records that you need to comply with, you know the European law, the Brazilian law, and that whole spectrum of U.S. privacy laws that you showed a few minutes ago. And those are the two core offerings we have. >> I love it. I mean, it's the cloud story, right? One is you don't have to spend a millions of dollars on hardware and software. And the second is, when you launch you enable small companies, not just the biggest companies you give them the same, essentially the same services. And that's a great story. Who do you sell to Justin? What does a typical customer engagement look? >> Yeah, we, in many of our customers and in the AWS say startup environment, you often don't have companies that have like a privacy officer. They often don't even have a general counsel. So we sell a package that will often go to whoever is responsible at the company for privacy compliance. And, you know, interestingly Dave in some startups that might be a marketing officer, it might be a CLO, it might be the CTO. So in startups and sort of growing companies, we've put out a lot of guidance, and our core WireWheel developer portal is meant to give even a startup all they need to stand up that experience and get it going, so that when you get that procurement imagine you're about to go sell your product, and they ask you, are you compliant, then you have that document ready to provide. We also do provide this core infrastructure for enormous enterprises. So think telecoms, think top three global technology companies. So Dave, we get excited about is we've built a core software platform privacy infrastructure that is permanently being used by some of the largest companies in the world. And our goal is to get that infrastructure at the right price point into every company in the world, right? We want to enable any company to spend and stand up the right system, that's leveraging that same privacy infrastructure that the big folks have, so that as they scale, they can continue to do the right thing. >> That's awesome. I mean, you mentioned a number of roles of marketing folks. I can even see a sales, let's say sales lead saying, okay we got this deal on the table. How do we get through the procurement because we didn't check the box, all right. So, let me ask you this. We talked a little bit about designing privacy in a and it's clear you help do that. How do you make it, you know fundamental to customer's workloads? Do they have to be like an AWS customer to take advantage of that concept? Or how did they make it part of their workflow? >> Yeah, so there's a couple of critical things. How do you make it part of the workflow? The first thing is, you go to any company's website right now, they have to be compliant with the California law. So a very straightforward thing we do is we can for both B2B and B2C companies stand up an entire customer experience that matches the scale of the company that enables it to be compliant. That means you have a trust center that shows the right information to your customers, it collects the consents, preferences, and it stands up with a portal to request data. These are basics. And for a company that's standing up the internal operations, we can get them app collecting that core record and create a compliance record very fast. With larger companies, Dave you're right. I mean, when you're talking about understanding your entire infrastructure and understanding where you're storing and processing data it could seem overwhelming, but the truth is, the way we onboard our customers is we get you compliance on your product and website first, right? We focus on your product to get that compliance record done. We focus on your website so that you can sell your product. And then we go through the rest of the major systems where you're handling personal information, your sales, your marketing, you know, it's like a natural process. So larger enterprises we have a pretty straightforward way that we get them up and running, but even small startups we can get them to a point of getting them compliant and starting to think about other things very, very quickly. >> And so Justin, you're a government so you understand big, but how I talk about the secret ingredient that allows you to do this at scale and still handle all that diversity, like what we showed in that graphic, the different locations, different local laws, data sovereignty, et cetera. >> Yeah, there's a couple things on the secret source. One is, we have to think about our customers every day. And we had to understand that companies will use whatever their infrastructure is to build. Like you've seen, even on AWS there are so many different services you can use. So number one, we always think with an engineering point of view in mind. Understand the tools, understand the infrastructure in a way that brings that kind of basic visibility to whoever it is that's handling privacy, that basic understanding. The second is, we focused on core user experience for the non-technical user. It's really easy to get started. It's really easy to stand up your privacy page and your privacy policy. It's really easy to collect that and make that first record. The third is, and you know, this is one of those key things. When I was in the government, I met with folks in the intelligence community at one point day, and this always stuck with me. They were telling me that 20 years ago, you know to do the kind of innovation that you have going on now, you would have had to have had a defense contract. You would have had to have invested an enormous amount of money to buy the processing and the services and the team. But the ability for me as a startup founder, to understand the big picture and understand that companies need to be compliant fast, get their website compliant fast, get their product compliant fast, but build on a cloud infrastructure that allowed me to scale was incredible. Because it allows us to do a lot with our customers that a company like ours would have been really challenged to do without that cloud backbone. >> Love this, the agility and the innovation. Last question, give us the company update Justin, you know where are you? What can you share with us, fundraising, head count, are you generating revenue? Where you are? >> Oh yeah, we're excited as I mentioned, we are already the privacy platform of choice of some of the larger brands in the world, which we're very excited about. And we help them solve both the trust, access consent problem for their customers, and we help with the privacy operations management. We recently announced a new $20 million infusion of capital, led by a terrific venture capital fund, ForgePoint Capital. We've been lucky to have been supported by NEA, Sands Capital, Revolution Capital, Pritzker Capital, PSP. And so we have a terrific group of investors behind us. We are scaling, we've grown the company a lot in the last year. Obviously it's been an interesting and challenging year with COVID, but we are really focused on growing our sales team, our marketing team, and we're going to be offering some pretty exciting solutions here for the rest of the year. >> The timing was unbelievable, you had the cloud at your beck and call, you had the experience in government. You've got your background as a lawyer. And it all came in, and the legal come into the forefront of public policy, just a congratulations on all your progress today. We're really looking forward to seeing you guys rocket in the future. I really appreciate you coming on. >> Dave, thanks so much for having me, really enjoyed it. And I look forward to seeing you soon. >> Great, and thank you for watching everyone is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on cloud startups. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> As you know by now, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is stepping aside from his CEO role and AWS CEO, Andy Jassy, is being promoted to head all of Amazon. Bezos, of course, is going to remain executive chairman. Now, 15 years ago, next month, Amazon launched it's simple storage service, which was the first modern cloud offering. And the man who wrote the business plan for AWS, was Andy Jassy, and he's navigated the meteoric rise and disruption that has seen AWS grow into a $45 billion company that draws off the vast majority of Amazon's operating profits. No one in the media has covered Jassy more intimately and closely than John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. And John joins us today to help us understand on theCUBE this move and what we can expect from Jassy in his new role, and importantly what it means for AWS. John, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. >> Hey, great day. Great to see you as always, we've done a lot of interviews together over the years and we're on our 11th year with theCUBE and SiliconANGLE. But I got to be excited too, that we're simulcasters on Clubhouse, which is kind of cool. Love Clubhouse but not since the, in December. It's awesome. It's like Cube radio. It's like, so this is a Cube talk. So we opened up a Clubhouse room while we're filming this. We'll do more live hits in studio and syndicate the Clubhouse and then take questions after. This is a huge digital transformation moment. I'm part of the digital transformation club on Clubhouse which has almost 5,000 followers at the moment and also has like 500 members. So if you're not on Clubhouse, yet, if you have an iPhone go check it out and join the digital transformation club. Android users you'll have to wait until that app is done but it's really a great club. And Jeremiah Owyang is also doing a lot of stuff on digital transformation. >> Or you can just buy an iPhone and get in. >> Yeah, that's what people are doing. I can see all the influences are on there but to me, the digital transformation, it's always been kind of a cliche, the consumerization of IT, information technology. This has been the boring world of the enterprise over the past, 20 years ago. Enterprise right now is super hot because there's no distinction between enterprise and society. And that's clearly the, because of the rise of cloud computing and the rise of Amazon Web Services which was a side project at AWS, at Amazon that Andy Jassy did. And it wasn't really pleasant at the beginning. It was failed. It failed a lot and it wasn't as successful as people thought in the early days. And I have a lot of stories with Andy that he told me a lot of the inside baseball and we'll share that here today. But we started covering Amazon since the beginning. I was as an entrepreneur. I used it when it came out and a huge fan of them as a company because they just got a superior product and they have always had been but it was very misunderstood from the beginning. And now everyone's calling it the most important thing. And Andy now is becoming Andy Jassy, the most important executive in the world. >> So let's get it to the, I mean, look at, you said to me over holidays, you thought this might have something like this could happen. And you said, Jassy is probably in line to get this. So, tell us, what can you tell us about Jassy? Why is he qualified for this job? What do you think he brings to the table? >> Well, the thing that I know about Amazon everyone's been following the Amazon news is, Jeff Bezos has a lot of personal turmoil. They had his marriage fail. They had some issues with the smear campaigns and all this stuff going on, the run-ins with Donald Trump, he bought the Washington post. He's got a lot of other endeavors outside of Amazon cause he's the second richest man in the world competing with Elon Musk at Space X versus Blue Origin. So the guy's a billionaire. So Amazon is his baby and he's been running it as best he could. He's got an executive team committee they called the S team. He's been grooming people in the company and that's just been his mode. And the rise of AWS and the business performance that we've been documenting on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, it's just been absolutely changing the game on Amazon as a company. So clearly Amazon Web Services become a driving force of the new Amazon that's emerging. And obviously they've got all their retail business and they got the gaming challenges and they got the studios and the other diversified stuff. So Jassy is just, he's just one of those guys. He's just been an Amazonian from day one. He came out of Harvard business school, drove across the country, very similar story to Jeff Bezos. He did that in 1997 and him and Jeff had been collaborating and Jeff tapped him to be his shadow, they call it, which is basically technical assistance and an heir apparent and groomed him. And then that's how it is. Jassy is not a climber as they call it in corporate America. He's not a person who is looking for a political gain. He's not a territory taker, but he's a micromanager. He loves details and he likes to create customer value. And that's his focus. So he's not a grandstander. In fact, he's been very low profile. Early days when we started meeting with him, he wouldn't meet with press regularly because they weren't writing the right stories. And everyone is, he didn't know he was misunderstood. So that's classic Amazon. >> So, he gave us the time, I think it was 2014 or 15 and he told us a story back then, John, you might want to share it as to how AWS got started. Why, what was the main spring Amazon's tech wasn't working that great? And Bezos said to Jassy, going to go figure out why and maybe explain how AWS was born. >> Yeah, we had, in fact, we were the first ones to get access to do his first public profile. If you go to the Google and search Andy Jassy, the trillion dollar baby, we had a post, we put out the story of AWS, Andy Jassy's trillion dollar baby. This was in early, this was January 2015, six years ago. And, we back then, we posited that this would be a trillion dollar total addressable market. Okay, people thought we were crazy but we wrote a story and he gave us a very intimate access. We did a full drill down on him and the person, the story of Amazon and that laid out essentially the beginning of the rise of AWS and Andy Jassy. So that's a good story to check out but really the key here is, is that he's always been relentless and competitive on creating value in what they call raising the bar outside Amazon. That's a term that they use. They also have another leadership principle called working backwards, which is like, go to the customer and work backwards from the customer in a very Steve Job's kind of way. And that's been kind of Jobs mentality as well at Apple that made them successful work backwards from the customer and make things easier. And that was Apple. Amazon, their philosophy was work backwards from the customer and Jassy specifically would say it many times and eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting. That was a key principle of what they were doing. So that was a key thesis of their entire business model. And that's the Amazonian way. Faster, cheaper, ship it faster, make it less expensive and higher value. While when you apply the Amazon shipping concept to cloud computing, it was completely disrupted. They were shipping code and services faster and that became their innovation strategy. More announcements every year, they out announced their competition by huge margin. They introduced new services faster and they're less expensive some say, but in the aggregate, they make more money but that's kind of a key thing. >> Well, when you, I was been listening to the TV today and there was a debate on whether or not, this support tends that they'll actually split the company into two. To me, I think it's just the opposite. I think it's less likely. I mean, if you think about Amazon getting into grocery or healthcare, eventually financial services or other industries and the IOT opportunity to me, what they do, John, is they bring in together the cloud, data and AI and they go attack these new industries. I would think Jassy of all people would want to keep this thing together now whether or not the government allows them to do that. But what are your thoughts? I mean, you've asked Andy this before in your personal interviews about splitting the company. What are your thoughts? >> Well, Jon Fortt at CNBC always asked the same question every year. It's almost like the standard question. I kind of laugh and I ask it now too because I liked Jon Fortt. I think he's an awesome dude. And I'll, it's just a tongue in cheek, Jassy. He won't answer the question. Amazon, Bezos and Jassy have one thing in common. They're really good at not answering questions. So if you ask the same question. They'll just say, nothing's ever, never say never, that's his classic answer to everything. Never say never. And he's always said that to you. (chuckles) Some say, he's, flip-flopped on things but he's really customer driven. For example, he said at one point, no one should ever build a data center. Okay, that was a principle. And then they come out and they have now a hybrid strategy. And I called them out on that and said, hey, what, are you flip-flopping? You said at some point, no one should have a data center. He's like, well, we looked at it differently and what we meant was is that, it should all be cloud native. Okay. So that's kind of revision, but he's cool with that. He says, hey, we'll revise based on what customers are doing. VMware working with Amazon that no one ever thought that would happen. Okay. So, VMware has some techies, Raghu, for instance, over there, super top notch. He worked with Jassy, directly in his team Sanjay Poonen when they went to business school together, they cut a deal. And now Amazon essentially saved VMware, in my opinion. And Pat Gelsinger drove that deal. Now, Pat Gelsinger, CEO, Intel, and Pat told me that directly in candid conversation off theCUBE, he said, hey, we have to make a decision either we're going to be in cloud or we're not going to be in cloud, we will partner. And I'll see, he was Intel. He understood the Intel inside mentality. So that's good for VMware. So Jassy does these kinds of deals. He's not afraid he's got a good stomach for business and a relentless competitor. >> So, how do you think as you mentioned Jassy is a micromanager. He gets deep into the technology. Anybody who's seen his two hour, three hour keynotes. No, he has a really fine grasp of the technology across the entire stack. How do you think John, he will approach things like antitrust, the big tech lash of the unionization of the workforce at Amazon? How do you think Jassy will approach that? >> Well, I think one of the things that emerges Jassy, first of all, he's a huge sports fan. And many people don't know that but he's also progressive person. He's very progressive politically. He's been on the record and off the record saying things like, obviously, literacy has been big on, he's been on basically unrepresented minorities, pushing for that, and certainly cloud computing in tech, women in tech, he's been a big proponent. He's been a big supporter of Teresa Carlson. Who's been rising star at Amazon. People don't know who Teresa Carlson is and they should check out her. She's become one of the biggest leaders inside Amazon she's turned around public sector from the beginning. She ran that business, she's a global star. He's been a great leader and he's been getting, forget he's a micromanager, he's on top of the details. I mean, the word is, and nothing gets approved without Andy, Andy seeing it. But he's been progressive. He's been an Amazon original as they call it internally. He's progressive, he's got the business acumen but he's perfect for this pragmatic conversation that needs to happen. And again, because he's so technically strong having a CEO that's that proficient is going to give Amazon an advantage when they have to go in and change how DC works, for instance, or how the government geopolitical landscape works, because Amazon is now a global company with regions all over the place. So, I think he's pragmatic, he's open to listening and changing. I think that's a huge quality >> Well, when you think of this, just to set the context here for those who may not know, I mean, Amazon started as I said back in 2006 in March with simple storage service that later that year they announced EC2 which is their compute platform. And that was the majority of their business, is still a very large portion of their business but Amazon, our estimates are that in 2020, Amazon did 45 billion, 45.4 billion in revenue. That's actually an Amazon reported number. And just to give you a context, Azure about 26 billion GCP, Google about 6 billion. So you're talking about an industry that Amazon created. That's now $78 billion and Amazon at 45 billion. John they're growing at 30% annually. So it's just a massive growth engine. And then another story Jassy told us, is they, he and Jeff and the team talked early on about whether or not they should just sort of do an experiment, do a little POC, dip their toe in and they decided to go for it. Let's go big or go home as Michael Dell has said to us many times, I mean, pretty astounding. >> Yeah. One of the things about Jassy that people should know about, I think there's some compelling relative to the newest ascension to the CEO of Amazon, is that he's not afraid to do new things. For instance, I'll give you an example. The Amazon Web Services re-invent their annual conference grew to being thousands and thousands of people. And they would have a traditional after party. They called a replay, they'd have a band like every tech conference and their conference became so big that essentially, it was like setting up a live concert. So they were spending millions of dollars to set up basically a one night concert and they'd bring in great, great artists. So he said, hey, what's been all this cash? Why don't we just have a festival? So they did a thing called Intersect. They got LA involved from creatives and they basically built a weekend festival in the back end of re-invent. This was when real life was, before COVID and they turned into an opportunity because that's the way they think. They like to look at the resources, hey, we're already all in on this, why don't we just keep it for the weekend and charge some tickets and have a good time. He's not afraid to take chances on the product side. He'll go in and take a chance on a new market. That comes from directly from Bezos. They try stuff. They don't mind failing but they put a tight leash on measurement. They work backwards from the customer and they are not afraid to take chances. So, that's going to board well for him as he tries to figure out how Amazon navigates the contention on the political side when they get challenged for their dominance. And I think he's going to have to apply that pragmatic experimentation to new business models. >> So John I want you to take on AWS. I mean, despite the large numbers, I talked about 30% growth, Azure is growing at over 50% a year, GCP at 83%. So despite the large numbers and big growth the growth rates are slowing. Everybody knows that, we've reported it extensively. So the incoming CEO of Amazon Web Services has a TAM expansion challenge. And at some point they've got to decide, okay, how do we keep this growth engine? So, do you have any thoughts as to who might be the next CEO and what are some of their challenges as you see it? >> Well, Amazon is a real product centric company. So it's going to be very interesting to see who they go with here. Obviously they've been grooming a lot of people. There's been some turnover. You had some really strong executives recently leave, Jeff Wilkes, who was the CEO of the retail business. He retired a couple of months ago, formerly announced I think recently, he was probably in line. You had Mike Clayville, is now the chief revenue officer of Stripe. He ran all commercial business, Teresa Carlson stepped up to his role as well as running public sector. Again, she got more power. You have Matt Garman who ran the EC2 business, Stanford grad, great guy, super strong on the product side. He's now running all commercial sales and marketing. And he's also on the, was on Bezos' S team, that's the executive kind of team. Peter DeSantis is also on that S team. He runs all infrastructure. He took over for James Hamilton, who was the genius behind all the data center work that they've done and all the chip design stuff that they've innovated on. So there's so much technical innovation going on. I think you still going to see a leadership probably come from, I would say Matt Garman, in my opinion is the lead dog at this point, he's the lead horse. You could have an outside person come in depending upon how, who might be available. And that would probably come from an Andy Jassy network because he's a real fierce competitor but he's also a loyalist and he likes trust. So if someone comes in from the outside, it's going to be someone maybe he trusts. And then the other wildcards are like Teresa Carlson. Like I said, she is a great woman in tech who's done amazing work. I've profiled her many times. We've interviewed her many times. She took that public sector business with Amazon and changed the game completely. Outside the Jedi contract, she was in competitive for, had the big Trump showdown with the Jedi, with the department of defense. Had the CIA cloud. Amazon set the standard on public sector and that's directly the result of Teresa Carlson. But she's in the field, she's not a product person, she's kind of running that group. So Amazon has that product field kind of structure. So we'll see how they handle that. But those are the top three I think are going to be in line. >> So the obvious question that people always ask and it is a big change like this is, okay, in this case, what is Jassy going to bring in? And what's going to change? Maybe the flip side question is somewhat more interesting. What's not going to change in your view? Jassy has been there since nearly the beginning. What are some of the fundamental tenets that he's, that are fossilized, that won't change, do you think? >> I think he's, I think what's not going to change is Amazon, is going to continue to grow and develop their platform business and enable more SaaS players. That's a little bit different than what Microsoft's doing. They're more SaaS oriented, Office 365 is becoming their biggest application in terms of revenue on Microsoft side. So Amazon is going to still have to compete and enable more ecosystem partners. I think what's not going to change is that Bezos is still going to be in charge because executive chairman is just a code word for "not an active CEO." So in the corporate governance world when you have an executive chairman, that's essentially the person still in charge. And so he'll be in charge, will still be the boss of Andy Jassy and Jassy will be running all of Amazon. So I think that's going to be a little bit the same, but Jassy is going to be more in charge. I think you'll see a team change over, whether you're going to see some new management come in, Andy's management team will expand, I think Amazon will stay the same, Amazon Web Services. >> So John, last night, I was just making some notes about notable transitions in the history of the tech business, Gerstner to Palmisano, Gates to Ballmer, and then Ballmer to Nadella. One that you were close to, David Packard to John Young and then John Young to Lew Platt at the old company. Ellison to Safra and Mark, Jobs to Cook. We talked about Larry Page to Sundar Pichai. So how do you see this? And you've talked to, I remember when you interviewed John Chambers, he said, there is no rite of passage, East coast mini-computer companies, Edson de Castro, Ken Olsen, An Wang. These were executives who wouldn't let go. So it's of interesting to juxtapose that with the modern day executive. How do you see this fitting in to some of those epic transitions that I just mentioned? >> I think a lot of people are surprised at Jeff Bezos', even stepping down. I think he's just been such the face of Amazon. I think some of the poll numbers that people are doing on Twitter, people don't think it's going to make a big difference because he's kind of been that, leader hand on the wheel, but it's been its own ship now, kind of. And so depending on who's at the helm, it will be different. I think the Amazon choice of Andy wasn't obvious. And I think a lot of people were asking the question who was Andy Jassy and that's why we're doing this. And we're going to be doing more features on the Andy Jassy. We got a tons, tons of content that we've we've had shipped, original content with them. We'll share more of those key soundbites and who he is. I think a lot of people scratching their head like, why Andy Jassy? It's not obvious to the outsiders who don't know cloud computing. If you're in the competing business, in the digital transformation side, everyone knows about Amazon Web Services. Has been the most successful company, in my opinion, since I could remember at many levels just the way they've completely dominated the business and how they change others to be dominant. So, I mean, they've made Microsoft change, it made Google change and even then he's a leader that accepts conversations. Other companies, their CEOs hide behind their PR wall and they don't talk to people. They won't come on Clubhouse. They won't talk to the press. They hide behind their PR and they feed them, the media. Jassy is not afraid to talk to reporters. He's not afraid to talk to people, but he doesn't like people who don't know what they're talking about. So he doesn't suffer fools. So, you got to have your shit together to talk to Jassy. That's really the way it is. And that's, and he'll give you mind share, like he'll answer any question except for the ones that are too tough for him to answer. Like, are you, is facial recognition bad or good? Are you going to spin out AWS? I mean these are the hard questions and he's got a great team. He's got Jay Carney, former Obama press secretary working for him. He's been a great leader. So I'm really bullish on, is a good choice. >> We're going to jump into the Clubhouse here and open it up shortly. John, the last question for you is competition. Amazon as a company and even Jassy specifically I always talk about how they don't really focus on the competition, they focus on the customer but we know that just observing these folks Bezos is very competitive individual. Jassy, I mean, you know him better than I, very competitive individual. So, and he's, Jassy has been known to call out Oracle. Of course it was in response to Larry Ellison's jabs at Amazon regarding database. But, but how do you see that? Do you see that changing at all? I mean, will Amazon get more publicly competitive or they stick to their knitting, you think? >> You know this is going to sound kind of a weird analogy. And I know there's a lot of hero worshiping on Elon Musk but Elon Musk and Andy Jassy have a lot of similarities in the sense of their brilliance. They got both a brilliant people, different kinds of backgrounds. Obviously, they're running different things. They both are builders, right? If you were listening to Elon Musk on Clubhouse the other night, what was really striking was not only the magic of how it was all orchestrated and what he did and how he interviewed Robin Hood. He basically is about building stuff. And he was asked questions like, what advice do you give startups? He's like, if you need advice you shouldn't be doing startups. That's the kind of mentality that Jassy has, which is, it's not easy. It's not for the faint of heart, but Elon Musk is a builder. Jassy builds, he likes to build stuff, right? And so you look at all the things that he's done with AWS, it's been about enabling people to be successful with the tools that they need, adding more services, creating things that are lower price point. If you're an entrepreneur and you're over the age of 30, you know about AWS because you know what, it's cheaper to start a business on Amazon Web Services than buying servers and everyone knows that. If you're under the age of 25, you might not know 50 grand to a hundred thousand just to start something. Today you get your credit card down, you're up and running and you can get Clubhouses up and running all day long. So the next Clubhouse will be on Amazon or a cloud technology. And that's because of Andy Jassy right? So this is a significant executive and he continue, will bring that mindset of building. So, I think the digital transformation, we're in the digital engine club, we're going to see a complete revolution of a new generation. And I think having a new leader like Andy Jassy will enable in my opinion next generation talent, whether that's media and technology convergence, media technology and art convergence and the fact that he digs music, he digs sports, he digs tech, he digs media, it's going to be very interesting to see, I think he's well-poised to be, and he's soft-spoken, he doesn't want the glamorous press. He doesn't want the puff pieces. He just wants to do what he does and he puts his game do the talking. >> Talking about advice at startups. Just a quick aside. I remember, John, you and I when we were interviewing Scott McNealy former CEO of Sun Microsystems. And you asked him advice for startups. He said, move out of California. It's kind of tongue in cheek. I heard this morning that there's a proposal to tax the multi-billionaires of 1% annually not just the one-time tax. And so Jeff Bezos of course, has a ranch in Texas, no tax there, but places all over. >> You see I don't know. >> But I don't see Amazon leaving Seattle anytime soon, nor Jassy. >> Jeremiah Owyang did a Clubhouse on California. And the basic sentiment is that, it's California is not going away. I mean, come on. People got to just get real. I think it's a fad. Yeah. This has benefits with remote working, no doubt, but people will stay here in California, the network affects beautiful. I think Silicon Valley is going to continue to be relevant. It's just going to syndicate differently. And I think other hubs like Seattle and around the world will be integrated through remote work and I think it's going to be much more of a democratizing effect, not a win lose. So that to me is a huge shift. And look at Amazon, look at Amazon and Microsoft. It's the cloud cities, so people call Seattle. You've got Google down here and they're making waves but still, all good stuff. >> Well John, thanks so much. Let's let's wrap and let's jump into the Clubhouse and hear from others. Thanks so much for coming on, back on theCUBE. And many times we, you and I've done this really. It was a pleasure having you. Thanks for your perspectives. And thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (soft ambient music)

(upbeat tech music) >> Announcer: From London, England it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Insp!re 19 Emea. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Coupa Insp!re 19. Very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE the CEO and Chairman of Coupa, Rob Bernshteyn. Rob, welcome back. >> Thank you so much, thank you for being with me. >> It's great to be here, so we are in with all of these customers and partners, this has been busy all day. You started things off today with a great keynote. I was telling you before we went live, I lost count of how many big customer examples were sprinkled, and I think infused throughout your keynote. I was looking at some numbers, Coupa just keeps doing this. 5x increase in spend under management since 2016, that's only three years. You guys have thousands of customers, five million suppliers on the platform, lot of growth. What are some of the key drivers to this great growth that you're seeing? Well a couple of things, I mean first of all, this is a huge total addressable market. Every company in the world could do a better job of the way they manage their business spending, and they could use information technology, hopefully from Coupa to help make that happen, and we are so proud to cultivate this community of like minded, thoughtful professionals that want to apply best practices, best in-class modern technology solutions like the ones we offer obviously, to drive quantifiable, measurable, outcomes for the companies that they work for. So in many ways, this is a celebration of our customer community and it's a wonderful opportunity to be with our customers here like this every year in Europe and every year in the United States, and now frankly in lots of other places around the world. >> So one of the themes that was also expressed during the keynote was Rachel Botsman's theme of trust and I think about the open community, the open platform and the community that Coupa is building, there's a lot of earned trust there that Coupa has earned from this growing community. Talk to me about what that means to you and the whole team and how it's influencing the direction that Coupa is going in. >> It means a lot to me personally frankly. The O in Coupa stands for Open, and that means not only technically open in terms of APIs and integrations, but it means open in spirit, open in dialogue, honest, transparent communications. I feel that our industry in enterprise software has a legacy or a history of a lot of PowerPoints, and a lot of demos, but frankly, quite a few failures of large scale deployments and a whole host of sectors. And we want to be part of the solution, we want to have an open, authentic, honest communication with our customers, with our prospective customers in the sales process, with our partners, with all of my Coupa colleagues, so we can avoid the friction and nonsense of politics that often gets in the way of driving measurable, meaningful value for every constituent. It's a very, very important thing to me, it's important to my team, and that's something we're doing our very best to cultivate in this Coupa community that we're creating. >> Speaking of cultivation, Coupa is cultivating this category of Business Spend Management. Tell us a little bit more about that and where you are with that. >> Sure, Business Spend Management is a pretty straightforward three words to describe the fact that our buyers and our customers are responsible for literally trillions of dollars and pounds and dollars and euros of spend all over the world. And as information becomes more and more transparent, the buyer, the one who's repsonsible for that spend becomes more and more powerful. So we sit on the side of that buyer, we give them information technology solutions from sourcing, to inventory management, to spend analytics, to procurement, to expensing, to invoicing, to payments, to supplier performance. All the capabilities needed to help them make the best purchasing decisions for their organizations, and help their companies become more profitable so that every one of these Coupa community customers we have here could get more bang for their buck and be that much more operationally efficient frankly in driving their own company's visions and missions and whatever it is that they bring to the world. And that's very aspirational for us and we're excited that so many have come on board with this establishment of the Business Spend Management category with us. >> So if we look at the PIPE, as you were calling it this morning, P-I-P-E, procure, invoice, pay, expense, I memorized that, you've got this one platform that can deliver all of that to this growing community of users who have the ability to get that visibility. That is one of the biggest challenges, I was reading some stats recently about the number of businesses, they were the percentages of businesses that don't have complete visibility over their spend, it's high. >> It's very high, we just did a study of 250 or so CFOs in the UK, and they're doing a great job at budgeting and reporting, but they have minimal visibility into their supply relationships, especially with what's happening here with Brexit. They have minimal visibility in supply risks, supply chain risks, and one of the ingredients that I think we're very special at and I'm proud of is the U in Coupa, the user centricity. In order to have visibility into your spend, you have to have adoption, you have to have people purchasing, spending, expensing, paying, processing invoices, everything that you just mentioned through this pipe on one centralized platform with a common UI layer, User Experience layer or User Interface, common business logic layer, common data model, use of community intelligence to help you make the best purchasing decisions, spend decisions. So we're really on the forefront of something very, very exciting because this adoption level is happening through this user centricity, and it's given these companies control and visibility of spend, and what could be more important to driving profitability, sustained business development? I think we're in a very unique position to help these customers. >> So is one of the biggest challenges for those, think it was 96% of those UK financial decision makers that you guys surveyed said, "We don't have complete visibility." Is it because they have legacy siloed solutions that don't give them that common layer? Or is it because maybe that and a mixture of users just not adopting it because it's not as intuitive to use? >> It's a number of things. First of all, for every process, whether it's procurement, expenses, invoicing, or payments, they have seperate systems to your point. Some cases, they don't even have systems. They're calling in orders, they're handling paper invoices, so there are different levels of maturity in each of those four areas. So one is getting them on to a common platform where all of those are orchestrating together. Secondarily, there's an opportunity to create synergy between those areas, so a lot of things that are getting expensed really should be preapproved and should be routed toward preferential pricing that procurement can negotiate on behalf of the user. Many times invoices are duplicate coming in from suppliers and AP departments are so excited that they pay quickly, but they're not necessarily sure whether they received the goods and services that the invoice is for. So having one common platform, that's the C in Coupa, Comprehensive. One common comprehensive platform for all these business processes is critical, leveraging the synergy of all them working together is critical, and getting that widespread user adoption is part of the secret formula here. >> Let's talk about the community. It's big, it's growing, 1.3 trillion in spend managed, and I watched our video back that you and I did a few months ago, it was 1.2. So that was four months ago, and you showed a bar chart today of just the last 12 months, had to look up this way to see that, so this community that has the ability to help derive and leverage the insights, talk to me about the insights and being able to help businesses go from reactive to predictive as a game changer for Coupa. >> Sure, it's a huge game changer and we really aspire to be, if you will, the tail that wags the dog in the enterprise software industry overall because the enterprise software industry, in effect, every customer is on their own island using information technology for a certain business process. What we've done with community intelligence is we've aggregated, anonymized, and sanitized data from the customer base and then are distilling insights that we could be prescriptive about. So we could tell our customers and we're telling them, "Hey, our community is having challenges with such "and such supplier based on literally perhaps millions "of dollars and millions of pounds in transactional spend. "We recommend you consider this supplier in "that same category because our community is having "great success with them. "The products are being shipped on time, "there's no war over invoicing, there's no breakage in "what's delivered." Those are just some examples, we're helping them think through commodities. A lot of our customers forgiven commodity, they have 20, 30 different suppliers. We're helping them think through in their industry. How can they do supply consolidation that makes sense based on benchmarking across the entire industry? We're helping them avoid supplier risk, we're helping them avoid fraud, we're identifying employees that may be expensing things or doing things that are fraudulent based on the collective intelligence of what we're seeing around the entire world in real time and we're prescribing actions to be taken before payments go out. So these are just some examples of what we're doing, we're doing things in benchmarking based on community intelligence, we're really just at the tip of the sphere of what's possible and we've prescribed tens of thousands of prescriptions in our platform to our customers. Many of them are taking those prescriptions and are making their businesses more operationally fit, and more agile, which is something we're very, very proud of. >> Speaking of those prescriptions, I think the number you shared this morning was 22,000 prescriptions delivered in one year? >> In the last 12 months, that's right. >> So we've got to talk about acceleration 'cause we've talked about the COUP, the acceleration, that is one example of that. I also saw that you guys have gotten, customers are doing approvals 30% faster than they were a year ago. You're getting mid-market customers up and running in four months, large enterprises up in eight months, talk to me about that acceleration that you guys are achieving. >> Absolutely, the A in Coupa is about Accelerated, it's about learning from our entire customer base and taking those learnings and making them part of best practices-based appointments so we could go faster and faster and faster. We look at retail customer, we've done dozens of retail customers, large and small. We know how to set up catalogs, we know how to set up workflow, we know how to think through the analytics that they need. So when they get going with the deployment from Coupa, they can get up and running way faster than with going back to five or six years ago where you have to think about it from scratch and a blueprint. They could leverage the insight from the community with doing that in mid-market, with doing that in subverticals like credit unions, for example. Biotechs, we're doing it in insurance, we're doing it in pharma, all hosts of industries, and I think as we learn from every deployment and collect those insights, we're going to be able to drive value faster and faster to our customers. And the other element that's important here is it's not just taking the customer live, all of our customers grow with us. They get more and more value every year, this is why our renewal rate is so strong and customers add more business with us because they're getting value and that value continues to grow, and that's really what value as a service is about. We're not a software company, and we're not a software as a service company. We're truly a value as a service company, which is a very different concept and one that we're cultivating in this marketplace. >> What are some of your favorite, I know you love being in front of the customers, what are some of your favorite examples that really show the value that Coupa is delivering to the changing role of procurement, making that girl or guy much more strategic and much more of a partner to the business? >> Sure, I shared some examples this morning that I really loved and appreciated celebrating some of our trendsetters, or what we call spendsetters. You look at Zalando, our retailer where they weren't necessarily going to take them so seriously about savings, but when they went to marketing and said, "We can give you much more bang "for your marketing budget "so you could reach more potential consumers," well of course they embraced that. And we gave them a usable opportunity, a usable platform for doing that as similar Zalando, they engaged. Now they have something like 85% spender management. When we started working with them, they had zero purchase orders, everything was the wild west. You look at, I was just speaking to one of our customers at Procter & Gamble just five minutes ago here at the expo. They've run more than 50 billion pounds of spend through the Coupa platform, 50 billion. That's not easy, but they've done that in just a couple of years with us, and not only did they have visibility spent, but they're saving, they're routing purchases to preferred suppliers, so the list just goes on and on and on our website, at Coupa.com on the Customers tab, you'll see obviously dozens of customers holding up signs of the real measurable value they're getting from working with us and that's something that we really take a lot of pride in. >> That speaks for itself. Last question for you Rob, talk to me about those strategic partnerships that Coupa has. I know some news coming out today with what you guys are doing with American Express. >> Sure, we've entered the payment space and we entered it because our customer community asked us for it. They said, "Look, if we're procuring goods "and services through you, why wouldn't we all, "and we're doing invoice and we're doing all "of the components of the pipe, "why wouldn't we also go deeper into payments, help us pay." Because many now have to log in to all these different ERP systems and kick off batch process, so we went into payments. And in payments, we have a host of partnerships. Now, today we announced the relationship with American Express in the UK and Australia for virtual credit card payments. Now it's very simple in Coupa, someone needs a good or service, it gets routed through workflow for approval. Once approved, a dynamic credit card number is generated by American Express, the individual makes the purchase, and all the reconciliation, the back-end is handled by Coupa. All the reporting, the visibility, the insights to price points and category assessments are there and visible and the company's in a position to fine tune their spend profile. So that's just one example, and we're doing things in dynamic discounting and accelerating payments. We've just launched today in general availability and Robby will be discussing it tomorrow ahead of business acceleration. We launched our batch payments capability, the ability to do invoice payments in batch along any rail, whether it be banking relationships, whether it be eCheck, whether it be credit card, going into one environment and kicking off batch payments without having to wait for all these different ERP systems to take hold. So we're really at the, in my mind, at the very beginning of addressing a huge market opportunity, we're proud of what we've achieved so far. I'm particularly proud of the customer community developing around us, and we're excited about the days, weeks, months, quarters, and years to come. >> So you talked about, last question, the big TAM, in this total adjustable market. What are some of the core elements to Coupa's path to a billion in revenue? >> We're not as exciting to many investors as a hot startup that grows really quickly and maybe has some sort of viral component to it. We've been at this for over 10 years, we've grown thoughtfully, we've grown carefully. The growth is fast 30, 40 plus percent, but it's thoughtful and careful, it's one customer at a time. We're careful in how much we spend on sales and marketing, especially want customers to choose us rather than us hard-selling them on everything, we want the offering to sell itself. We have an ecosystem of systems integrators, now more than 3,000, Centric, APMG, Deloitte, and others that are certified on deploying Coupa. We're expanding our product footprint, our customers now use on average 4.7 applications from us and they're consuming those applications rather than us pushing them on them. We're expanding globally, we're expanding in terms of the enterprise business and the mid-market business. Our mid-market business is now really at scale and scaling beautifully, it's a beautiful business model. So those are just some of the vectors in which we'll continue to expand, but I think the path to $1 billion for us is very clear, and ultimately comes down to execution, delivering for every customer, making sure they're getting value from working with us year in and year out, and I think before you know it, we'll be on the doorstep of that $1 billion. >> Excellent. Rob, it's been a pleasure having you back on theCUBE. Thank you for having theCUBE out here in London, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> For Rob Bernshteyn, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from Coupa Insp!re 19. Thanks for watching. (upbeat tech music)

>> From Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Presenting the People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here on Sand Hill Road at Mayfield's Venture Capital Headquarters for the People First Network. I'm here with Pradeep Sindhu, who's the co-founder of Juniper Networks and now the co-founder and CEO of Fungible. Thanks for joining me on this special conversation for the People First Program. >> Thank you, John. >> So I want to talk to you about entrepreneurship. You're doing a new startup, you've been so successful as an entrepreneur over the years, uh you keep building a great company at Juniper Networks, everyone kind of knows the success there, great success. We've interviewed you before on that, but now you got a new startup! >> I do. >> You're building a company I thought startups were for young people. (Pradeep laughs) Come on! We're nine years into our startup, we're still a startup. >> Well, I'm not quite over the hill yet. (John Laughs) One of the reasons I jumped back in to the startup world was I saw an opportunity to solve a very important industry problem and to do it rapidly and so, I took the step. >> Well, we're super excited that you shared your vision with us and folks can check that video out on theCUBE and deep dive on the future of that startup. So, it's exciting, check it out. Entrepreneurship has changed and one of the things that we're talking about here is how things have changed just since the last time you've done a round. I mean, you're now a couple years in, you've been stealth for a while building out this amazing chip, the the Data Processing Unit, the DPU. What's different about building companies now? I mean, are you a unicorn? You have a billion-dollar evaluation yet? I mean, that's the new bar, it's different. What are some of the differences now in building a company? >> You know, one thing, John, that I saw is a clear difference between when I started Juniper and started Fungible, is that the amount of bureaucracy and paperwork that one has to go through is tremendously larger. And this was disappointing because one of the things that the US does very well is to keep it light and keep it fast so that it's easy for people to create new companies. That was one difference. The other difference that I saw was actually reluctance on the part of Venture to take big bets. Because people had gotten used to the idea of a quick turn around with maybe a social media company or something. Now, you know, my tendency to work on problems is I tend to work on fundamental problems that take time to do, but the outcome is potentially large. So, I'm attracted to that kind of problem. And so, the number of VCs that were willing to look at those kinds of problems were far fewer this time around than last time. >> So you got some no's then? >> Of course, I got no's. Even from people that-- >> You're the Founder of Juniper Networks, you've done amazing things, like you created billions of dollars of value, you should be gold-plated. >> What you did 20 years ago only goes so far. I think what what people were reluctant, and remember, I started Fungible in 2015. At that time, silicon was still a dirty word. I think now there are several people who said, no, we're regretting because they see that it's kind of the second coming of silicon and it's for reasons that we have talked about in the other discussion that, you know, Moore's Law is coming to a close. And that the largest that it was distributing over the last 30, 40 years is going away so what we have to do is we have to innovate on silicon. You know, as we discussed, the world has only seen a few architectures for computing engines on silicon. One of the things that makes me very happy is that now people are going to apply their creativity to painting on this canvas. >> So, silicon's got some new life blood. What's your angle with your silicon strategy? >> So, our silicon strategy is really to focus on one aspect of computations in the data center and this aspect we call Data Centric Computing. Data Centric Computing is really computing where there's a lot more movement of data and lot less arithmetic on data. And today, giving scaled out architectures, data has to move and be stored and retrieved and so on as much as it has to be computed on. So, existing engines are not very good at doing these Data Centric Computations, so we are building a programmable DPU to actually do those computations much, much better than any engine can today. >> And that's great. And just a reminder, we got a deep dive on that topic, so check out the video on that. So, I got to ask you the question, why are people resistant at the silicon trend? Was it trendy? Was it the lack of information? You almost see people almost less informed on computer architecture these days as people Blitzscale for SASPA businesses. Cloud certainly is great for that , but there's now this renaissance. Why was it, what was the problem? >> I think the problem is very easy to identify. Building silicon is expensive. It takes very specialized set of skills. It takes a lot of money, and it takes time. Well, anything that takes a long time is risky. And Venture, while it likes risk, it tries to minimize it. So, it's completely understandable to me that, you know, people don't want to take, they don't want to put money in ventures that might take two, three years. Actually, you know, going back to the Juniper era, there are Venture folks, I won't name them, but who said, well, if you could do this thing in six months, we're in, but otherwise no. >> How long did it take? >> 2 1/2 years. >> And then the rest is history. >> Yeah. >> So, there's a lot of naysayers, it's just categorical kind of like, you know, courses for horses for courses, as they say, that expression. All right, so now with with your experience, okay, you got some no's, how did that, how did that make you feel? You're like, damn, I got to get out and do the rounds? >> Actually-- >> You just kind of moved on or? >> I just moved on because, you know, the fact that I did Juniper should not give me any special treatment. It should be the quality of the idea that I've come up with. And so, what I tried to do, my response was to make the idea more compelling, sharpen it further, and and try to convince people that, hey there was value here. I think that I've not been often wrong about predicting things maybe two, three years out, so on the basis of that people were willing to give me that credibility, and so, there were enough people who were interested in investing. >> What did you learn in the process? What was the one thing that you sharpened pretty quickly? Was it the story, was it the architecture message? What was the main thing that you just had to sharpen really fast? >> The thing I had to sharpen really fast was while the technology we were developing is disruptive, customers really, really care, they don't want to be disrupted. They actually want the insertion to be smooth. And so, this is the piece that we had to sharpen. Anytime you have a new technology, you have to think about, well, how can I make it easy for people to use? This is very, very important. >> So the impact to the architecture itself, if it was deployed in the use case, and then look at the impact of ripple effect. >> For example, you cannot require people to change their applications. That's a no-no. Nobody's going to rewrite their software. You also probably don't want to ask people to change their network architecture. You don't want to ask people to change their deployment model. So, there are certain things that need to be held constant. So, that was a very quick learning. >> So, one of the other things that we've been talking about with other entrepreneurs is okay, the durability of the company. You're going down, playing the long game, but also innovation and and attracting people and so you've done, built companies before, as with Juniper, and you've worked with a great team of people in your network. How did you attract people for this? Obviously, they probably were attracted on the merit of the idea, but how do you pick people? What's the algorithm? What's the method that you use to choose team members or partners? Because that's also super important. If you got a gestation period where you're building out. You got to have high quality DNA. How do you make that choice? What's the thought process? >> So John, the the only algorithm that I know works is to look for people that are either known to you directly or known to somebody that you trust because in an interview, it's a hit or miss. At least, I'm not so good at interviewing that I can have a 70, 80% success rate. Because people can fake it in an interview, but you cannot fake it once you've worked with somebody, so that's one very important test. The other one was, it was very important for me to have people who were collaborative. It is possible to find lots of people who are very smart but they are not collaborative. And in an endeavor like the one we're doing, collaboration is very important, and of course the base skill set is very important so, you know, almost half of our team is software because we are-- >> It's a programmable chip. >> It's a programmable chip. We're writing our own operating system, very lightweight. So, you need that combination of hardware and software skills which is getting more and more scarce regrettably. >> I had a chat with Andy Bechtolsheim at VMworld and he and I had a great conversation similar to this, he said, you know, hardware is hard, software is easier, (laughs) and that was his point, and he also was saying that with merchant silicon, it's the software that's key. >> It is absolutely the key. Software, you know, software is always important. But software doesn't run on air. We should also remember that. And there are certain problems, for example, switching packets inside a data center where the problem is reasonably well-solved by merchant silicon. But there are other problems for which there is no merchant silicon solution, like the DPU that we're talking about. Eventually, there might be. But today there isn't. So, I think Apple is a great example for me of a company that understands the value of software hardware integration. Everybody thinks of Apple as a software only company. They have thousands of silicon engineers, thousands. If you look at your Apple Watch, there are probably some 20 chips inside it. You look at the iPhone. It won't do the magic that it does without the silicon team that they have. They don't talk about it a lot on purpose because-- >> 'Cause they don't want a China chip in there. >> Well, they don't want a China chip, but not only that, they don't know to advertise. It's part of their core value. >> Yeah. >> And so, as long as people keep believing that everything can be done in software, that's good for Apple. >> So, this is the trend, and this is why, Larry also brought this up years ago when he was talking about Oracle. He tried to make the play that Oracle would be the iPhone of the data center. >> Mm-hmm. >> Which people poo-pooed and they're still struggling with that idea, but he was pointing out the benefit of the iPhone, how they are integrating into the hardware and managing what Steve Jobs always wanted which was security number one >> Absolutely. >> for the customer. >> And seamlessness of use. And the reason the iPhone actually works as well as it does is because the hardware and the software are co-designed. And the reason it delivers the value that it does to the company is because of those things. >> So you see, this as a big trend, now you see that hardware and software will work together. You see cloud native heterogeneous almost server-less environments abstracted away with software and other components, fabric and specialized processors? >> Yes. >> And just application developers just programming at will? >> Correct, and edge data centers, so computing, I would say that maybe in a decade we will see roughly half of the computing and storage being done closer to the edge and the remaining half being done in these massively skilled data centers. >> I want to get geeky with you for a second, I want to ask you a question, I want to get your take on something. I've been thinking about and haven't really talked publicly about, kind of said on theCUBE a few times in a couple interviews, but I want to get your thoughts. There's been a big discussion about hybrid cloud, private cloud, multi-cloud, all that stuff going on, and I was talking with Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, and Diane Greene at Google and I'm like okay, I can buy all these definitions, I don't believe any of 'em, but, you know, what the hell does that mean, what I know. I said to Diane Greene, I said, well, if everyone's going cloud operations, if cloud operations and edge is the new paradigm, isn't the data center just a big fat edge? And she looked at me and said, hmm, interesting. So, is the data center ultimately just a device on this network? If the operating model is horizontally scalable, isn't it just a a big fat edge? >> So you can, so here's the thing, right, if we talk about, you know, what is cloud? It's essentially a particular architecture, which is scaled out architecture uh to build a data center and then having this data center be connected by a very fast network. To consumers anytime, anywhere. So, let's take that as the definition of cloud. Well, if that's the definition of cloud, now you're talking about what kind of data centers will be present over time, and I think what we observed was it's really important for many applications to come, and with the advent of 5G, with the advent of things like augmented reality, now, with the advent of self-driving cars, a lot of computing needs to be done close to the edge because it cannot be done, because of laws of physics reasons, it cannot be done far away. So, once you have this idea that you also have small scale out data centers close to the edge, all these arguments about whether it's a hybrid cloud or this cloud or that cloud, they kind of vanish because-- >> So, you agree then, it's kind of like an edge? >> It is. >> Because it's an operational philosophy if you're running it that way, then it's just what it is, it's a scale out entity. >> Correct. >> It could be a small sensor network or it could be a data center. >> Correct. So, the key is actually the operational model and the idea of using scaled out design principles, which is don't try to build 50,000 different types of widgets which are then hard to manage. Try to build a small set of things, tinker toys that you can connect together in different ways. Make it easy to manage, manage it using software, which is then centralized by itself. >> That's a great point. You you jumped the gun on me on this one. I was going to ask you that next question. As an entrepreneur who's looking at this new architecture you just mentioned, what advice would you give them? How should they attack this market? 'Cause the old way was you get a PowerPoint, you show a presentations of the VCs, they give you some money, you provision some hardware, you go on next generation, get a prototype, it's up and running, you got some users. Built it then you get some cash, you scale it (laughs). Now with this new architecture, what's the strategy of the eager entrepreneur who wants to create a valuable opportunity with this new architecture. What would you advise them? >> So I, you know, I think it really depends on what is the underlying technology that you have for your startup. There's going to be lots and lots of opportunities. >> Oh don't fight the trend, which is, the headwind would be, don't compete against the scale out. Ride that wave, right? >> Yeah, people who are competing against scale out by building large scale monolithic machines, I think they're going to have difficulty, there's fundamental difficulties there. So, don't fight the trend. There's plenty of opportunities for software. Plenty of opportunities for software. But it's not the vertical software stack that you have to go through five or six different levels before you get to doing the real work. It's more a horizontal stack, it's a more agile stack. So, if it's a software company, you can actually build prototypes very quickly today. Maybe on AWS, maybe on Google Cloud, maybe on Microsoft. >> So, maybe the marketing campaign for your company, or maybe the trend might that's emerging is data first companies. We heard cloud mobile first, cloud first, data first. >> Correct. We think that the world really, the world of infrastructure is going from compute centric to data centric. This is absolutely the case. So, data first companies, yes. >> All right, so final question for you, as someone who's had a lot of experience in building public company, multi-billions of dollars of value, embarking on a big idea that that we like, I love the idea. A lot of people struggle with the entrepreneurial equation of how to leverage their board, how to leverage their investors and advisors and service providers. What would you share to the folks watching that are out there that have struggled? Some think, oh the VCs, they don't add value. Some do, some don't. There's always missed reactions. There's different, different types out there. Some do, some don't. But in general, it's about leveraging the resources and the people involved. How should entrepreneurs leverage their advisors, their board, their investors? >> I think it's very important for an entrepreneur to look for complementarity. It's very easy to want to find people that think like you do. If you just find people that think like you do, you're not, they're not going to find weaknesses in your arguments. It's more difficult, but if you look to entrepreneurs to provide complementarity, you look to advisors to provide the complementarity, look to customers to give you feedback, that's how you build value. >> Pradeep, thanks so much for sharing the insight, a lot of opportunities. Thanks for sharing here on-- >> Thank you, John. >> The People Network. I'm John Furrier at Mayfield on Sand Hill Road for theCUBE's coverage of the People First Network series, part of Mayfield's 50th Anniversary. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(lively music) >> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Micron Insight 2018. Brought to you by Micron. >> Welcome back to San Francisco Bay everybody, we're here covering Micron Insight 2018. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my cohost David Floyer. Sanjay Mehrotra is here, he's the president and CEO of Micron. Sanjay, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to be on the show. >> So quite an event here! First of all beautiful venue. >> Lovely venue. >> Got the Golden Gate that way, we got Nob Hill over there. So tell us about this event. It's not just about hardcore tech and memory. You guys are talking about AI for good, healthcare, changing the world. What's behind that? >> Yeah, our focus is on AI technologies and how AI is really changing the world. In terms of life, in terms of business, in terms of health. This is a showcase of how these technologies are in very very early innings, they've just barely begun. And what's happened is that AI algorithms have been around for a long time but now the compute capability and the memory and storage capability have advanced to the levels that you can really mine through a lot of data real-time, derive lot of insights and translate those insights into intelligence. And Micron plays a pivotal role here because our memory, our storage is where all this data resides, where all this data is processed. So we are very excited to bring together many industry figures, industry luminaries, park leaders, researchers, engineers all here today to engage in a dialogue on where technology is going, where AI is going, how it's shaping the world. And for the realization that hardware is absolutely central to this trend. And memory and storage is key. And we are very excited about what it means for the future. >> So a lot of thought leaders here today. Well first of all you guys have some hard news, which is relevant to what we're talking about. Talk about the hundred million dollar fund and how you've deployed it even just today you've made some sub-announcements. >> So, one of the things we announced today is we are launching a hundred million dollar fund to support, to fund start-ups in AI. Because we really think AI is going to transform the world. We want to be in the front row. With not only the large existing players that are driving this change but also the start-ups that will drive innovation. Having the front row seat with those start-ups, through our investment fund, will really help us accelerate intelligence, accelerate time to market of various AI applications. So a hundred million dollar fund is targeted toward supporting start-ups that are developing AI technologies. And what I'm really excited to talk about here is that 20% of that fund will go to start-ups that have leadership that is represented by women or under-represented groups. Under-represented--those groups that are under-represented in tech today. This demonstrates Micron's commitment to diversity and inclusion in the technologies phase. >> Well that's, well first of all congratulations on that we're big supporters >> Absolutely >> Of women and tech and diversity, it's something that we cover on the theCUBE extensively. And now you've announced two grants just today, a half a million dollars each. One with Stanford, one with Berkeley that we heard. We heard Amazon up on stage talking about Alexa AI, Microsoft was onstage we had NVIDIA on theCUBE earlier. So bringing together an ecosystem that involves academia, your partners, your customers, talk about that a little bit. >> So the two grants that you talked about, those are from Micron Foundation that is again supporting advancement of AI and AI research as well as teaching of AI to kids so that we can build the pipeline of strong engineers and technologists of the future. So the two grants that we have announced today are one to Stanford Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics Center, 200,000 grant to Stanford, pioneers in AI applications to precision management of your health. Very exciting field that will really truly enrich life and prolong life in the future as well as advance detection of diseases. Second $200,000 grant that we are giving is to Berkeley. Artificial Intelligence Research Center, absolutely cutting-edge that will be applicable to many industries and many walks of life. These are intended to support advancement of AI research. In addition to this advanced curiosity grant to these two institutions later today you'll hear there will be announcing a $100,000 grant to AI4ALL. And this is an institution that is encouraging women and under-represented minorities at high school level, 9th grade to 11th grade to pursue STEM careers. So Micron is really promoting study of advanced research and supporting the pipeline. In addition to this of course our focus today is on bringing together industry luminaries just like you mentioned, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, autonomous driving of the future, automotive partners, BMW, Visteon, really to engage in a dialogue of how AI is advancing in these various applications. We just heard great talk from vice president at Amazon, on Alexa devices really really exciting how those devices are truly making your life so easy and so intelligent. We heard from Microsoft Corporate Vice-President of AI research. So you see we really are as leaders in our industry, we are really bringing together industry experts to engage in a thought-provoking and inspiring dialogue on AI so that when we leave here today we leave with insights into what is coming next but even more importantly what do we all need to do to get there faster, and this is all about technology. >> So Sanjay and David too, Micron is one of the few companies that was here when I started in the business and is still around. At the time you were just a component manufacturer doin' memories and wow to watch the diversification of Micron over the years but also recently, I mean it's incredibly well-run company so congratulations on the recent success. At the analyst event in New York City this year, you talked about not only that diversification in your investments and innovation but you talked about the cyclicality of this business the historical cyclicality of this business you've dampened that down a little bit, for a variety of reasons. The capital requirements in this business are enormous, there's been consolidation. So how is that going, talk about sort of the trends in your business both in terms of diversification and your ability to make this business more predictable. >> So Dave you are very right to know that Micron is 40 year old company, we actually just turned 40, very proud of it. Really a company founded on the principles of innovation and tenacity. In fact the company has contributed to the industry to the world over the course of 40 years, 40,000 patents, just imagine that's a thousand patents a year, three patents a day over the course of 40 years. We are really a prolific inventor and we absolutely through our innovations in memory and storage have shaped the world here. As technology advances it really unleashes more applications and this is what has brought about the change in our industry. Today memory is not just in your PC. Of course it is in this PC but it is also in your data center it is going to be in the autonomous records of the future you going to have as much memory as what you had in the server just a few years ago. It's inside your mobile phone Artificial Intelligence, facial recognition is only possible because of the data and memory that you have in there. You have NAND Flash that is in these devices and with technology advancing that's bringing down the price points of NAND Flash really bringing more SSD's into these notebook computers, making these notebook computers lighter, longer battery life, more powerful. And of course Flash drives are also replacing hard test drives in data centers and cloud computing. So many applications, these diverse applications really have brought greater stability in our industry. And of course technology complexity has over time moderated the supply growth. And that's what we mean that the cyclicality of our industry, yes one or two quarters here or there you can have demand and supply mismatches but overall when you look at the demand trends and combine them with the moderating supply trends the long-term trajectory for our industry is very healthy. In fact we just completed a record year. >> Our fiscal year '18 was a record 30 billion dollar year for us with profitability that puts us at the very top of the most companies with 50% operating margin and with 30 billion in revenue we are actually number two largest semiconductor company in the U.S. And a lot of opportunity ahead given the demand drivers in the industry. >> Massive free cash flow, you've said publicly the stock is undervalued which is ya know, I don't know any CEO that says it's overvalued but nonetheless the performance that you've had suggests that you very well might be right. Go ahead David please. >> Yeah I just wanted to ask your opinion on, you are leading in this area now, very very clearly you're growing faster than the industry, you've had a magnificent year and the whole area is grown both the NAND and the DRAM. How are you judging how much to invest in this for the future? What's the balance between giving money back to the stockholders by buying stock back or versus investing in this what seems to me a very very exciting area. >> Do you have an AI algorithm for that? (laughing) >> We are in a great position where we are extremely disciplined about investing in CapEx to reduce cost of production and to deploy new technologies into production. We are very ROI focused in terms of any CapEx investments we make. We of course invest in R and D. I mentioned earlier 40,000 patents over the course of 40 years that only comes in investment in R and D. Investments in R and D are essential because we are today the most comprehensive technology solutions provider in memory and storage in the world. >> Yeah. >> In the world. With our DRAM, our Flash, our 3D crosspoint technologies, as well as future emerging technologies really position us as the only company in the world that have all of these memory and storage technologies under one company roof. So we do invest very thoughtfully and we manage our expenses very carefully but we do invest in R and D and of course we are committed to driving shareholder value as well. And we had announced earlier in the year ten billion dollar share buy back program with at least 50% of a fee cash flow. Every quarter on an annual basis actually, 50% of our fee cash flow on an annual basis going, at least 50% going toward share buy back. So we are managing the business, all aspects of it, excitedly looking forward to the opportunities. At the same time prudently in an otherwise driven fashion, building shareholder value through investments in R and D and manufacturing. >> Well of course the great Warren Buffett, David, says when asked if stock buy backs are a good investment says if your stock's undervalued it's a good investment, so. Obviously you believe that Sanjay, so. >> Absolutely! >> So thanks, thanks very much for coming on the theCUBE it was great to have you. >> Thank you. >> I hope we can have you back again. >> Thank you. >> We could talk to you for a long long time. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright, keep it right there buddy, >> Thank you. >> We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from San Francisco Bay Micron Insight 2018. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music).

>> Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit, Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Bahrain for Amazon's Web Service Summit in the Middle East, really built around the big announcement around their region coming which would open up in Q1 2019. And Amazon full force here and really bringing together a combination of cloud-computing, cloud-native, together with the community and entrepreneurship here. And of course we wanted to save the best for last of the day interview, the entrepreneurs themselves are going to tell a straight scoop what's happening 'cause it's a lot of action here. Alharith Alatawi, who is the CEO of ONEGCC and Zaman Zaman, founder and CEO of Skiplino. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> So I got to say, I was watching you guys yesterday in your little, and then Bahrain, you're on your best behavior. You didn't chirp too loud, but I can see the energy in the entrepreneurs. You know there's real entrepreneurs in the room when you can see the energy, right? And all the executives were in there, and you've got the Amazon, so you're on your best behavior banging your fists on the door. You guys are doing some good work, so congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> So what's the real deal? What's it like here? I mean I know it's tough to get access to capital, but the government's bringing some capital to the table, there's momentum, there's opportunities. What's the straight scoop here? >> So for the past three years, when Start-up Bahrain started, there's been tremendous support from the government because they really want to see this, what they're calling the Fourth Industrial Revolution, they want it to happen. They're pushing for it. They're pushing technology start-ups. And we were really blessed to be, I mean to have started just a few months before that, so we're riding an amazing wave. We've been getting a lot of support from Tamkeen, a lot of legislation support from the government, the EDB obviously have been doing a massive job in trying to support us, getting us business. And I mean since we started til today, we've at least doubled or even tripled the amount of clients we have. And there's a lot of attention now to technology start-ups. And I think as a growing sector, Bahrain, we're really reaping the fruits of it. >> And what is your start-up, ONEGCC? Just take a minute to explain what your start-up's doing, how many people you've got going on, the stage of the opportunity. >> So before I founded or co-founded ONEGCC, I was in an investment firm, and one of our investments was in Saudi. It was called a mega-recruitment company. And what we were trying to do is, we had 500,000 work permits. We had to bring a bunch of people and start outsourcing them to companies, but the Ministry of Labor still wanted us to maintain Saudization within these companies that we're working with. And it was a very tough challenge trying to find the right GCC nationals, the right Saudis. I mean 40% of them hold degrees in Humanitarian Islamic Studies, so how do you place all of these when most of the jobs that are being offered are in construction, retail, and other services? So that's when we started ONEGCC. We said you know what, we'll hire people based on skills rather than their job titles or academic background. And that's really where we started ONEGCC. >> So it solves your own problem? >> Exactly. >> You had a little pain there. >> Well today it's our own problem. >> Yeah, now you have a bigger problem. It's called growth. >> (laughs) Yeah, but tomorrow it's going to become a global problem with AI and smart machines wiping out almost maybe 70%. >> So how many people involved in the start-up? What's the stage, would you call it? >> So today we have 18 employees. We're still early stage, but we're growing as well as we can. >> Great. Tell us about your story here. >> Well, mine was a multi-lingual intelligent queue management system. So we realized there was a gap in the market. >> First, explain what a queue management system is, and remember 'queue' is not an American word. That's an English word, or international word. Queue is 'line' they call it in America. >> Okay, let's say line management. >> But we're talking about physical standing in line at the bank. >> Yes. When you go there, you actually take a token and wait. So we realized it was a problem not only in Bahrain. It was a global problem. What we did was, we went to investigate the issue. How it started was, I went to a bank a day before I traveled, and I had to wait for one hour and forty-five minutes just to clear a check. So I found that not acceptable. So what we did was go study the markets. And we realized that was like three or four players controlling the market for the past thirty years. Some people tried to do it cloud-based, but they didn't get it right because they didn't cater to those segments, which is the large B2B clients that need to scale or have a large number of branches. So when we decided to go and build it on the cloud, we realized that there is no performance management on each agent that is live and was streamed. So when we built the reports, we realized that most of it is bottlenecks that can be solved with AI or machine learning. So we incorporated that into Skiplino. Now Skiplino has around 2,500 companies from around the globe in 196 countries. And it's now in 69 languages. >> That's amazing. How many people in your opportunity, working with you? >> Including founders, we're around 15. >> Fifteen, great. Well congratulations, and one of the things I wanted to kind of get here while we're broadcasting around the continent and around cloud is, I live in Silicon Valley, so everyone's got the entrepreneurial bug going on, but you have successes and failures. That's the way it works. You've got to try something and hit the homeruns once in a while, but you got to get a couple base hits. It's really hard. I mean people don't understand how hard it is, right? If they've never done it, it's hard as hell. So, but having the ecosystem support is key, but Start-up Bahrain is doing some good work with EDB. What is the key requirement and what's the need? Where is it working, are you guys seeing on the ground here? Because the community's there and that's a check. That's hard to do. I mean robust entrepreneur community's good, and there's money. So now you've just got to fill in the blank. What is the cloud going to bring you guys? What are you guys hoping for? What do you want to see? >> Of course with the cloud, the best thing that comes with the cloud is scalability, for us. In effect, we're removing the unpremised queue management systems businesses, but the good thing that's happening in Bahrain, and around the GCC too, is ministries and governments are more receptive for additional transformation, and they know that's the only way to keep up. So actually we're the first cloud-based service the Bahraini government used. >> And you're using Amazon now? >> No, (laughs) we're actually a Microsoft concept partner. >> Oh, okay. >> We're the first. >> Are you using Azure? >> Yes. >> Okay, makes sense. Great partner. >> Because we usually deal with banks and telecoms. Microsoft always has a foot in the door there, but we are thinking of having an AWS structure, too. >> It's okay, use it here. It is what it is, a multi-cloud world we're living in. How about your solution? >> So actually we were in the first cohort of C5 Accelerate, which is a program supported by AWS, so we are on AWS, and obviously for us, as a start-up, setting up in the beginning, we have limited resources, and setting up on the cloud just makes it so much easier. >> Yeah, a no-brainer. Not a decision. >> Exactly. >> You got to go to cloud. If you do a start-up and you're not on the cloud, you're spending too much cash. >> (laughs) Exactly. >> It's just the way it is. It's the dumbest thing you should ever do. Unless there's a prototype and you want it next to you, like a puppy and a dog or whatever pet, kind of thing, a security issue. Other than that, there's no reason. >> And it's faster to set up. It's easier for us to reach a wider audience. When we do reach the wider audience- >> What do you think about the show here? What was your walk-away? Obviously you guys are in the middle of the community. We're here for the first time. I was really impressed and I learned a lot, and I made some observations that I didn't expect to have that were really positive. It was a good experience for me, but you guys live it every day. Amazon's in town. There's good dynamics going on. What's your impression? >> Impression on what? >> This show, Amazon's presence, the community coming together. Everyone came here from the gulf states. >> I think one of the main things that we needed to happen in the system is that mind shift. So corporates to start adopting start-up technologies, and for investors who are used to investing in traditional investments and real estate to start actually investing in start-ups. So I think AWS really helped in that mind shift. I think the work that EDB is doing also is helping that mind shift. Now we're seeing more angel investors who are interested in getting into the tech start-up space and more corporates are willing to adopt our technologies, even though they're fairly new. >> Your thoughts on the show? >> It definitely shined a spotlight on Bahrain. Getting Amazon to open AWS in Bahrain is, first of all, we're getting a lot of talent that's going to come in and be trained to set up. So it's a huge- >> It's like you guys are standing around. The metaphor, I'm imagining, you're standing around, you're working on some things, you're hustling, you're scrapping, you're smart. And then all of a sudden, a big resource generator just pops down and says, hey entrepreneurs, I was built for you. >> Yeah. >> And you're there and now you're present at creation. And when you're present at creation of a movement that has this much growth because let's face it, this is going to be growth, and you guys are going to be the leaders. >> Yeah. >> Hopefully. >> So you got to pay it forward. You have big responsibilities. >> Hopefully. >> And you going to make some money along the way, too. I mean, you know the old expression. >> No pressure, huh? (laughs) >> You know the expression, "Hang around the barber shop, "you'll get a haircut." So this is, "Hang around the cloud, "you're going to create some value." So you've got to capture it. So this is the dynamic that I see as an entrepreneur. I was like, damn, if I lived here, I'd be setting up shop. I'd have five companies going on. I'd be telling all my friends to come on in. >> Because you're in the ground floor right now. >> You're present at creation. We're going to start covering you guys, and do some work with you guys. I'm already convinced. >> It's a big wave, and we're happy to be riding it. >> We're going to collaborate with you guys. I think it's a really unique thing. I mean at this scale, it's unprecedented. I mean this is Amazon. I mean in the U.S. everyone is jockeying for where Amazon's next headquarters is going to be, and literally, people are freaking out, like, come to my state. Because they know, with it come jobs, services. It's like putting up a sports stadium, and all of a sudden there's all these new things around it, right? >> Sure. >> It's going on, >> Exactly. >> So this is going to be a big opportunity. >> It's huge. >> For start-ups. So you guys are going to be reaping the rewards. >> Hopefully. >> You hungry? >> We are. (all laughing) >> You have no idea. >> I'm from California. In America, it's like we call it the wave. Get your surfboard, get out there. A lot of sets coming in. So congratulations. Thanks for sharing. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you for coming to Bahrain. It's a pleasure having you. >> Looking forward to working more with you guys. >> Definitely a pleasure. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay, we're here in Bahrain. That's a wrap. We're wrapping up with the founders and CEOs. This is the entrepreneurial action here and the signs are all pointing towards growth. Amazon Web Service is going to bring cultural revolution, economic, society, people, all going to be coming here, for the region, not just Bahrain, but all around the region. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 18. Brought to you by Docker and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of DockerCon 2018 in beautiful San Francisco. It's a stunning day here. We're at Moscone West, I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer. Very honored to welcome to theCUBE, for the first time, the CEO of Docker Inc., Steve Singh. Welcome, Steve. >> Hi Lisa, very nice to meet you. John, how are you? >> So the general session this morning, standing room only between five and six thousand people. I gotta say a couple things that jumped out at me. One, coolest stage entrance I've ever seen with this great, if you haven't seen it from the livestream, this, like, 3D Golden Gate Bridge and I loved that and I loved the demo of Docker Desktop that your kids did, fueled by Mountain Dew, which actually single handedly got me through college here in San Francisco. So, the momentum that you guys, it was kicking off with a bang. >> Yeah, I, look, I've got a great team and one of the things we wanted to communicate this morning is that you're seeing a massive transformation in the world of software. And this transformation is enabling every company in the world to think about their business in a new light. To think about how their business meets customer needs in a way that's much more personal, in a way that delivers more value. And this is the beauty of where Docker is, right, we have a chance to help literally every company in the world. And that's the part, honestly, that gets me excited, is, like, how do you help other people go create amazing businesses? And so this is, I couldn't be more happy to be at Docker. >> Steve, keying on that, one of the customers on stage today, McKesson. >> Yeah. >> And I loved Rashmi Kumar came out and talked about future-proofing for applications, their infrastructure, their applications in partnership with Docker. >> Yeah. And that implies a certain amount of trust that they have in Docker and Docker's technology platform and in partnering with you. You come from a, so you've been at Docker for about a year now, right? Came in as CEO. Docker is still a small company, a couple hundred folks but punching way above its weight with a huge community impact. How do you, and, you know, you've worked with the biggest companies in the world, how do you come in and establish that trust and help reassure them that you're gonna be a good partner for them and, kinda, what are you seeing with your customers? >> It's a great question, John, and look, there's maybe two or three pieces of how we think about that. The first thing, trust is very human, right? You've gotta know that you're walking into a situation as a vendor and as a customer but really as partners. And you're trying to solve a problem together. Because the reality is, this transformation that companies are going through is the first time in 40 years that this kind of transformation has happened. Second is, the technology stack is still in the early stages. Now, it's incredible and it enables amazing things, but it's still in the early stages. So both of us have to walk into the relationship knowing that, you know what, sometimes it won't go perfect, but guess what? We're gonna be, you know, if it doesn't go perfect we're gonna honor everything we ever committed to you and the same thing on the customer's side. They look at it and say, "I may have actually described my needs differently than what they actually are." And that's what a real partnership is. That's number one. Number two is, trust is driven by culture. And one of the things that I love about Docker is that we see our place in the world but we wanna make sure the customer always has choice. We wanna make sure that if we do a great job the customer will choose to work with us. If we don't, they should have the choice to go somewhere else. And that's what our platform enables, is the choice to be able to work with anybody you'd like to work with, whether you're the developer or you're an operator or you're an IT, I'm sorry, an architect, or the executive. The other piece around this is that part of the value of Docker is it's not just the 400 people of our company, right? There's 5,000 members of our community that are adding value to our community. One of the things that I wanna make sure we do for our community is help them not just innovate on this incredible platform but how do we help them take their innovations to market? And so that's part of the ethos of our company. >> One of the things that you talked about this morning that I thought was really compelling was, you said software innovation used to be, for the last 40 years, it's been driven by tech companies. That's changing. You talked about distributed innovation and distributed consumption. How is Docker helping to, culturally, I don't wanna say instill, but helping to influence, maybe, organizations to be able to distribute innovation and be able to share bi-directionally? >> Yeah, so, a great question, Lisa. So, first of all, is there's a cultural change within companies. When you think about the next generation or the next 40 years being, software being driven from non-technology companies. First of all, we're seeing that. Second is that it requires a cultural change within the business but that change is critical 'cause in the absence of becoming more of a software company your business is gonna be under threat, right? From the competing business. Look at what Netflix has done in media compared to every other media company. That same example applies in every single industry. Now, the way that we help enable that software transformation is to provide a platform that is so easy to use that it doesn't require a lot of training. Now this is complicated platforms, so, yes you have to be a fantastic developer or an IT professional but our job is to take complicated technology like container management software, orchestration layers like Swarm or Kubernetes, service mesh, storage networking, all of those, and make it so simple and easy to use that your IT department can say, "I can use this platform to effectively future-proof your company," right? So, how do you have a platform that you can build every application on, take all of you legacy applications on, run it, and then run it anywhere you like. >> I think that's been one of the through lines for Docker since the very beginning, that developer experience, right? >> Yes. >> And what's been interesting in Docker's development was, I think for both inside and outside, is kind of, what is Docker Inc, and the project versus the company, what is it selling, what's the commercial aspect here? I think, I kind of think back to my experience at BMWare, where there was an enterprise side and then a huge install base of workstation folks. And it's even stronger with Docker because actually now with Docker Desktop as an application development environment or a, you know, I don't wanna, not quite development environment but, you know, the one you announced today with Docker Desktop. That's an even more valuable through line into the Enterprise Edition. >> Yeah. >> But I don't, so, I guess where I'm heading, Steve, is, can you talk a little bit about the commercial situation? Docker EE as the flagship platform. >> Yeah, of course. >> And, kind of, where we are in the maturity journey with customers right now, it's real and important. >> Absolutely John, but you're bringing up a great point within this. Look, we're both, we're a enterprise software company and we're this incredible community where innovation is being brought in by every member of the community. And there's nothing in the world that says you can't do both. This idea that you're one company versus another, this is nonsense, alright? It's a very narrow view of the world. In fact, I would argue that, more and more, companies have to think about that they have multiple people that they serve. Multiple constituents that they serve. In our case we serve the Enterprise IT organization and we also serve developers. And developers are a critical part, not just of our community, that is the life of every company going forward. Which is why we're so excited about this. That's the life of every company. So, Docker Desktop, the reason we're so excited about it is, first of all, it is the easiest way to engage with Docker, to build applications. And then we feel like there's a lot more innovation that we can actually deliver within Docker Desktop. Alright, so a million new developers joined on Docker Desktop this year. In fact, we're growing about seven or eight percent month over month on that. And so you should expect over the next year another million will be on Docker Desktop. But it's incumbent upon us to say, the only way that we continue to earn the trust of that portion of our constituents, that of the developer community, is to make sure we're innovative, to make sure we're open to allow others to innovate on top of us. >> I'd love to, kind of, explore on audience a little bit. So, in terms of innovation, you know, we know that the companies that have the ability to aggressively innovate, and to do that they have to have the budget, are the ones that stay relevant and that are the most competitive. But I think I saw some stats and I think Scott Johnson said that close to 90 percent of IT budgets are spent keeping the lights on. So you have very little dollars to actually drive innovation. So when you're talking with customers, and you said you just met with 25 of Docker Inc's biggest customers just this morning, are you talking to both the developer guys and girls as well as the C suite? >> Yeah. >> What is, how are you connecting and then, maybe, is it a conversation to enable the developers to be able to sell the value up the stack or is it vice versa? >> A couple of things here, so, first of all, John, I didn't answer part of your question which is the growth in our Enterprise customer base. We've literally doubled it year over year, right? So, more than 500 Global 10,000 companies that are using Docker to run their applications and to manage their applications. The way that we engage with our customers is literally across the entire constituents of that organization, right? A developer by themselves, as genius as that group of people are, you can't deliver the application. And delivering the application is just as important as building it. And so the IT organization, the ops organization is critical. And then there's gotta be an overriding objective. What is it we're trying to do? How do we transform ourselves into a software company? You think about, think about just for example, Tesla, right? When you have a company, and I realize Tesla's stock goes up and down, they're always in the news, but when you have a company that's worth more than some of the biggest automotive companies in the world, you have to ask yourself why. Well, part of the reason why isn't just the fact that we've got an electric vehicle that's better for the environment. Part of it is, it's really as much a software company as it is a automotive company. They have incredible amounts of data about how we use our cars, where we go, and in fact the Tesla cars are actually interconnected. And so, that brings a perspective in how you build cars and how they're gonna be used and how they're gonna be consumed that's radically different than if you're just an auto manufacturer. Now, look, Ford and GM and Volvo are all really smart, great companies and they're quickly moving through to themselves being software companies. >> Steve, can you talk a little bit about ecosystems? Microsoft, on stage this morning, a long partnership with them but also here at the show, right, enterprise folks, Dell and Accenture and I'm just looking down the list as well as Google and Amazon, right? So, you need to be partnering with a lot of folks to make all this work. How are you approaching that? >> John, part of the reason for that is, let's start with a simple premise, is something this large, alright, you can't possibly innovate fast enough on your own, alright? There's seven billion amazing people on this planet. The only way you can really drive mass scale global innovation, is you have to be open, right? I'm literally a guy that was born in a mud house in India, so I certainly appreciate the opportunity to participate in the rest of the world's economy. So we have to be open to say, anybody that wants to contribute, can. Now, obviously we think that contribution has to be within an ethos, right? If your definition of contribution is how do you help your own business, that's not good enough. You have to look at this and say, there has to be choice, in our view, choice, security and agility. So, how do we deliver those values or that ethos to our customers? And if you're willing to do that, man we want to partner with everybody in this space. >> Yeah, I, sometimes I despair of the tech press, although I consume a lot of it and if I never have to read another Swarm versus Kubernetes article again I would be happy. But Kubernetes' all over the keynote and it seems like Docker you all have embraced it and in fact are supporting it in very innovative ways with the cloud providers. In terms of ecosystem can you talk a little bit about-- >> Yeah, well, part of the value of Docker is we simplify very complex things and make it available to our customers to consume with little training, little understanding of the underlying deep technology. And the other part is that it comes back to this idea that innovation will happen everywhere. Why should we view the world as it's our solution or, you know, nobody's? That's nonsense, right? Kubernetes is a fantastic orchestrational entity. Why shouldn't it be integrated into the Docker container platform? And so, as we did that, guess what happened? Our customers, all they saw was, instead of conflict they saw the opportunity to work together. In fact it's been amazing for the growth in our business, that's why ewe doubled year over year. >> Now, collaboration is essential and we were talking with Scott Johnson a little bit earlier today about the internal collaboration but also the external collaboration with customers. You talked about partnerships, I think that the MTA program, the Modernization of Traditional Apps launched about a year ago with Avanade, Cisco, HPE and Microsoft. Tell us a little bit about that, probably around the same time that you came to the helm. You're seeing, you know, customers like Visa, PayPal as part of this program, be able to transform and go to the container journey. >> Yeah, and Lisa, this speaks to an observation you made a few minutes ago about the fact that, you know, 85, 90% of IT budgets are fixed before you even walk into the year. So, look, the Docker platform can be used for any kind of application. Legacy apps, next generation apps that run in the data center, next generation apps that run on Edge devices. But if you accept that 90% of the apps that sit within a company are all legacy apps, well, guess what, that's where their cost is. And then if you marry that to the fact that every CIO has this problem that I don't have a lot of money that's free in my budget. Well, how do we help solve that? And the way we chose to solve it is this Docker MTA solution. Modernizing Traditional Apps. Take your traditional apps, run 'em on the Docker platform, run 'em on any infrastructure you like, cut your app and infrastructure management costs in half. Now, then take that savings and then apply it towards innovation. This is why it resonates with CIO's. I mean, as much as they may love Docker and they may love us, they have a business to serve and they're very, very practical in how they think about, you know, going about their business. >> So with that approach, thanks John, how receptive were those enterprise CIO's to going, "You're right, we've gotta start with our enterprise apps." They don't have the luxury of time, of ripping out old infrastructure and building them on containers or microservices architectures. And these are often mission-critical applications. Was that an easy sell, was that, tell me about that. >> (laughs) Well, nothing's easy but the reality is, is that it, they got it quickly, right? Because it speaks directly to their paying point. And what I'm very proud of with my team is not only were we able to deliver a great product for MTA but we're also helping our customers actually make sure they can migrate these apps over. But what's been really a positive, you know, kind of a signal we've seen, that's still the early stages, is that as our customers are moving their legacy apps to Docker and running 'em on new infrastructure, sometimes public cloud, and cutting costs, they're starting to take that cost savings and actually applying it to their next generation apps. So they're not using Docker for new apps. And so that is, that's the benefit of when you really try to solve the problem the way the customer wants to consume it. >> So, Steve, the user conference, very energizing, right. >> Yeah. >> Already the energy's been good here, you've been doing trainings and certifications, there's people behind us, everyone's talking, so that kind of in some ways sets the tone for the year, so as you and your team go back to the office after this week, you know, what are you looking to do and what can we expect out of Docker? >> I'll just speak to two things. First of all, there's so much innovation we still have to deliver. If anything, you know, I would say my team will tell me I might be pushing a little hard. But you know what, this is the fun, you only have x number of years in life and you should make the most of it. So we're really excited about new apps, we're excited about SecurEdge apps. We're excited about, I don't know if you saw the demo this morning, of Armada, which allows you to run any app on any operating system, on any infrastructure, all from a single pane of glass. Our customers love that and they're very excited about that. That said, you know, this is a, it's a big test. We have a huge opportunity to welcome a lot of other companies, so when you walk around and see 5,000 people that see amazing opportunity, not just for Docker, for themselves, right? That's the secret part of Docker that I love. We're creating jobs that didn't exist before, right? I mean, you see kids coming out of college now getting Docker skills and they're using that to grow their IT profession. In fact, I was just at i.c.stars, this is an amazing organization in Chicago that helps individuals who've been displaced in the workforce learn the IT skills required to come back to the workforce and really help run internal IT organizations. Guess what they're learning? They're learning Docker. So that's, these are the kind of things that get us excited. >> And that's essential for enterprise organizations who, that's one of the challenges they face, was, you know, modernizing the data center, which they have to do, but then it requires new skill sets, maybe upskilling, so it's exciting to hear that you're seeing this investment in people that have an opportunity, the proclivity to actually learn this technology. >> Yeah, this is, we are happy because we help customers but we also create amazing new jobs that, you know, are, certainly our community can still benefit from. >> So, last question, the three themes that came out of your session and really the general session this morning was, you talked about someone's choice, agility and security. Are those the three pillars that you believe Docker, upon which Docker sits as really competitive differentiators? >> Amen, amen, number one, but it's also our values, right? This is rooted in our values and when a company performs best is when their values show up in their products. Because then you're never lost, you'll always know what you're focused on. And you know, when I ran Concur, we had this vision, north star, called The Perfect Trip. And our objective was to always go create a delightful business trip experience. And for Docker I wanna make sure that we have a north star. And our north star is our values and they have to translate directly to what actually helps the customer. >> Love that, the north star. Well, hopefully theCUBE is the north star of modern tech media. Steve, thanks so much for stopping by. >> Thank you, it's wonderful to meet you. It was great to meet you as well and congratulations on the big success. >> Thank you. >> We look forward to hearing-- >> Thank you Lisa, thank you John. >> What's coming out in the next year. >> Thank you. >> And we wanna thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer today live from San Francisco DockerCon 2018. Stick around, we'll be back after a short break. (upbeat music)